Student's Encyclopedia of Great American Writers, Vol. 3: 1910 to 1945

STUDENT’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GREAT AMERICAN WRITERS Volume III: 1900 to 1945 STUDENT’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GREAT AMERICAN WR...

Author: Robert C. Evans | Patricia Gantt

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STUDENT’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GREAT AMERICAN WRITERS Volume III: 1900 to 1945

STUDENT’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GREAT AMERICAN WRITERS Volume III: 1900 to 1945

ROBERT C. EVANS PATRICIA M. GANTT, GENER AL EDITOR

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers, 1900 to 1945 Copyright © 2010 by Robert C. Evans All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact: Facts On File, Inc. An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Student’s encyclopedia of great American writers / Patricia Gantt, general editor. v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: [1] Beginnings to 1830 / Andrea Tinnemeyer — [2] 1830 to 1900 / Paul Crumbley — [3] 1900 to 1945 / Robert C. Evans — [4] 1945 to 1970 / Blake Hobby — [5] 1970 to the present / Patricia Gantt. ISBN 978-0-8160-6087-0 (hardcover: acid-free paper) ISBN 978-1-4381-3125-2 (e-book) 1. Authors, American—Biography—Encyclopedias, Juvenile. 2. American literature—Encyclopedias, Juvenile. I. Tinnemeyer, Andrea. II. Gantt, Patricia M., 1943– PS129.S83 2009 810.9’0003—dc22 [B] 2009030783 Facts On File books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.factsonfile.com Text design by Annie O’Donnell Composition by Mary Susan Ryan-Flynn Cover printed by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Mich. Book printed and bound by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Mich. Date printed: June 2010 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents vi

Marianne Moore

Series Preface

xi

Eugene O’Neill

343

Volume Introduction

xii

Katherine Anne Porter

360

Ezra Pound

371

Sherwood Anderson

1

Edwin Arlington Robinson

383

List of Writers and Works Included

332

Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša)

13

Carl Sandburg

395

Willa Cather

27

Gertrude Stein

405

Hart Crane

47

John Steinbeck

421

Countee Cullen

57

Wallace Stevens

442

E. E. Cummings

68

Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton)

454

John Dos Passos

85

Jean Toomer

461

Theodore Dreiser

99

W. E. B. DuBois

114

Booker T. Washington

474

T. S. Eliot

128

Edith Wharton

484

William Faulkner

142

Thornton Wilder

503

F. Scott Fitzgerald

166

William Carlos Williams

513

Robert Frost

184

Richard Wright

529

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)

213

Ernest Hemingway

224

Langston Hughes

252

Zora Neale Hurston

271

Appendix I: Alphabetical List of Writers Included in All Volumes of the Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

549

Nella Larsen

288

Jack London

298

Appendix II: Chronological List of Writers Included in All Volumes of the Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers, by Birth Date

552

Claude McKay

310

Edna St. Vincent Millay

323

List of Writers and Works Included Sherwood Anderson (1876–1942)

1

Hart Crane (1899–1932)

Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

“Chaplinesque” (1921)

“The Book of the Grotesque” (1919)

“At Melville’s Tomb” (1926)

“Hands” (1919) “Mother” (1919)

“Voyages, I, II, III, IV, V, VI” (1923, 1926)

“Adventure” (1919)

The Bridge (1930)

47

“Queer” (1919)

Countee Cullen (1903–1946)

“Death in the Woods” (1919)

57

“For a Lady I Know” (1925)

Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša) (1876–1938)

“Heritage” (1925)

13

“Incident” (1925)

“Impressions of an Indian Childhood” (1900)

“Yet Do I Marvel” (1925)

“The School Days of an Indian Girl” (1900)

“Uncle Jim” (1927)

“An American Teacher among Indians” (1900)

E. E. Cummings (1894–1962)

Old Indian Legends (1901)

“Buffalo Bill’s” (1920, 1923)

American Indian Stories (1921)

“in Just-” (1920, 1923)

“From the Dark Tower” (1927)

The Enormous Room (1922)

Willa Cather (1873–1947)

“the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls” (1923)

27

The Troll Garden (1905)

“next to of course god america i” (1926)

“Paul’s Case” (1905)

“i sing of Olaf glad and big” (1931)

O Pioneers! (1913)

“somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond” (1931)

The Song of the Lark (1915) My Ántonia (1918)

“anyone lived in a pretty how town” (1940)

A Lost Lady (1923) Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)

“my father moved through dooms of love” (1940)

Shadows on the Rock (1931) “Neighbour Rosicky” (1932)

“pity this busy monster, manunkind” (1944)

Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940)

vi

68


John Dos Passos (1896–1970)

85

Manhattan Transfer (1925)

vii

“Barn Burning” (1939) “The Bear” (1942)

42nd Parallel (1930) 1919 (1932)

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)

The Big Money (1936)

This Side of Paradise (1919) “The Ice Palace” (1920) “May Day” (1920) “Winter Dreams” (1922) The Great Gatsby (1925) “Babylon Revisited” (1931) Tender Is the Night (1934)

Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945)

99

Sister Carrie (1900) “Old Rogaum and His Theresa” (1901, 1918) The “Genius” (1915)

166

“The Second Choice” (1918)

Robert Frost (1874–1963)

An American Tragedy (1925)

W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1963)

114

The Philadelphia Negro (1899) The Souls of Black Folk (1903) “The Song of the Smoke” (1907) The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926)

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)

128

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) “Sweeney among the Nightingales” (1919) “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) “Gerontion” (1920) The Waste Land (1922) “The Hollow Men” (1925) “Journey of the Magi” (1927)

William Faulkner (1897–1962)

142

184

“The Tuft of Flowers” (1906, 1913) “The Pasture” (1913) “After Apple-Picking” (1914) “The Death of the Hired Man” (1914) “Home Burial” (1914) “Mending Wall” (1914) “Birches” (1916) “An Old Man’s Winter Night” (1916) “Out, Out——” (1916) “The Oven Bird” (1916) “The Road Not Taken” (1916) “Design” (1922, 1936) “Nothing Gold Can Stay” (1923) “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923) “Once by the Pacific” (1928) “Provide, Provide” (1934, 1936) “Desert Places” (1936) “The Figure a Poem Makes” (1939) “The Gift Outright” (1942)

The Sound and the Fury (1929) As I Lay Dying (1930) “A Rose for Emily” (1930, 1931) Light in August (1932) Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886–1961) “Oread” (1914, 1924) “Leda” (1919, 1921)

213

viii

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

“At Baia” (1921)

Mules and Men (1935)

“Helen” (1924)

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

The Walls Do Not Fall (1944)

Nella Larsen (1891–1964) Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)

224

288

Quicksand (1928)

In Our Time (1925, 1930)

Passing (1929)

“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1926)

“Sanctuary” (1930)

The Sun Also Rises (1926) “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927)

Jack London (1876–1916)

A Farewell to Arms (1929)

“The Law of Life” (1901)

“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936, 1938)

The Call of the Wild (1903)

“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1938)

The Sea-Wolf (1904) “To Build a Fire” (1908)

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Langston Hughes (1902–1967)

298

Claude McKay (1890–1948) 252

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921, 1926)

310

“Harlem Shadows” (1918, 1922) “If We Must Die” (1919, 1922) “The Lynching” (1919, 1922) “Exhortation: Summer, 1919” (1920, 1922)

“Mother to Son” (1922, 1926) “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926)

“America” (1921, 1922)

“Mulatto” (1927)

“Outcast” (1922)

Not without Laughter (1930)

Home to Harlem (1928)

“I, Too” (1932) “The Blues I’m Playing” (1934)

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

The Big Sea (1940)

“First Fig” (1920)

“Theme for English B” (1949)

“Recuerdo” (1922)

“Dream Boogie” (1951)

“I, Being Born a Woman” (1923)

“Harlem” (1951)

“What lips my lips have kissed” (1923)

“The Weary Blues” (1932)

323

“Love is not all” (1931)

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)

271

“Spunk” (1925)

Marianne Moore (1887–1972)

“Sweat” (1926)

“The Fish” (1921, 1935)

“How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928)

“Poetry” (1921, 1935)

“The Gilded Six-Bits” (1933)

“To a Snail” (1924)

Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934)

“What Are Years?” (1941, 1967)

332


“The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing” (1944)

“Miniver Cheevy” (1910)

“Nevertheless” (1944)

“Mr. Flood’s Party” (1921)

“Eros Turannos” (1913, 1916)

“Baseball and Writing” (1961, 1966) “Granite and Steel” (1966)

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967)

395

“Chicago” (1914, 1916)

Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953)

343

“Child of the Romans” (1916)

The Emperor Jones (1920)

“Fog” (1916)

The Hairy Ape (1922)

“Halsted Street Car” (1916)

Mourning Becomes Electra (1931)

“Cool Tombs” (1918)

The Iceman Cometh (1939)

“Grass” (1918)

Moon for the Misbegotten (1943)

“Prairie Waters by Night” (1918)

Long Day’s Journey into Night (1945)

Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) 360 “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” (1929)

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)

405

Three Lives (1909) Tender Buttons (1914) The Making of Americans (1925)

“Flowering Judas” (1930)

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)

“Noon Wine” (1937) “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” (1938) Ship of Fools (1962)

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) Ezra Pound (1885–1972)

371

“Portrait d’une Femme” (1912)

“The Chrysanthemums” (1937, 1938) “The Leader of the People” (1937)

“A Virginal” (1912)

Of Mice and Men (1937)

“In a Station of the Metro” (1913, 1916)

The Red Pony (1937, 1945)

“A Pact” (1913, 1916)

The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

“The Rest” (1913, 1916)

Cannery Row (1945)

“The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” (1915)

The Pearl (1945, 1947)

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)

Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962)

383

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

“Credo” (1896)

“Sunday Morning” (1915, 1923)

“The House on the Hill” (1896)

“Anecdote of the Jar” (1923)

“Luke Havergal” (1896)

“The Emperor of Ice-Cream” (1923)

“Reuben Bright” (1896)

“A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” (1923)

“Richard Cory” (1896)

421

442

ix

x


“Peter Quince at the Clavier” (1923, 1931) “The Snow Man” (1931) “Of Modern Poetry” (1942) “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself” (1954) “The Plain Sense of Things” (1954)

Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton) (1865–1914)

The Age of Innocence (1920) “Roman Fever” (1934, 1936)

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) Our Town (1938)

454

“Mrs. Spring Fragrance” (1910, 1912) “The Chinese Lily” (1912)

Jean Toomer (1894–1967)

461

“Seventh Street” (1922, 1923) “Song of the Son” (1922, 1923) “Blood-Burning Moon” (1923) “Box Seat” (1923) Cane (1923) “Karintha” (1923)

Booker T. Washington (1856–1915)

“Souls Belated” (1899) The House of Mirth (1905) “The Eyes” (1910) Ethan Frome (1911) Summer (1917)

William Carlos Williams (1883–1961)

513

“The Young Housewife” (1916, 1917) “Tract” (1917) “Portrait of a Lady” (1920, 1934) “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” (1921) “To Elsie” (1923) “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923) “Spring and All” (1923) “The Dead Baby” (1927, 1935) “This Is Just to Say” (1934) Paterson (1946–1958) “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (1962)

474

“Atlanta Compromise Speech” (“Atlanta Exposition Address”) (1895) Up from Slavery (1901)

Edith Wharton (1862–1937)

503

Richard Wright (1908–1960)

484

Uncle Tom’s Children (1938, 1940) “Long Black Song” (1938, 1940) “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” (1939, 1961) Native Son (1940) “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1942, 1944, 1961) Black Boy (1945) American Hunger (1977)

529

Series Preface

T

and then subentries on the author’s major works. After each subentry on a work is a set of questions for discussion and/or writing. Another set of broader discussion questions appears near the end of each author entry, followed by a bibliography. The entire five-volume set therefore contains more than 1000 discussion questions. These questions make up perhaps the most important and useful features of the set, encouraging further creative thought and helping students get started on their own writing. Many of the questions reference not only the subject literary work or author but also related works and authors, thus helping students to make additional literary connections, as emphasized by the literature standards. The authors and works included in the set were selected primarily from among those most popular in the high school classrooms—that is, those often featured in secondary-school literary anthologies and textbooks; those often appearing on age-appropriate reading lists; and those most often searched for in Facts On File’s online literary database Bloom’s Literature Online, used primarily in high schools. In addition, we have endeavored to include a range of writers from different backgrounds in all periods, as well as writers who, though not perhaps among the very most popular today, appear to have been unjustly neglected and are gaining in popularity. No selection could be perfect, and those writers favored by scholars and critics are not always as popular in the high school classroom, but the general editor and volumes editors have attempted to make the set’s coverage as useful to students as possible. Above all, we hope that this set serves not only to instruct but also to inspire students with the love of literature shared by all the editors and contributors who worked on this set. Patricia M. Gantt

he Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers is a unique reference intended to help high school students meet standards for literature education and prepare themselves for literature study in college. It offers extensive entries on important authors, as well as providing additional interpretive helps for students and their teachers. The set has been designed and written in the context of the national standards for English language arts, created by the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association, the two professional organizations that have the most at stake in high school language arts education (see http:// www.ncte.org/standards). The volume editors and many of the contributors to this set not only are university scholars but also have experience in secondary school literature education, ranging from working as readers of Advanced Placement examinations, to developing high school literature curricula, to having taught in high school English classrooms. Although the volume editors all have extensive experience as scholars and university professors, they all have strong roots in high school education and have drawn on their experience to ensure that entries are stylistically appealing and contain the necessary content for students. The set’s five volumes are organized chronologically, as many literature textbooks and anthologies are. This system is convenient for students and also facilitates cross-disciplinary study, increasingly common in high schools. For example, a section on the Civil War in history class might be accompanied by the study of Walt Whitman and Stephen Crane in English class. To help students find what they need, each volume contains two lists of all the authors included in the set: one organized chronologically and the other alphabetically. Within each volume, authors are presented alphabetically. Each author entry contains a biography

xi

Volume Introduction

T

ishing growth of American might and prosperity. The period from 1900 to 1945 had thus seen the emergence of the United States as perhaps the most influential nation on Earth. A similar rise in American influence occurred in the literary history of this era. In the early decades of the 19th century, a British essayist had very famously, somewhat smugly, but all-too-pertinently asked, “Who reads an American book?” At that time, the answer to the question seemed obvious— and obviously discouraging to any champion of American literature. During the course of the 19th century, however, the United States began to produce a number of writers who would gain an international readership and win the increasing respect of serious readers everywhere. Edgar Allan Poe was one of these; Nathaniel Hawthorne was another; Walt Whitman and Mark Twain were two more; and Henry James (who nevertheless published some of his most significant novels after 1900) can also be added to the list. Interestingly enough, some of the most important American writers of the 19th century were not really fully appreciated (either at home or abroad) until later—sometimes much later. Thus, the fi rst real collection of Emily Dickinson’s poems was not published until 1890, while the great revival of interest in Herman Melville did not take place until the 1920s. Kate Chopin, meanwhile, did much of her own best writing in the 1890s (she published her great novel, The Awakening, in 1899), but her works were largely forgotten until the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, some of the greatest of all American writers of the 19th century were not fully appreciated—and did not begin to exercise real influence—until well after that century had ended. By the end of the 19th century, the United States was obviously poised to make a major contribution to world literature. It increasingly had the kind of wealth and other resources necessary to nurture

he period from 1900 to 1945 is perhaps the most important era in American literature, at least in terms of demonstrable impact and lasting influence. This period coincided with an unparalleled rise in American economic and military power. The United States, with a rapidly growing population drawn from all over the world, had at last become an undeniably significant player on the international stage. By the beginning of the 20th century, the United States was increasingly becoming a recognized center of innovation and progress in science, industry, technology, and medicine, and its democratic political system and constantly expanding economy held an enormous appeal to countless immigrants from around the globe. Millions of people were “voting with their feet”—choosing to leave the lands of their birth in order to take up residence in the so-called New World, which still seemed rich with the promise of economic prosperity and individual freedom. Meanwhile, the horrific devastation wrought by World War I (1914–18), combined with the Russian Revolution of 1917, left Europe weaker, poorer, and more divided than ever. The United States, on the other hand, seemed increasingly rich and powerful. Until the early 1940s it faced no obvious military threats, and its own mostly minor military adventures had tended to be successful. The Great Depression of the 1930s struck a huge blow to American self-confidence, but that depression was a worldwide phenomenon that affl icted many other countries even more severely than it did the United States. Even during this dark time, the United States was able to avoid sliding into the kind of dictatorial tyranny that had been imposed in such countries as Russia, Italy, Germany, and Japan. When World War II concluded, much of Europe lay in ruins. By 1945, the two most obvious “superpowers” were the United States and the Soviet Union, and the stage was set for an even greater and more aston-

xii

Volume Introduction

and sustain an educated readership; it had a rapidly growing population for whom reading was a major national pastime (although the era of movies and radio would develop rapidly from 1900 to 1945); and, perhaps most important, it had an increasing, and increasingly self-confident, sense of itself as an important and consequential nation that deserved an important literature of its own. American writers were not long in responding to this challenge and this opportunity. Among the authors who emerged and flourished during the period 1900–1945 are some who are difficult to classify in any obvious way, although it might be useful to think of them as “independents.” These were writers who were not necessarily connected (at least for long) with any clear-cut literary movement or any narrowly defi ned demographic group. They tended to chart their own idiosyncratic paths, sometimes writing in ways that now seem broadly traditional, sometimes striking out in unexpected directions, but rarely following any obviously predetermined course. Jack London (1876–1916)— with his stories and novels set in the Far North or on the broad seas—might be considered such a writer. His straightforward style and adventurous narratives have long made him one of the most popular of significant authors, both at home and abroad, and few writers are more identifiably “American” than he. Another obviously homegrown craftsman was Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), poet of Chicago and the Midwest and one of the best-selling major poets in American history. As was Sandburg, two other authors often identified with the Midwest were the novelists and short story writers Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) and Theodore Dreiser (1871– 1945), while the poets Edward Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) and Robert Frost (1874–1963) have in common not only a strong New England background but also a penchant for writing in more traditional forms and fashions than was common during much of the modern period. The same tendency to write in familiar, fairly accessible ways can also be seen in the novels and short fiction of John Steinbeck (1902–68) and in the novels and plays

xiii

of Thornton Wilder (1897–1975). None of these writers seems (either in topics, themes, or methods) an especially radical or innovative author; all are among the great writers to whom most “common readers” can most readily relate. The same might also be said of two of the most important of all the American fiction writers of the 20th century—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) and Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961). Few novels are as well respected and well beloved by both academic critics and popular readers as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and although Fitzgerald never created another such obvious masterpiece, his reputation nevertheless has only grown with time. Hemingway, in the meantime, managed to fashion perhaps the most influential and most widely imitated of all American prose styles, and by the time of his suicide he had become, around the world, almost the embodiment of the iconic American writer. His death was mourned in countries everywhere, for he had come to be considered not only a significant author but also a major public figure. William Faulkner (1897–1962)—whom many regard as the greatest American novelist of the 20th century—might also be classified as a leading independent, but with Faulkner (as also, to some extent, with Hemingway), one begins to sense that a different sort of label might be appropriate. Faulkner (more obviously than Fitzgerald) is one of the fi rst of the great innovators or modernists—those writers who began to do unexpected things with structure, characterization, and style. Faulkner often writes as if he does not care whether he is understood; his works—like the works of many other modernists— often pose difficult challenges for their readers and depart from traditional forms and fashions in deliberately provocative ways. The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying are far less accessible and far more obviously puzzling novels than anything by Fitzgerald or Hemingway (although Hemingway’s early work titled in our time poses a few of the same kinds of challenges). A similar penchant for restless innovation and experimentation can be seen in the dramas of Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) and in the early fiction of John Dos Passos (1896–1970).

xiv Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Other writers are even better characterized by the term modernist and even more difficult. Many of these writers owe obvious (and frequently acknowledged) debts to Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), who considered herself a genius and whose confident self-evaluation was endorsed by many others. Stein often wrote in ways that seem deliberately maddening and impenetrable; ease and clarity of communication were not her primary goals. Her writings often force readers (if they have the patience) to puzzle over the implications of practically every single word or syllable; her style is innovative and experimental in the extreme. Similarly experimental—especially in his later writings—was the poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972), whose influence on the arguably greater poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), as well as on the host of other writers whom Pound championed and defended, was enormous. Indeed the whole period from the 1920s to the late 1940s has been labeled “The Pound Era,” and the writers (usually poets) often associated with this sort of “high modernism” include such major figures as Hart Crane (1899–1932), E. E. Cummings (1894– 1962), Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), and William Carlos Williams (1883–1963). Each of these authors writes in his distinctive fashion, and none of them makes many concessions to the traditional expectations of conservative readers. Their poems are often unconventional in form, diction, subject, and tone. American literature in the period from 1900 to 1945 was, however, increasingly untraditional not only in its structures, styles, and themes but also in the kinds of authors who participated in its creation. Women, for instance, were more and more accepted as major literary figures. Of course, females had long played a significant role in the creation of American popular fiction and poetry (one thinks of Hawthorne’s complaint, in the mid-1850s, about the “damned mob of scribbling women”), but, until the early 20th century, the works of relatively few women writers were admitted into the canon of serious American literature. That prejudice began to subside as more and more talented American women writers were able to publish their works. Edith

Wharton (1862–1937), for instance, wrote fiction that was often compared—in style, topics, and achievement—to that of her friend Henry James. Her contemporary Willa Cather (1876– 1947), as did many other significant writers of this period, often set her novels and stories in the Midwest. Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) wrote novels and stories on a wide range of topics and themes. Among the poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) was one of the most accessible, Marianne Moore (1887–1972) was one of the most innovative, and H. D. (the pen name of Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961) was talented and unfortunately underappreciated. Perhaps the most significant change in the period was the emergence of more and more great African-American writers. Although not primarily a creative writer, Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) not only wrote a highly important autobiography but also helped inspire the confidence and unleash the creativity of his entire community. W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1963), although mainly a writer of nonfiction, also composed novels and poems. By the decade of the 1920s, African Americans had become a major and growing force in U.S. literature. Claude McKay (1890–1948) became the fi rst best-selling black writer with his novel Home to Harlem; Countee Cullen (1903–46) wrote verse that was traditional in style but that explored unusual racial themes; Langston Hughes (1902–1967) expressed himself distinctively in a wide range of forms and genres; Jean Toomer (1894–1967) wrote one of the most innovative of all the modernist works in his combination of fiction and poems titled Cane; and Richard Wright (1908–60) produced an immensely popular and important novel in Native Son and a highly influential autobiography in Black Boy (among many other notable works). In addition, two of the most significant women writers of the period were also African American: the irrepressibly vital and talented Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) and the gifted Nella Larsen (1891–1964), both of whom fell silent far too soon. Finally, two other writers discussed in this volume deserve special mention as pathbreak-

Volume Introduction

ers. Sui Sin Far, the pen name of Edith Maude Eaton (1865–1914), is regarded today as the fi rst significant Asian-American creative writer, while Zitkala-Ša, the pen-name of Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (1876–1938), is widely honored as one of the fi rst great Native American authors. Both women blazed trails that other members of their ethnic groups would later explore, and each, in her different way, symbolizes the increasingly diverse and ever-evolving nature of American literature in the period 1890–1945. By the end of World War II, American literature had become—and was still becoming—almost as full of variety as the American population itself. In 1900 American literature still often seemed peripheral or unimportant to many readers in Europe and elsewhere. By 1945, however, the impact and influence of American writers had become undeniable. The Nobel Prize in literature was inaugurated in 1901, and in the years since the founding of the prize, seven Americans active in the period covered by this volume received the award: Sinclair Lewis in 1930, Eugene O’Neill in 1936, Pearl S. Buck in 1938, T. S. Eliot in 1948, William Faulkner in 1949, Ernest Hemingway in 1954, and John Steinbeck in 1962. In the years since then, only two Nobel Prizes in literature have been awarded to American authors who

xv

wrote primarily in English: Saul Bellow in 1976 and Toni Morrison in 1993. (Isaac Bashevis Singer won in 1978 primarily for his works in Yiddish, while Joseph Brodsky won in 1987 mainly for his Russian poems.) Of course, winning the Nobel Prize is hardly an infallible sign of literary excellence, but the list of award winners does imply a great deal about the high regard in which many American writers from the fi rst half of the 20th century were held throughout the world, in their own times and afterward. No one today would seriously doubt the literary importance of O’Neill or Eliot or Faulkner or Hemingway (although there is a bit more argument about Steinbeck). In the period from 1900 to 1945, American literature not only came of age but also began to set the pace. There were more distinct—and distinctive—voices in American literature during this period than at any previous era, and, for the fi rst time, most of the rest of the world had begun to listen closely.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For help with the proofreading of this volume, I wish to thank Ruth Evans, Sarah Fredericks, and Donna Y. Smith. Robert C. Evans

Sherwood Anderson (1876–1942) [My mother’s] keen observations of the life about her first awoke in me the hunger to see beneath the surface of life. (Winesburg, Ohio)

A

Winesburg), and it was here in Clyde that Sherwood Anderson spent his most formative years. He would later regard Clyde as (at least in part) a “nostalgic symbol of pre-industrial innocence,” but the town was also “an agricultural village which, long since settled, lay stagnant between an exhausted agrarian era and a nascent industrial age” (Burbank 22–23). Anderson’s attitudes toward the place were therefore always somewhat ambivalent: For him it would come to represent both the comforts and the confi nements of small-town existence. Similarly ambivalent were Anderson’s attitudes toward his father, a man whose fi nancial failures often left his family in dire straits but whose gift for storytelling his son would eventually both admire and emulate. For his mother, however, young Sherwood always felt both admiration and sympathy, for she “seemed to have all the desirable qualities that his father lacked; and, as he rejected Irwin’s irresponsibility, he embraced the qualities of stoic endurance, self-sacrifice, and sympathetic curiosity that, to his mind, his mother possessed” (Burbank 26–27). Partly in reaction against his father’s failures, Sherwood was a determined, hardworking youth whose willingness to take on all kinds of employment, “from newsboy to stable hand,” earned him the nickname “Jobby” (D. Anderson ix). In 1895, Anderson’s mother died. The following year Anderson himself left Clyde and headed for Chicago, where he worked as a laborer. In 1898

lthough Sherwood Anderson’s status as a writer is not as high today as it once was, his work remains important not only in its own right but also because of his influence on other authors of even greater significance. Malcolm Cowley has called Anderson “the only story teller of his generation who left his mark on the style and vision of the generation that followed. Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck, Caldwell, Saroyan, Henry Miller . . . each of these owes an unmistakable debt to Anderson, and their names might stand for dozens of others” (1). For years Anderson struggled to achieve his dream of being a significant author, and for a very brief time he was widely considered one of the best writers his country had yet produced. In his fi nal decade, however, his standing fell, and in the decades since his death his reputation has never quite recovered. He is remembered mostly as the author of one crucial book: Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of interrelated stories that amount to a kind of novel. The book had an immediate impact when it appeared; it was eventually translated into numerous foreign languages, and it has never gone out of print. It remains today a widely read “classic” of American literature. Anderson was born on September 13, 1876, in Camden, Ohio, as the third child of Irwin and Emma Anderson (Burbank 15). In 1884 the Andersons moved to the small town of Clyde, Ohio (which would later be the model for the fictional village of

1

2


he joined the military to fight in the Spanish-American War, but by the time he was posted to Cuba in 1899 the war had already ended. Later that year he was back near Clyde, working on a farm and then taking classes at Wittenburg Academy (in Springfield, Ohio), from which he graduated in June 1900. He then returned to Chicago, where (from 1900 to 1906) he not only sold advertisements but also wrote them. At both tasks he was highly successful, and by 1904 he was able to marry Cornelia Lane, a well-traveled and well-educated young woman who had had the kind of fi nancially comfortable life Anderson himself desired. Within three years children began to arrive, and for a number of years the Andersons’ marriage was happy and their existence together was conventionally respectable. In 1906 Anderson moved “to Cleveland as president of United Factories Company, a mail-order jobbing agency” (Burbank 15), and in 1907 he moved to Elyria, Ohio, becoming president of a company that prospered by selling paint by mail. From 1907 to 1912 he wrote four novels in any time he could spare from his company: Mary Cochran, Talbot Whittingham, Windy McPherson’s Son, and Marching Men. By this point he had three children, a flourishing business, and a reputation in Elyria as a solid citizen who also dabbled in writing. It was in 1912, however, that Anderson’s life changed dramatically. He had been becoming increasingly frustrated with a life divided between business and creative writing, and “one afternoon late in November, 1912, while dictating a letter to his secretary, he suddenly broke off in midsentence, walked out of his office, and trudged along the railroad tracks toward Cleveland, where he was found a few days later wandering aimlessly and talking incoherently” (Burbank 19). After being hospitalized briefly in Cleveland and then returning to Elyria for a short stay, Anderson left his wife and children and headed back to Chicago, where he earned his living once more in advertising while devoting his main energies to his literary ambitions. He met and mingled with many other writers who were then contributing to the so-called Chicago Renaissance, in which Anderson himself now became a main force, and in 1915–16

he composed the stories that would later appear in Winesburg, Ohio. His marriage to Cornelia ended in 1915; a new marriage (to the less conventional Tennessee Mitchell, a sculptor) began the following year. In 1916 his novel Windy McPherson’s Son was published, followed in 1917 by Marching Men and in 1918 by a collection of prose poems called Mid-American Chants. It was not until 1919, however, with the publication of Winesburg, Ohio, that Anderson’s fame began. The book impressed many readers and reviewers as something new in American fiction; nevertheless, it also offended less adventurous readers, who disliked its dark tone and allegedly tawdry themes. Despite (or perhaps partly because of) these negative responses, he was admired by “advanced” intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic, and his volume began to be translated into various foreign languages. Numerous works in varied genres followed Winesburg, Ohio, including Poor White (a novel), which appeared in 1921, along with The Triumph of the Egg, a collection of stories or impressions of life in the United States that included reproductions of sculptures by Anderson’s wife and verse by Anderson. In addition, that same year Anderson met the young ERNEST HEMINGWAY (who admired him greatly, at least for the moment), and he also visited Europe, where he was warmly welcomed by such notable writers as GERTRUDE STEIN and James Joyce. He also won a prize of $2,000 given by the Dial magazine and was now able to make a break from the advertising business for good, but in 1922 his relationship with his second wife also broke down. However, a new romantic relationship—with Elizabeth Prall—had begun. In 1923 he published a novel titled (appropriately enough) Many Marriages, followed by another that same year called Horses and Men. An autobiography (A Story Teller’s Story) appeared in 1924, the year in which Anderson fi nally divorced Tennessee and married Elizabeth Prall. In 1925 both The Modern Writer (in which he reflected on his own craft and career) and a new novel, Dark Laughter, which was soon parodied by Hemingway, were published. Yet another novel, Tar, appeared in 1926, as did Sherwood Anderson’s Notebook, containing more reflec-

Sherwood Anderson

tions on writing and on being a writer. In 1927 he published A New Testament, a collection of poetic prose. In that same year he not only returned to Europe but also purchased a farm, house, and two newspapers in Marion, Virginia, where he hoped to live once more the small-town existence he knew so well and (to some degree) missed so much. This plan, though, did not last long, and in general Anderson felt restless and dissatisfied during this period of his life. Both 1928 and 1929 were unsettled years for him, and indeed in 1929 his marriage to Elizabeth deteriorated in the same year that America at large was entering the Great Depression. Nonetheless, during that year he published Hello Towns! (a collection of his writings for his newspapers), Nearer the Grass Roots (a pair of essays), and Alice and The Lost Novel (two reflective pieces of fiction). In 1930 Anderson met Eleanor Copenhaver, and, with her, began to take a more active role in left-wing politics. His support of laborers’ struggles made him briefly sympathetic to communism, though his views were never explicitly Marxist. In 1931 he published Perhaps Women, a miscellaneous collection of thoughts on the ways modern man was “losing his manhood to the machines,” in which he suggested that “whatever hope remains for man in the factories lies in women, who are the real sources of strength in an industrial society” (D. Anderson 119–120). The next year he published Beyond Desire (another novel) and officially divorced his third wife, an event that allowed him to marry Eleanor Copenhaver in July 1933. That same year brought the election as president of Franklin Roosevelt (whom Anderson favored), and the publication of Death in the Woods and Other Stories. In 1934 Winesburg, Ohio was produced as a play in a script written by Anderson, who also that year published a group of brief prose writings titled No Swank. In 1935 Puzzled America, a group of essays based on his travels, was published, followed in 1936 by Kit Brandon, another novel. In 1937 dramatic versions of Winesburg, Ohio; The Triumph of the Egg; and Mother were issued, and Anderson was also elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. By 1938 he was at work on

3

various novels and had begun his Memoirs, and in 1939 he composed Home Town, a lengthy essay not published until 1940. Anderson died on March 8, 1941, at Colon, in the Panama Canal Zone, “of peritonitis, while en route to a good-will tour of South America” (Burbank 17). Even after his death, however, his publishing life had not quite ended, for it was not until 1942 that Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs appeared in print. The fact that Anderson died while on a diplomatic mission suggests something of the status he still enjoyed, both in the United States and abroad, at the end of his life. Meanwhile, the fact that he could publish book after book throughout the 1920s and 1930s implies that there were still a decent market for his writings and a continuing interest in his opinions. Nevertheless, in the fi nal decade and a half of his life, his career was experiencing a kind of slowly darkening eclipse; the more (and the more frequently) he published, the less he attained the kind of widespread respect he had once enjoyed, especially from major literary figures. Other, younger writers, such as Hemingway and WILLIAM FAULKNER (both of whom Anderson had known and both of whom he had significantly influenced), would eventually surpass him in critical renown and public acclaim, and Anderson would increasingly be remembered mostly for one book (Winesburg, Ohio) as well as a number of separate stories (such as “The Egg”). Even this achievement, however, deserves our respect. How many other creative writers, after all, are remembered even slightly, and how many others ever have the kind of major impact on their own contemporaries that Anderson once enjoyed? Winesburg, Ohio has never gone out of print and is never likely to do so. It is still the book on which Anderson’s reputation is built, and in that respect, at least, his standing is—and is likely to remain—as solid as almost any writer could hope to achieve.

Winesburg, Ohio (1919) Winesburg, Ohio is the work that made—and continues to sustain—Anderson’s literary reputation.

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A series or cycle of interrelated short stories and sketches, the book is unified in various ways. The most obvious of these kinds of unity is implied by its title: The stories are set in the fictional village of Winesburg (based on Clyde, Ohio, where Anderson was raised). Recurring places and characters appear in different particular tales, so that by the end of the book the reader has a fairly comprehensive sense of the geography, citizens, history, circumstances, and style of life of Anderson’s fictional village. The most important recurring character in the book is George Willard, a young reporter for the Winesburg Eagle newspaper, who is the protagonist (or central focus) in some tales and who is an observer or secondary character in others. Willard is absent altogether from a few stories and is mentioned only in passing in some others, but for the most part it is Willard’s presence, in one way or another, that helps lend the book much of its continuity. Individual stories can be read and enjoyed in and of themselves, but when read from cover to cover the book coheres, partly because it charts the development of Willard’s own character and insights. He is a more mature, more understanding character at the end of the book than at its start: Through his interaction with the other characters, he has grown in many ways. It is this growth, ironically, that makes him ready to leave his hometown in the book’s brief final story, appropriately titled “Departure.” The book is also unified in other ways. Its tone, for instance, is almost uniformly dark and bleak. Little humor or joy pervades the existence of Winesburg’s citizens; many of them lead lives (in Thoreau’s famous phrase) of “quiet desperation,” and their interactions with each other and with George are often edgy and tense. Unhappiness, loneliness, fear, awkwardness, embarrassment, dissatisfaction, and sometimes even anger are common themes; the characters often feel isolated even when they superficially communicate, and in general Winesburg seems a fundamentally sorry (and sorrowful) place. Anderson deliberately sought to present a gallery of “grotesque” characters—characters whose lives have all become, in one way or another, distorted, inflexible, or unbalanced. His book shocked many contemporary readers because of its often blunt depiction of

sexual topics and its frequent presentation of neurotic, obsessive personalities. The total picture that emerges of Winesburg, Ohio, is of a place that is often unlovely and unloving, and yet Anderson’s purpose is not primarily satirical. Rather, he seeks to show small-town life in America as it really was, in all its existential loneliness, and his ultimate attitude toward his characters is not one of harsh judgment but of understanding, sympathy, and compassion. Character is more important in Winesburg, Ohio than plot. In other words, Anderson is less interested in what the town’s citizens do than in who they are; his focus is less on their actions per se than on the ways their behavior reveals their personalities and psychology. In particular, he is interested in their psychological depths and complexities—in the ways their minds and motives are confl icted, torn, and complex. Stories tend to build toward moments of revelation in which characters unveil themselves in some memorable fashion, either to themselves, to each other, or to the reader. The stories are usually told from the point of view of an omniscient (or “all-knowing”) narrator who shares his knowledge of the characters’ pasts and presents, including his insights into their innermost thoughts and feelings. The narrator will often address readers directly (thus giving some tales an air of intimate chattiness) and will also often call attention, in other ways, to the storytelling process. The language used is generally simple, plain, and direct, often featuring short, unadorned, declarative sentences but also often emphasizing recurring key words or images, such as hands or adventure or fear. Anderson’s method often involves such “oral” storytelling techniques as “the laying in at the beginning of blocks of background before the story proper is taken up; the apparent wandering away from the story because of some associational interest provoked by the mention of a name, object, or place; the frequent authorial intrusions in the form of ‘insights’ and self-dramatizations; the shifts in time, and the occasional stopping of the story to lay in apparently overlooked materials necessary to the ‘point’ of the tale” (Thurston 305). Anderson disliked plot-driven tales featuring rigid, predictable structures; his own style and

Sherwood Anderson

structure are therefore looser, more fluid, and (like the characters themselves) highly idiosyncratic. He attempts to catch each main character “at an essential moment in time that reveals a series of brief, intuitive, but true glimpses of the anguish of the human heart. Each story reveals the essence of the central character’s life as Anderson knows it” (D. Anderson 38). Yet the characters, for all their seeming peculiarities, are also emblematic: They symbolize the lonely lives most people lead, and it is this fundamental theme of alienation that makes them and their sometimes apparently bizarre experiences relevant to the lives of Anderson’s readers. Individual stories from Winesburg, Ohio, are discussed in the sections that follow.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Anderson’s uses of recurring characters, places, and themes with those of some other writer of short fiction, such as Kate Chopin or James Joyce. For example, compare two different stories in which George Willard appears with Chopin’s stories titled “At the ’Cadian Ball” and “The Storm.” How do Chopin and Anderson use irony in their presentation of recurring characters? 2. Trace George Willard’s evolution throughout Winesburg, Ohio; how does he develop in psychological or moral terms as the book progresses? In what ways is he more insightful, understanding, and sensitive by the end of the book than he was at the beginning? 3. The critic Lionel Trilling has written that in “Anderson’s world there are many emotions, or rather many instances of a few emotions, but there are very few sights, sounds, and smells, very little of the stuff of actuality” (480–481). Do you agree? Focus on a particular story in your discussion of Trilling’s claims. 4. Anderson’s style of writing has been compared to the techniques of impressionist and postimpressionist painters. Research their techniques and then discuss whether you think the comparison is valid. For instance, how is Anderson similar to these painters in his focus on everyday life and unheroic subjects?

5

5. How do Anderson’s style, tone, techniques, and attitudes compare or contrast with those found in the Spoon River Anthology of Edgar Lee Masters? For example, how do the works differ in the narrative points of view they employ? Is Anderson’s book as cynical as Masters’s work? 6. Compare and contrast the tone, technique, and themes of Winesburg, Ohio, with those of THORNTON WILDER’s Our Town. Which work presents a grimmer picture of small-town life? What “morals,” if any, are implied by the two works? Which work is more innovative in the techniques it uses? 7. Which stories in Winesburg, Ohio do you find most effective? Which do you fi nd least effective? In both cases, explain why. Discuss such matters as characterization, style, tone, and structure. 8. Trace and analyze the use of a key term—such as hands or adventure—throughout the tales. How does Anderson use such terms for symbolic purposes? How does the recurrence of such terms lend unity to the whole work, but sometimes also contribute to the irony of the book? 9. Analyze one particular story in detail, explaining how all of its parts cohere and how they reinforce one another. For example, how does the story maintain consistency in characterization? How does it use foreshadowing and/or irony? What theme or themes help unify the work? 10. Trace one particular theme—such as loneliness or love—throughout the collection of tales. How does Anderson manage to prevent his use of the theme from becoming monotonous? How does he explore different facets of the same theme in different stories? How is his treatment of the theme affected by his presentation of different kinds of characters?

“The Book of the Grotesque” (1919) An incapacitated old writer talks about deaths in the Civil War with an emotional old carpenter, who lost a brother in the confl ict and who has arrived to raise the writer’s bed so that he can glimpse trees outside his window. After the

6


carpenter leaves, the writer begins to imagine “a long procession of figures before his eyes” who represent all the people he has ever known and who now appear before him as “grotesques” (S. Anderson 22). The writer labors on a book discussing this vision, the essence of which is that people become grotesques when any one of them embraces only one limited “truth” to the exclusion of others, thereby turning each “truth” into a “falsehood” (S. Anderson 24). This brief sketch forms a kind of thematic prologue to Anderson’s cycle of short stories titled Winesburg, Ohio. Anderson, in fact, originally planned to call this whole volume The Book of the Grotesque but was persuaded by his publisher to give it instead its present famous title (Small 17). The present prologue nevertheless announces the main theme of the book—a book that will focus, in one story after another, on the ways individuals have distorted their lives (or seen them distorted) by limiting themselves (or being limited by their society) to narrow, unbalanced ways of thinking, feeling, perceiving, and living. Anderson implies that any approach to life that may be attractive or appealing in its own right can become a straitjacket (although sometimes even a “beautiful” or “amusing” straightjacket [S. Anderson 23]) if it dominates a person’s entire existence. The old writer obviously symbolizes, on at least some levels, not only Anderson himself but also the narrator of Winesburg, Ohio, as well as George Willard, the book’s main character (Small 13, 18, 21). Meanwhile, the unpublished book the old writer composes resembles, at least in some respects, Anderson’s own published collection of stories (Small 21). The prologue also introduces such main elements of the rest of Winesburg, Ohio as an emphasis on human suffering (in the tale of the old carpenter), the importance of sympathetic understanding (in the response of the old writer), the importance of the imagination and of the artist’s penetrating insight (in the description of the old writer’s vision of the procession of grotesques), and the tendency of many of the stories in Winesburg, Ohio to move toward moments of insight or revelation (Small 21, 23).

For Discussion or Writing 1. How are the themes, imagery, or phrasing of this sketch typical of the rest of the book? In what ways are the characters of Winesburg, Ohio “grotesque” in the senses outlined here? What imagery of limitation can you fi nd in later sections of the work? 2. In what ways is Captain Ahab, in Melville’s MobyDick, a “grotesque” according to the old writer’s defi nition? How is Ahab’s life narrow and constricted, and how does his obsession with the white whale affect the lives of his crew? 3. What do you think of the old writer’s idea that all truths are originally beautiful, including such truths as “poverty,” “profl igacy,” “carelessness,” and “abandon” (S. Anderson 23)? Do you agree that everything that is true is also beautiful? Explain your logic. 4. The narrator of this sketch contends that the old writer himself was “in danger of becoming a grotesque” (S. Anderson 24). In what sense does the old man run the risk? Is it a risk that Anderson himself entirely avoided? In other words, is there any sense in which Anderson himself ultimately embraced a narrow or onesided vision of human life? 5. How has the term grotesque usually been used in discussions of literature, and how does the old writer’s use of that term resemble or depart from the usual defi nitions? How does the old writer’s defi nition of the term differ (for instance) from Flannery O’Connor’s understanding of “the grotesque”?

“Hands” (1919) Wing Biddlebaum, an aging, isolated, and anxious man whose hands are constantly moving and infinitely expressive, encourages George Willard (a young reporter for the local newspaper) not to abandon his dreams but to embrace them, and he also urges George not to conform to the conventional conduct and thinking of the rest of the community. We eventually learn that Biddlebaum’s original name was Adolph Meyers; that he was once an inspired,

Sherwood Anderson

inspiring teacher in a small Pennsylvania town; that he had a habit when teaching of innocently touching the boys he taught while talking with them, but that one day a “half-witted boy of the school became enamored of” him and that this boy in “his bed at night imagined unspeakable things and in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts” (S. Anderson 32). A crowd of suspicious, belligerent parents descended on Meyers’s house, attacked him verbally and physically, and drove him from the town; for 20 years he has lived a lonely life in Winesburg, his existence blighted and his career as a teacher destroyed. Anderson considered this story his earliest piece of really successful writing and felt an enormous sense of accomplishment upon fi nishing it (Small 30). Homosexuality (even if only implied) was not a common topic in the literature of the 1920s, but Anderson himself, although he had numerous sexual relationships with women, remembered being once suspected of homosexual tendencies and recalled especially how it felt to be viewed with such suspicion (Small 31–32). The story’s main concern, however, is not homosexuality per se (Biddlebaum certainly does not think of himself as gay); rather, the work deals with such common themes in Anderson’s fiction as loneliness, fear, social failure, and disappointed desire. Biddlebaum, like many characters in Winesburg, Ohio, is an isolated, defeated man; his particular story may be peculiar to him, but his suffering, his need for communion and communication, and his deep attachment to hidden yearnings (which are more social than sexual) are all typical of many characters in Anderson’s book, and they are also typical (Anderson thought) of the human experience in general. As many of Anderson’s tales do, this one deals with a sudden moment of transformation in which a character, either through his own choice or through the impact of some external event, becomes a “grotesque”—a distorted, incomplete figure whose life, thinking, and feelings are thereafter confi ned (sometimes unwillingly) to a narrow groove. The story illustrates the “loose” plotting common to Anderson’s tales as well as his penchant for a style of narration that calls attention to the narrator’s voice. In addition, the story illustrates

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Anderson’s characteristic use of evocative imagery and repeated symbols (particularly, in this case, the symbolism of hands themselves). The tale of Wing Biddlebaum is also significant because it is the fi rst of many in the book in which characters are revealed (or reveal themselves) to young George Willard, who functions as a sort of alter ego both for Anderson himself and for all the book’s readers.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Trace the use of “hands” imagery not only in this tale but throughout the rest of the volume. What continuities exist in the imagery from one story to the next, and how is the imagery also used in distinctive ways in various tales? 2. How does this story establish a pattern of particular themes and phrasing that tend to recur in later stories? For example, how is the tone of this story typical of the volume as a whole? In what ways is Biddlebaum similar to other characters in the rest of the volume, particularly in his psychology? 3. How is the emphasis on “dreams” in this story ironic? What kinds of dreams inspire Biddlebaum; on the other hand, what other kinds of dreams have destroyed his life? What does the language of “dreams” imply about the relations between imagination and reality? 4. Compare and contrast the life of Wing Biddlebaum with that of the title character of EDWIN A RLINGTON ROBINSON’s poem “Richard Cory.” How are they similar (but also different) in their social positions and in their fates? 5. Compare and contrast the idea of a sudden, lifetransforming change in this story and in EDITH WHARTON’s novel Ethan Frome. In each work, how is the situation of the main character influenced by the kind of community in which he lives?

“Mother” (1919) Elizabeth Willard, the mother of George Willard (the main recurring character of Winesburg, Ohio) is “tall and gaunt” with a face “marked with small-

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pox scars” (S. Anderson 39), and her lonely life is as bleak as her appearance: She helps her ne’er-dowell husband, Tom, operate an old, rundown hotel, and she spends most of her days cleaning grimy rooms, recalling her promising youth, and hoping for a better, more stimulated and stimulating life for her son. Elizabeth’s relationship with George is close but awkward, and one night, when she hears her husband telling George that George must act and think more as his father does, she concocts a plan to kill her husband to protect George from his malign influence. Fortunately, however, she learns in a conversation with George that he rejects his father’s plans and values, and that he hopes to live the kind of thoughtful, unconventional life that Elizabeth herself desires but cannot enjoy. This story clearly reflects Anderson’s personal relationship with his own parents and may also have been influenced by the frustrations of his own fi rst marriage (Small 57–58). Like the main characters of the “The Book of the Grotesque” and “Hands,” Elizabeth Willard is a dreamer whose dreams, ironically, not only provide a limited means of helping her escape her agony but also help perpetuate her isolation (Small 59, 62–63). She lives the same kind of repressed, oppressive life endured by many characters in Winesburg, Ohio. George functions for her (as he functions for other characters in the book) as the focus of vicarious aspirations; she, as do others, tries to guide him and teach him, and she tries to live (or relive) her life through his. For her as for others, he represents a source of hope; she wants him to avoid the wrong turns that have blighted her own existence. Like many other characters in the book, she is a literally pathetic figure; Anderson invites us both to pity and to understand her, and although her plan to kill her husband may seem an extreme reaction to her circumstances, the frustration from which the plan is born is (in Anderson’s view) all too typical of modern life, whether lived in large, impersonal cities or in small, constricting towns. Elizabeth Willard represents the kind of people who appear so often in Anderson’s fiction: little-known, unregarded persons who feel that life has failed them (Burbank 28, 68) and who see no possibility of personal redemption or escape. Their early hopes have been disappointed,

their futures seem futile, and they cannot communicate clearly or openly their deepest feelings, even (or especially) with the people for whom they feel the most affection.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the characters and themes of this work with those of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers. In what ways are both works partially autobiographical? How can both works be interpreted in Freudian terms? In what ways (according to Freud) is the relationship between George and his parents typical of human life in general? 2. Compare and contrast the relationship between the husband and wife in this story with the relationship depicted in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Eros Turannos.” How are their relationships affected by the communities in which they live and by traditional gender roles? 3. Compare and contrast the relationship between the husband and wife in this story with the relationship depicted in SUI SIN FAR’s (Edith Maude Eaton’s) story “Mrs. Spring Fragrance.” How do the tones of the two works differ, and what does each work imply about the nature of life in general? 4. Research Anderson’s life and discuss, in detail, how this story reflects his relations with his own parents. To what extent is the story autobiographical, and in what ways does Anderson depart from the details of his own life in crafting this tale? How does George Willard’s father both resemble and differ from Anderson’s?

“Adventure” (1919) Alice Hindman is now a gangly old maid of 27, but when she was 16 she had fallen in love with a young man named Ned Currie, whom she hoped to marry and with whom she was even willing to run off to a big city. One day, along the banks of a remote creek outside Winesburg, they became lovers, and although Ned had the best of intentions of making his fortune in the city and then send-

Sherwood Anderson

ing for Alice to join him, eventually he forgot her, although she never blamed him for his neglect. For years and years she pined for him, considering herself his wife in all but name but also growing so increasingly lonely and frustrated that one night, in a fit of sexual and romantic frustration, she runs out naked into the rain; beseeches a deaf old man, who ignores her; and then crawls back, defeated and alone, to her isolated room. This story may have been influenced, in part, by Anderson’s awareness of his own sister’s alienation and yearning for affection, but the isolation felt by Alice Hindman is also a major theme of Winesburg, Ohio as a whole. Various words, phrases, or motifs emphasized in this story—such as “narrow life,” “unable to talk,” “loneliness,” “afraid,” and “wanted to be loved” (S. Anderson 112, 113, 116, 118, 119)—also appear in many others, and indeed the title word is one that recurs throughout the larger book. It seems sadly appropriate that Alice works in a “dry goods store” (S. Anderson 115), since her own life has become desiccated and parched; it is not an accident that at the end of the tale she runs out naked into the potentially cleansing and refreshing rain. This symbolic attempt to be rebaptized and reborn fails, however, when she confronts a man even more cut off, by his age and deafness, from life and vitality than she is; he literally cannot hear or understand her, and her effort to transform her life in a dramatically unconventional fashion ends (typically enough, for an Anderson story) in embarrassment and defeat. Sexual motives and conduct play an important role in this tale, as they do in many by Anderson (Small 105), but the sexual yearnings here, as in various other works of his, are frustrated and suppressed, disappointed and disappointing. At the root of much sexual desire in Anderson’s stories is an even more fundamental sense of loneliness (Burbank 73).

For Discussion or Writing 1. In what ways is Alice’s frustration shaped by the fact that she is a woman? How does Ned have more options and opportunities simply because he is male? How do conventional gender roles

2.

3.

4.

5.

9

affect the characters in other stories in Winesburg, Ohio? Compare and contrast the relationship of Ned and Alice to the relationship depicted in EZR A POUND’s poem “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.” Which of the two works is fi nally more optimistic, and why? What is the role of physical distance in both works? Compare and contrast Alice to the main character in Katherine Anne Porter’s story “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” How and why would a feminist critic respond to both women? In what ways are the women victims of society, and in what ways (if any) are they responsible for their own predicaments? Discuss the use of symbolism in this story. For instance, what is symbolic about the physical appearance of Alice’s employer? What is symbolic about Alice’s fi nal nakedness? What is symbolic about the rainfall? Discuss the presentation of religion and religious imagery in this tale. How does such imagery contribute to the irony of the story? How does it contribute to the complex tone of the work?

“Queer” (1919) Elmer Cowley, son of Ebenezer Cowley and junior partner of Cowley & Son’s store in Winesburg, grows increasingly frustrated not only by his own isolation (since he thinks he is regarded as “queer,” or odd) but also by his father’s incompetence as a businessman and by the apparent normality of the apparently well-adjusted and well-regarded George Willard, whom Elmer sees as representing everything he dislikes about his hometown. After threatening a salesman with violence, Elmer walks to the outskirts of the village, pours out his angry thoughts to an old acquaintance (a contented half-wit), and then returns home, determined to escape Winesburg on the next train. Summoning the curious and friendly George Willard to meet him at the station, Elmer suddenly attacks George, hops onto the departing

10


train, and thinks to himself, “I guess I showed him I ain’t so queer” (S. Anderson 201). Scholars have detected in Anderson’s portrait of Elmer Cowley reflections not only of Anderson’s brother, Earl, but also Anderson himself, who was often as chagrined by his own father as Elmer is by Ebenezer (Small 163). More generally, though, Elmer is simply another in the long list of characters Anderson created in Winesburg, Ohio, who are isolated, bitter, frustrated, and even a bit bizarre. The story is also typical of the book as a whole in its emphasis on a desire to escape, in the prominence it gives to George Willard, and in its movement toward a moment of sudden, unexpected, and somewhat shocking behavior. Elmer is obviously an ironic figure: The more he resists being labeled “queer,” the queerer he truly seems—a fact driven home by the story’s fi nal sentence. The narrative illustrates “George’s eager willingness to understand” the other characters he encounters, an eagerness that “marks his growing sensitivity to other people” (Small 165). A further irony, of course, is that Elmer attacks the one citizen of Winesburg who might have been willing and able to comprehend him. Stylistically the story is typical of most others in the book. Its diction is plain, its syntax (or sentence structure) is simple, and it relies on the repetition of key words and phrases (especially the word queer [Papinchak 8–9]). Midwestern dialect is also stressed, particularly in the repeated memorable phrase “I’ll be washed and ironed and starched” (S. Anderson 200). In “Queer” Anderson comes perhaps as close as he ever does in Winesburg, Ohio to writing something comic, but the tone of the comedy is absurd rather than affi rmative (Small 98–99).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the presentation of George Willard in this tale with the way he is presented in the little-discussed but highly effective story “Nobody Knows.” How does he seem a more complicated, more ambiguous character in the latter tale? In what other ways (and for what other reasons) does “Nobody Knows” deserve more attention than it has received?

2. To what degree is Elmer a sympathetic or even plausible character? Can a story be effective if the main character is unsympathetic? Can a story be effective if the main character is implausible? Justify your answers to both of these questions. 3. Compare and contrast the “half-witted” character in this tale with the one in “Hands.” Why does Anderson make each character “half-witted”? Would the character be less effective if he were “normal”? If so, why and how?

“Death in the Woods” (1919) As a young man, the anonymous narrator saw a prematurely old, poor, decrepit woman walk into his small town from her remote, rundown farm to buy a few scraps of food for herself, her no-good husband, her no-good son, and the various scrawny animals who also depended on her labor for sustenance. As a girl she had worked like a slave for an old German farmer, who abused her sexually; later, as a wife to Jake Grimes (a self-centered thief disliked by the townsfolk), she had been treated once more as little better than a slave; and, later still, as the mother of a rough, tough, hard-drinking, and sexually uninhibited son, she had once again been treated without affection or respect. In the evening of the day she is glimpsed by the narrator, as she makes her weary way back to the farm, she rests under a tree and quietly dies in her sleep, surrounded by her hungry dogs, before she eventually is discovered and examined by the curious townspeople, including the narrator, who considers her more beautiful in death than she had ever seemed in life. Anderson himself rather immodestly called this work “a magnificent tale, one of the most penetrating written in our times” (qtd. in Small 347). Whether or not this is true, the story has become one of his most admired (Small 353) and is certainly typical of his writing in numerous ways. Set in the Midwest and emphasizing rural and small-town life, it also emphasizes his characteristic themes of loneliness, fear, and the grotesque distortion of human potential. As in many of his other tales, the narration is rambling and digressive; the narrator

Sherwood Anderson

calls attention to his own presence in the story; the language is simple, plain, dry, and matter-of-fact, with plenty of examples of Midwest dialect and a good deal of deliberate repetition. The central male characters are dark, abusive failures who never amount to much; the woman, at least, is hardworking, stoic, and selfless—as beautiful (in a way) in spirit as her dead flesh later seems to the narrator. The sexual activity described is both loveless and joyless; existence is presented as a harsh, hard business of survival, for man and beast alike. In this tale violence—whether actual or merely threatened—is a fact of life, and death occurs without sentiment or ceremony (except in the strange behavior of the dogs after the old woman expires). In short, this is another of Anderson’s bleak, grim, unblinking tales of a depressing existence, which is only partially transformed by the physical strength and moral courage of a woman who quickly becomes old and broken before our eyes. Judy Jo Small argues that the central figure of this tale “somehow embodies all the women Sherwood Anderson ever wrote about” (352) and contends that the tale itself “honors the silent, selfsacrificing toil of countless generations of abused and mortal flesh as much as it celebrates the mind’s enduring power to weave the raw pain of human existence into stories that can, like music, uplift and redeem battered spirits” (353). Rex Burbank argues that “the real meaning of the story lies in the total effect the episode has on the teller himself” (126) and that the “narrative moves from fact to mystery, ordinariness to wonderment, recollection to imaginative perception” (127).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Jake Grimes to the father in WILLIAM FAULKNER’s story “Barn Burning.” How are the two characters similar in the ways they treat their wives and children and in the ways they relate to the community at large? Is one character more appealing than the other? 2. Compare and contrast the experiences and fate of the woman in this tale and those of the central character in JACK L ONDON’s tale “To Build a Fire.” How are climate and landscape used

11

symbolically in both stories? Which character is more sympathetic, and why? 3. Compare and contrast the woman in this story with the title character of Anderson’s tale “Mother.” Which of the two women is the more appealing figure, and why? 4. How do the experiences and fate of the woman in this story reflect the options open to women when Anderson was writing? How might a woman living today deal with the same kinds of problems that face the woman in this story? 5. Compare and contrast the experiences of the woman here with those of the central character in Z OR A NEALE HURSTON’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. How does the fact that the latter character is an African American complicate her situation?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON ANDERSON AND HIS WORK 1. The critic Lionel Trilling has written a fairly harsh assessment of Anderson’s style and methods. Read his essay, and then explain to what extent you agree or disagree with his comments, being careful to explain why. 2. Discuss the theme of materialism in a number of Anderson’s stories. What role, for instance, does this theme play in “Mother”? How is the theme relevant to economic changes that were taking place in American society in the fi rst decades of the 20th century? 3. Discuss the presence—or lack thereof—of religion in Anderson’s works. What were Anderson’s own religious views? How might a religious perspective have changed his presentation of his characters and his understanding of existence? 4. Compare and contrast the emphasis on grotesque characters and events in Anderson’s works and in the works of Flannery O’Connor. How is O’Connor’s view of the grotesque shaped by her religious views, and how might the generally secular perspective in Anderson’s stories be said to have shaped his own understanding of the grotesque?

12 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

5. Choose one particular story by Anderson and discuss how (if at all) its various details cohere, creating a mutually reinforcing and artistically complex design. For instance, how is characterization reinforced by symbolism? How do different aspects of the plot relate to one another through irony or foreshadowing? 6. Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of Anderson’s use of quoted speech and dialogue. Is the speech of his characters convincing? Does it sound like the speech real people would use? How does he attempt to make their speech plausible and credible? 7. Discuss the use of point(s) of view in one or more of Anderson’s stories. How is one of his tales affected by the narrative perspective(s) from which it is told? How would the story be different if the point of view were different? 8. In style, tone, method, and themes, how do Anderson’s writings resemble those of Jack London? On the other hand, how do the frequently exotic settings of London’s stories contrast, in their implications, with the small-town setting of Anderson’s stories? Why does each author choose the kinds of settings he does for the particular stories he tells? 9. Anderson wrote numerous tales besides the ones in Winesburg, Ohio. Track down several of his other stories and discuss the ways they resemble, or differ from, the ones in his most famous book. 10. Anderson read and admired the work of Mark Twain. In what ways do Anderson’s style and attitudes resemble those of Twain, and in what other ways do they differ? How, for

instance, do the experiences of Huckleberry Finn both resemble and differ from those of George Willard? WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Anderson, David D. Sherwood Anderson: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967. Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. Edited by Malcolm Cowley. New York: Penguin, 1992. Burbank, Rex. Sherwood Anderson. New York: Twayne, 1964. Cowley, Malcolm. Introduction. Winesburg, Ohio. By Sherwood Anderson. New York: Penguin, 1992. Ferres, John H., ed. Winesburg, Ohio: Text and Criticism. New York: Penguin, 1996. Modlin, Charles E., ed. Certain Last Things: The Selected Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1992. Papinchak, Robert Allen. Sherwood Anderson: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. Small, Judy Jo. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson. New York: Hall, 1994. Spear, Michael M. The Sherwood Anderson Foundation. Available online. URL: http://www.sherwoodanderson foundation.org. Accessed April 7, 2009. Thurston, Jarvis A. “Technique in Winesburg, Ohio.” In Winesburg, Ohio: Text and Criticism, edited by John H. Ferres, 304–317. New York: Penguin, 1996. Trilling, Lionel. “Sherwood Anderson.” In Winesburg, Ohio: Text and Criticism, edited by John H. Ferres, 474–485. New York: Penguin, 1996.

Robert C. Evans

Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša) (1876–1938)

When I saw the lonely figure of my mother vanish in the distance, a sense of regret settled heavily upon me. I felt suddenly weak, as if I might fall limp to the ground. I was in the hands of strangers whom my mother did not fully trust. I no longer felt free to be myself, or to voice my own feelings. (American Indian Stories)

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(or Reservation) near Greenwood, South Dakota, only months before the famous battle of Little Bighorn (also known as Custer’s last stand), in which Indians decimated a U.S. Army contingent led by General George Armstrong Custer. Although Bonnin later claimed to be the granddaughter of Sitting Bull, the famous Indian warrior who had led the battle against Custer, this claim is untrue, and indeed much of Bonnin’s depiction of her own life must be treated with a certain skepticism, since she often failed to stress important data. She often implied, for instance, that she was a full-blooded Indian when in fact she was the daughter of an Indian woman named Ellen Taté Iyóhiwin (whose Indian name meant Reaches for the Wind) and a white trader named Felker, Ellen’s third white husband, who left the relationship before Gertrude was born. At the time of Gertrude’s birth, Ellen had already given birth to eight children, of whom four were still living: Peter, Edward, and Henry St. Pierre (the children of her fi rst husband); and David Simmons, the son of her second husband, John H. Simmons. With Felker gone, Ellen gave Gertrude the last name Simmons. At the same time, however, Ellen (at least by Gertrude’s later accounts) taught the girl a deep suspicion and contempt of white people. In her later memoirs (especially “Impressions of an Indian Childhood”), Gertrude paints a happy picture of her life on the reservation with her mother (her real father and stepfathers are not

ertrude Simmons Bonnin, who adopted the pen name Zitkala-Ša (pronounced “shah” and meaning Red Bird) after graduating from college, is important for a number of reasons: She was one of the fi rst American Indians to write directly about her own life and in her own words, without the intervention or mediation of editors, transcribers, or professional (that is, white) biographers. Her autobiographical writings were published in some of the most important magazines of her day and were later issued in book form, thus giving her unusual prominence and visibility. These writings, moreover, were exceptionally blunt and outspoken in their criticism of white values, white culture, white conduct, and white hypocrisy. However, even after Bonnin turned most of her attention away from writing, she remained significant for decades as an eloquent champion of the rights of Native Americans. She was a highly visible leader in a number of American Indian organizations, achieving unusual recognition in her day not only as an Indian but especially as an Indian woman. Although no full-scale scholarly biography of Bonnin has yet been published, many of the most important details of her life are outlined by P. Jane Hafen in her introduction to Dreams and Thunder and especially by Doreen Rappaport in her detailed biography for children, which provides an extremely helpful chronology. Bonnin was born on February 22, 1876, at the Yankton Sioux Agency

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mentioned), but she claimed that this happiness abruptly ended when she was lured away, at age eight, to a white school in Indiana, to be educated and “civilized.” Gertrude’s brother David had already gone off to attend Hampton Normal Institute in Virginia in 1878; in 1881 he returned to the reservation to work as a clerk and then as a teacher of agriculture. From 1882 to 1884 Gertrude herself had attended day school on the Yankton Reservation, but then in February 1884 she decided (against her mother’s wishes) to go off to White’s Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker-run boarding school in Wabash, Indiana. Her unpleasant experiences there are described in detail in her later memoir, “The School Days of an Indian Girl.” In February 1887 she returned to live with her mother, staying until September 1889 (the same year in which South Dakota became a state). In fall of that year Gertrude (once more against her mother’s wishes) began attending the Santee School in Santee, Nebraska, where she stayed until June 1890—the year in which Sitting Bull was murdered and in which 300 Indians were slaughtered in the famous massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Gertrude stayed with her mother on the Yankton Reservation until February 1891, at which time she returned to White’s Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, where she stayed until June 28, 1895. From there she went, in September 1895, to Quaker-affi liated Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, where she quickly distinguished herself (as she had at White’s) as a star student. In February 1896, for instance, she won second prize in the Indiana State Oratorical Contest for a speech in which she offered “a stinging indictment of white society and hypocritical Christianity” (Hafen xvi). The fact that the speech won the prize (and was later reprinted in the Earlham school newspaper) implies that not all whites were as prejudiced as some, but Gertrude nevertheless had reason to remain distrustful: During the contest, students from an opposing school hung up a banner mocking Earlham for being represented by a “squaw.” During her time at Earlham, Gertrude became an accomplished violinist, pianist, and singer in

addition to being a skillful writer. After fi nishing her studies there in June 1897, she began working as a teacher herself in July at the U.S. Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania—a position she held until January 1899, which is described in her essay “An Indian Teacher among Indians.” By the time that highly critical essay was published in 1900 in the prominent Atlantic Monthly magazine (one of the nation’s leading periodicals), Bonnin had left the school, moved to Boston, adopted the pen name Zitkala-Ša, and begun attending the New England Conservatory of Music. By now she had begun publishing regularly in important journals, and in 1901 a respected Boston publisher issued her fi rst book, Old Indian Legends. In June of that same year, however, she was back in South Dakota, working as a clerk at the Standing Rock Reservation. Although she was briefly engaged to an Indian doctor named Carlos Montezuma, by 1902 she had broken off that relationship, and on August 10 of that year she married Raymond T. Bonnin, who was also a Yankton Indian and who was employed by the Indian Service (the former name of the Bureau of Indian Affairs). Later that year they took up residence at the Unitah Ouraye Ute Agency (or Reservation) in Duchesne, Utah, where Raymond had been transferred and where their only child, Raymond Ohiya (or Winner), was born in 1903. The Bonnins resided at this reservation until 1916, and in fact from March 1905 to November 1906 Gertrude taught at the boarding school there. The family did spend the winter of 1908 and spring of 1909 at the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, and in 1908 they also became friends with William F. Hanson, a music teacher from Utah who shared Gertrude’s cultural interests and who soon became her collaborator in a plan to produce an opera based on Indian themes. Eventually this work, titled The Sun Dance, premiered in Vernal, Utah, on February 20, 1913, and subsequent stagings took place in December 1913 and February 1914 in Salt Lake City as well as elsewhere that year in other places in Utah. By this time, however, Gertrude’s interests were increasingly social and political rather than strictly literary. Although she continued to compose stories

Gertrude Simmons Bonnin 15

while in Utah (many of them fi rst published long after her death in Dreams and Thunder), more and more of her time was taken up with her involvement in the Society of American Indians (SAI), which had been organized in 1911. She joined its advisory board in 1914 and also did fieldwork for the group, and in 1916 (in the year following the death of her mother, with whom she had continued to have a contentious relationship), she was elected secretary of the SAI and became editor of its publication, American Indian Magazine. In 1917 she and Raymond moved to Washington, D.C., and during this time Raymond also served in the U.S. Army, from which he was honorably discharged in 1919 (the year after the end of World War I). In 1920 women citizens of the United States were granted the right to vote (a right still denied to Indians who were not citizens), and in the same year Congress passed a law granting Indian veterans the right to apply for U.S. citizenship. Gertrude herself had editorialized in favor of the latter move, and she had also campaigned against the use of peyote among Indians. In 1919, however, tensions within the SAI led to her resignation from the organization; in 1920 she became actively involved with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, where, in 1921, she helped form an Indian Welfare Committee and authored a brochure titled Americanize the First Indian: A Plan of Regeneration. In these years she often spoke before groups while wearing traditional Indian costumes and advocating for Indian rights. Also in 1921 her book American Indian Stories was issued by a major press. Gertrude also continued her political activism, working with the Indian Rights Association and the American Indian Defense Association and collaborating on the authorship of a major report, titled Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indian: An Orgy of Graft, Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes, Legalized Robbery (1924). All of her advocacy efforts helped to produce some significant fruit in 1924 when a law fi nally granted citizenship (and thus voting rights) to all noncitizen Indians born in the United States. In 1926 she and Raymond (who had studied law and had been working as a law clerk) founded the National Council of American Indians (NCAI),

with Gertrude as president and Raymond as secretary. They claimed that theirs was the only national Indian organization actually headed by Indians, and in fact Gertrude remained president until her death. For the next decade they traveled widely and often, organizing chapters of the NCAI on numerous reservations, but they also spent much time in Washington, lobbying on behalf of various Indian-related causes and trying to influence the two major political parties to adopt pro-Indian positions. When the Democrats swept into office at the end of 1932 (partly in response to public concern about the Great Depression), many of the reforms that had been advocated by the Bonnins were put into effect. Unfortunately, despite these successes for Indians as a group, the Bonnins themselves were not faring so well. Their fi nancial condition was precarious and became even more so when the health of their son (who was diabetic) became so poor that eventually he, his wife, and their four children had to move in with Gertrude and Raymond in spring 1937. By this time (on a happier note) interest had revived in The Sun Dance opera, and indeed a revised version of the work was chosen by the New York Opera Guild as its opera of the year for 1938, with a performance scheduled for that spring. Gertrude, however, never lived to see the work restaged: She died in Washington, D.C., on January 26, 1938, at age 61 after succumbing to cardiac dilatation and kidney disease. As the wife of a veteran, she was eligible for burial in Arlington National Cemetery, where her headstone reads, “Gertrude Simmons Bonnin—‘Zitkala-Sa’ of the Sioux Indians—1876–1938” (Lukens 154). Raymond was buried beside her in Arlington when he himself passed away on September 24, 1942.

“Impressions of an Indian Childhood” (1900) In this memoir describing her earliest recollections, Zitkala-Ša focuses especially on her relations with her mother (who deeply distrusted whites), but she also recounts her relations with her friends, her older relatives, and the wider community. She


describes the typical pastimes of her people as well as her own activities and development, and then she also describes how and why she decided to leave her village in order to go off with white missionaries to pursue an education in the East. “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” has the double advantage of seeming alluringly foreign and deeply familiar. On the one hand, it describes a culture and kind of life with which most people had (and have) little personal experience; reading the memoir therefore appeals to one’s sense of curiosity and answers one’s desire to learn about a distinct and different way of living. On the other hand, many of the experiences described in the essay are ones that will seem instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever been a child (that is, to everyone). The essay has an almost inevitably universal appeal because it deals with so many experiences that are so common and widespread, such as relations with parents (especially with one’s mother), relations with childhood friends, relations with one’s immediate community (including relatives), relations with natural surroundings, the process of maturation, and nostalgia for the simple joys and innocence of childhood. Native American readers are also likely to fi nd the essay appealing as a fi rsthand and highly affi rmative account of the history of their culture, while many white readers will respond to the essay with a strong sense of guilt about the history of the abusive treatment of Native Americans. The language of this essay, like that of much writing by Zitkala-Ša, is clear and simple but can also seem mannered, “quaint,” predictable, and old-fashioned, as when the author describes herself by saying, “I was as free as the wind that blew my hair, and no less spirited than a bounding deer” (American 8). At times the writing seems sentimental (“My poor child, how I cried with her because the Great Spirit had forgotten us!”; American 10), but at the same time the tone can also be stingingly bitter (as when the girl’s mother describes any paleface as “a sham,—a sickly sham!” and declares that the “bronzed Dakota is the only real man”; American 9). There are times, too, when the writing seems to depart from strict historical accuracy. At one point, for instance, Zitkala-Ša quotes her

mother as saying, “There is what the paleface has done! Since then your father too has been buried in a hill nearer the rising sun. We were once happy. But the paleface has stolen our lands and driven us hither. Having defrauded us of our land, the paleface forced us to move away” (American 10). What this passage fails to make clear, however, is that Gertrude Bonnin’s own father was himself a paleface and that in fact all three of her mother’s husbands were white men. The passage just quoted seems to imply, though, that Zitkala-Ša’s father was an Indian, perhaps even an Indian killed by whites, when in fact he seems to have been a white man named Felker who left his wife (or was sent away) before his daughter was even born. Interestingly enough, the quoted passage is silently omitted when Deborah Rappaport, in the only full-length biography of Zitkala-Ša currently in print, extensively reproduces the rest of this account (10). It is as if Rappaport realized that including the passage might call the general veracity of Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical reminiscences into question. Gertrude Bonnin had many good practical reasons to want to present herself as a full-blooded Indian and to present her mother as a simple victim of white maliciousness. Not the least of these reasons was a genuine desire to win sympathy for her people and thus help promote achievement of their full human rights. When we know the truth, however, her equivocation runs the risk of making her larger story seeming more generally suspect and therefore less rhetorically effective than it might otherwise have been. In a work claiming to be a reliable historical memoir, any departure from verifiable truth risks damaging the credibility of both the work and the author. A really intriguing memoir might have been written about the attitudes of Gertrude Bonnin’s mother toward Gertrude’s father (or her other white husbands), just as a truly fascinating account might have been offered of Bonnin’s own feelings about her father—feelings that must surely have been quite complicated. Instead, Zitkala-Ša chooses to present a story that is inevitably simpler, more sentimental, and fi nally less interesting than the truth. Nevertheless, despite such concerns, “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” retains a good


deal of genuine interest, particularly in the ways it depicts the tribal lives of Native Americans. Zitkala-Ša presents the tribe as essentially one large family in which meals are freely shared, the young address any old person as “grandfather” or “grandmother” (and are treated as grandchildren in return), and people often sit together in a “great circle” (American 16)—an appropriate image of the intimate communal life the essay memorializes. Zitkala-Ša’s memories of her childhood focus on literal and figurative warmth; the essay is mostly set during the spring and summer, and when cooler weather intrudes, communal fi res provide comfort and a setting for sharing food and stories. At one point, for instance, Zitkala-Ša remembers being told “a long story about a woman whose magic power lay hidden behind the [tattooed] marks upon her face.” Nevertheless, although the tale was initially frightening, she “fell asleep before the story was completed” (American 16–17). Her sleep implies the security she feels as part of the community, even when faced with a frightening story, while the communal storytelling activity itself implies part of the impetus and model for Zitkala-Ša’s own goals as an author. She is the latest link in a long chain of tribal historians and storytellers, and her writing retains many of the features of this basically oral art. Her essays, for instance, tend to ramble a bit; they lack any sense of strict or rigid structure. Narrative threads are sometimes picked up only to be dropped, unresolved, a few paragraphs later. In this sense the essay reflects the desultory style of actual conversation. In recounting her own life, Zitkala-Ša inevitably recounts the customs of her tribe, and while showing how she herself was informally educated by living among her people, she educates her white readers. The essay shows how she learned about nature, her people, and her people’s relations with whites, and the essay also shows the moral education of the young girl. Among the most appealing aspects of the essay are those moments when Zitkala-Ša mocks herself or shows the ability to be self-critical, as when she “snarl[s]” at her mother at one point for stopping to visit an old woman instead of hastening to a feast and then feels “shame” when

she comprehends the generous motives behind her mother’s delay (American 31–32). At another point Zitkala-Ša recounts how, as a very young girl intent on making coffee for a visiting old warrior when her mother was not at home, she used old coffee grounds and warm water. When her mother returned and discovered what had happened, both she and the old warrior laughed, but “neither she nor the warrior, whom the law of our custom had compelled to partake of my insipid hospitality, said anything to embarrass me. They treated my best judgment, poor as it was, with the utmost respect. It was not till long years afterward that I learned how ridiculous a thing I had done” (American 28–29). In moments such as this, Zitkala-Ša shows a winning ability to laugh (or at least crack a thin, snide smile) at herself—an ability that tends to be missing from some of her other autobiographical essays. Whatever sense of limited paradise Zitkala-Ša enjoyed as a young girl is lost when some white missionaries tempt the children to leave the reservation in order to pursue education at a boarding school farther east. Symbolically, they lure the children with stories of a “great tree where grew red, red apples,” telling them about “how we could reach out our hands and pick all the red apples we could eat” (American 41–42). The symbolism is obvious (perhaps too obvious): The Christian missionaries ironically function here almost as Satanic deceivers, tempting the children in ways that will separate them forever from their once-Edenic surroundings. As the essay ends, Zitkala-Ša presents herself (as she often does in her later memoirs) feeling “as frightened and bewildered as the captured young of a wild creature” (American 45), even though it was she herself, despite her mother’s wishes and advice but also with the approval of a beloved aunt, who had yearned to make the journey. Her later essays emphasize the sufferings that resulted from succumbing to the missionaries’ temptations.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Examine the way Zitkala-Ša depicts the individual’s relationship with the larger community. You might discuss such matters as relations


between parents and children, relations between family and neighbors, and the process of informal education. 2. Discuss the ways elderly Indians are depicted in this work as compared to JACK L ONDON’s story “The Law of Life.” There are some obvious contrasts between the two works in this respect, but can you fi nd some interesting similarities? 3. Discuss the ways the mother is presented in the work. What kinds of advice and/or training does the mother give her child?

“The School Days of an Indian Girl” (1900) In this sequel to “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” Zitkala-Ša describes her intense unhappiness as a student at a boarding school for Indians—a school run by white Christian missionaries whom she perceives as strange, strict, and even abusive. At the school, she feels regimented, isolated, and eventually rebellious, and she longs for the relative happiness of the life she once enjoyed with her mother on the reservation. Eventually she attends a religiously affi liated college, where she excels at oratory, wins the respect of some of her white classmates, but continues to feel alone and angry, as well as alienated from her own mother. This essay begins, significantly enough, by mentioning at least two other Indian children by name—Judéwin and Thowin. These references are important, because Zitkala-Ša never gives names to the white people she describes. Instead, they are usually presented as distant, anonymous, often ugly, and frequently menacing figures who frighten the small (or “wee”) child even when they try to be affectionate. Perhaps this tactic of denying names to her oppressors was charitable: Perhaps she wanted to avoid merely personal attacks. Or perhaps she assumed that individual names and personalities were unimportant; what mattered, instead, were the motives and deeds of the whites, not their personal identities. In any case, the tactic of denying the whites any particular names makes it easier to treat them simply as anonymous,

somewhat inhuman “palefaces” (Zitkala-Ša’s favorite term for her oppressors); she thus turns the tables on whites, who tended to think of Indians as undifferentiated members of an inferior group. A white person, reading this essay, experiences how it feels to be the subject of broad stereotypes and racial discrimination, and if the experience is unpleasant, perhaps that is Zitkala-Ša’s intention. The essay will be uncomfortable reading for most contemporary whites, not only because they will be distressed to see the ways Native Americans were once mistreated (even by whites whose conscious intentions may have been good), but also because contemporary white readers will feel the sting of the same kinds of prejudices from which Indians so often suffered. Only rarely are the whites in this essay presented in attractive terms, and even then the depictions are often ambiguous. At one point, for instance, one missionary tosses sweets to the new young students, and Zitkala-Ša eats quite a few. “The missionary’s generous distribution of candies was impressed upon my memory,” she writes, and for a brief moment it seems as if she will actually have at least one happy reminiscence of her time at the school, but then the sentence continues, and it turns out that the incident was impressed on her memory “by a disastrous result which soon followed. I had caught more than my share of candies and gums, and soon after our arrival at school I had a chance to disgrace myself, which, I am ashamed to say, I did” (American 49). Presumably she became ill from eating all the sweets and perhaps even vomited. Thus the ill-considered attempt to be kind literally made her sick—an apt if unintended symbol of much of what happens in this essay. A similar incident occurs a few sentences later: “A rosy-cheeked paleface woman caught me in her arms” and tossed the young girl “high in midair.” The woman’s rosy cheeks and enthusiastic playing might at fi rst seem attractive and positively welcoming, but that is not how Zitkala-Ša remembers the experience: “I was both frightened and insulted by such trifl ing. . . . My mother had never made a plaything of her wee daughter. Remembering this I began to cry aloud” (American 50). These incidents set the tone and


the narrative pattern for much of the rest of the essay: The palefaces behave in ways that are either inadvertently or deliberately upsetting and disturbing, and Zitkala-Ša—even when writing in retrospect—fi nds their behavior repulsive. The fact that these missionaries were Quakers (a famously gentle, generous, freethinking, and compassionate group) is never mentioned, and the benefits of the schooling (such as the literacy displayed by the essay itself) are rarely stressed. Instead, the memoir often seems deliberately to echo the most depressing descriptions of Mr. Brocklehurst’s school, Lowood, in Charlotte Brontë’s famous novel Jane Eyre. These resemblances include an enforced policy against “natural” hairstyles, an indifference to the health of the children (an indifference that leads, both in the novel and in the memoir, to the death of a dear friend thanks to “consumption,” or tuberculosis [American 66]), and a general regimentation that robs the children of their freedom and peace of mind. Ironically, the resemblances to Jane Eyre (whether intended or not) help remind us that charity boarding schools were often harsh places for anyone in the 19th century, whether the students were Indians like Zitkala-Ša or whites like Jane. Yet the resemblances also lend an undercurrent of credibility and emotional force to ZitkalaŠa’s narrative: The school she describes seems in some ways so familiar that we almost feel as if we have been there. Practically everything about the school suggests unpleasantness and an absence of vitality: The landscape is “bitter-cold,” the trees are “bare,” there is a “constant clash of harsh noises,” and the young girls are described as “marching into the dining room” (which should, ideally, be a place of relaxed pleasure) in “stiff shoes and closely clinging dresses” (American 52). What these descriptions lack in subtlety they make up for in consistency; even eating is done “by formula” (American 54). Natural imagery, when it is used at all, is frequently used to depict the wee Indians as “little animals driven by a herder” (American 56). Even Satan is described in ways that make him resemble a white man: He has a beard “like some I had seen palefaces wear” (American 62), and when Zitkala-Ša later dreams about him,

she imagines how his “eyes were fastened upon me” (American 63)—much as the whites in the book are often described as rudely staring at the vulnerable young girl (see, for example, American 48). Ironically, then, in describing the devil (“this white man’s legend”; American 62), Zitkala-Ša depicts him as an embodiment of the worst traits of whites themselves. She uses the education she receives about the white man’s superstitions as a way of mocking the whites who teach her. Not all of Zitkala-Ša’s experiences with paleface education were entirely negative, however. At the end of her essay she describes her experiences at an unnamed college (which was in fact Earlham College, a Quaker school). Once more Zitkala-Ša describes this latest set of Quakers as “a cold race whose hearts were frozen hard with prejudice” (American 76), but eventually she wins their respect by performing well in a school oratorical contest. Greeted with applause and even with roses by her fellow students even before she learns that she has won fi rst prize, Zitkala-Ša issues one of her few statements of regret about her negative attitudes toward whites: “This friendly token was a rebuke to me for the hard feelings I had borne them” (American 78). It does not take long, however, for her to face further “strong prejudice against my people” when she is sent as Earlham’s representative to a state oratorical competition. Students from another school unfurl a “white flag” mocking the fact that Earlham is represented by a “squaw,” but when Zitkala-Ša is awarded one of the two top prizes, the hands that held the flag hang “limp in defeat” (American 79–80). Significantly, Zitkala-Ša does not mention that her speech was highly honored despite offering fierce criticism of whites and Christianity, nor that the speech was printed in the school newspaper—facts that suggest that not all whites were as prejudiced as the flag wavers. She thus sacrifices full historical accuracy, as well as the opportunity for a fuller psychological and artistic complexity, in the interests of immediate, short-term rhetorical effect. Her reasons for doing so are of course understandable. Ironically, however, the more prominent and respected Zitkala-Ša became as an advocate for her people,

20


the more likely it became that students of her life would become aware of discrepancies between the facts of that life and the image she offers of herself in her published works. Paradoxically, if her essays seem in some ways less credible today than when they were fi rst published, that is partly because they contributed so effectively to the fame that made her life an object of later scholarly study. The more famous she became, the more incentive scholars had to probe the details of her life.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Examine the way schools and schooling are described in this essay. You might compare the depiction of schooling here with that of W. E. B. DuBois’s book The Souls of Black Folk. What experiences did the two authors have in common? How did their experiences differ? What are the attitudes of each author toward education? 2. In his book Up from Slavery, BOOKER T. WASHINGTON describes his own experiences as a teacher of Native Americans at a school primarily intended for blacks. How does Washington’s report of these experiences shed light on Zitkala-Ša’s memoir, and how does Zitkala-Ša’s memoir shed light on Washington’s account? 3. Compare and contrast this essay with COUNTEE CULLEN’s poem titled “Incident.” How are the attitudes of the two central characters similar and/or different? What do both works imply about the later importance of childhood events?

“An American Teacher among Indians” (1900) In this third of a trio of autobiographical essays published in 1900, Zitkala-Ša describes her transition from student to a teacher herself at a school for Native Americans, but her experiences there are not much happier than earlier. She feels physically weak and psychologically drained, and she perceives herself as being treated with condescension, almost as if she were a domesticated animal. When she is sent west to recruit new students, she encounters an ugly

white man, voracious white settlers, and impoverished relatives, and she concludes that education of the Indians may do more harm than good. This essay is full of imagery of confi nement and oppression. Early in the work, Zitkala-Ša describes herself traveling on a train toward her new post as a teacher at an unnamed school for Indians (which was actually located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania). She feels “tired and hot” and is surrounded by “a black veiling of car smoke” (American Indian 81), and the images do not improve much even after she arrives at her destination. The school, to be sure, is more attractive than the town itself (“The large trees among the houses [of the campus] gave the place a cool, refreshing shade, and the grass a deeper green”; American 82), but it is not long before Zitkala-Ša fi nds herself in her own small room, with its “ghastly walls,” its curtains “yellowed with age,” and its “stiff-backed chairs” (although at least the bed is “clean” and “white”; American 82). The essay, then, shows a careful attention to imagery, the connotations of which are used indirectly to reinforce Zitkala-Ša’s overt declarative statements. Particularly interesting is the way Zitkala-Ša describes her fi rst encounter with her new employer (who remains unnamed, as does every other white in her three early autobiographical memoirs). At fi rst she hears a “heavy tread” stop outside her door; then she encounters an “imposing figure.” Initially, then, it seems as if she will be having the latest in her long line of negative encounters with intimidating whites. However, to her surprise (and ours), the imposing figure belongs to a “stately gray-haired man,” who, “with the right hand extended for greeting, . . . smiled kindly upon me.” Zitkala-Ša feels “awed by his wondrous height and strong square shoulders.” It is a rare moment: Zitkala-Ša seems to have met a friendly, welcoming white person, and the narrative thus gains an unexpected complexity. Almost immediately, however, she senses his disappointment: “he looked into my face. I imagined that a visible shadow fl itted across his countenance as he let my hand fall.” He is soon calling her a “little Indian girl,” and Zitkala-Ša reports that “I thought I heard a subtle note of disappointment in his voice.” The fact that


she says she “imagine[s]” the shadow on his face and only thinks she hears his disappointment raises the brief possibility that she is being overly sensitive and is willing to consider the possibility that her own attitude may be partly at fault, but soon she is referring without irony to the “lines of pain” on her face, to her “ill fortune,” and to her “unhappy silence” as she feels herself being “watched by those around me.” Soon, too, her employer is telling her—in phrasing she clearly considers patronizing rather than fatherly or affectionate—that he intends to “turn [her] loose to pasture” (American 83–85). In other words, he plans to send her west to recruit new Native American students. It is as if she is being treated as a sheepdog, sent out to round up new victims to be fleeced of their cultural heritage. The third memoir, in other words, repeats the pattern so well established in the fi rst two—a pattern in which Zitkala-Ša becomes a victim of whites (often thanks to her own good intentions). After the “intense heat” and “sticky car smoke” belching from the “iron horse” (i.e., train) on which Zitkala-Ša travels west, she is met by a white man who seems, if anything, even less appealing than the train ride. Although he is very briefly described as a “trusty driver,” his unattractive features soon take center stage: His “unkempt flaxen hair hung shaggy about his ears and his leather neck of reddish tan. From accident or decay he had lost one of his long front teeth.” Zitkala-Ša notes that although she calls him “a paleface, his cheeks were of a brick red. His moist blue eyes, blurred and bloodshot, twitched involuntarily. . . . His weather-stained clothes fitted badly his warped shoulders. He was stooped, and his protruding chin, with its tuft of dry flax, nodded as monotonously as did the head of his faithful beast” (American 87; italics added). Interestingly enough, Zitkala-Ša, who just a few paragraphs earlier had seemed to object to being treated as an animal, now describes the driver in blatantly animalistic terms, especially in the fi nal quoted sentence but also in the italicized phrases. If turnabout is fair play, then Zitkala-Ša effectively retaliates against prejudiced whites by letting such readers experience the feeling of being described as beasts. Indeed the joke—whether intended or

not—goes deeper, since this “paleface” is not pale, and in fact his skin is far redder than any “red man’s.” When Zitkala-Ša arrives with him at her mother’s cabin, her mother is momentarily stunned by the appearance of this man and his “jagged teeth” (American 89). Even though Zitkala-Ša had earlier mentioned that the driver had been taking passengers to the small village for “a long time” (American 87), her mother does not recognize him and seems to worry that her daughter has taken the ugly paleface home as a suitor. In this passage as in various others, Zitkala-Ša gives whites a taste of their own medicine, letting paleface readers experience for themselves how it feels to be the object of ethnic and cultural disdain. A similar reversal occurs a few paragraphs later, when Zitkala-Ša describes the horde of “broadfooted white beggars” who have recently staked claims to lands near the reservation (American 93). Whites of the time may have liked to think of themselves as a cultivated, civilizing influence on the allegedly “primitive” Indians, but the attitude of Zitkala-Ša’s mother toward these newcomers is wholly contemptuous, and Zitkala-Ša herself writes about them with a kind of derisive pity. Once again a basic rhetorical strategy of this essay seems to be to turn the tables on any potential white racist readers, sending back to them the repugnance they have so often expressed toward Indians. Thus she describes some of her fellow teachers at the Indian school in Carlisle with bitter opprobrium: One is depicted as an “opium-eater” and as a “pumpkincolored creature,” another is described as “stupid” and an “inebriate paleface,” and even the “few rare” whites who seem well intentioned and well qualified also seem “powerless to choose workmen like themselves.” Given these attitudes, it is little wonder that Zitkala-Ša “made no friends among the race of people I loathed” (American 95–97). Her essay seems designed to refute any condescending stereotypes of Indians (and especially of Indian women) as passive, long-suffering, inarticulate, faint hearted weaklings who had been beaten down and defeated by representatives of a supposedly sophisticated, powerful, well-intentioned, highly cultured, and ultimately charitable civilization.

22


In the present memoir and elsewhere, Zitkala-Ša shows that she can give as good as she gets, having learned well the old biblical axiom of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read this essay in conjunction with ZOR A NEALE HURSTON’s essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” Discuss such matters as tone, attitude, rhetorical strategies, and views of self and others. Which essay strikes you as being a more effective piece of writing? Explain why. Which essay seems more realistic? Explain. 2. Compare and contrast the attitudes toward schools and schooling expressed in this essay with the attitudes expressed in L ANGSTON HUGHES’s poem “Theme for English B.” What views of self and others are implied in each work? What is the fi nal tone of each text? 3. Examine the role of the white philanthropists described in this work. How are the motives and the results of the philanthropy ambiguous? To what extent do the philanthropists deserve disdain, respect, or some combination of the two?

Old Indian Legends (1901) This collection of 14 traditional Native American tales is typical of much folklore in its emphasis on animals who talk and behave as humans do, humans who are closely in touch with nature, and people (and even anthropomorphic animals!) who live according to the ancient ways of an ancient culture. The tales provide insights into the values and customs of American Indians, the stories are frequently amusing but sometimes have darker overtones, and almost always a moral lesson of some kind is stated or implied. A particularly important recurring character is Iktomi, a trickster who has a penchant for getting into complicated predicaments and who is often punished for his deceit. By collecting and collating various versions of the tales presented here, Zitkala-Ša sought to preserve and pass on in writing the essentially oral culture of her people; she realized that unless their

culture was preserved and reinvigorated, Indians themselves might die out as a distinct (and distinctive) people. Zitkala-Ša claims to have heard the legends directly from “old Dakota story-tellers,” and she says that she “often listened to the same story told over again by a new story-teller” (Old iv). The fact that she found these “renderings varying much in little incidents” (Old iv) gives her license to conflate various versions, just as it gives her license to introduce variations of her own. The political dimensions of the collection are also implied in Zitkala-Ša’s preface, where she justifies her decision to reproduce the tales in English by slyly noting that “America in the last few centuries has acquired a second tongue” (Old v)—phrasing that subtly reminds readers that Indians were the continent’s fi rst inhabitants but that they have, in the meantime, lost most of their earlier control. The quoted phrasing never mentions the horrible violence by which America “has acquired a second tongue,” but the disparity between this polite terminology and the violent facts lurking behind it is deftly ironic. By retelling these legends, then, Zitkala-Ša not only seeks to preserve a sense of native culture for native peoples themselves but also seeks to show the value in (and values of) a culture that has been pushed to the brink of extinction. Paradoxically, by emphasizing the legends of Native Americans, Zitkala-Ša also seeks to show their “near kinship with the rest of humanity” and point toward “the great brotherhood of mankind” (Old v). Although many of the tales give the appearance of being straightforward moral fables intended chiefly for children, in some of them defi nite adult political overtones are loudly audible. “The Badger and the Bear,” for instance, is essentially an allegory about the mistreatment of Indians by whites: A kindly badger family assists a sickly, impoverished bear who asks for help. They feed him generously until he becomes so strong that he seizes their food and evicts them from their home. As a result, the badgers themselves become desperately poor; facing starvation, they ask for assistance from the bear, but he and his family turn them away and laugh at their plight. Only one ugly cub, treated as a pariah by the others, even attempts to help the


needy badgers, and even he must act with cautious circumspection. Ultimately, however, the badgers perform a magic rite that raises up a powerful, avenging warrior, and it is only when confronted with this threat of force that the worried bears behave with even a pretense of decency. The “real” meaning of this tale is clear enough, but the point is cleverly made through the use of animals as characters. The appearance of the avenging warrior at the end of the story is, however, troubling in various ways. It is sad to think that the only means by which Indians will achieve justice is through force, and it is perhaps sadder to think that even this drastic solution may be only a fantasy that will never actually materialize. The miraculous warrior and the happy ending he provides are the only two elements of this tale that seem less than realistic. As Zitkala-Ša undoubtedly understood, in “real life” (unlike in fiction) satisfying solutions were often hard to come by.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the Native American folklore recorded in this book with the AfricanAmerican folklore recorded in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men. What similarities do you see in terms of themes, images, plots, characters, imagery, and tone? How do black folklore and Indian folklore differ? 2. Folklore is often thought to be especially interesting to children. Explain why. What aspects of plot, characterization, narrative technique, and imagery might make these legends particularly appealing to children? 3. Compare and contrast these stories with a wellknown collection of European folktales, such as Aesop’s Fables. What traits do the two collections share? How are they distinctive? Do the similarities imply anything about the possible existence of a broadly shared “human nature”?

American Indian Stories (1921) This collection consists of 10 items: the three well-known autobiographical tales fi rst published

in 1900, an essay called “The Great Spirit” in some versions of the book (and titled “Why I Am a Pagan” in other editions), a number of obviously fictional tales, and a concluding essay titled “America’s Indian Problem.” The items vary in tone, method, technique, and skill, but throughout them all runs a fundamental concern with protecting and preserving Native American culture. American Indian Stories is in some ways a puzzling book. The title, for instance, suggests that the work will be a collection of fictional tales, but most scholars have treated the opening three entries as examples of relatively straightforward autobiography. While the fourth seems to be an essay, the next several do seem to be stories, and the fi nal piece is essentially a political pamphlet that quotes, at great and sometimes clumsy length, an earlier municipal research report. To make matters even more complicated, one reprint edition of the book (with a foreword by Dexter Fisher) gives the title of the fourth piece as “The Great Spirit,” while the reprint published by Rio Grande Press gives the title as “Why I Am a Pagan.” Moreover, in the various editions this essay concludes differently: In the Rio Grande Press reprint, immediately after the sentence that ends with the reference to the “sweet breathing of flowers,” the ensuing statement concludes the piece: “If this is Paganism, then at present, at least, I am a Pagan” (American 107). The edition with the foreword by Fisher, on the other hand, omits this provocative assertion and instead ends with an extremely lyrical paragraph. To add to the textual complexity, the essay titled “America’s Indian Problem” is omitted altogether from the Rio Grande Press reprint (even though it is listed in the table of contents!). Finally, it is worth noting that while most other editors have treated the fi rst three pieces in the book as autobiographical essays or memoirs, Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris, in their recent Penguin edition, treat the works as fictional stories (although they tend to do so inconsistently). American Indian Stories, in short, is a work that defies easy or conventional classification in terms of genre, style, method, or organization. Of the more clearly fictional works included in the volume, “The Soft-Hearted Sioux” runs the

24


risk of seeming both sentimental and implausible: It focuses on a young Indian man who, because of his exposure to Christian education, entirely loses his ability to hunt or otherwise provide food by legal means for his starving father (as if Christians somehow did not hunt, raise crops, or purchase commodities). “The Trial Path” provides intriguing insight into native judicial practices and attitudes toward justice and revenge. “A Warrior’s Daughter” depicts a strong and resourceful Indian woman who rescues a captured brave, while “A Dream of Her Grandfather” is a more allegorical piece about Indian rights. “The Widespread Enigma Concerning BlueStar” is an openly political tale in which conniving, greedy Indians share the blame with conniving, greedy whites. Finally, “America’s Indian Problem” begins with a history of relations between whites and Indians and then ends with extensive quotation from a government report. American Indian Stories is, then, more a miscellany than the collection of fictional tales that its title might suggest. In that sense it provides a fairly comprehensive overview of Zitkala-Ša’s interests, methods, and talents and is a good place for any student of her work to begin study of her writings.

For Discussion or Writing 1. What themes, images, concerns, and kinds of characters help to give unity to this collection? Is unity even an important criterion in evaluating a book such as this? How do adjacent works within the volume relate to one another? What comparisons or contrasts can you see, for instance, between “The Widespread Enigma” and “America’s Indian Problem”? 2. What do you think of the argument that treats the fi rst three pieces in this collection as fictional stories rather than as autobiographical essays or memoirs? What are the advantages or disadvantages of reading these works in one way rather than another? Does it make a difference to consider them as fiction, as nonfiction, or as some blend of the two? 3. Trace one or more patterns throughout ZitkalaŠa’s three major autobiographical essays (from American Indian Stories). For instance, how are

her relations with her mother presented from one work to the next? How are her relations with her various communities presented? How is nature depicted from one work to the next? In what ways is Zitkala-Ša’s presentation of herself consistent from one essay to the next, and in what ways does her presentation of herself change?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON ZITKALA-ŠA AND HER WORK 1. Compare and contrast Zitkala-Ša’s three major autobiographical essays (from American Indian Stories) with Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, Up from Slavery. Discuss the works in terms of the experiences described, the tone and attitude adopted, and the rhetorical effectiveness of the style. How are whites depicted in both works? Which work was more likely to appeal to white readers and thus achieve its political objectives? 2. Read Zitkala-Ša’s three major autobiographical essays (from American Indian Stories) alongside R ICHARD WRIGHT’s autobiography titled Black Boy. How are they comparable in tone and attitude? How are they comparable in the ways whites are depicted? How are they comparable in the ways they use (or fail to use) humor? What is the rhetorical purpose of each work? In other words, which audience is each work trying to affect? How is that rhetorical purpose achieved? 3. Read Zitkala-Ša’s essays describing her education and compare and contrast with the educational experiences described by Maya Angelou in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. How do the two protagonists differ in their views of learning and educators? How are they similar? 4. Compare Zitkala-Ša’s fiction (in Old Indian Legends and in the stories included in American Indian Stories) with her nonfiction (especially the nonfiction works included in American Indian Stories). What features (such as style, themes, and narrative techniques) do they have in common? Which kinds of works—the fiction or the nonfiction—would have been likely to


5.

6.

7.

8.

appeal to the broadest range of readers? (Explain why and how.) Choose four separate works— two examples of fiction and two examples of nonfiction—and discuss the audiences to which each work seems primarily addressed. Compare and contrast the central figure of Zitkala-Ša’s three major autobiographical essays (in American Indian Stories) with Helga Crane, the central character of NELLA L ARSEN’s novel Quicksand. How are the two figures similar in their moods, views, and basic psychology? How are they similar in their experiences, including their experiences with educational institutions and their relations with family members? How does each character tend to relate to other people? Toward whom is most of the antagonism of each character directed? Examine a collection of writings by other American Indian women authors from roughly the same period as Zitkala-Ša. (See, for instance, the book titled Native American Women’s Writing 1800–1924: An Anthology, edited by Karen L. Kilcup.) How are Zitkala-Ša’s works typical of the works included in such a collection, particularly in theme, style, narrative techniques, and aesthetic success? How are they atypical? With which other writers does Zitkala-Ša seem to have most in common? With which other writers does she seem to have least in common? Choose five different passages from five different works by Zitkala-Ša and discuss the effectiveness with which they are written. Discuss them, for instance, in terms of diction, imagery, tone, sentence structure, and rhythm. What are their strengths and/or weaknesses? What makes them interesting (and/or uninteresting) simply as pieces of writing? In what ways was Zitkala-Ša most talented as a writer? Does it matter that Zitkala-Ša sometimes presents herself and her life in ways that seem to be at variance with the facts? Does it matter that she sometimes seems to omit potentially significant information from her autobiographical writings? Should such matters affect the value of her works or the way we respond to them? Justify your answers in detail.

9. What factors, aside from racial or ethnic discrimination, might help explain the tones and attitudes expressed in Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical essays of 1900? For instance, how might her relations with her mother, father, and stepfathers have affected her basic outlook on life? How might that outlook have been affected by her early experiences with poverty? How might her views be seen as typical of children of any ethnic background who are separated from their parents and sent off to boarding schools? 10. What historical events involving Native Americans were occurring at the very end of the 19th century that might help provide significant contexts for Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical essays of 1900? How might those events help explain the tones, attitudes, and rhetorical strategies adopted in the essays? Did Zitkala-Ša ever adopt significantly different tones or attitudes in other essays? For instance, compare her earlier essay titled “Side by Side” with the autobiographical memoirs. How do the rhetorical techniques in that essay differ from the techniques employed in the memoirs of 1900? WORKS CITED

AND


Davidson, Cathy N., and Ada Norris, eds. American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings. By Zitkala-Ša. New York: Penguin, 2003. Fisher, Dexter. “Foreword.” In American Indian Stories. By Zitkala-Ša. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. Katanski, Amelia V. Learning to Write “Indian”: The Boarding-School Experience and American Indian Literature. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. Kilcup, Karen L., ed. Native American Women’s Writing 1800–1924: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Lukens, Margaret A. “The American Indian Story of Zitkala-Sa?” [sic]. In In Her Own Voice: NineteenthCentury American Women Essayists. Edited by Sherry Lee Linkon, 141–155. New York: Garland, 1997. Regents of the University of Minnesota. Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/

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vg/Bios/entries/bonnin_gertrude_simmons_ zitkala-sa.html. Accessed April 7, 2009. Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. “Early American Women Authors: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Sarah Winnemucca, S. Alice Callahan, E. Pauline Johnson, and Zitkala-Ša.” In Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Critical Reader, edited by Karen L. Kilcup, 81–111. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.

Stevens, J. David. The Word Rides Again: Rereading the Frontier in American Fiction. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002. Zitkala-Ša. American Indian Stories. 1921. Reprint, Glorietta, N. Mex.: Rio Grande, 1976. ———. Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and The Sun Dance Opera. Edited by P. Jane Hafen. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.

Robert C. Evans

Willa Cather (1873–1947) To feel greatly is genius, and to make others feel is art. (The Kingdom of Art)

W

gians, Germans, and Russians—with the promise of free land to homesteaders willing to put virgin prairies under the plow and to build and occupy their homes on those empty plains. While much of Cather’s fiction expresses a deep and abiding love for the prairie landscape, her initial response had been one of horror at the difference between the plains and the Virginia hills. The prairie was, she later reflected, “as bare as a piece of sheet iron,” and “it felt a good deal as if we had come to the end of everything—it was a kind of erasure of personality” (In Person 10). But, she would conclude, “The country and I had it out together and by the end of the fi rst autumn, that shaggy grass country had gripped me with a passion I have never been able to shake” (In Person 32). Accepting the West, and all the perils it held for an aspiring young artist, however, was not so easy for Cather as this description might suggest. For instance, in the dissatisfied days between her graduation from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and a job offer the following spring in Pittsburgh, she felt so exiled in the West that she headed her letters from Red Cloud with “Siberia” (Woodress 104). Even into adulthood when Cather had moved away and visited the Midwest only on occasion, she continued to suffer from a “fear of dying in a cornfield” and “an unreasoning fear of being swallowed by the distances” between her and all that was going on in the world outside Red Cloud (Sergeant 49, 79).

illa Cather was born on a farm in Back Creek, Virginia, just 50 miles northwest of Washington, D.C., on December 7, 1873. The Cather family had been in Virginia for four generations and had been divided by the Civil War, with Willa’s great-grandfather James supporting the South because he believed in state’s rights and her grandfather William supporting the Union cause and sending his sons, including Cather’s father, into West Virginia to avoid conscription into the Confederate Army. Her mother’s side of the family was similarly divided by the war: Her grandmother Rachel Boak abhorred slavery, yet her three sons served in the army of the confederacy, and one son died in its service. By the time of Cather’s birth, her community, which was on a strategic highway between North and South, was still recovering from the ravages of the war. Despite her roots in the American South, however, Cather is probably best known for her literary portrayals of the frontier landscape of Nebraska, where she and her parents and siblings moved, joining her paternal grandparents and an uncle and aunt who had already migrated west, during the spring of Cather’s ninth year. The family’s migration was part of a vast national postwar movement to the West that had been opened up by the Homestead Act of 1862, an act that attracted huge numbers of American citizens as well as European immigrants—Swedes, Danes, Bohemians, Norwe-

27


Expressing her confl icting feelings, Cather herself concluded that Nebraska was both “the happiness and the curse of my life” (In Person 32). In her fi rst years on the prairies, young Cather had a special ability to make friends with many of the neighboring immigrant families, even when they could not speak much English. She felt that they shared her sense of alienation, and she credited those immigrants with offering the fi rst taste she knew of the richness of European culture. Talking to them provided an intellectual excitement she had never before known. Later their stories would figure prominently in her fiction, as she became one of the fi rst mainstream writers to include immigrants as a positive part of her literary landscape. Less than two years after moving to the Nebraska farm, Charles Cather moved the family 12 miles south to the small town of Red Cloud, the site of a spur of the Burlington Northern Railroad and the county seat of Webster County. They settled there permanently, and Cather’s father opened an office dealing in insurance, real estate, and farm loans. Red Cloud would inhabit Cather’s imagination for the remainder of her life; later she used the town repeatedly as a setting for her fiction, accurately detailing key geographical details, even if the name had been changed—Hanover in O Pioneers!, Black Hawk in My Ántonia, and Sweet Water in A Lost Lady, to name a few. During her adolescence in Red Cloud, Cather developed friendships with key town figures: Julia Miner, the daughter of a famous Norwegian oboist, offered Cather her fi rst experience of serious music. Dr. McKeeby, the family’s physician, and a colleague, Dr. Damerell, regularly invited young Cather to go out on calls with them; on one occasion, Cather reportedly administered chloroform while Dr. Damerell amputated a boy’s leg. Silas Garber, former state governor and founder of Red Cloud, and his wife, Lyra, often invited Cather to events at their home, which was as close to a Victorian mansion as the town could ever claim. Mr. Schindelmeisser, a German itinerant piano teacher, once told Cather’s mother that she was wasting money on Willa’s piano lessons because all the young girl wanted to do was hear

stories about his musical career in Europe (Cather’s mother, by the way, dismissed his concerns, saying her daughter was learning a great deal from listening to music and stories). These Red Cloud figures would all later be transformed into fictional characters in Cather’s novels and short stories—testament to Cather’s lifelong belief that “All my stories have been written with material that was gathered—no, God save us! not gathered but absorbed—before I was fi fteen years old” (In Person 43). During her high school years, Cather studied Latin and Greek and voraciously read Virgil, Ovid, and the Iliad in their original languages, as well as reading important authors writing in English—Shakespeare, Tennyson, Emerson, Dickens, Hawthorne, Ruskin, and Carlyle, among others. Through her associations with the town’s doctors, she became interested in biology, medicine, and dissection (she identified “vivisection” and “Slicing Toads” as a “favorite amusement” during summer vacations and “amputating limbs” as her idea of “perfect happiness” in an autobiographical survey she completed in 1888). When she graduated from high school in 1890, at the age of 16, she and two classmates gave graduation speeches that were published in the local newspaper. In her speech, entitled “Superstition versus Imagination,” Cather eloquently argued: “Scientific investigation is the hope of our age, as it must precede all progress”; however, she admitted that science was not the only valid approach to “the mysteries of the unknowable.” Imagination was the necessary complement: “Microscopic eyes,” she wrote, “have followed matter to the molecule and fallen blinded. Imagination has gone a step farther and grasped the atom” (quoted in Woodress 62). Equipped with this passion for scientific investigation, Cather enrolled, with the intention of being a premed major, at the University of Nebraska in the state capital of Lincoln that fall as a “second prep” (meaning that she was a nonmatriculated student given one year to meet the university’s rigorous entrance requirements). With a population of 35,000, Lincoln—150 miles northeast of Red Cloud—was the largest city Cather had lived

Willa Cather

in so far, and she was amazed at the notable modern improvements she found there: telephone and electric-light companies, a six-story “skyscraper,” a public library, two thriving newspapers, and two theaters that, because of the city’s location on the east-west railway lines, attracted the important traveling companies of the day. The opportunity for women to earn college degrees had dramatically increased over the course of the second half of the 19th century. Elizabeth Blackwell had been the fi rst woman in the country admitted to medical school, but when she graduated at the top of her class in 1849, no hospital would allow her to practice in its facility. Other women in the country had earned law degrees but were then refused licenses to practice. By 1880, just a decade before Cather enrolled at Lincoln, the fi rst Ph.D. was awarded to an American woman in the humanities. Despite opposition from scientists like the Harvard professor Dr. Edward Clarke, who in 1873 wrote that higher education exposed women to mental stimulus their underdeveloped brains could not tolerate and that such intellectual stimulation threatened their reproductive capacities, the numbers of women enrolling in universities steadily climbed, until, at the turn of the century, female enrollments nearly equaled male enrollments in more than a dozen states across the country, including Nebraska. Although Cather had planned to become a doctor, by the end of her fi rst year at the university, something had happened that would forever change her plans. She wrote a paper for her English class about the philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle, and her professor was so impressed that, without her knowledge, he submitted her essay to the Nebraska State Journal, the leading newspaper in the state and an important publication in the region. Seeing her essay in print in the Sunday morning edition had a mesmerizing effect, so much so that she immediately changed her major to English. With characteristic passion, Cather threw herself into her new field. Her fi rst short story, “Peter,” was published in a Boston magazine in May 1892

29

when she was just 18. Focusing on a Bohemian immigrant and former violinist who commits suicide on his family’s homestead in Nebraska, the story—based on a true one Cather had heard from her European neighbors when she fi rst moved to the plains—would later serve as the kernel for her 1918 novel My Ántonia. In addition to these early publications, during her remaining years at the University of Nebraska she would act in various editorial capacities on three university publications, including a stint as editor in chief of the Hesperian, the university’s premier literary magazine. Numerous early Cather short stories were used to fi ll the pages of the Hesperian. During those years, Cather found ways to be paid for her writing. In 1894 she wrote a ghost story called “The Fear That Walks by Noonday,” winning a $10 writing prize at a time when that amount could buy a fi ne set of silverware or a steel beam plow from the Sears and Roebuck catalog. She also began a position as a paid theater critic for the Nebraska State Journal, a job that gave her a dollar a page for what she would later characterize as “my florid, exaggerated, foamy-at-the-mouth, adjective-spree period” (In Person 12). Nevertheless, she made enough money to pay $15 a month for a rented room, as well as her university expenses. In her two and a half years as theater critic, she would write more than 200 1,000-word reviews; Cather’s biographer James Woodress estimates that she wrote more during these years than in all of her later work. But the pace she kept was exhausting. She spent her days at the university, carrying a full course load and continuing for most of that year as the managing editor of the Hesperian; her evenings were spent at performances, and the early morning hours were spent at the Journal offices writing reviews about everything from melodramas and minstrel shows to Madame Modjeska. It is no wonder, then, that Stephen Crane, who met Cather when he was in Nebraska to report on the drought, remembered her as the one person he had ever known who could sleep standing up. Her work left little time for studying, and, she would later confess, it was only by inspiration that she passed


her examinations during her senior year. Cather’s energies were instead directed to her new vocation, reviewing performances by the best that the late 19th-century stage had to offer: Clara Morris, Julia Marlowe, Nellie Melba, Emma Calvé, Richard Mansfield, and—Cather’s favorite—the famous French actress Sarah Bernhardt. Cather’s columns were part drama criticism, part biographical notes about performers, and part meditation on the nature of art. The voice of the young drama critic is fi lled with vibrancy and fervor; for instance, in a column about Bernhardt, she dramatically declares: “To aspire and create and conquer, to strike fi re from fl int, to compel the worship of an indifferent world, to make the blind see and the deaf hear whether they will or no, to win the world’s highest honor and noisiest fame, that is great” (Kingdom 155). Those late nights of writing were a valuable apprenticeship for Cather, an opportunity to fi nd and exercise her voice, to work out many of her artistic principles, to analyze the process of creation, and to observe the demands of artistic life. Cather recognized in the reviews that the performer’s profession was characterized by a sacrifice of personal life: “Art of every kind is an exacting master, more so than even Jehovah. He says only, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ Art, science, and letters cry, “‘Thou shalt have no other gods at all.’ They accept only human sacrifices” (quoted in Woodress 74). The artist, Cather wrote, must “cling” to art, “forsaking all others, and keeping unto her as long as they two shall live” (Kingdom 407), for “domestic and artistic life do not mix well. . . . Liberty and solitude, they are the two wings of art” (World 194). Not only was she discovering fi rsthand what it meant to be an artist, Cather was gaining a reputation. Her work became the reason the Des Moines Register could declare, “The best theatrical critics of the west are said to be connected with the Lincoln, Neb. press” (Kingdom 14–15). Her reviews often demonstrated an acerbic wit so fatal that one theatrical manager stated that “poor companies begin to tremble long before they get here [to Lincoln]”

(World 226). Will Owen James, Cather’s managing editor at the Journal, characterized her as the “meatax” critic, adding, “Miss Cather did not stand in awe of the greatest actors, but set each one in his place with all the authority of a veteran metropolitan critic” (Kingdom 17). She had, said another editor, “a most entertaining way of crucifying ambitious actors and actresses” (Kingdom 17). But when Cather graduated from the university in 1895, the 21-year-old was at a loss for what to do next. She applied for an opening as a university English teacher, but her application was blackballed by a former professor who failed to see her promise. Back home in Red Cloud, feeling aimless and banished from the world, she gladly accepted a job offer the following spring to edit Home Monthly in Pittsburgh. Cather packed her bags and headed east—never again to live for any extended period in the West. The Home Monthly, however, was a short-lived women’s magazine, trying to fi nd its place in the new publication niche created at the turn of the century by the Ladies’ Home Journal. Instead of writing about art and literature, Cather found herself required to produce copy on babies and mince pies, occasionally supplemented by the inclusion of one of her own short stories, usually printed under a pseudonym to disguise the fact that she was almost single-handedly writing most of the issues. When the magazine was sold more than a year later, she began reviewing for the Pittsburgh Daily Leader, where she stayed until March 1900, when she accepted a job as a teacher of Latin, algebra, and composition at a Pittsburgh high school. Her work as a math teacher was fortunately temporary: Cather had struggled with math; as an adult, whenever she was under stress, she recalled suffering from nightmares about taking math exams. However, she enjoyed teaching composition and Latin. Beloved by her students, Cather was an effective and forthright teacher who demanded the best from her pupils and did not abide sloppy or halfhearted work. In Pittsburgh, Cather continued writing short stories and poetry when she could steal away a few

Willa Cather

hours from editing, reviewing, or teaching. She did manage to publish a modest and largely unnoticed collection of poems, April Twilights (1903), and a collection of short stories, The Troll Garden (1905), which garnered only a little more attention than her poetry. But her long apprenticeship would eventually pay off in spring 1906, when Sam McClure, publisher of the muckraking McClure’s Magazine, took notice of her. McClure’s—which published investigative exposés on big business and labor unions, as well as some of the best fiction of the time by the best writers of the time—was the premier periodical publication in the early century. McClure offered Cather a job, fi rst as its literary editor and later, when she had proven herself, as the magazine’s managing editor. As the only female editor of a preeminent magazine during the fi rst decade of the century, Cather was in a unique position of power. Once again she threw herself into her tasks wholeheartedly, so much so that Viola Roseboro, Cather’s colleague at McClure’s, claimed that “If Willa Cather had been a scrub-woman, she would have scrubbed much harder than any other scrub-women” (quoted in Woodress 71). During her years at McClure’s, Cather wrote very little fiction because she had to focus her efforts on editing and journalism. She also ghost wrote two extensive book manuscripts: the biography of the Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy and the autobiography of her boss, Sam McClure. Cather’s job had been exhausting, and McClure, a man who reportedly “had three hundred ideas a minute” (quoted in Woodress 187), relied on Cather heavily. But as gratifying as it must have been to hold more editorial power than any other woman editor of the time, the work had exhausted Cather and taken its toll on her own literary aspirations. One good thing that came out of her work at the magazine was the chance to become acquainted with important artists and writers. She got to know Mark Twain in his fi nal years and acquired pieces for publication from THEODORE DREISER , JACK L ONDON, and the playwright Zoë Atkins. Perhaps the most significant association of those years was with the Maine short story writer Sarah Orne Jew-

31

ett, author of Country of the Pointed Firs. Jewett became Cather’s mentor, advising her that her incessant responsibilities at the magazine would hinder her development as a fiction writer; that she must fi nd her “own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world”; that what little she was managing to do suffered from her attempt to imitate other authors; and that she ought to draw upon the authentic material of her youth in Virginia and Nebraska as subject matter (quoted in Woodress 203). It would be almost three more years before Cather could take Jewett’s advice and end her association with the magazine. During her last months with McClure’s, she somehow managed, in spite of a serious illness and editorial duties, to write her short novel, Alexander’s Bridge, about an engineer, Bartley Alexander, who builds a bridge across the St. Lawrence River and begins an illicit love affair with an old flame. In it, Cather imitated the style and subject matter of Henry James, the most respected American novelist of the time; his work, however, was foreign territory to her. Often called “novels of manners,” James’s works were distinctly urban and cosmopolitan, frequently treating wealthy characters from high society who travel the world and are well connected. As much as she admired James, Cather grew to think of her own Jamesian novel as “shallow” and “conventional” (On Writing 91), perhaps because she recognized that it still failed to benefit from the advice given by Jewett to “write about your own country” (quoted in Woodress 223). The summer after leaving McClure’s Cather was exploring the cliff dwellings at Walnut Canyon, near Flagstaff, Arizona, when she had an epiphany much like that she would later portray in The Song of the Lark. She had never before seen the cliff dwellings, but she had heard of them since childhood; viewing them for the fi rst time was a profound experience that would be translated repeatedly in her later novels. There, she relates, she “recovered from the conventional editorial point of view” (On Writing 92) and, as did Thea in her novel, fully acknowledged how discontented and unfulfi lled she felt.

32


That summer gave Cather the clarity to realize other things, as well: She acknowledged that working with the writing of others at McClure’s meant she had not given full attention to her own work and that if she were to succeed as a writer at all, she would need to recognize that the West was the real material of her art. The result of this dramatic realization was O Pioneers!, a novel about a family of Swedish homesteaders in Nebraska, a book in which she lets the country be the hero of the novel. Cather had found her own voice at last and had also found a way to make a unique contribution to American literature; she was writing not the Jamesian novel of manners but, as she called it, a “novel of the soil” (On Writing 93). O Pioneers! would mark a personal transition in Cather’s life, as well. For the fi rst time, she was making a living as a novelist. She had fi nally completed the long years of apprenticeship as theater critic, teacher, editor, and journalist. Subsequent books drew increasing fame and even international recognition. Her next novel, My Ántonia, won wide acclaim, and in 1923, she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours. Her work in the 1920s with such important novels as A Lost Lady, The Professor’s House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop only solidified her position as a premier American writer, among the most significant creative artists of the 20th century. She enjoyed fi nancial success as well. Even when the fi nancial straits of the Great Depression hit the dozen or more drought-plagued families she still kept in contact with in Nebraska, Cather was able to send them blankets, clothes, canned food, and substantial checks. In 1936, she decided she was no longer buying gifts for anyone but the destitute farmers she knew in Nebraska. In the 1930s, the time between her publications increased, and in 1940 she would publish her fi nal novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Cather died in 1947 at the age of 63. She is buried in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in a small cemetery, where her gravestone is inscribed with a quote from My Ántonia: “That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

Since the 1980s, scholars have raised the issue that Cather may have been a lesbian whose sexual preference might have shaped her fiction. Although Cather may have been a lesbian, her sexuality was nothing she ever cared to express openly. Her sexual identity, ultimately, is a complex issue that has confounded those looking for easy answers. In her teens, Cather went through a period of identifying herself as “Wm. Cather, M.D.”—a pose that suggested not only her aspirations to be a doctor but her realization that men had more social power than did women. This period is also marked by her experimentation with male clothing styles; numerous pictures from the period show Cather with cropped hair and dressed in jacket and tie. To her credit, Willa’s mother, Virginia Cather—herself someone who embodied a sense of genteel femininity—gave young Cather the space and latitude to experiment with gender roles, even to the extent of having the phase documented with so many photos. Even so, while her clothing may have been an expression of Cather’s growing awareness of her sexual orientation, some critics have also placed her cross-dressing into a cultural context of young girls’ mimicking the famous actresses of the time who occasionally assumed male roles. Letters from Cather’s early years hint that she had a romantic attachment to Louise Pound, a classmate at the university, and later in Pittsburgh, to Isabel McClung, the daughter of an affluent and socially prominent family. Cather did share a nearly 40-year friendship with Edith Lewis, who was named as the executor of Cather’s estate and inherited Cather’s property, a substantial fi nancial portion of the estate, and royalties from her books. The intimacy of their relationship is in question. During her lifetime, Cather had seen Oscar Wilde brought up on charges of homosexuality in a very nasty, public scandal; what she wrote about him in her theater and book reviews is therefore quite revealing. While she personally thought Wilde largely a second-rate writer who relied too much on cleverness, whose insincerity made him, she said, “a buffoon and a harlequin,” she decried his being dismissed and reviled, despite his liter-

Willa Cather

ary achievements. Ultimately, she voiced anger at Wilde, not for being a gay man, but for the “crime” of courting unseemly public notoriety instead of having “reverence for his own gift” (World 264; see also 154 and 89–92). Cather, who had once discussed being “married” to her art and had also proclaimed that art was “an exacting master, more so than even Jehovah,” would have been horrified to have been characterized as a “lesbian writer” rather than just purely as a “writer.” In her earliest reviews, we can also see how Cather resisted the idea that people are wholly or even significantly defi ned by their sexuality. In an 1899 review of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, a landmark novel in which the main character, Edna Pontellier, ultimately kills herself because she remains unfulfi lled and unhappy, Cather faults Edna for being so caught up in a sexual liaison that she forgets the fi ner things in life, such as art. Counting her among misguided women who are solely defi ned by their sexuality, Cather writes, “These people really expect the passion of love to fi ll and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist upon making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infi nite variety, pleasure, and distraction, to contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense idealists” (World 698–699). In Cather’s own fiction, characters who look to sexual passion for fulfi llment often meet with sad fates (for example, Marie and Emil in O Pioneers! or Marian Forrester in A Lost Lady), and the best marriages are those based on mutual respect and shared goals, not on sexual passion, which does not assume major importance in Cather’s work at all. What is important to note, fi nally, is how intensely private Cather always was. Prior to her death, she attempted to gather and burn private letters she had written to friends and acquaintances—in fact, only one letter to Edith Lewis, in which she calls her “darling Edith,” is in existence. Realizing that she could not ensure that all her let-

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ters were destroyed, Cather added a codicil to her will that bars critics from quoting directly from any other previously unpublished letters that may have survived. Once calling literary scholars “information vampires” (In Person 111), Cather probably worried that her achievements as a writer would be eclipsed by speculation about her sexuality.

The Troll Garden (1905) A few of the stories published in The Troll Garden collection are still widely anthologized in American literature anthologies, and many readers’ fi rst experience with Cather is found reading “A Wagner Matinee,” “Paul’s Case,” or “A Sculptor’s Funeral” from that collection. What unifies these stories— besides a sense of ultimate defeat and disappointment—is the question of whether art is possible in the West. Written during a time when Cather was struggling with her doubts about herself as a writer and with ambivalent feelings about her childhood home in Nebraska as a place of either inspiration or suffocation, the collection is thematically centered on ideas of separation between two mutually exclusive worlds—the “garden” of art (located in eastern urban centers) and the world outside art (especially as seen in the raw and rough West). In “A Wagner Matinee,” for instance, the aging Aunt Georgiana, once a music teacher in Boston and a woman of the world, has become “semisomnambulant”—that is, half asleep—in her life as wife of a Nebraska homesteader (Early Novels 104), so when her nephew takes her to a matinee in Boston, she is profoundly shaken by how much Wagner’s music “broke a silence of thirty years; the inconceivable silence of the plains” (Early Novels 107). When her nephew tells her they must leave at the conclusion of the concert, Aunt Georgiana protests, and in a flash, the narrator understands that for her, just outside the door of the hall lie “the tall, unpainted house with weather-curled boards” and “the gaunt, molting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door” (Early Novels 110). The


West of the story is portrayed as a harsh place that robs people of the ecstasies of art. While “A Wagner Matinee” focuses on a woman homesteader’s returning to the East, “The Sculptor’s Funeral” is about a western town’s response when the sculptor Harvey Merrick’s body is taken home to his small Kansas town. The story emphasizes how the mass of people of western towns are generally incapable of being sympathetic toward an artistic soul: The townspeople prefer to relish stories of Harvey’s foolishly letting cows wander away while he watches the sunset. Merrick’s childhood home was a place of “raw, biting ugliness” (Early Novels 42), a “place of hatred and bitter waters” (Early Novels 47). While Cather emphasizes that Merrick has become widely admired for his art in the cultural centers of the world, she demonstrates that the hometown folk still see him as a ne’er-dowell. Here is Cather’s concern over provincialism and its horrific effects on the solitary artistic soul. The Troll Garden, however, does not directly deal with artists of great genius, as Cather would in later works like The Song of the Lark. Instead, the point of view is consistently centered on those who are cut off from art, as is Paul in “Paul’s Case,” Cather’s most famous story.

For Discussion or Writing The stories of The Troll Garden are fi lled with images of uncrossed thresholds, gulfs, walls, and barriers of all kinds, all suggesting how much Cather, in the early days of her career, felt lay between her and the achievement of her art. Identify some of these key threshold/barrier passages in The Troll Garden stories, and discuss the importance of the images.

“Paul’s Case” (1905) “Paul’s Case” is a deft psychological portrait of a desperate and sensitive youth. Paul, a Pittsburgh schoolboy, is not an artist, but merely an usher at Carnegie Hall, the only place, Cather writes, that he “really lived; the rest was but a sleep and a for-

getting.” And while he is invigorated by the stage performances—“he breathed like a prisoner set free, and felt within him the possibility of doing or saying splendid, brilliant, poetic things”—(Early Novels 120) he can only hang about at the peripheries of art, “loitering” about the dressing rooms of young, indulgent actors, imagining what it would be like to enter their world and suffering keen disappointment when he realizes that “mocking spirits stood guard at the doors” (Early Novels 116). When his father—acting on the advice of a school disciplinary committee studying Paul’s “case”—insists that he give up his ushering job, Paul impulsively steals $1,000 from his employer and runs away to New York to live a short but enraptured life of luxury in the fi nest New York hotel. When his money runs out and capture by his father is imminent, he steps in front of a speeding train. The story opens and closes with references to the bright red carnations that Paul wears in the buttonhole of his coat—flowers that symbolize his love of beauty and his attachment to the fi ner things in life, but that, as Paul himself does, ultimately seem faded (and fated to die) as the story concludes. By the end of the tale, Paul feels hopeless as he realizes that his rebellion has failed and that his hastily concocted escape (fi nanced by impulsive thievery from his Pittsburgh employers) could only ever have been temporary. Now he will not only have to confront his father but to face the law—two aspects, really, of the same dilemma. A train, the method and symbol of his earlier liberation, now becomes the instrument of his self-chosen destruction. It represents the powerful, seemingly unstoppable mechanistic forces against which Paul, throughout the story, has consistently thrown himself (or from which he has sought to flee). The train is the very symbol of the sort of industrial, mechanical mindset Paul has long rejected, and so it is entirely fitting that he should be destroyed by a train rather than dying by taking an overdose of pills or by jumping from a bridge. In the last split seconds of his life, Paul briefly realizes that he has made yet another hasty, impulsive mistake—one from which there can this time

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be no reprieve at all. Yet literally his last thoughts are vivid, imaginative, and even beautiful; they are the kinds of fantasies (of exotic, far-off oceans and deserts) that have, throughout the tale, helped sustain his desire to live. Cather’s description of Paul’s death is richly complex. We sense the waste involved, we realize (and so does he) the foolishness of his decision, and yet our fi nal vision of Paul is of a person who is in some ways at peace. He seems a person who has been reabsorbed into the immense universe from which he once emerged, and to which we all must someday return. His death is in some respects gruesome and brutal, but Cather deemphasizes any strong sense of pain or suffering. She depicts his death as in some ways a purely mechanical event, but in other ways as a moment almost of beauty and of a relaxing comfort—sensations of a sort Paul had never really enjoyed, for any length of time, while he lived.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the fl ights to the East in “Paul’s Case” and in THEODORE DREISER’s Sister Carrie. How do the circumstances, motives, and characters of the fleeing protagonists resemble and/or differ from one another? What does New York symbolize in each work? Discuss the fi nal fates of Paul and of George Hurstwood. 2. Discuss your response to Paul’s death in “Paul’s Case.” Why do you think he chose to kill himself? What other decision could he have made? What other options were open to him from the beginning of the story? Discuss the tone of Cather’s presentation of his suicide. In what two ways (at least) could that tone have differed from the tone presently used? Why do you think Cather adopted the tone she chose to use?

O Pioneers! (1913) While O Pioneers! was not Cather’s fi rst novel (see the earlier discussion of Alexander’s Bridge), it was the fi rst one in which she felt she had found her own voice and subject matter. Drawing upon

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the lives of the immigrant neighbors she had befriended in Nebraska, Cather wrote a story that centers on Alexandra Bergson and her family of Swedish homesteaders, who farm on a stretch of prairie called the Divide. Unlike her dull-witted brothers who want to quit the homestead when times become difficult, Alexandra has the vision to see that the prairie is “rich and strong and glorious,” and, according to Cather, “For the fi rst time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning” (Early Novels 170). Alexandra does indeed make a success of the land relatively early in the novel. Here Cather temporarily shifts the story’s focus to Alexandra’s youngest brother, Emil, who is desperately in love with their neighbor’s wife, Marie, who is also Alexandra’s best friend. Their love is fated, of course, and on the afternoon they consummate it in the tall grass of the orchard, Marie’s volatile Bohemian husband shoots them while in a blinding rage. The murders devastate Alexandra, and when an old friend, Carl Linstrum, returns, she fi nds comfort in his friendship and agrees to marry him because “when friends marry, they are safe. We don’t suffer like— those young ones” (Early Novels 290). O Pioneers! fulfi lls the advice given to Cather by Sarah Orne Jewett to “write about your own country” (quoted in Woodress 223). In this novel, Cather attempted what she called “a different process altogether” by writing “a book entirely for myself” (On Writing 92). Cather’s “deepest feelings,” she confessed in an interview, were “rooted” in the West: “I had searched for books telling about the beauty of the country I loved, its romance, and heroism and strength and courage of its people that had been plowed into the furrows of its soil and I did not fi nd them. And so,” she concluded, “I wrote O Pioneers!” (In Person 37). During the 1930s, when she looked back at the novel and what it had meant to her career, she recognized the significant break she had made from the conventional novel of manners that Henry James had made the gold standard of American literature for the time. She wrote with good humor, “I did not in the least expect

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that other people would see anything in a slowmoving story, without ‘action,’ without ‘humor,’ without a ‘hero’; a story concerned entirely with heavy farming people, with cornfields and pasture lands and pig yards—set in Nebraska, of all places! As everyone knows, Nebraska is distinctly déclassé as a literary background” (On Writing 94). Writing this novel was, Cather would write, “the fi rst time I walked off on my own feet—everything before was half real and half an imitation of writers whom I admired. In this one I hit the home pasture” (quoted in Woodress 240).

For Discussion or Writing 1. In a letter to a friend, Cather wrote that she had let the country be the hero of the novel. Examine the ways in which Cather personifies the land as a hero. 2. Find and read Ovid’s story of Pyramus and Thisbee in Metamorphosis. Consider how Cather rewrites this fated love story in O Pioneers! 3. While at the center of the novel is the love story of Emil and Marie, some scholars have argued that the real love story of the novel is that of Alexandra and the land. Agree or disagree and discuss why you think as you do.

The Song of the Lark (1915) The Song of the Lark asks a question fundamental to Cather’s thinking in the fi rst half of her career: Can the highest aspiration of art fi nd its genesis in the West, a place so seemingly hostile to high art, and can someone with imagination and drive translate her experiences in the West into a meaningful artistic career that fi nds an audience outside that region? The Song of the Lark, Cather’s Künstlerroman (a literary term derived from German, meaning the story of the development of an artist), centers on the life of Thea Kronborg, daughter of Scandinavian immigrants, who is raised in the small desert town of Moonstone, Colorado, patterned largely after Cather’s own childhood hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska. The novel, which is part psy-

chological autobiography, drawing upon elements of Cather’s own life, and part retelling of the life of Wagnerian diva Olive Fremstad, is about Thea’s struggle to rise from a small western town to fame as a Wagnerian opera diva in New York. Thea is one of many offspring of the Swedish minister and his wife, but unlike her siblings, Thea (whose name translates from Greek as “goddess”), has imagination and a significant talent for music, which is recognized by the people who act as her guides and mentors. Her mother respects Thea’s individuality and supports her talents in very pragmatic ways; her “queer, addle-pated” aunt (Early Novels 309) is astute enough to understand that Thea has gifts that will someday make Moonstone sit up and take notice; her piano teacher, Herr Wunsch (whose name means “wish”), tells her that there is only one big thing in life and that is desire—“And before it, when it is big, all is little” (Early Novels 360). Further, the family physician, Dr. Archie, advises her to seize opportunities to make something of herself in the larger world; her Mexican friend, Spanish Johnny, a performer himself, models for her the transcendent quality of art. Her primary support is derived from Ray Kennedy, a railroad man who dreams of marrying Thea, even though he knows that she is “bound for the big terminals of the world” (Early Novels 425), and who, when he dies in a railway accident, bequeaths her a modest sum of money that allows her to escape to Chicago to study music. While Thea initially goes there to study piano, it becomes apparent to her and her teacher that Thea’s real talent lies in singing. The Chicago years are marked by a struggle to accept and fulfi ll her fate and by a romance with a “beer prince” (Early Novels 523) and dilettante, Fred Ottenburg, who falls in love with her (despite the fact that he is already married). Fred watches out for Thea, and when she is at her lowest point both emotionally and physically, he provides a summer of reprieve at his Arizona ranch, where Thea discovers the ancient cliff dwellings of the Anasazi and contemplates the Indians’ pottery as artistic expression, akin to her own; she thus feels that her past is “lengthened,” that she is “bound” to “old and higher obligations” (Early Novels 555). The remainder of the novel

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concentrates on Thea’s growing reputation as a Wagnerian soprano. She ultimately achieves fame and worldwide recognition and is thought of back in Moonstone as a major source of pride. Cather emphasizes that Thea’s success is based on her ability to understand and portray the sorrows and aspirations of her operatic roles, which are based on Germanic legends, by exploring the heroism in her familiar West, such as that of the ancient Indians “dealing with fate bare handed” and the old man listening as the fi rst transcontinental telegraph message taps out, “Westward the course of Empire takes its way” (Early Novels 341). One of the challenges of the novel for readers is why the portrayal of Thea becomes less and less personal as the story progresses. In her preface to the 1932 edition, Cather explains that “in an artist of the type I chose, personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer” and that “the Thea Kronborg who is behind the imperishable daughters of music becomes somewhat dry and preoccupied. . . . Her artistic life is the only one in which she is happy, or free, or even very real” (Early Novels 1329). The Song of the Lark is Cather’s answer to the questions she had posed in The Troll Garden stories about whether the soil of the western landscape could produce someone recognized as an important artist. Here, while Cather acknowledges the pettiness and lack of sophistication of people in rural midwestern towns, she is able to imagine that the artist can grow beyond that without bitterness, to fi nd nobility and grace within the western experience—conclusions that a decade earlier Cather seemed unable to draw in her short stories. Unlike O Pioneers!, in which Alexandra seems eternally wedded to the soil of Nebraska, Thea goes forth from the western landscape that inspires her (the plains of Laramie, the sandhills of Moonstone, the canyons of the cliff dwellers) and seeks an attentive audience among people who seem to have stepped directly from a Henry James novel of manners. The novel is also important because it portrays a woman whose life is not defi ned by a desire to marry and—even more—whose identity is not defi ned by the men around her. Here, as well as in O Pioneers!,

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women determine the course of their own lives, with marriage one of the lesser goals of their existence. This view was radically unique in American literature of the time, for even EDITH WHARTON, Cather’s contemporary, examined women trapped by societal expectations to marry. In The Song of the Lark, Thea’s ultimate marriage to Fred (after his wife’s death) is handled almost as an afterthought; the focus remains on the possibility of her artistic achievements.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Consider who Thea is and what she is like in Moonstone, Chicago, and then Panther Canyon. What are the reasons for any differences you see? 2. Is the ending of the novel a happy one? Why or why not? How does Cather defi ne happiness? Is it a concern of Cather’s? You might compare and contrast this novel with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.

My Ántonia (1918) While previous works had gained Cather ever increasing recognition, it was the publication of My Ántonia that solidified her place among the best and brightest of early 20th-century American writers and marked the beginning of a period of notable productivity and literary success. The novel—which remains the most widely taught Cather novel at both the high school and university levels—was inspired by Annie Sadilek Pavelka, a Bohemian woman who had worked as a “hired girl” for the Miner family, Cather’s neighbors in Red Cloud. In an interview, Cather identified Annie Pavelka as “one of the people who interested me most as a child. . . . She was one of the truest artists I ever knew in the keenness and sensitiveness of her enjoyment, in her love of people and her willingness to take pains.” She added, “The farmer’s wife who raises a large family and cooks for them and makes their clothes and keeps house and on the side runs a truck garden and a chicken farm and a canning establishment, and thoroughly

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enjoys doing it all, and doing it well, contributes more to art than all the culture clubs. Often you fi nd such a woman with all the appreciation of the beautiful bodies of her children, of the order and harmony of her kitchen, of the real creative joy of all her activities, which marks the great artist” (In Person 42–49). The story of Annie’s father’s suicide had been one of the fi rst tales Cather had heard when she moved to the plains and had inspired her fi rst publication, the short story “Peter.” My Ántonia is a further reworking of that material, with the focus on the daughter. Cather would remain in touch with Annie Pavelka throughout her life, even sending her family money and supplies during the difficult years of the depression. My Ántonia is told from the fi rst-person perspective of a male narrator, Jim Burden, who, Cather’s introduction suggests, has handed her the manuscript of his memories of Ántonia essentially as printed. Jim originally moves to the plains of Nebraska from Virginia when he is just nine years old—as Cather herself had—and on the train there he meets the Shimerda family, Bohemian homesteaders who will try to make a go of it on a poor farm they have bought from a fellow countryman. Jim becomes friends with Ántonia and is privy to how desperately hard the fi rst winter is for the family. In January Ántonia’s father kisses his children, tells them he is going out hunting, and quietly walks out to the barn and shoots himself, leaving the family to fend for themselves. To assist her mother and siblings fi nancially, Ántonia does heavy farmwork on neighboring farms—grueling labor usually only done by men. The next year she leaves the farm and hires out as a maid/babysitter for the Harling family in town, where Jim and his grandparents have also moved. Attracted to Ántonia’s spirit and emotional strength, Jim nevertheless struggles to figure out what it is that she means to him. At one point he kisses her, but the class distinctions between them that would make a romance impossible are readily apparent to Ántonia, if not to Jim. Cather subverts the typical love plot in her novel, saying in an interview that she felt her main character “deserved

something better than the Saturday Evening Post sort of stuff” of formulaic romance stories (In Person 44). At another point, Jim saves Ántonia from a rape attempt by a nefarious moneylender whom Ántonia works for after she leaves the Harlings, but his rescue is not cast in the valiant heroics of some brave knight. After Ántonia falls in love with an unprincipled railroad man who jilts her when she becomes pregnant, Jim recognizes the complexities of his own feelings and declares them to her: “I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or sister—anything that a woman can be to a man” (Early Novels 910). After a brief and equally unlikely romance with another hired girl, an enlightening period of intellectual excitement at the university at Lincoln, and a marriage to a wealthy but cold New York woman, Jim returns to Black Hawk to visit Ántonia—and fi nds her happy in a marriage to another Bohemian, John Cuzak. The two have seemingly innumerable children and, despite struggles, have turned their prairie farm into an Edenic place of peace and harmony that sustains them spiritually. While this couple may not be so prosperous as Alexandra Bergson is in O Pioneers!, money hardly seems to matter to them. Ántonia and her family are rich in other ways. Jim’s Ántonia (for he most defi nitely sees her in possessive terms, as indicated by the title of the novel) has “lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true,” and she has become “a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races” (Early Novels 926). One challenge of My Ántonia is that it does not fit the usual pattern of plot and resolution. Loosely episodic, it begins a period in which Cather was experimenting with the novel as form. In a 1925 interview, she admitted that the novel was “just the other side of the rug, the pattern that is supposed not to count in a story. In it there is no love affair, no courtship, no marriage, no broken heart, no struggle for success. I knew I’d ruin my material if I put it in the usual fictional pattern” (In Person 77).

Willa Cather

For Discussion or Writing 1. Consider the narrative point of view that Cather chooses in My Ántonia. Draw some conclusions about Jim’s hopes and fears, his accomplishments, his relationship with Ántonia, his motivations, and his role as narrator. Consider, too, whether you think Jim is a narrator you can trust—why or why not? 2. My Ántonia is a book in which Cather pays close attention to the environment and landscape. First, examine Cather’s descriptions of human encounters with the plains, especially in the introduction and the fi rst chapter. What kinds of word choices does she make in connection with the natural world? What is the relation of human beings to the environment, and what are their feelings toward it? Then, examine the descriptions in book 5, “Cuzak’s Boys,” in the same way. Has the attitude changed at all? How do descriptions of human relations to the land compare to those in the introduction and chapter 1? What do you think accounts for the difference or transformation? What has happened between those periods? Enumerate the multiple things that humans have done to change the land and change their perceptions of the land. 3. My Ántonia is the only Cather book that in its fi rst edition included illustrations as an integral part of the book’s concept. She commissioned W. T. Benda to illustrate the book with pen-andink line drawings and paid close attention to the ways the drawings complemented her text. If you do not have Benda drawings in your text, fi nd one that does have them. Consider how the drawings contribute to the portrayal of Ántonia and the people around her. What significance do the drawings have?

A Lost Lady (1923) Loss of ideals is a theme Cather continues to explore, but this time she focuses specifically on what she viewed as the loss of western ideals in a modern world. Again inspired by real people

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Cather knew, A Lost Lady draws upon the lives of Silas and Lyra Garber, residents of Red Cloud who had been kind to Cather and allowed the young girl a glimpse into their world. Silas Garber, one of the town’s founders, had worked with the railroad during the settling of the West and had served as governor and later as founder of the bank in Red Cloud. His wife, Lyra, a beautiful and vivacious woman, was a generation younger than her husband. Together they were members of a railroad aristocracy that had arisen in the West in the late 19th century. In their ornate Victorian home, they hosted parties for important railroad men and their families who were passing through Red Cloud. Eventually Silas Garber suffered a debilitating stroke and spent his last days cared for by his young wife. These events are reworked in Cather’s novel: The Garbers become Captain and Marian Forrester, and Cather uses the point of view of Niel Herbert to examine the effect Marian has on men. For Niel and other males of his generation, Marian embodies the feminine ideal of refi nement, gentility, grace, hospitality, beauty, and sensuality, and yet she is willing to “mock” the social proprieties that confi ne other women of the town. She exemplifies for him “the magic of contradictions” (Later Novels 43) and is a “bewitching” enigma that Niel idolizes—that is, until he discovers that Marian is having an affair with Frank Ellinger, an idle dandy visiting the Forrester home. Deeply disillusioned by knowledge of the affair, Neil concludes, “It was not a moral scruple she had outraged, but an aesthetic ideal” (Later Novels 48). Niel subsequently witnesses the decline of Marian Forrester as she reveals herself to be quite human, not an ideal of womanhood at all. She is as pathetic as she is dazzling, and vulnerable as she is charming. When Captain Forrester is crippled by a stroke that follows the failure of his bank, Marian cares for him with tenderness and battles the gossips of the town who would invade her home under the pretext of nursing her husband. All the while, she laments the loss of their formerly glamorous lifestyle. After the captain’s death, Marian stays in

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Sweet Water for a time, throwing parties now with the young men of the town in attendance, rather than the influential men who had once attended parties in her home. Years later, Niel hears from a former friend of Marian’s second marriage and death and realizes that he has not been the only one to idealize the glamorous Mrs. Forrester. While Marian is the central figure in the novel, Cather also develops Captain Forrester as an emblem of a passing western nobility. A man who had lived out the pioneering dreams of the early West, the Captain has experienced fi rsthand the days when “One day was like another, and all were glorious; good hunting, plenty of antelope and buffalo, boundless sunny sky, boundless plains of waving grass.” The glory of the western myth, embodied by the Captain, is a dream: “All our great West,” he says, “has been developed from such dreams; the homesteaders’ and the prospectors’ and the contractors’. We dreamed the railroads across the mountains, just as I dreamed my place on the Sweet Water.” His experience, however, is clearly that of a passing generation at “the end of the road-making West.” In contrast, Cather offers Ivy Peters, Niel’s contemporary, as a foil. Peters, who at one point has blinded an innocent woodpecker merely because he can, becomes representative of the crass and materialistic generation willing to exploit the land for its resources, unfeeling about the West’s history or the refi nement of people like the Forresters, a common shyster who desires power rather than aesthetic beauty. For good or ill, the Ivy Peterses of the world have inherited the great potential of the West.

For Discussion or Writing 1. It is very easy to condemn Marian Forrester for her sexual faithlessness; however, are there ways in which Mrs. Forrester is a sympathetic character? 2. Compare and contrast the two dinner parties in the novel—the Christmas party in Book I and the one Mrs. Forrester has for the boys of Sweet Water. Consider the oral narratives told at the

parties—how do they contribute to character development in the novel? 3. Cather consistently uses the notion of voyeurism in this novel (for instance, the Blum boy sees Marian and Frank, Niel hears the laughter outside Marian’s bedroom window, the townswomen spend time trying to discover secrets by riffl ing through the Forresters’ closets). Why does Cather use voyeurism as a motif in the novel? What is its thematic significance? 4. In a related matter, you might also want to consider Niel’s as the chief point of view of the novel. Can we trust his conclusions about Mrs. Forrester? Why or why not? If you have read My Ántonia, compare and contrast him to Jim Burden. 5. Analyze the meaning of the title: What are the multiple meanings of the words lost and lady, and how does Cather uses these ideas thematically?

Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) As were other American novelists during the 1920s—WILLIAM FAULKNER , for example, whose The Sound and the Fury (1929) both inspired other writers and confounded readers—Willa Cather was interested in experimenting with the novel as form. She had used a shift in voice, style, and mood in her previous novel, The Professor’s House. In Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) she took on her boldest fictional experiment yet in a work that is both modern in form and historical in subject matter. Cather wrote to a former colleague at McClure’s Magazine that Death Comes for the Archbishop was “altogether a new kind of thing.” In a letter to a publisher, she said that it was “scarcely a novel,” and in another letter, to a literary magazine, she wrote, “I am amused that so many of the reviews of this book begin with the statement: ‘This book is hard to classify’ ” (On Writing 12). Nevertheless, Cather thought Death Comes for the Archbishop her most significant work to date, and, as a result, for the only time in her career, she felt that she was

Willa Cather

in the position to ask her publisher for a 1 percent royalty increase. In a 1925 speech on the technique of the modern novel, Cather had asserted that atmosphere in a book was “invaluable,” but plot was unimportant—after all, Shakespeare never created plot but borrowed story lines from others. She also claimed that the composition of Death Comes for the Archbishop had been influenced by seeing the frescoes of the 19th-century French artist Puvis de Chavannes, who in his portrayal of the childhood of Sta. Genevieve used “absolutely the reverse of dramatic treatment . . . something without accent, with none of the artificial elements of composition.” In legends, she wrote, “the martyrdoms of the saints are no more dwelt upon than are the trivial incidents of their lives; it is as though all human experiences, measured against one supreme spiritual experience, were of about the same importance.” She was attempting at this time to exert a kind of “discipline” on herself in which she did not “use an incident for all there is in it” but instead “touch on [it] and pass on” (On Writing 9). As a result, Death Comes for the Archbishop is, as Cather herself classified it, a quiet “narrative”— loosely episodic, digressive, and without crescendo—making it difficult for readers who expect rising action and a clear sense of climax and resolution from novels they read. The title itself is a clue to what Cather was attempting, for it announces from the beginning what the ultimate outcome of the book is, the outcome that awaits us all. And while death abounds in the book (one critic has counted as many as 96 deaths mentioned in the text), these deaths are often unaccompanied by any sense of the monumental. Cather claims she had never intended to write a novel of the Southwest, because the region was too big and varied as subject matter, but on a trip to Santa Fe, she discovered the story of Archbishop Lamy and his friend and fellow missionary the Right Reverend Joseph Machebeuf, Catholic priests who had settled in the Southwest in the mid-19th century. These men became the prototypes for the main characters, Bishop Latour and Father Valliant,

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who struggle to do the work of the church within the contested space of the American Southwest, where Mexicans, Americans, American Indians, and French or Spanish missionaries all compete to claim the land and the souls of the people who live there. Although Latour attempts to introduce change in the New Mexico settlements, he ironically resists change in his own life, wishing to preserve his French ways, right down to the manner in which the onion soup is prepared. “A soup like this,” says Latour of the Christmas soup, “is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refi ned tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup” (Later Novels 299). The literary episodes, often related through oral narratives, include stories of a tyrannical priest thrown from the top of the Ácoma mesa by the Indians he had virtually enslaved instead of ministering to them; a poor neophyte to whom the Virgin Mary appears; the performance of marriages and baptisms in remote villages; Father Valliant’s acquisition of two prized white mules; Latour’s visit on a stormy night to a sacred and secret Indian cave with an Indian guide; the downfall of a lecherous, corrupt priest, who is nevertheless beloved by his people; the vain woman who refuses to admit her age, even if that means she will lose a sizable inheritance; and the escape of a Mexican woman enslaved by an American family hostile to the Catholic Church who refuse to allow her to worship. Many of these episodes are full of potential drama, and yet Cather works to pass over dramatic possibilities in a calm and quiet manner. One such story that clearly demonstrates the author’s goal to write a novel without accent is the story of Magdelena and her husband, Buck Scales. Latour and Valliant are riding their mules on a remote road when a storm forces them to take shelter in a rundown shack. The woman, Magdelena, secretly communicates to them that they are in grave danger from her husband. They hurriedly leave; soon afterward, she escapes and fi nds them. The life story she relates is horrific: In addition to the cruel beatings she has been subject to, her husband had murdered four previous travelers, as well as the three children

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Magdelena has borne him. In a work of typical fictional form, such a confession would have been followed by the dramatic details of hunting down Buck Scales and bringing him to justice: Cather’s method is different. Scales is indeed caught, but Cather undercuts the drama inherent in his capture, writing, instead: “The degenerate murderer, Buck Scales, was hanged after a short trial. Early in April the Bishop left Santa Fe on horseback and rode to St. Louis, on his way to attend the Provincial Council at Baltimore” (Later Novels 324). The plot movement from Scales’s being brought to justice to the details of Latour’s attending to church business occurs without so much as a paragraph break. Much of the last part of the novel concerns the archbishop’s building his church in Santa Fe. The archbishop intellectually understands and admires the local architecture and the way in which it is characteristic for the Indians to “vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it. The Hopi villages that were set upon rock mesas were made to look like the rock on which they sat . . . [and the] Navajo hogans, among the sand and willows, were made of sand and willows” (Later Novels 419). Nevertheless, Latour envisions and builds a grand church in the classic Romanesque style of architecture. Cather does not fault Latour for this desire; nor does she seem to suggest that it is a result of great hubris; instead, her vision of Latour is as a man devoted to his work, but, ultimately and understandably, lonely and still enamored of his European culture. He emerges as deeply flawed, deeply human, and totally unforgettable.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Critics have said that this novel deals with the seven deadly sins (pride, envy, gluttony, sloth, lust, avarice, and wrath). Consider as many stories, scenes, and characters as possible that embody these sins. Speculate on why and how such elements are important to the novel. 2. Discuss Cather’s portrayal of the meeting of European and native cultures (both Mexican and American Indian), especially in terms of religion. What issues of colonialism is she deal-

ing with, and how do Valliant and Latour deal with religious confl icts? Is religion in this novel a relationship of antagonism or cooperation or something else? Discuss. 3. Miracles are very important in this novel, and Cather portrays a number of them. She also defi nes miracles at the end of book 1, “The Vicar Apostolic.” Examine that quote and consider how significant it is to the novel as a whole. Consider, too, how the miracles in the novel are presented, especially in terms of Cather’s goal to write without dramatic accent.

Shadows on the Rock (1931) Cather’s next novel is another frontier colonization story in the tradition of My Ántonia or O Pioneers! about transforming a strange landscape into a home place, yet Shadows on the Rock is about a culture that is focused eastward on Europe, rather than on the American West, and focused on community rather than individual achievement, as was the theme of western American mythology. Set in the late 17th century in the French settlement of Quebec, this tranquil novel has minimal plot and is centered on one year in the life of the widower and apothecary Euclide Auclair and his 12-year-old daughter, Cécile, as they strive in their domestic lives to maintain French culture and manners in the New World. Most of the story takes place at the hearthside of the Auclair home. There a variety of characters tell tales of religious asceticism (the practice of self-denial) by the recluse Jeanne Le Ber within her austere chamber; the betrayal felt by the woodsman Pierre Charron, who is in love with Le Ber and hopes to marry her; the terrors of being the king’s torturer in the Old World; the perils of building communities in the woods outside the city; and the personal sacrifice of a missionary’s making a “vow of perpetual stability” to the Huron Indians he initially despises. The warmth of the hearthside and the domestic scene in which these often-horrific stories are told acts as a corrective, a remedy that reasserts the storytellers’ place within a close-knit community. In the

Willa Cather

end, all the characters make their own form of “a vow of perpetual stability” to place, thus becoming Canadians rather than displaced Frenchmen, and the epilogue reveals that Cécile and Pierre have married and have four sons who are “the Canadians of the future” (Later Novels 640). While this book became a best seller in 1932, not all reviewers understood or appreciated what Cather had been attempting in it, and some complained that the novel was dramatically weak. What these reviewers did not understand, Cather protested, was that her book was like loving “a small Georgian pitcher better than the Empire State Building” (quoted in Woodress 432). Responding to a reviewer who had liked the book, Cather added, “as you seem to recognize, once having adopted a tone so defi nite, once having taken your seat in the close air by the apothecary’s fi re, you can’t explode into military glory, any more than you can pour champagne into a salad dressing . . . and really, a new society begins with the salad dressing more than with the destruction of Indian villages” (On Writing 16). Cather’s novel also drew the charge of falling back on “escapism.” Among intellectuals of the turbulent 1930s, the belief was that if the art of the age were to be important at all, it must have a direct political message and must wrestle head on with current social turmoil. The muralist Diego Rivera, for example, claimed, “Art is propaganda, or it is not art.” As a result of this attitude, Cather’s brand of writing, which looked at past cultures and events, began to be called into question. She was accused by Granville Hicks, an influential literary critic of the time, of having “fallen into supine romanticism because of a refusal to examine life as it is”; it was obvious, he wrote in a 1933 essay entitled “The Case against Willa Cather,” that she could not go on, painting again and again the Nebraska she had once known. The West was changing. . . . The story of this new West could scarcely take the form of a simple, poetic idyll. Heroism and romance, if they existed, had changed their appearance. Characters could no longer be isolated from the social movements

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that were shaping the destiny of the nation and the world. She would have to recognize that the life she loved was disappearing. (142, 147)

Cather saw Hicks’s accusation as “implying an evasion of duty.” “When the world is in a bad way,” she disputed, “we are told, it is the business of the composer and the poet to devote himself to propaganda and fan the flames of indignation. . . . But the world has a habit of being in a bad way from time to time, and art has never contributed anything to help matters—except escape” (On Writing 18–19). Asserting that literature concerning itself with current social ills was “a fleeting fashion,” she said that the critics like Hicks made “a career out of destroying the past. The only new thing they offered us was contempt for the old” (28, 25). Still thinking about the issue years later, Cather said that while writing about the theories for the betterment of humanity is a noble and useful thing, it had no place, as she saw it, in the genre of fiction (quoted in Woodress 470). What Hicks and critics like him failed to see, of course, was that Cather was in fact confronting modern problems in more subtle ways. In the years before women achieved suffrage, The Song of the Lark asks key questions about the possibility of women’s having meaningful careers. The Professor’s House offers a sound indictment of the materialism of the 1920s, Death Comes for the Archbishop confronts issues of racism and contested space in the Southwest, and Shadows on the Rock expresses many of the concerns that would become central to the nation during the depression. In Shadows, Cather demonstrates that happiness can fall apart through money or fame, that the human community is more important than isolated individuals or political agendas, that there is comfort in family and cultural ritual. While the literature of the 1930s turned outward to examine the ills of society, average Americans turned inward to home and family, and Cather’s book expressed that inwardness.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss Cather’s portrayal of the forest in Shadows on the Rock. What does it represent for the

44


settlers, and what is their emotional response to it? Compare and contrast this portrayal with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s depiction of the forest in works like “Young Goodman Brown” and The Scarlet Letter. 2. The perpetuation of traditions is important in this novel. Discuss ways in which Cather expresses this idea as theme, and consider whether or not traditions are revised and adapted to the New World environment.

“Neighbour Rosicky” (1932) “Neighbour Rosicky” is another widely anthologized short story by Cather and a companion piece to My Ántonia, because in it Cather draws upon the same prototypes for composition. Whereas her 1918 novel had drawn upon the life of Annie Shimerda Pavelka, this short story focuses on John Pavelka, Annie’s husband, who served as the prototype for Anton. A quiet story, “Neighbour Rosicky” investigates the daily life of the aging Bohemian immigrant and his homesteading family during the early years of the Great Depression. Through stories told by Rosicky and his wife, Mary, and memories evoked, we learn about Rosicky’s impoverished early life in a London slum, his lonely existence in what he thinks of as the concrete jail of New York City, and his eventual contentment on the Nebraska farm he and Mary homestead. The story hinges on the opening statement: “When Dr. Burleigh told Neighbour Rosicky he had a bad heart, Rosicky protested” (Obscure Destinies 7). The natural question at this point might be why we need to read on, if we know what is going to be the certain end of the story—Rosicky’s death. However, Cather then challenges this diagnosis throughout the story, fi rst by offering an alternative opinion in the remembered scene where the lonely young immigrant wanders the barren, concrete expanses of New York City on the afternoon of Independence Day and “found out what was the matter with him. . . . It struck young Rosicky that this was the trouble with big cities; they built you in from the

earth itself, cemented you away from contact with the ground” (Obscure Destinies 29). Rosicky’s cure, of course, is to establish a kind of spiritual kinship to the land, a deep and abiding understanding of the agrarian landscape that nurtures and sustains him, so that he can look out on what will be his own gravesite with peace and contentment, feeling that it is a good place to be buried, so close to home and family and surrounded by sky and ongoing life. In addition, what Cather guides us to understand by the final passages of the story is that while the physiological organ may be weakened by hard work and age, the “heart” as the seat of emotional and spiritual identity remains always strong, even to the end, when Rosicky suffers the fi nal “cramp” in his chest that will end his mortal life (Obscure Destinies 59). By never identifying Rosicky’s suffering as a “heart attack,” Cather urges her readers to reconsider what they know about his heart and to recognize fi nally the ways in which Rosicky’s is, in fact, a good heart. He has overcome misery and hardship with grace and good humor, placed his family’s emotional well-being above financial success, and offered his American daughter-in-law undying love and acceptance. Only a good heart could do so.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Students may notice a pattern in the story’s episodes and oral narratives—namely, the use of companion scenes: Cather uses two Fourth of Julys and two Christmas celebrations to create a contrast of emotions. Consider what these companion scenes have in common, or what pattern emerges from them, or what these thematically similar scenes suggest about each other. 2. Find and read Thomas Jefferson’s discussion on American farmers (chapter 19, entitled “Manufactures,” in his Notes on the State of Virginia 1787). How does Cather’s story exemplify the ideals Jefferson discusses when he speaks of the American farmer citizen? 3. Episodes in “Neighbour Rosicky” all reinforce personal values: The doctor’s memory emphasizes family harmony and hospitality; Mary’s story upholds the value of grace in time of hardship; Anton’s own stories prize hard work, hon-

Willa Cather

esty, humility, and the value of owning land. Research and record your own family’s legends of holidays, winters, droughts, city life, homesteading, or hard times. Consider whether they, too, emphasize some of the same themes.

Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) Written during a period when, as Cather recognized, the world was moving toward a second world war, Sapphira and the Slave Girl is Cather’s most deeply pessimistic work. It in no way shares the nostalgia for a lost past that some of her prior works had contained. As she followed in the papers the actions of Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, she recognized that there was the possibility for true evil in the world. This work is her attempt to probe the nature of evil. In it, she reveals the ways in which a facade of grace and southern hospitality can belie a deeper reality of cruelty. The novel opens in 1856, just four years before the Civil War begins. Sapphira, the title character, is an imperious matriarch of a southern plantation in Virginia. Her husband, Henry, is a miller and a Southerner who recognizes the inhumanity of slavery, even though he feels powerless to change it. Their daughter, Rachel Black (who is closely based on Cather’s maternal grandmother, Rachel Boak), is vehemently opposed to slavery, despite her upbringing. When Sapphira decides to sell their slave, Nancy, because her husband has made the mistake of treating the slave with kindness and respect, Henry objects. Since a husband’s signature is necessary for the sale of a slave—only males owned property legally—Sapphira must fi nd another way to get rid of Nancy. She invites Henry’s lecherous cousin, Martin Colbert, for a long visit and tries at every turn to provide him with an opportunity to rape the slave girl. Rachel and Nancy’s fellow slaves understand what Sapphira has set up, and they protect Nancy as best they can, until Rachel declares the situation intolerable. She seeks her father’s help in aiding Nancy to escape, but he is too paralyzed by Southern proprieties to assist her openly. Instead, on the night

45

planned for Nancy’s escape, he puts money into his coat pocket and hangs it near an open window, in effect forcing Rachel to “steal” money from her own father. Rachel assists Nancy’s escape, getting her to people in the Underground Railroad who can see her safely on into Canada. The epilogue takes place 25 years later, when the fi rst-person narrator, Cather herself, describes Nancy Till’s welcome home. Sapphira may be the main character of the novel, but she is certainly not its heroine. She is a woman without remorse or moral sensitivity, and her sinister actions are placed in direct contrast with her gentility and Southern manners. With most other slaves besides Nancy she is fair, even indulgent, a savvy businesswoman who, despite being a semiinvalid, has an iron will. Her handicap, identified as a crippling “dropsy” (Later Novels 783), symbolically represents a crippled society, a deformed social structure that tolerates slavery and all the horrors that accompany it. Sapphira and the Slave Girl is the only Cather novel in which the writer draws extensively upon material from her Southern birthplace. She once declared that in this novel her ending was her beginning—a phrase that can be interpreted in two ways. The novel’s epilogue is based on Cather’s own childhood memory of the former slave Nancy Till’s returning to Cather’s Virginia home, the catalyst for the book’s subject. As Cather’s last novel, this book took her full circle to her earliest childhood memories.

For Discussion or Writing Two other women writers confronting the issues of slavery whom readers might be most familiar with are Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and Harriet Jacobs, who wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). All three portray slavery especially in terms of its impact on women; Stowe writes a novel in which most scenes take place within a domestic sphere, while Jacobs portrays the cruelties that women slaves especially had to endure. If you know the work of either of these writers, discuss how Cather’s point of view is similar or different. If you are not familiar with

46


Stowe or Jacobs, consider Sapphira and the Slave Girl in terms of how it deals with women’s issues of power and domestic space.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ABOUT CATHER AND HER WORK 1. Willa Cather often writes about the natural world in evocative ways. With so much attention in her works to nature, what do you think she is saying about the human relationship to the natural world? If you have read more than one of Cather’s works, consider how her treatment of the natural world evolves or differs from work to work. What kinds of spiritual effects does a relationship with the natural world offer her characters? 2. Keeping in mind that Cather’s life spanned the years from a period when women were still expected to be domestic and submissive to one when women had permanently moved into the workforce and were forging careers for themselves in all fields, consider Cather’s female characters. How do you think Cather handles issues of female equality or feminism? 3. Comparing and contrasting more than one Cather work, consider how she defines success. What is necessary for true success and what is not? WORKS CITED

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Cather, Willa. Early Novels and Stories. New York: Library of America, 1987. ———. Later Novels. New York. Library of America, 1990. ———. The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather’s First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893–1896. Edited by Bernice Slote. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966.

———. Obscure Destinies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. ———. “The Opinions, Tastes, and Fancies of Wm. Cather, M.D.” In The World of Willa Cather. By Mildred Bennett. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961. ———. “Peter.” In Willa Cather, Collected Short Fiction, 1892–1912. Edited by Mildred R. Bennett. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. ———. “Superstition versus Imagination.” In Willa Cather, a Literary Biography. By James Woodress. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. ———. Willa Cather in Person, Interviews, Speeches, and Letters. Edited by L. Brent Bohlke. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. ———. Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as Art. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. ———. The World and Parish, Willa Cather’s Articles and Reviews, 1893–1902. Edited by William M. Curtin. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. Hicks, Granville. “The Case against Willa Cather.” In Willa Cather and Her Critics, edited by James Schroeter, 139–147. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967. Rosowski, Susan J., ed. Approaches to Teaching Cather’s My Ántonia. Approaches to Teaching World Literature, No. 22. New York: Modern Language Association, 1989. Willa Cather Archive. Available online. URL: http:// cather.unl.edu/. Accessed March 20, 2009. The Willa Cather Foundation. Available online. URL: http://www.willacather.org. Accessed April 7, 2009. Woodress, James. Willa Cather, a Literary Biography. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987.

Evelyn Funda

Hart Crane (1899–1932) I write damned little because I am interested in recording certain sensations, very rigidly chosen, with an eye for what according to my taste and sum of prejudices seems suitable to—or intense enough—for verse. (qtd. in Parkinson 91)

U

By 1914 Grace was often pulling Harold out of school to travel with her in order to get away from her unhappy life at home. He was incredibly well read as a child and a teenager, but he traveled so much with his mother that his school records are spotty. In 1916 the whole family took an extended tour across the United States. Travel suited him, and he lived in many different places in his life, including Paris and Mexico City. Part of his worries with his parents concerned his “fast” lifestyle. Not only was he homosexual, but he also liked to drink and party and got into a lot of trouble. He told his mother about his sexuality in his late twenties, but what had troubled both of his parents more than his sexual orientation was his inability to settle down to a stable career and nonpartying way of life. He had a quarrel with his mother in 1928 and never saw her again. In early 1917, at the age of 16, he left high school and went to New York City to live alone. There, he settled into a bohemian way of life, interacting with many poets and artists. He also developed a taste for sailors as lovers. Eventually he would sustain long-term relationships, but his life was also fi lled with fl ings and one-night stands. In addition, he frequently got into drunken brawls, often in connection with trying to pick up men. One long-term relationship that was highly influential for Crane was with the sailor Emil Opffer, Jr. In 1924, soon after he met Opffer, Crane wrote

nderstanding Hart Crane’s personal life is unusually important to understanding his poetry. Many of his poems, and especially those in his fi rst collection, White Buildings, are obscure and confusing without a fundamental familiarity with the events of his life. Born in Garrettsville, Ohio, on July 21, 1899, Harold Hart Crane was the only child of Grace Hart Crane and Clarence (“C. A.”) Crane, who owned a maple syrup cannery and a successful candy company. (C. A. Crane invented Lifesavers but sold the rights before they became popular.) Harold was close to his mother and began to use his middle name, her maiden name, when he started writing poetry. As with many young men, he had a vexed relationship with his father, not really reconciling with him until 1930. Grace and C. A. had had a troubled marriage almost from the start, and even as a young child, Harold sided with his mother, who confided all of her troubles to him. When his parents’ marriage fell apart in 1908, Harold went to live with his maternal grandmother in Cleveland. The family reunited together after Grace returned in 1909 from a “rest cure” in a sanitarium. Eventually C. A. returned as well, and he and Grace reconciled in 1911. However, the marriage was still unhappy and began to disintegrate by 1914. They fi nally officially divorced at the end of 1916. They almost remarried in 1917, but instead, they both married other people.

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in a letter to Waldo Frank, “For many days now, I have gone about quite dumb with something for which ‘happiness’ must be too mild a term.” To Crane, Opffer was associated with the Brooklyn Bridge, which was to play an important role in his later poetry. In the same letter Crane writes, “And I have been able to give freedom and life which was acknowledged in the ecstasy of walking hand in hand across the most beautiful bridge of the world, the cables enclosing us and pulling us upward in such a dance as I have never walked and never can walk with another” (qtd. in Unterecker 355). Crane moved into a building owned by Opffer’s father in order to be close to the bridge. Eventually he moved into rooms at the back of the building with spectacular views of it. He was excited to fi nd that the bridge’s architect’s son, who had been struck with a crippling disease, had observed its progress during construction from the very same windows. He wrote to his mother, “Just imagine looking out your window in the East River with nothing intervening between your view of the statue of Liberty, way down the harbour, and the marvelous beauty of Brooklyn Bridge close above you on your right! All of the great new skyscrapers of lower Manhattan are marshalled directly across from you, and there is a constant stream of tugs, liners, sail boats, etc. in procession before you on the river!” (qtd. in Fisher 221). The bridge was to become his major symbol. Artistically, Hart Crane ran in a circle of prominent figures who included Allen Tate, JEAN TOOMER , E. E. CUMMINGS, Yvor Winters, Kenneth Burke, Waldo Frank, and the photographers Walker Evans and Alfred Stieglitz, among many others. He continued to read widely and was heavily influenced in his poetry by romantics such as William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson; high modernists such as William Butler Yeats and T. S. ELIOT; and French symbolists such as Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and Jules Laforgue, not to mention the Renaissance figures William Shakespeare and John Donne. He had been published in the “little magazines” beginning in 1916 and by 1919

was starting to gain a reputation under the name Hart Crane. During this period he had begun to explore themes that would later appear in his “Voyages” poems. Among his many topics were loss of innocence and the differences between adolescence and maturity. His love affairs were teaching him the pains of loss due to broken promises, and in one early attempt he writes of the loss of innocence occurring at a seashore that delineates the border between adolescence and maturity. (He would later expand and develop this early poem into “Voyages I.”) Even at this stage of his artistic development, the themes of love, loss, and experience and the overarching image of the sea were becoming intertwined in his work. In 1923 his fi rst longer poem, “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,” was published to moderate acclaim. This was also the year he fi rst saw the Brooklyn Bridge and was impressed enough by it to want to write a poem about it. White Buildings, a collection of several short poems and the series “Voyages,” was published in 1926, and he continued to work on his masterpiece, The Bridge, off and on from then until he found a patron willing to help him publish it in 1930. Crane had been living a reckless 1920s lifestyle, and his new friends Harry and Caresse Crosby were the epitome of the F. SCOTT FITZGER ALD decadence that he could not quite afford himself. Their Paris-based Black Sun Press would eventually publish portions of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; in 1929 Crane met Harry, who inspired him to fi nish The Bridge with the idea that it would be published by the press. Crane spent much time with their circle of friends in Paris. In late 1929 Harry committed suicide, an act that had a profound effect on Crane. According to his friend Katherine Anne Porter, he thought that it was “imaginative; the act of a poet” (qtd. in Horton 287). Caresse published The Bridge in 1930 after some discussion of whether or not it would be fi nished. She was inclined to publish it as it stood, where Crane had stalled out on the writing, without “Cape Hatteras,” but he insisted on being allowed to attempt to complete it. Later, he claimed that The Bridge might “turn into something like the form of Leaves of Grass,

Hart Crane

with a number of editions, each incorporating further additions” (qtd. in Fisher 402). As it turned out, his death would preclude this possibility. The work was well received by the critics, who immediately understood its scope and its novel techniques. For example, the New York Times Book Review published an article titled “Hart Crane’s Cubistic Poetry in The Bridge.” In 1931 Crane received a Guggenheim Fellowship and went to live in Mexico City, where he knew Katherine Anne Porter and Peggy Cowley, Malcolm Cowley’s former wife. Crane was disturbed at this time and indulged in mercurial relationships with his friends. Despite his homosexuality, he became engaged to Peggy Cowley. During this period he was having trouble with writing and attempted suicide. Shortly thereafter, he and Peggy set sail for New York. On April 27, 1932, at the age of 32, he made a successful suicide attempt, jumping from the ship the morning after yet another midnight drunken brawl. An eyewitness describes his measured actions as follows: On that ill-fated morning, one of the ship’s officers told us that Crane had been in the sailors’ quarters the previous night, trying to make one of the men, and had been badly beaten. Just before noon, a number of us were gathered on deck, waiting to hear the results of the ship’s pool—always announced at noon. Just then we saw Crane come on deck, dressed . . . in pajamas and topcoat; he had a black eye and looked generally battered. He walked to the railing, took off his coat, folded it neatly over the railing (not dropping it on deck), placed both hands on the railing, raised himself on his toes, and then dropped back again. We all fell silent and watched him, wondering what in the world he was up to. Then, suddenly, he vaulted over the railing and jumped into the sea. For what seemed five minutes, but was more like five seconds, no one was able to move; then cries of “man overboard” went up. Just once I saw Crane, swimming strongly, but never again. (quoted by John Unterecker in “Introduction” to Crane xxxvii–xxxviii)

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Crane’s poem “The Broken Tower” was published posthumously in the New Republic in June 1932. He also left an almost-fi nished folder of poems known as the “Key West” sheaf, poems about the Caribbean. (These are available in print now in The Poems of Hart Crane, ed. Marc Simon.) Shortly after Crane’s death, his mother appointed his friend Waldo Frank to edit a collection of his works, The Complete Poems of Hart Crane, which appeared in 1933. She also decided that a biography would be in order, and in 1937 Philip Horton published Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet. Before her collaboration with Horton, however, Grace Crane had destroyed many of Hart Crane’s letters from his lovers as well as letters from Peggy Cowley, correspondence that she deemed damaging to his reputation. Hart Crane’s contribution to literature lies in his unique attempt to be romantic and modern at the same time. He is defi nitely a romantic in the strain of Whitman, though he also uses modernist themes and settings (such as urban, barren landscapes) and techniques (including fragmentation and overly obscure allusion). In addition, he combines unlikely influences such as Whitman and Dickinson or Dickinson and Eliot. Uses of the sea, the bridge as an organic symbol, and the buildings of Manhattan turned white by the sunrise point to the romantic influence of nature on his work. He remains optimistic in the face of the kind of despair common in the modern age. Judging from the progression from White Buildings to The Bridge, Crane had the talent to become one of the great poets of the century, but he died before he reached his full potential. Nonetheless, his work, especially The Bridge, retains its power and charm.

“Chaplinesque” (1921) “Chaplinesque” is an example of Crane’s attempt to make a private symbol more universal. First published in 1921, it appears in White Buildings (1926), Crane’s early work. He had seen Charlie Chaplin’s popular movie The Kid in 1921 and was moved by Chaplin’s poignant “Little Tramp”

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character, making connections between that persona and the French Pierrot. Of course, Crane himself seems to identify with the “Little Tramp,” misunderstood and down on his luck but ever persevering; however, he also wants to extend that metaphor to the human situation as a whole. In addition, according to several letters, he “made that ‘infi nitely gentle, infi nitely suffering thing’ of Eliot’s into the symbol of the kitten” (qtd. in Spears 15). In the modern age of 1921, human beings must make “meek adjustments” and be content with “random consolations” (ll. 1, 2), battered about by events beyond their control. Crane himself claimed a pun on his own name in the line “What blame to us if the heart live on” (l. 18). The previous line about evading “all else but the heart” (l. 17) is also telling of the modernist project of defi ning some kind of identity in the face of the anonymous, mechanical modern world. Symbols like “a grail of laughter of an empty ash can” (l. 21) clearly show T. S. Eliot’s influence, especially in juxtaposition of religious imagery with the empty, dirty reality of modern life. Crane also seems in this poem, as in many others, to be influenced by the French symbolists, particularly in his graphic imagery. In the end, though, the tramp’s innocent, surprised reaction to the smirks of the policeman is defended as a valid response to the vagaries of modern life.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Watch The Kid and make a detailed list of images that Crane borrows from Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” character. Discuss how Crane adapts these quirks to a more universal theme. Exactly what is he saying about modern life and our response to it? 2. Crane indicates that the “fury of the street” could represent the modern world. Discuss how. T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” uses similar images to condemn modern urban life. Illustrating with specific examples for support, compare the styles of these two poems. 3. What pun is suggested by pirouettes, and how does your answer reflect the role of Chaplin in the modern world? A famous image in William

Butler Yeats’s poetry is the spiral. You might also read “Sailing to Byzantium” or “The Second Coming” and compare Yeats’s spiral images with Crane’s. 4. Browse through the poems in White Buildings for more Pierrot images. Compare and contrast these uses. Why is this such an attractive image for Crane?

“At Melville’s Tomb” (1926) First published in 1926, “At Melville’s Tomb” appears in White Buildings, where it functions as a sort of prologue to the “Voyages” poems, which immediately follow it; the speaker looks out to sea, speculating on the remains of shipwrecks from years past and on Melville’s reaction to those remains. The sea is the major motif of the “Voyages” poems, and “At Melville’s Tomb” sets the tone for them. Melville was one of Crane’s heroes and a major influence. Here, the idea of a sea voyage that ends in death portends the voyages that will follow in the book. The poem has been accused of being unduly difficult and obscure. Crane wrote a famous letter to Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine, where the poem was eventually fi rst published, to defend its difficult imagery. In addition to explaining how some of the symbols operate in the poem, Crane expounds on his task as a poet: “To put it more plainly, as a poet I may very possibly be more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness (and their combinations and interplay in metaphor on this basis) than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations at the cost of limiting my subject matter and perceptions involved in the poem” (qtd. in Horton 330). In this theory, he seems to follow the French symbolists; textual evidence in the poem also points to their influence. Such evidence includes the references to “azure steeps” (l. 14), referring to the vortex of a deadly shipwreck described as a lifegiving cornucopia or beautiful swirling flower bud.

Hart Crane

Symbols in the poem illustrate the idea of chance, the indifference of cruel nature, and the hint that religion and history hold little sway over man’s destiny. For example, “the dice of drowned men’s bones” (l. 2) indicates the role of chance. Crane explained that the bones were ground up into “little cubes” and “thrown up on the sand,” leaving no identification. Of course, the pun on dice and bones is not to be missed. Crane elaborates, “Dice as a symbol of chance and circumstance is also implied” (qtd. in Horton 333). Religious symbols, including the calyx (in the sense of chalice), altars, passing bells, and monody (in the sense of elegy or dirge); historical symbols, such as chapter and hieroglyph; and technological symbols such as the compass, quadrant, and sextant are no match for the vast power and indifference of the stars and the sea. Man’s invented systems for making sense of the universe lose their meaning in the face of the spiral images connected with nature such as the coil, seashell, calyx (in the sense of flower bud), and the implied circling of the stars and vortex of the shipwreck going down. The awe-inspiring power of nature and particularly of the sea will also appear in each of the six “Voyages” poems.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In what ways does this poem convey Crane’s belief in the cruelty of nature? Support your argument with specific images, analyzing each thoroughly as you go. 2. Crane’s overarching image here is of a shipwreck. In fact, the poem is difficult partly because it consists largely of this image, with little explanation of what the image means. Attempt to explain how the specific details of the shipwreck image in stanzas 2, 3, and 4 contribute to the poem’s greater meaning. 3. T. S. Eliot’s complex poem The Waste Land contains recurring images of the drowned Phoenician sailor. Read The Waste Land and look for these images. Compare and contrast them with Crane’s use of drowned victims in “At Melville’s Tomb.” Do you see similarities in style or content? Where? (You might also try a comparison of religious imagery in the two poems.)

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4. Write an essay in which you defend the idea that “At Melville’s Tomb” is a sort of prologue to the “Voyages” poems that immediately follow it in White Buildings. Illustrate with specific examples to support your position.

“Voyages, I, II, III, IV, V, VI” (1923, 1926) Written between 1921 and 1925, the six “Voyages” poems appear last in White Buildings. They tie together the ideas of love, death, and the sea. They were written out of order and over the course of many years; critics agree that, like that of the poems of The Bridge, their quality is uneven. As many of the poems in White Buildings do, these poems still rely on the reader’s knowing something about Crane’s personal experience for a full understanding, but they are less obscure than his earlier poems and approach the universality of The Bridge poems. For example, although several of the “Voyages” poems were inspired by Emil Opffer, Crane’s lover, a sailor who returned from his periodic merchant marine voyages with fantastic tales of things like underwater cities, Crane does not refer to him directly, and even the sexual references are not explicitly homosexual. The poems are unmistakably about love, though. Other allusions to Crane’s personal life occur in the poems, but not recognizing them does not detract from the larger meaning of the poems. Although the reader may not know whether “Belle Isle” in “Voyages VI” is a specific reference to a real island off the coast of Labrador; or whether the term alludes to James Joyce’s Ulysses, Whitman’s “Specimen Days,” Eliot’s “Gerontion,” Emerson’s “Works and Days,” or Baudelaire’s “Un Voyage à Cythère”; or whether it is an inside reference to Crane’s grandmother’s plantation on the Isle of Pines in the Caribbean, the general meaning of the poem is not much diminished. That is, “Belle Isle” is a reference to all of those; Crane is deliberately obscure in his varied references, expecting his reader (as Eliot also did) to catch his allusions. However, the less astute or in-the-know reader can also take something away, even without recognizing Crane’s public and private references. Thus, the


poem works on several levels, more successfully on a public level than on a private one and perhaps most successfully on a general level, in which “Belle Isle” simply functions as a destination in the poem representing creativity or peacefulness. The “Voyages” poems are more mature than many others in White Buildings precisely because they work on more levels, including a general one, and are not so confessional. The poems in The Bridge will develop this tendency even further. In “Voyages I” children play on the beach. This is the beginning of the journey. The poet implores them to enjoy the shore at the same time that he warns them of the cruel sea. The tone is sad, hinting that time will steal the children’s youthful innocence. They will grow up to “flay each other” (l. 2) with more than sand. Once the reader notes that they are playing at “conquest” (l. 3), the question becomes, What journey have they begun? Crane is deliberately obscure. The reader is left asking, Why must they not cross the line? The line to what? The edge of the sea and the passage of time are somehow tied together in a bittersweet warning. “Voyages II” also addresses the theme of passing time. The poem discusses the sea itself as it reflects the moon, whose tides hasten the seasons. Themes include sleep, death, and desire, all of which are hurried on by the moon’s influence. The journey has now moved out into the ocean, into the Caribbean, and the phrase “the vortex of our grave” (l. 24) indicates that the voyage has death or paradise as its ultimate goal. The sea of experience is vast and beautiful but also cruel. “Voyages III” is more abstract. The sexual imagery and separation of the lovers are clear, but the famous last line is ambiguous in its exhortation “Permit me voyage, love, into your hands.” (l. 19). The address to love here can be to the lover, the sea, or death, yet the line is fundamentally optimistic. The poem is tinged with religious overtones throughout—note, for example, such words as laved, reliquary, and transmemberment (ll. 6, 8, 18). “Voyages IV” continues the religious theme (as in the terms chancel and incarnate word—ll. 13, 17), but its topic is geographic space, particularly the speaker’s efforts to return to the lover. This is

a love letter to an absent loved one. The albatross in line 5 seems to be an allusion to Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and the word bridge in line 4 indicates that the bridge theme is present in much of Crane’s early work as well as in the poems from The Bridge. These images also figure in the description of vast space between the Tropics and the Pole. Here, the speaker of the poem is trying to bridge space and time to reach the lover. “Voyages V” is much more vague. Here the reader feels a dramatic shift in mood. Images include the moon and the tide again, but this time the tide seems to separate the lovers. As Keats does in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Crane uses multiple negatives to set the tone, particularly in stanzas 3, 4, and 5. Images of pirates and stealing, as well as a reference to “the cables of our sleep so swiftly fi led” (l. 6), point to the death of love or the death of the lover, an idea reinforced by the last phrase, “and sleep the long way home” (l. 25). “Voyages VI” is full of sea images (such as “shell, “leagues,” “ocean rivers” [ll. 5, 6, 3]), but the voyage is drawing to a close in an approach to the harbor. Although the love may be dead, the poet continues to strive toward the creative paradise “Belle Isle” (l. 25), which is identified with the “Word” (the poem) that is “the unbetrayable reply / Whose accent no farewell can know” (ll. 29, 31–32). In the poem, the lovers will remain united. Poetry helps the poet survive the experience of suffering and death. This poem is full of imagery of fi re, light, and water. Here, the phoenix image rises not out of fi re, but out of water. It is significant that “Voyages VI” reverses the nighttime theme of “Voyages V” with its bright morning imagery. Seeing and being blinded by too much light are the result. The journey has been one from childhood to maturity; no farewell can eliminate the muse of poetry, but loving involves dying. However, as the fi nal stanza indicates, poetry itself cannot die, even though everything else does. The “Voyages” poems, like many of Crane’s works, are heavily influenced by other authors. In homage to Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, Crane implies here that the voyage

Hart Crane

includes both innocence and experience. From the innocent children in “Voyages I” to the jaded or accepting lover who has experienced the death of love in “Voyages VI,” the characters in these poems have completed a journey. Along the way the poet has learned that art is limited but that it can be a mechanism for survival.

For Discussion or Writing 1. As indicated by the last line of “Voyages I” (“The bottom of the sea is cruel” [l. 16)]), Crane is using shipwreck imagery again in these poems. Trace this motif and compare it to his use of the shipwreck idea in “At Melville’s Tomb.” 2. Try to tell what is happening in all six of these poems. Crane’s imagery is so dense that it gets in the way of the plot, but there is a plot, of sorts. You will also experience this problem in The Bridge. Here, make an outline of the sequence of events, as best you can. 3. What kind of journeys could Crane be alluding to in his “Voyages” poems? Emily Dickinson also discusses various trips and journeys. Read several of her trip poems and compare them with Crane’s “Voyages” descriptions. Do you see any similarity in the use of images? Where and how? Compare their styles. 4. Indicate where mood shifts occur in the “Voyages” poems. (For instance, a major shift occurs at the beginning of “Voyages V.” Why? How does Crane accomplish this effect?) What is the general tone of the series at the beginning? At the end? Find specific words and phrases to support your answers. See whether you can relate the shifts to the general meaning of the whole series. 5. In these poems, how does poetry help the poet survive the experience of suffering and death? Support your conclusion by discussing specific words and phrases.

The Bridge (1930) The Bridge, published privately in Paris and then in America in 1930, is Hart Crane’s most ambitious

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work. It is a Whitmanesque conglomeration of many smaller poems collected into eight sections and an invocation. As Whitman had, he worked on his poem for some time—it was begun in 1923; he wrote the majority of it in 1926, but he continued to add to it until its publication. Some of the sections are one substantial poem, and some contain several smaller poems. The work contains 15 poems in all. They were written out of order, and critics generally agree that those composed earliest are the most vibrant, but the poems build on one another, and to get the full effect one must read the entire cycle in sequence. The symbol of the bridge is taken from Crane’s fascination with and admiration of the Brooklyn Bridge. In 1924 he had moved into a building with a splendid view of the bridge and was very excited about the possibilities of a full poem series on that topic. As a symbol, the bridge suggests a journey not only through space but also through time, connecting the East to the vast American push westward. So the poem explores history, including examining Native American culture, the Mississippi River, and modern technology. Figures from history and legend include Christopher Columbus, Rip Van Winkle, and Pocahontas. In addition, the journey involves an exploration of love as well as of historical understanding. The country’s westward journey and the poet’s individual spiritual quest for understanding are intertwined. Symbols running throughout the individual poems of The Bridge include music, dance, and modern machinery (such as the subway, which, having been constructed in 1908, was still fairly new when the poems were written). Crane is worried about the dehumanization caused by technology. For him, in addition to bridging east and west, the Brooklyn Bridge is a bridge from the past to the future and indicates a change in American life. It is helpful to have a complete list of the poems and their sections. Many critics discuss this cycle piecemeal, ignoring the puzzling structure. Note that some of the sections do not contain a poem with the same title as the section and that some of the sections consist solely of a single poem with the same title. As you study the poems, keep an


eye on their relative lengths, weights, and densities. Here is a complete list, with section titles in capital letters followed, after a colon, by individual poem titles. PROEM: “To Brooklyn Bridge”; I. AVE M ARIA: “ave maria”; II. POWHATAN’S DAUGHTER: “The Harbor Dawn,” “Van Winkle,” “The River,” “The Dance,” “Indiana”; III. CUTTY SARK: “Cutty Sark”; IV. CAPE HATTER AS: “Cape Hatteras”; V. THREE SONGS: “Southern Cross,” “National Winter Garden,” “Virginia”; VI. QUAKER HILL: “Quaker Hill”; VII. THE TUNNEL: “The Tunnel”; VIII. ATLANTIS: “Atlantis.” The proem “To Brooklyn Bridge” sets the tone for the cycle. Crane is worried about encroaching technology (symbolized by “elevators,” “cinemas,” “subway”—ll. 8, 9, 17) at the same time that he lauds the bridge as spiritual (as is suggested by such phrases as “harp and altar,” “Prayer of pariah”—ll. 29, 32) and asks the bridge to “lend a myth to God” (l. 44). Section I, “Ave Maria,” presents Columbus’s monologue upon his return from a voyage westward. Here we see the bridge as poetry itself, a means of spanning two worlds. Columbus links the Old World and the New, and the third world, water, “tests the word” (l. 33) by simultaneously connecting and separating the other two worlds. In the second section, POWHATAN’S DAUGHTER , Crane uses five poems to explore the idea of Pocahontas as a symbol for America. The theme of sleeping and waking runs through several of them, including one admonishing Rip Van Winkle to hurry up and adjust to the changes that have occurred since he began to nap. “The River” continues the theme of nature versus technology with its underlying image of the train and plodding hoboes on the track who do not fully comprehend this new mechanical development. The “20th century” roars by them, and the momentum of the cycle continues in the swirling motion of the following poem, “The Dance.” This poem is somewhat easier to understand than many of Crane’s earlier works, primarily because the tone is more consistent throughout and the imagery is less dense and obscure. Pocahontas, standing for unspoiled nature, is fused with the West, the joyous elements

in nature. The general tone of the poem is joyous and ecstatic. “Indiana” continues the overland journey of the westward movement. Section III, CUTTY SARK , contains another major theme of The Bridge: the outcast. The sailor whom the narrator meets tells of his journeys, as the pianola, the erstwhile jukebox, intersperses snippets of popular songs. The poem “Cutty Sark” itself is quite difficult to follow, exhibiting modernist stream-of-consciousness and containing multiple obscure allusions. In line 58, the narrator says, “I started walking home across the Bridge.” The poet’s interior journey reflects his exterior one. Section IV, CAPE HATTERAS, represents a change in style. This poem is a tribute to Whitman and mirrors his typical use of all-encompassing lists of details. The topic is the airplane as a technological development. Again, a theme is homecoming, and a major motif is the noisiness of the modern world. In the next section, THREE SONGS, Crane examines women in the modern world, evoking fallen women (such as Eve, Mary Magdalene, and Venus) as well as elevated women like Pocahontas and Mary. Section VI, QUAKER HILL , shows the modern corruption of simple old-time ways of living. The Quaker Meeting House has become a new hotel (symbolizing religion corrupted by commerce), and even the Mizzentop, the palatial old hotel, has been abandoned (ll. 92–93). The tone is elegiac. The modern world is overtaking tradition. In section VII, THE TUNNEL , the narrator continues a dark journey in the subway under the river. This poem is also very difficult to follow. The tone is despairing, and the light appears only at the very end as the narrator emerges to the harbor above. There is strong birth and resurrection imagery. Finally, in section VIII, ATLANTIS, the bridge takes him back home. Here, the bridge is a fusion of the organic with the technological. The tone in this section is ecstatic. When it was published, The Bridge met with critical reviews, particularly from Crane’s friends Allen Tate and Yvor Winters. It is still seen as uneven in quality, though always powerful in its

Hart Crane

ambition of adapting modernist techniques to an expression of romantic ideals. The Bridge is much easier to read than the poems of White Buildings, precisely because it is more successful in generalizing its symbolism to apply to humans as a whole.

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5. Crane considered The Bridge to be analogous to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Read Leaves of Grass and compare the two works with regard to both style and theme. Which seems to you to be more accessible? Why? Illustrate your answer with many specific examples for support.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Think about the entire poem cycle The Bridge. Is the journey of the poet over by the end? Will he travel it again? (A case can be made for either response—yes or no. Explain your answer fully, illustrating with specific details from the poems.) 2. Research the epigraphs to each large section of The Bridge. Explain fully how each fits the theme of its section and the poem cycle as a whole. (Hint: Several of them are related to bridges of some sort. For example, the epigraph to section V mentions Sestos and Abydos, two cities on the Hellespont. Xerxes is supposed to have built a bridge from Sestos across the Hellespont when he invaded Europe. There is a love connection with this reference as well. Find it.) 3. Throughout The Bridge Crane uses deliberate grammatical ambiguity as a technique. For example, in ATLANTIS, explain the imagery in the last two lines. Why are the serpent and the eagle “antiphonal”? Why is their “swing” azure? Examine the grammar in that last sentence, considering that both “Whispers” and “swing” can be taken for either nouns or verbs. How do different readings change the meaning? Which interpretation do you think is correct? Find several more instances of this technique in The Bridge and discuss. Is this an effective technique? Why or why not? 4. Once again, imagery is the key to understanding these poems. Obviously, the bridge itself is a major motif in the cycle. Can you fi nd others? How do they intertwine with the bridge idea? Trace at least four motifs through the cycle, examining closely how they operate in the poems and in the cycle as a whole.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON CRANE AND HIS WORK 1. Compare and contrast Crane’s earlier and later poems in White Buildings and The Bridge. In what ways do both the poems of White Buildings and those of The Bridge show Crane’s quest for beauty? How do these poems reflect Crane’s own journey toward becoming a true poet? Do you see a progression in his use of imagery in these poems? 2. Many of Crane’s poems contain explicit sexual imagery. Choose one of these poems and trace its images throughout, relating them to the poem’s theme as a whole. 3. Crane takes on important modernist themes in his poetry, particularly in relation to the modernist obsession with death. Discuss the relation of art to death in Crane’s poetry. In what ways does Crane relate love and death in his poetry? Be specific. 4. How does Crane use the bridge as symbol? Discuss his early White Buildings poems as well as those from The Bridge. 5. Imagery is the key to Crane’s poetry. Choose a motif and trace it through several of Crane’s poems, analyzing how the theme relates to the general meaning. For example, you might try images from music, architecture, history, the seasons, and so on. 6. Crane was heavily influenced by the French symbolists. Write an essay in which you explore one of their images (try Stéphane Mallarmé’s “L’Azur” [The azure] or Charles Baudelaire’s “Une Charogne” [A carcass, carrion]). Is Crane’s use of imagery in the “Voyages” poems or The Bridge as effective? Why or why not?


7. Is Crane a modernist or a romantic? In what ways is the Brooklyn Bridge an apt symbol of both romantic and modernist elements? Crane is heavily influenced by romantics and modernists of vastly different styles and national backgrounds. Choose one or two from the following list and make a case for his or her influence: Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, SHERWOOD A NDERSON, ROBERT FROST, WALLACE STEVENS, WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS. WORKS CITED

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Berthoff, Warner. Hart Crane: A Re-Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Brunner, Edward. Modern American Poetry: Hart Crane. Available online. URL: http://www.english.illinois.edu/MAPS/poets/a_f/crane/crane. htm. Accessed April 7, 2009. Crane, Hart. The Poems of Hart Crane. Edited by Marc Simon. New York: Liveright, 1986. Fisher, Clive. Hart Crane: A Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002.

Giles, Paul. Hart Crane: The Contexts of The Bridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Horton, Philip. Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet. New York: Viking, 1937. Reprint, New York: Compass Books, 1957. Leibowitz, Herbert A. Hart Crane: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1968. Lewis, R. W. B. The Poetry of Hart Crane: A Critical Study. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967. Parkinson, Thomas. Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Paul, Sherman. Hart’s Bridge. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Schwartz, Joseph. Hart Crane: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983. Spears, Monroe K. Hart Crane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965. Trachtenberg, Alan, ed. Hart Crane: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, 1982. Unterecker, John. Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.

Catherine E. Howard

Countee Cullen (1903–1946) If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET. (qtd. in Early 23)

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ountee Cullen began his illustrious career in high school and published his first book of poems, the critically acclaimed Color (1925), in college, followed by Copper Sun (1927) and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927). Cullen wrote most of these poems as an undergraduate and by the age of 26 had passed his poetic prime. But as he aged, Cullen experimented with many other genres, including novels, theater, translation, and children’s literature, although none of these efforts was as well received as his poetry. At his untimely death on January 9, 1946, Cullen left more questions in his wake than answers. He seemed divided between two selves: Countee Cullen the man and Countee Cullen who represented the Harlem Renaissance to itself and the world. The question his fellow poet and sometime friend L ANGSTON HUGHES asked upon Cullen’s death is especially apt: “What happened to Countee Cullen?” (qtd. in Early 69). Cullen was of a perfect age to join the Harlem Renaissance, that fraught and romantic time in New York in the 1920s. Many factors contributed to the environment of the period, not the least of which was a mass migration of African Americans from rural areas into urban environments, including the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Another influence was the mentorship of figures like W. E. B. DUBOIS, whose concept of “the Talented Tenth”—the percentage of educated, intellectual African Americans who would represent and uplift

the entire race—set a new basis for black thought. But the movement created controversy also, and thinkers both then and since have critiqued the bourgeois attitude inherent in “the talented tenth” idea and the unfortunate necessity of white patronage during the period. The Harlem Renaissance ended with the advent of the Great Depression, which was especially difficult for American minorities. Now we can see that the Harlem Renaissance was, in a sense, trapped between the too conciliatory ideas of BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’s era and the more radical ideologies to be found in the later period of Civil Rights and the Black Arts Movements (see Kent). Countee Cullen’s birth on March 30, 1903, remains mysterious. Scholars are not certain who his birth parents were or where he was born. (Cullen himself variously listed his birthplace as Louisville, Baltimore, and New York City; most agree Louisville is most likely.) Sometime before 1918, Cullen went to live with the Reverend Frederick A. and Carolyn Belle Cullen, although he was still using the name Countee Porter (perhaps the name of his grandmother). By 1920 he went by Countee P. Cullen, and by the time his fi rst book was published he was simply Countee Cullen (Early 6–10). Cullen’s foster father led the very successful Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem, was an active member of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), and

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was a compatriot of DuBois. Cullen shared a close relationship with both his foster parents but especially with his father. The two traveled together extensively and Cullen wrote three poems for his father in the course of his career. “Yet,” as Gerald Early says, “there must have been some tension between the two men; the father was a strict fundamentalist while Cullen experienced intellectual doubts and often expressed a kind of ongoing quarrel with Christianity in many of his poems” (17). Cullen was also a well-known Francophile, a person enamored of French culture and the French language, which he spoke very well. As did his friend and fellow black writer Jessie Redmon Fauset, Cullen spent much time in France, taught French as a schoolteacher, and remained to his death a devotee of French culture. Cullen always did well at school. He attended the highly regarded DeWitt High School and served as vice president of the senior class and associate editor of the school’s literary magazine Magpie, won the Douglas Fairbanks Oratorical Contest, and received the Magpie Cup. He also won a citywide poetry contest, and “in some sense this initial success by Cullen . . . really kicked off the literary movement called the Harlem Renaissance” (Early 19). Cullen attended New York University on a scholarship, and it was there that he cemented his love for the romantic poet John Keats, arguably the strongest influence on Cullen’s own work. Color was published during his senior year. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa, Cullen went on to receive a master of arts degree from Harvard in 1926, and shortly after that he began writing his “Dark Tower” column for Opportunity magazine, which also became the title of Madame A’Lelia Walker’s famous literary salon. In the words of Early, “If anyone was being groomed, being intellectually and culturally conditioned and bred, fi rst by whites, then by blacks, to be a major black crossover literary figure, it was this thin, shy, black boy. . . . [He] was the race’s fi rst honest-to-goodness child literary star” (19). By age 24, Cullen had become a celebrity. But Cullen’s star faded as he aged, although it certainly never was extinguished. None of his other work met with the critical acclaim of Color, and in

1924 his friendship with Hughes (arguably Cullen’s greatest rival for the status of Harlem Renaissance wunderkind) came to an end. “It is a testament to the accomplished secrecy of both parties that, seventy years later, we know so little of what happened,” writes Steven Watson (61). The Harlem Renaissance was still in full swing in 1924, but the break between Hughes and Cullen represents a larger break between Hughes’s experimental jazzand-blues-based poetics (those that were to signify the movement) and Cullen’s affection for classical forms. Thus their separation is also the beginning of Cullen’s fissure from the larger group. Early writes, “In their distinct ways, both Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes . . . produced a striking and powerful new black poetry; one through suffusing essentially English poetry with race consciousness . . . and the other through elevating black folk forms with a kind of ingenious self-consciousness” (36). However, as the Harlem Renaissance continued and became tangled up with other literary and cultural experiments as represented by the modernist movement, Hughes’s poetry was embraced and Cullen’s began to be passed over. On April 9, 1928, Cullen married the daughter of W. E. B. DuBois. The union between Cullen and Yolande DuBois was seen as the ultimate conjunction, a mingling of intellect and beauty, a representation of black America’s future. Nearly everyone connected to the Renaissance was in attendance, and the Talented Tenth showed up en masse. Unfortunately, the marriage was a disaster. Yolande DuBois and Cullen had very little in common, and while their marriage ended officially in 1930, it really only lasted a few months. It is impossible to know why Cullen made such a poor match, but Early speculates that “he married Yolande because she was DuBois’s daughter, and this gave him a particular pedigree and status, not only socially but in polite circles of black literary culture which he wanted” (53). Regardless, the divorce signified another fissure between Cullen the man and Cullen the representation of Harlem. There has been much speculation over Cullen’s sexual orientation, although none of it is backed up with proof. David Levering Lewis implies that

Countee Cullen

Cullen was attracted to (and perhaps lovers with) both Harold Jackman and Hughes, and many have read a suggestion of homosexual love into some of Cullen’s poems such as “To a Brown Boy” (Lewis 76, 81). Early, however, rejects such claims, stating, “There is, however, no evidence that Cullen and Jackman were lovers. There is no evidence that Cullen was engaged in any homosexual relations with any other figures of the Renaissance” (Early 19, n. 21). Despite assertions on both sides, there are only hints and whispers to suggest Cullen was gay, and yet they persist, even though Cullen was married twice, apparently quite happily the second time. Such continuing questions speak to another potential duality in Cullen’s life. In truth, we will probably never know conclusively and it is probably best to follow Early’s example and believe the actual evidence rather than the sensational speculation. During the 1930s Cullen’s writing branched out while also becoming less prolific: He produced The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929); a novel, One Way to Heaven (1933); and a translation of Euripides’ Medea, “making him the fi rst black American author to do a major Greek drama translation in prose” (Early 66). He seems to have been drawn strongly to drama, as he collaborated with Arna Bontemps on an adaptation of Bontemps’s novel God Sends Sunday and worked on adapting his own novel for the stage as well. By the end of his life, he was also heavily and happily involved in writing stories for children, particularly a story titled “The Monkey Baboon” and a prose adaptation of his poem “The Lost Zoo” (Early 57). According to Early, “Many have speculated on Cullen’s reduced output. Part of it may have been writer’s block, lack of inspiration, or sheer laziness, but a part of it must have been that after 1929 . . . he no longer quite had the time to write that he had before. This was especially true after . . . he [became] a certified public school teacher, a job he was to keep until his death” (56). Noteworthy during his teaching career was Cullen’s tutelage of James Baldwin, who would grow up to become another great AfricanAmerican author (Early 65). Cullen married Ida Roberson in 1940, and their marriage proved more successful than Cul-

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len’s fi rst, despite ongoing speculation about Cullen’s sexual orientation. His last years were fraught with mixed reviews and bad health, but he was still active in literature, working on compiling a selection of his poetry and more concerned about his father’s health than his own when he died on January 9, 1946, of high blood pressure and uremic poisoning. Cullen’s funeral was remarkably well attended, and his former father-in-law, DuBois, gave the perfect eulogy: “That Countee Cullen was born with the Twentieth Century as a black boy to live in Harlem was a priceless experience. . . . Yet, as I have said, Cullen’s career was not fi nished. It did not culminate. It laid [a] fi ne, beautiful foundation, but the shape of the building never emerged” (qtd. in Watson 169). Cullen remains a complex figure who is hard to decipher. Early writes, “Cullen defi ned his age and, in that sense, dominated it as much as a man of Cullen’s temperament could dominate anything. . . . [He recognized] that the divided black psyche was the single most riveting riddle of the twentiethcentury Western world and it was time for the white Western world to recognize it as such” (22–23). But perhaps Cullen was divided not only with the “twoness” that DuBois spoke of in The Souls of Black Folk, but also with the peculiar doubleness of those who are made too famous or too representative of something too early. The pressures put on Cullen as a very young person to represent the “New Negro” to the world were considerable and no doubt had a great effect on his personal development. Thus, Cullen the man was always divided between his individuality and the expectations of the Harlem Renaissance. What is certain, however, are Cullen’s astounding contributions to American letters represented in poems that continue to defi ne, shape, and question the African-American experience as much today as when they were fi rst written. His words still resonate across the years.

“For a Lady I Know” (1925) Consisting of a mere four lines, “For a Lady I Know” uses quick wit as social satire and addresses

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the inherent problem of mingling Christianity with the black American experience. In this poem, however, the perspective involves the mind-set of a white upper-class woman; the work thus shows Cullen’s ability to manipulate other perspectives and thereby highlight his own: She even thinks that up in heaven Her class lies late and snores, While poor black cherubs rise at seven To do celestial chores. (ll. 1–4)

The format of the poem is simple—deceptively so. As readers, we quickly get the joke that the speaker is acquainted with a woman who believes race (and class) will matter in heaven, and we are meant to see this as ridiculous. Nicholas Canaday says, “Cullen was good at making short poems of social satire . . . contain[ing] some of his most often quoted lines. . . . The pervasiveness of the black experience is again apparent” (113). But there is more involved in this poem than a simple gag. Instead, Cullen’s use of obvious humor makes a larger statement about white society. (At least about the upper classes of white society. It should be noted that Cullen himself was from an educated, fi nancially stable minority—the “talented tenth”—so it does not seem surprising that he would place his white character in the class considered mainstream, and most similar to his own.) That the woman is of a higher economic status is hinted at by the use of the word class, paired with even thinks, suggesting she is of a leisure class and believes existence in heaven will remain similar to that on earth—she assumes that she will continue to be able to sleep late. She is almost certainly white as well, given the distance placed between her and the “poor black cherubs,” and therein lies the poem’s main concern. Racism and class prejudice are so deeply rooted in this woman’s mind that she cannot conceive of the afterlife, or anything else, without these constructs. We have already seen Cullen’s concern with reconciling a white Christian tradition to the enduring difficulty of the African-American experience.

While “For a Lady I Know” uses humor instead of questions, it still raises an important issue: If white culture is racist, how is a black person to embrace white culture’s religion? But the poem complicates this idea, too, by making a mockery of racist assumptions about God and heaven. The speaker certainly does not believe such inequalities will exist after death, and he pokes fun at the people who are so entrenched in their own thinking. While Cullen believes God is color-blind, he feels justified in ridiculing God’s followers who cannot see this. In the end, Cullen insists on his equality, if not his superiority, by implicitly contrasting his own intellectual capabilities and the inferior thought inherent in the racist mind.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Look at some of Cullen’s other very short, satirical poems, such as “For an Atheist,” “For an Anarchist,” “For a Pessimist,” “For Daughters of Magdalen,” or “For a Mouthy Woman.” How do they hold up next to “For a Lady I Know” as social satire? What do you think are the benefits of this brief form? How about the drawbacks? Why might a poet like Countee Cullen have chosen to write so many poems in this tight, concise format? 2. Compare and contrast this work with Langston Hughes’s poem “Song for a Dark Girl.” Discuss the poems in terms of theme, point of view, setting, and tone. 3. Discuss the irony of the rhyme words snores and chores. What are the connotations of each word? How is snores a particularly ironic word choice in view of the class of the woman satirized in this poem? What are the complex connotations of the word poor?

“Heritage” (1925) Generally considered Cullen’s fi nest poem, “Heritage” portrays one of his most common confl icts: the battle between paganism—represented here by Africa—and “civilized” Christianity. According to

Countee Cullen

Early, “What Cullen fi nds attractive as a writer is the basic ambiguity that exists in the meaning of his being a black Christian . . . because being a black Christian has . . . a kind of uneasy meshing of the sacred and secular” (58). “Heritage” begins by asking, “What is Africa to me?” and gives several exotic descriptions such as “Strong bronzed men, or regal black / Women from whose loins I sprang / . . . / Spicy grove, cinnamon tree” (ll. 4–5, 9). By exploring what Africa, symbolic of heritage, means to a “three centuries removed” African American, Cullen examines the nature of his existence (l. 7). In the second stanza Cullen begins to play with his readers. Starting with “So I lie,” literally meaning “lying down,” the poet also hints at a lack of truth (l. 11). Is he, in fact, lying about what Africa means to him? About the reason for the whole poem? This will be a prevalent question throughout as he repeats this phrase five times. Cullen uses this illusion to make a statement about Christianity and the black experience. “Illusions are crucial antidotes to a pain that threatens to overwhelm,” David E. Goldweber says. “Illusions are an ironic solution to life’s problems; they are, after all, unreal” (1). This illusive quality continues as Cullen both negates his connection to Africa—“Africa? A book one thumbs / Listlessly, till slumber comes” (ll. 31–32)—but continues to dwell on it all the same, fi nally admitting that he cannot escape this heritage: “So I lie, who fi nd no peace / Night or day, no slight release / From the unremittant beat / Made by cruel padded feet” (ll. 64–67, 79–80). But then the poet denies his connection to his African heritage: “My conversion came highpriced; / I belong to Jesus Christ, / Preacher of humility; / Heathen gods are naught to me” (ll. 89–92). Nicholas Canaday, Jr., suggests that “in that voice the poet says he is superior because his belief is ‘high-priced.’ . . . One must pay; one must give something back. . . . Besides, African gods look like Africans. Cullen’s irony is devastating because he is so well aware of what the Christian God looks like” (124). Therefore, Cullen expresses his awareness of the uncomfortable position black Christians face when choosing a “white” God.

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While the poet continues to express his Christianity, he also complicates his faith further by saying that he plays “a double part” and that “Ever at Thy glowing altar / Must my heart grow sick and falter, / Wishing He I served were black” (ll. 98–101). He then transforms Christianity into a faith he can embrace: “Surely this flesh would know / Yours had borne a kindred woe. / Lord, I fashion dark gods, too, / Daring even to give You / Dark despairing features . . .” (ll. 105–109). The poem concludes with (almost) a veiled threat to Christianity and the white Western tradition, expressing how close the poet lies to pagan regression: “Not yet has my heart or head / In the least way realized / They and I are civilized” (ll. 127–128). Ultimately, the poem explores Cullen’s connection to both paganism and Christianity, and the ways in which an African American tries to reconcile these two parts of himself.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In chapter 1 of W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” DuBois discusses an inherent “twoness” in the African-American consciousness. How might Cullen have employed this idea in “Heritage”? Do you think Cullen makes a convincing case for “twoness”? Why or why not? 2. David K. Kirby suggested that “Heritage” is philosophically and emotionally comparable to T. S. ELIOT’s The Waste Land (1922), arguably the defi nitive poem of the literary period known as high modernism, a movement somewhat contemporaneous with the Harlem Renaissance. Read The Waste Land while keeping “Heritage” in mind. How do you think the two poems might be philosophically and emotionally comparable? Are they representative of their times? If so, how and why? 3. Enjambment is the practice of running a sentence from one line to another, rather than providing a pause at the end of a line. How does Cullen use that technique to prevent the rhythm of this poem from becoming too “singsong” or too predictable? What devices does Cullen use

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to engage and involve the reader? In particular, discuss the use of questions in this poem.

“Incident” (1925) Countee Cullen’s “Incident” stands alongside “Yet Do I Marvel” and “Heritage” in both fame and prestige. This short, three-stanza poem depicts a young black boy’s encounter with racism, maybe his fi rst, or maybe just his fi rst involving another child like him. Many have speculated that this incident actually may have happened to Cullen, and the poem’s formal style perhaps “suggests how poetic form sometimes offers a much needed thankful distance from the experience of racial terror, particularly when the target is so vulnerable and the incident so unexpected” (Jarraway 223). Nevertheless, “Incident” retains a profound emotional quality that manages to portray the damaging effects of racism. The fi rst stanza sets up the scene and the narrator. He sits on a train or trolley car, “riding in old Baltimore,” heart and head “fi lled with glee” (ll. 1–2). Given the specification of place, it seems fair to assume the speaker is not from Baltimore. This probability sets up an early tension of difference between this out-of-towner and the “Baltimorean” (l. 3), who keeps staring at him, a tension that is played out later as it becomes clear the Baltimorean is white and the speaker is black. However, at this point all that can be deduced are the happiness of the speaker and his difference from the one regarding him. This cheerful beginning also places both the speaker and the reader in a perfect place to be knocked down. In the second stanza, Cullen establishes the speaker’s age: He is eight years old, and the Baltimorean is “no whit bigger” (l. 6). The speaker sees a similarity in their matching ages (as well as, probably, in the other child’s stare), and so he “smile[s]” (l. 7). However, the Baltimorean displays both his childishness (by sticking out his tongue) and his racism (by calling the speaker “Nigger” [l. 8]). Here the poem becomes more complex, because the words indicate the disturbing fact of confronting such hostile racism at such a young age (and

from such a young person), while the poem’s formality hints at how fully integrated racism is into society. Certainly this young Baltimorean did not learn bigotry in a vacuum but has already absorbed how to stigmatize others for the color of their skin, and he now passes that lesson on to the speaker. In the end, the poem shows “an incongruity between what a childhood experience ought to be and what it is. There is now a sad awareness” of how racism taints everything (Canaday 115). The speaker says he spent many months in Baltimore, but all he remembers is the racist incident that occurred on his way into town. With this closing statement (“That’s all that I remember” [l. 12]), Cullen shows how psychologically damaging racism is—so damaging that it blocks out all other occurrences. But, again, because of his masterful use of both emotion and form, Cullen also makes a social statement. The poem is not a sob story but a cautionary tale, explaining to anyone who will listen how traumatizing bigotry can be.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read either (or both) ZOR A NEALE HURSTON’s Dust Tracks on the Road or R ICHARD WRIGHT’s Black Boy. How do these works concern children and their experiences with racism? In what ways do they complement Cullen’s poem? In what ways do they challenge Cullen’s poem? What are the authors’ objectives in discussing childhood experiences? Do they achieve those objectives? 2. In W. E. B. DuBois’s book The Souls of Black Folk, read the chapter titled “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” Which incident described in that chapter seems most comparable to the incident described in Cullen’s poem? How do the incidents differ? Do you think one incident left a greater scar than the other? Explain. 3. Discuss the effectiveness of the last line of each stanza. How do the fi nal lines of the fi rst and second stanzas create suspense? What kind of impact does the fi nal line of the whole poem have? How does Cullen try to make his poem as memorable—as difficult to forget—as the incident he describes? To what extent, and in what ways, does he succeed?

Countee Cullen

“Yet Do I Marvel” (1925) “Yet Do I Marvel” stands as a classic Countee Cullen poem, mingling his concern with both race and Christianity, with just a touch of classical mythology thrown in. The poem begins with a musing declaration: “I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind, / And did He stoop to quibble could tell why / The little buried mole continues blind, / Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die” (ll. 1–4). The poet asserts initially that God is “good, well-meaning, kind” but then points out facts that seem cruel or unfair, such as the blindness of moles and the inevitability of death, and thereby complicates our sense of God’s inherent goodness. Cullen then mentions two figures in Greek mythology—Tantalus was condemned to eternal, unslakable thirst and hunger; Sisyphus was doomed to roll a mighty stone up a hill in Hades, only to have the stone roll down once he reached the top, forcing him to start over again. Arguably, both figures deserved their punishments, but Cullen deliberately chose two myths that highlight eternal futility. These mythological figures are, in turn, linked to the God-created unseeing mole and death. Returning to God, the poet says, “Inscrutable His ways are, and immune / To catechism by a mind too strewn / With petty cares to slightly understand / What awful brain compels his awful hand” (ll. 9–12). Here, the poet suggests that God’s ambiguous decisions are above reproach by humans. Cullen’s choice of the word awful is noteworthy. Probably Cullen implies older meanings of the word, such as “commanding awe” and “formidable in nature or extent” (American Heritage Dictionary). We should not, however, overlook the more common meaning of “extremely bad or unpleasant.” The poem thus states the speaker’s belief in God’s goodness and infallibility even as it continues to question facts that seem unfair. The fi nal couplet moves Cullen’s thought process full circle. Upon admitting that he cannot understand the mind of God, he says, “Yet do I marvel at

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this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” (ll. 13–14). We now see Cullen reacting to the inevitable struggle black Americans face, and ultimately questioning a God who would place them in this situation yet give them the drive to rise up and “sing.” It should be noted, however, that Fred M. Fetrow reads the poem quite differently, suggesting that the “punishments” mentioned are either justified or not punishments at all. Therefore, “Cullen acknowledges, even emphasizes, the difficulty for a black poet in answering that divine call to sing; but through the strategic presentation of precedent, he also claims that the black poet can still articulate his blackness and express his unique racial identity while singing his humanity” (2). However one interprets it, “Yet Do I Marvel” stands as one of Cullen’s most famous poems and as a perfect example of Cullen’s style and way of thought.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In Maya Angelou’s poem “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Angelou writes as both a woman and an African American, and she too uses the metaphor of singing. Compare the two poems. What symbolism is implied by the word sing? Why, and in what ways, do two different African-American poets use this concept? 2. Compare and contrast this work with EDNA ST. VINCENT M ILLAY’s poem “I, being born a woman.” Discuss the theme of fate in both works. Discuss their treatments of irony. How and why do both poets use the sonnet form? 3. Compare and contrast this work with CLAUDE MCK AY’s poem entitled “Outcast.” How are they similar and/or different in theme, tone, diction, and point of view? Which work appeals to you more? Explain why. 4. Is there any irony in the use of the word quibble? What are some connotations of that word, and what does that word suggest about the different perspectives of God and the poem’s speaker? Why does the speaker mention different kinds of beings, including both animals and humans as well as legendary figures and persons presently living?


“From the Dark Tower” (1927) “We shall not always plant while others reap” declares the opening line of Cullen’s “From the Dark Tower,” setting the stage not only for a poem dealing with race and racism, but also for one that contains a simmering anger and a veiled threat. That the anger and threat should be so subtle, or hidden behind pretty words and a contained sonnet form, has led many (especially during his own time) to criticize Cullen for a lack of political or racial consciousness. However, the fact that the poem opens Cullen’s second book of poetry, Copper Sun, and contains a bitterness and “ominous warning” not seen from him before makes “From the Dark Tower” an important poem in the Cullen canon (Canaday 117). “We shall not always plant while others reap / The golden increment of bursting fruit, / Not always countenance, abject and mute, / That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap; / . . . / We were not made eternally to weep” (ll. 1–4, 8). The poem’s fi rst half bursts forth with a poetically contained anger. The speaker/poet claims that while African Americans have too often settled for the status afforded them by white culture, those days are coming to an end. “From the Dark Tower” the poet observes and bides his time, and he sees a people ready to take equality by force because they “were not made eternally to weep.” The second part becomes slightly more complicated or, if not more complicated, more dense. After having declared his brooding threat, the speaker claims there is no aesthetic difference between darkness and lightness: “The night whose sable breast relieves the stark, / White stars is no less lovely being dark” (ll. 9–10). During the Harlem Renaissance, many thinkers insisted on the beauty of the black body, perhaps for the fi rst time in artistic history. Langston Hughes and Cullen were joined in this respect at least, for in life and poetry both stated their belief (in essence) that black was beautiful. The speaker then suggests that some things are better black: “And there are buds that cannot bloom at all / In light, but crumple, piteous, and fall” (ll. 11–12). The speaker is here presenting the evidence that legitimizes the poem’s

fi rst half. In short, African Americans are ready to claim equality because they are equal (if not, often, better). “From the Dark Tower” concludes by saying, “So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds, / And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds” (ll. 13–14). The phrase “So in the dark” clearly holds a double meaning—in a place without light where white culture cannot or has not seen “the heart that bleeds” (l. 13), as well as in the bodies and souls of “dark” (African-American) people. In this respect, the phrase “heart that bleeds” also contains a double meaning—it refers to the physical heart, of course, but also to the seat of emotion and passion. The fi nal line, “. . . wait, and tend our agonizing seeds,” restates the threat. Tending seeds conjures visions of cultivating plants, and the speaker suggests that in African Americans hurt and anger will grow until they are ready to be harvested. No longer is the poet an innocent boy facing racism for the fi rst time (as in “Incident”) but a grown man ready to speak for his people.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Countee Cullen has often been criticized for his devotion to “white, Western” poetic forms and for lack of a true political consciousness. We have seen, however, that Cullen often dealt with race in his poetry. Read some political poems by his fellow Harlem Renaissance poets Claude McKay (“Enslaved,” “White Houses,” “Harlem Shadows”) and Langston Hughes (“I, Too, Sing America,” “Will V-Day Be Me-Day Too?” and “Let America Be America Again”). Do you think the criticism of Cullen is justified? Describe, in your own words, what makes a political poem good or important. Do you think it is the business of artists to engage with politics at all? Why or why not? 2. Compare and contrast this poem with Richard Wright’s story titled “Long Black Song.” How does the ending of Wright’s story make explicit a possible outcome implied in Cullen’s poem? Is the violence at the end of Wright’s story a response merely to a single incident? In which work is the tone more ominous?

Countee Cullen

3. Discuss the irony of the term lesser men, especially in view of the racist assumptions of those very men. In what ways are they “lesser”? Given its economic connotations, why is cheap a particularly effective word? Discuss the ironic juxtaposition of the words subtle and brute. How and why would these words normally contradict each other?

“Uncle Jim” (1927) “‘White folks is white,’ says uncle Jim” at the opening of Cullen’s poem and thus begins a poetic musing on the essential and inherent differences between black and white, for in the poem, “the unspoken implication is that there is an impassable gulf between the white and the black experience” (Canaday 117). But while this confl ict lies at the center of “Uncle Jim,” uncertainty still surrounds the poem’s subtexts, especially regarding the speaker’s white companion. When Uncle Jim declares, “White folks is white,” the speaker responds: “ ‘A platitude,’ I sneer; / And then I tell him so is milk, / And the froth upon his beer” (ll. 3–4). This opening stanza gives us every reason to disregard Uncle Jim and identify with the speaker; after all, Uncle Jim uses bad grammar, drinks, and smokes (as the poem goes on), while the speaker is educated enough to dismiss Uncle Jim’s opinion with easy arguments and youthful self-righteousness. However, as the poem continues, Uncle Jim will not deign to argue with this youngster. Instead, “His heart walled up with bitterness, / He smokes his pungent pipe. / And nods at me as if to say, / ‘Young fool, you’ll soon be ripe!’ ” (ll. 5–8). Despite his hurt (probably stemming both from his experiences with white folks and from the speaker’s inattention), Uncle Jim knows the narrator will soon learn for himself the truth about white people. In the second stanza the poem moves away from the scene with Uncle Jim into a description of a “friend” of the speaker “who eats his heart / Always with grief of mine, / Who drinks my joy as tipplers drain / Deep goblets fi lled with wine” (ll. 9–12).

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In short, this friend is a kindred spirit to the speaker despite the probability that the friend is white. And therein lies the rub as the speaker ponders, “I wonder why here at his side, / Face-in-the-grass with him, / My mind should stray the Grecian urn / To muse on uncle Jim” (ll. 13–16). Even though the speaker feels the utmost affi nity for his friend, he comes upon an inexplicable moment when he considers Uncle Jim’s “platitude” and cannot help wondering whether there is indeed some inherent dissimilarity between black and white. While the major theme of the poem is relatively clear, many read a homosexual subtext, seeing the speaker’s “friend” as a lover. This interpretation adds another layer to our understanding of the poem, for it mixes romantic passion into the relationship between the black male speaker and his white male friend, a passion of which Uncle Jim (and most of Cullen’s contemporaries) would no doubt disapprove. If, however, we read the poem as a reflection on the larger theme of romantic love, Cullen may have been commenting on the complications of interracial relationships as well. For the record, most of the speculation regarding Cullen’s homosexual tendencies is just that: speculation. Nothing in either Cullen’s life or work does more than hint at this possibility. Regardless, “Uncle Jim” exhibits, once again, Cullen’s mastery of form while musing on life’s largest questions.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In one sense, “Uncle Jim” could be called a poem about differences, including such differences as black/white, gay/straight, educated/ uneducated. Discuss whether or not you think there are impassable barriers between certain categories of people, and be careful to justify your thoughts. 2. Langston Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son” also deals with relations between an older black person and a younger relative. Compare and contrast the two poems in terms of diction, tone, form, point of view, and ultimate meaning. 3. How could the title Uncle have demeaning and racist connotations in Cullen’s time, and how might such connotations be relevant to this poem?


In what various ways does this poem deal with the relationships between the past and the present? 4.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON CULLEN AND HIS WORK 1. Cullen’s novel One Way to Heaven is a social satire written in response to the white author/patron Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven. The Harlem Renaissance author Jessie Redmon Fauset wrote her novel Plum Bun in response to Van Vechten’s book as well. Read these three novels and compare and contrast them. Which is the best? Why? Is a white man like Van Vechten “allowed” to write about the African-American experience? Are African Americans better suited to address their lives? Why or why not? How does each book depict the African-American experience of the time? And which seems most authentic? 2. The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s was, arguably, the next major wave of AfricanAmerican art following the Harlem Renaissance and sought very strongly to celebrate a black aesthetic. Read some poems by Amiri Baraka and/ or Gwendolyn Brooks. How do their works stand up compared to Cullen’s dealings with race and racism? In what ways do you think Cullen influenced them? How about the Harlem Renaissance in general? In what ways do you see the Black Arts poets “overthrowing” or “rejecting” the work of Cullen and others like him who preceded them? 3. From 1931 to 1933 the trials of the so-called Scottsboro Boys galvanized the nation, inciting African Americans, liberals, and socialists to rise up in protest against the death convictions of eight young men accused and convicted of raping two white women despite very dubious evidence. Read Cullen’s poem “Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song” and discuss how Cullen treats the event. How does Cullen contrast this event with the Sacco and Vanzetti trial? (If needed, research the trial and see Cullen’s poem “Not Sacco and Vanzetti.”) Read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which also deals with rape and lynching and may have been influenced by the

5.

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7.

8.

Scottsboro trials. How does the work of Lee, a white woman writing decades later, compare and contrast with the work of Cullen? Cullen’s poem “The Black Christ” contrasts the story of Christ’s crucifixion with an American lynching. Research lynching during the fi rst half of the 20th century in America. How does Cullen’s poem handle this topic? Is the use of Christ as a metaphor pertinent and effective in this poem? Why or why not? Cullen used extensive Christian imagery in his poetry; why? Does it work? Compare Cullen’s “Heritage” to Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Both poems deal with the contrast between Africa and America in the African-American psyche but in very different ways. In what ways do they differ? What role does Africa play in each poem? How do their poetic styles differ? Compare Cullen’s “Yet Do I Marvel” to Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again.” How do the two poets handle the black experience in the United States? Which do you find more powerful? Why? How do their poetic styles differ? Black feminists such as Alice Walker and bell hooks have been critical of sexism found in the black community, an effect definitely felt by women in the Harlem Renaissance such as Jessie Fauset, NELLA L ARSEN, and Zora Neale Hurston. Read Marita Bonner’s essay “On Being Young—a Woman— and Colored” and discuss how her experience contrasts with Cullen’s biography. Then read Cullen’s “For a Mouthy Woman” and discuss how it does or does not collude with this criticism. Read some poems by John Keats (Cullen’s major influence) such as “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Hyperion,” or “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” Where can you see Keats’s influence on Cullen’s poetry? Be specific. Why do you think so many were critical of Cullen’s affection for Keats’s work? Consider the period of the Harlem Renaissance: In your opinion what was key: That black writers work with the aesthetics established by white Western civilization, claiming these as their own? Or that black authors create a new form of aesthetics particular to their experience? Support your answer.

Countee Cullen

9. Despite the lack of evidence, many conclude that Cullen was a homosexual or a bisexual. In theoretical terms, “queer theory” acts on the assumption that gender is a culturally taught construction and is therefore malleable. Do some brief research into the uses of queer theory and then see whether you can “queer” one of Cullen’s poems. What issues arise out of this exercise? How do you imagine Cullen would feel about it? Can you do the same to a poem by Hughes? Claude McKay? Gwendolyn Bennet? Amiri Baraka? 10. Research two or more poets of the modernist period such as T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, GERTRUDE STEIN, H. D., or EZR A POUND. What similarities do you see between their work and Cullen’s? How were they all influenced by the period? Conversely, what differences do you see? What reasons account for these differences (race, gender, age, location, politics, class)? Does the Harlem Renaissance belong with the aesthetics of the modernist period? Does Cullen? Or was the renaissance its own movement? Explain and discuss your answers. WORKS CITED

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Canaday, Nicholas, Jr. “Major Themes in the Poetry of Countee Cullen.” In The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, edited by Arna Bontemps, 103–125. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972. Cullen, Countee. My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem Renaissance. Edited by Gerald Early. New York: Anchor Books, 1991.

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Early, Gerald. “Introduction.” In My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem Renaissance. Edited by Gerald Early. New York: Anchor Books, 1991. Fetrow, Fred M. “Cullen’s ‘Yet Do I Marvel.’ ” Explicator 56, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 103–105. Goldweber, David E. “Cullen, Keats, and the Privileged Liar.” Papers on Language and Literature 38, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 29–49. Jarraway, David. “No Heaven in Harlem: Countee Cullen and His Diasporic Doubles.” In New Voices on the Harlem Renaissance: Essays on Race, Gender, and Literary Discourse, edited by Australia Tarver and Paula C. Burns, 214–237. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006. Kent, George E. “Patterns of the Harlem Renaissance.” In The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, edited by Arna Bontemps, 27–50. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972. Kirby, David K. “Countee Cullen’s ‘Heritage’: A Black ‘Wasteland.’ ” South Atlantic Bulletin 36, no. 4 (November 1971): 14–20. Available online. URL: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/ cullen/heritage.htm. Accessed June 6, 2006. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Knopf, 1981. Smethurst, James, and Cary Nelson. “Modern American Poetry: Countee Cullen.” Available online. URL: http://www.english.illinois.edu/MAPS/ poets/a_f/cullen/cullen.htm. Accessed April 7, 2009. Watson, Steven. The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African American Culture, 1920–1930. New York: Pantheon, 1995.

Sarah Stoeckle

E. E. Cummings (1894–1962) The tragedy of life always hasn’t been and isn’t that some people are poor and others rich, some hungry and others not hungry, some weak and others strong. The tragedy is and always will be that most people are unable to express themselves. (Eimi)

O

née Clarke Cummings, well educated and a poet herself, read aloud to her young son daily. Perhaps because of the great interest both parents took in Cummings’s language skills, he could read by age four, and by age six he was already composing short poems. To supplement their intellectual life, the Cummingses spent holidays in the country, mostly at Joy Farm, an old farm in Silver Lake, New Hampshire. For Cummings, Joy Farm eventually became a much-beloved retreat and an important scene of poetic inspiration. Cummings’s formal education began at age seven when he was enrolled at a nearby private primary school. Two years later, he was transferred to the private Agassiz School, where he continued to excel in all subjects but math. The precocious young Cummings soon began making a name for himself as a “writer” and “artist.” At age 12 he was enrolled at Peabody, another Cambridge school, where he maintained his predilection for the arts. Although still conspicuously poor in math, he distinguished himself enough to be chosen to recite a poem at graduation. Later, at the Cambridge Latin School, his avid enthusiasm for education suffered its fi rst slump, primarily because of the school’s emphasis on conjugating Latin and Greek verbs. Nevertheless, Cummings was soon reading well in Latin, and he also began submitting prose pieces not just to his school magazine but also to independent journals as well. Not until his 15th birthday

ne of the most unconventional poets of American literature, E. E. Cummings is perhaps best known for his revolt against capitalization. His eccentricity in matters of poetic form and grammar unquestionably influenced the development of modern verse, yet, despite a steady if not extensive number of devotees, his poetry has inspired surprisingly little scholarly analysis and, among academics in particular, a reputation for superficiality (Friedman 1). Perhaps this ambivalence stems in part from its radically experimental nature, especially its striking disarrangement of words, its transformations of verbs into nouns, and its often puzzling manipulations of punctuation. Cummings, however, never seemed very concerned by mixed reviews; in fact, he constantly sought to disrupt both literary and social complacency. In seeking nonconformity, he may have risked glamorizing the scandalous, the immoral, and the delinquent, but his work nevertheless reveals an almost childlike wonder and love of beauty, a love that he was able to express in a style that is lavishly kinetic and musical. Born October 14, 1894, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Edward Estlin Cummings revealed an interest in poetry remarkably early in life, and fortunately, his parents were able to provide an encouraging environment. His father, Edward Cummings, a professor at Harvard and a Unitarian minister, frequently took his young son on walks across campus, while his mother, Rebecca

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E. E. Cummings

in 1909, when his uncle gave him Thomas Hood, Jr.’s, The Rhymester or The Rules of Rime, did he begin to display the fi rst signs of his later notorious interest in experimental poetry. In 1911 Cummings entered Harvard to study classics. Although not a uniformly outstanding student, he continued to read and write extensively —habits that impressed such fellow student writers as JOHN DOS PASSOS, S. Foster Damon, Gilbert Seldes, and Robert Hillyer. Through these new acquaintances he developed his taste for all things avant-garde, and soon his poetry began to reflect the stylistic eccentricities common among many modern writers. In 1913 he joined the editorial team of the Harvard Monthly—a position that he held until he graduated. His lifelong friendships with other members of the Monthly’s staff were his most valuable acquisitions at Harvard; these dedicated young artists not only created the Harvard Poetry Society but also collaborated on a book entitled Eight Harvard Poets, to which Cummings contributed. In 1916 he graduated with a Harvard M.A.; however, he briefly continued living at Cambridge, taking advantage of the free room and board and indulging in intense bouts of painting and writing. In 1916 Cummings joined a publishing company, where most of his duties were clerical. Although he apparently enjoyed his job and “independence” (Sawyer 101), he quickly resigned, evidently unsatisfied by his lack of creative expression. Soon, however, he voluntarily joined the NortonHarjes Ambulance Corps, not only to seek adventure but also to avoid being drafted during World War I. On his way to Paris, he became friends with another young volunteer, William Slater Brown. Upon arriving in Paris, and having managed to detach themselves from the rest of their unit, they were detained in Paris for several months—a much-celebrated diversion that inspired Cummings’s lasting passion for Parisian life. Once the two were fi nally deployed, they quickly gained a reputation for “insipid insubordination” (Sawyer 115). It was their letters home, however, some of which expressed sympathy for German soldiers and many of which complained of the futility of

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the war, that ultimately generated worse charges. The French military, after several months of intercepting their mail, arrested them for espionage. After an initial interrogation at Noyon, Cummings was interred for three months at La Ferté-Macé, “a detention center for ‘undesirables’ and ‘spies’ ” (Sawyer 119)—an experience he later immortalized in his fi rst prose piece, The Enormous Room. Once released, he briefly recuperated in Cambridge before returning to New York and his artistic career. While there, he began an affair with Elaine Thayer, the wife of a Harvard friend, Scofield Thayer. Although Thayer eventually discovered the affair, it caused no breach in the men’s close friendship. Early in 1918 a reluctant Cummings was drafted and sent off to Massachusetts, where he met the unidentified young pacifist who inspired the poem “i sing of Olaf glad and big.” Fortunately for Cummings, his enlistment did not last more than eight months. By January 1918 he was back in New York, where he immediately rented a studio with William Brown and reimmersed himself in the modernist revolution. In 1919 the Society of Independent Artists in New York displayed two of his paintings, but Cummings and Elaine, still deeply involved, were also confronted with Elaine’s sobering pregnancy. Cummings, completely obsessed with his art, had no desire to be a parent; both he and Thayer tried to convince Elaine to have an abortion, but she refused and eventually gave birth to Cummings’s only child, Nancy (Mopsy). Although Cummings deliberately avoided any paternal obligations, he remained close friends with both Thayer and Elaine, who raised Nancy as their own child. During the following year, Cummings began to see many of his poems published, mainly in the Dial, a magazine now owned by Thayer. In summer 1920, Cummings moved back to Cambridge at his father’s insistence to fi nish documenting his experiences at La Ferté-Macé. As soon as the manuscript was completed, however, he turned the proofi ng and publishing over to his father and left for Europe with his old friend, Dos Passos. In 1922, while Cummings was in Paris, The Enormous

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Room was published, to be followed four years later by his fi rst collection of poems, Tulips and Chimneys. Unfortunately, any pleasure he might have felt was entirely eclipsed by the dismay of discovering the editors’ modifications: Not only did he fi nd numerous passages cut from The Enormous Room, but he also found various misspelled words and an extensive standardizing of punctuation. Another significant event that occurred during this time was the divorce of Elaine and Thayer in summer 1921. By 1924 Cummings was back in New York, basking in the rave reviews of Tulips and Chimneys and contemplating Elaine’s proposal of marriage. The two were married by Cummings’s father, and on April 25 of the same year, Cummings legally adopted Nancy. Although Cummings and Elaine treated each other more as old friends than as newlyweds, Cummings described himself as happy. He immediately began working on two new volumes of poetry, &, and XLI Poems, little realizing how his relentless cycle of work and socializing would take its toll on his marriage. Two months after their wedding, Elaine informed Cummings that she was in love with another man and asked for a divorce. Cummings reacted desperately but could not persuade her to stay. In September 1924, he moved in with his old college friend Watson, at 4 Patchin Place, his “home” for the rest of his life. Although he spent most of the following year in futile legal struggles for Nancy’s custody, he managed to stay fairly productive. The next two years brought both happiness and sorrow. In 1925 he won the prestigious Dial award and also began a passionate affair with a flapper, Anne Barton. In 1926 his newest collection of poems, Is 5, received many favorable reviews. However, near the end of 1926, his parents were involved in a car accident that instantly killed his father, and his friend Thayer suffered a serious mental breakdown. In the wake of these calamities, Cummings again moved to Paris, this time with Anne. There he worked on his fi rst play, Edward Seul, later renamed Him, which in 1928 incited enthusiastic applause from audiences and equally enthusiastic censure from reviewers. The following year, Cummings married Anne, but their marriage, despite periods of intense bliss, lasted

just a little over three years. By October 1932 the two were divorced and Anne had remarried, leaving Cummings once again alone with his work. Living with Anne, however, had proved inspiring (to say the least). In the two years of their marriage, Cummings published an assortment of short stories without a title, [No Title]; a compilation of artwork, CIOPW (Charcoal, Ink, Oil, Pencil, and Watercolor); and a remarkably structured volume of poetry, ViVa (W). Also composed during this marriage was a lengthy journal that eventually developed into his second autobiographical prose piece, Eimi. Although the 1933 publication of Eimi received overwhelmingly harsh reviews, Cummings was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that same year. It required that he spend at least one year abroad; this Cummings did with aplomb, taking with him the beautiful Marion Morehouse, actress and runway model, with whom he was to enjoy his most stable and lasting relationship. While his personal life was improving, however, his career began floundering; unable to fi nd a producer for his ballet, Tom, or a publisher for his manuscript titled 70 Poems, Cummings began to worry over his fi nances. Finally, with help from his mother and the printer Samuel Jacobs, he privately published No Thanks, a new book of poems; meanwhile, his Collected Works (1938) attracted surprisingly positive reviews, as did another book (50 Poems). In 1944 he produced 1 × 1, which won him the Shelley Memorial Award. Also in 1944 he released his play Santa Claus and exhibited new paintings at the American-British Art Center. Whatever joy he may have felt at this new fame, however, was curbed by the hospitalization of Marion, whom doctors diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, and the death of his mother only three years later. Perhaps because of these tragedies and his own often debilitating back pains, he began retiring from society. He and Marion divided their time between Patchin Place and Joy Farm, he painting and writing, she immersed in photography. It was during this time that Cummings reacquainted himself with his daughter, Nancy, disclosing at last the true story of her parentage. Although she was incredulous at fi rst, they soon bonded.

E. E. Cummings

Meanwhile, Cummings found himself increasingly distracted by fi nancial concerns. In 1948 he accepted a commission to translate part of a modern opera, but the next year he was forced to ask a friend and a relative for monetary help. He also applied for another Guggenheim Fellowship but was rejected. Yet all was not discouraging. In 1949 the AmericanBritish Art Center exhibited his work again, and in 1950 he not only won both the Harriet Monroe Prize and the $5,000 Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, but he also published another book of poetry, Xaipe (which was, however, badly received). Nevertheless, Cummings was invited the following year to assume Harvard’s annual Charles Eliot Norton Professorship, an invitation that baffled the poet, who had often mocked Cambridge traditionalism. Even so, he accepted the position and in 1952 began his famous “nonlectures,” which drew crowds of enthusiastic fans. Soon many colleges began vying for a Cummings “reading.” In fact, he quickly went from being a literary oddity to being a household celebrity. In 1954 his Poems 1923–1954 was nominated for the National Book Award; in 1953 his i:six nonlectures saw publication; in 1953 his satire “THANKSGIVING” was performed; and in 1965 his last completed volume of poetry, 95 Poems, appeared. No longer fi nancially desperate, he spent his last years claiming one distinction after another, including two more poetry prizes in 1958 and a $15,000 Ford Foundation grant in 1959. Meanwhile, his work continued to be reissued, set to music, and widely translated. By the time he died of a brain hemorrhage in 1962, he had gained international fame.

“Buffalo Bill’s” (1920, 1923) This poem is at once a tribute to and a mild disparagement of the famous American icon Buffalo Bill (William F. Cody), whose circus show “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” complete with cowboys, Indians, and sharp shooting, extended its commercialized, theatrical version of the western frontier to urban areas across the United States and Europe. Written two years after Cody’s death, the poem provides a

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brief reminiscence of Buffalo Bill and his familiar silver stallion. Although it may appear rather simple at fi rst, this unconventional modern elegy conveys a multitude of confl icting messages. For example, the fi rst two lines proclaim Buffalo Bill as “defunct” (l. 2). Rather than use a more dignified, respectful term, such as departed, deceased, or even dead, Cummings uses a word that carries a distinctly negative connotation; defunct implies the demise of someone or something that is out-of-date, outmoded, or obsolete. By immediately proclaiming the entertainer “defunct,” Cummings not only undermines the robust, resilient pioneering American spirit that Buffalo Bill had symbolized but also plants in the reader’s mind a hint of skepticism, which taints the poem’s subsequent expressions of admiration and foreshadows its concluding reference to mortality. Yet even as Cummings subtly mocks the artificial heroism and commercialized showmanship of Buffalo Bill, he also manages to evoke a thrilling sense of nostalgia for American optimism and bravado. In fact, the opening lines may be read as an exclamation not of disdain but of regret. Perhaps the speaker genuinely admires and mourns the fallen hero. Such a reading would emphasize how the speaker swears in order to express the vehemence of his admiration (“Jesus / he was a handsome man” [ll. 7–8]) and the way he rams his words together (“onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat” [l. 6]) to mimic the rapid, effortless shots of Buffalo Bill’s astonishing marksmanship. Furthermore, the last three lines of the poem could imply that Buffalo Bill took death itself by storm, just as he thundered brashly through life: “and what I want to know is / how do you like your blueeyed boy / Mister Death” (ll. 9–11). Nonetheless, a note of sarcasm lingers; the possessive pronoun in the poet’s question (“how do you like your blueeyed boy”) not only signifies Death’s inexorable dominance but also draws attention to the body’s inevitable demise. In addition, by ending with the word death, the poet reinforces the hollowness of fame and the fake heroism of the “handsome man” (l. 8) on his “watersmooth-silver stallion” (ll. 4–5). Perhaps the poet’s cynicism stems

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from the suspicion that his own dashing good looks and poetic prowess may in turn survive only as a “defunct” legend. Even in his seeming repudiation of fame, then, the speaker may paradoxically reveal his own desire to be remembered. Another irony lies in the fact that the poem itself, presumably written to further the poet’s career, serves only to immortalize the very spectacle that the poet labels “defunct.” In structure, the poem typifies Cummings’s vigorous defiance of conventional grammar. His blunt words, unhampered by punctuation, leap and halt and careen again across the page, creating a path very much like that of a cowboy’s plunging stallion. Yet underneath its tone of audacity and bravado, the poem manages to retain a subtle sense of loss and of disillusionment.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with EDWIN A RLINGTON ROBINSON’s “Richard Cory.” In particular, discuss the ways the two works deal with such issues as public reputation and sudden death. How do the deaths of Cory and Buffalo Bill differ? How is irony used in both works? 2. Read Cummings’s poem in conjunction with the lyric titled “Death,” by William Carlos Williams. Discuss the tone, imagery, structure, and relative clarity of the two works. Which one do you fi nd more effective or appealing? Explain why. 3. Discuss the relationship between the fi rst and second lines of the poem. Discuss the relationship between the fi rst line and the last. How and why is it ironic that Death is personified? Given Bill’s fi nal fate, why is it especially ironic that he is described as a boy?

“in Just-” (1920, 1923) In this short, simple poem, Cummings captures the bright, carefree atmosphere of a spring day immediately after it has rained. The speaker describes not only children playing at hopscotch, marbles, and jump rope but also a crippled balloon man whistling as he hawks his wares.

Erratically spaced and punctuated, Cummings’s poem is as playful visually as it is in content. The words appear strewn randomly across the page, much like scattered marbles or hopscotch pebbles. However, a closer look reveals that there is a deliberate design to what may at fi rst seem arbitrary. The irregularities in spacing, for example, help evoke the impulsive, whimsical wonders of childhood. The shortness of the lines and the sizable spaces between words force readers to experience each word or word group in a new way, with an almost childlike wonder. Such spacing also allows the reader to sense the spontaneity of childish activity and the breathlessness that accompanies physical exertion. At times the added spacing causes fluctuations of voice or elongated pronunciation. The phrase “far and wee” (ll. 5, 13, 22–24), for example, appears in a variety of different configurations— all of which leave the lively little expression “wee” either dangling at the end of a line or standing alone, thus enticing the reader’s voice to mimic the gleeful shriek of a child in motion. Extra spacing between words also mirrors the wide spaces of the outdoors and so leaves room for the imagination to seize upon the endless potential of a spring day. In fact, the very profusion of meanings one can apply to such odd spacing emphasizes again the exciting possibilities of spring and childhood. However, the poem exhibits many other significant oddities. For instance, the lack of spacing in the names “eddieandbill” and “bettyandisbel” suggests the inseparability of these children as well as the enthusiastic loyalty of childhood friendships. The lack of punctuation creates a sense of irrepressible, unruly energy, while the variously recurring lines (“when the world is mud-luscious” . . . “when the world is puddle-wonderful” [ll. 2–3, 10]; “the little / lame balloonman / whistles far and wee” . . . “the queer / old balloonman whistles / far and wee” . . . “the / goat-footed / balloonman whistles / far and wee” [ll. 3–5, 11–13, 19–24]) provide a sense of the repetitive chants and motions of children’s games. Cummings’s unique expressions also add to the fun—words like “mud- / luscious” and “puddle-wonderful” suggest uninhibited creativity and naive sensual pleasure. Although relatively sim-

E. E. Cummings

ple, the speaker’s choice of vocabulary yet manages to convey the bustling charm of a park or a circus; the imagination is engaged not just by the sound of whistling and the sensation of sloshing mud but also by the sight of a “goat-footed” (l. 20) man, floating balloons, and children dancing and playing. In a larger sense, this fun-fi lled scenario holds a message: The world is full of simple pleasures like mud puddles and springtime; all that is necessary to enjoy them is a childlike wonder. Thus, although the poem may at fi rst seem “just” a run-on sentence arranged eclectically on the page, a slower, more thoughtful reading exposes many intriguing layers of meaning. Indeed, this evocative simplicity is typical of much of Cummings’s work, as are the inventive word formations and the celebration of nature.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this lyric with William Carlos Williams’s poem titled “Spring and All.” How do the poems differ and/or resemble each other in the presentations of spring? Discuss such matters as tone, structure, techniques, and length. 2. Read Cummings’s poem alongside a brief portion of Tender Buttons, by GERTRUDE STEIN. How are the works similar and/or distinct in their techniques, their relationships to traditional literature, and their intended and actual effects? 3. How does Cummings use hyphens in this poem to contribute to the effectiveness of its rhythms? Why does he fail to use any punctuation? Discuss the irony of “puddle-wonderful.” How does that phrase imply the ability to appreciate what is often disparaged? How is the springtime setting relevant to the ages of the various persons mentioned?

The Enormous Room (1922) The Enormous Room, Cummings’s fi rst autobiographical prose piece, recounts his unwarranted arrest and imprisonment by the French military

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during World War I. Cummings and his friend B., disillusioned volunteers in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service (an American unit sent out to aid French soldiers), began writing letters full of antiwar sentiments, letters that eventually attracted the suspicions of the French police, who immediately arrested the two young Americans, questioned them separately, and fi nally imprisoned them together in a detention center called La Ferté-Macé. Before his eventual release and return to New York over four months later, Cummings endured many hardships, but he also met many intriguing characters whom he would remember affectionately for the rest of his life, and he additionally acquired a deep appreciation of human nature in its most primitive state. Loosely structured after Paul Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, The Enormous Room uses a traditionally Christian allegorical framework to convey a peculiarly modern message. For example, the Section Sanitaire has been compared to Bunyan’s Slough of Despond, C’s cell in Noyon to the House of the Interpreter, La Ferté-Macé to Doubting Castle, Paris to Vanity Fair, the Directeur of the Depôt to Apollyon, C’s depression after Brown’s departure to Christian’s capture by Giant Despair, and C’s confrontation with the wooden crucifi x to Christian’s encounter with the cross. Other (more obvious) references to Bunyan’s work lie in Cummings’s creative use of names: He calls his four favorite inmates the “Delectable Mountains” and labels many of his other characters with equally memorable epithets, such as “the Wanderer,” “the Clever Man,” “the Zulu,” “the Bear,” “the Schoolmaster”—all of which bear a striking resemblance to some of Bunyan’s figurative names, such as “Mr. Feeblemind,” Mr. Great-Heart, “the Ill-Favored Ones,” “the Shining Ones,” and “Mr. Fearing.” Furthermore, Cummings’s captivity could be viewed as a type of pilgrimage, his spiritual and artistic awakening a pilgrim’s progress, and his destination of freedom (New York) the Celestial City. However, Cummings does more than simply echo specific locations and names in Bunyan’s tale; he also imitates some of the most well-known paradoxes of Christianity. For example, physical


captivity becomes the means to mental freedom, the condemned prove to be innocent, the simple become sources of wisdom just as in Christianity, earthly trials yield spiritual rewards, Innocence dies for the sin of the world, and from “the mouths of babes and sucklings” issue forth “strength” (Psalm 8:2) and “perfected praise” (Matthew 21:16). Many critics see The Enormous Room as typical of much of Cummings’s later work both in its revival of romanticism and in its choice of themes. As did the romantics, Cummings emphasizes sensory detail over clear exposition, leaving readers to make their own assumptions about the significance of his images; in fact, many of his descriptions reveal startling combinations of the visual, auditory, and tactile, as in such phrases as a “clammy, stupid distance” (58), a “slender” movement (227), “musical fi ngers” (67–68), a “sonal darkness” (93), a “putrescent placidity” (147), “solid . . . wisps of profanity heavily fl icker[ed]” (93), a “roar bulge[s]” (94), “bells ding in the oldness of eyes” (119), “green murmurs in coldness” (174), and “candles wiggle a strenuous softness” (175). Another characteristic The Enormous Room shares with romantic literature lies in its unreal, dreamlike scenery: At one of the train stations “everything seemed ridiculously suppressed, beautifully abnormal, deliciously insane” (39); an approaching train makes the “ghastly miniature roar of an insane toy” (41); the town of Macé appears as a “city of Pretend, created by the hypnotism of moonlight” (55); a guard’s “shout was not merely amazing; it was uncanny, and not a little thrilling” (90); the laughter of Cummings’s fellow prisoners emerges as “unearthly smouldering” (157) from the “drooling greenish walls of La Ferté-Macé” (157); and the behavior of the prisoners themselves resembles “the ludicrous and hideous and beautiful antics of the insane” (308). Cummings also shares with the romantics an affi nity for the individual, the unique, and the eccentric. His favorite inmates are the most peculiar and often the most disturbed. These include the uncommunicative Surplice, for example, with his “unobstreperous affi nity for excrement” (257) or the simpleminded, massively built black man Jean Le Nègre, with his childish vanity

and mercurial nature. Yet Cummings’s voice carries little of the romantics’ sentimentality; although he does at times rise to eulogistic exaltations of the men he dubs “the Delectable Mountains,” many of his observations remain in the witty, slightly ironic voice of a young Harvard graduate. However, other features of The Enormous Room that critics consider typical of Cummings’s work include crude references to sex and excrement; startling combinations of cultured and colloquial language; scathing satires of government, leadership, and cultural norms; as well as an appreciation and celebration of the humble, the outcast, and the poor. When published several years after Cummings’s return to the United States, The Enormous Room provoked scathing reviews. Many of Cummings’s critics complained that he made light of sacred religious symbols, such as the cross, and that he diminished the violent atrocities of the war; others dismissed his linguistic manipulations as annoying rather than innovative and rejected his use of vulgarity as gratuitous rather than daringly truthful. Nevertheless, Cummings himself was unmoved by the censorious reception of his fi rst published volume; he had intentionally sought to challenge the traditional defi nition of the novel and of prose in general—a goal that he achieved not just by distorting syntax but also by veiling the chronological structure of his story line beneath successions of startling imagery. In addition to challenging the conventionality of previous literary structures, however, The Enormous Room challenges the conventionality of academic thought by implying that higher education and cultural preconceptions inhibit one’s appreciation of the world and its myriad types of beauty. Cummings portrays civilization as corrupt, governments as unjust, and religion as hollow. Yet despite this underlying message of defiance, Cummings’s allegory is both humorous and perceptive. When the enormous room of his physical imprisonment was confi ned to the enormous room of his mind, it became accessible to all.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast The Enormous Room to Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B.

E. E. Cummings

Toklas. How is World War I presented in each work? How is each work innovative and unconventional in style and structure? In what ways is each an essentially “modernist” work? 2. Read The Enormous Room alongside ERNEST H EMINGWAY’s A Farewell to Arms. How are they comparable or distinct in the ways they respond to war? How do the protagonists of the two works resemble and/or differ from one another? In what ways are the styles of the two texts distinctive, and how are the styles appropriate to the subjects and themes of the two works? 3. What traits of phrasing, imagery, and technique does The Enormous Room share with Cummings’s poetry? Could the story told in The Enormous Room have been told as effectively in a fundamentally different style? How does the style of the work contribute to its impact? Discuss in detail several specific examples of the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of the work’s phrasing. 4. Examine the opening paragraphs of chapter 2 of The Enormous Room. Discuss the effectiveness of Cummings’s use of verbs. How and why does he give them special emphasis? Discuss the effectiveness of his use of repetition. Discuss the effectiveness of his use of very brief sentences.

“the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls” (1923) In 14 abrupt lines, this poem mockingly exposes the artificiality of the “Cambridge ladies” and the smug conventionality of the academic world in which they live. Although written to resemble the traditional, highly structured form of the sonnet, the poem is anything but predictable. In fact, its number of lines seems the only distinctive feature linking it to the sonnet; the other two signature features of the sonnet, its rhyme scheme and the ending couplet found in Shakespearean sonnets, are conspicuously missing. Cummings’s reference to the women as “Cambridge ladies” introduces the fi rst suggestion of irony: Cambridge, Massachusetts, the home of

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Harvard University, and presumably a place of original thought or at least intellectual honesty, is here being used to represent stuffy “comfortable minds” (l. 2). Thus, Cummings not only mocks Cambridge but also points out the pretentiousness of those who place more value on prestigious titles than on genuine merit. The fact that these women call themselves “ladies” is in itself ironic since they meet to “coyly bandy” (l. 9) gossip in a very unladylike manner. Furthermore, by referring to them collectively as “the Cambridge ladies,” Cummings implies that individual names would be unnecessary; these women have so melded themselves into their surrounding culture that one description fits them all. Another irony lies in the fact that these Christian women, candidates for the “church’s protestant blessings,” appear to have no real concern for their charity work; they are not even sure whom they are knitting for—“is it Poles? / perhaps” (ll. 8–9). They claim to love Longfellow’s poetry but are indifferent to the beauties of nature around them, such as the “moon” (l. 14), in its “sky lavender” (l. 13). Worst of all, they are blinded to reality by their overwhelming desire to see what they imagine they are supposed to see; “invariably interested in so many things” (l. 6), they are naturally drawn to none. Trends have dictated their pursuits, not personal curiosity. Thus, Cummings uses the word furnished (l. 1) to illustrate the state of their “souls” (l. 1). Just as a furnished room offers the comfort of prefabricated items predictably arranged, so these women’s minds offer nothing but comfortable, unoriginal, and conventionally organized ideas. Such “furnished souls” are “unbeautiful” (l. 2) to Cummings; they possess no individuality, no character; in fact, they are even too bland for the word ugly. Cummings’s defiant rejection of the rules of punctuation and syntax provides a stark contrast to the ultraconservative, imitative women he is describing. It is as though by omitting capital letters and commas and periods and by rearranging normal grammatical structures, he is attempting to force his readers out of their preconceived ideas of language, thus allowing them to think in a truly original way. His poem ends abruptly with an


extremely fanciful image of the “moon rattl[ing] like a fragment of angry candy”—an image noticeably at odds with the “unscented shapeless” (l. 4) Cambridge ladies (or their daughters). Candy also conjures up visions of children with sweet, sticky hands and mouths—children who, unlike conditioned adults, tend to embrace what they love instinctively and without preconceived motive. The poem’s incongruous ending not only reinforces the artificiality of the Cambridge ladies but ultimately leaves the reader with a reckless sense of abandon and freedom of expression.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with EZR A POUND’s “Portrait d’une Femme.” Which work is more clearly satirical? How do the social situations implied in both poems resemble one another? Discuss the lengths and structures of the two works. 2. Read Cummings’s poem alongside the poem by WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS titled “Portrait of a Lady.” How do the works differ in tone, technique, and clarity? If you had to recommend one of these poems to a friend, which one would you recommend, and why? 3. Why are these women described as ladies rather than as women? What are some differences in the connotations of those two words? What is implied by the adjective comfortable in describing the ladies’ minds? How does Cummings’s own poetry seek to create discomfort? In what senses is Christ “dead” for these women? How does the interest of these ladies “in so many things” imply their superficiality?

“next to of course god america i” (1926) Since most of this poem is in quotation marks and since the quoted section consists mainly of muddled patriotic songs and catchphrases, it seems likely that the speaker is meant to be a politician or a military leader. However, in typical Cummings fashion, the poet satirizes the speaker’s opinions; thus, while these snatches of song taken individu-

ally could demonstrate a genuine endorsement of patriotism, instead, amassed and jumbled as they are, they convey the insincerity of empty political slogans. One might assume, therefore, that Cummings is mocking not just the extremism of the patriot but the ignorance and credulity of the patriot’s audience as well. In form, the poem resembles a sonnet; it has 14 lines and an easily distinguishable rhyme scheme. However, while a traditional English sonnet usually bears a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg, this sonnet separates the lines of the anticipated couplet to form a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efgfe g in much the same way that Cummings separates and rearranges his syntax (such as “drink rapidly a glass of water” [l. 14])—inversions that mimic the poem’s satiric reversal of conventional ideas. Furthermore, Cummings’s lack of punctuation also adds to the sarcasm of his message; the speaker appears to be talking “off the cuff,” jumbling together fleeting snippets of whatever stimulating wartime rhetoric he can remember, thus undermining his message and implicitly insulting his audience. Many of his phrases seem deliberately ambiguous, as when he proclaims, “i / love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth” (ll. 1–2). The phrase “and so forth,” suspended as it is at the end of the line, causes the reader’s voice to drop slightly and diminish, thus emphasizing its vagueness. Is the speaker simply alluding to the rest of the song, or is he perhaps attempting to be politically correct, since “the Pilgrims” and their descendants have never constituted more than a fraction of the American population? Regardless of the speaker’s intentions, however, the phrase serves subtly to dismiss both the song and the ensuing rhetoric as well. Throughout the poem, in fact, Cummings satirizes the speaker’s imitative rhetoric; in the very fi rst line, for example, the speaker shrewdly arranges his loyalties in the most widely accepted order, “god, america, i” (l. 1), presumably to impress the largest number of people by his morality, traditionalism, and altruism. He also tries to remain sensitive to multiculturalism, pointing out that young American men “acclaim” (l. 7) their country “in every language even deafanddumb” (l. 6); ironically, however, his attempt

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backfi res when he coarsely refers to sign language as “deafanddumb.” He appears to be passionate by uttering a hearty string of exclamations—“by gorry / by jingo by gee by gosh by gum” (ll. 7–8)—yet his passion is carefully expressed in euphemisms, typical of the habitual politeness politicians seek to cultivate. The speaker’s inconsistency presents another troubling feature of political rhetoric. For instance, the initial appeal for a calm acceptance of fate— “centuries come and go / and are no more what of it” (ll. 4–5)—is immediately followed by the phrase “we should worry” (l. 5). While in one breath soldiers are described as courageous—“the heroic happy dead / who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter” (ll. 10–11)—in the next breath the same soldiers are described as fools: “they did not stop to think they died instead” (l. 12). The speaker’s last words, “then shall the voice of liberty be mute?” (l. 13), present the fi nal contradiction: Although meant as a rousing call to arms, the question only draws attention to the fact that the dead soldiers are now mute forever and implies that the newly enlisted soldiers, full of patriotic zeal, are likely to suffer the same fate. The only “voice of liberty” left is the politician’s, but his words also lead to death.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Carl Sandburg’s poem titled “Grass” also deals with death in war. Discuss the two works in terms of tone, imagery, point of view, structure, and ultimate impact. 2. Read Cummings’s poem, and then read the poem titled “Shine, Perishing Republic,” by Robinson Jeffers. What underlying ideas or themes do the two poems share? How do they differ in tone, techniques, and point of view? 3. Discuss the contrasting tones that appear in this poem—as, for instance, in the contrast between most of line 8 and all of line 9. How do these contrasting tones prevent us from taking the speaker entirely seriously? Discuss the significance of the fi nal action described. What does the rapid drinking of the water imply about the speaker’s attitude?

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“i sing of Olaf glad and big” (1931) Loosely inspired by a fellow soldier Cummings met at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, who was drafted into the air force and then punished for refusing to pick up a gun, the poem both criticizes the mindless violence of the military and honors the brave pacifism of men like Olaf (not his real name). In seven stanzas of varying length, the poet describes how officers and soldiers brutally tortured, beat, and sodomized the young pacifist, whose only response was to “ceaselessly repeat / ‘there is some shit I will not eat’ ” (ll. 32–33). Cummings’s unorthodox use of syntax and punctuation provides an interesting parallel to his underlying message of nonconformity while also emphasizing many of the poem’s intriguing allusions. The limited amount of capitalization, for example, serves to build a visual connection between Christ and Olaf since throughout the course of the poem the only capitalized words refer to Christ, God, Olaf, and the personal pronoun I referring to Olaf. This visual connection reinforces a more abstract connection: Olaf as a symbol of Christ (or the Christian God). In fact, by singling out these two names, the poet may be suggesting that the images of Christ and Olaf are equal in significance. Indeed, the two possess some remarkable similarities: Both advocate love over violence, individual conscience over communal thinking, and pacifist suffering over forceful retaliation. Cummings’s nonconformity also reveals itself in his choice of vocabulary, as when he blends formal sentence patterns with obscenities and colloquialisms. He casts the officers’ brutalities in formal, almost polite, phrasing: “the officers “stroke / with brushes recently employed / anent this muddy toiletbowl, / while kindred intellects evoke / allegiance per blunt instruments” (ll. 10–14). Olaf’s dialogue, however, he fi lls with obscenities, such as “fucking” (l. 19) and “shit” (l. 33). By choosing polite language to portray horrific acts of violence and harsh obscenities to express calm, thoughtful resolve (l. 2.), Cummings forces the reader to notice the poem’s subtler ironies: The West Point– educated officers, the “nation’s blueeyed pride” (l. 23), reveal a despicable absence of morals, while


Olaf, the rebel, the “conscientious object-or” (l. 3), reveals true idealism and the “warmest heart” (l. 2). Cummings’s odd use of punctuation also forces the reader to notice the poet’s word choices. For example, by simply adding a hyphen (“object-or” [l. 3]), he draws the reader’s attention to the word object, perhaps to imply that the officers see Olaf only as a convenient target, not as a serious threat. Ironically, such an observation only makes their violent treatment of him all the more despicable. Cummings’s lack of spacing also draws attention to his verbal irony. The name “fi rstclassprivates” (l. 27), for example, unspaced as it is, accentuates the disparity between these mindless thugs and the label first class that is attributed to them. The poem’s striking rhyme scheme emphasizes yet another of Cummings’s unconventional techniques—his manipulation of word order. Lines such as “officers / their passive prey did kick and curse” (ll. 22–24), “noncoms . . . do through icy waters roll” (ll. 8, 9), and “Christ . . . / i pray to see” (ll. 38–39) seem particularly contrived to accentuate the poem’s end rhymes. This doggerel style, usually encountered in children’s books, seems startlingly out of place in a poem detailing a scene of brutal torture. Yet this disjunction between style and content proves effective, for it reiterates once more the startling discrepancy between the soldiers’ fl ippant attitudes and the redundant torture they infl ict on Olaf.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read Cummings’s work in conjunction with the poem titled “The Lynching” by Claude McKay. How do both poems use religious imagery for ironic purposes? What do both poems suggest about the mentality of groups and about the dark side of human nature? In which poem is victimization more strongly stressed? 2. Read L ANGSTON HUGHES’s lyric titled “Democracy.” How is it comparable to and/or distinct from Cummings’s text as a protest poem? Discuss the works in terms of length, tone, imagery, and point of view. 3. How does the opening line allude to the openings of various famous epic poems? How is the

allusion to epic poems ironic? In what other senses is the subject matter of this poem “epic” in its significance? How does the poem encourage us to admire Olaf’s vulgarity? What does his use of such language imply about his character? Discuss the significance of the very fi nal line of the poem, especially its fi nal word. In what ways do that line and that word implicate others in a narrative that had heretofore seemed externally focused?

“somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond” (1931) Through a clever manipulation of the traditional images of love poetry, such as an emphasis on springtime and roses, the poet expresses the profound mysteriousness and irrepressibility of his love. Although neatly divided into four-line stanzas and evenly aligned on the left margin, the poem nevertheless typifies many of Cummings’s typographical idiosyncrasies in its lack of capitalization, its irregular punctuation, and its unconventional manipulation of sentence structure. The very fi rst line suggests that the poet is about to describe something “beyond” anything he has ever experienced before and thus “beyond” the familiar words and expressions of his language. In this sense, both his experience of love as well as his experience expressing that love lead him to places altogether foreign. It seems fitting, then, that the poet’s next words praise his lover’s speechless eloquence: “your eyes have their silence” (l. 2). The poet’s sense of the ineffable soon mingles with an even more overwhelming sense of the incomprehensible, as when he sees in his lover’s “most frail gesture” (l. 3) “things . . . which [he] cannot touch because they are too near” (ll. 3–4). This idea of the unknowable, impenetrable nature of love recurs sporadically throughout the poem; in stanza 2, for example, the speaker compares his beloved’s influence on his emotions to spring’s mysterious influence on flowering plants; in stanza 4 he realizes that “nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals / the power of [his lover’s] intense

E. E. Cummings

fragility” (ll. 13–14); and in stanza 5, he confesses, “i do not know what it is about you that closes / and opens” (ll. 17–18). The poet’s use of synesthesia (in which stimulation of one sense produces a response appropriate to another sense, as in “hearing” a color) gives an emotional intensity to his confessions while redefi ning the immeasurability of his love. For example, something as abstract as his lover’s “fragility” becomes not just a tangible and visible thing but a thing so vast as to encompass entire realms: Its “texture / compels me with the colour of its countries, / rendering death and forever with each breathing” (ll. 14–16). A few lines down, the speaker describes the “voice” (l. 19) of his lover’s “eyes” (l. 19) as “deeper than all roses” (l. 19), again translating one sensory image into another in order to convey the singularity and immeasurable depth of what he is experiencing. Such examples of synesthesia also imply that the poet sees more in his beloved than anyone else could; he imagines an eternity of pleasure in the colors and textures of a body that before now has only been praised for its fragility and hears an audible beauty in eyes that have before now only held visual appeal. The poet also uses metaphors, juxtaposition, and personification to describe his love. In the second stanza, for example, he describes himself as a flower that the “slightest look” (l. 5) of his beloved opens “petal by petal . . . as Spring opens / . . . her fi rst rose” (ll. 7–8). Such imagery implies that his love not only is ungovernable, just as the return of spring is ungovernable, but that it is also instinctive and desirable, just as the blossoming of a flower garden is a natural and anticipated event. The poet’s use of juxtaposition also recalls the recurring seasons of the natural world. For example, his linking of the words “power” and “fragility” (l. 15), “death” and “forever” (l. 16), “closes” and “opens” (ll. 16–17) suggests the earth’s endless, inexorable cycles of birth, growth, decay, and death. Even the poet’s use of personification involves nature. For instance, the central stanza describes how the speaker’s life would “shut very beautifully, suddenly” (l. 10) at the prospect of rejection “as when the heart of [a] flower imagines / the snow carefully everywhere

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descending” (ll. 11–12), and in the fi nal line of the poem he exclaims that “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands” (l. 20). By thus associating his love with the beauty of nature, the poet is able to portray both the elusiveness as well as the timelessness of his love.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the way the relationship between a man and a woman is depicted in this poem and in Genevieve Taggard’s poem titled “Everyday Alchemy.” How do the poems differ in tone, imagery, point of view, and basic assumptions? 2. Read Cummings’s poem alongside a poem by EDNA ST. VINCENT M ILLAY whose fi rst line is “I, being born a woman.” Which of the two poems is the more “romantic”? What role do intense emotions play in the two works? How do the structure, syntax, diction, and length of the poems contribute to their divergent meanings and effects? 3. Discuss this poem’s use of paradox. Where, why, and how does Cummings use that technique? How does the poem’s use of repeated words and sounds help contribute to its lyricism? How does such repetition make the poem more like a song? Which words are repeated most often in the poem? How and why is the repetition of those words significant?

“anyone lived in a pretty how town” (1940) The poem tells the story of a man named anyone who lives and dies alone in a nameless town. The other residents of the town go about their business, marrying and dreaming, and only the children of the town “guess” (l. 9) that a woman named “noone” secretly loves anyone. When “anyone” and “noone” eventually die, the “busy” townspeople “bur[y] them side by side” (l. 27), and life continues on as though nothing had happened. Although this poem displays Cummings’s typical inventiveness in sentence structure and syntax,


it is uncharacteristic of Cummings in the conventionality of its layout. For example, not only are the lines evenly divided four to a stanza, but they are also uniformly aligned on the left margin. This balladlike format, combined with the rhythmic pattern of stresses in each line, presents a striking resemblance to the lively beats often found in nursery rhymes. Furthermore, Cummings’s playful variants on common English word arrangements, such as “little by little and was by was / all by all and deep by deep” (ll. 28–29) add a fun, childish quality to the piece. Nevertheless, despite the cheerfulness of its beat and the simplicity of its vocabulary, the poem also conveys dark emotions such as futility and loneliness. In fact, the various contrasts that appear throughout the poem reflect Cummings’s deep interest in the cyclical nature of the earth and the human experience. Contrasting seasons (“spring summer autumn winter” [l. 3] and “summer autumn winter spring” [34]) are complemented by contrasting weather conditions (“sun moon stars rain” [ll. 8, 36]). Contrasting phrases, which balance many of the lines (“he sang his didn’t he danced his did” [l. 4], “Women and men [both little and small]” [l. 5], “and down they forgot as up they grew” [l.10], and “she laughed his joy she cried his grief” [l. 14]), are complemented by larger oppositions within the story line (life and death, love and indifference, lightheartedness and sadness). In fact, Cummings’s choice of names alone creates diametrically opposed ambiguities: The phrase “noone loved him more by more” (l. 12) could be taken figuratively (an insignificant female labeled noone loved an ordinary, average man named anyone), or it could be taken literally (the town was loveless and no one loved anyone). The same double meaning could be read into the phrase “noone stooped to kiss his face” (l. 26). Even the title, “anyone lived in a pretty how town,” suggests a multiplicity of meaning; some may translate the phrase to mean “how anyone lived in a pretty town” or “anyone lived in how pretty a town”—both of which introduce a sense of sarcasm since the town’s prettiness apparently failed to give anyone happiness or satisfaction. Others may prefer to preserve

the word order and read pretty as an adverb (as in “a pretty good dog”) and how as an adjective; thus, a “how town” could be a town whose inhabitants are obsessed with the hows of living rather than simply enjoying life. Ultimately, the poem’s many contrasts serve as a reminder of life’s small tragedies. How is it that a human being, a someone, can feel like a “noone”? How can “anyone” remain satisfied, or even survive at all, without companionship and understanding? Yet such lonely existences are not uncommon. By giving new roles to the most ordinary, everyday terms, Cummings allows his readers a fresh glimpse into the age-old joys and sorrows of being human.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the themes of loneliness and isolation as they appear in this poem and in T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Discuss the relations between men and women in both poems and the ways both poems present the relations between the individual and the community. 2. Discuss the use of seasonal imagery in this poem and in WALLACE STEVENS’s “Sunday Morning.” How does such imagery contribute to the tones of the poems? How do the tones of the poems differ? Which poem is more celebratory and affi rmative? Why and how? 3. Discuss the use of balanced words and balanced phrases in this poem. How does the repeated use of balance contribute to the tones of the poem and to its rhythms? Choose some lines or phrases that may seem particularly puzzling (for example, lines 4 and 7) and explain their presence in the poem. How do such lines contribute (if at all) to the effects or effectiveness of the work?

“my father moved through dooms of love” (1940) Written in commemoration of Cummings’s father, a Unitarian minister and Harvard professor, the

E. E. Cummings

poem is generally treated as an elegy. However, while traditional elegies typically convey a mournful or pensive tone, Cummings’s elegy conveys a sense of energy and hope. In 17 four-line stanzas, it describes the various stages of Cummings’s father’s love; hints at the beauty, strength, and inspiration that such love imparts; and ends with a hopeful affi rmation that love, at least the kind of love that Cummings’s father shared, has the power to heal the world. Unlike many of Cummings’s other works, which rely primarily on typographical irregularities for structure, this poem achieves structure through the repetition of words, punctuation, and capital letters. For example, the phrase “my father moved” (ll. 1, 18, 34, 49) appears four times, neatly dividing the poem into four sections. The fi rst, second, and third sections are all four stanzas long and conclude with a period. The fourth section, however, is five stanzas long and ends without a period. By leaving the beginning and end of the poem open ended (without capitalization or punctuation), the poet gives his readers a sense of perpetuity that implies both completion and endless incompletion—a paradox fittingly reflective not just of death but of the cycles of nature as well. In fact, a seasonal pattern emerges from among the poem’s long sentences, moving from spring (“his april touch” [l. 10]) to summer (“keen as midsummer’s keen beyond” [l. 25]) to autumn (“septembering arms” [l. 37], “octobering flame” [ll. 41–42]) to winter (“he’d . . . build a world with snow” [l. 48]) and back again to spring (“spring / danced when she heard my father sing” [ll. 51–52]). This theme of circularity serves to emphasize the poem’s underlying optimism by implying that death is merely the beginning of a new stage of life and that an act of love, as a single seed, carries the possibility of endless replication. Cummings’s deft balance of opposites provides another form of paradox. For example, many of his sentences are parallel not just in their structure (“his flesh was flesh his blood was blood” [l. 29], “his anger was as right as rain / his pity was as green as grain” [ll. 35–36]) but also in their oppositions

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(“dooms of love” [l. 1], “haves of give” [l. 2], “griefs of joy” [l. 18], “singing each morning out of each night” [l. 3], “no hungry man but wished him food” [l. 39], “to foe and friend” [l. 38], “to foolish and to wise” [l. 39]). Thus, the sense of equanimity provided by the parallelism is continually complicated and yet clarified by the paired opposites, just as the seeming perfection of Cummings’s father becomes complicated and yet clarified by his obvious humanness. Furthermore, the ambiguity of Cummings’s phrasing suggests that the beauty of his father’s life is beyond words. For example, by beginning each new section of his poem with such ambiguous phrases as “my father moved through dooms of love” (l. 1), “my father moved through griefs of joy” (l. 18), “my father moved through dooms of feel” (l. 34), and “my father moved through theys of we” (l. 49), Cummings compels his readers to consider repeatedly the passion and complexity of his father’s unselfish life. Such ambiguity also universalizes the poem, allowing a multiplicity of interpretations. One interpretation is that the love Cummings’s father bore for his fellow man was strong enough to survive or “move through” the pain or “dooms” of this evil world and the “maggoty minus and dumb death / all we inherit” (ll. 63–64). Ultimately, the “doom” or fate of his love was to change the world for the better: “because my father lived his soul / love is the whole and more than all” (ll. 67–68).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the relationship between parent and child as it is presented in this poem and in Langston Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son.” How do the poems differ in tone, point of view, structure, and imagery? What lessons does each parent provide for his or her child? 2. Compare and contrast Cummings’s poem with two poems by John Crowe Ransom—“Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” and “Here Lies a Lady.” Discuss the poems in terms of structure, diction, tone, and point of view. What seems to be the main “purpose” of each poem? 3. Discuss some examples of places where Cummings achieves suggestiveness through phras-

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ing that might at fi rst seem confusing or unclear. For example, what are some suggestive connotations of “sames of am” and of “haves of give”? How would you paraphrase such terms? Discuss some of the ways in which Cummings’s phrasing suggests the complexities of his father’s character.

“pity this busy monster, manunkind” (1944) The poem laments the unwarranted arrogance of humanity and its needless destruction of the earth through the “progress” of technology. It also predicts the overthrow of naturally born organic organisms by laboratory-born synthetic items and calls for the reader to pity the needless destruction of the “diseased” earth. Although often categorized as one of Cummings’s “sonnets,” the poem possesses neither a rhyme scheme nor the expected length of 14 lines. In fact, only in its concise, controlled expression does it conform to the traits of a traditional sonnet. In all other respects, it typifies Cummings’s penchant for nonconformity. New sentences are often begun without capitalization, two words are often jammed together to form one, and semicolons and commas are often sandwiched between words with no dividing spaces. Although these eccentricities of mechanics seem at fi rst arbitrary, other features of the poem, such as the 10-syllabic measure of its lines, suggest that Cummings deliberated over the placement of each letter and mark of punctuation. Ironically, Cummings’s typographical peculiarities serve as a reminder that he composed his poems on a typewriter, an invention created by the very technology he condemns in his poem. The fi rst sentence provides a terse summary of the entire poem. The speaker calls humanity a “monster,manunkind” (l. 1)—names that bring to mind both the chemical mutations and perversions of medical science as well as the “unkind,” indifferent processes of technology. By describing humanity as infected or diseased by “progress”

(l. 2), the speaker cleverly reinforces the image of a malformed or misshapen being. However, the symptoms of this illness are spiritual, not physical; they include an inflated sense of supremacy (“your victim . . . / plays with the bigness of his littleness” [ll. 3–4]), an utter indifference to the beauties of nature (“pity poor flesh / and trees, poor stars and stones” [ll.10–11]), and an exaggerated veneration of man-made objects (“electrons deify one razorblade / into a mountainrange” [ll. 5–6]). The image of a camera lens suggests not only the distortions in man’s vision, but also man’s inability to recognize the beauty of an unwarped reality: “lenses extend / unwish through curving wherewhen until unwish / returns on its unself” (ll. 6–8). Just as a camera lens inverts images, which are later reinverted by the developing process, so human beings continually invert or reverse the natural order of things, placing their greed for money and material objects above a love for nature and each other. However, whereas the frames in photography begin with the accurate layout, moving from normal to inverted to normal again, the spiritual framework of humanity began with an “unwish,” an abnormality, and thus will “return . . . on its unself” (l. 8). In this way, the metaphor itself becomes warped. The concluding lines of the poem are set apart by a shift from third to fi rst person, thus spotlighting the perpetrators of earth’s deformation. Ironically, the speaker chooses doctors, the supposed healers of humanity, to represent the monster manunkind, “this / fi ne specimen of hypermagical / ultraomnipotence” (ll. 9–11). Although the diagnosis seems grim (“We doctors know / a hopeless case if-” [ll. 11–12]), the lingering if suggests that there may yet be hope. Unfortunately, the doctors quickly change topic, preferring to start over on “a good universe next door” rather than to try to fi x the one they have broken. The fi nal irony, of course, is that there is no other universe to serve as our refuge when we have wasted the resources of this one. The poet becomes the lonely, unheeded prophet, vainly begging his people to amend their ways.

E. E. Cummings

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read another poem—Robert Frost’s “The Tuft of Flowers”—that also deals with the relations between man and nature and between man and man. Then discuss the ways these issues are dealt with in both poems. How are the apparent chaos and disorder of Cummings’s poem appropriate to the themes it explores? 2. Read Robinson Jeffers’s poem titled “Carmel Point.” How does it deal with some of the same issues explored in Cummings’s poem? How do the two works differ in tone, imagery, structure, and underlying assumptions? 3. Discuss the effectiveness of the shift from line 1 to line 2. Discuss the poem’s use of paradox. In what senses, for instance, is progress a “comfortable disease” (l. 2)? Would it make any difference to the meaning of the poem if the poem were punctuated in conventional ways? Explain your answer by discussing specific examples.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON CUMMINGS AND HIS WORK 1. Compare and contrast the overall poetic styles of E. E. Cummings and Robert Frost. How do their techniques, methods, and approaches differ? What do these differences imply about their goals and purposes as poets? Despite the significantly different styles, Frost and Cummings were two of the most widely read and popular poets of their era. What factors do you think made each writer’s verse so popular? 2. In addition to being a poet, Cummings was a painter. Do a search on the Internet for “the paintings of E. E. Cummings,” and then examine some of the artwork you discover. In what ways do Cummings’s paintings seem similar in style, technique, and purpose to his poems? 3. Do some research into the meaning of the term modernism, and then discuss the ways in which you think Cummings is a modernist writer. In what ways, for instance, is the work of Cummings comparable to the work of (say) T. S. Eliot

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in The Waste Land? How is his work comparable to the work, for example, of Gertrude Stein in Tender Buttons? Choose one of Cummings’s works of nonfiction prose (such as i, six nonlectures). How does such prose help us understand what he was trying to do in his poetry? How does an understanding of his life help us comprehend his aims as a writer? How do Cummings’s poems illustrate or exemplify his ideas about the purposes of art? Choose a single poem by Cummings and discuss it in as much detail as possible. Read it as “closely” as you can, discussing (for instance) its imagery, rhythm, meter, word choice, sentence structures, grammar, punctuation, line breaks, and so on. How does Cummings use form to reinforce and emphasize content or meaning? How would you defend the poem against possible charges of gimmickry and trickery? How (in other words) does Cummings use the style, structure, and form of the poem to contribute to the poem’s meaning? How do the poem’s visual elements—the way it looks on the page— contribute to its meaning? Read some representative poems from the beginning, middle, and end of Cummings’s career. Did his style of writing change at all over the decades? Did his subjects change? Did his underlying attitudes evolve or alter? Did changes in his life affect the kind of writing he did? Choose two poems by Cummings—one that you consider highly effective and one that you consider unsuccessful. Explain, in detail, your responses to each work. Why do you consider one a success and the other a failure? What, specifically, makes one poem appealing and the other unappealing? Cummings was interested in jazz. Do some research into the traits and features of jazz music, and then discuss any similarities you perceive between that kind of music and the kind of writing Cummings did. How, for instance, does his writing seem improvisational and unpredictable? How does it seem unconventional and idiosyncratic? How does it seem popular rather than “highbrow”?

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9. Humor is frequently an element in Cummings’s works. Read a number of his poems and/or The Enormous Room and discuss the ways in which humor is used in his works. How does humor contribute to the tones, implications, and complexity of his writing? Discuss at least five specific instances. 10. Cummings wrote several plays in addition to his many poems. Track down at least one of his plays and compare and contrast it to some of his better-known work in the genre of poetry. Discuss his dramatic writing in terms of diction, imagery, structure, and technical devices. Discuss Cummings’s prose with attention to the same matters. Are there any traits that Cummings seems to use consistently regardless of the particular kind of writing he is doing? WORKS CITED

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Cohen, Milton A. POETandPAINTER. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987.

Cummings, E. E. Complete Poems: 1904–1962. Edited by George J. Firmage. New York: Liveright, 1991. ———. Eimi. New York: Covici, Friede, 1933. ———. The Enormous Room. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922. Flora, Joseph M. E. E. Cummings Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1994. Friedman, Norman. “Introduction.” In E. E. Cummings: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1972. Kostelanetz, Richard, and John Rocco, eds. AnOther E. E Cummings. New York: Liveright, 1998. Rotella, Guy. ed. Critical Essays on E. E. Cummings. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher. E. E. Cummings: A Biography. Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks, 2004. Webster, Michael. The E. E. Cummings Society. Available online. URL: http://www.gvsu.edu/english/ cummings/society.html. Accessed April 7, 2009. Wegner, Robert E. The Poetry and Prose of E. E. Cummings. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965.

Deborah Cosier Solomon

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them into print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow’s generation. That’s history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history. (qtd. in Martin xxiii)

A

actually his real son) his stepson and gave him the cognomen Dos Passos. The boy, therefore, became known as John Dos Passos. Young John Dos Passos went to various elite schools, such as the Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, before attending Harvard University from 1912 to 1916. At Choate, young John was encouraged by his father to read and write; for instance, Virginia Spencer Carr notes that after the father caught a raccoon on his farm, he sent it to his young son as a pet. When the pet raccoon escaped for two days, young John Dos Passos recaptured it and took it back to his room at Choate; in a letter, the father told his son to rename the raccoon Ulysses and write a story about him (33). It is quite possible, however, that the capitalistic ideals of his father markedly affected the author’s liberal politics and movement toward communism and away from the capitalistic system to which his father adhered. Dos Passos might have gone in a radically different direction because he was bitter that his father, an incessant champion of large corporate power and of capitalism, refused to acknowledge his son for 16 years and spent very little time with him and Lucy during those years. After graduating from Harvard, Dos Passos went overseas so that he could aid the Allies (the Triple Entente) during World War I. He worked as an ambulance driver in Italy and France in the Norton-Harjes unit in 1917–18. This war experience as an ambulance driver, with the inherent horrors

writer in the lost generation tradition, John Dos Passos is known primarily for his novel trilogy, U.S.A., which he composed from 1930 to 1936 and published as one unit in 1938, and for his experimental style, such as his use in his fiction of stream of consciousness and newspaper headlines. In addition to being a major American novelist, Dos Passos was a playwright, a political essayist who wrote fi rst in support of socialism but later against this movement as his ideology moved to the political Right, and a talented and prolific painter. Born clandestinely in a Chicago hotel room on January 14, 1896, John Roderigo Madison, later renamed John Dos Passos, was raised by his Virginian mother, the elegant widow Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison. Sprigg Madison had been engaged in a romantic relationship with the renowned— and married—corporate attorney of Portuguese heritage John Randolph Dos Passos. Embarrassed to acknowledge his illegitimate newborn son as his own because of the social stigma of the era and unable to divorce his fi rst wife because of her devout religious convictions, the elder Dos Passos often sent his young son and his mistress traveling overseas for the benefit of the young man’s education, sending him to places such as France, Greece, London, and the Middle East. In 1910, upon the death of his fi rst wife, Mary Dyckman Hays Dos Passos, the wealthy attorney fi nally married Lucy, and two years later he made young John (who was

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and bloodshed he witnessed, proved to be pivotal for the young man because it led to his disillusionment with war and his movement toward the leftwing political ideology that greatly influenced his writing for years. His friends E. E. CUMMINGS and ERNEST H EMINGWAY also worked for ambulance crews during the war. Like Cummings and Hemingway, Dos Passos was motivated by the horrors of war to write accounts of his war experiences, such as Three Soldiers (1921), and to describe the devastation he had witnessed. His war fiction probably had a profound influence upon Dalton Trumbo when he wrote his own noteworthy antiwar novel, Johnny Got His Gun (1939). In 1927 Dos Passos wrote Facing the Chair: Sacco and Vanzetti, in which he defended the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti from the charges of having committed two murders and a robbery seven years earlier in Massachusetts. He wrote this work the same year that the two men were executed. Upton Sinclair also wrote a book about the men (Boston), and other writers and artists who protested their treatment included EDNA ST. VINCENT M ILLAY (who wrote “Justice Denied in Massachusetts”), Ben Shahn, Maxwell Anderson, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and Dorothy Parker. Dos Passos visited both alleged murderers in prison and fi rmly believed in their innocence; he was arrested outside the Massachusetts State House for protesting their death sentences. He was convinced that the two men had not received a fair trial and were thus wrongfully convicted because of circumstantial— and tainted—evidence. The judge, Webster Thayer, and perhaps several of the jurors were clearly prejudiced against Italian immigrants, particularly anarchists. Dos Passos’s concern with Sacco and Vanzetti manifested his interest in anarchism, his support of the poor and of immigrants, and his concern that the poor were unable to receive fair treatment in the legal system. His championing of the two poor Italian immigrants demonstrates his socialistic view that capitalism created two Americas—one for the rich and one for the poor. Dos Passos’s strong interest and personal involvement in the case tell us a great deal about him and his poli-

tics in the 1920s, which clearly permeate his fiction (such as The Big Money) and his political essays. In 1924 Dos Passos met Ernest Hemingway in Paris. The two also met in Key West and other places; they shared similar political views, although their personalities were quite different. In 1925 Dos Passos published one of his fi nest novels, Manhattan Transfer, an examination of life in New York City. Dos Passos went to Russia in 1928 so that he could study communist ideals and also learn more about Russian theater so that he could employ what he learned about drama for the benefit of the New Playwrights Theatre, which was run by communists. Other important left-wing writers, such as THEODORE DREISER , had already traveled to Russia to learn more about communism. These left-wing American writers in Moscow were led by the New York Times writer Walter Duranty. According to Virginia Spencer Carr, Dos Passos felt ambivalent about communism: “His trouble in Russia was trying to decide whether he was for or against the Soviet Communist system, and even more important, what his own destiny was in relationship to it. . . . The Russian intelligentsia . . . saw him as the American Gorki, the most potentially influential revolutionary writer of the West, and were eager for him to commit his pen to Communist doctrine” (243). Although Dos Passos was very impressed with the Russian people, he remained ambivalent about Russian communism and eventually turned away from it politically. In 1929 Dos Passos married his fi rst wife, Katharine (Katy) Smith. On September 12, 1947, the couple was involved in a serious car accident while driving from Provincetown, Massachusetts, to Connecticut. Dos Passos had been temporarily blinded with the sun in his eyes and consequently had rammed his car (while his wife lay asleep beside him) into the back of a parked truck. Dos Passos suffered a severe eye injury in the accident and permanently lost his vision in his right eye. Even worse, Katy perished. Two years later, in 1949, he remarried, to Elizabeth Holdridge. One year later, his daughter, Lucy Hamlin Dos Passos, was born. Dos Passos wrote a trilogy about the United States, U.S.A., which contains the following three

John Dos Passos

novels: 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936). The novels are not necessarily separate entities, for strong connections exist between them and the plot and characters continue from one book to the next. Dos Passos was greatly disturbed by the success of the Fascist movement in Spain in the 1930s. It is unsettling, however, that events in Nazi Germany during that time that adversely affected Jews did not claim as much of his attention. Because of his concern about Fascism in Spain, Dos Passos, along with his good friend Ernest Hemingway, cheered on the republicans (the anti-Franco forces) during the Spanish civil war. In fact, Dos Passos decided to make a documentary fi lm about the republicans and their struggles against Franco; with Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, and Lillian Hellman, he created the Contemporary Historians society. They hoped to show Americans how much the common Spanish people were suffering during the civil war and to drum up support from the U.S. government for the anti-Franco side. Hemingway, however, clashed with Dos Passos about the documentary because Hemingway was more concerned with showing the actual fighting between the two sides than with depicting the suffering of the Spanish people. Furthermore, Dos Passos wanted to show the atrocities committed by both factions, while Hemingway wanted Dos Passos to ignore the evils of the socialistic republicans. This split, which helped dissolve the friendship between the two men, manifested a significant difference between them: Dos Passos did not glorify war and fighting as Hemingway did. Hemingway believed that Dos Passos’s supposed wealth rendered him unsympathetic to the proletarian cause. Hemingway, however, was misguided, in that Dos Passos, despite having a wealthy father, was not rich at all; in fact, he struggled fi nancially, particularly while he was helping to raise two children, Christopher and Jean Kaeselau, after their mother’s sudden death (Carr 399). Other factors contributing to the breach between the two men were Hemingway’s jealousy over Dos Passos’s great success as an author and Hemingway’s scornful and vigorous personality, which differed markedly

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from Dos Passos’s gentle comportment. In addition, Dos Passos’s changing politics—particularly his disillusionment with left-wing ideology—also led to his break from Hemingway. Dos Passos later expressed concern about violations of freedom of speech in the Soviet Union by Communists. The stifl ing of freedom of speech in Communist organizations and countries is another reason why Dos Passos became disillusioned with—and why he moved away from—left-wing politics. Communist ideologues castigated him for his work Adventures of a Young Man (1939), which manifests his movement to the political Right and his leaving behind of communist ideals. Dos Passos won several significant writing awards. He earned a Gold Medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1957; he won the Alumni Seal Prize from Choate (previous winners had included John F. Kennedy, the Reverend Avery Dulles, Adlai Stevenson, and Edward Albee); and he was awarded the Feltrinelli Prize for Fiction in 1967. To celebrate the talent and the influence of Dos Passos, the Department of English and Modern Languages at Longwood College, in Farmville, Virginia, has awarded since 1980 the prestigious annual John Dos Passos Prize for Literature for excellence in creative writing. The selection committee looks particularly for works that include American themes and that incorporate an experimental style—two traits certainly present in the works of Dos Passos. Longwood College also publishes the Dos Passos Review in tribute to this significant 20th-century proletarian author. Dos Passos is considered one of the greatest American novelists of the 20th century, an experimental novelist whose works offer a proverbial slice of life. His most popular and enduring writings are his works from the 1930s; although some critics might argue that the pronounced shift in his politics from a left-wing ideology to conservatism accounts for his declining popularity, one must also consider the possibility that his talent diminished after he penned his greatest texts. Dos Passos is nonetheless a major figure in 20th-century literature, but unfortunately, his influence on later writers has often been overlooked.


Dos Passos died of a heart attack in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 28, 1970, at the age of 74 and was buried in Westmoreland, Virginia.

Manhattan Transfer (1925) Manhattan Transfer is a novel about New York City and its effects on the lives of its inhabitants. The actress Ellen Thatcher attempts to rise socioeconomically through her physical beauty and her marriages, yet she ends up unhappy because she fails to recognize that happiness does not derive from wealth. Whereas Bud Korpenning and other characters fail to thrive in this panoramic portrayal of New York City, Jimmy Herf realizes that the big city can crush its inhabitants, and thus he leaves for greener pastures. The novel’s heroine, Ellen Thatcher, aspires to be an actress and to be fi nancially secure. A beautiful woman, Thatcher is pursued by many men. She fi rst marries the bisexual actor John Oglethorpe, then Jimmy Herf, and fi nally George Baldwin, yet in her relationships with these men and the theater executive Harry Goldweiser she seems to desire money and prosperity rather than love. The only man she truly loves, the wealthy alcoholic Stan Emery, commits suicide. Dos Passos suggests that Thatcher’s failed marriages and her quest for the trappings of wealth reflect at least indirectly the flaws of a capitalistic society. Although this novel contains some intriguing characters, such as Ellen Thatcher, Jimmy Herf, George Baldwin, Bud Korpenning, and Stan Emery, the characters and plot seem less important than the location—New York City. It can be argued, however, that the characters represent New York City at the time; the characters and the city are intertwined. Dos Passos makes this clear at the onset of the novel when 25-year-old Bud Korpenning asks for directions to the action in the city, saying that he needs them because he “want[s] to get to the center of things” (4). To the author, New York City is “the center of things,” such as the theater and Wall Street. Yet, as Korpenning discovers,

the big city can swallow up and destroy people; he eventually commits suicide. Dos Passos’s novel contains local color and regionalism, including vignettes that depict New York City as a melting pot. Dos Passos demonstrates, for the most part, an effective ear for dialogue. He captures New York City lingo and accents well, as when a short-order cook, who makes breakfast for Bud when he fi rst arrives in the city, comments, “I’m goin to slip you a bit of advice, feller, and it won’t cost you nutten. You go an git a shave and a haircut and brush the hayseeds out o yer suit a bit before you start lookin. . . . I’m tellin yez, that’s all” (5). (However, the dialogue spoken by a German immigrant, who has just become a father and who goes for drinks with Ed Thatcher, seems noticeably artificial and unnatural.) Dos Passos is concerned with portraying people of different ethnicities and various social classes, from Herf’s wealthy family to the unemployed and emotionally scarred Bud. One can consider Manhattan Transfer (the title derives from the name of a station that sends railcars to New York City) a tribute to a vibrant and enthralling city that overshadows the characters who live there. However, the city can be dangerous and can destroy those who are poor and weak. By depicting various interactions and situations involving the characters, Dos Passos presents a panoramic view of New York City from the onset of the 20th century until the mid1920s. The vignettes are short and hold readers’ attention, yet they make the novel appear episodic rather than fluid. Although the episodic nature of the vignettes might seem problematic, these scenes might have been written in that style to make a point about the characters’ truncated relationships. Manhattan Transfer quickly switches back and forth among characters, demonstrating how erratically the characters interact with each other and thus reflecting the unstable values and social mores of the city. The novel is ambitious and experimental yet also realistic in its portrayal of the characters and New York City, even tackling issues that were controversial at the time, such as homosexuality and abortion.

John Dos Passos

The idealistic Jimmy Herf, who shuns a lucrative career in banking so that he can be a journalist, resembles Dos Passos himself to some extent. It is inevitable that this idealistic man’s relationship with the mercenary Ellen Thatcher cannot last; Ellen, the successful, beautiful, and ambitious actress in a big city, is unmistakably modeled after Theodore Dreiser’s Carrie Meeber in Sister Carrie (1900); Dos Passos was, it should be noted, a good friend of Dreiser. Thatcher’s father, Ed, works very hard yet cannot make a good living, and Bud has trouble fi nding work; this problem with making sufficient money, along with the focus on labor unions, demonstrates the author’s suggestion that capitalism in America destroys lives. The backdrop in New York of the stock market and the destruction of the stock broker Joe Harland add to the mystique of New York—a city that seems to destroy many people even though some thrive there.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the portrayals of Ellen Thatcher and Carrie Meeber (in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie). What connections do you discern between the two women and the manners in which they are portrayed? What does Thatcher’s failure to fi nd true love suggest about her character, New York City, and the dangers of capitalism? 2. Discuss the portrayal of capitalism and business in Manhattan Transfer. Does the author suggest that there is hope for the working class under capitalism? How does money affect people’s lives and the decisions they make in the novel? 3. Discuss who of Ellen’s three husbands—Oglethorpe, Herf, or Baldwin—is the best suited to and deserving of her. What do these men have to offer her, and how compatible is she with them? Do the best qualities of the three men together make up a suitable husband? Which of the three does Ellen like best as a husband, and is there any hope for her marriage to Baldwin? 4. Compare and contrast the ways New York City is presented in Dos Passos’s novel with the ways it is depicted in EDITH WHARTON’s The Age of

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Innocence. In particular, focus on issues of social class and status and the roles of women. In what ways is the New York of the 1870s (as presented by Wharton) similar to and/or different from the New York of the 1920s (presented by Dos Passos)? 5. Read Dos Passos’s book alongside NELLA L ARSEN’s novel Passing, which is also set in New York during the 1920s and which also deals with issues of ethnicity and social status. Discuss the works in terms of their use of dialogue and diction and in terms of the aspirations of the central female characters.

42nd Parallel (1930) In 42nd Parallel, John Dos Passos creates narratives of individuals who represent the wealthy and the working class. Mac is from a poor family and seems committed to socialistic causes, yet love distracts him, prompting him to abandon his well-meaning ideas. J. Ward Moorehouse marries a second wealthy woman after divorcing another one, thus acquiring the capital he needs to open his own public relations fi rm and become a prominent and influential man. The title of the novel signifies that the 42nd parallel, which lies 42 degrees north of the equator, extends throughout much of the northern part of the United States, including Upstate New York, the Great Lakes region, and the city of Dos Passos’s birth—Chicago. The 42nd parallel tends to be stormy, a fact that symbolizes the lives of many of the novel’s characters. Furthermore, Chicago is where the protagonist, Fenian (Mac) McCreary, is raised; begins his printing career; and cultivates the radical Left political ideology that shapes his future. The title is also significant because the novel seeks to be representative of America—or at least of a cross section of the nation—from the beginning of the 20th century until World War I. 42nd Parallel follows the lives of four main characters: Mac, Janey Williams, J. Ward Moorehouse, and Eleanor Stoddard. Mac, a printer who

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accepts his uncle Tim’s socialist beliefs, is a bluecollar worker who struggles in vain to get ahead and achieve the American dream, a sense of contentment that always seems so elusive and unattainable for the working class in 42nd Parallel and the subsequent two novels in this trilogy. As Tim remarks, poverty is “the fault of the system that don’t give a man the fruit of his labor. . . . The only man that gets anything out of capitalism is a crook, an’ he gets to be a millionaire in short order” (21, author’s ellipsis). Mac, a character modeled in some ways on the author himself, holds a leftist political ideology and works for the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), an international labor union that was quite powerful around the time of World War I. Mac’s lack of fi nancial success illuminates Dos Passos’s argument that capitalism is an evil that hinders the working class from attaining prosperity and happiness. In San Francisco, Mac marries Maisie, who does not share his leftist ideology; she covets wealth and its trappings (the narrator even remarks that she dresses like a Gibson Girl and wears gloves as a fashion statement), and she actively attempts to dissuade Mac from following his leftist ideals. The inevitable friction caused by the confl ict between his radicalism and her materialism leads to the termination of their marriage. Dos Passos suggests that love and sex can hinder one’s devotion to the leftist cause. However, readers soon realize that perhaps the problem is that Mac is not as committed to his cause as he thinks he is—a possibility that also mirrors Dos Passos’s own doubts about his personal dedication to his left-wing ideals. Later, in Mexico, Mac is distracted again by a romantic relationship with a woman, a development indicating that women (and children from sexual encounters) distract socialist men from their jobs and their purpose. Donald Pizer says that in the novel, “[f]or the working-class radical, sex is a trap, since it can lead to the confi nement of belief and action within the prison of middle-class marriage, as it does for Mac—fi rst reluctantly with Maisie and then willingly with Concha” (121). Lisa Nanney claims that in 42nd Parallel and the other two parts of the trilogy, Dos Passos portrays women as being just

as victimized by men as by capitalistic forces, yet she adds that “the predictability of the forces in the lives of the women—conventionality, the drive for respectability, shallow materialism—has led some analysts of the trilogy to criticize it as sexist or even misogynist” (181). One must wonder, however, whether women are actually the cause of Mac’s failure to get ahead, especially since he is careless with money. (For instance, he sometimes spends it recklessly, once even wasting $15 on alcohol while he cannot afford to pay the bills to support Maisie and their two young children.) Janey Williams, another major character, is an intelligent and talented but plain-looking stenographer. She is ambitious but is ashamed of her brother, Joe, who not only deserted his navy position but also lacks an education and a good job. She is not interested in love after the death of Alec, a boy in her hometown of Georgetown who dies young. She works for a media king named J. Ward Moorehouse, who is perhaps modeled after either the public relations giant Ivy Ledbetter Lee (who handled publicity for John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Standard Oil) or the Red Cross leader H. P. Davidson. Moorehouse marries Annabelle Marie Strang, the daughter of a prominent doctor; even though he learns just before the wedding that she is sexually promiscuous, he marries her because he considers the marriage advantageous to his career. He leaves her shortly after the marriage, however, because she is still sexually promiscuous and unfaithful. Moorehouse then marries the very wealthy Gertrude Stamp and uses her parents’ money to build his public relations empire. The marriage almost falls apart when Gertrude becomes jealous of her husband’s relationship with an attractive and stylish interior decorator, Eleanor Stoddard. She even seems a bit jealous of Ward’s platonic relationship with his dutiful stenographer, Janey Williams. When the war begins, Gertrude becomes worried about her husband’s safety and begins to believe that her accusations about Moorehouse’s infidelity were mistaken. However, the reader will discover in the next novel, 1919, that her suspicions are correct. Moorehouse becomes greatly successful in public relations, particularly in publicly defi ning the

John Dos Passos

relationship between capitalism and labor; this success is a concern to Dos Passos, who suggests that the media distort the truth to favor capitalism and big business. He mistrusts those who employ the media to support capitalism and, from his perspective, to hold down the working class. Donald Pizer says that the public relations icon “epitomizes the manipulation and corruption of language and therefore of belief in American life” (125). The power Moorehouse attains is troubling because many other characters are poor while he has obtained great wealth. It is possible, in fact, that Moorehouse is based not only on Lee or Davidson, but also on John Randolph Dos Passos, the author’s father, who used language and sophistry to present idealistic portrayals of large capitalistic corporations, a practice that confl icts markedly with his son’s leftist ideals. Dos Passos’s father often struggled hard to defend large corporations in their efforts against smaller interests. But Dos Passos himself employs the media, such as his Newsreels, in his novel and distorts the truth in his subjective biography segments. The novel closes by introducing Charley Anderson (the protagonist of Big Money), who falls in love with Emiscah Svenson, is almost tricked into marrying her (although he realizes that he cannot be the father of her baby because he is a virgin), and then leaves for France to become a mechanic during World War I. The innovative aspects of the novel—which include the use of “Newsreel” narratives, biographies of key historical figures, and subjective “Camera Eye” segments—manifest Dos Passos’s love of experimentation and his fascination with American history. However, although the historical information in some ways makes the novel more realistic, it can also detract from the realism by interrupting the narrative flow and calling attention to the text as a text.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Dos Passos’s depiction of the working classes in this novel with the ways they are depicted in EUGENE O’NEILL’s play The Hairy Ape. How do the techniques used in the

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novel and the play contribute to the effectiveness (and/or ineffectiveness) of their treatments of social issues? Read Dos Passos’s book alongside W. E. B. DUBOIS’s novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece. How are the two works similar and/or distinct in their presentations of economic issues? In what ways is DuBois’s book a more traditional novel than Dos Passos’s text? Does Dos Passos indicate that women are responsible for the failure of male radicals to lead a socialist revolution, or does the author suggest that the male radicals are incompetent and not fully devoted to their cause and thus use females as scapegoats for their inability to effect change that helps America’s working class? What role do women play in the leftist cause? Read this book alongside Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and then compare the ways male characters perceive female characters as obstacles in both books. How do the goals of the main characters in the two novels differ, and what kinds of obstacles do they think women pose to the achievement of their goals? Critics have written about J. Ward Moorehouse as an opportunistic and amoral capitalist who employs propaganda to succeed. Is this an accurate assessment of the character, or does Dos Passos actually characterize Moorehouse in a much more positive light than these critics have claimed? How does the depiction of capitalism in this novel resemble and/or differ from the ways it is presented in JOHN STEINBECK’s The Grapes of Wrath?

1919 (1932) Dos Passos focuses on Joe Williams, Richard Ellsworth Savage, and Eleanor Stoddard in 1919, a novel that dwells on the impact of World War I on American citizens. Joe Williams wishes to achieve the American dream but cannot because he lacks the commitment to saving money and settling down in one place with one woman; the author suggests, however, that part of Williams’s failure

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derives from a capitalistic society with rigid social classes. Savage uses his good looks to manipulate others, such as Daughter, whom he impregnates and then abandons in a successful effort to save his career. 1919, the middle novel in Dos Passos’s trilogy, covers the time from the beginning of the United States’ entrance into World War I until the Armistice. In 42nd Parallel, the reader has met Joe Williams but only through the eyes of his sister, Janey. In 1919, readers gain insight into the character of Joe from his own perspective. For instance, readers in 42nd Parallel learn what Janey thinks of her meeting with Joe outside the Riggs Building; in 1919, readers get Joe’s perspective on the encounter and his evaluation of Janey and the changes in her life. Readers can now understand more about his life than they could from the cryptic comments he made in the previous novel, and they can now comprehend—although perhaps not justify—why Janey has become ashamed of him. Readers learn that he also senses his inadequacies when he is with his sister. Yet he keeps a cigar box full of mementos, including a photograph of Janey, manifesting the sentimental side of his character. A seaman with a knack for fi nding trouble, Joe is arrested for attempting to enter England without a passport during wartime and for being a spy. After his release, he realizes that he must stay out of trouble, but almost immediately he is arrested again for fighting in a brothel. Many critics contend that Joe Williams is a victim of his social class and cannot get ahead because he is poor, especially since the poor are exploited by the rich. However, Janey Williams is obviously from the same social class as her brother, yet she thrives in the business world. And it is clear that Joe would have a better chance of rising socioeconomically if he had an education, if he got along better with people and did not fight, and if he did not spend all his money on alcohol and prostitutes. Della Matthews, from the same social class, who later marries him, correctly believes that Joe is “a nice boy and came from nice people and had been nicely raised and ought to be thinking of getting ahead in the world instead of being a bum and a loafer” (401). Joe falls in love with Della and

decides to marry her, yet soon after making this decision to settle down, he contracts gonorrhea from a prostitute and decides to complete only half of his medical treatment. Joe’s poor character traits thus undercut the argument that his failure in life derives from his social class. The reader might not have much sympathy for Joe, particularly after he has sex with a prostitute in exchange for silk stockings and then steals back the stockings after she falls asleep. Although Joe seems to be a man who is down on his luck, he creates his own unfortunate situations and ultimately causes his own death when fighting a large man in a bar: When Williams attacks a large Senegalese man, another man crushes his skull with a bottle. Another of the novel’s main characters—Richard (Dick) Savage—does not come from a wealthy family either (although his grandfather was a major general), but he makes important connections with influential people, thus ensuring his success. Dick benefits from his connection to a prominent Jersey City lawyer and politician, Hiram Halsey Cooper. Cooper, impressed with Savage and perhaps interested in Dick sexually, uses his political connections to fi nd Dick good jobs, including a commission after Savage is recalled to the States after writing antiwar letters. Savage is amoral, having a sexual relationship with Hilda Thurlow, who, along with her preacher husband, Edwin, has befriended the young man. Savage even sleeps with Hilda on Sundays while her husband is preaching in church in a nearby town. Hilda breaks off the affair when she becomes pregnant. Although the text never indicates who the father is, the reader might assume, from details of Hilda’s relationship with her husband and with Savage, that the latter is the father. Savage joins the French ambulatory unit Norton-Harjes, just as Dos Passos himself did. It would be a mistake, however, to believe that Dos Passos identifies with (or likens himself strongly to) the amoral Savage. The war permeates all aspects of this novel. The characters are preoccupied with the war, and it thoroughly affects their behavior. Joe’s virginal wife, Della, suddenly changes when the war breaks out and becomes promiscuous, sleeping with men in uniform to do her part for the war effort.

John Dos Passos

Women frequently sleep with many men, and the men are drunk often, both justifying their behavior by saying, “C’est la guerre” (passim). Similarly, when Dick Savage asks Anne Elizabeth Trent for sex, she responds, “You boys [soldiers] have risked your lives. I guess I can risk that [losing her virginity]” (675). The initial description of Daughter (Anne Elizabeth Trent) manifests Dos Passos’s attitude toward the wealthy and privileged: The Trents lived in a house on Pleasant avenue [sic] that was the fi nest street in Dallas that was the biggest and fastest growing town in Texas that was the biggest state in the Union and had the blackest soil and the whitest people and America was the greatest country in the world and Daughter was Dad’s onlyest sweetest little girl.(576)

The sarcastic tone suggests the elitism that Dos Passos believes exists within wealthy American communities and families. The living is pleasant (the street name), and everything seems ideal because the privileged have wonderful opportunities. Yet Anne has lost her individuality—and her name—and thus is called Daughter by her father; she is treated as a child, as is suggested by the use of the word onlyest. Daughter’s father is a wealthy lawyer, as was Dos Passos’s father. Daughter goes from one romantic relationship to the next; she dates socialist activists such as Edwin Vinal and Webb Cruthers, although she never seems to care about her boyfriends’ causes. The reader might wonder, furthermore, how dedicated these men are to their causes as well. She then falls in love with Dick Savage, who impregnates her. When Savage discovers that Daughter is pregnant, he breaks off their relationship: “But, Ann Elizabeth, do be reasonable. . . . Can’t we go on being friends?” (694, author’s ellipsis); then he suggests that she trick G. H. Barrow into marrying her by sleeping with him and making him think that he is the father. Savage thus manifests his own callous and selfish nature. Daughter considers marrying the foolish and stuttering Barrow but cannot

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go through with it and instead goes for a plane ride with a drunken French aviator, Pierre; the plane crashes, killing them both. The death could be a suicide because she had wanted the drunken man to fly and do stunts, perhaps so that she could die in a crash. Eleanor Stoddard manipulates the press into declining to cover the story so that Dick will not be embarrassed, for his spurning of Daughter has indirectly caused the crash. Dos Passos here manifests his belief that the media manipulates, rather than reports, the news. Eveline Hutchins’s friendship with Eleanor Stoddard cools, and both women have affairs with the public relations giant J. Ward Moorehouse. Hutchins has numerous love affairs and is impregnated by Paul Johnson, whom she does not love. Moorehouse’s infidelities (he is married to Gertrude, who lives in a sanitarium) and his smooth nature indicate Dos Passos’s disdain for people who use language and influence to distort the truth about war and business. Dos Passos expresses his disdain for greed through his scathing biography of J. Pierpont Morgan, his contempt for deceptive public relations through the characterization of J. Ward Moorehouse, and his anger toward President Woodrow Wilson for involving the United States in World War I through the sarcastic biography titled “Meester Veelson.”

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the role that sex plays in the novel. The male characters tend to be very active sexually, and the women are very promiscuous. What points could Dos Passos be trying to make about the war or social class by introducing the theme of sexual promiscuity? What does Dos Passos’s book have in common, in these respects, with Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises? 2. How does the author characterize left-wing radicals such as Edwin Vinal, Webb Cruthers, Don Stevens, and Ben Compton? What point is Dos Passos making by characterizing socialists as he does? What does the author suggest by giving the capitalist J. Ward Moorehouse a significantly larger role than these radicals? How

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do his depictions of radicals resemble and/or differ from the ways they are depicted in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man? 3. Although Moorehouse seems to be a major character, readers learn about him primarily through other characters such as Eleanor Stoddard and Eveline Hutchins. What is the effect of portraying Moorehouse from the perspectives of other characters in the novel rather than directly? What is the effect of portraying Moorehouse primarily through the eyes of women rather than providing him with his own narrative (he appears in others’ narratives instead)? How does Dos Passos’s use of this indirect method resemble and/ or differ from the methods used in WILLIAM FAULKNER’s “A Rose for Emily”? 4. What role do censorship and truth play in 1919? Savage loses his position because he is a pacifist; Moorehouse succeeds by allegedly manipulating truth. What does this contrast suggest, particularly when Savage subsequently goes to work for Moorehouse? 5. What part does social class play in 1919? The working-class sailor Joe Williams and the wealthy Daughter both perish after living unhappy lives. Does Dos Passos indicate that character plays a larger role than class, or what other reasons, such as the casualties of war, explain the sad fates of characters from markedly different classes? Compare and contrast the impact of class on the characters in this novel with its impact on the characters in Gertrude Stein’s book Three Lives.

The Big Money (1936) In The Big Money, the author demonstrates how, in the aftermath of the war, big business and capitalism have become obsessions. The wealthy increase their power and riches while the working classes cannot succeed because of their poverty and because of the manipulation of the media by the affluent. The war veteran Charley Anderson dreams of becoming successful in the aviation motor business, yet he cheats his business partners; is cheated by his wife, Gladys; and dies of injuries suffered in a car accident.

The Big Money, the last novel in Dos Passos’s trilogy, deals with the aftermath of World War I and extends through the 1920s. American soldiers have returned from Europe, hoping to fi nd economic prosperity. In this volume of the trilogy, capitalism has replaced the war as the major theme, and the characters seem more thoroughly developed than in the fi rst two volumes of U.S.A. The aviator Charley Anderson returns to Minnesota to fi nd his mother dying, his unfaithful former girlfriend Emiscah Svenson trying desperately to get him to marry her (she threatens several times to kill herself by turning on the gas unless they are reunited), and his brother, Jim, and his sister-in-law, Hedwig, working for the Ford Motor Company. Jim and Hedwig dismiss Charley’s plans for the future of aviation engineering and appropriate his share of his mother’s inheritance when the mother passes away. To make a point about the deception of Jim and Hedwig (huge proponents of Ford) and to show the evils of capitalism, Dos Passos includes a sardonic biography of the entrepreneur Henry Ford (entitled “Tin Lizzie”). The author mentions that Ford promised high wages, but “of course it turned out that there were strings to it; always there were strings to it. . . . Ford’s was manufacturing munitions, Eagle boats. . . . He announced to the press that he’d turn over his war profits to the government, but there’s no record that he ever did” (809, 811). Dos Passos then proceeds to discuss Ford’s vigorous and hateful anti-Semitism. Ford also dehumanizes his workers and makes them unhappy by putting them on assembly lines and dictating their conduct (they must be married, not commit adultery, and not drink or smoke cigarettes on or even off the job, for instance). Dos Passos thus manifests, through his use of biography, the deceitfulness of Jim and Hedwig Anderson; he shows their strong allegiance to the Ford Motor Company and Henry Ford’s insidious behavior. (Charley, it is interesting to note, ultimately dies of injuries suffered in an automobile accident.) Charley moves to New York and attends a party hosted by Eveline Hutchins (now Eveline Johnson), who has a baby but clearly is not happy being a mother or a wife. Her former beaus Don Stevens

John Dos Passos

and Dick Savage are also at the party, leading to a frosty atmosphere in the room. Stevens talks of nothing but class struggles and socialism, and he even asks Charley, whom he has never met before, “Tell us what aviators think about. Are they for the exploiting class or the workingclass [sic]?” (822). The question is silly and sophomoric, illustrating the simplistic thinking of socialists such as Don Stevens. Stevens’s silly behavior manifests, perhaps, the change in Dos Passos’s sociopolitical views and his recognition of the lack of complex and mature thought exhibited by certain left-wing radicals. Charley courts the socialite Doris Humphries but cannot obtain her “love” because he is poor. Biding his time while he waits for enough money to win Doris’s heart, Charley has an affair with the promiscuous Eveline Hutchins Johnson, even though her husband, Paul Johnson, has befriended him in New York. As do many Dos Passos characters, such as Dick Savage and Joe Williams in 1919, Charley justifies his sexual indiscretions: “He felt bad about Paul, but after all Paul wasn’t a particular friend of his and if it wasn’t him [Charley] he reckoned it would be somebody else” (835). Anderson, therefore, justifies sleeping with his friend’s wife because Paul, although very kind to him, is not his closest friend and because he is in a way preventing Eveline from sleeping with another man by committing adultery with him instead. Dos Passos demonstrates how easily people justify their irresponsible behavior and how they lack introspection. The relationship between Charley and Eveline cools when she informs him that she wants to divorce her husband and marry him. Bored by her life and tied to a dull marriage and to a baby, Eveline commits suicide. Charley fi nally meets a fi ne woman named Anne Bledsoe, who is compatible with him, yet he chooses to marry Gladys Wheatley instead because she has a wealthier family. Their marriage fails, and Gladys tricks him out of his money. Here Dos Passos makes a statement about the dangers and seductive quality of money. He illustrates how social relationships such as marriages are inextricably tied to wealth, thus diminishing the ability of the working class to succeed or intermingle with members of the upper class.

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Another important character in this novel is the idealistic and emotional social worker Mary French, who works at the Hull House in Chicago and is inspired by her admirable father, a physician who devotes his life to caring for the poor; he dies while caring for indigent patients during the influenza epidemic. As Daughter does in 1919, French encounters a politician—G. H. Barrow—who claims to support the working class. He seduces her as he has attempted to seduce Daughter. The difference is that Barrow, an awkward man who devotes much of his time to chasing young women, is successful with French; he impregnates her in Pittsburgh and offers to marry her, but she refuses after he declines to support Gus Moscowski, who is doing the publicity for striking steelworkers. Dos Passos suggests that Barrow’s attempted seductions of women succeed or fail depending on the women’s political views. Daughter does not care about the working class, so she despises Barrow, whereas French is a strong advocate of the working class, so she admires the man, sleeps with him, and considers marrying him—until he fails to support the Pittsburgh steelworkers and thus the cause that he claims to champion. When Mary castigates Barrow for selling out the strikers in favor of the steel barons, the superficial and ignorant Barrow mistakenly assumes that her anger is caused by menstruation (“the curse coming on” [890])—not by his refusal to help Moscowski and his fellow strikers. French obtains a job as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Times-Sentinel and is fi red after she refuses her boss’s order to portray the strikers as Bolshevikled, greedy agitators who receive good pay but avariciously covet more. Dos Passos employs this incident to convey his belief that the media, whether in the person of Ted Healy (the newspaper’s editor) or J. Ward Moorehouse, manipulate the news so that the public cannot learn the truth about the ill treatment of the working class. The incident involving Healy might serve as Dos Passos’s veiled attack on the publisher William Randolph Hearst and on dishonest journalists who are more interested in selling newspapers and making profits than in the truth. The author also suggests that the media favor the wealthy and thus negatively portray the working


class. French then enters into a romantic relationship with Don Stevens, who, as do many of the men in her life, treats her badly. French’s idealistic and benevolent heart renders her vulnerable. Another significant female character is the New Yorker Margo Dowling. Upon being raped by her stepmother’s boyfriend, the actor Frank Mandeville, Margo leaves the United States for Havana, Cuba, with her husband, Tony. Although Margo seems to have a good heart, she is beautiful and manipulative, using her attractive body and good acting skills (she pretends to be an innocent woman in need of help) in order to gain what she needs. She has learned her acting skills from Frank. In fact, she ultimately becomes a successful film actress in Hollywood. In discussing issues such as labor strikes, the influenza epidemic, the policies of President Woodrow Wilson, and the inauguration of President Warren G. Harding and the Democrats’ loss of power, Dos Passos effectively intermingles historical fact and his own fictional account of his characters. He creates chapters that focus on one character but then enable that character to interact with other, seemingly unrelated characters, as when Mary French encounters the radical Jewish socialist Ben Compton and when Charley meets and has sex with Margo. Characters disappear and then reappear, such as Charley Anderson, who appears in 42nd Parallel, is omitted from 1919, and the reappears and becomes the protagonist of the last novel in the trilogy, The Big Money. The working-class characters tend to disappear or falter, while those who willingly sacrifice their ethics in exchange for capitalistic prosperity and big money, successful men such as Moorehouse and Savage, rise socioeconomically at the expense of others and thrive.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In The Big Money, machinery plays a significant role. Discuss the significance of machines such as cars and planes and of steel in the novel. How, for instance, does industrialization relate to big business, materialism, and the efforts of the working class? 2. Falsity and artifice are integral aspects of the plot of The Big Money, as in Margo’s acting on

and off the screen and in the book’s emphasis on the lies of the media. What is Dos Passos suggesting about the class system by demonstrating the artifice and falsehoods that people employ? Compare and contrast Dos Passos’s emphasis on lies and falsehood in this novel with the similar emphasis in John Steinbeck’s short story “The Chrysanthemums.” 3. Discuss the theme of suicide, which is prevalent in the novel. Are the suicidal characters sincere, or do they simply attempt to manipulate other characters with their threats to take their own lives? Are the suicides and threats to commit suicide related to the subjugation and hopelessness of the working class? Compare and contrast Dos Passos’s presentation of this theme with its presentation in such other works as Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, EDWIN A RLINGTON ROBINSON’s “Richard Cory,” and THORNTON WILDER’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. What different kinds of pressure in these works lead characters to contemplate and/or commit suicide? 4. Charley Anderson’s rise and fall could be categorized as tragic. What accounts for his fall, and is it tragic, in the sense of the Aristotelian conception of tragedy? For instance, is Charley responsible for his fall, or does Dos Passos suggest that in a capitalist society, his fate is beyond his control? Could he have saved himself if he had married Anne Bledsoe rather than Gladys Wheatley? Relate Dos Passos’s views of tragedy to those implied, for instance, in THEODORE DREISER’s novel An American Tragedy.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON DOS PASSOS AND HIS WORK 1. What changes do you discern as the author’s trilogy evolves? Does a progression or a regression exist in U.S.A. from 42nd Parallel to The Big Money? Is there, for example, a shift in Dos Passos’s political views during the course of the novels? 2. Discuss Dos Passos’s treatment of women in the novels. How does the author characterize his

John Dos Passos

3.

4.

5.

6.

heroines? What generalizations can you make regarding his characterization of women such as Eveline Hutchins, Emiscah Svenson, Maisie, Daughter, Margo Dowling, Gertrude Stamp, Della Matthews, Janey Williams, and Eleanor Stoddard? How do the men characterize the women, and how do the women describe, feel about, and treat each other? Although it is generally acknowledged that Dos Passos was a fervent supporter of the working class when he wrote the trilogy, why does he characterize so many working-class characters as unreliable men with penchants for alcohol and prostitutes? Do such portrayals undercut his argument, or does the behavior of such characters indicate what happens to the psyche of men who are downtrodden after being subjugated by the wealthy? Linda W. Martin says that “1919 is usually regarded as the most despairing of the three novels” (102) that make up the trilogy. When you compare the three novels in U.S.A., does the middle work seem the most despairing and pessimistic? In what ways is it pessimistic? What causes the pessimism in this novel? In what ways are the other two more optimistic? Do you agree with Martin’s statement? Throughout the trilogy and in Manhattan Transfer, characters share the same situations and biographical backgrounds as Dos Passos, such as serving as an ambulance driver in Paris for the Norton-Harjes, going to Harvard, and having a father who is a prominent lawyer. Although it is plausible that Dos Passos is inevitably drawing on personal experience and experiences he knew well, are there other possible reasons why he endows his characters—even the shady ones— with facts from his own personal history? How do such facts help shape the narrative? Discuss the different narrative voices that Dos Passos uses. Sometimes the narrator is an objective, third-person omniscient narrator while at other times the narrator seems to borrow the slang and even pejorative vocabulary of his characters. How do you account for the narrative shifts, and how do they affect the narrative?

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7. Discuss the significance of the Camera Eye, Newsreels, and Biographies that Dos Passos intersperses within his narratives. Which have the greatest impact and why? Do they enhance the novel, or do they detract from the plot by calling attention to the artificial nature of the books? 8. In the novels, the virtuous characters (such as Mac and Mary French) are disappointed again and again; although idealistic, they do not succeed. Meanwhile, unsavory characters (such as J. Ward Moorehouse, Dick Savage, and Eleanor Stoddard) thrive. What points could Dos Passos be making, then, about capitalism, socialism, and ethics? 9. Discuss the theme of abortion in Dos Passos’s novels. What do the abortions indicate about the societal and economic pressures on women and about sexual double standards? Why do these women abort their babies or induce miscarriages? How does the author link abortion to socialism and capitalism? 10. Several characters kill themselves for various reasons and take their lives indirectly, such as Daughter in 1919, who demands that a drunken pilot take her up in a plane and perform stunts so that she can die. Is Dos Passos making any points about the pressures of a capitalist society, a nation divided between the rich and the poor, or the ennui of the wealthy? Do those who commit suicide fit certain patterns that you can identify and analyze? WORKS CITED

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Carr, Virginia Spencer. Dos Passos: A Life. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2004. Clark, Michael. Dos Passos’ Early Fiction, 1912– 1938. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1987. Dos Passos, John. Manhattan Transfer. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1925. ———. U.S.A.: 42nd Parallel, 1919, The Big Money. New York: Library of America, 1996. Harding, Desmond. Writing the City: Urban Visions and Literary Modernism. New York: Routledge, 2003.

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John Dos Passos: Life Stories, Books, and Links. Available online. URL: http://www.todayinliterature.com/biography/john.dos.passos.asp. Accessed April 7, 2009. Ludington, Townsend, ed. Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos. Boston: Gambit, 1973. ———. John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey. 1980. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998. Maine, Barry, ed. Dos Passos: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988.

Martin, Linda W. Dos Passos: Artist as American. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979. McGlamery, Tom. Protest and the Body in Melville, Dos Passos, and Hurston. New York: Routledge, 2004. Nanney, Lisa. John Dos Passos. New York: Twayne, 1998. Pizer, Donald. Dos Passos’ U.S.A.: A Critical Study. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988.

Eric Sterling

Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) To express what we see honestly and without subterfuge: this is morality as well as art. (qtd. in Sloane 76)

T

In 1882 the family was saved from severe poverty by Dreiser’s elder brother, Paul, who had changed his last name to Dresser and won fi nancial success as a comedic singer. Between 1883 and 1887 the family lived in a variety of midwestern towns and cities, where they were usually poor and often isolated, living a kind of nomadic, underprivileged, outsider’s existence that significantly shaped Dreiser’s attitudes as well as his later literature. During these years Dreiser (who was never very physically impressive) became interested not only in books and in natural beauty but also in sex, and his response consisted of “an immense preoccupation mixed with painful anxiety over whether he was attractive enough to girls and whether he could adequately perform the sexual act. . . . Dreiser’s belief in his possible sexual inadequacy, accompanied by a sense of guilt attached to sex, bred doubts and fears that [later] required a constant stream of new conquests to prove both his sexual prowess and the legitimacy of sexual freedom” (Pizer 11). When he eventually began writing novels, his books were considered shocking for their time because of the openness with which they depicted sexual motives and behavior. For the time being, however, Dreiser had not yet found a real focus for his life. From 1887 to 1889 he was living in Chicago with other members of his family and was working various menial jobs when he encountered a former high school teacher

heodore Dreiser is widely considered one of the most important American writers in the naturalistic or realistic traditions (which emphasize detailed depictions of common daily life and which stress the influence of material reality on human behavior). He was born on August 27, 1871, in Terre Haute, Indiana. By this time his parents (John Paul Dreiser and Sarah Schänäb Dreiser) already had eight surviving children, and the family was not only large but poor. Their poverty resulted mainly from the physical and psychological difficulties of Dreiser’s father, whose business and body had both been damaged in an 1869 fi re that destroyed an uninsured mill he had owned and operated. John Paul Dreiser, a German immigrant who still often used his native language when speaking to his wife and children, was a strict Catholic, who sought to impose his will on his children, who grew to resent and resist his efforts at control. Dreiser’s mother, on the other hand, was a warmer, more obviously affectionate parent, and the “emotional dynamic of the Dreiser home during Theodore’s formative years comprised an ardent desire by the Dreiser children to remain within the family to profit from the nurturing love of their mother, matched by an equally compelling need to escape the authoritarian and restrictive moralism of their father” (Pizer 9). Both the negative and the positive influences of Theodore’s childhood would greatly influence his later concerns as a writer.

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who thought highly of his potential and offered to pay his way to college. In 1889, therefore, he began attending Indiana University, but he felt intellectually unprepared (having fi nished only one year of high school) and socially ill at ease among the more privileged students he met, and so he soon dropped out. His later fictional focus on “the outsider seeking the rich plenty on the other side of the wall or window but uncertain of his ability to grasp it probably derives from his own fi rst encounter with middle-class life” in college (Pizer 13). Even more disappointing than his failure at the university must have been the death of his beloved mother, who passed away on November 14, 1890. By this time he was back in Chicago, working in real estate and as a bill collector, but his life took a decisive turn in 1892 when he sought and won a job as a newspaper writer. Over the next few years he would move from one paper to another and from one city to the next (including Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and, fi nally, New York), writing hard news, soft features, and sometimes fiction masquerading as fact. He was a talented, prolific journalist and soon also won employment as an editor (1895–97) of his own magazine and as a contributor to various others. It was in 1899, however, that he fi rst turned his attention seriously to writing fiction, beginning with a series of stories but soon trying his hand at a lengthy novel. This book, titled Sister Carrie and fi nished early in 1900, marks a major turning point not only in Dreiser’s life but in the history of American fiction. Influenced by the experiences of one of Dreiser’s sisters, the novel was affected as well as by Dreiser’s own years as a big-city reporter, by his reading of such realistic European novelists as Balzac, and by his familiarity with the theories of such writers as Charles Darwin and especially Herbert Spencer, who emphasized the idea of life as a continuous struggle for survival in a universe in which both random chance and mechanistic fate left few options for genuine freedom or ultimate human happiness. The world depicted in Dreiser’s fi rst novel, as in much of his subsequent writing, is bleak and unforgiving; success depends less on moral conduct (since no transcendent moral values

can exist in a materialistic cosmos) than on ambition, competition, accident, and the inexorable laws of brute matter. Dreiser describes the (largely urban) environments of his characters in relentless detail, since he believed that environment was at least as important as “character” in determining a person’s fate, especially since human character was so much a product of one’s social and physical circumstances. This book, clearly, was something new, and its main plot—in which a sexually adventurous woman succeeds fi nancially while ultimately feeling unfulfi lled in any deeper sense—was shocking enough even to some readers at the publishing fi rm that the company did little to promote the book when it was fi rst printed. Dreiser had produced a novel that displeased many people who fi rst read it (as he must have known it would), but it was a book that was not, at fi rst, read by many. Although he started working on a new novel (Jennie Gerhardt) in 1901, he now became increasingly despondent. His physical and mental health declined so much, in fact, that by 1903 he was nearly at the end of his fi nancial rope when his brother Paul once again came to the rescue by arranging for him to be treated at a sanatorium, where Dreiser responded so quickly that by the end of the year he felt sufficiently recuperated to resume writing and editing. For the next five years he steadily climbed back to prominence in the field of publishing, and indeed in 1907 he arranged to have Sister Carrie reprinted. This new printing received good reviews, and Dreiser himself began to flourish fi nancially. In 1911 Jennie Gerhardt fi nally appeared, and in 1912 The Financier (the fi rst of three novels based on the life of Charles Yerkes) was published, as was yet another printing of Sister Carrie. The year 1914 saw the publication of The Titan (the second of the books based on the life of Yerkes), and in 1915 Dreiser published The “Genius”—a “barely disguised autobiography” that was “banned as obscene and blasphemous the following year by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice” (Sloane xii–xiii). From 1917 to 1923 his fi nancial success declined, so that he was forced to live once more under fi nancial stress; nevertheless, his books continued to appear, including

Theodore Dreiser

Free and Other Stories (short fiction; 1918); Twelve Men (biographical pieces; 1919); The Hand of the Potter (a tragedy about a pedophile; 1919); Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub (philosophical essays; 1920); A Book about Myself (autobiography; 1921); and The Color of a Great City (portraits of urban existence; 1923). It was in 1925, however, that Dreiser enjoyed his greatest fi nancial and critical success as an author of fiction with the publication of a massive two-volume novel titled An American Tragedy. This book established Dreiser as a major American writer. Movie rights were sold; a stage version was produced in New York; and Dreiser became so wealthy that he was able to visit Europe for an extended period with Helen Richardson, the woman with whom he had begun living in 1919 (after separating in 1914 from Sara “Jug” Osborne White, whom he had married in 1898). Increasingly involved in leftwing politics, he visited the Soviet Union in 1927 at the invitation of the communist government, but despite his traveling he continued to publish prolifically. In 1926, for instance, he issued a collection of his poems titled Moods: Cadenced and Declaimed (which was reprinted and expanded in 1928); 1927 saw the publication of Chains: Lesser Novels and Stories; in that same year he also issued Dreiser Looks at Russia; in 1929 he published a two-volume “collection” titled A Gallery of Women. In 1930 he missed winning the Nobel Prize in literature by one vote, but Sinclair Lewis, who was chosen instead, said in his acceptance speech that Dreiser, “more than any other writer,’ ” had “opened the way to honesty and passion in modern fiction” (qtd. in Sloane xiii). In 1931, certainly, Dreiser was famous enough to publish another volume of autobiography (A History of Myself: Dawn), describing his youth and adolescence, and in the same year he issued Tragic America, an indictment of the failures of American capitalism. Throughout the 1930s, as the United States suffered during the Great Depression, Dreiser became increasingly active in left-wing political causes, even becoming more and more closely associated with the American Communist Party and an apologist for the Soviet Union. His interest in science

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was also even stronger now than it had always been, as was his interest in philosophy, and he devoted much of his time as a writer to work on philosophical treatises he failed to publish in his lifetime. By the late 1930s and early 1940s he was also at work on a new novel (The Bulwark), but his only published book in 10 years was America Is Worth Saving (1941), which toed the Communist Party line concerning World War II—a line that would soon change abruptly when one dictator (the German Nazi, Hitler) attacked his fellow dictator (the Soviet Communist, Stalin), with whom Hitler had made an alliance of convenience two years before. Dreiser, however (despite the show trials and persecutions in the Soviet Union in the 1930s), remained a committed communist sympathizer to the end, and indeed in 1945 he actually joined the American Communist Party. This was the year after he had received the Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as the year after he fi nally married his longtime companion, Helen Richardson. By the end of 1945, however, he was dead of a heart attack suffered on December 28. Books, however, continued to appear: In 1946 his novel The Bulwark was published, and in 1947 the fi nal volume in the fictional Yerkes trilogy (The Stoic) was issued. In the decades since Dreiser’s death, numerous other unpublished works have been printed, and the University of Pennsylvania Press has begun publishing a series of carefully edited versions of his major and minor texts.

Sister Carrie (1900) When Caroline Meeber, at age 18, leaves her home in Columbia City, Wisconsin, in search of a better, more prosperous life in Chicago, she meets a dashing salesman named Charles Drouet, who immediately takes an interest in her and who later offers to help her when, after she works a series of menial, low-paying jobs, she suddenly finds herself unemployed as a result of sickness. After Carrie becomes Drouet’s mistress, she meets his prosperous friend George Hurstwood; he, although married


and a father, eventually becomes so obsessed with Carrie that he reluctantly steals money from his employer’s safe and persuades Carrie to run away with him to start a new life in New York, where at fi rst the couple prosper and where Carrie becomes increasingly involved not only in high society but also in the theater thanks to her innate talent as an actress. However, as Carrie’s career on stage thrives, George, through abrupt financial reversals, descends into poverty and destitution; when Carrie, now a major figure on the stage, essentially ignores George when he goes to her to beg for help, he eventually decides to kill himself. Although Carrie has now achieved much greater material success than either Drouet or Hurstwood, at the end of the novel she is not especially happy or fulfi lled. Sister Carrie was not only Dreiser’s fi rst important and extended work of fiction, but it is also one of his most typical pieces of writing and (along with An American Tragedy) is still the text on which his reputation mainly depends today. The book exemplifies many of his most characteristic themes and stylistic traits, and the patterns of plot and phrasing it establishes were repeated often in his later writings. Carrie’s movement from a small town in Wisconsin to the huge and growing metropolis of Chicago, for instance, typifies the kind of migration to urban areas that was an increasingly common fact of life in the era in which Dreiser lived and wrote, and indeed Dreiser is important in part because of the highly detailed descriptions he provides of city life during this significant period of American history. His works are often set in large cities, and in Sister Carrie he depicts the two largest of his era (Chicago and New York) and draws on his own intimate familiarity with both places. Carrie’s experiences, in fact, often reflect his own, especially in her movement from small-town obscurity to big-city prominence, but the experiences of George Hurstwood (especially his descent from material prosperity to grinding poverty) are also experiences with which Dreiser himself, with his impoverished background, could sympathize (Matthiessen 173). In fact, after the publication of Sister Carrie Dreiser personally suffered many of the same kinds of losses Hurstwood experienced in

the novel, so that the book becomes a kind of odd prophecy of his own personal fate. In addition to this novel’s emphasis on urban life, many other aspects of Sister Carrie make the book typical of Dreiser’s writings. Its focus on the struggle for material success, for instance, is a theme that recurs again and again in Dreiser’s works; the American economy at the time he wrote was characterized by enormous social mobility, and, as the contrasting fates of Hurstwood and Carrie show, one person could move down the social ladder just as quickly and abruptly as another person could move up the ladder. Both Carrie and Hurstwood live, for a time, in poverty, and this emphasis on the grim underside of American life is another characteristic feature of Dreiser’s works. Dreiser knew from personal experience what it was like to do menial, degrading labor for subsistence-level wages, and part of the purpose of his fiction is to describe the dark realities of American capitalism, a system (he believed) in which people are often treated as commodities and in which blind economic ambition, gnawing fear of unemployment and hunger, and the competitive struggle for survival play more important roles than any loftier spiritual motives. All these nearly Darwinian social pressures can be seen operating in Sister Carrie, which depicts a kind of existence involving the survival of the fittest and which also displays a kind of life in which mere chance is quite important (Elias 150). It is merely by chance, for instance, that Carrie meets Charles Drouet, and it is merely by chance again that she discovers the talent for acting that will lead her to such eventual social prominence. Similarly, it is merely by chance that Hurstwood ultimately steals the money from his employer’s safe: He had been tempted to steal it (after fi nding the safe unlocked), but as he attempts to put the money away (having wrestled with his conscience and decided that theft would be wrong), he accidentally locks the safe and then feels that he now has no choice but to steal after all. (A similar kind of “accidental crime” is at the heart of Dreiser’s other major novel, An American Tragedy.) Dreiser considered the universe a puzzling, inscrutable thing guided by no larger discernible purpose or

Theodore Dreiser

plan; any laws that controlled it were physical or mechanical rather than spiritual or moral. Who, at the beginning of this book, could have predicted Carrie’s eventual fantastic success? Who could have foreseen the eventual degradation of Hurstwood? Life in Dreiser’s fiction is unpredictable because life at large (Dreiser believed) is unpredictable as well. Much depends on luck (whether good or bad) and on the social circumstances in which one happens to fi nd oneself. If Carrie had not had the good fortune to be good-looking, she might never have attracted Drouet; if she had not happened to meet Drouet on a downtown Chicago street (after not having seen him for weeks after their fi rst chance encounter on a train), the ensuing chain of events might never have occurred. If Hurstwood had not happened to lose his fortune in one of the periodic business collapses to which American capitalism is prone, he might have ended the novel as a successful man rather than as a poverty-stricken suicide. Success or failure depends greatly on accident, and in America success and failure are largely judged in monetary and material terms. If Carrie succeeds, in part, through means society claims to disdain (by becoming the mistress of one man and then by absconding with that man’s friend, who has become a thief after abandoning his wife and children), who, Dreiser asks, is really in a position to judge or condemn her? A passage near the end of the novel sums up the narrator’s attitudes: Oh, the tangle of human life! How dimly as yet we see. Here was Carrie, in the beginning poor, unsophisticated, emotional; responding with desire to everything most lovely in life, yet fi nding herself turned as by a wall. Laws to say: “Be allured, if you will, by everything lovely, but draw not nigh unless by righteousness.” Convention to say: “You shall not better your situation save by honest labour.” If honest labour be unremunerative and difficult to endure; if it be the long, long road which never reaches beauty, but wearies the feet and the heart; if the drag to follow beauty be such that one abandons the admired way, taking rather the despised path leading to her dreams quickly, who shall cast the

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fi rst stone? Not evil, but longing for that which is better, more often directs the steps of the erring. Not evil, but goodness more often allures the feeling mind unused to reason. (368)

This paragraph is typical of the book (and of Dreiser’s larger thinking) in many ways. It shows, for instance, his standard reliance on an omniscient narrator, who is frequently willing to reflect philosophically on the events he describes (Sloane 70). It shows, as well, Dreiser’s common emphasis on the complexities of human existence and on the inadequacy of conventional moral, legal, or religious codes, which merely prescribe, proscribe, and condemn (Elias 157). It shows, moreover, Dreiser’s own unwillingness to censure people in difficult circumstances who face hard or narrow choices or no choices at all, and it also shows his tendency to react with a kind of sympathy and pity for them that they rarely found in society at large (Elias 141– 142). In addition, the passage implies Dreiser’s willingness to criticize social conventions and institutions and his awareness of the desire for beauty as a major motive of human conduct. The passage further exemplifies his typical emphasis on illicit sex (“the despised path”), especially as a possible means to personal success, particularly in a society in which possessing money is at least as important as practicing private morality (Elias 144, 147, 169). Stylistically, too, the passage is revealing. The third quoted sentence, for example, displays the plain, straightforward phrasing of which Dreiser was often capable and that often shows him at his best. It must be admitted, however, that this passage also displays some of the “pompous language” that David E. E. Sloane says often “marks some of the philosophical discourses in Sister Carrie” (62)— language that Sloane sees as “representative of a midwesterner [sic] forcing higher diction” (64). In Dreiser’s defense, though, it can be noted that the passage skillfully employs biblical allusions, echoing both the Old Testament (“in the beginning”) and the New (“cast the fi rst stone”), and that such allusions are highly appropriate in a passage that challenges some aspects of conventional religious thinking and proposes instead a more complex


moral response. The second allusion, in particular, by reminding us of Jesus’ words concerning a woman accused of prostitution (John 8:7), also exemplifies Dreiser’s tendency, when evoking religion, to stress the spirit rather than the letter of the law (West 137). In all these ways, then, this one brief paragraph from Sister Carrie illustrates many significant aspects of the novel as a whole. In some ways, however, the quoted passage is not particularly representative. It lacks, for instance, the emphasis on material facts and abundant physical detail that is so characteristic of Dreiser’s usual style; nor does it describe the hustle and bustle of city life he was so often accustomed to presenting (Elias 147–48). The passage does, though, reveal his fondness for repetition (Elias 151), whether the repetition involved events, images, symbols, or, in this case, phrasing (as in the repeated “if” clauses or the reiterated phrase “Not evil”). Missing from the passage, though, is his frequent emphasis on physical settings, and also missing is his habitual stress on dialogue and colloquial midwestern speech. Nevertheless, in one respect the quoted passage is quite highly significant, for it helps explain the uproar and scandal associated with the novel from the moment it was first published. The passage reveals, after all, that “Carrie not only escaped punishment” for her irregular conduct (as would not have happened in earlier books about such a woman) and that “Dreiser did not even regard her as sinful: and this was the crux of his defiance of late nineteenth-century conventionality” (Matthiessen 170). Far more than Dreiser’s skill in writing (or his alleged lack thereof), it was the events of the novel, and the narrator’s attitudes toward those events, that made Sister Carrie an unusual and even pathbreaking work in American literature when it first appeared at the dawn of the 20th century.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this novel, in its plot, main characters, setting, and style, with Henry James’s novels The Portrait of a Lady or Daisy Miller. How, in particular, do James’s novels and Dreiser’s deal with matters of social class? 2. Compare and contrast this novel, in its plot, main characters, setting, and style, with Z OR A

NEALE HURSTON’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. How, in particular, does racial identity affect the fate of each main character? 3. Choose one brief section of this book (a paragraph or two) and discuss all the ways in which that section is typical of Dreiser’s general approach to writing. In particular, discuss the ways in which the passage is either effective, ineffective, or some combination of both. 4. Study the positions of women in Dreiser’s era and discuss the ways this novel reflects the lives of women at that time, particularly the options open to them. How would Carrie’s life have been different if she had lived, say, in the 1960s? 5. Read a biography of Dreiser and discuss the ways this novel reflects the details of his own life. In what ways, and for what reasons, could Dreiser have sympathized and even identified with Carrie?

“Old Rogaum and His Theresa” (1901, 1918) Rogaum (fi rst name not given) is a butcher who lives in New York’s Bleeker Street with his wife and his children, including his 18-year-old daughter, Theresa, who has begun to disobey her father’s curfews in order to spend more time out on the streets in the company of her friends, especially “Connie” Almerting, a handsome, fl irtatious “tough” who encourages her to defy her father and who is distrusted by Officers Maguire and Delahanty, the local cops on the beat. One night, having long threatened to do so, Rogaum fi nally locks Theresa out of the house to teach her a lesson, but he soon learns a lesson of his own when she disappears with Connie and when Rogaum, in his frantic efforts to fi nd her, stumbles across the writhing body of a young prostitute who has just attempted suicide. Eventually the police track down Theresa and return her to her desperate parents, but not before giving Connie a piece of their minds and Rogaum a warning about the dangers of locking young daughters out of doors at night in a big city. This story displays many traits a reader would expect of Dreiser. It is set in a large city; the physi-

Theodore Dreiser

cal details of that setting are thoroughly described; and the story is populated by characters from diverse ethnic backgrounds (German, Irish, French, etc.), thereby reflecting the status of the United States as a multicultural melting pot. Ethnic dialects are heavily (perhaps too heavily) stressed, as is the kind of street lingo (especially used by Connie) that was increasingly characteristic of the colloquial speech of Dreiser’s day. Although such speech can now seem dated and almost unintentionally funny, Dreiser would have justified its use because he was interested in presenting facts and details of the actual life of his time. In his references to streetcars and police phones, for instance, we sense the growing modernization and urbanization of American life in Dreiser’s era; in his depiction of the nearly dead prostitute and the politically protected brothel we have evidence of what the story itself calls “the commercialized vice of the city” (219). Dreiser was always interested in the operations of power of all sorts and at all levels, and in this case we sense his view that the commercialism and materialism at the heart of American society could corrupt everything, including sex. While Dreiser is typically interested, however, in presenting a credible picture of life as it was lived in a specific time and place, he is also usually interested in dealing with more basic drives and conduct. Those include (in this story) “the attractions of sex, the tensions of family loyalty, the lure of the city, and the yearning for beauty” (Elias 169). Theresa is torn between her dwindling impulse to obey her father and her ever-growing instinct to enjoy the sexual excitement of Connie’s company; meanwhile, Connie and the elderly Rogaum embody the age-old battle between fathers and suitors, between the old and the young, between one male and another. On one level the characters represent life as it was lived in metropolitan New York in the early decades of the 20th century; on another level they simply act out desires and fears that are deeply rooted in the physical and psychological nature of human beings from time immemorial. The violence, the sex, and the contest of wills Dreiser depicts in this story are themes (he believed) that would never become irrelevant. Young people would always

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rebel against the authority of elders they considered oppressive, because they had always done so (certainly Dreiser himself had rebelled); and parents (especially fathers) would always try to assert their control over the lives of their children because it was their nature to do so (as Dreiser’s own father had demonstrated). The story thus deals with age-old themes as well as with aspects of life that must have seemed, in Dreiser’s day, up to the minute, such as the way the young folk in this story are becoming generically “American” despite their diverse ethnic backgrounds. Arguably the story is flawed by excessive dialect, implausible diction (Theresa was “wont to betake her way upward” [202]), unnecessary verbiage (“ ‘I vill lock you oudt,’ he declared, in strongly accented English” [203]), and intrusive, heavy-handed philosophizing (“Now, strangely, a new element, not heretofore apparent in her nature but nevertheless wholly there, was called into life, springing in action as Diana, full formed” [210]). These alleged flaws, however, are as common in Dreiser’s fiction as his various strengths, and, in that respect, this story is as typical an example of his work as one could hope to fi nd.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Defend or attack the artistic success of this work. Pay special attention to style, dialect, and dialogue. Can you point to particularly successful and/or unsuccessful passages? 2. Compare and contrast the depiction of family life (especially the confl ict between generations) in this story and in SHERWOOD A NDERSON’s “Mother.” In particular, what are the functions of the fathers in both tales? 3. In her attitude toward her father, how does Theresa resemble (but also differ from) the boy in William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”? How do the fathers in the two works differ from and/or resemble each other?

The “Genius” (1915) As Eugene Witla, the son of a salesman, grows up in Alexandria, Illinois, at the end of the 19th century,

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his increasing attraction to beauty leads him to a career in Chicago as a newspaper illustrator, while his increasing interest in sex leads him to involvement with one woman after another. Although he eventually marries an attractive young woman named Angela Blue, for whom he had felt a strong initial infatuation, his liaisons with other women continue as his career (now centered in New York) waxes, wanes, then waxes again. Eventually he becomes obsessed with Suzanne Dale, the beautiful and much younger daughter of a woman who is closely associated with his powerful employer; however, when Suzanne’s mother becomes aware of Eugene’s designs on her daughter, she uses her friendship with his employer to put Eugene’s job at risk, but Witla refuses his employer’s ultimatum, loses his job, breaks with his wife, soon becomes a widower, and ultimately returns to his original devotion to art. This novel, which is obviously and highly autobiographical, caused a furor when it was fi rst published in 1915. By the following summer the book’s publisher was threatened with legal action by a New York morals group, and although the threat initially succeeded in having the book withdrawn from sale, Dreiser won the vocal support of many influential intellectuals. Some of these figures (such as H. L. Mencken) doubted the artistic value of the work, but they nevertheless championed it because of their support of free speech. Once again, then, Dreiser had made a name for himself as much for the content of a novel as for any artistic skill it possessed; he had caused another scandal, this time by writing a book that dealt so relentlessly with sex. Aside from its blatantly erotic emphasis, however, the book is also typical of Dreiser in numerous other ways. The profession of Eugene’s father, for instance, implies the industrial, commercial concerns usually found in Dreiser’s fictions; his books reflect the transformation, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from a rural America dependent on farming to an urban America dependent on trade and industry. The Midwest setting is also typical, as is Eugene’s movement fi rst to Chicago and then to New York (a pattern also found in Sister Car-

rie, as well as in Dreiser’s own life). In describing the energy of Chicago, Dreiser paints his usual picture of a dynamic metropolis, but it is not long before Eugene also learns (in standard Dreiserian fashion) the importance of money in such a setting and the risks of being poor. This emphasis on the practical aspects of the struggle for survival is also typical of Dreiser, while Eugene’s quick movement through a series of menial jobs not only reflects aspects of Dreiser’s own early existence but also illustrates his usual depiction of the less glamorous aspects of everyday work in a competitive, capitalist America. Eugene’s innate talent as an artist and his attraction toward beauty remind us of the theatrically gifted title character of Sister Carrie, while his philosophical conversations with Angela about their contrasting goals in life remind us how important ideas often are in Dreiser’s fiction. When Eugene moves to New York, we see once more how, in Dreiser’s writings, a huge city can seem both beautiful and intimidating, and we also see again how skillful Dreiser is in depicting the actual facts of American life in the era in which he lived, especially in his focus on New York’s immigrants and its industrial economy. Eugene, meanwhile, is typical of Dreiser’s main characters in his willingness to challenge traditional standards of conduct, especially where sexuality is concerned. Furthermore, Eugene also resembles Dreiser himself in his explicit interest in the Darwinian ideas of Herbert Spencer, his skepticism about the ultimate meaning of human existence, and his doubts about the institution of marriage. Eugene’s experiences as a painter in New York reflect Dreiser’s own experiences as a writer in the same city: Just as Dreiser’s writings caused controversy but earned him a decent living, the same is true of Eugene’s paintings, and just as Dreiser’s writings were often criticized for their grim portrayals of life in large cities, so the same thing happens with Eugene’s art. Moreover, just as Dreiser himself suffered from psychological depression and financial failure after achieving a measure of success, so does Eugene after he returns from a trip to Europe. Here as elsewhere, then, Dreiser makes it clear that

Theodore Dreiser

economic movement in America is very defi nitely a two-way street: A person can be financially successful one moment and in fi nancial peril the next. Life in modern capitalist societies is uncertain and full of potential pitfalls; relations with other people tend to be unstable; humans are essentially isolated and alone; and their prospects for real and enduring happiness are governed far more by chance than by choice. Eugene, as do most people, acts according to certain inner compulsions he seems powerless to comprehend or control, and in acting on his drives he is willing (unlike many people) to transgress the dictates of conventional social morality. Personal freedom is a goal prized by many of Dreiser’s main characters, but these characters are embedded in a complex web of social and economic relations that make it difficult for them to enjoy the kind of liberty they seek and prize. Eugene (as does Dreiser himself) seems to consider marriage in particular a kind of snare—an artificial attempt to impose limits on the sexual impulses that are among the most compelling forces of human (especially male) nature. In his fi nal pursuit of Suzanne, Eugene learns once more (as do so many of Dreiser’s other characters) that economic success and social acceptance can vanish in a flash, leaving a person, quite suddenly, both financially and emotionally needy. At the end of the novel, when Eugene sees Suzanne years after their whirlwind affair, they pass without speaking—a fi nal example of Dreiser’s typical emphasis on man’s essential loneliness and alienation in a universe that is fundamentally indifferent to human happiness. No simplistic or conventional philosophy (and certainly not the Christian Science espoused by Eugene’s sister as the novel closes) can make sense of the complexity and the sadness of much of human life. Only an artist like Eugene or like Dreiser, who sticks close to the facts of actual experience, can even hope to have any chance of depicting life with any kind of accuracy and honesty. This, at least, is how Dreiser would justify his own ambitions as a writer and his own achievement in this particular novel. It is also how Randolph Bourne, one of Dreiser’s contemporaries, justified the book when he memorably wrote in an early review that

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Mr. Dreiser compels and convinces almost entirely in spite of his method. He has no distinction of style. His conversation is negligible, and at times he falls even below the level of cheapness. He is portentously wordy. He has no humor. And yet one reads him. In the 736 pages, one skips only the business and social details—which are too minute to be even good photography. One reads him because he never forgets that he is talking about life as it is lived, and because he takes it seriously. . . . He is always saved by a plodding sincerity. His people are rarely desirable or interesting. Yet they live and you cannot escape them. (245)

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the depiction of personal ambition and of American society in this novel and in F. SCOTT FITZGER ALD’s The Great Gatsby. Which novel is more effective in characterization and style, and why? 2. To what degree and in what ways is Eugene a sympathetic character? Choose a specific section of the novel and discuss how and why Eugene is depicted unfavorably or favorably there. 3. Study the life of Dreiser and discuss the ways this novel reflects that life, particularly in its treatment of women. Compare and contrast the depiction of women in this book with their depictions in other works by Dreiser. 4. Compare and contrast the depiction of marriage in this novel and in ERNEST H EMINGWAY’s short story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Does either work suggest a plausible alternative to marriage? What kinds of changes were occurring in the institution of marriage at the time Dreiser’s novel was written? 5. Study the philosophy of Herbert Spencer (whose thinking greatly influenced Dreiser) and discuss its relevance to the themes of this novel. Choose three main ideas of Spencer and, focusing on a particular section of the novel, explain how and why they relate to Dreiser’s concerns in this book.

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“The Second Choice” (1918) Shirley (last name not given) is a young woman who at fi rst is basically content not only with her routine lower-middle-class life but also with the dull but devoted man (Barton Williams) who hopes to marry her. But then she meets Arthur Bristow, an attractive, exciting, debonair, chatty, and welltraveled businessman who introduces some excitement and romance into her otherwise humdrum existence. Shirley, smitten with Arthur, distances herself from Barton, but when Arthur moves away and indicates that he has no plans for a long-term relationship, Shirley reluctantly resigns herself to her fate: She prepares for a drab life as the likely wife of the ever-loyal but unexciting Barton. This story opens abruptly and effectively with a letter from Arthur to Shirley in which he immediately adopts a patronizing, controlling tone as he gives her the brush-off and denies her request that he return the letters she had written to him. By the end of the second sentence he is already mentioning his “travels” (135), thus emphasizing, by contrast, Shirley’s sense of confi nement, and by the middle of the second paragraph he is referring to the “great big skyscraper” visible outside his window in distant Pittsburgh, thus emphasizing (as usual) Dreiser’s characteristic themes of American urbanization, industrial growth, and commercial expansion. In this story as elsewhere in his writings, Dreiser skillfully catches the tone and rhythms of the colloquial speech of his day (particularly when the self-consciously witty Arthur is speaking), just as he also adopts, as sometimes elsewhere, an objective, distanced tone of his own in the narration. However, no philosophical disquisitions interrupt the flow of this story, as they sometimes do in Dreiser’s other works; nor does Dreiser interject his own voice conspicuously into the telling of the tale. Instead, we see everything from Shirley’s rather desperate and increasingly frustrated point of view, and Dreiser does a skillful job of conveying indirectly Shirley’s ways of thinking, feeling, and speaking. As in many of Dreiser’s other writings, key words are repeated here to striking effect (in this case, the recurring word dull adds to our sense of the literal monotony of Shirley’s existence), and although the

story ends by depicting Shirley surrounded by family and assuming her eventual marriage to Barton, it nonetheless ironically conveys her profound sense of loneliness, disappointment, failure, and defeated desire—themes all quite common in Dreiser’s writings. Despite (or rather, because of) the fact that she is left with the somewhat fawning Barton, Shirley feels like a failure (another standard motif in Dreiser’s works), and the title of the story subtly reminds us that in Dreiser’s universe very few characters have any real kind of choice, since so much depends on fate, chance, and circumstance. Characters in Dreiser often strive to “succeed” in some worldly or material sense, and they sometimes do prosper in these terms for a brief period. Usually, however, they end feeling failed and frustrated, and Shirley is no exception. Like many of Dreiser’s other characters, she is driven at least in part by a real yearning for beauty (however shallow that yearning sometimes seems), and although she seems in part the focus of some understated mockery, in other respects she seems both sympathetic and even a bit pathetic. In this story as in other works Dreiser (in the words of Claude M. Simpson, Jr.) provides “a documentation of the life of instinct and emotion” (qtd. in Elias 150); Shirley’s life is dominated by her feelings more than her intellect, and, in describing her, Dreiser displays his characteristic precision in describing reality, the mind, and the emotions. All in all, the story seems carefully plotted, skillfully written, and memorable in fi nal effect.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this story with Dreiser’s “Old Rogaum and His Theresa,” paying particular attention to characterization, dialogue, and style. Which story do you fi nd more effective, and why? In particular, pay attention to the ways the characters speak. 2. Compare and contrast this story with EDWIN A RLINGTON ROBINSON’s poem “Euros Turannos,” which also deals with an erotically frustrated woman. How are the works similar and different in style, point of view, and tone? Which of the two women is more sympathetic, and why?

Theodore Dreiser

3. At the end of Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie, the title character has apparently achieved success, but at the end of this story the main character apparently has failed. On a deeper level, however, how are their experiences similar? 4. Compare and contrast Shirley to the title character of T. S. ELIOT’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” How are the characters similar in their desires and fi nal fates, but how do they also differ thanks (in part) to their different genders and social circumstances? 5. Compare and contrast the yearnings and disappointments of Shirley with those of the main character of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. In particular, discuss the fi nal fates of the two characters.

An American Tragedy (1925) Clyde Griffiths, whose parents are missionaries in Kansas City, works there when he is an adolescent in a large hotel, where he is exposed to the high life of money and power and where he also meets a group of friends with whom, while driving home after a party one night, he is involved fi rst in a hitand-run accident and then in a serious wreck as the group try to elude police. Clyde, having escaped both injury and arrest, stows away on a train and eventually winds up in Chicago, where he happens to meet a rich uncle, who offers him a job in New York State—a job that puts Clyde in contact with Roberta Alden, a fellow worker, with whom he begins a sexual relationship, although Clyde is far more interested in the rich and beautiful Sondra Finchley, who seems to promise him entry into a world of wealth and influence. However, when Roberta announces that she is pregnant and expects Clyde to marry her, he concocts a plan to get rid of her through an apparently accidental drowning—a plan he eventually rejects, only to have it come to pass, ironically, through a real accident that leads eventually to his own execution for intentional murder. An American Tragedy is often considered Dreiser’s best novel; certainly it was his most success-

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ful, and clearly it employs many of his most typical themes and stylistic techniques. The emphasis on Clyde’s early poverty, for instance, is a standard feature of Dreiser’s fiction, as are the initial midwestern setting and Clyde’s eventual migration to New York (although here the fi nal setting is not New York City but upstate locales). Clyde, as do many of Dreiser’s central characters, starts out near the bottom of the social ladder but, through a combination of hard work and good luck, begins his ascent to prominence and “success.” Indeed, the struggle for success is one of the most common of Dreiser’s themes, and the same is true of Dreiser’s typical focus on a young person’s initiation into big-city life—an initiation that almost always involves temptations of one sort or another. It is hardly a coincidence that Clyde’s departure from Kansas City involves both an automobile and a train, since both forms of transportation were symbols of the new industrial economy that was rapidly reshaping American society during (and even before) Dreiser’s lifetime. Nor is it a coincidence that Clyde’s fi rst stop after he leaves his hometown is Chicago, the great midwestern metropolis that often serves, in Dreiser’s fiction, as the emblem of American urbanization and as the Mecca to which countless people from all over the region (and indeed all over the world) were being drawn in hopes of better lives through better incomes and greater freedom. Often these hopes were disappointed, but Clyde, through the kind of lucky accident that is often a feature of Dreiser’s fiction (and that Dreiser considered a common feature of life itself), happens to meet a rich relative who gives the youth access to a world of even greater opportunity and even greater temptation. Clyde’s journey to New York symbolizes the kind of literal and figurative mobility that was increasingly common in Dreiser’s world and that is also a standard feature of Dreiser’s novels. Clyde moves not only horizontally (from the Midwest to the even more powerful East) but also vertically (from menial jobs to a supervisory position and then to the possibility of real wealth and power). Both kinds of movement are common in Dreiser’s books, but those books also inevitably reveal that

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what goes up may also come down. Before Clyde falls, however, we see him both as seducer and as seduced, and indeed seduction is another of the most common motifs in Dreiser’s fiction (Elias 147). Clyde, motivated mainly by sexual appetite (one more predictable feature of Dreiser’s writings because, according to Dreiser, it was a driving force in human life), sets his sights on Roberta Alden, but his willingness to engage in sex without commitment reflects not only Dreiser’s own lifestyle but also the kind of erotic liberty that was increasingly common in American society and that many readers found most disturbing in Dreiser’s writings. Clyde, however, not only seduces Roberta but is himself seduced by the prospect of possessing beauty, wealth, and influence through a possible relationship with Sondra Finchley. Here as in much of Dreiser’s work, a character (as does much of society at large) defi nes success in terms of worldly prosperity rather than in terms of “moral growth, self-discovery, and awareness” (Elias 153). Clyde’s determination to avoid a forced marriage to Roberta reflects the usual tendency, in Dreiser’s novels, for many characters to regard marriage as confi ning and bothersome. Meanwhile, Clyde’s willingness, fi rst, to seek an abortion-inducing drug, and then, second, to force Roberta to seek an abortion-providing doctor (who refuses to help them) is revealing in itself. Such behavior by Clyde exemplifies Dreiser’s grim and unfl inching realism in depicting life as it was actually lived in his time, when scientific and medical advances made such “solutions” more feasible than they might have seemed a century or two before. In typical Dreiserian fashion, it is only by chance or accident that Clyde stumbles across a desperate escape from his dilemma: He happens to read a newspaper article about two people who died in an accident while boating, and so he himself begins to concoct an “accidental” drowning for Roberta. To him, her pregnancy (and indeed her existence) now seems mainly a physical inconvenience to be solved in a purely mechanical fashion; in his Darwinian struggle for survival and success, she has become an impediment that needs to be removed. He therefore drives her to a distant resort, takes her

out onto the lake in a small boat, and contemplates killing her. In the end he cannot bring himself to do it, but when she, sensing that he is disturbed by something, tries to touch him, he impulsively recoils and his camera accidentally hits her. Rising to help her and to say he is sorry, he unintentionally tips the boat; both lose their balance; both fall into the water; Roberta is struck on the head by the boat; and, as she calls for help, confused thoughts race through Clyde’s tortured mind: “But this—this—is not this that which you have been thinking and wishing for this while—you in your great need? And behold! For despite your fear, your cowardice, this—this—has been done for you. An accident—an accident—an unintentional blow on your part is now saving you the labor of what you sought, and yet did not have the courage to do! But will you now, and when you need not, since it is an accident, by going to her rescue, once more plunge yourself in the horror of that defeat and failure which has so tortured you and from which this now releases you? You might save her. But again you might not! For see how she strikes about. She is stunned. She herself is unable to save herself and by her erratic terror, if you draw near her now, may bring about your own death also. But you desire to live! And her living will make your life not worth while from now on. Rest but a moment—a fraction of a minute! Wait—wait—ignore the pity of that appeal. And then—then—But there! Behold. It is over. She is sinking now. You will never, never see her alive any more—ever. And there is your own hat upon the water—as you wished. And upon the boat, clinging to that rowlock a veil belonging to her. Leave it. Will it not show that this was an accident?” (531–532)

It would be hard to imagine a scene more typical of Dreiser or more characteristic of his view of the way the universe operates. In the end, Clyde’s ambiguous intentions count for little; chance reigns supreme; and, just as in Sister Carrie George Hurstwood thinks about stealing, decides not to,

Theodore Dreiser

but then does so after he accidentally locks money outside a safe, so in this book Clyde plans to kill, decides not to, and then witnesses his plan succeed almost in spite of himself. In a reasonable universe—in a universe that made moral and logical sense—events like these could not happen, but that is not the kind of universe Dreiser thought existed. Just as Clyde began his path to success through an accidental encounter with a rich uncle, so he begins his path to execution through the accidental tipping of a boat. In Dreiser’s world, nothing is stable for long, and luck can be both good and bad. The paragraph just quoted is also worth discussing for its stylistic features. The prose is more dramatic and compelling than much of Dreiser’s writing, which can often be dry, clinically factual, and crammed with excessive detail. Here, though, the detail is effectively mental and emotional: Dreiser is not describing the appearance of a room or the exterior of a building but the second-by-second evolution of a person thinking and feeling under intense strain and pressure. The passage thus illustrates what has been called Dreiser’s “exactitude in the use of . . . psychological details” (Elias 157), and it also illustrates his frequent emphasis on repetition (particularly in the simple but emphatic word this) as well as his admiration for a style that could be brusque, raw, powerful, and unadorned. Sometimes the phrasing here, as often in Dreiser, seems mannered or hackneyed (“And behold!”), but for the most part it is vivid, gripping, and full of irony, as in Clyde’s legitimate fear that if he tries to save Roberta, they both may die. Indeed, from this point on, the novel spirals ever-downward into ever-darkening irony. Irony upon irony: That is life as Dreiser often saw it. Roberta’s body is discovered; papers in her room connect her to Clyde; her imploring letters to Clyde— about the baby and marriage—are found; and Clyde is arrested and charged with deliberate murder. The wealthy, influential friends, whom Clyde had sought to impress, quickly distance themselves from him, and he is convicted of a death he wanted but did not want, a death he caused but did not cause. Critical and scholarly response to An American Tragedy has been extensive and varied. A number of scholars have focused, for instance, on “the extent

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of Dreiser’s dependence on court records” of the trial and conviction of Chester Gillette, whose killing of Grace Brown in 1906 provided the model for the basic plot of Dreiser’s novel (Elias 152–153, 174–175). Dreiser drew extensively on newspaper accounts of the trial; sometimes the parallels between the phrasing of those accounts and the phrasing in his book are almost exact. Nevertheless, the consensus of opinion is that Dreiser heightened and transformed the basic facts of the Gillette trial. H. L. Mencken, for instance, in his introduction to a 1948 edition of the novel, argued that the concluding sections of the book, including the trial scenes, “have in them all the plausibility that made Sister Carrie a memorable event in American letters. To be sure, they stick close to the record—but surely not over-close. It is Dreiser who is telling the story, not some commonplace reporter. [The novel] offers a picture of profound tragedy seen through a suitable melancholy temperament. . . . It is not only a minutely detailed picture of one unhappy young man’s life; it is a commentary upon human life in general” (11). Indeed, scholars have also studied the ways Dreiser worked many details from his own youth into the book, and, according to Mencken, the novel reflects Dreiser’s own outlook on life at the time—an outlook that saw existence as “predominantly hopeless and meaningless” (12). In addition to discussing the roots of the book in “real life” (whether the life of Gillette, Dreiser, or American society in general), scholars have discussed its themes, structure, and techniques as well as its artistic merit. They have studied, for instance, its use of wordplay and parallels (including parallel characters and scenes) and especially have debated whether or not its prose is successful (Elias 154). Critics have also discussed the relation of Dreiser’s novel to past works (such as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, or T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land) and to the modern novels that followed it, and they have commented on the two fi lmed versions the book inspired (Elias 155; West 140–141, 147–148, 151–152). Commentators have also discussed the way Clyde’s attitudes and responses were shaped by the society in which he was raised as well as the way his behavior reflects

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assumptions that were particularly widespread in the 1920s (West 146–47). Other approaches to the novel have stressed the ways it deals with the theme of selfhood, the ways it both reflects and parodies the plots of popular Horatio Alger stories (in which a youth rises to success through luck and hard work), the ways the trial scenes (as did the original trial itself) involved violations of the Constitution, the ways Clyde’s behavior reflects the consumer-focused culture of his era, the way the novel shows the difficulty of putting one’s past behind one, the ways geographical aspects of the novel imply the impossibility of real change, and the way the book conforms (or fails to conform) to traditional notions of tragedy (West 147). The book has inspired vigorous attacks as well as impassioned defenses, but even its harshest critics often concede that it is one of Dreiser’s most effective novels, and the fact that the work continues to provoke strong debate suggests, by that fact alone, something about its power of endurance.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this novel with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which is also based on a real crime and real trial. In particular, discuss the reception of both books and discuss the ways the books were seen as reflections of American society in their particular eras. How did the two books adapt the details of the crimes and trials? 2. How does this novel fit (or fail to fit) with traditional notions of tragedy, such as those outlined by Aristotle in his Poetics? Aristotle argues that a truly tragic character must be noble but flawed. Does this description fit Clyde? 3. Track down a detailed record of the transcripts of the trial of Chester Gillette (or the newspaper accounts of that trial) and compare and contrast Dreiser’s version of the events with the details reported in his sources. How and why does Dreiser transform the original “facts” of the case? 4. To what degree, and in what ways, is Clyde a character who provokes sympathy, respect, or interest? In what ways is he a complex character rather than a mere caricature?

5. Choose a brief section of the novel, analyze its effectiveness in detail, and then either endorse or dispute the charges often leveled against Dreiser’s skill as a writer. In particular, discuss his diction (or choice of words) as well as his use of symbolism, sentence structure, and imagery.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON DREISER AND HIS WORK 1. Which book—Dreiser’s An American Tragedy or Melville’s Moby-Dick—is the more successful novel, and why? Compare the two books in plot, characterization, and tone; in particular, which is more truly tragic? 2. Compare and contrast Sister Carrie and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn as novels of growth and initiation, in which a main character evolves as s/he matures. In particular, which character seems more genuinely fulfi lled at the end of the novel in which he or she appears? 3. Why does humor tend not to be a trait found in Dreiser’s writing? How do Dreiser’s general attitudes tend to discourage an emphasis on humor or comedy? Does his writing suffer because of its heavily serious tone? 4. In his style, themes, and basic outlook, how does Dreiser compare and contrast with Sherwood Anderson? For example, how and in what ways are both authors “realistic” writers? Compare and contrast two specific passages from their works. 5. Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” both deal with deaths that seem simultaneously random and planned. How do Dreiser and O’Connor differ, however, in their styles, methods, and fundamental attitudes? In particular, how do the authors’ contrasting attitudes toward religion affect these works? 6. Choose a novel by Dreiser not discussed here and discuss the ways it exemplifies or departs from his typical style, themes, tone, and attitudes. Choose specific scenes from each novel and compare and contrast them in detail.

Theodore Dreiser

7. Both An American Tragedy and Sister Carrie have been made into fi lms. Compare and contrast one of the books with its fi lm adaptation(s), particularly in terms of storytelling technique and methods of characterization. 8. Explore the meaning of the term naturalism in literature and discuss the ways in which Dreiser is and is not a “naturalist.” Point to a specific passage in one of his works and describe in detail how it is influenced by naturalism. 9. Compare and contrast the theme, style, and main characters of Sister Carrie and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. In particular, discuss the conclusions of these two works and the ultimate fates of the two main characters. What do the novels imply about the lives of women during their authors’ eras? 10. Track down H. L. Mencken’s various writings on Dreiser and discuss the reasons why Mencken both championed Dreiser and sometimes criticized his writings. Which author was himself the better stylist? Compare and contrast passages from their works to substantiate your claims. WORKS CITED

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Bourne, Randolph. “Desire as Hero.” Critical Essays on Theodore Dreiser, edited by Donald Pizer, 243–246. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981.

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Dreiser, Theodore. An American Tragedy. Introduction by H. L. Mencken. Cleveland, Ohio: World, 1948. ———. Free and Other Stories. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1918. ———. Sister Carrie. Edited by Donald Pizer. New York: Norton, 1991. Elias, Robert H. “Theodore Dreiser.” Sixteen Modern American Authors: A Survey of Research and Criticism, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 123–179. New York: Norton, 1973. The International Theodore Dreiser Society. Available online. URL: http://www.uncwil.edu/dreiser. Accessed April 7, 2009. Matthiessen, F. O. “A Picture of Conditions.” In Critical Essays on Theodore Dreiser, edited by Donald Pizer, 169–185. Boston: Hall, 1981. Pizer, Donald E. Theodore Dreiser. Literary Masters Series. Detroit: Gale, 2000. Sloane, David E. E. Sister Carrie: Theodore Dreiser’s Sociological Tragedy. New York: Twayne, 1992. West, James L. W., III. “Theodore Dreiser.” In Sixteen Modern American Authors. Vol. 2, A Survey of Research and Criticism since 1972, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 120–153. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990.

Robert C. Evans

W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1963) The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line. (“Of the Dawn of Freedom”)

W

illiam Edward Burghardt DuBois, one of the most important African-American writers and political figures, was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to Alfred DuBois and Mary Silvina Burghardt. The couple had married in 1867 despite opposition from Mary’s family, and, when Alfred shortly relocated to Connecticut, Mary declined his invitation to follow him there. Alfred stayed apart from his wife and child and in fact may have passed away in 1870; in any case, young William was raised mainly by his mother (who was employed to do housework) and never really knew his father. Nevertheless, he thrived in elementary school and enjoyed much standard boyhood fun, although his life changed for the worse when a stroke in 1879 left his mother partially handicapped. Although DuBois and his mother never had much money, as an adolescent he earned extra income by doing various odd jobs, all the while working hard in high school, reading widely, and taking part in many physical activities and sports. By 1883 he had begun writing not only for his high school newspaper but also for newspapers in Great Barrington and New York, and he had begun to identify more strongly with the broader African-American community. In 1884 he was the only black member of his small high school graduating class, and, although he hoped someday to attend Harvard, he temporarily had to defer that dream because of concerns about his mother’s

circumstances, worries about his own fi nances, and uncertainties about his likelihood of academic success. However, when his mother died in 1885, local churches and their ministers collected funds that helped DuBois enter the recently founded Fisk University, a black college in Nashville, Tennessee. Although a bout with fever nearly killed him during his fi rst months there, he eventually recovered and soon became strongly involved in many aspects of college life, taking courses in languages, literature, philosophy, and science. He twice served as a schoolteacher in rural Tennessee during his summers at Fisk while also cultivating his interests both in classical European music and in the native music of his fellow black Americans. After receiving his bachelor’s degree from Fisk in 1888, he was fi nally able to attend Harvard, which he entered as a junior with assistance from a grant and a later scholarship. Although his relations with his fellow (mostly white) students were somewhat distant, he studied with some major scholars, including the philosophers William James and George Santayana, all the while earning spending money by doing various jobs, by speaking to local religious groups, and by writing for a black newspaper. In 1890 he won a prize for public speaking and received his Harvard B.A. with a degree in philosophy. A speech on Jefferson Davis won national notice; a small bequest from his grandfather’s estate helped his fi nances,

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W. E. B. DuBois

but perhaps the major event of this period was his acceptance into the graduate program in political science at Harvard, which twice awarded him fellowships. Although initially frustrated by disappointments in his efforts to fi nd support for further study, in 1891 he nevertheless was awarded a master’s degree from Harvard, and then, in 1892, he received enough funding to permit him to study in Germany and travel throughout Europe. Returning to the United States without having received his doctorate, he applied for a number of jobs at black American colleges and was eventually hired to teach classical and modern languages at Wilberforce University in Xenia, Ohio. Although DuBois grew increasingly unhappy there, it was at Wilberforce that he met Nina Gomer, whom he married in 1896, shortly after receiving his doctorate from Harvard in 1895—the fi rst African American to attain that distinction. His doctoral dissertation, a study of the suppression of the African slave trade, was published in book form in 1896, the same year DuBois was hired by the University of Pennsylvania to undertake a major sociological study of the African-American population of Philadelphia. By 1897 DuBois had become affi liated with Atlanta University, a black college with which he would be connected, off and on, for much of the rest of his life. He was becoming increasingly prominent as an African-American scholar and intellectual, focusing especially on sociological research and publications and studying numerous aspects of black American life. In 1899 his study The Philadelphia Negro was published by the University of Pennsylvania; however, this satisfying achievement was counterbalanced by the early death of his fi rst son, who had been born in 1897. While living in the South, DuBois became increasingly repulsed by his experiences with segregation and discrimination, which he always resisted; partly as a result of his encounters with such prejudice, his journalism, then and later, became more and more politically outspoken. By 1900 he was active in legislative and legal efforts to oppose discrimination, and in the same year he received recognition in Europe (where he was traveling) for his scholarly work and politi-

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cal advocacy. Later that year, he also welcomed the birth of his daughter, Yolande. By 1902 he was more and more disenchanted with the leadership of BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, the most prominent African-American spokesman in the country, who emphasized economic progress (rather than full civil and political rights) and who stressed the need for vocational training for blacks. DuBois, in contrast, advocated broader political advancement and emphasized the need to train the most gifted black students in the same ways the best white students were trained, exposing them to the broadest possible education. His expression of these and other views in his significant book The Souls of Black Folk (1903) gained him broad national attention and established him both as one of the most eloquent spokesmen of his people and as a challenger to Washington’s leadership. Despite attempts in 1904 to collaborate with Washington, DuBois increasingly set an independent course, even accusing his rival in 1905 of attempting to suppress opposition in the black press. In that same year DuBois was himself voted leader of a newly formed organization to advocate full rights for blacks, and in 1906, responding to whiteon-black violence in Atlanta, he even took up arms to defend his own home. His devotion to scholarship, journalism, and politics continued during 1907 and 1908 and culminated in the publication in 1909 of John Brown, a biography of the notorious antebellum abolitionist. In 1910 he assumed a prominent position in the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization run mostly by white liberals that nevertheless soon became one of the most important civil rights groups in the country. DuBois moved to New York to establish, edit, and contribute to the organization’s monthly journal, the Crisis, although he quickly entered into confl ict with other leaders of the organization because of his political assertiveness and general independence. By 1911 he had published his fi rst novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece, while also building the circulation of the NAACP’s magazine and continuing his confl ict with Washington. Increasingly seen as

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a prominent national spokesman for his race, he was now also rising to greater influence within the NAACP itself, although his talent for stirring up controversy (even or especially within the black community) remained unabated. In 1915 his historical study The Negro was published, and in the same year the feud between DuBois and Washington ended with the latter’s death. By this point the main patterns of DuBois’s life had become established. He was a successful editor, a prominent political advocate, a controversial figure both within and outside the AfricanAmerican community, a prolific journalist, and a hands-on civic organizer. He took strong positions on disputed issues (so much so that he was actually threatened with prosecution in 1918 for attacking racism in the armed forces), although he also sometimes was criticized for being too accommodating to white interests. Shortly after the end of World War I he traveled once more to Europe, where he took a leading position in 1919 in the fi rst Pan-African Congress while also continuing his advocacy on behalf of African-American soldiers—advocacy for which he was attacked in Congress. Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (a collection of essays published in 1920) provoked further attention and attacks, while in 1921 DuBois gained further prominence at a new meeting in Europe designed to oppose colonialism in Africa. Back home, in 1922, he opposed lynching, continued the challenge (which had begun a few years earlier) to the leadership of the black separatist Marcus Garvey, and, in 1923, made his fi rst trip to Africa. In 1924 he published The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America, and he also participated in opposition to the current president of Fisk University, his alma mater. By 1925 and 1926 he had become involved, in various ways, in the Harlem Renaissance (a significant cultural movement among blacks), and in the latter year he also visited the Soviet Union, at that time the center of international communism. On his return to the United States he praised the Soviet government, which then was less than a decade old. During the ensuing years and decades, DuBois remained constantly busy as a writer, editor, and

political activist, and even an occasional political candidate. His novel Dark Princess: A Romance appeared in 1929, and his historical monograph Black Reconstruction was published in 1935. In 1939 Black Folk, Then and Now was issued, and in the following year his autobiography, Dusk of Dawn, was printed. In 1944 he became the fi rst AfricanAmerican member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1945 he published not only the fi rst volume of a long-planned Encyclopedia of the Negro but also a political work called Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace. In 1947 he edited a book-length collection of essays (titled An Appeal to the World) on behalf of American blacks. Meanwhile, in 1948 his often rocky, on-again-off-again relationship with the NAACP fi nally ended when a memo by DuBois criticizing the organization’s director was published in the national press. By this point, however, DuBois had also moved much further left than many other members of the NAACP could readily accept. His involvement with organizations sympathetic to communism and the Soviet Union had also become increasingly prominent and led to much subsequent confl ict with the U.S. government. After DuBois’s fi rst wife died in 1950, he married Shirley Graham in 1951 at a time when he was facing indictment for his involvement in alleged communist-front organizations, although a judge later found him innocent of these charges. His book about this experience, In Battle for Peace, was published in 1952, and his involvement with communist-oriented groups and ideas continued and even deepened. Not all of his writings, however, were narrowly political: In 1957 he published The Ordeal of Mansart, the fi rst of three historical novels, which was followed in 1959 by Mansart Builds a School and in 1961 by Worlds of Color. By this point DuBois was in his 90s, and, although respected by many, was also a figure of great controversy. He now identified so strongly with communism, for instance, that he actually joined the American Communist Party in 1961 after years of traveling (despite the wishes of the U.S. government) in communist countries as well as in Europe and Africa. In Africa, indeed, he was considered a kind of father figure in many countries that had

W. E. B. DuBois

recently won their independence from colonialism. Thus it was no great surprise when, in 1963, he chose to become a citizen of Ghana, where he died on August 27, in his 95th year.

The Philadelphia Negro (1899) The Philadelphia Negro is a massive sociological and historical study outlining the conditions of AfricanAmerican life in Pennsylvania’s largest city at the end of the 19th century. The study was commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania, which had been approached by a group of prominent (mostly white) citizens who were concerned about the widespread conditions of poverty, crime, alcoholism, and illness among the city’s blacks. By interviewing thousands of black citizens, studying nearly every relevant social institution, and compiling an extraordinary number of statistics, DuBois hoped to provide solid data that could be used to improve not only the lives of the city’s blacks but also the social health of the municipality in general. In an introduction to the book, Samuel McCune Lindsay, writing on behalf of the university, described how DuBois devoted all of his time to systematic field-work among the Negroes, especially in the Seventh Ward, attending their meetings, their churches, their business, social and political gatherings, visiting their schools and institutions, and, most important of all, conducting a house-to-house visitation in their families, through which he came in personal contact with over ten thousand Negro inhabitants of the city. (vii)

Writing 40 years after the publication of his landmark study, DuBois himself recounted his thinking at the time the work was undertaken: “The Negro problem was in my mind a matter of systematic investigation and intelligent understanding. The world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know. The ultimate evil was stupidity. The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation” (Writings 596). Although he later expressed

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skepticism about the motives of the study’s backers as well as frustration with his own lowly status at the university (Writings 596), he threw himself into his work with passionate commitment, collecting nearly all the data himself and producing, in the end, a report almost 400 pages in length—a work that is full of graphs, charts, maps, and tables but one that is also characterized by its clear style, relentless logic, and frequent eloquence and passion. DuBois does not hesitate to criticize blacks for self-destructive behavior, but he makes it obvious that most of their problems have resulted from their history of oppression and the current climate of pervasive discrimination constantly confronting them. His tone is always rational and measured; he constantly strives to see the complexities in every situation he studies and to reject simplistic explanations. He is careful to study the background that helped create any contemporary problem, and his focus is always on practical, realistic solutions to any problem he describes. In every case the solutions he proposes involve changes in the behavior and attitudes of both blacks and whites, and he lays a special obligation on better-educated blacks to assist the struggling masses. As the study reaches its fi nal pages, DuBois becomes more and more outspoken about the ways racial prejudice has not only crippled the lives and spirits of black Philadelphians but also has harmed the city as a whole. At one point, for instance, he argues that the class of Negroes which the prejudices of the city have distinctly encouraged is that of the criminal, the lazy and the shiftless; for them the city teems with institutions and charities; for them there is succour and sympathy; for them Philadelphians are thinking and planning; but for the educated and industrious young colored man who wants work and not platitudes, wages and not alms, just rewards and not sermons— for such colored men Philadelphia apparently has no use. (352)

Later, in his fi nal chapter, DuBois offers “a few plain propositions [that] may be laid down as axiomatic”:

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1. The Negro is here to stay. 2. It is to the advantage of all, both black and white, that every Negro should make the best of himself. 3. It is the duty of the Negro to raise himself by every effort to the standards of modern civilization and not to lower those standards in any degree. 4. It is the duty of the white people to guard their civilization against debauchment by themselves and others; but in order to do this it is not necessary to hinder and retard the efforts of an earnest people to rise, simply because they lack faith in the ability of that people. 5. With these duties in mind and with a spirit of self-help, mutual aid and co-operation, the two races should strive side by side to realize the ideals of the republic and make this truly a land of equal opportunity for all men. (388–389) Later in the same chapter DuBois condemns racial discrimination as “morally wrong, politically dangerous, industrially wasteful, and socially silly,” and he insists that it “is the duty of whites to stop it, and to do so primarily for their own sakes” (394). Racial prejudice, he concludes, “is a disgrace to the city—a disgrace to its Christianity, to its spirit of justice, [and] to its common sense,” and he concludes by asking: what can be the end of such a policy but increased crime and increased excuse for crime? Increased poverty and more reason to be poor? Increased political serfdom of the mass of black voters to the bosses and rascals who divide the spoils? Surely here [in the ending of prejudice] lies the fi rst duty of a civilized city. (396)

As the quoted passages show, The Philadelphia Negro is not a turgid exercise in boring sociological jargon; it is, instead, a constantly interesting, consistently illuminating, and frequently eloquent example of nonfiction prose at its best. Social scientists consider it a landmark study, and surely it is one of the earliest and most detailed examinations of the actual lives of

black Americans ever undertaken. Whatever the motives of the group that commissioned it, they received from DuBois a classic that remains as intriguing today as it was when it fi rst appeared in print.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast The Philadelphia Negro with chapter 5 (on the city of Atlanta) of The Souls of Black Folk. How (at least according to DuBois) are the two cities comparable in their remote histories, present challenges, and potentials for future development? What role does education play in DuBois’s hopes for both places? 2. Compare and contrast DuBois’s depiction of the conditions of blacks in Philadelphia at the turn of the 20th century with R ICHARD WRIGHT’s depiction of the condition of blacks in Chicago in the 1930s in his novel Native Son. How do the books present such issues as poverty, crime, racism, and rebellion? 3. Compare and contrast The Philadelphia Negro with JACK LONDON’s 1903 study of poverty in England’s capital city, The People of the Abyss. Discuss the ways both authors prepared to write their books, the conditions they described, the tones they adopted, and the solutions they proposed.

The Souls of Black Folk (1903) The Souls of Black Folk, which consists of 14 chapters sandwiched between a brief “Forethought” and an even briefer “Afterthought,” is widely considered DuBois’s most important work; certainly it has been one of his most influential. First issued in 1903, it consists of nine revisions of previously published pieces, along with five wholly new sections. Diverse in topics, methods, approaches, and styles, the work is held together by DuBois’s insistence in its very fi rst paragraph that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line” (Writings 359). By exploring so many different issues in such various ways, DuBois offers

W. E. B. DuBois

not only a complex picture of African-American life at the turn of the 20th century but also a comprehensive sense of his own interests, passions, personality, and stylistic skills. One distinctive feature of the book—and a key source of unity—is the appearance of brief musical quotations at the beginning of each chapter. These bars of music are taken from the “sorrow songs” (or spirituals) that DuBois considered not only one of the great achievements of African-American creativity but also one of the great glories of American culture in general. Often these pieces of music are juxtaposed with quotations from famous European or American poets, thus implying DuBois’s larger belief in the fruitful interaction of people of goodwill from diverse racial and national backgrounds; he himself was a man of wide cultural training and interests, and that fact is everywhere implied and demonstrated in this book. He was at heart a humanist who wanted his own people to be full participants in the greater development of humanity; he could not comprehend why the potential contributions of such a large, vital, and valuable segment of mankind would be suppressed or ignored. The opening chapter, titled “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” begins on a frankly personal note. DuBois describes how it feels to be treated as a living representative of a social “problem”— the problem of blacks in contemporary America (Writings 363). He recalls the day when, as a boy, he fi rst became aware that he differed from his white playmates. The boys and girls used to exchange “gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package,” and the exchanges were “merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned on me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil” (Writings 364). This passage typifies DuBois’s style in various ways, not only in its often elevated diction (“peremptorily,” “mayhap”) and in its equally frequent plainness and urgency (“heart and life and longing”) but also in its emphasis on the metaphor of the veil—an

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image DuBois emphasizes repeatedly to describe the pervasive separation of blacks from whites. Indeed, the recurring image of the veil helps lend the volume much of its thematic unity. Another key term introduced in the opening chapter is double consciousness—the tendency of American blacks to see themselves as perceived by whites. DuBois describes it as a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (Writings 364–365). In an especially significant paragraph, DuBois writes that The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain selfconscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. (Writings 365)

In the rest of the volume, DuBois eloquently describes the various obstacles to this kind of merging, and in the process he examines the shortcomings of both whites and blacks while also suggesting the potential each race possesses to attain, individually and through cooperation, the best humanistic ideals. In his second chapter (“Of the Dawn of Freedom”), DuBois operates mainly as a historian, seeking to study the period “from 1861 to 1872 so far as it relates to the American Negro” (Writings 372). He details the many practical difficulties facing the

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newly freed slaves and the haphazard bureaucracy set up to administer their affairs. One paragraph, in particular, outlines his key arguments: Such was the dawn of Freedom; such was the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which, summed up in brief, may be epitomized thus: For some fi fteen million dollars, beside the sums spent before 1865, and the dole of benevolent societies, this Bureau set going a system of free labor, established a beginning of peasant proprietorship, secured the recognition of black freedmen before courts of law, and founded the free common school in the South. On the other hand, it failed to begin the establishment of good-will between ex-masters and freedmen, to guard its work wholly from paternalistic methods which discouraged self-reliance, and to carry out to any considerable extent its implied promises to furnish the freedmen with land. Its successes were the result of hard work, supplemented by the aid of philanthropists and the eager striving of black men. Its failures were the result of bad local agents, the inherent difficulties of the work, and national neglect. (Writings 387)

Here as elsewhere, DuBois strives for—and achieves—a balanced assessment that implies his own reason, honesty, and fairness. All these traits contribute to the persuasiveness of his analysis. Perhaps the most notable of all the book’s chapters is the third, titled “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others.” Washington was the most famous black leader of his day. As the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, he was widely hailed as a champion of racial progress; his emphasis on practical economic training for blacks won the admiration and cooperation of many influential whites throughout the nation, while his tendency to de-emphasize the immediate attainment of full political rights for African Americans made him acceptable to many whites in the South. DuBois summarizes Washington’s stance as a “programme of industrial education, conciliation of the South, and submission and silence as to civil and political rights” (Writings 392)—a program DuBois

could not embrace. He felt that Washington’s ideas had led not only to an erosion of voting rights for blacks but also to the “legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro” as well as to the “steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro” (Writings 399). DuBois, by contrast, spoke for many other blacks in insisting on (1) “The right to vote,” (2) “Civic equality,” and (3) “The education of youth according to ability” (Writings 400). He argues that Washington’s “doctrine has tended to make the whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators, when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs” (Writings 403). In so directly challenging Washington’s ideas and leadership, DuBois strongly established his own status as an emerging black spokesman. Chapter 4 (“Of the Meaning of Progress”) recounts DuBois’s own experiences, during his time at Fisk, as a volunteer schoolteacher in impoverished rural areas. He describes, for instance, the apparently enthusiastic welcome he received from a white commissioner of education, who invited him to stay for dinner: “ ‘Oh,’ thought I, ‘this is lucky’; but even then fell the awful shadow of the Veil, for they ate fi rst—and then I, alone” (Writings 407). With a novelist’s touch, he vividly describes the different personalities he met among his isolated black students. He is careful not to romanticize the people he encountered or the conditions they endured, yet it is clear that he was deeply affected by his contact with these people, who shared his racial background but whose living conditions differed so greatly from the ones he had known in his youth. At one point he notes, “I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it; and yet there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness, sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from a common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above all, from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity” (Writings 410). When DuBois returns to the “tiny com-

W. E. B. DuBois

munity” 10 years later, his tone becomes movingly elegiac as he describes the bleak changes that have occurred in the interim. Chapter 5 is partly a meditation on the growing city of Atlanta but partly also a lamentation on what Atlanta, like America at large, was coming to represent, with its growing emphasis on materialism and “a lust for gold” (Writings 419). In contrast, DuBois celebrates the ideal of a true university, which should be designed to pursue “one goal— not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes” (Writings 420). He extols the liberal arts, but he simultaneously asserts that a liberal education is not for everyone. DuBois believed in equal opportunity but not in equal abilities, equal orientations, or in necessarily equal outcomes. In some ways he was an elitist, as when he notes that the founders of many of the nation’s fi rst black colleges forgot the rule of inequality:—that of the million black youth, some were fitted to know and some to dig; that some had the talent and capacity of university men, and some the talent and capacity of blacksmiths; and that true training meant neither that all should be college men nor all artisans, but that the one should be made a missionary of culture to an untaught people, and the other a free workman among serfs. And to seek to make the blacksmith a scholar is almost as silly as the more modern one of making the scholar a blacksmith; almost, but not quite. (Writings 421)

The object of the satire here is obviously Booker T. Washington, who (according to DuBois) had failed to address actual complexities, offering instead a simplistic solution to a complicated problem. Chapter 6 continues the focus on education. Titled “Of the Training of Black Men,” it argues that human problems (such as racism) “can be met in but one way—by the breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture” (Writings 425). DuBois traces the history of education in the South since the Civil War, and he reiterates themes already sounded, such as his skepticism

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about mere vocational training for all blacks and his doubts about the overemphasis on materialism in contemporary American culture (Writings 428). His elitism is also once more evident when he argues that “Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage-ground” (Writings 429). He argues eloquently that both the South and the nation will benefit from a better-educated black population (Writings 436), and he insists that the “function of the Negro college . . . is clear: it must maintain the standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact and cooperation” (Writings 437). In chapter 7, “Of the Black Belt,” DuBois describes the life of African Americans living in a part of the South known for its rich black soil, where slaves were transplanted in great numbers to pick cotton. Part-travelogue, part-history, partsociological study, the chapter describes the land and its people and the transformations that have occurred both since the Civil War. In chapter 8, “Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece,” he maintains his emphasis on the Black Belt, focusing especially on its chief crop and the unfortunate social conditions the cotton economy has bred. Chapter 9, “Of the Sons of Master and Man,” argues that it is “the strife of all honourable men of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fi ne and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and impudence and cruelty” (Writings 476). He particularly advocates the right of blacks to vote (Writings 481) and laments the continuing social separation of the races. In chapter 10 (“Of the Faith of the Fathers”) he discusses the nature of black religious life and especially the social importance of black preachers, and he laments the growth of two opposed groups of blacks (“the fi rst tending toward radicalism, the other toward hypocritical compromise” [Writings 503]), with neither group representing any


true hope for the future of the race. Once more DuBois both represents and advocates a more complex position in opposition to allegedly simplistic alternatives. Chapter 11 (“Of the Passing of the First-Born”) is the book’s most personal section, recounting the birth and early death of DuBois’s infant son. The father’s sadness at this loss is mitigated by his realization that the boy, by dying so young, has at least escaped the suffering he would have experienced growing up in a racist society—a society dominated by “the Veil” (Writings 510). However, whereas chapter 11 pays tribute to a young boy, chapter 12 (“Of Alexander Crummell”) celebrates an old man (also dead at the time the book was published), whose example as an intellectual and man had inspired DuBois, especially because of Crummell’s refusal to submit to the temptations of hate, despair, and doubt (Writings 512). DuBois extols Crummell’s dignity in the face of attempted humiliations and laments the fact that he was not better known or more highly valued. Chapter 13 (“Of the Coming of John”) is essentially a short story about two boys, playmates in a small southern town, who grow up and leave home to attend northern colleges. Both, ironically, become estranged, not only from each other but also from their own people, and when by chance they meet again, the results are tragic. Finally, in chapter 14 (“The Sorrow Songs”), DuBois turns from his own fiction to the musical poetry of his race, arguing that “by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas” (Writings 536–537). By the end of the book, then, the reader has confronted a wide swath of African-American history, personalities, experience, and culture, but the reader has also encountered one of that culture’s fi nest minds. The book’s unity results not only from its recurring themes (such as education) or images (such as “the Veil”) but also from DuBois’s sense and sensibility: His portrait of his people is inevitably also a portrait of himself. The book implicitly refutes the racist notion that blacks could not compete intellec-

tually with whites, just as it also implicitly rejects the idea that solutions to the race problem would be easy or simple. DuBois’s tone is alternately analytical and impassioned, indignant and calm, touching and sarcastic. He criticizes both blacks and whites, but he also is willing to reason or debate with anyone open to hard facts and fresh ideas. His faith in reason and his commitment to humanism are indeed among his most consistent traits, and for all the ugliness his book describes, he remains hopeful for the entire human race if it honestly is willing to confront “the problem of the color-line.”

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the ordering of chapters in The Souls of Black Folk. Can you see any logic in the way the chapters are arranged? How do the chapters “play off” each other, one chapter complicating or reinforcing the section preceding or following it? How, for instance, are chapters 11 and 12 related? What connections can be drawn between chapters 1 and 14? 2. Compare and contrast chapter 3 of this book with the speech by Booker T. Washington called the “Atlanta Compromise Speech” (or the “Atlanta Exposition Address”). On what precise points do the two men differ? Are there any points of agreement? Which aspects of each argument do you fi nd most persuasive or least persuasive, and why? 3. Examine the quotations that head each chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, and then discuss the particular relevance of those quotations to the chapters they preface. How, for instance, is the quotation from Byron that precedes chapter 3 relevant to DuBois’s response to Booker T. Washington? How is the quotation from Whittier relevant to the argument of chapter 5? 4. Compare and contrast DuBois’s chapter 11 and Ben Jonson’s poem “On My First Son.” Discuss the hopes the fathers had for their sons, the ways the mothers are presented in both works, and the ways both fathers come to terms with the deaths of their sons. 5. Choose one chapter from The Souls of Black Folk and discuss the various ways in which DuBois

W. E. B. DuBois

tries to make his arguments appealing and persuasive. How does he use appeals to emotion? How does he use appeals to reason? How does he use plain language? How does he employ elevated diction?

“The Song of the Smoke” (1907) In this four-stanza lyric poem, the voice of the black “Smoke King” proclaims its attributes and actions in strongly rhythmic, heavily repetitious, and highly alliterative phrasing. First published in the magazine Horizon in February 1907, the work is one of DuBois’s few poems. Although it is frequently reprinted, it has not been analyzed very often in much detail, perhaps because its language and meaning sometimes seem somewhat opaque. The tone of the poem is emphatic and assertive: the word I (or I’m) is its most frequently used term, and often it wins extra emphasis by being placed at the beginning of each line. Clearly the work is an assertion of pride in being black; it stresses the power of the black smoke as well as its sheer active dynamism: Verbs are heavily emphasized, especially in the present progressive tense (which implies an action that is happening at the same time the statement is written, as in “I am swinging,” “I am wringing” [ll. 3–4]). Even the adjectives often imply action, as in the use of such words as throbbing (l. 5), trading (l. 7), and toiling (l. 17). The overall effect is to give the poem a sense of enormous energy; it is easy to imagine how this “song” could indeed be set to music with a pounding, impulsive beat. Just as smoke is in constant movement, so is this poem. Paradoxically, DuBois’s lyric is both highly structured and extremely flexible. All stanzas begin and end in the same way, and the same basic patterns of grammar, sentence structure, and rhyme are constantly repeated. The poem’s shape on the page is highly regular yet constantly alternating, particularly in its use of patterned indentations. All stanzas have the same number of lines; usually the fi rst syllable of each line is strongly accented; and the rhyme scheme is highly regular: abccdddeeab.

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In addition, another trait contributing to a sense of predictable order is the poem’s characteristic use of alliteration (as in the references to “wringing worlds awry” [l. 4] and to “the thought of the throbbing mills” [l 5]). In all these ways, then, the work seems tightly organized. On the other hand, standing within and against all these ordered regularities is the poem’s phrasing, which is often unpredictable and even (sometimes) seemingly impenetrable. A reader never knows for sure what new claim the poem will make about the “Smoke King” (or even quite what is meant by that phrase itself), and thus the poem is both highly regular (in sound, shape, grammar, rhyme, and sentence structure) and yet also frequently mystifying. Like smoke itself, then, the poem seems both patterned and unstable. Lines 3–5, for instance, are clear enough in grammar and sense, but the meaning of line 6 is less obvious: What, precisely, does DuBois mean by “soul-toil kills”? Without the hyphen, the phrase would make perfect sense; with the hyphen, it seems unclear. The meaning (and relevance) of lines 14–15 is also not immediately obvious, and in general the poem proceeds in a fashion that inspires questions rather than providing answers. DuBois seems to be dealing with the two concerns that chiefly interested him as a black socialist: race and industrial capitalism. An emphasis on the grimy aspects of capitalism seems implied, for instance, in such phrases as “throbbing mills” (l. 5), “trading rills” (l. 7), “iron times” (l. 16), “the toil of toiling climes” (l. 17), “grimy hands” (l. 41), “toiling lands” (l. 42), and perhaps even “the blood of bloodless crimes” (l. 18), especially if that phrase can be interpreted as referring to the exploitation of laborers. Meanwhile, the emphasis on race seems especially prominent in stanzas 3 and 4, especially in lines 28–29 and 39–40. Finally, references or allusions to God seem to occur in every single stanza (especially in lines 9, 20, 30, and 42), perhaps implying a higher standard by which racism and capitalist exploitation can be judged and possibly even punished.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read DuBois’s discussion of “The Sorrow Songs” (chapter 14 of The Souls of Black Folk),

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and then discuss how “The Song of the Smoke” is comparable to those songs in its themes, techniques, and impact. 2. Discuss some of the specific phrases of this poem and try to relate them to the work’s larger meaning. What, for instance, do you think DuBois means when he says that smoke is “wringing worlds awry” (l. 4)? What do you think he means when he writes that smoke is “hearsing hearts unborn” (l. 37)?

The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) Blessed (Bles) Alwyn is a boy on his way to attend a school for blacks in Alabama when he encounters a spirited young girl named Zora who lives near a swamp; eventually, during the years both youths attend the school, they fall in love, but when Bles learns that Zora is not sexually “pure” (having been abused by local whites), he leaves Alabama and heads north, determined to make his way in Washington, D.C. While there he becomes politically influential but decides to return to the rural school after his strong ethics confl ict with the political corruption of the capital; meanwhile, Zora has undergone a similar transformation: After serving as a maid to a powerful white woman (also in Washington), she had decided even before Bles to return to Alabama and devote herself to supporting and enlarging the school. As their bond strengthens through their mutual devotion to this greater cause (including their attempts to defend the school against white attacks), the couple subtly renew their affection and, in the book’s fi nal scene, Bles declares his love and Zora proposes marriage. DuBois prefaces his novel with a note claiming that whatever the book may lack in artistry or beauty, it is at least honest: “In no fact or picture have I consciously set down aught the counterpart of which I have not seen or known” (11). This emphasis on truthfulness already implies that DuBois saw his work not merely as a piece of fiction but as an accurate description of political, social, and cultural conditions that he hoped to influence and change. Many themes already enunciated in

The Souls of Black Folk are repeated in the novel, including DuBois’s strong concern with the nature of black education, his implicit criticism of Booker T. Washington, his focus on life in the cotton-producing “black belt,” his stress on the ideal cooperation of well-motivated people of both races, and his concern with matters of class. Indeed, class is almost as important an issue in this novel as race: By this point in his life DuBois was a socialist, and his novel shows not only how the desire for excessive profit allegedly corrupts people of both races but also how a genuine commitment to selfless service motivates admirable individuals on either side of the “color-line.” The novel depicts the complexities of black life in both the North and the South, but it also suggests how the South was inevitably changing in ways that would forever alter the lives not only of its black citizens but especially of its whites. The whites who were particularly being affected were the old aristocracy of planters and plantation owners, who were losing their grip on power in the face of challenges not simply from blacks but from the white poor and from white commercial interests, both in the South and in the North. One of the most interesting characters in the book is Caroline Wynn, who does not appear until the novel is half over. Whereas some of the other figures in the work are clearly caricatures whose motives are simplistic and whose behavior is fairly predictable, Wynn is a talented, articulate, influential black woman whose personality is somewhat complex: She is selfish, but she knows and partly regrets that she is; she is cynical, but her cynicism is partly born of real pain and thus makes her partially sympathetic: “Miss Caroline Wynn of Washington had little faith in the world and its people. Nor was this wholly her fault. The world had dealt cruelly with the young dreams and youthful ambitions of the girl; partly with its usual heartlessness, partly with that cynical and deadening reserve fund which it has to-day for its darker peoples” (253). Caroline Wynn admires the idealism of Bles Alwyn, but she also seeks to exploit it; Bles, meanwhile, fi nds himself attracted by Caroline’s intelligence, beauty, and ambition, and eventually he asks her to marry him. She agrees, but when she later

W. E. B. DuBois

discovers that Bles’s commitment to his principles will ruin his political career, she rejects him. Yet her response is complex: he to her was always two men: one man above men, whom she could respect but would not marry, and one man like all men, whom she would marry but could not respect. His devotion to an ideal which she thought so utterly unpractical, aroused keen curiosity and admiration. She was sure he would fail in the end, and she wanted him to fail; and somehow, somewhere back beyond herself, her better self longed to fi nd herself defeated; to see this mind stand fi rm on principle, under circumstances where she believed men never stood. (321)

Caroline Wynn, however, is only one of a number of central female characters in DuBois’s novel, and in fact the women in the book are almost always more intriguing and complex than the men. Zora, of course, is the novel’s key personality, and it is fascinating that DuBois fi nally makes Zora, rather than Bles, the book’s truly visionary figure and the chief leader of her people. Her dominant position is implied even in the novel’s very last sentences, when Bles kneels before her and when it is she, rather than he, who explicitly proposes marriage (433–434). Yet by this point she also seems to have begun to symbolize, for DuBois, not only the hope of her own people but that of the working class in general: “She did not anticipate any immediate understanding with the laboring whites, but she knew that eventually it would be inevitable. Meantime the Negro must strengthen himself and bring to the alliance as much independent economic strength as possible” (398). By the end of the novel, Zora has become the embodiment of the best hopes and ideals not only of her race but of her sex, her class, and humanity at large. DuBois has created not simply a compelling black heroine but also a feminist and socialist icon.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Zora in The Quest of the Silver Fleece with Melanctha, the black charac-

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ter who is the central figure in the central tale of GERTRUDE STEIN’s Three Lives. Discuss the women in terms of their fundamental motives, the kinds of language they use, and the degrees to which they change or develop. How might DuBois have reacted to Melanctha (and why), and how might Stein have responded to Zora (and why)? 2. Discuss the symbolism of distinct places in The Quest of the Silver Fleece. What does the swamp symbolize? What does the school symbolize? What do the plantation and the city of Washington symbolize? How does DuBois compare and contrast these different symbolic locations? 3. How does the socialism implied in this novel compare and contrast with the kind of socialism embraced by Jack London? What were London’s views on racial differences and racial cooperation, and how do they resemble and/or depart from those of DuBois?

“Criteria of Negro Art” (1926) In this essay, fi rst published in Crisis magazine in October 1926, DuBois advocates a strong AfricanAmerican interest in art, which might otherwise seem a luxury compared with the apparently more pressing issues of attaining civil and economic rights. DuBois argues, however, that art cannot (and should not) be divorced from political concerns and that all art, ultimately, is a form of propaganda. DuBois begins by asserting that art is “part of the great fight we are carrying on” and that it “represents a forward and an upward look—a pushing onward” (Writings 993). He contends that black Americans, precisely because they are discriminated against, can see both the flaws and the true potential of their country more clearly than whites can, and that blacks have therefore developed “not only a certain distaste for the tawdry and flamboyant but a vision of what the world could be if it were really a beautiful world; if we had the true spirit” (Writings 994). After describing various instances of beauty and arguing that the “world is full of it,” he laments that nevertheless “today the mass of human beings

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are choked away from it, and their lives distorted and made ugly” (Writings 995). African Americans (DuBois suggests) are in a position to help improve the entire culture “for we have within us as a race new stirrings; stirrings of the beginning of a new appreciation of joy, of a new desire to create, of a new will to be” (Writings 995). Yet DuBois disdains any talk of art for art’s sake; beauty (he insists) is inherently united with truth and goodness, and therefore he proclaims, “I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda” (Writings 1000). He objects to the ways blacks are often depicted in works created by whites, but he also objects to the strictures that prevent the full and true development of art by African Americans: We are bound by all sorts of customs that have come down as second-hand soul-clothes of white patrons. We are ashamed of sex and we lower our eyes when people will talk of it. Our religion holds us in superstition. Our worst side has been so shamelessly emphasized [by white writers] that we are denying we have or ever had a worst side. In all sorts of ways we are hemmed in and our new young artists have got to fight their way to freedom. (Writings 1001)

The essay ends by looking forward to a time when the art of blacks will be as accomplished, and as valued, as the art produced by other races. When that time arrives (DuBois suggests), blacks themselves will fi nally be valued as full human beings.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Examine some of DuBois’s own creative work (such as The Quest of the Silver Fleece and “The Song of the Smoke”) in light of the criteria laid out in this essay. In what ways (for instance) is DuBois’s own creative writing propagandistic? In what ways do his own works reflect a concern with truth, beauty, and goodness? Do you agree that art should be propagandistic? If so, why? If not, why not? 2. Examine the work of later African-American writers (such as Zora Neale Hurston or Rich-

ard Wright) and evaluate them in accordance with the criteria DuBois sets out in this essay. For example, to what degree and in what ways do these writers, in their most famous works (Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Wright’s Native Son), treat art as propaganda? To what degree and in what ways do they exercise the kind of freedom DuBois endorses at the end of his essay?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON DUBOIS AND HIS WORK 1. Although DuBois is mostly known as an analyst of race relations, he was also greatly interested in economics. Choose a chapter from The Souls of Black Folk and discuss it in economic terms, paying special attention to DuBois’s comments about capitalism, class confl ict, and the proper role of economic motives in a healthy society. 2. Compare and contrast DuBois’s description of the southern rural “black belt” in The Souls of Black Folk with Richard Wright’s description of the urban Chicago “black belt” in his novel Native Son. How are the two areas similar and/ or different in terms of economic, cultural, and social conditions? Is one place better or worse than the other? If so, how and why? 3. Compare and contrast the character of Zora in The Quest of the Silver Fleece with the narrator of “The School Days of an Indian Girl” by GERTRUDE SIMMONS BONNIN (Zitkala-Ša). Discuss the responses of the two girls to their formal schooling, the specific challenges they face because of their particular ethnic backgrounds, and the effectiveness with which each personality is presented. 4. Compare and contrast the fictional Zora in The Quest of the Silver Fleece with the real-life author Zora Neale Hurston. How were the experiences of both women shaped by their backgrounds? What similar or contrasting choices did each woman make in her life? Which of the two women do you admire more, and why?

W. E. B. DuBois

5. Compare and contrast DuBois’s fictional tale “Of the Coming of John” (in The Souls of Black Folk) with his novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece. How are the two works similar in plot, theme, and characters, and how do they differ? Which is more effective as a work of fiction, and why? 6. Compare and contrast the depiction of women in The Quest of the Silver Fleece and in Richard Wright’s Native Son. What consistencies run throughout both books in their presentations of women, and how and why do you think those presentations differ in the two works? 7. Compare and contrast DuBois’s autobiography (Dusk of Dawn) with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. How do the two works compare and contrast in topics, tone, and techniques? 8. The Philadelphia Negro included, as an appendix, a separate report by Isabel Eaton discussing black domestic servants. How does Eaton’s work compare and contrast with the work of DuBois in its methods, tone, assumptions, and conclusions? 9. Compare and contrast DuBois’s fi rst published work (The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade . . .) with some of the works that followed it, especially The Philadelphia Negro and The Souls of Black Folk. For instance, how is The Suppression similar to The Philadelphia Negro in its methods and conclusions, and, in particular, how do the fi nal summary sections of both works resemble each other? How does The Suppression (especially in chapter 10) anticipate the themes and arguments of The Souls of Black Folk (especially in chapters 6 and 7)? 10. Compare and contrast DuBois’s autobiography (Dusk of Dawn) with Richard Wright’s Black Boy. Discuss the ways the books treat such issues as the protagonists’ regional back-

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grounds, class status, family circumstances, and educational opportunities. WORKS CITED

AND


Bloom, Harold, ed. W. E. B. DuBois. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2001. Byerman, Keith E. Seizing the Word: History, Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. DuBois. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. DuBois, W. E. B. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. 1899. Reprint, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967. ———. The Quest of the Silver Fleece: A Novel. 1911. Reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969. ———. “The Song of the Smoke.” In American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, edited by Robert Hass et al. 2 vols, Vol. 1: 25–26. New York: Library of America, 2000. ———. Writings. Edited by Nathan Huggins. New York: Library of America, 1986. Dudley, David L. “W. E. B. DuBois.” In African American Authors 1745–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 121–131. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000. Hubbard, Dolan, ed. The Souls of Black Folk: One Hundred Years Later. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Huggins, Nathan. “Chronology.” In Writings. By W. E. B. DuBois. New York: Library of America, 1986. Moore, Jacqueline M. Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, and the Struggle for Racial Uplift. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2003. Rampersad, Arnold. The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. DuBois. New York: Schocken, 1990. Williams, Robert W. WEBDuBois.org. Available online. URL: http://www.webdubois.org. Accessed April 7, 2009.

Robert C. Evans

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) When I wrote a poem called The Waste Land some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed the “disillusionment of a generation,” which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention. (T. S. Eliot, “Thoughts after Lambeth”)

A

s an American who became a British citizen, T. S. Eliot has been claimed by both countries as part of their literary canon. Although best known for his poetry, Eliot was also a successful playwright and an extremely prolific writer of prose, in the forms of critical essays, reviews, and lectures. Eliot was a key figure in the literary movement of modernism. He became known as perhaps the most prominent man of letters of his day and was presented with many honors, including 14 honorary degrees, the British Order of Merit, the Presidential Order of Freedom, and the Nobel Prize. In 1956 he lectured to 14,000 people in a baseball stadium at the University of Minnesota, in the largest assembly ever gathered to attend a literary lecture. Although the commonly held image of Eliot is that he was isolated and even a bit snobbish, with a formal and stiff exterior, he was described by those who knew him well as calm, generous, kind, and always deeply contemplative. Eliot wanted, paradoxically, to be “a poet who, out of intense and personal experience, is able to express a general truth” (Gordon 3), and much of his writing can best be understood as a sort of spiritual autobiography; Eliot used his poetry and prose to grapple with the intellectual and personal issues facing him throughout his life. Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri. The Eliot fam-

ily at the time of his birth was socially prominent. Although his grandfather, the Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot, died the year before Eliot’s birth, his legacy remained very important in the family; Eliot’s mother stressed his ideals of self-denial and public service. Eliot’s father, Henry, was a successful manufacturer, and his mother, Charlotte, was a poet, mainly writing optimistic and didactic religious verse. Growing up with much older siblings, and with a congenital hernia that led his mother to forbid sports, Eliot had few playmates and spent a lot of his time reading (Poe became a favorite). During his childhood, the family spent summers at Cape Ann, Massachusetts, and Eliot loved the seashore. His schoolboy writings reflect the glory and heroism of the fisherman, and he once said he thought of himself as a New England poet. Despite growing up in a Unitarian family, Eliot was not convinced by this faith, as he believed that true salvation should result from individual human effort rather than divine will. The question of true religious belief was one that would continue to trouble Eliot, and this religious questioning is reflected in many of his early poems. Eliot attended Smith Academy, a prep school in St. Louis, where in January 1899 he brought out eight issues of his own magazine. He later claimed he knew he wanted to become a poet after reading Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám at about age 14. He spent a year at

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Milton Academy just outside Boston before enrolling at Harvard in fall 1906. While at Harvard, Eliot became disillusioned with the decaying upper-class Boston society in which he was expected to play a part; despite connections with family members in the inner circles of this society, he felt detached from it, although he did take up aspects of its character, including “its rigid manners, its loss of vigour, its estrangement from so many areas of life, [and] its painful self-consciousness” (Gordon 27). He preferred time spent wandering the slums of Roxbury and North Cambridge to that at cocktail parties and social events. He was known as a bit of a recluse during his time at Harvard, but he did attend some social functions and joined the staff of the Harvard Advocate, a literary magazine to which he contributed some early poems. One of the key intellectual influences of Eliot’s early years was the 19th-century French poet Jules Laforgue, whom he fi rst encountered in December 1908 in a book by Arthur Symons called The Symbolist Movement in Literature. He was struck by the idea of a growing interest in consciousness described by Symons, and he seems to have taken from Laforgue in particular the technique of free verse (which Laforgue developed in 1885) and the “willfully defeatist figure” (Gordon 40) that was at the center of his poems after reading Laforgue. This defeatist figure appears in Eliot’s fi rst successful poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which he began writing while at Harvard and was fi rst published in 1915. Eliot’s decision to go to Paris after graduation from Harvard in 1910 was not really supported by his family, and many of the poems he wrote during this year are rejections of family and Boston life. He spent nine months at the Sorbonne and was disillusioned as quickly as he had been in Boston. He found the city drab and boring and the people apathetic and again spent time “slumming.” One important influence during his time in Paris was the philosopher Henri Bergson, whose ideas about duration—the subjective and continuous lived experience of time—would figure in Eliot’s later work.

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Since Paris had not provided him with the poetic inspiration he was seeking, Eliot decided to return to Harvard for graduate study in philosophy. There, Eliot spent some time studying Indian philosophy, although he eventually focused on the work of F. H. Bradley. In his dissertation on Bradley’s Appearance and Reality (1893), Eliot examined ideas about subjective experience and perception and the impossibility of grasping absolute truth. Although he did fi nish his dissertation in 1916, Eliot was never awarded his Ph.D. because he did not return to Harvard to defend his dissertation. Another key influence on Eliot during this time (and throughout the rest of his poetic career) was the poetry of Dante. He found Dante’s narration of his journey through the inferno extremely relevant to his own struggles with religious faith in modern life. Eliot wrote a group of religious poems in 1914, dealing with topics such as martyrdom and sainthood, which were never published, but he did not feel satisfied with his poetry during this period. In 1912 Eliot met Emily Hale, and, although they never married, his relationship with Emily became probably the most important of his life. Many of the details of the relationship of Eliot and Emily are unknown and will remain so until the release of her letters in 2019. In later writings Eliot claimed that before he left for Europe in 1914 he told Emily he was in love with her, and he suggested that he had been rejected. Little is known about any contact they may have had between his departure and the time when their relationship was revived in the 1930s. Eliot decided in 1914 to spend more time abroad and was awarded a fellowship at Oxford. He planned to spend the summer in Germany, but when war broke out, he moved to London in August and then on to Oxford, where he stayed until June 1915. Oxford during this time was very quiet, with many British young men fighting in the war, but Eliot did meet two very important influences during this year: EZRA POUND and Vivienne Haigh-Wood. Eliot initially impressed Pound by showing him “Prufrock,” and Pound became a key supporter of

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Eliot’s fledgling poetic career. He encouraged Eliot to remain in London, arguing that poetry from America was not taken seriously in London. Pound turned Eliot fi rmly toward poetry at a time when he was leaning toward a career as a philosophy professor, and he remained an important “sponsor.” Pound also introduced Eliot into literary circles in London. Eliot met Vivienne (called Vivien) Haigh-Wood, a governess working in Cambridge, in early 1915. They shared an interest in writing, and he was attracted to her adventurousness and quick wit. After the end of the term at Oxford in June, Eliot faced the important decision of whether to return to Harvard and the life of a professor or to stay in London and continue to write poetry. Pound’s advice was apparently extremely influential, and, for Eliot, marrying Vivien seemed to be necessarily related to a decision to stay in London. They were married suddenly, on June 26, 1915, without the knowledge of either set of parents. The marriage, although it lasted for many years, was by all accounts a failure, and a trial for both of them. Vivien was chronically ill and often mentally unstable, and these problems exacerbated Eliot’s own nervous condition. Eliot was also relatively isolated socially during this period in London. He attempted to enlist in the U.S. Navy but was rejected because of his health problems and as a result was one of the few young men of his generation to be “left out” of World War I. He and Vivien were somewhat adrift in London society. Through Bertrand Russell, who had been a mentor to him at Harvard, Eliot became acquainted with Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, and other members of the Bloomsbury group, but he did not really fit in with them. They were put off by his proper manners and ostentatious displays of learning. He did eventually, though, develop a friendship with Virginia Woolf and her husband, Leonard, whose Hogarth Press published a book of seven of his poems in 1919. This, combined with the 1917 publication of Prufrock and Other Observations, established Eliot as a poet in the eyes of London literary society. During the initial period after his marriage, Eliot worked as a schoolteacher, but he was not

really suited to this position and did not enjoy it. During the fall and winter of 1916 and 1917 he also gave lectures on English and French literature in London. Eliot began working at Lloyd’s Bank in 1917 and did enjoy the regular work of a banker. He was also extremely busy writing reviews for various journals. In 1922 he became the editor of a new literary review (the Criterion) fi nanced by Lady Rothermere, the wife of a newspaper owner. All of these responsibilities, which he took very seriously, left him very little free time to write poetry. The continuous stresses of life in London, particularly his marriage to Vivien, led to a nervous breakdown. He spent several months in 1921 in a sanatorium in Lausanne, Switzerland, where his health did in fact improve, and where he was also able to fi nd time to devote to his writing. On his way back he passed through Paris and left The Waste Land with Pound, who was to have a substantial effect on the poem’s revision. The Waste Land was published in October and November 1922 in the Criterion. By 1923 Eliot was ready to leave the bank, but Vivien’s continually worsening health meant that he needed fi nancial stability. He had to turn down the editorship of the literary journal the Nation because the owners were unable to give him enough of a fi nancial guarantee. The years between 1923 and 1925 were extremely trying, and the Eliots struggled fi nancially. By 1925 Eliot knew he needed a major change. His fi rst thought was to leave his wife, as it was clear by then that their marriage was a complete failure. Vivien’s condition grew worse, no doubt at least in part as a result of side effects of the drugs she was prescribed. In September 1925 Eliot convinced Geoffrey Faber to give him a job at his new publishing house, Faber & Gwyer, and his Poems 1909–1925 was published in November. He threw himself into the work of the publisher, reading and commenting on works from prospective writers. As a director of Faber & Gwyer (later Faber & Faber), Eliot was in constant contact with the literary scene. Under Eliot, Faber launched the careers of W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and Ted Hughes, as well as publishing works by already established figures such as Ezra Pound and James Joyce.

T. S. Eliot

This career change certainly affected Eliot greatly, but the major change to his life in this period was his religious conversion. He met William Force Stead, a poet and Anglican minister, who became his confidant, in 1923. Eliot was baptized into the Church of England in June 1927 and, in November, became a British citizen. After his conversion, Eliot regularly attended Mass, and he became a warden of St. Stephen’s Church in 1934, serving in this capacity for 25 years. In the late 1920s Eliot began once again to correspond with Emily Hale and probably spent time with her when she visited London during the summers. She became for him an ideal of womanly purity, as well as a nostalgic reminder of New England. Eliot’s nostalgia increased after his mother’s death in 1929 and eventually led to his acceptance of the Norton Professorship at Harvard in 1932. In the winter of 1932–33, Eliot took the train across the country to visit Emily Hale, who was then teaching at Scripps College in Claremont, California. This meeting, and his happiness at being surrounded by family while in Cambridge, left him feeling torn between England and the United States and helped him make up his mind fi nally to request a deed of separation from Vivien. When he returned to England that summer, he kept his address secret in order to evade Vivien, who refused to accept their separation and in fact never signed the papers. Eliot thought of this period as a sort of “new life,” the most important aspect of which was that Emily Hale came to England on a year’s leave beginning in late summer 1934. They spent a great deal of time together, including a trip to Burnt Norton (an old house and accompanying garden, unoccupied at the time of their visit). Eliot’s poem of the same name (1935) is often read as a re-creation of a transcendent experience. Eliot’s guilt over his “abandonment” of Vivien, however, left him unable to make a commitment to Emily, who returned to New England and accepted a post at Smith College in 1936. She did continue to visit England each year until 1939, when the outbreak of World War II forced her to stay in America. The deep-seated tension and turmoil Eliot felt about his relationship with Vivien were dramatized

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in his play The Family Reunion, in which many of his close friends were able to recognize the main character as the playwright. Vivien never stopped feeling abandoned by Eliot, and she began to suspect a conspiracy that allegedly hid him from her. When she was found wandering the streets in 1938, her brother signed the papers to have her placed in a mental institution. While Eliot did not take an active part in her confi nement, he made no objection and even arranged to have Vivien’s income cover the cost. He never visited her, and she died in the institution on January 23, 1947. Vivien’s death in 1947, which should have left him free to marry Emily Hale (as she and everyone else had been assuming would happen for the previous 15 years), instead caused Eliot what he called a “catastrophe” when he realized that, although he loved Emily, he did not want to marry her. A version of this confl ict is dramatized in his play The Cocktail Party. He felt that he had “lost his passion” (Gordon 412) and seemed to his friends to age quite a bit in this short time. He and Emily carried on the pattern of their relationship (mostly through letters, with occasional visits) for another 10 years, and he continued to send her copies of all his works. She clearly took comfort in the familiar routine, and she therefore suffered an emotional breakdown when he married again in January 1957. His marriage was not the only betrayal; at this point Eliot broke off all correspondence with Emily as well. It seems that he destroyed her letters to him; hers have been placed in the Princeton University library with instructions that they are not to be opened until 50 years after the death of the survivor (in 2019). Eliot’s Four Quartets, written in 1940–42 (except Burnt Norton, written in 1935), explore the intersection of time and timelessness. The quartets can be seen as autobiographical, conveying unity and circularity, and it seems likely that Eliot intended these poems as his fi nal ones. After his publication of the Quartets, Eliot became perhaps England’s predominant poet and was extremely well known, even among the general public. He was in great demand and made many appearances, especially after winning the Nobel Prize in 1948. However, despite his

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public profi le and popularity, Eliot was quite isolated. He spent much of his time either working or alone in the dark rooms of the flat he shared with his friend John Hayward, and even his closest friends were not privy to his inner thoughts. Eliot’s marriage to his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, in January 1957 took everyone who knew him by surprise. Valerie was 30 (Eliot was 68), and she had admired and felt a connection with the poet since fi rst hearing his poetry as a girl. After his marriage, Eliot withdrew from the few friends he had at the time, but by all accounts he was extremely happy, and the Eliots lived in a very loving and devoted marriage until his death of emphysema in January 1965. Since his death, Valerie has devoted the rest of her life to preserving Eliot’s papers, editing his works, and compiling his letters. According to Eliot’s wishes, after his death he was cremated and his ashes were buried at East Coker, in Somerset, England, from which Andrew Eliot had traveled to Boston in 1670. His burial thus effectively returned him to the place of his ancestors.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) Although “Prufrock” adopts the narrative voice of a middle-aged man, Eliot in fact completed this poem in 1911 when he was not quite 23. It was fi rst published in 1915 and established the young Eliot as an important poet. The poem describes the speaker’s alienation and disillusionment in a lonely urban setting. The epigraph from Dante’s Inferno suggests that what is said in the poem is not meant for the ears of anyone in the world, and it may also imply that Prufrock considers himself to be in a kind of modern hell. The poem’s tone is confessional, personal, and reflective, as Prufrock takes stock of his life and attempts to answer some “overwhelming question” (ll. 10, 93). The title creates irony through the unlikely combination of the romantic suggestion of “love song” and the dull, unheroic sounding name (it is perhaps interesting that T. Stearns Eliot was an early form of the poet’s signature).

The “you and I” of the fi rst line seems to indicate that Prufrock has two selves—the outward, public figure who attends social gatherings, and the inner philosopher contemplating the important questions of life. His inability to fuse the two into a coherent whole reflects his overwhelming timidity (“do I dare?” [l. 38]). As an illustration of this timidity, imagery of paralysis runs throughout the poem, beginning with the initial simile and continuing with suggestions of the repetition of existence (“For I have known them all already, known them all— / Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons . . .” [ll. 49–50]), and the comparison of Prufrock to an insect pinned to a wall (ll. 57–58). Prufrock also reveals his insecurity, one contribution to which is certainly his isolation from society. The refrain “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” (ll. 13–14, 35–36) sets him apart from this type of social conversation; he is concerned with what “They” will say about him (ll. 41, 44) and does not want to “Disturb the universe” (l. 46). He is particularly uncertain in the company of women (stanza 10). Prufrock’s indecision is also key, and there is a repeated motif of delay or hesitation (even if he is “not Prince Hamlet” [l. 111]—another expression of his feelings of inferiority). Prufrock questions even the purpose of a search for meaning, and there is plenty of miscommunication (“That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all” (ll. 97–98); “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” [l. 104]). Prufrock also seems to feel that his life has passed its prime (“I have seen the moment of my greatness fl icker” [l. 84]) and is perhaps even afraid of death (l. 86). The poem is commonly read as a modernist text, because of its portrayal of Prufrock’s alienation, suggestions of meaninglessness (or at least of the difficulty of fi nding meaning), somewhat fragmented structure, and description of a disillusionment with modern society. It is also notable for its successful employment of free verse and significant allusions.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Trace the references to Prufrock’s perceived inferiority or insecurity throughout the poem.

T. S. Eliot

To what extent do you think this aspect of Prufrock might reflect Eliot himself? 2. Note the imagery that is used to describe the city, in particular in the fi rst four stanzas. What atmosphere is created in the poem, and how does this contribute to the portrayal of Prufrock’s state of mind? 3. Choose one significant allusion or set of allusions in the poem (for example, the allusions to Shakespeare’s Hamlet) and examine the function of these references. How do they add to the meaning of Eliot’s work? 4. Compare the mood and atmosphere of “Prufrock” to those of Robert Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night.” In what ways do both poems suggest the alienation and isolation of their speakers?

“Sweeney among the Nightingales” (1919) In this early poem, the title character, who is described through the use of primitive and animalistic language, encounters two treacherous women one night in a bar or restaurant. “Sweeney” is somewhat unusual among Eliot’s works in that it does not employ free verse; instead, the four-line stanzas follow a (mostly) regular pattern of iambic tetrameter, rhyming abcb, and the simplicity of this pattern contrasts with the foreboding atmosphere. The epigraph (“Alas, I am struck with a mortal blow within”) is the voice of Agamemnon, crying out from the palace as he is murdered by Clytemnestra, his wife. Throughout the poem Sweeney is compared with Agamemnon. The comparison culminates in the fi nal stanza, but the intent is not clear; perhaps Eliot is merely using Agamemnon as an example of someone betrayed by women. Eliot may also be mocking Sweeney by comparing him with the heroic Greek king. There is a nightmarish atmosphere throughout, and a sense of foreboding is created, beginning in the second quatrain’s references to the “stormy moon” (l. 5) and to “Death” and “the Raven” (l. 7). The constellations are “veiled” (l. 10), and even the reference to Orion (the hunter) could be read as a threat to Sweeney.

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The women in the poem are presented as dangerous, even preying on Sweeney. The “person in the Spanish cape” (l. 11), who is not revealed as female until the “She” in line 15, is destructive, overturning a coffee cup and then seeming unconcerned with her subsequent yawn. Rachel “Tears at the grapes with murderous paws” (l. 24), and the two women are “thought to be in league” (l. 26) and operating a “gambit” (l. 28). Sweeney (the “man with heavy eyes” [l. 27]) seems to escape their clutches but then returns to “grin” at the window, and he is unlikely to be protected by the host of the institution, who is busy conversing “at the door apart” (l. 34), or by the nearby “Convent of the Sacred Heart” (l. 36). The animal imagery in the poem is striking, serving to dehumanize Sweeney. In the fi rst stanza alone, he is compared to an ape, a zebra, and a giraffe, and the descriptions suggesting apes (such as “Letting his arms hang down” [l. 2]) in particular suggest that Sweeney is primitive. The man in brown is called a “vertebrate” (l. 21), and Rachel has “paws” (l. 24). The nightingales singing at the end of the poem, as they had sung at Agamemnon’s death, suggest ultimately that there is no difference between the ancient tragedy and the modern plot.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Many critics feel that Sweeney will be assassinated sometime shortly after the narrative of the poem ends. What is your opinion about Sweeney’s fate? Use specific evidence from the poem to support your argument. 2. Compare the depiction of women in this poem to the way women are portrayed in part 2 (“A Game of Chess”) of The Waste Land. In what ways do both poems present women as dangerous? 3. Eliot’s original title for “Prufrock” was “Prufrock among the Women,” suggesting a possible parallel between these two poems. How are Prufrock and Sweeney in similar situations with respect to their interactions with women? How does the difference in narrative perspective between the two poems influence your perception of these interactions?

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“Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) Eliot fi rst published this essay in the Egoist, and it is one of his most well-known articulations of his own literary theories. It is also often considered an expression of some of the key ideas of literary modernism. The two key aspects of the argument Eliot makes here are, fi rst of all, the necessity of being aware of the past (“tradition”) when writing poetry, and, second, the separation between a poem and the poet who writes it. It is important to reach an understanding of the arguments Eliot makes in this essay in order to grasp fully the reasons behind the allusive nature of Eliot’s own work, and in order to consider the relationship (if any) between Eliot’s poetry and his own life. In considering the role of tradition in poetry, Eliot rejects the common practice of praising a poet by emphasizing “those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else” (Abrams 2,171). He claims that “not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously” (2,171). This assertion is somewhat paradoxical, as Eliot argues that elements of a poem that refer to or invoke the work of previous poets can in fact be the most individual creations of a poet. However, what Eliot calls tradition is not simply a blind following of the previous generations. He considers it to be much broader, involving “the historical sense” (2,171). Eliot describes this historical sense as a consciousness of all the great writers of the past and of the fact that these great writers continue to exist and to inform the present; it is “a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of [the poet’s] own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (2,171). This contention leads to his claim that “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone” (2,171). Eliot feels that any artist can only be considered and evaluated with relation to the entire tradition. Any new work of art, he argues, modifies and alters the entirety of the tradition

at the moment of its creation, so that “the past is altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (2,171). This claim leads him to the concept of poetry as a living whole. Related to this idea, Eliot moves on in part 2 of the essay to discuss his idea of the impersonality of poetry. He says that “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (2,173). This is because an artist must be constantly absorbing the past and therefore surrendering himself to what is more valuable. Therefore, Eliot argues that successful art involves a process of depersonalization. He analogizes the mind of the poet to a shred of platinum, which acts as a catalyst in a chemical reaction. Through this analogy, he suggests that the mind is necessary for the “reaction” (or the writing of the poem) to take place, but that it is itself unchanged by the process. The other elements of this reaction, according to Eliot, are emotions and feelings, and one or both of these may be present in different quantities. “The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together” (2,174). In this way, the mind of the poet, according to Eliot, transforms the emotions and feelings experienced by the poet himself into those expressed by the poem, and these are not the same feelings and emotions: “Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality” (2,174). Thus Eliot argues that there is a separation between poem and poet: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” (2,175). Some have seen a contradiction between Eliot’s theory of impersonality expressed here and some of his later writings, in which he argues that personality is necessary for high art. However, this seeming contradiction can be explained by considering the idea of a split or double self of the poet—the outward self, which he displays in society, is that from which he escapes in poetry, but the inner, intellec-

T. S. Eliot

tual, personal self is that which is really expressed in his art.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Consider the paradox inherent in Eliot’s claim that “not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” How can you explain this seeming contradiction? Which parts of Eliot’s own work might be considered “the best,” according to this defi nition? 2. Why do you think Eliot places such importance on a consciousness of the past in his discussions of poetry? Does this seem to be particularly relevant to poetry as a genre, or do you think (and would Eliot think) that this consciousness of the past would be equally important to novels, stories, and plays as well? 3. Compare Eliot’s discussion of tradition in this essay with that in the fi rst chapter of F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1960). Consider in particular to what extent Eliot would agree with Leavis’s explanation of the relationship between great writers and tradition.

“Gerontion” (1920) “Gerontion” is a dramatic monologue, fragmented in both style and content, in which Eliot’s speaker contemplates the emptiness of his last years, considering a decline in Christian faith and the state of Europe in 1919. Some critics have argued that the poem was originally intended as a sort of preface to The Waste Land, and it certainly makes use of similar imagery. The extended metaphor of the mind as a house is used to illustrate the speaker’s decay, disillusionment, and lack of belonging, and the end of the poem shows nature (in the form of the trade winds) driving Gerontion toward “a sleepy corner” (l. 73), perhaps his fi nal resting place. The poem’s portrayal of a barren landscape is linked to its suggestions of the isolation of the modern condition. The poem opens with images of sterility (including “a dry month” [l. 1], “wait-

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ing for rain” [l. 2], and “the salt marsh” [l. 5]), and this idea continues with the descriptions of decay in cities such as Antwerp, Brussels, and London. The anonymous high-class foreigners who appear in lines 23–29 (and again in line 67) seem to be engaged in meaningless activities and linked with human faults (i.e., Silvero suggests money, and von Kulp may be taken from the Latin for fault). Isolation is implied not only by the allusion to the Battle of Thermopylae (“the hot gates” [l. 3]) but also by the succeeding lines’ discussion of fighting, in that here Eliot may be expressing his disappointment at being “left out” of the war, which he saw as a defi ning event for his generation. The paradoxical condition of modern life is illustrated through contradictions such as “Unnatural vices / Are fathered by our heroism” (ll. 44–45). Along with isolation are difficulties with knowledge and with communication. The phrase “The word within a word, unable to speak a word” (l. 18) suggests that knowledge cannot be passed on. History is personified as a deceptive woman (ll. 34–41), implying a possible reason for the current condition of the world: We have not been able to learn anything from the past. The speaker of the poem would like to communicate: “I would meet you upon this honestly” (l. 54) but has lost “passion” (l. 57) and all five senses (l. 59) and does not know how to make “closer contact” (l. 60). He thus remains alienated from society. The second stanza begins to suggest Christianity’s decline; line 17 refers to a passage from Matthew (“Master, we would see a sign from thee”), and the following line is taken from a Lancelot Andrewes sermon on this Matthew passage. However, “We would see a sign!” seems more desperate in tone than the biblical source, and the “word within the word” (a reference to the Christ child) is “swaddled with darkness” (l. 19) and “unable to speak a word” (l. 18). Instead, Christ is “the tiger” (l. 20) and thus seems threatening (as is the reference to Judas). Likewise, the reference to the Eucharist in line 22 is disturbingly inverted later in the poem, when the tiger “devours” us (l. 48), with the sentence structure of this line reflecting this inversion.


Although the house in the poem is literally a boarding house in which Gerontion lives, it is also used metaphorically, but it is only with the fi nal two lines that we understand the connection between the house and the mind of the speaker. After this, lines such as “My house is a decayed house” (l. 7) and “I / Stiffen in a rented house” (ll. 49–50) take on added significance as illustrating that the speaker is uncomfortable with his own thoughts and feels his mind fading.

For Discussion or Writing 1. What are the similarities between Gerontion and Prufrock? Do they seem to have similar concerns about the modern condition? 2. Critics have argued that Eliot’s early poems often show a distrust of Christianity. Do you think this is the case in “Gerontion”? Compare the view of Christianity presented in this poem with that presented in one of Eliot’s later poems, such as “Journey of the Magi” or “Ash Wednesday.” 3. Examine closely the extended description of history in lines 36–43 of the poem. What are Gerontion’s complaints about history? How are these complaints related to the poem’s portrayal of the modern world as decayed and corrupt?

The Waste Land (1922) The Waste Land was published in the same year as two other seminal modernist texts—Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses. It is perhaps Eliot’s best-known work, and certainly his most difficult. It is crucial to have an edition of the poem that is effectively footnoted in order to follow the myriad allusions. Much of the poem’s difficulty stems from its lack of a coherent narrative; it instead presents a series of scenes and images from which a reader must attempt to extract meaning. Its overwhelming message (and its legacy) is of the barrenness and decay of the modern Western world, and the fragmentation of the poem reflects the confusion and uncertainty Eliot (and other modernist writers) believed characterized modern existence.

Eliot, in a general note to the poem, acknowledged that much of the work’s symbolism was suggested by a book by Jessie L. Weston, in which she linked ancient fertility myths to Christianity, focusing on the archetypal story of the Fisher King. The Fisher King, whose death or illness produces drought and desolation in the land and who can only be revived by a knight who fi nds some form of the Grail, was, according to Weston, parallel to the Christian God. In the poem, “Eliot, following Weston, thus uses a great variety of mythological and religious material, both Occidental and Oriental, to paint a symbolic picture of the modern Waste Land and the need for regeneration” (Abrams 2,146). The dedication to Ezra Pound, “the better craftsman,” is in thanks for the enormous amount of assistance Pound provided in editing the poem for Eliot. The epigraph refers to the Cumaean Sibyl in Greek mythology, who was granted immortality but forgot to ask for eternal youth. This is why she says, in this passage, “I want to die,” and her desire for escape is fitting as an introduction to the poem and its portrayal of the entrapments of a modern wasteland. There are suggestions throughout the poem of being trapped, some of which explicitly evoke the Sibyl’s dilemma: “I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing” (ll. 39–40). Tiresias is also in this type of in-between state: “I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, / Old man with wrinkled female breasts . . .” (ll. 218– 219). Perhaps this entrapment in a difficult liminal state is one result of the modern wasteland. The poem’s bleak imagery begins immediately. The opening suggests that “April is the cruelest month” because it provides false hope; although there are “lilacs,” the land is still “dead” (ll. 1–2). This desolation is also suggested by “this stony rubbish” (l. 20) and the suggestion in the following lines that man knows “only / A heap of broken images” (ll. 21–22) and that the landscape is marked by “the dead tree” (l. 23) and “the dry stone” (l. 24). The references to dryness continue throughout, culminating just before the thunder speaks in stanza 5 in its “empty cisterns” and “exhausted wells” (l. 385). Here even the sacred

T. S. Eliot

river Ganges—bathing in which (Hindu legend held) would give renewal to a person—is dried up (l. 396). Imagery specifically relating to London occurs in the last stanza of part 1, where Eliot compares the businessmen flowing over London Bridge during the morning commute to Dante’s flow of the damned into hell, and again in the descriptions of the Thames in part 3. In the last half of the “Unreal City” stanza, the use of fi rst person, the reference to “one I knew” (l. 69), and the use of Baudelaire’s phrase “mon semblable—mon frère” [my likeness—my brother] (l. 76) all suggest that the speaker is in fact one of these businessmen, and Eliot himself would have known this daily ritual well from his time working at Lloyd’s Bank. In part 3 Eliot takes his refrain (“Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song” [l. 176]) from Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamion, a marriage song, adding irony to his descriptions of the river as fi lled with garbage and infested with rats. The City returns in part 3 with an idyllic description of St. Magnus Martyr, a church near London Bridge: “the walls / Of Magnus Martyr hold / Inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold” (ll. 263–265); however, this seems to be but a brief glimpse of a lost world, and the following stanzas (which Eliot called the “Song of the Thames-daughters”) return to the dingy imagery of the river. The sterility of the wasteland world extends to the fruitlessness or lack of fulfi llment in sexual encounters. This is evident in the relationship between Lil and Albert in the last stanza of part 2 (in which Lil seems to have lost her youthful good looks as a result of a drugstore abortion) and in the mention of the doomed relationship between Queen Elizabeth and the earl of Leicester in the second Thames-daughter’s song in part 3. The fi nal Thames-daughter also describes an unfulfi lling sexual encounter in a canoe on the river. Tiresias observes this type of encounter between the typist and the “young man carbuncular” (l. 231); the typist’s reaction after the exit of her “departed lover” (l. 250)—“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over” (l. 252)—illustrates a modern indifference

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to sexual coupling and hints at the meaningless of life in general. Even conversations are fruitless, as in the dialogue in part 2, a representative line of which is “Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?” (l. 126). Despite its lack of narrative, the poem does feature several distinct characters. Madame Sosostris, the fortune-teller, is introduced in part 1 of the poem, reading the tarot cards for an unidentified listener. Her reference to “the drowned Phoenician Sailor” (l. 47) anticipates the “Death by Water” section of the poem. “The Hanged Man” (l. 55) symbolizes the self-sacrifice of the fertility god, who is killed so that his resurrection can generate fertility; therefore, her inability to locate this card is another indication of the barrenness of the modern world. Tiresias makes his appearance in part 3, and Eliot, in a note, called him “the most important personage in the poem,” claiming that “what Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.” Using Tiresias as an observer is somewhat ironic, since he is blind, but in his literary appearances (as in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex) Tiresias is often portrayed as able to see (metaphorically, through his gift of prophecy) more clearly than others, despite his literal blindness. Here he “Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest” (l. 229). Tiresias is a particularly fitting observer for this modern wasteland, as he had previously observed the tragic events leading to the years of plague and desolation in the city of Thebes. Indeed, parallels like this between the historical (or mythical) and the modern are created throughout the poem, suggesting that the emptiness described here has in fact been evident throughout history. Phlebas the Phoenician is mourned in the brief part 4 of the poem, and his “death by water” is often seen by critics as a death without resurrection. The fi nal line of this section provides a warning of mortality for all readers. In part 5 of the poem, as earlier, there is no water (although it is imagined: “Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop” [l. 358]); there is merely “dry sterile thunder without rain” (l. 342). Ironically, the only time there is sufficient water in this wasteland, it produces death.

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The fi nal two stanzas of part 5 of the poem contain the most significant allusions to Eastern philosophy, which was a particular interest of Eliot’s, although it is also referenced in the title of part 3. The Fire Sermon was preached by the Buddha against the fi res of passions that, he argued, prevent people’s regeneration. The title of part 5 refers to a Hindu fable in which different groups interpret the divine voice (expressed as thunder) saying DA in different ways: Datta, “to give alms”; Dayadhvam, “to have compassion”; Damyata, “to practice self-control.” In the poem, these interpretations of the thunder’s “DA” seem to provoke its listeners to question whether they have in fact performed any of these honorable actions: “Datta: what have we given?” (l. 401). Then, after a fi nal stanza that may be spoken by a Fisher King figure wondering whether he can “set [his] lands in order” (l. 426), the poem ends with the repetition of “Shantih shantih shantih” (l. 434), a traditional benediction, but one that is unfamiliar to any Western audience, perhaps suggesting that any fi nal blessing is ultimately beyond our understanding.

For Discussion or Writing 1. The first line of the poem alludes to the opening of the General Prologue of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures swoote.” In addition, George Orwell alludes to both Chaucer and Eliot in the opening of his novel 1984: “It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Examine all three openings and discuss the differences in tone. How does a knowledge of the earlier works inform your reading of the later ones? 2. Research the role of Tiresias in Greek mythology, particularly as he appears in Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy. To what extent do you see Tiresias as a fitting “narrator” for this poem, based on the basis of his previous history? 3. Compare the vision of the modern world Eliot develops here with the portrayal of modern civilization in W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” In what ways do both poets suggest an ominous future, and does either of them provide any hope?

4. How far do you believe the poem itself fits the description “fragments shored against my ruins” (l. 431)? Can you understand the entire poem as a series of fragments assembled by the speaker in order to try to come to terms with his situation? Choose another modernist poem (for example, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” by Wallace Stevens) and discuss whether the same defi nition could apply.

“The Hollow Men” (1925) “The Hollow Men” was written during a period in which Eliot was on leave from the bank, having suffered a nervous breakdown, struggling with his failing marriage, and contemplating his impending religious conversion, and, as was often the case, the poem seems to reflect aspects of his personal life with its bleak tone and suggestions of the emptiness and fragmentation of modern existence. The fi rst epigraph, the announcement of Kurtz’s death by one of the natives in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, evokes the failed quest of a great man. The second refers to an English custom followed on Guy Fawkes Day and suggests the custom of burning the bearer of guilt (in this case, in the form of a straw effigy). This image directly anticipates the description of “stuffed men” “fi lled with straw” in part 1 of the poem. Part 1 vividly evokes the emptiness Eliot feels pervades modern existence (expressing a typically modernist sentiment). Not only are the men described as “hollow” and “stuffed,” but their minds are empty (“headpiece fi lled with straw” [l. 4]), and even their conversation is “meaningless” (l. 7). The use of the fi rst-person plural illustrates that the poem’s speaker considers himself one of these “hollow men.” “Shape without form” (l. 11) is a recurring image that also emphasizes emptiness and meaninglessness and links to the discussion in part 5 of the poem of the gap between the potential and the actual: “Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow” (ll. 72–76). The poem seems strongly

T. S. Eliot

concerned with the failure to realize some goal or potential (as illustrated by Kurtz and by the incomplete prayer in lines 93 and 95). The “hollow men” in the poem are those who have failed to make a decision about their own actions and therefore remain in an “in-between” state. Part 3 of the poem describes the modern landscape as a “dead land” (l. 39) and wonders whether this barren landscape anticipates “death’s other kingdom” (l. 46). Part 4 continues this imagery of lifelessness, referring specifically to hell, with the damned “gathered on this beach of the tumid river” (l. 60), an allusion to the river Acheron described in Dante’s Inferno. It suggests blindness and darkness with phrases such as “there are no eyes here” (l. 53), “we grope together” (l. 58), and “twilight kingdom” (l. 65), and this state seems likely to continue unless Christ (alluded to as “the perpetual star / Multifoliate rose” [ll. 63–64], another image from Dante) grants salvation. The verse opening the fragmentary part 5 of the poem replaces the mulberry bush, a traditional fertility symbol, with “the prickly pear” (l. 68), a plant found in the desert, continuing the sterile imagery found earlier in the poem. The fi nal lines of the poem (another parody of the children’s song about the mulberry bush) suggest that the world as a whole will peter out quietly, without fanfare.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Examine the connections between this poem and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Do you think the poem presents an accurate portrayal of Kurtz, who is described in the novel as being “hollow at the core” (Abrams 1,802)? 2. Examine the poem’s portrayal of religion. Does the poem suggest the possibility of salvation? Consider whether you think this might relate to Eliot’s personal religious contemplations. 3. Trace the different ways in which the poem suggests a failure to achieve potential. Compare the suggestions of failure in this poem with those in Eliot’s “Prufrock.” 4. What is the effect of repetition in the poem? In particular, what do you think are the functions of the repeated images of eyes in parts 2 and 4

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and of the repeated words and phrases in part 5 of the poem?

“Journey of the Magi” (1927) Eliot wrote “Journey of the Magi” shortly after his conversion to the Church of England. A dramatic monologue, the poem adopts the voice of one of the three wise men who traveled to see the birth of Jesus, recalling the experience in old age. The speaker remembers the hardships of the journey and the way the experience changed the lives of the wise men afterward. In the New Testament, the three wise men are from the East, and the poem evokes a contrast between the land of origin of the magi and the landscape through which they are traveling. They have traded “summer palaces on slopes” and “silken girls bringing sherbet” (ll. 9, 10) for “hostile” cities and “dirty” villages, in the “very dead of winter” (ll. 14, 15, 5). The use of anaphora in lines 10–15 (the repetition of And at the beginning of successive lines) emphasizes the accumulation of hardships during the journey, and indeed this was enough for the wise men to have doubts about their purpose, as they heard voices “saying / That this was all folly” (ll. 19–20). The arrival of the wise men in Bethlehem is described in the second stanza of the poem with more vibrant imagery, including references to “a temperate valley” (l. 21), “smelling of vegetation” (l. 22), and “a running stream” (l. 23)—details symbolic of the new life given by the birth of Christ. However, this stanza also includes allusions to details from the later story of Christ: The “three trees” (l. 24) suggest the three crosses, and the description of men “dicing for pieces of silver” (l. 27) refers to soldiers dicing for Christ’s garments and to Judas’s betrayal for 30 pieces of silver. These allusions create some ambiguity, as the birth of Christ eventually leads to his suffering but also to salvation for mankind. The speaker’s meditations about birth and death in the last stanza maintain this ambiguity. The birth the wise men have witnessed seems to have

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led to the death of their old faith, as they had “evidence and no doubt” (l. 37) about the birth of the new king. However, this new faith has also led to a disillusionment with the way of life they return to after their journey, leaving them “no longer at ease” (l. 39), so much so that the poem’s speaker “should be glad of another death” (l. 43). Some critics have suggested that the poem reflects Eliot’s own state of mind after his conversion, suggesting a mix of hope and uncertainty or even a feeling of being ill at ease in his old world with his new faith.

3.

4.

For Discussion or Writing 1. The initial five lines of the poem are taken from a 1622 Christmas sermon by Lancelot Andrewes, an Anglican clergyman whose writings were a favorite of Eliot’s. Read the entire sermon and compare Andrewes’s portrayal of the journey of the magi with Eliot’s. 2. Trace the natural imagery used throughout the poem, paying particular attention to any contrasts you fi nd. How does Eliot use natural imagery to achieve his purpose in the poem? 3. Compare the religious sentiment expressed in “Journey of the Magi” with that found in The Waste Land. In what ways do you think Eliot’s religious conversion affected his poetry? 4. Compare this poem with Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” another dramatic monologue in which the speaker reflects on his life in old age. In what ways are the contemplations of these two characters similar?

5.

6.

7.

8.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON ELIOT AND HIS WORK 1. Research the characteristics of literary modernism and discuss the extent to which several of Eliot’s poems could be considered as representative examples of the modernist movement. 2. Explore the portrayal of modern man as alienated or isolated throughout Eliot’s works. Compare this to the depictions of isolation in other modernist poems such as Robert Frost’s “Desert Places,” Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving but

Drowning,” and E. E. CUMMINGS’s “anyone lived in a pretty how town.” What, if anything, does The Waste Land have in common with the description of the “Valley of Ashes” in F. SCOTT FITZGER ALD’s novel The Great Gatsby? Do you agree with critics who argue that Fitzgerald used this setting as a portrayal of a modern wasteland? How does Eliot respond to the concerns he raises in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” throughout his own poetry? Do you think his poetry accurately reflects the theory he develops in this essay? In particular, consider his argument about the separation between poem and poet. Examine the portrayal of cities throughout Eliot’s work. What does his predominant imagery suggest about his feelings about city life and city inhabitants? Trace Eliot’s use of the dramatic monologue (especially in his early poetry) and compare this to the use of dramatic monologue by Victorian poets such as Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning. Are the personae Eliot creates in his dramatic monologues (“Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” “Journey of the Magi”) similar in any ways? What, if any, connection do you think they have to Eliot himself? Examine Eliot’s uses of irony. In particular, consider “Prufrock” and The Waste Land and whether irony is employed in a similar way in these two poems. Trace the ways in which Eliot employs heteroglossia, or the use of many different voices, in his poetry. Consider The Waste Land (originally titled “He Do the Police in Different Voices”) in particular.

WORKS CITED

AND


Abrams, M. H., ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 2. 6th ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: A Life. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984. Esty, Jed. Modern American Poetry: T. S. Eliot. Available online. URL: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/

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maps/poets/a_f/eliot/eliot.htm. Accessed April 6, 2009. Gallup, Donald. T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969. Gardner, Helen. The Art of T. S. Eliot. London: Cresset Press, 1958. Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. London: Vintage, 1998. (Revised edition of two earlier volumes: Eliot’s Early Years. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, and Eliot’s New Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988.) Kenner, Hugh. T. S. Eliot: The Invisible Poet. London: Methuen, 1965.

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Moody, A. David, ed. The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Scofield, Martin. T. S. Eliot: The Poems. British and Irish Authors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Tomlin, E. W. F. T. S. Eliot: A Friendship. London: Routledge, 1988. Van Aelst, Heather. A Hypertext Version of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” Available online. URL: http://aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Poem. htm. Accessed April 6, 2009.

Rebecca Strong

William Faulkner (1897–1962) . . . it still seems to me impossible to evaluate a man’s work. None of mine ever quite suited me[;] each time I wrote the last word I would think, if I could just do it over, I would do it better, maybe even right. But I was too busy; there was always another one. (qtd. in Cox 73)

W

illiam Faulkner is widely considered one of the very best American novelists (perhaps even the best) of the 20th century. His works often focus on the same large cast of recurring characters inhabiting the same small area of northern Mississippi—the area in or near the fictional town of Jefferson in a fictional place called Yoknapatawpha County. Jefferson was closely based on Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent much of his life and did much of his best writing. Nevertheless, despite his preoccupation with the people and events in one tiny portion of the American South, Faulkner won worldwide recognition (including a Nobel Prize) both for his themes and for his stylistic and technical innovations. He was a “regional” writer who appealed to an international audience, and his influence and fame (already strong during the latter years of his career) have grown even stronger in the decades since his death. Most of the facts of the novelist’s life are laid out clearly in the superbly detailed “Chronology” prepared by Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk. William Cuthbert Falkner (he added the u to his name later in life) was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, the fi rst child of Maud Butler Falkner and Murry Cuthbert Falkner. On his father’s side he was descended from a fairly prominent line of local notables, including a great-grandfather who had been a planter, a railroad pioneer, a Confederate colonel, a politician, and even the

author of a best-selling novel who was shot to death by a former friend and business partner. Faulkner’s paternal grandfather was, in turn, a leading local businessman and political figure, while the novelist’s father was fi rst employed by the family railroad and then (after it was sold) moved his family to Oxford, Mississippi, and started a series of small businesses. Young William (along with his younger brothers, Murry, John, and Dean) grew up in a household that included not only his parents but also his maternal grandmother and an elderly black caretaker whom Faulkner loved and admired. Although William was never much interested in conventional schooling, he was an intelligent boy who read widely and began writing poems at an early age. His writing led to a lifelong friendship with an older local boy named Phil Stone, who encouraged Faulkner’s literary interests and helped introduce him to the work of significant modern writers. Meanwhile, the adolescent Faulkner had also taken an interest in a local girl named Estelle Oldham; by 1918 she was ready to elope with him even though she was engaged to someone else, but both sets of parents disapproved of her relationship with Faulkner, and so her marriage proceeded as planned. Faulkner, in the meantime, tried to enlist as a pilot in the army after the United States entered World War I, but he was rejected because of his small size and low weight. After spending some time with Phil Stone, who was studying at

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Yale (where Faulkner met a number of up-andcoming writers), the future novelist was accepted for pilot training in Canada by Britain’s Royal Air Force. The war, however, ended before he could ever get into the air. Nevertheless, this fact did not prevent him from later claiming that he had been injured in a plane crash during his training. Back in the Deep South after returning from Canada, Faulkner continued to write poetry and had his fi rst significant magazine publication in 1919. After registering that year at the University of Mississippi (located in Oxford), he became involved in the campus literary and theatrical scene, even writing an experimental play, but by 1921 he had left the university for a short stay in New York City, where he worked briefly in a bookstore. By the end of the year, however, he was back in Oxford and had taken a job as the university’s postmaster—a job to which he never showed much devotion but that did give him plenty of time to read and write. By 1924 he had self-published a collection of poetry (The Marble Faun), but in the same year he lost his position as leader of a Boy Scout troop thanks to his drinking, and he also lost his job as university postmaster because of his lack of serious attention to the job. Faulkner, however, was not brokenhearted at this loss, memorably remarking that “I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank God I won’t ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp” (qtd. in Blotner and Polk, “Chronology” 997). By 1925 he was living in New Orleans, where he made the acquaintance of SHERWOOD A NDERSON (the influential novelist who had helped promote the careers of so many young American writers) and where he began contributing frequently to local periodicals. By this time he had written a novel, which Anderson recommended to his own New York publishers. Before the book was accepted, however, Faulkner set off on a freighter bound for Europe, where he spent much of his time in Paris, visiting art galleries, doing his own writing, and taking occasional side trips, including a brief journey to England. By the end of 1925 he was back in the United States

and was awaiting publication of his novel, Soldiers’ Pay, which appeared in February 1926 to generally good reviews. Nevertheless, despite Anderson’s role in promoting this book, by this time his relationship with Faulkner had become strained (thanks, in part, to Faulkner’s role in contributing to a book that mocked Anderson’s writings). In 1927 Faulkner’s second novel (Mosquitoes) was published and he was working on two other books, including a work he planned to title Flags in the Dust. The latter book, however, met with repeated rejection from publishers to whom Faulkner submitted it in 1928—a fact he found discouraging, but a fact that also prompted him to begin to work on a new book written mainly for his own satisfaction. Although Flags in the Dust (now titled Sartoris) was eventually published by a major New York press early in 1929, it was Faulkner’s newest manuscript, titled The Sound and the Fury, that would help change the course not only of his career but of modern American fiction. Highly innovative in structure, style, and technique, that book remains one of the most influential of all modern novels, and it was always the work of which Faulkner was the most proud. The book was quickly accepted for publication, but the same was not true of his newest novel, Sanctuary, which publishers initially considered too scandalous to print. Undeterred, however, Faulkner quickly completed another novel, As I Lay Dying, which was as pathbreaking in its own way as The Sound and the Fury. That latter book had been published in early October 1929 (not long before the stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression) and was receiving good reviews even if few copies were being sold. Nevertheless, Faulkner (who was now working at the university power plant in Oxford) had a major reason besides literary achievement to be pleased: In the midsummer of 1929 he had finally been able to marry his old sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, whose fi rst marriage had ended in divorce. By the beginning of the 1930s, then, he had thus become not only a rising novelist but also a husband and the stepfather of Estelle’s two children. Given his new responsibilities, Faulkner became increasingly concerned in the 1930s with earning

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a decent living. He began to write short fiction for national magazines, sometimes earning more for a single story than he had for any of his novels. With this income he was able to buy a large but dilapidated house in Oxford, which he began repairing. Meanwhile, there was also good news on other fronts: Both British and French publishers had begun to show interest in his work; As I Lay Dying was printed in October 1930, and even Sanctuary—once considered too shocking to publish—was accepted and was issued (after extensive last-minute revisions) in March 1931, receiving good reviews and generating healthy sales. Furthermore, a collection of short stories, also published in 1931, also sold well; new publishers were courting him; he was making a wide range of new friends among the New York literary establishment; and his income was growing. Not all the news was positive, however: Early in 1931 the Faulkners had lost a newborn daughter, and by the end of the year Faulkner (always a heavy drinker) was so affl icted by his addiction to alcohol that he had to be retrieved by Estelle from New York (where he had been visiting) after friends became concerned. Nevertheless, Faulkner remained productive: Early in 1932 he fi nished Light in August (another masterpiece), and by spring of that year he found himself in California, where he began his long association with the Hollywood fi lm industry as a scriptwriter and script consultant. The death of his father at the end of that summer meant that Faulkner now became the chief fi nancial supporter of his widowed mother, but the money he was earning from his involvement with the movies (including sale of the screen rights to Sanctuary) was good for that era and even helped him continue with the renovations on his house in Oxford. Indeed, Faulkner soon had enough disposable income that he fi nally realized his longtime dream of becoming a pilot in 1933, even buying his own plane, and he was also able to purchase additional property in Mississippi. The best news of 1933, however, was the birth of his daughter, Jill, on June 24. In 1934 a new collection of short stories appeared; further profitable work in Hollywood ensued; and another novel (Pylon) was completed.

During this time Faulkner was also hard at work on an even more important novel—Absalom, Absalom!—but his personal life was complicated, in November 1935, by the accidental death of his brother Dean and by the beginning of his own longtime affair with Meta Doherty Carpenter, a woman from Mississippi who was also employed in Hollywood. Faulkner usually resented his own need to work there, since his fi lm duties interrupted his devotion to his own fiction writing, and so his relations with the Hollywood studios were often fitful and stormy. His drinking did not help, and Estelle herself had also acquired a strong taste for alcohol. Nonetheless, Absalom, Absalom! was published to impressive reviews (but less impressive sales) in October 1936, and by the end of the year Faulkner was fi nally able to pay off the mortgage on his Oxford house. In 1937 he spent time working in Hollywood, doing his own writing back in Mississippi, and visiting (and drinking) in New York. Indeed, he drank so heavily while there that he passed out in his hotel room and was severely burned when he lay, unconscious, with his back against a scalding steam pipe. Recuperation was lengthy and painful, but Faulkner remained productive: His latest novel, The Unvanquished, was issued early in 1938, and screen rights for the book were quickly sold. Faulkner purchased a large farm near Oxford (on which he planned to raise mules), all the while continuing his work on various writing projects, including a new novel titled The Wild Palms, which was published to significant commercial success at the start of 1939. By this time he had been elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and by the end of that year his short story titled “Barn Burning” had been awarded a major literary prize. More stories were written in 1940, and in addition a new novel (The Hamlet) was published that year, followed in early 1942 by a collection of fiction (Faulkner called it a novel) titled Go Down, Moses. By this time, of course, the United States had entered World War II. Faulkner found himself back in Hollywood (always a source of income, if also of frustration), where he worked intermittently throughout the war. By the time the con-


fl ict ended in 1945, a well-known critic named Malcolm Cowley was hard at work on an anthology—to be titled The Portable Faulkner—that he and Faulkner hoped would call important attention to the significance of Faulkner’s body of work. When the book was published in 1946, it did just that, and in fact Cowley’s collection is often credited with reviving Faulkner’s reputation by reminding American readers of a novelist who enjoyed far more acclaim in Europe than in his native land. In any case, by 1948 Faulkner had published a new book, Intruder in the Dust, which became his best-selling novel to that point; screen rights for this work were quickly purchased, and by the end of the year its author had been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1949 the fi lm version of Intruder in the Dust premiered in his hometown; one of his short stories won a major prize; and a collection of short fiction was issued late that fall. By summer 1950 Collected Stories of William Faulkner was published, but by far the major event of that year was the announcement that Faulkner had been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Both the award itself and the inspiring speech Faulkner made in accepting it won him widespread new attention and respect. Finally he had achieved, in his own country, the kind of serious recognition he had long enjoyed abroad. From now until his death little more than a decade later, awards, academic positions, speaking invitations, government assignments, and other kinds of distinctions would flow in upon him. The man who had never fi nished high school had become one of his country’s most distinguished writers. He also increasingly became a widely published commentator on social affairs, especially on matters related to the racial problems of the South. Faulkner favored voluntary integration of the public schools and was generally liberal in his attitudes toward racial issues—a stance that often annoyed less progressive whites, especially in his native state. In other ways, however, his social views were often traditional and conservative. Throughout the 1950s Faulkner continued to be productive, despite frequent back pain, various injuries, and persistent problems with alcohol.

In 1951 he published a partially dramatic work, Requiem for a Nun, on which he had worked with Joan Williams, a young admirer with whom he had become romantically involved. In 1954 he published a new novel, called A Fable, on which he had been laboring for many years; it won the National Book Award for fiction in 1955. That same year he published Big Woods, a group of stories about hunting. Meanwhile, his romantic entanglement with another young woman—Jean Stein—complicated his personal life and helped provoke his wife to offer a divorce (an offer he refused) in 1957. During that same year, his newest novel (The Town) received a mixed reception from the critics, but by this point Faulkner was receiving increasing respect from academics (becoming writer in residence, for instance, at the University of Virginia) and was also being asked more and more to represent the United States on goodwill trips abroad. While living in Charlottesville, Virginia, he began to spend greater and greater time participating in the hunts on horseback organized by wealthy local residents, even though he occasionally suffered serious injuries in accidents and falls. In the meantime, his latest novel, The Mansion, appeared in late 1959, followed in 1962 by his last novel, The Reivers. During these last years of his life, Faulkner spent much of his time hunting, traveling, dealing with back pain and other ailments, and (unfortunately) drinking excessively. In his fi nal months both the pain and the drinking continued, so that when he died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962, his death put an end to a considerable amount of suffering. It also, unfortunately, ended a literary career that still held much promise, even if its most fruitful period was now decades in the past. By the end of his life Faulkner had risen from total obscurity to worldwide prominence. He had produced not only more than a score of important books but also a whole new kind of American writing. As ERNEST H EMINGWAY did (but in a much different manner), he had created a distinctive style and had explored a distinctive set of themes and subjects and had thereby helped, in the process, to win for American literature broad international recognition and respect.

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The Sound and the Fury (1929) This experimental novel, which is highly innovative in structure and technique, deals with the breakdown of the southern Compson family, which is headed by a cynical father and a self-pitying mother and consists of a loving, lovable daughter named Caddy, a mentally retarded son named Benjy, his intellectual brother named Quentin (who eventually commits suicide), and their self-centered, sarcastic brother named Jason. All three brothers are preoccupied, in one way or another, with Caddy, whose adolescent sexual involvements lead to a pregnancy that results not only in estrangement from her family but also in a daughter also named Quentin, whose relationship with her uncle Jason is eventually full of tension and confl ict. Ultimately the teenaged, female Quentin escapes what is left of the family, leaving behind a frustrated, embittered Jason, who strongly contrasts with Dilsey, the family’s old black cook—the one character throughout the book who consistently shows herself to be wise, kind, stable, and loving. Although The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner’s fourth novel, it is widely considered his fi rst truly significant work, and indeed many readers regard it as his best piece of writing. It is, initially, a very difficult book to understand, especially in the fi rst two of its four sections. Section 1, which is titled “April Seventh, 1928,” is told from the perspective of Benjy, the mentally handicapped brother, whose thoughts are highly random and disjointed: His thinking constantly shifts, without warning or explanation, between the present and the past. Indeed, the title of Faulkner’s novel derives from a famous speech near the beginning of act 5, scene 5 of Shakespeare’s play Macbeth in which Macbeth declares that all of human life is merely “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” This quotation seems especially relevant to the fi rst section of the novel for at least three reasons: (1) Benjy is considered a literal idiot by most of the other characters; (2) he is in fact often angry and frustrated, but his ability to express himself to others is limited mostly to inarticulate howls; (3) it may seem easy to conclude that the events Benjy perceives are merely chaotic and meaningless.

This impression of confusion and disorder seems, if anything, to intensify in the second section of the novel, titled “June Second, 1910”—a section in which events are described from the perspective of Benjy’s older brother, Quentin. Although Quentin is not an “idiot” (in fact, he is a highly intelligent student at Harvard), his obsession with his sister Caddy is, if anything, even more intense than Benjy’s and results in extreme psychological confusion and, eventually, suicide. Ironically, Benjy’s section seems relatively simple and straightforward when compared with Quentin’s, which is full of odd allusions, fragmented syntax, and complicated disruptions in the narrative. The fi rst half of Faulkner’s book will therefore not only puzzle most readers but frustrate many. In contrast, section 3—titled “April Sixth, 1928”—is not only much easier to follow but also often laugh-out-loud funny, offering a refreshing change in tone and technique from the fi rst two parts. The perspective here belongs to Jason Compson, who is in some ways a much simpler character than either of his two brothers. Appropriately, therefore, his section is presented in a much simpler, more straightforward fashion than theirs, and for many readers this portion of the book will be a welcome relief after the tangled (and, in some respects, not especially interesting) knots Faulkner ties in the fi rst two sections. Jason is bitter, sarcastic, brutal, and biting, and all these traits give his section a strong, clear narrative thrust as well as an enormous degree of perverse energy and vitality. Reminiscent, in many ways, of Shakespeare’s Iago and King Richard III, Jason is an essentially evil, self-centered character who is nonetheless highly entertaining; in his snide cynicism he anticipates (and probably influenced) some of the equally misanthropic characters later depicted by Flannery O’Connor. It is hard to imagine a mind quite as dark and derisive as Jason’s, but Faulkner brings him to vivid life, and the plot picks up a kind of acerbic briskness and buoyancy whenever he dominates the scene. In section 3, therefore, Faulkner reveals that he was not simply a daring experimenter but also a conventionally talented writer. The same is true, to a lesser degree, in section 4, which is titled “April


Eighth, 1928” and differs from the three earlier sections because it is reported by an omniscient narrator. Jason is still a central figure here (as is Quentin, his adolescent niece and constant antagonist), but in many ways the central figure is now Dilsey, the old black housekeeper who has devoted her life to caring for the Compsons and who is the clear standard by which we can measure that family’s flaws and failures. Dilsey is, in particular, the polar opposite of Jason; she possesses all the kindness, selflessness, compassion, and strength he lacks, and she is (even more obviously than Caddy) the true heroine of Faulkner’s novel. Ironically enough, the cynical, caustic Jason is fi nally himself an object of both Faulkner’s and the reader’s derision, whereas Dilsey is the one character in the book who seems to earn the unqualified respect of both the author and his audience. Paradoxically, then, the true aristocrat of this novel—at least in moral terms—is not any of the relatively privileged Compsons, with their large house and long lineage, but an old black cook who is far less simple than she seems. Thus Faulkner’s novel, in spite of its innovative structure and unconventional techniques, is (in its underlying ethical values) a highly traditional book: It implicitly endorses many of the most orthodox ideals of old-fashioned Judeo-Christian morality. The “plot” of the book, such as it is, is rather straightforward and even banal: When the Compson siblings are youngsters, they are playing near a creek when Caddy muddies her underpants. Later she climbs a tree while her brothers, watching from below, glimpse the dirty drawers. The soiled underwear eventually becomes, at least in the fevered mind of her brother Quentin, a symbol of Caddy’s later loss of sexual “innocence”—a loss he cannot tolerate because it symbolizes the loss of his own intensely close attachment to her. For Quentin and for Benjy, Caddy has provided the kind of love and caring they have never received from their self-involved mother or their remote and cynical father. Caddy, too, of course, suffers from this parental indifference or neglect—and so, in his own strange way, does Jason. Each child responds differently from the others to this fundamental sense of isolation: Benjy and Quentin become

obsessed with Caddy; Jason becomes obsessed with himself; and the teenaged Caddy ultimately seeks attention from a series of boys, one of whom fi nally makes her pregnant. In response, a marriage is hastily arranged to a youth from Indiana, but not before Quentin tries to preserve his relationship with Caddy by falsely telling his father that he and his sister have committed incest—a claim the father dismisses. Realizing that his links with Caddy (as well as his romantic illusions about her) are now fundamentally lost, Quentin kills himself by plunging into a river in Massachusetts. Meanwhile, Benjy (who is 33 when the novel opens but who has the mind of a three-year-old) spends his time roaming the grounds near the family home, moaning whenever anything upsets him or reminds him of Caddy. Benjy is usually accompanied by one of the blacks who work for the Compsons, but the only person who truly seems to care about him (after Caddy leaves) is the ever-reliable and fundamentally compassionate Dilsey. Jason, certainly, feels no real love for his disadvantaged brother: When Benjy menacingly approaches some neighborhood girls, the family has him castrated, and Jason would like nothing better than to have him also committed to an insane asylum. In the meantime, Jason himself hoards the money that Caddy sends each month to help provide for Quentin, the illegitimate daughter she has had to leave behind. Jason tries to control every aspect of the rebellious girl’s behavior, including her involvement with boys, but at the end of the novel she defeats him by breaking into his locked room, stealing the money he has hidden away, and running off with a worker from a traveling carnival. As does her mother, then, she fi nally escapes (at least geographically) from the bizarre influence of the Compsons, among whom Benjy seems in some ways the least unstable (or most innocent) of the bunch. Faulkner claimed that he was inspired to write the novel by his own love of Caddy, whom he seems to have regarded as a symbol of kindness and love. If he had told the story in a “normal,” conventional fashion—with a clear chronological progression and with a consistently omniscient third-person point of view—the book would be simpler to read,

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easier to understand, but not (for many readers, at least) nearly as interesting. Instead, Faulkner elected to use two techniques that were just beginning to come into widespread use among avant-garde (or cutting-edge) novelists: stream of consciousness and interior monologue. As the very term implies, in stream of consciousness fiction the mind of the character spills out onto the page haphazardly and without obvious or conventional structure. Practitioners of the stream-of-consciousness technique tended to believe that the mind itself was extremely complex, consisting not merely of conscious thoughts and rational ideas but also of largely unconscious yearnings, fears, moods, sensations, memories, and associations. The purpose of using the stream of consciousness method was therefore to evoke, on the page, the complications, inconsistencies, dead ends, and puzzling gaps typical of actual human thought. Just as the mind works in random, unpredictable, and disordered ways, so Faulkner’s novel—at least in its fi rst two sections— tries to convey some sense of that chaotic complexity. The same effects are achieved by his reliance on another avant garde technique—interior monologue. As the term implies, this technique emphasizes the individual character’s responses to the world rather than emphasizing the external world itself. We see, hear, and feel everything from the highly subjective point of view of single characters: An explicit authorial voice is absent. We are “inside the head” of the character, perceiving what he or she perceives, feeling what he or she feels. Faulkner, then, is less interested in telling a straightforward story than he is in suggesting the complexities of individual psychological experience. Any encounter with “reality” is, necessarily, an encounter from some particular, limited, biased, and conditioned point of view, and Faulkner is more interested in exploring these various viewpoints than he is in pretending to offer a simple, objective, “authoritative” narrative. His method implies that there is no single, simple “truth”—or that if there is, we have no easy access to it. For this reason he often returns to the same “events” again and again, allowing us to perceive them from many different angles and perspectives. In The Sound

and the Fury this method is especially relevant to some of his main themes, since the book is largely about the absence of shared outlooks, the breakdown of collective responses, and the growing isolation of alienated individuals. Benjy is cut off from the rest of the world by his mental retardation; his brother Quentin is cut off by his hypersensitivity and excessive intellectuality. Jason, meanwhile, deliberately cuts himself off from others through his monumental egotism—a trait he has inherited from his equally solipsistic mother, although her egocentrism is expressed in more passive-aggressive ways. Mr. Compson, the father, is mostly a scoffing bystander and then is mostly absent (thanks to his early death) from the later sections of the book, while Quentin, the rebellious teenage girl, is cut off from the rest of the family because of the circumstances of her illegitimate birth, because of the physical absence of her mother, and because of her refusal to kowtow to her manipulative uncle Jason. Only the black members of the household—centered on Dilsey—seem members of a real community with a clearly shared outlook, a solid chain of authority, and a relatively “normal” family life, and it is significant that the narrative is never presented solely from the perspective of any of the black characters (not even Dilsey’s). Precisely because Dilsey (and, to a lesser extent, Caddy) is capable of genuine selflessness, the book never allows us to see events merely from her single, isolated point of view. Her perspective, after all, is never truly single or isolated, and so it should not surprise us that a section devoted exclusively to Dilsey’s outlook is missing from the novel. Many of the secondary themes of the novel are related to this larger theme of isolation or alienation. The racism taken for granted by so many of the characters (and expressed with such explicit and contemptuous language by Jason) is, for example, merely one of the many means by which characters are cut off from one another in this novel. Jason assumes his own superiority not only to most of the other people in the book (including his own mother) but especially to all of the black people—an assumption, paradoxically, that makes him even more essentially isolated. Likewise, his aggres-


sive economic competitiveness, like his monetary greed and his disdain for his niece’s lower-class suitor, only reinforces his fundamental alienation. It hardly seems an accident that he never marries or is never shown even courting a woman: He is much too self-involved ever to feel the need for love, a wife, or children. More than one analyst has suggested, in fact, that his obsession with his niece (and particularly with her love life) implies more than a touch of incestuous feelings, and, if this diagnosis is accurate, such an interpretation would only reinforce the view that the thoughts and feelings of most of the characters in this book are self-enclosed and claustrophobic. Certainly the feelings of Jason’s brother Quentin toward their sister, Caddie, fit this description, and although Quentin and Caddie are not guilty of the literal act of incest, Quentin is certainly guilty of a kind of “love” for his sister that is fundamentally rooted in his own self-love. His geographical isolation (during much of the book) from the rest of the family when he is in Massachusetts is therefore entirely appropriate, for Quentin is essentially a “distant” character even when he shares the same space with other people. Like his mother (who spends most of her time confi ned to her bed in her own room), and like his brother Jason (who carefully keeps his own room locked and shut off from the rest of the family), Quentin is detached, solitary, aloof, and disconnected. Most of the people in this book are in fact cut off from anything or anyone outside themselves, whether it be family, community, the church, or God. Only Dilsey and her children enjoy any kind of vital contact with these larger sources of meaning and happiness. Only Dilsey, in the end, escapes the tragic, existential isolation that is Faulkner’s main theme in this book.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Jason, in this novel, with the character named Julian in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” How are they similar in their personalities, their ways of treating other people, their ways of expressing themselves, and their ultimate fates? How and why are they funny at

the expense of others, but how and why is the joke fi nally on them? In particular, discuss each man’s relationship with his mother. 2. How does this novel resemble and/or differ from THORNTON WILDER’s play Our Town? In what ways are the characters in both works fundamentally isolated? What does each work imply about the importance of the family, both positively and negatively, in individuals’ lives? What do both works suggest about the relations of past, present, and future? How are both works technically innovative in similar ways? 3. Read Faulkner’s novel in conjunction with the novel by W. E. B. DUBOIS entitled The Quest of the Silver Fleece. How do the works compare and/or contrast in their depictions of race relations, in their techniques of characterization and narration, in their description of life in the South, and in their resolutions and fi nal tones? 4. Discuss in detail the fi rst three paragraphs of the novel. How are they typical, in phrasing and method, of the novel as a whole? How does Faulkner use them to create interest, to imply a specific geographic and temporal setting, and to suggest already the nature of relationships among the characters? How does the very opening of the novel foreshadow the novel’s conclusion?

As I Lay Dying (1930) After the death of Addie Bundren, a poor white wife and mother in rural Mississippi, her husband (Anse) and children (sons Cash, Darl, Jewel, and Vardaman and daughter Dewey Dell) laboriously transport her body 40 miles to Jefferson to fulfi ll her desire to be buried with her kinfolk. Her fi nal days, her previous life, and the process of hauling the corpse are all described and commented on in a succession of 59 short chapters narrated by 15 different characters, including all the members of the family and a variety of people they meet along the way as the body, putrefying in a homemade wooden coffi n, begins to stink and attract buzzards. Eventually the family arrive in Jefferson, where Addie is

150


buried, where Dewey Dell is seduced while seeking to abort her pregnancy, where Darl is committed to an insane asylum, and where Anse, having purchased a long-sought set of false teeth, immediately takes up with a new woman. Like The Sound and the Fury (the novel that immediately preceded it), As I Lay Dying is a technically innovative and challenging book. Both works reject the traditional use of an all-knowing thirdperson narrator, employing instead a modernist “stream of consciousness” technique in which the story is told from a multitude of often-confl icting points of view. However, whereas Faulkner, in The Sound and the Fury, had presented the perspectives of a relatively small number of characters in only a few lengthy sections, in As I Lay Dying the sections are much shorter and much more numerous, reflecting the viewpoints of a much wider cross section of personalities. The later novel thus seems, at least in structure and design, more fragmented than the earlier book, although the “plot” is actually easier to follow, partly because the chronology is simpler and fewer distracting flashbacks are employed. In addition, the speaker of each chapter is clearly mentioned at the beginning of each section, making the later novel seem less confusing than its predecessor. The styles of the various chapters of As I Lay Dying vary in accordance with the personality and mind of the character speaking in each section, and Faulkner leaves it to his readers—as he so often does—to piece together a coherent narrative. He is (as usual) less interested in telling a simple, straightforward story than in suggesting the multitude of ways in which any event can be perceived, interpreted, and presented. Admirers of this novel have praised it for a number of stylistic and technical traits. They have applauded it, for instance, for the ways it blends comedy (including humor that is often macabre and ironic) with more serious and even tragic elements, and they have also commended the novel for its combination of cutting-edge narrative techniques with convincing vernacular diction and dialogue. Faulkner, in other words, writes in the most up-todate modernist fashion, but his characters think and speak (for the most part) in language that any person

from the backwoods of the Deep South would have instantly recognized. The book is thus modern in method but traditional in the personalities, social relations, and values it presents. Many readers fi nd the characters vivid and intriguing, and analysts have also often praised the sheer variety of types of characters presented, with their multitude of different outlooks, motivations, and responses. The lengthy, arduous journey has been compared to the kind of plot often found in such classical epics as Homer’s Odyssey, while the book has also been admired for the sheer suspense it creates: Will the Bundrens succeed in their journey? Will the rapidly decaying body survive the trip? Will the family hold together after the burial? Will Dewey Dell have an abortion? How will the characters respond to—and be treated in—the city of Jefferson? By implying such questions, Faulkner holds the attention and interest of numerous readers, who fi nd the Bundrens sometimes laughable, sometimes pathetic, and sometimes even noble in their dedication and commitment to finishing the task they have undertaken. Simply as a piece of writing, As I Lay Dying has been extolled for the ways it creates and communicates emotion, for the ways it sustains interest by withholding or postponing meaning, for its effective use of imagery, and for the ways it forces readers to take an active role in trying to make sense of what is happening and why. Faulkner has been praised for creating a variety of convincing voices and viewpoints and for using contrasts among these differing perspectives to create a novel that is kaleidoscopic in its ultimate effects. Not all readers, of course, have been uniformly impressed by this book. Some critics, for instance, have found both the characters and the plot tedious, arguing that the Bundrens are merely simplistic caricatures and thus fail to arouse much authentic sympathy, compassion, or even interest. For the most part, however, commentators fi nd the book’s plot, people, and methods fascinating and engaging. Whether the Bundrens are regarded as buffoons, heroes, or some mixture of the two, they do interest many readers. At least as interesting, to many critics, as the characters themselves are the themes the book explores. Many commentators, for instance, have discussed the ways this novel reveals the impact the dead can


have on the living or the influence the past can exert on the present. The surviving Bundrens struggle mightily to make sure that Addie’s fi nal wish is fulfi lled—even if (as some analysts have argued) her wish was motivated less by a yearning to rest beside her kinfolk than by a desire to impose her vengeful will on a spouse and children with whom she was never really happy. Indeed, for many analysts a main theme of the book is the fundamental loneliness of most human beings—their essential isolation from one another even (or perhaps especially) when they are members of the same families. Each Bundren participates in the common enterprise of getting Addie moved and buried, but each Bundren has his or her private (and often selfish) reasons for doing so. Thus the book shows (at least according to some readers) how even acts of apparent solidarity can involve an immense sense of solitude, and the styles and structure of the novel emphasize the selfenclosed isolation of characters who interact with one another without ever really sharing a true common purpose or a larger point of view. On the other hand, for some readers the novel conveys a more optimistic message: It shows the ability and willingness of human beings to struggle, overcome obstacles, endure, and even prevail in the face of enormous difficulties. It would have been easy enough for the Bundrens to ignore Addie’s wishes and conveniently bury her closer to home, but instead they honor their obligations, showing a kind of respect for the dead that implies that life is not without meaning, purpose, or dignity, even when the people involved are poor, uneducated, simple, and somewhat crude. Conversely, for other readers the journey the Bundrens undertake illustrates the absurdity of life—its lack of any ultimate purpose and the impermanence of human attachments and identities. At the end of the book, after all, Darl has been committed to an insane asylum and Anse has suddenly acquired not only new teeth but a new partner. Addie herself, meanwhile, seems quickly forgotten. It is tempting, then, to read the novel as a description of a long, mock-epic journey that leads to nothing of any great consequence or significance. Comments on the various characters of the novel have focused mostly on Addie, Anse, and

Darl. Addie, for instance, has sometimes been viewed as a victim of a male-oriented power structure who, through the way she lives and through her fi nal wishes, tries to repudiate that power and take vengeance on it. She has been seen as a sexually frustrated woman who defies her husband by having an affair, but she has also been interpreted as a woman who, in her desire to be buried in Jefferson, is motivated by sincere devotion to her own original kinfolk. Although some commentators have found Addie too stereotyped or caricatured to be a convincing character, others have regarded her as a genuinely tragic figure who inspires true devotion in her children and who exercises far more influence over them, even after her death, than their father does. Indeed, Addie has often been compared to Caddy in The Sound and the Fury: Both women exert a powerful sway over many of the male characters even though both Caddy and Addie are technically absent from their novels for long stretches of time. Addie is as much a focus of the male characters’ obsessions as Caddy was, and certainly she seems a more substantial and serious figure than her husband, Anse. Anse, in fact, has rarely been the subject of positive comments from the novel’s analysts. Sometimes he is seen as a selfinterested clown and sometimes as a real villain, although occasionally commentators have argued that other critics have been too hard on Anse. He has been depicted as lazy, stupid, hypocritical, greedy, and selfi sh and also as a master manipulator, but at least one commentator has attributed any “defects” in his character to his real physical affl ictions (symbolized by his aversion to working up a sweat). In general, however, while for some commentators Anse merits derisive ridicule, others regard him as genuinely despicable. Finally, one more character has been the subject of extensive critical discussion: Darl, the second-oldest son of Addie and Anse and the figure who narrates more chapters (19) than any other character in the book. It is Darl who tries at one point to incinerate his mother’s decaying corpse by burning a barn in which her coffi n is temporarily housed, and it is Darl who is declared insane and imprisoned by the end of the novel. For many commentators, Darl is a


tragic figure whose incarceration confi rms his perception that life is cruel—a cruelty underscored by his unrequited love for his mother, whose personal favorite among her children is Jewel, the product of her extramarital affair with a local preacher. Jewel, in fact, is the object of much of Darl’s jealousy. He appears in every one of the many chapters narrated by Darl, including the fi rst chapter, in which Jewel is indeed the very fi rst word. Nevertheless, despite this obsession with a particular brother, Darl has also been seen as the most comprehensive character—the one who has the most insights into the others and the most responses to them, and indeed the character whose point of view most closely resembles the narrative perspective of the author himself. In fact, Darl’s language (which, among other traits, abounds in metaphors but is relatively lacking in similes) has sometimes been criticized as sounding too authorial, too sophisticated in diction and tone, and thus the realism of Faulkner’s depiction of Darl has sometimes been faulted. As has Quentin in The Sound and the Fury, Darl has sometimes been seen as greatly resembling Faulkner himself in his concerns, thoughts, and language, but Quentin, at least, was a highly educated person from whom complex thoughts and sophisticated phrasing might have been expected. Other commentators, however, have defended Faulkner’s presentation of Darl by arguing that achieving an effect of mere realism was never Faulkner’s main aim in this book—a book that many readers consider one of his best, most complex, and most intriguing.

For Discussion or Writing 1. JOHN STEINBECK’s novel The Grapes of Wrath also deals with a lengthy, arduous journey by a group of poor white southerners in the same general period in which Faulkner’s novel is set. Compare and contrast the two books in terms of style, characterization, narrative technique, and themes. For instance, how does Addie Bundren resemble and/or differ from Ma Joad? How is each book innovative in the ways it tells its story? What “message(s)” or meanings does each book seem to imply? Does one book appeal to you more than the other? If so, explain why.

2. How does the family life depicted in Faulkner’s novel resemble and/or differ from the family life depicted in R ICHARD WRIGHT’s novel Native Son? Discuss the roles of the mothers in both books and the relations of the siblings. Discuss the impact of the different settings—rural and urban—presented in each book; how are the characters shaped by their environments? Discuss the impact of race and social class in each novel. 3. How does the culture of the poor southern whites described in this novel compare and/or contrast with the culture of the poor southern blacks described in ZOR A NEALE HURSTON’s book Mules and Men? Which are greater: the similarities or the differences? Which book offers a more convincing depiction of the cultures it describes? How are the techniques, purposes, and styles of the works affected by the differing genres to which they belong? 4. Choose one of the main characters and trace his or her development throughout the novel. How is the character presented in ways that make him or her seem both complex and consistent? Is there a particular episode in which this character is involved that seems especially revealing or important? Does the character change in any significant ways as the novel develops?

“A Rose for Emily” (1930, 1931) A narrator who speaks with intimate knowledge of the town of Jefferson, Mississippi, tells about the life of Miss Emily Grierson, an elderly, isolated, strong-willed spinster who has recently died after living alone for many decades in a large, decaying, dust-fi lled house in which her only regular contact was with an old black servant named Tobe. When Emily was a young woman, her domineering father discouraged suitors; after his death, she took up with a visiting Yankee construction worker named Homer Barron, but their relationship caused a scandal in the town; eventually he vanished, and after his disappearance Miss Emily retreated into seclusion. After Emily is buried, a delegation from the town opens a room in her house that has not


been seen for 40 years; in it, they discover the skeletal remains of Homer Barron, dressed in his nightshirt, on a bed, with a strand of Miss Emily’s graying hair on the pillow beside him. “A Rose for Emily” is one of Faulkner’s most widely read and widely admired stories. It exemplifies his typical interest in the small fictional southern town of Jefferson (modeled closely on his own town of Oxford, Mississippi) and reveals his frequent concern with eccentric characters, cultural decay, the way the past impinges on the present, and bizarre, often perverse relationships, especially within families. Faulkner often likes to deal with the strange skeletons in people’s closets, and in this case the metaphor almost becomes a literal fact. The story is an example of the “gothic” in literature: It emphasizes dark settings, a gloomy tone, an eccentric character, an air of mystery, and a touch of horror. Miss Emily’s life has obviously been warped by the influence of her domineering father, and it seems significant that no other close relations are ever mentioned: the words mother, brother, and sister do not exist in this story, and the only relatives of Emily who are referred to (besides her father) are cousins who live in distant Alabama. Emily has been isolated by her father, and, after his death and the disappearance of Homer Barron, she deliberately isolates herself. Ironically, her weakness in relation to her father ultimately results in strength and indomitable willpower in her relations with the rest of the town. By rejecting connections with the rest of the community, she paradoxically fulfi lls her father’s desire to keep her cut off from any real influence but his own, and it seems fitting that at her funeral a crayon portrait of her father (presumably drawn by Emily herself) looms above her coffi n. Although Mr. Grierson’s relationship with his daughter may not have been physically perverse, it certainly seems symbolically incestuous, at least in the way he dominates and isolates Emily. In one way or another, her fi nal decades are overshadowed by her obsessive relations with dead men. Although commentators on this story often view Emily as a bizarre figure, she also has been seen as a character more sinned against than sinning—as an example of a woman whose whole life has been dis-

torted not simply by a particular overbearing father but by the whole patriarchal culture of the traditional South. Critics often see her as being simultaneously intimidating, pitiable, admirable, and pathetic; she is often interpreted as a woman whose isolation and conduct lend her a kind of tragic dignity. Some critics contrast her with her servant, Tobe, who seems more noble, more normal, more healthy, and more humble than his oddly murderous mistress; and commentators also tend to contrast her with the anonymous narrator, whose tone and attitudes seem sane, insightful, and sympathetic. Homer Barron, meanwhile, is as mysterious in life as he is in death: We never learn the details of his motivations or the exact nature of his relationship with Emily. Even (or perhaps especially) at the end of the tale, when we glimpse the startling remains of Homer’s unexpected corpse, Faulkner keeps us guessing, and “A Rose for Emily” is rightly regarded as one of the most tantalizing mystery stories in American literature.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this story with one or more works by Flannery O’Connor that also deal with domineering parental figures, such as “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” or “The Artificial Nigger.” In what ways are the tones and underlying messages of those stories similar to and/ or different from the tone(s) and message(s) of Faulkner’s story? How and why are O’Connor’s stories “comic” in ways that Faulkner’s story is not? What role (if any) does religion play in O’Connor’s stories and in Faulkner’s? 2. Discuss the role of isolation in this story and in the three major autobiographical essays of GERTRUDE SIMMONS BONNIN (Zitkala-Ša)— “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” “The Schooldays of an Indian Girl,” and “An Indian Teacher among Indians.” How is the isolation, in both cases, somewhat self-imposed? How is it affected by the gender, class, and ethnic backgrounds of the protagonists? How does each character respond to (and cope with) her isolation?

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3. How does Faulkner build and maintain suspense in this story? How does he keep his readers offguard, and how does he keep us guessing? What questions remain unanswered by the end of the tale? What are some possible (and plausible) answers to those questions? What evidence in the text supports those possible answers? What evidence confl icts with those answers? 4. Discuss the ways in which this story reflects changes that were taking place in southern culture during the decades described in this tale. Do some historical research and then discuss the ways the story reflects its era. How are the different generations described in this story typical of their times?

Light in August (1932) After a long journey (much of it on foot), pregnant Lena Grove arrives in Jefferson, Mississippi, in search of Lucas Burch, the father of her child, who is living there under the name Joe Brown; instead of fi nding Burch, however, Lena encounters a friendly man named Byron Bunch, who immediately takes a kindly (but also romantic) interest in her and who seeks advice and help from his one real friend, Gail Hightower, a former minister who now lives in isolation, having long been ostracized by the town because of an obsessive personality that led to the scandalous death of his unfaithful wife. Burch (alias Brown) is the junior partner in the illegal sale of alcohol by Joe Christmas, a bitter, violent man whose entire life has been warped by the suspicion (never confi rmed) that his father was black; Christmas and Burch live in a cabin on the property of Joanna Burden, an aging, isolated spinster with whom Christmas has a complicated relationship full of passionate sex and psychological tension. When Burden one day threatens Christmas with a gun, he kills her with a knife, sets fi re to her house, flees, is pursued, and takes refuge in the house of Gail Hightower, where he is eventually found, shot, and castrated by a fanatical racist named Percy Grimm; meanwhile, as the book concludes, Lena, having by now given birth to her baby, con-

tinues her search for Lucas Burch, accompanied by the ever-faithful Byron Bunch. Despite its often melodramatic plot and its sometimes implausible characters, Light in August is widely considered one of Faulkner’s best novels, particularly because of the ways it explores the racial tensions that shaped the southern past and continue to affect the southern present. Joe Christmas is the obvious symbol of this central theme: His entire life, from his earliest childhood until the moment of his death, is warped and twisted by the mere possibility (which is never actually confi rmed) that his father may have been black. Although Joe looks white enough to pass easily as a Caucasian, he is haunted by the private suspicion (and the public rumor) that he may possess black blood—a possibility that subjects him not only to internal torment but especially to social prejudice and persecution. Thus, through the depiction of Christmas (but also through the depictions of such other characters as Gail Hightower and Joanna Burden), Faulkner deals with one of his favorite themes: the inevitable impact of history on the present moment. Christmas’s life is distorted by the whole tradition of American racial prejudice, especially in the South; Hightower’s life is distorted by his preoccupation with the allegedly glorious deeds of his long-dead Confederate grandfather; while Joanna Burden’s life is deformed by the teachings of her own northern ancestors, who long ago instructed her that blacks are an inescapable burden for whom whites are responsible. Her family’s attitudes have alienated her from the town in which she lives, and those attitudes also ultimately lead to her own violent death when she tries to force her views on Christmas, the “black” man with whom she has been having a clandestine affair. In his presentation of all these characters (as well as others, such as Percy Grimm, a violent racist, and Simon McEachern, a religious fanatic), Faulkner shows how attitudes inherited from the past almost inexorably affect the present, often in highly destructive ways. Human beings, in Faulkner’s novels, are hardly ever entirely free or totally independent agents; instead, they are almost always trapped in sticky webs spun in the often-distant past. It is this emphasis on the


profound effects of history that so often makes the tone of Faulkner’s works so gloomy and so tragic. The impact of the past on the present is, however, only one of a number of important themes emphasized in Light in August. For instance, another key problem explored in this book is the struggle to achieve a whole and satisfying sense of identity. This dilemma is, in fact, the key challenge facing Joe Christmas, who is the most confl icted and therefore in some ways the most complex and fascinating character in the novel. From the beginning, Joe has never known exactly who he is: His father was killed (by Joe’s own racist maternal grandfather) before the boy was born; his mother died in childbirth; his earliest days were spent in an orphanage; his later years were spent with foster parents; and even his name—Joe Christmas—was invented off the cuff to reflect the day on which he arrived at the orphanage. Joe’s background, personality, and motivations always remain somewhat mysterious, both to him and to Faulkner’s readers, but Joe is only one of a number of characters in this novel who seem to lack stable and consistent identities. Joanna Burden is another example: At fi rst an isolated spinster, she soon evolves into Joe’s sexstarved lover, then becomes suddenly frigid, then reverts to a kind of religious and social fanaticism that leads, eventually, to her bizarre attempt to kill Joe and herself—an attempt that ultimately results in her own violent murder. Joanna (like Joe, whose name resembles her own) is an enigmatic personality who can sometimes appear so strange that she can occasionally seem unreal or unconvincing—a mere figment of Faulkner’s overheated imagination rather than a recognizable human being. Still, the fact that both Joe and Joanna are often so difficult to know or comprehend also contributes to another important theme of Light in August—the theme of isolation. Many of the characters in this book are cut off from society either literally, figuratively, or both: Joe lives in a rundown shack where his only companion is Brown/Burch, with whom Joe frequently fights; Joanna lives alone in a distant house, where her only significant contacts (with Joe) are often violent; Hightower is an exile who, ostracized by the community, shuts himself off in

a lonely dwelling; and Byron Bunch, kindhearted as he is, is mostly a loner until Lena unexpectedly enters his life. Like many other characters in various other Faulkner novels (such as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying), the important characters in Light in August are often cut off from satisfying, meaningful relationships. Human isolation is one of the most frequent and significant themes in many of Faulkner’s best books. Other themes commonly emphasized elsewhere in Faulkner’s fiction also appear in Light in August. The tragic legacy of southern racism, for instance, is one of the most important aspects of this novel. Joe is the obvious victim of this legacy: The mere possibility that he may be of mixed-race parentage corrupts his relations with his family, his friends, his lovers, and his society, and it also undermines any chance of his ever achieving a confident sense of coherent selfhood. His life, ironically, might be easier if he were entirely black; he would then at least belong to one defi ned and established community. Instead, he is the perfect embodiment of the traditional character type known as the tragic mulatto. In his case, however, the ironies of this status are even greater than usual since it is not even certain that he is indeed of mixed blood. He suffers (psychologically as well as socially) because of a status that may, in his case, not even be “real.” People’s opinions of him change instantly for the worse as soon as they suspect that he may be partly black, and corrupt characters (such as the dietitian in the orphanage or the greedy Lucas Burch) are easily able to use his allegedly mixed parentage against him. By depicting such behavior, Faulkner also implies that “race” is as much a social construction—as much a matter of interpretation—as it is a biological “fact”: It matters less who Christmas actually is than who he is perceived to be. However, the fact that he is the victim of such vicious prejudice seems all the more ironic because of the presence of another important theme: corrupt Christianity. Christmas lives, after all, in a society nominally devoted to a god of love, mercy, and compassion, yet some of the least attractive features of that society result from religious fanaticism. Christmas’s grandfather and foster father both pervert the true spirit of Christianity in

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highly unattractive ways; each man is vicious partly because he believes such conduct reflects God’s will. Faulkner shows how Christianity, far from being an inevitable antidote to racism, often served to reinforce it. Faulkner makes his treatment of Christian themes in this novel all the more tantalizing by hinting at various parallels between Joe Christmas and Jesus Christ. Obviously they share the same initials, and Joe’s name also associates him explicitly with the birthday of the Christian messiah. Other resemblances also exist. Thus, the true identity of each man’s father is a matter of concern and speculation; each man attracts a seemingly loyal follower who ultimately betrays him in pursuit of money; each man is captured on a Friday; and each man is 33 when he dies. Yet the differences between the two figures far outweigh any similarities: Joe is selfish, violent, sullen, and often vicious; he lacks any sense of a higher calling or any conviction of a deeper identity; and his death lacks any transcendent or transformative meaning. Joe is, then, in some ways the reverse image of Jesus, and any parallels between them merely help call attention to their far more important distinctions. Yet the character with whom Joe most strikingly contrasts is Lena. Although these two figures never actually meet and are hardly even aware of each other (certainly Joe never learns of Lena’s existence), obviously their stories are the two central strands from which the novel is woven, and just as obviously Faulkner juxtaposes these two narratives to highlight their differences. While Joe is complex, Lena is simple; while Joe is tormented, Lena is uncannily self-assured; whereas Joe is grim, violent, deadly, and ultimately dead, Lena is serenely optimistic, full of goodwill, literally full of life, and fi nally a nursing mother. Lena is essentially a comic figure in both senses of that term: Sometimes her actions and words (such as the very last words of the novel) provoke real smiles, but always her presence provokes a sense of the most positive and most hopeful aspects of human existence. She is kindhearted, gentle tempered, somewhat naive, and completely guileless, and she almost always draws out the best in the many people she encounters during her journey. Her positive impact on Byron Bunch is extreme

in degree but is not unique in nature: Her mere presence inspires him to acts of generosity, compassion, and self-sacrifice, and she has a similar impact on various other characters (including Gail Hightower) with whom she has contact. If anything, it is Lena—not the intriguingly named Joe Christmas— who comes closest to exemplifying (and evoking in others) the virtues often associated with Christian faith, and it is largely thanks to the presence of Lena that Light in August is not entirely dark and grim. Indeed, despite the fact that it features a nearbeheading and an actual castration, this book is in some ways one of the sunniest of Faulkner’s major novels. Lena Grove—whose last name itself implies an abundance of green life—is in some ways the embodiment of Faulkner’s underlying optimism about the fundamental, eternal rhythms of nature and life.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Joe Christmas in Light in August with Jim Casy in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. In what ways does each figure resemble and/or differ from Jesus Christ? How and why does each author seem to employ allusions to the story of Christ? How do such allusions contribute to the tone, resonance, and meaning of each work? 2. Read Faulkner’s novel alongside NELLA L ARSEN’s novel titled Passing. Discuss the roles of race, and of race mixing, in each work. How do geographical settings affect the “mixedrace” characters in each novel? How are their lives affected by their different genders and social classes? How does each character deal with the challenges posed by his or her ethnic background? 3. How are the themes of isolation and of social pressures explored in Faulkner’s novel and in EUGENE O’NEILL’s play The Hairy Ape? How are the positions, attitudes, and responses of Joe Christmas and Yank comparable and distinct? What roles do women play in the lives and fates of both of these characters? How are the deaths of the two characters comparable and/ or different?


4. Choose a particular chapter in the book and discuss its significance in the entire narrative. What characters, themes, settings, and patterns of imagery does that chapter emphasize, and how are all those factors connected to the larger narrative? How does the chosen chapter relate to the chapters that precede and follow it? How would the book seem different if a reader skipped the chosen chapter? What would the reader lose by doing so?

Absalom, Absalom! (1936) After a mysterious outsider named Thomas Sutpen arrives one day in the early 19th century in the north Mississippi town of Jefferson, he proceeds to buy a huge tract of land, on which he and his slaves eventually build an imposing house; Sutpen then marries Ellen Coldfield, who bears him a daughter named Judith and a son named Henry. When Henry attends college, he befriends a charming but mysterious figure named Charles Bon, to whom his sister eventually becomes unofficially engaged, even though Thomas Sutpen privately expresses his strong disapproval to Henry. Only when Sutpen eventually tells Henry that Charles is not only Henry’s brother (from an early alliance Thomas had in Haiti) but also partly black does Henry kill Charles to prevent the marriage—an act that ultimately leads to the destruction of all of Sutpen’s ambitions for power, prestige, status, and an heir to help establish a lasting dynasty. As so often in Faulkner’s fiction, the most interesting aspect of this novel is less the plot itself than the styles, structures, and techniques the author employs to tell the story. In this work he uses four different main narrators to relate the “facts” of the plot, but these narrators are so distinct in their personalities, so diverse in their biases and motives, and so varied in their actual familiarity with the events and people they describe that readers, by the end of the book, can easily come away confused— confused not only about what, exactly, “really” happened but especially about the significance (if any) of the events the narrators relate. The fi rst narrator

is Miss Rosa Coldfield, an elderly spinster whose sister Ellen was Sutpen’s wife. At the time she tells her tale, Miss Rosa still strongly detests the longdead Sutpen and regards him as almost demonic, and her fevered account of his acts and character, which she relates decades after his demise, is obviously colored by her contempt and disdain. Miss Rosa tells her story to young Quentin Compson, the Harvard undergraduate who is also a central character in Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury, and Quentin himself also becomes a chief narrator of the Sutpen saga. In addition, Quentin collects information and perspectives on Sutpen from his own father, Jason Compson III, who in turn heard reports from his father, General Jason Lycurgus Compson II, who actually knew Sutpen and was indeed one of Sutpen’s few real friends. Finally, yet another perspective is added by Quentin’s Harvard roommate, a Canadian named Shrevlin (“Shreve”) McCannon, who at fi rst seems to mock the tale Quentin tells him but who soon becomes so caught up in it that he eventually narrates events he could not possibly know about directly. To make matters even more complex, the novel opens (deceptively) with the voice of a seemingly all-knowing thirdperson narrator, who quickly introduces Rosa and Quentin and then just as quickly disappears for long stretches at a time, appearing again only intermittently, so that the story is told mainly from the limited perspectives of Rosa, Quentin, Quentin’s father, and Shreve, not to mention in letters written by a number of different characters. Other factors contribute even further to the narrative complexity (or confusion). Thus, sometimes Faulkner uses quotation marks to indicate clearly who is speaking; sometimes he does not. Sometimes he employs italics for one purpose; sometimes he employs them for another. Moreover, the standards of strict chronology are often ignored; it is not until late in the book, for instance, that we learn why Sutpen felt the need to build a grand house and found a dynasty, and likewise it is not until long after we hear of Bon’s murder that we discover the probable reason for his death. Thus, in this novel as so often elsewhere, Faulkner deliberately makes matters difficult for his readers; he wants us to work and strain

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to untangle whatever meanings or significance his story may possess. Part of his point, of course, is to make us not only think about but also actually feel and experience the difficulty of making sense of any events and personalities, especially those from the past. All narration, all history, necessarily involves large elements of subjective interpretation, and we can never be entirely sure that our own interpretations—or those of anyone else—are ever entirely accurate or reliable. Paradoxically, the more some of Faulkner’s narrators (such as Miss Rosa or Shreve) insist on the truth of their accounts, the more skeptical we, as readers, must be, and by the end of the novel we cannot be entirely sure who (if anyone) has anything like an accurate understanding of what has happened or why. Faulkner thus re-creates in his readers some of the same kind of uncertainty and insecurity felt by many of his characters. Just as the characters must rely on their memories of the events they have either experienced or heard about, so must we, and just as the characters often draw conclusions based on incomplete or confl icting evidence, so do we. As numerous commentators have remarked, Absalom, Absalom! resembles a highly elaborate detective novel in which readers are forced to try to piece together not only the basic elements of the story but also the natures of the characters and the meanings of their actions. Yet Faulkner’s book, unlike most detective fiction, lacks any neat resolution or ultimate sense of tidy meaning. The basic story is told over and over again by each new narrator, but each new narrator adds his or her own perspective while also supplying information (or making claims) not heard before. Thus the novel becomes more and more complex as it develops, until fi nally we cannot be quite sure whom or what (if anything) to believe. In one sense the work does build to a climax—We fi nally do discover why (apparently) Henry kills his stepbrother—but in another sense our understanding of events becomes less certain as each new voice is heard and as each new sentence unravels. If Absalom, Absalom! is indeed a mystery novel, it is one that is in some ways even more mysterious at its end than at its beginning.

The process of reading the book has also been compared to that of working a crossword puzzle, but this analogy is flawed, since the process of working a puzzle results in clear, correct, and defi nite answers. In contrast, a reader of Absalom, Absalom! feels less certain, less sure of its meanings at the end of the book than at the beginning. It is easy, then, to view Absalom, Absalom! as a book that “deconstructed” itself long before the term deconstruction was ever invented. In other words, the book seems to illustrate perfectly the recent idea that textual “meanings” are inevitably deferred and postponed and that interpretive certainty can therefore only be an illusion. Nevertheless, commentators have discovered in Faulkner’s novel many themes or motifs that, they believe, help give the book coherence and significance. Certainly the common Faulknerian themes of incest, racial tension, race mixing, confl ict between siblings, confl ict between parents and children, and connections between sex and death are all present in this book, and likewise the novel also illustrates once again Faulkner’s continuing concern with moral corruption, with the decay of southern society, and with the ways such corruption has contributed to such decay. As with many works by Faulkner, this novel also shows how strongly the past impinges on the present, and it likewise demonstrates how one’s view of the past is always inevitably affected by one’s present (and inevitably limited) perspective. The book not only explores but also makes a reader participate in the uncertainty of human knowledge, especially knowledge of the deepest motives of other people. And, as in much of Faulkner’s fiction, this novel shows how often and how closely issues of race and issues of family are intertwined. Many commentators have remarked how ironic it seems that Henry is apparently willing to allow his sister to commit incest by marrying her half brother but cannot tolerate the thought that she might marry a man whose ancestry is partly black. Analysts have noted that just as the Civil War was fought because southerners would not admit blacks to full membership in society, so Henry kills Bon because he cannot tolerate having a black in the family. Of course, a few skeptical commentators


have wondered why Thomas Sutpen did not simply tell his children of Bon’s black ancestry from the beginning and thus prevent all the complications and tragic consequences that ensued from keeping the matter secret for so long. In this respect, as in a number of others (such commentators have argued), the novel is unrealistic. Mere realism, though, was rarely Faulkner’s main concern; he is more often interested in suggestive symbolism than in simple plausibility. It goes without saying that most of the commentary about this novel’s characters has centered on Thomas Sutpen himself. He is indeed a highly intriguing figure and has been the subject of extensive critical discussion. For some analysts he is the embodiment of every flaw of the Old South—the personification of all the corruption, abuse, selfishness, and exploitative impulses that fi nally resulted in the destruction of the prewar southern system. For other critics, in contrast, Sutpen is an interloper who is the antithesis of all the best aspects and potential of southern culture. He is calculating, rationalistic, opportunistic, and driven by a desire for money and status; for these critics, in other words, Sutpen is a kind of closet Yankee who symbolizes the rise of forces that would eventually undermine any hope for a civilized southland. Likewise, while some critics (resembling Miss Rosa) see Sutpen as almost totally evil, others view him as a dynamic, almost mythic personality—larger than life, full of energy, heroic in his ambitions, and tragic in his flaws. For some commentators Sutpen resembles a figure from ancient Greek tragedy—a figure doomed by the very qualities of character that make him stand out. For other analysts Sutpen is the epitome of self-centered American individualism—a man driven by greed to succeed at any and all costs, a man determined to stamp his own overbearing identity on the land, on other people, and on history itself. He is a person so full of pride, arrogance, and self-regard that he treats other people merely as disposable instruments in the pursuit of his own grand design. Ironically, his ambition was born when he felt lack of respect as a youth, but he then proceeds to spend a lifetime treating others with massive disrespect, often provoking

their hatred and their desire for vengeance. Bon, for instance, desires little more than recognition and acknowledgment; it is partly Sutpen’s refusal simply to confess his paternity to Bon that makes Bon want to destroy his own father. However one reacts to Sutpen or interprets the novel as a whole, and however one responds to the structural or technical innovations the book exhibits, there seems little denying the stylistic energy and inventiveness of Faulkner’s language here. From the fi rst page until the last, the book is a linguistic tour de force: The phrasing is memorable and often mesmerizing in ways that seem less consistently true of some of Faulkner’s earlier important novels. The sentences frequently roll on and on, clause added to clause, word piled upon word, often without concern for conventional punctuation but frequently fresh and vivid and often even startling in their combinations and ranges of resonance. Take, for instance, the fi rst half of a long sentence that describes a sudden appearance by Sutpen: “Out of quiet thunderclap he would abrupt (man-horsedemon) upon a scene peaceful and decorous as a schoolprize water color, faint sulphur-reek still in hair clothes and beard” (Absalom, Absalom! 8). Among the various strengths of this sentence, one notes especially the surprising paradox of “quiet thunderclap”; the invented, inventive verb (“abrupt upon”); the vivid, jumbled imagery (“man-horsedemon”); the concocted but convincing adjective (“schoolprize”); the newly coined noun (“sulphurreek”); and the clutter of unpunctuated, jammedtogether substantives (“hair clothes and beard”). Any of these features, taken by itself, would make us sit up and pay attention; run together, as they are, in a single sentence, they attract particular notice. The important point, though, is that there are literally thousands of such sentences—thousands of such startling moments—in this novel, and the even more important point is that for the most part such sentences do not seem mere stunts or tricks. For the most part they contribute to the power and effectiveness of the book and to the credibility of the characterization. In this novel more, perhaps, than in any other, Faulkner shows himself to be the kind of prose poet—the lover and master of sounds,


rhythms, images, symbols, and meanings—that he always aspired to be. In this book his linguistic inventiveness and sureness of step are almost Shakespearean, and one concludes the novel feeling that whatever the book may or may not mean, it adds immensely to our sense of the potential and resources of the English language.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Faulkner himself compared this book to Wallace Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” In what ways is the comparison appropriate? How are the two works similar in structure, technique, purpose, and meanings? How do they differ, especially in terms of style? In what ways do both works reflect the tendencies of modernism in literature, not only in the ways in which they are written but also in what they seem to assume about reality and truth? 2. Compare and contrast Faulkner’s book with THORNTON WILDER’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. How do both works deal with the problem of trying to explain historical events and personalities? How are the works similar and/or distinct in the moral stances they imply and in the styles they employ? How does each work try to re-create, in convincing and credible ways, a particular culture and historical period? 3. How is Thomas Sutpen similar to and/or different from Wolf Larsen in JACK L ONDON’s novel The Sea Wolf ? Discuss the two men in terms of their education, their personalities, their ambitions, their ways of treating other people, and their fi nal fates. In what ways does each figure reflect his culture and his historical era? In what ways is each figure simultaneously attractive and repellent? What are each man’s strengths and weaknesses? 4. Choose a small passage from the novel (a paragraph or less) and discuss the effectiveness of its phrasing. What, precisely, makes the language vivid and memorable? How does the chosen passage use such techniques as imagery, rhythms, sound effects, and sentence structure? What, precisely, makes the passage “worth reading” and worth recommending to other readers?

“Barn Burning” (1939) Named after a legendary Civil War figure, Colonel Sartoris Snopes—or “Sarty”—is actually the 10-year-old son of Abner Snopes, a onetime horse thief and habitual barn burner who moves his poor white family from one sharecropping job to another, usually after he is expelled from the previous community in which his arrogant, vengeful character has earned him enemies. Although most members of Sarty’s family (with the exception of his mother and aunt) seem untroubled by Ab’s destructive habits, young Sarty feels increasingly torn between loyalty to his “pap” and an inherent sense of what is right and proper. Finally, when Ab sets out one night with the intention of burning the barn of Major de Spain (his wealthy current employer), Sarty breaks free from his mother’s confi ning grasp, runs to the major’s mansion, warns the major of what is about to happen, and then runs away, knowing that he may have put his father’s life at risk and knowing, too, that in any case he has forever broken his links with his family. “Barn Barning” is often read as a coming-of-age story in which Sarty faces a crucial moral dilemma and makes the right ethical choice despite the personal sacrifices that choice entails. Although Sarty admires his father (partly because he thinks Ab performed heroic service during the Civil War, when in fact Ab was a thief who stole horses from both sides), eventually Sarty realizes that he must place his obligations to the community and to higher standards of conscience above his loyalty to his own kin. The story can therefore be read as a tale of moral maturation in which the 10-year-old Sarty is actually more of an adult (in all the crucial senses of that word) than his own abusive, domineering, and hate-fi lled father. Some critics, however, feel a certain sympathy and understanding for Ab; rather than regarding him as a complete villain, they argue that he is a man of immense willpower, determination, and self-regard who protests, in his own destructive ways, against real injustices and inequalities in the social and economic systems of the traditional South. From this perspective, Major de Spain is not an entirely blameless victim; he is the beneficiary of a rigidly hierarchical social struc-


ture that oppresses not only all blacks but many poor whites as well. One problem with this reading, however, is that Ab seems full of contempt and abuse toward practically everyone, regardless of race, class, or family background, and indeed the most frequent victims of his abuse are the members of his own family. With his fierce pride, crippled foot, and love of fi re, he is clearly in many ways a Satanic figure, and certainly he repeatedly disrupts any chances his family (not to mention the surrounding communities) may have for peace and stability. Ab’s moral handicap is far more serious than his physical affl iction, and although he is constantly on the move, he never grows or develops. He is an essentially static character whose selfassertiveness leads to self-imprisonment, whereas Sarty changes and develops, moving from passivity to activity and from actual childhood to real ethical maturity. His separation from his father and family will, ironically, make it possible for him to join (and become a productive member of) society as a whole. His disloyalty to his “pap” signals his growing allegiance to values more important than simple security, convenience, or comfort.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Ab Snopes with the father figures in such stories by Sherwood Anderson as “Mother” and “Death in the Woods.” How does Ab resemble and/or differ from those fathers? What admirable traits, if any, do these fathers possess? Why does Faulkner refrain from making Ab a total villain? How would the story be less effective if Ab displayed absolutely no redeeming qualities? What redeeming qualities does he in fact possess? 2. Discuss the relations between father, mother, and children in this story and in Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine. How are the fathers in both works presented in ambivalent ways? How do the mothers in both works resemble and/or differ from one another? Discuss the roles of race and class in both works. 3. Compare and contrast Ab Snopes with Emily Grierson’s father in “A Rose for Emily.” How is each child’s life shaped by the influence of

his or her father? How does Sarty’s response to his father differ from Emily’s to hers? What are some possible reasons for the differences in their responses? 4. How are women presented in this story? How do the female characters differ from and/or resemble one another? What functions do they have in the narrative? How and why are their relations with the male characters significant or revealing?

“The Bear” (1942) The story describes the participation of young Ike McCaslin (who is 16 during parts of the story but younger and older in other parts) in yearly hunting trips in the Mississippi woods with a number of older men, including a primitive woodsman named Boon Hogganbeck and a highly talented, halfblack, half-Indian hunter named Sam Fathers, who teaches Ike the proper attitudes and skills needed to survive and succeed in the forest. Each year the men hunt a huge, wily, and ferocious black bear known as Old Ben, whom Ike glimpses on several occasions but who seems immune to the hunters’ efforts and weapons; only when the bear is pursued by a huge, half-wild dog named Lion does Boon fi nally succeed in killing Ben with a knife, after which Sam himself dies. In the fourth section of the five-part story, an older Ike repudiates his inheritance of property—an inheritance that he considers morally tainted by his family’s and his region’s ethical corruption—and in section 5 Ike becomes increasingly aware of the destructive impact of humans on the vanishing wilderness. “The Bear” exists in two main versions: a fourpart story (focusing mainly on various hunts) originally published in the Saturday Evening Post, and a five-part work (in which an added fourth section is almost as long as the other four sections put together) that was published as part of Faulkner’s book Go Down, Moses. The added section is immensely complex in style and content; by providing extensive background about Ike McCaslin’s family, it adds greatly not only to the length of the


entire work but also to its moral implications and historical resonance. To make matters even more complicated, Faulkner insisted that Go Down, Moses was a coherent text (a novel, in fact), thus implying that any interpretation of “The Bear” had to take into account the relations between that narrative and the rest of the book. Faulkner’s publishers, however, labeled Go Down, Moses as a collection of stories, and in fact most critics tend to treat the fivepart version of “The Bear” as a generally self-sufficient work, coherent in and of itself. At the same time, however, they also acknowledge that “The Bear,” like many of Faulkner’s writings, is part of a larger, more comprehensive narrative that focuses on the same small part of northern Mississippi and that features many of the same characters, events, and themes. Interpreting “The Bear” (in short) is no easy task, and efforts to make sense of the work have resulted in much critical disagreement. Most analysts, however, do concur that the story is a tale of maturation, education, and initiation, in which Ike McCaslin develops from a young boy into a young man. Most cultures around the world have “rites of initiation” in which girls and boys (but especially boys) are encouraged or forced to put their childish ways behind them and develop into members of the adult community. In Faulkner’s story, Ike’s participation in the hunting trips serves this crucial function; as he learns the skills of a woodsman, he also learns the values and qualities of character that should permit him to function as a successful and respected adult. His mentor in this process is the aptly named Sam Fathers, who clearly functions as a kind of paternal figure in this work. Unlike many other fathers in Faulkner’s fiction, Sam is a worthy role model for his surrogate son, and the bond that forms between Sam and Ike (despite their different racial backgrounds) exemplifies Faulkner’s ideal of the brotherhood that might ideally exist between all people of maturity and goodwill, whatever their cultural differences. By participating in the hunts under Sam’s tutelage, Ike learns valuable lessons about himself, about nature, about other people, and even perhaps about man’s proper place in the universe. From this perspective, then, Old Ben the bear symbolizes nature

itself—wild but beautiful, sometimes threatening but worthy of our respect and veneration. It is significant that neither Ike nor Sam participates in the actual killing of Ben (although each has opportunities to kill him), and it is also significant that Ben’s true nemesis is the dog named Lion—another force of nature. Boon fi nally kills Ben not with a gun (a mechanical instrument) but with a knife (a more primitive, “natural” weapon), and he is prompted to act partly by his desire to save Lion, the dog to whom he has become attached. In the end, though, Ben, Lion, and Sam all die as a result of this crucial hunt, and Ike is left behind—not only older but also wiser. By the end of the five-part tale, both Ike and we realize that the deaths of Ben, Lion, and Sam helped symbolize the passing of old values and old ways of life: At the conclusion of the narrative, the wilderness itself seems to be disappearing before Ike’s very eyes. The lessons he learned from Sam (and also from Ben) are perhaps becoming less and less relevant in a world that is rapidly changing under the force of modern technological “progress,” in which nature is exploited rather than respected, raped rather than loved. Concerning the foregoing points, most commentators are agreed. There is much less agreement, however, concerning the lengthy fourth section of the narrative, which appeared when the work was published as part of Go Down, Moses. That section—in which Ike hunts not for a bear but for the truth about his family’s past, and in which he learns not so much about external nature as about the nature of human corruption—culminates in Ike’s decision to repudiate his right to inherit his family’s property after he learns that his grandfather not only fathered a half-black daughter but that he then later committed incest with her. Ike thus feels that his inheritance (like the South itself) has been tainted by a legacy of racial injustice and dehumanizing abuse, and so he turns his back not only on his own property but on the very idea of private property in general. For some critics, Ike’s decision is virtuous and heroic: Having learned courage and wisdom of one sort in the wilderness, he now displays courage and wisdom of another sort in his rejection of the heritage of his family


and his region. He acts as a kind of secular saint, turning away from worldly prosperity because of his humble allegiance to higher ethical values. His renunciation of material wealth is an affi rmation of a humane spiritual ideal. By overcoming his selfish impulses, Ike shows that he is a true child both of Sam and of God, and by the end of the story he is capable of achieving a kind of harmony with nature, with its Creator, and with his fellow man. Ike is thus one of the few clear heroes in Faulkner’s fiction: In a Christlike gesture, he assumes responsibility for the sins of others and tries to make restitution. That, at least, is how some commentators interpret Ike’s motives and behavior in repudiating his inheritance. For others, however, Ike’s decision is an evasion, an attempt to escape mature duties and responsibilities. It is a futile romantic gesture— pointless because it accomplishes no real practical good. It is thus an immature, uncourageous act and fails as a worthy model for conduct by others. Ike becomes (as he sometimes was during the hunt) a paralyzed figure—a person unable to act as a fully fledged adult. He is not fit to function in the real world; by repudiating his past, he repudiates both his present responsibilities and future opportunities to change the world for the better, and the arguments he uses to justify his choice are lame and unconvincing. Rather than affi rming life, he rejects life’s hard choices in favor of a cheap and meaningless idealism. Nevertheless, other commentators on Ike try to split this difference, arguing that although his gesture is unrealistic and absurd, it is also noble and well intentioned, and that although it cannot succeed in practical terms, it nevertheless merits our respect because it implies a worthy ideal. Only a few critics have suggested that Faulkner’s depiction of Ike may be confused and incoherent; for most analysts (however differently they respond to Ike’s choice in section 4), “The Bear” is one of its author’s most typical and most impressive works.

For Discussion or Writing 1. “The Bear” is often read as a story of growth and maturation of the main male character. How does it compare and/or contrast in this

respect with such other works as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, or Richard Wright’s Black Boy? What similarities or differences exist in the backgrounds and challenges faced by the boys in these works; how do they cope with those challenges similarly and/or differently? 2. How does Faulkner integrate the lengthy fourth section of “The Bear” with the other four sections of the story? What prevents the fourth section from being merely a tacked-on and irrelevant digression? How is section 4 related (in theme, characterization, imagery, symbolism, and style) to the rest of the work? In what ways is section 4 typical of Faulkner’s writings in all these ways? 3. Read “The Bear” alongside such works by Jack London as The Call of the Wild, “To Build a Fire,” and “The Law of Life.” Discuss the ways Faulkner and London treat the relations between man and nature, including the place of human beings in the natural environment and the interactions of humans and animals. To what extent, and in what ways, is each author (in your opinion) optimistic, realistic, and/or pessimistic in his depiction of man’s place in the physical universe? What assumptions and values do the two authors seem to share? How do they seem to differ? 4. Discuss the similarities and differences in Ike McCaslin at different stages of his life. How is his personality consistent? How does it change and evolve? In what ways and to what extent does he change as he grows older?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON FAULKNER AND HIS WORK 1. Incest—real, potential, or imagined—is a frequent theme in Faulkner’s fiction. Discuss the role of incest in a number of his works (such as The Sound and the Fury, “The Bear,” and Absalom, Absalom!). What symbolic functions does this theme serve? What other themes does it

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help intensify or reinforce? What has been the attitude toward incest in most cultures throughout the world, and how and why might these attitudes have affected Faulkner’s treatment of the theme? Trace the depiction of female characters in at least three different works by Faulkner. What continuities exist from work to work? What differences exist? How does Faulkner tend to depict females in symbolic ways? How are his depictions of them affected by such issues as race, class, and historical period? Black characters frequently appear in Faulkner’s fiction. Are there any patterns in the ways they tend to be presented? How do Faulkner’s depictions of blacks refl ect the attitudes of his era and region? How (if at all) do his depictions of blacks go beyond conventional stereotypes? How and why is race such an important theme in Faulkner’s fiction? What symbolic functions do blacks sometimes serve in his writings? Faulkner is famous for often writing exceptionally long, incredibly complex sentences. Sometimes these sentences go on for a page or more. Choose one of these sentences and analyze it in detail. How is it organized? What kind of structure, rhythm, diction, and sound effects does it display? How is the sentence effective in creating particular rhetorical effects? Are the length and structure of the sentence justified or is the sentence merely a gimmick? What do long, complex, tangled sentences imply about the nature of the experiences they describe? Read a good, detailed biography of Faulkner; focus on one fairly limited period of his life. After doing this research, study one of the works he produced during this limited period. How (if at all) does the work seem to reflect the life Faulkner was living at the time he produced the work? How does the work seem to reflect events, concerns, personalities, and/or feelings you recognize from your study of that period of Faulkner’s life? Is knowledge of an author’s life necessary to a proper understanding of his works? Why or why not?

6. Choose one particular work by Faulkner and then ask yourself what particular set of ethical values (if any) seems to be implied by that work. What kind of conduct does the work seem to suggest is valuable, worthy, or right? What kind of conduct does the work seem to suggest is detestable, blameworthy, or wrong? Does the work in fact endorse—either explicitly or implicitly—any kind of moral code? Support your argument with detailed evidence from the text. 7. Choose one of Faulkner’s most stylistically and technically innovative works, such as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, or “The Bear.” Explain how and why (if at all) the unconventional stylistic and technical features of the work contribute to the work’s effectiveness. How and why would the work be less effective if it had been phrased or structured in more traditional ways? What does Faulkner gain (and/or lose) by departing so radically from traditional methods of storytelling? 8. How would you defend Faulkner against the potential charge that his fiction is too narrow and too parochial—that by focusing so much on the past and present of a tiny part of the South, he neglects to deal with broader, more universal issues and concerns? What themes or features of his writing make it relevant to nonsoutherners? Do some research to determine how and why readers from outside the South and even outside the United States have responded positively to Faulkner’s fiction. 9. Choose one common theme of Faulkner’s fiction—such as the history of the South, the relationship between past and present, the process of cultural decay, the confl ict between distinct classes, the tensions within families, or the tensions between different races—and trace the appearance of that theme in at least one work from at least three different decades. What continuities and/or differences exist in Faulkner’s treatment of the chosen theme? How does the theme contribute to the coherence and success of the selected works? How does Faulkner avoid the risk of merely repeating himself in dealing with the chosen theme?


10. Faulkner greatly admired Ernest Hemingway’s short novel The Old Man and the Sea. Try to explain why Faulkner might have had such high regard for this work. How and why might the themes, setting, characterization, and “moral” of Hemingway’s novel have appealed to Faulkner? How do the style and techniques of Hemingway’s work differ from the typical style and techniques of Faulkner? Compare and contrast Hemingway’s novella with Faulkner’s work “The Bear.” How are they similar in plot and theme but dissimilar in phrasing, structure, and other characteristics? WORKS CITED

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Blotner, Joseph, and Noel Polk. “Chronology.” In Novels 1930–1935: As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, Pylon. By William Faulkner. New York: Library of America, 1985. Cox, Leland H. William Faulkner: Biographical and Reference Guide. Detroit: Gale, 1982. Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Random House, 1936.

———. Collected Stories. New York: Random House, 1950. ———. Novels 1930–1935: As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, Pylon. Edited by Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk. New York: Library of America, 1985. ———. Novels 1942–1954: Go Down, Moses, Intruder in the Dust, Requiem for a Nun, A Fable. Edited by Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk. New York: Library of America, 1994. ———. The Sound and the Fury. Edited by David Minter. New York: Norton, 1987. Karl, Frederick R. William Faulkner, American Writer: A Biography. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989. McHaney, Thomas L. William Faulkner: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1976. Padgett, John B. William Faulkner on the Web. Available online. URL: http://www.mcsr.olemiss. edu/~egjbp/faulkner/faulkner.html. Accessed April 7, 2009. Volpe, Edmond L. A Reader’s Guide to William Faulkner. New York: Noonday, 1964.

Robert C. Evans

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) It eluded us then, but no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further. . . . And one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (The Great Gatsby)

D

uring his lifetime, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a celebrity of sorts. Despite never graduating, he remains one of Princeton’s best-known alumni. He and his wife, Zelda, embodied the ideals of the roaring twenties (and the Jazz Age, a term coined by Fitzgerald) through their carefree and extravagant lifestyle. They spent money freely, moved around the United States and Europe almost constantly, and both broke down famously and tragically. Although he did spend time among the expatriate community in Paris, Fitzgerald’s works remain quintessentially American, concerning themselves with such subjects as the American dream, failed illusions, and Hollywood. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. Young Scott was spoiled by his mother, Mollie, who had inherited money from her father, an Irish immigrant who had become one of the most successful businessmen in St. Paul. In contrast, Scott’s father, Edward, was largely unsuccessful. The family moved regularly, but they had a good standard of living because of Mollie’s money. Scott was a voracious reader and a writer from a young age. Although he was always small, he dreamed of athletic success and, throughout his life, worshipped star athletes. In addition, Scott desired popularity and respect from his peers. He was good-looking and always dressed well. Scott played with the children of the wealthy in St. Paul,

but he considered himself an outsider: “his sense of differentness in St. Paul sharpened his skills as a social observer and shaped his lifelong self-consciousness” (Bruccoli 25). In 1908, Scott started at St. Paul Academy, where he played football and baseball and was labeled a show-off. His desire for recognition and his tendency to boast sometimes annoyed his peers, but he was very socially active, always organizing activities at the center of a large group. He published his fi rst story in the school magazine in 1909. From the beginning Scott was a poor student; although he enjoyed writing, he found school assignments dull. In 1911 the family decided that he needed more discipline and he was sent to the Newman School, a Catholic boarding school in New Jersey. While at Newman he was unhappy and unsuccessful, but he was drawn to the idea of Princeton University and to the excitement of New York. During the summers in St. Paul he wrote, directed, and performed in plays; each year these were quite successful. Despite his poor academic record at Newman and an unimpressive showing on the entrance exams, Scott was admitted to Princeton in fall 1913. He loved it at Princeton; he particularly approved of the focus on social success and the hero worship accorded to star athletes. He tried out for football but did not make it past the fi rst week. He turned instead to the Princeton Tiger, the humor

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

magazine, and the Triangle Club, an organization that produced original musical comedies. He made friends, but once again he was a bit of an outsider because he was from an obscure prep school. Throughout his Princeton career Fitzgerald did poorly in his classes, and his frequent failures put him in the position of having to take extra makeup classes. In the beginning of his junior year, he failed his makeup exam in qualitative analysis and therefore was ineligible for campus offices, including the presidency of the Triangle Club. Fitzgerald never recovered from this disappointment: “To me college would never be the same. There were to be no badges of pride, no medals, after all. It seemed on one March afternoon that I had lost every single thing I wanted.” (The Crack-Up, qtd. in Bruccoli 60). In November Fitzgerald was in the infirmary twice and, after Christmas, he dropped out of college for the rest of the year to recuperate. He was adamant that he had not been expelled for his academic failures, although this was indeed partly the case. He returned to Princeton in September 1916 to repeat his junior year and continued in the same pattern, fi nding his classes boring and throwing himself into extracurricular pursuits. He published a play, four stories, three poems, and five book reviews in a magazine called the Lit. After America entered World War I, Fitzgerald signed up for a military training program. Home for the summer, he took the exam for an infantry commission and then reported for training in November 1917. He spent much of his time during training camp writing a novel, because he expected to be killed in battle and wanted to leave a legacy. He fi nished the book, which he called “The Romantic Egoist,” in February 1918 and submitted it to Charles Scribner’s Sons. Scribner eventually rejected the work, although the rejection letter said that the book displayed a great deal of originality. In March Fitzgerald reported to his infantry regiment in Kentucky. The regiment was soon transferred to Montgomery, Alabama, to prepare for overseas service. It was in Montgomery that Fitzgerald met 18-year-old Zelda Sayre, one of the most popular and sought-after belles of the

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town. During summer 1918 Fitzgerald managed to become Zelda’s primary suitor, although she continued to date other men. The war ended before Fitzgerald’s regiment could leave for France, and he was somewhat disappointed at “missing” the war and a chance to prove himself. By the end of the year he had decided he wanted to marry Zelda, but she hesitated to marry an unpublished writer with little money. Therefore, after his discharge from the army, Fitzgerald went to New York to try to earn enough money so that Zelda would marry him. He worked for an advertising agency and spent his nights writing stories, accumulating rejections in the process. After a failed attempt to convince Zelda to marry him immediately, he quit his job and decided to return to St. Paul to buckle down and write a novel. He holed himself up in his parents’ house and wrote steadily. The typescript of This Side of Paradise (much of which was transferred, and still more reworked from “The Romantic Egoist”) was accepted by Scribner on September 16, 1919. The novel was published on March 26, 1920, and the first 3,000 copies were sold within three days. Fitzgerald became famous almost overnight (as he had always expected). Although the novel sold extremely well and was in fact Fitzgerald’s most popular book, the sales did not make him rich. Most of Fitzgerald’s income in 1920 was from stories; throughout his career, he always regarded short story writing as a way to make money between his novels. He also began the custom of borrowing money from Harold Ober, one of his publishers at Scribner. Scott and Zelda were married on April 3, 1920, in New York and were immediately swept into a new life of celebrity. They drank, went to parties, and spent money wildly. After a month of living in hotels, Fitzgerald needed a place to work without distractions, and the couple rented a house in Westport, Connecticut. Their life did not settle down entirely, however; there were weekend parties and frequent excursions to New York. In September 1920, Scribner published a volume of Fitzgerald’s stories called Flappers and Philosophers. The book sold well, although reviews were

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mixed. Fitzgerald continued to work on his next novel, The Beautiful and Damned. Zelda found out in February that she was pregnant, and, after traveling in Europe for three months, the couple settled in St. Paul, where they would stay until late 1922. Their daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald (called Scottie), was born October 26, 1921. The Beautiful and Damned was published in book form (after having previously appeared in installments) in March 1922, to a disappointing critical reception, although it did sell reasonably well. In 1922 Fitzgerald wrote an ultimately unsuccessful play, The Vegetable, and Scribner published his second collection of stories, Tales of the Jazz Age, in 1923. The family moved back to New York, renting a small house in Great Neck. Fitzgerald began drinking more frequently. He continued to write stories, now needing to publish for the money. In April 1924 the Fitzgeralds moved to the French Riviera. There was a near-crisis in their marriage when Zelda became involved with a French aviator named Edouard Jozan, but they reconciled. Fitzgerald’s feelings about Zelda’s betrayal influenced his portrayal of lost illusions in his next novel, The Great Gatsby. The typescript of Gatsby was sent to Scribner in October 1924. The novel was published in April 1925 and received excellent reviews, despite not selling very well. After 1925 Fitzgerald found it increasingly difficult to devote extended periods of time to writing. That spring in Paris, Fitzgerald met ERNEST H EMINGWAY, whose chronicle of their meeting in A Moveable Feast portrays Fitzgerald as a drunk. Fitzgerald was always awed and intimidated by Hemingway (especially because of his reputation as a war hero and an athlete). Through Hemingway Fitzgerald also met GERTRUDE STEIN and other expatriate writers. The Fitzgeralds became well known in Paris for various (often drunken) stunts and fought frequently (and publicly). The family returned to America in December 1926. Their two and a half years abroad had generally been a failure. After staying briefly in Montgomery, Zelda and Scott spent two months in California, where Scott had been invited to write a movie treatment; they hoped to make a good

amount of money from this. Instead, the treatment was rejected and they spent much more than the amount of the advance. They settled in a rented house in Delaware and, for the most part, continued their lavish lifestyle. The Fitzgeralds decided to return to Europe in spring 1929 when the lease on their Delaware house expired. During this period Zelda published several stories, partly to pay for ballet lessons, into which she threw herself with increasing fervor. Her behavior started to become somewhat strange. At one point she accused her husband of being a homosexual, a charge for which there was no evidence and that deeply hurt him. Several of the stories Fitzgerald wrote in 1929 explore the theme of marital problems. In Paris Fitzgerald continued to drink and to get into trouble. He did also continue to work on the novel that would eventually become Tender Is the Night, which would be published in 1934. Zelda continued to exhibit the strain of her intense ballet training and grew nervous and anxious. In April 1930 she entered the Malmaison clinic outside Paris, discharged herself in May against her doctor’s advice, and, after trying to resume her training, experienced hallucinations that led her to attempt suicide. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic in June and entered a clinic on Lake Geneva. Fitzgerald split his time between Paris and Switzerland so that he could be close to Zelda, and they exchanged hundreds of letters during the time she was in the clinic. During this period Fitzgerald wrote stories and did not work at all on the novel. Zelda had made a partial recovery by April 1931 and was discharged from the clinic in September, when the family returned to America. They settled for a time in Montgomery. Scott received an offer to go to Hollywood to write a screenplay; although he did not want to leave Zelda or to delay his novel, he eventually accepted when MGM raised the offering salary. He stayed for five weeks and earned $6,000, although ultimately his screenplay was not used. Zelda’s condition worsened again in early 1932, and, in February, Scott took her to a psychiatric clinic in Baltimore. During this time Scott was working on Tender Is the Night and felt threatened when, after Scrib-

F. Scott Fitzgerald

ner had published her mostly autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz, in fall 1932, Zelda began work on a novel dealing with madness. Tender Is the Night was published serially in early 1934, and then in book form in April. It was not (as commonly believed) a failure, although it was a failure in terms of Fitzgerald’s expectations. It sold reasonably well for a novel during the depression. In February 1934 Zelda was transferred to a sanitarium in New York, but she failed to improve there and in May was admitted in a catatonic condition to a hospital outside Baltimore. She attempted suicide repeatedly while in the hospital. At this point Fitzgerald seems to have accepted that she would never fully recover, and, although he would never consider divorcing her, he basically considered their marriage to be over. Fitzgerald’s fourth story collection, Taps at Reveille, was published in March 1935. The reviews were mainly favorable, but the book did not have huge sales. In 1935 Fitzgerald’s tuberculosis had become active, and he spent the summer in North Carolina in a treatment area. He had an affair with a married woman, Beatrice Dance, that summer, but he made it clear that he would never abandon Zelda and ended the affair with a fi rm letter after Beatrice left North Carolina. He continued to write stories during 1935, but “Since he was now writing to raise fast money for pressing debts, Fitzgerald was submitting what were really working drafts” (Bruccoli 400). In November he returned to North Carolina and wrote a series of confessional essays: “The Crack-Up,” “Pasting It Together,” and “Handle with Care.” Other writers (such as Hemingway) found these pieces embarrassing, and indeed they did somewhat undermine Fitzgerald’s reputation, as he had admitted he was a broken man. By summer 1936 he was struggling to sell any stories and was $9,000 in debt to Scribner. By June 1937 he had not sold a story for over a year and his situation was growing desperate. He was drinking frequently and was fairly depressed. In 1937 he was hired by MGM to work on a movie portrait of himself, and so he went to Hollywood, hopeful that he could launch a new career and rid himself of the more than $22,000 in debt

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he had accumulated. He worked hard for MGM, but his only screen credit in 18 months was on a fi lm named Three Comrades, based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque. He did earn a good salary and did not live extravagantly, but he still had very little in savings once his paychecks stopped in 1939. In July 1937 Fitzgerald met Sheilah Graham, a 28-year-old English Hollywood columnist, at a party. They began a relationship that would last until Fitzgerald’s death. Fitzgerald had ambivalent feelings about his relationship with Graham: Although he grew to depend on her, their relationship still made him feel guilty. During the time he lived in California Zelda remained in the hospital in Baltimore; he visited her occasionally and they wrote each other frequent letters. In 1939 he became a freelancer and, without the discipline of a regular job, began drinking steadily again. In what would turn out to be the last time he saw Zelda, they went on a trip to Cuba, where he was continuously drunk. His tuberculosis was also active again at this point. In spring and summer 1939 he returned to short story writing but, after 120 stories, his “ability to write fresh, wellconstructed commercial stories was irrecoverable” (Bruccoli 457). In 1939 he began planning a novel about Hollywood, which he thought of as based on the life of the MGM producer Irving Thalberg. It was published posthumously (and unfi nished) in 1941 as The Last Tycoon. Zelda was discharged from the hospital in April 1940 and went to live with her mother in Montgomery. Fitzgerald sent her an allowance every week, but he never considered taking her out to Hollywood. In December 1940 Fitzgerald had a heart attack at a drugstore and was ordered to rest in bed. He died of another heart attack on December 21 and was buried in Maryland. Zelda continued to live with her mother, voluntarily returning to Highland Mental Hospital during periods of depression. She was there in March 1948 when a fi re broke out, and she was one of nine patients who died. She was buried with her husband in Maryland.


This Side of Paradise (1919) Fitzgerald’s fi rst novel is also his most autobiographical. It traces the life of handsome, rich Amory Blaine, spanning from his childhood through his time at prep school, at Princeton, and in the First World War, with a brief period of aimless drifting afterward. It ends when Amory, only 23, gains some self-awareness after a period of disillusionment; however, returning to Princeton and standing in front of its gates, he demonstrates that this is not sufficient when he cries, “I know myself—and that is all!” (308). The novel’s main subject is the development of Amory’s character as he progresses to maturity through a series of disappointments. Amory, like Fitzgerald himself, is influenced primarily in childhood by his mother (indicated by the title of the fi rst chapter, “Amory, Son of Beatrice”). While Beatrice Blaine spoils her son in much the way that Mollie Fitzgerald spoiled Scott, Beatrice has wealth, beauty, style, and a glamorous lifestyle that young Scott only wished his mother possessed. Amory begins the book with “a sort of aristocratic egotism” (21), combining a sense of his own superiority with the desire to assert this over others: “Vanity, tempered with self-suspicion if not self-knowledge, a sense of people as automatons to his will, a desire to ‘pass’ as many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world . . . with this background did Amory drift into adolescence” (22). In his early days at Princeton, Amory’s attitude is “I want to be admired” (54). Throughout his young life, Amory is motivated by dreams of success and greatness, but “It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being” (21). Indeed, his initial relationships with girls focus on the conquest rather than the possession; once Myra St. Clair has let him kiss her once, he is no longer interested. The most passionate part of his relationship with a girl named Isabelle takes place before they kiss, and this long-delayed moment is described as “the high point of vanity, the crest of his young egotism” (100). Of course, this achievement is immediately ruined by Amory’s failure to be sufficiently sympathetic about the small mark his shirt stud has left on Isabelle’s neck, and he no lon-

ger views her in the same way after this incident. In the short section “Heroic in General Tone,” Amory achieves a small part of the success that Fitzgerald himself never attained when he scores the only touchdown in a prep school football game, and this becomes “a high point in Amory’s memory” (36). Amory’s dreams of being a “big man on campus,” as did Fitzgerald’s own, come crashing down when he fails a makeup exam and is left ineligible, and Amory’s reactions to this disappointment are chronicled in the section titled “Aftermath.” He realizes that this failure represents a regression to “the fundamental Amory, idle, imaginative, rebellious” (110). Monsignor Darcy recognizes, however, that Amory is developing: “This has given you time to think and you’re casting off a lot of your old luggage about success and the superman and all” (115). Monsignor Darcy, who was based on Father Sigourney Fay (to whom Fitzgerald dedicated the novel), is a key influence on Amory throughout the novel. Scott met Fay in 1912, and “Fay was the fi rst important person who responded to Scott and encouraged his aspirations” (Bruccoli 37). In the novel, Fitzgerald presents Darcy and Amory as having a surrogate father/son relationship, but he also depicts them as intellectual equals: “The priest seemed to guess Amory’s thoughts before they were clear in his own head, so closely related were their minds in form and groove” (116). It is Monsignor Darcy who introduces Amory to the idea of the “personage,” which influences the way he views himself and others. After the war Amory is bored and restless in a way that he feels embodies the attitudes of his entire generation. He changes rapidly after his heartbreak with Rosalind: “it was already hard for him to visualize the heart-whole boy who had stepped off the transport, passionately desiring the adventure of life” (237). He engages in self-reflection, narrated by Fitzgerald as a literal question-and-answer session in the chapter “The Egotist Becomes a Personage.” By the time of Monsignor Darcy’s funeral, there is clear development in Amory’s view of himself as he realizes what he really wants in life: “He found something that he wanted, had always wanted

F. Scott Fitzgerald

and always would want—not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable” (290). In the last chapter of the novel, Amory accepts his selfishness—an acceptance that is a part of his fi nal journey to self-knowledge. Another important aspect of the novel is the way in which Fitzgerald acts as a social historian; the novel documents trends of the era such as the “petting party” and the changes in behavior and expectations of the new, rebellious American girl. This book is often considered the fi rst realistic American college novel and is also praised for capturing the feelings of a generation “grown up to fi nd all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken . . .” (307). An interesting stylistic feature of the novel is its blend of many different kinds of writing techniques, most notably the drama format of the chapter “The Debutante.” The dramatic sections of this chapter allow for the development of the characters (Rosalind, most importantly) through dialogue and stage directions alone; the absence of any narrative perspective also means that narrative judgment is omitted. At the actual moment when Amory and Rosalind meet, the characters are reduced to “HE” and “SHE,” a technique that serves to universalize them and this scene of fl irtatious conquest. The novel is a montage of different scenes and “poses” for Amory; it is episodic, focused not so much on plot as on development of character. This aspect of the book is illustrated by sections like “Snapshots of the Young Egoist,” which presents a series of isolated incidents from Amory’s childhood in Minneapolis in order to give the reader the opportunity to assemble an overall picture. Fitzgerald’s use of titles for the short sections within each chapter creates an important organizing principle. Occasionally these titles self-consciously refer to function rather than content, with titles like “Historical,” “Descriptive,” or “A Damp Symbolic Interlude.” The titles also allow Fitzgerald to comment more directly on Amory’s actions than the third-person narrator can, as when he uses the title “The Superman Grows Careless” for the chapter in which Amory fails the makeup exam.

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Fitzgerald’s lyricism is particularly evident in the novel in descriptions of Princeton, in which there is always a sense of nostalgia. We must remember that Fitzgerald’s time at Princeton did not end happily, and he clearly felt a strong desire to recapture the magic of his initial time there. Amory describes the seniors singing on campus at night: “The early moon had drenched the arches with pale blue, and, weaving over the night, in and out of the gossamer rifts of moon, swept a song, a song with more than a hint of sadness, infi nitely transient, infinitely regretful” (47). Perhaps most poignant is the section entitled “The End of Many Things,” when Amory and Tom spend their last night at Princeton.

For Discussion or Writing 1. This novel is an example of a bildungsroman, or novel of formation, which traces the growth of its protagonist from childhood to maturity. Compare the growth experienced by Amory in this novel to that of the protagonist in another bildungsroman, such as J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye or Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. To what extent has each character reached maturity by the novel’s end? 2. Trace Amory’s relationships with young women throughout the novel. Do you see any progression in his interactions with Myra, Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, and Eleanor? Does Amory seem to learn anything from each successive relationship and, if so, what? 3. Trace Amory’s intellectual development throughout the novel by focusing on one particular idea (e.g., wealth, the class system) and his discussions with other young Princetonians on the subject.

“The Ice Palace” (1920) “The Ice Palace” is one of several stories in which Fitzgerald considered the differences between the North and the South, a difference personally relevant for him because of his marriage to the famed southern belle Zelda Sayre. In the story, Sally Carrol Happer, a young southern debutante, decides


to marry Harry Bellamy, a northerner, because she feels that everyone in her Georgia town lacks ambition. However, during a trip north in January to visit Harry and his family, Sally becomes lost in an ice palace and, as a result, decides she belongs in the South; the story ends as it began, with Sally Carrol lazily waiting at her window on a beautiful day. The South is presented as slow moving but familiar. In particular, the end of the story suggests the repetition of a routine that Sally Carrol knows well, and that has perhaps taken on added significance for her (and for readers) after her adventure in the North. Clark Darrow, one of Sally Carrol’s suitors, seems to embody the life of many of the denizens of their southern Georgia town. “Clark had ‘a income’—just enough to keep himself in ease and his car in gasolene—and he had spent the two years since he graduated from Georgia Tech in dozing round the lazy streets of his home town, discussing how he could best invest his capital for an immediate fortune” (49). In contrast, the North is presented as more stiff and formal. Sally Carrol fi nds the women of the Bellamy family particularly lacking in charm and even hostile. Even Harry at one point lets slip his opinion that southerners are “degenerates” (62). Roger Patton, the only northerner in the story who seems to have any self-awareness, explains to Sally Carrol his theory that people in the North are slowly “freezing up” (59). The ice palace, although beautiful and a novelty for Sally Carrol, represents the coldness in personality that she begins to see as typical of the North, and her getting lost also shows the isolation she feels there: “She was alone with this presence that came out of the North, the dreary loneliness that rose from ice-bound whalers in the Arctic seas.” (67). Earlier in her trip, she had reflected that “sometimes at night it had seemed to her as though no one lived here—they had all gone long ago—leaving lighted houses to be covered in time by tombing heaps of sleet” (64). Sally Carrol’s true feelings about the South (and the Old South in particular) are illustrated in part 2 of the story when she takes Harry for a walk in the

cemetery. When her eyes fi ll with tears while observing the Confederate graves, Sally Carrol reveals her reverence for the Old South: “Oh, Harry, there was something, there was something I couldn’t ever make you understand, but it was there” (54). This side of Sally Carrol also becomes clear when, during her stay in the North, she is strongly affected by hearing an orchestra playing “Dixie.” Although she claims otherwise in the early part of the story, it is clear that Sally Carrol’s nostalgia for the Old South means that she will be incapable of settling in the North.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Sally Carrol’s idealized view of the South with the viewpoint presented in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” Consider, in particular, the relationship that each female main character has with the Old South and how this affects her fate. 2. Compare the northern characters in this story with characters in Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts or Hedda Gabler. Do you think Roger Patton’s theory about the North, that its people lack “infi nite possibilities for great sorrow or joy” (60), is correct? Justify your response with specific details from the text. 3. Do you think the story presents a stereotypical view of the North and/or the South? If so, what might be Fitzgerald’s purpose in portraying such stereotypes? Discuss some specific examples of this kind of stereotypical presentation.

“May Day” (1920) “May Day” takes place in New York over the course of one day, through to the early hours of the following morning, and tells three separate stories of the downfall of Gordon Sterrett, a Yale alumni dance, and a May Day riot. The three incidents become linked through characters crossing among them. The intercutting sections of the story alternately narrate these events from different points of view.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald said of the story that he was trying to capture some of the effect of spring 1919 in New York, when what he later called “the Age of Jazz” was born. The opening section of the story, with its allegorical description of “the great city of the conquering people” (97), poetically invokes the postwar jubilation of New York. Fitzgerald also depicts the celebratory atmosphere of the Yale dance (and its aftermath) by portraying the increasing drunkenness of Peter Himmel and Philip Dean, who, by the story’s end, have been transformed, to their own great hilarity, into Mr. In and Mr. Out. There is a striking contrast between this atmosphere, exemplified by the extravagance of the dance and the rowdy crowd at Childs’ the following morning, described by Gus Rose as “a colorful circus of beauty and riotous pleasure” (132), and the frightening chaos of the riot in the newspaper office, when Edith “felt the push of warm bodies under rough cloth, and her ears were full of shouting and trampling and hard breathing” (130). Fitzgerald also creates contrast in the story through the juxtaposition of the wealthy socialites and the two former soldiers, Carrol Key and Gus Rose. These two live in a different world and are only able to glimpse the fashionable lifestyle when hidden in a janitor’s closet at Delmonico’s. They are easily swept along in a crowd; the beating of a small Jew and subsequent rush toward Tolliver Hall foreshadow the more serious riot later in the story, when their willingness to follow has tragic consequences for Key. Gordon Sterrett’s relationship with Edith Bradin is sadly ironic. He remembers her fondly when he hears that she will be attending the dance, and the shifting narrative perspective allows Fitzgerald to reveal that she secretly loves him: “Edith Bradin was falling in love with her recollection of Gordon Sterrett” (113). However, from the moment Gordon cuts in on Edith at the dance, she can tell he has changed: “She loved him—she knew she loved him—then for a minute there was silence while a strange feeling of uneasiness crept over her. Something was wrong” (117). When she sees the condition Gordon is in now, Edith is repulsed by him:

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“As he talked she saw he had changed utterly. . . . Revulsion seized her, followed by a faint, surprising boredom” (118). Gordon’s experience with Jewel Hudson has left him a broken man, unable to experience what might have been with Edith. It has been argued that Gordon “is an obvious projection of Fitzgerald’s despair during the days when New York was celebrating the birth of the Jazz Age” (Bruccoli 99). Gordon, like Fitzgerald himself in early 1919, is a failed artist, and his description of the reasons for his failure sound like early criticisms of Fitzgerald as a writer: “I tried, a little, but my stuff’s crude. I’ve got talent, Phil; I can draw—but I just don’t know how” (101). The decline in Gordon’s lifestyle since his graduation from college is fi rst indicated by his clothing, which is now ragged and soiled, while “only three years before he had received a scattering vote in the senior elections at college for being the best-dressed man in his class” (99). Gordon’s desperation is evident from his manner when he fi rst encounters Philip Dean, when he “collapsed unexpectedly upon the bed; [and] lay there inert and spiritless” (100). After Dean denies his request for money, we observe Gordon only through the narration of others, such as Gus Rose and Edith Bradin, until the abrupt fi nal section of the story ends with his equally abrupt suicide.

For Discussion or Writing 1. “May Day” was influenced by “Fitzgerald’s temporary interest in the school of naturalistic or deterministic fiction” (97). Compare the story to a naturalistic novel such as THEODORE DREISER’s Sister Carrie or R ICHARD WRIGHT’s Native Son, focusing on the way each work reveals the harsh side of life and the indifference of the universe. 2. Edith Bradin seems to be a typical Fitzgerald woman in many ways—beautiful, popular, and cruel. Compare Edith to Judy Jones, Rosalind Connage, or Daisy Buchanan. Does Edith’s experience with the riot at her brother’s office seem to change her in any way that might make her stand out from the Fitzgerald stereotype of the rich young socialite?


3. Choose one of the characters and trace the ways Fitzgerald portrays this character through the eyes of others in the different sections of the story. What new insights into the character do you gain by seeing him or her from these differing points of view?

“Winter Dreams” (1922) This story focuses on Dexter Green, growing up in Minnesota, and his “winter dreams,” which eventually revolve around the rich, beautiful Judy Jones. He manages to become one of Judy’s many beaux, but she does not show any special interest in him until after he is already engaged to another girl, and their brief fling at that point is satisfying for no one. Eventually Dexter ends up in New York, where seven years later he hears news of Judy’s unhappy married life, and the story ends with his grief that the illusion of Judy is gone and he cannot even mourn this loss. The story was written just before the publication of The Great Gatsby and has some similarities to the novel. Dexter’s ambitions to win Judy Jones mirror Gatsby’s quest for Daisy Fay. Dexter, like Gatsby, is not of the same social class as the object of his affections; it is significant that he fi rst encounters Judy when, as a young girl, she is playing golf at the club where he works as a caddy. However, Dexter differs from Gatsby in that he eventually realizes the futility of his dream: “He loved her, and he would love her until the day he was too old for loving—but he could not have her” (233). Another difference is that this story employs a third-person omniscient narrator, allowing Fitzgerald to focus on Dexter’s feelings while still giving the impression of an outsider’s perspective. Dexter’s “winter dreams” also differ somewhat from Gatsby’s. They initially concern success and fame among the rich patrons of the Sherry Island Golf Club: “But do not get the impression, because his winter dreams happened to be concerned at fi rst with musings on the rich, that there was anything merely snobbish in the boy. He wanted not association with glittering things and glittering people—he wanted the glittering things themselves”

(220–221). It is only later that Dexter’s dreams become associated with Judy Jones, and, perhaps more important, with the illusions she creates. At the end of the story, Dexter’s reaction to hearing about Judy (“The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him” [235]) reveals that what was important about Judy was his continuing illusion of her perfection, not Judy herself (who was already lost to him), and it is this loss that he tries, but fails, to lament: “Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished” (235–236). The story is thus also about growing up, as the dreams and illusions of youth are lost as Dexter grows older. Another illusion that is exposed in the story is that of the American dream, of which Dexter’s business success—he becomes rich from humble origins through hard work—is a clear illustration. His golf game at Sherry Island Golf Club is indicative of his social rise. However, the end of the story implies that this success has not led to happiness. Wealth and beauty are similarly unsatisfying for Judy: “ ‘I’m more beautiful than anybody else,’ she said brokenly, ‘why can’t I be happy?’ ” (232). The report from Devlin about Judy’s marriage also confi rms this reality.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Examine closely the similarities and differences of Dexter Green and Jay Gatsby, particularly with respect to the way each goes about pursuing his dream. What does the different understanding each has of the reality of his dream suggest about the personality differences between the two men? 2. Compare the descriptions of winter in this story to those in “The Ice Palace.” How does Fitzgerald make use of specific language to give a nearly opposite impression of winter landscapes in these two stories? 3. Look closely at the description of the first meeting between Dexter and Judy (end of part 2 of the story), paying particular attention to the repetition of key phrases and the intensity of the physical description. What impression of this moment is created by Fitzgerald’s use of language?

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby (1925) Fitzgerald’s most famous (and most widely studied) novel was written after a period of struggle in his marriage; perhaps his feelings of betrayal found their way into the novel’s sentiment of lost illusions. The novel tells the story of Jay Gatsby, an idealistic young man who re-creates his whole life to recapture the love of Daisy Buchanan. The novel is narrated by Nick Carraway, Daisy’s cousin, who happens to move in next door to Gatsby’s grand mansion in West Egg and who therefore becomes involved in Gatsby’s dreams. The novel’s climax occurs in a scene in the Plaza Hotel in New York when Daisy, after seeming to fall in love with Gatsby once more, ultimately decides to remain with the security and “old money” of her husband, Tom. On the way home from New York, the car driven by Daisy strikes and kills Tom’s mistress, Myrtle, whose husband, George, murders Gatsby, believing he was the driver of the car. One of the novel’s key subjects is the importance of dreams and illusions, and Gatsby himself, with his overriding quest to win Daisy back, is its most important dreamer. At the climactic moment of the book, Gatsby is personified by his dream; the man fades away as “only the dead dream fought on” (128). Gatsby’s “incorruptible dream” (147) and his seemingly infi nite capacity for hope are what make him “great,” in Nick’s view. When Nick fi rst meets Gatsby, this hope is evident in his description of Gatsby’s “rare [smile],” which showed that he “believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself” (49). Nick defi nes Gatsby’s “greatness” as “an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever fi nd again” (8). Although Nick feels that Gatsby’s hope is unique, the use of the fi rst person in the optimistic closing lines of the novel suggests that this characteristic also reflects a general human tendency to dream. Nick ends the novel by raising the possibility that “one fi ne morning—” “we” may be able to grasp the dream that “eluded” Gatsby (172), and the uses of dashes and ellipses in this sentence add to the sense of hope. Some critics see Gatsby as a representative of the struggle to live the American

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dream, but also of the failure of this dream to provide happiness. Gatsby’s dreams are revealed as being unattainable, even from the fi rst moments of his reunion with Daisy. Nick realizes that the extent of Gatsby’s dream made it impossible for it to ever be attained: “there must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams— not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything” (92). Here it becomes clear again that it is the strength of the dream that drives Gatsby, even more than the reality of Daisy herself. Gatsby’s dreams are inextricably linked to his misconception that he can control time. During his reunion with Daisy, Gatsby is trying to recapture their past relationship, and Fitzgerald uses the clock in this scene to illustrate Gatsby’s failure to impose his will on time. Although Gatsby catches the clock when it topples, Nick says that “we all believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on the floor” (84). At the end of that scene, Gatsby is described as “running down like an over-wound clock” (89), a phrase once again suggesting that time does not function as he wishes it to. When talking to Nick later in the novel, Gatsby reveals his attitude toward time directly when Nick tells him he cannot repeat the past: “ ‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’ ” (106). Gatsby’s illusion that no time has passed since he and Daisy were together is shattered, however, by seeing Daisy’s child, the physical manifestation of her relationship with Tom. Gatsby’s dream is also illustrated by the symbol of the green light. Its fi rst mention in the novel is simultaneous with the fi rst appearance of Gatsby himself; when Nick returns from his fi rst evening at the Buchanan home, he sees his neighbor, who “stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way,” while Nick can see nothing but “a single green light, minute and far away” (25). Later when Jordan tells him the background between Gatsby and Daisy, Nick realizes the significance of this moment: “Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night”


(76). However, for Gatsby, the light stands not only for Daisy herself, but also for the dream of recapturing her love; that is why it loses its meaning for him after his reunion with Daisy: “it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. . . . Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one” (90). Nick, however, continues to associate the green light with Gatsby’s capacity for hope: “Gatsby believed in the green light” (171). There is a similarity between Gatsby and Myrtle Wilson as dreamers, and the repeated descriptions of Myrtle’s “vitality” (28, 66, 131), the same word used to describe Gatsby’s dream, illustrate the power a dream can have; it literally gives Myrtle life, which has to be violently ripped from her: It appears “as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long” (131). In contrast, George Wilson represents what happens in the absence of a dream. He is described as “a blond, spiritless man, anaemic” (27) and “one of those worn-out men” (130). He is easily manipulated by Tom, and the discovery of his wife’s infidelity makes him physically ill. The dreams of the novel often manifest themselves as the typical American dream of money and success. To achieve this dream, for the sole purpose of winning Daisy’s love, Gatsby reinvents himself, becoming a literally “self-made” man: “Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself” (95). Ironically, as a result, his unknown background leads to all the rumors that circulate about him. The rumors enter the novel the fi rst time Nick attends one of Gatsby’s parties (35), becoming most extreme with the assertion that “he killed a man once” (45). Tom Buchanan calls him “some big bootlegger” (104) and “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” (123). Rumors also swirl around Gatsby’s death—rumors that are “grotesque, circumstantial, eager, and untrue” (155). This constant speculation, and indeed the concern with Gatsby’s background, is one way in which Fitzgerald criticizes the upper class of American society, perhaps pointing out the irony in the fact that those who achieve what should be

the American dream are then shunned by the truly wealthy. In keeping with this irony, and with the way dreams are often revealed to be false throughout Fitzgerald’s works, it becomes clear that hard work and the accumulation of money are not enough; there is an insurmountable distinction between “old money” and “new money,” and this difference is a large part of the reason that the relationship between Daisy and Gatsby is doomed to failure. The split between old and new money is also made clear in some of the novel’s many geographical contrasts, such as the difference between West Egg and East Egg, which exhibit a “dissimilarity in every particular” (10). East Egg is the domain of those with old money, while the newly rich occupy West Egg. There is a striking contrast between Gatsby’s mansion, described as a “factual imitation” and “spanking new” (as is Gatsby’s money) under a “beard of ivy” (10), and the Buchanans’ colonial house, described as “glowing now with reflected gold” (12) and with a “frosted wedding-cake” (13) ceiling. When Daisy fi nally attends one of Gatsby’s parties, the difference is clear to her: Daisy “was appalled by West Egg” (103). Even Nick fi nally describes Gatsby’s mansion (albeit after his demise) as a “huge incoherent failure of a house” (171). The East-West dichotomy also manifests itself on a larger scale. Nearly all of the novel’s characters originate in the “Middle West.” However, after college (in the East) and the war, Nick notes that “the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business” (9). Not only does the war create in Nick a desire for a more exciting life, but it is obvious to him (and to “everybody [he] knew” who was already in the bond business) that this type of excitement can only be found in the East. However, the “riotous” East is too much for some of the characters; George Wilson claims that “my wife and I want to go West” (118) after fi nding out about her affair with Tom, and Nick ultimately returns to the relative innocence of the Middle West at the end of the book. This geographical contrast is also linked to the American dream in the sense of exploring; the novel

F. Scott Fitzgerald

provides a reversal of the idea of manifest destiny in that prosperity is sought eastwards in the “fresh, green breast of the new world” (171). By the end of the novel, Nick can see, through his exposure to Gatsby’s dream, what the dreams of the original settlers—“the last and greatest of all human dreams” (171)—were like, and in that moment the novel is not just about Gatsby’s dream but about the fundamental dream that defi ned America as a country. The idea of the characters as trailblazers, conquering a new territory, is reinforced when Nick, early in the novel, gives directions and feels like “a guide, a pathfi nder, an original settler” (9). Another geographical contrast in the novel is between city and country (the “country” in this case represented by Long Island). New York City is seen as a place of adventure (57), where “anything can happen” (67), containing the “wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world” (67). It is also described as ironically pastoral and idyllic (30), and it is where Tom Buchanan takes his mistress, where Nick gets drunk for just the second time in his life, and at the same time the setting for the climactic fi nal confrontation. In between the city and the country is the desolation of the “valley of ashes” (26), which symbolizes death and decay. It is a fitting place for Myrtle’s gruesome end, and perhaps a fitting place for Tom’s affair to begin. As discussed, George Wilson is also metaphorically “dead.” The valley exists under a billboard featuring “Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare” (27); although we might hesitate to associate the eyes of this faded advertisement with the eyes of God, as Wilson does (152), they certainly suggest a constant watchfulness (and perhaps judgment) and are the most important manifestation in the novel of the motif of sight. However, we later see the ineffectiveness of sight, as Gatsby is left outside the Buchanans’ house the night of Myrtle’s death, “watching over nothing” (139). The eyes also illustrate the omnipresence of consumerism in the increasingly commercial American society of the 1920s. Fitzgerald also criticizes contemporary society through his portrayal of the rich. His (and Nick’s) harshest criticism is reserved for the Buchanans:

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“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made” (170). Tom Buchanan is described consistently throughout the novel as brutish, cruel, and powerful (both physically and behaviorally). He is “always leaning aggressively forward” (12), and Nick notes a tone of “paternal contempt” (12) in his voice. He does not hesitate to break Myrtle’s nose when she taunts him with the name of his wife (39), and he manipulates Nick as easily as he controls a weakling like Wilson: “Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square” (16). His lie about Daisy’s being Catholic (36) shocks Nick, and it provides another means for Fitzgerald to criticize the insincerity of the rich. The only real break in Tom’s powerful image occurs immediately after Myrtle’s death, when he “whimpered” and let out a “low husky sob” (135). In striking contrast to Tom, Daisy (along with Jordan) is initially described as ephemeral (“the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor” [13]), and her consistent connection with the color white reinforces this perception. Daisy can never be separated from her money, beginning with her “white girlhood” (24) in Louisville when “the largest of the banners and the largest of the lawns belonged to Daisy Fay’s house” (72). Listening to her voice makes Nick think of her as “High in a white palace [like] the king’s daughter, the golden girl” (115), and Gatsby sees her “gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor” (142). Because of this constant association, Gatsby hits the nail on the head when he says that her voice, a key image throughout the novel, “is full of money” (115). Perhaps this is the indescribable quality that makes Daisy’s voice so fascinating, even to Nick: “her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened” (19). Daisy’s voice (and, by extension, her money) becomes her most important attribute, the one thing that “couldn’t be over-dreamed” (93). However, it also makes Jordan suspect possible infidelity: “and yet there’s something in that voice of


hers” (75)—another subtle way in which Fitzgerald is able to criticize the rich. Gatsby’s party guests are portrayed as equally impersonal and unconcerned: “sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all” (43). Even Gatsby himself is wasteful; the image of the fruit used for his parties suggests an almost parasitic consumption: “Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves” (41). Gatsby’s extravagance is also illustrated by his shirts (89), his car (the “circus wagon” [115]), and the books in his library. The books also show the unreliability of appearances (as his guests expect them to be false) and the fragility of his created world: “if one brick was removed the whole library was likely to collapse” (47). In contrast to the Buchanans, however, Gatsby seems to be forgiven for his excesses, at least in Nick’s perspective, as they are all in the service of his “great” dream. Indeed, the narrative perspective is a key stylistic feature of the novel. Nick is certainly a biased, and perhaps even an unreliable, narrator because of his emotional involvement with the events he describes. He is a snob, believing that he is “inclined to reserve all judgments” (7), although throughout the novel we see him judge nearly all of the other characters. When retelling the story of Gatsby’s background, he invents or fi lls in details: “I suppose he smiled at Cody—he had probably discovered that people liked him when he smiled” (96). He also imagines Gatsby’s last moments: “I have an idea. . . . If that was true. . . . He must have looked up” (153). It is also difficult to know what to think when Nick tells us that he is “glad” to have told Gatsby that he was “worth the whole damn bunch put together” (145) and then, in the same breath, says that “I disapproved of him from beginning to end” (146). As a result, a reader must be constantly aware that the events of the novel are presented through a biased lens.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Gatsby, like other classic works such as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and JOHN STEIN-

BECK’s

Of Mice and Men, is commonly seen as a study of the concept of the American dream. Examine how Gatsby reveals the impossibility of the dream of achieving success and happiness solely through hard work. 2. Read Fitzgerald’s story “The Rich Boy” and compare the attitude toward the rich expressed in this story to that expressed in Gatsby. How, in both texts, does Fitzgerald illustrate his view that “the lives of the rich had greater possibilities, but he recognized that they failed to use these possibilities fully” (Bruccoli 232)? 3. Trace the color imagery used throughout the novel. You may wish to focus on a particular color, or a certain color’s associations with a single character (for example, white with Daisy). How does the use of colors allow Fitzgerald to make the novel come alive? 4. Read T. S. ELIOT’s The Waste Land, focusing particularly on the figure of Tiresias and the description of the landscape of the wasteland, and then discuss the extent to which you agree with the following claim: “A more probable source for the Eckleburg figure (who ‘sank himself down into eternal blindness’) and for the valley of ashes was T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which Fitzgerald greatly admired. Eckleburg can be read as a Long Island version of the blind seer Tiresias, and the ash heaps are actually and symbolically a waste land” (Bruccoli 209). In what ways can Dr. T. J. Eckleburg be compared with Tiresias?

“Babylon Revisited” (1931) In this story, the American expatriate and recovering alcoholic Charlie Wales, now a successful businessman, returns to Paris, where his young daughter has been living with the family of his sister-in-law, Marion Peters, since his wife, Helen’s, death some time ago. Now that he is sober, Charlie desperately wants to reclaim his daughter and some semblance of a normal family life. However, after initially agreeing to grant him custody, Marion recants after some of his old friends, drunk, arrive

F. Scott Fitzgerald

unannounced and unexpected at the Peters’ house, and the story ends with Charlie realizing that he will have to continue to live alone, at least for the time being. Change and a nostalgia for the past are evident throughout the story, beginning with the initial dialogue, when Charlie learns that many of his former acquaintances are no longer in Paris. It is clear to him that the days when American expatriates in Paris “were a sort of royalty, almost infallible, with a sort of magic around us” (619) have passed. These societal changes parallel the changes in Charlie’s personal life since losing his family and giving up drinking. Even when he happily plans his future life with Honoria, he cannot help growing sad, “remembering all the plans he and Helen had made” (628). However, although he often thinks about the past, Charlie has no desire to go back, as is evident through his rejection of Lorraine and Duncan. For him they symbolize all of the negative aspects of his earlier life. The story is full of Charlie’s regret for the wasted days of alcoholism, and especially for the loss of Helen. Even when he remembers her fondly and imagines her supporting his desire to care for Honoria, the poignant description suggests that she is slipping ever further away: “She said a lot of other things—very friendly things—but she was in a swing in a white dress, and swinging faster and faster all the time, so that at the end he could not hear clearly all that she said” (628). Charlie is also anxious about his relationship with Honoria, in particular that she will grow up without him and he will “miss” influencing her life: “Charlie was more and more absorbed by the desire of putting a little of himself into her before she crystallized utterly” (623). The story is autobiographical in these respects, as Fitzgerald also experienced anxiety about his bouts of alcoholism and his daughter, Scottie (from whom he was often separated). It is surely no accident that Charlie is 35—Fitzgerald’s age when he wrote this story. Not everything in Charlie’s life has changed, notably Marion’s distrust of him. The story suggests that she will eventually succumb, but at the moment she is torn, preserving her loyalty to her

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sister. However, our sympathy remains fi rmly with Charlie through the story’s moving fi nal sentence: “He was absolutely sure Helen wouldn’t have wanted him to be so alone” (633).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Does Charlie deserve what he gets at the end of the story? The fact that his chance to have Honoria back is ruined by old friends from his drinking days could suggest that he is continuing to pay for the sins of his past; do you agree with this interpretation? Support your argument with details from the story. 2. The exact circumstances of Helen’s death are left unclear in the story. What do you think happened to Helen? How closely was it connected to the incident when she was locked out in the snow by Charlie, and does your answer to this question affect whether you sympathize more with Charlie or Marion? 3. Research the city of Babylon and discuss why Fitzgerald might have chosen it as a representation of Paris in the title of the story. How does this title relate to the story’s theme of the unrecoverable past?

Tender Is the Night (1934) Fitzgerald’s fourth novel traces the collapse of the marriage of Dick and Nicole Diver, a wealthy expatriate American couple living on the French Riviera. In a later, revised version of the text (which Fitzgerald claimed to prefer), the novel begins when the two fi rst meet in 1917, when Dick is a psychiatrist and Nicole a mental patient, suffering the negative effects of a childhood sexual relationship with her father. The narrative then jumps forward in time to after their marriage and, for a time, adopts the point of view of Rosemary Hoyt, a young American fi lm star who falls in love with Dick while vacationing on the Riviera. Dick’s— and, to some extent, Nicole’s—dissatisfaction with their life together grows, the marriage falls apart, and, at the end of the book, Dick has returned to America, his exact whereabouts unknown.


Tender Is the Night is often considered a classic example of the “breakdown” novel, which became a common genre in American fiction of the 20th century, often focusing on a fall from grace. In particular, Fitzgerald was interested in portraying the way the “breakdown” intervenes in and ruins the glamorous and perfect facade of wealthy American life. Hints of this theme are evident throughout the novel with incidents like the duel, the shots in the train station, the corpse in Rosemary’s bed, the Divers’ car accident, and Dick’s imprisonment in Rome. This revelation of the falseness of glamour is one way in which Tender Is the Night illustrates Fitzgerald’s characteristic focus on false illusions and failed dreams, including the failure of the particularly American dream of success. This failure is most evident for Dick, who begins the novel full of potential. He arrives in Zurich as a young, successful doctor, with illusions explicitly linked to the American experience: “the illusions of eternal strength and health, and of the essential goodness of people—they were the illusions of a nation, the lies of generations of frontier mothers who had to croon falsely that there were no wolves outside the cabin door” (6). Even early in the novel, Dick is beginning to understand the problems inherent in the ambitions of his youth: “he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult” (26). After his father’s death, he regrets some of what he has not achieved: He is described as “wishing he had always been as good as he had intended to be” (257). Dick’s success as a psychiatrist is called into question by the fact that, for much of the novel, he does not practice, and perhaps also by his failure to “cure” Nicole. For a short period he does jointly run a clinic in Switzerland (significantly, however, this is only possible with the Warren family money), but this endeavor goes downhill after he begins drinking. His aspirations to publish also never play out in the way he had hoped, and his long-delayed breakthrough work becomes a symbol of his unachieved potential. This kind of failure continues even after his split from Nicole; she

hears that he “always had a big stack of papers on his desk that were known to be an important treatise on some medical subject, almost in process of completion” (391). The title of book 1—in the revised text “Case Study”—emphasizes Nicole’s status as a patient at the beginning of her relationship with Dick, and her instability (and initial reverence for Dick) is revealed through her letters. Their relationship is manipulated by Nicole’s doctors, who advise Dick not to see her again after it becomes clear that she is in love with him. Dick initially complies, but afterward he realizes his emotional involvement and succumbs to her advances when they meet again in the mountains. He seems to accept their mutual complicity: “when he left her outside the sad door on the Zürichsee and she turned and looked at him he knew her problem was one they had together for good now” (55), and the word problem here also suggests that Dick is aware of flaws from the moment of the relationship’s beginning. There are also illusions inherent in the relationship between Dick and Rosemary: “They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered” (159). Dick’s illusions about Rosemary’s innocence are shattered when Collis Clay tells a story about her on the train with Hillis, and this image continues to haunt Dick, as is indicated through the repetition of his imagined accompanying dialogue: “Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?” (176). Many critics consider this novel to be very autobiographical, and indeed it was written after Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, began to break down mentally. By this point in his life Fitzgerald had realized as well that the glamorous life of celebrity he had always assumed he would lead when he became a famous author was not all it appeared. Whether or not the Divers are intended as direct representations of the Fitzgeralds, the novel’s portrayal of the careless, often carefree lives of wealthy expatriates reflects Fitzgerald’s keen observations on and criticism of the upper class in American society. Fitzgerald criticizes the wealthy “life of leisure” by employ-

F. Scott Fitzgerald

ing Rosemary’s (comparably) innocent perspective: “Rosemary envied them their fun, imagining a life of leisure unlike her own. She knew little of leisure, but she had the respect for it of those who have never had it. She thought of it as resting, without realizing that the Divers were as far from relaxing as she was herself” (187). Dick realizes early on the superficiality of social poses, “starting awake at night” to ask himself with chagrin, “am I like the rest. . . ?” (25). However, even this awareness does not stop him from behaving “like the rest” after his marriage to Nicole. The party Dick hosts in Paris, featuring the car of the shah of Persia, symbolizes the extravagance of their lifestyles, and even Rosemary, from the glamorous fi lm world, is impressed: “Rosemary appreciated how different it was from any party in Hollywood, no matter how splendid in scale” (161). The “grand stage” of Europe provides an elaborate playground for the expatriate community. However, Fitzgerald never allows this splendor to continue long without exposing its illusory nature. In describing a large gathering of Americans at the train station, the narrator emphasizes the inaccuracy of our initial perceptions: “When there were enough Americans on the platform the fi rst impression of their immaculacy and their money began to fade into a vague racial dusk that hindered and blinded both them and their observers” (169). Immediately after this description, the alluring atmosphere is disrupted by the sudden shooting: “The shots had entered into all their lives: echoes of violence followed them out on to the pavement” (172). Similarly, Rosemary’s initial illusion of the idyllic existence of the Divers (“Rosemary was thinking that the Villa Diana was the centre of the world” [99]) is dispelled immediately at this fi rst party by the “scene” Violet McKisco observes in the bathroom and the subsequent duel. Another subject of the novel, and a key factor in Dick’s “breakdown,” is the necessity for separation between life and work, a separation Dick has trouble maintaining. As Nicole’s problems recur and he deals with her as a patient, it becomes difficult for Dick “to distinguish between his self-protective professional detachment and some new coldness in

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his heart” (210), and this seems to be a factor in the cooling of their marriage. Dick expresses a growing unhappiness with the way his caring for Nicole is affecting his life: “The dualism in his views of her— that of the husband, that of the psychiatrist—was increasingly paralysing his faculties” (238). When Dick takes a leave of absence in book 4, it is from both the clinic and Nicole, suggesting that these two facets of his life can no longer be separated. “Escape” is a fitting title for this book, which represents the turning point for Dick. The leave of absence is a sort of midlife crisis in which Dick breaks away from the confi nes of the marriage, realizing that he has changed: “But Dick had come away for his soul’s sake, and he began thinking about that. He had lost himself—he could not tell the hour when, or the day or the week, the month or the year” (253). It is appropriate that it is during this trip that his father dies, and that his affair with Rosemary is fi nally consummated—“what had begun with a childish infatuation on a beach was accomplished at last” (269). Book 4 also features one of the more distressing intrusions into the glamorous lives of the characters: Dick’s drunken arrest in Rome, which ultimately involves Baby Warren and Collis Clay as well. By his return in book 5, Dick understands the permanence of the change: “I’m not much like myself any more” (326). This change is also symbolized by his failure to lift the man on the surfboard (355), and even Rosemary has heard rumors that “he’s not received anywhere any more” (358). After one of the fi nal arguments between Dick and Nicole, the close of the chapter is particularly significant: “The case was fi nished. Doctor Diver was at liberty” (375). The medical terms used here suggest that the failure of the marriage is in fact due to his failure to separate life and work. Nicole’s corresponding realization occurs in book 5, when she reencounters Tommy Barban after already feeling disillusioned with her relationship with Dick. After Dick’s return, she tells him that “you used to want to create things—now you seem to want to smash them up” (334). Giving the camphor rub to Tommy symbolizes that she now values him above her own family (symbolism that is


not lost on Dick), and indeed shortly after this incident she yields herself to him as well. The breakdown of the marriage is now complete. The style of the novel, in particular its focus on description and use of idealized, poetic language, is a reflection of Fitzgerald’s attempt to portray the beauty and glamour of life. Moments such as the description of Dick’s arrival on the train platform in Paris show the glamour conveyed by Fitzgerald’s lyricism: “Dick Diver came and brought with him a fi ne glowing surface on which the three women sprang like monkeys with cries of relief, perching on his shoulders, on the beautiful crown of his hat or the gold head of his cane” (168). The novel is not driven by action; rather, the structure is episodic, and the isolated incidents of action exemplify the ugliness that occasionally interrupts the facade of beauty. This type of interruption is also apparent during scenes involving drinking, when the narration becomes disjointed or confused to simulate the impressions of drunkenness. The novel’s shifting narrative perspective is another interesting stylistic feature. The brief section of fi rst-person narration from Nicole’s perspective at the beginning of the revised book 2 covers the early years of the Divers’ marriage quickly, in a stream of consciousness style. Its rapid jumps and sometimes childish language illustrate Nicole’s still unstable state of mind, and Fitzgerald is also able to convey both her moments of despair, such as after Topsy’s birth when “everything got dark again” (62), and of rapturous happiness. Aside from this section, the point of view is always third person, but it shifts frequently so that the omniscient narrator adopts the focus of each of the major characters (and even minor ones like Abe North and Baby Warren) for a time. The majority of the novel is narrated in this fashion from Dick’s point of view, establishing him as the protagonist (and making his effective disappearance at the end of the novel more poignant), but the shifts allow Fitzgerald to give readers varying perspectives on the characters and to create sympathy for Dick, Nicole, and Rosemary in turn. The most significant shift is the large section told from Rosemary’s perspective. The description of the Divers and their friends from the innocence

of Rosemary’s point of view allows Fitzgerald to develop these characters as they appear to an outsider, and to glorify the Divers before this illusion of perfection is shattered. Although the reader is aware of the dark background behind the Divers’ marriage from book 1, Rosemary remains unaware until much later.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the effect of the multiple points of view Fitzgerald uses to narrate the novel. In particular, what is the effect of the introduction of Rosemary’s perspective on the Divers in book 2? 2. Compare Nicole and Rosemary, in terms of their personalities and respective relationships with Dick. You may also wish to consider each woman’s relationship with her parent. Do you fi nd it significant, particularly in comparison with Nicole, that the fi lm that has made Rosemary famous is titled Daddy’s Girl? 3. Compare this novel to other “breakdown” novels, such as Saul Bellow’s Herzog or J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. How are the breakdowns of the central characters similar and different? 4. The novel’s epigraph is taken from John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” Read the poem and examine the connections you see between it and the subject of the novel. Why do you think Fitzgerald chose this epigraph, and do you fi nd it appropriate?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON FITZGERALD AND HIS WORK 1. Trace the uses of geographical contrasts throughout Fitzgerald’s works. You may wish to consider in particular his use of characters originating in the “Middle West” (Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, Nicole Warren, Amory Blaine, Dexter Green)—Fitzgerald’s own birthplace—and the seemingly inevitable transfer of these characters to other locations. 2. Discuss the significance of the city of New York across Fitzgerald’s fiction. You may especially

F. Scott Fitzgerald

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

wish to consider how the city compares to other locations in works like Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, “Winter Dreams,” and “May Day.” Compare Nicole Diver to Daisy Buchanan. How are their personalities similar? Is there any similarity between the affairs they have (with Tommy Barban and Gatsby, respectively)? Research Zelda Fitzgerald and discuss to what extent each woman could be seen as a portrayal of Zelda. You may also wish to consider whether any of Fitzgerald’s other female characters incorporate certain characteristics of Zelda. Consider the appearances of automobiles throughout Fitzgerald’s fiction. How does Fitzgerald make use of the automobile as a symbol, and what is suggested by the frequent occurrences of automobile accidents in his works? Explore the significance of the First World War throughout Fitzgerald’s works. Although the war never plays a primary role, perhaps because Fitzgerald’s regiment did not actually go to Europe before the war ended, its symbolic significance and effects are clearly felt in a number of works, from the presence of the soldiers in “May Day” to the deaths of several of Amory’s Princeton friends in This Side of Paradise. Compare Fitzgerald’s treatment of the war to that of other American writers of the 1920s, such as Ernest Hemingway or JOHN DOS PASSOS. Consider the ways in which Fitzgerald’s works concern themselves with the idea of a loss of innocence. You may wish to compare the degree to which characters such as Nick Carraway, Rosemary Hoyt, Amory Blaine, Sally Carrol Happer, or Edith Bradin experience a loss of innocence and what leads to their respective losses. Read Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” and consider to what extent the breakdowns of various characters in Fitzgerald’s fiction (Dick Diver, Gordon Sterrett, Charlie Wales) can be seen as reflecting the author’s own experiences. Read one of Horatio Alger’s novels, such as Luck and Pluck or Tattered Tom, and consider how Alger’s 19th-century presentation of the American dream compares with the portrayal of this dream throughout Fitzgerald’s works.

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9. Fitzgerald greatly admired the poetry of John Keats and tried in his own writing to “become a prose Keats, imitating the poet’s rhythms and enriching his own style with lush Keatsian imagery” (Bruccoli 73). Read some of Keats’s poetry, such as the known Fitzgerald favorites “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and consider the extent to which the more poetic passages of Fitzgerald’s novels and stories successfully achieve this goal. 10. Read “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” an early story in which Fitzgerald considers the importance of social success and popularity (especially among young women), and compare his treatment of this theme in that story with its treatment in This Side of Paradise and in later stories like “May Day” and “Babylon Revisited.” WORKS CITED

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Bruccoli, Matthew J. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. Bryer, Jackson R., and Cathy W. Barks, eds. Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002. The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society. Available online. URL: http://www.fscottfitzgeraldsociety.org. Accessed April 7, 2009. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. London: Penguin Books, 1950. ———. The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1989. ———. Tender Is the Night. London: Penguin Books, 1955. ———. This Side of Paradise. Edited by Ruth Prigozy. New York: Washington Square Press, 1995. Hemingway, Ernest. “Scott Fitzgerald,” “Hawks Do Not Share,” and “A Matter of Measurements.” In A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner, 1964. Meyers, Jeffrey. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Mizener, Arthur. The Far Side of Paradise. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951. Prigozy, Ruth. Illustrated Lives: F. Scott Fitzgerald. London: Penguin Books, 2001.

Rebecca Strong

Robert Frost (1874–1963) [A poem] begins in delight and ends in wisdom . . . it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. (“The Figure a Poem Makes”)

D

uring his lifetime, Robert Frost became not only one of the most respected but certainly also one of the most popular of serious American poets. He received more Pulitzer Prizes (four) than any other writer of verse has ever won, and he was also the beneficiary of numerous awards, scores of honorary degrees, many academic appointments, a variety of presidential recognitions, and healthy sales of his books. During a time when poetry had seemed to become increasingly remote and distant from the audience of “common readers,” Frost was one of the few poets to win both the respect of critics and the affection of a large and admiring public. Although his success occurred late (he was nearly 40 when his fi rst book was published), once it arrived it never left, and the fact that Frost lived into his eighties meant that by the end of his life he had become a national icon—one of the most famous and best-loved writers of his time. In the years since his death his reputation has only grown, even though darker sides of both his personality and his verse have received increasing emphasis. Most of the details of the poet’s life and career are outlined in the exceptionally helpful “Chronology” prepared by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson. Although Frost would eventually become most famous for poems often set in New England, he was actually born on the other side of the continent—in San Francisco, California. His father, William Prescott Frost, Jr., had been born

in New England and had graduated from Harvard, while the poet’s mother (Isabelle Moodie) had been born in Scotland but had been raised by an uncle in Columbus, Ohio. After the couple met while serving together as teachers in Pennsylvania, they married in March 1873 and soon moved to San Francisco, where William worked as a journalist and where Robert, their fi rst child, was born on March 26, 1874. Although William had some success as a writer and editor, his taste for alcohol and gambling led to tensions in the marriage; the couple’s daughter, Jennie, was born in 1876 when Isabelle was temporarily back in Massachusetts, but eventually she returned to San Francisco, accompanied by a number of female relatives and friends. Not long after their arrival, William Frost was diagnosed with tuberculosis, but his condition did not prevent him from participating, during the next few years, in local politics. As a parent, however, William Frost was often harsh, and partly as a result young Robert became nervous and sickly and often had to drop out of school because of stomach pains. Nevertheless, as he grew older he also developed a streetwise tougher side, even while, under the influence of his highly religious and literate mother, he was cultivating an interest in reading literature and in hearing poetry read aloud. When William Frost fi nally died of tuberculosis in 1885, his wife and children were left almost destitute. His widow had little choice but to take her son

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and daughter back to Massachusetts to live for a time in the town of Lawrence with her husband’s parents. By 1886, however, the small family had taken up residence in New Hampshire, where Isabelle Frost taught children in grades 5 through 8, including her own son, who had now developed a lively interest in reading. In the coming years Robert would increasingly distinguish himself as a student, especially after he transferred to Lawrence High School. His own fi rst poems were published in that school’s Bulletin in 1890, and indeed by 1891 he had been elected its editor. By this time, too, he had met and fallen in love with Elinor Miriam White, another accomplished student at the school, and by 1892 they had in fact become privately engaged. Although Frost had been accepted by Harvard, his grandparents— who were paying for his education—determined that he would instead attend the less-expensive Dartmouth College, but Frost’s time there lasted merely a semester. Regimented education bored him, but he continued to study on his own even as he worked a number of low-paying jobs as a mill worker and teacher. In 1894 he was able to publish some poems in a New York newspaper, but he was unable, at fi rst, to persuade Elinor finally to marry him. Depressed, he traveled (perhaps with suicidal intent) to the aptly named Dismal Swamp in North Carolina, but before long he was back in Lawrence, working as a journalist, teacher, and tutor. Eventually, on December 19, 1895, he and Elinor were married, and on September 25, 1896, their fi rst child—a son named Elliott—was born. Meanwhile, Frost continued to teach, write poems, and pursue an amateur interest in botany, and he also made plans to resume his formal education by entering Harvard. Frost’s studies at Harvard began in 1897 and continued, despite ill health, until March 1899, when he withdrew despite having had some real success. His daughter Lesley was born on April 28, and Frost—partly to earn a living and partly to rebuild his health through manual labor—decided to begin raising chickens. Nevertheless, after the death of young Elliott in July 1900, Elinor became depressed and Frost’s own physical and mental health continued to deteriorate, but he continued to write poems

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even after his grandfather bought him a 30-acre farm in Derry, New Hampshire. Most of the work there was actually done by a friend, and when Frost’s grandfather died in 1901, the poet was left with a yearly income of $500—an arrangement that left him time for his writing despite his commitment to the farm. By 1903, in fact, he had managed to unite the two pursuits by publishing prose pieces in various poultry magazines, although poetry remained his primary literary love. He often wrote at the end of the day, after his duties on the farm were done. Meanwhile, as children continued to arrive (son Carol in 1902, daughter Irma in 1903, and daughter Marjorie in 1905), Frost felt an increasing need to supplement his income, and so in 1906 he began teaching again, this time at the local Pinkerton Academy. He was an active, effective, and innovative teacher, and his success at Pinkerton eventually led, in 1911, to a position as a college instructor. By this time, however, he had begun to feel an increasing yearning to write full-time in a new environment, and so in the late summer of 1912 he and his wife and children abandoned their life in New England and set sail for England itself. London at this time was the center of a lively literary scene, and it was not long before Frost was making the acquaintance of many notable writers, including EZRA POUND, the dynamic American expatriate. Conceited but at the same time generous, Pound was always ready to help promote other writers of talent, and when Frost’s fi rst book—A Boy’s Will—was published by a small London firm in April 1913, Pound was one of a number of reviewers who hailed it as an important work. In the meantime, the reception of Frost’s next book— North of Boston, published in May 1914—was even more enthusiastic. Indeed, many critics still consider this work Frost’s best. Not long after World War I began in August 1914, Frost had moved his family back to the United States (they arrived in February 1915), and by the time of their return it had become clear to practically everyone who cared about poetry that a major new voice had arrived on the scene. North of Boston and A Boy’s Will were soon published in American editions, and both books quickly met with many highly positive reviews

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and with gratifying sales. Frost had now begun to attract the kind of attention and respect in his own country that he had never enjoyed before; in 1916, for instance, he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and in that same year he was invited to teach at Amherst College (with which he would now enjoy an on-again, off-again relationship for many years). Invitations to speak and to read his poems began to arrive on a regular basis, and in November of that year his newest book—Mountain Interval—was published by the same major New York fi rm that had reprinted his fi rst two volumes. In 1917 one of Frost’s poems won a major prize; in 1918 he himself received an honorary degree; in 1919 he was elected president of the New England Poetry Club. Thus, as the 1920s dawned, Frost’s career was defi nitely on the rise, although he continued to favor a rural life when he might easily have moved to a large city. In 1920 he began to plan to raise apples on a farm in Vermont, although in 1921 he also began a long-standing relationship with the University of Michigan, and in 1922 he undertook an extensive lecture tour in the South and Midwest. In 1923 his Selected Poems were published, followed later by a book titled New Hampshire, and during that same year he was invited back to Amherst. Success thus followed success: In 1924 New Hampshire won a Pulitzer Prize; in 1925 friends celebrated his birthday with a major dinner; and during this same period Frost was being wooed both by Amherst and by Michigan. In 1926 Amherst made him an offer he could not refuse, and in 1928 he signed a highly lucrative contract with his New York publisher. During these years, however, all was not entirely well: Frost’s own health and the health of some of his children were often poor; tensions with his wife were increasing; his adult children were beginning to encounter problems of their own; and Elinor was more and more depressed. His relations with his fellow poets (whom he often viewed as competitors) were frequently strained, and Frost, despite his prominence, was often worried that his status would not endure, despite the publication of a new book (West-Running Brook) late in 1928 and the simultaneous reissue of an expanded ver-

sion of his Selected Poems. Nevertheless, despite his worries, his Collected Poems (which soon won him another Pulitzer) was published in 1930, the same year he was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Meanwhile, another major award (from the National Institute of Arts and Letters) followed in 1931. Despite the painful illness and death of his beloved daughter Marjorie in 1934 and the declining physical health and growing depression of his wife, Frost in the early 1930s (when he was now approaching his sixties) was still an active figure on the American literary scene. He continued to travel both frequently and widely to read his poems (an activity that helped build his national audience), and in 1936 he not only gave a series of prestigious and popular lectures at Harvard but also published a new book (A Further Range), which sold well and soon won him yet another Pulitzer Prize. That book, however, attracted some of the fi rst seriously negative criticism Frost had ever received as a writer; some commentators considered him old-fashioned and out of touch with the economic and social conditions of modern life. Since late 1929 the country had been suffering through the most severe economic depression in its history, and Frost, with his focus on rural landscapes and country people, seemed (at least to some readers) naively nostalgic or even worse. Indeed, his fairly right-wing political opinions put him at odds with many intellectuals (and also with much of the voting public) at that time, while his respect for custom and convention in the writing of poetry (including a preference for clear meter, regular rhyme schemes, plain language, and traditional themes) made him seem conservative not only in his politics but also in his writing. Frost never, though, really lost his popularity with the broad reading public, and any objections to his work from professional literary critics actually helped stimulate fruitful defenses and debate. He thus remained an important fi xture on the American literary landscape. The death of Elinor on March 20, 1938, was a major blow, for despite the frequent tensions in their relationship, she had been a major part of his life since his late teens. Now, without her,

Robert Frost

he became severely depressed and, almost on the rebound, proposed marriage to a young woman named Kathleen Morrison (who at the time was married to a friend of Frost’s and who was also the mother of several children). She refused his proposal, but they did begin a secret long-term affair while she officially served as his secretary for many years. Frost was proud of his continued sexual vigor, and he often boasted about the affair to male friends (Meyers 245–246). In the meantime, literary accomplishments continued and literary recognitions piled up, including a gold medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1939 and an appointment at Harvard that same year. Frost had even, by this time, chosen Lawrance Thompson as his official biographer (with the proviso that any book not appear until after his death). It was, however, the death by suicide of his own son, Carol, that was most on Frost’s mind in 1940—an incident that was just the latest in a long line of sad events that often made his family life so different from his professional career. In the 1940s that career continued to prosper: another appointment from Harvard in 1941, a new book of poems (The Witness Tree) in 1942, yet another Pulitzer Prize in 1943, an appointment from Dartmouth that same year, another book (A Masque of Reason) in 1945, an updated edition of his Collected Poems in 1946, the publication of two new books (Steeple Bush and A Masque of Mercy) in 1947, a new appointment at Amherst in 1948, and publication of the Complete Poems of Robert Frost 1949 (to positive reviews and good sales) at the end of the decade. Likewise, the 1950s saw many further distinctions and achievements. In 1950 itself, the U.S. Senate honored Frost with a resolution of praise; in 1953 he won a major fellowship from the Academy of American Poets; 1954 included an invitation to the White House and a major dinner in his honor, not to mention the publication of a new collection of poems (Aforesaid); in 1955 the state of Vermont named a mountain after him; while in 1957 he was awarded honorary degrees by both Oxford and Cambridge universities in England. While visiting in Britain to receive these awards, Frost was widely praised, and the following year—1958—included

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another invitation to the White House and several new official distinctions, followed by a major celebration of his 85th birthday in 1959. Congress awarded him a gold medal in 1960, but perhaps the highlight of Frost’s national recognition was his selection, by the newly elected president John F. Kennedy, to read his poetry at the inaugural ceremony in January 1961. A major trip to Russia (where he met the Soviet leader) followed in 1962, but by this time Frost’s health was in serious decline, and by the end of the year he was in the hospital, where doctors diagnosed cancer. Even in his waning days, however, he was awarded one last major honor (the Bollingen Prize for Poetry), and on January 29, 1963, he died. His public career as a poet had begun late but had lasted long and had been extraordinarily successful, and, unlike many writers who are prominent in their own days but whose reputations subsequently decline, Frost has continued, even after his death, to live a vigorous and well-respected life in the many vital poems he composed—poems that remain both widely read and widely admired.

“The Tuft of Flowers” (1906, 1913) The speaker is working alone in a field, turning over the grass that has been mowed earlier in the day by another worker, whose companionship the speaker misses (even though he realizes that the essential human condition is one of fundamental loneliness). Just when the speaker has reached this conclusion, however, he notices that a butterfly is circling around a tuft of flowers that the mower, out of an innate appreciation for their beauty, decided to spare. Responding to this gesture, the speaker suddenly feels a sense of brotherhood with the mower and with other human beings, who are linked not only by their common labor but also by their shared appreciation of natural loveliness. This poem is not only one of Frost’s earliest but is also one of his most typical. As do many of his works, it uses plain, simple language and clear, straightforward sentence structures. The diction is ordinary and uncomplicated; the tone is

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understated and undramatic; and the pace (like the pace of the worker the poem describes) is deliberate and unhurried. As is common in Frost’s works, the setting is rural, and the behavior the work depicts is normal and prosaic; the poem uses a highly traditional structure (rhymed couplets) and employs one of the most common of all English poetic meters (iambic pentameter, in which 10 syllables occur in each line, with the even syllables usually accented and the odd syllables usually unaccented). The iambic rhythm is perfectly regular and steady for the fi rst nine lines; only in the fi rst syllable of line 10 does Frost violate this predictable arrangement. Likewise, until we reach line 8, all the previous couplets had ended with periods; thus, when Frost departs from this pattern in line 8, the statement he makes there and in the next two lines has extra emphasis. As it happens, it is precisely in those lines that the speaker stresses a theme—human loneliness—that is central not only to this particular work but to many of Frost’s other poems. The key word (“alone”; l. 8) is accentuated through rhyme, through placement at the end of a line, and through the unusual punctuation that both precedes and follows it. Thus, despite the surface plainness of his writing, Frost also demonstrates his subtle skill and craftsmanship. The details of his poems are always more carefully chosen than is fi rst apparent, and the regular patterns he establishes help emphasize any departures from them. In line 12, for instance, the phrase “a bewildered” not only disrupts the normal iambic pattern of the line but also mimics, through that disruption, the very bewilderment the phrase describes. Likewise, the same kind of meaningful disruption occurs with the use of the word tremulous in line 18. Examples such as these reveal that Frost had a sensitive ear for the sounds of poetry—a trait also revealed (for instance) in his use of quadruple alliteration in line 22 (“At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook”). This line, of course, deserves special emphasis because it offers the fi rst reference to the crucial fact of the surviving flowers, and Frost highlights this key moment not only through his stress on similar consonant sounds (all those ts and fs and ls and bs) but also through his imme-

diately subsequent use of a memorable metaphor (the “leaping tongue of bloom,” which compares the colorful flowers to a flame; l. 23). Although the poem is not without its flaws (such as the cliché of “as far as eye could see”; l. 17), on the whole it is impressively successful, particularly in the way the fi nal lines not only echo but reverse the conclusion earlier stated in lines 9–10. In this respect, as in so many others, the work reveals the kind of careful craftsmanship that makes Frost such a reliably accomplished writer.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the depictions of man’s relationship with nature in this poem and in Jack London’s short story “To Build a Fire.” In addition, discuss the ways both works present the relations of human beings in a natural setting. How does the speaker of Frost’s poem differ, in his attitudes toward other people, from the central character of London’s story? 2. How does this poem resemble and/or differ from Ezra Pound’s poem “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” in its treatment of such themes as loneliness and the desire for companionship? How, in both works, do we see a change in the speaker’s attitudes and feelings over time? How do the conclusions of the poems differ? 3. Discuss the use of irony in this poem. For example, how and why is it ironic that the cutting of the grass reveals the brook? How and why is it ironic that the flowers are identified as weeds? How is the speech at the very end ironic?

“The Pasture” (1913) The speaker announces his intention to perform various farm-related tasks, but then, after each announcement, he invites an unidentified addressee to join him on his rounds. In this very brief but highly intriguing text, Frost displays many of the traits that make him such a memorable poet. In some respects the poem seems, at fi rst glance, unremarkable. It uses, for the most part, the iambic rhythm so common in

Robert Frost

English poetry—rhythm that Frost himself considered close to the rhythms of typical English speech. In iambic rhythm, each even syllable is accented, while each odd syllable is not, and “The Pasture” employs this rhythm without variation in the fi rst three lines of each stanza—a pattern that helps the poem seem both simple and traditional in its music. The work also employs (again in the fi rst three lines of each stanza) the highly common pentameter (or five-foot) line length so frequently used in so many poems written in English: Each of those lines is exactly 10 syllables long (no more, no less). Once again, then, Frost writes in a way that makes his poem appear, at fi rst, highly conventional and unremarkable. In its subject matter, too, the poem seems almost mundane: The speaker will clear some leaves from a spring, and then he will go to fetch a calf. In short, at fi rst there seems nothing at all unusual about this poem. But then, of course, Frost catches us completely by surprise, for in the fourth line of each stanza, he not only drops (without warning) from 10 syllables to eight, but he also departs completely from the rhyme scheme the poem had seemed to be establishing: The fi rst three lines lead us to expect that the fourth line will rhyme with the fi rst (abba), but instead the fourth line rhymes with nothing that precedes it (abbc); likewise, a similar surprise awaits us at the end of stanza 2, where the rhyme scheme is as follows: deec. This kind of structure is highly unusual (to say the least), and it helps reinforce the speaker’s sudden shift, at the end of each stanza, from his own intentions and activities to the desired presence of the unnamed person he addresses. Frost, in other words, uses simple diction, simple rhythms, and a structure that at fi rst seems completely predictable to produce a poem that is nonetheless startling in its inventiveness and effect. Each fourth line gets maximal emphasis, not only because of its brevity and departure from the expected pattern of rhyme but also because of Frost’s wonderful combination of assonance (emphasis on shared vowel sounds) and alliteration (emphasis on shared consonants) in the repeated and heavily accented words “gone long” and “You . . . too” (ll. 4, 8). Although the speaker at fi rst seems totally focused, in each stanza, on his

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rural tasks, each last line makes it obvious how much he values and yearns for the companionship of the unnamed person he addresses. By leaving the identity of this addressee unclear, Frost adds to the mystery, charm, and intrigue of the poem. We cannot be sure whose company the speaker wants, but on one level the you must surely be the reader himself (or herself). The poem (which was often printed as a prefatory lyric at the head of collections of Frost’s verse) functions, in one way, as an invitation by the poet to the reader to enter the poet’s rural world. The imagery of the pasture, the spring, and the tottering calf suggests an idyllic world of calm, peace, plenty, and life, and the fourth line of each stanza extends and intensifies that sense of harmony when the speaker, in his understated way, offers a hand of friendship both to the anonymous addressee and to the reader as well.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with the poem by William Carlos Williams titled “This Is Just to Say.” How are they similar in the kinds of actions they depict, the kind of language they use, and the ways they include an unnamed addressee as part of the “plot” of the poem? 2. How does the effectiveness of this poem depend, in part, on its brevity? How and why might the poem be less effective if it consisted of 10 similar stanzas rather than just two? How might such lengthy repetition change our perception of the speaker? In terms of the poem as it presently exists, what kind of person do you imagine the speaker to be? Explain your response by pointing to specific evidence in the text.

“After Apple-Picking” (1914) Having spent an entire day picking apples, the speaker is exhausted from his work; he describes the labor involved in picking apples and anticipates the troubled sleep that will soon descend upon him. As many of Frost’s poems do, this one blends tradition and innovation and fuses the conventional with the unusual. It describes a common

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activity in a familiar rural setting, yet it is also strangely suggestive—as if the poet implies more than he openly states. Likewise, the poem is provocative in form and techniques as well as in subject matter and theme: It uses rhyme and meter, but it does so in highly unpredictable, unorthodox ways. At fi rst glance, it seems merely to use realistic details to depict mundane activities, but on closer inspection it also seems highly suggestive. Thus, in the same way that dreams often blend credible data with imaginative coloring, so does this poem. The poem opens with a seemingly simple fact: “My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree” (l. 1). The line describing the long ladder is itself unusually long (12 syllables), and although the line can be forced into a regular iambic pattern (in which even syllables are accented and odd syllables are not), the rhythm sounds less regularly patterned. That fact, combined with the apostrophe-plus-s of ladder’s, helps create an immediate impression of a relaxed, unassuming speaker describing a literal, everyday scene. But then, of course, Frost surprises us in the second line, which adds that the ladder is pointing “Toward heaven still.” Here the use of the word heaven (rather than, say, the sky) gives the line metaphorical resonance; the speaker no longer seems simply to be describing facts but to be using figurative language. The extreme brevity of the second line (which can be read as having only three syllables) also catches our attention, especially since the fi rst line had been so lengthy. In the space of just two lines, then, Frost has already set the tone for the rest of this unusual poem: He has combined the mundane and the metaphorical, the literal and the imaginative, and he has also shown a willingness to play freely with form. All these traits will appear repeatedly as the poem proceeds: Rhyme will be used, but the rhyme scheme will be completely unpredictable; line lengths will vary radically and without warning (reaching a radical minimum of just two syllables in line 32); and sometimes the speaker will seem to be describing simple data while at other times he will seem to be implying something more—although the exact nature of what he may be implying will never be precisely clear. This, in short, is a puzzling and intriguing poem.

Frost’s freedom with form in this poem means that when he does revert to regularity (especially in rhythm), his phrasing has maximum impact. Line 6, for instance, is especially memorable because it is the fi rst clear example of regular iambic pentameter to have appeared up to that point: “But I am done with apple-picking now.” The steady beat lends a sense of strong assurance to the line—an assurance that contrasts with the irregularity of much of the rest of the work. And in fact throughout the poem Frost continually surprises us, alternating between present and past, the real and the remembered, the literal and the figurative. At one point, for instance, he mentions looking through a “pane of glass” (l. 10), but it soon becomes clear that this “pane” was not real glass but merely a sheet of ice. At another point (lines 18–36), it is not clear at fi rst whether the speaker is already dreaming or whether he is describing remembered events. Even when the speaker mentions the “load on load” of apples coming in (l. 26), the phrasing can be read both literally and figuratively, and throughout the poem Frost blurs distinctions between what is strictly “real” and what is metaphorical. Is the poem simply about the process of picking apples, or is it about any kind of human labor? Is it about labor merely, or is it about the larger process of living? Is the sleep mentioned merely sleep, or is it also death? Should we be reminded, when reading this poem describing the labor involved in picking apples, of the curse of labor that resulted after an apple was picked in the Garden of Eden? Frost never makes the answers to any of these questions (or numerous others) blatantly clear, and ultimately that sense of mystery is part of both the charm and the power of this poem.

For Discussion or Writing 1. CARL SANDBURG’s poem “Child of the Romans” also describes a worker’s pause after long labor. Discuss the similarities and differences between that work and Frost’s poem, paying particular attention to such matters as setting, characterization, point of view, and tone. How does the purpose of Frost’s poem seem to differ from the purpose of Sandburg’s? Which poem would you describe as more reflective, and which poem

Robert Frost

would you describe as more propagandistic or political? Explain your response by pointing to details from both works. 2. Discuss the kind of weariness described in this poem in relation to the kind discussed in L ANGSTON HUGHES’s poem “The Weary Blues.” Discuss the use of sleep imagery in both poems; discuss the points of view used in both works; and discuss the social and political implications (if any) in both texts. How does Frost use the form of his poem to create a kind of “dreamy” impact? What kind of impact is created by the use of form in Hughes’s poem? 3. Discuss the relative absence of punctuation at the ends of lines 1–5 and its heavy presence in lines 6–8. Why did Frost want those latter lines to be so heavily punctuated? Why does he shift away from such heavy punctuation in lines 9–12? How do such alterations contribute to the effectiveness of the poem and prevent any sense of predictable monotony?

“The Death of the Hired Man” (1914) When a farmer named Warren returns to his house after going to the market, his wife, Mary, informs him that Silas, an old and somewhat undependable laborer who has worked on their farm in the past, has returned and wants to work there again. Warren is reluctant to rehire him, but Mary is more forgiving and stresses the old man’s physical weakness and emotional vulnerability. After the couple reminisce about Silas’s character and past behavior (including his frustrated attempts to mentor a young bookish fellow worker named Harold), Warren’s attitude begins to soften, but when he goes to talk to Silas, he discovers that the old man has died. In many ways this lengthy poem of 175 lines resembles an accomplished short story or even a brief play. Written mostly in iambic pentameter blank verse (with lines ranging in length from eight to 13 syllables, although usually containing 10 or 11), the poem moves with the ease and clarity of lucid prose and contains many elements

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of effective drama, particularly since much of the work consists of straightforward dialogue. All four main characters are deftly sketched, and the comments by Warren and Mary about Silas and Harold tell us as much (if not more) about the married couple and their relationship as about the workers they describe. Mary at fi rst seems the more gentlenatured and forgiving of the two, whereas Warren seems more judgmental and sharper edged. By the end of the poem, however, Warren’s thinking and feelings have evolved—a fact that makes the death of Silas all the more sadly ironic. Just when Warren seems prepared to greet the old man with compassion and understanding, both he and we discover that Silas is dead. Of course, the title of the poem foreshadows his death from the very beginning, but suspense nevertheless remains, since we do not discover until the last lines the exact circumstances of his demise or the precise nature of its impact on Warren and Mary. Indeed, it is not even clear until the very end whether the “death” referred to in the title will be literal or simply metaphorical, and in some ways it is metaphorical before it becomes a literal fact. Thus the poem maintains an air of uncertainty despite its title, especially since the work’s main interest derives less from the fate of the hired man than from the subtle nuances of the interaction between the married couple. The poem is at least as much about them and their relationship as it is about Silas. In numerous ways this poem is highly typical of Frost’s writing. It emphasizes, for instance, the often hard and lonely lives of New England farm folk (and, by implication, says much about the essential loneliness of the human condition). As do the couple who speak in this work, Frost himself combines realism with sympathy in his response to Silas; he refuses to mock the people he writes about, but he also refuses to present them sentimentally. Thus Silas’s death is presented quickly and without explicit comment, either from Warren or from Frost; a lesser poet would have been tempted to engage in maudlin moralizing. Warren never has a chance to welcome Silas home or even extend a bit of sympathy and understanding, but Frost, in his typically laconic fashion, feels no impulse to spell


out any lessons about missed opportunities—or any lessons at all. Instead he offers a convincingly level-headed and unromantic work that offers a believable “slice of life” (and of death) in credible and effective phrasing. It is, of course, the detailed phrasing of any poem that makes it worth reading, and this work by Frost offers many adroit details. Line 11, for instance—in which Warren exclaims, “When was I ever anything but kind to him?”—shows effectively how Frost can gain extra emphasis by playing the rhythms of speech off against his underlying iambic pattern, and the same line also shows how he sometimes lengthens or shortens lines to give them added impact. Likewise, in line 18 he uses metrical variation to emphasize the key word Off, and he uses the same technique in line 23 to stress the crucial word fixed. Throughout the poem, in fact, Frost shows a similar attention to precise detail, as in Warren’s effectively brief “I’m done” (which is contrasted with an exceptionally long preceding sentence [ll. 25–30]); or in Mary’s glancing aside (“You needn’t smile”; l. 37]), which implies Warren’s thoughts without openly stating them; or in Mary’s two-word reply (“But little”; l. 46) when asked what Silas had said, so that her own brevity matches his. Throughout the poem Frost skillfully foreshadows its conclusion (see, for example, the references to “nodding off” in line 44, or the reference to “sleep” in line 60, or the image of the falling moon in 106), and he also subtly suggests the key fi nal theme of missed chances in lines 80, 89, and 105. In addition, the poem is full of sly ironies: Thus Silas, considered a failure by so many others, presumes to offer advice to the ambitious and successful Harold (l. 100), while it is, ironically, his own family (rather than his employers) who can least tolerate his worldly failings (l. 147). Likewise, Warren ironically proclaims that Silas’s working days are done (l. 160) just moments before he discovers that all of the old man’s days have ended. Irony, however, is just one of many features that contribute to the complex tone of this work, for Frost combines such irony with such other techniques as prosaic statements, lyrical phrasing (see, for instance, lines 106–113), and epigrammatic

reflection (as in the famous competing defi nitions of home in lines 122–125). However, in addition to offering tonal complications, the poem features complex characterization. Mary, for instance, can be both tender and assertive, while Warren can seem both cynical and kind. Even Silas himself is multifaceted (especially in his attitudes toward Harold—attitudes that seem to combine jealousy, injured pride, and almost paternal concern). Frost, in short, has created a poem that is rich on numerous levels; it is a work that well rewards rereading.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this poem with Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory.” Discuss the similarities and differences between the lonely title figures of the two works; how do they respond differently to the challenges they face? How are they similar and/or different in their relations with other people and in their social positions? How do their deaths differ? 2. In what ways does Silas resemble and/or differ from the main character of SHERWOOD A NDERSON’s story titled “Hands”? In what ways are both characters somewhat inscrutable? Discuss their relations with people younger than they. What does each man seek from such relations? How is each man disappointed by such relations? 3. Discuss in detail Frost’s use of various literary devices in the opening 10-line section of this poem. How do these devices contribute to the effectiveness of the passage and thus make us want to read further? For example, why does Frost use alliteration so heavily in the opening sentence? How does he create suspense? Why are the spoken comments so brief? Discuss the significance of the actions and gestures depicted. How do various details in this passage subtly suggest the class of the people described?

“Home Burial” (1914) This poem explores the marital tensions that result from the death of a couple’s baby and its burial

Robert Frost

(by the husband) on their rural property, in a small family burial plot within sight of their house: The wife, burdened by grief, accuses the husband of callousness, especially because of an offhand remark he made in the immediate aftermath of burying the child; meanwhile, the husband is baffled, frustrated, and even angered by her accusations and coldness, which he considers unfair. At the end of the poem, as the wife prepares to walk out of their house in anger, the husband threatens to retrieve her by force. Like many of Frost’s other successful long poems, this one is written in blank (or unrhymed) verse and uses a basically iambic rhythm (in which even-numbered syllables are accented) and basically pentameter lines (consisting of 10 syllables each). As “The Death of a Hired Man” does, this poem features a lengthy conversation of a married couple, but the differences between the two works are as significant as their similarities. That poem dealt with the death of an old man; this one deals with the death of a baby. That poem presented a reasonable if sometimes strained conversation between a genuinely loving couple; this one presents an oftenheated debate between a husband and wife whose personalities and basic assumptions seem fundamentally at odds. In “Death” the wife had seemed full of sympathy, charity, rationality, and forgiveness; in the present poem the wife seems cold, judgmental, and unreasonably harsh. In “Death” the husband had seemed the harder edged of the two, but in “Home Burial” the husband, although sometimes inept in choosing his words, nonetheless seems desperate to accommodate his wife and achieve reconciliation. Finally, whereas the husband had softened in his attitude by the end of “Death,” in “Home Burial” the husband’s harshest words are the last ones he speaks. These are just a few of the many differences between two poems that nonetheless also resemble one another in numerous ways. It is almost as if Frost wrote a pair of companion pieces in order to illustrate the breadth of his poetic range. Whatever the case, the two poems are mutually illuminating. The poem opens with a perfectly regular iambic pentameter line (“He saw her from the bottom of

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the stairs”) that also shows Frost’s skill in the use of enjambment—the technique of running a sentence past the end of an unpunctuated line. In the present case, the opening sentence concludes with the significant phrase “Before she saw him,” but that important fact is delayed until the beginning of line 2. The delayed phrase is also metrically irregular, giving it even further emphasis. Frost’s craftsmanship in the use of such sound effects is likely to be unnoticed by the casual reader, but it is precisely this kind of craft that makes him such a noteworthy poet. He had an excellent ear and a superb sense of rhythm, and it was his ability to create apparently plain and simple speech while subtly employing all the sophisticated devices of meter and other sound effects (such as enjambment) that helps make his poetry so accomplished in such understated ways. Frost is not a “flashy” poet who calls overt attention to the artfulness of his art; it is, indeed, the seeming artlessness of his verse that so often makes it so impressive. Thus the physical positions of the couple in these opening lines (she is above; he is below) seem both perfectly mundane and appropriately symbolic: At the start of the work, the wife is both literally and figuratively in the superior position and looks down on her husband in both senses of the term. Meanwhile, his movement up the stairs is both entirely natural and effectively symbolic, and by the end of the poem he has assumed a position that is both literally and figuratively domineering. Also worth noting, moreover, is the way Frost uses the fi rst 30 lines of the poem to put us, as readers, into the same position of confusion and uncertainty as the husband: Just as he is not sure what his wife is talking about, neither are we. Frost could easily have made clear from the very beginning that the wife was preoccupied with her dead child; instead, by withholding that information for the fi rst quarter of the poem, he makes his readers share in (and feel) the husband’s uncomprehending bafflement. As in any good poem, then, part of the power of this work derives not merely from what is said but from the way the poet shapes the unfolding structure of the work; the work’s meaning, in other words, is not simply a matter of content but of form.


Other examples of Frost’s technical skill are easy to cite. For instance, when the wife urges the husband not to mention the dead child, her apparently simple phrasing—“‘Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,’ she cried” (l. 31)—not only receives exceptional metrical emphasis but can also be interpreted as simultaneously pleading, threatening, angry, pained, and/or desperate (to mention just a few possibilities). Thus, what seems on the surface a perfect example of plain, mundane, and unadorned speech seems, on reflection, one of the most highly artful moments of the poem (especially since this example of repetition also resembles the famous “Never, never, never, never, never” in act 5, scene 3 of Shakespeare’s King Lear [Meyers 49]—a moment that also deals with the profoundly felt loss of a loved one). Later, when the husband urges his wife, “Don’t—don’t go. Don’t carry it [i.e., her grief] to someone else this time” (ll. 59–60), his words subtly echo her own earlier outburst, but now the emotional overtones are quieter and more pathetic. Through such subtle links and contrasts, Frost crafts a poem as interesting for its poetic skill as for the tense interaction it describes. A less skillful poet could have depicted the very same events and themes and produced a much less effective work. It is Frost’s talent as an artist that brings the poem to vivid and memorable life.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the ways marital tension is depicted in this poem and in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Eros Turannos.” How do the wives in the two poems differ? How are the husbands in the two poems unalike? How do the sources of tension in the two poems contrast? What similarities exist between the characters and circumstances the two poems depict? Discuss the forms and points of view used in these poems. 2. Compare and contrast the marriage presented in Frost’s poem with the one described in SUI SIN FAR’s story “Mrs. Spring Fragrance.” How are the tones of the two works different? How do the relations between husband and wife in the two works reflect the different cultural backgrounds of the two sets of couples? Discuss

the endings of the two works; how do the differences in these endings reflect the differences in the genres of the two works? 3. Discuss the various ways in which dashes are used in this poem. What are their specific purposes and effects in various particular instances? For example, how does the dash in line 7 differ in purpose and effect from the dash in line 116? Why are dashes used so frequently in this poem? How are they relevant to some of the main themes of the work?

“Mending Wall” (1914) The speaker begins the poem by noting that walls— especially those marking divisions of property—are difficult to maintain and seem destined to fall: They inevitably collapse, are undermined by natural processes, or are vandalized by humans. Even so, when the speaker tries to convince his neighbor that the wall dividing their rural properties is not worth repairing and maintaining, his neighbor insists, “Good fences make good neighbors,” and so each spring the two of them repair the wall that not only separates them but also marks their continuing connection. As many of Frost’s poems do, this one has a rural setting and focuses on relations between country neighbors and indeed on the concept of neighborliness itself. The two men in the poem are simultaneously connected but separated, linked but also distinct, and in that sense they symbolize the common human condition, for in Frost’s works human beings are often outwardly aligned yet also fundamentally alone. The speaker’s desire to cease repairing the wall can thus be seen, in one sense, as reflecting a deeper desire for a more fundamental kind of friendship and communion, but part of the paradox of the poem is that it is the yearly ritual of repairing the wall that helps bind these two men in conversation and community. Fixing the wall gives them a common project; it gives them something to do together and something to talk about, and it does not seem an accident that the only people mentioned in the poem are two men. Two women

Robert Frost

would probably fi nd it easier to talk to one another; two families (especially two sets of children) would probably feel less separated by the wall than the male speaker seems to feel. The fact that no wives or children are mentioned enhances the sense of loneliness and isolation that is one of the underlying themes not only of this poem but of many of Frost’s works. The wall, paradoxically, is the means by which these two men are both divided and united. While some analysts argue that Frost sides with the speaker’s skepticism about maintaining the wall, and while other commentators contend that Frost endorses the neighbor’s commitment to repairing the wall, most critics suggest that the poem (like the wall itself) is ambivalent—that Frost lets each man have his say, sees merit in the arguments of each, and fi nally (as so often in his poems) leaves the issue unresolved. Whatever the fi nal “meaning” of this poem, its particular techniques are often memorable and effective. It opens, for instance, with a blunt, plain statement of theme that the rest of the poem will then proceed to complicate and perhaps even undermine (just as the seemingly solid wall itself is undermined by natural and human forces). The opening statement, like much of the rest of the poem, is typical of Frost’s writing in its simple, common diction; critics have noted how few of Frost’s words (here and elsewhere) are derived from Latin roots and how many can be traced to Anglo-Saxon origins—a trait that helps give Frost’s phrasing its air of blunt directness. To say this, however, is not to imply that the poem lacks subtlety or craft, for indeed part of the impressiveness of Frost’s achievement is his ability to combine apparent plainness with understated art. In the poem’s fi rst few lines, for example, he parallels and juxtaposes two emphatic verbs—sends in line 2 and the similarly positioned spills in line 3—to stress destructive actions from below and from above, the one associated with cold and the other with heat. Meanwhile, the hyphenated phrase “frozen-groundswell” (l. 2) mimics the very swelling it describes, while the words gaps and pass in line 4 combine both assonance (repetition of vowels) and alliteration (repetition of consonants). In all these ways and in many others, therefore, Frost shows a keen atten-

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tion not only to the “plot” and “theme” of the work but to its rhythms, structure, and sounds; he never forgets that the importance of a poem lies less in its meaning than in its craft. Further craft is demonstrated later in the poem, for example, in its heavy use of parallel phrasing (as in lines 10, 14–15, 16, and 17). Such parallelism, by its very nature, reinforces the poem’s key idea of things that are similar yet separate, connected but distinct. Yet Frost employs numerous other devices to prevent his plain diction and blank verse from seeming merely mundane or prosaic. He sometimes uses near-rhymes, for example, to keep the poem sounding “poetic” (as in the way the word out at the end of line 33 echoes the word cows at the end of line 31, or in the way the word trees at the end of line 42 echoes the word me at the end of the preceding line). Or he uses metaphors, as in the nicely succinct statement “He is all pine and I am apple orchard” (l. 24). And he uses a sly and humorous play on words, suggesting that to build a wall is to risk giving “offense” (i.e., a fence; l. 34). In all these ways and in many others, Frost gives the poem the kind of richness we associate with poetry more than with any other genre, but he does so in ways that keep this work (like much of the rest of his writing) simultaneously unobtrusive yet still intriguing.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the symbolism of the wall in this poem with the symbolism of the “western gate” in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Luke Havergal.” How do both poems deal with the theme of separation? What are the differences between the separated characters in the two works? How do the tones and conclusions of the two poems differ? How and why is humor used in Frost’s poem but not in Robinson’s? 2. How and why is wall imagery used differently in this poem than in H. D.’s work titled The Walls Do Not Fall (especially sections 1 and 43)? What do walls symbolize for H. D.’s speaker? What do they symbolize for the speaker of Frost’s poem? One poem is set in a peaceful rural environment; the other poem is set in a war-torn urban area. How do these contrasting contexts of the


walls help determine the significance of the wall imagery in each work? 3. How and why might a Marxist critic respond to this poem? What does the poem suggest about “private property”? What is the probable class of the two men featured in this poem? Does their focus on maintaining boundaries seem ironic in any way from a Marxist perspective?

“Birches” (1916) The speaker notes that white birch trees, especially when they are bent, present a striking contrast to nearby darker trees, and although he would like to think that playing boys have bent the trees by climbing in them and grabbing their branches to descend back to the ground, he knows that the branches have actually been bent by ice storms that have weighed them down and forever altered their shapes. After describing the storms and their effects, he returns to his fantasy of boys climbing the trees and bending their branches by holding them to return to solid ground. Musing on life’s troubles, and recalling that he himself once swung from birch trees, he wishes that he could now climb toward heaven but then descend gently back to earth on bending branches. As so often in his long poems, Frost here uses blank (or unrhymed) verse consisting mostly of 10 syllables per line, although sometimes he uses 11 syllables and occasionally 12. The fi rst four lines of the work use perfectly regular iambic pentameter meter, in which the even syllables are accented and the odd syllables are not. Afterward, however, the meter of the poem becomes much less predictable and much more erratic; in a poem that deals so insistently with motion, movement, and literal swinging, this kind of frequent departure from metrical regularity is often effective, allowing Frost to emphasize key syllables, words, or phrases, as in the heavily accented phrase “As ice storms do” (l. 5), or the word Loaded (l. 5), where the fi rst syllable receives unusual stress, or the heavily emphasized phrase “hung limp” (l. 2), where the rhythm mimics the sense. Frost, in other words, shows his usual skill in orchestrating the sounds of a poem

to reflect and reinforce its meaning, and the fact that the meter in this work is so unpredictable helps contribute to the heavily conversational style of the lyric—a quality also enhanced by the absence of rhyme, the frequent use of enjambed (or run-on) lines, the repeated use of unaccented fi nal syllables, the repeated references to “I,” the stress on personal memories and personal aspirations, and the implicit inclusion of readers themselves in the experiences the poem describes (as in the your of line 45). The structure of the poem seems loose rather than rigidly patterned, as the speaker himself explicitly concedes in lines 21–22: The work begins by offering one possible (and fanciful) explanation of the bent birches (ll. 1–3), then suddenly shifts to a more realistic explanation (ll. 4–20), then shifts back to fantasy that also seems to combine elements of personal memory (ll. 21–40), then makes the emphasis on personal memory explicit (ll. 41–49), and then concludes by focusing on wishes and hopes for the future (ll. 50–59). The speaker expresses highly personal recollections and aspirations, but obviously he also speaks for any person who has ever enjoyed the carefree play of childhood, or experienced the disappointments and worries of adulthood, or longed for a way of recapturing simple joys in the midst of life’s complexities. In the poem’s last line, Frost moves closer than he usually does to stating an explicit theme, lesson, or “moral,” but for the most part the speaker resists any didactic impulse. Ironically, though, by speaking so convincingly of and for himself, he also speaks for numerous readers, as the enduring popularity of this poem attests.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss this poem in relation to THORNTON WILDER’s play Our Town. In particular, discuss the relations between past and present and between youth and age in both works. How do both texts try to avoid sentimentality? How is childhood presented from a double perspective in both texts? What do both texts suggest about the process of loss through maturation? 2. Compare and contrast this poem with Jack London’s story “The Law of Life.” How is nature presented in both works? How is man’s place in

Robert Frost

nature described? In which work is the emphasis on man’s place in society more strongly emphasized? How do the tones and conclusions of the two works differ? 3. Why and how does the speaker use the word you so often in the fi rst 20 lines of the poem? How does his use of that word contribute to the poem’s tone and effectiveness? How does his use of that word help to involve the reader? In what other ways does the tone of the poem seem casual and conversational, and what other devices does Frost use to help create that tone?

“An Old Man’s Winter Night” (1916) In the darkness of the night, an old man is alone in a storage room in his empty house; he has entered the room with a lantern, but now he cannot remember why he went there. The sounds of his clomping feet disturb the quiet night, but eventually he falls asleep, and the poem ends by emphasizing the theme of human isolation. As in many of his best poems, Frost here uses blank verse and a basically iambic pentameter meter that allows him to create subtle and effective variations once the iambic pattern has been established. The opening line, for instance, is strictly regular in its iambic beat: Each even-numbered syllable is accented, while each odd-numbered syllable is not. Then, in the second line, both of the first two syllables are unaccented, so that the next two (“thin frost”) receive extra emphasis. Frost’s skill at using meter, however, is only one of the traits that make him an effective poet. In the present work, for instance, the title uses three key words (Old, Winter, and Night) to create immediately a melancholy mood—a mood the poem then develops and sustains. That mood is instantly reinforced by the word darkly (l. 1), an adverb that is both a literal description of the lack of light and metaphorically appropriate to the sad and somewhat ominous tone of the poem. Although Frost uses personification when describing nature (not only in line 1 but later on as well), that technique is ironic in this work, for the whole point of the poem is to emphasize

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man’s separation and isolation from nature, no matter how often nature is described in human terms. As the poem proceeds, Frost continues to pile on words that enhance the overall sense of coldness and alienation, including “frost” (l. 2), “separate” (l. 2), “empty” (l. 3), and “loss” (l. 8). Loss, of course, is an especially important word in this poem; the old man is “at a loss” not only in the sense that he cannot remember why he entered the storage room but also in the sense that his whole life is now in a process of decline. In his isolation, however, he is also paradoxically a symbol of the common human condition—a fact that Frost makes clear by the end of the poem when he uses the technique of subtracting a word to emphasize the incapacity not only of this “One aged man” but of any “one man” in general (l. 26). By the end of the work, the sleep of the old man not only is literal but also symbolizes the larger sleep of death that will overtake all people during the literal and metaphorical “winter night” of old age and death. As in all of Frost’s best poems, this one is full of specific moments of beauty and poetic skill, as in the memorable image of frost droplets as “separate stars” (l. 2), or in the rhythmic repetition of “What kept” in lines 4 and 6, or in the near-rhyme of “gaze” and “age” in lines 4 and 7, or in the use of onomatopoeia in the double use of “clomping” in lines 10–11, or in the staccato use of alliteration in the description of the old man’s footsteps “beating on a box” (l. 14). Describing the house as a “box” emphasizes its empty lifelessness, while using the past tense of know in 16 underscores the old man’s sense of loss. Frost likewise shows his skill in arranging syntax (or sentence structure) when he begins line 15 by saying, “A light he was” but then ends the sentence by adding “to no one but himself”: The poet gives with the fi rst four words but then takes away with the fi nal five. He uses a similar technique a bit later when he fi rst mentions (in neutral terms) a simple “moon” (l. 18) but then appends a deflating adjective: “the broken moon” (l. 19). Likewise, Frost shows his talent for delaying key facts by appending a simple two-word phrase (“And slept”) at the end of an unusually long sentence (ll. 18–23) and by putting that phrase at the very beginning a line, where it not only has extra


emphasis but also catches us by surprise. In all these ways and many others, Frost shows that he can take a tried-and-true theme (human loneliness) and make something fresh and original of it.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with T. S. ELIOT’s poem titled “Gerontion.” Discuss the works in terms of such matters as setting, point of view, characterization, imagery, symbolism, form, and style. How would you describe the differences of the poems in terms of purpose and impact? 2. Discuss this work in relation to ERNEST HEMINGWAY’s short novel The Old Man and the Sea. What differences exist between the two old men? How are the settings and actions described in the two works fundamentally distinct? How are the social situations of the two old men different? Which old man is more pathetic, and why? What is the ultimate effect of each work? 3. Analyze the poem’s use of various sound effects, such as assonance and near-rhymes. Where does Frost employ such methods, and how do they contribute to the continuity, flow, and effectiveness of the poem? Analyze their impact, for instance, on lines 1–7.

“Out, Out——” (1916) A boy living in idyllic rural New England has been cutting wood with a power saw for his family’s stove; just when he is about to stop work in order to eat supper, he loses control of the saw and realizes that his hand has been cut off. Later, after he has been anesthetized by a doctor, his strength ebbs away and he dies. The people who witness his death soon return to their own routines. Like many of Frost’s narrative poems, this one is written in blank (or unrhymed) verse with a basically iambic meter. The title alludes to lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth (“Out, out, brief candle! / Life’s but a walking shadow” [5.5.23–24]) and thus foreshadows the work’s emphasis on the fleeting nature of human existence. In this case, that existence is especially fleeting, since the victim of

accidental death is only a boy—yet a boy trying to be a man by helping with the family chores. Frost begins the poem with words whose cacophonous music imitates the sounds of the tool they describe (“The buzz saw snarled and rattled”; l. 1), and he soon repeats the key words—“snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled” (l. 7)—not only to emphasize them but also to mimic the repetitive sound of the saw. The verb snarled makes the saw sound almost like a living beast, while the word rattled implies a more mechanical effect but may also suggest the sound of a dangerous snake. Yet this is a poem that is full of ironies, and so while Frost immediately makes clear the danger of the saw, he also complicates the effect by giving it pleasant associations as well. Thus the saw produces “Sweet-scented” pieces of cut wood (l. 3) that will be used to stoke the family stove, and in the background of the cutting the boy can glimpse “Five mountain ranges one behind the other / Under the sunset far into Vermont” (ll. 5–6). The setting and mood are almost pastoral, but on second reading we note the irony inherent in the reference to the “sunset” and the similar irony of the ensuing comment that the day “was all but done” (l. 9). This is a poem, after all, in which a boy will die, and so such references to passing time are not insignificant. Similar irony results from the fact that the fatal accident occurs when the boy is called to a nourishing, life-sustaining “Supper” (l. 14), and the fact that the call is given by the boy’s own sister simply gives the irony one more agonizing twist. A poem that might easily have become maudlin or sentimental (on the one hand) or merely gruesome and grotesque (on the other) instead strikes a difficult balance: Frost allows us to sympathize with the victim without himself descending into manipulative pathos. Indeed the ending of the work—in which the bystanders, having witnessed the boy’s death, are simply said to have “turned to their affairs” (l. 34)—has been interpreted by some readers as a sarcastic indictment of indifference and by others as a stoic recognition that life must go on. Whichever reading we choose, neither reading makes either Frost or the poem seem sentimental. As always with Frost, there are wonderful examples of technical skill. Thus the line describing the

Robert Frost

seemingly mundane end of another mundane day is composed in perfectly regular iambic rhythm (l. 9); later, however, the key verb “Leaped” (l. 16) is metrically emphasized; and a crucial phrase is repeated (after an interruption) with an ominous addition: “the boy saw all—/ . . . / He saw all spoiled” (ll. 22, 25). Frost can be eloquent by using a sentence consisting merely of a single word (“So”; l. 27); he can use rhythm and sentence structure to masterful effect (l. 32); and he can use near-rhyme, in an unrhymed poem, to create a powerful sense of fi nality (“there” and “affairs” in lines 33–34). In short, what makes this poem great is not the event described (which could easily have been mishandled by a lesser poet) but Frost’s skill and craft. But these traits, as always, are subtle and unobtrusive.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this poem about death with Wallace Stevens’s lyric titled “The Emperor of Ice Cream.” How do the poems differ in style, tone, and attitude? What differences in plot and characterization help to account for these other differences? What elements make Frost’s poem more “tragic” than the poem by Stevens? 2. Read this poem in conjunction with “The Dead Baby” by WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS. Which of the two works is more sad or pathetic? Why? How do the poems differ in structure, diction, tone, and method? How does the opening stanza of the Williams poem resemble the closing lines of the Frost poem? Which of the two works is more obviously sarcastic? 3. Discuss the implied depiction of gender roles in this poem. What assumptions seem to underlie the poem’s presentation of the activities and responsibilities of males and females? How do you interpret the tone of the fi nal lines? Justify your response.

“The Oven Bird” (1916) The speaker describes the song made by a kind of warbler known as an ovenbird because the nest it builds—made of mud and vegetation—resembles

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a small oven. The bird is heard most often (the speaker claims) in midsummer, and he associates its singing with the passing of spring and the transition to fall. Because this poem consists of 14 lines, most commentators would label it a sonnet, although its rhyme scheme (aabcbdccdeefgfg) is highly unusual, fitting none of the standard patterns found in traditional sonnets. In this respect, the poem is typical of Frost, who liked to use traditional forms while also giving them his own distinctive twist. The poem opens with a strictly regular iambic pentameter line (“There is a singer everyone has heard”; l. 1), in which the even syllables are accented and the odd ones are not, but this regular beat only helps emphasize the irregular rhythm of the succeeding line, especially the key word Loud, which (given its meaning) gets appropriately unusual stress not only because it is accented but also because of its initial position. Here as so often, then, Frost shows his alertness to the musical quality of his poems—a trait especially relevant in a poem about birdsong. The speaker associates the song of the ovenbird with mutability—particularly with the transition from spring to fall: “He says that leaves are old and that for flowers / Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten” (ll. 4–5). The song of the bird is linked, then, with loss, decline, and diminishment—with falling flowers, with literal darkness, and with the onset of autumn (ll. 6–9). By line 10, with its reference to “highway dust,” the song of the bird has become associated not only with the kind of modernization that destroys nature but also with the death that is the inevitable fate of all living things; the use of the word dust, in particular, reminds us of the biblical idea that we come from dust and return to it when we die (Genesis 3:19). As is often the case in Frost’s lyrics, the tone of this work is dry, objective, and matter-of-fact: He does not lament the fact of death; he merely calls it to our attention. The poet himself, then, is a kind of ovenbird: Part of the purpose of his singing is not simply to celebrate nature and life but to note their inevitable fragility. Paradoxically, by calling attention to their passing he makes us value and appreciate them all the more; it is thanks in part to the singing of the ovenbird that

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we realize more intensely the beauty of both spring and summer and even the rapidly passing beauty of autumn itself. In describing the ovenbird, the speaker calls attention to his own function as a plain-spoken herald of fundamental facts—as a poet who “knows in singing not to sing” (l. 12) and who, through the skill of his art, manages to make something beautiful and memorable even of “a diminished thing” (l. 14).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with M ARIANNE MOORE’s poem “What Are Years?” How does each work deal with the issues of mutability and mortality? What is the tone and/or “message” of each work? Which work more obviously has a message? How is bird imagery used in both works? How do the works differ in point of view? 2. Discuss the way the passage of time is treated in this poem and in EDNA ST. VINCENT M ILLAY’s lyric titled “First Fig.” Why is Millay’s poem so much briefer than Frost’s? How is the brevity of the poem appropriate to its theme? Which of the poems is more meditative? Which is more hortatory? What details of the poems account for these differences in stance and tone? How would you describe the personality of the speaker of each work? 3. Where and how does Frost use repetition to emphasize variation in this poem? How does the poem resemble (but also not resemble) a standard Shakespearean sonnet in its fi nal two lines? How do those lines relate to the rest of the work?

“The Road Not Taken” (1916) During a walk through a forested area in autumn, the speaker came upon diverging roads—one seeming slightly less traveled than the other, although the difference was not very great. After wishing that he could walk down both roads at once, he fi nally chose the road that seemed slightly less worn, telling himself that someday he would

explore the other road (although he doubted that he ever would). The speaker then imagines that a long time in the future, he will be telling people of this choice of roads and will be suggesting that the choice he made was highly significant. This extremely well-known, highly popular, and seemingly straightforward poem is much less simple than a casual reading might suggest. The poem, in fact, has been interpreted in highly different and often contradictory ways. Some readers, for instance, take the speaker completely at face value, while others believe that the speaker is being mocked by Frost. Some readers believe that the poem endorses unconventional individualism, while others contend that the work offers no such message. Some analysts argue that the poem must be read in light of extratextual, biographical evidence that suggests that Frost used the work to poke gentle fun at an indecisive friend (his fellow poet Edward Thomas), while other commentators believe that the poem can and should be read on its own terms, without appealing to any special knowledge from outside the text itself. Meanwhile, still other commentators assert that Frost himself initially explained the poem as satire of Thomas but later changed his mind, although this claim itself has been disputed. Thus a poem that initially seems uncomplicated—with its simple diction, its solid rhyme scheme, and its generally iambic meter spread across eight to 10 syllables per line— appears, on closer examination, more complex than a superficial reading might suggest. The poem begins with a defi nitive statement of fact: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” (l. 1), and indeed few if any complications appear in the rest of the opening stanza. There is a nicely abrupt shift in the fi rst four words of stanza 2, and in fact it is in this second stanza that the poem’s real complications begin. At fi rst the speaker seems to make a clear distinction between the two roads (one seemed less well traveled than the other [l. 8]), but then he immediately subverts that distinction, suggesting that the two roads were very much alike (ll. 9–12). It is easy to see, from these lines, how Frost might be mocking the indecisive speaker—a speaker who finds it difficult not simply to choose between the two roads but even to describe them with any real

Robert Frost

sense of certainty or consistency. The speaker’s indecisiveness continues in lines 13–15, so that—ironically—a poem supposedly dealing with irrevocable choice is actually a poem about the difficulty of making up one’s mind. Even the famous fi nal lines of the poem seem ironic. Thus the speaker imagines himself asserting, sometime in the distant future, that of the two roads before him, “I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference” (ll. 19–20). Line 19, however, plainly contradicts lines 9–10, and so even as the poem concludes, the speaker seems uncertain and confused, even when making an apparently definitive statement. Of course, if the poem is read as mocking the speaker, this fi nal confusion only adds to the subtle satire.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the decisions (or decision-making processes) described in this poem and in Theodore Dreiser’s short story “The Second Choice.” Compare and contrast the central characters in the two works. What role does irony play in each text? How are the conclusions of the two works similar and/or different? 2. Discuss this poem in relation to SHERWOOD A NDERSON’s “The Book of the Grotesque” in Winesburg, Ohio. How do the works resemble and/or differ from one another in their treatment of the tendency to make choices and in their presentation of the results of those choices? Does one work present the idea of choice more positively than the other? 3. How do you read the poem—ironically or not ironically—as a piece of satire or as a straightforward meditation? Is there some third possibility? Justify your response. Archetypal (or “myth”) critics argue that great literature often deals with standard human desires, fears, and circumstances. How and why might an archetypal critic fi nd this poem intriguing?

“Design” (1922, 1936) The speaker notices a well-fed white spider holding a white moth on a white flower that is normally

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colored blue. He wonders how all these examples of whiteness happened to be together in such a perfect conjunction, and then he suggests that the conjunction may have been the result of an appalling design or intent. This work exemplifies Frost’s interest in the sonnet form as well as his ability to use that form in unusual ways. The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet, consisting of an octave (the fi rst eight lines) followed by a sestet (the fi nal six lines). In structuring the octave, Frost followed the standard Petrarchan rhyme scheme of abbaabba, but then, instead of creating a new set of rhymes in the sestet (as would have been expected), he continued to play with one of the rhyme sounds already so strongly established: acaacc. Finding appropriate rhyme words is more difficult in English than in Italian (Petrarch’s native language), and that is one reason that Petrarchan sonnets present special challenges for English-speaking poets. In this poem, however, Frost not only accepts the challenge but ups the ante: It is as if he deliberately sets out to make his task as tough as possible. In one sense, of course, he is playing on the poem’s title, calling attention to the elaborate “design” that is at the heart of his own text. The fact that the rhyme design of this poem is so rigid, inflexible, and even potentially monotonous may indeed be relevant to the “meaning” of the work—a meaning that itself implies the possibility of a universe that is rigidly designed down to the very smallest details. The poem begins with the speaker’s discovery of a spider, which he describes almost as if it were an attractive baby rather than an unappealing insect: The spider is “dimpled,” “fat,” and “white,” but the effect of such description is paradoxical, for the same adjectives that might be pleasing in one context seem grotesque here: Dimpled implies a close-up, almost microscopic, view of the insect; fat implies that this predator has had success in killing; and white makes the spider sound unnatural and perhaps even sickly. Likewise, the fact that the spider appears on a white flower that is normally blue again suggests an unnatural, sickly pallor, and by the time we reach line 4, the speaker’s concern with “death and blight” has become explicit. The spider,

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flower, and moth seem like “the ingredients of a witches’ broth” (l. 6)—phrasing that again implies unnatural and even malign influences. At this point, however, the phrasing sounds almost fanciful or unrealistic; witches, after all, do not “really” exist, and so the tone of the poem at this juncture can sound almost whimsical or witty, especially when the wings of the dead moth are compared to “a paper kite” (l. 8). By the time we reach the sestet, however, the tone of the poem considerably darkens. The speaker reminds us that the name of this sickly looking flower is, ironically, the “heal-all” (l. 10), and he wonders what force or forces were responsible for this deadly meeting of flower, spider, and moth. In line 13 (a number conventionally associated, appropriately enough, with misfortune) he suggests that a malevolent “design” (perhaps even a malicious deity?) engineered this “design of darkness” in order to “appall.” The conjunction of the words darkness and appall is part of the poem’s wit, for darkness suggests blackness, whereas appall implies making pale by provoking disgust, dismay, or shock. Typically, however, Frost shows both his cleverness and his sophistication by pulling back, in line 14, from any obvious or unequivocal moralizing: This fi nal line raises the possibility that design in small matters may be merely illusory. In other words, the conjunction of spider, flower, and moth may simply have been an odd accident and may lack any larger meaning at all. In the fi nal line, then, the poem leaves open the chance that there is no real meaning—not even a malign one—in the ironic union the poem describes.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss this poem in relation to “Credo” by Edwin Arlington Robinson. How does Robinson’s poem make explicit concerns that are only implied in Frost’s work? How do the two poems differ in their views of the possibility of divine design? How do the endings of the two works differ? In what ways is Robinson’s poem somewhat self-contradictory? 2. How do the views of God implied in Frost’s poem compare or contrast with the views enun-

ciated by Wolf Larsen in JACK L ONDON’s novel The Sea Wolf ? How do both works reflect the rise of Darwinism as an intellectual influence in the late 19th century? How is the last line of Frost’s poem in some ways even bleaker, in its implications, than the line that precedes it? 3. How do the fi nal six lines of the poem attempt to engage the reader directly? How and why is such engagement an effective strategy? In other words, how does it add to the impact of the poem? How does the speaker attempt to anticipate potential objections from his readers? How does the speaker implicitly characterize himself as he describes the objects of his attention? What kind of person does this speaker seem to be?

“Nothing Gold Can Stay” (1923) The speaker points to various data (particularly from nature) to argue that while beauty can only be temporary, change and decline are inevitable. The title of this splendid little lyric immediately announces its main theme: Nothing precious can endure. The brevity of the work—with its clipped trimeter (or six-syllable) lines, its quick couplets, and its short overall length—exemplifies its argument: The poem is fi nished almost before it begins, thus illustrating its own claims about the briefness of beauty. Yet this poem, however short, is exceptionally well designed; every detail contributes to its coherence and success, and thus part of the paradox of the text is that Frost, while arguing that beauty is fleeting, has himself created an enduringly beautiful work of art. In some respects, then, the very existence of this superbly crafted poem refutes (or at least qualifies) the poem’s own claims. Frost begins with a line in which each key word receives maximum metrical emphasis: The fi rst syllable of Nature is accented, as are the words first and green; only in the very last two syllables of the opening line does the poem settle into an expected iambic pattern (in which even-numbered syllables are accented and odd-numbered syllables are not). The iambic rhythm of the fi rst line’s last two syllables, however, puts powerful stress on the key

Robert Frost

word gold, so that the fi rst line is a model of epigrammatic compression: Frost manages to state the main argument of the whole poem in just six syllables. The opening line, however, also has a kind of paradoxical force: How, after all, can “green” be “gold”? The meaning of this claim seems to be that the very fi rst springtime buds of growing plants are especially precious, valuable, and beautiful, but the juxtaposition—indeed, the metaphorical identification—of green (associated with organic life) and gold (associated with something that is precious but inanimate) contributes to the paradoxical power of the opening claim. Yet even as the poem begins with a strong and vigorous assertion, this opening assertion also contains (in the word first) the seeds of its own undoing: The word first, after all, implies the very change that is the real subject of the poem, and this emphasis on change becomes blatantly obvious by line 2, which states of nature’s gold that it is “Her hardest hue to hold.” Frost here combines heavy musical alliteration on the consonant h with use of practically every vowel available (e, a, u, and o), so that pronouncing the line involves a vocal workout that reinforces the idea of the difficulty of holding on to beauty. By personifying nature (calling it “Her”), Frost also begins a process that the rest of the poem will expand, as he shows the relevance of natural change to human existence. Line 3 is another paradoxical metaphor: The speaker claims that nature’s “early leaf’s a flower.” How can a leaf be a flower? Indeed, we usually think of leaf and flower as opposites. By using such paradoxical phrasing, Frost makes us think; the poem is not simply an expression of emotion but a provocation to thought. A leaf, for instance, “is” a flower in the sense that it unfolds as a flower does, and in the sense that a flower results from a leaf, and also in the sense that a leaf is merely a temporary thing of beauty, as is also true of a flower. In any case, Frost reinforces the poem’s overall emphasis on change by using the adjective early (which echoes the previous adjective first from line 1) and also by writing “leaf’s” rather than “leaf is.” Partly, of course, he is required to use the apostrophe and s by the demands of his metrical pattern,

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but the contraction inevitably also helps create and convey a sense of speed. That emphasis on speed is then explicitly reinforced in line 4, which states that although a leaf may be a flower, it is “only so an hour.” In most plants, of course, leaves endure much longer than a mere hour, but Frost exaggerates (using hour to imply brief time) to emphasize the undeniable point that change and decay cannot be stopped. Frost uses the older meaning of the verb subside (implying to sink down, to settle to the bottom) when he states that “leaf subsides to leaf” (l. 5), and once again the swiftness of the poem’s movement contributes to (and reinforces) its meaning: Only two lines earlier, the leaves were being born; now, a few syllables later, we see them falling and piling on top of one another. Up until this point the poem has seemed to describe merely natural processes, but in line 6 Frost vastly expands the emotional range and significance of the work by stating that just as leaves fall, “So Eden sank to grief.” In a few simple words, Frost suddenly makes clear the human implications of his poem. He associates natural change with the unnatural sin that supposedly unleashed all the forces of decay his poem describes; he implies that change is not something that simply affects external nature but is also an inevitable aspect of human life that causes deep human pain. The verb sank echoes the preceding verb subsides, and both verbs foreshadow the ensuing phrase “goes down” in line 7. That line once again masterfully combines assonance and alliteration; ironically, then, this very sad poem is also splendidly musical—a trait also seen in the fi nal line (“Nothing gold can stay”), which not only repeats (and confi rms) the title but also echoes (in its ns, gs, sts, and long as) the line with which the poem began. The repetition of the key word gold also helps move the poem full circle, giving the work a strong sense of symmetry, and indeed the essential message of the entire text might be summed up by juxtaposing line 1 and line 8: “Nature’s fi rst green is gold,” but “Nothing gold can stay.” The word Nothing has special metrical emphasis because it violates (for the fi rst time in six lines) the standard iambic pattern, and the entire fi nal line receives extra emphasis because it is

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the only line in the entire poem that constitutes a single sentence. By using all these elements of careful craftsmanship, Frost creates a poem that comes close to subverting its own central argument, since the poem itself seems an instance of something “gold” that will indeed “stay” or endure.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this poem with Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” particularly its fi nal stanza. What do both poems imply about nature? What do both poems imply about man’s place in nature? Which poem is more celebratory? Which one is more elegiac? Discuss the role of religious imagery in each poem. 2. Read this lyric alongside CARL SANDBURG’s poem “Prairie Waters by Night.” How are these two works similar and/or different in form, techniques, themes, and ultimate effects? What feeling(s) are you left with after reading Sandburg’s poem, and how do those feelings resemble and/or differ from the results of reading Frost’s poem? Justify your response by pointing to specific details in both texts. 3. Discuss the heavy use of periods in this poem. Why, in a lyric so short, are there five periods? How does this kind of punctuation affect the rhythm of the poem, and how is it relevant to the poem’s theme and meanings? Discuss the use of verbs in lines 5–7. What similarities are there (and what differences) in the use of verbs in those lines, and how do those lines differ, in their use of verbs, from the poem’s other lines?

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923) The speaker, while traveling in a horse-drawn conveyance on a road beside a forested area, pauses to contemplate the vision of the woods “fi ll[ing] up with snow,” but as he stops, he also thinks about the owner of the woods (who lives in the village) and about the presumably puzzled reaction of his own horse. Finally, responding to the apparent impatience of the horse as well as to his own sense

of obligation, the speaker decides to continue his journey and leave the woods behind. This poem is probably Frost’s most famous and best beloved work, and it is one of the poems on which he certainly hoped and thought his reputation would rest. It has many of the hallmarks of a “typical” Frost lyric: the plain, simple, often monosyllabic language; the rural setting; the seemingly straightforward and uncomplicated “plot”; the thoughtful but understated speaker; and the theme of man’s relationship with nature and man’s position in the universe. The poem invites serious reflection but is not preachy or didactic; part of its impact derives from Frost’s willingness to let readers draw their own conclusions about the ultimate “meaning” of the work. Is the speaker affl icted with a “death wish”? Does he in fact contemplate suicide? Is he tempted—at least temporarily—to abandon his responsibilities? Does he wish (at least for a time) that such responsibilities did not exist? Are his journey and his contemplated sleep merely literal, or are they metaphorical (implying, perhaps, the larger journey of life and the fi nal sleep of death)? Frost’s poem intriguingly raises many such questions without ever providing clear or simple answers, and it is partly the poem’s ability to seem simultaneously simple and complex that makes it so hauntingly memorable. If one effect of the poem is to lull us into a contemplative mood so that we share in the speaker’s own thoughtfulness, that effect is partly the result of the strikingly regular (but strangely subtle) iambic rhythm. In every single line of the work, the even syllables are accented and the odd syllables are not, yet the poem never sounds tediously predictable or metronomic. Likewise, every line of the work consists of exactly eight syllables—no more and no fewer—and yet (once more) the poem seems anything but stale or monotonous. Frost has chosen the perfect meter and rhythm for a low-key, quiet, and contemplative work such as this, and his heavy use of monosyllabic words (only 18 of the poem’s 108 words consist of two or more syllables, and only one of those words is trisyllabic) is completely appropriate to a speaker whose character seems as direct and forthright as his language. At the same time, despite its highly

Robert Frost

unadorned and unelaborate phrasing and despite its extraordinarily regular meter, the poem also has an exceptionally unusual rhyme scheme: aaba, bbcb, ccdc, dddd. Numerous commentators (including Frost himself) have discussed the inventiveness of this pattern of rhyme and have called special attention to the way the pattern is both broken and completed in the fi nal line, where the unexpected repetition (not only of a rhyme word but of an entire line) gives the conclusion exceptional emphasis. Thus the form of the poem (which is simultaneously simple and complex) mirrors many other aspects of the work, for the speaker himself seems, on one level, an uncomplicated rural character while also seeming both highly self-conscious and unusually contemplative. Similarly, the landscape, too, seems both predictably mundane and highly symbolic. These woods, for instance, seem both a credible forest and yet also a symbol of something mysterious and intriguing, while the snow and cold seem both literal and metaphoric. Likewise, the journey seems both real and emblematic: The speaker moves through a believable rural landscape, but he also progresses along the larger road of life itself.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Frost was a great admirer of Edwin Arlington Robinson, and he especially admired Robinson’s poem titled “Mr. Flood’s Party.” What resemblances and/or differences can you see between that poem and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”? Discuss the poems in terms of such matters as setting, theme, symbolism, and the characterization of the protagonist. Discuss the issues of isolation and the motif of making a journey as they are used in both works. 2. Compare and contrast Frost’s poem with L ANGSTON HUGHES’s lyric titled “Mother to Son.” Discuss the way both works deal with the theme of obligations and responsibilities. Discuss how they both use the idea of physical movement in symbolic ways. Is one work more clearly affi rmative or positive than the other, or is each complicated in its own ways? Discuss the forms the poets choose for their works and the tones and attitudes of the speakers.

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3. Why is the speaker concerned with being seen by the owner of the woods? What other evidence is there for the speaker’s self-consciousness? Discuss the attitude of the speaker toward his horse. What are some effects of describing the horse as “little”? What do the speaker’s observations suggest about his own personality?

“Once by the Pacific” (1928) After describing large waves of the Pacific Ocean advancing with destructive force toward a shore, the speaker interprets them as symbols of an even larger kind of cosmic destructiveness. Although this poem consists of 14 lines, it is not a sonnet in the usual sense. It is written in seven iambic pentameter couplets, thus lacking the standard divisions into either the octave (eight lines) and sestet (six lines) characteristic of Petrarchan sonnets or the three quatrains (four lines) and fi nal couplet associated with Shakespearean sonnets. The frequent use of punctuation at the ends of lines (and in particular the fact that all the periods occur in that position) gives the poem a kind of tightly confi ned, highly controlled quality that in some ways seems to confl ict with its chaotic subject matter, which concerns dangerously destructive natural forces. Yet the poem does exhibit many stylistic and technical felicities, including the combination of paradox, alliteration, and onomatopoeia (in which sound imitates sense) in the phrase “shattered water” (paradoxical because how can a liquid be “shattered”?) or the combination of sound, sight, and even tactile sensation in the phrase “misty din” (l. 1). Assonance and double accents are used to emphasize the “Great waves” mentioned at the beginning of line 2, while the phrase “looked over” in that line introduces the technique of personification that is one of the major features of this poem. The idea that nature might be capable of “thought” (l. 3) makes nature seem possibly malign and thus even more potentially dangerous than usual, and Frost enhances this sense of potential danger by vaguely saying that the waves thought of doing “something” to

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the shore (l. 3). The word something is just the right term to create a sense of mystery and foreboding, especially when the next line implies that whatever the water intends to do, the action will be unprecedented and unique. Also effective is the memorable (indeed, almost unforgettable) imagery of “hairy” clouds (l. 5)—an adjective that at fi rst makes them seem almost animalistic until the effect is softened in line 6. Even when Frost seems to falter—as he appears to do in his use of meter in line 8—he only proves that it is unsafe to second-guess a major poet: Why does he write “in being backed” when he could have written “to be backed” and thereby preserved metrical regularity? Because the phrasing he chooses emphasizes the key verb backed, and in addition it creates an effective repetition in line 9. Here, as usual, Frost knows what he is doing. By the time we arrive at line 10, the vague “thought” of line 3 has evolved into an apparently “dark intent” and the imagery (especially of colors) is growing noticeably more menacing and the overtones are beginning to imply a cataclysm or an apocalypse. Then “dark intent” metastasizes into “rage” (l. 12), and finally Frost not only possibly alludes (in a potential example of black irony) to the broken water associated with birth (l. 13) but definitely alludes, in line 14, both to God’s “Let there be light” in Genesis and to the words Othello pronounces just before killing Desdemona in Shakespeare’s great tragedy. The allusion to Genesis is ironic; the allusion to Shakespeare seems highly appropriate to the murderous destructiveness that is the main theme of this poem. Meanwhile, the imagery of “water broken” moves the poem full circle by reminding us of the “shattered water” mentioned in line 1. Yet that reminder only accentuates how much the mood of the poem has changed—how dark it has become and how much its resonance has broadened. Frost is no longer merely describing waves breaking on the beach; he is suggesting the end of the world by depicting the fury of an ironically named Pacific (or peaceful) ocean.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem titled “Credo.” How do they differ in purpose, tone, and fi nal

effect? How does the fi nal line of Robinson’s poem contrast with (but also resemble) the imagery Frost uses? Although both poems are 14 lines long, how and why does Robinson use one of the traditional sonnet forms effectively? Which of the poems is more personal in its phrasing? Which one is more concrete and vivid in its imagery? 2. Read this text alongside the poem titled “Oread” by the poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle). How do the poets use sea imagery to radically different effect? What are the mood and tone of H. D.’s poem, and how do they compare to the same aspects of Frost’s? What attitudes toward nature are implied by the two works? In particular, how do the endings of the two works differ? 3. How is it appropriate, in writing about ocean waves, that Frost chose to use seven couplets rather than a more traditional sonnet stanza in this 14-line poem? Since many 14-line sonnets have often dealt with the subject of love, how is it ironic that Frost chose that number of lines for this poem?

“Provide, Provide” (1934, 1936) The speaker points to an ugly old woman who was once beautiful, young, and tantalizing, and he uses her as an example of the way mutability and old age inevitably overtake anyone who does not die young. He advises readers that in order to avoid this fate they must either die young or make provisions to become rich, powerful, or respected so that they will not be insulted or lose their dignity in old age. Even if they have to buy friends, they should provide for the future ravages that will overtake them when they are elderly. In some respects this poem is humorous, whimsical, and ironic; in other ways it is deadly serious. The speaker jokes about old age, but by the end of the work it is clear that old age is not entirely a laughing matter. At fi rst the work seems entirely fanciful: It mentions a “witch” (a description quickly echoed, through assonance and alliteration, by the phrase “withered hag”; l. 1) who finds herself in the undig-

Robert Frost

nified position of having “To wash the steps with pail and rag” (l. 2)—a statement that makes clear that the woman is a “witch” not in the fairy-tale sense of being a woman with vast mystical powers but rather in the opposite sense: old, unattractive, and socially impotent. To add to the irony, the speaker then reveals that this ugly, elderly crone “Was once” (figuratively, if not literally) “the beauty Abishag”—a stunning young woman in the Old Testament who was so exceptionally attractive that she was chosen to lie in bed beside the aging King David to keep his old body warm. After David nevertheless died, one of his sons was so smitten with Abishag that he sought permission to marry her, but King Solomon, another of David’s son’s, suspected that the request involved treason and so had the petitioner put to death. Abishag, then, is a triply ironic beauty: Not only was her beauty incapable of preventing David’s death, and not only did her beauty lead to the death of her suitor, but, in Frost’s poem, she herself has grown old, ugly, and pathetic. Yet the poem soon suggests that the speaker’s concern is not with the real, historical Abishag but with Abishag as a symbol of feminine beauty anytime and anywhere—including even (or especially) in “Hollywood” (l. 4). In the jump from the fi rst stanza to the second, the poem also jumps from the mythical or legendary past to the real if glitzy present. Then, to place the work even closer to home, the speaker directly addresses the poem’s reader in line 6, thereby making it clear that the perils of aging are directly relevant to the audience of the work. Suddenly we are no long smiling at the witch. The speaker then proceeds to offer advice that can be seen as either preposterous or gruesome, telling readers either to “Die early” (an event over which individuals have no control except by suicide; l. 7), or, if they are “predestined to die late,” to make up their minds to “die in state” (i.e., with real social power or public dignity or acclaim; ll. 8–9). He then gives unrealistic advice that ends with further irony: Few people can hope to become fabulously wealthy through the stock market, and fewer still can hope to “occupy a throne,” and even if those who hold royal power cannot publicly be called crones, their status as crones is not at all affected by such public nice-

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ties (ll. 10–12). In the next stanza the speaker offers more practical advice: One can win respect either through knowledge, ethics, or authenticity, but even in this stanza the prospect of achieving respect by these means is merely something that “might” happen to the reader (ll. 13–15). As the poem winds to its conclusion, the speaker opines that old age is inevitably “hard” (l. 18), especially if one is alone and friendless, and the work concludes with advice that can seem either cynical or bluntly realistic: It is better to buy friends than to have “none at all” (ll. 19–21). In some ways the poem (with its quick lines, brief stanzas, and triple rhymes) seems singsong and merely fl ippant, but in other ways it is grimly, bleakly honest. The ability to combine such tones with such craft is part of the measure of Frost’s poetic talent.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Jack London’s short story “The Law of Life” also deals with the subject of growing old. How do the tones and attitudes of the two works differ? Which treatment of the theme is grimmer? Which work expresses greater sympathy? Discuss the presence and/or absence of humor in each work. 2. The process of aging is an implicit and explicit topic in JOHN STEINBECK’s book Travels with Charley. How do Steinbeck’s thoughts and depictions of aging in that work compare and contrast with the ideas and descriptions presented in Frost’s poem? How could both works have easily been sentimental, and how (and with what success) do both writers guard against the risks of sentimentality? How would you describe the personality of Frost’s speaker? 3. How and why are lines 9–12 especially ironic? How are the solutions suggested there not as simple as the tone of the lines would suggest? How and why is the word dignified ironic in the context of this poem?

“Desert Places” (1936) The speaker describes snow and night falling on a deserted field surrounded by woods—observations

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that lead him to meditate on loneliness and nothingness. He ends by noting that although outer space is usually considered terrifying because it is so empty, a more frightening kind of emptiness exists on Earth, where human habitation ironically makes any loneliness seem even more painful. In its imagery, setting, and “plot,” this poem invites comparison with Frost’s exceedingly famous work “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Both works involve isolated speakers provoked to thoughtfulness by a snowy rural scene, but the present poem seems both darker and bleaker than its predecessor. The speaker here is more isolated (he mentions no other people and is accompanied by no domesticated animal); his perspective is literally more cosmic and his thoughts are more explicitly frightened and frightening; and at the end of the poem there is no expression of a stoic determination to move on; instead the speaker seems frozen, immobile, in a landscape that offers no hint of consolation. Indeed, by the end of the work the speaker seems less concerned with this particular landscape per se than with an inner, deeper emptiness. There is already some irony in the title of the poem, for although the word desert usually suggests an arid, sandy, sun-baked setting, Frost’s poem is set in fields and woods, with “Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast” (l. 1). “Snow,” “night,” and the fi rst syllables of both uses of the word falling receive strong metrical emphasis here, and although most of the words of this line are objectively descriptive, the interjected oh already implies the speaker’s emotional response. Although in some ways the landscape reveals some beauty (“the ground almost covered smooth in snow”; l. 3), the reference to “a few weeds and stubble” complicates the picture, suggesting ugliness and decay (l. 4). By the time the poem reaches lines 7 and 8, however, the focus has shifted from the bleak external setting to the speaker’s own internal moods: His only connection to the environment is to feel as lonely inside as the surrounding setting appears. To emphasize his point, Frost repeats versions of the word lonely four times in three lines (ll. 8–10), but by the end of this series Frost has moved from a milder kind of loneliness to one that is more intense;

the repetition (in other words) helps emphasize the change from one mood to something even darker, just as the “blanker whiteness” of line 10 is more depressing than the snow mentioned in line 1. By the time we reach line 12, the mood of the poem has become literally nihilistic, implying a kind of existential nothingness. The speaker seems less concerned with the specific wintry place in front of him than with the march of time and the process of inevitable decay. Indeed, by the very end of the poem the focus of this speaker’s thoughts has shifted from the external environment to his own character, nature, and spirit. It is a shift from something out there to something “in me” (l. 15). The most truly significant “desert places” (Frost suggests) are the ones we carry around inside.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read this work alongside Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Snow Man.” Discuss the use of imagery in both poems, and discuss their comments on the idea of nothingness. How do their tones and points of view differ? Discuss Frost’s use of the word I and Stevens’ use of the word one. Does one poem appeal to you more? If so, explain in detail why. 2. Compare and contrast this work with the poem titled “Spring and All” by WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS. How are the works similar and/or different in imagery, tone, and meaning? How do they differ in form and in point of view? Who is speaking in Williams’s poem? Why does Frost’s poem emphasize an individual speaker? 3. Discuss the effectiveness of the repetition in line 1. In what respects is the speaker’s movement in line 2 both literal and metaphorical? Weeds and stubble are normally considered unimportant or even worthless, but what makes them seem of some value here? Why is the verb smothered especially effective?

“The Figure a Poem Makes” (1939) In this rambling and sometimes disjointed essay, Frost argues for the importance of variety, sounds,

Robert Frost

themes, and “wildness” in poetry, contending that theme is particularly important in achieving the other goals. He emphasizes both the pleasure and the profit a poem can provide and suggests that a poem briefly staves off chaos. He also suggests that if a poem is to create specific emotions in its readers, those emotions must fi rst have been aroused in the poet himself, and he ends by suggesting that a good poem never loses its freshness. Anyone who has read Frost’s poetry carefully will not be surprised when he argues that the sound of a poem is “the gold in the ore” (Collected 776); Frost, after all, is one of the master technicians of sound in modern verse. Nor should anyone be surprised when Frost contends that “the object of writing poetry is to make all poems sound as different as possible from each other” (Collected 776). Frost practiced this maxim through his own close attention to variations in meter, rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and numerous other devices. What is a bit surprising, perhaps, is the emphasis Frost places on theme (or what he calls “context—meaning—subject matter” [Collected 776]) in achieving variety of sound. He never fully explains why or how variety of sound is promoted by “subject matter” other than to say that the “possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited meter are endless” (Collected 776). Also somewhat surprising (although more immediately comprehensible) is his claim that the theme of a poem can help tame its “wildness”: “Theme alone can steady us down” (Collected 776). Presumably this means that a poem’s theme helps impose order and discipline on writing that might otherwise be chaotic and uncontrolled. Frost, in fact, seems to emphasize the crucial importance of the meaning of a poem when he argues that a poem “begins in delight and ends in wisdom” and when he also contends—in one of the most famous phrases from this essay—that a poem is “a momentary stay against confusion” (Collected 777). In this phrase, the word momentary is crucial: Frost does not contend that a good poem provides perfect and immutable wisdom; rather, he suggests that a good poem gives compelling but temporary order to an existence that might otherwise seem purely meaningless and random.

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Much of the essay is devoted to describing how poems are written—the evolution of a poem in the poet’s own mind and emotions. Using fragments, Frost declares, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” (Collected 777). He suggests that the writing of a poem is largely an unconscious act; certainly it is one (he suggests) that cannot be planned or controlled with total deliberation. The act of writing a poem is an act of unexpected discovery for the writer, as the act of reading one is for the reader. If a poem seems fresh to the writer as he is composing it, it will remain fresh to its readers, no matter how often it is read: “Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a petal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went” (Collected 778).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this essay with T. S. ELIOT’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” How do the works differ from and/or resemble one another in argument, method, clarity, and tone? How does Frost’s essay itself exhibit the kind of spontaneity and “surprise” the essay extols? 2. Read Frost’s essay in conjunction with Wallace Stevens’s poem titled “Of Modern Poetry.” What assumptions do the two works share? How do they differ? How—if at all—does Stevens’s poem illustrate any of the arguments made by Frost? 3. Discuss the ways in which Frost, in this prose essay, effectively uses devices often thought of as “poetic,” such as metaphor, simile, imagery, and rhythm. For instance, how and why is his reference to “a hot afternoon in the life of a grasshopper” effective? How might he have stated the same idea in a less memorable way?

“The Gift Outright” (1942) In this public poem, the speaker meditates on the relations between America and Americans— between the land and the people who inhabit it. He

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focuses on the nation’s past, describes its evolution, and speculates about its future development. The speaker of the poem speaks explicitly not simply for himself but for the American people in general, and it is partly this openly public stance that makes this work so different from so many of Frost’s other best-known poems. The speaker begins by proclaiming (in language that involves, as does much of the language of this work, a good deal of repetition), “The land was ours before we were the land’s” (l. 1). In other words, people possessed physical territory in America before they were really “Americans” in the deepest sense of that word: They lived on the land and owned it but did not yet fully identify with it or see themselves as part of it—as emotionally bound to it. In the next line and a half the speaker elaborates on this point, but the fact that he now uses personification (“She” and “her”) to refer to the land already suggests a stronger bond between the inhabitants and their territory. At this point, however, the speaker still describes the relationship between the land and those who lived on it as a unilateral relationship—as a relationship between possessors and possessed, owners and owned. The original settlers lived in America but still thought of themselves as Britons; politically and psychologically, they were still “colonials”—still tied, emotionally and legally, to a distant motherland. They possessed what they were unpossessed by (l. 6): That is, they owned property in America but felt no deep bond to that property; they were “Possessed by what [they] now no more possessed” (l. 7). In other words, they were still legally citizens of Britain, even though they no longer lived there. Here and throughout, the diction of the poem is clotted, repetitious, paradoxical, and ironic; through using such techniques, Frost wants to suggest the complications involved in the range of possible relations between any land and the people who inhabit it. Only when the inhabitants of America “surrender[ed]” themselves to the land by breaking their ties with Britain and embracing their identity as Americans did they truly find “salvation” (l. 11). Appropriately enough, the language here has religious overtones, and once again the phrasing is

paradoxical: By surrendering, the people are saved; by sacrificing, they succeed. Of course, the paradox is even greater, since it was only through literal military victories over England that this kind of metaphorical “surrender” was possible; it was only by achieving independence from Britain that Americans were able to codify the new bond they now felt with the lands they had long inhabited. As the poem continues, however, the language remains punning, paradoxical, and complex: The “deed” (meaning act, but also legal title or proof of ownership) by which we gave ourselves the country was “many deeds of war” (l. 13)—phrasing that reminds us of the fact (without making it very explicit) that the process of creating America often involved the dispossession of the Indians, the original Americans. Frost’s “ours,” “we,” and “ourselves,” however, seem mainly to imply the white, European settlers; except for the passing reference to “deeds of war,” he seems little interested in the fate of the native peoples. In a poem full of deliberate ironies and paradoxes, there is, then, perhaps an unintended irony in the idea that the white settlers “gave” themselves to the land (l. 12) by moving westward—in the process taking territory that was not theirs.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the version of American history presented in this poem with the version stated or implied in various works by GERTRUDE SIMMONS BONNIN (Zitkala-Ša). How do you think she might have responded to Frost’s poem, and why? Use specific passages from her works to support your arguments. 2. Compare and contrast Frost’s work with the poem by CLAUDE MCK AY titled “America.” How are paradoxical ideas and language used in both works? What do the works imply about America’s future? In what ways does each work present a complex view of the relations between the land and the people who inhabit it? 3. Multiculturalist critics stress the significance of different ethnic, racial, sexual, and other minorities in the creation of and response to literature. How might a multiculturalist critic respond to this poem, especially to its references to “ours,”

Robert Frost

“we,” “England’s,” “colonials,” “ourselves,” and so on? What important distinctions (from a multiculturalist perspective) does this poem minimize or overlook?

5.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON FROST AND HIS WORK 1. Of the poems discussed here, which one do you consider the least successful or effective? Explain and justify your opinion by discussing such matters as form, theme, tone, and especially diction, or word choice. Compare and contrast the poem you have selected with a work by Frost that you consider especially accomplished; use the successes of the latter poem to help explain the shortcomings of the former. 2. Because of his generally clear diction, conventional meter, and traditional forms, Frost can be accused of being an unsophisticated and perhaps even simplistic writer. How would you defend him against this charge? Which qualities in his works make them seem rich, complex, provocative, and stimulating? Illustrate your argument by pointing to specific aspects of particular poems. 3. Using the sections above that analyze each poem, make a list of the typical thematic and stylistic traits of Frost’s poetry. In other words, make a list of the topics he tends to write about and the methods or techniques he tends to use when writing. Then, having assembled that list, choose a poem by Frost not dealt with earlier and discuss all the ways in which that poem seems typical and/or atypical of Frost’s writing. 4. Choose a poem by Frost not discussed earlier and analyze it in detail, paying particular attention to its structure and sound effects, including such matters as meter, rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and enjambment. Frost famously said that writing a poem without meter is like playing tennis with the net down. What did he mean, and how does the poem you chose illustrate his point? How, in other words, does

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meter contribute to the complex meaning of the poem? Frost was once famously accused of being a frivolous writer whose poems lacked moral seriousness. Choose one of his better-known poems and use that work either to confi rm or confute (or some combination of the two) that claim. How is the chosen poem ethically serious and mature? How does it raise thoughtful questions about the ways humans treat one another? How does the poem deal with the problem of good versus evil? Critics of Frost have sometimes complained that he ignores the complex problems of modern life and that he rarely comments on political issues. How would you respond to these charges? Do you think they are fair or even relevant? Using some poems by Frost, discuss the ways he handles (either implicitly or explicitly) social and/or political issues. Frost is often regarded as a regional poet whose main concern was life in rural New England. Is this a fair assessment? In what ways (if at all) does Frost transcend any “regional” limitations? How and why might his work be relevant to a person living, say, in sub-Saharan Africa or in the South Seas islands? Why should non-American readers fi nd Frost’s verse worth reading? Choose a particular poem by Frost and then discuss whether and how it illustrates the ideas outlined in his essay “The Figure a Poem Makes.” In particular, discuss the way the sound of the poem is distinctive, the way theme contributes to the success of the poem, the ways the poem moves from delight to wisdom, and the ways it functions as “a momentary stay against confusion” (Collected 777). Compare and contrast Frost’s essay “The Figure a Poem Makes” with several of his other extended essays on poetry. What concerns and arguments do the essays share? How is each distinctive? Is Frost consistent in his thinking, or does he ever seem to contradict himself? Which of the essays you chose did you fi nd most useful in helping you to understand Frost’s poetry? Explain why that essay was helpful.

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10. In relation to various modern poets you have read, what do you think are Frost’s distinctive strengths and most serious weaknesses? How would you rank Frost in relation to such other important modern poets as Eliot, Pound, Stevens, or Williams? Which of these poets do you think will be most esteemed 100 years from now? Explain and justify your answer. WORKS CITED

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Cook, Reginald L. “Robert Frost.” In Sixteen Modern American Authors: A Survey of Research and Criticism, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 323–365. New York: Norton, 1973. ———. “Robert Frost.” In Sixteen Modern American Authors. Vol. 2, A Survey of Research and Criticism since 1972, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 360–403. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990. The Friends of Robert Frost. Available online. URL: http://www.frostfriends.org. Accessed April 7, 2009.

Frost, Robert. Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays. Edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1995. Gerber, Philip L., ed. Critical Essays on Robert Frost. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. ———. Robert Frost. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Greiner, Donald J. Robert Frost: The Poet and His Critics. Chicago: American Library Association, 1974. Meyers, Jeffrey. Robert Frost: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. Nelson, Cary, and Edward Brunner. Modern American Poetry: Robert Frost. Available online. URL: http://www.english.illinois.edu/Maps/poets/ a_f/frost/frost.htm. Accessed April 7, 2009. Poirier, Richard, and Mark Richardson. “Chronology.” In Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays. By Robert Frost. New York: Library of America, 1995. Potter, James L. Robert Frost Handbook. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980. Tuten, Nancy Lewis, and John Zubizarretta, eds. The Robert Frost Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2001.

Robert C. Evans

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886–1961) I know, I feel / the meaning that words hide; / they are anagrams, cryptograms, / little boxes, conditioned / to hatch butterflies (The Walls Do Not Fall)

H

ilda Doolittle was rechristened H. D. in 1912 by her good friend (and onetime fiancé) EZRA POUND when he sent off a batch of her startling new poems to be published as the first examples of “imagist” verse. The new name stuck, and for the rest of her long life Doolittle was known as H. D., not only to her readers but even to most of her friends. The initials gave her an allure of mystery, making her seem not so much a real person as a remote oracle, speaking in the cryptic but beautiful verse one might expect from an ancient Greek prophetess. The name also forever linked her with the imagist moment and style in modern poetry—sometimes to her frustration and annoyance. During the course of a lengthy career, she produced much more than the carefully crafted brief poems that first made her famous; she wrote novels, memoirs (including a notable account of her psychiatric sessions with Sigmund Freud), and other kinds of prose. It is as a highly innovative poet, however, that she is best (and justly) remembered. Most of the facts of Doolittle’s life are available in the detailed (if unfortunately undocumented) biography by Barbara Guest; other facts (along with a different perspective, detailed notes, and a helpful chronology) are available in the complementary book by Janice S. Robinson. The future poet was born on September 10, 1886, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Professor Charles Doolittle and his second wife, Helen Woole. The professor and his fi rst wife (Martha Farrand) had already produced

two sons (Eric and Alfred) before Martha died in childbirth; Charles’s marriage to Helen (Hilda’s mother) occurred in 1882, and four children arrived in the decade from 1884 to 1894: Gilbert, Hilda, Harold, and Charles Melvin. Hilda, then, grew up surrounded by brothers, but although she seems to have been her father’s favorite child, she remembered him mainly as a somewhat distant figure. A highly regarded scientist who taught astronomy and mathematics at Lehigh University from 1875 to 1895, he became a distinguished professor of astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania and fi rst director of its Flower observatory in 1896. Thus, at age nine Hilda moved to a large house in Upper Darby, a Philadelphia suburb, where she attended various schools before entering Bryn Mawr College (in 1905, according to Guest [19]; in 1904, according to Robinson [xvii]). She withdrew from Bryn Mawr in 1906 because of poor health and never completed a college degree (the only one of the Doolittle siblings to fail to do so). By the time she withdrew from Bryn Mawr, however, Doolittle had already met and become involved with Ezra Pound—an involvement that was always, for anyone who knew him well, an education in itself. Hilda was 15 when they met at a Halloween party in 1901; Pound was just a year older, but already he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania, and already he was absolutely obsessed with literature and determined to become a great poet. Even at this

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early age, he was enormously well read and was reading ever more widely all the time, educating himself and educating, through his excited conversation, all his friends in the process. Pound loved to talk, and he especially loved to talk about his own ideas; he was (even at this young age) exceptionally self-confident. Many of his fellow students found him insufferable, but some, such as WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (also at Penn) and Hilda Doolittle were intrigued. Hilda, in fact, was more than intrigued by Pound; in 1905 they became engaged (much to the displeasure of Hilda’s father), and although the engagement was soon broken (Pound had also given a ring to another young woman at around the same time), the connection between them was not. Between 1905 and 1907 Pound composed poems for her and put them together into a volume he called “Hilda’s Book,” and although in the next few years his life was peripatetic (he taught briefly in Indiana, lost that job, went off to Venice, went to London, and then in 1910 briefly returned to New York, having visited many other places besides), he never lost his interest in Hilda; nor did she lose interest in him (despite her close relationship with another woman, Frances Gregg [Guest 22–24]). When Pound (now recognized in London as an emerging writer) returned to New York, Hilda arranged to meet him, and soon their “engagement was unofficially—or as she later wrote, ‘equivocally’—renewed. There was an understanding; they were to be married. After a fourmonth tour of Europe in 1911 with Frances Gregg, and her mother, [Hilda] settled in London. She had at least made her decision to leave home and be with Ezra Pound” (Robinson 24). Although her planned marriage to Pound never took place (he eventually married someone else and later took a mistress in addition to his wife), Hilda remained his good friend and occasional literary collaborator, and she spent most of the rest of her life in London or elsewhere in Europe, returning only rarely and briefly to the United States. In 1911 she married Richard Aldington, an Englishman whom she met through Pound (as she met most of her English friends), and in fact the three traveled together in the fi rst half of 1912. It was in that latter year— when she, Pound, and Aldington were talking in

the tea room of the British Museum—that she happened to show Pound some poems she had recently written. Pound was impressed; he told her, “this is poetry” (quoted in Robinson 28), and although he could not restrain a characteristic impulse to edit a bit, at the end of the process he scrawled H. D. Imagiste at the bottom of the page and promptly sent the poems off to Poetry magazine in Chicago, of which he was then the foreign correspondent. When the poems were published in January 1913, “imagism” had in effect been born. The new “movement” (which as yet consisted only of H. D., Pound, Aldington, and a few others) rested on a few simple principles, including the following: 1. Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome. (qtd. in Robinson 27) In 1914 Pound edited a collection of poems (including some by H. D.) titled Des Imagistes; Aldington, meanwhile, in that same year became assistant editor of a journal called the Egoist, thus providing yet another platform for their new ideas and poems. “Imagism” immediately excited great interest, including the interest of the wealthy American poet Amy Lowell, who soon pronounced herself an imagist and who toured London to meet H. D. and arrange for the publication of a series of further imagist anthologies. Pound, annoyed by this transition to “Amygism,” quickly lost interest (instead he took up his next new thing, “Vorticism”). Never, however, did he break his connection with H. D.; nor did she ever lose touch with him; they remained friends for the rest of their lives. Even after Pound married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914, he and H. D. continued to be literary comrades, although increasingly her career and status became independent of his. The most important event of 1914, of course, was neither Pound’s marriage nor H. D.’s growing

H. D.

fame in literary circles as a pioneering imagist but was rather the outbreak of World War I in August. The war affected everyone, and its impact was eventually felt by H. D. in numerous negative ways. Its fi rst immediate impact was felt in 1916, when Aldington joined the army and was thus forced to spend increasing time away from his wife. Their marriage had initially been happy (despite the loss of a child in a miscarriage in 1915), and their literary fortunes had prospered in the fi rst years of the war: H. D.’s work was being included in anthologies, and in 1916 she published her first independent book (Sea Garden—a collection of poems) as well as translations from Euripides’ ancient play Iphigeneia in Aulis. In 1917 her relations with the important (and already married) English writer D. H. Lawrence, whom she had met several years earlier, became literally closer: He and his wife took up residence in H. D.’s apartment, and indeed Robinson argues that he and H. D. had a life-altering affair. Whether or not they did, it does seem clear that in 1917 Aldington became involved with a woman named Dorothy (“Arabella”) Yorke, and that by 1918 H. D. had herself been involved with several other men, including John Cournos and Cecil Gray. When she became pregnant that year, Aldington realized that the child was not his. Robinson suggests that the father was Lawrence; Guest suggests that it was Gray; Aldington, in any case, was sure he had not been involved. Despite her husband’s own affair(s), H. D. was thus in a difficult position, especially legally— particularly if she tried to attribute paternity to Aldington. He and H. D. separated in 1919, not long after the birth of the child (named Perdita), but they did not officially divorce until nearly 20 years later. Within a few months of the end of the war, then, H. D. had become an essentially single mother: She was separated from her husband and cut off from the father of her child (whose precise identity she never revealed). To make matters worse, her favorite brother had been killed in the final year of the war, and her father died in 1919. Furthermore, H. D. herself had been deathly ill during the final stages of her pregnancy. Little wonder, then, that she found this period so depressing and reflected on it in many of her later writings.

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All was not entirely grim, however. In 1918 she had been approached by a young Englishwoman named Winifred Ellerman, who had read H. D.’s fi rst book and had fallen in love with the poems and (by extension) with the poet. Ellerman, as it happened, was the heiress of one of the greatest fortunes in Britain; she could thus afford to be extremely generous not only to H. D. but also to numerous other artists and causes. Calling herself Bryher to assert her independence of her family, she now took an almost obsessive interest in H. D. She helped nurse H. D. back to health, helped begin to raise Perdita, and in general became H. D.’s constant companion (and sometime-lover) for the rest of the poet’s life. Although the relationship was often strained, and although H. D. felt that Bryher’s influence was frequently controlling, the two women remained extremely close from this point forward (often traveling together around Europe, to the Mideast, and to the United States), even though Bryher married in 1921 and again in 1927. H. D., meanwhile, continued to write: Hymen (a collection of poems) appeared in 1921; Helidora and Other Poems was published in 1924; and in 1925 an important New York press issued the Collected Poems of H. D. Palimpsest (a novel) was published in 1926, followed by Hippolytus Temporizes (a play) in 1927, Hedylus (a novel) in 1928, Red Roses for Bronze (a collection of poems) in 1929, Kora and Ka (a novel) in 1934, and The Usual Star (a novel), also in 1934. Interestingly enough, in 1930 both H. D. and Bryher had also appeared as actresses in a fi lm (Borderline) they had helped produce. Throughout the 1920s, then, and into the 1930s, H. D. had been prolifically creative. She had also, however, been psychologically troubled, and so in 1933 and again in 1934 she met for extended analysis in Vienna with Sigmund Freud—sessions she later described in her Tribute to Freud (published in 1956). Although the famous psychiatrist and his patient did not always see eye to eye, the sessions apparently helped her not only make sense of her troubled past but also prepare for an eventually productive future. She published The Hedgehog (children’s fiction) in 1936 and a translation of Euripides’ Ion in 1937. She was also at work

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on a novel and autobiography (not published until much later), but in general the late 1930s was a fallow period. She and Aldington fi nally divorced in 1938, and for several years little was heard from H. D. as a published author. The outbreak of World War II in 1939, however, would soon inspire a new wave of creativity. She lived in London during the worst of the bombings and deprivations, and in response to the destruction (but also the heroism) she witnessed all around her, she began writing an important series of poems. Before the war had even ended (in 1945), she began publishing again. What Do I Love? (a collection of poems) appeared in 1944, followed by the significant poetic trilogy The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946). She also issued a collection of poems and prose titled By Avon River in 1949. Clearly the fallow period had ended; H. D. had found her voice once more, and although her health was in decline during the 1950s, she managed to write her epic poem Helen in Egypt between 1951 and 1956 and witnessed the publication of her Selected Poems in 1957. In 1960 her autobiographical novel Bid Me to Live appeared, and in that same year she received the highly prestigious Award of Merit Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts of Letters—the fi rst woman to receive it. She continued to work on other projects, but the last major publication to occur in her lifetime was the appearance of Helen in Egypt in 1961, which was printed shortly before she died on September 27. In the years since her death, many previously unpublished works by H. D. have appeared in print, including several novels and memoirs, collections of letters, and various poems. Her Collected Poems, 1912–1944 was issued in 1983, and much material (including diaries, correspondence, and notebooks) remains in scattered archives. Although interest in H. D. had waned somewhat during the 1950s and 1960s, in the past several decades she has been the subject of intense attention. Despite the fact that the full range and quality of her work remain to be explored and assessed, she certainly produced some of the most memorable and accomplished poetry of her time.

“Oread” (1914, 1924) The title of this work, which refers to the mythical wood nymphs of ancient Greece, implies that such a creature is the speaker of the poem. Using language associated with the forests she knows so well, she summons the sea to rise up and fall down onto the surrounding rocks, covering the land—and presumably the nymphs as well—with its wetness. This brief lyric, which is one of the most famous H. D. ever composed, is typical of her writing (and especially of her early imagist style) in numerous ways. The phrasing is clear and simple; no unusual words (except perhaps the title) are used; most of the words (except three) consist of single syllables. In short, nothing about the language itself makes this poem difficult to understand, although the imagery is often striking, especially the metaphorical comparison (in line 2) of ocean waves to “pointed pines.” It would be natural, of course, for an oread, so closely associated with the land and vegetation, to imagine the sea as a kind of forest, and so the metaphors of lines 2, 3, and 6 perfectly fit the character of the presumed speaker. They do not, however, seem arbitrary or merely idiosyncratic: Once we hear them, the comparisons make sense. Large waves—in their height and sharpness—can resemble “pointed pines”; vast green forests, seen from above, can resemble “pools of fi r” (l. 7). The effectiveness of the poem depends, then, on imagery that seems both initially surprising and ultimately apt. As does any great writer, H. D. here achieves the so-called shock of recognition, in which we are made to think in ways we have not thought before and then instantly conclude that these thoughts are convincing. The poem begins with an emphatic verb, and emphatic verbs occupy the opening positions of five of the work’s six lines. This brief lyric thus brims with energy, and the language seems alive in numerous ways. The sea is addressed—or, rather, it is summoned and invoked—as if it were a living thing, and the energy implied by the verbs is matched by the urgent tone of the speaker’s commanding and/or imploring voice. The fi rst four verbs—Whirl, whirl, splash, and hurl—all imply

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rapid, powerful movement, while the fi nal verb (cover) suggests a calm, comprehensive stasis. The speaker at fi rst seems as excited as the movements she attempts to summon; in the fi nal line, however, she seems to surrender to a desire for rest. The poem (with its “pointed pines”) has an almost sexual rhythm of mounting to climax and then subsiding into relaxation: The fi rst few lines imply surging waves, but the last line stresses the “pools” of undisturbed water. In a few brief lines, H. D. uses many vivid sound effects to bring the poem to life. These include anaphora (repeated opening words, as in the “Whirl” / “whirl” of lines 1–2), internal rhyme (as in the echo of “whirl” and “hurl” in lines 2 and 4), end rhyme (as in the repeated “pines” in lines 2–3), alliteration (the repetition of consonant sounds, as in the “pointed pines” of line 2), and even onomatopoeia (where the sound of the word imitates the thing described, as in the “splash” of line 3). The oread’s excitement matches the energy of the sea and inspires excitement in H. D.’s readers, and the poem ends (in expert imagist fashion) with one last striking picture that sticks in the mind. The poet offers no comment, no interpretation, no assessment; the images and words speak for themselves and leave a quick, crisp impression.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this “imagist” lyric with Ezra Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro.” How are the works similar in diction, imagery, purpose, and structure? How do they differ in tone, rhythm, fi nal effects, and points of view? 2. Carl Sandburg’s poem “Grass” uses many of the same techniques as H. D.’s “Oread,” including direct address, repeated words, and a heavy emphasis on verbs. Nevertheless, how do the poems differ in subject, stance, mood, and overall effect?

“Leda” (1919, 1921) The title of this brief poem alludes to the name of the woman who, in Greek mythology, was raped by Zeus (the king of the gods), who had transformed

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himself into a swan to accomplish that very purpose. The present poem, however, depicts the swan in lovely, alluring language and describes Leda as a “gold day-lily,” while the sexual encounter of swan and symbolic flower seems anything but violent. Instead it seems rapturous, blissful, and beautiful. The poem opens with calm, peaceful imagery that immediately sets the tone for the rest of the work; the speaker describes a place “Where the slow river / meets the tide” (ll. 1–2). The drawnout “long o” sound of slow mimics the relaxed movement of the river, while the depiction of the freshwater river meeting (and blending with) the gently rising saltwater sea foreshadows the later encounter of other opposites (swan and flower, god and mortal). The language of the poem is typical of H. D.’s best work: It is simple, clear, colorful, and sensuous, but it is also full of restraint, understatement, and subtlety. This poem could easily have been melodramatic or sentimental; the fact that instead it is simultaneously so gentle, so vivid, and so deeply but delicately erotic is a tribute to H. D.’s art. Her famous commitment to imagism—to quick, sharp pictures; brief but flowing lines; and crisp but suggestive diction—is everywhere evident in this poem, while she also achieves many rich musical effects, especially by using such techniques as assonance, repeated words and phrases, and even an occasional rhyme. Thus “beak” in line 4 is echoed through assonance by “feet” in line 7, while “feet” itself is then rhymed by “heat” in line 9. Likewise, “breast” in line 13 is rhymed by “crest” in line 15, while “lifting” in 16 is echoed by “drifts” in line 19. None of these effects, however, is clumsy or obtrusive. H. D. had a sure ear and is a master of sound effects. The structure of the poem is also subtle: Line lengths are unpredictable (ranging anywhere from just two syllables to eight), and the four stanzas are likewise of uneven shapes, consisting (respectively) of seven, eight, seven, and then fi nally 11 lines. Yet the structure never seems erratic, arbitrary, or contrived; the line breaks often coincide with units of sense: New lines often begin with prepositions (such as of, to, among, beneath, and through [ll. 6, 9, 10, 17, 20, 27, 32, 31, 33]), conjunctions

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(such as and and where [ll. 1, 4, 5, 14, 19, 28), and verbs (ll. 2, 8, 12, 18, 29). The poem unfolds with a natural rhythm, reflecting the cadences of a real speaking voice. Often the line rhythms are conventionally iambic (with each unaccented syllable followed by an accented one, as in lines 4–5, 7, 10, 14–15, 19–25, 27, 30), but these “regularly stressed” lines thereby help emphasize any departures from regularity. Often, for instance, H. D. ends lines by jamming two heavily accented syllables together, followed by an unaccented one, as in such phrases as “slow river” (l. 1), “deep purple” (l. 8), or “slow lifting” (l. 16); sometimes she places heavily accented, single-syllable verbs as the fi rst words of her lines (as in lines 2 and 18); and occasionally almost every word in a line seems equally stressed (as in line 3, “a red swan lifts red wings,” with its wonderfully balanced syntax). The poem is brimming with vivid adjective-noun combinations (such as slow river, red swan, red wings, darker beak, purple down, and coral feet—all from just the fi rst stanza [ll. 1–7]). The contrasts and combinations of colors are striking and memorable, making the poem a kaleidoscope of reds, purples, golds, and yellows. H. D. subtly implies that the poem is set at sunset (l. 11) on a lazy summer day, and the entire pace of the poem—including the fi nal understated (and partly symbolic) sexual encounter—is unhurried. Although the idea of a swan copulating with a woman (or even a lily!) seems bizarre by modern standards, nothing in this poem seems unnatural. The eroticism is always understated. The images of waters, birds, flowers, and sedge-covered landscape (l. 28), along with the imagery of gently juxtaposed light and darkness and the sensation of comforting warmth during summer dusk, all combine to create a sense of almost idyllic peace and beauty. If the encounter between Zeus and Leda has often been depicted as a rape, here it seems a mutually satisfying consummation.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss some of the sound effects used in this poem. Where and how (for instance) does H. D. use alliteration (repetition of consonants) for emphasis? Why is the phrase “old deep” (l. 26)

so heavily accented? How is the rhythm of the very fi nal line effective? How are assonance and alliteration combined in line 30? How is the use of one long word and two short words in that line effective? 2. Compare and contrast this work with WALLACE STEVENS’s poem “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” How are the poems similar yet different in subject matter? How do they resemble yet differ from one another in form and technique? How do the poems differ in purpose, tone, and fi nal effect?

“At Baia” (1921) The title of this poem alludes to an ancient Roman resort town; perhaps, then, the poem’s speaker (who seems to be a woman) is a long-dead resident of that town who is addressing a beloved person (whether male or female is unclear) of the same city and era. Their relationship seems to have been loving but not sexual, and the woman wonders why, in her dreams, the other person has never at least presented her with orchids or expressed love explicitly in a note. As many of H. D.’s poems do, this one combines clear language and vivid images with an air of vague mystery. We cannot be precisely sure who is speaking or to whom, what the nature of their relationship is, what exactly is the message or purpose of the address, or how we are meant to respond to the communication. The poem alludes twice to dreams (ll. 2, 17), and the work itself has the kind of sharp-but-hazy, precise-but-indefi nite quality of a dream or reverie. The odd, paradoxical nature of the phrasing is epitomized by the speaker’s yearning for something that is both “lovely” and “perilous” (l. 3), and the dreamlike atmosphere of the poem is also exemplified by the rambling, repetitive sentence structure of the second stanza. That stanza—with its reference to the “fragile” hands of the anonymous, mysterious beloved (l. 14)—raises the strong possibility that the speaker is addressing another woman. If so, this might account for the repeated use of the word perilous in the speaker’s

H. D.

descriptions of the imagined orchids (ll. 3, 20). Openly lesbian relationships, however they were viewed in classical Rome, were still regarded with widespread distrust and disapproval in H. D.’s day; if the relationship imagined in this poem is indeed tinged with lesbian desire, that might help explain the sexual restraint or inhibitions to which the speaker alludes. The imagined lover, after all, has so far left the speaker’s “throat unkissed” (l. 8); their hands have never touched (ll. 9–10); and at the very end of the poem we are reminded explicitly that so far there has been “no kiss, / no touch” (ll. 28–29). The poem is energized, then, by erotic yearnings that have been suppressed, denied, sublimated, or postponed; appropriately, the work is full of richly sensuous details, including the “blue veins” of the speaker’s “throat” (ll. 7–8), the fragile “hands” of the beloved drifting “so carefully” over “the orchid heads” and “gently” touching “the fragile flower stuff” (ll. 11–16), and the repeated image of “orchids, piled in a great sheath”—a word that itself contains hints of peril because of its usual associations with swords (ll. 4, 21). The mysterious tone of the poem is enhanced by the fact that we never hear from the beloved in the beloved’s own direct words; everything is presented from the speaker’s point of view, even the imagined (but never-sent) notes with which the poem concludes. The poem, then, has a dreamlike focus on a single consciousness (the speaker’s); all thoughts, feelings, and facts are fi ltered through her perspective; and if in the end we know little about the actual relationship, we do know much about the speaker’s own yearnings and frustrations.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with Ezra Pound’s poem “A Virginal.” In particular, discuss such matters as setting, imagery, tone, and theme. How are the works different in their treatment of physical contact? How are they similar in their use of personal address? How are they distinct in the forms they employ? 2. Do some historical research to determine how, in fact, lesbianism was viewed in ancient Rome. How was it regarded in H. D.’s day? How might

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the facts of H. D.’s own life be relevant to the present work? Is there any reason to think that the beloved in this poem is not a woman? Why should we assume that the speaker of the poem is female?

“Helen” (1924) Helen was the wife of the ancient Spartan king Menelaus; her adulterous affair with Paris, a prince of Troy who took her back to his city, unleashed the bloody Trojan War described in Homer’s great epic The Iliad. For 10 long years the Greeks battled Trojans outside the walls of Troy, seeking to reclaim Helen and thus avenge her husband. This poem describes the hatred the Greeks feel for Helen, the cause of so much bloodshed. The poem begins with a startling juxtaposition of hatred and beauty. The brief opening line, which describes the bitter contempt the Greeks feel for Helen, consists of three heavily accented monosyllables. Every word is emphatic, and H. D. effectively stresses the verb (“hates”) by putting it last in the line. The next line, however, is longer and its rhythm is more relaxed; it emphasizes not the passionate emotion of the Greeks but the “still” (i.e., quiet, calm) beauty of Helen. The opening lines, then, pit raw emotion against impassive beauty, and H. D. stresses the ironic juxtaposition through the nearrhyme of “hates” and “face.” The rest of stanza 1 is devoted to elaborating on Helen’s physical loveliness and her cool, unexcited passivity; while the Greeks burn with hatred, she merely “stands” (l. 4), literally and figuratively unmoved, protected either by the Trojans (during the war) or by her status as Menelaus’s wife and reclaimed prize (after the confl ict ends). The second stanza seems at fi rst simply to repeat the ideas contained in the fi rst, but (as is usual with H. D.’s work) the repetition involves variation. Now all Greece not only “hates” Helen but “reviles” her (l. 2). Hatred can be an unexpressed feeling, but to revile means to abuse in language, to curse or condemn openly in words. Yet the second stanza is also varied in other ways as well. Helen’s face, for

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example, is now described not merely as “white” but as “wan” (ll. 7, 9), a word implying sickly weakness or pallor. Although Helen “smiles” (l. 7—in an ironic rhyme with reviles), perhaps she is not entirely impervious to the hatred of the Greeks: Perhaps her “wan” color contradicts her “smiles,” and perhaps it suggests fear, a guilty conscience, or maybe both. In any case, the Greeks hate her even more when they see her face lose its color, either because they think her reaction shows insufficient regret for the suffering she has caused, or because they associate the whiteness with the beauty that led to so much bloodshed. Paradoxically, the very loveliness and/or vulnerability of Helen makes the Greeks feel all the more contempt for her, especially when they remember “past enchantments / and past ills” caused by her beauty (ll. 10–11). Or perhaps it is Helen herself who does such “remembering” (l. 10): The syntax of the poem permits either interpretation and thus exemplifies the complexity that often lies beneath the apparent simplicity of H. D.’s phrasing. Finally, in the concluding stanza, it is the Greeks rather than Helen who seem rigid and static: They are emotionally “unmoved” either by her delicate beauty, by her status as the daughter of Zeus, or by her varied associations with the emotion of “love” (l. 13). They might indeed be moved to “love . . . the maid” (a word ironically associated with unmarried virginity and innocence; l. 16), but only—in one last paradox—“if she were laid, / white ash amid funereal cypresses” (ll. 17–18). Only (in other words) if Helen were dead and cremated (as so many Greek and Trojan soldiers died and were burned on funeral pyres) could the Greeks love her at all. This is love with a literal vengeance, and in the closing lines of the poem H. D. achieves a powerful sense of ultimate irony as well as a stunningly vivid fi nal image. Only if the beautiful white skin of Helen’s body became the “white ash” of her charred flesh could the Greeks be happy. As so often in her poems, H. D. here shows consummate restraint. She does not comment or interpret; she merely describes. We see both the beauty of Helen and the hatred of the Greeks; H. D. does not take sides, and she resists any impulse toward

melodrama or sentimentality. She communicates through images and implication, not through moralizing statement. Helen is not condemned, but neither are the Greeks. Their hatred is understandable even as her beauty remains undeniable.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Helen is mentioned or depicted in many of H. D.’s writings, particularly in her late long poem Helen in Egypt. Compare and contrast her depiction in the present poem with her depiction elsewhere; what similarities or differences do you see? Do some research into H. D.’s life; why did she fi nd Helen such an intriguing figure? 2. Do some reading about H. D.’s writing, being careful to compile a list of her typical themes and her characteristic techniques and traits of style. Having assembled such a list, discuss how the present poem is a representative work by H. D. How is it typical in its setting, its phrasing, its form, and its subject matter?

The Walls Do Not Fall (1944) Inspired by the destruction visited upon London by German bombs during World War II (and evoked also by the destructiveness of that war, and all wars, in general), this poem marvels at the endurance of the human spirit, even as it also wonders about the meaning and purpose of human life. The speaker explicitly and implicitly compares current events to historical happenings in past civilizations (especially events in ancient Egypt). The speaker indicts modern corruption, celebrates ancient and enduring wisdom (which transcends particular cultures and religions), and ends by anticipating the possibility that humanity may someday “reach haven, / heaven” (ll. 877–878). In this splendidly rich work, H. D. combines a variety of tones and stances in an attempt to do justice to the complex experiences she has witnessed and the complicated feelings these evoke. Sometimes the poem is vividly descriptive in depicting the ruins of wrought by war (as when the speaker,

H. D.

wandering through the devastation left by bomb blasts, describes “another sliced wall / where poor utensils show / like rare objects in a museum” [ll. 28–30]). Sometimes the tone is horrific, as when the speaker describes flesh “melted away, / the heart burnt out, dead ember, / tendons, muscles shattered, outer husk dismembered” (ll. 46–48). Sometimes the tone is satirical, as when she attempts to explain the appeal of the evil that resulted in the war (“I’ll promised adventure, / Good was smug and fat” [ll. 54–55]). Sometimes the speaker offers practical advice for survival in a hard and dangerous world (“be fi rm in your own small, static, limited // orbit and the shark-jaws / of outer circumstance // will spit you forth” [ll. 125–128]). The tone alternates between humility and prophetic selfconfidence, between confusion and uncertainty, on the one hand, and visionary boldness, on the other. The speaker is sometimes ecstatic, sometimes weary and withdrawn; sometimes the message is inspired and inspiring, while at other times it is caustic and sardonic. She speaks as the latest in a long line of prophets, summoning readers to value old wisdom that is never out of date, but she also condemns narrowness of all sorts, including the narrowness not only of dogmatic religious bigots (who reject any traditions but their own) but also of the modern utilitarians who dismiss the value of poets and prophets, with their spiritual visions and complex language. “[I]f you do not even understand what words say,” the speaker asks at one point, “how can you expect to pass judgement / on what words conceal?” (ll. 209–211). The Walls Do Not Fall, in other words, is epic in its range of tones and subjects, and it is therefore not surprising that H. D. later extended the piece by adding two additional sections (Tribute to the Angels [1945] and The Flowering of the Rod [1946]) to form a larger work eventually published as Trilogy (1973). Yet all three collections, with their brief, crisp lines, their frequently meditative moments; their constant shuttling between description and direct address; and their absence of continuous narrative, seem more lyric than epic, and indeed part of the effectiveness of all three works is that they so often achieve the heightened movement

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of inspired songs. It is in their detailed phrasing, not in their general messages or meanings, that the poems attain their true value; a less talented poet could have expressed the same ideas in language that lacked all life. It is fi nally in the specific words, sounds, and rhythms of these poems that H. D. shows her genius and makes her views compelling. Without her talent for phrasing, the poems would seem merely puffed-up New Age pomposities. It is, ultimately, in the individual words that the poems succeed or fail. Take, for instance, a passage from early in The Walls Do Not Fall. “Pompeii” (the speaker declares) “has nothing to teach us” (l. 31). Immediately, in a single line, the speaker thereby juxtaposes the past and the present (a common technique employed everywhere in this work): A great disaster of the ancient world highlights the disaster of the present, just as throughout the poem the past is used to situate current happenings into a larger, broader perspective. Moreover, by using the word us, the speaker makes common cause with her readers; the disasters she describes are disasters she and her readers have experienced—and endured—together (if only in our readerly imaginations). The speaker thus becomes our representative, our voice. She speaks not only to us but for us, and by adopting this role, she increases the likelihood that we will listen sympathetically when, later, her tone becomes more challenging, more critical, more strangely prophetic. For the time being, though, we are enchanted simply by the power of her language, as when she next declares, “we know crack of volcanic fissure, / slow flow of terrible lava, // pressure on heart, lungs, the brain / about to burst its brittle case” (ll. 32–35). The subtle, internal rhyming of know, slow, and flow; the onomatopoeic effect of “crack” and “burst” (in which the sound of the word imitates the thing described); the clotted, heavy assonance of “slow flow” (in which the long o sounds are strongly emphasized both by their initial positions in the line and by the use of a spondee, or double accent); the combined alliteration of bs, ts, and ss in the phrase “about to burst its brittle”—all these techniques, and many others used elsewhere in the work, exemplify the skill

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of a talented poet with a sure ear for sounds and rhythms. Here as so often elsewhere in this work, for example, H. D. effectively employs lists (or “catalogues”) to overwhelm us with specifics, as in the phrase “heart, lungs, the brain,” or in a later series, when the speaker mentions “the earth sway, dip of a floor, / slope of a pavement // where men roll, drunk / with a new bewilderment, / sorcery, bedevilment” (ll. 38–42). Here again the freshness and craft of the language are everywhere apparent. The phrase “earth sway,” for instance, jams two nouns together in the manner of an ancient AngloSaxon kenning, achieving much more impact and surprise than swaying earth or sway of the earth would have delivered. (She uses the same technique when, shortly afterward, she calls the skeleton a “bone-frame”; [l. 43]). In this as in so many other ways, H. D. boils language down to its concrete essentials, never wasting a word. She also, however, knows how to employ oxymorons, as in the references to dipping floors and sloping pavements—images that imply a disrupted, topsy-turvy world with no need for the poets to offer explicit commentary or bald explanation. Likewise, in addition to oxymorons, she uses other forms of paradox: Drunkenness, for instance, is usually associated with pleasure, but here it is linked with the frighteningly literal cracking of roads, sidewalks, and floors. This is a world that lacks stability or sure foundations; it is a world of “bewilderment” (implying mere confusion), “sorcery” (implying a kind of supernatural power), and “bedevilment” (implying an almost Satanic sort of torment). This list of nouns, then, is not a string of empty synonyms; instead, each new word complicates and darkens the picture. Each single word, that is, is either carefully chosen or intuitively divined; rarely if ever—in these poems and in her works in general—does H. D. fail to create a vivid, memorable effect.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read the two collections of poems that immediately followed The Walls Do Not Fall (Tribute to the Angels and The Flowering of the Rod). How are all three works similar in style, form,

techniques, and themes? How are they different in these ways or others? How do the three collections form a coherent sequence? Is there any kind of development or progression from one to the next? 2. Read H. D.’s later sequence of poems titled Helen in Egypt, which (like her wartime Trilogy) is also divided into three parts. How does the Trilogy anticipate or foreshadow Helen in Egypt in the ideas explored, the methods employed, and the language used? How (if at all) do the prose passages in Helen in Egypt contribute to the effectiveness of the work? Do you prefer one of these sequences to the other? If so, explain why.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON H. D. AND HER WORK 1. Read H. D.’s book By Avon River, in which she comments on a multitude of English poets of the 16th and 17th centuries. How are her comments on those writers relevant to her own works, especially her trilogy of war poems, which were written at roughly the same time? What qualities did she most admire in other writers, and how are those qualities reflected in her own writings? 2. Compare and contrast the long poems of the socalled Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound. How are the works comparable or distinctive in theme, structure, setting, and style; how do they resemble or differ from one another in tone, purpose, and/ or effectiveness? 3. Read some of H. D.’s earliest poems and some of her latest ones, and discuss any continuities or distinctions you see. How is her early work similar to her later work in the subjects it deals with, the techniques it employs, and/or the style(s) it uses? Do H. D.’s methods or ideas seem to change much as she gets older? 4. Read H. D.’s Tribute to Freud, and then discuss its possible relevance to her own work—particularly the work she did in the decade following her meetings with Freud. How (if at all) did her discussions with Freud influence the kind

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

of writing she subsequently did? How was her thinking similar to Freud’s? How was it different? How are the similarities and differences reflected in her poems? How are women generally depicted in the writings of H. D.? Are there any consistent patterns? Are women presented differently in the poems than in the prose? How may H. D.’s own life have influenced the ways she presents women? Read one or more of H. D.’s novels and then compare her work in that genre to her work as a poet. Why is she remembered mainly as a poet rather than as a novelist? Is she equally effective in using both forms? What similarities or differences exist between the styles, themes, and techniques of her novels and her poems? Compare and contrast some of H. D.’s poems with some poems by Emily Dickinson. How do their works compare in style, structure, tone, and technique? In what ways can H. D. be seen as an “heir” of Dickinson? Is there any evidence that she even knew of and/or responded to Dickinson’s works? Track down one of H. D.’s translations of a classical work, and then fi nd at least one other translation of that same work (preferably use a fairly “literal” translation, such as the ones in the Loeb Classical Library). Compare and contrast H. D.’s rendering with the more literal translation. What similarities or differences do you see? What choices did H. D. make in her renderings? Are her choices effective? Read some of H. D.’s poems and then read some of the “poems” contained in GERTRUDE STEIN’s Tender Buttons. How do both writers use such techniques as striking images, repeated phrases, simple diction, and a variety of sound effects? Do you fi nd one writer more appealing than the other? If so, why? Is there any evidence that they knew (or knew of) each other and/or were influenced by one another?

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10. Read WALLACE STEVENS’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Does it remind you of H. D.’s work in any way(s)? If so, how? (Be specific: Discuss such matters as structure, style, and techniques.) How and why might Stevens’s poem be considered an imagist work? Is there any evidence concerning how the two poets felt about each other’s writings? WORKS CITED

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Bloom, Harold, ed. H. D.: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Burnett, Gary. H. D. between Image and Epic: The Mysteries of Her Poetics. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989. Dodd, Elizabeth. The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H. D., Louis Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Glück. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. H. D.: The Career of That Struggle. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H. D.’s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Guest, Barbara. Herself Defined: The Poet H. D. and Her World. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984. H. D. Collected Poems, 1912–1944. Edited by Louis L. Martz. New York: New Directions, 1983. ———. Helen in Egypt. New York: Grove, 1961. ———. Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H. D. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. Hernandez, H. H. D. Home Page. Available online. URL: http://www.imagists.org/hd/index.html. Accessed April 7, 2009. Quinn, Vincent. Hilda Doolittle (H. D.). New York: Twayne, 1967. Robinson, Janice S. H. D.: The Life and Work of an American Poet. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982.

Robert C. Evans

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. (Nobel Prize speech)

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rnest Hemingway’s importance in the history of American (and, indeed, world) literature is difficult to challenge. Even readers who do not especially admire his subjects or style must concede his enormous influence. His ideals of clarity, concision, understatement, and simplicity are widely considered hallmarks of effective writing, while the themes he repeatedly explored—such as the ways people demonstrate “grace under pressure”; or the ways they discharge their responsibilities, face their fears, or master some skill; or the ways they cope with pervasive loneliness, uncommon love, widespread despair, frequent danger, and inevitable death—are never likely to lose their interest. Finally, Hemingway will remain significant simply as a highly representative figure of his era. He voiced the ideals, aspirations, frustrations, and disappointments of millions of his contemporaries; among serious writers, he became one of the most popular and iconic figures of his time. He became associated not only with distinctive themes and a distinctive style but also with a distinctive approach to living. Hemingway’s own life began on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a comfortable suburb of Chicago, where his father, Clarence, was a respected doctor and a lover of the great outdoors and where his mother, Grace, was a somewhat domineering wife. Grace was a crucial influence on her son’s life—an influence he later often despised—and

there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that she was the stronger willed of the two parents. Because she liked the idea of having twins, for instance, she often dressed young Ernest in the same girlish clothes as his older sister, and she held the sister back from school a year so that she and Ernest could begin fi rst grade together. Ernest, however, enjoyed many of the normal pleasures of American boyhood, thanks especially to the influence of his father, who encouraged his son’s interest in hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, boating, and athletics. Many of the boy’s happiest days were spent on long vacations at the family’s cottage on Walloon Lake in Michigan, where he could indulge his interest in nature to his heart’s content. Nevertheless, back in Oak Park, he did well in school, receiving a fi ne literary education while pursuing his growing interest in authorship of all sorts, including writing for the school newspaper and composing stories for the literary magazine. By the time he graduated from high school in 1917, his interest in (and talent for) writing was strong enough to win him a job as a cub reporter for the highly distinguished Kansas City Star. He tackled the job with typical energy and enthusiasm, readily embracing the Star’s emphasis on short sentences, vigorous phrasing, clear diction, and plain syntax. He later claimed that these rules were the best he had ever encountered as a writer. He worked at the Star from October 1917 until the following April.

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By this time, of course, the United States had entered World War I, and many young men were joining the military. When Hemingway was rejected because of his poor eyesight, he joined a Red Cross ambulance unit assigned to service in Italy. Bored with such duty (which was too far from the front), he volunteered for canteen service to be closer to the action. He discovered just how close he was when, on July 8, 1918, a large incoming shell peppered shrapnel into his legs, which were also hit by machine-gun fi re. Hemingway nevertheless behaved heroically, assisting another injured man, but the physical and psychological aftereffects of the experience persisted for years. While recovering in Milan, the 19-year-old Ernest met and fell in love with a beautiful 26-year-old nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky, with whom he became infatuated. When he returned to the United States in January 1919, he assumed that Agnes would soon follow and that they would marry, but within a couple of months she wrote to say that she had fallen in love with someone else—a development that fi rst depressed Hemingway and then made him angry. Eventually, though, he returned to his fi rst love (writing), composing stories and hoping to have them published. A chance encounter with the wealthy mother of a handicapped son who was a year younger than Hemingway led to a job in Toronto, Canada, where Ernest would be the boy’s companion and where he soon found additional employment as a reporter for the Toronto Star. When this job ended, however, he was soon living back at the family’s cottage on Walloon Lake, where he spent much time fishing and enjoying himself— much to the frustration of his mother, who considered him disrespectful and unambitious. Not long after his 21st birthday, therefore, she handed him a note telling him to leave the cottage and not to return until he had learned to behave with greater maturity. Ironically, this expulsion became a positive turning point. He moved to Chicago and lived with friends while looking for work, and although he soon found a job (with a commercial magazine), the most important development was his involve-

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ment in the thriving Chicago literary scene, where he made the acquaintance of such rising talents as C ARL SANDBURG and SHERWOOD A NDERSON. Anderson, in particular, was a beneficial contact; genuinely impressed with Hemingway’s talent and potential, he did much to promote the younger man’s career. He not only encouraged editors to print Hemingway’s work but also advised Hemingway himself to go to Paris, where Anderson had a number of influential friends. Besides, Paris was, at that time, the center of an international literary renaissance. Meanwhile, in Chicago Hemingway had also met and fallen in love with Hadley Richardson, who was several years his senior and was from a comfortable family in St. Louis. They married on September 3, 1921, and her sizable trust fund meant that their fi nancial condition was far from desperate. Nevertheless, he took a part-time job with the Toronto Star, intending to write stories about Europe, and in December they set off for Paris. Armed with generous letters of introduction from Anderson, Hemingway soon got to know many of the most notable American literary figures living in the French capital, including GERTRUDE STEIN, EZR A POUND, and Sylvia Beach (the owner of a splendid little bookstore visited by many of the most important modern writers, including James Joyce, whom Hemingway also met). With his keen intelligence, lively personality, and total devotion to writing, Hemingway quickly made a positive impression (at least at fi rst), becoming particularly close to Stein, whose stylistic experiments he admired and emulated. Meanwhile, Pound—not only a talented poet but also an extremely energetic impresario—soon became another one of Hemingway’s champions, and while Hemingway covered big stories for the Toronto Star, he also tried to fi nd time for his own creative writing. Unfortunately, many of his early manuscripts were stolen when Hadley briefly left them unattended in a suitcase on a train. This theft helps to account for the slim pickings in Hemingway’s fi rst published book—the revealingly titled Three Stories and Ten Poems, printed in 1923 by a newly founded avant-garde

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press. This thin book was soon followed in 1924 by another short collection, titled (with fashionably lowercase letters) in our time. Hemingway was not (at this time) trying to make money with his creative writing; he was trying to win critical attention and respect, and that was something he had certainly begun to do. Admirers of serious literature quickly recognized that his was a new and distinctive voice—a voice that emphasized crisp, curt sentences; plenty of vernacular dialogue; and a hard-boiled, no-nonsense approach to any subject it discussed. Hemingway was giving birth to one of the most influential styles in the history of literature. Meanwhile, on October 10, 1923, Hadley gave birth to their fi rst child—a son named John. Although Hemingway had had some qualms about becoming a father, neither marriage nor parenthood slowed him down much. By 1924 he had been named associate editor of the transatlantic review, and by 1925 he had made the acquaintance (and won the friendship) of such rising literary figures as F. SCOTT FITZGER ALD and Archibald MacLeish. He had also met an Englishwoman named Duff Twysden (who sexually excited Hemingway and many others), and he had met as well an American named Pauline Pfeiffer, who became a friend of his wife and would soon become her replacement. In the meantime, however, 1925 also saw the U.S. publication, by Boni and Liveright, a major press, of In Our Time (capital letters this time), which reprinted most of the earlier in our time, plus much else besides. It was Hemingway’s fi rst major book and won him much admiring attention. Another reason 1925 was important was that it was the year when Hemingway, while visiting Spain (where he was quickly developing a passionate interest in bullfighting), gathered much material for the book that would become his fi rst significant novel—The Sun Also Rises. He had fi nished the manuscript by the fall, by which time the prestigious Scribner publishing house had expressed a strong interest. Hemingway, however, was under contract to Boni and Liveright, which also published Sherwood Anderson, who was their prime author. Therefore, Hemingway, to free himself from the contract (and to take a mocking jab at

Anderson, whom he now viewed as a competitor), quickly dashed off The Torrents of Spring, a novel parodying Anderson’s style. Boni and Liveright, of course, refused to publish it, and so in 1926 it was brought out by Scribner, which also, that October, issued The Sun Also Rises. To salve his conscience, Hemingway assigned the royalties to Hadley, whom he nonetheless divorced in January 1927, marrying Pauline Pfeiffer in May. Along with his new wife he gained new-found fame, for The Sun Also Rises was instantly recognized as a pathbreaking book. In a few years, then, Hemingway had gone from obscurity to widespread recognition. The publication of his collection of stories titled Men without Women in 1927 only confi rmed his growing prominence. In 1928 Hemingway began work on a new novel—A Farewell to Arms—that would soon make him even more popular with critics and the public alike. By this time he had moved to Key West, Florida, where he wrote in the mornings, fished in the afternoons, and otherwise spent his time in bars. On June 28, Pauline gave birth to Hemingway’s second son (Patrick), but this good news was offset by the end of the year, when Hemingway learned that his father, ailing physically and fi nancially, had shot and killed himself on December 6. The younger Hemingway regarded the suicide as cowardly (although later he would be better able to understand it). In any case, by 1929, having fi nished his novel, he was back in Europe. The book was published and sold well, even after the stock market crashed in October, inaugurating the economic catastrophe soon known as the Great Depression. Hemingway, however, was living relatively well; he was back in Key West, continuing to pursue his interest in deep-sea fishing and now also planning to go on safari in Africa. He also, however, spent time on a ranch in Wyoming (while writing a book about bullfighting, published in 1932 as Death in the Afternoon), and in 1931 Pauline gave birth to his third son, Gregory. A book of short stories titled Winner Take Nothing appeared in 1933, the same year Hemingway and Pauline also returned to Europe and then fi nally made good on their long-delayed plans to go on an African safari. This trip provided Hemingway with raw material for

Ernest Hemingway

some fi ne stories, but it also, as usual, drew out his fierce competitive streak, both toward Pauline and toward their guide. Back in the United States in 1934, Hemingway, having ordered a custom-designed yacht and christened it the Pilar, now devoted himself even more enthusiastically to deep-sea fishing. He also, however, was at work on a new book, published in 1935 as Green Hills of Africa, which was followed in 1936 by such famous stories with African settings as “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Yet 1936 was important for other reasons as well: Civil war had broken out in Spain, a country Hemingway loved, and Hemingway had met a talented journalist named Martha Gelhorn, who was attractive, selfconfident, and at least as interested in the Spanish war as he was. By 1937 Gelhorn and Hemingway were in Spain together, covering the war and having a passionate affair. In the same year he published a novel titled To Have and Have Not, which was followed in 1938 by a collection of short fiction (which included a play) titled The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. By 1939 he was living in Cuba with Martha, was awaiting a divorce from Pauline, and was hard at work on a massive new novel set during the Spanish civil war: For Whom the Bell Tolls. When the book appeared in 1940, it was an instant and massive best seller and was also a huge critical success. After he divorced Pauline, his marriage to Martha occurred on November 21, but all was far from bright. By this time the Second World War—a confl ict he had foreseen and warned against—had been under way for more than a year, and it was obvious to nearly everyone that the United States would soon be dragged into the fight. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the confl ict became truly global. For a time, Hemingway’s contributions to the war effort consisted mainly of cruising the Caribbean on board the Pilar, ostensibly searching for German submarines, which he planned to attack with bazookas and bombs. Martha, however, suspected that his main interest was still fi shing; the “subhunting” missions allowed him to escape wartime

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rationing of gasoline. As strains began to appear in their marriage, she convinced Hemingway to go with her to Europe in 1944 as a war correspondent. Because of his prominence, he arrived before she did—giving him enough time to meet and become enamored with Mary Walsh (a reporter for Time who would soon become the fourth and fi nal Mrs. Hemingway), as well as enough time to become involved in a drunken car crash. Martha was not amused, and their marriage essentially ended at this time. For the duration of the war, the two saw themselves as rival writers, although Hemingway (in violation of the Geneva Conventions regarding war correspondents) also took an active role in combat. With the war winding down and an allied victory assured, he returned to Cuba early in 1945 to prepare for his divorce from Martha and his marriage to Mary (who, however, fi rst had to divorce her own husband). After his marriage to Martha officially ended in December 1945, his wedding to Mary occurred the following March. By this time Hemingway was at work on a new and extremely lengthy novel, which would eventually be published—long after his death—as The Garden of Eden. He was also back to his old habits of hunting, fishing, drinking, and eating. Although he was only in his late forties, his health was becoming so bad (and his weight so great) that he put himself on a diet and managed to drop both some pounds and his blood pressure. He and Mary traveled to Europe in 1948, and it was there that he became smitten with a much younger woman (who was nearly 19) named Adriana Ivancich. Although their relationship never became physical, he saw her as a kind of muse, and his infatuation helped inspire his next published novel, Across the River and into the Trees, which appeared in 1950. Unfortunately, most critics considered the book a disaster, but Hemingway did not give up. He began work on a new novel (not published until 1970) titled Islands in the Stream, but it was in 1951, after a visit to Cuba by Adriana and her mother, that he produced his fi nal masterwork, The Old Man and the Sea. When the book was initially published as a special issue of Life magazine in 1952, over 5 million copies sold in just two days. The book was also selected

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for publication by the Book of the Month Club, and Scribner brought out its own edition. Popular with both critics and the general public, the novel soon won Hemingway the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and helped him win the 1954 Nobel Prize in literature. Before then, however, Hemingway had returned to some of his old stomping grounds. In 1953 he was back in Spain, watching more bullfights, and later that year he was once again on safari in Africa. In 1954 a plane in which he and Mary were riding while in Africa crashed, and then, the next day, the rescue plane crashed as well. Hemingway was significantly injured in both wrecks and was even reported dead, but these were just the latest in a long line of accidents that had occurred over the years—accidents that often involved major injuries to his head. Nevertheless, despite growing problems with his physical and psychological health, he continued to travel and write. In 1956 he was back in Spain, watching the bullfights, and later that year he was back in Paris, where the chance discovery of two trunks full of his old clothes and some of his writings from the 1920s helped inspire him to begin working on a set of memoirs that would eventually be published (in 1964) as A Moveable Feast. Hemingway, however, was increasingly moody and depressed, and his spirits were not improved by the growing political instability in Cuba, where a revolution would soon topple the corrupt government. Before that happened, however, Hemingway’s own house was actually searched in an early morning raid by soldiers looking for a fugitive insurgent. Although Hemingway himself was not injured, his dog was shot, and by the end of the year the writer and his wife had rented a house in Ketchum, Idaho, where they settled permanently in 1959. As usual, serious tensions had long since developed in this latest marriage, and they became worse as Hemingway’s mental health deteriorated. Depressed, unable to sleep, and even suffering from paranoia (he was convinced that the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] was plotting against him), Hemingway by 1960 was being treated for mental illness at the Mayo Clinic—even undergoing electroshock therapy, which helped relieve his depression but

also robbed him, for a time, of his memory. Less and less able to write, he became more and more depressed; one day in April 1961, Mary found him pointing a gun at his head. Hospitalized both in Ketchum and again at the Mayo Clinic (where he once again received electroshock therapy), he managed to convince his doctors (but not Mary) that he had recovered sufficiently to return home. He was back in Ketchum on June 30, but he survived just two days: On July 2, he awoke in the morning, went to the basement, retrieved a double-barreled shotgun, leaned his head against it, and fi red.

In Our Time (1925, 1930) This innovative collection of short fiction consists of alternating stories and vignettes; the latter, ironically called chapters, are very brief (often just a single paragraph long), are printed in italic type, and deal with such matters as war, bullfighting, and crime. They provide an intriguing counterpoint to the stories themselves, many (but not all) of which deal with the physical, emotional, and psychological maturation of a character named Nick Adams, who develops from a boy living with his parents in the Midwest; to a young man dealing with his friends, girlfriends, and random strangers; to a solitary fisherman, remembering his past while communing with nature. The remaining stories, in which Nick is not the main character, often deal with characters who resemble Nick in some way, or they deal with themes fi rst enunciated in the stories that focus on Nick. As a group of interrelated stories unified by the appearance of the same (or similar) characters, by a set of connected themes, and by a prevailing mood or tone, Hemingway’s collection resembles James Joyce’s Dubliners as well as Winesburg, Ohio, a similar work by the American writer Sherwood Anderson. Anderson’s writings were highly influential at the time Hemingway composed his collection, and Hemingway himself admired Anderson before he later mocked and parodied Anderson’s style in his novel The Torrents of Spring (1926). Early reviewers of In Our Time praised the work for its lean, hard-

Ernest Hemingway

boiled style—especially its simple, often monosyllabic diction, its emphasis on concrete visual details, its sparing use of adjectives, its effective use of dialogue, its avoidance of overt interpretation and analysis of characters’ emotions and motives, and its presentation of convincing characters speaking a credible American vernacular. Some reviewers did fi nd the characters dull, thin, and mostly humorless, but in general reaction to the volume was very positive; most reviewers believed that a major new presence had arrived on the American literary scene. Hemingway was welcomed as a significant spokesman of the younger generation—a generation that had been permanently scarred by World War I and a generation that had to cope with all the challenges of a chaotic modern world. Later commentators have mostly taken the stylistic value of the collection for granted and instead have tended to focus on two main matters: (1) how (or even whether) the stories and chapters are coherently interconnected, and (2) thematic interpretations of the various tales. Some commentators have argued that the stories and chapters are not coherently linked and that the randomness is deliberate; according to this view, Hemingway wanted to replicate, in the structure of his book, the chaos and disorder he saw all around him. The movements from one story to the next, as well as the alternations between stories and “chapters,” are thus meant to be disorienting and disturbing; no underlying unity was intended, and none should be sought. Most analysts, however, have indeed sought to explain how the stories are linked and how the stories and the “chapters” interrelate. Such analysts have argued (for instance) that the “chapters” cover a discrete chronological period (1914–23, inclusive); that war tends to be the focus of the fi rst seven chapters, that bullfighting tends to be the focus of chapters 7 through 14, and that chapters 8 and 15 focus on crime; and that nearly all the chapters deal with issues of manhood—of what it means to function as a man in a world that has lost its moral and psychological bearings. According to this view, the early chapters, dealing with war, show the destruction of traditional values, while the later chapters, dealing with bullfighting, illustrate a search for a

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new value system—a system rooted in individual courage, technical skill, and aesthetic grace. Hemingway never pretends that this new system of values will be widely or easily achieved (and indeed the fi nal brief chapter of the book can be read as one last sardonic, ironic thrust), but many critics seem to agree that the book implies that it is only through private effort and individual integrity that one can hope to achieve a proper relationship with nature, with others, and with oneself. Just as the brief “chapters” have been interpreted as suggesting a general movement from meaningless violence, extreme disorder, and tragic absurdity to a fragile but valuable sense of dignity and meaning, so the stories themselves have been seen as following a similar pattern. According to this view, most of the stories chart Nick Adams’s slow, painful movement from innocent boyhood to disillusioned adulthood—with all of its physical pain, psychological suffering, and literal and figurative death—until he fi nally achieves, in the story titled “Big Two-Hearted River: Part II,” a kind of inner serenity and satisfaction while fishing alone and communing with nature. Meanwhile, the stories in which Nick is not the main character serve (according to this view) to reinforce many of the themes, attitudes, and tones fi rst enunciated in the Adams stories. Such themes include, for instance, relations between fathers and sons, between men and women, between male friends, and between humans and nature. Additional themes include the disappointments of marriage and the demoralizing effects of war. The collection opens by focusing on Nick as a boy in rural Michigan; then it shows him as a student and soldier in Europe; and then it concludes (except for the fi nal “L’Envoi”) by moving him back to rural Michigan, but now Nick is an adult who has achieved a kind of peace with himself and his world. The stories are thus organized (as Clinton S. Burhans, Jr., persuasively argued) by a movement from “youth to maturity, from innocence to experience, from peace to war to peace again, and from America to Europe and back to America” (see Reynolds 91). In the process of charting this journey, Hemingway offers us a vision of numerous individuals faced with a multitude of


challenges, but he also thereby offers a vision of a restless, tormented world—a world in which real happiness is rare and therefore precious. Part of the power of the book derives from its diversity of topics, styles, and techniques. In “On the Quai at Smyrna,” for instance, Hemingway skillfully imitates the tone and vocabulary of a smug British officer, while in the extremely brief “Chapter I,” he adopts the colloquial manner of a common American soldier. In “Indian Camp” a third-person narrator suddenly yanks us back from fi rsthand accounts of warfare to describe, instead, an innocent boy’s exposure to bloody cesarean childbirth and equally bloody suicide, while in the cryptic “Chapter II” we are back in the midst of a fi rsthand account of foreign warfare, only to be returned, in “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” to the wilds of Michigan to witness an entirely different view of the physician (Nick’s father) who was fi rst described in “Indian Camp.” The entire book alternates—in subjects, methods, characters, and locations—in just this way, producing a bewildering sense of disorientation and confusion but producing, as well, a fascinating kind of suspense and curiosity. We can never quite be sure what will happen next, and so the impulse to continue reading is strong. The collection achieves a high degree of variety but also an underlying unity of tone—a tone that is mostly bleak and somber but one that is also punctuated by brief moments of kindness, friendship, peace, joy, and even love.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the character of Nick Adams in In Our Time with the character of George Willard in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. How are they similar and/or different in their experiences, attitudes, changes, and fi nal developments? Discuss their relations with their parents, friends, and communities. In what ways is each character a reflection of his era and his region? 2. Read Hemingway’s collection alongside Gertrude Stein’s work titled Three Lives. How did each author try to be and succeed in being an innovative writer of fiction, especially in terms

of style, characterization, plot, and structure? Which book is more unconventional? Which, in your opinion, is more interesting to read? Explain your response in detail. 3. JOHN STEINBECK’s collection The Red Pony deals, as does In Our Time, with a recurring character—a young boy who is initiated into the facts of life and death. How is Steinbeck’s character similar to, and different from, Nick Adams? Discuss the chronological range covered by both sets of stories. Discuss the protagonists’ relations with other characters, especially their parents but also other role models. What kinds of lessons does each youth learn as he matures? 4. Do some research into literary modernism, and then discuss the ways in which In Our Time is a modernist work, particularly in terms of style and structure. Pay special attention to the role of the “chapters.” How does Hemingway’s collection compare, as a modernist piece of writing, with WILLIAM FAULKNER’s novel The Sound and the Fury and/or As I Lay Dying? Which of these writers is the more relentlessly modernist of the two? Explain your response in detail. 5. Choose a particular theme—such as war or bullfighting or maturation—and trace it over the course of several sections of the narrative. How does the theme change or develop (or fail to do so)? How does each section provide a distinctive perspective on the chosen theme? Is there any consistency in Hemingway’s treatment of the selected topic?

“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1926) As an old deaf man sits late one night in a deserted Spanish café and consumes drink after drink, two waiters—one younger, one older—discuss his circumstances: Although he is economically comfortable, he recently attempted suicide, and he likes to stay as late as possible in the café, whose cleanliness and light provide him with some sense of security and comfort. Unlike the older waiter, the younger waiter cannot understand the old man’s lonely feelings, and because the younger man is impatient

Ernest Hemingway

with the delay and wants to go home to bed with his wife, he fi nally urges the deaf man to leave the café. Later, alone at a bar, the older waiter reflects on the pervading sense of nothingness and alienation that helps explain the deaf man’s dislike of the dark and his desire for order and companionship. Despite the brevity of this work, it manages to imply a great deal, not only about the characters depicted but also about the fundamental tragedy of human life—a tragedy rooted in the sense of feeling utterly alone in a world that lacks any deeper meaning or purpose. The story opens by emphasizing the “late” hour as the “old man” who is “deaf” sits in the “shadow” cast by dim electric lights (Complete 288). All these details are clearly symbolic: The man, who has recently been rescued from a suicide attempt, is nevertheless (as is everyone) inexorably moving toward death. His advanced age simply means that death will occur sooner for him than for everyone else. Meanwhile, his deafness simply makes him even more isolated than all people already are. He is, then, merely an extreme symbol of the common human condition; all of us are alone in the shadows, awaiting death, cut off from any real communion with others, and trying in the meantime to fi nd some comfort in pleasurable sensations and surroundings that, by their very nature, can only be temporary. When the younger waiter asks the older waiter what has caused the old deaf man enough “despair” to make him attempt suicide, the older waiter responds by saying, “Nothing” (Complete 288)—a reply that is far more significant than it seems at fi rst. It is indeed a sense of nothingness or nihilism (a sense that nothing really matters in life; that human existence has no ultimate meaning or purpose; that there are no objective, transcendent values that give fulfi llment to our lives; and that we are fi nally alone in a universe without a god or any other source of grand significance) that helps explain why this old deaf man, or indeed any human being, might consider killing himself. Despair of this sort was increasingly common during the era in which Hemingway wrote—an era in which thoughtful people were increasingly less confident concerning all the old, traditional values (such as religion, patriotism,

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or faith in progress) that had once seemed to give meaning to human existence. The older waiter, near the end of the story, uses the Spanish word nada to express this pervasive sense of nothingness, and the older waiter is clearly presented as more insightful and perceptive than his younger colleague, whose responses to the old deaf man are more shallow, superficial, selfish, and cruel. However, despite the gloomy philosophy that underlies the story, the work is not entirely pessimistic. The old man himself displays a quiet dignity in his loneliness; he never becomes drunk, self-pitying, or angry, and the older waiter, through his actions and attitudes, demonstrates compassion, understanding, and empathy. In a work that might easily have become sentimental or preachy, Hemingway quietly implies that human life need not be entirely solitary or lacking in generosity. The older waiter represents a kind of moral ideal, for in spite of his awareness of the underlying darkness of life, he continues to try to fi nd some light and to share that light with others.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” How are the works comparable in tone, atmosphere, setting, and philosophical implication? How does Prufrock compare and/or contrast with the older waiter? What does Eliot’s attitude seem to be toward Prufrock, and what does Hemingway’s attitude seem to be toward the old waiter? 2. Read this story alongside WALLACE STEVENS’s poem “Sunday Morning.” What does each work seem to imply about the status of religion, and of belief in God, in modern life? What does each work suggest about possible alternative sources of meaning, value, and purpose? Which work is more affi rmative in its view of existence? Discuss the role of humor in each work. 3. Choose a relatively small section of the story and analyze, as closely as possible, how each detail of that section contributes to the tone, atmosphere, coherence, and effectiveness of the story as a whole. For example, why, in the opening


paragraph of the story, does the narrator stress that it is “very late”? Why does the old man sit in “shadow”? Why is the light “electric”? Why is the old man just “a little drunk” rather than completely inebriated? Discuss the implications of each of Hemingway’s descriptive choices.

The Sun Also Rises (1926) Jake Barnes, a young American journalist who is now impotent as a result of a wound suffered in World War I, describes his relations with a number of acquaintances while they live in France and travel in Spain in the early 1920s. Central figures of the group include Lady Brett Ashley, a highly sexed and free-spirited Englishwoman to whom most of the men in the novel are attracted; Michael Campbell, a Scotsman whom Brett plans to marry after her impending divorce is fi nal; Bill Gorton, a successful American writer who is a friend of Jake; and Robert Cohn, a Jewish-American writer and former boxer whom most of the other characters despise, especially because of his desperate fi xation on Brett. Brett herself becomes infatuated with a young Spanish bullfighter named Pedro Romero, but by the end of the novel she decides that it would be wrong to continue the affair she briefly began with him. General assessments of The Sun Also Rises will inevitably depend on more particular responses to the novel’s plot, characters, themes, and style. While some readers, for instance, have found the plot tedious and trivial, far more have praised the work for convincingly depicting the lives of American and British expatriates in continental Europe and for memorably presenting the aftereffects of World War I on the so-called lost generation—a generation who were often crippled (physically, psychologically, or both) by the pointless destruction unleashed during that ironically named “Great War.” Certainly the novel communicates a vivid sense of what it was like to be young, relatively wealthy, and generally rootless in the years immediately following that massive confl ict. Simply as a historical document, then, the novel retains a good

deal of interest, for Hemingway manages to convey what life was like for a small but highly influential subset of the population of an important historical era. Meanwhile, although many of the characters themselves have struck various readers as shallow, superficial, and self-absorbed, other readers have found Hemingway’s people intriguing, engaging, and sometimes even sympathetic. Jake, for instance, strikes some readers as a sensitive, thoughtful, and vulnerable man whose physical injury denies him the love that might make him whole again, while Lady Brett—despite her hard-drinking, toughtalking, sexually promiscuous ways—often strikes the same readers as a mostly sympathetic victim: Having lost her fiancé in the war and having been denied the chance for a completely fulfi lling love with Jake, she has already made two bad marriages and seems about to make another. Pedro Romero, in the meantime, seems an admirable and appealing character by almost any standard; he inspires lust in Brett and respect in Jake, in most readers, and probably in Hemingway himself. However, even readers who consider most of the characters unappealing may fi nd themselves admiring the novel for depicting such unsavory types so vividly. The obvious themes of the book give it, to many, an appeal that is equally obvious. The novel raises a number of perennially important issues, including the following: What is love? What is friendship? What kind of life is most worth living? What qualities make a person worthy of respect? What is the ultimate significance of human life? What are the best ways to cope with loss? What values can replace old certainties that no longer seem reliable? Can mere material or physical pleasure make for a satisfying existence? Whether or not Hemingway does full justice to these themes was once (and may to some extent remain) a matter of debate, but perhaps the ultimate touchstone for the success of this book (or of any literary work) is the success of its style. If the book were not skillfully written, it might not seem worth reading, no matter how inherently interesting its ideas. It is as a stylist, in fact, that Hemingway is perhaps most important, and The Sun Also Rises reveals many of the stylistic traits for which he has most often been praised.

Ernest Hemingway

The language of the book is generally simple, clear, straightforward, and unadorned. Sentences tend to be short; adjectives, adverbs, metaphors, and similes tend to be few; and the tone is flat and largely objective, relying greatly on understatement and subtle irony. Moreover, a huge proportion of the book is given over to dialogue, and much of the novel’s success depends on Hemingway’s talent for convincingly catching the diction, rhythms, and sound of actual speech. Even readers who may fi nd the book unappealing for other reasons nevertheless often concede Hemingway’s skill in creating credible dialogue. If that dialogue often seems trivial, drab, monotonous, and rambling, that is partly because Hemingway is imitating the actual sounds of mundane conversation. Occasionally the dialogue seems dated, phony, and almost quaint. At one point, for instance, Brett enters a bar and addresses Jake and some others in her typically breezy, slangy style: “Hello, you chaps.” “Hello, Brett,” I said. “Why aren’t you tight?” “Never going to get tight any more. I say, give a chap a brandy and soda.” (Sun 22)

The fact that Brett uses the word chap in referring both to the men and to herself is partly a reflection of her British nationality and partly a reflection of her gender-bending personality: She acts, talks, and wears her short hair in ways that would have made her seem somewhat masculine in the 1920s, and her tendency to speak of herself as a “chap” implies that she partly thinks of herself (and certainly presents herself) as “one of the boys.” During her own era she would have seemed a startlingly “liberated” woman and would thus have symbolized the profound changes that were beginning to take place during that period in relations between the sexes. Nevertheless, in the passage just quoted (and often elsewhere) her speech now sounds oldfashioned and even affected, and perhaps even in Hemingway’s day it was deliberately intended to suggest Brett’s self-conscious pretensions. She is

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less self-confident and less happy than she pretends to be, and her need to adopt such poses implies the essential hollowness at the core of her psyche. Although Brett considers herself a sophisticated woman of the world, her discussions with Jake are often gushingly sentimental and self-pitying (as in “Oh darling, I’ve been so miserable”; Sun 24). Moreover, her explicit self-assessments are often both melodramatic and self-deceptive. At one point, for instance, when telling Jake about her sudden infatuation with the athletic young bullfighter Pedro Romero, she announces, with her usual maudlin effusiveness, “I’m a goner. I’m mad about the Romero boy. I’m in love with him, I think” (Sun 183). Real love, of course, is hardly the issue: She has merely glimpsed the sexy matador in his snug green tights, and her libido has been aroused. Her words to Jake illustrate the shallow theatricality that defi nes her personality, and later, even Brett herself realizes that her feelings are almost predatory. Of course, her change of heart does not occur until after she has already gone to bed with the much-younger Romero, but her belated attack of conscience at least allows her to indulge in her trademark vulgarity, which is supposed to signal her tough-as-nails sophistication: “I’m thirty-four, you know. I’m not going to be one of these bitches that ruins children” (Sun 243). Later still, congratulating herself on her decision to put the young man behind her, she announces, “You know I feel rather damned good, Jake. . . . You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch” (Sun 245). Individual readers will have to decide for themselves whether or not Brett actually attains this lofty goal, but many readers, apparently, found Brett not only an appealing character but a worthy role model. For various reasons, however, it is hard to take her nearly as seriously as she takes herself. A plausible case can in fact be made that Hemingway’s novel satirizes not only Brett but also most of the rest of the book’s personalities, including even Jake (but excluding Romero and his fellow Spaniard, Montoya, who respects the artistry, skill, character, and values that Romero so strikingly embodies). According to this reading, much of the book is ironic, and we are never meant to


admire most of the people in it as much as they admire themselves. Hemingway (from this perspective) describes the aimless existence of a group of shallow hedonists not in order to endorse their frantic, frenetic lifestyle but precisely to expose its hollowness and limitations. Certainly there are passages in the book that can suggest such a reading. Almost at the very end of the novel, for instance, just after Brett has proclaimed her noble intention “not to be a bitch,” she immediately adds, “It’s sort of what we have instead of God.” To this, Jake at once responds: “Some people have God. . . . Quite a lot.” But then Brett just as quickly retorts, “He never worked very well with me” (Sun 245). Jake seems almost wistful for the consolations provided by traditional religious belief—consolations others possess but ones that Jake himself seems unprepared to embrace with any real enthusiasm. (His own Catholic faith is mentioned in passing but seems merely nominal.) His comment does remind us that alternatives do exist to the egotism symbolized by Brett, but Brett’s snappy comeback, as well as Jake’s immediate abandonment of the subject (“Should we have another Martini?” Sun 245), suggest that Hemingway is not seriously proposing religion as an answer to any of the problems the novel presents. If anything, the answer (if there is one) lies in the cool professionalism, innate humility, and stoic bravery of Pedro Romero, who constantly faces death with the kind of courageous, unassuming nonchalance that Hemingway would increasingly admire as the decades wore on. Romero is the sort of secular hero featured in many later works by Hemingway—figures such as Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls or Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea (to mention just two obvious examples). Next to Romero, most of the other characters in The Sun Also Rises seem petty and pitiful (not to mention self-pitying), and if the book is indeed a satire, then Romero is the standard by which the other characters are measured and found wanting. Romero, however, does not enter the book until it is nearly two-thirds complete, and he quickly disappears from the main action. He is, moreover, a mostly silent character, little given

to all the superfluous talk typical of most people in this novel. That reticence, of course, is one of his virtues, but it also means that as a foil to the others he is mostly inarticulate: He does not speak on behalf of an alternative set of values but merely (and quietly) embodies them. However, if Romero has a more troubling flaw as a moral standard, that flaw lies in the fact that he responds at all to the ironically titled “Lady” Brett (who has memorably been called a “tart with a title”). It is hard to imagine what he fi nds appealing about this rapidly aging, rather prurient party hound; if Romero had simply turned away and laughed her off, it might have been more obvious that Hemingway himself was mocking her. After all, when Hemingway so desired, he could be quite blatantly satirical and ironic (as he had already proven in the story “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” in In Our Time). However, the satire and irony in The Sun Also Rises—if satire is there at all—are much more subtle, muted, and implied. Perhaps Hemingway does indeed intend to undercut the pretensions of Brett and her crew, and perhaps he even intends to satirize Jake for serving as Brett’s pimp and procurer (since it is Jake, after all, who facilitates her liaison with Romero). If these are Hemingway’s intentions, however, he mostly leaves it to his readers to connect the dots.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast The Sun Also Rises with NELLA L ARSEN’s novel titled Quicksand. How are the social settings of the novels similar? How are the works similar in tone? How do both novels present the experiences of Americans living abroad? How do the books compare and contrast in the ways they deal with issues of race? In which novel is the central character more appealing and sympathetic? Explain your response in detail. 2. Read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein and then discuss its relations with The Sun Also Rises. How do both books describe the world of expatriates living in Europe in the 1920s? How is Hemingway presented in Stein’s book; are her comments about him relevant at all to his novel? How does Hemingway’s style

Ernest Hemingway

in Sun seem to have been influenced by Stein’s ideas about style? How are the tones, moods, and atmospheres of both books similar? 3. Compare and contrast the values, social relationships, and kinds of characters depicted in The Sun Also Rises with the same aspects of THORNTON WILDER’s Our Town. How does Hemingway try to prevent his novel from being excessively cynical? How does Wilder try to prevent his play from being excessively sentimental? Does one work achieve a better balance than the other? How are the styles of the two works similar? How does Hemingway’s novel resemble a play, and how does Wilder’s play resemble a novel? 4. Choose a relatively minor character (such as Count Mippipopolous, Bill Gorton, Mike Campbell, or Montoya) and trace that character’s appearances in the book. How does that character help illuminate the themes of the novel? How does he or she help cast light on one or more of the major characters? How would the book be significantly different if the chosen character were absent?

“Hills Like White Elephants” (1927) As an unnamed American man and a young woman he calls “Jig” sit at a train station in a valley near the Ebro River in Spain, they drink alcohol and have a tense discussion. Although the word abortion is never explicitly mentioned, it soon becomes clear that the man is trying to persuade the reluctant Jig to end her pregnancy. After their discussion reaches an intense pitch in which Jig threatens to scream at the man, the tension eventually subsides, and at the very end of the story, with their train approaching, Jig claims to feel “fi ne.” This story—one of Hemingway’s briefest and most famous—illustrates many of the most typical traits of his writing. The phrasing is simple and clear; much of the tale is given over to terse, colloquial dialogue; the unobtrusive narrator offers few explanations and no interpretations but instead merely relays facts and reports conversation; and

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the work ends without a clear or simple resolution. The story presents itself as a straightforward, objective, slice-of-life description; it offers no moralizing comments, depending instead on readers to draw their own conclusions about the psychology, motives, and emotions of the two main characters. The work relies on implication and suggestion rather than on explicit authorial explanation. Nevertheless, Hemingway provides plenty of subtle, understated imagery and symbolism to guide interpretation of this seemingly simple story. Perhaps no other work of his better illustrates his “theory of omission” or “iceberg principle”: Just as only the tip of a massive iceberg is visible above water, so a truly effective piece of writing depends for its power on what it suggests and implies rather than on what it overtly states. By the time we have fi nished reading “Hills Like White Elephants,” we have a far deeper insight into the relationship of Jig and the American than either of them has openly expressed. The story is extremely well designed, but the subtleties of its craftsmanship become fully visible only in retrospect. The skill with which the story is crafted begins at once. The narrator opens by mentioning that on the side of the valley where the characters are sitting “there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun.” One part of the landscape, then, is lifeless and barren; as the narrator later reports, on this side of the valley “the country was brown and dry” (Complete 211). In contrast, we learn later that on the opposite side of the valley there “were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro,” and that the river is visible through the trees (Complete 213). Clearly, then, Hemingway has placed these characters in the midst of a highly symbolic landscape—a landscape in which one side is associated with blank sterility and the other is associated with teeming fertility and life. Obviously this setting is appropriate to a story about abortion, and it soon becomes evident that Jig is attracted by the distant, fertile side of the valley and associates abortion with the bleak desert that presently surrounds her. She fi nds herself at both a literal and a symbolic transition point in her life; she must choose, both literally and figuratively,


which direction she will take. A train will soon be arriving from Barcelona and will then proceed to Madrid; should Jig board it and presumably have the abortion? Or should she refuse to board the train and thereby risk ending her relationship with the American? By the very end of the story, the narrator leaves it tantalizingly unclear just what Jig has decided, or even whether she has decided anything, but during the course of the story he manages to convey the enormous pressures she feels. Among those pressures, the heat is symbolically important. As the couple try to fi nd comfort in the train station’s “warm shadow” (a nicely paradoxical phrase), the narrator reports that “it was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes” (Complete 211). Not only is the climate uncomfortable, then, but Jig and the American also feel the added pressure of the ticking clock to reach a quick decision about this life-altering matter. Little wonder, therefore, that they soon begin drinking heavily—behavior that not only typifies the life of random sensual pleasure they have been leading up till now (a life of which Jig has grown increasingly tired), but will also help explain Jig’s later angry outburst. In the meantime, however, Jig seems the more passive of the two; the discussion opens with her asking a question, and throughout most of the dialogue she seems more hesitant, more uncertain, and more desperate to please. Her tone often sounds like that of a pleading little girl, and indeed her comment comparing the hills to white elephants is intended to be “bright” and pleasing (Complete 212). Yet even this seemingly offhand remark is revealing: A white elephant was conventionally considered a possession unwanted by its owner but one that is difficult to dispose of, or as something rare and valuable but also difficult to maintain. For the American, the baby is an unwanted burden; for Jig it seems to offer the promise of a new, more settled, more satisfying kind of existence. Ironically, the more that the American insists that the “operation” will be “simple” and “natural,” the more complex and unnatural the prospect seems to Jig; physically the procedure may be simple (although the American’s claim that the operation

merely involves “let[ing] the air in” seems either hopelessly naive or brutally cynical), but emotionally and psychologically it seems exceptionally complex, especially for a relatively inexperienced young woman who was living during a time when abortions were anything but accepted or routine. Although the American claims that the pregnancy is “the only thing that bothers us” and is “the only thing that’s made us unhappy,” Jig seems to think and feel differently. She seems increasingly dissatisfied with their life of shallow sensation seeking—a life in which their main activity has been to “look at things and try new drinks” (Complete 212). She has grown weary of the life of random travel symbolized by their suitcases with “labels on them from all the hotels where [in a splendid choice of verb] they had spent nights” (Complete 214; italics added). Jig clearly wants a more permanent existence with a stronger sense of commitment from her partner, but when she tells him that they could have “everything,” the couple cannot even agree on a defi nition of that word. For her it implies a rooted life; for him it suggests continued travel (Complete 213). Although he insists that he does not want her to do anything she does not desire, she easily realizes that this claim is just another manipulative tactic. The discussion, then, reveals not simply their disagreement about abortion but their fundamentally different personalities, values, and goals: The American considers himself a rational, logical being (as when he emphasizes his interest in proof or when he admires the other passengers for waiting “reasonably” for the train), whereas Jig realizes that her nature is more romantic, emotional, and intuitive (as when she says, “I just know things”). If Jig fi nally seems frustrated, depressed, and angry, it is partly because she now understands how little she and her partner have in common and how improbable it is that an abortion will solve any of the deeper problems in their relationship. Thus her very last comment—“I feel fi ne. . . . There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fi ne” (Complete 214)—seems painfully ironic. Whether she has the abortion or elects to keep the baby, it seems highly unlikely that Jig will ever feel “fi ne” in the ways she once hoped for or imagined. Her simple fi nal

Ernest Hemingway

word—which is also the fi nal word of the story as a whole—seems (as does so much else in this story) exceptionally double-edged.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the relationship depicted in this story with the relationship presented in Ezra Pound’s poem “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.” How do the personalities, values, and desires of the two women resemble and/or differ from one another? How are the two works similar in their use of implication, symbolism, and imagery? What kind of future do you foresee for the two women? 2. Read this story alongside Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” How are Jig and Granny obviously different, but what do they also have in common? In what ways, and for what reasons, is each woman frustrated? How do they differ from and/or resemble one another in their personalities? 3. Discuss this tale in relation to John Steinbeck’s story “The Chrysanthemums.” How are landscape and setting used symbolically in both stories? How do the men in the stories compare and/or contrast? How and why do both stories end without a clear resolution? 4. Discuss the appearances of the old woman in this story. How does her presence add to the impact of the narrative? What does she symbolize or represent? Discuss her interactions with the two main characters; how are those interactions significant? In particular, discuss the way Jig interacts with the old woman. What do those interactions reveal about Jig?

A Farewell to Arms (1929) Frederic Henry, a young American lieutenant who is volunteering as an ambulance driver for the Italian army during World War I, enjoys his relations with his lively Italian comrades, including a friendly young doctor named Rinaldi, a thoughtful young priest, and a variety of other colorful characters. His life becomes more complicated, however, when

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he meets and quickly falls in love with Catherine Barkley, a British nurse’s aide whose former fiancé suffered a brutal, fatal injury earlier in the war and whose good friend, a nurse named Ferguson (nicknamed “Fergie”) disapproves of Catherine’s new relationship with Frederic. Frederic is injured when the Austrians shell his camp; while recuperating at the hospital he becomes even more involved with Catherine; she becomes pregnant; the Italian army retreats; Frederic deserts; he and Catherine escape to Switzerland, but Catherine dies while being delivered of a stillborn baby. Hemingway’s fi rst novel, The Sun Also Rises, had dealt with the aftereffects of World War I on a group of feckless Americans and Britons living in continental Europe, while this next novel, A Farewell to Arms, describes the impact of the war itself on Americans, Britons, and Italians in the fi nal years of the confl ict. This emphasis on the so-called Great War—also ironically termed, by optimists at that time, the “war to end all wars”—is entirely appropriate, since the First World War was one of the most important events in human history. It had an undeniably major impact not only on Hemingway himself (who, as had Frederic Henry, had volunteered as an ambulance driver, was wounded, and fell in love with a nurse) but also on his entire generation. This was the group whom the writer Gertrude Stein (Hemingway’s onetime friend) dubbed “the lost generation,” and her adjective has always seemed apt for a number of reasons. In the fi rst place, millions upon millions of young soldiers were literally lost as a result of the war—killed in bloody, vicious battles in which thousands of men often died on a single day merely to acquire or hold a few yards of territory. The war had begun almost by accident, but because most of the European powers were also global empires, it eventually involved the entire planet. It was fought with all the latest technological innovations (such as tanks, airplanes, poison gas, and highly destructive machine guns), and it eventually unleashed profound political and social changes, including the Russian Revolution, the collapse of the German monarchy, the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the rise of the United States to world-power status. Most important for Hemingway


and his generation, however, it helped destroy confidence (especially among artists and intellectuals) in such old-fashioned values as patriotism, nationalism, religion, and idealism. Traditions of all sorts came under withering suspicion; the young people who returned from the war (many of them mentally and physically crippled) often felt not only disgusted and disillusioned by their experiences but also betrayed by the older generation, who had let this seemingly pointless confl ict occur. The mood of these young men and women was often cynical and bleak, and so they were “lost” in the additional senses of feeling rootless, aimless, skeptical, and embittered. As both its title and its plot suggest, A Farewell to Arms reflects the desire of many of Hemingway’s generation to put war—and especially “the” War—behind them. Yet most of them also intuited (correctly, as it turned out) that the end of the First World War might soon lead (ironically enough) to a second and even more destructive confl ict. Indeed, it was partly the pacifism at any price bred by the First World War that helped make the Second inevitable. War, then, is one of the major themes of A Farewell to Arms; love is another. Some readers (including the novelist F. SCOTT FITZGER ALD as well as Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway’s editor) thought that the two themes were not sufficiently integrated, but most readers have had few complaints. Hemingway juxtaposes chapters about the war with chapters about the developing affection between Frederic and Catherine, showing how love provides a source of meaning, happiness, fulfi llment, and inner peace in a world that otherwise seems chaotic, maddening, brutal, and senseless. Despite the urgings of the Italian priest, Frederic can fi nd no source of consolation or stability from such traditional sources as religion, and so, as the novel develops and his own character matures, his relationship with Catherine (which he treats at fi rst as a kind of game) becomes the source of much of his genuine joy and satisfaction. The fact that she ultimately dies—and that she dies while trying to give birth to his child—therefore makes the ending of the novel all the more bitter, painful, and ironic; Hemingway suggests (here as so often elsewhere) that life is not “fair,” that joy can only ever be

temporary, that the best people often die soonest, and that human love is precious precisely because human life is so precarious. By the end of the novel, Frederic has been wounded physically, but the far more serious wound is to his psyche and soul. The tone of the novel is elegiac, and the elegy Frederic offers is not only a tribute to Catherine’s vitality and beauty but a far deeper tribute to the courage and selflessness she personifies. Ironically, Hemingway’s “war novel” is most famous for its vivid depiction of a notorious Italian retreat from war, and the truest example of courage in the book is not provided by the men at arms but by the leading female, who faces her death with the kind of stoic resolve that Hemingway always admired. Of the novel’s leading characters, in fact, Catherine has always attracted not only a good deal of admiration but also a fair amount of controversy. Analysts have praised her vivacity, spirit, and capacity for love, but some have also found her— especially in the book’s early sections—needy, immature, overwrought, and selfless to the point of being self-neglectful. Feminists have often seen her as an eager doormat, all too willing to sacrifice her own interests and fi nally even her life itself on the altar of serving Frederic’s pleasure, and some analysts have even argued that if her death seems almost foreordained, that impression is due less to fate or circumstances than to Hemingway’s general desire to keep his male heroes free of entangling involvements with women (especially women who might compromise male autonomy by becoming mothers). Other analysts, however, have argued that Catherine is far less subservient than is sometimes assumed; they note, for instance, that when Frederic fi rst tries to kiss her, she slaps him (Farewell 26), and they also note that even after the relationship has lasted for a long time, Catherine at one point openly objects when she feels that Frederic has made her feel like a “whore” (Farewell 152). Most significantly, defenders of Catherine argue that as the novel develops, so does she—that she is a far stronger, braver, and more self-reliant person at the end of the book than at the beginning, and that the way she faces death is particularly heroic. There seems

Ernest Hemingway

no denying, however, that Catherine (as do many of Hemingway’s women) seems almost sentimentally immature; she often resembles a little girl, even to the point of sounding mawkish. As she is straining with her labor pains, for instance, she turns and addresses Frederic: “Don’t mind me, darling. Please don’t cry. Don’t mind me. I’m just all gone to pieces. You poor sweet. I love you so and I’ll be good again. I’ll be good this time” (Farewell 322). Sounding sometimes like a doting mother and sometimes like a tearful infant, Catherine is frequently too saccharine for her own good (or the good of the novel). But at least she seems capable of true love, and the mere fact that she is a nurse (combined with her various other generous traits) demonstrates that she is capable of devotion to causes larger than her own momentary pleasures. In both respects she is a defi nite improvement over Lady Brett Ashley, the female lead in Hemingway’s previous novel, who managed to combine a brash, hard-edged exterior; melodramatic self-pity; and shallow, hedonistic egotism in a way that makes Catherine by far the more attractive of the two. Critical comment on Frederic Henry is often as mixed as responses to Catherine. As Catherine does, Frederic shows his concern for others (as well as a considerable degree of bravery) simply by having volunteered for military service—even if his service is mostly confi ned to driving an ambulance. He is well liked and well respected by his subordinates and comrades (especially Rinaldi), and despite being seriously injured, he willingly returns to the front. It is only later, when the entire Italian army is in wholesale retreat and he is falsely suspected of spying for the enemy and faces possible execution, that he decides to desert and makes his own “separate peace” (Farewell 243). Frederic, however, is admirable for other reasons as well: He is a more sensitive and thoughtful soldier than many of his mates, resisting (for instance) their tendency to bait the priest, and he eventually develops an affection and respect for Catherine that transcend a simple appreciation of her physical beauty. Nevertheless, Frederic has often been criticized for an alleged selfishness that supposedly keeps him aloof and apart, and his

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relationship with Catherine (especially in its early stages) has often been seen as exploitative. Some critics consider Frederic immature and self-pitying and argue that he lacks a fi rm core of stable identity; others, however, see him as a typical representative of his time—a figure who is alienated, unsure, rootless, lonely, and fi nally alone. Many readers believe, however, that he is a more mature man by the end of the novel than he was at the beginning and that he owes his maturation largely to the beneficent influence of Catherine. Certainly Frederic is a more ethically attractive figure than just about any nonSpanish male in The Sun Also Rises (with the possible exception of Jake), and by the conclusion of the book Frederic seems truly capable of a kind of genuine love that seems foreign to the thinking of almost any of the characters in the earlier novel. Finally, no discussion of the characters of A Farewell to Arms should fail to mention Rinaldi. One of the most lively, funny, and memorable people Hemingway ever created, he almost always adds wit, good humor, vitality, and a spirit of affectionate friendship to the novel. He shows that his creator was capable of fashioning highly vivid characters (as Hemingway would later prove again when he concocted the equally memorable Pilar in For Whom the Bell Tolls), and Rinaldi also demonstrates that not all the admirable men in Hemingway’s fiction are dour, buttoned-up tough guys. Rinaldi is a highly competent surgeon, but he is also full of life and laughter; he knows his stuff, but he also knows how to have a good time (even, unfortunately, to the point of contracting syphilis). Frederic’s conversations with Rinaldi are far more consistently credible than his conversations with Catherine: The joking, the swearing, the boasting, the insults, even the affection seem easier to believe (and often easier to take) than all the terms such as darling, fine, good boy, lovely, or dear, brave sweet that so often make the exchanges by Frederic and Catherine seem so unbelievably sentimental. Hemingway often had trouble depicting relations between the sexes convincingly, but in describing same-sex friendships he was far more reliable, and nowhere better than in depicting the bond between Frederic and Rinaldi.

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In characterization, plot, theme, and style, A Farewell to Arms struck a number of its initial readers as a defi nite advance over The Sun Also Rises. Later critics have sometimes disagreed, but it seems hard to deny that in its range of characters, events, tones, settings, imagery, and symbols, Farewell is the more capacious book. Simply in terms of phrasing, it has much to recommend it, for although Hemingway here (as elsewhere) shows his debt to the repetitive plainness he borrowed from Gertrude Stein (as in a brief passage full of such deadpan descriptions as “very nice,” “very fi ne,” “very handsomely,” and “very glad”; Farewell 5), elsewhere the diction is far more memorable and inventive. Thus at one point Frederic explains something “winefully” (Farewell 13); at another point a car is described as “looking disgraced” (Farewell 16); later still a character is advised to “chew some coffee” (Farewell 40); and, when Catherine asks Frederic early in their relationship whether he loves her, we get his classic response: “ ‘Yes,’ I lied” (Farewell 30). Consistently the language is intriguing and inventive (or at least far more consistently than in The Sun Also Rises), and the characters also seem more complex, both morally and psychologically. (When Catherine slaps Frederic, for instance, he is not entirely disappointed: “I felt I had a certain advantage” [Farewell 26].) At any rate, there are not only more characters in this book but more kinds of characters; a far broader sweep of humanity is represented here than was present in The Sun Also Rises, and the challenges these people face are also more serious and consequential, often involving matters of literal life and death. All in all (except in some maudlin scenes of romance), this novel seems more mature than its predecessor: The characters are more interesting, the plot is more substantial, and the style is more complex. A Farewell to Arms also represents, in many ways, a farewell to the shallowness that sometimes made The Sun Also Rises cloying and annoying.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast A Farewell to Arms with E. E. CUMMINGS’s novel The Enormous Room. How do both works present World War I, espe-

cially life away from the front? How are their presentations of secondary characters similar and/or distinct? What attitudes toward the war do the two works seem to have in common and/or how do they differ in this respect? How do both works present social relations among soldiers? 2. Read A Farewell to Arms alongside Ezra Pound’s poem “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.” Discuss the ways developing affection is presented in both works. How does the relationship between the Chinese merchant and his wife differ from and/or resemble the relationship between Frederic and Catherine? Is one relationship more sentimental than the other? 3. How is the relationship between Frederic and Catherine similar to and/or different from the relationship between Janie and Tea Cake in ZOR A NEALE HURSTON’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God? How are the couples similar and/or distinct in the reasons they are attracted to each other, in their relations with one another, and in their relations with the outside world? Discuss the similarities and/or differences between the conclusions of both relationships. 4. Trace the role played by Rinaldi in this novel. How does he contribute to the effectiveness of the book? What themes or values tend to be associated with him? Why and how is his relationship with Frederic illuminating? How does his relationship with Frederic differ from Frederic’s relationship with Catherine? What fi nally happens to him in this book, and how is his fi nal fate significant?

“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936, 1938) Harry is a talented American writer who has gone on safari to Africa with a wealthy woman named Helen; although he had hoped someday to produce writing worthy of the memories he carries within him, an accidental scratch has now led to a severe case of gangrene that threatens his very life. As his condition deteriorates and as he and Helen wait for a plane that may possibly carry him to safety,

Ernest Hemingway

Harry ponders all the topics he had hoped to write about, and he regrets that he has allowed a life of easy living to prevent him from achieving his full literary potential. When the plane fi nally arrives, it takes him on a fl ight past the beautiful snowcapped summit of Mount Kilimanjaro—or at least it seems to do so in his fantasy, for in the middle of the night Helen awakens and fi nds Harry dead in his cot. In this well-known story, Hemingway deals with issues that were obviously relevant to his own life. Like Harry, Hemingway himself was a noted writer who feared that he might never achieve all that he was capable of accomplishing. Also like Harry, Hemingway himself had spent much time hunting in Africa, had fallen severely ill there, and had waited anxiously for evacuation by a plane (although Hemingway, unlike Harry, actually was rescued). Finally, Hemingway, like Harry, worried that his goal of producing serious literature might be compromised by the seductions of a wealthy, comfortable lifestyle, including the enervating effect of a domesticating marriage. The story, then, can be read partly as a cautionary self-portrait—as a warning by Hemingway to Hemingway about the risks of failing to hold himself to high literary and personal standards. Yet the work would hardly be worth reading if it were merely an autobiographical memo; its real merit derives from its lively dialogue, its generally convincing characterization, its effective evocations of setting, mood, symbolism, theme, and tone, and especially its alternation between straightforward narrative (rendered in a normal roman typeface) and italicized stream-ofconsciousness flashbacks, in which Harry remembers and ponders all the topics he had hoped someday to turn into powerful prose. Part of the irony of the story, of course, is that whereas Harry is denied the chance to achieve these ambitions, Hemingway himself uses the flashbacks as crucial components of a story that is both well written and skillfully designed. Harry’s fears of failure thus become grist for the mill of Hemingway’s own creative achievement, so that the story is a kind of literary tour de force: It is a highly successful meditation on the risks of not succeeding.

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Harry, at the beginning of the story, is not an especially attractive character. He picks petty quarrels with Helen, becomes sarcastic when she offers help, and seems determined to blame her for his own lack of accomplishment. Such frustrated irritability and irresponsibility are, however, exactly what one might credibly expect of such a personality in such circumstances, and by the end of the story he seems to have mellowed and matured, at least to some degree. Spiritually and psychologically, then, he seems less sick by the conclusion of the tale than he was at the beginning; although he continues to decay physically, he recovers some lost moral ground when he shows a growing ability to appreciate Helen, treat her with some kindness, and cease blaming her for his own shortcomings and mistaken choices. He never completely changes or shows her any genuinely deep affection, but such a transformation not only would have been inconsistent with his hard-nosed personality but would also have been mawkishly sentimental. The story already fl irts dangerously enough with sentimentality as it is, especially in some of the dialogue between Harry and Helen in the second half of the tale, and a syrupy reconciliation between the couple would only have ruined the work. Instead, Hemingway chooses a surprise ending resembling the conclusion of Ambrose Bierce’s famous short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”: Just when we think that the protagonist may have miraculously cheated death, we are brought up short, presented with a corpse. Although the endings of both stories have sometimes been criticized as contrived (one critic called Hemingway’s conclusion “a slick magazine exit” [see Smith 358]), in both cases the authors subtly prepare us for the “surprise,” thus adding an extra level of craftsmanship to their works. In Hemingway’s story this kind of craft is all the more important, because it helps to demonstrate once more the distinction between Hemingway the skilled author and Harry the frustrated writer. Much commentary about “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” has centered on the italicized epigraph with which the story opens, which describes Mount Kilimanjaro itself and reports that the mountain’s

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western summit is known as “the House of God.” Even more intriguingly, the epigraph notes that close to that summit “there is a dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude” (Complete 39). Clearly Hemingway is inviting his readers to connect the epigraph and the story, but the nature of that connection has been a matter of dispute. Some critics, for instance, have seen the leopard as a symbol of Harry’s materialistic desire to live a “high life” of luxurious comfort and privilege—a desire that ultimately leaves him stranded, desiccated, and dead. Other commentators, in contrast, have more plausibly seen the leopard as a symbol of lofty aspiration—of the desire to transcend mundane limits. Interpreted in this way, the leopard can be viewed as symbolizing Harry’s own artistic ambitions, although there is disagreement about whether or not the symbolism is ironic. Is Harry (in other words) comparable to the leopard in having fi nally attained some type of transcendence? Or does Harry contrast with the leopard because he never achieves the kind of hard-won prominence and immortality the leopard fi nally attains? Each position has its advocates, and the debate has led some analysts to argue that Hemingway should be faulted for leaving the fi nal significance of his symbols unclear. Most readers, however, seem satisfied with the story as written—a story that resembles “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” not only in its African setting but also in its focus on a character who lives most intensely right before he dies.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Harry in Hemingway’s story with the title character of EDWIN A RLINGTON ROBINSON’s poem “Richard Cory.” In what ways does each man seem to have many material advantages and thus many reasons to feel satisfied with his life? Why does each man seem, however, not to be satisfied? In which work is the reason for dissatisfaction made more clear? How does each man cope with his dissatisfaction? Which character is more sympathetic? 2. Read this story alongside Gertrude Stein’s book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. How do the

two works depict the roles, responsibilities, and aspirations of the artist? How does each writer use his or her work to comment on himself or herself? How does each writer depict his or her relationship with his or her closest companion? 3. Compare and contrast this story with Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Discuss the works in terms of setting, characterization, theme, and technique. How are the relationships between the two married couples similar and/or different? In what ways do social class and economic status play important roles in both works? Which story has the happier ending? Which of the two works strikes you as the more interesting? Explain your response. 4. The previous discussion mentions the story’s “generally convincing characterization . . . [and] its effective evocations of setting, mood, symbolism, theme, and tone.” Try to fi nd one passage in the story that especially illustrates all of these aspects of the work’s effectiveness, and then discuss that passage in detail.

“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1938) Francis Macomber and his wife, Margot, are wealthy Americans in a troubled marriage who are on safari in Africa, where their guide is a British professional hunter named Robert Wilson. When the inexperienced Macomber flees after being confronted by a lion he has wounded, the sarcastic Margot treats her husband with contempt; she even makes little effort to disguise the fact that she has slept with Wilson. The next day, after Macomber demonstrates surprising courage while hunting, he seems to be a new and much more self-confident man, but as he is about to be attacked by a wild buffalo he has been pursuing, he dies when Margot fi res on the animal (even though Wilson later insinuates that she was really aiming at Macomber himself). This is one of Hemingway’s most famous and most controversial stories. Most of the controversy surrounds the fi nal scene, in which a shot from

Ernest Hemingway

Margot’s rifle strikes Macomber in the back of the head just as he is being charged by the wild buffalo. Did Margot, as Wilson suggests, intentionally kill her husband because she feared his new-found courage and self-confidence and was worried that he might divorce her? Or did she genuinely seek to save her husband’s life by taking aim at the buffalo, killing Macomber merely by a horrific accident? Opinion concerning these questions has long been divided, although commentators now most often argue that Margot did indeed intend to save her husband. The narrator, after all, explicitly states that “Mrs. Macomber, in the car, had shot at the buffalo” (Complete 28), and analysts increasingly have been inclined to accept this statement at face value. Wilson (these interpreters argue) is an unreliable commentator whose assessment of Margot’s actions is biased not only by his own cynicism but also by his awareness that if Margot reported him to the authorities for chasing buffalo from a moving car, he could lose his license and thus his career. From this perspective, then, his closing attacks on Margot are meant to intimidate her into silence about his own professional misconduct, and in fact some critics have even suggested that Wilson intentionally engineers Macomber’s death—that he deliberately creates the conditions that make it likely that Macomber will be shot by his wife. Hemingway, however, leaves the ending of the story effectively ambiguous. Margot never denies Wilson’s charges; instead, she merely repeats the phrase “Stop it” again and again, as if she cannot bear to hear his words and cannot think of a more effective answer. Nor does the narrator himself intervene to make a stronger case for Margot; instead, Wilson literally has the last word, and as the story closes, Margot seems desperately defenseless. Perhaps she feels guilty, not for having intentionally killed Macomber but for having betrayed him by sleeping with Wilson, or perhaps she is momentarily too overcome with shock at his death to muster an effective refutation of Wilson’s charges. Perhaps she senses that on some subconscious level she did in fact seek or desire her husband’s death, so that even if she did not deliberately aim her gun at him, she did hope to be rid of him.

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In other words, her conscience may be deeply troubled even though she may be technically innocent of any crime. Hemingway, in short, has crafted a masterfully complex conclusion to an exceptionally complicated tale. Instead of providing clear answers and a pat ending, he leaves us with nagging questions about the moral and psychological complexity of all three major characters. Macomber himself, for instance, certainly seems increasingly complex (and thus increasingly interesting) as the story proceeds. Although he is relatively young, is physically fit, is an accomplished athlete, and is a highly skilled fisherman, as the story opens he has “just shown himself, very publicly, to be a coward” (Complete 6). It might be easy, then, to sympathize with the disdain that Margot (and, to a lesser extent, Wilson) adopts toward Macomber, but, as the story proceeds, Wilson feels growing sympathy and respect for the novice hunter, not only because Macomber seems genuinely remorseful for fleeing from the lion but also because Wilson sees him as a victim of his bitchy, unforgiving, and self-centered wife. Ironically, the more Margot throws herself at Wilson, the less respect he seems to feel for her. In addition, the more she condemns Macomber, the easier it is for all readers to feel sympathy for him. This is especially the case when we learn that even the Africans have a proverb “that says a brave man is always frightened three times by a lion; when he fi rst sees his track, when he fi rst hears him roar and when he fi rst confronts him” (Complete 11). Macomber’s fear of the lion, then, hardly seems inexplicable (especially since this is his fi rst lion hunt). Meanwhile, his willingness to go out the next day in pursuit of buffalo also helps to rehabilitate him not only in Wilson’s eyes but also in the eyes of most readers. His courage in facing and killing three wild buffalo (including shooting the biggest one entirely on his own) further enhances Wilson’s (and the reader’s) respect for him. Most important, however, that act helps renew Macomber’s respect for himself. His abrupt and surprising death, then, occurs at the most ironic of all possible moments: Macomber dies just when he is feeling most alive—just when he is most looking forward to the future. If at the beginning

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of the story he seemed a weak cuckold, by the end of the tale he has evolved into a far more intriguing character. How might he have dealt with Margot and her infidelity in light of his new-found self-regard? Hemingway leaves the answer to that question tantalizingly unclear. Macomber’s death is one of the most ironic in American literature, since he dies when he feels most vital. Margot herself is also a fascinating character, who becomes even more complicated as the tale proceeds. Sometimes she seems weak; sometimes she seems hard-hearted and passive-aggressive. Sometimes she seems to feel sorry for her husband; sometimes she treats him with contempt. At times she seems sexually promiscuous in an almost smugly taunting way, while at other times she wins sympathy as an aging beauty trapped in a fundamentally unsatisfying marriage in which she lacks any real autonomy. A different, lesser kind of writer might have made Margot an object of sustained sarcasm and might have depicted Macomber himself with a total lack of compassion; Hemingway, instead, implies the complexity of each character and the inevitable complications of their relationship. He manages to take their complexities and, rather than letting them seem a bundle of inconsistent contradictions, he makes rounded, credible characters from them. By the end of the tale, neither the husband nor the wife seems a shallow caricature, and the same is also true of Wilson. Although often he has been seen as a kind of spokesman for Hemingway himself (particularly in his stoic attitudes toward death; in his cool, businesslike approach to hunting; in his respect for Macomber’s eventual courage; and in his disdain for Margot’s bitchiness), Wilson has also increasingly been seen as a morally unreliable judge of others’ characters and even (by some) as a scheming hypocrite. He is willing to bed a married woman while viewing her as a kind of slut, and he prides himself on his professionalism while being willing to break professional rules. Yet he also shows himself capable of giving Macomber his due and of discerning the intricacies of the Macomber marriage. In short, all three major characters are convincingly complicated personalities, and they are enmeshed in a plot that is

itself so complex that one’s immediate impulse, upon fi nishing the story, is to read it again.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Hemingway’s story with Nella Larsen’s novel titled Passing. In particular, discuss the ways both works describe complex marriages; the ways they present sudden, unexpected deaths; and the ways they conclude with compelling moral and psychological ambiguities. What is the evidence for and against the “guilt” of the two surviving women? What are their own attitudes toward the deaths they witness? 2. Discuss the depiction of gender roles in this story and in JACK L ONDON’s novel The Sea-Wolf. In what ways is Humphrey Van Weyden, in that novel, similar to and/or different from Francis Macomber? How do both characters evolve in similar ways? In what ways is Margot in Hemingway’s story similar to and/or different from Maude Brewster in The Sea-Wolf ? How does Wilson in Hemingway’s tale resemble and/or differ from Wolf Larsen in London’s novel? 3. Discuss the issue of criminal and moral guilt in this story and in THEODORE DREISER’s novel An American Tragedy. How does the situation of Francis and Margot Macomber parallel the situation of Clyde Griffith and Roberta Alden? What differences exist between their circumstances? Discuss the intentions of Clyde and Margot, and discuss the role of accident in both works. 4. How and why is the African setting effective in this story? Why do you think Hemingway chose to place his characters in such a “primitive” environment, and why did he make one of the major antagonists in the story an animal rather than another human? In what ways does this story deal with “primal” emotions and ancient, almost primeval human passions and concerns?

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) Robert Jordan, a young American professor who has returned to Spain during its civil war to sup-

Ernest Hemingway

port the side of the Republicans against the fascists, has been assigned to work with local partisans to blow up a bridge that will be crucial in a coming offensive. While living in the remote mountains with a group of republican peasants (headed by the unreliable Pablo and his feisty, courageous wife, Pilar), Jordan falls in love with a beautiful young woman named Maria, who has recently been gangraped by the fascists. After much preparation, many delays, and numerous dangers, Jordan succeeds in destroying the bridge, but he dies in the fighting that immediately follows. Just as Hemingway set A Farewell to Arms in the midst of World War I, so he set For Whom the Bell Tolls in the midst of the civil war in Spain, which immediately preceded World War II and which, as many people foresaw, was really the opening salvo of that later confl ict. The Spanish civil war was not only the fi rst major armed struggle between fascist and anti-fascist forces, but it also gave the major Fascist powers (such as Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy) the opportunity to aid their allies while also testing new methods of warfare, including heavy reliance on airpower and the wholesale bombing of civilian targets. For numerous people in Hemingway’s generation, defeating the fascists in Spain was considered crucial to preventing the spread of fascism elsewhere, but, even before Hemingway’s novel was published, the Spanish Republicans had been crushed and the Second World War (which had been widely feared but just as widely expected) had already begun. Within a year the United States itself would enter the fight, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Hemingway’s novel, then, was both an elegy for Spain and a call to future arms: It celebrated a Spanish cause that had already been defeated, but it was also meant to inspire courage and resolve on behalf of the even larger struggle now under way. Responses to Hemingway’s newest novel varied right from the start. Most critics immediately praised the new book; they saw it as a return to its author’s earlier strength after he had produced a number of books in the 1930s widely regarded as disappointments. For Whom the Bell Tolls was greeted by many reviewers as proof that Heming-

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way could still write major narratives, and indeed some reviewers considered this work his best novel so far. Most reviewers praised it for its length, its complexity, its vivid characters, its greater variety of style, its moral seriousness, its political relevance, and its skillful blending of exciting physical action and suspense with a touching story of genuine love. The book was an immediate best seller, and fi lm rights for a major Hollywood movie were quickly purchased. Hemingway had thus produced a novel that pleased not only most professional commentators but also the public at large. Nevertheless, critics did (of course) disagree on some points, and the disagreement continues to this day. Some analysts, for instance, found the novel too openly political and propagandistic; they believed that Hemingway wrote too much as a partisan of a particular cause, and they therefore argued that the characters were often too abstract, too thin, and too wooden. Other critics, in contrast, argued that the book was not political enough; they thought that Hemingway had failed to clarify the social ideas and ideals that motivated the fighting he described. Instead (these critics contended) he tended to focus too much on individual personalities, leaving obscure the larger causes at stake. Still other reviewers, however, praised Hemingway for his objectivity—especially for his ability to suggest that atrocities had been committed by both sides and his willingness to show that even the republican cause, with which he obviously sympathized, was not without its flaws, especially because of the assistance it received from Soviet Stalinists. For many of the book’s initial reviewers, then, the book was politically controversial: Some considered it too stridently political, some felt that its politics were fuzzy and indistinct, while others felt that Hemingway had struck a delicate balance, producing a work of enormous political relevance while not sacrificing his ability to depict credible characters. Characterization, in fact, was another point of controversy among the earliest reviewers of the book. Many readers (indeed, probably most) thought that Hemingway had managed to present a beautiful and moving account of the rapidly developing love (and frequent lovemaking) between

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Robert Jordan and Maria, the Spanish peasant. Their romantic involvement, which becomes physical almost immediately and which develops forcefully over the course of a mere three days, struck many readers as charming, convincing, lyrical, honest, and profound. Other reviewers, however, considered the affair too abrupt, too conventional, too sentimental, and too much a reflection of an almost adolescent male fantasy in which a beautiful woman immediately offers her sexual favors. Jordan does not even need to court Maria; instead, she quickly presents herself to him, climbing at once into his sleeping bag for a night of passionate lovemaking. One Spanish reviewer, Arturo Barea, found Maria’s behavior literally incredible; he argued that no self-respecting Spanish woman of Maria’s era, class, and circumstances would behave in this way and expect to keep her reputation. He also argued that Jordan’s constant tendency to call Maria his “rabbit,” as a term of tender affection, would have been laughable to most Spaniards, since that term in Spain is a vulgar reference to a woman’s genitals. Hemingway’s slip, in this respect and many others, reflected (according to Barea, who knew Hemingway personally) his relatively shallow knowledge of Spanish society, customs, and phrasing. Barea asserted, for instance, that the language attributed to the Spanish characters is often stilted and pompous, and that Hemingway, in attempting to convey the true flavor of Spanish speech, had offered only incredible distortions (see Meyer 350–361). On the other hand, most English-speaking reviewers found the diction of Hemingway’s Spaniards (particularly their obscenities) vivid and convincing, and the book does in fact remain one of his most popular in Spanish-speaking countries. If Hemingway’s rendering of Spanish dialect is indeed inaccurate, most readers seem untroubled by that fact, and if the term rabbit seems objectionable to any English-speaking readers, it is probably because the word sometimes, ironically, gives the love scenes a tone that is occasionally too sugary. The problem, then, is not vulgarity but sentimentality. Arturo Barea, the Spanish commentator who objected to Hemingway’s depiction of Maria, also criticized the ways he describes Pablo and Pilar.

Spanish peasants from the mountains would never (Barea alleged) accept leadership from a couple as foreign to their parochial culture as Pablo and Pilar—especially not from Pilar herself, who is a Gypsy. For most readers, however, Pilar is one of the most memorable and appealing characters in this book; like Ma Joad in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, she is vigorous, earthy, opinionated, and full of spirit, and more than one early reviewer compared her to Shakespeare’s Falstaff both in her size and in her gregarious self-assurance. Occasionally a reviewer objected that Pilar was overdone and overexposed, but for most readers she remains one of the best aspects of the book, contributing a vitality it might otherwise lack. As were a number of the other “secondary” characters (especially El Sordo and Anselmo), Pilar was praised for giving the novel a range and depth often missing from some of Hemingway’s earlier fiction, and although some reviewers complained about the novel’s allegedly excessive length, most praised it for its substantial exploration of a multitude of interesting characters facing a host of daunting moral, physical, and psychological challenges. Robert Jordan struck many reviewers as a more thoughtful, intelligent, and reflective hero than many earlier Hemingway protagonists, and the novel in which he is the central character was greeted as mature and full of meaning—a story in which much more is at stake than who beds whom, who drinks what, who slugs whom, how many fish are caught, how many bulls are killed, the skill one shows in the techniques of fishing, or the courage one shows in fighting bulls.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Hemingway’s depiction of Spain with THORNTON WILDER’s depiction of Peru in The Bridge of San Luis Rey. What techniques does each writer use to try to make his presentation of a foreign culture seem authentic? How do the works differ and/or resemble one another in their styles of language and in the kinds of characters they present? Discuss the symbolic functions of the bridges in both works. 2. How are the attitudes toward war in this novel similar to and/or different from the attitudes

Ernest Hemingway

toward war in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms? What factors made World War I seem, in the minds of many of Hemingway’s contemporaries, a different kind of confl ict from the struggle against fascism? How are the hero and heroine in For Whom the Bell Tolls similar to and/or different from the hero and heroine in A Farewell to Arms? How do the plots of the two books—especially their conclusions—compare and contrast? 3. Ambrose Bierce’s story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” also deals with a man’s effort to destroy a bridge during wartime. How is Bierce’s protagonist similar to and/or different from Robert Jordan? What differences are there between the causes the two men represent? What is the nature of each man’s relationship with the woman he loves? Why is it significant that Jordan acts as a member of a group whereas Bierce’s protagonist acts as an individual? What is the implied attitude of each author toward his protagonist? 4. Discuss the characterization of Pilar. What does she contribute to the book? How (if at all) does she detract from its success? How does the presentation of this character reflect the strengths (and perhaps also the flaws) of Hemingway’s general method in this novel? Compare and contrast Pilar with Maria. Why does Robert Jordan admire them both? What do they have in common despite their obvious differences?

The Old Man and the Sea (1952) Santiago is an old Cuban fisherman who has gone almost three months without making a significant catch—a fact that causes many of his fellow villagers to consider him pitiful, laughable, or unlucky, and a fact that also causes the parents of Manolin, a boy who assists and adores the old man, to put their son to work on another boat. One day, however, Santiago’s bait is taken by a huge marlin; although the old man’s struggle with the fi sh endures for two days, he fi nally succeeds in outlasting the creature and claiming his prize. Unfortunately, however, as

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the old man heads back to port on the third day with his enormous catch, the marlin is attacked and almost entirely devoured by sharks. Nevertheless, at the end of the tale Santiago feels enormously tired but not entirely defeated. When it was published in 1952, this short novel (or novella) helped restore Hemingway’s faltering reputation. In the immediately preceding years, many critics had begun to feel (perhaps along with Hemingway himself) that his best days as an author were behind him, but The Old Man and the Sea was greeted with enormous critical and popular acclaim. WILLIAM FAULKNER considered it Hemingway’s best book, and it was certainly not a coincidence that Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature just two years after this novel was published. In the years since its fi rst printing, the reputation of the novel has declined somewhat, but the work remains one of its author’s most widely read, widely taught, and best-loved books, partly because it deals with issues of such timeless concern and partly because it focuses on a central character who seems to be a kind of modern Everyman. Practically all readers can identify with Santiago’s extended misfortune, his growing isolation, and his sense of being overtaken and undermined by age, while most readers would clearly also like to respond to such challenges with the kind of courage, dignity, and determination that Santiago displays. Unlike the hedonism, disillusionment, and nihilism so tiresomely emphasized (if accurately reported) in such earlier works as The Sun Also Rises, the values articulated and implied by The Old Man and the Sea are life affi rming and even inspiring, and the issues the later book deals with seem of broad existential relevance. In The Sun Also Rises Hemingway deals with characters who are shallow and rather spoiled; in The Old Man and the Sea he presents a protagonist who might symbolize anyone confronting the kinds of difficult challenges common to most human lives. Certainly Santiago, on one level, symbolizes the aging Hemingway himself, and the old fisherman’s struggle to tame and subdue the powerful marlin is almost an allegory of Hemingway’s own struggle to produce a major, enduring piece of writing.

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From this perspective, then, the voracious, scavenging sharks represent the hordes of literary critics who are always willing to descend on a dedicated author’s work and tear it to pieces. If this were the story’s only significance, however, the book would not only be of limited relevance but also run the risk of being highly sentimental and self-pitying. Admittedly, even when it is viewed as the story of an old man worshipped by a boy and bested by nature, the tale does sometimes veer in the direction of maudlin melodrama (especially when the old fisherman is compared, a bit too heavy-handedly, to the suffering, crucified Christ), and some major critics have in fact found the story far too mawkish. Generally, however, Hemingway guards against this danger through a number of mostly successful means. For one thing, Santiago rarely really thinks of himself as a victim; he never asks for pity, and he usually deflects it when it is offered. He stoically accepts his fate (whatever that fate may ultimately prove to be), and in his struggle with the marlin (and even more in his angry, violent combat with the sharks), he shows a tough pugnacity that allows him to preserve his own respect while winning the respect of the reader. At the same time, he evinces a kind of humility that prevents him from seeming excessively “macho”: He is keenly aware of his own flaws, mistakes, and foibles. He is, in short, a fairly complex character beneath a veneer of primitive simplicity, and the fact that the book’s only real love interest is the taciturn love between the old man and the boy means that the novel lacks the often syrupy romance that sometimes makes some other Hemingway novels too sugary. There are no “rabbits” or “darlings” or even “bitches” in this book to mar its understated tone; instead, Hemingway keeps his focus squarely on one person’s struggle to live, succeed, and endure. It is hard to imagine a reader who could not empathize with such desires on one level or another. The style of this book, like the style of Hemingway’s writings in general, is simple, clear, and straightforward, but, if anything, the phrasing here seems even more clean and classic than before. Gone is the sophisticated, cynical wit often employed by the pretentious characters of The Sun Also Rises;

gone, too, is all the babyish love talk of A Farewell to Arms. Also gone are the vivid but sometimes quaint attempts of For Whom the Bell Tolls to capture Spanish speech in English diction (all those thees and thous, not to mention the unfortunate rabbits). Instead, as the very title of The Old Man and the Sea suggests, the emphasis in this book is on universal, elemental facts presented in plain, almost pristine language. Hemingway never lets us forget that the speakers are Cuban (he occasionally uses foreign terms and foreign sentence structure), but the language rarely sounds abnormally remote from everyday English speech. Nor does it seem affl icted or affected by the repetitive, Gertrude Steinian style that sometimes mars some of Hemingway’s early works (with all those phrases such as “very nice” and “very good” and “very fi ne” that quickly become so tediously predictable). In this book, Hemingway lets his words do whatever they need to do in any particular instance; he seems less interested than before in making the style conform to preconceived patterns. Stylistically, a reader can never be quite sure what may be coming next, and so, simply in terms of phrasing, the book is rarely monotonous. In terms of plot, as well, the book sustains interest. The basic story—an old man struggles with a giant fish far out at sea—is inherently suspenseful: Will the fisherman succeed? Will the fish escape? Might the fisherman die? Indeed, our focus is so much on Santiago’s initial battle with the marlin that it does not occur to us that he might win that battle but lose the war—that the giant fish, once caught, might itself be assailed by sharks. The abrupt arrival of these predators is a surprise (even though, of course, it should not be), and then the suspense begins all over again: Will the sharks entirely consume the marlin? Will Santiago himself fall victim to the sharks? How will Santiago fi nally react if the sharks do succeed in stealing the marlin that means so much to him? Thus, although the plot of the book is simple, one’s interest rarely lags, and although most people cannot (of course) relate in any personal way to the struggles of a deep-sea fisherman, most humans can easily identify in general terms with the kinds of hopes, disappointments, and challenges Santiago faces and with the spirit he tries to sustain.

Ernest Hemingway

The novel deals with archetypal, primordial emotions, such as the desire to succeed in one’s work, the desire to achieve luck and display skill, the desire to be respected and even loved, the desire to recapture lost youth, the desire to set a good example, the desire to retain one’s self-respect, and the desire to age with dignity and grace. Far more, perhaps, than any of Hemingway’s other novels, this one speaks to some of the deepest, most universal of human yearnings, even as it reminds us of the courage, grace, and resilience people at their best can achieve and display. Little wonder, then, that the book sold so well or that Faulkner not only called it Hemingway’s “best” but also speculated that time might “show it to be the best single piece of any of us, I mean his and my contemporaries” (see Meyer 414). If such praise today seems excessive, one can at least understand the generous impulse that prompted it.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read this novel alongside John Steinbeck’s The Pearl and discuss the works in terms of their settings, their styles, and their use of characterization. In what senses (and in what ways) are both works “parables”? What is the “moral” of each story? Which work is morally more complicated? In other words, which book deals more insistently with matters of right and wrong, and which presents characters who are ethically more complex? What are some differences between the basic kinds of confl ict presented in each work? 2. Compare and contrast this novel with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. In particular, discuss the works in terms of style, structure, themes, symbolism, and characterization. Why is Melville’s book so much longer than Hemingway’s? Why is the style of Melville’s novel so much more diverse than the style of Hemingway’s book? How does Captain Ahab differ from Santiago in his motives and personality? What are some symbolic meanings of the marlin in Hemingway’s novel and of the whale in Melville’s? 3. Discuss Santiago in relation to the old man in John Steinbeck’s story “The Leader of the People.” How are the two men similar and/or distinct? Discuss their relations with the boys in both stories. Dis-

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cuss their relations with the other adults. How does each old man try to retain his self-respect? How does each relate to his past? How do the concluding tones of the two works compare? 4. Trace and discuss the relationship between Santiago and Manolin. What does each character represent to the other? How does each character display the kinds of values and character traits that Hemingway tends to admire? What traits make each character worthy of the reader’s respect?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON HEMINGWAY AND HIS WORK 1. Trace the ethical evolution of the male and female protagonists in Hemingway’s fi rst three major novels—The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. In moral terms, are the hero and heroine of the second novel more admirable than the hero and heroine of the fi rst book? Are the hero and heroine of the third book an ethical advance on the central characters of the two earlier books? If so, explain how; if not, explain why not. 2. Discuss the role of religion in Hemingway’s four major novels—The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea. How, why, and to what extent does religion play a significant role in these works? In particular, how do Christian elements figure into these books? What does their presence and/or absence say about cultural changes in the 20th century? In what ways do Hemingway’s writings seem to reflect any pre-Christian or non-Christian attitudes, such as stoicism or pantheism? What were Hemingway’s own religious views? 3. Discuss the role of nature in at least three different works by Hemingway. Is there any consistency to the ways he presents the external world in these works? Is nature presented as comforting, threatening, indifferent, ugly, beautiful, or some combination of these? Given the decline of religion among many people in the 20th century, why is man’s relationship with nature all the more important as a topic for serious writers?

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4. Read In Our Time as a book that foreshadows later aspects of Hemingway’s career in its style, themes, techniques, and characterization. How does this early work anticipate one or more of his later writings in one or more of these ways? How is Nick Adams a precursor of later Hemingway figures? How are relations between male friends, or relations between males and females, or relations between the young and their elders depicted in In Our Time in ways that shed light on Hemingway’s later works? How is the fi nal tone of In Our Time similar to and/or different from the fi nal tone of The Old Man and the Sea? 5. Hemingway’s stories and novels have often been turned into fi lms. Choose one of the fi lmed versions of one of his works, and compare and contrast the fi lm with the original text. How does the fi lm depart from the text? Are the departures effective? Why may such departures have seemed necessary to the screenwriter or director? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the fi lm when it is compared with the original text? 6. Choose one of Hemingway’s lesser-known and less well-regarded novels (such as Across the River and Into the Trees, Islands in the Stream, or The Garden of Eden) and discuss the effectiveness of the work. Why is the book less respected than other works by Hemingway? In what ways is it successful or unsuccessful? How does it resemble and/or differ from his other writings? 7. Choose one of Hemingway’s novels, and then select several of his short stories written at roughly the same time. What similarities and/or differences do you see between the longer work and the shorter ones? What do they have in common in terms of themes, plot, characterization, style, structure, or techniques? 8. Choose one relatively brief passage from a work by Hemingway—approximately a page in length—and analyze that passage in as much detail as possible. For example, discuss the

denotations and connotations of particular words, the length and structure of particular sentences, the implications of particular images, or the effectiveness of the characterization and dialogue. How does the chosen passage contribute to the work as a whole? How is it typical of the entire work? How does it look back at, or forward to, other portions of the larger text? 9. Discuss the ways women are presented in at least three different works by Hemingway. What similarities and/or differences do you see in the way female characters are depicted? What traits do various women characters seem to symbolize or represent? Does Hemingway present women effectively and convincingly? What generalizations, if any, can you make about the ways he depicts women? 10. Read a biography of Hemingway, and then discuss the ways in which his own experiences, ideas, and personality are reflected in one of his works. Is knowledge of Hemingway’s life important to a proper understanding and interpretation of the work you selected? If so, why? If not, why not? WORKS CITED

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Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition. New York: Scribner, 1987. ———. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner, 1929. ———. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Scribner, 1940. ———. In Our Time. New York: Scribner, 1958. ———. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner, 1952. ———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, 1954. The Hemingway Resource Center. Available online. URL: http://www.lostgeneration.com. Accessed April 7, 2009. The Hemingway Society. Available online. URL: http://www.hemingwaysociety.org/#welcome.asp. Accessed April 7, 2009.

Ernest Hemingway

Hoffman, Frederick J. “Ernest Hemingway.” In Sixteen Modern American Authors: A Survey of Research and Criticism, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 367–416. New York: Norton, 1973. Meyer, Jeffrey. Hemingway: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Reynolds, Michael S., ed. Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983. Sandison, David. Ernest Hemingway: An Illustrated Biography. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1999.

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Smith, Paul. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989. Stark, Bruce. “Ernest Hemingway.” In Sixteen Modern American Authors. Vol. 2, A Survey of Research and Criticism since 1972, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 404– 479. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990. Tyler, Lisa. Student Companion to Ernest Hemingway. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2001. Wagner, Linda W. Ernest Hemingway: Six Decades of Criticism. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1987.

Robert C. Evans

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) [M]y best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn’t write anything. (The Big Sea)

L

angston Hughes burst upon the American literary scene in the 1920s with prodigious force. He was quickly embraced as one of the most talented black writers of his day, and his early poetry, in particular, was accorded immense and widespread respect. Although he never (in the eyes of some critics) lived up to the enormous potential of his youth, he is still considered one of the most important and most influential of all AfricanAmerican authors. James Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, the son of James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Mercer Langston, who had married in 1899. Almost immediately the boy was called Langston, and almost immediately, too, his father absented himself from the life of his wife and son, moving to Mexico because of a job and deciding to stay there to escape the pressures of racial discrimination in the United States. Relations between young Langston and his own mother were often strained, and for much of his youth he lived with Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston, his grandmother, while Carrie sought employment in various locations. Although Langston, his mother, and his grandmother traveled to Mexico to meet Langston’s father in 1907, no reunion of the family resulted from the visit, and Langston grew up in various cities in the United States, including Lawrence, Topeka, and Kansas City, Kansas, as well as Cleveland, Ohio, and Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Most of the fi rst decade or so of his life, however, was spent in Lawrence with his grandmother, but then, in 1915, after her death, he moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his now-divorced mother and her new husband, Homer Clark, whose son (Gwyn “Kit” Clark) became Langston’s new stepbrother. Already at this early age Langston was showing defi nite literary talent and was chosen class poet by his fellow eighth graders. After moving to Cleveland in 1916 and beginning high school there, Hughes continued to develop his interest in literature; he read the writings of a variety of American poets and published his own verse in the school magazine. By 1918 his mother had separated from her husband and moved to Chicago, where Hughes visited her that summer, but he made a more important (and more distressing) trip in 1919 when he visited his father in Mexico, where conflicts, especially concerning Langston’s ambitions to become a professional writer, soon emerged. Hughes’s father, who had an important post with a power company, believed that his son should set his sights on a more practical and profitable goal than being a poet; tensions between the father and son became so severe that Langston actually became physically ill and had to be hospitalized. Nevertheless, on returning to Cleveland, Hughes received an allowance from his father and continued to succeed at school. When he graduated in 1920, he had already begun to write some of his most notable poems (such as “When

252

Langston Hughes

Sue Wears Red”), and while making a second visit to his father in 1921 he composed one of the lyrics for which he is still best known (“The Negro Speaks of Rivers”), which was soon published in the Crisis, one of the most prominent African-American journals. Hughes’s father, however, wanted his son to become an engineer, not a poet, and so the boy’s second visit to Mexico was not much happier than the fi rst. Despite these tensions between father and son, the elder Hughes did agree to pay for his son’s education for one year at Columbia University in New York City. The move to New York could not have been more auspicious for Langston, since the mid-1920s became the years of the so-called Harlem Renaissance, that great outpouring of literary, musical, and artistic talent by blacks who had been flocking to New York for some time. Although fi nancial pressures played a part in Hughes’s decision to withdraw from Columbia in 1922, in 1923 he was living, working, and writing in Harlem, all the while making contacts with other significant writers and earning a growing reputation for his own works. His time in Harlem was interrupted, however, by several expeditions abroad as a sailor on merchant ships, including trips to West Africa in 1923 and to Europe (including Paris) in 1924. These journeys and sojourns—which were full of adventure and new and exciting experiences of all sorts—helped contribute to the tone and substance of Hughes’s increasingly unconventional verse, which was also influenced by the jazz and blues music so popular during this time. After returning to the United States, he briefly took up residence in Washington, D.C., where he worked in various low-paying jobs, including as a busboy. Nevertheless, he was still in contact with various writers and intellectuals, and when he heard that the famous poet Vachel Lindsay would be reading his work in Washington, Hughes went to the hotel where Lindsay was staying, presented three of his own poems to the great man in the hotel dining room, and later had the pleasure of learning that Lindsay had read and praised the poems in public, thus winning them and their author the attention of the

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press. (Ironically, Hughes himself could not attend the reading because of his race.) In 1925, too, Hughes won a literary prize offered by the magazine Opportunity, and his work was also published in a number of significant venues. His contacts with other black authors and intellectuals were also broadening, and, with the support of a wealthy white patroness (Amy Spingarn), he was able to enroll at all-black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1926. The most important event of his life during that year, however, was the publication of his fi rst collection of poems, The Weary Blues, which was issued by the distinguished publisher Alfred A. Knopf. The poems of that collection shocked many readers (including many black readers), not only because of their substance (especially their focus on what some considered the less savory aspects of black urban life) but also because of their style (which was often colloquial, jazzy, and vulgar in a variety of senses of that word). Hughes vigorously defended his work from the attacks it provoked, but the poems also received widespread praise—so much, in fact, that in 1927 he published another book of verse (Fine Clothes to the Jew), which created even more controversy. By now Hughes was recognized as one of the most important African-American writers of his day, and by this time he had also won the patronage of yet another patroness—a rich, eccentric white woman (Charlotte Osgood Mason) who took a strong interest in black culture and in supporting (and sometimes trying to control) the careers of young black artists. Hughes welcomed Mason’s support but eventually chafed at the strings to which it was attached. By 1929 Hughes had graduated from Lincoln University and had fi nished a novel titled Not without Laughter, but these two strokes of personal good fortune were offset by the onset of the Great Depression, the enormous economic downturn that overtook the country in the fall of that year and created gloom and despair throughout the 1930s. Meanwhile, Hughes’s personal fortunes took a downturn of their own when he quarreled with Mason in 1930 and when he also, that year,

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entered into confl ict with a fellow black writer, ZOR A NEALE HURSTON, with whom he had been cowriting a play. Nevertheless, on the plus side, 1930 saw the publication of Not without Laughter as well as Hughes’s selection as a recipient of an award from the Harmon Foundation, an organization established to encourage the work of black authors. In 1931 he was also awarded a travel grant from the Rosenwald Foundation; this allowed him to tour the southern states, where he gave poetry readings and (unfortunately) came face to face with blatant examples of racial discrimination and injustice. By this time his politics (like those of many American intellectuals during the Great Depression) had become distinctly left-wing, and even somewhat Marxist; in 1932 he even traveled to the Soviet Union to participate in a planned motion picture, and by the end of that same year he published an extremely controversial poem titled “Goodbye Christ” in a black Marxist journal. The poem sparked outrage among many readers for many years, and Hughes would never quite escape the controversy it inspired. Also appearing in 1932 was a book of children’s verse titled The Dream Keeper as well as Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play. For Hughes, life in the 1930s was characterized by travel. Returning from Russia, he passed through Soviet Asia and also visited Japan, Korea, China, Hawaii, and California, settling for a time (with the support of another patron) in 1933 in the beautiful town of Carmel-by-the-Sea. He had to flee that community in 1934, however, because of threats arising from his reputation as a communist, but 1934 was also the year of another literary triumph—the publication of a well-reviewed collection of stories titled The Ways of White Folks. Meanwhile, further travel took Hughes to Mexico (to settle the estate of his now-dead father), back to California in 1935 (where further protests dogged him), then to Ohio to visit his mother, and then to New York to witness the production of a play of his titled Mulatto. He was also at work on other plays during this time, including Little Ham, When the Jack Hollers (written in collaboration with Arna Bontemps), and Angelo Herndon Jones (which in

1936 won a contest sponsored by New Theatre magazine). Hughes’s commitment to drama was also affi rmed by the staging, in 1937, of his plays Drums of Haiti and Joy to My Soul and by his decision to establish, that year, the Harlem Suitcase Theater, which put on his newest play (Don’t You Want to Be Free?) in 1938. He wrote further dramatic works (including The Organizer, Young Man of Harlem, and Front Porch) that year, in addition to publishing a collection of left-wing poetry titled A New Song. By 1939 he was at work on two different fi lm scripts in California (God Sends Sunday and Way Down South), and 1940 saw the publication of his important autobiographical novel, The Big Sea. After a bout of serious ill health in 1941, he was soon back at work. He continued to show a strong interest in theater, founding the Skyloft Players in Chicago in 1941, working on a musical called The Sun Do Move, and even writing radio scripts in 1942 to support the American cause in World War II. Shakespeare in Harlem, a new book of poems, appeared that year, but a significant new development for Hughes began in 1943, when, in a series of newspaper columns he had begun publishing earlier for the Chicago Defender, he introduced the character of Jesse B. Semple, whose wry commentaries on the lives of blacks in the United States would eventually make him one of Hughes’s most popular creations. Merely to list the works of Hughes’s fi nal two decades shows how productive he remained throughout his life. His collections of poetry included Jim Crow’s Last Stand (1943), Fields of Wonder (1947), One-Way Ticket (1949), Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (1959), Ask Your Mama (1961), and The Panther and the Lash (1967). His works based on the Jesse B. Semple character included Simple Speaks His Mind (1949), Simple Takes a Wife (1953), Simple Stakes a Claim (1957), The Best of Simple (1961), and Simple’s Uncle Sam (1965). Other prose works included Laughing to Keep from Crying (1952), I Wonder as I Wander (1956), Tambourines to Glory (1958), and Something in Common and Other Stories (1963). Hughes produced eight books for children in his fi nal two decades, edited

Langston Hughes

(or coedited) eight anthologies, authored (with Milton Meltzer) A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (1956), and worked on numerous plays. He was, in short, a comprehensive man of letters, and although he tends to be best remembered for the work he did in the 1920s and 1930s, during the course of his career he produced enough work to keep critics busy for decades. By the time he died (after undergoing surgery, on May 22, 1967) he had become one of the most visible and successful African-American authors of the 20th century. He had left a rich legacy in words and deeds and had earned his stature as one of the most respected black writers of his time.

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921, 1926) The speaker of the poem acts as the spokesman for the whole black race and its ancient and recent history; he mentions the associations between blacks and a variety of famous rivers, including the Euphrates in the Middle East, the Congo in tropical Africa, the Nile in the Egypt of the pharaohs, and the Mississippi at the time of Lincoln. The speaker associates the history of his people and their souls (and his own soul) with the timeless flow of such rivers. This poem (one of Hughes’s earliest and most famous) announced an unusual new voice on the poetic scene—a voice that would speak with enormous self-respect about the black experience and its distinguished historical roots. The speaker is identified in the title as a spokesman for his race, and the title equates black people with one of the most ancient, archetypal, and mythic features of the planet’s geography. The poem implies that the history of black people is as ancient, varied, and vital as rivers themselves. Rivers existed long before humans arrived on the planet, and blacks (the poem makes clear) have played important roles in human culture since the beginnings of recorded time. The poem fluctuates between the abstract and the specific: Its fi rst three lines deal with rivers in general; its next four comment on four rivers in particular, from the most distant to the nearest, both in time

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and in space; its fi nal three lines move back to the general again, repeating earlier phrasing and ending with an exact repetition of line 3, which now functions as a kind of refrain. The Euphrates is a river associated with the beginnings of human civilization; the speaker (giving voice to archetypal black experiences) claims to have bathed in those ancient waters (l. 4). The phrasing here implies humans’ complete immersion in nature. Next the speaker claims to have built a “hut” near the Congo (l. 5)—phrasing that implies another stage of human development. Then the speaker claims to have “raised . . . pyramids” above the Nile (l. 6)—yet another advance in the progress of civilization, although the poem leaves tantalizingly unclear whether the black builders of the pyramids were their designers or were slave labor exploited to construct them. Finally, in the next line (which is, appropriately, the longest and most meandering in the poem) the speaker refers to the Mississippi—a reference that cannot help but remind us of the enslavement of blacks (l. 7). Yet the inevitable implied allusion to slavery is balanced by an explicit reference to “Abe Lincoln,” who was instrumental in ending slavery, and the line is further balanced, in effectively complex ambiguity, when the speaker claims to have seen the “muddy bosom” of the Mississippi “turn all golden in the sunset” (l. 7). Darkness is balanced against light; muddy waters are seen as beautiful. The river is personified, as if it were an old mother or a young lover, and Hughes, in his loving appreciation of the beauty of nature and the history of America, shows here (in substance, style, and form) his clear debt to Walt Whitman. The depth of the speaker’s soul is implied not only by the breadth of his historical memory but also by the absence of mere bitterness in his reference to the Mississippi; the simplicity, clarity, and directness of his language (which flows smoothly, as the rivers themselves do); and the profoundness of his appreciation of nature and natural beauty.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with two poems by Carl Sandburg—“Prairie Waters by Night” and “Grass.” How do all three poems use imag-

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ery of nature? Which poem by Sandburg most resembles Hughes’s poem in tone, technique, and style? How does the tone of “Grass” differ from the tone of Hughes’s poem, and why? Which of the two works is more ironic and cynical? Which is more lyric and celebratory? 2. How does Hughes’s poem resemble and/or differ from W. E. B. DUBOIS’s “Song of the Smoke”? Discuss the poems in terms of rhythm, imagery, tone, and the implied characterization of the speaker. Is one poem more obviously “political” than the other? If so, explain why. 3. Discuss the use of repetition to stress variation in this poem, especially in lines 1–2 and 4–9. Discuss, in particular, the variation of verbs in the latter set of lines. How does such variation imply the complexity and capacities of the black race?

“Mother to Son” (1922, 1926) In this poem a loving, wise, and presumably wizened old mother speaks to her young son, telling him of the repeated challenges she has faced and the persisting endurance she has displayed. She encourages him to emulate her own example—to continue struggling forward and not to give up in the face of disappointments. Although the southern dialect used in this poem suggests that its speaker is black, the title of the work (and the sentiments the poem expresses) might refer to any mother and any son. The bond between parent and child is one of the most deeply rooted of all human attachments, and mothers in particular are archetypally associated with selfless love and compassionate wisdom. Using fewer than 100 words and only 20 lines, Hughes successfully creates a credible voice and implies a profound depth of experience; as in many of his poems, the language is simple, clear, direct, and colloquial. The fi rst line immediately establishes an intimate tone and personal point of view; it is as if we are eavesdropping on a particularly private exchange. The second line effectively juxtaposes the conventionally ungrammatical language of the mother (“ain’t been no”) with a symbol of the grand, easy

life from which she feels so distant. In the next four lines (as elsewhere in this poem) Hughes not only uses anaphora (repetition of initial words) and paratactic construction (repetition of the same kinds of clauses) to create a convincing effect of actual speech, but he also enlivens the lines with precise and vivid images that serve as effective metaphors for the pains and obstacles the mother has faced. Especially effective is the sudden shift from line 6 (which is exceptionally long) to line 7, which consists of the single word Bare. That word thus receives enormous emphasis—emphasis that seems all the more appropriate when we realize that this single word sums up the essence of the mother’s materially impoverished existence. The fact that Bare also rhymes with stair from line 2 exemplifies the subtlety of Hughes’s music; the poem moves in the rhythms of natural speech, but the structure of the work is far from artless. The irregular line lengths, the general lack of rhyme, and the generally straightforward sentence construction all help make the poem seem appropriately artless and realistic, but the repeated words and repeated patterns of phrasing (such as “And reachin’ . . . / And turnin’ . . . / And sometimes goin” [ll. 10–12]) also give it splendid rhetorical force. The repetition of verbs (just quoted) not only contributes to the dynamic vigor of the poem but also reflects the very persistence the mother extols: She repeats patterns of phrasing just as she persisted in patterns of determined behavior, and the catalog of “And / And / And” in lines 10–12 (which describe her continuous movement upward) nicely answers and balances the earlier pattern of “And / And / And” in lines 4–6 (which described the obstacles she faced). In her diction and grammar the mother may seem simple and unsophisticated, but in her feelings and attitudes she embodies the wisdom of the race, in both senses of that word.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the character of the speaker of this poem with the central character in NELLA L ARSEN’s novel Quicksand. How do their backgrounds, attitudes, tones, styles of speech, and fi nal outlooks differ? How are the

Langston Hughes

conclusions of the two works different in effect? How have issues of race and gender affected the lives of both women, and how have they responded in different ways? 2. Read this poem alongside some of the autobiographical writings of GERTRUDE SIMMONS BONNIN (Zitkala-Ša), such as “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” and “An Indian Teacher among Indians.” How do the poem and the prose works differ in spirit, tone, and implied purpose? Do you fi nd one of the speakers more appealing or admirable than the other? If so, explain why. What role does anger play in the Hughes poem and in Bonnin’s prose? 3. How is this work similar to (and/or different from) Hughes’s poem “The Negro Mother”? Discuss the two works in terms of characterization, structure, form, tone of voice, point of view, and diction. In your opinion, is one poem more effective than the other? If so, explain why, being careful to discuss precise details. Is one poem more sentimental than the other? 4. Discuss the ways this poem is divided into distinct lines. Why does Hughes break up the lines as he does? How and why would the poem be less effective if it contained the same number of words but fewer lines? How do the structure and length of the poem mimic its message and its central metaphor?

“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) In this essay, fi rst published on June 23, 1926, Hughes begins by describing the remark of another young and talented black writer who told Hughes that he wanted “to be a poet—not a Negro poet” (DeSantis 31), a remark Hughes interpreted as implying that the man essentially wanted to be white. In the rest of the essay, Hughes laments the ways black people often are encouraged to devalue the beauties, achievements, and potential of their own race, and he celebrates the black common folk, who simply live their lives, without worrying

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about whether whites will approve. Hughes looks forward to the day when black artists of all sorts will proudly embrace their racial identity and use the abundant raw material at their disposal to create art that is true to the full richness of the black experience. Written in the direct, clear, and accessible style that characterizes much of Hughes’s prose, this essay is obviously a kind of personal artistic manifesto. It helps justify and explain the kind of creative writing that Hughes himself had already begun to practice. The essay is, in a sense, a response to the critics (especially the black critics) who objected to the kind of poetry Hughes himself preferred to write—poetry that featured the actual slang, dialect, rhythms, subjects, and attitudes common in the colloquial speech used by African Americans of the “lower classes.” The essay explains why Hughes values such speech and the perspectives and experiences it represents, and yet the essay also shows how skillful and articulate Hughes can be in employing the kind of language, logic, and attitudes associated with people who are highly educated and highly literate. Hughes admires “the low-down folk, the so-called common element” (DeSantis 32), but he can more than hold his own when arguing with people who consider themselves superior to such folk. Yet his tone (as is characteristic of Hughes) does not seem hectoring, belligerent, or unduly argumentative; the essay exemplifies the very kind of self-confidence, self-possession, and self-respect it advocates. Near the very conclusion of the piece he writes, for instance, that “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too” (DeSantis 36). Those last three words are typical Hughes: On one level they amount to a joke; on another level they are thoroughly serious. In one sense the words are an implicit but taunting reply to all the critics who alleged that Hughes wrote unduly about the “ugly” side of black life. In another sense the words simply acknowledge the plain fact that all life has an ugly side, and that to be fully true and complex, great art must deal with


the ugly as well as the more obviously beautiful. Hughes here implies that his deepest commitment is not so much to a particular race as to truth itself, and he also implies that the best art about black people will be art that treats them simply as people, with all the inevitable complications that word connotes.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with T. S. ELIOT’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” How are both authors concerned with the relationship between the individual writer and other writers of the past and present? How, why, and to what extent does each essay deal with sociological matters or economic concerns? How do you think Eliot would react to Hughes’s essay, and vice versa? Support your arguments with specific evidence from each text. 2. How does Hughes’s essay resemble and/or differ from the comments on African-American art in W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk? What values, aspirations, or attitudes does Hughes seem to share with DuBois? How (if at all) do they seem to differ? Discuss the style, tone, and argumentative methods of both works. 3. Discuss the rhetorical effectiveness of the opening sentence of this essay. How does that sentence immediately command attention and create interest? How and why does it make the reader want to read further? Rewrite the sentence in a way that would make it much less forceful— perhaps by dividing it into a number of separate sentences. By the same token, discuss the rhetorical effectiveness of the fi nal four sentences of the essay. In particular, discuss their tone and attitude. How do both factors contribute to the fi nal impact of the essay as a whole?

“Mulatto” (1927) This startling poem opens with an impassioned exclamation by the mixed-race son of a white southern man; the son asserts his connection to the father, but the father, in angry and ugly tones and

phrasing, rejects any link. The racist father sees black women in the rural South merely as opportunities for sexual exploitation; in illiterate and vulgar language, he repudiates any deeper bond with blacks in general and with his own son in particular. Part of the effectiveness of this poem derives from the stark contrast between the beauty of the rural Georgia setting—with its “turpentine woods” (l. 3), its “Great big yellow stars” (l. 10), and its “scent of pine wood [that] stings the soft night air” (l. 18)—and the ugliness of the racist father’s vulgar language. The poem is simultaneously lyrical and dramatic, lovely and bitter, and its complicated imagery of color also contributes to its force. Appropriately enough, the text is full of images of light that are juxtaposed with images of darkness, with the color yellow (often associated with the stars) mediating between white and black and thus symbolizing the mixture of the races. As many of Hughes’s poems do, this one uses repetitions to great effect; rhyme, on the other hand, is used only infrequently, so that when rhymes do occur, they have the impact of the unexpected. Here as so often elsewhere Hughes demonstrates a gifted musical ear; very long lines often alternate with very short ones; the meter follows no prescribed, monotonous pattern; the poem moves along according to its own rhythms and logic, seeming spontaneous and unpredictable but also (thanks to the repetitions and refrains) seeming ordered, artful, and anything but shapeless. As usual in Hughes, the language is simple, colloquial, bold, and direct, with touches of dialect and more than a touch of crudeness and profanity. Hughes wisely refrains from explicitly commenting on, responding to, or sermonizing about the vicious outbursts of the racist father; he lets the man have his say, feeling no need to spell out any obvious lessons derived from the ugliness of the father’s words and feelings. The son’s tone can be read both as angry and as pleading, while the father’s words can be read both as highly personal and private and as representative of broader racial prejudice. On the one hand, the poem depicts the confrontation between one son and one father; on the other hand, it symbolizes the whole history of

Langston Hughes

American racism, especially the widespread mixing of the races. At the beginning of the poem, the voice of the son seems defi ant and bitter, but at the end of the work our last glimpse of him is of “A little yellow / Bastard boy” (ll. 44–45). In this transition, as in so many other respects, the poem manages to combine anger and pathos, satire and sadness, repulsive ugliness and affecting beauty. The ugliness prevents it from seeming sentimental; the beauty prevents it from seeming entirely cynical, depressing, or grim.

For Discussion or Writing 1. How is this poem comparable to, and/or different from, Nella Larsen’s novel titled Passing, particularly in its depiction of the lives of mixed-race people and their relations to the dominant racial culture. Discuss such issues as the impact of economic class, the importance of regional settings, the genders of the central characters, and the significance of the conclusions and concluding tones. Is one work more pessimistic than the other? Is one work more private or personal in focus than the other? If so, are these differences significant in what they imply about the place of mixed-race persons in American culture? 2. Compare and contrast this poem with WILLIAM FAULKNER’s short story “Barn Burning,” paying particular attention to the ways the two works present relations between fathers and sons. How are the fathers similar in their attitudes, tones, language, and behavior (especially in their treatment of blacks, women, and their own children)? How are the attitudes of the sons complicated and ambivalent? Compare the imagery used at the very end of Faulkner’s story with the imagery of Hughes’s poem. How do the works differ in their points of view? 3. Discuss the connotations and significance of line 3; what meanings does it imply? How does Hughes structure the poem so as to create maximum curiosity? In particular, what is the function of the early passages describing the landscape? Discuss the ironic juxtaposition of

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line 35 and line 36. How is the poem as a whole built around such juxtapositions?

Not without Laughter (1930) This novel describes the maturation and family life of a young boy named James “Sandy” Rodgers, who lives in a small town in Kansas with his hardworking and deeply religious elderly grandmother (“Aunt Hager”) and his mother, Annjee, while his carefree father, Jimboy, travels the country in search of work. Aunt Hager has two other daughters: the rebellious Harriet, who runs off and joins a carnival, fl irts with prostitution, but ultimately becomes a successful singer; and the distant and ambitious Tempy, who is proud of her hard-won economic and social status and who disdains the lower-class values and behavior of the rest of her family. After Aunt Hager dies, Sandy (now a teenager) is taken in by his aunt Tempy and her husband, who try to groom him according to their upper-middle-class values; eventually, though, he goes to live with his mother in Chicago, where an encounter with his now-prosperous aunt Harriet helps ensure him the chance at a fuller education that he so desires. This book, which was the fi rst of only two novels by Hughes, was widely praised when it first appeared. Contemporary critics (whose comments are reproduced by Dace) admired the work for presenting a cross section of black society—from the old to the young, from the poor to the relatively well off, and from the traditional, pious, and accommodating (such as Aunt Hager) to the rebellious and often bitter (such as Hager’s daughter Harriet). By structuring the novel around the literal, mental, moral, and emotional growth of Sandy, and by using Sandy mostly as a detached and fair-minded observer of the older characters, Hughes was able to create a convincing sense of what it was like to grow up as a sensitive black in the opening decades of the 20th century. In addition, he was able to convey a sense of the confl icts and tensions involved in the transition from one generation (a generation whose members, such as Aunt Hager, had often known slavery from their own experience) to a new generation—one that

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was often eager to break with the past, either by the pursuit of pleasure (as Harriet does) or by strict selfdiscipline and the determined acquisition of status and wealth (the path chosen by Tempy). Reviewers who commented on the novel when it fi rst appeared often praised the book for offering a different view of African-American life than the views frequently presented in novels set either in sophisticated (or squalid) Harlem or in the gothic (or moonlight-and-magnolias) territory of the Deep South. Hughes was frequently commended for depicting “ordinary,” credible blacks who reflected the typical lives of average African Americans; the characters in his book (it was often said) were neither all saints nor all sinners but usually a bit of both. A number of early commentators praised Hughes for his simplicity, directness, avoidance of melodrama, and ideological restraint; the novel was extolled for dealing with difficult issues without degenerating into mere propaganda, and the tone was often seen as neither sentimental nor simply sarcastic. Reviewers praised Hughes for creating characters who were not political props but convincing human beings. The dialogue, dialect, and glimpses of popular culture and popular entertainment (especially the snatches of songs Hughes often quoted) were applauded for adding credibility to the book, and Hughes was commended for presenting most of his characters with objectivity, understanding, and even compassion. As its title suggests, this is not a fundamentally angry book, although it does contain scenes that arouse the anger of both characters and readers— especially the scenes that depict the often subtle yet crude manifestations of racist discrimination, which seem particularly repulsive when (as often here) the victims are children. Not all the early reviewers, of course, praised the novel completely; some even had serious reservations. Some found the book’s pace too slow (especially in its early pages), and some found its ending too rushed. A number of readers complained that the work lacked a compelling plot, depending too much on characterization and too little on intriguing or revealing incidents. Some claimed Sandy was an underdeveloped character, while others found the same fault with most of the other people in the

book, whom they considered stereotypes rather than fully rounded people. Although almost all readers found Aunt Hager a memorable, vivid, and attractive personality, at least one reviewer dismissed her as too much an old mammy type and wished that more attention had been paid to Annjee, whom he considered potentially more complex than the other characters because she was closer to seeming real. Even readers who praised Hughes’s lively and endearing depiction of Aunt Hager (and they were numerous) sometimes regretted that the book (in their view) lost much of its force and interest after Hager’s death, while others thought that Hager, even when alive, sometimes hurt the book by philosophizing too much. Although objections to the novel were much less common than praise, objections did exist, and even Hughes himself (in his later autobiography The Big Sea), felt that he had been less than fully successful in rendering the characters he had imagined (228–230). One of the oddest complaints about the novel (at least to a modern reader) was that of a black reviewer, Lillian Lewis Feurtado, who worried that white readers might think “that segregation is justifiable” after having to suffer through “chapter after chapter of contact with immoral, vulgar, low-down, 3rd rate Colored people.” She considered the book to be full of “vulgar suggestions and some plain talk that makes for nasty thought,” and she thought that Hughes’s focus on such characters and such language was “too bad, for we do have some girls of lovely characters and fi ne instincts who think of something besides sex and jazz.” However, because Hughes was such a talented writer, Feurtado worried that white readers would fi nd his depiction of the ugly aspects of black life convincing and typical and would never know that among African Americans there actually existed “some young men with high aspirations” to match the girls with lovely characters (see Dace 151). Interestingly enough, Feurtado sounds, for all the world, like the novel’s own Aunt Tempy and thus is living proof that people like Tempy did actually exist. This is not a trivial point, for one of the persistent notes of controversy in early comments on the work concerned Hughes’s presentation of Tempy: Critics disagreed about whether

Langston Hughes

she was a credible character and whether she had been presented fairly. A number of the novel’s fi rst reviewers found Tempy a caricature rather than a believable human being (Dace 142, 147, 160), and at times it is hard to disagree with this allegation. One early reader, however, thought that Hughes had drawn Tempy with “sympathy and understanding” and that, in any case, “it is upon her kind that the progress of the race depends” (Dace 150). Feurtado’s review shows, if nothing else, that people like Aunt Tempy were not merely figments of Hughes’s imagination. Tempy, in any case, is a more complex character than she has often been given credit for being, and the same seems true of most of the other characters, who merit more analysis than they have yet received.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Hughes’s work with Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. How do the various husbands in that novel function in similar ways to the various sisters in Hughes’s book? How do the geographical settings of the works affect the tone of each book? In which book does setting play a more prominent role? What is the relative importance of plot and characterization in each novel? How are the experiences of the main characters affected by their different genders? 2. Read Hughes’s account of his own youth in his autobiography The Big Sea and then discuss the similarities and differences between his own life and the life of “Sandy” Rodgers. How do the two boys differ from and/or resemble one another in such matters as family backgrounds, interactions with relatives, experiences with racial prejudice, fundamental aspirations, and essential temperaments? 3. Trace the character of Aunt Tempy throughout the book and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of her characterization. How did Hughes succeed in presenting her? How (if at all) did he fail? How might he have made her a more believable character? Do you agree or disagree about the faults some critics have found in the ways she is presented?

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“I, Too” (1932) In this poem the speaker begins by announcing that he also sings (that is, writes about or even celebrates) the United States, even though he is treated as a second-class citizen, who is separated from whites, especially on important occasions. In spite of this discrimination, he nurtures himself and prepares for the future, when, because of his newly developed strength, no one will dare to treat him with less than respect. In that future time, whites will fi nally recognize the merits of blacks, and in their consciences they will regret their past treatment of blacks. In its opening and closing lines and in its general subject matter (especially its identification of an individual voice with the American nation as a whole), the poem recalls the work and attitudes of Walt Whitman, a poet Hughes greatly admired. By echoing Whitman in tone and technique, the poem cannot help but remind us of the distance between Whitman’s democratic ideals and the actual degrading existence of blacks in the United States at the time Hughes wrote. The allusion to Whitman, then, is not merely a matter of similar phrasing; instead, it also helps highlight the contrast between Whitman’s optimistic celebrations of personal freedom and national idealism and the sad realities most black Americans faced. Yet the tone of Hughes’s poem is not as bitter as one might have expected. The lyric opens, after all, by proclaiming that the speaker “sing[s]” America” (l. 1), and although there is a hint of a threat in line 11 (“Nobody’ll dare” mistreat the speaker after he has grown strong), in general his mood is one of vigorous, vital self-confidence; self-respect; and even generosity in his assumptions about whites. The speaker’s vitality, for instance, is symbolized by the ways lines 5–7 answer, and undercut, lines 2–4; his self-confidence is symbolized by the ways lines 8–14 balance and respond to lines 2–7. His generosity, meanwhile, is implied in lines 15–17, in which he gives whites credit for having both a sense of beauty and a sense of ethical responsibility; the shame whites will someday feel will actually be, ironically, a testament to their own moral attractiveness. The transformation the poem predicts

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(and implicitly calls for) is implied by the subtle change of phrasing in the fi nal line, which functions as a kind of refrain: Whereas the poem began by asserting that the speaker “sing[s] America,” it ends by announcing (and prophesying) that the speaker will be America: He will not simply stand apart from the country and celebrate its best ideals; he will instead be part of its very fabric, embodying those ideals and exemplifying them in the everyday facts of his life. In its plain diction, simple rhythms, generally short lines, and generally declarative sentences, the poem exemplifies many of the most typical traits of Hughes’s poetry, just as in its fundamental optimism it reflects the best qualities of the national spirit. In poems like this, Hughes speaks for himself, for his race, and for the worthiest instincts of his country as a whole.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the similarities and differences between this work and Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son.” In what senses might the present poem almost be considered an address from son to mother? Discuss the poems in terms of the speakers presented, the tones adopted, the attitudes implied, the diction used, and the other techniques employed. 2. Read Hughes’s lyric alongside CLAUDE MCK AY’s poem titled “Outcast.” Discuss the works in terms of the forms used, the diction chosen, and the focus emphasized. Which poem focuses on the past? Which one focuses on the future? How and why is this difference significant? Which poem seems more bitter? Which one seems more resigned? Which one seems more determined? Which one, ironically, seems more traditional or conventional in structure? 3. Discuss the connotations of the idea of eating in the kitchen. What two kinds of people might typically “eat in the kitchen / When company comes”? What is the symbolic relevance of both kinds of persons to this poem? What are the connotations associated with one of those kinds of people, and what are the connotations associated with the other kind? How might the poem

suggest an eventual transition from one of those kinds of persons to the other kind?

“The Weary Blues” (1932) The speaker describes hearing a man perform, playing a piano and singing a melancholy “blues” song on a dark New York night. The man’s song emphasizes his loneliness but also his resilience, yet the end of the song stresses his fundamental dissatisfaction, and even a measure of despair. After concluding his song, the singer’s body sleeps while the song “echoes through his head” (l. 34). This poem, like many by Hughes, is both a tribute to and an imitation of the blues tradition in black American music. The speaker (who may or may not be black himself, since his racial identity is never made explicitly clear) obviously appreciates the beauty of the blues, and just as obviously he employs many “musical” features in his own poem. He begins, for instance, with emphatic alliteration (or repeated consonants) in the words “Droning a drowsy” (l. 1). In fact, alliteration is a prominent feature throughout the work, especially in a phrase such as “pale dull pallor” (l. 5) or in a line such as “He made that poor piano moan with melody” (l. 10), with its repeated ms and ps. Assonance (repetition of vowel sounds) appears less often than alliteration, but it does show up, as in such phrases as “sad raggy” (l. 13) and especially in line 23 (“Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor”)—a line that not only combines the assonance of the repeated u and o sounds with the alliteration of th and f, but also achieves (in the fi rst three syllables) the effect of onomatopoeia, in which words mimic the very sounds they describe. Throughout the poem, Hughes uses repetitions of lines, phrases, sounds, and ideas to give his lyric a highly musical quality, and he achieves the same effect by alternating line lengths, by employing rhyme, and by inserting exclamatory interjections. He often emphasizes verbs by placing them at the beginnings of lines and accenting their key syllables (as in “Droning,” “Rocking,” “Swaying,” and “Coming” [ll. 1, 2, 12, and 15]); he sometimes runs strings of

Langston Hughes

heavily accented syllables together (as in “pale dull pallor” and “old gas light” [l. 5]); at other times he makes us wait for the accented syllable by putting two unaccented ones before it (as in “To the tune o’ those Weary . . .” [l. 8]). In short, in any number of complicated and subtle ways, Hughes makes his own poem literally lyrical—literally like a song. The poem does not simply describe, celebrate, or quote from the blues; it becomes itself an example of the art form it extols. Another technique the poem effectively employs is the juxtaposition of opposites. Thus the drawnout sound of drowsy is set immediately beside the bouncy rhythm syncopated (l. 1); or the piano-player’s “ebony hands” are set against the piano’s “ivory key[s]” (l. 9); or the word moan (implying pain) is linked with melody (implying beauty); or the selfpity of lines 19–20 is offset by the resolve of lines 21–22. Of course, the most significant form of juxtaposition involves the pairing of the poem’s speaker (who seems educated and conventionally literate) and the blues singer (who relies on dialect and other examples of nonstandard English). Without making an explicit argument, the poem implies the universal relevance of “low” or “popular” culture (such as the blues) to all people, no matter what their race, their class, or their level of education. The poem shows the speaker’s bond with the singer, and the poem implicitly endorses a larger bond among speaker, singer, and readers as well.

For Discussion or Writing 1. How does Hughes’s lyric resemble and/or differ from WALLACE STEVENS’s poem “Peter Quince at the Clavier”? Discuss such matters as tone, diction, imagery, point of view, and purpose. How does each poet use music as both a subject and a technique? Which poem seems more clearly an example of high culture? Which seems more clearly an example of popular culture? Discuss the specific aspects of the poem that support your answers to the previous two questions. 2. Compare and contrast this poem with Claude McKay’s sonnet “The Harlem Dancer.” Discuss such matters as the central characters (both are black performers), the attitudes of the

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observer(s), the forms and styles of the poems themselves, the appropriateness of the forms and styles to the subjects of the works, and the appropriateness of the diction used. 3. Discuss the various ways in which the musician might accurately be described as “a musical fool.” In particular, what are some possible connotations of the noun in that phrase? How does the use of dialect add authenticity to the poem, but how do the words in dialect nevertheless express universal human emotions?

“The Blues I’m Playing” (1934) When Mrs. Dora Ellsworth, a very wealthy New York widow and patroness with no children of her own, hears about—and then hears for herself—the talented piano playing of Oceola Jones, a poor young black woman from Harlem, she instantly decides to sponsor the young woman: She pays for further lessons, provides her with a nice apartment, eventually sends her to Europe for further study, and in general tries to manage both her artistic career and her personal life. She dislikes Oceola’s interest in jazz music and other forms of popular culture, and she particularly dislikes Oceola’s romantic involvement with Pete Williams, a young black medical student. When Oceola, despite Mrs. Ellsworth’s warnings, decides to marry Pete, Mrs. Ellsworth makes it clear that she will have little more to do with the young woman, but their break is preceded by one last performance, in which Oceola defiantly launches into a loud and spirited rendering of a sensuous blues number. This story, with its obviously autobiographical roots in Hughes’s recent troubled experiences with his own patron (Charlotte Osgood Mason), runs the risk of seeming merely two-dimensional and even a bit vindictive. Mrs. Ellsworth (in other words) can be interpreted too easily as a merely manipulative villain, while Oceola can be perceived as a simple saint who suffers for her art in ways her domineering patroness cannot imagine. Hughes does, however, manage to complicate a potentially black-and-white (or black versus white) story in a

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number of interesting ways. For one thing, he suggests that while Mrs. Ellsworth’s attitude toward Oceola is partly “motherly,” there may also be elements of an erotic attraction. This is especially the case when he describes how the two women would sometimes sleep in the same bed, with Mrs. Ellsworth “aware all the time of the electric strength of that brown-black body beside her, and of [Oceola’s] deep drowsy voice. . . . such a hard young body!” (Miller 78). Phrasing such as this implies that the roots of Mrs. Ellsworth’s behavior may be more complex than she realizes, while descriptions elsewhere of her life as a young woman, and of her relations with her late husband, suggest that she may have repressed (or been forced to repress) potentially romantic and even rebellious aspects of her own nature (Miller 80, 84). There are hints, in other words, that Mrs. Ellsworth may not be a totally uncomplicated ogre who is subtle only in her unconscious racism; she may be a more complex human being than she or anyone else in the story understands. However, another way in which Hughes avoids simple (and simplistic) polarities in the story involves his descriptions of classical music. Clearly the story makes a case for the value and vitality of jazz and the blues, but Oceola’s talent and tastes are clearly eclectic: “She played the Rachmaninoff Prelude in C Sharp Minor. She played from the Liszt Études. She played the St. Louis Blues. She played Ravel’s Pavanne pour une Enfante Défunte” (Miller 73). Obviously her repertoire is determined in part by the demands of her audiences, but just as obviously she is a gifted and committed performer of the classics (otherwise she would never have attracted Mrs. Ellsworth’s attention), and her personal love of “art” music is implied when Hughes tells us that she could not understand how “white folks . . . [could] imagine that Beethoven had nothing to do with life, or that Schubert’s love songs were only sublimations.” Her own interpretations of the classics are “warm and individual” (Miller 80). Thus, just as Hughes partially resists the temptation to make Mrs. Ellsworth simply a kind of evil stepmother, so he also partially resists the temptation to make classical music merely the art of oppressive whites and jazz merely

the art of oppressed blacks. Indeed, in one of the most complex moments in the whole story—the last sentence—Hughes even raises the possibility that Mrs. Ellsworth may be more open to the appeal of the blues than either she or Oceola had suspected (Miller 84). But that is another story altogether.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read the discussions of music in W. E. B. DuBois’s book The Souls of Black Folk. How do his comments on music seem relevant to Hughes’s story? How is DuBois’s view of music complex? Are the views about music in Hughes’s story similarly complicated? 2. Read Hughes’s autobiography The Big Sea, particularly its closing discussion of his relations with his patron Charlotte Osgood Mason. What similarities or differences do you see between Hughes’s own experiences with Mason and Oceola’s experiences with Mrs. Ellsworth? In which work is the patron presented in more complex, sympathetic, and credible ways? 3. Read the opening two paragraphs of the story and discuss their contrasting tones. How does the second paragraph undercut and complicate the fi rst? What are the various methods Hughes uses to accomplish this ironic effect? How does the beginning of the story (especially the second paragraph) already foreshadow the story’s conclusion?

The Big Sea (1940) This book, the fi rst of Hughes’s two autobiographies (the second is I Wonder as I Wander [1956]), traces his life from childhood to the 1930s and the traumatic break with his wealthy white literary patroness, Charlotte Osgood Mason. The work is divided into three sections. The fi rst describes Hughes’ life until the age of 21 and focuses especially on his tense relationship with his disapproving father. The second section describes his life as a sailor, his voyages and visits to Africa, his time in Europe (particularly in Paris), his return to the United States, and the real beginnings of his seri-

Langston Hughes

ous literary career. Section 3 describes his experiences in New York during the black Renaissance in Harlem, his experiences as a student at Lincoln University, his various travels in the South and in Cuba, and his initially gratifying but ultimately troubled relationship with Mrs. Mason. This volume of autobiography is appealing in numerous ways. It not only provides crucial insights into his own personality, values, confl icts, and development, but can also be read as an intriguing work of social and literary history, especially in its treatment of the Harlem Renaissance, in which Hughes was an active participant while serving also as a perceptive eyewitness. As the thoughtful, surprisingly objective observations of a highly intelligent African American—observations set down in response to some of the most important decades of black American history—the book provides an “inside narrative” of how it actually felt to grow up under the heavy burden of racial discrimination. In addition, simply as a highly colorful travelogue the book is also of great interest: Hughes provides a black man’s view of black Africa, and he also happened to be in Paris during one of the most significant periods in the cultural history of that ancient city. Finally, the book is of interest for its depiction of the often-complicated relations between parents and children (especially between sons and fathers) and for its personal telling of the oft-told stories of an artist’s growth and an individual’s achievement of independence and maturity. On all these different levels, then, and for all these different reasons, the book is innately interesting, but it is also worth reading for the clarity of its writing, the sharpness of its observations, and the even-handed generosity of its assessments of other people. Even when Hughes proclaims that he hated his father (McLaren 62), he hardly seems full of hate, and even when he had good reason to feel contemptuous of other people, he rarely seems to have looked on the world with bitterness or contempt. The fi nal impression left by this book is of a man who enjoyed his life, was capable of enjoying others, did not take himself too seriously, and almost always exhibited great sanity, attractive modesty, and calm self-respect.

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For Discussion or Writing 1. How is this autobiography similar to and/or different from Black Boy, by R ICHARD WRIGHT? Does one book seem more credible than the other? If so, why and how? How are the tones of the books affected by the geographical and economic circumstances the authors faced in childhood and later? 2. Read Hughes’s book alongside two other notable examples of autobiography by African Americans: BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’s Up from Slavery and the autobiographical sections of W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Does Hughes seem to have more in common (in background, values, and goals) with one of these men rather than the other? Does he have any qualities shared by both of his predecessors? How is his book different precisely because it is the work of a younger man—a man of a newer generation? 3. Why is it symbolically significant that Hughes begins his own book by describing how he discarded books written by others? Why is it symbolically significant that the one book he particularly mentions was written by a white man (H. L. Mencken)? Why is it symbolically significant that Hughes’s book opens when he is 21? What does that age traditionally symbolize? Why is it symbolically significant that Hughes begins his book by describing an ocean voyage that takes him away from America? Discuss other instances of possible symbolism in this autobiographical work.

“Theme for English B” (1949) The speaker tells of being given an assignment in an English class—an assignment to write something expressing himself, since self-expression will necessarily be true. In the course of reflecting on this apparently simple (but actually fairly complicated) assignment, the speaker reveals details of his life: He is a young black who has emigrated from the South to attend college in New York; he lives in a room at the Harlem YMCA; his desires

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are ordinary; his tastes are broad; but his life and experiences are inevitably affected by his race. Despite their important differences (especially the difference of race), he and his instructor are both Americans, and each has the potential to learn from the other. In this deliberately prosaic poem (in which the poetry, appropriately enough, comes close to sounding like unadorned, nonfiction prose), the speaker fi rst responds to the assignment by reporting the external details of his life, including his age, his place of birth, the college he attends, the crucial fact that he is the only black in his class, and the neighborhood and building in which he resides. When the “theme” (or essay) itself begins with line 16, the tone becomes more personal and complex; now the speaker not only directly addresses the teacher, but he also begins to focus less on the external facts of his existence and more on his thoughts, feelings, desires, and uncertainties. As befits this new focus, this section of the poem becomes more irregular and unpredictable in every way. Whereas lines 7–15 were of roughly equal length (at least in appearance on the page), the shape of the poem from line 16 to the end is far less predictable. The rhythms and the sentence structures are also more varied, but perhaps the most striking difference between the introductory section of the work and the “theme” itself is that in the theme portion the speaker directly addresses his instructor and (by implication) the reader of the poem as well. The you continually mentioned is both the teacher in the poem and the reader outside it, and although the speaker has been asked to write about himself, to express his own authentic truth, he realizes that a self rarely if ever exists in isolation—that crucial to any individuality is the individual’s relations with others. This is especially the case if (as in this example) the individual is treated as less than fully equal by those who enjoy superior power. The speaker was assigned to write autobiographically, and he realizes that to do so most effectively, he must try to create a dialogue. The assignment called for self-examination by the speaker, but the poem encourages self-examination by the reader. The speaker is realistic enough to acknowledge the differences that separate him from

his instructor (“you’re older—and white— / and somewhat more free” [ll. 39–40]), but despite his youth he is also mature enough to understand that he and the instructor (and the reader) are indissolubly linked by the common fate of being Americans together. The instructor is only “somewhat more free” (l. 40)—a wonderfully resonant line. On the one hand, the line seems subtly ironic and even sardonic in one respect (since the white instructor is significantly more free than the black student in the America of Hughes’s time simply because the instructor is white). On the other hand, the line simply acknowledges a plain fact: No human being is completely independent or autonomous. All humans exist in relations to others, whether they want to or not. Hughes’s debt to Walt Whitman is evident in this idea, and it is particularly evident when the student tells his instructor, “You are white— / yet a part of me, as I am a part of you” (ll. 31–32). In simple, plain, straightforward language, the speaker produces a “theme” that is as much about his instructor (and his reader) as it is about himself.

For Discussion or Writing 1. How is Hughes’s poem similar to Booker T. Washington’s famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech? In particular, what do both works suggest about the inevitability of relations between whites and blacks in the United States? What techniques do both works employ in addressing white audiences? What do both works suggest about the underlying similarities between whites and blacks, despite their obvious differences? What do both works suggest about the ability—and the necessity—of both races to learn and profit from one another? 2. Discuss Hughes’s poem alongside “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” by GERTRUDE SIMMONS BONNIN (Zitkala-Ša). Compare and contrast the works in terms of tone, attitude, purpose, and literary techniques. Do you fi nd one speaker more appealing than the other? If so, why? Which of the two speakers seems to have faced a more difficult life? Which speaker seems more bitter?

Langston Hughes

3. How and why is it symbolically significant that the college is up on a hill and that Harlem is down below? What does the speaker’s residence at the “Y” suggest about his social circumstances? Discuss the significance of line 21. How and why would this line resonate with most readers? Discuss the speaker’s musical tastes, especially his liking for Bach. What does his liking of Bach suggest about him? Line 26 is not grammatically correct, but how is it therefore credible in a poem of this sort?

“Dream Boogie” (1951) The poem uses the bounce and diction of boogie-woogie music—“a rhythmically complex and experimental kind of jazz characterized by dissonance, improvisation, and unusual lyrics” (Emanuel 145)—to imply the complex feelings of American blacks, including both their capacity for joy and celebration and their frustration with the postponement of full freedom. This brief and highly energetic poem begins on a literally bright and emphatically joyous note: “Good morning, daddy!” (l. 1). The word daddy here almost certainly does not refer to the speaker’s literal father but is, instead, quite probably already an example of the jazz talk that permeates the poem. A “daddy” in this sense is simply another person. Yet this word, like the other two of the opening line, is clearly upbeat and affirmative, implying a close bond between speaker and addressee, including the poem’s own readers. The tone remains light until the end of line 4, where the sudden appearance of the phrase “dream deferred” implies a particularly pervasive concern of Hughes’s writing here and elsewhere—a concern with the risks of postponing the achievement of treasured ideals and the dangers of putting off the fulfi llment of solemn promises. In a mere four lines, then, Hughes has managed to enrich and complicate a work that might otherwise have been merely upbeat; now, and for the rest of the poem, there is a darker undercurrent. In retrospect, even the earlier word rumble (l. 3) takes on a slightly ominous connotation: On the one hand, the word

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can merely seem an example of onomatopoeia (in which the sound of a term echoes its sense). That is, the word rumble echoes the very kind of low, heavy, rolling sound it describes. On the other hand, rumble by this point had also become a slang term for a street fight between urban teenage gangs, and the most common such fights occurring in the United States at the time Hughes wrote were fights between gangs of blacks and whites. A poem that seemed to begin as a joyous celebration has now turned into a kind of subtle warning; the speaker does not even need to repeat the phrase “dream deferred” (a phrase that is clearly implied, but not openly stated, in line 13) in order to suggest the danger inherent in continued, continual postponement of full civil rights for a huge segment of the national population. The last seven lines of the poem are emphatically affi rmative, but they also seem ominously superficial. The tensions the poem has suggested remain unresolved; the joyous conclusion is belied by the disturbingly vague reference to “something underneath” (l. 12).

For Discussion or Writing 1. How is this poem similar in its methods, brevity, and concluding tone to ERNEST HEMINGWAY’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants”? In both cases, what is the importance of what is left unsaid? How do both works use indirection and implication rather than overt statement? How do both works end on notes that seem falsely cheerful? How do both works manage to suggest more complex human relations than they ever make explicit? 2. Compare and contrast this work with Hughes’s poem titled “Harlem” (whose fi rst line is “What happens to a dream deferred?”). Pay particular attention to the tones, diction, structures, and conclusions of the two works. How and why are questions used effectively in both works? 3. How is the poem all the more effective because it is explicitly addressed to the “daddy” mentioned in line 1? How does such drama contribute to the energy of the poem, and how does it also involve the reader? By what means does Hughes create curiosity and suspense? Where and how does the poem seem especially ambiguous?


“Harlem” (1951) The poem begins by asking what happens when an ideal remains unachieved or a promise remains unfulfi lled. After using a number of metaphors and similes to suggest some possible results of such a situation, the poem ends by suddenly raising the possibility of a violent and destructive outcome. The title of this poem refers to a section of New York City that was (and still is) most heavily populated by African Americans. In the 1920s it had briefly been the center of a remarkable creative outpouring by blacks (including Hughes himself) in literature, music, and many other arts, but by the time Hughes wrote this poem, the neighborhood was more often thought of as a slum characterized by poverty, unemployment, and widespread discontent. These latter connotations of the word Harlem are the ones that seem most relevant to the present lyric—a lyric that gains impact from its brevity, directness, and repeated use of vivid, probing questions. Hughes does not preach; instead, by directly interrogating the reader, and by raising a number of alternatives, he actively engages us, encouraging often-disturbing thought rather than providing simple, easy answers. The “dream” mentioned in line 1 is almost certainly the dream of full civil, political, and economic equality for blacks—a dream that many Americans (both black and white) had assumed would result from the triumph of the Union in the Civil War. Instead, by the time Hughes wrote this poem, nearly a century after that confl ict, blacks were still suffering from severe discrimination, much of it sanctioned by government authority. Blacks, however, were increasingly unwilling to tolerate second-class citizenship. Riots had broken out in various cities in the late 1940s, but they were as nothing compared to the storms of racial violence that would eventually overtake the country in the mid- to late 1960s. In light of these later developments, Hughes’s poem seems eerily prescient, and its fi nal line seems prophetic. Lines 2–3 raise the possibility that a dream deferred may “dry up / like a raisin in the sun” (ll. 2–3). This simile (a comparison using like or as) is memorably effective, for whereas grapes are full

of life-sustaining juice, raisins are black, withered, shriveled, and on the verge of desiccation. The ensuing imagery, however, is even more disturbing: The speaker wonders whether a dream deferred might “fester like a sore— / And then run” (ll. 4–5). At least the transition from a grape to a raisin is still somewhat hopeful: A raisin is still edible and pleasing. In lines 4–5, however, the process implied in lines 2–3 is reversed: Instead of a transition in the direction of dryness, the imagined sore becomes wet and swollen with pus, and then (as if to make the imagery even more disgusting) the pus runs. The lines suggest an infection or uncleanness that has begun to spread. Having affronted our sense of sight, Hughes next repulses our sense of smell by asking whether a dream deferred will “stink like rotten meat” (l. 6)—an image that implies not only sickening corruption but also wasted potential. Hughes now invokes two more senses—the senses of touch and taste—when the speaker asks whether a deferred dream may “crust and sugar over— / like a syrupy sweet” (ll. 7–8). As with the comparison to meat, the imagery here implies something valuable squandered through lack of proper or timely use. Finally, after one more simile that seems deliberately less vivid than the ones before it (as if the speaker has begun to run out of possible comparisons [ll. 9–10]), the poem suddenly switches to a short, sharp, and frightening metaphor: “Or does it explode?” (l. 11). The abrupt shift to italic type catches us by surprise, much as an explosion itself might, while the rhythm of the line mimics the meaning the line describes: The fi nal syllable bursts forth with exceptionally heavy emphasis. All the processes described earlier in the poem are gradual; they unfold slowly in time. By using the italicized word explode, however, Hughes implies that time for remedies or improvement may soon—or may already have—run out.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Hughes’s text with Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die.” Discuss the works in terms of technique, diction, imagery, tone, and use of implication. Who are the main implied readers of both works? In other words, whom is McKay mainly addressing, and

Langston Hughes

whom is Hughes mainly addressing? How does a possible difference in implied readers affect the rhetorical strategies of the two poems? 2. How is Richard Wright’s story “Long Black Song” relevant to the kind of simmering, brewing tensions that seem to be implied in Hughes’s poem? What “dreams” does the main male character of Wright’s story possess, and how do his fi nal actions seem relevant to the kind of explosion that Hughes’s poem warns about? 3. Why is it effective that the poem begins with a question and then uses five more questions? How is this technique engaging and involving? How might the effect (and effectiveness) of the poem be different if it made emphatic, propagandistic statements? How and why are even lines 9–10 tentative rather than defi nitive in tone? In what ways does the poem fi nally function as a warning?

4.

5.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON HUGHES AND HIS WORK 1. Relate one or more of Hughes’s poems to one or more of the works of drama, fiction, or autobiography he composed. In particular, try to relate the poem(s) to a work or works in another genre written at roughly the same time. Discuss such matters as themes, style, techniques, and point of view. How, for instance, do two works on comparable themes differ because they are presented as a poem, a short story, or a play? 2. Does Hughes write in ways that will make his works interesting and appealing to readers who are not African American? If so, explain how he manages to be true to his experiences and perceptions of black life while still making his writing attractive to nonblack readers. How, if at all, does his work have “universal” appeal? Which aspects of his writing are likely to prevent his works from seeming dated? 3. Track down a volume of Hughes’s verse and discuss the arrangement of the poems within it.

6.

7.

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How (if at all) does the collection function as a unified “book”? Do any of the poems profit by being read in connection with the poems that precede or follow it? Do any of the poems function as part of a sequence? How are adjacent poems related (if at all) in terms of such matters as style, theme, techniques, tone, and point of view? Read a number of Hughes’s poems and then read a number of poems by Claude McKay. How do these poets resemble (or differ from) one another in terms of themes, attitudes, styles, structures, forms, and techniques? Why do you think Hughes is often regarded as the more talented of the two? Do you agree with this assessment? Justify your response by pointing to the specific details of particular works. How do Hughes’s depictions of life in Harlem in the 1920s compare to those offered by Nella Larsen in her novels Quicksand and Passing? How does Larsen tend to depict the males of that time and place, and how does Hughes tend to depict the females? How are issues of economic class treated in the “Harlem” works of each writer? Do some research into the complicated relations between Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. How and why were these two artists drawn to one another? What social, political, and artistic values did they have in common, and/or how were they distinct in those respects? What does their difficult collaboration on the play titled Mule Bone reveal about their individual personalities and the circumstances under which they wrote? Read a number of general discussions of Hughes’s writings, and make a list of (1) his typical themes, (2) his typical stylistic traits, and (3) his typical technical devices. Once you have compiled these lists, choose one relatively brief work by Hughes and then discuss all the various ways in which it is a typical example of his work. Also discuss the ways in which you think that particular work is not only typical but also an effective piece of writing.

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8. Choose one brief work from each of the decades of Hughes’s public career—the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. In each case, choose a work that somehow typifies the decade in which it was written. For instance, from the 1920s choose a work that seems representative of the Harlem Renaissance. From the 1930s, choose a work that seems relevant to the Great Depression. From the 1940s, choose a work that seems to reflect American involvement in World War II. From the 1950s, choose a work that seems connected in some ways to the cold war. From the 1960s, choose a work that seems to reflect the Civil Rights movement. What continuities exist among these diverse works? What fundamental differences (if any) do they reveal? How do they reflect the evolution of Hughes’s career? 9. Choose two different poems by Hughes of roughly comparable length and on roughly similar themes; choose one poem that you think is successful and another that you consider a relative failure. Then, in as much detail as possible, explain your reactions to each work. Explain why you think one work is effective and the other ineffective. Pay attention to such matters as structure, diction, rhythm, imagery, and tone. 10. Compare and contrast the depiction of black urban life in Richard Wright’s Native Son and Black Boy and the various works written by Hughes that feature the character Jesse B. Simple. Are there any comic dimensions to Wright’s works? Are there any darker dimensions to Hughes’s stories? In what respects do these authors’ depictions of the lives of blacks in northern cities confl ict with and/or reinforce one another? How do the works reflect the particular times during which they were written? WORKS CITED

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Bloom, Harold, ed. Langston Hughes: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1989.

Dace, Tish, ed. Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. De Santis, Christopher, ed. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Vol. 9, Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Emanuel, James A. Langston Hughes. Boston: Twayne, 1967. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Hubbard, Dolan, ed. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Vol. 4, The Novels: (Not without Laughter and Tambourines to Glory.) Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. New York: Knopf, 2000. Jemie, Onwuchekwa. Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1973. Leach, Laurie F. Langston Hughes: A Biography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2004. McLaren, Joseph, ed. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Vol. 13, Autobiography: The Big Sea. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Miller, R. Baxter. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Vol. 15, The Short Stories. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Nelson, Cary. Modern American Poetry: Langston Hughes. Available online. URL: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/hughes/hughes. htm. Accessed April 7, 2009. Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. Vol. 1, 1902–1941, I, Too, Sing America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. ———. The Life of Langston Hughes. Vol. 2, 1941– 1967, I Dream a World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Robert C. Evans

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen / that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation / more or less. No, I do not weep at the world— / I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife. (“How It Feels to Be Colored Me”)

A

lthough during her lifetime Zora Neale Hurston won a certain amount of recognition as a writer, in the decade following her poverty-stricken old age and death she was largely forgotten. After dying in a welfare home in rural Florida, she was buried in an unmarked grave, and her surviving manuscripts were nearly burned as trash. Only in the 1970s was the rich legacy of Hurston’s work really rediscovered, and in the years since then, her reputation has soared. She is now considered one of the preeminent authors of the so-called Harlem Renaissance, the brief but highly important efflorescence of creativity among African-American artists in the New York of the 1920s (and 1930s), and certainly she is the most important black woman writer in the fi rst half of the 20th century. As a novelist, essayist, folklorist, short story writer, and theatrical director and producer, she left behind a wonderfully vibrant body of work, full of wit and wisdom. She had discerning ears and eyes, a vivid sense of style both in her prose and in her clothing, and an immensely appealing sense of humor (often laced with stinging sarcasm). She is an author who richly deserves all the renewed attention she is now receiving. Hurston’s own autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road, is a superbly well-written book, and it is necessarily the primary source of much information about her early life. It is, unfortunately, also unreliable in some of its claims. Thus, for strictly accurate accounts of Hurston’s life, readers should

turn to the various scholarly biographies that have appeared since the mid-1970s. Most of the solid facts are laid out nicely in the highly detailed “Chronology” prepared by Cheryl A. Wall, which reports that Hurston was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama. (Hurston herself claimed to have been born in Florida, and she sometimes misreported the year of her birth.) She was the fi fth child (and second daughter) of John Hurston and his significantly younger wife, whose maiden name had been Lucy Ann Potts. Lucy had alienated her family (especially her mother) by marrying Hurston, whom they considered lower-class, but John was a hardworking and ambitious man. In 1894 he moved his family (which eventually consisted of eight children) to the small village of Eatonville, Florida, which was the fi rst all-black town to be officially incorporated in the United States. Zora and her siblings grew up in an eight-room house on five acres of land in the town, where their father, in addition to doing manual labor, was a local minister and where he also eventually served three terms as mayor. Zora was a lively child (sometimes too lively for her exasperated father, who favored his quieter daughter); she attended a local school and also learned at her mother’s knee, but she particularly enjoyed listening to the adults talk, joke, and tell stories on the front porch of a local store. Zora’s early childhood was playful and happy, but her life changed significantly when her mother

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died on September 18, 1904. Zora was soon sent off to school in Jacksonville, where she performed well (especially in spelling), even though she had to do manual labor to help offset her tuition expenses, which her father had begun to neglect to pay. Her father had quickly remarried, and his new wife had little interest in raising his children; although Zora was sent home from school (after her father had failed to pay for her return), she did not stay there long. Instead, she and some of her siblings were sent to live with relatives (some of the older siblings had already left home on their own), and Zora blamed her stepmother for this breakup of the family. After returning to Eatonville in 1912, she actually fought with the stepmother physically, and for the next several years she had to support herself by doing domestic work, even after she moved in with an older brother in Memphis. In 1915, however, her life took another of its radical turns. She was hired to be the personal maid of a singer with a traveling musical production, and her involvement with this troupe of entertainers not only took her around the country but also gave her a kind of second family. When she became ill in Baltimore in 1916, she had to leave the show, but in 1917 she began attending an evening high school (claiming to be 10 years younger than she really was) while supporting herself as a waitress. Her father died that same year in an automobile accident. She gained encouragement from various teachers and school administrators who recognized and admired her intelligence. In September 1917 she entered Morgan Academy (the high school branch of the college now known as Morgan State University), graduating in 1918 after impressing many people (as she always did) with whom she had contact. One of these people suggested that she should think of attending Howard University, a prestigious all-black college in nearby Washington, D.C., and so in the summer Hurston moved to Washington, entering Howard’s preparatory program in the fall while working as a manicurist in a black-owned barber shop that served a strictly white clientele. Once again she impressed people; her white customers often tipped her generously to help support her schooling. In 1919 Hurston began taking regular college classes at Howard, receiving her associate degree in

1920. Although she took classes at Howard until 1924 and was a member of a sorority there, she never received a B.A. She did, however (as usual) impress her teachers, including Alain Locke, a philosophy professor who was later a crucial figure in fostering the growth of African-American literature. Hurston herself, in fact, now began to publish fiction and poetry and to associate with other writers, including a number of the most prominent and/or talented black authors of the day. By 1924, in fact, she had published a story in a significant black magazine headquartered in New York, and it was largely thanks to the encouragement of its editor that she moved to New York in 1925, just as the Harlem Renaissance was coming into full bloom. Hurston, with her lively personality and literary gifts, was quickly at the center of developments. She began winning literary prizes, and she also won the friendship and patronage of important figures, including a number of prominent whites with a strong interest in black culture. Thanks mainly to their support she won a scholarship to Barnard College (the women’s division of Columbia University), where she was the only black student at the time. At Barnard she soon attracted the attention of the famous anthropologist Franz Boas, who encouraged her to become an anthropologist herself. Meanwhile, she was also heavily involved in the Harlem literary scene, having gained the friendship of many significant figures, including such up-andcoming younger writers as L ANGSTON HUGHES. In 1927, in fact, Hurston accidentally reencountered Hughes in Mobile, Alabama, while she was on a funded anthropological research trip to the Deep South to collect folklore data. The two drove back to New York together in Hurston’s car (nicknamed “Sassie Susie”), stopping off at numerous southern locations and cementing the friendship they had already developed in New York. Earlier in the year, however, Hurston had already married Herbert Sheen, whom she had met much earlier as a fellow student at Howard, but they spent most of their time in different places (partly because he was studying medicine in Chicago), and eventually they divorced. Perhaps the most significant person to enter Hurston’s life in 1927, however, was an elderly

Zora Neale Hurston

(and wealthy) white New Yorker named Charlotte Mason (Mrs. Rufus Osgood Mason), who was earning a reputation as a generous if somewhat demanding and eccentric patron of black artists and writers. Hughes was already one of her clients, and Hurston now also joined the fold. Mason had a forceful and intriguing personality; she insisted that her support be anonymous, but she also insisted that “her” artists literally sit at her feet and address her as “Godmother.” Both Hughes and Hurston seem to have felt genuine affection for Mason (besides being thankful for her financial support), but eventually both also chafed at their dependency. In the meantime, however, Hurston prospered even further thanks in part to Mason’s encouragement. She was able to collect southern black folklore with funding from Mason and other sources; she published widely and often provocatively; she earned a B.A. from Barnard in 1928, the same year she also studied hoodoo in New Orleans; she began working on a lengthy manuscript based on her folklore fi ndings; and in 1929 she not only began planning to write a play with Hughes but also traveled to the Bahamas for further anthropological research. Meanwhile, her relationship with Mason was growing increasingly complex, while her relationship with Hughes was becoming more and more tense because of disagreements about the play (tentatively titled Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life). By 1931 an open (and permanent) break with Hughes had occurred. Each artist felt betrayed by the other, and Mule Bone was not produced until long after both writers had died. In 1931 Hurston’s support from Mason also suffered a decline, and by that year, too, it had become obvious to everyone that the United States (and indeed the world) was in the grips of the Great Depression, the severe economic downturn that had begun with the stock market crash of October 1929. Just when Hurston was most full of creative energy, then, Americans had the least amount of disposable income ever. If she never made much real money from her writings during the next few years, the depression was largely to blame. The depression also hampered her repeated efforts during the 1930s to stage blackinspired and black-acted theatrical and musical pro-

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ductions; Hurston often had to scrape together the funds to pay actors. Nevertheless, despite her own poverty, she was preoccupied with the idea of theatrical production (in several senses of that term) during this period, and her obsession led her all over the country during this decade, seeking jobs connected with drama and seeking venues for a musical production called From Sun to Sun. Ultimately, though, it was her prose (both fiction and nonfiction) rather than her drama that would win her the most recognition and reward. In 1933 Hurston published a wonderful story titled “The Gilded Six-Bits” in a national magazine. This story was seen by a number of significant New York publishers, who wrote and asked her to consider submitting a novel. She wrote back to the most prominent publisher, promising to send him something soon, and by spring 1934 her fi rst novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, was in print. The publisher also offered her a contract for her folklore book (which appeared as Mules and Men in 1935), and indeed later in 1934 a wealthy Chicago foundation offered to pay her tuition if she decided to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology at Columbia University. Back in New York, she began her academic work but was more interested in creative writing than in pure scholarly research and publication. The foundation therefore withdrew much of its promised funding, but Hurston, always resourceful, found other sources of support, including a job with the Federal Theatre Project in Harlem and a Guggenheim Fellowship to study the black culture of Jamaica. By this time she had fallen deeply in love with a somewhat mysterious and much younger man (having officially divorced from Sheen in 1931), and it was partly in response to this love affair that she composed her most important novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, toward the end of 1936. The book was published by fall 1937, receiving mostly positive reviews despite some objections from a few black critics, including her old friend and mentor Alain Locke as well as the rising young author R ICHARD WRIGHT. Hurston, meanwhile, continued to support herself through jobs on government-funded writing and editing projects, through brief academic positions, and through the spotty earnings of her various


books, including Tell My Horse (1938), which was published in England in 1939 as Voodoo Gods: An Inquiry into Native Myths and Magic in Jamaica and Haiti. Her novel Moses, Man of the Mountain also appeared in 1939, the same year in which Hurston married Albert Price, a much younger man, whom she divorced the following year. Perhaps the most significant event for Hurston in the early 1940s was the publication of her splendid autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road, in 1942. During these years she also did further anthropological research, briefly worked in Hollywood, lectured at various black colleges, published essays and articles, taught creative writing, bought and (lived happily on) two different houseboats, received recognition for her award-winning and profitable autobiography, was awarded various honorary degrees, and published a number of highly controversial statements about race and racism in America. Some fellow blacks found her comments too conservative and accommodating, and indeed by this time Hurston had staked out a position for herself to the right of most other black intellectuals. By 1948 her latest novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, had been published, but in that year, too, she also suffered perhaps the most devastating event of her life: She was accused (almost certainly falsely, it seems) of child molestation. Unfortunately, the accusations received wide attention in the national black press, and for a time Hurston, depressed and uncertain about how she could possibly prove her innocence, even contemplated suicide. In 1949 the charges were dropped, but significant damage—to Hurston’s reputation and to her psyche—had been done. She never really recovered from these events, and although she did continue to write (and sometimes publish an occasional article) throughout the 1950s, she never recaptured her earlier fame. Her weight was increasing; her health was declining; her funds were increasingly meager; and more and more she began to rely on charity. She ended her days living in a small, concrete-block house, using orange crates as a desk and shelves. Her personality was still often lively, but by the end of the 1950s, she was largely a neglected and forgotten figure. When she died on January 28, 1960, in Fort Pierce,

Florida, few people noticed or cared. Not until the 1970s was her unmarked grave tracked down (by the rising young African-American writer Alice Walker) and properly honored. In the decades since then, however, Hurston has been fully restored to life thanks to her richly vibrant writings.

“Spunk” (1925) When the townspeople inform Joe Kanty that Joe’s wife, Lena, once again has been seen walking in the streets with her lover, a big and fearless man called Spunk, the reluctant Joe fi nally decides that he must take action: He approaches Spunk with a drawn razor, but Spunk shoots and kills him and is later acquitted, since the killing is judged an act of self-defense. Although Lena soon moves in with Spunk, Spunk begins to be troubled by various ominous signs: He thinks that a howling black bobcat he has spotted near his house is actually Joe, back from hell to haunt him, and he thinks Joe’s spirit has pushed him in the direction of a buzz saw at the sawmill where he works. When Spunk later does in fact fall into the whizzing saw, he blames Joe’s spirit again and, before dying, vows to take vengeance when he meets Joe in hell. This story, one of Hurston’s earliest published works, is typical of her writing in many ways. It is set in the small-town rural South; it heavily features African-American characters (in fact, in this work no whites appear at all); it effectively employs the dialect of rural southern blacks; and it explores the complexities of romance, violence, and superstition. In addition, the story makes clear the importance of the local community in the lives of Hurston’s characters (another common feature of much of her fiction), and the tale deals with such archetypal figures and themes as the powerful and sexually aggressive male, the unfaithful wife, and the intimidated cuckold; the force of lust, jealousy, and community pressure; and the power of a guilty conscience and poetic justice. In fact, the next-to-last sentence (with its reference to “the funeral baked meats”) has been read as an allusion to Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, which deals with

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many of the same issues and presents many of the same developments of plot. Hurston’s story, then, deals with people and actions that have been staples in much great literature of the past, but she gives these standard characters and personalities her own distinctive stamp, thereby creating something fresh and new. The name of the title character—Spunk—also implies his personality: As a noun, the word suggests mettle, spirit, courage, or pluck, but as a slang term it could also refer to seminal fluid. As a verb, spunk could mean to stand up or assert oneself, or to blaze up in fi re or passion. All these meanings seem appropriate to the central figure of Hurston’s tale, who initially radiates masculine energy and self-confidence. The fact that he literally rides a log at the sawmill is obviously symbolic, suggesting his phallic potency; the fact that he later loses his selfconfidence and becomes, if anything, even more fearful and nervous than the man he has killed is one of the story’s great ironies. The story may imply that moral qualms (or perhaps mere superstitions) are fi nally more potent than physical strength; by the end of the story, Spunk has lost his spunk as well as his life. Meanwhile, the rather amoral community—which had egged on Joe to challenge his rival—are gossiping just as much in the fi nal paragraph as they had been at the beginning of the tale. For them, the confl ict between Spunk and Joe has merely been a source of much-needed excitement and even entertainment. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this tale is the way Hurston complicates our initial impressions of Joe and Spunk. At fi rst, Joe seems merely cowardly: He challenges Spunk only when he feels pressured by the gossips. Later, however (after Joe has been killed), a character named Walter points out that in some respects Joe had more real courage than Spunk: “Lookit whut he [i.e., Joe] done; took a razor an’ went out to fight a man he knowed toted a gun an’ wuz a crack shot, too; ’nother thing Joe wuz skeered of Spunk, skeered plumb stiff! But he went jes’ the same” (Novels 953). By the end of the tale, it is Spunk who actually seems the more easily frightened of the two men—at least until, in his dying breaths, he vows revenge: “Ah’ll git the

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son-of-a-wood louse soon’s Ah get there [i.e., to the after-life] an’ make hell too hot for him” (Novels 954). By the concluding sentences of the tale, however, Hurston’s focus is not on any imagined afterlife but on the everyday existence of smalltown communities, in which people eat, drink, and gossip.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the small-town existence Hurston depicts with the small-town life depicted by THORNTON WILDER in his play Our Town. Consider such matters as race, class, and gender and such techniques as diction, dialect, and tone. How do both works deal with the afterlife? How does each work feature “choral” characters who comment and explain? 2. Discuss this story in relation to EDWIN A RLINGTON ROBINSON’s poem “Eros Trannos.” How is the title of that poem relevant to both works? How is marriage presented in both texts? What is the role of the community in each work? 3. Trace and discuss the pattern of ironies and foreshadowings Hurston has built into this story. For example, discuss the comment that Spunk “ain’t skeered of nuthin’ on God’s green footstool” or the reference to his skill at the sawmill (Novels 949). How do such ironies contribute to the resonance and complexity of the story?

“Sweat” (1926) Delia Jones is a hardworking, deeply religious woman who takes in laundry to earn income, while her husband, Sykes, is a crude, abusive philanderer who enjoys tormenting Delia while flagrantly cheating on her with a large rival named Bertha. Knowing Delia’s intense fear of reptiles, Sykes one day takes home a rattlesnake in a wire-covered box and leaves it on their porch; Delia is terrified, but Sykes merely laughs. The marriage continues to deteriorate, and one night, when Delia fi nds the snake in her laundry basket, she flees to the nearby barn; when a drunken Sykes himself stumbles home in the darkness, he is bitten by the snake,


and as the tale ends, Sykes glimpses Delia as Delia watches him die. Here, as in many other works, Hurston deals with relations between black men and women, especially husbands and wives. As in many of her tales, the rural community plays an important part; the other men in the small town cannot understand why Sykes neglects Delia to consort with the hefty Bertha, whom one of them memorably describes as looking like “a hunk uh liver wid hair on it” (Novels 960). As this comment suggests, part of the pleasure of reading this story—as of reading much of Hurston’s fiction—results from her use of vivid imagery, memorable dialogue, and convincing dialect. Meanwhile, Delia Jones (like many of Hurston’s women) is a strong, appealing, resourceful, and stoic character; she stands up to Sykes when she needs to, but in general she prefers not to fight. Despite his abusive treatment of her, she retains her self-respect and thus earns the respect of the community at large. Hurston deals here, as she often does, with elemental emotions, such as sexual desire, sexual jealousy, and the tensions between husbands and wives. Thus the story, although set in a remote and somewhat unfamiliar locale, and although populated with characters whose speech and actions are tinged with a certain degree of “local color,” never seems merely quaint or exotic. If the story seems faulty in any way, it is perhaps flawed in its depiction of Sykes, who is close to a simple, unidimensional villain. From the moment he enters the tale, he seems sadistic, abusive, and mean; it is difficult to understand why he is as full of hatred (especially for the long-suffering and compliant Delia) as he is. Occasionally Hurston implies that he resents the fact that his wife must wash the clothes of white people; perhaps, then, his mistreatment of her is a way of striking back at whites. In general, however, he displays the kind of “motiveless malignity” that Coleridge once attributed to Shakespeare’s Iago, but unfortunately Sykes does not seem anywhere near as complex a character as Iago is. He is, for the most part, merely an uncomplicated “evildoer,” and it is hard to feel any sympathy for him as the story ends. This is especially true since it seems quite likely that it was Sykes who deliberately placed

the snake (a fairly obvious symbol of evil) in Delia’s laundry basket, intending to kill her. Although some critics have suggested that Delia, ironically, takes on some of her husband’s evil personality by the end of the story (since she fails to help him and watches him die), it would be hard to expect her, with her well-known fear of snakes, to enter the rattler-ridden cabin. Besides, the narrator notes that “Delia could not move—her legs were flabby,” and the narrator also reports that despite her inaction, Delia nevertheless does feel a “surge of pity” for Sykes (Novels 966). Delia, in other words, does not seem much more complicated than Sykes himself: He is a fairly simple villain, and she is a fairly simple (and almost completely sympathetic) victim. The story therefore runs the risk of seeming merely melodramatic but is rescued by Hurston’s talent for re-creating convincing, lively speech and by her skill at sustaining suspense. From the moment the snake enters the story, we cannot help but wonder—and worry—about how the tale will conclude. That it concludes with Sykes’s death is a nice (but perhaps too neat) bit of poetic justice.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss this work in relation to the story “Barn Burning,” by WILLIAM FAULKNER . How does Sykes resemble Abner Snopes in personality and behavior (despite their differences in race)? What motivates each man? In what ways is each a complex character? What similarities or differences do you see between Delia and Sarty? 2. Discuss the moral complexity of the characters. Is Sykes nothing but a simple villain? Is Delia nothing but an abused wife? Is Bertha nothing but an unappealing (and unattractive) hussy? In what ways does Hurston give the story ethical and artistic complexity?

“How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928) In this brief autobiographical essay, Hurston announces her pride in her race and her pride in her own personality; using reminiscence, personal narrative, and a healthy dose of humor, she describes

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how she fi rst realized that she was different from most Americans in her skin complexion, but she insists that she does not feel “tragically colored.” She feels (she says) unhampered by her race in her determination to succeed in life; indeed, her color (and the relatively recent freedom of her people) gives her a challenge that makes life particularly exciting; instead of bemoaning the past, she looks forward to the future, and she says that she would rather be black (with everything to gain) than white (with the constant fear of loss). She does concede that blacks do differ from whites (in their impassioned response to jazz, for instance), but in the fi nal analysis, she thinks of herself as fi rst and foremost Zora, and she cannot comprehend why anyone would deny himself or herself the joy of getting to know her. This essay exhibits many of the traits that make Hurston such an attractive prose stylist—traits that also, by all accounts, made her a delightful personality and an instant friend to practically all who met her. From the very fi rst sentence of the essay, for instance, she displays the directness, the candor, and the disarming ability to laugh at herself (and at others) that make her writing seem so honest, unpretentious, and trustworthy. She shows a fi ne flair for paradoxical phrasing (as when she says, “I remember the very day that I became colored”; Folklore 826), and her childhood memories of life in her small (and all-black) Florida town are the sort that immediately make her an appealing figure, partly because of her ability to mock herself without sacrificing her self-respect. She describes, for instance, how whites passing through her town would often give her small gifts of money when she performed amusing antics for them—generosity “which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop” (Folklore 827). By teasing her earlier self, Hurston makes her present persona all the more attractive and thus makes her current essay all the more winning. It is difficult to imagine being able to justify discrimination against a person who is so obviously articulate, intelligent, wise, and full of life. Hurston in this essay displays many of the traits any person would wish for in a child, a friend, or

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himself. She is resourceful, stoic, optimistic, and determined; at one point, for instance, she proclaims, “No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife” (Folklore 827). That single sentence epitomizes many of the best traits of her writing, here and elsewhere: It is crisp; it is clear; it is unforgettably vivid in its imagery; it is self-confident without being at all arrogant; it is, in short, an expression of the vitality of the mind and spirit that produced it. Hurston is frank in her ambitions (“The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting”; Folklore 828), but her ambitions are never unattractive, because they are the normal and healthy human ambitions of wanting to make the best of one’s life and talents and leave behind a record in which one can feel a sense of accomplishment. One rarely senses, either in this essay or in most of her other writings, that Hurston is asking for more than she would willingly grant to others; she is merely asking (or, rather, taking for granted) the right to prove herself. Ultimately she sees herself as an individual, and as an individualist: When she is feeling most confident, the “cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time,” and she simply cannot imagine how anyone “can deny themselves the pleasure of my company!” (Folklore 829). The frankness of this nonegotistical egotism cannot help but make one smile, laugh, and ultimately like Zora.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this essay with BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’s autobiography Up from Slavery and with R ICHARD WRIGHT’s autobiography Black Boy. With which of these other works does Hurston’s essay have most in common? Discuss the tones, attitudes, and credibility of the three works. How do the three writers use humor? 2. Read this essay in conjunction with one of Hurston’s fictional works, such as Their Eyes Were Watching God or Jonah’s Gourd Vine. How are the attitudes expressed in this nonfiction essay reflected in Hurston’s more obviously “creative” writing? Do the main protagonists of her novels seem to share any of the attitudes expressed in the essay? Given the social circumstances of

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American blacks in Hurston’s day, is the essay at all naive or simplistic? 3. Discuss specific instances of Hurston’s use of humor in this essay. How, in particular cases, do the touches of humor contribute to the persuasiveness and rhetorical effectiveness of the piece? What does Hurston’s humor imply about her attitudes toward herself, others, and life in general? How and why are such attitudes appealing?

“The Gilded Six-Bits” (1933) Missie May and her husband, Joe, a young black couple living in the rural South, enjoy a happy, playful, sexually fulfi lling marriage; they take pleasure in each other’s company, and in fact one evening they visit an ice cream parlor newly opened by Otis D. Slemmons, a prosperous black who has recently arrived from the North—a man whom Joe admires for his wealth, his success with women, and even his prominent pot belly. Missie May, however, cannot understand why Joe thinks so highly of Otis, whom she fi nds much less physically appealing than Joe himself; nevertheless, when Joe returns home early from work one day, he fi nds Missie May and Slemmons in bed together. Although Joe’s fi rst impulse is to laugh, the infidelity opens up a silent chasm between the couple: Missie May feels deeply guilty and Joe largely keeps his distance as well as his own counsel, but eventually the breach is mostly healed when Missie May gives birth to a child who is clearly Joe’s. In this exceptionally fi ne and complex story, Hurston manages to create an utterly persuasive picture of domestic joy. The opening scenes of Joe and Missie May, which are full of genuine tenderness as well as palpable sexual energy, are among the best ever presented of a happy marriage—a fact that makes the later destruction of that happiness all the more powerful and tragic. Hurston makes Missie May’s initial disdain for Slemmons so convincing that readers are just as shocked as Joe is to fi nd his loving wife and Slemmons in bed together. Even more surprising, however, is Joe’s response:

“He was assaulted in his weakness. Like Samson awakening after his haircut. So he just opened his mouth and laughed” (Novels 991). Just when we might expect Joe to launch into a vicious, vindictive assault on his wife (he does, after all, beat Slemmons), he merely puts “Slemmons’ watch charm in his pants pocket and [takes] a good laugh and [goes] to bed” (Novels 992). Joe, however, is not an implausibly noble saint who merely turns the other cheek; instead, he commits small acts of psychological vengeance, even treating his wife at one point as if she is a whore who has earned her wages of sin. For the most part, though, Joe and Missie May handle the crisis in their marriage with admirable maturity: She shows commendable sorrow, while he shows commendable restraint. Readers miss their evening romps as much as Missie May does, but eventually they do begin having sex again, although even then Joe cannot resist punishing her by leaving Slemmons’s gilded coins underneath her pillow the next morning (Novels 994). In this story (unlike in some others by Hurston, such as “Sweat”) nothing ever seems simple. Instead, the story is full of rich and complex characterizations—a fact that makes the comment of a white merchant near the end of the tale seem especially ironic: “Wisht I could be like these darkies. Laughin’ all the time. Nothin’ worries ’em” (Novels 996). The shallowness of this comment is highlighted by the depth of the preceding story—a depth that also lends added ironic dimension to the fi rst words of the text: “It was a Negro yard around a Negro house in a Negro settlement” (Novels 985). These words imply a completely stereotypical setting for a totally predictable tale. In contrast, Hurston gives us something much richer, more knotted, more vivid and vital—a story every bit as complicated as life itself.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with ERNEST HEMINGWAY’s story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” In particular, discuss such matters as marital relations, sexual jealousy, male psychology, and moral complexity. 2. How do you explain Missie May’s affair and Joe’s reaction to it? How are both the affair and

Zora Neale Hurston

his response to it surprising? How, in particular, do you explain Joe’s relatively passive reaction? Why does he seem generally willing to forgive his wife? How might a less talented writer have depicted Joe’s response?

Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) This novel traces the rise and fall of John Buddy Pearson, a strong and resourceful black youth who is born into poverty in turn-of-the-century Alabama, where he is loved by his mother, Amy; abused by his stepfather, Ned; and respected and admired by a lively community of blacks and even by a local white plantation owner, Alf Pearson, the man from whom he takes his last name and the man who may indeed be his biological father. Much of the novel describes the growing love and gradual courtship of John and a beautiful young girl, named Lucy Potts, whom John fi nally succeeds in marrying; unfortunately, however, despite his real affection both for Lucy and for their ever-increasing number of children, and despite his new-found prominence as a popular preacher in a thriving Florida church, John engages in one extramarital affair after another—a pattern of behavior that breaks the spirit of the long-suffering Lucy. When Lucy dies, John cannot stop his pattern of womanizing, and this behavior leads to a bad second marriage, a messy divorce, loss of his church, and a plunge into poverty, until he is rescued by his marriage to the prosperous and affectionate Sally Lovelace—a marriage, however, that still does not prevent him from lapsing into his old ways just before his untimely end. This remarkably well-written fi rst novel was composed in just a few months in response to the invitation of a publisher who had been impressed by Hurston’s story “The Gilded Six-Bits.” As is that story and much of Hurston’s other fiction, the novel is set in the rural and small-town South and paints a convincing picture of numerous aspects of African-American life, including the joys and tensions of communal existence, the pleasures and frustrations of relations between the sexes (especially in marriage), and the complex interplay

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between blacks and whites. Whites, however, tend to be mostly a marginal presence in this book (as in much of Hurston’s work); her chief interest is in the lives, loves, hopes, worries, happiness, and disappointments of the people she knew so well, and indeed this particular novel is loosely based on the life of her own father. In fact, a character named Isis, closely resembling the young Hurston herself, also appears in the book. One need not know this autobiographical background, however, to appreciate the riches of this novel—riches that include exceptionally vivid use of dialogue, imagery, folklore, and African-American dialect. Hurston makes it possible for readers to feel, taste, smell, see, and above all hear what it was like to live as a poor southern black in the early decades of the 20th century, and some of the impressions she creates in this work are indelible. The novel begins, for instance, with a memorable description of the “grumbling” thunder of an approaching storm—a sound that leads Amy, John Buddy’s mother, to remark of God that “Ole Massa gwinter scrub floors tuhday” (Novels 3). The remark is typical of dialogue in this novel in many ways. It alludes, for instance, to the long history of slavery that continued to shape African-American thinking well after the official end of that practice. It also reveals the tendency in black folk culture to describe nearly everything (even the weather) in anthropomorphic terms. Thus, God is not simply an abstract force or even a mystical personality; he is a powerful and unpredictable “Ole Massa.” At the same time, however, the imagery is typically homespun, mundane, and unpretentious: Thunder means that God is scrubbing floors, not that he is engaging in any grand, awesome, or incomprehensible conduct. God, then, is distant and powerful, but in his actions, feelings, and thoughts, he is also kin to the people he has created, and indeed in the folk world Hurston describes, practically everything seems vital, alive, familiar, and approachable. God scrubs floors just as everyone else does, and when he speaks, he speaks in the same kind of dialect as Amy herself. That dialect is one of the most appealing aspects of the novel. By lovingly reporting and recording it, Hurston performs a role that T. S. ELIOT considered


one of the most important any poet could discharge: She keeps the language fresh and alive, revivifying and renewing it (and doing so, in this case, by returning it to its roots). Examples of Hurston’s skill in re-creating the actual speech of the people she describes are too numerous to mention; memorable phrasing occurs in practically every paragraph of the novel, especially in its fi rst two-thirds. At one point, for instance, when Amy reproaches her husband (John Buddy’s stepfather) for constantly criticizing the boy’s mixed racial heritage, she accuses him of “always washin’ his face wid his color” (Novels 4), and later the stepfather himself uses memorable phrasing when he tells Amy to “git dat punkin-colored bastard outa dis house” (Novels 10). As both of these examples will attest, Hurston pulls no punches in honestly reporting even the least attractive aspects of life among her characters (including a good deal of intraracial prejudice, as well as a good deal of violence, especially against women), but the important point is that her language is almost always equal to whatever task she sets for herself. She rarely hits a false note, and she can convincingly re-create the speech both of upper-class whites and of lower-class blacks, just as she can use standard English every bit as effectively as dialect. It is the dialect, however, that makes this novel live. We hear it, for instance, in various examples of folk poetry (such as “See yuh later, and tell yuh straighter”; Novels 16); we hear it in folk sayings (such as “Ah’ll betcher Alabama wid uh fence ’round it”; Novels 24); we hear it in the vivid imagery of common (and comic) phrasing (as when Lucy tells John, “Hug me till mah dress fit tight”; Novels 47); and we hear it in the colorful syntax, or sentence structure (as when John’s brother asks him, “Where at de bread is?”; Novels 56). Again and again and again, Hurston makes these characters live through the words they use; speech and characterization are at least as important to this novel as plot, and readers turn its pages in eager anticipation of the next bit of vivid phrasing Hurston will employ. Further examples of Hurston’s lively language include her use of invented words (such as shickalacked, to describe the sound of a moving train; Novels 16); her skill at characterization (as when she says, “The teacher was a stodgy middle-aged man

who prided himself on his frowns”; Novels 25); her effective use of fragments (as when she describes a school ceremony as follows: “Opening prayer. Song. Speech by white superintendent. Speeches rattled off like beans poured into a tin can”; Novels 35); her striking skill with metaphors (as when she notes that “the things left unsaid laid a steamy blanket over talk”; Novels 41); and her splendid sense of comedy (as when Lucy, wanting John to stay as long as possible at her parents’ house for supper, “cut peas in two and split grains of rice” while they are eating; Novels 60). Hurston enters the minds of men as well as women; she conveys the thoughts and emotions of the young as well as the old; she reports the latest cultural developments (such as the mass migrations of blacks to the North touched off by World War I), but she also deals with ancient, enduring facts of life (such as sexual maturation, tensions between parents and children, and the complexities of marriage). The book is full of wisdom and comedy, pleasure and pain, happiness and regret. John achieves his goal of marrying a good, beautiful, and supportive young woman, and then he unaccountably destroys the life he has made for himself. In one sense his behavior seems inexplicable; in another sense it seems all too familiar. Hurston’s novel is one more variation on the ancient theme of “paradise lost”: John works to achieve and then ruins his achievement. Yet Hurston offers no simple morality tale; like Lucy, she is tolerant of John’s misjudgments because she appreciates his many strengths. Lucy is one of Hurston’s most memorable creations, and the book loses much of its appeal when she dies two-thirds of the way into the novel. John himself is most interesting when he is courting and living with Lucy, and, after she passes, the novel weakens: The language becomes less lively, the plot seems rushed, and the characterization seems less rich than before. Hattie (John’s new wife) is unappealing but is treated too obviously as a mere villain, while the saintly Sally not only seems too good to be true but (more important) is introduced and depicted so quickly that we never get to know her well enough to be greatly interested. John’s behavior, meanwhile, is much harder to understand in the last third of the novel than

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it was earlier, nor does Hurston make much effort to explain it. The church members who scheme against him are almost cartoonish, and the rival preacher they bring in to challenge John seems too inept to be a credible contestant. It is as if Hurston herself lost much of her own earlier interest in the book when Lucy (the character modeled closely on her own mother) departed from it, but to say this is not to imply that the novel fails. It simply becomes less good in its fi nal third than earlier, but the fi rst two thirds of the book is impressively strong and refreshing.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Hurston’s book with W. E. B. DUBOIS’s novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Discuss the works in terms of characterization, diction, use of dialogue, and plot. Which novel seems to have a more explicit political purpose? Which is more effective as a work of art? 2. Read Hurston’s novel alongside CLAUDE MCK AY’s book Home to Harlem. Discuss the works in terms of their settings, their use of dialect, their depictions of race relations, and their conclusions. How are the main male characters alike and/or different? 3. Discuss the moral codes this novel seems to imply or take for granted. What kinds of attitudes and behavior (if any) does the novel seem to endorse? What kinds of attitudes and behavior (if any) does it seem to censure? Which characters seem most—and least—admirable, and why? How does Hurston complicate her presentation of her characters, so that they do not seem merely superficial or stereotypical?

Mules and Men (1935) In this innovative anthropological report on African-American folklore, Hurston herself becomes a character and narrator as she returns to her hometown in Florida (and journeys to New Orleans) to collect and record the stories, sayings, jokes, songs, and customs of southern blacks, including “hoodoo” practices in Louisiana.

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Now considered a classic of American anthropology, Mules and Men was (and remains) a pathbreaking book, not only because of its content but especially because of its methods and style. Previous students of African-American folklore had often been white outsiders who never succeeded in truly penetrating the depths of the culture they had been sent to study. They faced polite reticence from blacks, who distrusted their questions and their motives. As Hurston herself remarks in describing the response of her fellow blacks to the typical folklore researcher, “We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing. The Indian resists curiosity with a stony silence. The Negro offers a feather-bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries” (Folklore 10). As this passage illustrates, Mules and Men is another of Hurston’s typically well-written books: The language is clear, precise, and vivid. She gives to her scientific task all the gifts of a talented prose stylist, and indeed the book is valuable not only for the numerous tales and sayings it reports but also for the vivid narrative (and often dramatic) style in which the reports are offered. Mules and Men reads as a good piece of fiction rather than a dry anthropological report; both the narrator and the characters come alive as distinct personalities, so that Hurston does not simply describe a culture from the outside but instead re-creates it from within. She does not merely record tales; instead she shows how the tales arise from, and function within, the culture that gives them birth. She writes as a trusted “insider” and even as a participant in many of the events she describes, and just as she quickly wins the trust of her black southern subjects, so she soon establishes the same bond of trust with her readers. It is easy to understand why her subjects “opened up” to her, since the personality she presents in this book is so obviously appealing and inviting. The success of the book derives, however, not only from its manner but from its matter. The stories, events, and practices that Hurston describes are almost invariably interesting (and entertaining) in and of themselves. Often the stories are funny;

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often they are charming; frequently they are wise. Many of the tales are extended jokes, as in the story about the slave owner who told a judge that he owned a black who smelled worse than a goat. The judge, curious to see whether this was true, fi rst asked the man to bring in the goat, which smelled so bad that the judge fainted. After the judge was revived, the black was brought in, who smelled so bad that the goat fainted (Folklore 82). Hurston reports such stories (using language that would be considered highly racist today, at least if used by a white person) without apology or defensiveness; she obviously delights in all the facets of her people’s complex culture. Her book suggests the ways African Americans used humor to cope with a history and lives that were often full of pain. The book reveals a rich, vibrant culture (full of friendship, comedy, imagination, and inventiveness) existing outside the awareness of most white Americans; it makes that culture accessible to everyone and thus helps promote a richer national heritage for all. Although Mules and Men obviously reflects the experiences of a particular subset of the human population, it also deals with many of the most common and widespread of human concerns, such as relations between the sexes, relations between the young and the old, relations between different cultures, relations between man and nature, tensions within communities, and relations between humans and the supernatural or divine. Indeed, one reason the book is so interesting is that it presents the responses of one specific culture to these broad concerns. The book allows readers to compare and contrast the responses of African-American culture to these timeless preoccupations with the responses of other cultural traditions. Doing so not only provides a better appreciation of the distinctiveness of the black American heritage but also offers a fuller sense of cross-cultural similarities. The fact that readers of all sorts can fi nd the book’s jokes amusing, its fables charming, and its insights wise suggests that Hurston has done something more than describe the legends and lore of one particular culture; apparently, by doing so, she has also tapped into some deeper truths of human nature. On the one hand, her book is an introduc-

tion to a wide variety of forms of African-American discourse (including prayers, sermons, fables, jokes, poetry, and the forms of everyday conversation); on the other hand, the work also speaks to something broader and more universal. Reading the book is like getting to know more deeply a branch of one’s family that had never before seemed so familiar.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read Mules and Men alongside W. E. B. DuBois’s pathbreaking sociological treatise The Philadelphia Negro. How are the two works similar and/or different in their purposes, procedures, methods, and styles? What are the advantages and possible disadvantages of the distinctive approaches used in each book? What kind of picture emerges of African-American culture in each book? What similarities and/or differences are there between the urban culture described by DuBois and the mainly rural culture depicted by Hurston? 2. Compare and contrast the southern black culture described by Hurston with the kind of culture depicted in Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy. How do the two works complement one another? How are they similar and/ or different in style, substance, purpose, tone, and attitude? How do the differences between the two works reflect and/or help explain the tensions that existed between Wright and Hurston? 3. Read this work as if it were (as it partly is) an autobiographical portrait. How does Hurston present her own personality and character? What consistencies emerge in her comments about herself? What attitudes does she display? What kind of coherent picture emerges of Hurston the individual?

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) Janie Crawford is an adolescent African-American girl being raised by her grandmother, Nanny, in impoverished conditions in the rural South; when Nanny (who has suffered in the distant past from

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sexual abuse herself) realizes that Janie is reaching sexual maturity, she quickly marries the girl off to a much older man named Logan Kendricks—a relatively prosperous black farmer but a man in whom Janie herself has no real interest. Thus, when a younger, more attractive, more articulate, and more ambitious black man named Joe Starks comes along, he has little trouble persuading Janie to run off, marry him, and help him build a prosperous business in a newly founded all-black town, where he quickly becomes the mayor and leading citizen, but where he also (eventually) begins to treat Janie more as a workhorse than as a beloved wife. After Starks dies, the now-wealthy Janie meets a lively, attractive, much younger black man nicknamed Tea Cake, with whom she falls into passionate love and with whom she lives a happy life farming in the Everglades— until a natural disaster leads to a tragic conclusion to their previously joyous relationship. This novel is generally considered not only Hurston’s best but also one of the fi nest novels by any African-American writer. Its emphasis on the growth of an increasingly independent and selfassertive female spirit—especially a spirit faced with various kinds of male oppression—has made the book a favorite of feminists, while its focus on both the discrimination suffered by blacks and their resilience in the face of racist conditions has made it a popular work among people of color. Some black males, however, have objected to the novel’s depictions of the abusive husbands (even the normally charming Tea Cake sometimes beats Janie), while some African-American political activists have suggested that the novel underemphasizes the destructive impact of white racism and lacks the kind of liberating political force it could have had. Hurston, however, could plausibly reply that Their Eyes does possess a more obviously political dimension than her fi rst novel (Jonah’s Gourd Vine), and she could also claim that although violence by black males against black women is a feature of both novels, the main character of Their Eyes is less a passive victim than had been true in the earlier book. Janie, in fact, seems to embody many of the best traits of the young Lucy, who had been only a secondary (but highly appealing) character in Jonah’s Gourd

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Vine, but Janie also epitomizes many strengths and virtues that Lucy lacked. By the end of the novel Janie has become the kind of character seldom featured in previous fiction in the United States (or anywhere else, for that matter): a woman of color who is not merely (or even mainly) a tragic victim but who has lived a rich, full, and complex life and has also learned and grown in the process. Hurston’s second novel features many of the same traits that make much of her fiction attractive. She is adept at characterization; she employs dialogue effectively; she uses humor to offset and intensify sadness; she is psychologically insightful; she shows an unsurpassed skill in rendering the black dialect of the rural South; she takes readers inside the internal workings of small black communities; she draws on the resources of folklore and folk culture while also offering a credible depiction of modern life; and she depicts settings (especially natural settings) in ways that are both convincingly realistic and highly evocative. Their Eyes is richer in self-conscious symbolism than Jonah’s Gourd Vine; it begins, for instance, with a highly lyrical passage comparing human existence to a vision of ships at sea; it uses imagery of a flowering pear tree to suggest Janie’s sexual awakening; and its later depiction of a destructive hurricane makes the storm seem almost apocalyptically powerful. Above all, however, the novel is alive with the kind of vivid phrasing that is “poetic” in all the best senses of that term: It is fresh, crisp, suggestive, and precise. Repeatedly Hurston uses language that leaves a memorable impression. When Janie fi rst appears, for instance, her nosy neighbors are so transfi xed that “nobody moved, nobody spoke, nobody even thought to swallow spit” (Novels 176). Anyone might have written the fi rst two phrases, but only Hurston (or someone with a comparable imagination) could have conceived the third. Later, when Joe Starks enters the novel, he is deftly characterized as a man “who walked like he knew where he was going” (Novels 196), and thus Hurston, in fewer than 10 simple words, efficiently conveys the essence of his personality. A little later he is described (with effective alliteration and wordplay) as someone who “spoke

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for change and chance” (Novels 197), and later still another character threatens to kill someone “cemetery dead” (Novels 235). It would be easy to compile a long list of examples of Hurston’s language that sticks in the mind and rolls off the tongue. Her writing is essentially an oral art, based on long years of listening closely to the way words are actually spoken by street-corner poets and front-porch raconteurs. The structure of the book is straightforward: It opens in the present, when Janie mysteriously returns to town after a long absence, thus provoking not only curiosity in her gossipy neighbors but also suspense in Hurston’s readers: Both the neighbors and the readers want to know what Janie has been up to and why she has returned. The story then deals, in turn, with three significant deaths (those of Nanny, Joe, and Tea Cake) and with three distinctive kinds of husbands (an old man, a less-old man, and then a man much younger than Janie). Each husband is a symbolic figure: Killicks is a relatively prosperous farmer who represents the traditional rural economy; Starks eventually becomes an even wealthier symbol of the rising merchant class; while Tea Cake is a relatively poor but almost entirely carefree symbol of vibrant, youthful masculinity; he is associated with nature, with music, with sexuality, with life—a fact that makes his sudden, violent death, and its even more tragic circumstances, all the more powerfully ironic. He is the only husband Janie actually chooses for herself, and although he sometimes beats her (when he submits to traditional notions of masculine power and authority), for the most part their relationship is one of healthy mutual respect and affection. As in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Hurston here shows a splendid ability to depict the true joys (both physical and emotional) of genuine love in a good marriage. Yet the book is rarely, if ever, saccharine or sentimental. In its tone as in almost every other respect, it is a remarkably well-balanced book: It is complex but comprehensible. Even in dealing with men and with whites it seems to have no special ax to grind; its focus is more on explaining Janie’s growth and development than on indicting other characters. Hurston obviously sympathizes with Janie, but not

to the point of lacking objectivity; few (if any) of the characters are presented either as simple villains or as simple saints. Janie’s grandmother, for instance, might easily have been depicted as a merely villainous character; after all, she thwarts Janie’s youthful romantic dreams, forces her to marry a man she does not love, and even slaps her face when Janie resists (Novels 186). Yet it is obvious that the grandmother also loves the girl and wants to protect her from harm, and it is equally obvious that her protectiveness is rooted in painful recollections of her own hard life. Thus she tells Janie, “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see. Ah been prayin’ fuh it tuh be different wid you. Lawd, Lawd, Lawd!” (Novels 186). Later she memorably explains herself by telling Janie, “Ah can’t die easy thinkin’ maybe de menfolks white or black is makin’ a spit cup outa you: Have some sympathy fuh me. Put me down easy, Janie, Ah’m a cracked plate” (Novels 190). In depicting the grandmother, as in presenting most of the other characters, Hurston reveals a good deal of charity and generally avoids sarcastic caricature. She puts her people in their places—not in the sense of standing over them in judgment, but in the sense of situating them in complex settings and circumstances that help us understand their tangled motives and complicated behavior. It is easy, for instance, to sympathize both with Janie and with her fi rst husband when Janie explains to her grandmother why she fi nds the man physically repulsive: “Ah hates de way his head is so long one way and so flat on de sides and dat pone uh fat back uh his neck.” And when her grandmother replies, sensibly enough, that the husband cannot be held responsible for his appearance because he “never made his own head,” we can nevertheless laugh at Janie’s sharp reply: “Ah don’t keer who made it, Ah don’t like the job” (Novels 193). In exchanges such as this one, Hurston reveals the illogic often found in human responses while presenting them sympathetically, and she also catches the real rhythms of the ways people actually think and speak. If the book does have a villain, it may be Joe (or “Jody”) Starks, Janie’s second husband. The irony, of course, is that he is the man Janie her-

Zora Neale Hurston

self selects as a way of escaping from her loveless fi rst marriage, and although their own union quickly deteriorates as Starks becomes more and more taken with his own power, authority, and prosperity, they stay married for many years. As he eventually lies on his deathbed, Janie rebukes him with all her pent-up frustration over years of abusive treatment, but even at this moment, she is able to see him with some balance and perspective: “Listen, Jody, you ain’t de Jody ah run off down de road wid. You’se whut’s left after he died. Ah run off tuh keep house wid you in uh wonderful way. But you wasn’t satisfied wid me de way Ah was. Naw! Mah own mind had tuh be squeezed and crowded out tuh make room for yours in me” (Novels 244). The pathos of this scene derives from the fact that Janie’s anger is fueled by her sense of lost love: She is bitter at Starks because she so clearly remembers the man he once was and because she so strongly regrets the ways he has squandered the opportunities for real happiness they might have shared. Her treatment of him as he is dying is cruel from one perspective but perfectly understandable from another, and when he fi nally does die, Hurston writes that Janie “was full of pity for the fi rst time in years. Jody had been hard on her and others, but life had mishandled him too. Poor Joe!” (Novels 245). The complexity of Janie’s emotions here is a sign of her psychological maturity, as it is of Hurston’s insightful and balanced characterization. Finally, just as Hurston resists demonizing either Janie’s grandmother or her fi rst two husbands, so she also resists turning Tea Cake into an entirely implausible saint. Yes, he is charming, handsome, sexually potent, and even musically talented, but he can also be dishonest (as when he steals Janie’s money soon after they run off together, although he quickly wins it back by gambling), and he also beats her at one point—if only to prove his authority to others (Novels 294). Oddly enough, Janie’s response to this beating is not reported, but we know from elsewhere in the book that she can fight back when she feels the impulse, as when she and Tea Cake battle each other over his apparent attraction to another woman:

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They wrestled on until they were doped with their own fumes and emanations; till their clothes had been torn away; till he hurled her to the floor and held her there melting her resistance with the heat of his body, doing things with their bodies to express the inexpressible; kissed her until she arched her body to meet him and they fell asleep in sweet exhaustion. (Novels 287)

It is a typically complex passage, as complicated in its sentence structure as in the actions it describes; it is full of violence and affection, resistance and attraction, power and love. It mixes activity and passivity, anger and lust: In some ways the action seems a rape and in some ways it seems a mutually satisfying expression of shared desire. It is a passage, in other words, that exemplifies the kind of complications that make Hurston’s novel as a whole so compelling and provocative.

For Discussion or Writing 1. How does Janie resemble and/or differ from Melanctha in the second section of GERTRUDE STEIN’s work Three Lives? Discuss these characters in terms of their motives, their behavior, their romantic involvements, their styles of speech, and their ultimate fates. 2. THEODORE DREISER’s novel Sister Carrie also deals with a young woman’s maturation and romantic involvements. How do the two novels compare and contrast in setting, style, characterization, and plot? How do such issues as race and class affect the works? What motives drive the two main characters? How do the endings of the novels reflect the values of the heroines? 3. How does Hurston’s novel compare and contrast with Richard Wright’s Native Son? Consider such matters as the protagonists, the plots, the settings, the outcomes, and the implied purposes of the two books. How are men and women presented in the two novels? How important is race in each work? 4. Read Hurston’s book alongside Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand. How are the heroines comparable and/or different, especially in their backgrounds, their basic attitudes, their involvements

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with others, and their final fates? How do the novels differ from (and/or resemble) one another in settings, plots, and depictions of AfricanAmerican communities? 5. Choose one substantial passage from the novel—a passage that you fi nd especially effective. In as much detail as possible, try to explain how that passage “works” (that is, how numerous elements join to make it a compelling and interesting piece of writing). By the same token, choose one substantial passage from the novel that you consider ineffective, and in the same ways discuss why you think that passage is less compelling than the other. 6. Discuss the ways white people are presented in this book. Are there any patterns or consistencies? Are the presentations of whites stereotypical in any way? What roles do whites tend to play in the narrative?

4.

5.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON HURSTON AND HER WORK 1. Discuss the use of folklore and African-American southern dialect in Hurston’s works. How, exactly, do these elements contribute to the effectiveness of her writing? How (for instance) do they add to characterization, tone, atmosphere, and theme? Is such language too distinct from standard English to be widely appealing? How does Hurston keep such language authentic but at the same time understandable? 2. Read one of Hurston’s later novels (such as Moses, Man of the Mountain, or Seraph on the Suwanee) and discuss the work from various perspectives. For example, how is the work typical of Hurston’s characteristic style and themes? How is it different from her earlier novels? Is the later work an effective work of fiction, particularly in terms of such elements as characterization, plot, diction, and imagery? Why do you think these later novels are not better known or more admired? 3. Read Hurston’s autobiography (Dust Tracks on the Road) and then discuss the book in relation to her other writings. How, for instance, do her

6.

7.

8.

novels or stories reflect some of the same experiences, attitudes, and ideas described in her autobiography? In what ways does the autobiography itself use some of the same narrative techniques as her fictional works? How is the book similar to her novels or stories in style, tone, and themes? Hurston is often thought of as a “black” writer or a “feminist” author. Do such labels limit the appeal of her work? Does her writing transcend such categories? Why, for instance, should a Scandinavian male fi nd the works of Hurston worth reading? What aspects of her writing might make her works appealing to a very broad range of readers? Read one or more of Hurston’s nonfiction essays in conjunction with a fictional work written at roughly the same time. For instance, read an essay or two written during the 1930s along with one of her novels from the same era. What similarities or differences do you see between the two works? How does the fictional work embody any of the attitudes or ideas reflected in the nonfiction essay? Trace a particular theme or issue throughout several of Hurston’s works. For example, examine her presentation of the role of women in a number or stories or novels, or study the ways she depicts men in various works, or explore the ways in which community life is described in a number of different texts. What continuities and/or differences do you see? Discuss the role of humor in at least three different works by Hurston. How does humor add to the complexity and effectiveness of the works in which it appears? How does the absence of humor affect the tone, characterization, and fi nal meaning of a text? What kinds of humor does Hurston typically employ? Discuss the political stance(s) implied in one or more of Hurston’s fictional works. What does the work seem to suggest about the ways society should be organized or about who should hold power and how it should be exercised? To what extent is Hurston concerned with political issues in the larger sense?

Zora Neale Hurston

9. Discuss the ethical or moral dimensions of one or more of Hurston’s works. What kinds of ethical ideal(s) seem to be implied by the work? What does Hurston seem to suggest about the ways people should treat one another, and why? How does Hurston present characters in morally complex ways (that is, as combinations of good and bad rather than as all good or all bad)? How does moral complexity contribute to the artistic effectiveness of a novel or story? How does a simplistic approach to moral issues detract from the artistic impact of a work? 10. Examine one of Hurston’s lesser-known works (such as one of her less-known short stories) and discuss the work in detail. Does it deserve to be more widely recognized? If so, why? If not, why not? What are its strengths and weaknesses? How is it typical or atypical of Hurston’s writing? WORKS CITED

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Bloom, Harold, ed. Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. ———, ed. Zora Neale Hurston. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003.

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———, ed. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Broomall, Pa.: Chelsea House, 1999. Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner, 2003. Campbell, Josie P. Student Companion to Zora Neale Hurston. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2001. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Hurston, Zora Neale. Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. Edited by Cheryl A. Wall. New York: Library of America, 1995. ———. Novels and Stories. Edited by Cheryl A. Wall. New York: Library of America, 1995. Newson, Adele S. Zora Neale Hurston: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. Wall, Cheryl A. “Chronology.” In Novels and Stories. By Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Library of America, 1995. Zora Neale Hurston. Available online. URL: http:// www.zoranealehurston.com. Accessed April 7, 2009.

Robert C. Evans

Nella Larsen (1891–1964) [S]urely it is more interesting to belong to one’s own time, to share its peculiar vision, catch that flying glimpse of the panorama which no subsequent generation can ever recover. (letter to Carl Van Vechten, qtd. in Wall 93)

N

ella Larsen has always been, and remains, one of the most mysterious figures in the famous Harlem Renaissance, the brief but effervescent outpouring of creative writing by African Americans in the 1920s that centered around the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Larsen is remembered, on the strength of two surviving books, as one of the best novelists of the movement, but her personal life has always been somewhat obscure, and in her fi nal decades she virtually vanished from the literary scene. Fortunately, the publication of George Hutchinson’s massive biography of Larsen in 2006 has answered many lingering questions and cleared up much previous confusion, and any student of Larsen’s life is necessarily indebted to Hutchinson’s research and should begin by studying his huge and impressively detailed volume. According to her birth certificate, Larsen was born as Nellie Walker in Chicago on April 13, 1891, the daughter of a white Danish immigrant named Mary Hansen and of Peter Walker, an immigrant from the Danish West Indies whose own parentage was racially mixed: Walker’s father was probably a West Indian white man who had impregnated a black mistress. Although Walker (a cook) had a reasonably good job for a “colored” man in the racially prejudiced United States of the 1890s, at the time of Nellie’s birth he and Mary (whom he apparently married in 1890) lived in an especially unappealing area of Chicago. Unfortunately, Peter Walker either

died (as Larsen herself believed) or disappeared from Nellie’s young life for some other reason; Nellie’s mother soon became involved with (and probably married to) a white Danish immigrant named Peter Larsen, and in July 1892 Nellie’s white half sister, Anna, was born. Claims that “Peter Larsen” was really “Peter Walker” passing as a white man have been effectively refuted by Hutchinson (24); in this case, as in many others, Nella Larsen’s own accounts of her life seem more trustworthy than those of some later biographers. Nella’s childhood and adolescence cannot have been easy, not only because she experienced racial discrimination but also because her parents were never prosperous. There is some reason to think that her white stepfather found her something of an embarrassment (at one point he apparently failed to report her existence to a census taker), but, on the other hand, there is good reason to believe that she was much loved by her mother. For one thing, her mother took both Nella and Anna with her on a return visit to Denmark when both girls were quite young, and when they returned to Chicago in 1898, Nella was enrolled in school and in fact eventually received a better education than Anna. Hutchinson argues that Nella’s mother realized that her racially mixed child would face greater challenges than her white daughter and so made an extra effort to ensure that Nella would be as well prepared as possible for her future. The available evidence suggests

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that young Nella was a particularly bright child; she was able to skip various grade levels, and when she entered a largely white high school in 1905, she was one of a very small minority of Chicagoans of any race able to avail themselves of a high school education. Her half sister never had this opportunity; nor did she go to college (as Nella did). Through her own gifts and efforts and through the extra income provided by her mother’s work as a dressmaker, Nella thus became a well-educated and highly articulate young woman, but in the America of her era all her talents were less important than the simple fact of her race. Chicago was becoming increasingly racially segregated during Larsen’s youth, and she must have realized that life for her parents and sister would have been easier (or at least less awkward) if she were not a member of the family. Hutchinson convincingly argues that this early recognition of her difference shaped Larsen’s psychology for the rest of her life. Larsen’s awareness of racial discrimination would have increased vastly when she enrolled at Fisk University, a traditionally black college in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1907. Suddenly she was living in the South, where legal and de facto segregation was a pervasive fact of life; she and her mother, for instance, could not have sat beside each other on public transportation (Hutchinson 53). Nashville had a much higher proportion of African-American citizens than did Chicago, and Fisk itself (at least in its student body) was entirely black. Larsen’s time there did not last long, however, for in June 1908 she was one of nearly a dozen students who were expelled from the university, apparently for objecting to its rigid dress codes and other restrictions on student conduct. The self-assertiveness that would increasingly become a feature of Larsen’s character had now begun to manifest itself, but if her expulsion from Fisk was a disappointment to her mother, it provided an opportunity of sorts for Nella, for during the next four years (except for a brief return trip to the United States) she was able to live with relatives in Denmark, where racial prejudice was much less common than in America and where she seems to have been cordially received. Although

some biographers have questioned Larsen’s claims about this sojourn in Denmark, Hutchinson argues persuasively that (once again) Larsen’s own accounts can be trusted. This extended stay abroad, especially since it occurred during the crucial years of her late teens and early twenties, helped radically to shape her sense of herself as a cosmopolitan outsider—familiar with many different nations, cultures, classes, and ethnicities, but not entirely “at home” in any. Larsen and her family may even have assumed for a time that she would live permanently in Denmark, and perhaps it was this assumption that helped account for the fact that she was not reported as being a member of her family’s Chicago household in the 1910 census. In any case, Larsen was back in the United States in 1912 and had soon enrolled in a nursing school in New York, where she received rigorous training and where (as before and later) she excelled in her work. In January 1915 she graduated as one of the top nurses in the program and quickly found employment as head nurse at the Tuskegee Institute, perhaps the most famous black college in the world at that time. At Tuskegee, however, she was expected to work long and punishing hours (especially as a result of an epidemic of grippe that hit the school during the winter season), and she was also expected to conform to a rigid code of conduct—a code Larsen soon found oppressive and exploitive, and one with which she quickly became disenchanted. Resigning from her position in fall 1916, she eventually returned to New York, began teaching at her old nursing school, and earned certification in the rapidly developing and increasingly important field of civil service nursing. In the early summer 1918 she began working for the Bureau of Preventable Diseases, earning impressive pay raises and taking a leading role in helping to combat the infamous epidemic of Spanish flu that spread throughout the globe that year—one of the most deadly epidemics in world history. Larsen had a real talent for nursing and a passionate commitment to it, and these facts would stand her in good stead when her later literary career suddenly collapsed. For the time being, she remained a nurse

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until 1921, by which time her salary had increased substantially. On May 3, 1919, however, she had married Elmer Imes, a black man who not only was a member of a noted and well-connected family, but also had the distinction of being only the second African American in U.S. history to earn a Ph.D. in physics (Hutchinson 124). Elmer and Nella soon became active in the social and cultural life of Harlem, and Nella in particular became involved with a local library and began to consider becoming a writer. Resigning her position as a nurse, she became a librarian and then enrolled in library school—one of the fi rst blacks in the country to do so. Once again she quickly distinguished herself, especially in her performance on the job, and pay raises and promotions rapidly followed. By the mid-1920s, however, she was as much interested in writing books herself as in tending to books written by others, and her growing connections with other black intellectuals and writers, as well as the increasing interest taken in her by such white literati as Carl Van Vechten (author of the famous novel Nigger Heaven) helped encourage her ambitions. Interest in black literature, music, dance, and art was at a high point during this period; whites visited Harlem to take part in its active social life, which centered around nightclubs and jazz. Larsen’s fi rst published work of fiction, a story titled “The Wrong Man,” appeared in print in January 1926, followed in April by another, titled “Freedom.” In was in early 1928, however, that her fi rst novel, Quicksand, appeared. Partly autobiographical in theme and plot, this novel won Larsen wide acclaim, and by the end of the year she had already fi nished a second novel, titled Passing, which some readers considered even better than her fi rst. Despite her growing professional success, however, her marriage had begun to fail—a fact reflected in the plot of Passing. Although charges (probably accurate) that Larsen had deliberately plagiarized a story called “Sanctuary” damaged her reputation in 1930, she had nevertheless begun working on a new novel, and in the spring of that year she learned that she had been selected to receive a highly prestigious

Guggenheim Fellowship, which would allow her to travel to Europe to work on her new book. The fellowship occurred at a welcome time, since Larsen could now confront Elmer with her knowledge of his affair with a white woman who worked at Fisk University, where he had recently become a highpaid professor. Although their marriage did not end immediately (since the wrong kind of scandal would have cost not only Elmer his job but Nella any chance of adequate alimony), her time in Spain and France, which began in fall 1930, gave her an opportunity to work on her book, gather her thoughts, and perhaps (or so Hutchinson suggests [372]) conduct an affair of her own with a young white man. Her third novel, however, pleased neither Larsen nor her publishers, and the book never did appear in print. Adding to her disappointment was the fact that she was expected, upon her return to the United States, to move from New York to Nashville to take up residence as the faculty wife of her adulterous husband. Although she did indeed move to Fisk, she was quite unhappy there—a feeling exacerbated by the fact that many blacks on campus sympathized with Elmer. During her time in Nashville she apparently suffered (or took) a fall—an incident that some have interpreted as either a real or phony suicide attempt. In any case, by the end of August 1933 she was granted a divorce (with ample alimony) on grounds of Elmer’s alleged cruelty. The alimony payments, which continued until Elmer’s death in 1941, gave her a measure of fi nancial security during the depths of the Great Depression. By the mid-1930s Larsen had begun to withdraw from many of her previously closest friends, and by the late 1930s she had broken with most of her former acquaintances. Few of them had any idea where she now lived or how to contact her. The breakdown of her marriage (which had been publicized in the press) had demoralized her, while the failure of her third novel must also have been depressing. Hutchinson suggests that she may have become dependent on drugs and/or alcohol in the fi nal decades of her life (450, 469–471), and perhaps by pulling away from her former friends she sought to hide this or other problems. The alimony

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payments from Elmer allowed her a certain degree of economic freedom, but in the years immediately following Elmer’s death on September 11, 1941, Larsen became a bit more accessible, although she maintained her distance from most of her old associates. Early in 1944 she began working as a nurse at Gouverneur Hospital in New York, and, as in the past, she quickly won promotions and raises. By 1947 she had become chief nurse and night supervisor, and throughout the 1950s she worked diligently, earning the respect of numerous colleagues. Even when she was assaulted and robbed in early 1960 while on her way to her job, she nevertheless proceeded to work, but she seems to have lived a largely isolated life, keeping to herself and breaking with friends when (for whatever reasons) they disappointed her. In September 1963 she was forced to retire because she had worked beyond the legal age limit, and in late March 1964 she was found dead in her apartment, apparently of a heart attack. The woman who had once found fame as a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance died, alone and lonely, obscure and largely forgotten.

Quicksand (1928) Helga Crane, the young, talented, well-dressed, and well-educated daughter of a white mother and black father, fi nds herself unhappily employed at Naxos, an all-black college in the South, but she soon quits her job, returns to her hometown of Chicago, makes her way (with the support of a wealthy black patroness) to New York City, and there becomes involved with a group of comfortable, sophisticated blacks living in Harlem, the center of African-American cultural and social life in the United States during the 1920s. Eventually, though, after she grows disenchanted with her circle of black friends, she moves to Denmark (her mother’s home country) for several years, but she soon becomes frustrated with the patronizing, calculating attitude of the Danes (who fi nd her merely exotic), and so she yearns to go back to the United States. After her return and after some romantic disappointments, she impulsively mar-

ries an unkempt, exploitative black preacher, who moves her to Alabama, where she lives in poverty, remains constantly pregnant, gives birth to several children, nearly dies in childbirth, and ends the novel depressed, disillusioned, and pregnant with a fi fth child. Larsen’s fi rst novel, which is obviously autobiographical to a great degree, opens with a poetic epigraph by L ANGSTON HUGHES (another significant writer of the Harlem Renaissance) that already implies several of the book’s main themes. The epigraph’s fi rst line (“My old man died in a fi ne big house”) foreshadows the novel’s sometimes satiric depictions of upper-class life among both blacks and whites; meanwhile, the second line (“My ma died in a shack”) anticipates the grim ending of the book, which describes the continually pregnant protagonist suffering in rural poverty. Meanwhile, the epigraph’s fi nal two lines (“I wonder where I’m gonna die / Being neither white nor black?”) announces the novel’s central concern with racial division, racial tension, and personal alienation. Helga Crane is “neither white nor black” not only because she is racially mixed by birth but also because she feels fully at home in none of the cultures she tries to inhabit. She is rootless, bitter, and constantly on the move; her dissatisfaction with one place and one circumstance after another generates much of the forward movement of the plot and most of the shifts from one symbolic location to another. As she moves from Alabama to Chicago to New York to Denmark and then ultimately back to Alabama, she tries out not only a series of possible homes but also a series of potential identities, fi nding fulfi llment or happiness in none of them. The book is partly a meditation on the old theme of the “tragic mulatto,” but more broadly it is a depiction of a woman whose life is defi ned in large part by rigid defi nitions of race, class, and gender. More broadly still, it is a novel that deals with the fundamental modern problem of existential alienation—of the inability to feel at peace, at rest, or at home anytime or anywhere. The fi rst sentence of the book is highly revealing: “Helga Crane sat alone in her room, which at that hour, eight in the evening, was in a soft

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gloom” (35). Helga’s name is immediately suggestive: Her Christian name already implies her partScandinavian roots, while her last name is plain and nondescript. Even her name, in other words, suggests her mixed cultural background, while the fact that she is “alone” symbolizes her essential condition: She is alone at the beginning of the book, will be essentially alone (even when surrounded by others) throughout much of the rest of it, and will be even more fundamentally alone and lonely when the novel ends. It is not an accident, then, that the book opens in literal darkness and “gloom”: That word sets the tone for much of the rest of the novel. Helga, in these opening pages, is surrounded by abundant material comforts, but she never feels comfortable in her own skin; nor does she ever really feel at home with other people. It is not long, for instance, before she is remembering the day’s “distasteful encounters and stupid perversities” (36–37), a phrase that epitomizes many of her assessments of most of the people and events she encounters throughout the book. Helga is intensely unhappy with Naxos (an ironic anagram of Saxon), the white-funded and white-controlled institution of higher education for blacks (modeled on BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’s famous Tuskegee Institute)—a place she considers to be “smug and fat with self-satisfaction” and a place that “tolerated no innovations, no individualisms” (39). But Helga, unfortunately, is no more satisfied with her biological family than she is with her coworkers: Remembering her relatives in Chicago, she reflects that they “feared and hated her. She pitied and despised them” (41). From now until the end of the book, no matter where she is or who surrounds her, Helga will never know joy, for (as the narrator notes), “She could neither conform, nor be happy in her nonconformity” (42). Quicksand, then, is a book with a deeply unhappy and (it must be said) a fairly unpleasant and even unappealing central character. Helga rejects Naxos (with typical melodrama) as “a place of shame, lies, hypocrisy, cruelty, servility, and snobbishness” (48), and she compares it to “some loathsome, venomous disease” (53), but she rarely stops to consider that the roots of her dissatisfac-

tion may lie in her own bitterness as much as in her surroundings, and (more to the point) Larsen rarely invites us to regard Helga with this sort of critical irony. Perhaps Helga was too close to Larsen’s own personality for Larsen to achieve any kind of significant distance from her, but in some ways the novel suffers from its almost suffocating focus on a character who seems, in many respects, so selfcentered, uncharitable, and essentially immature. Everything is seen from Helga’s perspective; everything is fi ltered through Helga’s consciousness; there is relatively little of the dialogue and drama and confl ict of viewpoints that help make Larsen’s second novel (Passing) an arguably better book. Helga and many of her friends (especially when she arrives in New York) can appear pretentious, affected, self-centered, and unsympathetic in both senses of that word, and sometimes Larsen’s own writing lapses into awkward affectation. At one point, for instance, she reports, “Having fi nally turned her attention to Helga Crane, Fortune now seemed determined to smile, to make amends for her shameful neglect. One had, Helga decided, only to touch the right button, to press the right spring, in order to attract the jade’s notice” (69). Occasionally Larsen seems to mock the materialism and hedonism of the people she describes, but she rarely achieves the kind of ironic, satiric, or humorous distance from those values that would make the book seem either warmer, more complex, or more substantial. In the fi nal analysis Helga Crane is (sad to say) a character about whom it is difficult to care very deeply; her suffering seems largely the result of her own self-centeredness. As Charles Larson puts it, “The problem is Helga herself: her restlessness, her feelings of superiority, her deeply rooted sense of insecurity about her blackness, all the seemingly contradictory aspects of her personality. Self-hatred can manifest itself in many ways, and certainly one of the most common is to disdain everyone else” (Invisible Darkness 73). It is not clear, however, that Nella Larsen shares Charles Larson’s penetrating diagnosis of Helga Crane; too often the novel seems to invite us to pity Helga, and to share her perspective and attitudes, rather than to achieve much critical distance from them. Helga takes her-

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self quite seriously, and Larsen unfortunately often seems to follow Helga’s lead. To say this, however, is not to deny the importance of Larsen’s achievement in this book. She has been praised, for instance, for her “depiction of a memorable protagonist, her adept narration, and her skillful development of the novel’s central metaphor” (Wall 116), and although most critics consider Helga’s sudden marriage unconvincing and the novel’s ending abrupt and flawed, most have also agreed with the original judgment of W. E. B. DUBOIS, who considered the book one of the best novels by a black person written up to that point (see Davis, Nella Larsen 280). The book might benefit from greater distance from (and about) its protagonist, but there is no gainsaying the talent Larsen reveals—a talent (it seems possible to argue) that would soon be on even greater display in her next novel, Passing.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the somewhat autobiographical protagonist of this work with the autobiographical protagonist of Booker T. Washington’s book Up from Slavery. Pay particular attention to such matters as tone, attitude, character, and implied values. How do you think each writer would have responded to the other’s book, and why? Discuss the significance of race, class, and gender in each work. 2. Both this novel and the short story “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” (by SUI SIN FAR [Edith Maude Eaton]) deal with minority women who must fi nd a place for themselves in an ethnically distinct majority culture. How do the works resemble and/or differ from one another in such matters as style, genre, technique, and fi nal effect? What role does social and economic class play in each work? Discuss the depiction of marriage in each text. 3. Read W. E. B. DuBois’s work The Souls of Black Folk and then discuss the reasons DuBois may have admired Larsen’s novel. How does her book reflect some of the ideas discussed by DuBois? Why would the style, manner, and subject matter of her writing have been likely to appeal to

DuBois? What personal traits or experiences did the two authors have in common? 4. Compare and contrast Helga’s experiences in different geographical and cultural settings (for instance, the North versus the South and America versus Europe). What similarities and/or differences do you see? Is there any place where Helga seems particularly happy or at home? Where might she have had the greatest chance to lead a satisfying life?

Passing (1929) Irene Redfield, a comfortably upper-middle-class and light-skinned black woman living in New York in a somewhat strained marriage with her husband, Brian, and their two young sons, chances to renew contact with Clare Kendry, a very lightskinned, very beautiful friend from her youth who has in the meantime married a wealthy white racist named Jack Bellew and who is “passing” as a white herself. Clare, however, is eager to spend time among the blacks of Harlem without her husband’s knowledge, and, as the vivacious Clare insinuates herself into the social circle of Irene and Brian, Irene becomes increasingly worried that Brian is becoming attracted to the adventurous interloper and that this attraction may threaten the Redfield marriage and, with it, Irene’s economic security. When Bellew unexpectedly stumbles across reason to believe that his wife is indeed black, he traces her to a party (also attended by the Redfields) in a sixstory building; when he angrily confronts Clare, Irene rushes to her side, but Clare falls (or jumps, or is pushed) from a large open window nearby, and Irene, distraught and worried, is left suddenly anxious and alone. The complexity of Larsen’s splendid second novel is already implied by its title, which obviously refers to the phenomenon of racial “passing” but also carries numerous other possible meanings and implications. Irene herself, for instance, is “passing” in certain respects: She is living an outwardly comfortable life, but she realizes that her economic security depends greatly on the continued existence of a marriage that

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is increasingly unhappy. She also passes as a friend of Clare, even though she feels growing hostility toward her old acquaintance. Worried that her marriage and her lifestyle may be at risk of passing away, Irene tries to imagine means to remove the threat of Clare from her life, and, at the very end of the book, when she may indeed have shoved Clare from a window to a death that others consider simply an accident, Irene may be in the conscience-stricken predicament of spending the rest of her life passing (or posing) as an innocent person who may actually be guilty of murder. Some critics have also suggested that there is an undercurrent of sexual attraction between Clare and Irene, in which case these women may to some degree be “passing” as devoted wives who nevertheless feel more complicated emotions. Finally, other analysts have suggested that many of the middleclass black characters in the book are “passing” by imitating the lifestyles and values of wealthy whites, while various wealthy whites themselves may be “passing” as friends of blacks by visiting Harlem on the weekends for exotic adventure without ever really abandoning their fundamentally racist assumptions. Larsen, in short, has created a novel that is full of psychological and social complications. A number of the individual characters (especially Clare, but also Irene and Brian and even Clare’s racist husband) are morally and emotionally complex, and the plot itself (especially the conclusion) is full of suspense and intriguing ambiguities. Many of the same thematic elements dealt with in Larsen’s fi rst novel (Quicksand) are dealt with again in Passing, including the social and psychological distortions caused by overrigid defi nitions of race, class, and gender, especially as they affect the lives of women in general and of African-American women in particular. But although the setting of Passing (which basically centers on New York City, with a quick side trip to Chicago) is more confi ned than the multiple locations of Quicksand (which travels from the South to the Midwest to the Northeast to Europe and then back to the South again), Larsen’s second novel somehow seems more expansive than her fi rst. For one thing, the basic focus is not confi ned to the consciousness of a single character; for another, the characters in Pass-

ing seem more interesting and more sympathetic than those in Quicksand; fi nally, much of the narrative in Passing is carried along by crisp, rapid, and usually vivid (if sometimes mannered, pretentious, or dated) dialogue. Larsen has a more nuanced, more distanced, more critical perspective on all her characters here than she seems to have achieved in Quicksand, and this is especially true of her perspective on Irene, who emerges as an exceptionally complicated personality. On the one hand, it is easy to feel sympathetic to Irene, who cares about her sons and is anxious to preserve their security as well as her own; it is also easy to see why she feels threatened by the vivacious and somewhat amoral and calculating Clare. On the other hand, by the end of the book, Irene has allowed her fears to lead her to become fairly calculating and amoral (if not actually immoral) herself. Passing (it can be argued) is a more ethically complex novel than Quicksand; the moral dilemmas it raises would be interesting no matter what the color(s) of the characters, and the characters themselves would seem intriguingly complex no matter what their race or class. Quicksand (as its title implies) dealt more obviously with passive victimization; Passing (as its title suggests) is more concerned with conscious choices for which the characters can be held responsible. As with Quicksand, Larsen has been criticized for the ending of Passing; some analysts consider the conclusion too abrupt, too melodramatic, and too quickly convenient in the way it disposes of Clare and moves the novel to a rapid fi nish. All these criticisms have some merit, but the fi nal pages of the book can also be defended in various ways. Consider, for instance, Jack Bellew’s verbal attack on Clare when he bursts unexpectedly into the party: “ ‘So you’re a nigger, a damned dirty nigger!’ His voice was a snarl and a moan, an expression of rage and pain” (271). His words are ugly, but his anguish is real, and Larsen manages to capture the complexity of his emotions, which are fueled by hatred and (ironically) by love; he feels bitter in part because he feels deceived, and although he is hardly a sympathetic character, he is not merely a cheap villain, either. This becomes clear when Clare later falls from the window and Bellew emits

Nella Larsen 295

“a sound not quite human, like a beast in agony. ‘Nig! My God! Nig!’ ” (271). “Nig” had been his nickname for his darker-than-usual “white” wife, and when he shouts that name now we are repulsed by the word but nonetheless touched by his sense of loss. In some ways he is indeed a “beast,” but he is also a “beast in agony.” A lesser writer would have made Bellew merely evil; Larsen, to her credit, achieves something more complex. Complexity, in fact, is the hallmark of her writing throughout the novel, even in its somewhat contrived ending. Thus, although Irene lovingly remembers Clare’s beauty, “Irene wasn’t sorry” about Clare’s fall (272). And as she rushes down to view the body, her greatest fear is not the sight of the mutilated corpse but another possibility altogether: “What if Clare was not dead?” (273). Whether or not she actually pushed Clare, Irene is glad that Clare is no longer a threat; striving to preserve her marriage, her family, and her respectability, Irene has become a kind of moral monster; she is full of selfi sh calculation, but she is also like a frightened child. When Irene faints in almost the last (somewhat melodramatic) sentence of the book, Larsen writes that “everything was dark” (275), but the sentence is redeemed when we realize that the darkness can be explained not simply by a loss of consciousness but also, symbolically, by a loss of conscience. Irene may (or may not—even this much is not clear) get away with murder, but if she does, her experience with “passing” is only just beginning.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Irene Redfield in Passing with Bigger Thomas in R ICHARD WRIGHT’s novel Native Son. How do their social, economic, and racial circumstances differ, but how (at the end of both works) do they face comparable moral predicaments? Is one character more ethically appealing than the other? If so, why? 2. Read ZOR A NEALE HURSTON’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, and then discuss the similarities and differences between Janie Crawford and Clare Kendry. What motivations and other traits of character do they share? How are their lives affected by their marriages and their racial

backgrounds? How does a yearning for freedom and autonomy affect both characters? 3. Both Passing and THEODORE DREISER’s An American Tragedy (1925) climax with deaths whose circumstances are ambiguous. How are the descriptions of these deaths comparable and/or distinct? Discuss the circumstances and motivations that lead to both deaths and the aftermaths that ensue. What role do larger social forces play in both deaths? 4. Focus on the theme suggested by the title of the book and trace its different appearances throughout the novel. Discuss as many different instances of as many different kinds of “passing” as you can fi nd. How does this theme, almost by defi nition, contribute to the complexity of the book’s characterization? How does this theme help guarantee that the characters will not be mere stereotypes?

“Sanctuary” (1930) In a remote area of the poor rural South, a large black man approaches the isolated cottage of aging Annie Poole (also black); when the man enters the cottage, Annie sees that he is Jim Hammer, a friend of her son Obadiah, although Annie herself dislikes him intensely. However, when Hammer reveals that he is being pursued by the local white authorities for having impulsively shot someone in a panicked escape from an attempted robbery, Annie agrees (because he is her son’s friend) to hide him; she knows that he is unlikely to receive fair treatment at the hands of the local whites. Even after the white sheriff arrives and reveals that it is Annie’s own son who was shot and killed, Annie keeps Hammer hidden; when the whites leave, however, she expels Hammer from her house and makes it clear that she kept his secret only because he was a black being pursued by whites. This effectively written story—the only surviving work by Larsen set entirely in the South, and the only one so full of southern dialect—caused enormous controversy soon after it was published, when a reader alleged that the text seemed to be

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extremely heavily indebted to (if not in fact plagiarized from) a story by the English writer Sheila Kaye-Smith. Kaye-Smith’s story, “Mrs. Adis,” had been set in rural England, but otherwise the two tales were remarkably similar in plot, characterization, dialogue, and details of phrasing. Revelation of these resemblances caused something of a scandal for Larsen, who claimed that she had heard the basic story from an elderly black patient she had attended as a nurse, and she produced various drafts of the tale to support her claim that she had written the work without knowing about KayeSmith’s story. She also asserted that the basic plot of the work was well known in black folklore, and she likewise defended herself by claiming that if she had intended to steal someone else’s work, she would not have done it in such a clumsily obvious manner. Most scholars note that the resemblances between Larsen’s text and Kaye-Smith’s are too numerous and exact to be coincidental; some analysts have suggested that Larsen may have read the earlier work, forgotten that she had done so, and then relied subconsciously on an almost photographic memory when she began to produce her own version (Larson, Invisible Darkness 98). Other scholars have suggested that Larsen admired the Kaye-Smith work, wanted to transpose it into an African-American key, and simply may not have realized that such heavy indebtedness to another person’s work might be perceived as plagiarism (Davis, Nella Larsen 351). Still other analysts have suggested that Larsen may have been acting, at some deep level of her mind, in a deliberately self-destructive way, as if driven by some impulse to ruin the success she had recently been enjoying (Hutchinson 344). However one explains the similarities between the two texts, Larsen’s work deserves detailed attention in its own right; however it came to be written, it is effective in numerous details—details that merit close analysis.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Track down a copy of Kaye-Smith’s story and then closely compare and contrast the two works. Does Larsen’s debt to Kaye-Smith make her own story less valuable? Does Larsen

improve on Kaye-Smith in any ways? Does her story fall short of the original in any respects? Does it matter that Larsen’s story was apparently based on another work, especially in view of the long history of authors’ borrowing closely from previous authors? 2. Analyze the story in detail and discuss the various factors that make it an effective work of fiction. Discuss, for instance, specific examples of its skillful characterization, its effective use of dialogue and diction, and Larsen’s talent in the use of imagery, irony, and suspense.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON LARSEN AND HER WORK 1. Choose one of Larsen’s other published works—such as her stories “The Wrong Man” or “Freedom”—and discuss its effectiveness in terms of such matters as plot, style, characterization, imagery, and symbolism. Does the work you chose deserve to be better known and more widely read? If so, why? If not, why not? 2. Discuss the theme of individuality in Larsen’s works. Is there any common pattern in Larsen’s depiction of the relations between individuals and groups? Does Larsen seem to value group solidarity, does she seem suspicious of it, or do her attitudes vary from work to work? 3. Examine the conclusion of one or more of Larsen’s writings. Is the conclusion effective? How does the conclusion relate to the rest of the work and particularly to the larger themes of the text? What does the conclusion imply about Larsen’s larger outlook in the work? For instance, is the conclusion optimistic, pessimistic, ironic, cynical? 4. Read one or more historical accounts of the Harlem Renaissance and then discuss one or more of Larsen’s texts in connection with that historical movement and moment. In what ways is Larsen’s work typical of other writings of the “Renaissance”? In what ways is her voice highly individual? How does her work differ (for instance) from that of Langston Hughes?

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5. Track down a copy of Carl Van Vechten’s famous work Nigger Heaven—a work Larsen admired and defended. Why do you think Larsen was attracted to this book? What features does it have in common with her own work? What were Van Vechten’s purposes in writing his book, and why might Larsen have been sympathetic to his purposes and his achievement? 6. Choose one specific passage from one work by Larsen and analyze it in as much detail as possible. Discuss it in terms of such matters, for instance, as plot, characterization, theme, diction, dialogue, imagery, and symbolism. How is the chosen passage an effective piece of writing? How does it contribute to the larger success of the work of which it is a part? How is the chosen passage typical of Larsen’s writing as a whole? How does the chosen passage help justify the recent renewed interest in Larsen as an author? 7. Discuss the role of some of the white characters in one or more of Larsen’s works. What are their practical as well as their symbolic functions? Are they depicted convincingly, or are they merely caricatures? Is there any observable pattern in Larsen’s use of such characters, or is each such character depicted in a unique and complex way? 8. Discuss the presentation of lower-class blacks in Larsen’s fiction. What practical and/or symbolic functions do they serve? What are their relations with the upper- (or upper-middle-) class blacks who are the central figures in Larsen’s two surviving novels? Compare and contrast Larsen’s depiction of poorer African-American characters with the depiction of such characters in the fiction of Richard Wright. 9. Do some research into the “tragic mulatto” character in American fiction. Read (for instance) Kate Chopin’s story “La Belle Zoraode” and other such works, and then discuss the ways in which Larsen echoes or departs from previous depictions of mixed-race persons in American fiction. How does she reinforce and/or subvert any stereotypes associated with such persons?

10. Compare and contrast the writings and careers of Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. How are the works and lives of these two writers similar, and how are they distinct? Discuss such matters as theme and style, the autobiographical elements in the fiction they produced, and the fi nal fates of both women. WORKS CITED

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Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Davis, Thadious M. “Introduction.” In Passing. By Nella Larsen. New York: Penguin, 1997. ———. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Hutchinson, George. In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. Larson, Charles R. “Introduction.” In The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen. By Nella Larsen. New York: Anchor, 2001. ———. Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993. Larsen, Nella. The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen. Edited by Charles R. Larson. New York: Anchor, 2001. McLendon, Jacquelyn Y. The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. Nelson, Emmanuel S. “Nella Larsen (1891–1964).” In African American Authors, 1745–1945: A BioBibliographical Sourcebook. Edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000. Regents of the University of Minnesota. Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/ Bios/entries/larsen_nella.html. Accessed April 7, 2009. Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Robert C. Evans

Jack London (1876–1916) Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it. (qtd. in Sinclair 32)

J

ack London, who eventually became one of the most popular American writers in the world, was born in humble circumstances in San Francisco on January 12, 1876. His mother, Flora Wellman, had been involved with a traveling astrologer named William Henry Chaney, who quickly abandoned her when she told him she was pregnant. When her son was born, she named him John Griffith Chaney, but by September 7, Flora married John London, a widower with two daughters of his own, and Flora’s son became John Griffith London. In 1876–85 the family lived in straitened circumstances in various places in or near San Francisco; in 1878 (for instance) they moved to Oakland (across San Francisco Bay) to escape an epidemic that nearly killed Jack and Eliza, an older stepsister who helped take care of him until she herself later married. By 1881 the family was living in Almeda; by 1886 they were residing in San Mateo County and then in the Livermore Valley; by 1886 they were back in Oakland, where Jack became a frequent user of the public library while also helping to support his family through a variety of menial jobs. After graduating from grammar school in 1891, he worked briefly in a cannery but then borrowed enough money to buy a small boat and become an oyster pirate in San Francisco Bay. In 1892, however, he was hired as a deputy patrolman for the California Fish Patrol. By 1893 he had signed up as a sailor on a ship that sailed, for more than half a year, to the North

Pacific, Hawaii, and Japan. Then, when London returned to San Francisco, he not only did heavy labor for little pay but also began his career as a writer by winning top prize in a contest sponsored by a local newspaper. His winning entry was based (as was much of his later work) on his own experiences at sea. In 1894 London joined a group of other unemployed California workers who were making their way east to protest in Washington, D.C., but London left the group in Missouri to do some traveling on his own. He visited the World’s Fair grounds in Chicago before winding up in Niagara, New York, where he was arrested as a vagrant and spent a month in jail. Back in Oakland, he attended high school for a year; there he wrote and published in a school publication while trying to get ready to enter the University of California at Berkeley. In 1896 he joined the Socialist Labor Party, earning a reputation as the “Boy Socialist,” before being admitted to the university that fall. Forced by fi nancial hardship to leave college in 1897, he tried at fi rst to earn his living as a writer before turning to work in a laundry. Later that year, however, he made one of the most momentous decisions of his life: He and a brother-in-law joined the “gold rush” that had begun in Alaska. He spent a rough winter in a small cabin in the Yukon until sickness forced him to abandon his plans. After rafting down the Yukon River to the Bering Sea, he worked as a sailor to

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Jack London

earn his passage home to San Francisco, where he arrived by late July, only to discover that his stepfather had passed away during his absence. From this point on, London was more and more determined to earn his living as an author, and by 1899 he had begun to achieve real success with writings based on his experiences in Alaska. In 1900 London’s fi rst book, The Son of the Wolf (set in Alaska), was published, and in the same year London also married a woman named Elizabeth (Bess or Bessie) Maddern, with whom he settled back in Oakland. Their daughter Joan was born early in January 1901, and London himself won his fi rst job as a journalist. He received only a few hundred votes when he ran for mayor of Oakland as a Socialist, but he did succeed as an author once more by the end of the year with the publication of another book of tales set in Alaska, The God of His Fathers. In 1902 his fi rst novel (A Daughter of the Snows) was published, as were two additional books (Children of the Frost and Cruise of the Dazzler); his second child, Bess, or Becky, was born; and he traveled to England to collect material for yet another publication. In 1903 The KemptonWace Letters (a book about love he cowrote with Anna Strunsky) appeared, as did not only The People of the Abyss but also The Call of the Wild, which was an instant success and remains one of his most famous works. During this same year, however, he also separated from his wife after falling in love with Charmian Kittredge, whom he had met in 1900. In 1904 he was a war correspondent in the Far East, while, back in London and New York, his publishers issued a new collection of tales (The Faith of Men and Other Stories) as well as one of his most notable novels, The Sea-Wolf. During this same year, his wife fi led for divorce, citing her husband’s involvement with Anna Strunsky as one reason for the breakup. The divorce was fi nalized in November 1905, and the next day London married Charmian Kittredge. Also in 1905 he ran again (and again without success) as a Socialist for mayor of Oakland, and also in that year he bought a large California ranch. Despite this new status as a substantial landowner and successful author, he

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also in 1905 published a book of essays called War of the Classes and additionally lectured at Harvard and elsewhere advocating socialism. More books of fiction—Tales of the Fish Patrol and The Game— also appeared that year. More lecturing on socialism occurred early in 1906 in such diverse places as Chicago, New York, New Haven, North Dakota, and Jamaica, although illness soon led London to end these appearances and return to California. While he was there, three new books were published: Moon-Face and Other Stories, Scorn of Women, and the particularly notable White Fang. Perhaps his most significant nonliterary project of 1906, however, was his decision to begin building a schooner, the Snark, which he planned to sail around the world in a trip that would last seven years. The craft was fi nished in 1907, and in late April London and Charmian set off for the South Pacific, arriving in Hawaii in late May. They stayed there until October, then visited a number of other islands, including Tahiti. Meanwhile, books written by London continued to spill from the presses, including (in 1907 alone) Before Adam, Love of Life and Other Stories, and The Road, followed in 1908 by The Iron Heel. London was briefly back in California at the beginning of 1908, but the South Pacific voyage soon continued, taking him to Samoa, the Fiji Islands, the New Hebrides, the Solomon Islands, and Australia before he was stricken by sickness and, in late November, felt compelled to give up the trip. By mid-1909 he was back at his California ranch after traveling through Central America and the American South, and he now spent much of his time improving his property (and adding to it). His ambitious novel Martin Eden appeared that year, followed, in 1910, by Lost Face, Revolution and Other Essays, Burning Daylight, and Theft: A Play in Four Acts. Unfortunately, a daughter born that same year died within a few days, but London soon turned his attention to his plans to construct an elaborate home (“Wolf House”) on his newly expanded ranch. London’s taste for new adventures continued in 1911, when he, Charmian, and an employee spent their summer driving a four-horse carriage


to Oregon and back. Meanwhile, four new books appeared that year: When God Laughs and Other Stories, Adventure, The Cruise of the Snark, and South Sea Tales. By late December London headed for New York, and by the beginning of March 1912 he and his wife were on a voyage from Baltimore that would take them on a sailing ship to Seattle by way of a trip around the Horn of South America. London was back at his ranch by August 1912, a year that saw the publication of still more books: The House of Pride and Other Tales of Hawaii, A Son of the Sun, and Smoke Bellew, which were followed in 1913 by The Night-Born, The Abysmal Brute, John Barleycorn, and The Valley of the Moon. Unfortunately, during July of that year, after undergoing surgery for appendicitis, London learned that his kidneys were diseased. As if to compound this misfortune, a month later the Wolf House was destroyed in a mysterious fi re. Nevertheless, by midfall London had the distinction of seeing his book The Sea-Wolf presented on-screen as the subject of the fi rst feature-length movie produced in the United States. By early 1914 he was back in New York but soon left for Mexico with his wife to report on the revolution there, although by midsummer illness forced him to return to the California ranch. The Strength of the Strong and The Mutiny of the Elsinore appeared that year, followed by two fantasies, The Scarlet Plague and The Jacket (otherwise known as The Star Rover), in 1915. During this latter year London, battling extreme rheumatism, traveled back and forth twice between California and Hawaii, hoping that the change of climate would help his health, but to little avail. He quit the Socialist Party early in March 1916, disappointed with its moderation, and, despite his stay in Hawaii, his health did not improve. He entered a California hospital for treatment of his rheumatism in September, but by November 22 he was dead of uremia. Although this death may have resulted from an intentional drug overdose (Pizer 994; Nuernberg xx–xxi), some scholars consider this possibility is unlikely (Lundquist 73). In the year of his death, London was as prolific as ever: In 1916 The Acorn-Planter: A California Forest Play, The Little Lady of the Big House, and

The Turtles of Tasman were published. Yet even after he died, books by London continued to pour from the presses, including The Human Drift, Jerry of the Islands, and Michael, Brother of Jerry in 1917; The Red One and Hearts of Three in 1918; On the Makaloa Mat in 1919; Dutch Courage and Other Stories in 1922; The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. in 1963; and, in subsequent years, collections of his war reportage, articles on sports, fantasy fiction, uncollected stories about Alaska, miscellaneous articles, and multiple volumes of letters. Even this list is hardly comprehensive, for London was one of the hardest-working and most productive writers of his or any time, and, although it is usually conceded that his works are of uneven quality, many were instantly popular and have always remained so, and some have won increasing critical respect.

“The Law of Life” (1901) Old Koskoosh, an elderly Indian who was once the chief of his tribe but who is now blind and decrepit, sits outside in the cold weather, listening as his son (the new chief) and the other young members of the tribe break camp and prepare to move to a new location. It soon becomes clear that they plan, in accordance with custom, to leave Koskoosh (protected merely by a temporary fi re) behind to meet his fate, for he is too old now to help either himself or his people. After the tribe departs, Koskoosh thinks back to his youth, when he watched an old moose, separated from its herd, eventually lose the battle for life with a pack of wolves; as he ponders the fate of the moose, he realizes that he is himself now surrounded by snarling wolves and that resistance can only be brief and futile. Thematically, stylistically, and in nearly every other way imaginable, this story is a typical work by Jack London. Its very title already suggests his characteristic concerns with the immutable facts of existence—facts no living thing can afford to ignore. The setting is the Klondike territory, which was the breeding ground of London’s earliest ambitions as a writer and the landscape where so many of his most distinctive tales take place. Against this

Jack London

backdrop he depicts (in stark, unsentimental terms, and in clear, simple, straightforward language) the inevitable fact of death in a world in which individuals are of no intrinsic importance. They matter only as members of groups, and they matter only as long as they contribute to the group’s survival. Here as in so many works by London, nature is not so much pitiless, cold, or cruel as blankly indifferent: Nature is not (as it was for many romantics) a beautiful home but an often grim and dangerous testing ground, an obstacle course in which creatures either survive or die. The influence of Darwinism on London’s thinking is especially obvious in this tale: Koskoosh has long since fulfi lled his basic natural functions (he has survived to maturity, mated, and produced offspring), and now he not only serves no obvious purpose but (what is more important) can no longer struggle successfully to survive. The main “law of life,” paradoxically, is that all life must die. The opening sentence of the story is already full of significance: “Old Koskoosh listened greedily” (365). The crucial fact about Koskoosh in this tale is his age, and so London emphasizes that detail in the story’s fi rst word. Meanwhile, the name Koskoosh, which immediately sounds exotic to Western, American ears, alerts us to the fact that here (as in so many other works by London) we will be focusing on a human being whose cultural background differs from our own, but one whose existence is likely to resemble ours in ways we might not at fi rst imagine. London often sets his stories in remote or “primitive” locales, but the tales almost always deal with facts that are basic to any human life—facts we ignore at our peril, even in our supposedly civilized urban environments. The fact that Koskoosh “listened greedily” already suggests, for instance, our basic human need to depend on our senses, and on the strength of our flesh, to survive. Koskoosh is almost literally hungry for information, but neither his eyes nor his limbs can help him now. London never lets us forget that our minds are embedded in bodies and that our continued existence depends largely on simple physical strength. Old as he is, Koskoosh still possesses a keen and “glimmering intelligence” (365), but intelligence alone is not

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enough to guarantee his survival. Indeed, part of his tragedy (if we can use such a potentially sentimental term) is that his mind and memory have outlived his body. In this respect, of course, his fate is quite common, and so London makes the life and death of this obscure Klondike Indian implicitly relevant to any reader. London’s writings interest us because they deal with seemingly exotic and unfamiliar people and events, but also because (on another level) they deal with facts we may fear, may try to ignore, but must ultimately acknowledge. Stylistically, too, “The Law of Life” exemplifies many of London’s most typical traits. Thus, in calling the female character Sit-cum-to-ha, Koskoosh’s “daughter’s daughter” (365), London not only again uses an intriguingly exotic name but also uses a kind of foreign dialect to refer, in a strange but exceedingly precise way, to a person we would merely (and more vaguely) call the old man’s “granddaughter.” London’s diction is rarely complicated, but it often (as in the example just mentioned) subtly implies a significantly different and remote way of looking at the world. Likewise, his syntax (or sentence structure) is rarely complicated, but it is often more artful than a quick reading might suggest. Thus, when London writes that “the long trail waited while the short day refused to linger” (365), he not only skillfully balances long trail and short day but also uses the alliterative l sound with understated musical effect. Similarly balanced, alliterative, and indeed almost rhyming language is used later in the emphatic description of a portable lodge’s being “rammed and jammed” into place (365), while the techniques of both personification and foreshadowing are employed when London writes, “Death waited, ever-hungry and hungriest of them all” (366). Such phrasing not only looks forward to the story’s fi nal paragraph but also looks back to its opening reference to Koskoosh’s own greedy listening. Yet London’s diction never calls undue attention to its own artfulness; if it did, it would distract us from his focus on facts that exist beneath and behind any mere literary style. “The Law of Life” is, then, skillfully but unobtrusively crafted. London knows, for instance, how to use brief sentences for dramatic effect (as when he


deftly notes the tribe’s departure by suddenly and simply reporting, “They were gone” [366]). And he also knows how to use authentic-sounding dialect (as when Koskoosh’s son tells his father, “There be wood beside you” [366]). And London knows how to use dramatic juxtaposition, as when he no sooner describes one young brave as “the craftiest of hunters” than he immediately reports that this same youth died suddenly when he “fell through an air-hole on the Yukon” (369). The implied point is swiftly and effectively made: Nature is unforgiving, and even the strongest and most cunning can instantly vanish. Finally, London knows how to use both parallelism (the old moose is taken down by wolves, just as old Koskoosh will be) and symbolism (the old man’s fi re “sizzled and went out” just before Koskoosh himself meets a similar fate [371]). But always, in London, the emphasis is less on the words themselves than on the facts they represent. For London, words do matter, but facts matter more.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the depiction of nature in this story with its depiction in “Sunday Morning,” a poem by WALLACE STEVENS. For example, focus on the fi nal passages of both works, and discuss the ways in which Stevens’s view of nature seems more “romantic” than London’s. 2. Compare and contrast this story with T. S. ELIOT’s poem “Gerontion.” In particular, discuss the works in terms of their treatment of old age, their use of points of view, their choices of diction, and their ultimate clarity. 3. Compare and contrast the use of nature imagery in this story and in ZOR A NEALE HURSTON’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. In particular, relate this story to the description of the storm in the second half of Hurston’s novel. What do both works imply about man’s relations to the elements, to animals, and to other people in extreme situations? 4. Discuss, in detail, the effectiveness of the opening paragraph of this story. How does it arouse interest and make us want to read further? How does it foreshadow central themes of the tale as

a whole? How does it already begin the process of complexly characterizing the central figures of the tale? How does it use setting and diction effectively?

The Call of the Wild (1903) Buck, a large dog, had been living a comfortable life on a California farm before he was stolen and sold off to pull sleds in the Klondike. Through struggle, suffering, and the will to survive and prevail (especially in confl ict with a dog named Spitz), he eventually learns to function well under a variety of human masters. Eventually he is lucky to fi nd, in John Thornton, a master who treats him with love and kindness—a master whom Buck can love in turn—but when Thornton is killed, Buck joins a wolf pack, becomes its leader, and heeds the ancient, instinctive call of the wild. This novel, considered by many readers to be London’s best, is also highly characteristic of his work in general. As do many of his other writings, it shows the kinds of transformations that occur when any individual is taken out of a familiar, comfortable environment and plunged into strange and challenging surroundings. In this case, however, the individual is not a human but a dog named Buck, who, owned by the kindly Judge Miller, “lives the life of a sated aristocrat; he had a fi ne pride in himself, was even a trifle egotistical, as country gentlemen sometimes become because of their insular situation” (6). As this sentence suggests, part of London’s purpose is not simply to tell the story of a dog but to draw parallels between its life and the lives of human readers. What happens to Buck could happen to anyone; the lessons Buck learns are lessons any person ignores at his or her own peril. London often writes about animals, not because he wants to sentimentalize them or treat them as humans but because he sees humans themselves as merely animals of a different sort. Influenced by the thinking of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, London believed that people share much of their psychology and physical nature with other beasts, and so it made perfect sense for

Jack London

him to explore common “human” problems by showing animals facing similar challenges. Thus, just as Buck’s egotism will eventually be humbled, so will our own. We will soon take a great interest in this dog because we will soon recognize that his circumstances could (and do) easily resemble ours. On the night Buck is stolen, the “Judge was at a meeting of the Raisin Growers’ Association, and the boys [the Judge’s sons] were busy organizing an athletic club” (7). In this clever sentence, London already implies how California, once part of the untamed frontier, was now becoming prosperous, effete, and civilized: Raisins, after all, are luxuries, not necessities, and the fact that there are enough raisin growers to need an “Association” suggests that life in California was becoming as commercialized and organized as in the East. Meanwhile, the fact that the Judge’s sons feel the need to organize an “athletic club” again suggests the encroachment of civilized values in a previously untamed landscape: A few decades earlier, any settler in California would have had plenty of athletic exercise merely by working, but now life has become so easy and relaxed that artificial exercise must be invented and organized. Although London’s works are more often read for their plots than for the subtle details of their phrasing, such subtlety does exist, and the sentence quoted is an example. London does, to be sure, often blatantly spell out the philosophical meanings of his works, but his writings are strongest when they work by implication, challenging readers to think rather than simply digest preformulated thoughts. Buck’s journey to the Klondike begins, significantly enough, during the same year as London’s own: 1897 (6). In describing Buck’s adventures, London thus surely is also describing aspects of his own unsentimental education, and just as Buck is forever transformed by his experiences, so was London. Both Buck and London, however, are themselves merely single instances of London’s larger concern with what would happen to any human (or any creature) suddenly shifted from a relatively comfortable routine and forced to confront elemental conditions, particularly the struggle for survival and the survival of the fittest. Inevitably, economics

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is key to everything that now happens to Buck, just as economics (for London) is key to everything in any human existence. When Buck is sold into slavery, he hears how “the money chinked between” buyer and seller (7), and surely the cold brevity of the transaction implies London’s view that in capitalistic societies, people themselves can be (and are) disposed of as dogs are. London’s novel, then, reflects not merely his Darwinism but also his socialistic creed that a society rooted in profits is inevitably crude, vicious, and uncaring. In one sense, Buck travels to a remote, exotic place, but in another sense, he merely arrives in a landscape where the brutal but familiar energies of exploitative capitalism are most obvious and transparent. In his new environment Buck fi rst survives, then later thrives, not merely because of his physical strength but also because of his real, and realistic, intelligence. It takes only one severe beating, for instance, for Buck to learn “that he stood no chance against a man with a club” (12). The lesson does not break him (he does not react as other “beaten dogs that fawned upon the man, and wagged their tails, and licked his hand” do [12]), but neither is he foolish enough to rebel openly (for “he saw one dog, that would neither conciliate nor obey, fi nally killed in the struggle for mastery” [12]). Here as often elsewhere, Buck both chooses and embodies a middle course: Just as he eventually becomes both half-dog and half-wolf, so he steadily learns to steer a middle passage. He bides his time and picks his fights, realizing that intelligence is no less crucial to survival than instinct. Nowhere is this strategy more obvious than in his dealings with the hypocritical Spitz, the dog he must eventually challenge, who seems “friendly, in a treacherous sort of way, smiling into one’s face the while he meditated some underhanded trick” (13). As Buck watches Spitz attack a weaker dog and then smile as the other dogs kill it, Buck draws a valuable conclusion: “So that was the way. No fair play. Once down, that was the end of you. Well, he would see to it that he never went down” (16). The simplicity of the diction and the brevity of the sentences drive home the elemental force of the lesson—a lesson that London, both Darwinist and socialist, could


easily embrace. Spitz embodies the kind of deceit, meanness, and egregious selfi shness that London despised and that he always associated with exploiters intent on dominating others, not merely living their own lives. The Call of the Wild can be read, in part, as an education manual intended to show anyone (but especially the downtrodden) how to survive in a world populated and controlled by beings like Spitz. As Buck learns, we learn; as Buck’s insight grows and develops, ours does, too. We profit vicariously from his education. Spitz eventually meets his end when Buck, surprised but prepared, is challenged for the last time. The two dogs fight, and although Buck “fought by instinct, . . . he could fight by head as well” (35). Once more, then, what makes Buck fi nally superior is his versatility, his combination of strengths, his ability to adapt. Buck’s story is indeed the story of the survival of the fittest, but in this case fittest means not merely most strong but most capable of fitting the right talents to particular circumstances. At the end of the battle, as the other dogs tear into the fatally wounded Spitz, “Buck stood and looked on, the successful champion, the dominant primordial beast who had made his kill and found it good” (16). Surely the ironic echo of the opening chapters of the Bible is intended here: The Hebraic, Christian God created, and then found his creations good, and now Buck kills and fi nds satisfaction in killing. A different kind of writer might have recoiled from such irony, but London merely implies that death is a part of life, that some must die if others are to live, and that beings such as Spitz, in particular, deserve little mercy and no pity. Darwin is behind such thoughts, but so is Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher who taught the doctrine of the Superman, for whom pity is weakness and for whom strength is essential to life itself. With Spitz gone, Buck soon asserts his leadership of the other dogs—a leadership acknowledged both by them and by their present human masters, a pair of tough but affable French Canadians who use the dogs to haul mail. After being turned over to another master (a “Scotch half-breed” [40]—phrasing that implies London’s tendency to describe humans in animalistic terms, just as he

describes animals as if they were humans), the dogs are eventually purchased by a trio of callow, superficial, and ludicrously out-of-place adventurers consisting of two preening men (Hal and Charles) and one preening woman (Mercedes). Their presence allows London to mock (without much subtlety) both “civilized” affectations and the cruelty, selfishness, and naïveté of the so-called cultured class. Hal, Charles, and Mercedes symbolize much that London considered weak, wicked, and ultimately doomed in the pretentious, artificial society of his day—a society unable to withstand any true confrontation with genuinely harsh realities. The trio quickly descend into petty bickering, and they abuse the dogs. Finally, they all stagger “into John Thornton’s camp at the mouth of the White River” (55). It does not take long for John (with his plain, blunt name and his plain, blunt manner) to become disgusted with the greenhorns, especially with their abuse of the dogs. When John eventually threatens to kill Hal if Hal strikes Buck again, Hal quickly backs down, and, in a somewhat melodramatic touch, we soon witness the trio and the other dogs plunge to their deaths through a break in the ice as John, unconcerned, comforts Buck (58). Thanks to John Thornton, Buck’s life changes dramatically: “Love, genuine passionate love, was his for the fi rst time” (59)—not only John’s love for Buck but especially Buck’s love for John. Buck fi nally serves an “ideal master” (60), who genuinely cares for Buck’s well-being and who thus earns his deep affection and respect. It is hard not to see, in John, London’s own notion of an ideal human type: John has mastered both his physical environment and his own worst instincts. He is comfortable both with others and with himself. He is capable of both giving love and inspiring it; his needs are simple, his outlook is wise, and his manner is unpretentious. The life Buck leads with John reflects genuine loyalty but also increasing freedom, for Buck now begins to explore the surrounding woods and make contact with the surrounding wolves, to whom he fi nds himself increasingly attracted. Buck, then, is leading an idyllic existence that allows him to satisfy both aspects of his double nature. With John he enjoys the love of a human, and with the wolves

Jack London

he can satisfy the increasingly urgent “call of the wild” he feels growing within him. Of course, in most works by London, any idyllic existence can never last long, and Buck’s idyll is soon shattered when he returns to camp one day only to fi nd the other dogs, the other humans, and John himself slaughtered by Indians. Filled with fury, Buck exacts his revenge, even using his intelligence to trick the marauders into fi ring deadly arrows at each other (82). Thus the Indians, inadvertently, cause Buck’s fi nal break with humans: “Man and the claims of man no longer bound him” (84). And yet Buck’s link with man is not entirely broken, for each year he returns to the site of John’s death and issues a mournful howl (85–86).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this novel with London’s White Fang, which describes how a wild dog becomes domesticated. In particular, discuss the works in terms of plot, characterization, and theme. Pay special attention to the characters of John Thornton and Weedon Scott; what do these characters imply about London’s social ideals? 2. Study Jack London’s own experiences in the Klondike in 1897–98 and discuss how they compare and contrast with those of Buck. What were London’s own experiences that year with nature, with other people, and with animals? 3. Compare and contrast John Thornton in this novel with Wolf Larsen in London’s novel The Sea-Wolf. Specifically, discuss the two men in terms of their attitude toward love, their treatment of others, and the ultimate success of their lives. Which character do you think London admires more, and why? 4. Compare and contrast the opening chapters of the novel with the closing chapters. Using specific examples, discuss the ways in which Buck’s “personality” has changed between the beginning of the book and its conclusion. How is he different at the close than he was at the start of the book? What lessons has he learned, and how have they affected his attitudes toward others and his interactions with them?

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The Sea-Wolf (1904) When Humphrey Van Weyden, a prosperous man of letters, is shipwrecked while crossing San Francisco Bay, he is picked up by a ship full of seal hunters commanded by the imperious and brutal Wolf Larsen, who decides to make “Hump” a cabin boy to replace a dead crewman. During the ship’s long voyage, the once-weak Van Weyden is forced to become physically and psychologically tough in order to survive the harsh treatment he both witnesses and receives, meanwhile engaging in spirited philosophical debates with the intelligent, articulate Larsen, whose view of life is hard, unsentimental, and uncompromising. After the poet Maud Brewster is also rescued at sea, she and Humphrey manage to escape and begin building a new life together on a deserted island, but the unexpected reappearance of Larsen, who is now sick and dying, not only introduces new threats but also gives the lovers one more chance to return to civilization. As do many of London’s other tales (especially The Call of the Wild), this novel takes an untested, complacent character who has been living a comfortable, predictable life and suddenly plunges him into a strange environment full of harsh challenges and threats. The character must (and does) learn to survive, but only by sacrificing many civilized illusions. Here as in so many other works, London implies that civilization is merely a veneer covering a more basic primitive reality—a reality no creature can afford to ignore if it hopes to continue living. The Sea-Wolf, however, is an especially powerful and interesting treatment of London’s familiar themes, and much of its effectiveness derives from London’s creation of the fascinating character of Wolf Larsen. On the one hand, he is crude, brutal, mean, and even vicious; on the other, he is thoughtful, well read, and supremely capable of both asserting and defending his highly unconventional beliefs. He is both physically strong and mentally agile, sophisticated in his thinking yet primitive in his impulses, and his debates with “Hump” are among the most interesting passages in the book. In many ways this novel is much more complex than The Call of the Wild; there are a greater diversity of characters, much greater emphasis on both dialogue


and dialect, and considerably more stress on irony and sardonic humor. The ship functions as a small world—a microcosm that is not only unfamiliar to most readers (and therefore inherently interesting) but also inherently unpredictable, both because of the sea in which it sails and because of the diverse crew it contains. London shows real skill at characterization, and the fact that the story is told from Van Weyden’s perspective gives the work a good deal of its interest. On the one hand, the narrator is laughable, effete, and pretentious, but, on the other hand, we cannot afford to mock him much, because few of us would be any better prepared to confront a man like Wolf Larsen than Van Weyden is. As the story proceeds, Van Weyden increasingly wins the respect of Larsen, the other crew members, and the novel’s readers, especially when he bravely tries to hold his own in debate with the confident captain. Larsen is a fascinating figure: His ideas and actions are often repellent, but his views are not easily refuted, and they constantly provoke thought. To a much greater degree than in The Call of Wild, the reader feels mentally challenged by The SeaWolf: London is not merely philosophizing here but is challenging Humphrey (and us) to respond. We can never predict what Larsen will say or do, and his penchant for brutality makes him a dangerous but compelling figure. Like Humphrey, we can never be sure how to respond to Larsen: One minute he seems repulsive, the next minute sympathetic. Certainly he is one of the most intriguing and memorable characters in American fiction. Unfortunately, the novel suffers greatly when Maud Brewster arrives. It seems implausible, to begin with, that of all the people Larsen might happen to rescue on the open sea, he would rescue a famous woman poet—someone, moreover, who already knows (and is known by) Humphrey Van Weyden. The dialogue between the supposedly great poet and the allegedly great critic seems insufferably stilted and pretentious, and their growing love for one another seems sentimental in the extreme. When Humphrey, late in the novel, says of Maud that “she was spirit, fi rst and always spirit, etherealized essence of life, calm as her calm eyes, and sure of permanence in the changing order of

the universe” (696), it is hard to take either him or London seriously, especially after everything that has gone before in this book. Also implausible is the sudden reappearance of Larsen near the end of the novel, as well as the ability of the inexperienced Humphrey and Maud to refit a badly damaged ship. However, if the second half of the novel often seems contrived and unconvincing, the fi rst half (especially the sections dominated by Larsen) is powerful, intriguing, and full of fascination. Larsen is a kind of demented Nietzschean Superman—a supreme egotist whose belief that might makes right leaves him, by the end of the book, utterly isolated and ironically vulnerable. Dark, brooding, destructive, and fi nally self-destroying, he is one of the great antiheroes of American literature.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Many critics have attacked the fi nal half of the novel, which describes the love affair of Humphrey and Maud. Can you justify this portion of the book, especially in terms of characterization, diction, and plot? Is it effective in any of these respects? 2. Wolf Larsen has sometimes been compared to Satan in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Examine books 1, 2, and 4, 5, and 6 of that poem, and then discuss the similarities and contrasts between the two characters. For instance, discuss their motives, their philosophies, and their treatment of others. 3. Compare and contrast The Sea-Wolf and Melville’s Moby-Dick, paying special attention to such matters as the ways both books combine adventure with philosophizing, the ways both works create complex social worlds, and the ways Ishmael both resembles (and differs from) Humphrey Van Weyden.

“To Build a Fire” (1908) An unnamed gold miner, with only a year’s experience in the frozen Klondike, decides to take a shortcut from the main path as he walks (accompanied only by a husky dog) in severe subfreezing

Jack London

temperatures toward a camp and the comfort it will provide. Having ignored warnings from more experienced men about traveling alone in such cold, the miner prides himself on his skill—until, suddenly, he falls through thin ice into water and feels his feet instantly begin to freeze. Although he successfully builds a fi re to warm himself and dry out his socks and shoes, the fi re is abruptly extinguished when snow falls from the tree beneath which the fi re was built—a mistake that dooms the man fi rst to frantic fear and then to a slow death as the dog watches and wonders. This story, which is perhaps London’s most acclaimed piece of short fiction, is one of many tales he set in the Far North, drawing on his own familiarity with that territory when he was a gold miner there in 1897–98. As does much of his fiction, this work focuses on humans’ relations with a natural environment that can seem both literally cold and figuratively cruel but that is actually indifferent and uncaring. London’s skill as a writer is already evident in the story’s fi rst sentence, which begins by reporting that “Day had broken” (a statement that might at fi rst seem to imply hope and promise) but then continues to note that the day was “cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray” (a statement that immediately undercuts any initial hint of optimism [462]). The main character is identified simply as “the man”: His name and his unique personal identity are unimportant, for in the present context he is merely a representative human trying to survive in circumstances that may seem extreme in one sense but are entirely typical in another. All human beings (London implies) are, like this man, on an ultimately lonely journey in a forbidding and unforgiving environment—a journey that will inevitably end in death. This man, however, has mistakenly decided in several senses to “go it alone”: He unwisely departs from the main path, and he foolishly ignores advice to travel with a human partner. Moreover, he shows no affection or concern for the dog who accompanies him and thus, in the end, can expect none in return. Like many of London’s works, this one is strengthened by the presence of the animal and the animal’s point of view: Animals (London often implies) see

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life more clearly, less sentimentally, than humans do. They are more in touch with the elemental facts of life than are most humans, who are misled either by their emotions or by their reason. Animals rely on instincts born from generations of close contact with nature, and so animals are, in many ways, wiser than the humans, who pride themselves on rationality or fi ne feelings. Here as in so much of his writing, London’s prose is dry, objective, clear, and precise. A certain degree of suspense is naturally built into the tale (we wonder from the beginning what will happen to this man and this dog in such a dangerous climate and landscape), and that suspense instantly intensifies when the man steps through the ice and begins his frantic struggle to survive. Yet London avoids melodrama, sentimentality, or cheap theatrics: He merely describes what happens and what each character (both human and canine) thinks and feels. We can recognize the man’s foolishness and yet still sympathize with his plight; we can be shocked by his fi nal plan to kill the dog (in a desperate bid to stay alive) and yet still understand his primitive logic. Moreover, while London’s skills as an objective, almost relentless reporter are evident throughout the story, other skills become obvious as well. Among these, for instance, are his penchant for irony (particularly in such quick, crisp statements as “The fi re was a success. He was safe” [470]), and his talent for presenting perceptions from the elemental perspective of the dog (who tends to think of humans simply as “foodproviders and fi re-providers” [478]), or his ability to imitate action through sound (as in the alliterative statement “the spittle crackled” [463]). Here as in his other work London also effectively employs dialect (as in the description of the inexperienced man through use of the Indian term chechaquo [462]), and he likewise skillfully uses implication (as when, referring to the human heart simply as a “pump” [469], he robs it of all its conventionally romantic associations and emphasizes instead its vital, mechanistic function). Larger implications seem at work as well when, for instance, London describes the man’s treatment of the dog as a mere “toil-slave” controlled (in some typically ironic

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phrasing) through “the caresses of the whip-lash” (468). Surely this passage cannot help but suggest the similar exploitation of human labor in the capitalist system London despised, but the connection is never overtly made. Instead (wisely) London leaves us to draw our own parallels. The story, then, never degenerates into mere political propaganda or philosophical special pleading. The emphasis is on reporting facts, not on pushing a specific creed. By the end of the story, however, London’s implied philosophy is clear: Life is always potentially harsh, nasty, brutish, and short, and the only way we can hope to survive it in any degree of comfort is by humbly cooperating with each other while relying on the accumulated wisdom of the species.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this story with Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” especially with respect to the following issues: the degree to which the main character is sympathetic, the author’s use of suspense, the narrative tone or point of view, and the use of fantasy in the fi nal sections of both tales. 2. Compare and contrast this story with Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” in terms of the following issues: what the stories imply about man’s relations with nature, what they imply about the need for human cooperation, how they employ and emphasize irony. 3. Compare and contrast the depiction of the dog in this story with the depiction of the dog in London’s novel The Call of the Wild. Specifically, discuss the ways London avoids (or fails to avoid) sentimentality in depicting both animals, the devices he uses to make the reported thinking of the animals seem convincing, and the ways his descriptions of the relations between humans and animals imply his attitudes toward the relations between humans and humans. 4. Choose a particular section of this story— amounting to roughly 300 words—and analyze that section in as much detail as possible. How does it relate to the sections that precede it? How does it foreshadow anything that occurs

later? How is it effective in terms of such matters as characterization, imagery, symbolism, diction, and irony? Read the section as carefully as possible and discuss its skill and artfulness.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON LONDON AND HIS WORK 1. Compare and contrast the relationship between Buck and John Thornton in The Call of the Wild to the relationship between Huck and Jim in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. For instance, discuss these pairings in terms of such themes as male friendship, the relationship of man to nature, and the ways private relations can provide a model for social and political life. 2. London actually wrote two versions of “To Build a Fire”—fi rst a shorter version for children, then the longer version that is usually read today. Both versions can be found on the Internet. Compare and contrast them, paying special attention to their diction, their main characters, and their conclusions. 3. Study Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings on the Superman (especially in his book Thus Spake Zarathustra) and discuss the ways in which Wolf Larsen in The Sea-Wolf is or is not a Nietzschean figure. Discuss whether, to what degree, and in what respects London seems to admire and/or satirize Larsen. 4. Examine a recent, reader-friendly example of Darwinian literary theory (such as Madame Bovary’s Ovaries, by David and Nanelle Barish) and discuss its relevance to “The Law of Life.” For instance, discuss the story in terms of Darwinian ideas about reproduction, relations between parents and children, and the division of the sexes. 5. Compare and contrast The Call of the Wild with EUGENE O’NEILL’s play The Hairy Ape. In particular, discuss the two works in terms of their depiction of animals and their use of animal imagery, their presentation of their main characters, and their political implications, especially those dealing with issues of class.

Jack London

6. Examine the ways religion is discussed in The Sea-Wolf and then discuss the depiction and relevance of religion in The Call of the Wild, “The Law of Life,” and “To Build a Fire.” How (if at all) is religion presented in these works? What is implied about the nature of reality by the way(s) religion is or is not discussed in these works? 7. Compare and contrast the presentation of women in The Sea-Wolf, The Call of the Wild, “The Law of Life,” and “To Build a Fire.” Discuss the ways women function in these works as symbolic characters, how the works are affected by the presence or absence of female characters, and the kinds of women London seems to admire or disdain. 8. Compare and contrast the presentation of Indian characters in “The Law of Life” and The Call of the Wild. For example, discuss the complexity of London’s presentation of Indian culture(s) and characters in both stories, the ways Indians are used symbolically, and the relations between Indians and physical nature and animals. 9. Compare and contrast Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick and Wolf Larsen in London’s The Sea-Wolf, especially in terms of their treatment of their crews, their guiding philosophies, and their ultimate fate. What is each man’s attitude toward God? 10. From his own day to the present, Jack London has always been one of the most widely read and widely admired American authors in other countries. How would you explain this enormous international appeal? In particular, discuss any aspects of The Call of the Wild that would make this book of great interest to non-

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American readers. How does the book explore themes of universal interest? WORKS CITED

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Auerbach, Jonathan. Male Call: Becoming Jack London. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Hedrick, Joan D. Jack London and His Work. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. Hodson, Sara S., and Jeanne Campbell Reesman, eds. Jack London: One Hundred Years a Writer. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 2002. Jack London Foundation. Available online. URL: http://jacklondonfdn.org. Accessed April 7, 2009. London, Jack. Novels and Stories: The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea-Wolf, Short Stories. Edited by Donald Pizer. New York: Library of America, 1982. Lundquist, James. Jack London: Adventures, Ideas, and Fiction. New York: Continuum, 1990. Nuernberg, Susan M., ed. The Critical Response to Jack London. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1995. Pizer, Donald. “Chronology.” In Novels and Stories: The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea-Wolf, Short Stories. By Jack London. New York: Library of America, 1982. Reesman, Jeanne Campbell. Jack London: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1999. Sinclair, Andrew. Jack: A Biography of Jack London. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Tavernier-Courbin, Jacqueline, ed. Critical Essays on Jack London. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983. The World of Jack London. Available online. URL: http://www.jacklondons.net. Accessed April 7, 2009.

Robert C. Evans

Claude McKay (1890–1948) I believe that whenever literature and art are good and great they leap over narrow group barriers and periods to make a universal appeal. (qtd. in Hathaway 46)

A

lthough Claude McKay was born and raised in Jamaica and although he spent many years of his adult life living and traveling in Russia, Western Europe, and North Africa, he also spent a good deal of time residing in (and writing about) the United States. He is generally considered one of the most significant black authors in America in the fi rst half of the 20th century. In his poetry, fiction, memoirs, and nonfiction prose he established a reputation as a creative and often controversial figure who was never shy about expressing himself, even when doing so meant alienating friends or allies and creating new enemies. He moved from an early sympathy with communism to a strong anticommunist stance, and he also moved from a career that seemed to hold enormous promise to a life of relative poverty and neglect. Most of the details of McKay’s life are available in the superb study by Tyrone Tillery and especially in the excellent and lengthy biography by Wayne F. Cooper. Born on September 15, 1890, in the small village of Sunny Ville, Jamaica, McKay was the youngest of eight children produced by Thomas Francis McKay and his wife, Ann Elizabeth. Although the parents were peasants, and although they were black in a society in which people of mixed race ranked above blacks but below whites, Thomas and Ann were respected and influential members of the local community and church. Economically they were better off than most of their

neighbors; they were also better educated and more ambitious and were particularly devoted to Baptist Christianity. Thomas was a serious and somewhat distant figure, whereas his wife was more relaxed and loving; Claude’s ties with his mother were, in consequence, especially strong. When he was eight, however, his parents sent him off to live with his oldest brother, Uriah Theophilious (“U’Theo”), a full-time schoolteacher and occasional journalist who lived with his wife near the resort town of Montego Bay. U’Theo’s library was well stocked and U’Theo’s own thinking was open-minded, and it was while living with his brother that young Claude fell in love with learning and began to distance himself from the simple faith of his parents. During these years he had no contact with them, and by the time he (along with U’Theo and his wife) returned to Sunny Ville when Claude was 14, Claude already felt somewhat distant (or at least distinct) from the rest of his family. Although he could be friendly, a kind of reserve characterized his relations with most people throughout his life, and his sense of independence often put him in confl ict with friends and foes alike. Although Claude began training in 1901 to become a schoolteacher, in 1906 he won a stipend to begin three years of study at a trade school in Kingston. Early in 1907, however, an earthquake struck the city, and so Claude soon moved to a smaller town to prepare for certification as a maker

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Claude McKay

and repairer of wheels. Nevertheless, after two years of training in that profession, he returned home, briefly tried his hand at farming, and then, after the death of his beloved mother, moved once more to Kingston. After working briefly in a factory there, he joined the local police force, where he seems to have bonded closely with some of his fellow officers. Tillery even suggests that McKay fell in love with one of them (7–8), and certainly later in life he had sexual relations with both men and women, with perhaps a stronger inclination toward homosexuality. In any case, by this time he had begun writing poems, and after he quit the police force he was fortunate to make the acquaintance of a middle-aged Englishman named Walter Jekyll, a resident of the island, whose interest in Jamaican verse had led him to publish a well-regarded book on the subject. Jekyll took an immediate (and perhaps romantic) interest in the young poet and encouraged his work, particularly his poetry written in the Jamaican dialect. Thanks in large part to Jekyll’s support, McKay in 1912 published Songs of Jamaica—a book that not only sold well but won him a literary prize. This book was soon followed by Constab Ballads (1912), which reflected his experiences on the police force (or constabulary). By the time he was in his very early twenties, then, McKay had already begun a noteworthy literary career. However, 1912 was an important year in McKay’s life for other reasons as well. By the summer of that year he had left Jamaica for the United States, intent on earning a degree in agriculture at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the famous all-black school founded and directed by BOOK ER T. WASHINGTON. Nevertheless, although McKay admired Washington, he soon tired of the rigid lifestyle at the school itself, and so he quickly left and instead began studying agriculture at Kansas State College. He remained there for almost two years, but by 1914 he had decided that farming was not his future. Fortunately, early that year a generous gift of several thousand dollars (probably from Jekyll) allowed McKay not only to leave Kansas for New York City but also to marry there a Jamaican woman, Eulalie Imelda Lewars, with

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whom he had been corresponding for some time. Their marriage occurred on July 30, 1914, when Claude was 23, but within six months a pregnant Eulalie had returned to Jamaica. There she gave birth to a daughter (Rhue Hope McKay), whom McKay never met. McKay never married again, although he was involved with various men and women throughout his life. With his gift of money gone by 1915, McKay needed to fi nd some way—any way—of supporting himself, but this was not an easy task in a country in which employment opportunities for black males (even educated ones) were hardly abundant. He took a succession of menial jobs—“porter, fi reman [to coal-burning boilers], waiter, bar-boy, houseman” (qtd. in Cooper 77)—but during all the years from 1915 to 1919 his main hope was to become a writer. He began submitting poems (usually conventional sonnets) to various publications and eventually saw a few of them published. In 1917, for instance, two poems—including one called “The Harlem Dancer”—were printed in a small but influential magazine, and from 1917 to 1919 McKay himself was based in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City (although he spent most of his time working as a waiter on the railroad). Harlem, in fact, would soon become the center of a renaissance in black creativity that affected all the arts, but especially literature. By this time McKay had attracted the attention and support of Frank Harris, an influential white editor, and by this time as well McKay had also begun to make an increasingly outspoken commitment to left-wing political causes. In 1919 he had met and won the patronage of Max Eastman, the wealthy but radical editor of a magazine called the Liberator, which now began to publish McKay’s vocally political poems. These included a sonnet called “If We Must Die,” which soon won McKay widespread fame as a fierce opponent of racial discrimination. From this point forward, McKay became known as a significant black writer with a strong commitment to economic and political radicalism, both at home and abroad. Later in 1919, in fact, McKay was able to travel to London through the support of some socialist

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friends, and while there he became more and more interested in Marxism and began working for an English socialist periodical. In 1920 he published in London a collection of his poems titled Spring in New Hampshire, but by 1921 he had returned to New York, where he now became an editor of the Liberator. His book of poems Harlem Shadows appeared in 1922; in that same year he resigned from his post at the Liberator (after a disagreement with a more strident Marxist) and undertook a momentous journey to the newly formed Soviet Union, which was now the center of international communism. Although representatives of the American Communist Party at fi rst opposed any official recognition of McKay, the Soviet government soon accredited him as a representative to the international communist congress, and McKay not only spoke to the group on behalf of American blacks but also received highly friendly receptions from the Soviet people. Back in western Europe in 1923, he was treated for a severe bout of syphilis and began a 10-year voluntary exile from the United States, living mostly in France but also in Spain and Morocco. Ironically, during the very decade when black writers, intellectuals, and artists in Harlem were beginning to attract widespread attention, both from other blacks and from whites, McKay was abroad, living in rather poverty-stricken circumstances. He did write a novel (“Color Scheme”) in 1925, but he destroyed it. In 1928, however, his novel Home to Harlem was published with great success, even though some of the more conservative members of the black community found it shocking and distasteful. In 1929 a second novel— Banjo—appeared, followed in 1932 by a collection of stories (Gingertown), which was in turn followed in 1933 by Banana Bottom, the novel that many critics consider McKay’s best. Unfortunately, none of the books after Home to Harlem earned McKay much money, partly because by the early 1930s America and the world were in the depths of the Great Depression. Financial conditions were desperate for everyone, and especially for McKay. In 1934 he fi nally returned to the United States, hoping to fi nd work but instead fi nding himself compelled to take up temporary residence in a

welfare camp for the unemployed, many of whom turned out to be alcoholics. Given such circumstances, one might have expected him to become even more closely associated with communism than he had been in the early 1920s, but instead, just the opposite happened. As the 1930s wore on, McKay became increasingly anticommunist, partly because he had grown disenchanted with Stalin’s brutal Soviet dictatorship and partly because McKay had by now been involved in numerous skirmishes with homegrown communists, who, he felt, were often hypocritical, racist, and/or unscrupulous in their treatment of anyone who was not a true believer. In his 1937 autobiography, A Long Way from Home, he tended to downplay the extent of his own earlier infatuation with communism; by now he had become more an advocate of black self-reliance and self-help than of international socialism. When Soviet Russia signed a peace pact with Nazi Germany in 1939 (allowing the two nations to carve up Poland when World War II broke out), McKay’s distrust of communism seemed vindicated, but by this time he was no longer a very influential voice on the African-American scene. His prickly personality had alienated many former friends, and his days as a major creative artist now seemed behind him. In 1940 he did publish a book, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, and he also continued to write essays and poems. In the early 1940s, however, his health began to fail, and he turned increasingly for friendship and support to friends who were deeply involved in the Catholic Church. After McKay suffered a stroke while working in a shipyard in 1943, his reliance on his Catholic friends became even stronger, and in spring 1944 he moved to Chicago to work for Bishop Bernard Sheil as an adviser on both communism and blacks and as a lecturer on social topics. By the fall of that year McKay had himself become a Catholic, a decision he explained in various writings published in 1945 and 1946. Partly his decision was motivated by his anticommunism; partly he was grateful for the church’s recent support; partly he believed that Catholicism was the one organization best equipped to resist tyranny and promote racial justice; and partly, no doubt, he hoped for literary patronage from a well-

Claude McKay

endowed source of funding. In any case, when McKay fi nally died of heart failure in Chicago on May 22, 1948, his funeral was Roman Catholic, but for a fi nal commemorative service his body was sent (appropriately enough) home to Harlem.

“Harlem Shadows” (1918, 1922) Harlem was (and is) a section of New York City inhabited mainly by African Americans. In this poem the speaker describes and laments the degradation of young black women who feel compelled to earn their income as prostitutes. The poem opens by describing “the halting footsteps of a lass” (l. 1). Appropriately enough, not only this line but most of the poem (which describes literal streetwalkers) is written in the regular rhythm of iambic meter, in which even syllables are stressed and odd syllables are unstressed. The regular rhythm of the poem almost mimics the movement of walking and thus suits the poem’s subject matter, but the work is also skillful in other ways as well. The word lass, for instance, seems almost deliberately archaic and even romantic; lass (which refers to a girl or young woman) is a word used mainly in northern England and in Scotland and thus seems somewhat ironic in the present context. The word also suggests innocence and youth and thus again seems ironic, since the young women McKay describes are earning money in ways that quickly rob them of both traits. Not until the fourth line does the emphasis on prostitution become obvious and explicit; for the fi rst three lines, then, the poem postpones this crucial information, so that when the information arrives we feel a sense of loss—a sense of vanished innocence. The sudden realization that the “lass[es]” mentioned in line 1 are actually prostitutes enhances the poignant and ironic reference to them (in line 5) as “little dark girls in slippered feet”— phrasing that makes them seem almost delicately childlike. That irony, in turn, is underscored by the immediately ensuing reference to their “prowling through the night” (l. 6), phrasing that makes them sound almost like animals looking for prey. In the short space of six lines, then, the women have been

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described as lasses, then as prostitutes, then as “little . . . girls” (l. 6), and then almost as beasts. The constant shifts in the ways they are described imply the speaker’s complex responses to the lifestyle he describes—responses that mix affection and dismay, pity and repulsion. The rhythm and other sound effects of the poem become more complex in the second stanza. McKay had already used alliteration (repetition of consonant sounds) in stanza 1, especially in the phrase “bend and barter” (l. 4). In stanza 2, however, he combines both alliteration and assonance (repetition of vowel sounds) in the phrase “know no rest” (l. 8), and he also effectively emphasizes the words “long night” (l. 7), not only by accenting both words but by preceding them with two unaccented syllables. He then echoes “long night” in the subtly varied phrase “lone night” two lines later, just as he uses the phrase “street to street” as a kind of refrain in the fi nal line of each stanza. The poem, in other words, reveals a sophisticated sense of music, and this kind of artistry is enhanced by its subtle use of imagery as well. In the second stanza, for instance, the speaker makes it clear that the setting is in winter, and although the falling snow makes the landscape beautiful, it also makes the “slippered feet” of the girls (mentioned earlier; l. 5) seem woefully unprotected. As the poem proceeds, in fact, both the tone and the imagery become progressively darker and more depressing; thus the fi rst stanza refers to “little . . . girls . . . in slippered feet” (l. 5), while the second stanza refers to “half-clad girls of tired feet” (l. 11), and then the third excludes any reference to “girls” at all, focusing instead simply on their “weary, weary feet” (l. 17). Likewise, the feet at fi rst are described as “prowling” (which at least suggests animal vigor and vitality; l. 6), then as “trudging” (which implies an almost lifeless weariness, but at least a sense of direction; l. 12), and then fi nally as “wandering” (which suggests an absence of any aim or meaningful purpose; l. 18). Through the use of such subtle shifts, and especially through the constant and constantly changing references to feet, McKay reveals real poetic skill, and if the poem sometimes seems too effusively romantic and too much focused on

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the speaker rather than on the girls (as in the “Ah’s” of lines 13 and 17 and the phrase “heart of me” in that latter line), these minor flaws do not outweigh the work’s general accomplishment.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with McKay’s sonnet titled “The Harlem Dancer.” What are the similarities and differences in the depictions of women in both works? Why are women (rather than men) used as symbolic figures in both poems? How is Harlem portrayed in these two poems? 2. Discuss the depiction of prostitution in this poem and the way(s) it is depicted in W. E. B. DUBOIS’s sociological study The Philadelphia Negro. How do the two works illuminate one another? Why is prostitution a potent symbol for the more general conditions blacks have had to suffer in America? 3. Why do you think McKay chooses to focus on the feet of these women rather than on other parts of their bodies? How do the references to feet contribute to the unity and coherence of the work? Discuss the use of color imagery in this poem. How do the various colors add a sense of variety to the poem?

“If We Must Die” (1919, 1922) In this poem (which won McKay instant fame when it was published), the speaker exhorts his fellow sufferers of oppression, urging them not to surrender to their persecutors but to offer courageous resistance. Here as in other poems, McKay ironically uses a highly traditional form (the Shakespearean sonnet, with a rhyme scheme of abab / cdcd / efef / gg) to give expression to highly defiant content: The attitude of the speaker is almost revolutionary, whereas the form of the poem is strictly traditional. McKay thus shows that he can appropriate the legacy of Western culture and use its standard forms for his own purposes; he demonstrates that he is deeply familiar with the conventions of Western art, even

as he employs those conventions to resist the worst aspects of Western culture. No one, therefore, can accuse either McKay himself or the speaker of this poem of being uneducated or illiterate, and indeed part of the power of the poem derives from the fact that the speaker expresses ideals of freedom, courage, and self-respect that are often considered central to Western culture. The poem’s form and even its content thus imply the ways in which whites, by persecuting blacks, have betrayed the deepest values of their own cultural heritage. The effectiveness of this poem depends as much on the skill with which it is written as on the ideas it expresses. McKay effectively varies the meter of the poem (for instance) to emphasize the verbs Hunted and penned in line 2, just as he also uses double alliteration, near-rhyme, and metrical variation to stress the connection between Making and mock in line 4. In addition, McKay uses repetition in the opening halves of lines 1 and 4—repetition that therefore stresses the distinct contents of the second halves of each line. Likewise, he effectively employs enjambment (in which the sense of the phrase runs beyond the unpunctuated end of the line), making use of this technique not only in lines 1–2 but especially adeptly in lines 6–7, so that the phrase “In vain” has special stress. (The speaker suggests that blood may indeed be shed—but at least it will not be shed “In vain.”) Especially potent is the strong double-accented emphasis on the key word deathblow in line 11, while metrical stress is also used with special effectiveness in the fi nal line, in which Pressed has unusual emphasis, and in which the double stress on syllables 4 and 5 gives the line a memorably tight and tangled rhythm. In addition to employing sound and meter skillfully, McKay uses individual word choices to great effect. Thus the speaker urges his fellows not to behave like hogs (animals often thought of as fat, stupid, and dirty; l. 1), while he compares their persecutors to “mad and hungry dogs” (l. 3), thus making them seem irrational, inhuman, and out of control. Dogs, however, are at least familiar creatures and are sometimes well behaved; later the enemies are described as “monsters” (l. 7), phrasing that makes them seem unnatural, abnormal,

Claude McKay

deformed, hideous, wicked, and cruel. Then, later still, they are called a “cowardly pack” (l. 13), phrasing that is almost contemptuous in implying that they are innately weak and unheroic, their temporary strength depending on sheer numbers alone. They operate as a stupid, unthinking unit rather than as a collection of autonomous beings, unlike the “men”—the true human beings—the speaker tries to rally. The irony, of course, is that it is the “dogs” and “monsters” who, by trying to treat others as beasts, behave as mere beasts themselves.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with Booker T. Washington’s famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech. How do the works differ in tone, spirit, and purpose? To which audiences are the works addressed? How is each persuasive in its own way? 2. McKay’s poem was fi rst published in 1919. Do some historical research in order to try to recover the original historical contexts of the work. What was happening in American race relations in 1919? How is McKay’s poem partly a response to those circumstances? Why did the poem have the kind of immediate impact it did? Can the poem speak to other situations besides racial confl ict? Is there any evidence that it has proven its appeal in such broader circumstances?

“The Lynching” (1919, 1922) The title suggests that the poem will describe one of the illegal public hangings that were often used by mobs to persecute and punish alleged wrongdoers—hangings that were especially employed by whites against blacks (particularly in the South) in the decades after the Civil War. Very quickly, however, the language suggests that McKay is comparing such a lynching with the crucifi xion of Christ. By the end of the poem the focus returns more obviously to a contemporary lynching, but the analogies between the two events are now clear. The poem is cast in the form of a sonnet with the following rhyme scheme: abba / cddc / effe / gg.

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The title suggests that the work will describe the kind of lynchings that were becoming increasingly notorious as examples of the racist abuse suffered by American blacks, especially in southern states. The opening line, however, especially because of the capitalized word Spirit, implies that the poem may be describing the immediate aftermath of Christ’s crucifi xion. This possible reference to Christ seems confi rmed by the next two lines, but then line 4 introduces momentary confusion, since it mentions an “unforgiven” sin, whereas the whole point of the crucifi xion was to redeem mankind from its sinfulness. In line 5, though, McKay seems to allude to the star of Bethlehem, and lines 6, 7, and most of line 8 also seem appropriate as descriptions of the crucified Christ. The last word of line 8 is briefly ambiguous: Does char mean a small cart, wagon, or chariot (as in the famous spiritual “Swing low, sweet chariot,” to which the line may allude)? Or does char refer to something burned or charred? Both meanings of the word were acceptable in McKay’s era, and perhaps both meanings are simultaneously acceptable in this poem. The fi rst meaning would seem to refer most clearly to Christ, while the second meaning would seem most appropriate to the lynched body of a black man, since lynched bodies were indeed often burned. In the single word char, then, McKay may combine and epitomize the double meanings already suggested by the title and by the fi rst eight lines. The double reference seems to continue in lines 9 and 10 and the fi rst half of line 11: The hanging body, the gathering crowds, and the interested women could all be appropriate in describing either Christ’s crucifi xion or a lynching, and certainly the irony of the phrase “Day dawned” (which would normally carry hopeful connotations; l. 9) would apply to either event. By the second half of line 12, however, the poem’s focus seems to have shifted clearly to a modern-day lynching, and by the end of the work that modern focus seems particularly clear. In any case, it seems dreadfully ironic that women and children (often symbolically associated with innocence and compassion) are the ones described as either unmoved by, joyous about, the dead body. Such phrasing makes the poem seem all the darker


in its fi nal tone, since these lines imply little hope for the future. The mothers and their children either are indifferent to the ugly sight (“never a one / Showed sorrow”; ll. 11–12) or are actually fi lled with “fiendish glee” (l. 14). The work ends, then, on a thoroughly ironic word that epitomizes all the paradoxes suggested by the poem as a whole.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read this work alongside R ICHARD WRIGHT’s story “Big Boy Leaves Home.” How are lynchings presented in each work? Is one work more memorable or effective than the other? Explain your response in detail, paying special attention to such matters as genre, point of view, imagery, and the lengths of the two works. 2. Compare and contrast this poem with ERNEST H EMINGWAY’s novella The Old Man and the Sea, paying particular attention to the ways both works use religious imagery, allusions, and symbolism. What are the advantages of employing religious references in works that otherwise seem to deal with secular issues? How does use of such references contribute to the range, resonance, or depth of a work? 3. Why might lines 2–3 seem particularly disturbing or unsettling? What might those lines imply about the nature of God? Discuss the relationship between those lines and line 7. What is the “awful sin” mentioned in line 4? How is the reference to “women” in this poem especially ironic in view of traditional depictions of Christ’s crucifi xion?

“Exhortation: Summer, 1919” (1920, 1922) The poem is set explicitly during the year just after the end of World War I, when many African-American servicemen were returning from the confl ict, hoping for new opportunities, and when many of the blacks who had emigrated to the North from the South to work in wartime industries were hoping for a new and better phase in their lives. Instead (unfortunately), various destructive and violent riots broke out in response to racial discrimination

in a number of northern cities; many blacks died, and McKay’s poem—which prophesies the dawning of a new day for blacks (a new day linked with the rise of Africa)—is therefore simultaneously hopeful and ironic. This work differs from many of McKay’s other poems in several important respects. In the fi rst place, it is not a sonnet; instead, it consists of 26 relatively long lines, ranging in length from 11 to 16 syllables each. In appearance, language, and rhythms, the poem seems indebted to the work of Walt Whitman; it is as if McKay thought that he could not do justice to his prophetic message here in the shorter, more constricted, more conventional sonnet form. As its title suggests, the poem is a kind of formal public speech summoning the spirit of a group to encourage proper attitudes or action; the sonnet would not have been the most appropriate genre to use for such an extended hortatory purpose. However, another way in which this poem differs from many others by McKay is in the very explicitness of its racial rhetoric. In some of his sonnets (such as “If We Must Die” or “America”), McKay never openly mentions racial confl ict (although such contexts are often implied); in the present poem, however, the references to Africa and Ethiopia, along with the context implied by the title itself, make the racial message unmistakable. The poem is primarily addressed by one black person to other blacks. Finally, another difference between “Exhortation” and many of McKay’s other poems lies in its peculiar structure. Not only does McKay here abandon the sonnet form, but he also abandons regular, predictable stanza structures altogether. Thus, the fi rst stanza consists of only four lines; the second consists of nine lines, while the third consists of 13 lines (although six of those 13 are repeated, with one slight variation, from the preceding stanza). The poem thus has a cumulative structure: The stanzas grow in length and intensity as the poem proceeds, and the heavy use of repetition gives the work an almost chanting, songlike cadence. In its rhythms, shape, and rhetoric, this is one of McKay’s most distinctive poems. Here as in many of his other works, McKay reveals a discerning ear. From the fi rst line to

Claude McKay

the last (for instance), it is clear that he will not be content with using straight iambic meter (in which each even syllable is stressed and each odd syllable is unstressed). Instead, in this poem the very fi rst word is accented, and throughout the work McKay shows an unusual willingness to play with (and vary) the rhythms of his lines. The fi rst syllable of the word rumbles, for instance, receives exceptionally strong stress because the two syllables preceding it are unaccented (l. 1), and indeed this technique is one McKay employs frequently elsewhere in the poem. One particularly striking use of this rhythm occurs, for instance, in line 5, in which three unaccented syllables precede the heavily accented new dawn, which thus receives all the more stress because of the preceding unstressed words. (The same tactic is employed in the reference to a “strong new world” in line 11, where three heavily stressed syllables are preceded by three syllables that are unstressed.) However, McKay also effectively employs other sound effects, such as assonance (echoing vowel sounds, as in “rumble” and “thunder” in line 1), internal rhyme (such as “quake” and “break” in line 2 or “birth” and “earth” in lines 8 and 21), and alliteration (repetition of consonants, as in “Sons of the seductive night” [l. 15]). It is as if McKay, in this work, sought a new kind of music that would be appropriate to the new day he called for and predicted. In this work more than in many others (with the obvious exception of “If We Must Die”), the speaker functions as a kind of public bard—as the historian, conscience, and voice of an entire people.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with McKay’s sonnet “If We Must Die.” How are the poems similar in rhetoric, intent, tone, and diction? How are they different in form, meaning, and fi nal effect? 2. What does this poem imply about the relations between Africa and African Americans? How does the poem perhaps reflect new thinking about Africa that was beginning to arise in the fi rst decades of the 20th century? Who, for

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instance, was Marcus Garvey, and how might he be relevant as part of the historical context of this poem?

“America” (1921, 1922) The speaker describes his paradoxical relationship with the land in which he lives: On the one hand, he feels oppressed by his country (probably because he is a member of a racial minority, although this point is never openly stated); on the other hand, he feels that such oppression strengthens him by forcing him to achieve a tough resilience. In any case, he anticipates the day when the country that oppresses him will collapse as history takes its inevitable toll. Here as in so many other works, McKay uses the sonnet form (this time with a rhyme scheme of abab / cdcd / efef / gg) to give emphatic brevity and point to a fairly bitter and sardonic poem: The work would be less potent if it were lengthy and less controlled. The initial line uses effective delay, becoming openly ironic only when we reach the fi nal word, while the second line enhances the intensity of the poem as the speaker shifts from an image of being fed to an image of being attacked and even eaten. Line 3 begins with an emphatically stressed verb, while line 4 concludes the opening sentence with a surprising paradox: In spite of everything, the speaker loves the “cultured hell” (an effective oxymoron, or union of words with opposite meanings) that “tests [his] youth.” The word youth makes his status as victim of oppression seem all the more unfortunate, but the same word also suggests his strength, his resilience, and his willingness (even his eagerness) to face a challenge. The next few lines, however, seem the least successful in the work (ll. 5–10). The similes (comparisons using the word like or as) seem undistinguished; the imagery seems mostly unmemorable; and the ensuing claim—that the speaker feels neither “terror” nor “malice” and offers no “word of jeer”—seems refuted by the existence of the poem itself, especially the opening two lines and the fi nal couplet. In any case, in the fi nal four lines

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the speaker prophesies the collapse of America; he predicts that it will suffer a kind of national shipwreck, and he compares its ultimate fate to a vision of “priceless treasures sinking in the sand” (l. 14). The speaker does not say whether this fate is a kind of divine punishment or whether it is simply the sort of decline that has befallen all once-mighty nations. He takes no unequivocal joy in the decline he predicts, but neither (for obvious reasons) does he express any regret. Instead he seems indifferent to the fate of a nation that has, after all, shown him only contempt and even malevolent hatred.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read McKay’s poem alongside “The School Days of an Indian Girl” by GERTRUDE SIMMONS BONNIN (Zitkala-Ša). How is America depicted in both works? How do the works compare and/or differ in tones, attitudes, and rhetorical strategies? 2. How does McKay’s sonnet compare and contrast with CARL SANDBURG’s poem titled “Chicago”? Discuss the works in terms of form, technique, tone, and purpose. What are the fundamental attitudes of the two works? 3. Discuss the specific metaphors and similes and other figurative language in this poem. In what cases, and for what reasons, do you fi nd them either effective, ineffective, or some combination of both? Discuss the tone of lines 8–10; do you fi nd that tone effective or ineffective? Explain your answer.

“Outcast” (1922) The speaker, who feels like an alien in a foreign culture, longs for the language, heritage, peace, and freedom he associates with Africa, the land of his ancestors. Like many of McKay’s poems, this one is a sonnet consisting of three quatrains (or four-line stanzas) and a concluding couplet (two rhyming lines). The rhyme scheme is thus abab / cdcd / efef / gg. Ironically, then, McKay uses a highly structured poetic form—one with a long history in Western litera-

ture—to lament the bondage imposed on blacks by Western culture and to extol freedom from Western influences. The poem begins by referring to Africa as “dim regions”—a phrase in which the fi rst two syllables are emphasized by being doubly accented, and a phrase in which the word dim is meaningful in several different senses. Africa is “dim” (unknown, obscure) not only because it was as yet a relatively unexplored continent, but also because it is a place about which the speaker himself has little personal knowledge. Yet it is the place “whence my fathers came” (l. 1)—a phrase in which the noun refers not only to the speaker’s direct ancestors but also (more broadly) to the ancestors of his race as a whole. When the speaker describes his “spirit” as being “bondaged by the body” (l. 2), the alliterated phrase not only alludes to the ancient Christian belief that the soul is imprisoned in the flesh, but also refers to the literal bondage endured by African Americans during several centuries of slavery. Meanwhile, the ironic juxtaposition of conservative phrasing with radical content continues in line 4, in which the speaker mentions his desire to “sing forgotten jungle songs,” even as the rhythm of the line (and of the lines before and after it) is a perfectly regular example of iambic pentameter verse (in which the even syllables are accented and the odd syllables are not). The very form of the poem, in other words, exemplifies the extent to which the speaker has mastered the discipline of a kind of poetry associated with the culture he partly rejects. As does any talented poet, however, McKay uses metrical regularity to establish predictable patterns—patterns that will then emphasize any departures from them. Thus, when the speaker describes how the “great western world holds” him in bondage, every syllable except the third is stressed, so that the meter not only accentuates the power of the West but also mimics the kind of pressure by which the speaker feels himself enthralled. A similar effect is achieved in the fi nal line, where the phrase “white man’s menace” receives unusually heavy metrical emphasis on the fi rst three syllables. The fact that most of the poem is highly regular in its iambic rhythms makes any such moments of metrical irregularity stand out. In this way and in others, there-

Claude McKay

fore, McKay reveals a sure ear for sound effects, just as he also shows a solid sense of the varied connotations of words. In line 8, for instance, the speaker refers to the “alien gods” to whom he must bend his knee. If he had referred to a god (singular) rather than to gods (plural), the line might have seemed a direct attack on Christianity; instead, gods can suggest not only the Christian God but also the various idols worshipped in the West, especially the false gods associated with materialism. Likewise, when the speaker says that he feels like “a thing apart” (l. 12), the word thing (which is indefi nite and vague) not only implies that he feels less than fully human but also suggests that he is treated as less than a true person by the surrounding culture. In this work as in any good poem, the important thing is not the meaning itself but the skill with which that meaning is communicated.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read this work alongside T. S. ELIOT’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and then discuss the theme of alienation in both works. What is the basic source of alienation in each poem? How do the speakers differ in their backgrounds and attitudes? What implied attitude does each poet take toward each speaker? How are Prufrock’s problems more individual and “personal” than the problems of McKay’s speaker? 2. Compare and contrast this work with L ANGSTON HUGHES’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” In particular, discuss the forms, tones, imagery, and diction of the two works. How do both works effectively use simple, clear diction? 3. Discuss the ways references to gender are used in this poem. Do you see any consistency in those references? How and why might a feminist object to those references? How might McKay respond to such possible objections?

Home to Harlem (1928) When Jake Brown, a vigorous, friendly, and openminded young black man goes AWOL from the

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army and returns to Harlem, he chances to meet and spend the night with a beautiful and generous young prostitute, Felice, who refuses to accept payment for their encounter. Although he unfortunately loses touch with her, he thinks of her often during the rest of the novel, which describes his encounters with various other lower-class blacks as they work at various jobs while looking forward to chances to drink, party, and spend time with members of the opposite sex. While working, Jake befriends Ray, an intellectual young black who lacks Jake’s carefree attitudes; eventually Ray departs, but by the end of the book Jake has reestablished his connection with Felice, and as the novel concludes, they look forward to a happy life together in Chicago. McKay’s novel is often considered one of the seminal works of fiction of the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of artistic creativity by African Americans living in or near the Harlem neighborhood of New York in the 1920s. The book created significant controversy when it was published: Some black opinion leaders thought that the work played into white prejudices by giving so much emphasis to so many of the seedier aspects of AfricanAmerican urban life, such as violence, prostitution, drinking, and even drug abuse. W. E. B. DuBois famously wrote that the novel made him sick and left him feeling in need of a shower, but other blacks—including such up-and-coming young writers as Langston Hughes—had the opposite reaction. For them the novel was refreshing in its honesty, its realism, and its commitment to telling the truth even when the truth might prove unappetizing to the more “refi ned” segments of the black community. For these readers, McKay seemed a conscientious artist rather than a mere political propagandist. DuBois, however, argued that even the best black art could and should have a propagandistic dimension; it should help improve the lives, and advance the cause, of black people, rather than merely describing the ways in which many of the less conventionally successful members of the community lived. McKay’s determination to present an unvarnished picture of some of the less appealing aspects

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of existence is signaled by the novel’s fi rst sentence, which describes the protagonist’s life as a worker on a ship: “All that Jake knew about the freighter on which he stoked was that it stank between sea and sky” (1). Since much of the novel deals with physical sensations of one sort or another, it seems appropriate that it should open with this strong emphasis on the sense of smell, even if the smell is repulsive. Jake, however, is an infi nitely adaptable character; nothing depresses long, and it is clear that McKay admires and respects his hero’s resilience. Jake is not even bothered very much by the insects that bite him as he tries to sleep: “ ‘Nip me all you wanta, Mister Louse,’ said Jake. ‘Roll on, Mister Ship, and stinks all the way as you rolls. Jest take me ’long to Harlem is all I pray. I’m crazy to see again the brown-skin chippies ’long Lenox Avenue. Oh boy!’ ” (3). This passage is typical of the book in several ways, including in its strong emphasis on nonstandard English dialect, its use of slang from the 1920s (such as chippies), and its stress on irrepressible sexual energy. Jake is dynamic, vital, and lacking in any kind of hypocrisy; chippies, for instance, was a slang term for prostitutes, and so McKay makes it clear that Jake is not even interested in fi nding a real girlfriend so much as he is interested in immediate, casual sex. Neither Jake nor his creator feels any need to hide or apologize for the character’s strong sexual drives. In the 1920s this kind of frank emphasis on sex—and particularly on illicit sex—would have been considered far more scandalous than it seems today. Another feature of McKay’s novel that made it startlingly unusual in its own time was its explicit emphasis on the beauty and attractiveness of black people. Whereas many blacks during this period derived their standards of beauty from the majority white culture, and whereas many lighter-skinned blacks even tried to “pass” as whites, McKay celebrates the seductiveness of dark-skinned people. At one point, for instance, Jake fantasizes about the women he will encounter when he returns to Harlem: “Brown girls rouged and painted like dark pansies. Brown flesh draped in soft colorful clothes. Brown lips full and pouted for sweet kissing. Brown

breasts throbbing with love” (8). In passages such as this, McKay shows his unabashed, unapologetic pride in the distinctiveness of his own race; Jake never yearns for white women, just as he never submits in other ways to the standards of “white” culture; instead he is (both literally and metaphorically) comfortable in his own skin. At the same time, another aspect of the novel that created some controversy was the book’s repeated descriptions of the variations in skin color among African Americans, as when McKay depicts all the many different “layers of brown,” such as “lowbrown, high-brown, nut-brown, lemon, maroon, olive, mauve, gold. Yellow balancing between black and white. Black reaching out beyond yellow. Almost-white on the brink of a change” (57). Black writers who wanted to emphasize the sameness and solidarity of black people in order to forge a strong sense of political and cultural unity had to contend, then, with McKay’s emphasis on the differences among “blacks,” and indeed McKay’s stress on a wide variety of distinctive skin tones is related to his general interest in the individuality of his characters. As usual, he resists the impulse (or the externally imposed compulsion) to paint in broad strokes: He suggests that just as “black” people are diverse in their physical appearance, so they are diverse in their personalities, their values, their interests, and their motives. Some of the black characters in McKay’s novel are admirable; some are unappealing; some are merely ridiculous. McKay feels no need to make all the blacks virtuous or noble, and even the occasional white character is sometimes presented in an appealing light. At one point, for instance, Jake asks his new friend Ray (whom he meets when they both work in a railroad dining car) how Ray “like[s] waiting on them ofays.” “‘It isn’t so bad,’” Ray replies. “‘Most of them are pretty nice. Last trip I waited on a big Southern Senator. He was perfectly gentlemanly and tipped me half a dollar’”—a sizable sum in the 1920s (138–139). Ultimately McKay seems more interested in people as individuals than as members of groups, for as Jake says at one point, “We may all be niggers aw’right, but we ain’t nonetall all the same” (159).

Claude McKay

Home to Harlem is not without its flaws. Ray enters the book abruptly, receives a certain amount of attention, and then quickly departs; all in all, he is not an especially well-developed character. The heavy emphasis on 1920s slang can seem dated and almost unintentionally comical at times (as when male characters repeatedly refer to one another as “chappy”), and the characters tend to lack much complexity or depth. Both Jake and Felicia (but especially Jake) seem a bit too good to be true, and the novel lacks much in the way of a sustained or well-structured plot. Yet the book does convey a convincing sense of what it was like to be not merely alive but also fully living during a particular time and place in American history, and especially what it was like to be a black person of a certain class and circumstances during a highly significant era. If the style of the book rarely seems especially distinguished, the novel nevertheless creates a memorable impact. Jake, once encountered, is hard to dislike or forget, and the same is true of the novel as a whole.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the depiction of Harlem life in this book and in Nella Larsen’s novel Passing. How do the works differ in settings, themes, diction, dialogue, and kinds of characters? Discuss the role(s) played by race, class, and gender in each work. Discuss the significance of varying shades of skin color in both novels. 2. Compare and contrast the depiction of New York in McKay’s novel with the depiction of Chicago in R ICHARD WRIGHT’s Native Son. How are the two cities comparably or differently presented in these two works? In particular, how are the lives of blacks presented in the two novels? At the conclusion of McKay’s book, the hero and heroine look forward to a new beginning in Chicago. What reasons are there for either optimism or pessimism in assessing their hopes? 3. Discuss the moral values implied by this book. What kinds of attitudes and behavior does the book seem to endorse? What kinds does it seem to censure? How does the morality implied by the book differ (if at all) from conventional or

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traditional moral views? Which characters strike you as the least moral and why? Which characters strike you as the most moral and why?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON MCKAY AND HIS WORK 1. Compare and contrast the image of America presented in McKay’s poems with the image of the nation implied in THORNTON WILDER’s play Our Town. How do you account for these differences in terms of such issues as race, class, and gender? Which of these issues is most important in the works of each writer? 2. McKay had personal knowledge both of Booker T. Washington and of W. E. B. DuBois. What evidence of their impact do you see in his work? Did he ever comment on them explicitly? Did his attitudes toward them change at all as his own thinking evolved? 3. Compare the works of Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, especially their novels and poems but also their nonfiction essays. How were their roles in the Harlem Renaissance similar? How did their attitudes toward art and politics resemble and/or differ from one another? Did they comment at all on each others’ works? 4. Read McKay’s novel Home to Harlem alongside W. E. B. DuBois’s novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece, and then discuss the two works in terms of such issues as styles of language, methods of characterization, underlying purposes, basic themes, and fundamental assumptions about the role of art in society. Which novel seems more “propagandistic”? Explain your response in detail. 5. McKay wrote other novels besides Home to Harlem. Track down one or more of those books and discuss them in relation to his fi rst novel. How are the works similar in such matters as themes, characterizations, diction, and dialogue? How are they different in such matters as setting and plot? Which novel, in your opinion, is most successful as a work of art? Explain your logic.

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6. Do some research and discuss McKay’s response to GERTRUDE STEIN, especially his reaction to the “Melanctha” section of her book Three Lives. In what ways does that work by Stein remind you of McKay’s works? In what ways are the works of these two writers different in purpose and effect? 7. Trace McKay’s evolving political positions (focusing, for instance, on his changing responses to communism). Are his changing attitudes reflected in his creative works? If so, how? Should knowledge of a writer’s political ideas shape our responses to his or her works? If so, why and how? 8. McKay is often discussed as both a poet and a novelist, but he is little discussed as a writer of short fiction. Find some of his short stories and discuss them in detail. Is any of them particularly successful as a work of art? Is any of them particularly unsuccessful? Why are they not better known? How are they comparable (in such matters as themes, style, settings, and techniques) to McKay’s novels and/or poems? 9. McKay set a number of works in countries other than the United States. How do his “nonAmerican” writings compare and/or contrast with the “American” ones? How do the settings of these various works affect such matters as characterization, dialogue, dialect, plot, and tone? How is the issue of race affected by different settings? 10. Track down some of McKay’s nonfiction, especially his writings about art. How do these writings help us understand his own artistic purposes and achievements? What was McKay trying to do in his “creative” writing? To what

extent, and in what ways, did he succeed or fail in attaining his announced objectives? WORKS CITED

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Cooper, Wayne F. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance: A Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Giles, James R. Claude McKay. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Gosciak, Josh. Claude McKay and the Romance of the Victorians. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Hathaway, Heather. Caribbean Waves: Relocating Claude McKay and Paule Marshall. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. James, Winston. A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay’s Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion. New York: Verso, 2000. Maxwell, William. Modern American Poetry: Claude McKay. Available online. URL: http://www.english. illinois.edu/Maps/poets/m_r/mckay/mckay.htm. Accessed April 7, 2009. McKay, Claude. Complete Poems. Edited by William J. Maxwell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. ———. Home to Harlem. 1928. Reprint, Chatham, N.J.: Chatham Bookseller, 1973. Ramesh, Kotti Sree. Claude McKay: The Literary Identity from Jamaica to Harlem and Beyond. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Stephens, Michelle Anne. Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Tillery, Tyrone. Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for Identity. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991.

Robert C. Evans

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

My candle burns at both ends; / It will hardly last the night; / But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends— / It gives a lovely light! (“First Fig”)

E

dna St. Vincent Millay—known as “Vincent” to her family and friends—was born in Rockland, a small town in coastal Maine, the eldest of three daughters. Her father left the family when she was seven, though he did remain in regular contact with them. Edna grew up in what was basically an all-female household, an environment that played a role in her lifelong independence and strong sense of self. Millay, her sisters Kathleen and Norma, and her mother, Cora, maintained a tight (as well as a literary and highly musical) family unit until her mother’s death in 1931. Edna was recognized early at her school for her writing talents, and her work (signed E. Vincent Millay) was frequently published in a national young people’s magazine, St. Nicholas. She won the magazine’s Silver Badge in 1909 and a cash prize the following year. When she turned 18, however, that association ceased. Millay lacked the fi nancial means to attend college, but she did get involved in local dramatic troupes. Then at age 19, during a stay with her ailing father, she began work on the poem that would change her life (Milford 58–59). She submitted “Renascence” to a new literary anthology, the Lyric Year. Though destined for fame, the lengthy poem was very nearly discarded by the two men who were culling the thousands of submissions. The poem was notable for such arresting images as “The creaking of the tented sky / The ticking of eternity” (ll. 43–44) and for the opening of its fi nal

stanza: “The earth stands out on either side / No wider than the heart is wide; / Above the world is stretched the sky, / No higher than the soul is high” (ll. 203–206). The year 1912 was a fortunate time for the poem to appear. It was a revolutionary year not only for Millay, but also for the arts in general. Cubism in painting, the rejection of tonality in music, the rise of imagism in poetry—all of them were products of modernism, the general term for a large-scale artistic revolution in the opening years of the 20th century. Most readers recognized the poem’s freshness and vitality, and they condemned the editors who had awarded it a mere fourth place. (Fourth place also meant no cash prize, a sore disappointment for Millay and her struggling family.) A certain Mrs. Caroline Dow heard Millay read the poem at the Whitehall Inn, a summer hotel in Camden, Maine. Dow was dean of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) Training School in New York and an influential Vassar alumna. She became determined that Edna would attend her alma mater. Before long, funds were being raised on Millay’s behalf, and soon she was spending a college-preparatory year at Barnard College in New York. It was a city whose vitality she was to love, and to which she would return after her college graduation. The following year, at age 21, she became a member of Vassar’s class of 1917, choosing Vassar over

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Smith College, even though Smith had offered her a full scholarship. As she told her mother, she preferred Vassar because of the wide range of international students there, while “there isn’t one ‘furriner’ in Smith.” In addition, it was apparently a tradition that “Lots of Maine girls go to Smith; very few to Vassar. I’d rather go to Vassar” (Milford 79). This sentiment was clearly another early sign of Millay’s independent spirit, as well as a lifelong interest in that wider world beyond America’s shores. Once matriculated, Vincent continued to devote herself to poetry, but she also again became deeply involved in college dramatic productions, this time both as writer and actor. She excelled in both arenas. She performed as Marie de France in A Pageant of Athena, in celebration of the college’s 50th anniversary. Her Deirdre in Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows was remarkable enough to bring reviewers from several New York newspapers. A poem, “The Suicide,” that she had written in 1914 won fi rst prize in 1916 from the Association of Northern College Magazines. ROBERT FROST served on the committee that awarded the prize. She also became an ardent suffragist, committed to the movement that was demanding the right to vote for women and that led to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. She also took a woman’s right to independent choice and behavior seriously on a more personal level. For one thing, she acquired several lesbian lovers, taking full advantage of the era’s new commitment to sexual freedom, including free love. She herself later admitted she was “far from unsusceptible to a woman’s charms” (qtd. in Milford 379). She also hotly rejected many of Vassar’s rules and customs (mandatory class and chapel attendance in particular) and was nearly disqualified from Vassar’s graduation ceremony by some off-campus antics. She had a fi rm supporter in Vassar’s new president, Henry Noble MacCracken, a progressive educator who winked at much of Vincent’s misbehavior. He wrote later that he had assured her, “I don’t want to have any dead Shelley on my doorstep and I don’t care what you do.” He also recorded her reply: “Well, on those terms I think I can continue

to live in this hellhole” (qtd. in Milford 138). In short, her college years encouraged Millay’s iconoclastic tendencies, in both behavior and belief. She rejected what she considered Christianity’s strict doctrines and proclaimed a woman’s right to total freedom, both intellectual and sexual. She did receive her diploma and moved to New York’s Greenwich Village, whose bohemian lifestyle and freedom perfectly suited her. She continued to write poetry, performed with a new theater group (the Provincetown Players), and either fended off or encouraged the attentions of many suitors, male and female. Three years later, Millay left America for Europe, where she earned money as a foreign correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post. After her 1922 return to America, she fi nally settled on a husband: Eugen Boissevain, a handsome Dutch widower who had been married to another Vassar alumna (also an active suffragist). He proved to be the perfect match for Millay, deeply committed to her physical and mental health and remarkably tolerant of her occasional romantic and sexual involvements. The most intense of these was with the young, probably gay, poet George Dillon, whom she had met on a fall 1928 reading tour in Chicago. Their affair produced an unprecedented outpouring of sonnets from Millay, and the 52 sonnets were later gathered into a volume called Fatal Interview. It sold an astonishing 33,000 copies within 10 weeks of its April 1931 publication (332). Millay and her husband retreated to a house they built in the Berkshire Mountains, “Steepletop.” Along with their purchase of Ragged Island near her old home in Maine, it became her primary residence for the remainder of her life, though the couple also traveled widely. Most of Millay’s best writing was completed by the late 1930s, including Wine from These Grapes (1934), Conversation at Midnight (1937), and Huntsman, What Quarry? (1940). An effort was made to publish her Collected Poems in the early 1940s, but critical appraisal had begun to turn against her work. A review of the proposed volume suggested that “If [her artistic merit] is not taken quite seriously . . . today, it may be that she was


taken too seriously twenty years ago.” It suggested further that “the direction of her progress has been from legend to success” (qtd. in Milford 464). Though affl icted with a series of both nervous and physical ailments throughout her life, she remained an admired performer of her work. Making use of her remarkable dramatic gifts, including a vibrant speaking voice, she conducted exhausting national tours to read from each new volume of poetry she produced. Millay was the fi rst poet to be given eight Sunday evenings to read her poetry, live, on a national radio hook-up. She also served until 1939 on the prize committee of the Guggenheim Foundation, helping to determine each year which new poets deserved fi nancial encouragement. Her health prevented her from continuing her reading tours after 1939. To combat various ailments, Millay became a prey fi rst to alcoholism and later to drug addiction, particularly addiction to morphine, for which she unsuccessfully sought rehabilitation. She never retreated, however, from national life. As she said, “Poets are deeply aware of world conditions. In fact, they have a tendency more than other writers to become world-conscious” (qtd. in Milford 420). In her fi rst years in New York, she had been a defender of Floyd Dell, who, besides being a theatrical entrepreneur, was one of the editors of the radical magazine the Masses, which had been indicted by the government under the 1917 Espionage Act. After two trials, Dell and his fellow “conspirators” were acquitted. Millay accompanied him to court every day, in a show of support. Later Millay became deeply but unsuccessfully involved in the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, two convicted anarchists from the 1920s, in whose innocence many believed. She wrote to the Massachusetts governor, Alvan Fuller, on the eve of their 1927 execution, “I cry to you with a million voices: answer our doubt. Exert the clemency which your high office affords” (qtd. in Milford 298). She later became a determined voice warning Americans of the impending threat from Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany. She was particularly sensitive to that threat when her husband’s property in the Netherlands was seized by the invading Germans.

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She is best known for her volumes of poetry, the most famous of which are Renascence and Other Poems (1917), A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), Second April (1921), The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1924), The Buck in the Snow (1928), Fatal Interview (1931), and Wine from These Grapes (1934). She also wrote (and performed in) several plays in the 1920s, and even composed the book for one opera, The King’s Henchman, with music by the eminent music critic and composer Deems Taylor (1927). It proved to be a splendid Metropolitan Opera premiere, and book sales of the play were massive. She also wrote several short stories for Ainslee’s Magazine under the pen name of Nancy Boyd. The one genre at which she failed was the novel. Her favorite poetic form was the sonnet. She preferred it to the increasingly common use of free verse. She liked its tight structure and rhyme schemes. She once exulted: “What formal grace and method of procedure as of a ritual most precise and perfect of high ecstasy restrained” (qtd. in Milford 459). Her word ecstasy is a reminder that love is a sonnet’s usual topic—its intense pleasures as well as its complex emotional challenges. In 1922 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in literature. This gratified her enormously, both as an artist and as a feminist, as she was both the fi rst woman and fi rst poet to earn the prize. In 1940, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Millay was very much a part of her times and was either intimately or informally acquainted with the major writers of her day, including Deems Taylor (music critic, composer, and collaborator); the critic Edmund Wilson; the novelists Pearl Buck, JOHN DOS PASSOS, and Somerset Maugham; the painter Georgia O’Keeffe; the playwright Susan Glaspell; as well as her fellow poets Elinor Wylie and Rebecca West. The English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy once said of her, “There are two great things in the United States: the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and our ‘recessional buildings’ [skyscrapers]” (qtd. in Milford 290). If ZELDA and F. SCOTT FITZGERALD were the prototype Jazz Age couple, Millay was its liberated young woman. She gave the age, as her biographer Nancy Milford asserts, “its lyric voice” (33).

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“First Fig” (1920) My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends, It gives a lovely light.

This is the most celebrated Millay poem, the one that opened her second collection, Some Figs from Thistles (1920). That title suggests that while life can be full of thorns and will not last forever, beautiful moments can happen. The four lines offer a concise and clear metaphor for the speaker’s (and in this case also the poet’s) take on life, a strong argument that one should carpe diem, Latin for “seize the day”: Pursue life’s intensity. The phrase “burning one’s candle at both ends” has entered our language as an expression of living life to the fullest, but with the awareness that such a course may not be the most healthful. It conveys perfectly a young person’s philosophy on living life. (Millay was in her twenties when the poem was written.) One weakness in the poem derives from the two interjections, oh and ah. One would expect that since they are addressed to two opposing groups— “my friends” and “my foes”—they would express differing emotions or attitudes, but actually the two interjections are interchangeable. What cannot be denied, however, is that both words convey the speaker’s pure enjoyment of the self-indulgence with which s/he was seizing the day, as well as the pleasure and “illumination” she was giving herself and her world. But coupled with this delight in those double pleasures is the awareness, characteristic of Millay (not to mention many great poets from Shakespeare or the medieval French poet Villon, to Marvell and Housman), of life’s brevity and time’s passing. The speaker knows full well that the light he or she is generating may not even last through the night. Self-indulgence in Millay is often shadowed by the knowledge that time is flying.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Scan the poem (mark its accents, light and heavy, and its rhyme scheme). Also pay attention to its use of alliteration and its vowel sounds.

Examine how the sounds, meter, and rhythms contribute to the poem’s effectiveness. 2. Summarize in a few sentences the speaker’s philosophy for living life. Then respond in a lengthy paragraph to the poem’s recommendations for living. Do you approve? What do you fi nd appealing about those recommendations? What dangers might result from living life this way? 3. Compare the philosophy of life voiced by the speaker to that of the speaker in Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” Which poem is potentially the more ironic? In which does the poem’s content do more to undermine the speaker’s apparent views? Explain how such irony is achieved. Which poem is the more successful as a work of art? Explain why. Compare and contrast the philosophy implied in this poem with the one implied in Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

“Recuerdo” (1922) This poem consists of three six-line stanzas and recounts another apparent night of romance, this time outdoors and this time less explicitly physical than the experiences described in some of Millay’s other poems. It was written early in Millay’s career, possibly during her “college-prep” year at Barnard (1913). As a sonnet does, the poem relies on a careful structure. The fi rst two lines of each stanza are identical, and their recurrence reflects the “back and forth” experience of the ferry the couple apparently rode all night. Furthermore, the third, fourth, and fi fth lines of each stanza list pleasures the couple experienced during the night. In the fi nal stanza, the kindness and generosity the lovers display are not so perfect that they forget to be practical: They save enough cash to go home on the subway. The poem does a fi ne job of suggesting a night (a long night) of romantic adventure and pleasure, and the details are just prosaic enough (the ferry,


the table, the smells, the fruits) to suggest a reallife experience. The second stanza also ends with a brilliant and captivating image of the sun as it rises “dripping, a bucketful of gold” (l. 12). There are, however, some less appealing features of the poem. Each stanza’s opening couplet consists of a feminine rhyme (“merry” / “ferry”), one that consists of two syllables, not the usual one. In English, the practice can produce a singsong effect. The poem also relies too heavily on an irregular anapestic rhythm (in which two unaccented syllables precede an accented one), which disrupts the regularity of its flow. Finally, line 15 employs some unnecessarily archaic diction (“we hailed, ‘Good morrow, mother’ ”), which undercuts the fresh naturalness of its diction elsewhere. The line does use an effective synecdoche, however (in which head stands for “woman”).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Mark the stressed and unstressed accents of the opening couplet. How does the rhythm of the lines contribute to their meaning or effectiveness? Which words or syllables receive special emphasis, and how can that emphasis be justified? 2. To what activities do you suppose the speaker is referring in lines 3 through 6 and in line 11? What can we infer about the couple’s tastes, interests, and values from these activities? 3. The word recuerdo in Spanish means “memory.” How do you think the couple is feeling about this one-night adventure? Do you imagine they will view it differently in 10 years? If so, why? 4. Compare the speaker’s experience of a night and dawn on a New York ferry with the experience recorded by Walt Whitman in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” How and in what ways do the poem’s respective tones, attitudes, and vocabularies either compare or differ? 5. Compare and contrast the romantic relationship depicted in this poem with the one presented in T. S. ELIOT’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” How is sexuality dealt with in each work? How do the tones of the speakers differ?

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“I, Being Born a Woman” (1923) Millay is one of the comparatively few women poets who have mastered the sonnet form. Her wit and craftsmanship in this handling of a sonnet in the Petrarchan mode are impressive. She describes a distinctly physical encounter with a man that, while it has produced no lasting emotional bond, still seemed unavoidable and felt to a degree pleasurable, at least at the time. This sonnet resembles Shakespeare’s number 138 (“When my Love swears that she is made of truth / I do believe her, though I know she lies”) as a knowing, wise, and in fact cynical take on a dying or dead relationship, this one from the woman’s point of view. The opening five lines constitute a rather ironic or self-critical analysis of the man’s expectation that she wants him. She is “urged by your propinquity” to feel attracted to the man; any attraction results less from any inherent merit or appeal in him than from “the needs” of her “kind” (ll. 2–3). The speaker accepts, not with total enthusiasm, that women need sex from men. One of the poem’s most brilliant insights is the very unfeminist suggestion that women are almost designed, by nature, to crave thoughtless and meaningless sexual intimacy. It is the way females are made, the speaker strongly implies. She warns the man clearly that the moment has meant nothing. She in fact looks at three steps in the process: First her pulses grow clear (l. 7), which in this context means that she is fi lled with desire for him; when that happens, her mind grows cloudy (she loses her calm powers of reason); and the fi nal result (l. 8) is to be left abandoned. He has simply used her, and she has for the moment participated, allowing herself to be thus used. Line 4 contains the possibility of another interpretation. Either she is declaring that she “feel[s] a certain zest,” or the word feel goes back to “urged by your propinquity,” which would suggest that she does not truly feel it but is forced to respond that way by her body’s desires. Good poets put into their poems these double possibilities, these potentially ambivalent interpretations, forcing the reader to think about both choices and to decide for himself or herself which meaning is the more likely.

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The speaker’s insights about her physical responses and loss of self-discipline in line 7 are nicely repeated in lines 8–9, when she speaks of “the poor treason / Of my stout blood against my staggering brain.” Their night (or perhaps merely an hour) of passion is no reason for him to expect her to talk to him next time they meet. Of course, as with any poem worth its salt, that fi nal couplet can be taken a second way, creating an interesting ambivalence. She may be implying that, next time, once again, there will be no need for any chat—just one more encounter of passionate but meaningless sex. Given that Millay was a woman who was a fi rm believer in women’s rights and talents, the persona (the speaker) of this particular poem may seem surprising. “She” seems convinced that women have unique “needs and notions” that drive them into unwise choices of lovers, as if they have little control over their desires. This work is a reminder that a good poet will often create a speaker who represents a certain type of personality and may not speak for the poet herself. Millay is portraying human psychology, not judging it.

For Discussion or Writing 1. What do you think is the most likely meaning of propinquity in line 3? What is the effect of Millay’s use of this particular word, rather than a synonym? How does her choice of diction, and the tone it creates, contribute to our sense of the speaker’s personality? How would you interpret line 7? 2. In line 13, defi ne the noun frenzy. How and why is that noun effective? Discuss some alternatives to that word. How might those other choices have changed the line’s connotations? 3. Compare and contrast the attitude toward sexuality of Millay’s speaker with that of the central character of ZOR A NEALE HURSTON’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. How is sexuality presented in complex ways in both works? 4. In a substantial essay, compare this speaker’s analysis of an unsatisfying love relationship with that of the speaker in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138, “When My Love swears. . . .” What common

attitudes to an imperfect relationship do both sonnets share?

“What lips my lips have kissed” (1923) In this sonnet, the speaker, in a mood both coolly philosophical and melancholy, lies in bed late at night and recalls the many men whom she has loved, recognizing that she has forgotten most of them. The poem ends with a sad realization that many of the pleasures that she has known have fled and that she somewhat regrets that loss. The sonnet reflects the speaker’s life of romantic selfindulgence as well as the indifference to particular loves that can result from such frequent pleasures. The octave (a Petrarchan sonnet’s fi rst eight lines) describes the speaker’s state of mind as she considers how many young and apparently needy men she has loved and realizes further how many of them she can no longer even recall. The phrase “quiet pain” (l. 6) suggests ambivalent feelings. The speaker knows that she has outgrown the attentions of men, but she cannot stop herself from feeling upset at that more “mature” insight. The sonnet’s sestet (its fi nal six lines) consists of an extended simile in which she compares herself to a tree in winter. She recalls the joys of summer, seeming to recognize that her previous days of love and pleasure, even though the individual lovers are no longer recalled, were a lovely time in her life. She also senses, however, that they are likely never to recur, though summer, being part of the natural cycle, may offer a subtle hint that one part of her hopes a season of love will eventually return. As many of Millay’s poems do, this one contains an echo of Shakespeare. The “vanished . . . birds” and the “summer” that “no longer . . . sings” in her echo the reference in his Sonnet 73 to tree branches in late fall, which that speaker terms “bare ruined choirs / Where late the sweet birds sang.”

For Discussion or Writing 1. Mark the poem’s rhyme scheme and from that try to determine whether this is an Italian or a Shakespearean sonnet. How does the sonnet


form—especially the division between octave and sestet—contribute to the poem’s meaning? How do a sonnet’s brevity and tight construction add to the work’s impact? 2. Discuss the relationship of the poem’s fi nal six lines to the dramatic situation described in its fi rst eight lines. What role does that relationship play in the development of the poem’s argument? 3. Compare Millay’s simile likening the speaker to a tree in winter to Shakespeare’s image of a tree in his Sonnet 73 as “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” Compare the effects of the two similes in their respective poems. 4. Write a substantial paragraph that analyzes the speaker’s attitude toward her past “loves.”

“Love is not all” (1931) This appealing sonnet has the complexity and ambivalence one looks for in a satisfying work of art. It traces the speaker’s analysis of the nature and benefits of love, as well as its wide range of inadequacies. But at its resolution, it considers two possible conclusions to the lovers’ night of love—“I might be driven to . . . / . . . trade the memory of this night for food. / It may well be. I do not think I would” (ll. 13–14). The poem takes for its cue a clever premise. As does Shakespeare’s “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” it begins with a look at love’s inadequacy, listing all it cannot achieve. But most of those items are either physical (“It is not meat nor drink”) or medical (it cannot heal one’s “blood” or “lung” or “fractured bones” [ll. 1, 5–6]). Nevertheless, the speaker is quick to admit that men may die without love. The sonnet’s last six lines (its third quatrain and concluding couplet) turn the attention to the speaker herself, address her relationship with her lover, and focus on a particular night; she looks carefully at the possibility that she might be disloyal but is fairly certain she would not. The poem also shows considerable technical facility. This is especially evident in its use of caesura (the grammatical pause in the middle of the

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fi rst and last lines) and its use of enjambment (in which the end of one line flows without punctuation into the next, as between lines 3 and 4). Both techniques work to break up the regularity of the iambic rhythm. The poem also takes the rather daring step of devoting one full line and part of another to the alternating repetition of the verbs rise and sink, and it ends, significantly, on the latter. Another part of the poem’s originality (or at least its experimenting with the traditional sonnet form) is that it chooses not to make use of the “three quatrain plus couplet” structure of the typical Shakespearean sonnet in order to present three different aspects of love. Instead, it devotes its fi rst six lines to negative descriptions, then moves in lines 7 and 8 to another facet—men who die for lack of love. Those two lines form a transition to the speaker’s own involvement in love, when she contemplates the possibility that she might sell “your” love for peace of mind. The poem concludes with the suspense of ambiguity: Would she sell the memory of their night of love? She leaves the possibility open, thus ending with an honest appraisal of love’s indefi nable and emotionally wrenching power.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Mark this sonnet’s rhyme scheme and meter, comparing them to the rhyme and meter of “What lips my lips have kissed.” Discuss the ways in which these two techniques contribute to the meaning and effectiveness of both poems. Which syllables or words receive special metrical emphasis, and how? 2. In a paragraph, identify and then analyze the various forces that might drive the speaker to “sell your love.” What is the speaker’s tone? To what degree is it appealing or sympathetic? Explain your assessment. How does the attitude of the speaker in Millay’s poem compare or contrast with the attitude of the female speaker in EZRA POUND’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”? 3. Draw a conclusion as to the speaker’s analysis of love: Is it really something humans can do without, or will it have a lasting effect on the speaker’s life? How does the speaker ultimately

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defi ne love? What are some other possible definitions of that emotion? 4. Compare and contrast the depiction of love in this work with its depiction in EDWIN A RLINGTON ROBINSON’s poem “Eros Turannos.” How do the women in these poems resemble or differ from one another?

6.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON MILLAY AND HER WORK 1. Try to consider the five poems by Millay discussed as a sequence of poems about love. In what order would you arrange them? Why? Explain your choices, fi rst, by analyzing each poem’s take on love and life; then show how each poem voices a new and different approach to living life and to dealing with love relationships. 2. Examine the life and a few selected poems of Emily Dickinson, another female poet from rural New England. What differences do you see in the lives she and Millay eventually led and in the topics they normally chose for their poems? Find one specifically romantic poem by Dickinson and compare and contrast the attitude to love expressed in one of the poems by Millay discussed. 3. Consider the view of love, its pleasures as well as its psychological pressures, as Millay conveys it in several of these love poems. Then compare that view with the “take” on love expressed in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Consider especially Hamlet’s words to Ophelia in act 3, scene 1, but also take into account the judgments about love expressed by Polonius, Laertes, and Claudius. 4. Millay often actively involved herself in the issues of her day, ranging from the Sedition Act of World War I and the Sacco-Vanzetti case to the rise of Hitler. Compare the intensity of her involvement with one or more of these issues with that of Norman Mailer in the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s. 5. Millay referred to the “formal grace” and “precise . . . ritual” of the sonnet form and used it to analyze and dramatize romantic relation-

7.

8.

9.

ships. Compare and contrast this poetic practice of hers with the approach to rhyme, meter, and subject matter employed by Walt Whitman. Millay spoke for and helped to dramatize the lives and loves of the new woman of the 1920s, an era that celebrated feminism and free love. Compare her analysis of love and freedom in several of her poems with the views of women expressed in one or more of the works by the following female authors: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, her “Story of an Hour,” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Millay was a successful amateur actress both at college and shortly afterward in New York City. Later she gave readings of her poetry both on the radio and live, in theaters. Compare her success as a performer of her own works with one (or more) of the following: Charles Dickens, James Taylor, or a contemporary poet whose works you admire and whom you have heard perform. “Renascence” is a poem about someone who feels out of place in her environment but who, after considerable thought, attains a more positive view of her place in the universe. Compare her positive discovery with the picture EDITH WHARTON gives of Ethan Frome in her novella of that name. Choose any three of Millay’s sonnets about love and compare her worldview, as well as her use of the sonnet form, to similar features in Robert Frost’s “Design,” William Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us,” and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”

WORKS CITED

AND


Chaney, Anne. Millay in Greenwich Village. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1975. Dash, Joan. A Life of One’s Own: Three Gifted Women and the Men They Married. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Edna St. Vincent Millay Society. Available online. URL: http://www.millaysociety.org. Accessed April 7, 2009. Epstein, Daniel Mark. What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.


Falck, Colin, ed. Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Gould, Jean. The Poet and Her Book: A Biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1962. MacDougall, Allan Ross, ed. Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1952. Majerus, Elizabeth. “Modern American Poetry: Edna St. Vincent Millay.” Available online. URL: http://

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www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/ millay/millay.htm. Accessed April 7, 2009. Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty. New York: Random House, 2001. Nierman, Judith. Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Reference Guide Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. Patton, John J. “A Comprehensive Bibliography of Criticism of Edna St. Vincent Millay.” Serif 5 (September 1968): 10–32.

Jamie Spencer

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) Poetry—I, too, dislike it. (“Poetry”)

T

he best authority on Marianne Moore is of course the author herself. In an October 7, 1951, interview for the New York Herald Book Review, Moore reveals quite a bit about herself. In her own words she presents herself as an average American who enjoys “the theater, tennis, sailing, reading, and the movies—animal documentaries, travelogues, an occasional French fi lm, and the newsreel” (14). The terse list of her personal favorites includes “country fairs, roller-coasters, merrygo-rounds, dog shows, museums, avenues of trees, old elms, vehicles, experiments in timing like our ex–Museum of Science and Invention’s two rollerbearings in a gravity chute, synchronized with a ring-bearing revolving vertically” (14). Such a list mirrors her ability as a poet to paint a picture by using only a few details. Moreover, her declaration that “I am fond of animals and take inordinate interest in mongooses, squirrels, crows, [and] elephants” emphasizes the central role animals and animal imagery play in many of her poems (14). Most of the key facts concerning Moore’s life are laid out in Charles Molesworth’s fi ne biography. Born on November 15, 1887, in Kirkwood, Missouri, Marianne Craig Moore was the second child of Mary Warner Moore and John Moore. However, John Moore never took an active role in Moore’s or her older brother’s lives. In fact, it appears that Marianne Moore never had the opportunity to meet her father and that her mother made

every effort to prevent the Moore family from having contact with her children (Molesworth 1). Together Mary Moore and her two children formed a tight family unit that became a powerful force in Moore’s poetry. Mrs. Moore may have been Moore’s most severe critic, but the close relationship between mother and daughter cannot be denied. Although Moore and her brother did experience sibling rivalry, their relationship was built on a mutual respect for each other’s accomplishments. When Moore’s grandfather died, her mother decided to support fi nancially and raise her children on her own. She and her two children moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she taught English at the Metzger Institute. Moore’s mother had been college educated, and she instilled in both of her children a great knowledge of literature and culture. While many hypotheses have been offered to explain why the Moores moved to Carlisle, it is clear that the change afforded Marianne Moore a better education. Her daily lessons at the Metzger Institute may not have prepared her adequately for college, but the tutoring of a friend, Mary Norcross, helped Moore pass Bryn Mawr College’s entrance exams in summer 1905. Once there, Moore studied literature but was advised against majoring in English because her essay writing was marked by the unconventional organization that became the hallmark of her poetry. Although she edited and published short stories and poems in the college

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Marianne Moore

literary journal, Tipyn O’Bob, she majored in history and politics. In 1909 she graduated from Bryn Mawr and enrolled in Carlisle Commercial College to master secretarial skills. Her first job, however, was not as a secretary or even as a writer. Instead, in 1911 she became a teacher at the United States Industrial Indian School of Carlisle, Pennsylvania. As an employee at a government-funded program intended to help Native Americans assimilate into American culture through education, Moore bore a heavy workload for small wages. Somehow, however, she did make time to write and began to publish her poetry, with several poems appearing in national magazines in 1912 and 1913. But in 1915 Moore published an astonishing 20 poems and gained some significant literary notice. Seven poems were published in the Egoist, a literary bimonthly edited by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), a wellknown imagist poet, who befriended Moore and supported Moore’s developing talents through a balance of praise and criticism. Four others were placed in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. EZRA POUND, an editor and contributor to that journal, “was one of the first to notice Moore’s unique talent, and was later . . . to begin a correspondence with her” that marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship (Molesworth 111). Moore may not have been able to make a living by her art alone, but the recognition and professional associations H. D. and Pound offered were important steps on her journey as an author. In 1918 Moore and her mother moved to New York City. The family dynamic was changing and challenged by Moore’s mother’s recent remarriage, but the valued relationships among Moore, her brother, and her mother were not severed. Moore’s move to Greenwich Village created a new source of support through the literary circles she encountered there and through expanding connections to other modernist poets, including WALLACE STEVENS, WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, and T. S. ELIOT. In fact, New York City, along with Mount Rainier and Virginia, became one of the central themes of Moore’s poetry. In Moore’s fi rst decade in New York, she was very busy. Molesworth reports the literary parties,

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trips to museums, and lectures she and her mother attended. But her life there was not entirely enjoyment; she also worked to support her mother and herself. Her fi rst position (as a secretary at a girls’ school) seems irrelevant to her developing literary identity. Her part-time position at the Hudson Park Branch of the New York Library has often been connected to her penchant for categorization and lists in her poetry. Lasting from 1925 to 1929, her full-time position as an editor for the Dial, a literary magazine, widened her literary connections and assured her that her literary tastes were valuable. Her poetry was also gaining wider acclaim. In 1921, her fi rst volume of poetry, Poems, was collected and published by H. D., Winifred Elllerman (known as Bryher), and Robert McAlmon through the Egoist Press, but it was not noticeably reviewed. In 1923 Moore oversaw her fi rst publication of her own work, and this chapbook of verse was widely reviewed by key modernists, including T. S. Eliot and Richard Aldington. The capstone to this decade’s literary publication, however, was the Dial Press’s publication of Observations in 1924. After its publication, Moore in 1925 won the annual Dial Award of $2,000 for a writer’s overall contribution to art. Sharing her title with Van Wyck Brooks and William Carlos Williams, she had established her place in literary modernism. After the closing of the Dial, the literary magazine she not only edited but where she published the greatest number of poems in the 1920s, Moore now began supporting herself through publication of her works. Devoting her time and resources to her art, Moore began a long series of publications that reflect her connection to other poets as well as her own development as a poet, including her need to revise and republish works until she believed they clearly conveyed her intended message. In 1935 she published Selected Poems, which draws from two of her previous publications, Observations (1924) and Poems (1921). T. S. Eliot’s introduction praised her work and career, and his suggestion that she reorganize her poems so that the works from Observations appeared fi rst helped provide the order Moore would use in later republications (Molesworth

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267–268). In the next year, she published Pangolin and Verse, a small, limited-edition volume of five poems. This volume, regarded as her masterpiece, reflects her ability and range as a modernist poet. Later publications, however, included What Are Years? (1941); Neverthless (1944); Collected Poetry (1951), which received the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and Bollingen Prize; Like a Bulwark (1956); O to Be a Dragon (1959); Eight Poems (1962); Occasionem Cognosce (1963); The Arctic Ox (1964); A Talisman (1965); Dress and Kindred Subjects (1965); Le marriage . . . (1965); Poetry and Criticism (1965); Silence (1965); Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics (1965); Tippoo’s Tiger (1967); and the Complete Poems (1967), which received the Edward MacDowell Medal, the Poetry Society of America Gold Medal, and the Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. To think of Marianne Moore only as a poet, however, is to neglect her other literary work. For instance, in 1945, Rock Crystal: A Christmas Tale by Adalbert Stifter was published in translation from the original German by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore. Furthermore, in 1954 Moore published her own translation of the Fables of La Fontaine. Considered “her largest single project,” the “Fables continued her interest in the dynamic relationship between nature and culture” (Molesworth 304). She also published Puss in Boots, The Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella: A Retelling of Three Fairy Tales Based on the French Tales of Charles Perrault, illustrated by Eugene Karlin, in 1963. Although not a literal translation as her renderings of the works by Stifter and La Fontaine were, Moore’s versions of these three fairy tales emphasize her wide scope of reading and her ability to fi nd value in what others could easily discard. The Absentee: A Comedy in Four Acts (1962), a play based on Maria Edgeworth’s novel of the same name, similarly shows Moore’s command of a wide variety of genres and indicates her willingness to attempt new challenges. Other publications—including Predilections (1955), a collection of essays and reviews; Idiosyncrasy and Technique: Two Lectures (1958); The Accented Syllable (1969); and her contribution to Homage to Henry James (1971)—

not only reveal her own theories of writing and reading but also underscore the characteristics she valued in art. Moore also played an important role, however, as a mentor to younger poets. Her relationship with Elizabeth Bishop, for instance, was of key significance to both poets’ careers. Bishop approached Moore for advice while still a student at Vassar. The public record of their connection reveals a distinctly professional relationship. In 1936 Bishop introduced Moore to Louise Crane, the heir of the Crane Paper Company, who would support Moore fi nancially and with legal advice and would become the executor of Moore’s estate (Molesworth 292). Moore similarly helped Bishop nearly 10 years later by recommending that she receive the Houghton Miffl in Award for her fi rst volume of published poetry, North and South. Moore’s January 4, 1937, letter to her brother indicates her fondness for Bishop; she claims to “like Miss Bishop better than any of our friends—of the friends we have adopted, & are not beating off. But my whole feeling of enthusiasm is tempered by her tendency to be late” (Selected Letters 376). Her letters to “Dearest Elizabeth” and her use of pet names (like those Moore used with her mother and brother, such as “Master of Minnows”) reveal the closeness of their friendship (Selected Letters 378–379). During her lifetime, Moore received widespread recognition for her poetic skill. Included in her long list of awards are a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal, two Poetry Society of America Gold Medal Awards, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a MacDowell Medal, appointment as the chevalier of the Legion of Honor, election to the Order of Arts and Letters, and recognition as a Woman of Achievement by the American Association of University Women. Nevertheless, Moore was the people’s poet as well. In her fi nal years, she was named an “Unknockable” by Esquire in June 1966 and was honored as Senior Citizen of the Year at the New York Conference on Aging in 1969. The photograph of a small figure of an elderly woman in a black tricorn hat throwing out the opening pitch at

Marianne Moore

Yankee Stadium in 1966 seems comic, but baseball was one of her favorite pastimes. When Marianne Moore died on February 5, 1972, America lost more than a poet; America lost an icon.

“The Fish” (1921, 1935) “The Fish” is one of Moore’s many poems about nature and animals. As in “To a Snail,” the poem’s meaning and development are more complex than the title implies. Although the poem describes the fish of its title, the description provides insight into Moore’s intricate rhyme and stanza schemes, which Moore uses to mimic the complex setting of the fish her poem describes. Each stanza consists of five lines. In all of the stanzas the lines create a rhythm through a repeated metrical pattern. The fi rst line of each stanza has only one syllable; the second has three syllables; the third has nine syllables; the fourth has six syllables; and the last line usually has eight syllables. Essentially the rhythm mimics the rise and fall of waves. The rhymed lines also mimic the ebb and flow of the water. The fi rst line’s syllable rhymes with the fi nal syllable of the second line, and the third and fourth lines’ fi nal syllables rhyme as well. The fi fth line is left unpaired and confronts the silence of the line breaks between the stanzas. As do the waves of the water, the fi rst two lines have a short rhyme, mimicking the rocking beginning of a wave. The third and fourth lines build up to the crest and roll of the wave. The last line is the surge and rush of the water to shore, followed by the silence of the receding water. Throughout the poem, Moore describes in detail the world beneath the sea. “The fish wade / through black jade” of dark waters full of life (ll. 1–2). Hidden beneath the waves is a brutal, but beautiful, world. While the sea creatures dance with “spotlight swiftness” (l. 13) in the glorious light and color of the kaleidoscope of life beneath the sea, they are rooted to the “defiant edifice” (l. 29) of the scarred surface of the dead chasm. Complicating the contrast between life and death are the natural color and vibrancy associated with life and the man-made dynamite and

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hatchet associated with the dead chasm. In the last lines, Moore emphasizes the contrast between life and death: “Repeated / evidence has proved that it can live / on what can not revive / its youth. The sea grows old in it” (ll. 37–40). Figuring out what Moore means by it is her challenge to her readers.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Moore’s intricate use of stanza, meter, and rhyme is integral to this poem. How do these poetic devices work to establish mood and meaning? 2. Moore provides a vivid, detailed description of the underwater scene. Are these details realistic or fanciful? What effect do these details have on the poem? 3. The contradictions of the poem build up to the image of life and death contained in the fi nal stanza. How do these contradictions lead you to explain the challenging lines of the fi nal stanza? 4. Compare and contrast this work with Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Birds and Fishes.” What does each work imply about nature and beauty? How do they differ in tone and theme?

“Poetry” (1921, 1935) Among the fi rst poems Moore published, “Poetry” is an odd start to a poet’s career. Included in Poetry (1921) is a 29-line poem that begins with the startling declaration “Poetry / I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle,” which seems to devalue the author’s work and poetry in general. If the author does not like poetry, then why should a reader like the author’s verse? Even more startling may be the reception “Poetry” received from other poets, who understandably could have been insulted by Moore’s work. William Carlos Williams wrote to Moore with praise, claiming that she was “the only one who sees any use in using his brain” (qtd. in Molesworth xviii). In the Egoist of August 1916, H. D.’s essay on Marianne Moore’s poetry claimed that “Miss Moore helps us” (118) through her poetry.

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If Moore’s poem truly impressed two well-known modernist authors, one of whom was her earliest publisher, then she cannot be discarding all poetry. A close reading of the longest version of her poem reveals what Moore dislikes about poetry. In the second and third stanzas, the speaker suggests that the most prominent problem is not poetry alone, but interpretation. When critics use “highsounding” words and “become so derivative as to become unintelligible” (ll. 7–8), then a poem loses its power because the general audience can no longer understand it. With the fourth stanza, Moore introduces another complication—“half poets” (l. 19) and poets who are not “literalists of / the imagination” (ll. 21–22). Neither can effectively portray their messages in their poetry because they are caught up in form, not content. As the fi nal stanza reveals, only those who have distilled poetry to its raw material in search of the genuine can appreciate and write poetry. All the rest is false poetry, and it is false poetry that Moore dislikes. As she did with many of her texts, Moore returned to “Poetry” to revise and distill the essence of her work. The resulting version, which appeared in Selected Poems (1935), is far briefer than the original. Its three lines appear in the fi rst stanza of Moore’s original version of the poem. As the need to revise suggests, defi ning the difference between genuine poetry and everything else was a preoccupation throughout Moore’s career.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Do you like poetry? Think beyond a simple yes or no and, as Moore does, describe what it is you like or dislike about poetry. Do you like or dislike this poem in particular? Explain your response in detail. 2. How does “Poetry” help Moore’s readers understand her defi nition of her art? What, according to her defi nition, must a poem do to be genuine? How does her own poem accomplish that task? 3. The three-line version of the work included in Selected Poems (1935) is meant to represent the same principles articulated in the original version. How does the later version differ from the earlier

version? Moore has distilled the details from the original version of the poem, but does the revised work still relay the same message to her readers?

“To a Snail” (1924) First collected in Observations (1924), “To a Snail” is a quintessential Marianne Moore poem. As many of her other works do, “To a Snail” focuses on nature and the animal kingdom. Also as do many of her poems, it includes a quotation without providing its author or source. However, as in all of her volumes after Observations, Moore provides an index of her poetry and notes to explain references made in her poems. In these “Notes,” Moore attributes the opening line of “To a Snail” to Demetrius on Style as translated by W. Hamilton Fyfe. Thus, a poem with a title that seems to suggest that it will be merely a fablelike animal tale quickly becomes a study of composition. Both the snail and the poem achieve “grace of style” through “compression” (l. 1). The snail, small in stature, compresses itself within its shell, displaying the dual virtues of contractility (an ability to limit itself) and modesty. The shell is much more than a pretty covering for the snail’s slimy, sluglike body. For Moore the shell becomes the symbol of the snail’s ability to use something beautiful. Similarly, in order for a poem to be powerful, it must limit itself and present its message directly. The style, or shell, of the poem is much more than a beautiful covering that hides the supple existence of a poem of many meanings. Style is not adornment but a trait that makes every word count in the creation of the poem and its message. Nevertheless, Moore is not asking for simple or unadorned poetry. As the snail moves without feet, the poem should move without our needing to count its feet and meters. A poem’s movement is determined not by the number of lines or rhymes, but by the feeling it conveys and the reaction it receives. The snail’s “curious phenomenon of your occipital horn” (l. 12), or its eye, allows it to see “a knowledge of principles” (l. 11) as it travels along its glistening trail. Essentially then, “To a Snail”

Marianne Moore

is not merely about a snail. By pairing her description of the snail with advice on rhetoric and style, Moore has complicated our understanding of both a poem and a snail. By analyzing the characteristics they should share, Moore develops a subtle defi nition of poetry that emphasizes not what is said, but the way one should say it.

For Discussion or Writing 1. What other animals or insects could Moore have chosen to represent “compression” through her poetry? Why do you think she chose to write about a snail instead other possible subjects? 2. In terms of the theories of composition Moore outlines in this poem, is “To a Snail” a successful poem? Why or why not? 3. Compare and contrast this work with Robinson Jeffers’s poem titled “Vulture.” In particular, discuss form, tone, point of view, and theme. What does each poem imply about beauty?

“What Are Years?” (1941, 1967) “What Are Years?” is Marianne Moore’s way of asking, What is history? Moore was a history and political science major with an interest in philosophy during her college career; this poem is clearly connected to the concepts she thought about as an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr. Far more sophisticated in language and topic than her college publications (which focused on college dramas that reveal the identity of the artist) and written long after Moore graduated, the poem moves beyond the immediacy of the present moment and looks at the significance of the individual’s moment within the context of all of history. The opening allusions to innocence, guilt, nakedness, and safety reveal a beginning to mankind that closely parallels the conditions described in Genesis in the Bible. Cast out of paradise for eating of the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve lost their innocence, experienced guilt both for their actions and for their nakedness, and were no longer safe. Here the rewriting of the Bible ends. Rather than focus on their sins, Moore emphasizes their

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courageous actions. Both had the courage to ask unanswered questions, to doubt without yielding, to call without speaking, and to listen without hearing; essentially Moore claims that both were thinking human beings. Courage is fi nding strength to question, and questioning strengthens the soul. By connecting the questioning soul of mankind with the sea and a bird, Moore complicates the image of courage. (Moore’s use of masculine pronouns is a reflection of her times; her poem is meant to include both men and women.) The sea, with its constant ebb and flow and fathomless bottoms, is compared to the soul’s imprisonment in ignorance. Regardless of how many times the soul rises up with a courageous question, it can never break free of the confi nes of mankind because man has a limited capacity to know and understand the world. Like the water of the sea, man must recognize his limits in order to survive. By recognizing and achieving what it is capable of, the soul achieves freedom regardless of captivity. As has the caged bird, the now free soul has a new challenge. Breaking free of the confi nes of its captivity by recognizing his or her limits, the individual must share the knowledge he or she has acquired. Through singing his song, the bird grows. Through spreading his message, man “steels / his form straight up” (ll. 21–22). Accepting the status quo, or satisfaction with life as it is, brings man down. Joy results not from singing and spreading knowledge or accepting limitations, but from the questioning that leads to knowledge.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Moore’s poem about history contains few if any historical references. How then does she establish her poem’s focus: the history of mankind? 2. Moore’s last lines claim, “This is mortality / this is eternity.” What is this and how can it be both mortal and immortal simultaneously? 3. Is there another motive or message in Moore’s poem, or is it simply about history? Explain your response. 4. Compare and contrast this poem—in theme, tone, attitude, and image—with ROBERT FROST’s “The Road Not Taken.”

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“The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing” (1944) Essential elements of the beauty of “The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing” are the complex, rhythmic rhyme scheme and syllabic structure. All stanzas are six lines long and follow the same rhyme scheme (abaccd), although Moore uses slant rhyme when it is needed. Such an innovative rhyme scheme may be difficult enough to master in one poem without any added structural complexity, but Moore also closely monitors the number of syllables in every line. All of the stanzas follow the same pattern: Line 1 has six syllables, line 2 has five, line 3 has four, line 4 has six again, line 5 has seven, and line 6 has nine, except in one case. (In a nice bit of wit, line 24, which mentions “inconsistency,” has 10 syllables, thus violating the consistency of the pattern.) The repetition of the number of syllables and use of rhyme create a singsong feel to the poem, enchanting the reader with sound as well as words. The words Moore selects similarly enchant the reader. In the fi rst stanza, Moore captures her readers by mentioning glazed katydid wings and by including references that call for identification although none is provided by the author. Walter Gieseking, a celebrated pianist who reportedly played every performance flawlessly even though he never physically practiced the music, and Domenico Scarlatti, an 18th-century composer of more than 500 complex pianoforte sonatas, are both presumed to be well-known persons. It seems that the mind is an enchanting thing because of people like Gieseking and Scarlatti, whose astounding skill and creativity display two of the many feats the human mind can achieve. Using a technique that mimics stream of consciousness, Moore moves from the easily identifiable and explainable allusions to the musicians to the convoluted complexities of memory and the way it works. Although the bird imagery deserves closer scrutiny since Moore’s use of animals in her poetry is always complex, the development of memory as the magic of the mind is the significant theme of the third, fourth, and fi fth stanzas. Memory allows us to “hear without / having to hear” (ll. 14–15) and see with “conscientious inconsistency” (l. 24) what never was. The double-edged sword can keep alive

a moment we do not want to forget or recreate—a moment from our past to reflect our own desires. Although we rely on our minds to store our life experiences, Moore, the librarian, reminds us that the mind may be the best natural means we have for storing data, but it is not objective or reliable. It is this very unreliability and flexibility that grant the mind its greatest power. The ability to change is what makes the mind an enchanting thing.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Moore refers to several birds and parts of birds throughout the poem. What significance do the kiwi, dove, beak, and wing have? 2. Moore overtly uses hearing and seeing in her discussion of memory. Are the other senses— taste, touch, smell—included in her poem? Why or why not? 3. Moore alludes to three key men—two positively (Gieseking and Scarlatti) and one negatively (Herod). Who is Herod, and what was his oath? 4. Compare and contrast this work with WALLACE STEVENS’s poem “The Plain Sense of Things.” What does each poem imply about the mind? Compare them in terms of tone, attitude, and imagery.

“Nevertheless” (1944) The title poem of Moore’s 1944 volume of poetry, “Nevertheless” appears to be an unassuming work that is merely an exercise of form, but its very form contributes to its challenge. By using the form to shape the visual representation of the poem, Moore teases the reader into the disadvantage of ignorance. The fi rst word of every line (except one) is lowercased, so that the stanzas begin in the middle of sentences. Thus, it seems as if Moore’s speaker invites the readers into a conversation he/ she has already started with someone else. Moreover, the couplets that end every three-line stanza end midsentence as well, causing further confusion by halting the conversation as if the speakers were interrupted. Without a linear, logical exchange of ideas, it seems impossible to make any sense of

Marianne Moore

the obscure references to fruits and vegetables or achieve any immediate comprehension of the topic at hand. How does any of these images have anything to do with the word nevertheless? Moore explains the connection between the title and its imagery in the last stanza of her poem. Nevertheless (according to Moore’s understanding of the term) implies fortitude. The unstated refrain of each stanza, then, is that even these representatives of the plant kingdom that are limited in mobility and have no critical thinking skills have managed to fi nd a way to overcome the insurmountable obstacles they confront in their daily existence. The stalks of kok-saghyz, a central Asian plant in the dandelion family, are confronted with potentially damaging frost. Nevertheless, they have found a way to thrive where other plants would die. Although the frost may kill the fragile leaves, the roots have thrust deep into the soil for protection. The prickly pear of stanzas 5 and 6 is suspended by barbed wire. Nevertheless, a root grew in search of the anchorage provided by the ground. Although far from the soil, the root system extended two feet in order to fi nd what the plant needed to survive. Neither the kok-saghyz stalks, which are weeds, nor the prickly pear, which is a cactus, looks inviting, but through Moore’s poem they have managed to earn our admiration. Their perseverance has allowed both to thrive in the natural world despite all the odds against them. It may have been simpler if Moore had declared that nevertheless suggests fortitude in the face of adversity, but the images she uses to explore such fortitude are integral to understanding her defi nition of the word. The weeds and cacti, not the lovely rose and sweet carnation, are nuisances because they have the tenacity not only to survive, but to thrive. From Moore’s perspective, such characteristics endow these plants and others like them with heroic qualities.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Do “Nevertheless” and its association with perseverance and fortitude apply to plants only? Explain your response. 2. Is Moore’s portrayal of the strength of fortitude and perseverance positive or negative?

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3. How is Moore’s depiction of nature in this poem similar to (or different from) the depiction of nature in Wallace Stevens’s poem “Sunday Morning”? In which poem is the presentation of nature more complex?

“Baseball and Writing” (1961, 1966) Laden with allusions to baseball, “Baseball and Writing” combines Moore’s favorite American pastime with her poetic craft. According to Molesworth, “In 1964, three years after ‘Baseball and Writing’ appeared in The New Yorker, she said in an interview in Harper’s that it was the display of ‘dexterity—with a logic of memory that makes strategy possible’ that made baseball especially appealing to her” (393). As her poem begins, Moore pairs baseball and writing by emphasizing the excitement they both generate. Excitement results from unpredictability as “You never can tell with either / how it will go / or what you will do” (ll. 3–5). Although both activities produce excitement in Moore, as a poet she feels excitement from shaping the poem as it is created. As a baseball fan, she is excited by watching the game unfold. Essentially, then, excitement can be achieved by the players who shape the game and by the reader of the poem who watches it unfold. More important, in order for baseball and poetry to be exciting, there must be both a doer and a receiver. Without both, there is no excitement in the game or the art. As the poem continues, it seems as if the fi rst stanza alone links baseball and writing, but a close inspection of the descriptions of the men referenced throughout her lines reveals many of the characteristics Moore valued in baseball and, by inference from the poem’s title, in poetry. Elston Howard emphasizes the good of the team. Roger Maris and Mickey Mantel of stanza 3 stretch themselves to their physical limits. The winners of the pennant won it together because they are “all business, each, and modesty” (l. 46); each works to complete his job on the team to his best potential and knows that he could not win the series without


the team’s other eight men. Although each play is controlled by two men, the pitcher and the batter, there would not be a game if all the members of each team did not give their all. As baseball players must, the words and lines of a poem must join and work together for the overall success of the poem. And “yes, [both are] work . . . but [you] enjoy it while you’re doing it” (ll. 76–78). Again Moore closes her poem with a complication. The stadium becomes “Studded with stars in belt and crown” (l. 82). It is the new Pleiades twinkling in the sky with Orion. Mythical sisters of ancient Greece captured in the night sky will no longer hold fame or fascination for people. The new stairway to fame is “the Stadium” (l. 83). The accomplishments and fame of these bright nine will continue to shine long after they have left the field.

For Discussion or Writing 1. If the baseball players are the Pleiades (a cluster of nine stars), then who is Orion? 2. Is Moore’s comparison valid? Can a sport, such as baseball, really be compared to an art? What qualities could a sport and an art form share? What differences exist between a sport and an art form? 3. As an American pastime, baseball has been immortalized by many other authors and in many other genres. THORNTON WILDER’s Our Town, WILLIAM C ARLOS WILLIAMS’s “The Crowd at the Ball Game,” and CARL SANDBURG’s “Hits and Runs” (among many other works) refer to or focus on baseball imagery. Chose one work to compare and contrast it to Moore’s “Baseball and Writing.” Examine what the sport symbolizes in each work and how the author conveys the social significance of the sport.

“Granite and Steel” (1966) In 1929 Moore and her mother moved across the Brooklyn Bridge to leave Manhattan, Greenwich Village, and the literary circles of the Dial for the “domestic tranquility” of 260 Cumberland Street, Brooklyn (Molesworth 248). The poem captures Moore’s imagistic rendering of the causeway

between her professional life as an editor and her career as a poet. The Brooklyn Bridge project spanned nearly two decades; 1866 saw the initial legislation in support of the bridge, which opened to the public on May 24, 1883. Suspending a 14,680-ton structure 135 feet above the East River are approximately 3,600 miles of steel cable manufactured at the New Jersey factory of John Roebling, the chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge project. At the time of its completion, the Brooklyn Bridge was the largest successful suspension bridge in the United States. Moore’s poem, published nearly 60 years after the fi rst nickel was paid to travel across its span, commemorates the ingenuity and beauty of the granite and steel of this modern marvel. Moore’s word choices paint a picture of both the bridge and the men who built it. “German ingenuity” (l. 7) allowed men to fi nd a way to overcome the once-impassable distance between cities. Described as “silvered by the sea” (l. 1) and “grayed by the mist” (l. 2), the steel cables and wire become insubstantial and natural elements invested with a magical strength. The granite towers and steel cables join to create the “Climactic ornament, a double rainbow / as if inverted by French perspicacity” (ll. 26–27). As “John Roebling’s monument” (l. 28) the bridge is a testament to this individual’s accomplishments as an engineer and manufacturer, but it also is a large tombstone testifying to the cost of scientific progress. Mankind has learned how to use the “‘catenary curve’ from tower to pier” (l. 8) in order for “Liberty to dominate the Bay” (l. 3). However, such knowledge has a grave price. Before the bridge was even under construction, it claimed its fi rst fatality. On July 6, 1869, John Roebling’s foot was crushed at the Brooklyn Fulton Ferry Slip. After a partial amputation of his foot, Roebling suffered from an infection and lockjaw, which eventually killed him on July 22. The Brooklyn Bridge truly is a monument honoring John Roebling’s life work.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Moore is often considered a poet of locales. How does knowing that she lived near the bridge for

Marianne Moore

most of her life shape your interpretation of the poem? 2. How does Moore feel about the Brooklyn Bridge? How does her poem reveal her opinion? 3. How does Moore blend the actual historical and factual details of the Brooklyn Bridge with her poetic representation of it? Does her presentation accurately portray the Brooklyn Bridge and its history? Why or why not? 4. Many other authors have written works about (or included references to) the Brooklyn Bridge. Compare and contrast the use of symbolism, diction, imagery, and theme in Moore’s poem and in such other works as H ART CRANE’s “The Bridge” and Jack Kerouac’s “Brooklyn Bridge Blues.”

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON MOORE AND HER WORK 1. Moore’s biographers emphasize her studies in history and political science as well as her work as an editor and librarian. How are these achievements reflected in her poetry? Does her poetry reveal any other life interests? 2. Moore’s love of baseball is apparent in “Baseball and Writing” as well as in other poems she wrote about baseball. Does her interest make it easier or more difficult to understand her poem? Why? 3. Moore continually returns to and uses animals in her poetry. She also loved and translated La Fontaine’s Fables. Are the animals in her poetry like the animals of fables? Does Moore use human characteristics to describe the animals or associate an animal with a human characteristic in order to teach us a moral or lesson? 4. In a letter to H. D. dated August 9, 1916, Moore reveals that “there are two things that I have always been disappointed not to be able to put into my work—a sense of the sea and a fighting spirit, and it delights me that anything I have written should remind you of the sea or seem to you to set itself in opposition to mediocrity and the spirit of compromise” (Selected Letters 113). How does “The Fish” contradict or support Moore’s statements here? Are there other

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poems that could be used either to support or to reject Moore’s evaluation of her own poetry? 5. In both “Granite and Steel” and “To a Snail,” Moore sees beauty in utility. How does utility function in her other poems? Does such utility make her poetry beautiful? 6. Moore included “The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing” in Nevertheless (1944). In 1966, with the publication of Tell Me, Tell Me, Moore released “The Mind, Intractable Thing.” Compare and contrast Moore’s description of the mind in both of these poems. Why do you think her portrayal of the mind changes over time? 7. If “Poetry” is Moore’s defi nition of good poetry, how does Moore’s poetry meet her own expectations? Provide a detailed explanation of one example of a successful poem and one example of a flawed poem. 8. In “Nevertheless” Moore clearly uses form to help develop her poem. Does Moore seem to pay attention to form in other poems? Does the form help shape the reader’s response to Moore’s messages in other poems? 9. In “What Are Years?” and “The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing” Moore uses allusions to biblical times to develop modern issues. Are modern times comparable to biblical times? Are the differences too great for the allusions to be effective? Do such differences create difficulties in understanding the message of Moore’s poetry? 10. “Granite and Steel” reflects on the impressions created by a specific place. Is setting important to any of Moore’s other poems? How does setting impact voice and tone? 11. Moore’s poems tend to focus on a central message about mankind and human character. How do you see Moore’s perception of mankind changing? What does her poetry reveal about her belief in mankind? WORKS CITED

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Baym, Nina, ed. “Marianne Moore.” In The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: Norton, 1998.


Bryant, Jen. Call Me Marianne. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2006. A Concordance to the Poems of Marianne Moore. Edited by Gary Lane. New York: Haskell House, 1972. The Critical Response to Marianne Moore. Edited by Elizabeth Gregory. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Engel, Bernard F. Marianne Moore. 1964. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Kalstone, David. Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Marianne Moore. Edited by Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1987. Marianne Moore: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide. Edited by Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. Marianne Moore: The Art of a Modernist. Edited by Joseph Parisi. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1990. Molesworth, Charles. Marianne Moore: A Literary Life. New York: Atheneum, 1990. Moore, Marianne. Complete Poems. New York: Penguin, 1981.

———. Idiosyncrasy and Technique. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958. ———. A Marianne Moore Reader. New York: Viking, 1961. ———. The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore. Edited by Bonnie Costello. New York: Knopf, 1997. ———. “Some of the Authors of 1951 Speaking for Themselves.” New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 7 October 1951, p. 14. Nitchie, George W. Marianne Moore: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Page, Dave. Marianne Moore. Mankato, Minn.: Creative Education, 1994. Tomlinson, Charles. Marianne Moore: A Collection of Critical Essays. Engelwood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970. Willis, Patricia C., and Cary Nelson. “Modern American Poetry: Marianne Moore.” Available online. URL: http://www.english.illinois.edu/MAPS/ poets/m_r/moore/moore.htm. Accessed April 7, 2009.

Nichole Bennett-Bealer

Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) What I am after is to get an audience to leave the theater with an exultant feeling from seeing somebody on the stage facing life, fighting against the eternal odds, not conquering, but perhaps inevitably being conquered. The individual life is made significant just by the struggle. (transcript from Eugene O’Neill, PBS documentary)

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efore Eugene O’Neill, American theater consisted largely of light comedy and melodrama. More than any other playwright, O’Neill established America’s place in the realm of literary drama, introducing an intensely American dramatic realism and psychological focus to theater. A master of applying his often painful life experiences to playwriting, O’Neill transformed his experiences inside and outside the theater—as gold prospector, sailor, journalist, derelict, stage manager, and member of a dysfunctional family—into characters of shattering psychological depth and realism. He was also one of the pioneers of expressionism, which he saw as being more “spiritually true” than classical realism. The only U.S. playwright to win the Nobel Prize in literature, O’Neill also won Pulitzer Prizes for four of his plays. O’Neill was immersed in the theater from birth. The son of a handsome, successful actor, he was born in a Broadway hotel room. He spent much of his early childhood touring with theatrical companies, together with his mother and his older brother, Jamie. Their only stable residence was a house in New London, Connecticut, where they stayed during summers. His father, James O’Neill, Sr., was a successful Shakespearean actor who left literary theater for a more lucrative lead role in The Count of Monte Cristo, a melodrama. This choice made him famous but bitter. Eugene grew to share his father’s disdain for “the old, ranting, artificial

romantic stuff” (qtd. in Gelb and Gelb 64), and this was a factor in his own quest to create plays that offered depth and insight into the human condition. Eugene’s mother, Ella, loved her husband and children but disliked the theater and its people. Her unhappiness was a factor in her morphine addiction, which began at Eugene’s birth. Her addiction had profound effects on both her children. The pain of Eugene’s childhood and its lingering consequences would be retold in his most autobiographical play, Long Day’s Journey into Night. Irish Catholicism was another influence on O’Neill’s early life. Like his parents, O’Neill was proud of his Irish ancestry, though by 15 he had abandoned the Catholic Church. Instead, he found his ethical foundations in philosophy and experience. After attending a series of Catholic and nonsectarian boarding schools, he entered Princeton in 1906. He made little effort to study the required curriculum, though he read Nietzsche, Strindberg, and JACK L ONDON voraciously. These works proved influential in his writing. When heavy drinking, low motivation, and a student prank led to his suspension after a year, he chose not to return. He became secretary of a small mail-order jewelry house in New York but became bored with that quickly. At his family’s instigation, he joined a gold-prospecting expedition in Spanish Honduras. His father hoped the trip would separate him from

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his girlfriend, Kathleen Jenkins, of whom the family did not approve. He married her secretly before leaving, because she was pregnant, but they never lived together as a married couple. O’Neill’s experiences in Honduras were an inspiration for his play The Emperor Jones, set in Haiti. He discovered no gold but contracted malarial fever after just six months, which convinced him to return to the United States. He made no attempt to see his wife, though he did visit his son. Next he sought adventure as a seaman. Between voyages he lived destitute on the waterfronts of New York, Liverpool, and Buenos Aires, occasionally taking short-lived jobs. These experiences offered good inspiration for the sea plays he wrote in later years, including Bound East for Cardiff (1914) and The Moon of the Caribbees (1917). He claimed that his “real start” as a playwright occurred when he “got out of an academy and among men on the sea” (Gelb and Gelb 156). O’Neill suffered from shyness and depression, and much of his life during those years centered around drinking. In New York he roomed at Jimmy-thePriest’s boarding house and saloon, living on free soup and five-cent whiskey. His closest friends were unemployed sailors, prostitutes, and other marginal characters. Many of these would be represented in such plays as Anna Christie and The Iceman Cometh. Though he was not politically involved, he had close friends who were, including the founder of the U.S. Communist Party, John Reed. In many ways 1912 was his saddest year: a year of derelict wanderings, divorce, a failed attempt at journalism, a diagnosis of tuberculosis, and endless nights in bleak saloons. At his lowest point, he attempted suicide by overdosing on Veronal. Fortunately he was discovered by friends who took him to a hospital in time to save his life. His father sent him to a private sanatorium, which turned out to be a much-needed place of rest and rediscovery of literature. He once claimed that without this experience he might never have become a playwright. After his discharge from the sanatorium, he began writing plays in earnest. At his father’s expense, in 1914 he attended the 47 Workshop at Harvard, where he studied literature for a year.

He learned to write scenarios before fleshing out dialogue, and he studied the use of dialect in Irish plays. Both skills would be put to good use. In this fi rst period of his writing, he focused on realism with touches of naturalism. He sought to represent characters and events as realistically as possible, including the sometimes colorful ways in which his characters spoke. Because of his intimate knowledge of life at sea and in waterfront dives, he was able to offer theatergoers a glimpse of this very different world. Naturalism added emphasis on the effects of heredity and environment. His closest friends remained derelicts, and he often lived on the one-dollar allowance that his father gave him. One friend was Terry Carlin, who convinced him to go to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where a group of like-minded artists had opened a theater company that featured their own plays. His Bound East for Cardiff (1914) was accepted, and it was a success. According to O’Neill, it was the fi rst of his plays that had merit. This play was light on plot but progressive in dialogue, as it introduced the use of dialect into American drama. It began his life as an established playwright. He had friends who believed in him, and he had a job in the theater, where he sometimes acted bit parts. The Provincetown Players opened a theater in Greenwich Village, New York, and nine of O’Neill’s one-act plays were produced there, starting in 1916. As depicted in the movie Reds, he had a short affair with Reed’s wife, Louise Bryant. Some claim that she broke his heart. In 1918 O’Neill married his second wife, Agnes Boulton. She was a writer of novellas and short stories, and they lived artists’ lives in New York. In 1919 they had a son, Shane. When Louise tried to tempt him back, he declined; he was content. Delighted that Eugene seemed to have settled down, James O’Neill bought them a home in Provincetown. In 1920 both parents attended the successful performance of O’Neill’s fi rst full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, on Broadway. It won his fi rst Pulitzer Prize. During this time, Eugene O’Neill began to know and understand his parents better, though the reconciliation was short-lived: His father died of cancer later that year. O’Neill

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also renewed his acquaintance with his fi rst son, whom he had not seen since the child was a baby. Also in 1920 The Emperor Jones was produced. This production was notable for having an African-American lead, an innovation in American theater. This was done at O’Neill’s insistence, and it opened the way for African-American actors in theater and musicals. This also marked the beginning of O’Neill’s expressionist period. Expressionists are more concerned with inner realities than outer realities; actions and dialogue portray life the way one or more characters perceive it, which may be radically different from the way life really is. In 1922 another expressionist play, The Hairy Ape, was released. By 1922 O’Neill was clearly living the life of a successful playwright. He wrote more and more daring, successful plays, including Anna Christie, which won his second Pulitzer Prize. In 1923 he wrote All God’s Chillun Got Wings, a daring play about an interracial couple for whom love is insufficient for happiness. In 1924 he wrote Desire under the Elms, another powerful play that focused on passionate people who spiraled to their own destruction. He now had a large house and estate in Connecticut. Yet he was not at peace. Among other things, he needed quiet to work, while his wife wanted liveliness. O’Neill’s mother fi nally recovered from her addiction, but she died in 1922. After her death, Jamie O’Neill, Eugene’s brother, returned to alcoholism and died in a sanatorium. Needing an escape, Eugene and his family moved to Bermuda, where his daughter, Oona, was born. The change proved insufficient to save the marriage, however. In 1927 O’Neill resumed his friendship with Carlotta Monterey, who would become his third and last wife in 1929. His literary productivity continued. In 1928 Strange Interlude won his third Pulitzer. His last marriage proved his happiest. They fi rst lived in France, where Carlotta protected his privacy and helped him fi nd enough peace to enjoy the company of others. A brief stint with psychoanalysis also gave him a taste for Freudian psychology, which had played a role in the creation of the intensely psycho-

logical Strange Interlude (1927) and in the writing of Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). The O’Neills returned in 1931 to the United States, where Carlotta was even more protective than she had been in France. In 1932 he wrote his only full-length comedy, Ah, Wilderness. In 1934 he wrote Days without End, the last of his plays to be produced on Broadway during his lifetime. He suffered a nervous breakdown that required a sixmonth rest. One factor was a degenerative disease similar to Parkinson’s, which made his hands shake. This made writing very difficult, since his creative process required handwriting. He produced no more plays for 12 years. In 1936 he received the Nobel Prize in literature. In 1937 the O’Neills moved to California, where they remained. In 1939 he wrote The Iceman Cometh, which was produced in 1946. In this period he fi nally came to terms with parts of his past and he wrote his most autobiographical plays, A Long Day’s Journey into Night (1941) and Moon for the Misbegotten (1952). This marked his third and last literary period: a return to realism. He and Carlotta separated a few times but always reunited. His relationships with his children were more strained. He estranged himself from Oona when she became an actress, then disowned her for marrying the elderly Charlie Chaplin when she was only 18. He and Oona never reconciled, and he never spoke her name again. He also disinherited his son Shane for becoming a heroin addict. Shane committed suicide in 1950. In 1951 his eldest son, Eugene, Jr., also committed suicide. His suicide note showed that he also succumbed to the family curse of alcoholism: “Never let it be said of O’Neill that he failed to fi nish a bottle” (Eugene O’Neill, a Steeplechase Films Production). O’Neill himself died in 1953. Ironically, he died in a hotel room, as he had been born, and his last words lamented that fact: “Born in a hotel room— and goddamn it—died in a hotel room” (Eugene O’Neill, a Steeplechase Films Production). Despite his wishes, Carlotta made A Long Day’s Journey into Night available to theaters in 1956, and she requested that it be published. The publishers at Random House already had the copy that O’Neill


had sent, but they refused to publish it early, in respect for the playwright’s wishes. Carlotta then took it to Yale University Press, which published it immediately. It won O’Neill’s fourth Pulitzer Prize and gave his fans an essential insight into the forces that shaped his genius. In all he wrote 62 plays, of which 45 were produced. He remains one of the most widely translated and produced playwrights in the world.

The Emperor Jones (1920) The debilitating effects of industrialism on humanity are starkly portrayed in this play about an African-American porter who escapes from prison, travels to a Caribbean island, and persuades the inhabitants to crown him emperor. In his inevitable fall from power, he confronts memories from his own past as well as the historical past. In some ways The Emperor Jones is one of O’Neill’s more dramatic plays. The play draws on events in Haitian history, though the playwright sacrificed historical accuracy for dramatic effectiveness. The work was so successful that long lines formed at the box office for the second night’s production. Subscriptions to the Provincetown Theater, where it was produced, doubled. The production moved from off Broadway, where lesser plays are produced, to Broadway itself by the end of the year, then to major world capitals, including London, Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo. This success made O’Neill an internationally known playwright—the fi rst American playwright to earn this kind of recognition. Originally titled “The Silver Bullet,” The Emperor Jones was O’Neill’s fi rst experiment with expressionism, a style that emphasizes internal realism over external realism. It inspired O’Neill to go further with expressionist techniques in many of his later plays, such as The Hairy Ape. The Emperor Jones was groundbreaking in other ways. It was the fi rst Broadway play to feature an African-American actor in the leading part. Previously African Americans had not been considered capable of major theatrical roles; African-American

characters were typically acted by white actors in stage makeup. O’Neill felt strongly that his character should be played by an African American, and Charles Gilpin became the fi rst African-American actor to star in an all-white theater. Gilpin’s powerful performance helped open doors for all AfricanAmerican actors. Brutus Jones is, as his name suggests, a brute: He was in prison for killing a man over a craps game. Yet he is also a victim. His strength and cleverness had few outlets in early 20th-century American society, and his only avenues to real power involved crime. As with many bullies, Jones might have channeled his strengths into more positive results if he had had the opportunity: Where society limits an individual’s potential, the results can be devastating. One inspiration for the character was Adam Scott, a black bartender whom O’Neill admired in New London. Gelb and Gelb note that Scott’s strength, bravado, superstitions, and influential personality were translated into Jones (203). The play opens in Emperor Jones’s throne room. Jones claims to be unconcerned about an impending revolt. He has convinced the Haitians he can only be killed by a silver bullet, and he already has escape plans and a substantial stock of cash. By scene 2, his plan is problematic. He begins to see “Little Formless Fears,” or hallucinations. In scenes 3 and 4, he confronts the ghost of the man he killed as well as his fellow convicts and prison guards from the United States. In scene 5, the hallucinations become historical memories: He sees an auction block where slaves are bought and sold, and he is one of the slaves. The Auctioneer describes Jones as a “good field hand” (26). The technique of showing what Jones imagines he sees, rather than what actually exists, demonstrates both expressionism and psychological focus. By scene 6 Jones has fired so many bullets at hallucinations that he has only one silver bullet left, symbolically the last vestige of his power. In scene 7, a Witch Doctor tells Jones he must be sacrificed to a ghost-crocodile. He spends his last bullet on the beast. By the final scene Jones is back where he started: His fear has caused him to run in a circle, and he is killed. The Emperor Jones shows the debilitating effects of


racism in the United States and other countries. Even Jones uses terms such as “ign’rent bush n-----s” (13) to describe the native people. As do many in power, he believes the less powerful are innately inferior, and O’Neill memorably demonstrates the danger as well as the inaccuracy of this view. Smithers, a white man who had previously held a position of power on the island, is openly racist. On hearing that Jones will be overthrown, he crows, “Serves ’im right! Puttin’ on airs, the stinkin’ n-----!” (6–7). Despite Jones’s evident strength and intelligence, his confidence is easily shaken: When Smithers suggests that his rise to power resulted more from luck than from ability, Jones fears that this is true, even though Smithers himself is unable to deny that Jones did most of the “brainwork” (8) that put Smithers himself in power. Whereas Smithers was content with petty crimes, Jones had a larger vision, albeit a corrupt one. Jones also had the perception to see that larger crimes are likelier to be unpunished: “For de little stealin’ dey gits you in jail soon or late. For de big stealin’ dey makes you Emperor and puts you in de Hall o’ Fame when you croaks” (9). At the end he recognizes the evil of his ways, as when he calls out, “Oh, Lawd, pertect this sinner!” (30), but it is too late. Thematically the play shows O’Neill’s attempt to “probe the collective consciousness of the black race” (Ranald 206). Inspired by his readings of C. G. Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst, O’Neill used Jones’s hallucinations to show the complexity of the psyche, including the collective unconscious. Thus Jones can reach back to events that he did not personally witness but that are still a part of his character, such as slavery and the early rituals of witch doctors. The white and black cultures are in opposition, and Jones must choose between the new gods and the old ones. The consequences, as the play demonstrates, can be dramatic.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the importance of hallucinations in showing Brutus Jones’s character. Compare and contrast these with dreams presented in James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” or Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

2. List examples of racist attitudes and language shown by Jones, Smithers, and at least three minor characters. How are these important in developing themes? 3. Discuss how the staging and special effects of this work contribute to characterization and theme. Compare and contrast with another work in which nonrealistic effects are used to communicate something about reality, such as O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” or Gabriel García-Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.”

The Hairy Ape (1922) The brutally hard work of stoking coal furnaces on a steamer can reduce humans to the level of animals, but Yank fi nds the insult of an upper-class woman more painful than backbreaking work. His search for revenge can only lead to disaster. The dehumanizing effects of modern society are graphically shown in The Hairy Ape, in which physical characteristics as well as internal traits demonstrate the effects of industrialism on human beings. This play is O’Neill’s fi rst major venture into expressionism, extending the experiment he began with The Emperor Jones. It also represents greater experimentation with language, going beyond the slang he had used in earlier plays to include a dialect that reflected the exact way characters talked—including words hitherto considered too crude for the theater. O’Neill was greatly influenced by the works of the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, who believed that the internal realities of life were best expressed by moving away from the external realities. Expressionist artists such as Strindberg exaggerate certain features—scenery, events, and/or characters—in order to portray a more memorable, more emotional internal reality. These techniques are clearly seen in The Hairy Ape, where unrealistic descriptions and events offer important insights into reality itself. The play is drawn from O’Neill’s experiences on the SS New York, which he described as “no place for a man who wanted to call his soul his own”


(qtd. in Gelb and Gelb 164). According to the stage directions, the title character (Yank) and other representatives of the lower classes have degenerated into a near-animal state: “The men themselves should resemble those pictures in which the appearance of Neanderthal Man is guessed at. All are hairychested, with long arms of tremendous power, and low, receding brows above their small, fierce, resentful eyes.” At the other extreme, the upper classes have degenerated into a pale, weak version of humanity: “incongruous, artificial fi gures, inert and disharmonious, as if their lifeblood had been sapped” (644). The play is divided into eight scenes. In scene 1, Yank is immediately established as the leader of a group of fi remen on a transatlantic steamer. O’Neill uses dialect to establish the men’s low educational levels and the primitive way in which many of them communicate. When Yank cries that he is “tryin’ to t’ink,” his comment is almost laughable: He has little capacity for thought since he is rarely called upon to think. Emphasizing the irony, O’Neill shows him sometimes assuming the position of Rodin’s statue The Thinker. “Drink, don’t think!” the voices chant in a chorus (645). Drinking is the only escape from the harshness of life that some can fi nd. The oldest fi reman, Paddy, can remember the time of clipper ships, when the laborers at sea could still enjoy the beauty of nature, but that time has passed. Their work has divorced them from nature. Scene 2 introduces the contrasting world of the wealthy. O’Neill’s inspiration for this was his experience on the SS New York, a luxury liner. He found the attitudes of wealthy passengers to be worse than the job itself. On the promenade deck, the wealthy people in the play pass their time in idle conversation. Mildred claims she wants to help the poor, but her pretense at social conscience is shallow. Her wardrobe is white, symbolizing her colorlessness and artificiality. She wangles permission to visit the boiler room so she can “investigate how the other half lives” (649). In scene 3, she gets her wish. The sight of hairy, half-naked men bent over roaring furnaces and the sound of Yank’s angry voice so horrify her that she faints, though not before crying out, “The fi lthy beast!” (651).

The gap between her and the workers is too large for her to bridge. Yank’s rage at being called a beast leads to taunts by the other fi remen in scene 4. When Paddy suggests that Yank has fallen in love, Yank retorts, “Hate, dat’s what. I’ve fallen in hate, get me?” (651). Long, the most politically inclined fireman, uses the exchange as an excuse to argue that workers must rise against capitalists, but few in the room have the mental capacity to understand his arguments: The Marxist notion that the workers will rise against the bourgeoisie is seen as unlikely at best. Scene 5 takes place three weeks later, when Yank and Long are searching New York for their revenge. They pass through crowds that ignore them entirely until the end of the scene, when Yank punches an elderly gentleman. The gentleman does not react at all to the punch but is angry that Yank made him miss his bus, for which Yank is sent to prison in scene 6. The nonreaction to a vicious punch is another example of expressionism: Showing an elderly wealthy man unaffected by a punch makes clear that physical strength has little value in industrialized society; inconvenience has greater repercussions. For all Yank’s strength he is powerless to harm Mildred or any of her class. While in prison, Yank learns about the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a socialist group that fights against industrialists. Yank attempts to join the IWW in scene 7, but he cannot communicate his passion for the cause. When asked for his name, he answers, “Lemme tink,” since it has been so long since he was called anything but Yank. This response demonstrates the way in which industrialism can dehumanize. Yank can only enunciate his desire to cause violence to industrialists, causing the IWW secretary to reject him as “too stupid” at best, a “rotten agent provocator” at worst (659). In the fi nal scene, realizing that he belongs nowhere, Yank fi nds himself in the monkey house of a zoo. He hopes that there, at least, he can belong. But Yank is a man, not an animal; he does not belong. He is killed by the ape he hoped might be a brother. A recurring O’Neill theme is that people need to belong, but that industrial society has torn too


much of the social fabric for this to happen easily. Yank fits nowhere: He is rejected by other fi remen, passers-by in New York, cellmates, the IWW, and an ape. As many moderns cannot, he cannot fi nd meaning within his social role, but neither can he break out of it. His role, like the coal dust that surrounded him on the ship, is part of his being.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the worlds of Yank and Mildred. Discuss how their physical appearance offers insights into the worlds that formed them. 2. Find as many references to animals as possible, both in stage directions and in dialogue. Compare and contrast this animal imagery with that in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where animals are given human characteristics. 3. Compare and contrast the way that expressionism is seen in The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones. How do expressionist techniques aid in developing the themes in each play? How do O’Neill’s applications of expressionist techniques differ from those of Strindberg?

Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) The Mannon family is tormented by inappropriate romantic attachments as well as a historical legacy of past wrongs. Ezra, Christine, Orin, Lavinia, and Adam must choose between revenge and forgiveness. They must also decide whether to follow their hearts or social conventions. O’Neill’s most complex and ambitious work, Mourning Becomes Electra is a trilogy of three plays: The Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted. Unlike in other dramatic trilogies, each part of the larger work is really incomplete without the other two. This fact does not make production easy, since presenting all three plays unedited takes more than six hours. O’Neill’s fondness for long plays increased with time, and theatergoers became accustomed to seeing the fi rst part of an O’Neill play, taking a dinner break, then returning for the fi nal act or acts. In creating these works, O’Neill drew inspiration

from ancient Greek tragedy as well as contemporary Freudian psychology. His intent was to create a modern psychological drama using a plot from Greek tragedy. He chose the Oresteia, also a trilogy of tragedies, as the model for Mourning Becomes Electra. To emphasize the parallels, the Mannon house is described as “of the Greek temple type” (454). The fi rst play of O’Neill’s trilogy, The Homecoming, establishes the strange and complicated family relationships of the Mannons. The parallels with the Oresteia are particularly clear in the fi rst play of Aeschylus’s trilogy, entitled Agamemnon. Aeschylus wrote about the return of Agamemnon, king of Thebes, to a wife who wishes he had died in the Trojan War; since he did not, she plots to kill him. In O’Neill’s trilogy, Ezra Mannon—very similar in sound to the name Agamemnon—is returning from the Civil War to a wife, Christine, who hates him, though for very different reasons than Clytemnestra hated Agamemnon. Agamemnon was responsible for the death of their daughter, for which Clytemnestra cannot forgive him. Brant, Christine’s lover, is the parallel to Aegisthos, Clytemnestra’s lover; Christine loves him because he is “not a hypocritical Mannon” (491). Both Clytemnestra and Christine kill their husbands when their lovers are unwilling to help, and their children discover that the emotional consequences of their parents’ acts have a permanent effect on their lives. An equally dark theme in both plays is the love that the daughters feel for their fathers and the hatred they feel for their mothers. Lavinia reveals her hatred for her mother when she quietly accuses Christine of having an affair and attempts to blackmail her mother into curtailing the illicit relationship. Angry at the daughter she never really loved, Christine flaunts Ezra’s affection for her, then poisons him in the marital bed. In each trilogy, the brothers are torn. Electra’s brother, Orestes, is pulled two ways: He loves his mother but must avenge his father. Ezra’s son Orin—similar in sound to the name Orestes—is also pulled, as he loves his mother overly much but also loves his sister, who causes the mother’s suicide.

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Additional twists in the Mannon family history are revealed in the fi rst play: Adam Brant is actually Ezra’s cousin, a Mannon who had been dispossessed over a squabble concerning Adam’s mother, and his seduction of Christine was motivated by hate and revenge. As in his other plays, O’Neill suggests that the effects of parentage, environment, time, and chance are virtually inescapable. Each personal tragedy has clear roots in at least one of these factors, and the characters seem powerless to break free. Each character has moments that inspire sympathy, as when the normally cold and harsh Ezra tries to regain his wife’s love, but each quickly returns to the original role. An understanding of Freudian and Jungian psychology is very helpful to understanding both trilogies. Freud wrote about the Oedipus conflict and Oedipus complex, which describe the strong feelings that children have for the parent of the opposite sex; both terms are derived from the Oedipus trilogy, by Sophocles. According to Freud, sons unconsciously desire their mothers and see their fathers as competitors for that love. This explains the conflict that fathers and sons often experience: They are in competition for the same woman. In normal development the male child matures and transfers his affections to females of his own age, but if the Oedipus confl ict is not resolved, it becomes a complex. The adult may not be able to leave the parent of the opposite sex, or he or she may be drawn only to adults who strongly resemble the parent. Freud used the term Oedipus conflict/complex for both genders, but Jung introduced the term Electra complex for a woman’s inability to resolve her attraction to her father and her competition with her mother. In many ways Electra is the better representative of both genders: The tragic Oedipus did not know that the woman with whom he fell in love was his mother, nor that the man he killed was his father, since he had been raised by strangers, while Electra understood quite clearly that she loved her father and hated her mother. O’Neill protested when critics referred to his use of Freudian psychology, since he was more strongly influenced by Jung, but both schools influenced him. The role of fate is established in the fi rst play and continued throughout the second and third plays

of the trilogy. In the second play, The Hunted, the battle of affections focuses on Orin, who is back from war. Lavinia and Christine vie for Orin’s affection and sympathy, but Orin loves his mother “better than anything in the world” (533), just as Christine loved her father. Orin refuses to believe that Christine poisoned Ezra until he is confronted by evidence of her affair, but even then his anger is focused on Brant, whom he kills. His hope is to go away with Christine, but upon learning of Brant’s murder, she kills herself. This play not only bears strong similarities to Aeschylus’s second play, The Libation Bearers; it also recalls the Oedipus trilogy. In this parallel, Orin is Oedipus, who loved his mother, Jocasta. Christine is Jocasta, and Ezra is Laius, who is killed by her. Brant, who resembles Ezra, is also a Laius figure. In the third play, The Haunted, the townspeople are convinced that the Mannon house is cursed. Here O’Neill returns to the notion that heredity and environment are inescapable: The sins of the parents are now visited upon the children, physically as well as emotionally. Lavinia and Orin now resemble their parents in appearance and dress. Neither is capable of a healthy relationship. Orin is now attracted to Lavinia; he comments, “You don’t know how like Mother you’ve become, Vinnie” (579). He makes an indecent proposition but is repelled when she admits to having had a relationship with an island man—symbolic of her desire for paradise. Her chances with this man, Peter, are ruined when she accidentally calls him Adam (Brant). Orin kills himself, the only way he can resist fate, and Lavinia becomes a recluse in the old house. The Haunted bears only general similarities to the last play in Aeschylus’s trilogy, The Eumenides, which centers on a court case in which gods debate the ethical issues, a premise not easily translated into an American post–Civil War setting, though some critics suggest that the parallel still exists: Ethical issues are argued, albeit not by gods, and revenge is shown to be destructive. Though clearly influenced by Greek tragedy and Freudian psychology, the trilogy also focuses on issues that are more clearly American. Critics note that the word Mannon is also similar to mammon,


or worldly gain, and money has cursed this family. The family’s strange pathologies can be traced back at least as far as David Mannon, Ezra’s uncle, who married a beautiful Canadian woman, Marie Brantome, who was not of his class. This decision completely estranged him from his family. When David fell on hard times and needed help, Ezra chose fi nancial profit over family responsibilities, a decision that ultimately led to Marie’s death. Had the Mannons accepted the American notion of class mobility—or at least valued family over materialism—the tragic events would not have been set in motion. Modern psychology, Greek tragedy, and American history combine to create powerful drama in Mourning Becomes Electra. The plays add interesting changes in the Greek tragedies: Electra, not Orin, is the major figure, and drives, not gods, motivate actions. Throughout the plays the townspeople function as the Greek chorus, offering perspectives on the events and people portrayed, and these perspectives are very American. The plot was particularly daring for the period, as it included notions of incest and adultery as well as the more classic honor and revenge.

For Discussion or Writing 1. To what extent can the characters control their destinies, and to what extent are they victims of their past and their environment? Compare and contrast the role of fate in this play and in Long Day’s Journey into Night. 2. Compare and contrast Mourning Becomes Electra with the Oresteia. Consider plot, character, and themes. 3. Discuss the importance of Freudian and Jungian psychology to the themes in Mourning Becomes Electra. Explain how understanding this psychology contributes to understanding characters’ motivations and actions.

The Iceman Cometh (1939) The characters at Harry Hope’s saloon are all failures in some way, but all have dreams that sustain

them. They are waiting for Hickey, a hardware salesman who goes to Harry Hope’s saloon every year and treats everyone to drinks. This year is different: Instead of offering just a temporary escape, Hickey wants to help them achieve their dreams, with very unexpected consequences. Though it is long on dialogue and short on action, the power of the play was such that it was recognized as one of O’Neill’s fi nest. It would be the last play produced in his lifetime. As in many other plays, O’Neill observes the Aristotelian unities of time and place: All action takes place within a single place, in a single day. It also begins with extensive stage directions, including very precise physical descriptions for each character. For O’Neill this precision had a price: He saw his characters very clearly, but as a result he tended to be disappointed in the actors who took their roles—they were rarely exactly as he saw the characters in his imagination. The play is set in 1912, one of the saddest and most significant years in the playwright’s life. Harry Hope’s saloon is modeled on three bars that O’Neill frequented: Jimmy-the-Priest’s, the Hell Hole, and the Taproom of the Garden Hotel—bars where the playwright himself dreamed of a happier future. O’Neill believed that dreams are essential to life, often the only things that keep humans “fighting, willing—living” (Gelb and Gelb 5). Act 1 establishes the characters and their pipe dreams. The characters live for tomorrow, when they pretend they will take action to improve themselves. All depend on a pipe dream, the belief that tomorrow they will make something of themselves, to maintain their connection with each other as well as their belief in themselves. Most of the dreams concern a tomorrow that will never occur: Cora will never leave prostitution and marry. Others have illusions about today as well as tomorrow: Rocky imagines he is a manager rather than a pimp because he does not beat his employees, and he believes he will one day be successful. Still others have illusions about yesterday as well as tomorrow: Harry Hope imagines that his dead wife was a wonderful woman, and he believes he will have the confidence to go out into the world instead of hiding in his bar.

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Larry, one of the central characters, claims he lost his pipe dream. He lost his belief in “the movement,” yet he still dreams, imagining that tomorrow he will pay his bar bill and lead a more respectable life. For Larry and Parritt the movement is the radical labor movement known as the International Workers of the World, or IWW. The same political organization appears in The Hairy Ape. The IWW sought to unionize workers to empower the working class to rise against the wealthy industrialists, but ultimately its dream was no more successful than Larry’s. All eagerly await Theodore Hickman, known as Hickey. Hickey is popular not only for his generosity but for his sense of humor. When he fi nally arrives, however, he has changed. Instead of dreaming with them, he intends to show them “what real peace means” (611). Through him O’Neill describes the many do-gooders whose intentions backfi re. In act 2, Hickey goads the others into trying to achieve their dreams, but they are resistant. Rocky complains that “everybody’s gettin’ a prize grouch on,” though he claims that the “bums” do need to relinquish their pipe dreams (619). Hickey claims they will be happier when they can lose the “grandstand foolosopher bunk” (620), but dreams are the cement that holds the characters together, both individually and collectively. They are diminished without them. When Parritt is driven to admit that he turned in his mother to the legal authorities, he does not fi nd peace; instead, he begins the spiral to his own destruction. Act 3 shows the deterioration of the once-cohesive group as they begin to see the unreality of their dreams. Since Parritt’s revelation in act 2, his bond is diminished with Larry, the other anarchist. Parritt reveals that his reason for betraying his mother was not political commitment but desire for the money, combined with jealousy that she loved the Cause better than she loved him. His honesty costs him Larry’s friendship. As each dream disappears, sadness or loss follows. Cora realizes that she and Chuck are unlikely to make a happy married couple. Wetjoen has claimed to want a real job to earn his passage back to South Africa, but he must admit his past actions preclude his return. Finally,

Hickey admits that his wife did not just die, as he suggested in act 2; he killed her. In act 4 Hickey explains that he murdered his wife because she always forgave him for his failings and she believed in him. Ironically, that left him with a guilt that became too oppressive to handle. He loved her and hated her at the same time. This drove him to kill her: He was saving her from his own unfaithfulness. His admission does not give him peace. Parritt’s repeated begging for understanding also backfi res. Larry believes that suicide is Parritt’s only respectable escape, and ultimately he persuades Parritt of this. What allows the others to resume their pipe dreams is Hickey’s confession that he murdered his wife to give her peace: They grasp at the notion that he must be crazy, and therefore when Hope asks “with a groping eagerness” whether Hickey has become insane, they all grasp at this—including Hickey himself. If he is insane, they all have a reason to continue their pipe dreams, and then their attempts to set aside their dreams were illfated attempts to follow the bad advice of a crazy person. They can return to the happiness of their pipe dreams. Symbolically, the stage setting in this act is exactly as it was in act 1, representing the return. The title of the play is taken from a bawdy joke that Hickey likes to tell about his wife: that she cheats on him with the iceman. Symbolically the title implies much more. Ice is suggestive of death: Corpses were once preserved in ice, and in the slang of O’Neill’s time, to ice someone meant “to kill.” Larry makes this clear when he says, “Death was the Iceman Hickey called to his home” (667). Ice is also suggestive of inaction: To freeze means to cease action, and freezing preserves things exactly as they are. In a sense the characters are frozen in both ways: They are unable to change and escape their ruts, and they are likely to stay there until death. Critics as well as theatergoers complained about the length of the play—it lasted somewhere between four and five hours—but O’Neill was adamant that he would not cut it. Lawrence Langer complained that O’Neill had made the same point 18 times in the play, but O’Neill retorted, “I intended it to


be repeated 18 times” (qtd. in Bogard 408–409). There are many repetitions in the play, but all are important. On the surface the redundancy is realistic, since drunks tend to repeat themselves. If we dig deeper, we see that the repetitions emphasize the patterns that the characters are unable to escape—the recurring excuses, poor choices, and dreams that make up their lives. The names are symbolic. Harry Hope houses people who live their lives on futile hopes that nonetheless sustain them. Hugo Kalmar, the former political radical, represents Karl Marx: His last name is a condensation of those two words. The former policeman, McGloin, takes his name from the Tenderloin section of New York, where the police were particularly known for corruption. The greedy barman is Pioggi, a name very close to piggy. Hickman is hick-man, one who innocently offered a very false salvation. The critic Cyrus Day has pointed out the many parallels between the play and the Bible. He notes that Hickey, the would-be savior, has 12 disciples. They drink wine in a grouping that the stage directions suggest is like the Last Supper. One is a betrayer, like Judas: Parritt. The supposed savior, Hickey, will go to his death. One of O’Neill’s strengths as a playwright is the ability to portray beauty in the darkest aspects of life. He believed that “vices are often nobler than . . . virtues, and nearly always closer to a revelation” (Gelb and Gelb 3). In this play, characters’ vices are the vehicle for important revelations about the human condition. O’Neill shows that dreams can be as important as accomplishments. Forcing people to face harsh realities is not always a kindness: It can be a cruelty that leads to psychic or physical death.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the ways in which characters in The Iceman Cometh depend upon pipe dreams with the way characters in other dramatic or novelistic works do so. Examples might include Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie or F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’s The Great Gatsby. 2. Discuss how events in the past have influenced the present and future for Mary, Jamie, and

Tyrone. To what extent are these influences inevitable? To what extent do the characters have more control than they imagine? 3. Compare and contrast the ways in which the characters deceive each other and themselves. Discuss how O’Neill uses symbols to clarify these deceptions.

Moon for the Misbegotten (1943) A farmer and his queen-sized daughter are masters at comic deception, whether they are deceiving their landlord, a wealthy neighbor, or each other. Josie discovers that deception in the name of love can be a kindness for the deceived but a profound sacrifice for the deceiver. One of O’Neill’s more autobiographical plays, Moon for the Misbegotten is the playwright’s expression of love for his older brother, Jamie. The character Jim Tyrone is clearly Jamie O’Neill, Eugene’s older brother, and Josie is one of the women he loved. The play is notable for its excellent balance of comedic and tragic elements. It was not immediately appreciated, partly because its three-dimensionality was not recognized and partly because its bawdy humor was more than audiences could handle at the time, but it was later praised as a masterpiece. The play is set in the period after A Long Day’s Journey into Night, and it picks up where that play left off. The action takes place within a 24-hour period, from noon until the dawn of the following day. Set in an impoverished New England farmhouse, the interactions between characters are comic in the fi rst act but increasingly tragic in the following three acts. One problem for theatrical producers was the character of Josie, who was particularly difficult to cast in the 1940s, when young actresses were expected to reflect conventional notions of female attractiveness, which excluded larger women. According to the stage directions, Josie is “so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak—five feet eleven in her stockings and weighs around one hundred and eighty. Her sloping shoulders are broad, her chest deep with large, firm

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breasts, her waist wide but slender by contrast with her hips and thighs . . . immensely strong . . . more powerful than any but an exceptionally strong man” (857). These descriptions are central to the play, because Josie is blessed and cursed by her own anatomy: It allows her to prevent her harsh father from controlling her, but it also radically reduces her chances for romantic love. The irony is that Josie is delicate in spirit and romantic at heart. She has the strength to return sarcastic remarks as well as physical blows, but she lacks confidence in herself as a woman. She sees herself as an “ugly lump of a woman” (870), a “great ugly cow” (923). She is both tough and vulnerable, proud and ashamed of her strength at the same time. She pretends to be a coarse woman of loose morals when in fact she is a virgin. Jim Tyrone is also a study in contrasts. He is a gregarious loner—one who loves the comradeship of a bar but must drink heavily to feel that he belongs. As Jamie does, he drinks to escape his guilt over his behavior after his mother’s death. Like Josie, Jim is a lost soul who needs love but lacks hope. Like her, he is judged on externals—in his case, his drunkenness and wealth—that have little relation to the man inside. He pretends to be a shallow cosmopolite interested only in fun, while in truth he has a profound need for closeness and understanding. He is the only one who sees through Josie’s facade—he knows she is really a virgin—and the only one who perceives her genuine beauty. The father, Hogan, is five inches shorter than Josie but still powerful. A harsh man who is readier with a blow or an unkind word than with a kindness, he is slowly revealed as a person capable of love, though only with those he respects. Josie helps him partly because he is her father and partly because he is the only person who seems to care for her. The play is a series of deceptions that move from the comic to the tragic. In act 1, Josie deceives her father to help her last brother, Mike, escape from the farmhouse. Mike is a self-righteous prig, but she loves him because she remembers the child that he was. He needs to escape because their father is abu-

sive to him, and Josie is the only one who can stand up to the father, physically as well as emotionally. Josie joins her father, Hogan, in deceiving the landlord into forgetting the rent, and they recount stories of times they deceived other farmers by selling them damaged livestock. The family’s banter often has a hard edge, but it also shows the closeness they share: They are people who can express their affection only through insults. In the most comic section of the act, Hogan and Josie turn the tables on a wealthy neighbor, Harder, who has arrived to complain that their pigs are bathing in his ice pond: They berate him for endangering their livestock. (Hogan is based upon one of James O’Neill’s tenants, who pulled precisely that deception. Harder is based not on O’Neill, Sr., but on a wealthy man of O’Neill’s acquaintance.) Harder is such an unlikable character that the deception seems just. The deceptions in act 2 are more complex. Through many convoluted arguments, Hogan fi nally convinces Josie that she should trick Jim Tyrone into marrying her. He claims that doing so is necessary to prevent Tyrone from selling their farm to Harder. Because Josie loves Jim—and because she believes Jim might sell their farm—she deceives herself into thinking that her deception would be fair. Act 3 concentrates on the ways in which various characters deceive themselves. Jim reveals his understanding of Josie’s self-deceptions about her character. He knows she is not a slut but a virgin with a tender heart. He reveals that he fi nds her beautiful and desirable, but he believes that he does not deserve her goodness. Jim suffers from the classic virgin/whore dichotomy: He cannot understand that women can be pure at heart yet have a sexual side. As a result, he cannot reach out to Josie as a potential mate, however much he needs to do so. He shares with her the guilt that has wracked his soul—his behavior after his mother’s death, when he sought out a prostitute to escape the pain, just as Jamie O’Neill had. Like Jamie, he is unable to forgive himself. Jim reaches out to Josie for maternal comfort, but that need is complicated by another need: He also desires her as a woman. Each time


his sexual feelings for her arise, he represses them with self-loathing. Josie recognizes that his guilt is causing him to drink himself to death. Because she loves him, she gives him the material comfort he seems to need rather than staking a claim on the more mature romantic love that she needs. Act 4 establishes that the play is more tragedy than comedy. Hogan reveals that he deceived Josie to give her a chance at happiness. His love for her is made clear. Josie hopes that Jim Tyrone will be able to fi nd peace in death, as she realizes that he cannot fi nd it in life. The challenge of this play is understanding the tragedy and psychological complexity that overlie the humor. This challenge also faces producers of the play, since the comic deceptions cannot take precedence over the psychological deceptions; nor can the romantic elements be overemphasized, lest the play become the type of melodrama that O’Neill detested. Hogan is a tyrant and a cheat, but he loves his daughter. Jim is a drunkard with a penchant for self-destruction and an inability to reconcile the virgin/whore dichotomy, but he is a sensitive soul who understands Josie’s beauty and delicacy and who is more generous to Hogan than Hogan deserves. The bawdy-mouthed Josie is a partner in her father’s deceptions, but she chooses Jim’s needs over her own, and she protects her brother Mike even as he insults her. As Bogard observes, the play is “an act of love, supplying through its romantic fiction a blessing for a damned soul” (446). Hinden suggests that O’Neill may also have been seeking absolution through this romantic portrayal for his own abandonment of his alcoholic brother. Whatever the reason, the result is powerful theater.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss how Josie’s appearance has shaped her life choices. To what extent has her appearance been an advantage, and to what extent has it harmed her? Compare and contrast her challenge with that of Pecola in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. 2. Compare and contrast the inner and outer strengths of each of these characters: Josie, Phil, Mike, Harder, and James.

3. Discuss the ways in which a character’s sacrifice can work against his or her own happiness. What lessons does O’Neill mean for the audience to take away? Compare and contrast Josie’s choice with that of Edna in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening or Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

Long Day’s Journey into Night (1945) Four members of an Irish-American family blame fate as well as each other for what went wrong in their lives, yet they love each other even as they trade emotional barbs. The Tyrones face the same challenges with which O’Neill grew up: His mother’s drug addiction and depression, his older brother’s alcoholism and wild life, the father’s stinginess and regrets, and his own tuberculosis and ill-fated emulation of his brother. The dedication to Long Day’s Journal into Night provides an essential insight into the play as well as into the circumstances that created it. Writing to Carlotta, O’Neill’s third wife, on the occasion of their 12th wedding anniversary, O’Neill describes the play as one of “old sorrow, written in tears and blood,” meant as “a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play—write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones” (7). Through this play he forgives himself as well as his family for the wrongs that were done. This is O’Neill’s most autobiographical play. James Tyrone, simply called “Tyrone” in the play, is his father, James O’Neill. Jamie is Eugene’s older brother, Jamie, and Edmund is Eugene himself. Mary Tyrone is his mother, Ella; Ella’s given name was actually Mary. Recognizing the pain that this play could cause his family, O’Neill stipulated that it not be published or produced until 25 years after his death, though his wife chose to release it just three years later. It won a Pulitzer Prize, O’Neill’s fourth, and it is counted among his most successful works. The entire play takes place in a summerhouse much like the one where the O’Neills spent their


summers. O’Neill observes the classical unities of time and place, as presented in Aristotle’s Poetics: The time span of the play consists of 24 hours, and the setting is a single place. The past, however, is always present: The dialogue makes clear that past events heavily color the present. As the title suggests, the play involves a movement from light into darkness, both figuratively and literally. It begins in the morning and ends at night. The characters frequently retreat into denial, continually referring to dark memories that affect their present and cast clouds on their future. Act 1 opens with a gesture of affection, as Tyrone walks with an arm around his wife and they exchange loving words. Yet there are undercurrents to suggest that something is not quite right. Mary loves him but is unhappy with him. Her inability to stop her hands from fluttering is symbolic: She is unable to control herself physically or emotionally. When Tyrone compliments Mary for having gained 20 pounds, it is clear that her health is an issue. It soon becomes clear she is a morphine addict: She would like to break the addiction but cannot do so. When she means to “take advantage of the sunshine before the fog comes back” (41), she cannot. Fog is a recurring motif, and it is also figurative and literal: Just as fog obscures people’s ability to see far ahead, destructive practices obscure people’s ability to understand and move ahead. The other central confl icts and motifs of the play are also introduced here. Denial of personal responsibility for existing problems, refusal to move beyond the past, and escape into alcohol and narcotics are examples of the Tyrones’ destructive behavior. Jamie blames his father’s miserliness for the health problems faced by his mother and brother, since Tyrone hired only the cheapest doctors. Tyrone blames Jamie for weakening Edmund’s health by introducing him to a life of dissipation. Jamie, Tyrone charges, is a “healthy hulk” (33) like him, while Edmund is delicate like his mother. Mary blames everyone but herself for her addiction: Tyrone for hiring the cut-rate doctor who prescribed the morphine; Edmund for causing the birth pains that necessitated drugs; Jamie for infecting their youngest brother, Eugene, with

his own childhood measles, thereby causing the baby’s death and increasing the mother’s depression. While each family member argues against the accusations, each nonetheless accepts the guilt. Act 2 begins at lunchtime. Throughout the play, characters use the excuse of drinking or drugs to say things they would not say when sober. Mary alternately berates her family and fi nds excuses for their failings, aiding in the pattern of denial: Whiskey can be useful in generating an appetite when someone is ill, an impoverished childhood can lead to difficulty in spending money later in life, and so on. Though she knows it is “inconsiderate . . . to bring up the past” (67), she cannot help it any more than the others can. This is a recurring theme: The past indelibly marks the present. As in The Iceman Cometh, it is essential to have faith in something, religious or otherwise. Mary regrets the loss of the happiness she felt in her convent days, when she had faith. For Tyrone his sons’ rejection of Catholicism put them on the path of destruction. He believes that if Mary had more faith in God and the church, she would have the strength to fight her addiction. The loneliness that has plagued Mary’s married life is emphasized in act 3. Mary cannot bear to be alone, and she keeps Cathleen, the maid, with her by plying the girl with whiskey. Ironically Mary is still alone, since each character discusses very separate personal concerns. Mary speaks eloquently of the rheumatism in her crippled hands, the loneliness of being an actor’s wife, the loss of her girlhood faith, the alcoholism of the men in the family, and her inability to protect Eugene from death. Inability to handle more pain is her excuse for the morphine. When Edmund tries to tell her about his tuberculosis, she angrily hushes him, denying the problem. The dialogue makes clear that the playwright has reached an understanding of his own mother’s tragedy. While he does not excuse her addiction or her denial of her sons’ problems, he understands them: Sometimes an individual’s pain is too great for the person to reach out to others for help. When Mary retreats to her room at the end of the act, supposedly to rest, the others know that she is going to use drugs, and they know they cannot stop her. Sometimes it is simply futile to offer help.


The love that Tyrone feels for Mary is particularly evident in this act. When she recalls the time that they fi rst fell in love, Tyrone must blink back tears. When he tells her that he will love her “always and forever” (112), it is clearly true. Act 4 focuses on the loneliness of the male Tyrones. Near midnight Tyrone is already drunk. He laments to Edmund that he is still affected by his impoverished childhood, when he was deserted by his father. His resulting miserliness has hurt him as well as his family. Though he is a great melodrama star—a matinee idol—this was never his dream. He once had a chance to fulfi ll his dreams, since even the great Edwin Booth commented on his great talent for Shakespeare, but he chose the “big moneymaker” (150) instead. Here O’Neill expresses his understanding of his own father’s tragedy at being typecast in The Count of Monte Cristo. Tyrone is embarrassed by his work and angry at himself for abandoning his dream in order to ensure a dependable income. He is hurt that his wife speaks of her convent childhood as the happiest time in her life. Though he denies it, his wife is equally tormented by wasted talent: She was recognized as a brilliant pianist. Tyrone knows he is at least partly to blame for his own loneliness. Thus, he drinks heavily, though, as with O’Neill, Sr., his constitution could handle large quantities of alcohol, and he never misses performances. Next Edmund talks about his own loneliness, sense of meaninglessness, and need to escape from his own pain, all of which correspond to O’Neill’s own experiences. When he says, “The fog was where I wanted to be” (131), he is talking about more than his walk outside. While he was at sea, he felt a sense of peace he was unable to fi nd at home: “I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life” (153). At home, he feels the fog—the loneliness and lack of clarity—and he is “always a stranger who never feels at home” (153). He fears what tuberculosis will entail, and he suspects that Tyrone means to pay for only the cheapest care. His suspicions are correct, though by the end of the act, Tyrone has agreed to send him to a private facility. Edmund blames his

father for Mary’s inability to break her addiction, while he recognizes that both Jamie and Tyrone blame him for it. When Jamie enters, he is equally drunk and equally inclined to talk about personal regrets. He describes his evening with Fat Violet, a prostitute who was about to be dismissed because of her weight. She is similar to Josie in Moon for the Misbegotten, though much less developed as a character. Feeling sorry for Violet, Jamie hired her for the evening and made her feel loved and appreciated. Speaking more freely as a result of the alcohol, Jamie reveals that he cannot forgive their mother for her addiction. Her inability to break her habit gives him little optimism of recovering from his own alcoholism. He fears that Edmund, his closest friend, will die in the sanatorium. He confesses that he led Edmund into bad habits, such as drinking alcohol and patronizing whores. In part he acted from jealousy, since he failed to develop his own talents, and in part he acted from anger that Edmund’s birth had begun Mary’s addiction, though he knew that the latter was not Edmund’s fault. Even more than in the fi rst three acts, the characters bare their souls, but they also bare their teeth. They love each other, but they are well skilled in hurting each other and better skilled at hurting themselves. At the climax, Mary enters, wearing a blue dressing gown. The gown is symbolic: The blue represents goodness while the nightgown represents the precedence of dream over reality. Mary has taken so much of the drug that she does not know where she is. She imagines she is still a convent student, dreaming of being a nun, though she carries her wedding dress. Her hopelessness and sadness are summed up in the last line, when she remembers one spot of happiness in her life: when she fell in love with Tyrone and was “so happy for a time” (176). Earlier in the act Tyrone said, “My name is Might-Have-Been” (168); clearly he spoke for them all. In creating his characters, O’Neill recognized his own failures—his own might-have-beens—as well as his family’s, and the play provides beautiful absolution for all.

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For Discussion or Writing 1. List all the references to fog in the play. Explain the importance of this symbol, and discuss its importance in characterization. You might further compare and contrast with the use of fog in another work, such as Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. 2. Discuss the importance of the interplay between caring and recrimination in the playwright’s development of themes. Compare and contrast with the way this is handled in O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” or a similar work. 3. Compare and contrast the ways in which the characters deceive each other and themselves. Discuss how O’Neill uses symbols to clarify these deceptions.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON O’NEILL AND HIS WORK 1. Compare and contrast the importance of pipe dreams in The Hairy Ape, The Iceman Cometh, and Long Day’s Journey into Night. To what extent do pipe dreams offer positive inspiration, and to what extent are they an excuse not to succeed? To what extent are pipe dreams essential to characters’ psychological survival? 2. Discuss the effect of the past on the present in Mourning Becomes Electra, Long Day’s Journey into Night, or The Emperor Jones. Compare the O’Neill plays to Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts or Hedda Gabler, or Toni Morrison’s Beloved. To what extent are characters’ actions and attitudes determined by events in the past, including events that happened before they were born? To what extent is that influence inevitable, and to what extent do the characters themselves choose not to look forward? 3. Compare and contrast O’Neill’s use of dialect with that of any other playwright. Examples might include O’Casey or Synge. How does dialect aid in developing the characters?

4. Compare and contrast the way the quest for belonging is handled in Moon for the Misbegotten, The Hairy Ape, The Iceman Cometh, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Discuss how the main characters in each work attempt to find human connections. 5. Consider the political themes in The Hairy Ape, The Iceman Cometh, and The Emperor Jones. Which political beliefs does O’Neill seem to support, and which does he reject? 6. Writers sometimes depart from realism in order to portray the real world in a deeper way. Compare and contrast O’Neill’s departures from photographic reality to those by at least two other writers, such as Isabelle Allende, GarcíaMárquez, Toni Morrison, or Laura Esquivel. 7. Compare and contrast O’Neill’s critiques of capitalism and industrialism in The Hairy Ape and The Iceman Cometh with the critiques presented in JOHN STEINBECK’s The Grapes of Wrath or a similar work. 8. Discuss the importance of alcohol in The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Moon for the Misbegotten, and The Hairy Ape. Why do characters in each play drink to excess? How does O’Neill use drunkenness as a way to develop his characters and themes? 9. Compare and contrast the autobiographical elements in Moon for the Misbegotten and Long Day’s Journey into Night. Refer to at least one biography of O’Neill for support. 10. The problem of alienation is seen in many of O’Neill’s plays. Some characters address this dilemma by creating their own meaning and standards. Compare and contrast any two characters who reject existing political or religious standards to act according to their own beliefs. 11. Read scenes of any two plays aloud. If possible, act the parts. Discuss how the performance aspect adds to the appreciation of a play. Which elements are less evident when the play is read silently? 12. Guilt is a powerful motivator. Compare and contrast the importance of guilt in Moon for the Misbegotten, Mourning Becomes Electra,


Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, or any other full-length literary work in which guilt plays an important role in motivating action. WORKS CITED

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Alexander, Doris. Eugene O’Neill’s Last Plays: Separating Art from Autobiography. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Black, Stephen A. Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1999. Bloom, Harold, ed. Eugene O’Neill: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Bogard, Travis. Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Day, Cyrus. “The Iceman and the Bridegroom.” Modern Drama 1 (1958): 3–9. Dugan, Lawrence. “O’Neill and the Wobblies: The IWW as a Model for Failure in The Iceman Cometh.” Comparative Drama 36, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 2002): 109–124. eO’Neill.com: An Electronic Eugene O’Neill Archive. Available online. URL: http://www.eoneill.com. Accessed April 7, 2009. Eugene O’Neill. A Steeplechase Films Production for American Experience, 2006. WGBH Educational Foundation and Steeplechase Films, Inc. Transcript. Available online. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/ oneill/filmmore/pt.html. Accessed April 7, 2009. Floyd, Virginia. The Plays of Eugene O’Neill: A New Assessment. New York: Ungar, 1985. Frenz, Horst. Eugene O’Neill. Translated by Helen Sebba. New York: Ungar, 1971. ———, ed. O’Neill: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1964. Gassner, John. Eugene O’Neill. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965. Gelb, Arthur, and Barbara Gelb. O’Neill. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Hinden, Michael. “O’Neill and Jamie: A Survivor’s Tale.” Comparative Drama 35, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 435–445.

Houchin, John H., ed. The Critical Response to Eugene O’Neill. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993. Johnson, Janice. “A Long Dark Journey into Light.” Humanities 27, no. 2 (March/April 2006): 38–41. Available online. URL: http://www.neh.gov/ news/humanities/2006–03/darkjourney.html. Accessed July 7, 2009. Krasner, David. “Whose Role Is It Anyway? Charles Gilpin and the Harlem Renaissance.” African American Review 29, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 483–496. Manheim, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. O’Neill, Eugene. The Emperor Jones. Selected Plays of Eugene O’Neill. New York: Random House, 1967. ———. The Hairy Ape. A Treasury of the Theater: From Henrik Ibsen to Robert Lowell. Edited by John Gassner and Berhard F. Dukore. 4th ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970. ———. The Iceman Cometh: O’Neill: Complete Plays 1932–1943. Edited by Travis Bogard. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1988. ———. Moon for the Misbegotten: O’Neill: Complete Plays 1932–1943. Edited by Travis Bogard. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1988. ———. Mourning Becomes Electra: Selected Plays of Eugene O’Neill. New York: Random House, 1967. Ranald, Margaret Loftus. The Eugene O’Neill Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1984. Sheaffer, Louis. O’Neill, Son and Artist. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. ———. O’Neill, Son and Playwright. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968. Siebold, Thomas, ed. Readings on Eugene O’Neill. San Diego: Greenhaven, 1998. Tornqvist, Egil. A Drama of Souls: Studies in O’Neill’s Super-naturalist Technique. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1969. ———. Eugene O’Neill: A Playwright’s Theater. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004.

Terry Mackey

Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)

I am a passenger on that ship. (Ship of Fools)

K

atherine Anne Porter was notoriously secretive and mysterious about the details of her life. For instance, for much of her life she gave a false birth year. In fact, she was born on May 15, 1890, in Indian Creek, Texas, the fourth of five children. Her mother and father were Harrison and Mary Alice Jones Porter, and she claimed that Daniel Boone was her ancestor. As a child she was named Callie Russell Porter, only changing her name when she began to write. Her mother died in 1892, when Callie was very young; the children went to Harrison’s mother, Catherine Ann Porter, in Kyle, Texas, to be reared. At age six Callie wrote and illustrated a “nobble” in crayon titled The Hermit of Halifax Cave and was upset when her grandmother and the neighbors laughed at it. The grandmother died in 1901, leaving the family to move to San Antonio. During this time Callie had free access to many books and read widely from such authors as Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy. She and her sisters attended convent schools, although the family was Methodist. (She converted to Catholicism in 1910.) In 1906 at age 16, Porter eloped with John Henry Koontz. In some accounts the marriage lasted only until she was 19, but they did not divorce until nine years after they married. After she left him, she supported herself with a variety of interesting jobs, including newspaper work at papers in Fort Worth and Denver, movie work in

Chicago, and ghostwriting in New York City. She had a bout of tuberculosis and spent some time in a sanatorium in 1915, and she contracted influenza in October 1918. Near death, she recovered and used her experience as the basis for the story “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” written many years later. Both of these illnesses made her keenly aware of the need to be serious about her purpose in life: Her chosen profession was art, specifically writing. She became preoccupied with the idea of death, partly because a favorite niece died shortly after Porter’s own neardeath experience. In 1920 she made her fi rst visit to Mexico. She spent the next several years there, on and off, studying art while also writing. She published “Maria Concepción” in Century magazine in 1922. During her time in Mexico she came face to face with the Obregón revolution, the fi rst of five Mexican revolutions she witnessed. This was the culmination of violent insurrections that had begun in 1910; Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, and various landowners joined the wealthy reformer Francisco Indalecio Madero to overthrow the longtime ruler Porfi rio Díaz. This was an exciting time for Porter, who thought she could make a difference in the world in a significant way. She spent her time with artists and intellectuals and showed a decided interest in Mexican politics, analyzing events for Mexican and American newspapers. Her affi liation with communist ideals would continue for some time,

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but eventually she recognized that artistic expression was being squelched in favor of mainline party rhetoric, and she broke off her relation to communism. It is unclear whether she was actually a member of the Communist Party; if so, it was probably only for a brief period during her stay in Mexico. In 1925 her story “Rope” was published in American Caravan. This work was based on a relationship with an Englishman named Ernest Stock. (There are confl icting reports as to whether she actually married him or not.) During this period she also had experiences that later resulted in episodes in “Flowering Judas” and Ship of Fools. In the mid- and late 1920s she was a book reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune, the New Republic, and the Nation. She worked at length on a biography of Cotton Mather that was never completed or published, although she would continue to work on it for many years to come. Meanwhile, the story “He” appeared in New Masses in 1927, and “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” was published in transition in 1929. Politically she was involved in protesting the Sacco-Vanzetti case, in which two anarchists had been sentenced to death. She later claimed that this affair was “one of the important turning points in the history of this country” (quoted in Unrue 109). In August 1927 she marched in the picket lines and was arrested several times, all to no avail—the anarchists were put to death. At this point Porter began to have serious doubts about the value of organized political movements. A major literary break occurred for her in 1930 with the publication of “Flowering Judas” in Hound and Horn. From that point on critics regarded her work as serious literature, and although she did not publish a great volume of literary work, each piece she produced received close attention. She eventually became a member of the literary intelligentsia, associating with such figures as Allen Tate, Delmore Schwartz, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, WILLIAM FAULKNER , Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, SHERWOOD A NDERSON, Edmund Wilson, Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNiece, Robert Lowell, Lincoln Kirstein, Gilbert Seldes,

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Yvor Winters, Mark and Carl Van Doren, and Diego Rivera. In 1930 a collection of stories, Flowering Judas, was published. (It was expanded in 1935.) She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1931, writing in Mexico and Europe. She had a falling out with the poet H ART CR ANE, also in Mexico on a Guggenheim, where he was her housemate and neighbor. They had been fairly close friends, despite her distaste for his flagrant homosexuality. Both of them had a bit of a diva streak, however, and when they fi nally blew up at each other, over a misunderstood time for a dinner appointment, each held a grudge. Her trip from Mexico to Europe provided her with much of the material for Ship of Fools, and some critics claim that the scene in which a man dies after jumping overboard was inspired by Crane’s suicide by jumping from an ocean liner in 1932. In Europe she lived in Berlin, Paris, and Basel and met many political figures, including Hermann Göring. (She never met Hitler, though she later claimed she had.) Her personal life in the 1930s included marriages with Eugene Pressley in 1933 and Albert Russell Erskine in 1938. After marrying Erskine, she lived primarily in Louisiana. They separated in 1940 and divorced in 1942. In 1933 she collected and translated songs for Katherine Anne Porter’s French Song Book. She won a Book-of-theMonth-Club award in 1937, and her collection of three novellas Pale Horse, Pale Rider appeared in 1939. This book includes “Old Mortality,” “Noon Wine,” and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” A fourth short novel, “Promised Land” (later called “No Safe Harbor”) was to have been included, but it was not fi nished; this novella became her life work, Ship of Fools, weighing in at 500 pages and taking more than 20 years to complete. She liked to point out that she did not work on it “full time,” as she was obliged to earn a living. Rather, she wrote on it when she could get a few minutes here and there. At any rate, it was not published until 1962. In the 1940s Porter worked briefly as a scriptwriter in Hollywood and lived in California. World War II affected her politics, and at this time she turned against communism, becoming a political

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moderate. Her interests turned to teaching writing and practicing literary criticism, and she taught at Stanford in 1948–49 and at the University of Michigan in 1953–54, among several other schools. During this period she published The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944) and won several honors, including the fi rst annual Gold Medal for Literature from the Societies of Libraries of New York (1940) and election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1943). She translated The Itching Parrot by Fernández de Lizárdi in 1942. In 1952 her collection of essays The Days Before appeared, and she continued to receive awards and grants throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including election as vice president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1950–52), an Emerson-Thoreau Award from the Academy of Arts and Sciences (1952), a Fulbright Lectureship at the University of Liège (1954), a Ford Foundation Grant (1960–62), the National Book Award for fiction (1966), and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (1966). Ship of Fools fi nally appeared in 1962 to mixed reviews. It concerns an Atlantic crossing in August 1931, in the years before World War II, and in addition to presenting the intricately intertwined relationships of some five dozen main characters, not counting the “eight hundred and seventy-six souls in steerage” (SF xii), it implies hints of impending political doom. By 1962 critics considered the material “stale,” but commercially the book was a great success, and in 1965 a Hollywood movie appeared starring a large cast, including Vivien Leigh in her last fi lm role, Oskar Werner, Simone Signoret, Lee Marvin, Jose Ferrer, George Segal, and Elizabeth Ashley. Porter earned quite a bit of money from the fi lm, and she became more of a household name than she had ever been. In 1965 riding this new wave of publicity, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter appeared to great acclaim. Her National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize were for this book. In the 1960s and 1970s Porter lived largely in Washington, D.C. She published The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter in 1970. The Never-Ending Wrong, a memoir of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, was published in 1977. In 1976 she experienced a series of strokes

that left her bedridden; her health continued to deteriorate through the late 1970s. Mentally she became cranky and suspicious, turning on her friends. For instance, she became convinced that Malcolm Cowley was plotting to publish her letters to him without her permission. She died at age 90 on September 18, 1980, and her ashes are buried beside her mother’s grave in Indian Creek, Texas. Of course many of Porter’s stories are based on episodes from her life. Nevertheless, her point always is to delineate a particular character or characters in relation to a universal theme. The “Miranda” stories depict a recurring character at different ages who is supposed to represent the young Porter, and various other stories center on her grandmother’s farm or her life in Mexico. However, her primary interest is in psychological analysis, and a specific understanding of the particular events of her life is not necessary to an understanding of what she was aiming for in these stories. In general, her style is compressed, economical, and forthright. Her characters use everyday language, yet the overall effect is of brilliant subtlety and control. Descriptions can be elaborate, displaying a close attention to detail. Her sensitivity to language, particularly in dialogue, is precise yet unpretentious. Much of her work is funny, and characterization is her forte. Her major themes include the relation of past to present in the mind, cultural displacement, the death of love, the idea of a fate that dooms one to suffering and disappointment, the nature of reality, and courage in the face of fear and failure, all of which demonstrate modernist concerns. Katherine Anne Porter is considered a major figure in American letters, despite her relatively small output.

“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” (1929) “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” fi rst appeared in the magazine transition in 1929 and is collected in Flowering Judas and Other Stories. It is a masterpiece of shifting point of view, not so much among characters as among different times within a single character’s consciousness. Alternating between limited omniscient narration and stream


of consciousness in Granny Weatherall’s thinking, Porter employs flashbacks to make the reader piece together who Granny Weatherall is. Once the reader distinguishes between present events and Granny Weatherall’s wandering memories, the plot is fairly simple. Granny is sick, and the doctor has arrived. She thinks he is a whippersnapper and wants to give him a piece of her mind. She does, here at the beginning and again later. At fi rst he reacts, but later, although we hear her diatribes, it is clear from his and the nurse’s reactions that they do not. She addresses people in the room, people who are long dead, and herself, both her present self and an earlier version. Eventually we can surmise that the children and the priest have arrived. Granny is worse off than she has realized. Much of the plot concerns flashbacks to the time when she was left at the altar by George. She seems to have married anyway—“I want him to know I had my husband just the same and my children and my house like any other woman” (Porter, Flowering Judas 131)—married the man who caught her when she swooned at the wedding after George failed to appear. It is telling that she wants her children to fi nd George and explain that she has forgotten him. (She has not.) Many of her memories concern the everyday things she did to take care of the house and the children and above all the things she did to be prepared. She does not like surprises, but there is one last one for her at the end of the story—a surprise left to the reader to figure out. Granny has been jilted at the altar again, a second time, at the very end of her life. Porter’s technique is very modernist (dense, cryptic, compact), leaving a lot of work for the reader to do. For instance, near the end of the story Granny snaps at the priest, who is tickling her feet and murmuring in Latin (FJ 134). It is left to the reader to infer that he is performing last rites. Throughout the story the pillow rises and floats; it is up to the reader to understand that Granny’s head is sinking deeper and deeper into it. Even with sensations like the doctor’s whispering, Granny cannot decide whether leaves are rustling or newspapers are swishing or what. She concludes that her daughter and the doctor are whispering loudly

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into her ear, even as she recognizes that what they are saying is not meant to be heard by her. Clearly we cannot trust Granny to analyze correctly what is going on, and much of the humor in the story results from her unawareness of the gravity of her situation. She says to the doctor, “Ah, I’ll never be young again—but I’d be happy if they’d let me lie in peace and get rested” (FJ 130), never realizing that “Rest in Peace” is exactly what she’ll do at the end of the story. The end, however, will not be all that peaceful for her. Despite the novelty of the stream-of-consciousness technique, the point here for Porter always seems to be characterization. We get a real sense of who Ellen Weatherall is and how she got to be that way. (Of course, the symbol of her last name is not to be missed.) In imagining seeing her husband again, a husband who has preceded her in death by some years, she thinks: Why, he couldn’t possibly recognize her. She had fenced in a hundred acres once, digging the post holes herself and clamping the wires with just a negro boy to help. That changed a woman. John would be looking for a young woman with the peaked Spanish comb in her hair and the painted fan. Digging post holes changed a woman. (FJ 126)

Her repetition of “changed a woman” sounds as though she is either trying to convince herself that she has changed or trying to reason out why she has changed. Her incessant worrying about the future indicates that she does not want to be caught off guard by sudden change. It is ironic that she has spent 20 years thinking ahead and preparing for her death yet only recognizes late in the story that it is actually happening to her now. “Granny closed two fi ngers around Jimmy’s thumb. Beads wouldn’t do, it must be something alive” (FJ 135). That religion cannot help her foreshadows the betrayal at the end of the story. Porter’s command of voice and her use of juxtaposition help make this story a resounding success. The tight pattern of recurring descriptive symbols (such as Cornelia’s voice described as a tilting cart

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[FJ 134, 136]) and repetitive phrases like “my time has come” (FJ 131, 133) lead the reader to the true sequence of events in the work. More than that, however, they provide clues to Granny Weatherall’s psyche and give us a view of her take on death, a surprise that no one wants to admit is about to occur. Granny meets death as she has met life, with hard work, a chip on her shoulder, and a sense of entitlement—God owes her; her entire life has been spent putting the pieces together after the fi rst jilting, and it is a shattering image, for her and for the reader, when God fails to appear.

For Discussion or Writing 1. What happens at the end of this story? Trace the light/flame imagery throughout. Why does Granny Weatherall blow out the light in the last sentence? What does her action mean? 2. Name Granny’s children. Why is there no namesake for her husband, John? What has happened to Hapsy? (How do you know?) 3. Have a look at the tenses in the story. Note instances of past perfect, usually indicating flashbacks. Can you identify the order of her flashbacks? Trace the “real” time of the present events, realizing that Granny is not a reliable narrator here. Also check to see where the idea of “tomorrow” is mentioned. What can you infer from these instances? 4. How is Granny Weatherall jilted twice? Explain the last paragraph in light of the allusion to Christ’s parable of the bridegroom. (See Matthew 25:1–13.) What bridegroom is missing here? 5. Compare and contrast this work with Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Discuss the grandmothers in both works (especially their relations with the families and their deaths). Which work has a more positive ending? Why?

“Flowering Judas” (1930) “Flowering Judas” was a pivotal story in Porter’s career because it fi rst made critics notice her as a

serious literary figure. It fi rst appeared in Hound and Horn in 1930 and is collected in Flowering Judas and Other Stories. The story is a tightly written account of incidents in the life of a young American expatriate during the Obregón revolution in Mexico. There is speculation that Laura, like the Miranda character in many of Porter’s stories, is a stand-in for the author herself, but Porter insisted that Laura was based on a friend and was an amalgamation of several acquaintances. Laura has several potential lovers: the young captain she goes riding with, the shock-haired boy who sings to her at her window and to whom she makes the mistake of tossing a rose, and Braggioni, a bigwig in the revolution. When we fi rst see her, she is painfully enduring Braggioni’s advances—he is serenading her with a guitar, and she is disgusted by him. He is described as a “gluttonous bulk” (Porter, Flowering Judas 141) “heaped” on a chair (FJ 139) “flaunting a yellow silk handkerchief” doused with Jockey Club cologne (FJ 144). She fancies herself a revolutionary, and we later fi nd that she is tolerating Braggioni because he is an influential figure in the cause. Her motivations are unclear to him, and he imagines that she must be working so hard for the revolution because she has a lover involved in it, but she denies this notion. The story displays masterful descriptive characterization, especially in depicting Laura. Porter is descriptive but selective here: To piece together what is going on and how Laura feels, the reader must pay close attention to small clues. One big clue is the symbol of the Judas tree in her yard. Legend has it that Judas became a redbud tree after betraying Christ, and it is easy to see how Laura feels she has betrayed Eugenio, who has been languishing in prison, waiting for Braggioni to do him the favor of getting him released. Laura has given him the pills he ultimately uses to commit suicide. When he appears as a Christ figure in her dream and calls her “Murderer! . . . and Cannibal!” (FJ 160), her trademark “No!” has new and dramatic meaning. Throughout the story she has been reluctant to commit herself to love, even seeming to be incapable of feeling any fondness for her little students. She keeps repeating, “No. No. No” (FJ


151) to amorous advances. By the end of the story, however, she shows some feeling and observes, “It is monstrous to confuse love with revolution, night with day, life with death—ah, Eugenio!” (FJ 159). She has been dead to life and love, and now because of her dream of Eugenio, she wakes up, “afraid to sleep again” (FJ 160). The implication is that she might fi nally learn to love, accepting the sacrament of the “warm bleeding flowers”—but she still cries “No!”

For Discussion or Writing 1. Explain the “cruelty,” “vanity,” and “vast cureless wound of [Braggioni’s] self-esteem.” Who killed Eugenio, and why? Explain the title “Flowering Judas.” What has Laura known all along that Braggioni is going to ask of her? 2. Comment on the implication of Braggioni’s “tenderness,” “amplitude,” “eternal charity,” and “excess” of self-love. What does his name suggest? 3. How would Laura’s possible gift of a “box of colored crayons” be appropriate for the young captain’s declaration of love? 4. Explain the reason for Laura’s stoicism and her “negation of all external events.” How is her mantra of “No” appropriate or inappropriate? 5. Compare and contrast this work with Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Good Country People.” Discuss similarities or differences between the heroines, the tones of the works, the uses of religious imagery, and the fi nal situations of the central characters.

“Noon Wine” (1937) Published in 1937 in Story magazine and also brought out that year as a separate book in limited publication, “Noon Wine” is the middle novella in Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Its setting is a “Small South Texas Farm,” and it covers the years 1896–1905 (Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider 93). A farmer and his family have trouble making ends meet until a stranger appears. The stranger not only whips the farm into shape but stays on as a worker for many

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years. When a bounty hunter appears and demands that the farmer turn the worker over to him, the farmer defends the worker with tragic results. The fi rst sentence immediately introduces three central characters: “The two grubby small boys with tow-colored hair who were digging among the ragweed in the front yard sat back on their heels and said, ‘Hello,’ when the tall bony man with strawcolored hair turned in at their gate” (PHPR 93). As is usual with Porter, even the smallest detail gives a wealth of information. That the boys are digging is a central point—they are real pests, always into things, and their curiosity and lack of self-control eventually set a key factor in the plot into play. The taciturn stranger will also set into motion the chain of events that results in the story’s shocking ending. We already get a sense that the farm is somewhat rundown, with ragweed allowed to thrive in the front yard. The stranger will change all that. The two boys are Arthur and Herbert, sons of the dairy farmer Mr. Thompson and his sickly wife, Ellie. Mr. and Mrs. Thompson have different ideas as to discipline for the boys, with the result that the boys are basically uncontrolled. Mrs. Thompson is particularly indulgent, but at the same time she feels guilty for being so. She makes excuses for the boys and often takes the path of least resistance when faced with a confl ict between them and her husband. For instance, she says the fastest possible dinnertime blessing, rather than enforcing the rule of waiting until the prayer is over to reach for the food. Mrs. Thompson clasped her hands, bowed her head and said aloud hastily, “Lord, for all these and Thy other blessings we thank Thee in Jesus’ name, amen,” trying to fi nish before Herbert’s rusty little paw reached the nearest dish. Otherwise she would be duty-bound to send him away from the table, and growing children need their meals. Mr. Thompson and Arthur always waited, but Herbert, aged six, was too young to take training yet. (PHPR 108)

Of course six is not “too young to take training.” At the same time that she makes an excuse for

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Herbert in her mind, she feels guilt about the situation. She knows that if she does not outpace him with the prayer, there will be consequences and she will have to be the one to enforce them. That she includes Mr. Thompson in her mental description of what happens seems to indicate that she is feeling guilty or responsible to someone besides him for her family’s potential bad behavior—perhaps toward the God she is so hastily thanking. Her shame eventually fi nds as its object the mysterious stranger who has arrived in the fi rst sentence. Mr. Helton, the stranger, is a cryptic, silent Swede who seems stubborn and has the one passion of his treasured harmonicas. He becomes their hired hand. In actuality he is a very hard worker and turns the farm around fiscally, suggesting improvements and doing all sorts of chores that Mr. Thompson eschews as “women’s work.” Mrs. Thompson has not wanted him there at fi rst, jumping to the conclusion that he will be lazy or cause her trouble, but she soon recognizes that he has made her life easier. She feels even guiltier when the boys pester him or get on his nerves. In one alarming incident, she observes him shaking Arthur and concludes that the boys must have done something to deserve it. Although she is unnerved by his taking disciplinary action as his responsibility, she gives him the benefit of the doubt until she hears the full story. (This is a new development. Throughout the story people jump to conclusions about character that sometimes prove to be false and sometimes prove to be true. Mr. Thompson will have a “gut instinct” about another stranger at the end of the story that will be correct.) It turns out that the boys had played with and ruined Mr. Helton’s precious harmonicas. Mrs. Thompson, trying to make small talk when she fi rst met him, had recognized this as a possibility and warned him to keep them up on a shelf, out of harm’s way. She fully understands his anger and is unnerved only by the sudden violence and total silence of the scene. This is the only hint we get that Mr. Helton may have had a violent past. The point of view in the story shifts back and forth from Mrs. Thompson to Mr. Thompson, and it is somewhat of a surprise when Mr. Thompson

becomes the dominant voice. Nine years pass, and the boys grow up to be decent young men (one gets the impression that this happens through Mr. Helton’s influence and no thanks to their parents’ lenience). Then one day, another stranger, Mr. Homer T. Hatch, appears, nosing around for information about the Swede. Mr. Thompson is immediately suspicious of him, and they have a long conversation before Mr. Hatch gets to the point. He is trying to collect a bounty for Mr. Helton, who he claims “jus’ went loony one day in the hayfield and shoved a pitchfork right square through his brother” (PHPR 144). It turns out that the brother had also borrowed and lost a sacred harmonica. Mr. Thompson is immediately on his guard and wants to defend Mr. Helton, and events quickly escalate—we see some real action for the fi rst time in the slow-paced farm life. Mr. Helton appears; Mr. Hatch charges at him; Mr. Thompson, thinking the Swede has been fatally wounded, crashes an ax down on Mr. Hatch’s head, killing him. The tragedy is that Mr. Helton has not been murdered. The posse sent for him kills him as they try to take him into custody. The remainder of the story deals with Mr. and Mrs. Thompson’s psychological responses to this jarring event. Although Mr. Thompson has been acquitted with a self-defense plea, he experiences terrific guilt and feels the need to make the rounds to the neighbors, telling his side of the story. It is clear that most of them either do not believe him or just do not care. Mrs. Thompson is required to tell the white lie that “she saw and heard it all” (PHPR 165)—when, in reality, she had walked around the corner a split second after the incident. Mr. Thompson’s shocking suicide at the end of the story is the culmination of a confusing series of events. As with much of Porter’s writing, the beauty of this story lies in its descriptive detail and psychological portraiture. Recognizing the shift in point of view is essential to a full understanding of the story’s meaning: Different participants perceive different versions of an event, and in the retelling, either to oneself or to others, an event and its motivations change even further. Reality is a slippery concept, and if one loses grasp of one’s own ver-


sion of it, all hell is liable to break loose. The story concerns themes of guilt and innocence, knowing the difference between right and wrong, and doing something about that difference.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Trace the subtle shifts in point of view. Whose story is this, ultimately? How do you know? 2. People often seem to miss Mr. Thompson’s meanings and intentions. Find at least three of these passages and analyze them, explaining why people respond to him as they do. Explain the ending, particularly the last line. How does it relate to Mr. Thompson’s personality? 3. Trace Mrs. Thompson’s difficulty seeing—both literally and figuratively. How does it relate to the end of the story? 4. How does the title relate to the story? Clearly it is a reference to Mr. Helton’s harmonica tune, but explain what that song means to the story itself. 5. Compare and contrast this work with Flannery O’Connor’s story “The Displaced Person.” How do the works compare in plot, theme, characterization, and setting?

“Pale Horse, Pale Rider” (1938) “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” which fi rst appeared in Southern Review in 1938 and is the fi nal novella in the collection Pale Horse, Pale Rider, is based on a real incident in Porter’s life. She contracted influenza in the epidemic of 1918 and almost died. Both the boy and the dreams depicted in the story were real, but even her own accounts vary as to how well she knew him and whether she was in love or not. (This is one of the Miranda stories in which the recurring character stands for Porter herself.) The plot is uncomplicated. Miranda, who works as a newspaper reporter in Denver, has contracted the flu close to the end of World War I. She has fallen in love with Adam, a young soldier who is to be shipped out within a matter of days and whom she has only just met. He takes care of her, disappears when the hospital workers arrive to take her

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to the hospital, and then, she later learns, dies of the flu himself. The story is considered to be one of Porter’s best, not because of the plot, but because of the skill with which she explores Miranda’s consciousness. The story begins with a hallucinatory dream about a mysterious rider trying to persuade her to go with him—an obvious symbol of death. Miranda wakes from the dream, but it is not until later that we realize the waking episodes of the story may be occurring “out of order” in Miranda’s fevered reconstruction of events. The dream sequences throughout point to Miranda’s encounter with death. In addition to describing her own near-death experience, the story explores Miranda’s reaction to the tragic irony of Adam’s death. She loses him twice, and the fi rst time she has trouble in her fevered state understanding what has happened. He has stepped out to fetch her some ice cream when the orderlies arrive for her. They will not wait for him, and at the hospital she keeps asking for him, only to be told that he has been by to see her and left a note, a note that explains that the doctors are not allowing him to visit her. At this fi rst “loss,” Miranda goes back into the daze of her fever while she observes the shadows of two figures behind a screen making a bed. This Platonic shadowy dream world seems to be “an entrancing and leisurely spectacle” (Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider 248), in which she sees figures bowing and curtsying to one another, but once the screen is removed, she blithely observes that there is a dead man on the bed. This episode leads into a complicated streamof-consciousness dream involving the doctor and the battlefield. After a brief waking episode, the continuation of her dream involves “granite walls, whirlpools, stars” (PHPR 252), concrete images that dissolve into a “fiery motionless particle,” which in turn flattens into a rainbow that Miranda looks through. Porter said in an interview that when she almost died in 1918, she “felt a strange state of— what is it the Greeks called it?—euphoria” (quoted in Hendrick and Hendrick 59); Miranda’s extended vision of some sort of afterlife is an attempt to represent this state. That her long-dead acquaintances

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“cast no shadows” and have been transfigured into “pure identities” suggests that Miranda has arrived in Plato’s world of Forms. However, she is jangled back into waking life by the din of celebration of the Armistice. A major irony occurs when Miranda, now somewhat recovered, gets around to reading her letters. She fi nds one reporting that Adam has died of the flu—her second loss of him. She has struggled back to life, resisting the temptation to go into the light; when she returns, the Armistice promises a happy ending for the two of them, since he will not be shipped out after all, and yet he has died. Her zombielike reaction to the news and her going about mundane tasks to resume regular life underscore the futility of love and being. In the last paragraph the dead images of life after her illness and after the war—“dazed silence,” “empty streets,” “dead cold light of tomorrow” (PHPR 264)—indicate her spiritual death, even as her body has recovered.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Explain the title of this story. How does it relate to the fi rst episode? 2. Trace Miranda’s dreams/hallucinations. Do you see any recurring themes? Examine closely Miranda’s long internal monologues about death near the end of the story. What conclusions can you draw from her images? 3. Make a timeline of the events of the story to sort out flashbacks and stream of consciousness from present action. When does her waking up/ getting ready occur? 4. How does the juxtaposition of her waking up and the celebration of the Armistice work in the story? Explain the line: “Adam, she said, now you need not die again, but still I wish you were here; I wish you had come back, what do you think I came back for, Adam, to be deceived like this?” 5. Compare and contrast this work with Porter’s story “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” How are the works similar and/or different in setting, theme, characterization, and narrative technique?

Ship of Fools (1962) Porter’s only novel, Ship of Fools, was published in 1962. It is a massive work, defying summary. (There are so many characters to keep track of that she provides a list of them in the front.) Basically, a diverse group of people is traveling on a ship from Mexico to Germany on the eve of World War II, in August and September 1931. Porter draws the reader in, with a big crowd milling about before they embark. Through detailed description of each one’s appearance we get to know them one by one and then in combinations of two and three as their story lines become entangled. There are literally dozens of characters, at least 10 of whom can be considered major figures. In fact, the point of view shifts in such a fluid way that it is difficult to tell who is a protagonist, even at any given moment. The characters are from Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Cuba, Mexico, Sweden, and America, not counting almost 900 Spaniards in steerage who are being deported from Cuba. So, in addition to class differences between upper and lower decks, there are distinctions in nationality among the passengers—distinctions that are especially important in light of the ominous political developments in Germany in the early 1930s. The issue of anti-Semitism, for example, figures in more than one of the subplots. Of course, in a crowd this big, there are also love issues—problems with marriages, love triangles, unrequited crushes, pimps and whores, innocent fl irtations, full-blown affairs, and lechery. In addition to romantic relationships, there are simple cabinmate squabbles to keep track of. For the most part, those sharing cabins have been assigned their roommates randomly, creating interesting problems and tensions. The situation in the fi rst-class dining room is a little more structured—such matters as who is privileged to dine at the captain’s table and who is shunned are based on class as well as on the elite’s changing perceptions of individual values. For instance, one character is “banished” from the captain’s table when it is discovered that his wife is Jewish. A central episode of the book points to the allegorical nature of the work as a whole. An artistic woodcarver in steerage jumps after a spoiled fi rst-


class dog that has been tossed overboard by a pair of bratty young twins. The woodcarver drowns while saving the dog, and his funeral triggers a riot on the lower deck. Most of the upper-deck passengers do not fully appreciate his ridiculous but noble sacrifice. Issues of class, human worth, and selfsacrifice are key to Ship of Fools, both politically and socially. Porter chose her title from a medieval satire in which the world is represented as a ship fi lled with passengers traveling to the Land of Fools. The political and social comparisons are obvious. Although Porter taps into the universal and ancient nature of the human condition, her themes are at the same time distinctly modern. She explores issues of identity and lack of communication, not just among races and cultures (prejudices in this book cut across all groups and move in both directions), but between and among individuals. Her exploration of what can and cannot be communicated distills a central concern of the 20th century.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In Ship of Fools Porter depends heavily on point of view. Follow a character throughout the novel and focus on times when the narration reflects that person’s perspective. What do we learn from that telling that we would not otherwise know—not only plot elements, but attitudes and motivations? 2. Are there characters you fi nd unsympathetic? Characters you do not like? Choose one and explain why. (What is he or she doing in the novel? How does this character operate to further a theme?) 3. Compare and contrast this book with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. In each novel, how is the ship a complex but self-contained world? How do issues of nationality and class affect both books? How are the settings symbolic or allegorical? 4. The characters are deeply aware of nationalities on their voyage, yet they are all inhabitants/ citizens of the boat. Write an essay in which you explore an aspect of this topic fully. 5. Porter’s hallmark is her rich descriptive detail. Choose a descriptive passage and analyze fully

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what the reader is to gain from it. Remember to pay attention to what she leaves out as well as what she includes.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON PORTER AND HER WORK 1. Porter is a master of characterization. Choose a character and examine closely how Porter conveys that person’s essence. Consider such factors as description, dialogue (or monologue), motivation, and point of view. 2. Porter employs many modernist techniques, including stream of consciousness, fragmentation, shifts in point of view, density, compactness, and selection of “hints” or “clues” for the reader. Choose one of these techniques and trace the way it operates in one or two stories. What does she accomplish by telling the story in an oblique, rather than a direct, way? 3. The character Miranda Gay appears in many of Porter’s stories. Read “Old Mortality,” “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” “The Source,” “The Witness,” “The Circus,” “The Old Order,” “The Last Leaf,” “The Grave,” and “The Fig Tree.” Compare her viewpoint at different ages. Is her development plausible? 4. Porter writes within the context of several different cultures—Texas, the Old South, Mexico, Ireland, Germany. Compare and contrast her treatment of setting in at least two stories. 5. Ship of Fools, in particular, deals with political themes, but many of Porter’s earlier stories also examine political ideas, especially about developments in World War I, revolutions in other countries, and the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Choose one or more of these stories and compare it with Ship of Fools in this regard. 6. Porter has a practice of creating strong female protagonists. Compare and contrast two or more of these in her works. Ship of Fools demonstrates special insight into the differences between the roles of male and female characters. Examine how gender affects the actions and attitudes of one or more characters in the novel.

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7. During a panel discussion on southern fiction held at Wesleyan College in 1960, Porter stated, “Symbolism happens of its own self and it comes out of something so deep in your own consciousness and your own experience that I don’t think that most writers are at all conscious of their use of symbols. . . . I have a great deal of religious symbolism in my stories because I have a very deep sense of religion and also I have a religious training” (quoted in Givner 54). Find and explain a religious motif or theme in one of Porter’s works. Do you think it was conscious? Why or why not? 8. Porter is often compared with Eudora Welty, particularly since they are both southern women writers who favor the short story as a genre. Compare and contrast one or more of Porter’s and Welty’s characters, themes, or techniques. How do these two authors differ? 9. Porter’s stories, especially the Miranda Gay works, also have much in common with the stories of the New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield. Read Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” and discuss the idea that both Porter and Mansfield use young female protagonists who stand for them. Would you know that fact without being told? Why or why not? 10. In a 1965 interview with Roy Newquist, Porter discussed the unfavorable reception of Ship of Fools. She states, “I don’t blame them if they don’t like Ship of Fools. But isn’t it odd that they can read Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, they can read Hawkes’ scene in The Lime Twig, about that man in the dark cellar beating a woman to death with a sandbag . . . but they hate Ship of Fools. Nobody’s going to identify with that man in the cellar—that’s all sexual daydreaming. They know it doesn’t apply to them. However, Ship of Fools is about live people, and if they don’t take care, they’re going to see themselves” (Givner 112). In your opinion, has Ship of Fools worn well? Does it seem tame? Dated? Sensationalistic? Real? Support your assertions with specific examples from the text. Address whether her perception that Ship

of Fools is unpopular because it hits too close to home emotionally is still valid. WORKS CITED

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DeMouy, Jane Krause. Katherine Anne Porter’s Women: The Eye of Her Fiction. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. Givner, Joan, ed. Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987. Hendrick, Willene, and George Hendrick. Katherine Anne Porter. Edited by Kenneth E. Eble. Rev. ed. Twayne’s United States Authors Series 90. Boston: Twayne [G. K. Hall], 1988. Katherine Anne Porter Society. Available online. URL: http://www.lib.umd.edu/Guests/KAP. Accessed April 8, 2009. Lopez, Enrique Hank. Conversations with Katherine Anne Porter: Refugee from Indian Creek. Boston: Little, Brown, 1981. Porter, Katherine Anne. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1965. ———. Flowering Judas and Other Stories. New York: Modern Library [Random House], 1935. ———. The Leaning Tower and Other Stories. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1944. ———. Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels. New York: Modern Library [Random House], 1939. ———. Ship of Fools. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962. Stout, Janis P. Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of the Times. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Unrue, Darlene Harbour. Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. ———, ed. Critical Essays on Katherine Anne Porter. Critical Essays on American Literature, edited by James Nagel. New York: G. K. Hall [Simon & Schuster/Macmillan], 1997. Warren, Robert Penn, ed. Katherine Anne Porter: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Maynard Mack. Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1979.

Catherine E. Howard

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) Let it stand that from 1912 onward for a decade or more I was instrumental in forcing into print, and secondarily in commenting on, certain work now recognized as valid by all competent readers. (Make It New)

E

zra Pound’s importance in the history of both American and even British and Irish literature is hard to overestimate. A gifted if sometimes eccentric poet, he was also a revolutionary tastemaker: He helped found, formulate, and propagate modernism, not just in literature but in all the arts. A generous friend, discerning critic, and tireless champion of other artists (at least the ones whose work he approved), he was often the whirling center of new and radical approaches to writing and thinking. William Butler Yeats, though older and more experienced than Pound, valued the advice and example of his new young American friend, while T. S. ELIOT, WILLIAM C ARLOS WILLIAMS, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), and a host of other eventually important authors were strongly influenced by Pound’s ideas, personality, and personal advocacy. Pound’s increasingly extreme economic and political views—which eventually led him to embrace Mussolini, fascism, and anti-Semitism— posed a dilemma for his many admirers, especially after he was indicted for treason after World War II and then committed to a hospital for the insane. Yet even readers who could not stomach Pound’s politics often found his poetry undeniably important, both in its own right and in the influential example it set for so many other writers. In his superbly detailed “Chronology” Richard Sieburth outlines the main facts of the poet’s life. Ezra Loomis Pound was born on October 30, 1885,

in Hailey, Idaho, the son of Homer Pound and Isabel Weston Pound. Pound’s father was a government official, whose own father had been a successful Wisconsin businessman and flamboyant congressman, and when the Pounds moved east in 1887, Ezra’s father again eventually found work with the government—this time with the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia in 1889. Ezra grew up in the Philadelphia suburb of Wyncote, where he attended local schools, entered a nearby military academy, and eventually enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania at age 15. Already well read, highly opinionated, and unusual in both dress and appearance (with his wild reddish hair), he soon also showed the talent for winning friends (and annoying bystanders) that would be so significant to his later career. While still in Philadelphia he befriended both Hilda Doolittle (whom he would later rechristen H. D. when he was championing her poetry) and William Carlos Williams, both of whom would eventually have significant literary careers of their own—thanks in part to Pound’s enthusiastic support. After transferring to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, in 1903, Pound maintained his infatuation with literature of all sorts, from the most modern to the most ancient, while also cultivating his interest in foreign languages, including Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Italian, Spanish, and French. Indeed, this interest was so strong that in 1906 he received his master’s degree (from the University of Pennsylvania) in Romance languages

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and immediately set off for Europe for further academic research. Pound, however, was never a conventional academic. Although he was hired in 1907 as a professor of Romance languages at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, he was dismissed the next year for allowing a destitute actress to stay in his rooms overnight—scandalizing his landladies and the college. Rejected in 1908 by one young woman (Mary Moore) when he asked for her hand, and rejected as well by Hilda Doolittle’s father as an unsuitable potential son-in-law, Pound, with the support of his father, made the momentous decision that year to set his sights on Europe, and in a sense he never looked back. After spending time in Venice (where he self-published his significant early collection of poems titled A Lume Spento), Pound soon moved to London, quickly making friends with a wide spectrum of other writers. There he published his important collection Personae in 1909 and followed it immediately with more poems in Exultations (1909) and The Spirit of Romance (1910). By this time Pound had befriended (or been befriended by) such notables as Ford Madox Hueffer (the novelist and editor better known as Ford Madox Ford); T. E. Hulme (the literary theorist); Wyndham Lewis (the novelist and literary radical); D. H. Lawrence (the novelist and poet); and W. B. Yeats (the great Irish writer), to mention just a few. Pound also found, in 1910, support from a wealthy patroness who guaranteed him a substantial yearly income (at least for the time being), and for the next few years his life was a whirlwind of travel, translations, social interactions, and original literary productiveness. His collection titled Canzoni appeared in 1911; his translations of The Sonnets and Ballete of Guido Cavalcanti were published in 1912; and Ripostes, his collection of mostly original works, was also issued in 1912. During the latter year Pound learned, however, that his publisher was bankrupt and that his patroness had killed herself, but the year proved auspicious in various other respects, particularly through his association with the newly founded Poetry magazine, edited in Chicago by Harriet Monroe—a magazine for which Pound soon became foreign correspondent. This

position gave him a prominent soapbox from which to expound his own tastes and enthusiasms, and he quickly took advantage of the opportunity by announcing the existence of a new school of poets, the “imagists,” consisting mainly of H. D. (who was now living in London); her new husband, Richard Aldington; Pound himself; and a few others. The impact of imagism (which favored brevity, directness, simplicity, and crisp images) was immediate and profound. Pound himself, however, would soon abandon the group, partly because he distrusted the influence of one of its newest members (Amy Lowell) and partly because of his interest in a new approach to writing (“vorticism”) that emphasized dynamic energy as opposed to the more static approach of the imagists. In the meantime, he was throwing himself, with his characteristic energy, into all sorts of literary and artistic projects, including helping to promote the careers of ROBERT FROST and James Joyce, championing the sculpture of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Jacob Epstein, serving as an editor of the Egoist, contributing to such other magazines as the Smart Set and the New Age, promoting vorticism, assisting T. S. Eliot in being published, and developing an interest in Chinese poetry and Japanese drama. In April 1914 he also found time to marry Dorothy Shakespeare, but by late summer 1914 World War I had broken out—a confl ict that unleashed profound destruction. Gaudier-Brzeska, for instance, was soon killed in action, an event that inspired Pound to publish Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir in 1916. Nevertheless, despite the war, Pound’s own literary productivity continued to be prodigious; his collection of poems titled Cathay had been published in spring 1915, followed by an expurgated edition of his collection titled Lustra in 1916 and by Certain Noble Plays of Japan that same year. In 1917 a fuller version of the Japanese plays was published, followed also by a fuller version of Lustra. Meanwhile, Pound continued to be a vigorous advocate and midwife for other now-famous-but-then-obscure writers, especially Eliot and Joyce. Yet the destructiveness of the war continued to have personal impact: For instance, the battlefield death of T. E. Hulme, whose literary ideas had been such an important

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influence on Pound’s own thinking, occurred in 1917. Pound’s growing interest in offbeat economic ideas (an interest that would eventually lead him to become an apologist for fascism and would fundamentally ruin his life) can be attributed, in part, to his disgust with the political and economic causes and results of World War I. In the decade following the end of the war (which concluded in late 1918), Pound was as vigorous as ever as an author, promoter, and innovator. Umbra: The Early Poems of Ezra Pound, appeared in 1920, as did Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, a work in which he signaled his growing disenchantment with London. He now began to spend more time in France (especially Paris), becoming acquainted with many eventually notable French and American writers (including GERTRUDE STEIN and E. E. CUMMINGS), helping to promote the careers of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi and the American poet M ARIANNE MOORE, and befriending the young ERNEST H EMINGWAY. His own Poems 1918–21 appeared in the latter year, but perhaps his most significant activity at this time involved his editing, in early 1922, of Eliot’s revolutionary poem The Waste Land, which Pound helped transform into a highly influential masterpiece. By this time Pound himself had also begun working on a series of poetic “Cantos”—a project that would last for the rest of his life. In 1925 A Draft of XVI Cantos was published, and by that time Pound had also begun to spend most of his time in Italy, not only with his wife, Dorothy, but also with his mistress, Olga Rudge, who bore him a daughter that year. Not to be outdone, Dorothy bore him a son in 1926, but Pound (predictably) seems to have been less interested in his flesh-and-blood children than in his literary and artistic offspring, which included an opera staged in 1926 and a poetic collection titled Personae published that same year. By 1927 he had begun editing his own journal, the Exile, in which he printed such significant writers as Yeats, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky. In 1928 A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 as well as Pound’s Selected Poems were published, followed in 1930 by A Draft of XXX Cantos and by Imaginary Letters. His advice on How to Read was

published as a book in 1931, but by this time his writings had also become increasingly preoccupied with politics and economics, often exhibiting a fascistic and anti-Semitic tone. His ABC of Economics appeared in 1933, followed in 1934 by an ABC of Reading and by Make It New (both works of literary commentary) as well as by Eleven New Cantos XXXI–XLI. The increasingly political preoccupations of his poetry can be seen in the latter work, and they appear as well in Alfred Venison’s Poems and in the prose work Jefferson and/or Mussolini, both published in 1935 during the depths of the Great Depression, the worldwide economic downturn that made the 1930s so bleak. By this time Pound was an open supporter of fascism—a fact reflected in The Fifth Decad of Cantos, XLII–LI, which was published in 1937 (the same year as his Polite Essays). His important prose work titled Guide to Kulchur appeared in 1938, and during a brief return to the United States in 1939 he met with various politicians in an effort to promote peace (at least according to his own definition)— doing so at a time when most people were expecting a new world war. His fascist politics created unease among his friends and controversy with others, and when Cantos LII–LXX appeared in 1940, certain anti-Semitic lines were blacked out. By late 1939 the long-dreaded war had fi nally begun, and by spring 1940 Fascist Italy was in the thick of it, allied with Nazi Germany. Pound now made the fateful decision to begin broadcasting for Radio Rome—eventually delivering well over 100 Fascist and anti-Jewish diatribes, although he continued to think of himself as a highly patriotic American with the best interests of his country at heart. This was true even after the United States entered the war late in 1941. His broadcasts, however, were now being transcribed by the U.S. government, and in mid-1943 he was indicted for treason. Nevertheless, he continued to speak over the air, and in 1944 the now-retreating Fascist government even managed to publish six volumes of his Italian writings. By spring 1945, though, everything was lost: Mussolini was dead, the Germans had surrendered, and Pound was imprisoned by American forces in Pisa in a literal cage—an experience that led to mental collapse

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in a man whose sanity had been in doubt for some time. Nevertheless, he was able to compose his Pisan Cantos (often considered among his greatest works). In fall 1945 he was in Washington, D.C., awaiting trial as a traitor. By the end of that year, however, he was diagnosed as suffering from paranoia and was declared mentally unfit to stand trial. Now began his long confi nement in Washington’s St. Elizabeths Hospital for the criminally insane. During his long years of confi nement, Pound was (as usual) a highly paradoxical figure. On the one hand, he was a political embarrassment; on the other hand, many considered him one of the greatest literary figures of the 20th century, and he was visited in St. Elizabeths by many of the most notable writers of the day as well as by many younger writers who worshipped his work. His writings continued to appear in print—including The Pisan Cantos, published in 1948. When this book was awarded the fi rst annual Bollingen Prize of $10,000 (given in the name of the Library of Congress), all hell predictably broke loose. The highly distinguished judges declared that poetic merit alone should determine the awarding of the prize, but many citizens obviously disagreed— and disagreed vociferously. The award did stand, but the Library of Congress was stripped of its authority to offer similar prizes in the future. Meanwhile, throughout the 1950s Pound continued to produce translations and original work, the most important of which were published in 1955 as the Rock-Drill cantos. During this period numerous important writers called for Pound’s release from imprisonment, and eventually, in 1958, the treason charges were dropped on the grounds that Pound would never be mentally fit to defend himself. Returning to Italy (where he at fi rst seemed an unrepentant Fascist), he began to lapse into depression. Nevertheless, the Thrones cantos (96–109) were published in 1959, and although his mental and physical health was unsteady throughout the 1960s, he was more and more recognized and honored for his early work, including both his own writings and his efforts on behalf of others. Increasingly dejected and increasingly doubtful about his value as a writer or political thinker, he nevertheless remained an intriguing and controversial figure. Drafts and Fragments of Cantos

CX–CXVII appeared in 1969, but when the American Academy of Arts and Letters proposed to award Pound a major prize in 1972, the plan was vetoed by its executive council. When he died on November 1 of that year, he himself was far less sure of the value of his work than were his far-flung and numerous admirers, who considered him one of the major authors of his era.

“Portrait d’une Femme” (1912) The poem describes a presumably middle-aged and apparently unmarried woman who has lived in London for at least 20 years; during that time she has met and conversed with many intelligent people, who have sought out her company, especially when no better company was available. Her long history of interactions with interesting persons has thus made her, derivatively, interesting herself; she is like the Sargasso Sea, a calm area of the Atlantic Ocean where seaweed is abundant and where odd and unusual items that have been tossed from ships, lost from them, or swept up from wrecks can be collected, examined, and appreciated. The woman has no really independent identity, yet she is fascinating nonetheless because of her long and rich exposure to others. In its title as well as in its phrasing and manner, the poem is reminiscent of the fiction of the novelist Henry James—a writer whom Pound greatly admired and who was famous for his subtle, understated, but probing depictions of people of leisure. Certainly the woman depicted here seems Jamesian in her interests, habits, and lifestyle; she is apparently under no great pressure to earn a living by strenuous work, and so she has been able to spend most of her days merely observing, listening to, and remembering all the interesting people with whom she has had contact. It is not an accident that it is her “mind” that the speaker values (l. 1), and by mind he seems mainly to mean her memory, her recollections: She is less important for any of her own thoughts, insights, or reflections than as a repository of information about others. There is some irony, then, in the poem’s title, since the subject of the portrait is not so much

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intriguing in her own right as a reflection of others. Ironically by being so open to the lives of others, she has not lived much of an independent life herself; she has not developed much of an autonomous existence or separate identity (there is “Nothing that’s quite [her] own” [l. 29]); like the Sargasso Sea itself, she is fascinating but somewhat stagnant. On the other hand, she has avoided the worse fate common to the lives of many women of her era; she has not been the mere appendage, through marriage, of “One dull man, dulling and uxorious, / One average mind— with one less thought each year” (ll. 9–10). In short (and in typically Jamesian fashion), her life has been ambiguous and complex; in some ways she has profited (and been a source of profit to others); in some ways she has lost. As a good portrait does, Pound’s poem presents a subtle mixture of light and dark shades, making us admire this woman even as we somewhat pity her. With its blank verse, mainly iambic meter, clear phrasing, and occasional touches of rhyme, this fairly traditional poem is entirely in keeping with its subject; it is restrained, cultured, and sophisticated. The speaker acts as a representative of (and spokesman for) the community of London’s intelligentsia; his tone is by turns genuinely appreciative and slightly ironic or biting, as when he says, “Great minds have sought you—lacking someone else” (l. 6). The blank verse, leisurely rhythms, and long lines allow Pound to achieve a conversational cadence that is entirely in keeping with the subject and setting of the poem; it is as if we are overhearing the actual spoken words (or at least the actual thoughts) of a real member of this sophisticated milieu. In some ways, the poem is reminiscent of the blank-verse monologues of Robert Browning; in other ways (such as in the use of the extended metaphor comparing the woman at great length to the Sargasso Sea), the poem recalls the use of conceits (or highly detailed comparisons) common in the poetry of such metaphysical writers as John Donne. As is true so often in so many of his early poems, Pound here is deliberately adopting a persona; he is taking on an identity independent of his own; he is trying out a distinct and distinctive style, manner, and point of view, and part of the

effectiveness of the poem derives not only from his vivid portrait of the lady but also from the convincing self-portrait he offers of the speaker. The poem is even richer than a painting would have been, because every word used to characterize the woman also characterizes the speaker himself.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read T. S. Eliot’s poem “Portrait of a Lady,” and then read the poem of the same title by William Carlos Williams. Discuss the similarities and differences of the three poems in terms of such matters as style, diction, setting, point of view, and theme. Which of the three poems appeals to you most? By careful to explain why, by pointing to particular details of each work. 2. Compare and contrast this work with EDWIN A RLINGTON ROBINSON’s poem “Eros Turannos.” In particular, discuss such matters as a woman’s isolation, the speaker as spokesman for the community, the use of sea imagery, and the implied dangers of marriage. Discuss the relevance of social class in both poems, and discuss the forms (including line lengths and degree of rhyme) each poet chooses. 3. How does this poem characterize the speaker? What does it reveal about the speaker’s values, ideals, attitudes, and personality? Is it a safe assumption that the speaker is a male? What can we assume about the speaker’s social class and habits of mind?

“A Virginal” (1912) In this sonnet the unidentified speaker addresses an unidentified interlocutor, urging that person to leave the speaker (who seems to be male) alone so that the speaker can enjoy his memories of a very recent encounter with a beautiful woman. Merely being in her presence (he feels) has brightened his life, and he does not want that brightness to diminish by contact with anything less attractive. The title of the poem refers to an archaic musical instrument—“a small rectangular harpsichord . . . popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”

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(Froula 41). The title seems appropriate in several ways: fi rst, because the poem itself is a small work, a kind of miniature fi nger exercise in which Pound (as was his habit) impersonates a speaker from an earlier era; second, because in its sonnet form and archaic diction (such as “hath” and “aye” [ll. 3, 11]) the poem harks back to a previous historical period and an ancient poetic style; and third, because the title suggests the presumably virginal woman herself, so that the poem becomes a song about a woman of virginal purity. The poem exemplifies Pound’s exploration by imitation of whole swaths of literary history; here he adopts the style, tone, diction, mentality, and mannerisms (as well as one of the favorite forms) of a Renaissance poet. His sonnet rhymes abba / cddc / efg / efg—a variation on the standard Petrarchan form (in which the fi rst eight lines would normally rhyme as follows: abba / abba). As in most Petrarchan sonnets, there is an emphatic division between the octave (the fi rst eight lines) and the sestet (the last six); the transition is signaled in Pound’s poem by the repetition of “No, no!” at the beginnings of lines 1 and 9. In addition, the imagery of seasons and plant life in the last six lines helps set off that section of the poem from the rest of the work. The imagery of the fi rst eight lines (especially the references to “sheath[s]” and “sheath[ing]”; [ll. 2, 8]) seems less clear than the imagery of the sestet, sometimes making the meaning of the octave difficult to follow. On the whole, however, the poem shows Pound as a skillful technician, particularly in his use of meter. In many lines (such as ll. 2, 5, 7–8, and 14) he takes full and obvious advantage of iambic rhythm (in which an unaccented syllable precedes an accented one); this solid iambic base allows him to play expert variations, as in the use of spondees (two heavily accented syllables) at the start of lines 1 and 9, or in his use of trochaic substitutions (where an accented syllable precedes an accented one, as at the beginning of line 4). Pound, in other words, plays with his words much as a master performer might manipulate a virginal’s keys, and indeed one of the most technically daring aspects of the sonnet is the unusual music that ends each line. Every single line concludes (appropriately enough, in view of the subject of the poem) with a feminine

rhyme—that is, with a rhyme in which the fi nal syllable of each rhymed word is unstressed. The decision to use so many feminine rhymes in one poem was typical of Pound’s poetic daring; the proliferation of such rhymes makes the poem sound somewhat mannered and old-fashioned—which was, of course, precisely the effect he was seeking.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Pound’s use of the sonnet form in this work with its use in various poems by Claude McKay (such as “The Lynching,” “If We Must Die,” “Outcast,” and many others). Discuss the poems in terms of theme, tone, style, diction, and purpose. How is McKay’s choice of the sonnet form both ironic and appropriate in view of the history of sonnet writing in English? How does Pound’s sonnet represent only one aspect of that history (the aspect that focuses on romantic love)? 2. Discuss the treatment of love in this poem and in Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.” In particular, pay attention to such matters as point of view, the relationship between speaker and addressee, the use of natural imagery, and the role of sexual contact or relations. Do you prefer one poem to the other? If so, explain why in specific detail. 3. What is the meaning of “spoil my sheath” (l. 2)? Why do you think Pound used that phrase rather than something more clear and simple? Why does he use the verb hath rather than has? Aside from the title of the poem, what other indications are there that the speaker is from an earlier time? How are the attitudes he expresses, as well as the language he uses, typical of an earlier era? Whom do you think he is addressing?

“In a Station of the Metro” (1913, 1916) In this extremely brief but highly influential poem, the speaker compares the appearance of random faces in a packed subway station in Paris to the appearance of flower petals against a backdrop of the dark wet bark of a tree.

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This poem is one of the most famous of all the texts associated with imagism—the phrase invented by Pound to describe the kind of precise, crisp, clear, and highly visual poetry he and several of his friends were trying to achieve in the years preceding and following World War I. The brevity of the poem contributes to its impact: The work records and then re-creates a vivid mental impression, and then it ends. If the poem were longer, it would be less effective, since elaboration would ruin the effect of transience—of beauty suddenly glimpsed and then just as suddenly gone. It is both ironic and appropriate that the poem is set at a subway “station,” since that word implies a place of stasis, a place where movement ceases. The irony of this setting is that the “metro” itself is a place whose whole purpose is devoted to movement. The appropriateness of the setting, however, is that the poem itself freezes a moment in time. It provides a kind of impressionistic snapshot of an instant glance that is now preserved forever. Yet the setting also seems ironic because we do not normally think of a busy, noisy, crowded urban transportation hub as a place where beauty is likely to present itself. That, of course, is part of Pound’s point: Beauty can be found anywhere if an observer is alert enough to see it. The poem is full of implied opposites. These include not only the station (associated with stasis) and the metro (associated with movement) but also the urban, man-made setting of the metro and the rural, natural language of petals and trees. Such oppositions also include the juxtaposition of individual faces and the impersonal “crowd,” as well as the juxtaposition of the soft, light (or colorful) petals and the hard, dark wood. Simple, plain, monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon words are juxtaposed with the Latinate term apparition, while the fi rst line depicts the fact the speaker wants to convey, even as the second line provides the metaphor that communicates his response to that fact. However, just as the poem is complexly and subtly structured, so its individual words are precisely chosen. The term apparition, for instance, not only means “appearance” but also connotes a startling or unexpected appearance, just as it likewise suggests the appearance of ghostly or supernatural beings, thus creat-

ing an impression of the people briefly glimpsed in the subway as transient phantoms. Meanwhile, the word these creates a sense of immediacy; it makes readers feel almost present at the act of seeing, as if we are almost cowitnesses rather than a distant audience to whom the vision is later recalled. The vowel of the word crowd is echoed later in the word bough, so that the poem achieves a kind of rhyme without really rhyming. In all these ways, then, the poem is a skillful, nuanced work of art. Its simplicity is deceptive; it is a fi nely carved miniature whose subtleties become ever more apparent the more closely it is examined.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” and/or “This Is Just to Say.” How are the poems similar in technique, diction, purpose, and effect? Are there any significant differences, such as in structure or point of view? 2. How is this work similar to and/or different from WALLACE STEVENS’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”? What similarities are there in diction, structure, and tone, and how are the works different in purpose and final effect? 3. Scan the meter of this poem: Which syllables are accented, and which are not? What patterns do you detect? How does the fi rst line differ metrically from the second? Why does Pound contrast the meters of the two lines so strikingly? What effects does he thereby achieve?

“A Pact” (1913, 1916) The speaker (presumably Pound himself) offers a “pact” (or “truce” in the poem’s fi rst version) to Walt Whitman, the great innovative American poet of the 19th century. For a long time the speaker has detested Whitman as one might detest a stubborn father, but now the speaker feels mature enough to appreciate Whitman’s genuine contributions to American poetry without feeling any impulse to imitate them slavishly. He can assimilate and appropriate Whitman’s innovations while also

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trying to improve upon them and advance beyond them. This poem speaks in the direct, plain, brusque, and colloquial manner that Pound often favored both in his poetry and in his prose. Significantly enough, the first word is I, and this emphasis on the self is true of four of the poem’s nine lines. Despite his well-known generosity, Pound was usually at the very center of his own mental universe, and so it is not surprising that the poem focuses at least as much on him as on Whitman. Pound saw Whitman as a poet who, as did Pound himself, sought something new, daring, and different in the history of his country’s often conventional literature. He recognized that Whitman had been a great revolutionary and innovator, and he recognized that many of Whitman’s innovations had pointed in his own direction—that is, in the direction of plain speech, freedom from ossified tradition in form and phrasing, and liberty in breadth of subject matter. By the time Pound was writing, however, Whitman had himself become a part of the acknowledged literary tradition in America. Pound, then, found himself in the paradoxical position of having to admit that Whitman had once been a revolutionary, even as he recognized that Whitman’s influence could now seem suffocating. In this poem Pound makes his peace with his great predecessor: He concedes that Whitman has done important work because he “broke the new wood” (i.e., cleared the forest for habitation), but this activity, however essential, was also somewhat crude, requiring more brawn than any deep intelligence. In Pound’s view, however, “Now is the time for carving” (l. 7): In other words, the time has arrived for more subtle, artful, skillful writing than Whitman himself produced. It is a measure of Pound’s maturity and self-confidence that he no longer feels threatened by Whitman. He thus offers Whitman a “pact”—a word that in its etymology (or history of development) connotes not only an agreement but also a fixing, a fastening, a process of making something solid, and a process of creating peace (from the Latin word pax). Fittingly, Pound addresses his great predecessor in precisely the kind of abrupt, straightforward language that Whitman himself favored and could

appreciate. He uses “unpoetical” language (such as “pig-headed” [l. 4])—undignified language of the sort that Whitman himself had helped make acceptable. With his typical self-confidence, Pound addresses Whitman man to man, as an equal. The line lengths of the poem are unpredictable, and the poem lacks rhyme—traits that Whitman himself could appreciate. Pound, as had Whitman, speaks here as a literary democrat, and he pays tribute to Whitman not only in what he says but also in his very manner of saying it. Significantly, a poem that began with the word I ends with the word us, while the word commerce implies a freely chosen exchange of things of value in which each party profits.

For Discussion or Writing 1. How is Pound’s poem relevant to the ideas expressed in T. S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in which Eliot discusses the relations between modern poets and their predecessors? How, in their own creative writings, did Pound and Eliot try to assimilate the work of earlier writers, especially through such techniques as allusion and citation? 2. Compare and contrast Pound’s poem with Mark Twain’s famous essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” How are the poem and the essay similar in basic intent, and how do they differ in approach, style, and tone? 3. Discuss the use of pronouns in this poem, especially the very fi rst and the very last. What kind of progression is there in the use of such words? How, in the use of line lengths and in the overall brevity of the poem, does Pound still assert his independence from the kind of writing we typically associate with Whitman? What does this poem imply about Pound’s view of poetic tradition and of the relationship of newer poets to their predecessors?

“The Rest” (1913, 1916) The speaker of this poem (presumably Pound himself) addresses the fellow artists he has left behind in his own country (presumably America); he

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speaks from his present perspective as an expatriate or exile. He expresses pity for them because of the obstacles, discouragements, and oppressions they face, even as he praises their integrity and intelligence. He ends the poem by offering himself as an example of an artist who has persisted despite discouragements and who has achieved. In his typically excited, prophetic, and even somewhat melodramatic fashion, Pound presents himself as a survivor who has managed to escape the oppressive conditions of an America hostile to true art. However, although he criticizes most of his fellow citizens, he still thinks of himself as a patriot: He still considers the United States his own country (l. 1), and he definitely sees its best artists as its best hope for national redemption and renewal. The poem is addressed primarily to those artists and is intended to give them heart, but it also addresses indirectly the country at large, implicitly pleading with Americans to value properly their most creative and insightful minds. The double exclamation of O at the beginning of the first two lines implies a multitude of emotions, including pity, anger, frustration, concern, and perhaps even a touch of fear for the ultimate fate of the brave remnant of artists; they are left behind in an America that seems alternately ignorant of, indifferent to, and even hostile toward them. These “enslaved” artists (surely a histrionic adjective) are “lost in the villages”: That final word suggests not the ideally comforting community of small towns but rather a sense of isolation and provincialism—the narrow confines of a limited and fundamentally parochial culture (ll. 2, 4). These artists are not simply isolated but are “mistrusted” (this word is repeated twice: ll. 5, 16); they are “spoken-against” and even “Hated” (ll. 5, 16). Yet despite all the obstacles and hostility they face, the best American artists remain true to themselves (and thus, ironically, also true to their country’s best ideals); they refuse to wear themselves out by “persisting to successes” in the conventional sense of that term (i.e., financial or material success). Instead, they seek a deeper, more satisfying, more spiritual success by remaining devoted to their art. Moreover, just as these artists reject the tempting allure of American commercialism, so they also reject the conventional role of the successful artist

in America: They refuse merely to repeat and imitate what is already acceptable; they refuse to lapse into the mere “reiteration” that might win them popular approval (l. 11). These artists, after all, are men and women who have it within them to “know at first hand” (l. 14)—that is, to think and feel for themselves rather than conforming to approved, traditional habits of thought and expression. In the final stanza, Pound urges them not to “take heart” but (significantly) to “Take thought” (italics added; l. 17), and he ends by presenting himself as someone who has “weathered the storm” and “beaten out my exile” (ll. 18–19). If the reference to “weather[ing] the storm” seems, ironically, somewhat conventional and pedestrian, the final line seems more original and fresh, and clearly Pound sees himself as the best hope of the best hope—that is, as an artist who has it in him to inspire not only his fellow artists but his nation at large. The poem began by exclaiming, “O . . . / O” (ll. 1–2); it ends by emphasizing “I . . . / I” (ll. 18–19). Ultimately Pound assumes the simultaneous roles of both prophet and savior.

For Discussion or Writing 1. How do early poems such as this one already possibly foreshadow Pound’s later involvement with fascism? What does a poem like this imply about his attitudes toward democracy, the “common people,” and the ideal role of artists in the life of a nation? After World War II Pound was diagnosed as suffering from paranoia; are there already hints of paranoia here? 2. How does Pound’s view of small-town America relate to the view offered by THORNTON WILDER in his play Our Town? How does Wilder try to protect his play against possible charges of offering a sentimental view of an American village? Is Pound’s poem sentimental in its own ways?

“The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” (1915) The speaker is a young Chinese woman (16 or, at most, 17 years of age) who is writing to her absent husband, who is probably not much older. As

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young children they innocently played together; when she was 14, they were married, and her initial attitude was one of reserve; by the time she was 15 she had fallen deeply in love with her husband; when she was 16, he left on a trip (presumably connected with business). Now she writes to suggest how much she misses him and how eagerly she looks forward to his return. This poem, adapted by Pound from an original by the Chinese poet Li Po (701–762), who was known in Japan as Rihaku, exemplifies Pound’s interest in the literature of an enormous range of nations, cultures, languages, and eras. Pound was both well and widely read to an enormous degree, but behind his reading was always the hope that he could use his massive learning to breathe new life into the Englishlanguage poetry of his own day, which he considered somewhat ossified and stale. His goal as a writer was always to “make it new” (the title of a 1935 collection of his essays), even if “making new” meant returning to ancient examples. Pound himself recognized that the original Chinese poem he worked with here was similar to the dramatic monologues of the English poet Robert Browning, but the delicacy, subtlety, and gentleness of the present work almost seem in a class of their own. The use of indirection and implication, of understated symbolism and restrained imagery, makes this work an altogether different kind of reading experience than such other poems by Pound as “A Pact” or “The Rest.” The opening line of the present work, for instance, does not state a specific age for the young woman; instead, the line implies her youth by referring to the style of her haircut. The childish activities described in the opening lines seem both enchantingly exotic and deeply familiar, and indeed the entire poem (although set in the China of centuries past) deals with experiences and feelings with which all humans can deeply identify. The language of the poem is simple, clear, plain, and precise. The statements are direct, but they are also often heavy with implication. The sudden shift from childhood to marriage, for instance, in line 7 suggests that the marriage was probably arranged rather than freely chosen; the mere fact that the girl refers to her slightly older husband as “My Lord” suggests a rig-

idly hierarchical and patriarchal society. Obviously, however, this couple have by now fallen deeply in love, and indeed one of the most beautiful things about the poem is the sense that they both perform their duties and behave as expected, while feeling so much more than simply a dutiful connection. At fi rst the woman seems shy, perhaps even sexually reticent, but just as the transformation from girlhood to marriage was sudden, so is the transformation from marriage to love and even to sexual fulfi llment (ll. 11–14). By the end of the fi rst half of the poem, the couple have bonded completely, but once again a sudden shift takes place: In the very middle line 15 the husband’s departure is described, and in the ensuing stanza Pound uses some of his most effectively evocative language. The husband has gone to (or by way of) “the river of swirling eddies” (l. 16), phrasing that surely implies the wife’s own disorientation and unsettled mind and emotions; similarly, when she thinks of his long absence she remarks, “The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead” (l. 18). The monkeys, of course, are not sorrowful; it is she, in her pain, who interprets their noise as expressing sadness. It is not only the woman, however, who feels the pain of separation: When the husband left, he “dragged [his] feet when [he] went out” (l. 19). The fi nal stanza is full of imagery of decay, transience, and mutability: Moss grows, autumn leaves fall, and even though the butterfl ies are still paired (unlike the speaker and her husband), they, too, age. In the fi nal lines, however, the speaker does not recall the happy past or mourn the lonely present but instead anticipates a joyous reunion; in the poem’s fi nal words she is ready to become active—to meet her beloved as he returns. The poem ends, however, not on a note of sentimental melodrama but with practical plans and a precise geographical fact. In this way as in so many others, Pound not only depicts delicate restraint—he enacts it.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read this work alongside John Donne’s famous poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” How are the works comparable in “plot” and theme? How are they different in point of view,

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imagery, and symbolism? What does each work imply about the role of women in marriage? 2. Compare and contrast this work with William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Young Housewife.” Discuss such matters as mood, point of view, imagery, setting, and tone. What does each poem imply about the role of wife? 3. How and why is the opening line effective as a way of indicating the young wife’s youth? Why did she not just mention a specific age? How does the third line already indicate a great deal about the setting of the poem? How and why is line 6 important in helping to prepare for later changes in the poem? Discuss the effectiveness of the arrangement of words in 7. In general, discuss the many specific aspects of artistry that make this an effective poem.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON POUND AND HIS WORK 1. Choose any one of the numerous long individual “cantos” Pound composed and compare and contrast that work with one of more of his shorter poems. How are the works comparable or distinct in themes, style, structure, and methods? How do the early short poems anticipate or foreshadow one of the later works in style and/ or substance? In what ways are the earlier works more “accessible” to a wider audience than is often true of the later poems? 2. Is it necessary to agree with a poet’s politics in order to value his art? Assume that you were a member of the Bollingen Prize committee after World War II; assume that you found Pound’s poetry important but were troubled by his fascistic politics. Would you have voted to give the Bollingen award? Why or why not? Can you think of a work by Pound or some other writer that you fi nd politically (or perhaps religiously) unappealing but that you still consider a great work of art? Can you think of a work (by Pound or some other writer) that appeals to you politically or ideologically or religiously but that seems ineffective as a piece of writing?

3. Choose one of Pound’s “translations” (such as “The Seafarer” or “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” and then fi nd at least one (preferably more) other translation of the original work. How does Pound’s “translation” compare with the other(s) you found? Which translation is most effective in terms of such matters as clarity, vividness, rhetorical force, and poetic skill? 4. Study Pound’s life and then discuss his relationship with some other modern writer, such as H. D., William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, or Ernest Hemingway. In what ways was the influence of Pound and the other writer mutual? In other words, what impact did Pound have on the other author’s works, and what impact did the other author have on Pound’s writing? How was the relationship complex or ambivalent? 5. Track down an edition of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land that shows and explains how Pound radically edited the poem before it was fi rst published. How and why did Pound change the poem? Discuss some of his cuts and changes, and try to explain how they reflect Pound’s own ideas about the purposes and methods of effective literary art. 6. Read one of Pound’s various critical works (such as The Spirit of Romance, ABC of Reading, Make It New, or Literary Essays), and then discuss one or more of his own poems in relation to one or more of his writings about literature. Try to compare and contrast an essay and poem from roughly the same period. How does a specific poem illustrate or exemplify Pound’s theoretical or critical ideas? Are there any contradictions between Pound’s theories and his practice? Which other poets, and which other specific works by other modern writers, did Pound admire, and why? 7. Choose one work by Pound that you fi nd especially appealing and one work by him that you consider particularly unappealing. Try to explain your reactions to both works, being careful to cite specific details. To what extent are your reactions purely subjective? To what extent do you think they can be justified as something other than entirely personal responses?

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8. Read one or more of Pound’s political or cultural writings (such as ABC of Economics, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, If This Be Treason, or Impact: Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American Civilization), and then discuss one or more of his poems (preferably written at around the same time) in light of one of those prose works. How are the prose work and the poem(s) relevant to one another in such matters as themes, style, purpose, and tone? 9. Choose a favorite work by Pound, and then discuss the ways in which that work has been analyzed and interpreted by five or more critics. Which analysis or interpretation do you fi nd most helpful or convincing, and why? How does each critic muster evidence to support his or her particular reading of the poem? On what points do the critics agree and/or disagree? Is there any way to resolve their differences, or are the disagreements entirely a matter of personal opinion? 10. Choose an artist in some other medium (such as music, painting, sculpture, or the novel) who reminds you most of Pound in terms of values, goals, styles, methods, and achievements, and then compare and contrast their works. For instance, in what ways (if any) does Pound remind you of Picasso or Stravinsky or Joyce or Brancusi? What contacts, if any, existed between them? What comments, if any, did they have on each other’s work? How are they comparable figures in the history of their own art forms?

WORKS CITED

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Ackroyd, Peter. Ezra Pound. London: Thames and Hudson, 1980. Alexander, Michael. The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Bell, Ian F., ed. Ezra Pound: Tactics for Reading. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982. Espey, John. “Ezra Pound.” In Sixteen Modern American Authors: A Survey of Research and Criticism, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 445–471. New York: Norton, 1973. ———. “Ezra Pound.” In Sixteen Modern American Authors. Vol. 2. A Survey of Research and Criticism since 1972, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 519–597. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990. Froula, Christine. A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems. N.p.: New Directions, 1982. Nadel, Ira B., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Nelson, Cary. “Modern American Poetry: Ezra Pound.” Available online. URL: http://www.english.illinois. edu/maps/poets/m_r/pound/pound.htm. Accessed April 7, 2009. Pound, Ezra. Poems and Translations. Edited by Richard Sieburth. New York: Library of America, 2003. Sieburth, Richard. “Chronology.” In Poems and Translations. By Ezra Pound. New York: Library of America, 2003. Wilson, Peter. A Preface to Ezra Pound. London: Longman, 1997.

Robert C. Evans

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)

If a man’s work is good for anything it will find a way to those who read it; and if it isn’t it won’t. (Selected Letters 41)

E

dwin Arlington Robinson is widely considered one of the most important American poets of the early 20th century, although interest in his work has diminished greatly in recent decades. In his early years he faced frustration, disappointment, poverty, and family tragedy; by the end of his life he had achieved great recognition and acclaim. Ironically, his early sufferings may have benefited his writing by contributing to his distinctive themes and tone, while his later success may have hurt his work by allowing him to write long, somewhat diffuse poems—poems often considered far less successful than his earlier, briefer lyrics. Robinson mastered many traditional poetic forms (especially the sonnet), and he frequently employed rhyme and conventional meters; all these traits can make his work seem old-fashioned when compared to the writings of such later poets as T. S. ELIOT or EZR A POUND. At the same time, he often used plain, unadorned diction and wrote about “unpoetic” topics in ways that clearly distinguish his works from the mannered, precious artificiality of much earlier verse. In some ways, then, he is one of the fi rst “modern” American poets, while in other ways his roots are fi rmly in the 19th century. Robinson was born in Head Tide, Maine, but spent most of his early life in nearby Gardiner, a town on which he later modeled a fictional village (“Tilbury”) in which he set many poems. His father was a successful businessman, his mother was fairly

cultured, and both parents had deep roots in New England. One brother became a doctor; another was trained for business. Edwin, whose interest in poetry was strong from an early age, was able to study at Harvard for two years before his family suffered in an economic downturn in 1893. Robinson’s father had died the year before; meanwhile, Dean, the brother who had become a doctor, had also become a drug addict and eventually committed suicide; then in 1896 Robinson’s mother died of a highly infectious disease. That same year saw the publication of his fi rst book of lyrics, The Torrent and the Night Before, which was printed at his own expense; the same was true of his next book, Children of the Night (1897), which contains altered versions of many earlier poems. Neither book succeeded, either critically or financially, although both contained some of his most justly admired works, including “Luke Havergal,” “Richard Cory,” and “Credo.” Robinson, now living mainly in New York City, was fi nancially badly off and increasingly tempted by alcohol. In 1902 his collection Captain Craig was printed but met with little success. The title poem, in blank verse, describes an eccentric, humorous, and stoic failure. Other poems in the volume (such as “Isaac and Archibald” and “The Book of Annandale”) also depict distinctive characters, as do many of Robinson’s later writings. In 1903 and 1904 Robinson was employed as a time checker during the construction of New

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York’s fi rst subway, and his mood was increasingly gloomy. His fortunes improved, however, in 1905, when President Theodore Roosevelt happened to read The Children of the Night, which had been shown to him by his son. Roosevelt (who sometimes shared Robinson’s poems at cabinet meetings) not only published a favorable assessment of the book but also arranged for Robinson to receive a government job, which he held until Roosevelt left office in 1909. Finally relieved of fi nancial pressure, Robinson worked on two plays (Van Zorn, a failed comedy, and The Porcupine, a more successful tragedy), but neither work made much of a mark. In 1910 he published a third volume of poems (The Town down the River), which contained “Miniver Cheevy” as well as other notable works. In 1911 he spent his fi rst summer at the MacDowell artists’ colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire—a place he found so appealing that he returned for 23 successive summer visits. It was not until 1916, however, that he achieved his fi rst major success, with the publication of a new book of poems titled The Man against the Sky. Among notable works printed there are “Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford” and especially “Eros Turannos,” regarded by many commentators as among Robinson’s very fi nest poems. Critics now began to pay increasingly favorable attention to his work, and from 1917 to 1922 he even began receiving fi nancial gifts from anonymous admirers. Also in 1917 Merlin, the fi rst of a trilogy of long narrative poems updating the legends surrounding King Arthur, was published. (Similar works included Lancelot [1920] and the enormously successful Tristram [1927]). In 1919 Robinson’s 50th birthday was commemorated by the publication, in the New York Times Book Review, of a host of favorable commentaries on his career, while 1920 saw a new book of lyrics (The Three Taverns, including a number of dramatic monologues and dialogues), followed in 1921 by Avon’s Harvest. The title poem describes Avon’s macabre, obsessive memories of an acquaintance from his youth—memories that eventually lead to Avon’s bizarre death. The volume also contains such noteworthy poems as “Mr. Flood’s Party” and “Rembrandt to Rembrandt.” Most significantly

in 1921 Robinson’s Collected Poems appeared. At nearly 600 pages, this book contains most of the nine volumes of verse he had released until that point, and it won him the very fi rst Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Robinson had now obviously arrived quite fi rmly on the national literary scene; many (though hardly all) informed readers regarded him as the best American poet then writing. And write he did. Unmarried, childless, and mostly uninterested in the literary limelight, Robinson devoted himself relentlessly to his art. In his last decade or so he turned out one book after another, often writing quickly (some would say lazily), in the process producing most of the long narrative poems that many readers consider far less effective than his earlier lyrics. In 1923, for instance, he issued Roman Bartholow, which is sometimes regarded as his least appealing work but is typical in its focus on the complexities of romance and a suicidal character. More successful was The Man Who Died Twice (1924), another narrative, this time focusing on a failed composer, for which Robinson won his second Pulitzer. Dionysus in Doubt (1925) is a collection of lyrics (including, notably, the title work and such other important poems as “Karma” and “Maya”), while Tristram (1927), the fi nal volume in the Arthurian trilogy, was a stunning commercial and critical triumph. Endorsed by a major book club, it sold nearly 60,000 copies in its fi rst year, and it also won Robinson (remarkably) a third Pulitzer Prize. The work marks the high point of Robinson’s public career, although he continued to produce books almost yearly for the rest of his life. In 1929, for instance, he published Cavender’s House, which delves into the psychology of a husband who slays his wife; in 1930 he issued The Glory of the Nightingales, which describes the complex, murderous relations between two men. Matthias at the Door (1931) depicts, in transcendental terms, the relations between the title character and a symbolic rock formation, while Nicodemus (1932) describes various real or legendary personalities. In Talifer (1933) Robinson attempts a comic depiction of romance involving two couples, while Amaranth (1934) presents a talentless painter who neverthe-


less achieves self-understanding. Finally, in 1935, Robinson (although dying of cancer) was nevertheless hard at work putting the fi nishing touches on his fi nal book, King Jasper, which seems to have been inspired by the Great Depression of 1929 and the rise to power of Franklin Roosevelt. The poem can be read as an economic allegory, although it (along with much of Robinson’s later verse) is in fact seldom read in any way today. It seems fitting, however, that Robertson was working almost until the moment he died. As Hoyt C. Franchere has written, Robinson’s “business was the writing of poetry. His poetry was concerned almost exclusively with people: not so much with what these people did but with what they thought and how and why. His own quiet way of living, his humility, his genuine warmth, his capacity for friendship, his large humor—all are exemplary” (147). Robinson died as a famous and respected man, but interest in his work declined sharply in the second half of the 20th century. His traditionalism proved unappealing to many later, younger writers, while the long poems on which he expended so much time during the height of his fame have done little to enhance his subsequent reputation. Nevertheless, Robinson remains a highly significant writer, not only because he helped usher in a whole new tone in American poetry (a tone that was often dry, laconic, witty, ironic, understated, and plain-spoken), but also because his poetry had a distinctive focus on often everyday characters facing the trials and tribulations of everyday life. These characters often fail in worldly terms while sometimes succeeding in other respects, whether by gaining in self-understanding or simply enduring the challenges they confront. Alienation (that modern buzzword) is Robinson’s special theme, and indeed James Dickey (a later admirer and himself a significant poet) has written that no poet ever understood loneliness or separateness better than Robinson or knew the self-consuming furnace that the brain can become in isolation, the suicidal hellishness of it, doomed as it is to feed on itself in answerless frustration, fated to this condition by the accident of human

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birth, which carries with it the hunger for certainty and the intolerable load of personal recollections. He understood loneliness in all its many forms and depths and was thus less interested in its conventional poetic aspects than he was in the loneliness of the man in the crowd, or alone with his thoughts of the dead, or feeling at some unforeseen time the metaphysical loneliness, the angst, of being “lost among the stars,” or becoming aware of the solitude that resides in comfort and in the affection of friend and family—that desperation at the heart of what is called happiness. . . . The acceptance of the fact that there is no way, that there is nothing to do about the sadness of most human beings when they are alone or speaking to others as if to themselves, that there is nothing to offer them but recognition, sympathy, compassion, deepens Robinson’s best poems until we sense in them something other than art. A thing inside us is likely to shift from where it was, and our world view to change, though perhaps only slightly, toward a darker, deeper perspective. (86)

Any poet who wrote as well as Robinson often did on so many central concerns of the human experience is unlikely ever to be forgotten. Out of the pain of his own life and the lives he saw around him, he managed to produce a handful of truly memorable lyrics that will surely be read and admired for as long as poetry itself survives.

“Credo” (1896) The title, which literally means “I believe” in Latin, refers to a creed or system of beliefs. Ironically, however, the speaker here seems at fi rst to deny the existence of any such system; implying instead an absence of any obvious source of significance, he almost welcomes death. Nevertheless, fi nally the speaker asserts that a “far-sent message” does indeed give existence meaning, and he ends by proclaiming “the coming glory of the Light!” (l. 14).


In its conclusion (at least) this is an unusually and overtly affi rmative poem by Robinson, although he always claimed that despite his apparent surface pessimism he was an idealist or optimist at heart. The poem resembles his other writings in its basically plain, clear, simple phrasing; in its initial emphasis on loss and darkness; and in its functional use of generally uncomplicated imagery of sight and sound. The poem also displays Robinson’s mastery of the sonnet form—one of the most respected, but also one of the most overused and abused, of all poetic types. Robinson, moreover, here chooses an especially difficult sonnet pattern: He uses the so-called Petrarchan form, in which the standard 14 lines are divided into an eight-line octave followed by a six-line sestet. Petrarchan octaves are especially challenging to write in English because they use only two rhyme sounds, structured abbaabba. The sestet, which introduces new rhyme sounds, is also usually more flexible in structure than the octave; in the present case, Robinson chooses a cdecde rhyme scheme. In “Credo,” the octave is one long sentence, as is the sestet. However, while the sestet’s fi rst three lines at fi rst seem simply to restate the dark, somewhat pessimistic argument of the octave, the last three lines point the work in an entirely new, emphatically affi rmative, direction. Robinson thus uses form to reinforce meaning. The final line of the sonnet completely reverses the impact of the poem’s opening assertion, although it must be confessed that the speaker provides little specific, solid evidence to make us share his own final (and somewhat abrupt) belief in the “coming glory of the Light” (l. 14). That claim risks seeming a bit wishful rather than anything the poem convincingly proves.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Imagine that Robinson chose to end this poem on a less optimistic note. Rewrite the fi nal three lines in a way that would be typical of Robinson’s apparent pessimism in other works. How does the overall structure of this poem (and especially its conclusion) compare and contrast with that of Robinson’s “Richard Cory”? 2. Are there any lines in this poem that strike you as either particularly effective or particu-

larly ineffective? Which lines are they, and how would you justify your opinion of them? 3. Compare and contrast this poem with John Donne’s sonnet “Death Be Not Proud.” Which of the poems is more affi rmative, and why? Which of the poems is more coherent, and why?

“The House on the Hill” (1896) In this brief, simple, but evocative poem, an unidentified speaker (who nonetheless seems to speak for a larger group) describes an empty house whose former inhabitants have departed, leaving the residence “shut and still” (l. 2)—a desolate place through which winds now “blow bleak and shrill” (l. 5). Although no one at present can say anything good or bad about the former inhabitants, people nevertheless continue to visit the house, even though the speaker confesses that any words spent describing it are “wasted” (l. 14) and that “There is nothing more to say” (ll. 3, 6, 9, 15, 18). However, the fact that the speaker makes this assertion in five separate lines suggests that he is, in some ways, haunted by this house and that he hopes to haunt his readers, too. This poem is representative of Robinson’s work both in its phrasing and in its subject. As so often in his writing, loss is a major theme: The house is no longer a home, and its former residents have vanished. The phrasing is deliberately monotonous, especially in its rhymes, which revolve around merely two different sounds; here as in other poems, Robinson uses repetition with great impact, creating an effect of paralysis, lassitude, and apathy. The speaker seems almost as listless and lifeless as the scene he describes. The diction is plain and simple; few words have more than one syllable, and those that are longer tend to be depressing (including “nothing” [ll. 3, 6, 9, 15,18]; “broken” [l. 4]; “sunken” [l. 11]; “wasted” [l. 14]; “decay” [l. 16]; and “away” [l. 18]). The speaker makes no effort to ascribe any grand, sweeping significance to the scene he describes, although clearly the poem symbolizes Robinson’s view of everyday life as often dreary, frustrating, and


perhaps even meaningless. The speaker, however, merely states facts as he sees them; as so often in Robinson’s works, understatement and reticence are major features of this poem. The opening word (They) is both precise and vague, and indeed vagueness is used effectively throughout. The former residents of the house have “all gone away” (l. 1), but we are never told why or how. Have they simply moved? Have they died? The speaker never says, and indeed he paradoxically insists—again and again—that “There is nothing more to say,” thereby crafting a poem out of his repeated confession that no poem is necessary and that no account of his subject can be adequate. As is common in Robinson’s works, the speaker asks questions without ever attempting to provide clear answers (“Why is it that we stray / Around that sunken sill?” [ll. 10–11]); the subject of the poem is a mystery and the tone of the poem is mysterious. The sense of “ruin and decay” (l. 16]) mentioned in the fi nal stanza is typical of Robinson’s verse, and the same is true of the craftsmanship with which the fi nal stanza (now consisting of four lines rather than the expected three) ties everything together, including the poem’s title, its main themes, and the refrains from all the earlier stanzas.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this poem with Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher.” How are the works similar in tone, symbolism, and imagery? Contrast the endings of the two works; which is more dramatic, and why? 2. Compare and contrast this poem with the ancient Anglo-Saxon lyric “The Ruin,” particularly in terms of symbolism, imagery, and diction. How are the poems alike in theme and fi nal effect? Why and how do both works use buildings as symbols? 3. What (if anything) do you think the house and its departed inhabitants symbolize? In what way are the themes of the poem relevant to the lives of nearly all humans? Why does Robinson want to create a sense of mystery, and how does he achieve that effect?

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“Luke Havergal” (1896) A voice from “Out of a grave” (l. 17) speaks to the mournful title character, whose loved one has apparently died. The voice tells Havergal that if he goes to a mysterious “western gate” (l. 1), he will be able to hear the woman’s voice among the sounds of falling leaves, and the voice from the grave even seems to insinuate that the only way for Havergal to reunite with his beloved is by joining her in death, perhaps through suicide. There is (the voice assures Havergal) just “one way to where she is”; although that way is “Bitter,” it is “one that faith can never miss” (ll. 21–22). This poem is one of Robinson’s most admired works; President Theodore Roosevelt, in particular, thought so highly of it that it was one reason he was moved to help Robinson fi nd a government job. Roosevelt confessed, however, that although he found the poem effective, he was not quite sure precisely what it meant, and many subsequent readers have agreed. Certainly the poem creates an air of intriguing ambiguity that seems perfectly appropriate to its literally haunting subject matter. Certainly, too, the poem is one of Robinson’s most typical works, both in themes and in style. His poetry often concentrates, for instance, on particular people, and especially people in pain, and surely Havergal is one of these. These characters are often lonely and isolated and have often suffered some profound loss, and Luke qualifies on all these counts. The tone of many of Robinson’s poems is dark and desolate, and suicide is a frequent topic. Robinson’s language is often plain and straightforward (as is true here), and when he does use imagery, he tends to use it symbolically, as is clearly the case in “Luke Havergal.” Repetition is often a major feature of Robinson’s style, and nowhere is this trait more obvious than here, not only in the repeated images of gate, wall, wind, and leaves, but also in the way the fi rst line of each stanza is repeated in each seventh line, and then in the way each eighth line echoes the last few words of the line before it. Robinson was a master of stanzaic form, and in this poem he strikingly combines rhyme and meter to reinforce meaning powerfully. Each stanza rhymes in an aabbaaaa pattern, thus


giving the poem an almost claustrophobic insistence—an effect amplified by the repetition used in each stanza’s brief fi nal phrase. In each of the four stanzas, the fi rst seven lines consist of 10 syllables, while the abrupt eighth line is all the more emphatic by using only four syllables. In another unusual move, Robinson makes sure that each fi rst syllable of each stanza is heavily accented. In all these respects this poem (like many of his works) is very carefully and lovingly crafted. Here as in so many works by Robinson, nature provides no consolation to suffering humans, and religious consolation is notable mainly by its absence. Indeed, the only explicit reference to God seems to suggest a model for possible self-destruction (“God slays Himself in every leaf that fl ies” [l. 13]), and the only reference to “faith” (l. 22) also seems to associate that word with suicide (an act forbidden by conventional Christianity). The “western gate” toward which the ghostly voice of the poem repeatedly urges Havergal clearly seems linked with death; it seems a place of transition that is forbidding and perhaps also forbidden. In an earlier era the poem’s seductive voice would clearly have been associated with a Satanic tempter. It is typical of Robinson, however, that he never condemns the voice; nor indeed does he pass any obvious judgment at all. He merely lets the voice speak and lets each reader judge for himself or herself what to make of the dark counsel it offers.

For Discussion or Writing 1. How is this poem similar, in theme and phrasing, to such other classic works by Robinson as “Richard Cory” and “Eros Turannos”? Discuss the tones of the two works and the sense they convey of mystery and ambiguity. 2. Compare and contrast this poem with Robinson’s “Mr. Flood’s Party.” How do they contrast in tone, point of view, and final effect? In what ways is isolation an important theme in both works? 3. Compare and contrast this poem, in theme and style, with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” How do both poems create and sustain an air of ambiguity? How are the voices of the two works similar and/or different?

4. Do some research into Robinson’s attitudes toward religion and relate those attitudes to this poem. How were Robinson’s views typical of those of his era? What historical factors influenced his thinking about religion? 5. What do you think Robinson meant by the phrase “hell is more than half of paradise”? Why does he not make the meaning of the phrase more simple and clear? What is the effect of making its meaning suggestive rather than obvious?

“Reuben Bright” (1896) The fi rst-person but unidentified speaker begins by directly addressing his audience, remarking that although Reuben Bright was a butcher, we should not therefore assume that he was any less tenderhearted than the speaker or we are. As proof of this claim, the speaker reveals that when Reuben was informed of his wife’s impending death, he wept as an infant does, causing women who witnessed him to weep in response. After his wife had passed away, Reuben took care of the funeral expenses, stored and perfumed her belongings, and (somewhat surprisingly) “tore down the slaughterhouse” (l. 14). Like “Credo,” this poem is a Petrarchan sonnet, thus revealing once more Robinson’s strong commitment to conventional forms and to the traditions of rhyme and meter that many poets of his time had begun to reject. Robinson uses the octave/sestet division effectively, and he also packs one of his not infrequent surprises into the fi nal half-line. In other ways, too, the poem is typical, particularly in its focus on an individual character facing a traumatic experience and suffering, as a result, a feeling of desolation and defeat without any real source of spiritual or philosophical consolation. All the while this character is observed and commented on by a representative of the community, but this speaker offers no overt “moral” to the story he reports, although commiseration and compassion are implied, particularly by line 8. The style, as usual, is plain, simple, and matter-offact; the tone is flat, laconic, and realistic. Robin-


son lets us draw our own conclusions about why Reuben Bright “tore down the slaughter-house” (l. 14); perhaps death, which had once been his stock in trade, was now something he could no longer stomach. In any case, Robinson employs a form (the sonnet) often associated with romance, prettiness, and affected language and uses it to offer a grim, unfl inching slice of life and death, but one rooted in deep love nonetheless.

For Discussion or Writing 1. How (if at all) does line 2 make sense in light of the implied logic of lines 1, 3, and 4? Why is the simple, general word things in line 11 effective? Choose other specific details of the poem’s diction and explain how they contribute to the effectiveness of the two works. 2. Compare and contrast the use of the themes of death and marriage in this poem and in Kate Chopin’s short tale “The Story of an Hour.” What is implied about the relations of the couples in the two works? What is the difference between the reactions of the grieving spouses? How does each work use its ending to give the work maximum effectiveness? 3. Compare and contrast this poem with another famous sonnet—Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How do I love thee?” How are the poems similar and/or different in tone, imagery, structure, and fi nal effect? Which work is more “romantic,” and why? Do you prefer one work to the other? If so, explain why.

“Richard Cory” (1896) This poem (perhaps the most famous Robinson ever wrote) describes a wealthy, good-looking, well-groomed, courteous, and eminently fortunate man who is an object of fascination and even envy among the people of the town in which he lives. Cory seems to possess every material advantage a person could desire, and thus it shocks both his fellow citizens and Robinson’s readers when we learn, in the fi nal line, that one night Cory “Went home and put a bullet through his head” (l. 16).

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The poem is typical of Robinson’s writings in both theme and style. As many of his works do, it deals with one person’s painful life, even if that pain is not apparent until the very end. The lyric is one of Robinson’s numerous character studies that deliberately raise more questions than they answer. It provokes thought rather than teaching a simplistic lesson. Suicide (which is often implied or suggested in Robinson’s poems) is here shockingly explicit, and yet Robinson, typically, passes no judgment and preaches no moral. Cory, despite the regard in which he is seemingly held by his fellow citizens, is nevertheless deeply alienated from them and is thus in one more respect a typical Robinson character. No religion, and indeed no secular philosophy of life, seems to offer an answer to whatever pain leads him to his death; aside from speaking in polite but superficial pleasantries, he is cut off from any genuine communion or communication with others. The poem’s diction, as so often in Robinson, is simple and plain, and here as in other works by this author the speaker represents the common citizens he describes. Imagery is kept to a minimum; the syntax (or sentence structure) is uncomplicated; the narrative is straightforward and (until the fi nal line) unsurprising; thus, the irony of the last four words is all the more unexpected and powerful. Irony, indeed, is one of the most common traits of Robinson’s style and of his general outlook on life, and perhaps one reason this poem has been so perennially popular is that it implies that most humans carry within them painful thoughts and feelings that others might never suspect. In its meter, rhyme scheme, and stanzaic form the poem is both conventional and plain: The meter is iambic pentameter (10 syllables in each line, with even syllables accented); the rhymes alternate (abab) in a thoroughly predictable fashion; the four-line stanzas are brief and uncomplicated. In short, nothing in this poem prepares us for the potent surprise of the fi nal line. Robinson’s craft, here as in all his best poems, is sure but unobtrusive.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read a biography of Robinson and discuss how this poem may reflect the experiences of his elder


2.

3.

4.

5.

brother, Dean. Does the effect (or effectiveness) of the poem depend on such knowledge? How does the poem deal with universal experiences and emotions? Simon and Garfunkel set this poem to music. Listen to their song and examine the relationship between the music and the poem. Is their music appropriate to the words? Why or why not? Is their adaptation of the work effective? Explore historical facts concerning suicide in Robinson’s era and discuss their relevance to this poem. Were attitudes toward suicide changing during this period? If so, why and how? Why is suicide such a common theme in Robinson’s writings? What does it symbolize? Why do you think this has always been one of Robinson’s most popular works? How much of the appeal of this work depends on its theme, and how much depends on the craft with which the poem is written? In what ways is Richard Cory unusual, and in what other ways is he typical of many people? Why would a person like Cory be more common in Robinson’s era than in earlier historical periods? What kinds of changes were taking place in the culture of Robinson’s time that would have made a person like Cory less unusual than (say) during the Middle Ages? Compare and contrast Cory with the title figure in T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

“Miniver Cheevy” (1910) This poem describes a frustrated, scornful modern man who regrets that he was not born in more exciting, less prosaic times. He fantasizes about living in the classical past, enjoying the days of King Arthur, and indulging in the excitement of the wicked Renaissance. He feels contempt for modern materialism and for the unfortunate need to earn money, but instead of trying to act according to his ideals, he merely thinks about them, as he grows increasingly and pathetically dependent on alcohol. Many critics have seen this poem as (in part) a satiric self-portrait of Robinson himself. As does

Cheevy, Robinson felt much contempt for the modern age, was steeped in the past, and was tempted by alcohol. Unlike Cheevy, however, Robinson was devoted to hard work, was capable of self-discipline, and was able to mock, with good humor, his own shortcomings. The poem is typical of Robinson’s writings in its plain style, its simple diction, its colloquial language (as in the phrase “on the town” [l. 15]), and its somewhat surprising conclusion. Irony and even sarcasm are especially emphasized in this work, particularly in stanza 4 (about the Medicis) and in the undercutting comic reference to “the mediaeval grace / Of iron clothing” (ll. 23–24). Perhaps Robinson (who usually did not judge harshly, if at all, the characters he created) felt inclined to be fairly tough on Cheevy precisely because he saw a bit of Cheevy in himself. In any case, in the depiction of Cheevy we have another of Robinson’s psychological character studies, as well as another of his alienated, isolated people who are disappointed with their lives—people whom the world counts as failures. Robinson’s ironic treatment of Cheevy begins with the character’s oddly unusual name, which sounds too contrived to be taken seriously. The fact that he is a “child of scorn” (l. 1) implies his basic immaturity and suggests not only that he feels scorn but that he is probably scorned by others. He is, paradoxically, full of both anger and maudlin self-pity (ll. 2–3), and Robinson shows his usual metrical skill in the sudden switch, in line 4, to an abruptly briefer line. Line 4 creates real suspense in the ambiguous “he had reasons,” but then we discover that Miniver’s “reasons” amount merely to a bad case of nostalgia. Until stanza 5 it is partly possible to sympathize with Miniver’s rejection of modern materialism, but when we learn that he would love to sin if given the chance, his moral authority vanishes. From that point forward, Cheevy seems increasingly the object of the speaker’s disdain, particularly in the wonderful lines— full of verbs without action—in which the speaker reports that “Miniver thought, and thought, and thought, / And thought about it” (ll. 27–28). ROBERT FROST (himself an eminent American poet, who respected Robinson) justly admired these lines


(Franchere 80), in which Robinson makes the repetitious structure of his sentence cleverly mimic its meaning.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Why is Miniver Cheevy a less sympathetic character than the title character of “Richard Cory” or “Mr. Flood’s Party”? Why and how does his scorn cause us partly to scorn him? Why is it harder to identify with him than with the characters described in those other poems? 2. Compare and contrast this poem with T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” What similarities of personality, attitude, and situation do the two characters have? How is Eliot’s work, in general, similar to Robinson’s? 3. Research Robinson’s life. How did he resemble Cheevy, and how were they also different? What might have been the psychological benefits to Robinson of writing a poem about a character with whom he had various traits in common? 4. Do any details in the poem suggest that Robinson partly shares Cheevy’s “scorn” for the modern world? How are Robinson’s views of the modern age reflected in his longer poems based on medieval legends? 5. Using a good reference work (such as the Oxford English Dictionary), explore the meaning of the phrase “on the town” (l. 15). Why, in light of your fi ndings, is line 15 particularly ironic?

“Eros Turannos” (1913, 1916) This poem, one of Robinson’s most widely praised, describes the loveless relationship between a woman who, fearing the prospect of growing old alone, marries a superficially charming man whom she nonetheless distrusts and knows to be unfaithful. He, in turn, marries her not because he truly loves her but because she provides security and status; however, as she grows increasingly disenchanted with her choice, she withdraws from society and perhaps even contemplates suicide. Meanwhile, the townspeople observe this domestic tragedy from afar and gossip about it, although the poem’s

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speaker (who is also their spokesman) admits that the full truth of other people’s lives can never be completely explained or understood. The title of this poem refers (ironically enough) to the ancient Greek god of love, who is imagined here as a tyrant or overwhelming force of nature that overrules the woman’s better judgment. She is another in the long line of Robinson characters who considers herself (and is considered by others) a frustrated failure; her life is one of disappointment and defeat. Robinson here provides another of his many psychological character studies, suggesting the complex motivations of the woman and the man while also suggesting not only the way each is regarded by the community but also the inevitable limits of the community’s perceptions. Alienation and despair are major themes of this poem, as they are of so many of Robinson’s works, and it is typical, too, that the woman has no source of consolation, either in religion or in some secular philosophy. She lives a life of lonely pain—a life made all the more lonely by the presence of her unloving, unloved husband. The style of the poem bears all the hallmarks of Robinson’s writing: The poem uses conventional rhyme and meter to describe a topic that would have seemed highly unconventional in Robinson’s day. The phrasing is simple, plain, understated, and restrained; bleak imagery contributes to the gloomy mood and tone, and nature provides no comfort, but instead reinforces the woman’s sense of isolation and despair. Although the poem is a narrative, it contains very little “action”; here as elsewhere, Robinson creates a sense of stifl ing paralysis as he depicts a doomed life lacking any options or joy. Repetition of key phrases and images adds to our sense of a stagnating relationship that can end only in disappointment or death, and perhaps even self-destruction.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare this poem to the sonnet cycle Modern Love by the English poet George Meredith. How do both works depict marriage? How do both use irony? How are they similar in tone, themes, and imagery?


2. Research the position of women in Robinson’s times. Why would a woman in Robinson’s era feel particularly compelled to marry? How were a woman’s options more constricted than a man’s? Why might a woman feel particularly frustrated in an unhappy marriage? 3. Discuss some of the many ironies of this poem. For instance, what is ironic about the phrasing of the second line? How does irony contribute to the effectiveness of the poem? Why use irony rather than some more obvious method of communicating an idea? 4. Compare and contrast the depiction of marriage in this poem with the ways it is depicted in ZORA NEALE HURSTON’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. How does the main character in Hurston’s novel respond to the frustrations of her early marriage? Would the woman in Robinson’s poem have had the same options of response? 5. How do you interpret the fi rst two lines of stanza 3? How have other readers of the poem interpreted those lines? How do those lines contribute to the overall impact of the work?

“Mr. Flood’s Party” (1921) This poem describes Eben Flood’s journey back to his lonely home after a visit to Tilbury Town (the fictional setting of many of Robinson’s poems), where he has refi lled his jug with liquor. Pausing on the isolated road during the moonlit night, Flood courteously engages in whimsical conversation with himself as he remembers his happy past, contemplates his lonely present and lonelier future, and offers himself several drinks. He sings a nostalgic song, remembers long-gone friends, and ponders his present isolation. Robinson’s tone here (unlike the tone of many of his other best-known poems) is comic and somewhat playful. Yet Eben Flood (whose name perhaps suggests the “ebb and flow” of human life) is not merely or even mainly a subject of mocking fun; he is treated with some genuine dignity (as the term Mister implies), since he symbolizes many common human emotions, desires, and experiences.

These include a yearning for friendship, a love of lost friends, a fear of isolation, the process of loss that inevitably accompanies age, and the will to face life’s disappointments with stoic good grace and without maudlin self-pity. Robinson uses many words implying loss, gloom, and mutability, including “Old” and “night” (l. 1); “forsaken” (l. 2), “harvest moon” (l. 9), “dim” (l. 24), “fearing” (l. 26), “trembling” (l. 28), “break” (l. 28), “uncertain” (l. 30), “time” (l. 34), “change” (l. 34), “loneliness” (l. 45), “weary” (l. 49), “last” (l. 50), “nothing” (l. 54), “strangers” (l. 55), “long ago” (l. 56), and especially “alone” (ll. 1, 17, 52), a term that is almost the keynote of the work. Here as in so many other works, Robinson emphasizes alienation and pain in a universe lacking much consolation aside from cool liquor and fond memories. Flood obviously suffers pain, but he (unlike such other Robinson characters as Richard Cory) endures his suffering without becoming self-destructive. Despite his drinking, he is an intelligent man, capable of literary allusions (as in line 11, which invokes Edward Fitzgerald’s famous translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám) and worthy of being compared (even if a bit ironically) to the legendary (and ultimately tragically isolated) medieval hero Roland (l. 20). Flood’s longing for companionship is so great that he creates an imaginary alter ego with whom he can converse and imbibe, and the humor of the tipsy but polite conversation Flood conducts with himself only underscores the pain of his loneliness. Robinson achieves a wonderful balance in this poem between the funny and the profound; by the end of the poem, Flood has earned both our compassion and our respect. The poem reminds us that life, for everyone, is a kind of journey that must ultimately end in isolation. What matters is less the outcome of the journey than the courage, good humor, and self-respect with which we proceed.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this poem with ROBERT FROST’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” How are the two works similar in tone, imagery, theme, and fi nal effect?


2. Compare and contrast the ways the theme of a lonely journey is used in this poem and in JACK L ONDON’s story “To Build a Fire.” Which character is more sympathetic, and why? How does imagery function in both works? 3. Has Mr. Flood’s life been a failure? Compare his existence, for instance, with that of the title character in Robinson’s poem “Miniver Cheevy.” Which of the two characters is more appealing, and why? How do their attitudes toward life differ? 4. Research Robinson’s own complicated relationship with (and attitudes toward) alcohol. How are they relevant to this poem? What factors in the life of both Robinson and Flood may have led them to drink? 5. Compare and contrast the depiction of alcohol in this poem and in F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’s story “Babylon Revisited.” How do the main characters of both works differ in their attitudes toward drink? What extra motivation does Fitzgerald’s character have to overcome his addiction to drinking?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON ROBINSON AND HIS WORK 1. Robinson’s style of writing has often been associated with the traits of literary “realism.” What are some of those traits, and how does Robinson’s work qualify as realistic? How does he use realistic details for symbolic purposes? 2. What historical and cultural trends of Robinson’s day are reflected in his works? How, for instance, does his work reflect the growth of individualism and alienation in his culture? How does it reflect the growing influence of commercial values? How does it reflect the breakdown of community? 3. In what ways do Robinson’s writings resemble but also differ from (for instance) those of T. S. Eliot? In what ways are both writers “modernists” in their attitudes toward the larger culture? What values do they seem to share; what aspects of their culture do they both seem to reject?

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4. If you had to choose a favorite poem by Robinson, which one would it be, and why? Discuss the poem in detail, explaining particularly what makes it effective and what makes it cohere. 5. Trace one theme—such as alienation, religion, or failure—over the course of a number of poems by Robinson. What changes occur in Robinson’s presentation of that theme, and what continuities also exist? 6. Choose one poem by Robinson and analyze it in as much detail as possible, showing how its details cohere and reinforce one another and discussing, in particular, any moments you consider flawed. 7. Compare and contrast the works of Robinson with those of a comparable English poet, such as Thomas Hardy. How do these two writers resemble one another in their characteristic themes, tones, imagery, and symbolism? In what ways do both writers reflect their larger cultural moments? 8. Read some of Robinson’s prose (such as his letters and essays) and discuss their relevance to his poetry. How are they similar in their ideas, attitudes, and style? 9. Read widely in Robinson’s poems and make a detailed case on behalf of a poem you consider unfairly neglected. Why do you think the poem is valuable, particularly in terms of its structure, its imagery, its diction, and its subtlety? Why do you think the poem has not received its fair share of attention and praise? 10. In mood, style, and theme, how are Robinson’s writings comparable to those of Jack London? How are the works of both writers realistic? How are their attitudes toward life similar or different? In what ways are their outlooks optimistic and/or pessimistic? What is the place of humor (if there is one) in the works of these writers? WORKS CITED

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Barnard, Ellsworth. “Edwin Arlington Robinson.” In Sixteen Modern American Authors. Vol. 2, A Survey of Research and Criticism, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 558–581. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990.


———, ed. Edwin Arlington Robinson: Centenary Essays. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1969. Coxe, Louis. Edwin Arlington Robinson: The Life of Poetry. New York: Pegasus, 1969. Dickey, James. “Edwin Arlington Robinson: The Many Truths.” In Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Francis Murphy, 77–94. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970. Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Virtual Tour of Robinson’s Gardiner, Maine. Available online. URL: http://www.earobinson.com. Accessed April 7, 2009. Franchere, Hoyt C. Edwin Arlington Robinson. Boston: Twayne, 1968.

Joyner, Nancy Carol. “Edwin Arlington Robinson.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Poets, 1880–1945, Third Series. Part 2, N–Z. Vol. 54, edited by Peter Quartermain, 366–387. Detroit: Gale, 1987. Murphy, Francis, ed. Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970. Porter, Joshua. Edwin Arlington Robinson. Available online. URL: http://robinson.bokardo.com. Accessed April 7, 2009. Robinson, Edwin Arlington. Collected Poems. New York: Macmillan, 1929. ———. Selected Letters. New York: Macmillan, 1940.

Robert C. Evans

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) All around us the imponderable and the unfathomed—at these targets many a poet has shot his bullets of silver and scored a bull’s eye, or missed with dull pellets of paper. (“Notes for a Preface”)

C

arl August Sandburg was born in humble circumstances in tiny Galesburg, Illinois, on January 6, 1878, the son of Swedish immigrants, August and Clara Sandburg. The family lived in a small house near the main rail line. Sandburg’s father was a hardworking, deeply religious man with a no-nonsense temperament and a limited education. Employed by the railroad, he made less than 15 cents an hour, but both his politics and his personality were conservative—traits that would eventually put him in confl ict with his strong-willed son. Carl’s mother was more openly affectionate and was also better educated than her husband, and it was she to whom Carl always felt more drawn. Soon after the boy began attending school, he also began calling himself by the more American-sounding name Charles—the fi rst of many signs of his intense identification with the land of his birth. However, his formal education ceased for a time after the eighth grade, since his parents could not afford to pay for high school. From his earliest teenage years, then, young Sandburg worked, and his experiences with various forms of manual labor and service jobs would help give him a lifelong sympathy with the working class. Although confi rmed in the Swedish Lutheran Church when he was 13, he never took much interest in formal religion, tending instead to derive his spiritual sustenance from faith in the best aspects of humanity and from nature’s beauty. His

interest in liberal politics can also be traced to these teenage years, when he fi rst began to identify with the Democrats (in opposition to his Republican father). Nevertheless, his lifelong admiration for Abraham Lincoln (the most famous of all Republicans) also began at this time (Crowder 21–25; Niven 1–26). By the time he was 19, Sandburg had begun a life of restless traveling that would never really cease. He hopped a train and headed west, with no defi nite destination or plan in mind. During these early travels he saw the country and worked an even greater variety of temporary jobs, but now he had also begun keeping notes and writing about his experiences. Back in Galesburg, he did more manual labor before joining the state militia and heading off, in 1898, to participate in the Spanish-American War. Although he saw little military action, he did send letters back home to the Galesburg newspaper recounting a soldier’s life, thus beginning his long involvement with journalism. When he returned to Galesburg he was able, as a veteran, to enroll free for a year’s study at tiny Lombard College, and he was even offered a chance to enroll at West Point, although his performance on academic examinations was not good enough to permit him to study there. Back at Lombard, he was active both academically and athletically, and he also continued to work a variety of jobs to help support himself. Perhaps the most important aspect of his time at

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Lombard, however, was his contact with Professor Philip Green Wright, who taught not only English but numerous other subjects and who quickly saw in Sandburg a young man of great potential. It was Wright who fi rst encouraged his literary ambitions and who actually published some of Sandburg’s earliest poetry on a basement printing press. Sandburg always said that Wright was one of the three people who had most affected his life (the other two were his eventual wife and her brother). Wright was a relatively freethinking teacher at a relatively liberal college, and by this point Sandburg himself increasingly identified with liberal, populist, and “progressive” causes, to which he would be loyal all his life (Crowder 25–33; Niven 27–89). Although he spent four fruitful years at Lombard, Sandburg did not graduate. Instead he left in 1902 to travel once more—this time heading east rather than west. Arrested in Pennsylvania for hitching an unpaid ride on a train, he spent more than a week in jail—an experience that allowed him to identify even more strongly than before with the less genteel aspects of American life. Back in Galesburg by 1904, he worked as a fi reman and salesman and reestablished contact with Professor Wright, who that year published Sandburg’s fi rst three books of verse and other creative writing (In Reckless Ecstasy, The Plaint of a Rose, and Incidentals), which already show his enduring interest in common people and in the loveliness of nature. By 1906, however, he had begun to feel constrained in Galesburg, and so he set his sights (and hopes) on the metropolis with which he is now forever identified: Chicago. Soon after arriving there he became an editor of the Lyceumite, a journal intended for traveling public speakers, and it was not long before Sandburg himself began touring in that capacity, speaking particularly on Walt Whitman, the poet with whom he had so much in common, both in outlook and in style. By 1907 he had also begun to take an increasingly prominent role in politics, signing on as an organizer and speaker for the liberal Social Democrats. It was through his involvement with this party that he met Lillian Steichen (whom he called Paula), with whom he quickly fell in love, who would soon become his wife. Intelligent and thoughtful, she admired his charac-

ter, his views, and his poetry, and for the next 60 years she would be a source of constant support and encouragement in all his varied endeavors (Crowder 33–41; Niven 90–180). By 1909 the Sandburgs had moved to Milwaukee, where Carl continued to be involved in politics while also working in advertising and journalism and maintaining his interest in creative writing. Besides publishing a socialist pamphlet (You and Your Job), in 1910 he also issued a literary essay (Jossefy) and additionally served as private secretary to the newly elected socialist mayor. After leaving this job he worked for a liberal newspaper (the Leader), then headed to Chicago in 1912 to work fi rst on one newspaper (the World), then another (the Day Book), then (ironically) for a business journal (the System), then for the National Hardware Journal and American Artisan, and then fi nally back to the Day Book at a salary of $25 per week. He now had an infant daughter to support, but despite his need to earn a living and his constant switching from one job to another, he still found time to write poetry, and in 1914 he submitted a batch of it to a recently established (but highly significant) journal based in Chicago called Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Its editor, Harriet Monroe, soon became one of Sandburg’s most vigorous champions, despite the opposition of various critics, who found his work allegedly too shapeless, roughhewn, and vulgar to constitute as true “verse.” In poetry, however (as in politics), Sandburg was deliberately radical, yet it was not long before his work was winning recognition, payment, and awards (including the magazine’s Levinson Prize for the best poems of the year). His career as a poet was now fi rmly launched, and for the moment (at least) he was increasingly considered one of the country’s most distinctive and revolutionary creative writers. He wrote in free verse on gritty urban topics and celebrated the common people in the language of the streets, and he was thus part of a general rejection at this time of the genteel tradition in American letters (Crowder 42–48; Niven 181–273). In 1916 Chicago Poems, one of Sandburg’s most important books, was published. In 1917 he joined the staff of the Chicago Daily News, a newspa-

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per with which he would be associated for many years. In 1918 his book of poems called Cornhuskers appeared, its very title suggesting its focus on the life of common workers on the prairie. The book helped win him a prize awarded in 1919 by the Poetry Society of America; in that same year his continued interest in journalism and public affairs resulted in the publication of a book called The Chicago Race Riots. In the following year he not only began reading his poems in public on college campuses (a practice that would last most of the rest of his life), but also published a third significant volume of verse (Smoke and Steel), for which he was again honored in 1921 with a prize from the Poetry Society of America. In 1922 he published yet more poems (Slabs of the Sunburnt West) as well as his fi rst collection of children’s tales (Rootabaga Stories, followed in 1923 by Rootabaga Pigeons). By now, though, his interest in Abraham Lincoln had deepened enormously, so that in 1926 he published a massive two-volume biography (Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years) that quickly established him not only as a best-selling author but as one of the most important (if controversial) Lincoln scholars in the country. Meanwhile, his interest in American folk music resulted, in 1927, in publication of The American Songbag, while his continuing productivity as a poet and creative writer resulted in the publication of a collection called Good Morning, America in 1928—the same year he was honored both by Harvard University and by his alma mater, Lombard College. Honorary degrees were now awarded to him frequently, as his ever-prolific pen produced more books; in 1929 a study of his increasingly famous brother-in-law titled Steichen the Photographer; in 1930 two new children’s books (Potato Face and Early Moon); in 1932 a biography called Mary Lincoln, Wife and Widow; and, in 1936, another volume of poems (The People, Yes). By this point in his life Sandburg was one of the most prominent writers in the country, even though many critics thought that as a poet he had begun to repeat himself and had failed to develop (Crowder 48–126; Niven 273–513). As a biographer, however, Sandburg’s best days still lay ahead. In 1939 he published a massive, two-

volume sequel to his earlier biography of Lincoln, calling the continuation Lincoln: The War Years. This work was even better received than the fi rst installment, winning the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1940, the same year in which he also received honorary degrees from five colleges or universities, including Harvard and Yale. During World War II Sandburg (a great admirer of President Roosevelt) wrote a newspaper column, made radio broadcasts, and wrote commentary for a fi lm, using all these media largely to support the nation’s war efforts. Some of these works appeared in Home Front Memo (1943), but it was not until 1948 that his next major work (and fi rst novel) appeared. This massive historical epic, Remembrance Rock, is the one work that even his strongest admirers consider weak and disappointing. Nevertheless, in 1950 his Complete Poems was published and received the Pulitzer Prize, and in the same year his New American Songbag also appeared. In 1952 he was awarded the gold medal for history and biography by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in the following year he received yet another gold medal—this one for verse—from the Poetry Society of America. Also in 1953 his autobiographical work Always the Young Strangers, which covered his earliest years, was published, and in 1954 a condensed, corrected version of the Lincoln biography appeared. Various other collections and modified versions of his works were also issued in ensuing years, including Prairie-Town Boy (1955), The Sandburg Range (1957), Harvest Poems (1960), Wind Song (1960), and Six New Poems and a Parable (1961). In 1959 he was invited to speak before the government and both houses of Congress to celebrate Lincoln, and in the same year he received a medal from the king of Sweden. He was also a frequent guest on national radio and television (Crowder 126–155; 514–684). In his fi nal decade, Sandburg continued to be active and celebrated. A play called The World of Carl Sandburg toured the country with some success; he was employed as a script consultant in Hollywood; he was invited to the White House by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson (receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the latter); and,

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in 1963, he saw the publication of Honey and Salt, his fi nal volume of poems to appear during his own lifetime. He was particularly moved by an award he received in 1965 from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and in general by this time Sandburg was considered a revered national figure, even if respect for his poetic talent had now declined sharply. Although he had been hale and hearty for most of his long life, he was now increasingly frail, both in body and in mind. Death took him quietly on July 21, 1967: His last word was his wife’s name, and then he was gone.

“Chicago” (1914, 1916) This poem, one of Sandburg’s most famous and most characteristic works, takes a hard, clear, but ultimately affi rmative look at the city with which the poet was most associated—a city that had become one of the largest and most dynamic urban centers in the world during the era in which he wrote. The speaker acknowledges the dark, gritty, unappealing aspects of Chicago (its prostitution, its murders, its poverty), but he also celebrates its vitality, its strength, and its energy and dynamism. “Chicago” is typical of many of Sandburg’s works, both in themes and in style. Thematically the poem is characteristic in its focus on hard labor, big industry, urban corruption, and the suffering of the poor, but the poem is also typical of Sandburg in its celebration of virility, physical power, mental determination, and the sheer joy of living and creating (or what the speaker calls “Building, breaking, rebuilding” [l. 17]). The poem is a tribute to the common people, particularly the working class, on whom the strength and prosperity of the nation depend, and its affi rmation of Chicago is indirectly an affi rmation of America (and of the “American dream”) as a whole. Stylistically, the poem is also typical of Sandburg in numerous ways, including its unconventional, “unpoetic” imagery; its vigorous rhythms and meter; its uneven, unpredictable line lengths; its strong stress on emphatic verbs (often heavily accented on the fi rst syllable); its forceful use of repetition of all kinds; and its love of lists.

In its free rhythms, unconventional shape, unusual imagery, and masculine assertiveness, the poem itself mimics the city it extols, and yet the poem (as does the city itself) exhibits a deeper order beneath its apparent randomness. It is built, for instance, around a variety of oppositions (including accusations versus defense, the accusers versus the speaker, the city’s ugliness versus its undeniable power and even beauty), and the poem is given further order and coherence through the return, in its fi nal lines, to the images and phrasing with which it opened. It seems significant, too, that the poem’s fi nal word is Nation, since one main purpose of the work is obviously to celebrate the essential contribution of Chicago to America as a whole. The poem implicitly extols the city as a symbol of all that is best in America but also treats it as a symbol of all that needs reform and improvement.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the depiction of urban life in this poem with that offered in T. S. ELIOT’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In particular, focus on the imagery, moods, tone, and themes of the two works. 2. Compare and contrast the style and themes of this poem with the style and themes of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” In particular, discuss the works in terms of their rhythms, line lengths, imagery, and points of view and in terms of their attitudes toward common people, working life, and role of the American poet. 3. Compare and contrast the image of American life presented in this poem and in THORNTON WILDER’s play Our Town. In particular, discuss the two works in terms of their presentations of big city life versus small town existence and in terms of their presentations of distinctions of class. 4. Discuss the effectiveness of specific aspects of the diction of this poem. For example, discuss the nouns used in the fi rst three lines. In what ways are they similar? In what ways are they distinct? Discuss the adjectives used in line 3. Why are all three of those words accented in their first syllables? Why are all the admissions of lines 6–9 crucial to the later credibility of the poet’s praise?

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“Child of the Romans” (1916) The poem describes an Italian workman (probably an immigrant to America) who grabs bites of an extremely simple lunch as he works to maintain a rail line. As he eats, a train whizzes by; it is fi lled with people wealthy enough to afford lavish meals at well-appointed tables. The Italian’s work—dedicated but unnoticed—allows these people to enjoy their meals without disturbance. Irony is a key element of this poem, in its phrasing, situation, and tone. The irony begins with the two key words of the title. The Italian workman is, obviously, no longer a “Child”: He is an adult who must perform back-breaking labor to earn a meager income. His life is thus far from the innocence and uncomplicated joy we normally associate with children. He is, however, indeed a “child” of the “Romans” in the sense that his heritage is Italian, but the word Romans is double-edged: It reminds us of the reputations the ancient Romans enjoyed as mighty builders (constructors of aqueducts and coliseums), and thus it seems an appropriate term to use in connection with this hardworking laborer. Yet the word Romans also reminds us that the Roman Empire once ruled the world, whereas this descendant of Roman forebears must now struggle to earn his very humble daily bread. The irony becomes even more emphatic when, in the fi rst line, the workman is called a dago—a slang insult for a person of Italian heritage and thus typical of Sandburg’s tendency to use colloquial language for harsh and shocking effect. The “dago” is not simply a worker but a “shovelman” (l. 1): His identity is bound up with the tool he uses, and he is valued by his employers merely as an extension of that instrument. His simple meal—consisting of the alliterative “bread” and “bologna” (l. 2)—contrasts starkly with the lavish fare being eaten by the wealthy people who whiz by on the train, who are oblivious to him, his work, and their dependence on both. The comfort and beauty they enjoy depend ultimately on the labor of such people as this anonymous “dago,” and it is part of the poem’s point to make the wealthy (and all readers) aware of this undeniable but often overlooked fact.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Sandburg’s poetry has sometimes been criticized as too politically propagandistic. Is this poem guilty of that charge? If so, why? If not, why not? In particular, how do you respond to line 9? 2. Compare and contrast this poem with “Mill Town,” a poem by Genevieve Taggard. In particular, discuss the poems in terms of their tones, attitudes, and implied political stances. 3. Compare and contrast this poem with EZR A POUND’s Canto XLV. In particular, discuss the works in terms of their political and economic stances, their allusions to earlier eras, and their uses of repetition.

“Fog” (1916) This poem compares the approach and departure of fog in an urban port to the approach and departure of a small, quiet cat. In contrast to Sandburg’s often loud, boisterous, even hectoring political poems, this one is brief, cryptic, and impressionistic. In style and theme it has much in common with the work of the socalled imagists—writers (such as Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound) who believed that the poet’s responsibility was to use quick, vivid images to convey an indelible mood by implication rather than by overt statement. Sandburg’s poem fits this defi nition almost perfectly, although he sets himself the difficult task of trying to paint a vivid picture of a vague, indefi nite subject. The brevity of the lines, like the brevity of the poem as a whole, is appropriate to this task. The simple diction, the focus on a single metaphor (comparing the fog to a cat), and the abrupt but quiet conclusion all seem fitting to the subject, and just as the cat quietly moves on at the end of the poem, so the poem quietly moves on after a mere six lines. Whereas Sandburg’s poetry often blatantly stresses the harshness of life, the tone of this poem is subdued, understated, and peaceful, and whereas his works often emphasize shocking images and gripping diction, this poem is gentle, simple, and plain. The lyric gains added

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impact by its contrasts with the very different poems that surround it; it suggests that beauty and delicacy can be found even in big cities if we simply take (or are given) the time to look.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the use of fog and cat imagery in this poem and in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In particular, discuss the kinds of tone, attitude, and mood created by the use of such imagery in each poem. Why is it significant, for instance, that Eliot’s fog is yellow? 2. Compare and contrast this poem with “This Is Just to Say,” a brief lyric by WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS. In particular, discuss the works in terms of structure, diction, imagery, tone, and point of view. 3. Try to write a poem of your own that resembles this one by Sandburg. Use simple phrasing, simple imagery, and just a few lines to create a vivid impression. Compare and contrast your poem with Sandburg’s, discussing in particular the difficulties involved in making such a poem successful.

“Halsted Street Car” (1916) The anonymous speaker summons cartoonists (visual artists) to draw the faces of the working people the speaker glimpses on a downtown Chicago streetcar. The poem begins by emphasizing the visual appearances of these people but ends by implying their worn-out inner moods. If the poem “Chicago” is written in an almost epic, aggressively public tone, the mood of the present work is more intimate and lyrical. The poem is typical of Sandburg in its sympathetic focus on the hard life of the urban working class, and it is typical, too, in the various stylistic devices it uses, including emphatic verbs, colloquial diction, repeated words, and contrasts between terms that are abstract and concrete. The work begins with a vigorous summons—“Come you, cartoonists” (l. 1)—that employs direct address, alliteration, and a strongly

stressed opening verb. Another emphatic verb and further alliteration appear in the second line, along with two words (me and here) that instantly create a sense of personal and physical immediacy. The speaker of the poem is himself a witness to the details he describes, and he will create verbally the very pictures he urges the cartoonists to conjure with their pencils. He wants these cartoonists to draw “faces” (l. 6)—a key word, and one he repeats constantly— but by the end of the poem he will himself have sketched not merely external visages but also internal emotions and feelings. The people on the streetcar are headed to work, and it is work—hard, physical labor—that mainly defi nes their lives. Their work is hardly glamorous: One of them is a “pig-sticker” (a phrase typifying Sandburg’s penchant for vigorous, unconventional imagery that would have shocked the more polite poetry readers of his day), while another is an “overall factory girl” (with the word overall not only describing her cheap denim clothing but also, perhaps, suggesting through a pun her versatile skills). The fact that a young female worker is included is typical of Sandburg’s common emphasis on gritty, realistic details: “girl[s]” are not exempt from the need to toil in Sandburg’s world (l. 9). Repetition (always a major technique in Sandburg’s verse) is used with special effectiveness in the second half of this poem, in which the mood and tone become more abstract. Emphasis continues on the key word faces, but the appearance of the words tired and empty (for instance) in line 11 prepares us for their emphatic reappearance in the fi nal two lines, where the speaker tells us that even after a night’s sleep, these workers are still (ironically) “Tired of wishes, / Empty of dreams” (ll. 17–18). By the end of the poem the vigorous tone of the opening lines has given way to a quieter, more thoughtful, more melancholy mood, not only in the speaker’s subjects but also in the speaker himself.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this poem with “Chicago,” particularly in their presentations of work, youth, and women. Also, discuss why Sandburg chooses to emphasize pigs so strongly in both poems.

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2. Compare and contrast this poem with Ezra Pound’s lyric “In a Station of the Metro.” In particular, discuss the poems in terms of their visual techniques, their moods and tones, and their presentations of urban life. 3. Compare and contrast this poem with Robinson Jeffers’s “To the Stone-Cutters.” In particular, discuss the poems in terms of their presentations of labor and in terms of what they imply about the relations between manual laborers and the artists who depict them. 4. In what specific senses do you think Sandburg meant the word “cartoonists” (l. 1)? Why does the speaker want the artists to focus on faces? What do faces usually symbolize or suggest? How do the people in the poem contrast with the atmospheric conditions mentioned?

whether hero or common human, whether Indian princess or corrupt politician, ends fi nally in the “cool tombs”—a phrase effective partly because of its assonance and partly because of its paradoxically combining the fact of death with the suggestion of comfort and peace. Death seems to hold no terror for this poem’s speaker; nor does he seem interested in any religious consolation. He can speak shockingly but dispassionately of Lincoln’s being “shoveled into the tombs” (l. 1), but he can also appreciate the beauty of Pocahontas’s body. His attitude seems predominantly secular: The spirit seems to die with the flesh (although there is a slight hint that the mind of Pocahontas may somehow survive in some form). Ultimately it is love (the fi nal section implies) that may be the closest to true happiness anyone experiences in life.

For Discussion or Writing

“Cool Tombs” (1918) This poem emphasizes the fi nality of death by mentioning a number of famous figures in American history who now lie “in the dust, in the cool tombs” (the poem’s constant refrain). The work concludes by asking whether, in the end, anything is more valuable than love, especially in the face of death. Death is a frequent theme in Sandburg’s poetry, and here the theme is obvious. All people—from the most famous to the most anonymous, from the most noble (such as Lincoln) to the most tainted (such as Grant)—are fi nally united by the fact of the grave. Typically, Sandburg chooses American examples to illustrate his claims, and although his focus on two noted leaders of the Union in the Civil War may seem to limit the breadth of his poem, he does manage to mention an American Indian woman (Pocahontas) before broadening the focus even further in the fi nal section to encompass “any streetful of people.” This phrase is typical of Sandburg in its emphasis on urban life and the common masses, and typical, too, is the sudden shift from this concern with everyday people going about their ordinary lives to a focus on “a hero” being celebrated with “confetti” and “tin horns.” Everyone and anyone,

1. Compare and contrast the presentation of death in this poem and in WALLACE STEVENS’s “Sunday Morning.” In particular, discuss the relations of death and beauty, death and religion, and death and love. 2. Compare and contrast this poem with H ART CR ANE’s lyric “At Melville’s Tomb.” In particular, discuss the poems in terms of their diction, form, imagery, accessibility, and effectiveness. Which poem appeals to you more, and why? 3. Compare and contrast the attitudes toward death implied by this poem and by Philip Larkin’s lyric “Aubade.” In particular, discuss the poems in terms of tone, point of view, imagery, and fi nal implications. 4. Discuss the use of the refrain in this poem. How and why is it effective, and how and why does the constant repetition of the phrase reinforce one of the major themes of the work? Discuss the fi nal variation of the refrain. What is the effect of the alteration?

“Grass” (1918) This poem, spoken by the grass that covers and eventually obscures the common graves of common


soldiers, implies the waste caused by war by mentioning the sites of famous battles both in Europe and in the United States. Ultimately (the grass asserts) no one remembers the dead when the grass has done its job. Beginning (as he often does) with an emphatic, heavily accented verb, Sandburg implies the sheer numbers of the dead, who are treated as so much mere flesh to be “shovel[ed]” (l. 2) and who are thus robbed of their individuality. Just as Sandburg often deals in his poems with the masses of the living, so he deals here with the masses of the dead, killed in famous battles but now forgotten as the unique persons they once were. Significantly, no individual names are mentioned (as they are in “Cool Tombs”); the dead (both those whose sides were victorious and those whose sides suffered defeat) are united in their common anonymity and oblivion. Using Sandburg’s common technique of repetition, the grass repeatedly urges that the bodies be “pile[d]” (ll. 1, 4, 5), and, in the same way, the poem itself piles the name of one famous battlefield on top of another. The bodies (in a typical bit of Sandburgian contrast) are both “pile[d] . . . high” and “Shovel[ed] under” (ll. 2, 6). Meanwhile, grass—which we normally associate with life, with gentle growth, and with peacefulness— here seems (ironically enough) almost aggressive, malevolent, energetic, and brusque. The simple language, the direct address, the quoted questions, and the emphatic monosyllables of the fi nal line all contribute to the force and power of this ironically memorable work. In the very act of seeming to extol forgetfulness and oblivion, the poem undercuts its surface message, implying that the dead should never be forgotten and suggesting also an understated protest against the waste of war.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this poem with Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.” In particular, discuss the poems in terms of their speakers, their attitudes, their imagery, and their effectiveness as antiwar poems. 2. Compare and contrast this poem with Wallace Stevens’s “The Death of a Soldier.” In particu-

lar, discuss the poems in terms of their forms, diction, syntax (especially repetition and brevity), and treatments of religious consolation. 3. Compare and contrast this poem with Randall Jarrell’s poem “The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner.” In particular, discuss the works in terms of their points of view, their imagery, and their attitudes toward death. 4. Discuss the pattern implied in the battles mentioned; how are they organized, chronologically and geographically? Why is Sandburg careful to mention battles in Europe as well as one in America? Discuss the special significance, for him and his contemporaries, of the battles mentioned in line 5.

“Prairie Waters by Night” (1918) This impressionistic poem describes the sights, sounds, and moods evoked by its titular subject, including the sounds of birds, the sights of old stones, and moods of drowsy peace. If Sandburg’s verse is often associated with the hustle and bustle of urban life and the turmoil and even exploitation of industrial workers, this poem typifies a different aspect of his creativity: his frequent focus on the pastoral beauties of the midwestern prairie. With its long, lazy lines; its catalog of vivid images; its repeated phrases; its emphasis on comforting personification; and its stress on the gentle aspects of nature, this is one of Sandburg’s most romantic and most Whitmanesque poems. As the romantics do, Sandburg here offers a vision of natural loveliness—a landscape almost Edenic in its peace, tranquillity, and quiet beauty. As Walt Whitman does, Sandburg here tosses conventional poetic forms, meters, and rhythms aside, letting his ideas and images dictate the shape of his work. Just as the poem’s mood is relaxed, so is its form. Yet even though the poem almost seems at times to approach the level of prose, it contains enough heightened language to give it the complexity we usually associate with poetry. Among its more obviously “poetic” devices are its use of alliteration (as in the second

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half of the fi rst line), its use of paradox (as in the reference to “stony waters” in line 2), its use of allusions (as in the reference to “new psalms” at the end of the second line), and, in general, its almost magical implication that inanimate objects are somehow alive and that nature, like man, is rich with thought and feeling.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this poem with Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” particularly focusing on the depictions of nature in both works, the ways they use form, the ways they use religious language, and the ways they conclude. 2. Is this poem by Sandburg sentimental? If so, why? If not, which particular aspects of the work protect it against that charge? 3. Compare and contrast this poem with Sandburg’s “Fog.” In particular, discuss the poems in terms of length, the number and nature of images, and the structures of lines. Why did Sandburg choose to make one poem so short and cryptic and the other so packed, dense, and flowing?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON SANDBURG AND HIS WORK 1. Study the careers of Carl Sandburg and T. S. Eliot and then compare and contrast the two poets in terms of their styles, their political views, their religious views, and the long-term reception of their poetry. 2. Study the careers of Carl Sandburg and Wallace Stevens and then compare and contrast the two poets in terms of their styles, their political views, their views of the purposes of art, and the long-term reception of their poetry. 3. Compare and contrast Sandburg’s “Prairie Waters by Night” with ROBERT FROST’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” In particular, compare and contrast these works in terms of mood, imagery, tone, attitude, and implied themes.

4. Sandburg has sometimes been accused of various faults, such as formlessness, vagueness, prosy plainness, and an obsession with the ephemeral and mediocre. Choose one of his poems and try to defend it from (or convict it of) such charges. 5. Discuss the use of various kinds of repetition in one of Sandburg’s poems. In particular, how does repetition contribute to the rhythm, tone, and meaning of the work? 6. Sandburg is often considered a particularly “American” poet. Which particular aspects of his writings justify this claim? How and why should his works interest readers in other countries and other cultures? 7. Compare and contrast the use of nature imagery in “Prairie Waters by Night” and “Grass.” How do the poems differ in their diction, tones, points of view, and ultimate implications concerning nature? 8. Many commentators have argued that Sandburg’s earliest poems (which include all of the poems discussed earlier) are consistently superior to his later works. Find a late poem or two and compare and contrast the later work(s) with some of the poems mentioned here. In particular, examine the early and late poems with respect to their themes, imagery, diction, form, and subtlety. 9. Compare and contrast Sandburg’s “Chicago” with Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing.” In particular, discuss the poems in terms of their line lengths, their meter, their use of repetition, their imagery, and the politics they imply. 10. How are Sandburg’s uses of form, imagery, diction, and themes appropriate to a poet who celebrated American democracy, populism, and equality? WORKS CITED

AND


Allen, Gay Wilson. Carl Sandburg. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972. Callahan, North. Carl Sandburg: His Life and Works. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987.


Carl Sandburg Website. Available online. URL: http:// www.carlsandburg.net. Accessed April 7, 2009. Crowder, Richard. Carl Sandburg. New York: Twayne, 1964. ———. “Sandburg, Carl.” In St. James Reference Guide to English Literature: 20th-Century Poetry. Edited by James Vinson, 398–401. Chicago: St. James, 1985. Golden, Harry. Carl Sandburg. Cleveland: World, 1961.

Niven, Penelope. Carl Sandburg: A Biography. New York: Scribner, 1991. Sandburg, Carl. Complete Poems. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1950. “Sandburg, Carl.” In Library of Literary Criticism: Modern American Literature. 3rd ed. Edited by Dorothy Nyren, 416–420. New York: Ungar, 1964. Yanella, Philip. The Other Carl Sandburg. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1996.

Robert C. Evans

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken. (qtd. in Bridgman 91)

G

ertrude Stein was born on February 3, 1874, to Daniel Stein and his wife, Amelia, who had four other surviving children. Although Gertrude was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, she lived there only briefly, for by that autumn her father had moved his family to Austria for business. Although Daniel Stein often returned to the United States, his wife and children stayed in Europe, living in Vienna from 1874 to 1878 and in Paris from 1878 to 1879. Eventually everyone moved to East Oakland, California, in 1880, where Daniel pursued various business interests. Gertrude’s relations with her parents, however, were never particularly close; her greatest bond was with her brother Leo, her elder by two years. She was always an intelligent and bookish child (once worrying that she would eventually run out of things to read), and even as a small girl she showed some talent for writing, although she never officially graduated from high school. The deaths of her mother in 1888 and of her father in 1891 left her even more closely attached than before to Leo, and when he began attending Harvard in 1892, Gertrude followed in 1893. She entered the Harvard Annex (soon rechristened Radcliffe College), and for the next four years she was a well-regarded student of philosophy and psychology, studying with such notables as George Santayana and William James. Even when she was an undergraduate her writing, punctuation, thinking, and behavior

were unconventional; nor was she conventionally attractive (particularly because of her weight), but she made friends easily and impressed her teachers with her promise. By the time she received her B.A. in 1898, she had already entered medical school at Johns Hopkins University and seemed set on a career as a physician. By this time Stein seems to have realized that she was a lesbian, and she was also becoming increasingly bored with medicine. Having failed four courses at Hopkins, she decided to abandon her medical studies. During the next few years (partly to escape an unsuccessful love affair), she traveled in Europe with Leo, with whom she shared a growing interest in art. While briefly back in America in 1903, she started work on the book that would eventually grow into her huge novel The Making of Americans, and then, after having returned to Europe to live with Leo in Paris, she composed a brief novel, Q.E.D., a partly autobiographical account of a lesbian triangle. With inherited money, she and Leo began buying modern paintings, acquiring (over the next few years) work by artists who would later become extremely famous, such as Delacroix, Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet, Degas, Cézanne, Matisse, and especially Picasso. Meanwhile, Stein satisfied her own creative urges by working (in 1904) on a short novel called Fernhurst and by producing (in 1905–06) a collection of stories called Three Lives, a book still considered one of her most important. She also continued working

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on her mammoth novel The Making of Americans, but she was now becoming even more noted for her friendships (especially with Picasso, who painted a famous portrait of her) and for the parties she and Leo hosted in their Paris apartment—parties attended by many notable modern painters, writers, thinkers, and their admirers. Stein, it was widely agreed, had an extremely lively mind, a pungent wit, and excellent taste as a connoisseur of art, and the apartment’s walls were soon festooned with paintings that made it one of the most noteworthy collections in the city, if not the world. By 1907 Stein had increasingly become a champion of the latest developments in Picasso’s style, much to the growing annoyance of her brother, whose tastes were less radical. By 1907, as well, Stein had met the person who would soon displace Leo as the most important figure in her personal life: Alice B. Toklas. Toklas, who had grown up in San Francisco, had there met relatives of Stein’s, who had shown her paintings by Matisse and had thus stimulated her interest in visiting Paris. After Toklas arrived in France, she and Stein quickly became friends, and by 1908 they were essentially a couple. Alice volunteered to type the enormous manuscript of The Making of Americans, while Stein herself began to write in ever-more-unconventional ways, beginning (for instance) a series of abstract word portraits of numerous friends, including Toklas herself. Meanwhile, Stein’s Three Lives was fi nally published in New York in 1909 at her own expense, and some of the few people who read it were struck by its originality, especially in its middle section. Meanwhile, Stein’s relationship with Toklas was growing increasingly close as her relations with Leo became increasingly strained. By the end of 1910 Toklas had moved in with Stein, becoming (essentially) her de facto wife and all-around helpmate. In 1911 Stein fi nally fi nished The Making of Americans, even as she continued working on her various word portraits of friends or acquaintances; two of these, “Matisse” and “Picasso,” were published in a magazine in 1912, the same year in which another portrait (of the wealthy Mabel Dodge) was published in book form at its subject’s expense. Stein and Toklas traveled in Europe in 1912 and in 1913 vis-

ited England, where Stein hoped (without success) to fi nd a publisher. During 1913 Stein also wrote her fi rst play (What Happened), but the year’s most significant event was her fi nal break with Leo, who took his paintings, moved to Italy, and never met or spoke with his sister again. He could not abide her growing enthusiasm for cubist painting; nor could he tolerate her increasing independence and autonomous fame. Although Gertrude had begun as Leo’s follower, she now considered herself a true and independent genius. In 1913 Stein published one of her most notorious works, Tender Buttons, a three-part collection of poetic meditations on objects, food, and rooms. By conventional standards these works (like many of her other recent writings) seemed ponderously impenetrable and barely coherent; they were full of repetitions, wordplay, violations of standard grammar, and an absence of any obvious logic. Many readers considered them annoyingly nonsensical, while others (particularly Stein herself) regarded them as cutting-edge innovations in perception and expression. Clearly they were comparable to the similarly radical innovations in painting, sculpture, music, and indeed almost all the arts that were occurring at this time; “modernism,” in other words, was now in full swing. And then the war began: In 1914 the confl ict that soon became known as the Great War or World War I was unleashed, with massive destruction descending on Europe. Stein and Toklas were in England at the time, visiting the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (whom Stein considered, along with herself and Picasso, another genius), but by October the two women were back in Paris. In 1915 they moved to Spain for a year, but by 1916, when the tide seemed to have turned against the Germans, the women returned to Paris, where they soon began volunteering to deliver supplies for an organization designed to aid the French wounded. After the end of the war, in 1918, Stein and Toklas (who had been awarded medals for their volunteer service) eventually resumed something like their old routine, although now they were increasingly visited by young writers (such as ERNEST H EMINGWAY) who arrived to imbibe Stein’s wine and

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wisdom. Affable, opinionated, and the friend of practically anyone who counted in the modern arts (especially in Paris), she enjoyed a growing reputation not only as a patron and connoisseur but as a writer herself. In 1922 she published a collection of prose, poems, and dramas called Geography and Plays, with a foreword by SHERWOOD A NDERSON, who was one of her swelling band of admirers. More and more, she was the subject of written tributes, admiring photographs, and the attention of sculptors and painters. In 1924 Stein’s epic novel The Making of Americans was partly printed in several issues of the magazine Transatlantic Review, and then in 1925 the entire book was published in a subsidized edition. During this same year Stein’s circle of contacts expanded to include F. SCOTT FITZGER ALD and his wife, Zelda, as well as Edith Sitwell, the English poet. Stein had already met WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS and T. S. ELIOT the year before, and in 1926 her fame was such that she was invited to lecture at both Cambridge and Oxford universities. During that same year she published not only this lecture (“Composition as Explanation”) but also an illustrated book with the typical Steinian title “A Book Concluding with As a Wife Has a Cow, A Love Story.” In 1927 she produced the libretto for an opera by Virgil Thomson called Four Saints in Three Acts, wrote a lyrical prose work titled Lucy Church Amiably, and continued producing her prose portraits, all the while maintaining her ongoing interest in befriending, cultivating, and gossiping with the newest writers, painters, and other artists. In 1928 she self-published a collection called Useful Knowledge, continued composing a work titled How to Write, and witnessed the publication of her book titled A Village [:] Are You Ready Not Yet. Meanwhile, Lucy Church Amiably appeared in 1930. Ironically, her friendship with the French writer Georges Hugnet ended when in 1931 she published Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded, which Hugnet considered an insufficiently accurate translation of one of his works. In 1932 Stein’s How to Write appeared in print, as did a collection called Operas and Plays. It was toward the end of that year, however, that

she composed the work that would soon make her a best-selling writer: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. With typical cleverness, Stein here adopts the pose and persona of Toklas to write mainly about her own life, opinions, and friendships, including (of course) the important link with Toklas herself. When the book was printed in America in 1933, Stein suddenly won the fame she had long coveted. Written in an unusually accessible style and full of wit, gossip, and personal memories of the growth of modernism, the book made Stein a celebrity in her home country—a figure whom the press loved to quote, mock, bait, and debate. By 1934 Stein was off to America for a highly publicized and highly successful lecture tour. She was widely interviewed, spoke often, was invited to the White House, and made new friends, including THORNTON WILDER . Her opera Four Saints in Three Acts was successfully staged, a shorter version of The Making of Americans was issued, and a collection called Portraits and Prayers was published. Also in 1935 she lectured, visited Hollywood, returned to her childhood home in Oakland, and published not only Lectures in America but also Narration (consisting of further lectures). In 1936 she spoke again at Oxford and Cambridge, collaborated with the composer Lord Gerald Berners, befriended (and posed for) the photographer Cecil Beaton, and then witnessed the publication (in 1936) of The Geographical History of America, followed in 1937 by Everybody’s Autobiography (an account of her travels in the United States). In 1938 she published Picasso (in French) and completed a play called Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, and in 1939 she published a children’s book titled The World Is Round. By this time, however, the world was not (unfortunately) peaceful, and when the Second World War broke out in September 1939, Stein seems to have been caught by surprise. Although urged to leave France, she and Toklas stayed behind, and initially Stein (despite being Jewish) seems to have felt real sympathy for the French collaborators with the Germans. She published Paris France in 1940 and Ida: A Novel in 1941, and she began work on a novel called Mrs. Reynolds as well as on a memoir called Wars I Have

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Seen. In 1944 American troops liberated the small village where Stein and Toklas were living, and Stein now won even greater publicity, not only as a famous writer but as a kind of mother hen to the American troops. Wars I Have Seen was published in 1945, the same year Stein lectured in Germany, Paris, and Brussels (often speaking to soldiers), and the year in which she began an opera libretto called The Mother of Us All. In 1946 she completed that libretto, heard of the production of her play Yes Is for a Very Young Man back in California, and published an account of American troops called Brewsie and Willie. By midsummer, however, she was diagnosed with cancer, and on July 27 she died during surgery. On October 22 she was buried in a Paris cemetery, to be joined there in 1967 by the body of Alice B. Toklas, her long-beloved mate.

Three Lives (1909) Three Lives, which was begun in 1905 and published in 1909, is one of Stein’s earliest and most accessible books; it depicts the lives of three lowerclass women, including two German immigrant servants (“The Good Anna” and “The Gentle Lena”) whose relatively brief stories frame a much longer central section (“Melanctha”) that emphasizes the romantic relationships of a young black woman. All three tales end in the early deaths of the central characters, and all three also stress the hard lives these women lead because of their bleak circumstances. The book reflects Stein’s intense interest in character types and in repetitious patterns of behavior—patterns reflected in Stein’s own deliberately repetitious style of writing. “The Good Anna” begins with an apparently conventional opening describing the relations between Anna and various tradesmen as well as her relations with her employer, Miss Mathilda, whose household Anna manages. The style at fi rst seems simple, direct, and plain, and the key to the story’s tone is set in the fourth paragraph, which asserts that “Anna led an arduous and troubled life” (69). Although Stein’s later stylistic trademark of repeated phrases already begins to appear

in the next two paragraphs, at fi rst the tale emphasizes Anna’s colloquial, colorful speech; her comic obsession with “canine chastity” (70); and a fairly straightforward plot involving the succession of assistants with whom she often fi nds fault. As the title suggests, Stein tends to be interested in character types, often using single adjectives to sum up a person’s essential traits, as when she describes two subordinate servants by saying that the “pretty, cheerful Lizzie was succeeded by a melancholy Molly” (71). Stein conveys the monotonous lives of the women she depicts, including their minor spats and simmering tensions, and the tale reveals its author’s ear for both dialect and dialogue. The characters’ ethnic backgrounds are often stressed, so that Stein’s people often seem to be representative types rather than highly distinctive individuals. The story’s style is rarely vivid, powerful, or engaging; instead, Stein intentionally uses dry, unadorned phrasing to portray predictable, unexciting lives. Often the diction seems so basic and stripped down that it sounds almost awkward, as if written by a foreigner with a limited command of English: “It was pleasant that everything for one was done, but annoying often that what one wanted most just then, one could not have when one had foolishly demanded and not suggested one’s desire” (77–78). The strange inversions, the repetition of one, the absence of any kind of concrete, enlivening detail—all these traits would become increasingly typical of Stein’s style, and all are already apparent in “The Good Anna.” The second part of “The Good Anna” takes us back into the protagonist’s past, briefl y describing her time in Germany and her immigration to the United States. Here as before, Stein tends to focus on externals: Anna is described as being “of solid lower middle-class south german stock” (78), while her brother is depicted as “a heavy, lumbering, good natured german man, full of the infi rmity that comes of excess of body” (79). Despite all of Stein’s proclaimed interest in psychological characteristics, she rarely in this opening section of Three Lives conveys or stimulates much interest in the distinctiveness or complexity of the people she depicts—probably because she felt that few people

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were truly distinctive or genuinely complex. Anna tends to regard other persons as mere types (as in her thoughts on boys versus girls [79–80]), and she herself tends to be treated as such by Stein. Here as so often elsewhere, Stein shows little interest in creating excitement, suspense, or even a strong sense of a developing “plot”; there is no powerful feeling of forward movement, only the humdrum, everyday impression that this-happened-and-thenthis-happened-and-the-good-Anna-reacted-thisway-or-that way. By writing this way, Stein was deliberately reacting against the conventional expectation of a “well-made tale”; her method was revolutionary precisely because she was rejecting and stripping away many of the standard elements past writers had used to create and sustain readers’ interest, such as exotic settings, shocking events, “profound” themes, lyrical phrasing, or characters who seemed larger than life. Instead she presents an “ordinary” character who lives a rather unexciting life, who thinks rather predictable thoughts, who expresses herself in rather standard speech, and who is treated—by her creator and by other characters—as a “type” rather than as a fully complicated personality. Stein repudiates the often flowery diction, the often lofty moralism, and the often high-minded characterization that make bad Victorian fiction so difficult to read; instead she chooses a style and methods that are simple almost to the point of being simplistic. Nevertheless, in the process she helped create a new way of writing that other authors (such as Hemingway) would exploit with much greater popular success. If part 1 of “The Good Anna” focuses mainly on Anna’s relations with other servants, part 2 deals chiefly with her relations with various employers. Part 3, the brief fi nal section, emphasizes the period when she makes her living by taking in boarders. Eventually, having grown increasingly poor and increasingly unhealthy, she dies, and the narrative ends as quietly and abruptly as it began. Stein suggests no larger meaning or significance for Anna’s commonplace life; she offers no grand interpretation of its purpose or even its lack of purpose. Anna dies as she lived: without fanfare, without any close family, with just one friend in attendance—in short,

essentially alone. Yet Stein emphasizes no sense of pathos; she simply describes plain facts. The second section of Three Lives— “Melanctha”—is widely considered one of Stein’s best pieces of writing. It is one of the fi rst works by a white American author to focus so intently and exclusively on the lives of black characters, and although the story has been accused (even by some of Stein’s greatest admirers) of exploiting and perpetuating racist stereotypes, it has also been broadly praised for capturing so effectively the diction and rhythms of African-American speech. The story describes the friendship of Melanctha Herbert (whose fi rst name means dark flower) and Rose Johnson. It also describes Melanctha’s romantic involvements with a young doctor named Jeff Campbell and then with an unsettled gambler named Jem Richards. The potentially offensive nature of Stein’s narrative is apparent from its opening paragraphs, in which Rose is described as “a real black, tall, well built, sullen, stupid, childlike, good looking negress” and as a character who “was never joyous with the earth-born, boundless joy of negroes” (124). Anyone writing such sentences today would instantly be suspected of racism, but although Stein probably did share some of the racist preconceptions of her era, her phrasing here is also typical of her more general tendency to view all her characters (both black and white) in terms of somewhat crude external stereotypes. Fortunately the most important aspect of her depiction of Melanctha is not her almost cartoonish description of the woman’s external traits (“Melanctha Herbert was a graceful, pale yellow, intelligent, attractive negress . . . [who] had been half made with real white blood” [125]) but rather her splendid ability to convey the rhythms of this woman’s thought and speech. The most interesting portions of “Melanctha” involve the slowly growing affection between the title character and Dr. Jeff Campbell, whom she meets when he helps treat her sick and dying mother. As usual, Stein introduces Campbell with her standard list of simple, even simplistic adjectives and her typical neglect of common punctuation: “Dr. Jefferson Campbell was a serious, earnest, good young

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joyous doctor. He liked to take care of everybody and he loved his own colored people. . . . He sang when he was happy, and he laughed, and his was the free abandoned laughter that gives the warm broad glow to negro sunshine” (143). If these sentences had been written by another author, we might suspect the writer of having some ironic fun at the expense of a simple-minded, racist narrator, but such broad-brush comments about ethics, ethnicity, and personality typify the ways Stein describes practically everyone. The story achieves real distinction, however, during the long middle section, in which the dialogues between Jeff and Melanctha are quoted at length. Here, for instance, is Melanctha addressing Jeff early in their relationship: You are certainly a very good man, Dr. Campbell, I certainly do feel that more every day I see you. Dr. Campbell, I sure do want to be friends with a good man like you, now I know you. You certainly, Dr. Campbell, never do things like other men, that’s always ugly for me. Tell me true, Dr. Campbell, how you feel about being always friends with me. I certainly do know, Dr. Campbell, you are a good man, and if you say you will be friends with me, you certainly never will go back on me, the way so many kinds of them do to every girl they ever get to like them. Tell me for true, Dr. Campbell, will you be friends with me. (156)

In passages such as this, many of the odd tics that typified Stein’s phrasing (including the repetitions, the comma splices, the simplistic vocabulary, the strange grammar, and the imprecise punctuation, to name just a few) seem perfectly appropriate to the characters she depicts. Much more than is true of “The Good Anna” or “The Gentle Lena,” one emerges from “Melanctha” with a strong sense of the distinctive personality of the central character, partly because in “Melanctha” Stein herself often keeps quiet and lets her heroine talk for such long stretches. The result is a fascinating character portrait—certainly one of the most genuinely effective and compulsively readable pieces of writing Stein ever produced.

Unfortunately for Melanctha, her relationship with Jeff Campbell does not last. She loses interest in a man she knows is good and decent (or, as Stein puts it in her typically fractured English: “Melanctha was all ready now to fi nd new ways to be in trouble. And yet Melanctha Herbert never wanted not to do right. Always Melanctha Herbert wanted peace and quiet, and always she could only fi nd new ways to get excited” [217]). New excitement enters her life in the person of Jem Richards, a normally lucky gambler who soon gives her a ring and promises marriage. However, when Jem’s luck fails, he sours on making a permanent commitment, and Melanctha’s attempts to pressure him boomerang. Over and over again Stein repeats that Melanctha’s passion for Jem has made her “mad and foolish” (230), and indeed when he leaves her, she even contemplates suicide. Suicide, however, would be too dramatic and exciting a plot development for a story by Stein, and so Melanctha, as does Anna before her, merely dies an unseen, uneventful, anticlimactic death, and once more Stein deliberately points to no moral, draws no conclusions, and indeed seems rather unmoved by the loss. A different kind of writer would have made us feel the lonely pain of Melanctha’s passing or would have drawn some larger parallel between Melanctha’s life and the existence of humans in general. Stein, however, deliberately avoids pathos or the suggestion of any larger meaning. Her method is one of laconic understatement and plain restraint. In creating Melanctha Herbert, however, and in letting her speak with Jeff Campbell at such great length, Stein invented some of the most memorably eloquent characters of recent American literature. The third and fi nal portion of Three Lives, titled “The Gentle Lena,” resembles the opening section by focusing on a German immigrant servant. The portrait begins just as one might expect, with Stein’s typical list of sweeping adjectives: “Lena was patient, gentle, sweet and german” (240). Once more, too, the phrasing is simple to the point of sometimes seeming banal, as when Stein describes Lena’s place of employment: “This place Lena had found very good. There was a pleasant, unexacting mistress and her children, and they all liked Lena

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very well” (240). Stein’s style in such passages is anything but concrete, precise, or gripping; instead, it seems colorless and abstract, perhaps to suggest the relatively drab and colorless lives such characters lead. Stein describes the predictable relations Lena shares with her fellow servants, her employers, and her employers’ children. Excitement (of a sort) enters Lena’s life only when her employer decides that Lena should marry and arranges a match with the parents of Herman Kreder. A lethargic but compliant young man, he has no real interest in marrying but seems willing, at fi rst, to follow his parents’ orders: “He did not like to see girls and he did not want to have to have one always near him,” but “Herman always did everything that his father and mother wanted and now they wanted that he should be married” (251). Small hints of suspense and uncertainty, and even a bit of pathos, enter the story briefly when Herman absconds before the wedding, but soon he is retrieved and the match occurs. Lena and Herman both perform their duties; they move in with Herman’s parents; and, despite his mother’s scolding of Lena, Herman learns to value her presence (or, as Stein puts it, “He did not care very much about her but she never was a bother to him being there around him” [263]). Another kind of writer might have milked this relationship for a good deal of pathos or even comedy, but neither sympathy nor laughter seems much on Stein’s mind. Or, again, a different kind of writer might have presented Lena’s story as an example of the oppression of women, or might even have presented Herman himself as a victim of his environment and upbringing. Stein, however, seems uninterested in any such “messages,” and the tale’s only real surprise occurs when it emerges that the asexual Herman wants to be a father. Lena, typically, does her duty, and the story’s fi nal pages describe the arrivals of four children. During the fourth delivery the child dies, and even “Lena had grown very pale and sicker. When it was all over Lena had died, too, and nobody knew just how it had happened to her” (270). Not that anyone (including the narrator) seems to care about her death or miss her much; in the story’s fi nal sentence, we are told that “Herman Kreder was very

well content now and he always lived very regular and peaceful, and with every day just like the next one, always alone now with his three good, gentle children” (271). Stein’s phrasing, as usual, is very plain and very simple and very repetitious and very frequent in its use of the word very and it is very common for it to be using very bland adjectives like content and regular and peaceful and these no doubt are some of the very reasons that Stein had such a very strong influence on writers who were looking for a very different way of writing than had been usual before Gertrude Stein.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Examine Stein’s descriptions of the lives of German immigrants. How does she use dialect to depict them and other characters in the book? How does she evoke sympathy for them? 2. Compare and contrast Stein’s depiction of Melanctha with ZOR A NEALE HURSTON’s depiction of Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God. How do the women resemble each other or differ in their dialect, their backgrounds, their aspirations, their achievements, and their relations with men? 3. Richard Wright was a great admirer’s of Stein’s “Melanctha.” Read his story “Long Black Song” and them compare and contrast the two works in terms of their use of dialogue, plot, and theme. How and why does Wright use suspense differently than Stein? How do the writers seem to differ in their motives and purposes?

Tender Buttons (1914) As its title suggests, Tender Buttons is full of odd combinations—strange juxtapositions involving words, phrases, and sentences that ordinarily seem to have little relationship. Divided into three sections (titled, respectively, “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms”), the work appears to be a series of brief, disconnected prose paragraphs, although it is often regarded as a collection of short prose poems. Here as in so many of her other works, Stein challenges conventional notions of genre (in other words, the different kinds


of literature), as well as traditional ideas about sentence structure, grammar, logic, punctuation, and the importance of conveying meaning. Perhaps the most profitable way to read Tender Buttons (as well as much of the rest of Stein’s work) is as a series of experiments in language. In this text as in so much else that Stein composed, “meaning” in the conventional sense is relatively unimportant; she is not so much trying to convey information or ideas as she is attempting to startle, provoke, disconcert, entertain, and even frustrate. She wants readers to pay attention to individual words and to their unexpected, even apparently “nonsensical” combinations; she wants readers to linger over sounds, to listen for puns, to play (and/or watch Stein play) with words as one plays with toys: for the sheer pleasure of the activity rather than for any more “serious,” “larger” purpose. Admirers of Tender Buttons fi nd it a fascinating exercise in linguistic inventiveness; they extol its unpredictability, its suggestiveness, its microscopic attention to the tiny details of daily living, its rejection of the tired conventions of “normal,” “rational” thought and inherited rhetoric. Dissenters, on the other hand, consider the work mostly monotonous, lumbering, dull, contrived, pretentious, emotionally barren, and fi nally both uninspired and uninspiring. Tender Buttons has been usefully compared to the kind of abstraction common in many arts during Stein’s era: Just as the cubist painters were challenging traditional methods and subjects of Western painting, and just as the 12-tone composers were undermining traditional techniques of Western music, so Stein and other writers were trying to break free of the standard practices of Western creative writing. Thus, the “poems” Stein creates in Tender Buttons do not seem poems in the traditional sense: They lack any regular patterns of rhyme or meter; they resemble short fragments of prose; and they lack any obvious coherence of theme, any standard pattern of internal development, and any clear sense of an overall “plot.” It would be difficult to argue, for instance, that the fragments depend on their present arrangement to be intelligible: The current “shape” of the work could presumably be altered without doing any real

damage to its “larger meaning,” precisely because Stein seems uninterested in meaning of that sort. Likewise, it would be difficult to imagine the grounds on which any particular interpretation of the work could be challenged. Numerous critics, for instance, have attempted to offer explications of individual sections, but these explications frequently have little in common; nor do their authors seem engaged in meaningful dialogue, partly because Tender Buttons does not encourage such exchange. How would it be possible to argue, for instance, that any particular interpretation was “correct” or “incorrect,” “adequate” or “inadequate,” “convincing” or “unconvincing”? For good or ill, Tender Buttons is not amenable to such discussion. Each reader reacts to it individually, and there seem to be no means to assert that any particular reaction is “valid” or “invalid.” Faced with a text like Tender Buttons, such criteria seem outmoded or pointless. And perhaps such “pointlessness” (ironically) is precisely the point. Tender Buttons reveals Stein’s ability to focus on any particular thing (including the most common domestic objects) and use that thing as an occasion for meditation and writing. The work has often been compared to a collage, and it has also often been compared to a series of painted “still lives”— the kind of painting that centers on objects but in which the objects themselves are less important than the painter’s treatment of them. In Tender Buttons as elsewhere, the main “theme” of Stein’s writing seems to be writing itself; the main subject is not so much any of the things she “describes” but rather the movements of her mind (erratic, associative, dissociative) as she contemplates those objects. The text is fragmented, open-ended, unresolved, and unresolvable; it depends on a method of constant surprise, of continuously subverted expectations. (Of course, once one begins to expect that one’s expectations will constantly be subverted, the sense of surprise diminishes and monotony may set in.) It is a text that will intrigue many readers and frustrate many others; it is, in short, Stein at her most Steinian. The challenges posed by Tender Buttons are apparent from the very fi rst item in the “OBJECTS” section:

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A carafe, that is a blind glass A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

What do we make of this? The short answer is “pretty much whatever we want.” The “poem” seems to be a series of relatively free associations, and it certainly seems to spark such associations in the minds of many of Stein’s more admiring readers. The fi rst two words of the title seem simple enough: They seem to promise that the “poem” will provide a description of an open-topped glass flask typically used for serving wine. The next two words (that is) seem to reinforce this promise: They seem to promise a clarifying explanation. The words that follow, however, are not especially clear or explanatory: In what senses is a carafe a “blind glass”? Well, certainly a carafe is (usually) made of glass, but in what senses is a carafe “blind”? Perhaps in the sense that when it is fi lled with dark red wine it cannot be seen through, although blind is usually a word applied to someone or something normally capable of seeing rather than to someone or something normally capable of being seen (or seen through). Already in the title, then, Stein has achieved her usual effect of being puzzling or provocative—an effect many of her readers fi nd appealing. When we move into the body of the “poem” itself, we discover that kind rhymes with blind—a fact commentators frequently note, although why such rhyming is important or how it contributes to the effectiveness of the “poem” is rarely made clear. The fi rst four words of the body of the “poem” seem to continue the defi nition and explanation begun in the title (a carafe is indeed usually made of glass), but the word in is puzzling: If Stein had said that a carafe was a “kind of glass,” the statement would make more immediate sense (although even then it would not be conventionally clear, since a carafe is actually a kind of thing that is usually made of glass). Per-

haps Stein means to suggest that a carafe is a kind of thing that usually fi nds expression in the form of glass; in any case, in a mere four words she has once again disrupted our normal expectations of how an English sentence usually works. Next the carafe is called “a cousin.” Commentators usually note the alliteration of carafe, kind, and cousin, although once again they often fail to explain what larger purpose, if any, the alliteration serves or how it contributes to the poem’s effectiveness or how it adds (dare one say it?) to the beauty of the piece. Commentators also often note the possible pun on the word spectacle, which can suggest “glass” put to a different “kind” of use (that is, in eyeglasses, or “spectacles,” which work against blindness). This alleged pun can also suggest that the carafe is an object of fascinated sight (a “spectacle” in the sense of being a “public spectacle”). What, however, is the point of such a pun? How is it effective? Is it in any way beautiful? Does it contribute to the overall impact of this “poem”? These are questions each reader must answer for herself or himself. No sooner does the text describe the carafe as a “spectacle” (in the second sense of the pun) than it immediately asserts that the carafe is “nothing strange.” Thus the work seems to offer a paradox: We are presented with something that is unusual but also not unusual. The word strange is later echoed, through assonance and a kind of internal rhyme, by the word arrangement. Moreover, the idea that the carafe is “nothing strange” is later complicated by the assertion that it is also “not ordinary,” and then the sound and sense of that phrase are themselves played with in the subsequent assertion that while the carafe is “not ordinary,” it is also “not unordered.” Thus, the carafe is in some ways peculiar (it is “not ordinary”), but it is also not chaotic (“not unordered”). While noting all these kinds of echoes of sounds and all these playings with sense, commentators also often note the constant repetition of not, if only because such repetition is one of the mainstays of Stein’s style. Finally, the opening paragraph (or stanza?) of “OBJECTS” closes with an assertion (“The difference is spreading”) whose relation to everything that precedes it is not immediately clear,

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although perhaps the word difference relates to the prior reference to “not resembling.” Or perhaps not. Perhaps the “poem” ends with a broad metaphysical pronouncement. Or perhaps the reference to “difference” forecasts and foreshadows the method of the ensuing book. Who can say? How could one argue convincingly for any particular interpretation? By what criteria could one decide that any given interpretation was invalid or unconvincing? Is interpretation even necessary or appropriate in dealing with such a text? The only confident assertion one can offer is that the rest of Tender Buttons strongly resembles its opening paragraph (and so, in that sense, difference—ironically—is not spreading). One phrase in the opening paragraph does seem (at least to me) memorable and striking: “hurt color.” Here the combination of words does seem to evoke a sharp, refreshing idea. One does not normally think of colors as capable of being “hurt,” but it is just this kind of odd combination of contrasting words, and of distinctive categories of experience, that Stein’s admirers value in her writing. The phrase “hurt color” is effective perhaps because it seems less abstract, less coldly clinical than much of Stein’s phrasing; here both the adjective and the noun seem more vivid than usual. This phrase does seem to refresh the English language in the ways Stein claimed she wanted to do (and in a way that her most famous phrase—“A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”—may not). Commentators have suggested that “hurt color” may refer to the (bloody) red color of wine, or to the various colors of different kinds of wines—colors that may resemble the various shades of a bruise. Whatever the case, I fi nd that “hurt color” does stick in my mind in ways that the rest of the “poem,” frankly, does not. This, of course, is purely a subjective opinion, but it is hard to see how writing like Stein’s can do much more than appeal to almost purely subjective reactions. Tender Buttons does not invite us to evaluate it by shared, conventional, traditional categories or by common standards of response. Like most of her works, it is sui generis—it is (in other words) a thing unto itself, its own kind of thing, something fi nally unique.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast one brief section of Tender Buttons with WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.” How are the works similar and/or different in style, method, tone, and philosophical implication? What do they suggest about the importance of “common” objects? What do they imply about the role of the observer and describer of such objects? 2. Commentators have suggested that some aspects of Tender Buttons (including the title itself) have erotic connotations that make sense in light of Stein’s lesbianism. Read through the entire text and look for any imagery, phrasing, rhythms, and possible puns that might support such an interpretation. 3. Compare and contrast one brief section of Tender Buttons with EZR A POUND’s brief poem “In a Station of the Metro.” How do the works resemble and/or differ from one another, particularly in their use of imagery, in their structure, and in their use of grammar, punctuation, and syntax (sentence structure)? Which work is more conventionally “unified,” how is such unity achieved, and what does such unity contribute to the effectiveness of the work?

The Making of Americans (1925) The Making of Americans, which Stein considered her most important work, is less significant for its plot than for its style and technique; it is a huge, rambling book (consisting of over 900 closely printed pages), and even some of Stein’s greatest admirers have confessed to being unable to fi nish it or even to stay awake while attempting to read it. Ostensibly it is a saga describing the lives of three generations of the Dehning and Hersland clans, with various Herslands resembling various members of Stein’s own family, including Stein herself; the narrative, however, is less concerned with individual personalities or individual conduct than with character types and recurrent patterns of behavior.

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The full title of Stein’s book—The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress— suggests that the work is some kind of historical novel, and writing such a work may indeed have been Stein’s original intention. By the time she had fi nished her project, however, she had deliberately violated most of the traditional conventions of novel writing, producing a work in which the story, people, setting, and themes take a distant back seat to the particularities of phrasing and to the very process of writing. Few people read The Making of Americans for its narrative; to the extent that the book is read at all, it is usually dipped into for samples of its style and for Stein’s reflections on various topics. The work has been considered a kind of day book or journal rather than a standard novel; in other words, it has been regarded as a text in which Stein, over a period of years, recorded her thoughts on various characters and issues (particularly issues of writing, including the writing of this book itself) rather than as a coherent narrative. Both for Stein and for most of her readers, The Making of Americans is more important for the way it is written than for what it actually says or for any story it attempts to tell. The book seems (and probably was) largely improvised; it follows no obvious plan and displays no obvious design. Although it is divided into five large sections, it lacks the kind of coherent structure—such as chapters of roughly equal length—that usually helps readers pace their progress through most traditional novels. Characters are introduced and then dropped for hundreds of pages, only to be reintroduced much later without fanfare or explanation. Because the book deals with different generations of two families, various characters share the same fi rst and last names, but Stein makes little effort to distinguish one person clearly from another. As the book grew in length, so did its sentences and paragraphs; it is not unusual for a single paragraph to take up most of (or even more than) an entire page. As in most of Stein’s writings, conventional rules of punctuation and capitalization are tossed aside; commas are often missing where they would usually be expected, or commas are often used where periods or semicolons might

have made the sentence structure clearer. Rambling sentences sometimes consume entire paragraphs. Thus, just as an obvious structure is missing from the book as a whole, so the same kind of structure often seems missing from individual utterances. The book de-emphasizes many of the standard “literary” devices (such as imagery, metaphors, similes, dialogue, dialect, dramatic irony, foreshadowing, symbolism, wit, humor, figurative language, or descriptions of setting) that attract most readers to most novels and help sustain their interest. The following paragraph, for instance, is relatively short and relatively conventional in its focus on character description (including inner personality traits) and on relations between characters; even in this paragraph, however, some of Stein’s most typical stylistic traits are obvious: Mr. David Hersland had it in his strongest living to be as big as all the world around him, it was in him, he was all it in him, it was to him all inside him, he was it and it was to him all always in him. This was the big feeling in him and then he was strong in beginning. This was the biggest time of his living, when this was strong in him his big feeling his being strong in beginning his keeping going even with impatient feeling in him, before all of it in him turned into impatient feeling. This was the big time in his living, and this was when his wife was still in him as a tender feeling, when his children were fi rst beginning to have in them individual feeling. This was the time of such a big feeling in him and then he was strong in beginning. The world around him, all, every moment, in beginning, it was then and it was all in him, and he was strong then and full up with beginning. (136)

Here as so often elsewhere, Stein’s choice of individual words seems simple and plain; she writes a kind of basic English, restricting herself to just a few fundamental words and then repeating them continuously. She rings constant variations on them, recombining them in almost every conceivable way until she seems to have exhausted practically every possible permutation of sound and

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meaning. Her style has often been compared, in this respect, to the style of grammar school primers (such as the famous Sally, Dick, and Jane books), in which a few basic words are reiterated incessantly, often to the point of maddening monotony. In this sense, her style can often seem deliberately naive and even childish, although obviously one of her intentions was the more sophisticated one of trying to force readers to puzzle out the complexities that can result when a few apparently simple terms are laid out, combined, and then endlessly recombined. Thus, although Stein’s vocabulary is indeed usually simple, it is also usually anything but transparent; it is impossible to breeze through a Stein sentence, reading it quickly for any obvious “meaning.” Instead, Stein tries to compel readers to linger over every word, even every syllable; she wants us to pay close attention to every single word as a word, rather than simply as the symbol of an idea. When read aloud, her sentences often have a rhythmic, hypnotic quality; they function more as a kind of music than as plain communication. In the paragraph just quoted as so often elsewhere, Stein violates all the standard rules usually associated with effective writing. Rather than showing, she tells; rather than using dialogue to disclose feeling, she stands apart from her characters and externally describes their emotions in the most blatantly abstract language. Rather than using vivid imagery to create pictures in her readers’ minds, she uses terms so general that they risk seeming imprecise and vague. (What, exactly, is a “big feeling”?) Rather than using just a few words to convey meaning efficiently and effectively, she often uses more words than plain sense seems to require—referring, for instance, to “impatient feeling” rather than “impatience.” Grammatically she prefers to emphasize participles and gerunds (such as living, beginning, keeping, feeling, being, going, etc.), and the effect is to slow the pace of her paragraphs, de-emphasizing any sense of rapid action and thereby forcing the reader to linger, and almost to meditate, over every single word. Moreover, just as Stein violates the common rules of effective narrative, so she violates the standard prescriptions of normal grammar and punctuation. Comma

splices and run-on sentences abound; parentheses and dashes (typically used for emphasis and clarity) are rarely employed. Semicolons rarely appear, and question marks or exclamation marks are also infrequent. Most of Stein’s sentences are blandly declarative. She seems less interested in getting inside her characters’ heads or hearts and letting them speak for themselves than in making external pronouncements about them. In short, Stein seems less interested in her characters (or her readers) than in Gertrude Stein: Gertrude Stein’s thoughts, Gertrude Stein’s style, Gertrude Stein’s emotions. Many professional readers of Stein fi nd this egotism refreshingly honest, and certainly in her obsession with her own responses to words, ideas, and behavior, Stein has given us one of the most detailed insights into the minute workings of one person’s mind ever put to paper. Her proclaimed intention, in writing The Making of Americans, was to show how the American people had evolved, and she also said that she was interested in explaining the fundamental traits of a few basic personality types. In the end, however, the clearest picture that emerges from her book is a complex picture of Stein’s own mind and personality, Stein’s own thoughts and emotions, Stein’s own struggles with language and meaning and narrative. The book, in the fi nal analysis, is perhaps more a record of the making of Gertrude Stein than of anything else.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast The Making of Americans with another experimental novel that deals with the fortunes of several generations of the same family—WILLIAM FAULKNEr’s Absalom, Absalom! In particular, discuss the works in terms of their styles, themes, structures, and characterization. Which book would you more strongly recommend to a friend, and why? 2. Since Stein admired Henry James, compare and contrast The Making of Americans with his novel The Europeans. How do the works resemble and/ or differ from one another in style, theme, tone, and structure? What do the works suggest about the traits of inhabitants of the “Old World” (Europe) and the “New World” (America)? Can

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you see any ways in which James may have influenced Stein in his methods or concerns? 3. Examine The Making of Americans in light of T. S. Eliot’s famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” What is Stein’s relationship with the tradition of novel writing that precedes her? How does she help alter and transform that tradition? How (if at all) does Stein’s work exemplify the kind of artistry Eliot calls for in that essay? How (if at all) is Stein the kind of artist Eliot admires? How might Stein have reacted to Eliot’s ideas?

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) This book, which was Stein’s most popular work and which is one of her most accessible, is initially presented as the autobiography of Toklas, her longtime companion; its central focus, however, is Stein herself, and, in its fi nal pages, Stein’s own authorship is made clear. Stein uses a generally lucid and straightforward style to recount, in gossipy, often witty anecdotes, her decades of life in Paris and her relations with many of the most famous names of modern art (including Matisse and Picasso) as well as her connections with such noted writers as Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson. Stein’s personality traits (including her humorous egotism, her unconventional opinions, and her often peculiar habits of thought and expression) provide the main source of unity in a work that tacitly assumes that any event in the life of Gertrude Stein will naturally interest others. People who knew Alice B. Toklas have claimed that Stein, in this book, expertly conveys Toklas’s own habits of speech and thought—so much so, in fact, that some scholars have even suggested that Toklas herself may in fact have written the book. The consensus of opinion, however, is that Stein is indeed the author, and certainly it would have been typical of Stein to write about another person’s life in a way that makes Stein the central figure. Just as Stein was able, in Three Lives, to imitate convincingly the speech patterns of a variety of Afri-

can Americans and German immigrants, so in the Autobiography she was able to mimic the tone and temperament of Alice B. Toklas. The stylistic peculiarities of the book (such as its habit of jumping erratically from one topic or time to another, or its self-conscious references to the process of its own composition) are appropriate in a work that offers itself as an unfolding monologue expressing the mind and perspectives of one particular person. In writing the book, Stein not only conveyed aspects of her own life story in often interesting ways, but also created an interesting “fictional” character who also happened to be a “real” person. This kind of blending and subversion of traditional genres, as well as this kind of experimentation with style and point of view, are both typical of modern literature, but in writing the Autobiography Stein also created a work that has a generally interesting story to tell, that presents some often intriguing characters, and that is frequently appealing for its stylistic cleverness. In short, in writing the Autobiography she came closer than usual to meeting conventional standards of literary effectiveness. Although the book sometimes becomes tiring in its “this-happenedand-then-this-happened-and-then-Gertrude-Steinsaid-this-about-that” comprehensiveness, there is no denying that the work is often fascinating and clever and that it is even sometimes both fun and funny. One appealing aspect of the Autobiography is its emphasis on the personal eccentricities of both Toklas and Stein. A reader never knows quite what to expect from either of them, and thus the book attains a certain level of sustained suspense, since we can never predict what either woman may say or do. Both seem to be generally good-natured individualists who not only enjoy their own peculiarities but also seem interested in (and mostly tolerant of) the peculiarities of others. In the book’s third paragraph, for instance, Stein has Toklas report of herself that “I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it” (659), and it is just this sort of emphasis on slightly off-kilter sensibilities that helps make the book attractive. Humor also adds to the book’s appeal, as when “Toklas” reports (with Stein’s typical disregard for conventional punctuation) that “I remember that once when my brother

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and a comrade had gone horse-back riding, one of the horses returned riderless to the hotel, the mother of the other boy began to a make a terrible scene. Be calm madam, said my father, perhaps it is my son who has been killed” (660). The Autobiography is full of similarly clever anecdotes, and one senses that both Stein and Toklas saw life as a kind of droll pageant staged mainly to amuse and entertain them. Partly for this reason, the tone of the work sometimes seems superficial; rarely does much depth of feeling or any sense of tragedy or compassion or deeply personal revelation interrupt the flow of sophisticated chitchat. We never have much sense, for instance, of anything painful about the lives of two women, who were, after all, a pair of conventionally unattractive expatriate Jewish lesbians in a culture that often disdained Jews, mocked the fat and “ugly,” and discriminated against gays. In fact, the most intimately personal aspects of the relation between Stein and Toklas are never discussed; their sexual identities are lightly implied but never confi rmed. To expect such things from the book, however, would be to misjudge its purpose: It is, for the most part, a witty comedy (often resembling a play by Oscar Wilde) in which Stein gets all the good lines. Stein makes little attempt to impose a conventional shape on the book or to hide the hinges that link its various parts. She is not trying to write a “standard” autobiography but to create a kind of drama, with Toklas as the only actor in a onewoman show—but a show in which Stein is always the main subject of discussion. “Toklas” is constantly telling us what she plans to tell us before she is distracted by another digression; the book thus conveys the sense of listening to an actual person talking. The Autobiography also contains many of Stein’s standard stylistic tics (such as her emphasis on repetition), but in this case those traits do not seem as contrived or self-indulgent as they occasionally seem in her other works, since they appear to reflect the idiosyncratic character of “Toklas.” At one point, for instance, “Toklas” says, “I was confused and I looked and I looked and I was confused” (668). Here the repetition seems effective, since it not only captures and conveys an individual

personality, also re-creates and mimics the very sense of puzzlement it describes. Likewise, when “Toklas” later says that “Matisse worked every day and every day and every day and he worked terribly hard” (696), the repetition seems functional rather than arbitrary: It forces the reader to share the experience of incessant labor rather than merely reading about it. Whether or not Stein’s book is factually reliable (and many of the people described in its pages instantly challenged its credibility), it certainly conveys the impression of plausibility, vitality, and real life; one comes away from it with a strong sense of what it might truly have been like to be alive in bohemian Paris in the early decades of the 20th century. The Autobiography is full of memorable anecdotes and incisive observations, many of them involving some of the most important figures of 20th-century culture. It is hard to forget (for instance) Stein’s brutally quick put-down of Ezra Pound (whose own ego was almost as large as hers): “Gertrude Stein liked him but did not fi nd him amusing. She said he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not” (856). Likewise, she later quotes Picasso as saying dismissively of Georges Braque (the painter) and James Joyce (the novelist), “they are the incomprehensibles whom anybody can understand” (869). One of the most often-quoted of these jibes concerns the now mostly forgotten Glenway Wescott, about whom Stein simply said, “He has a certain syrup but it does not pour” (875). Hemingway, meanwhile, is depicted as a kind of imitative, cowardly sycophant whose mysterious personal life is far more interesting than any of his books (872). Yet Stein was sometimes capable of genuine admiration for others, especially if she considered them geniuses (like her) and especially if she herself had played any role in calling them to public attention. (It also helped if the others in question had publicly praised Gertrude Stein.) Thus she expresses great regard for Picasso and for the painter Juan Gris, and her opinion of Sherwood Anderson seems to have been as high as his opinion of her. At times, however, her comments seem callous by modern standards, as when she writes, “Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein 419

concluded that negroes were not suffering from persecution, they were suffering from nothingness. She always contends that the african is not primitive, he has a very ancient but a very narrow culture and there it remains. Consequently nothing does or can happen” (894). At moments like this (and they are not infrequent) Stein seems less eccentric than condescending and smug. Her world revolved around herself, and the Autobiography, for good and for ill, is perhaps the most accessible entrance into that world we now possess.

2.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Stein’s Autobiography with Up from Slavery by BOOKER T. WASHINGTON. How do the works resemble or differ from one another in style, structure, tone, topics, and purpose? How might Washington react to Stein’s book, and why? How might Stein react to Washington’s book, and why? Which of the two books appeals to you more, and why? Are they really comparable? 2. How are the lives of painters presented in the book? How did Stein’s material circumstances and setting in France affect the book? 3. Sherwood Anderson’s book Winesburg, Ohio is often considered to be a kind of autobiography. Compare and contrast the ways Anderson presents his alter ego in that book, George Willard, with the ways Gertrude Stein creates the character “Gertrude Stein” in the Autobiography. How do the two characters differ or contrast in their concerns, their personalities, their circumstances, and their aspirations? What are some features of the two works that might have led their authors to admire each other so much?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON STEIN AND HER WORK 1. Stein was an advocate and defender of the artistic movement known as cubism, and she particularly admired Picasso’s cubist works. Among other things, the cubists emphasized geometric forms, an absence of perspective, repetitive shapes, and

3.

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5.

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an absence of bright colors. Examine some defi nitions of cubism; then examine some cubist paintings; then compare and contrast those defi nitions and paintings with some examples of Stein’s art, especially in Tender Buttons. Stein claimed that she was present at one of the fi rst performances of the revolutionary ballet The Rite of Spring, composed by Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky’s music (which was highly controversial at the time) was highly rhythmic, highly repetitive, greatly discordant, and often unmelodic. Listen to a recording of Stravinsky’s work, and then compare and contrast it with a piece of writing by Stein from the same period, focusing especially on the features of his work already mentioned. Thornton Wilder was an admirer of Gertrude Stein. Compare and contrast his play Our Town with Stein’s prose work The Making of Americans. How do they resemble and differ from one another in their treatment of family life, the passage of time, and the presentation of character? In what ways are they alike or dissimilar in their use of dialogue? Which aspects of Stein’s style might have appealed to Wilder, and why? Compare and contrast The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas with R ICHARD WRIGHT’s autobiography American Hunger. How are the works similar or different in style, themes, structure, and methods? How do such issues as class, race, and politics affect the two works? Sherwood Anderson was an admirer of Gertrude Stein. Examine several of Anderson’s works (such as the stories “Queer” and “Hands”) and compare and contrast them with a work by Stein, such as Tender Buttons. How are the works similar or different in their use of repetition, in their use of plot, in their presentation of character, and in their overall style? Compare and contrast a small section of Stein’s Tender Buttons with WALLACE STEVENS’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” How do the works resemble or differ from one another in style, method, or theme? Which strikes you as a more effective or thoughtprovoking use of language, and why?

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7. Choose a short work by Ernest Hemingway (such as the story “Hills Like White Elephants”) and then, on the basis of your reading of that work, try to decide why Hemingway admired Gertrude Stein and how her method(s) of writing influenced his own style. For instance, how does the story reflect Stein’s interest in repetition, in subtle revelation of character, and in a lack of conventional emphasis on story or “plot”? 8. If you had to choose one work of Stein’s to recommend to a good friend, which work would you choose, and which three reasons would lead you to recommend it? Is there a work of Stein’s that you do not particularly like? If so, which one is it? Explain specifically why you dislike the work; what three elements of the work do you fi nd particularly ineffective? 9. Listen to the work of a recent minimalist musical composer, such as Philip Glass. For example, listen to his works called Einstein on the Beach and Akhnaten. How does Glass’s music resemble Stein’s writings, particularly in its use of repetition, variation, simplicity, and unexpected shifts? 10. Compare and contrast The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas with Richard Wright’s Black Boy. How are the two works comparable or different in their themes, structures, styles, tones, and purposes? What are the ethical implications of each work; in other words, how does each work address issues of right and wrong in human conduct? How are both concerned with issues of art but in different ways? Is one work

fundamentally more serious than the other? Is it fair to compare them? WORKS CITED

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Bridgman, Richard. Gertrude Stein in Pieces. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Hoffman, Michael J., ed. Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. ———. The Development of Abstractionism in the Writings of Gertrude Stein. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965. ———. Gertrude Stein. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Knapp, Bettina L. Gertrude Stein. New York: Continuum, 1990. Nelson, Cary. “Modern American Poetry: Gertrude Stein.” Available online. URL: http://www.english. illinois.edu/Maps/poets/s_z/stein/stein.htm. Accessed April 7, 2009. Reid, B. L. Art by Subtraction: A Dissenting Opinion of Gertrude Stein. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958. Stein, Gertrude. The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress. Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995. ———. Writings 1903–1932: Q.E.D, Three Lives, Portraits and Other Short Works, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Edited by Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman. New York: Library of America, 1998. Stendhal, Renate, ed. Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures: A Photobiography. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1994.

Robert C. Evans

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. (Travels with Charley)

J

ohn Steinbeck’s status as a major American author would be secure if he had written no book other than The Grapes of Wrath, his huge, sprawling, vivid, and moving account of a simple Oklahoma farm family displaced, along with hundreds of thousands of others, from their land during the disastrous drought that made the Great Depression of the 1930s a doubly devastating period. The Grapes of Wrath is an American epic, but in addition to composing that significant and popular book Steinbeck authored Of Mice and Men (a brief novel about loneliness that is almost a drama in prose), The Pearl (a lyrical but tragic parable about a modern-day loss of innocence), and a number of short stories that are considered among his country’s fi nest. Steinbeck also, of course, wrote much else during the course of a long and prolific career, and during that career he was showered with prizes, awards, and recognitions—a trend that culminated in his being awarded, in 1962, the Nobel Prize in literature. Yet although his works were often turned into influential fi lms and his books remain widely read, he has never been accorded quite the same level of critical respect bestowed on such contemporaries as ERNEST H EMINGWAY or WILLIAM FAULKNER . He remains a writer whose reputation was somewhat hurt by his very popularity. Most of the details of Steinbeck’s life are laid out clearly in the helpful “Chronology” compiled by Robert DeMott. Steinbeck was born on Febru-

ary 27, 1902, in the town of Salinas, California, to Olive Hamilton Steinbeck (who had been a teacher) and John Ernst Steinbeck, who managed a local flour mill. The Steinbecks already had two daughters (Esther and Beth) and would later add another (Mary). Young John, however, was their only boy, and he spent his early years enjoying the pleasures of nature and developing an early infatuation with books and literature. He was a good student, and already as an adolescent he had begun composing stories and sharing them with friends. After graduating from Salinas High School, Steinbeck began taking classes in fall 1919 at Stanford University, which he attended off and on for the next several years without ever taking a degree. Meanwhile, he also worked at various practical jobs and began to develop a deep interest in science to match and balance his literary inclinations. He did publish stories in the Stanford literary magazine, but his real interest in writing did not fully surface until after he moved in 1926 to New York, where he worked both as a laborer and as a reporter. His fi rst collection of short stories was turned down that year by a New York publisher, but Steinbeck persisted in writing, and by 1927 (after he had returned to California) he had published one story and had begun collaborating on a play. By 1928 he had completed his fi rst novel, Cup of Gold, which appeared in print in August 1929. By this time, Steinbeck (who had been working a variety of jobs)

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had moved to San Francisco and was able to devote more time to writing, thanks to fi nancial support from his father. In 1930 he married Carol Henning (whom he had met in 1928), and the two lived extremely simple lives in a number of very modest homes. Most important to Steinbeck, however, was 1930 because it was the year in which he fi rst made the acquaintance of Edward F. Ricketts, a marine biologist who became a close and influential friend. Meanwhile, Steinbeck continued to write, producing an innovative short novel as well as a crime novel (neither of which was published). In 1931 he was also hard at work on a series of stories that were published in 1932 as The Pastures of Heaven. The year 1933 was sad but productive for Steinbeck. In early spring his mother became severely sick, eventually suffering a major stroke. Steinbeck and his wife soon moved home to care for her, but then his father also became seriously ill. When time permitted, Steinbeck worked on stories that eventually became part of his noted collection titled The Red Pony, and indeed two of them were printed in a prominent magazine by the end of the year. Meanwhile, his novel To a God Unknown appeared in September, by which time he was also nearly fi nished with the fi rst draft of a new novel—Tortilla Flat— that would soon help make him famous. When his mother passed away in February 1934, Steinbeck and his wife continued to live with his father for a time, but eventually caretakers were found to look after him, thus freeing John to devote more time to his writing. During that summer he composed nine stories, most of which were later collected in The Long Valley, but during this time he was also working on a new novel, In Dubious Battle, which was based on recent labor strife in California. Tortilla Flat was accepted for publication in 1934, and in 1935 In Dubious Battle was also accepted. Unfortunately the highly successful publication of Tortilla Flat in May was counterbalanced by the death of the novelist’s father that same month. Profits from sales of the novel allowed Steinbeck and his wife to travel to Mexico, and it was not long before fi lm rights to the book were also sold for a substantial sum. Steinbeck, in other words, had fi nally begun to achieve real commercial success as a writer. In Dubious Bat-

tle appeared in print early in 1936, thus giving him even further visibility as an increasingly significant author. By this time he had also begun working on one of his most famous books—Of Mice and Men. Unfortunately, his dog chewed up much of the manuscript, but Steinbeck was able to rewrite the piece rather quickly (and showed relative mercy to the dog). The revised manuscript was fi nished by August 1935; by then the Steinbecks had also moved into a newly constructed home near Monterey, California. The year 1935 was even more significant for other reasons, however, because this was the year in which he began researching California’s migrant farm workers—research that would eventually lead to the composition of his masterwork, The Grapes of Wrath. In the meantime, however, a number of his less famous books were issued in limited editions this year, and in March 1937 Of Mice and Men was published and became immediately successful. The Steinbecks were now able to travel in northern Europe as well as in the Soviet Union, and on their return in midyear his notable collection of stories, The Red Pony, was published, to be followed in the fall by an enormously well-received stage version of Of Mice and Men on Broadway (Steinbeck himself, however, never attended a performance). Meanwhile, early in 1938 a stage adaptation of Tortilla Flat was much less successful, but in general the late 1930s were perhaps the most satisfying years of Steinbeck’s creative career. In 1938 the dramatic adaptation of Of Mice and Men won the top award of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle; also during 1938 Steinbeck was hard at work on the novel that would soon be published as The Grapes of Wrath. He fi nally fi nished the book in November, by which time his collection of short stories titled The Long Valley had been published and was doing well both with critics and with the buying public. It was in 1939, however, when he achieved his greatest critical and popular success. The Grapes of Wrath appeared in April and was soon the country’s best-selling novel. Even readers who disliked it recognized its political importance. Indeed, the book was too often discussed as a political docu-

John Steinbeck

ment rather than as a work of art—a fact that led, for a long time, to insufficient appreciation of the work as a well-crafted novel. It was actually burned or banned in various American locales and was even denounced in Congress; farmers’ associations considered it a left-wing libel, while leftists naturally embraced it. In any case, it was not long before Hollywood purchased the fi lm rights; nor was it long until the work was turned into an unusually fi ne movie directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda, which appeared by the end of the year—at around the same time as the release of a separate fi lm based on Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck himself, in fact, was increasingly becoming involved in motion pictures: In 1939 he collaborated on a documentary called The Fight for Life, and it was in Hollywood in 1939 that he met and began an affair with a singer named Gwendolyn (“Gwyn”) Conger. Nevertheless, his now-strained marriage to Carol would briefly continue, and during 1940 he worked on further fi lm projects, including the script for a movie called The Forgotten Village. The highlight of 1940, however, was the news that The Grapes of Wrath had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. (With typical generosity, Steinbeck gave the prize money to a fellow novelist to help him complete a book of his own.) Early in 1941 Steinbeck purchased a small home back in Monterey, near Salinas. By spring he had separated from Carol, at around the same time as the publication of his newest book (The Forgotten Village, based on the script of the fi lm). He was also now at work on a screenplay of The Red Pony, and the end of the year saw the appearance of his innovative work Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journey of Travel and Research, cowritten with his scientist friend Ed Ricketts. By this time, of course, the United States had been plunged into World War II, and soon Steinbeck began his own contributions to the war effort. His novel The Moon Is Down, which takes place in occupied Norway, appeared in March 1942, followed quickly in April by a staged version on Broadway and plans for a fi lm. Steinbeck also began work on an officially sanctioned book about the U.S. Army Air Force; this soon appeared as Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team. Although

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plans for a fi lm of that book were soon in the works, it never appeared, but by the end of the year Steinbeck had completed the script for a new movie—A Medal for Benny—and a Hollywood fi lm of his earlier novel Tortilla Flat was issued, directed by Victor Fleming and starring Spencer Tracy. Steinbeck’s divorce from Carol became fi nal in mid-March 1943, and within two weeks he had married Gwyn. By midsummer he was off to Europe and North Africa as a war reporter, but his involvement was not limited to reporting: He actually took part in combat (including special operations commanded by the actor Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) and suffered both physical and psychological wounds. Partly in response, he began working on Cannery Row, a nostalgic look back at life in prewar Monterey. Nevertheless, by the end of 1943, his war fi lm The Moon Is Down was released (as was an important omnibus collection of his writings titled The Portable Steinbeck). In addition, early in 1944 another war movie (based on a Steinbeck novella and titled Lifeboat) appeared, and although Steinbeck himself disliked the fi lm, even though it had been directed by Alfred Hitchcock, it nevertheless won him an Academy Award nomination. More important to Steinbeck, however, were the birth of his son Thom (on August 2) and his move back to Monterey by the end of the year. Appropriately enough, the novel he had set in that town (Cannery Row) appeared early in 1945; it was a commercial success even if many critics disliked it, and soon the novella The Pearl was completed, with Steinbeck quickly beginning work (mostly in Mexico) on turning this story into a fi lm. Ironically, by the end of the year his relations with the Monterey community had become so sour that he and Gwyn quickly sold their house there and returned to New York, and Steinbeck would live mostly in the East from then on. Although the major event in Steinbeck’s life in 1946 was the birth of his son John (in mid-June), he also completed a novel titled The Wayward Bus, which was published early in 1947. By this time, however, his relationship with Gwyn had begun to falter, as had his own health. Nevertheless, after recovering well enough to travel, he visited France

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with Gwyn in midsummer and then traveled without her in Eastern Europe for much of the rest of the year. In November The Pearl appeared in book form (having earlier been published in a magazine), followed early in 1948 by the fi lm version, which was itself followed in the spring by the publication of his book titled A Russian Journal. Unfortunately these successes were soon counterbalanced by various kinds of misfortune, including hospitalization for minor surgery, the death of his good friend Ed Ricketts, and (by October) fi nal divorce from Gwyn. Although Steinbeck tried to distract himself from such troubles, he nevertheless began drinking too much and became severely depressed. Professionally, however, he continued to prosper; he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters by the end of 1948, and early in 1949 the fi lm based on his own screenplay of The Red Pony (with music by Aaron Copland) was released. During that same year he met Elaine Scott, the wife of the actor Zachary Scott, and by the end of the year she had fi led for divorce from her husband and had moved in with Steinbeck. Meanwhile, in 1950 he continued his work in fi lm and theater, collaborating on a movie titled Viva Zapata! (released in 1953), while also seeing his latest work (Burning Bright) fi rst produced as an unsuccessful Broadway play and then released as a novel. By the very end of 1950 he had married Elaine, but he was also hard at work during this period on a lengthy new novel—to be titled East of Eden—which he hoped would be a major book. The novel was published late in 1952, after a period in which Steinbeck and Elaine had traveled widely in Europe. Commercially the book was a success, but critically it was less so. Despite Academy Award nominations in 1953 for his work on the fi lm Viva Zapata! (which had been released the year before), and despite his work on other literary projects, Steinbeck during this time was depressed. Nevertheless, he was anything but paralyzed or inactive. He was moving in high society; he was writing frequently for newspapers; he collaborated on plans to turn Cannery Row into a musical; he was able to travel widely; and in 1954 his latest novel, Sweet Thursday, was published. In 1955 the

fi lm adaptation of East of Eden (overseen by the notable director Elia Kazan and starring James Dean) appeared, and toward the end of that year Pipe Dream, a musical created by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II and based on Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, was produced on Broadway (although without much success). Steinbeck was increasingly involved in politics (he actively supported each of Adlai Stevenson’s three presidential campaigns, in 1952, 1956, and 1960), and in 1957 he actually published a short satirical novel based on the French political scene titled The Short Reign of Pippin IV. Yet much of his time during the late 1950s was consumed in foreign travel, and his health had become unpredictable. His literary production during this time was not especially noteworthy; his novel The Winter of Our Discontent, which was published in 1961, totally pleased neither the critics nor Steinbeck himself. He achieved a genuine popular success, however, in 1962 with the publication of Travels with Charley in Search of America, which recounts a long, 10,000-mile car trip he took with his dog around the country in 1960. It was also in 1962, however, that Steinbeck—to the surprise of many and the utter astonishment of not a few— was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Many thought that he was hardly the most deserving candidate, but this was not the fi rst (or last) time that the Nobel award created this kind of controversy. In the fi nal five years or so of his life, Steinbeck functioned frequently as a kind of national cultural ambassador. He traveled widely in Europe and in the Soviet Union in 1963, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964 from Lyndon Johnson, traveled in England and Ireland in 1965, and was named by Johnson to the council of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1966. During this time he supported the war in Vietnam and in fact even traveled there in 1966 and 1967, fi ling positive reports about the confl ict for a New York newspaper, but by April 1967 he had returned to the United States with an injured back that required surgery. Although the operation (which took place that fall) succeeded, Steinbeck suffered a stroke at the end of May 1968 and then two heart attacks in the next few months. By this time he had become

John Steinbeck

disillusioned with the war, but his days as an active political commentator had now ended. When he died of heart failure on December 20, 1968, he was widely considered one of the most important American writers of the 20th century. Although, as do many great authors, he had long outlived his most creative period, he had nonetheless produced thousands of pages of memorable work. Probably none of those pages, however, were more memorable or of longer-lasting significance than The Grapes of Wrath.

“The Chrysanthemums” (1937, 1938) Elisa Allen, a strong, capable woman with a talent for growing plants, lives with her kind but taciturn husband, Henry, on a small ranch in California’s Salinas Valley; when Henry sells some steers from the ranch, he suggests that he and Elisa go into the nearby town to celebrate by having dinner and seeing a movie. After Henry goes off to round up the steers, Elisa sees a traveling salesman approach in a beat-up old wagon; when he seems interested in the chrysanthemums she is growing, she gives him some in a pot to take with him, and she feels pride and satisfaction in the fact that she and her plants are valued. Later, however, as she and Henry drive into town, she sees the flowers tossed onto the road, but she realizes that the salesman did at least keep the valuable pot. The story opens with imagery that already suggests the isolated, enclosed, somewhat dreary life Elisa leads with her husband on their remote farm. Elisa herself is described in ways that make her sound almost conventionally masculine: Her clothing, activities, and manner associate her with male stereotypes, although she also seems physically and psychically remote from most of the actual men on the ranch, including the ranch hand, some visiting agricultural buyers, and even her own husband, with whom her conversations tend to be abrupt and even a bit awkward. Communication does not seem to be an especially strong point in this marriage, and the fact that the couple apparently have no children, combined with their somewhat clumsy

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and reticent ways of speaking to one another, has led many critics to assume that their marriage is a source of sexual and psychological frustration, at least for Elisa. Her vigorous devotion to her plants, and especially to her flowers, has led many readers to assume that gardening provides her a sense of satisfaction, beauty, pride, and fulfi llment that is otherwise lacking in her life. According to this view, the flowers function almost as substitute children; cultivating them gives her a sense of power, identity, and fulfi llment she otherwise lacks. Likewise, the traveling salesman seems to appreciate not only her own technical skill but also the beauty of her flowers; in her discussion with him about the plants, she seems far more animated, stimulated, and voluble than in her earlier exchange with her own husband, and indeed her response to the salesman even seems tinged with a kind of sexual excitement, partly because he seems to symbolize a romantic life of travel, freedom, and adventure. To her he seems to represent the sort of autonomy and liberty denied her because she is a woman, and in fact many critics read the story from an explicitly feminist point of view, so that Elisa is seen as a victim of an oppressive, male-dominated culture. Her encounter with the salesman leads her to feel a renewed sense of self-worth and a renewed appreciation of her own sexual and feminine potency. Ironically when Elisa, near the end of the story, sees the flowers discarded in the middle of the road, she realizes that the seemingly romantic traveler is far less thoughtful and caring than her stumbling, bumbling husband, whose compliments, affection, and concern, however poorly expressed, at least seem sincere. Nevertheless, at the conclusion of the tale, Elisa feels impotent and defeated; in our very last glimpse of her she is “crying weakly—like an old woman” (348). In one sense the story is an object lesson in the illusions inherent in dreams that are excessively romantic and insufficiently realistic; in another sense, however, the story is a sympathetic study of the alienation, isolation, and sense of constriction any human being (of either sex) can feel from time to time. Although Elisa herself can at times seem at least as distant and remote as her husband, Steinbeck succeeds in picturing her

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in ways that arouse compassion for her loneliness and empathy for her longings.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this story with “The Great Mountain,” the second tale in Steinbeck’s collection titled The Red Pony. Which characters in one story most resemble which characters in the other story? How and why? How are the themes of the two stories similar? How do they also resemble one another in setting and in style? 2. Read this story alongside K ATHERINE A NNE PORTER’s tale “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” Discuss any similarities and differences between the two main characters. Which of the two (if either) is more sympathetic? Explain your response. How are the stories similar in theme? 3. How does Steinbeck use symbolism in this story to reinforce characterization and themes? In particular, discuss the ways the landscape is described, the ways the flowers are depicted, and the ways actions are presented (especially Elisa’s actions as she works with the plants and, later, as she prepares for her evening out with Henry).

“The Leader of the People” (1937) When the grandfather of young Jody Tifl in (his mother’s father) announces his plans to visit Jody and his parents at their modest ranch, the parents have opposite reactions: Jody’s mother looks forward to the event, but Jody’s father dreads it, because he hates to listen to the old man’s endlessly repeated stories about the days when he and other explorers traveled across the United States in wagons to settle in California. One morning, when the grandfather accidentally overhears Carl complaining to Jody’s mother about the stories, the old man becomes depressed and withdrawn, partly because he realizes that there may be some justice to Carl’s complaints. Although Carl awkwardly apologizes for his words, it is young Jody who makes a real effort to comfort and appreciate the elderly storyteller.

This story was eventually included as the fi nal work in Steinbeck’s four-part collection titled The Red Pony. Just as the fi rst and third stories of that collection focus on young’s Jody’s obsession with the adventure of owning and raising a horse, so the second and fourth stories focus on his fascination with the adventurous lives once lived by old men who are now approaching death. Indeed, death— whether literal or figurative—is a major theme that unites all four works: Collectively, the stories show Jody’s initiation into an adult world of mutability and loss. At one point, for instance, when Jody is telling Billy Buck (the family’s faithful ranch hand) how he plans to kill some mice, he says, “I’ll bet they’re fat. I’ll bet they don’t know what’s going to happen to them today.” To this, Billy Buck (a spokesman for intelligent common sense in all four stories) simply replies, “No, nor you either, . . . nor me, nor anyone.” Life, Steinbeck suggests, is not only unpredictable but also often hard and unforgiving, and just as the mice can easily be crushed and killed, so can humans suddenly be robbed of their literal lives, their metaphorical vitality, or their reasons for living. Billy’s words, in fact, prove prophetic, for it is only a few paragraphs later that Jody’s grandfather feels crushed by the weight of Carl’s thoughtless words. In addition to showing Jody’s growing acquaintance with death and disappointment, the stories in The Red Pony collection show his own growing maturation, and nowhere is he more mature than at the conclusion of the present tale. Having witnessed, with shame, his father’s wounding of the grandfather, Jody loses his earlier keen interest in killing the similarly defenseless mice. Instead, he sits on the porch, trying to comfort the old man, if only through his presence. No one else makes a similar effort: His father has already retreated; his mother has refused to intervene; and even the wise and compassionate Billy Buck has been left speechless and has hurried off. In the fi nal pages of the story, the young boy sits and listens sympathetically to the old man, thus demonstrating his own growth toward moral maturity. This conclusion might easily have been trite and sentimental, but Steinbeck wisely refrains from implying that any problem has

John Steinbeck

really been resolved. The old man’s depression is not cured, but he does take some comfort in his grandson’s simple presence and respect. Although the grandfather ends the story by feeling defeated and outmoded, Jody’s kindness implies that a fundamental link from the past to the present has been forged and that the moral values embodied by the grandfather will pass to a new generation.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read the three earlier stories in The Red Pony collection and trace Jody’s emotional, psychological, and moral growth from one story to the next. How does he mature in his relations with others, in his attitudes toward life, and in his capacity for independent action? How does Steinbeck demonstrate his own ethical maturity in the present story? How, for instance, does he prevent Carl Tifl in from seeming a mere villain even in the present tale? 2. Compare and contrast the presentation of elderly characters in this story and in JACK L ONDON’s tale “The Law of Life.” How are the underlying philosophies of the two stories similar and/or distinct? What traits do the two old men in the stories have in common; how are they different? Contrast the endings of the two works. 3. Discuss the ways different generations relate to one another in this story. What role does the theme of past versus present play? 4. Make a list of at least 10 specific words or phrases from this story that you fi nd especially striking, memorable, or effective, and then try to explain why they have that kind of impact. You might focus, for instance, on striking imagery, memorable sound effects, or effective bits of dialogue.

Of Mice and Men (1937) The novel opens by focusing on two working-class drifters who are also close friends: George Milton is small, intense, intelligent, and skilled at practical survival, while Lennie Small is a huge, childlike, mentally retarded man whose affection for soft little animals (such as mice and puppies) often

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leads, ironically, to their deaths because Lennie has no sense of his own strength when he tries to caress them. The two men dream of someday owning a small farm together, but in the meantime economic necessity compels them to take work on a ranch populated by a variety of other lonely workmen and overseen by the small, pugnacious Curley (whose belligerence leads him into confl ict with practically everyone—including, to his misfortune, the gigantic Lennie) and Curley’s wife, whose prowling, fl irtatious, almost predatory yearnings, combined with her fundamental loneliness, lead to her accidental death during an unfortunate encounter with Lennie. As Curley and a mob pursue Lennie with the intention of vengefully killing him, George, in an ironic act of mercy, preempts them by shooting Lennie himself—thus ending not only the life of his best friend but also his own dreams of the life they had hoped to share. Of Mice and Men was the fi rst work by Steinbeck to win him enormous popularity. First published as a short novel with an unusually high degree of dialogue, this playlike work was soon transformed into an award-winning drama that pleased both audiences and critics alike. Later the story became the basis of a well-regarded fi lm. Meanwhile, the novel continues to be very widely read (especially in high schools), and the play has been adapted and fi lmed several times since the release of the original movie in 1939. Yet although the novel is often considered one of Steinbeck’s best, it has also been subject to severe criticism over the years. Its characters have been condemned as simplistic stereotypes; its plot has been attacked as too predictable; its tone has been censured for being too sentimental; its language has been called uncouth and uninspired; and its themes have been called thin and rudimentary. Even Steinbeck himself expressed some reservations about the success of the book, but it nevertheless continues to be read, admired, studied, and praised. As many of Steinbeck’s works do, this one focuses on relatively simple working-class people who must struggle to survive. It shows the loneliness that pervades the lives of many people, but it also shows the satisfactions that can result when persons let

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down their guard and embrace the possibilities of friendship. Communication among the characters is often awkward, stilted, and inarticulate, but when true communication does occur, it can provide immense satisfactions. The novel reveals the genuine capacity of people to care for (and about) one another, but it also shows the obstacles that so often stand in the way of a satisfying sense of community. The novel also emphasizes the importance of dreams and aspirations in sustaining the will to continue living. As do the characters in Steinbeck’s later masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath, George and Lennie seek security, peace, and happiness by pursuing the dream of owning and working a small plot of land they can call their own, and, as with the characters in that later novel, their dreams are ultimately thwarted. Nevertheless, in both works Steinbeck implies that without dreams to motivate and sustain them, human beings suffer from desperation and isolation. The book implies the rewards that can result when people bond and cooperate, but it also suggests that friendship, communication, cooperation, and community are rare, fragile things that can easily be lost or broken. The language in Of Mice and Men is plainer, simpler, less vibrant, less colorful, and less lively than the language in The Grapes of Wrath. Whereas that later novel is full of rich dialect and vivid imagery, the language of the earlier book seems relatively drab by comparison, as perhaps befits its relatively drab setting, characters, and themes. Occasionally, however, Steinbeck breathes distinctive life into the phrasing, as when he describes how traveling tramps “jungle-up” near a woodland pond (Novels . . . 1932–1937 797), or when bed-bugs are described as “pants rabbits” and “graybacks” (Novels . . . 1932–1937 810), or when a character reports that Curley has “yalla-jackets in his drawers” (Novels . . . 1932–1937 835). At times, too, the narrator’s descriptions are nicely and precisely observed, as when he describes how George “unrolled his bindle and put things on the shelf, his razor and bar of soap, his comb and bottle of pills, his liniment and leather wristband” (Novels . . . 1932–1937 810), or when he describes how the hair of Curley’s wife “hung in little rolled clusters, like sausages” (Novels

. . . 1932–1937 819), or when he reports how another character “held a crushed Stetson hat under his arm while he combed his long, black, damp hair straight back” (Novels . . . 1932–1937 821). In addition, the language of the narrator is often psychologically shrewd and insightful, as when he notes that the supposedly slow-minded Lennie, in an early conversation with George, “avoided the bait” and “spoke craftily” (Novels . . . 1932–1937, 806). Lennie, then, can be more cunning and less psychologically simple than he seems. A similar psychological complexity is implied later when the narrator refers to “those Western magazines ranch men love to read and scoff at and secretly believe” (Novels . . . 1932–1937 809), and comparable insight into the complex workings of human minds is demonstrated when the narrator later observes how a black character, insulted by a sarcastic white woman, “had retired into the terrible protective dignity of the negro” (Novels . . . 1932– 1937 855). At moments like these, Steinbeck peels back the layers of characters who are less simple than they may otherwise appear. For the most part, however, the characters in this novel are not especially complicated. This is particularly true, of course, of Lennie, whose simplicity is crucial to his role. He represents a kind of innocence, decency, and kindness that would not be entirely credible—and would also seem much too saccharine and sentimental—in a normally mature human being. Steinbeck thus makes Lennie a half-wit, but by doing so, he helps us see that much of what passes for “normal” human behavior also seems crude and uncaring when juxtaposed with Lennie’s fundamental decency and goodness. Although numerous characters ask George whether Lennie is crazy, one of Lennie’s functions in the book is to highlight through contrast the craziness of much supposedly “normal” behavior. Curley and his wife, for instance, are much closer to being mentally disturbed in the truest sense than Lennie ever is, and much the same might be said of Carlson, a somewhat sadistic ranch hand who seems all too eager to kill another ranch hand’s aged dog. By contrast, Lennie is passive, peaceful, and benevolent; any hurt he infl icts (whether on animals or later on Curley’s wife) is entirely unintended. Yet his

John Steinbeck

capacity for committing violence also helps make him a somewhat menacing figure and thus prevents him from seeming an entirely maudlin or mawkish character. Always lurking beneath his gentle exterior is the potential for destruction, and thus he is a natural source of suspense in the plot. At the same time, however, his killing of Curley’s wife (like his earlier confrontation with Curley himself) seems almost entirely predictable. Because he lacks a full intelligence, Lennie also lacks the kind of free will and capacity for independent thought and choice that are crucial traits of a truly complicated character. In the plot of this book, Lennie is partly a wild card, partly a victim of fate, and partly a puppet (though a largely appealing puppet, to be sure) in the hands of Steinbeck himself. George is clearly a more complicated figure. If Lennie symbolizes the body, George represents the mind. Yet George is obviously also capable of real feeling; his willingness to help look out for Lennie and help keep him out of trouble shows his capacity for kindness and even for love, and his fi nal act of killing Lennie (to prevent Lennie from being captured and killed by a violent mob) is, paradoxically, the most compassionate deed in the book. Beneath his often gruff, sarcastic exterior, George is a romantic at heart; his dream of having a small place of his own where he can enjoy peace, security, and freedom is a romantic dream to which almost everyone can relate, while his concern for Lennie (and the many practical sacrifices he endures while acting on that concern) makes him the moral touchstone of the novel. His frequently blunt, occasionally caustic style of speech helps prevent the novel from seeming overly sentimental, as when, in exasperation with his friend’s forgetfulness, he tells Lennie, “Jesus Christ, you’re a crazy bastard!” (Novels . . . 1932–1937 799). At times George even adds a much-needed touch of comedy to this otherwise somber tome, as when Lennie notes that George had recently told another character that he and Lennie were cousins, to which George responds, “Well, that was a lie. An’ I’m damn glad it was. If I was a relative of yours, I’d shoot myself” (Novels . . . 1932–1937 814). When we fi rst read this exchange we laugh in sympathy with George’s frustration, but in retrospect, of course, his

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comment seems profoundly ironic. By the end of the novel, George does indeed act toward Lennie with the kind of love one would hope for from a member of one’s family, but it is not George who is shot, but Lennie. At the same time, however, by killing Lennie George also kills a deeply valuable part of himself. By acting morally to prevent pain to Lennie, he creates pain for himself. Of all the characters in the novel, he is the most complex. Unfortunately some figures in the book amount to little more than caricatures. Both Curley and his wife, for instance, are almost cartoonish: He is a short-tempered, thuggish boor, while his wife is a vampish tart. Neither arouses or sustains much real interest; instead, both are convenient stooges, and it is hard to take either of them very seriously. Steinbeck’s efforts to provoke some sympathy for Curley’s desperate housewife sometimes veer toward sentimentality, and in the fi nal analysis her death provokes little compassion either for her or even (ironically) for Lennie, partly because the wife seems so unappealing and partly because the death seems almost a foregone conclusion from the time we fi rst see the two characters together. However, in the same way that Curley and his wife seem too simplistically debauched, Slim (a mule driver on the ranch) can seem too simplistically virtuous, sane, and sensible. He is obviously the anti-Curley—the man whom the rest of the men admire and respect; however, just as Curley represents one extreme of the moral and psychological spectrum, so Slim represents the other extreme. Neither is as intriguing a character as George (whose seemingly unselfish devotion to Lennie is in some ways as puzzling to us as it is to the other characters). In any given situation, Slim will predictably behave well and do good, in the same way that Curley will just as predictably behave badly. Less predictable (and therefore more interesting) is Crooks, the sole black ranch hand. In his encounter with Lennie, he is by turns hostile, defensive, vulnerable, pitiable, cruel, and kind. He is, in short, a recognizable human being whose complications make the relative superficiality of some of the other characters— particularly Curley and Curley’s wife—all the more apparent by contrast.


For Discussion or Writing 1. Read Of Mice and Men alongside JACK L ONDON’s novel The Sea-Wolf. Discuss the ways both writers depict essentially all-male environments in which the most powerful male is often cruel and vindictive. Discuss the impact of the lone female in both environments. Discuss the similarities and especially the contrasts between Curley and Wolf Larsen. What do both works imply about the value of friendship and the perils of isolation and loneliness? 2. Compare and contrast Steinbeck’s novel with SHERWOOD A NDERSON’s short story titled “Hands.” How do both works deal with abnormal characters or with characters who are cut off from the larger community? Discuss the themes of isolation and alienation in both works. In what ways is Lennie more fortunate than the main character in “Hands,” and in what ways is he less fortunate? 3. How are male bonds presented in this work and in EUGENE O’NEILL’s play The Hairy Ape? What is the role of women in both works? How do both works employ animal imagery? What are some important similarities and/or differences between Lennie in Of Mice and Men and Yank, the central character of O’Neill’s drama? What similarities and/or distinctions exist between the kinds of language used in both works? 4. Discuss the structure of this book. How, for instance, does phrasing early in the book foreshadow later developments? How do the concluding scenes look back to the very beginning? Has either one of the central characters changed or developed at all during the course of the book? If so, how? If not, why not?

The Red Pony (1937, 1945) The Red Pony is a collection of four interrelated short stories: “The Gift,” “The Great Mountains,” “The Promise,” and “The Leader of the People” (discussed earlier). In “The Gift,” 10-year-old Jody Tifl in is presented with a young horse by his rather stern and distant father (Carl Tifl in) and the

father’s wise and friendly ranch hand, Billy Buck, but Billy Buck is unfortunately unable to prevent the horse from catching cold and dying. In “The Great Mountains,” young Jody is approached by an old Spanish-speaking man of Mexican or Indian heritage, who returns at the end of his life to live his remaining years on the land (now owned by the Tifl ins) where he was born, but when Carl Tifl in refuses him more than temporary hospitality, the old man steals an old horse named Easter (whom Carl no longer values) and rides off into the nearby mountains on the animal’s back. In “The Promise,” Jody is promised by his father and Billy Buck that he can raise the new colt due to be delivered by Nellie, but when the long-awaited day arrives, Billy Buck must kill Nellie in order to ensure that the colt is born safely. The stories included in The Red Pony, like many stories about children, are essentially tales of initiation—that is, tales in which a young person is initiated into the often hard facts of adult reality and into the often painful ways of the world. Each of the stories (including the last, “A Leader of the People”) deals in some way with the theme of actual or approaching death: In “The Gift” the pony dies; in “The Great Mountains” the old man is facing imminent death; in “The Promise” the mother horse dies so that her colt may live; and in “The Leader of the People,” Jody’s own grandfather is facing the sunset of his life. As the stories are read in sequence, Jody grows not only physically but also psychologically and morally; by the time one reads the fi nal story, Jody has reached an important new level of maturity and shows himself capable of a kind of sympathy, empathy, and compassion that are to some degree lacking in his father, who is older than Jody in years but who in some ways seems emotionally stunted. Indeed, the relations between Jody and his parents provide much of the “human interest” of the stories—an interest that also depends on the boy’s relations with Billy Buck, who provides a different kind of role model than Carl Tifl in. Billy seems more closely in tune with Jody’s feelings than the boy’s own father does, and in fact Billy seems to combine the best aspects of conventionally male and female

John Steinbeck

behavior: He is strong, wise, decisive, and physically capable, but he is also a nurturing figure who is capable of showing tenderness and concern both to the animals he cares for and the boy he cares about. In the fi nal story, Jody shows that he has learned well the lessons of concern and compassion that Billy Buck teaches by quiet example. Steinbeck does an effective job of conveying the personalities of all the major characters, presenting none of them in a simplistic or unequivocal way. Carl Tifl in is the closest to seeming coldly unappealing and one-dimensional, but even he has his attractive and complicating aspects. In “The Gift,” for instance, he enjoys pretending to be stern with his son just before he gives the boy the gift of a lifetime, and when he sees how happy the boy is with the pony, he retreats in befuddled embarrassment. Carl, in other words, is not a fundamentally cold man; he is simply (like many men of his time) uncomfortable with showing the tenderness he is capable of feeling. He is a sensible, practical man, and if he sometimes seems chilly and even a bit mean (particularly in the second tale), he is also able to recognize and apologize for his shortcomings (as he does most obviously in “The Leader of the People”). Even when he is rebuked openly by Billy Buck in front of Jody (as happens at the very end of “The Gift”), he seems willing to tolerate the chastisement, and the fact that Billy feels comfortable enough with Carl to criticize his employer so blatantly speaks well (ironically) of Carl’s own character. Carl, in short, is not the simple villain he could easily have been in the hands of a lesser writer. By the same token, Billy Buck is not the kind of plaster saint that a less talented author might have created. He is in many ways an attractive alternative to Carl, but he is capable of making mistakes (as when he misjudges the effect a rain storm may have on the pony’s health), he is capable of losing his temper (as he does with Carl at the end of “The Gift”), and he is even capable of being angry with—and swearing at—a young boy when he feels frustrated at having had to kill Nellie in order to save her colt and fulfi ll his titular “Promise” to Jody. Billy’s anger, however, is always rooted in love—love for Jody at the end of “The Gift” and love for Nellie at the end of

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“The Promise.” He is a perfect example of the kind of rock-solid but kindhearted common working man whom Steinbeck especially admired. In crafting this series of stories, Steinbeck created a small but entirely credible community of real persons who reflect the kinds of thought and feeling common to their time and place while also reflecting deeper, more universal, and more timeless habits of the human heart and mind.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the life of young Jody with the life of the young girl described in Gertrude Simmons Bonnin’s (Zitkala-Ša’s) “Impressions of an Indian Girlhood.” In particular, discuss the relations of both young people with their parents and with their broader communities. How (if at all) are their experiences affected by their distinct ethnic backgrounds? How (if at all) are their experiences affected by the fact that one is a boy and the other a girl? 2. Read these stories alongside L ANGSTON HUGHES’s novel Not without Laughter and then discuss the plots, themes, characters, and settings of both tales. In what ways do the boys in both stories grow up? How are their relations with their fathers similar and/or different, and how are the fathers themselves comparable or distinct? Compare and contrast the mothers in both tales. Which characters provide the main role models for the two boys, and what traits and values do those role models have in common? 3. Choose one of the characters besides Jody and discuss the continuities in the ways that character is portrayed from one story to the next. How, for instance, does Jody’s mother remain consistent from one story to another? How does she develop? Does she seem any more complex by the end of the fi nal tale than she had seemed by the end of the fi rst tale?

The Grapes of Wrath (1939) When Tom Joad returns to his family’s Oklahoma farm after having been released from prison (where


he served time for killing a man in self-defense), he discovers that his family, along with thousands of others, have been evicted from their land as a result of bank foreclosures sparked by a dusty, persistent, and destructive drought. Accompanied by Jim Casy, a preacher they have known for years who has now turned his back on conventional religion in favor of a simpler commitment to human welfare, the Joads (Ma, Pa, Granma, Grampa, Tom, Al, Ruthie, Winfield, the pregnant Rose of Sharon, and her husband, Connie) pack up as many of their belongings as they can cram into an old truck and begin a desperate journey, as do hundreds of thousand of other “Okies,” toward California, where they have heard that jobs are plentiful. By the end of the novel, after making a few good friends but also after suffering many hardships and disappointments, the group begins to disintegrate: Grampa and Granma have died, Connie has deserted, Casy has been killed, and Tom has killed Casy’s assailant and must flee, but Rose of Sharon, although having lost her baby, is able, at Ma’s urging, to show compassion to a man even more needy than the Joads themselves. The Grapes of Wrath is generally considered to be Steinbeck’s best book as well as a classic of American literature. Although the novel has sometimes been criticized as too long, too sentimental, and too propagandistic, it has also been vigorously defended. Champions of the work have praised its large cast of memorable characters, its vivid language (especially its striking imagery, convincing dialogue, and use of lively rural dialect), and its structural innovation (particularly its alternation of chapters focusing on the Joads with “intercalary” chapters offering a broader picture of various social developments). When the book was fi rst published, it was enormously controversial as well as highly popular; opponents of the work accused Steinbeck of offering an inaccurate and deliberately distorted view of the economic and social conditions he claimed to depict, while other readers found the novel realistic, credible, and profoundly moving. Some readers felt that interest in the novel would dwindle as the depression-era conditions it describes receded in memory; others, however,

think that Steinbeck wrote in a timeless style about issues of enduring human concern. It is, in fact, the style of this book that helps to make it so effective. It would not matter what topics Steinbeck wrote about if his language were dull, tedious, or commonplace, but the language of The Grapes of Wrath is brimming with energy and vitality, especially in its use of dialogue and dialect but also in its imagery, symbolism, and descriptive passages. When Steinbeck depicts people, places, or events, he usually (in this book, at least) has the power to make us see them, and when he lets his characters talk, real people seem to speak. Entering the pages of this novel is like entering a previously unknown but highly intriguing region in which persons employ language that is unself-consciously poetic in is freshness and sharp precision. Thus Tom does not simply say that his feet were tired; he says, “My dogs was pooped out” (Grapes 218). Later, explaining one effect of his time in prison, he remarks that “when you been in stir a little while, you can smell a question comin’ from hell to breakfast” (Grapes 223). Casy, the preacher, later describes a girl who is “so full of the Holy Sperit that it’s sproutin’ out of her nose and ears” (Grapes 232). Likewise, he subsequently asks himself, “ ‘Why is it that when a fella ought to be just about mule-ass proof against sin, an’ all full up of Jesus, why is it that’s the time a fella gets fi ngerin’ his pants buttons?’ ” (Grapes 233). What (exactly) does it mean to be “mule-ass proof against sin”? Presumably it means to be stubbornly or even almost stupidly immune to temptation; in any case, the language is much more evocative than if Steinbeck had written something like “completely untempted by sin.” Similarly, the metaphorical phrase “all full up of Jesus” implies that Jesus is like a brimming, nearly overflowing liquid, and the metaphor is therefore much more powerful than if Steinbeck had simply said “truly committed to Jesus.” Finally, the imagery of a “fella . . . fi ngerin’ his pants buttons” is much more precise, vivid, and memorable than if Steinbeck instead had colorlessly written, “a man becomes sexually excited.” In phrase after phrase, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, Steinbeck reveals a sure command of

John Steinbeck

the idiomatic English actually spoken by the real people he describes. That dialect, however, far from seeming dated or quaint, retains its power to startle, surprise, and stimulate, and one of the pleasures of reading The Grapes of Wrath is the pleasure of anticipation—the delight in knowing that each new page will reveal diction (especially spoken diction) that will seem colorful, vibrant, zesty, and yet always entirely credible. Quite simply, the novel is full of what Casy himself at one point calls “the poetry of folks talkin’ ” (Grapes 309). The rural dialect of the book is, however, only one strength of the novel’s language. Similarly important is Steinbeck’s highly skillful use of dialogue, which he employs to characterize the speakers, to advance the plot, and to underscore themes in subtle ways. As with his use of dialect, examples are extremely numerous, but one instance may be taken as typical. Thus, at one point, Al works on a car while Tom talks to a one-eyed man whose whining self-pity and maudlin self-consciousness he fi nds annoying. As he rebukes the handicapped man, the following exchange occurs (with Tom speaking fi rst):

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“I knowed a hump-back in—in a place I was. Make his whole livin’ lettin’ folks rub his hump for luck. Jesus Christ, an’ all you got is one eye gone.” The man said stumblingly, “Well, Jesus, ya see somebody edge away from ya, an’ it gets into ya.” “Cover it up then, goddamn it. Ya stickin’ it out like a cow’s ass. Ya like to feel sorry for yaself. There ain’t nothin’ the matter with you. Buy yaself some white pants. Ya gettin’ drunk an’ cryin’ in ya bed, I bet. Need any help, Al?” “No,” said Al. “I got this here bearin’ loose. Jus’ tryin’ to work the piston down.” “Don’t bang yaself,” said Tom. The one-eyed man said softly, “Think— somebody’d like—me?” “Why, sure,” said Tom. “Tell ’em ya dong’s growed sence you los’ your eye.” (Grapes 401)

speaks but also by the manner in which he speaks them. Tom, for instance, is typically blunt, direct, and honest; here as elsewhere, he does not mince words, although his tone here is sharper than usual. When he refers to the handicapped person he once knew, he does not call him a “handicapped person”; rather, he calls him a “hump-back.” Yet Tom can also be evasive when he needs or wants to be; thus, the prison in which he spent time is simply called “a place I was.” The profane references to Christ, meanwhile, are exactly the kind of language we might expect from such characters, while the staccato rhythms of Tom’s angry instructions mimic perfectly the cadence, inflection, and intonation (not to mention the imagery) of a real exasperated outburst. Overall the language of the passage is precise, concrete, and exact, not abstract or general (“Ya gettin’ drunk an’ cryin’ in ya bed, I bet” is much more effective than “You’re feeling depressed, aren’t you?”). Yet Tom can immediately switch from anger at the one-eyed man to a practical concern with Al’s work on the car, and Al, focused on his important work, remains oblivious to the argument. Tom can seem almost mean to the handicapped man while also seeming solicitous toward Al, and yet Tom, perhaps regretting his earlier sharpness, can also end the exchange with a reassuring joke. In just a few swift sentences, then, Steinbeck uses dialogue to depict his characters memorably, move his plot forward, and underline such important themes as the virtues of determination, the dangers of self-pity, and the value of stoic endurance. Although much of The Grapes of Wrath (to the novel’s great benefit) advances by means of this kind of energetic dialogue, the book is also famous for its reflective and interpretive passages, in which the omniscient narrator pulls us back from our immediate focus on the Joads to give us broader insights into the conditions of the hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who were undergoing similar experiences. At one point, for instance, when speaking of these people, the narrator remarks that

In this vignette, each separate person is deftly characterized, not only through the words he

suddenly the machines pushed them out and they swarmed on the highways. The movement


changed them; the highways, the camps along the road, the fear of hunger and the hunger itself, changed them. The children without dinner changed them, the endless moving changed them. They were migrants. And the hostility changed them, welded them, united them— hostility that made the little towns group and arm as though to repel an invader, squads with pick handles, clerks and storekeepers with shotguns, guarding the world against their own people. (Grapes 510)

Passages such as this reveal Steinbeck’s ability to use standard English just as eloquently and effectively as he uses rural dialect. Each word, each detail, is carefully chosen, and then all are assembled in a masterfully arranged paragraph. The word machines, for instance, implies an unfeeling, unthinking, inhuman power, while the word swarmed implies that the displaced people now resemble insects or animals. The constant repetition of the word changed mimics the grinding, relentless forces the passage describes, while the progression of details becomes ever-more specific: First abstract “movement” is mentioned, then more specific “highways,” then even more precisely imagined and inhabited “camps along the road,” then the “fear of hunger” among the people who inhabit those camps, then not just the fear of hunger but the actual hunger itself, and then, fi nally, not just hunger itself but the hunger of starving children. After the long series of repeated references to “change” comes a very brief and entirely different kind of sentence: “They were migrants.” Three simple words sum up all that is important about their new condition. And then the focus switches from the swarms of migrants themselves to the people who have changed from ordinary, everyday citizens of “little towns” into armed “squads.” The fi nal quoted sentences are steeped in paradoxes, as “clerks and storekeepers” (who are usually anything but militant) arm themselves with “shotguns,” intent—in a fi nal paradox—on “guarding the world against their own people.” If in his scenes featuring dialogue Steinbeck shows his ability to zoom in for close-ups, in passages such as the one just quoted

he shows his skill at offering panoramic overviews. Much of the dynamic rhythm of the book results from this constant interaction between the specific and the general, between chapters on the Joads and chapters on the conditions they represent, but even the most “general” portions of the novel are rarely abstract, dry, or imprecise. Steinbeck, then, uses dialect, dialogue, and exposition to great effect, but he also simply shows enormous skill in coining memorable phrases and phrasing. Thus the dust that coats a truck is compared to “red flour,” while children are pacified with candy they have “whined out” of their father (Grapes 310). A young boy is “kid-wild and calfi sh,” while a young pregnant woman has a “knowing perfection-look.” Connie, when staring at his pregnant wife, “was proud” (as we might expect) but also “fearful” (a bit of a surprise). Connie himself is a “sharp-faced, lean young man of a Texas strain, and his pale blue eyes were sometimes dangerous [impression one], and sometimes kindly [impression two], and sometimes frightened [impression three]” (Grapes 311). Through such subtly complicated phrasing, Steinbeck implies the complexity not only of the characters he describes but of human beings in general: Connie cannot be easily explained, because no person is easily explainable. People are complicated, but so are physical environments and social conditions, and Steinbeck’s language tries to do justice to all the complexities involved. More often than not, however, his phrasing is not only complex but also sharp and precise, conveying an unforgettable impression. Thus, one character “would raven with lust for some whore,” and, having paid for three prostitutes at once, “snorted and rutted on their unresponsive bodies for an hour” (Grapes 311–312). Again and again and again, Steinbeck summons up just the right words to create whatever picture he means to impress on our memories. His general diction is thus every bit as effective as his use of dialect or dialogue. Steinbeck uses all these stylistic strengths (and many more) in the service of a number of significant themes or key ideas. His book has been seen, for instance, as lamenting the passing of the old belief,

John Steinbeck

associated with Thomas Jefferson, that American democracy would be best sustained by a citizenry composed mostly of small independent yeoman farmers. Steinbeck is clearly a “small-d” democrat (not a communist, as some of his detractors alleged) who has enormous faith in the “common people.” In this sense he is a writer clearly in the tradition of Whitman, Thoreau, and especially Emerson, and indeed Jim Casy’s notion that humanity shares one big soul is obviously indebted to Emerson’s transcendentalist idea of the Oversoul—an idea that similarly stresses the importance of the bonds that unite all people. Steinbeck’s social and political ideal, however, is not any forced collectivism (of the sort associated with Bolshevism) but rather a voluntary group cooperation, in which free individuals see the practical and spiritual advantages of joining for mutual assistance. Casy himself, meanwhile, is obviously a kind of secular Christ figure: His initials are J. C.; he has turned away from religion as conventionally practiced; he travels with a band of 12 people (including Sairy and Ivy Wilson, whom the Joads befriend on their journey); and he dies while trying to help others and while speaking words clearly similar to Christ’s last words on the cross: “You don’ know what you’re a-doin’ ” (Grapes 621). Because Casy’s words are repeated twice just before he dies and are then quoted twice again later by Tom (Grapes 627), the parallel with Jesus becomes impossible to miss. Tom subsequently becomes a kind of apostle of Casy’s cause, and Rose of Sharon’s fi nal act—in which she offers her milk-swollen breasts to a man who is starving— becomes a kind of secular Eucharist (Grapes 692). The whole movement of the Joads from Oklahoma to California is an ironic reenactment of the exodus of the Israelites from their bondage in Egypt to their hoped-for freedom in the promised land, and California itself is potentially a land of milk and honey—in which, however, neither the Joads nor many others fi nd any immediate salvation. Thus in its language, its ideas, and even its title, the book draws on the rich biblical heritage that has been central to a good deal of literature and culture in the West, and yet the novel uses that heritage to promote ends that are more secular than conven-

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tionally sacred. The book is a protest against the growing materialism, alienation, and selfi shness of American life, but if Steinbeck is hopeful about a solution at all, he does not put his trust in God but in the basic decency of common people united by a sense of their own best interests.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast The Grapes of Wrath with THEODORE DREISER’s An American Tragedy. In what ways does each book try to offer an epic or panoramic overview and diagnosis of American life? How are their diagnoses similar, particularly in their assessments of matters of class and economics? How do they differ in their plots, their settings, and their lead characters? 2. Read Steinbeck’s novel alongside GERTRUDE STEIN’s The Making of Americans. What role does family play in each work? How do the styles of the two books differ? Discuss the social milieu depicted in each novel. What are Stein’s central thematic concerns, and how do they differ from Steinbeck’s? In what way does each book reflect the life and lifestyle of its author? 3. Discuss The Grapes of Wrath in relation to WILLIAM FAULKNER’s novel As I Lay Dying, paying particular attention to such matters as the emphasis on journeys, the importance of families, the significance of mother figures, the use of rural dialect, and the influence of Deep South versus western settings. 4. Compare and contrast The Grapes of Wrath (which was published in 1939) with R ICHARD WRIGHT’s novel Native Son (which was published in 1940). In what ways are the books similar and/or different in their emphasis on social conditions, family life, economic pressures, and class strife? How are the rich and poor presented in each work? What political solution does each book seem to propose for the problems it presents? How do matters of race add an extra level of complexity to Wright’s novel? 5. Discuss Steinbeck’s characterization of Ma Joad. What factors help to make her an effective character? What personality traits does she exemplify? What values does she symbolize? In


what ways does she epitomize Steinbeck’s moral, social, and even political ideals? 6. This book is one of the most famous novels to deal with the America of the 1930s, but what factors—if any—prevent the book from seeming dated, parochial, or no longer relevant? How (if at all) does Steinbeck deal with timeless issues, perennial concerns, and standard character types? Why should a reader of the 21st century fi nd this novel worth reading apart from its historical value?

Cannery Row (1945) Doc, who makes a very modest living as a marine biologist, is the most respected person living in a rundown area of Monterey, California, known as Cannery Row, whose other inhabitants include (among many others) a pragmatic Chinese grocer named Lee Chong, a generous-hearted woman named Dora Flood (madam of the nearby whorehouse), and a ragtag group of good-natured vagrants known as “the boys” and consisting of Mack (their leader), Hazel, Hughie, Jones, Gay, and Eddie. The “boys,” as does everyone else, love Doc, who is kind, intelligent, cultured, helpful, and friendly to any and all, and so they decide to scrounge up the means to throw him a party to show their appreciation. Their fi rst attempt to stage the event ends in a drunken brawl, but their second succeeds to the general satisfaction of all concerned. Steinbeck eventually claimed that he had written this novel at the behest of some of the soldiers he had encountered during his own service during World War II, who had asked him to write something comic that had nothing to do with the war that had sickened both them and him (Lisca 198). Certainly a personal desire to put the war at least partly out of his mind seems to have helped motivate him to compose this novel, which is a nostalgic (and some would say saccharine and sentimental) look back at prewar life on the Monterey coast. Many critics have complained about the allegedly fl imsy and anecdotal plot of the book, while many others have censured the work for its some-

what syrupy characterization. The prostitute with a heart of gold is a staple of sentimental fiction, and Dora Flood and her “girls” certainly fit that description; it is they, for instance (in chapter 16), who assist Doc in treating an influenza outbreak by volunteering to sit with and comfort sick children, but their selfless behavior is typical of many other characters in Cannery Row, especially when those characters are in the presence of the noble and inspiring Doc. The “boys,” for example, may in some respects be cagey, “irresponsible” vagrants who live from hand to mouth on borrowed (or stolen) dimes, but when it comes to dealing with Doc, all their best traits of generosity and fellow feeling move to the fore. More than one character in the course of the novel openly expresses explicit love for Doc, and certainly Steinbeck goes out of his way to make him seem a highly lovable man. He symbolizes, in fact, all the traits of character Steinbeck most admired: He is smart, wise, kind, capable, sensitive, and thoughtful, but he hides all these endearing traits under an even more endearingly tough and gruff exterior. He loves to listen to classical music and appreciates great art, but he can swill beer with the best of them, satisfy multiple women, and hold his own in a fight. Many readers will feel that a character like this is too good (in several senses of that word) to be true, but Steinbeck seems to have modeled him carefully on his close friend Ed Ricketts, whom Steinbeck considered a singular pearl among men. Doc, however, is just one of the many amiable ne’er-do-wells who stroll through the pages of this book. They are people who may seem unsuccessful by the standards of a competitive, materialistic world, but who appeal to Steinbeck because of their fundamental decency, honesty, and benevolence and their indifference to worldly values. Although Steinbeck does include some suicides, corpses, meanness, hard drinking, and rough behavior to try to prevent the book from seeming unduly saccharine, the novel does (unfortunately) leave a fairly sugary aftertaste.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Cannery Row with Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf, particularly in the ways

John Steinbeck

they present mainly male social groups and the impact of women on those groups. How do the male groups in the two novels differ in spirit, attitudes, and purpose? How does Wolf Larsen differ from Doc? Are they similar in any respects? 2. How does the community presented in this novel resemble and/or differ from the community presented in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men? How is Dora in the present novel similar to and/or different from Curley’s wife in the earlier book? Is there any character in Cannery Row who resembles Lennie in Of Mice and Men? How do the tones, atmospheres, and conclusions of the two works contrast? 3. Choose two characters from this book and discuss the ways in which (and degrees to which) Steinbeck manages to present each as a distinctive personality rather than as a mere stereotype. How is each character individualized—especially in attitudes, behavior, and speech—so that he or she seems a complex figure rather than a mere artificial creation?

The Pearl (1945, 1947) Kino is a young Mexican-Indian pearl diver who lives with his wife, Juana, and his infant son, Coyotito, in a small hut near the beach; although they are poor, they enjoy a basically happy life, existing in harmony with nature and with other people until one morning, when a scorpion bites Coyotito. Kino, desperate for money to pay a doctor, goes diving and fi nds an especially impressive pearl, but as word spreads that he owns the gem, various people try to steal it: The hut is broken into and eventually burned down, and fi nally Kino even kills an attacker in self-defense—a deed that causes him to flee toward the mountains with his wife and child. The trio are pursued by three trackers, but although Kino succeeds in slaying the pursuers, Coyotito is killed in the process; thus, when the bereaved mother and father return home, Kino throws the pearl back into the ocean. This short novel (or novella), with its simple diction, simple plot, and relatively simple characters, is

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often considered a kind of parable—that is, a short allegorical story that teaches a straightforward moral lesson. In this case, the lesson seems to involve the risks of materialism and the dangers of greed: The pearl at fi rst seems to be an extremely lucky fi nd, but it soon arouses corrupting instincts, not only in the thieves who try to steal it and in the many people who envy Kino for possessing it, but even in Kino himself. At fi rst, he sees the pearl mainly as a means of helping his young son achieve the kind of educated and prosperous life that Kino and Juana themselves have never enjoyed, but eventually the pearl symbolizes his own yearning for prosperity, power, and autonomy. Ironically, not only is the pearl unnecessary to cure Coyotito’s wound (since he had largely recovered before the pearl was found), but its discovery eventually results in his death. Thus, in attempting to preserve and protect the literal pearl, Kino paradoxically loses “pearls” of far greater value, including his infant son and his previously happy life. The novel has therefore often been seen as a kind of retelling of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: Untroubled paradise (at least of a rudimentary sort) is lost when humans cannot control their selfish desires. The novel opens with a brief epigraph, which quickly introduces the main characters and the basic plot and explicitly suggests that the story may indeed be a kind of “parable,” particularly since the tale involves “only good and bad things and black and white things and good and evil things and no inbetween anywhere” (Novels . . . 1942–1952 231). Yet the book itself seems more complex and subtle than this phrasing suggests; certainly Kino is a more complicated character than this epigraph might lead us to suspect, and although the phrasing of the book is generally direct and straightforward, it is also often subtle and even sometimes ironic. As the dangerous scorpion approaches tiny Coyotito, for instance, the narrator describes how Juana “repeated an ancient magic to guard against such evil, and on top of that she muttered a Hail Mary between clenched teeth” (Novels . . . 1942–1952 235). The sentence not only nicely suggests the mixed cultural heritage of the people Steinbeck depicts (superstitious, on the one hand, and religious, on the other), but it also


leaves unclear which kind of belief gives Juana the greater hope: She fi rst turns to magic (implying that she is more superstitious than devout), but she then immediately turns to religion (implying that she may doubt the efficacy of magic alone). Juana, in short, is a more complicated character than we might at fi rst assume. Later, for instance, she rebels against her husband (when she tries to throw the pearl back into the ocean after realizing the trouble it is beginning to cause), but at the end of the novel, she submits to Kino, allowing him to throw the pearl back into the water as the book concludes, and thereby showing not only her respect for him but also her recognition of the apology implied by his own contrite behavior. Kino himself repeatedly demonstrates the kind of complex psychology and motives that make his story more than a simple parable. For instance, as he approaches the doctor’s residence to seek help, he is said to have “felt weak and afraid and angry at the same time. Rage and terror went together,” and a few sentences later, as Kino prepares to knock on the door, the narrator notes that “his lips drew tight against his teeth—but with his left hand he reached to take off his hat” (Novels . . . 1942–1952 241). His balanced actions indicate his complicated emotions. At the doctor’s residence Kino is greeted by an Indian servant, but the latter, instead of responding with immediate compassion to a fellow Indian in need, “refused to speak in the old language” and shuts the gate; and when the servant does inform the doctor of Kino’s presence, he calls him “a little Indian,” as if to distance himself from his own ethnic heritage. Later, however, after the doctor has refused to treat the baby because Kino cannot pay, the servant leads Kino out, and the narrator reports: “And he shut the gate quickly out of shame” (Novels . . . 1942–1952 241–242). The fact that he shuts the gate quickly might at fi rst make him seem as callous as his employer, but the fact that he shuts it out of shame shows that he is capable of moral compassion. Within just a few paragraphs, then, Steinbeck manages to create a minor but complex character: The Indian at fi rst seems supercilious, then seems intimidated enough by his employer to want to distance himself from his own people, but then fi nally seems

embarrassed enough by his employer to feel ashamed of the doctor’s behavior. The Indian servant is thus a minor but typical example of the ways the story moves beyond the simple black versus white polarities of an uncomplicated parable, thereby becoming something more than a straightforward allegory of good versus evil. No matter how complex the characterization, however, the book would not hold much interest if its language were dull. Steinbeck, fortunately, manages to breathe a good deal of life into the novel simply by the skill of his phrasing. Often, for example, the language has the same kind of rhythmic repetition and simple phrasing frequently found in the King James version of the Bible, as in the following passage describing Kino dreaming of Coyotito’s reading: “And then darkness spread over the page, and with the darkness came the music of evil again, and Kino stirred in his sleep; and when he stirred, Juana’s eyes opened in the darkness. And then Kino awaked, with the evil music pulsing in him, and he lay in the darkness with his ears alert” (Novels . . . 1942–1952 263). The repeated images and the pulsating “and . . . and . . . and” clauses make the language seem artfully artless, as if it were being spoken rather than written. Sometimes, too, the language can seem almost primitive in its simplicity, as when Juana’s birth pangs are called “child pain” (Novels . . . 1942–1952 239) or the poor are referred to as “poverty people” (Novels . . . 1942–1952 240), yet sometimes the phrasing can also seem sophisticated in its poise and balance, as in a comment about four beggars sitting outside a church: “They knew every little scandal and some very big crimes” (Novels . . . 1942–1952 240). The imagery, too, is often sharp and precise (as when the narrator reports that the doctor’s eye’s “rested in puffy little hammocks of flesh” [Novels . . . 1942– 1952 241]), and the words are also frequently rich in sound effects (such as assonance and alliteration), as when Kino, having seen the special pearl, is flooded with feelings that seem “glowing and gloating and triumphant” (Novels . . . 1942–1952 250). On nearly every page, then, Steinbeck manages to provide some intriguing linguistic nugget that resembles the pearl itself: The language of the

John Steinbeck

book is smooth but is also often brilliant, and it never ceases to command our fascinated attention.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with ERNEST H EMINGWAY’s brief novel The Old Man and the Sea. How are the works similar in setting, style, characterization, and theme? What is the role of struggle and loss in both stories? What is the nature of the struggle in each work, and how are the struggles distinctive? 2. Read this story alongside ZORA NEALE HURSTON’s tale “The Gilded Six-Bits.” How does each work deal with the theme of “paradise lost”? What role does materialism play as a motivating factor in each work? Discuss the relations between the married couples in each work. How is each tale morally and psychologically complex? 3. Read this story in relation to THORNTON WILDER’s brief novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. How does each writer cope with the challenge of presenting a “foreign” (that is, non-American) culture? What is gained by setting these works in non-American locales? How are the works similar in style and characterization? How is loss a major factor in both works? 4. Discuss the ways Steinbeck presents male and female characters in this novel. Does his presentation conform to—and/or violate—any stereotypes? If the presentations are at all stereotypical, how might that kind of presentation perhaps seem appropriate to the kind of work he has composed here? In other words, how might the subgenre of this work have affected the way he chose to present his men and women?

Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962) In this meditative journey of his travels across the United States in 1960 accompanied by an old French poodle named Charley, Steinbeck describes his progress from New York to New England, then his trip across the northern rim of the country, down the West Coast, through Texas, into Louisiana, and

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then back home to New York. Traveling in a specially outfitted truck with a camper on the back, Steinbeck moved around anonymously and was never recognized; he stayed mostly on back roads and visited many small towns in an effort to reacquaint himself with the sights, sounds, habits, and pulse of his country. He was distressed by many of the changes he witnessed, including rapid urbanization, growing materialism, and a loss of independent spirit. This book was one of Steinbeck’s most popular best sellers; many readers must have found the idea of a famous author traveling around the country with his dog inherently appealing, but Steinbeck produced a book with a sharper bite than many might have expected. The book is not a straightforward hymn to the natural beauty of the American landscape (although Steinbeck does sometimes wax lyrical, especially when describing California redwoods), and it is even less a simple celebration of the sturdy virtues of the American people. Often, indeed, its depiction of American lifestyles and manners is quite bleak, especially when Steinbeck arrives in the Deep South in the midst of the Civil Rights movement and witnesses numerous examples of ugly racism. Anyone turning to the book merely for a fuzzy, warm, nostalgic, and cheerful report about “life in these United States” must have been disappointed, for Steinbeck’s own disappointment with his country is expressed repeatedly. If he hoped (as he did) that by renewing his intimate acquaintance with his country he would restock his supply of topics to write about and refresh his inspiration, he must have been a bit frustrated, at least on the second count. The book is not entirely inspiring, but for that very reason it can at least claim to be honest. Dog lovers will of course fi nd this book appealing (even if it seems incongruous that the companion of this hard-nosed, hard-drinking, and often roughspoken traveling author is a poodle!), and Steinbeck tries his best to guard against the kind of sentimentality that might inevitably creep into a book on such a topic. Thus he spends a good deal of time emphasizing Charley’s urinary habits, and he avoids the temptation to make Charley seem too cutely human. Meanwhile, the journey from one place to another and from one encounter to another gives Steinbeck

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himself the opportunity to express his opinions on an enormous range of subjects—from politics to sociology to psychology to geography to history to cuisine (to mention just a few). Occasionally the conversations he claims to have had with people he meets along the way seem too philosophical and too “literary” to sound believable; there are times when one suspects that Steinbeck is inventing rather than reporting. There is a “stagey” quality to some of the encounters (such as the discussion with the old white southerner in Louisiana), but for the most part the book is a credible account of one man’s sometimes satisfying, sometimes disappointing rediscovery of his country.

2.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Steinbeck’s skills as a reporter of American life and manners with those exhibited by Zora Neale Hurston in Mules and Men. How are the purposes, styles, and structures of the two books similar and/or different? 2. Read Steinbeck’s book alongside NELLA L ARSEN’s novel titled Quicksand, which also involves movements from one region of the country to another. How do the two authors’ depictions of America differ from and/or resemble one another, especially in the ways they deal with issues of class, race, and gender? In the same way, compare and contrast Steinbeck’s book with Richard Wright’s autobiographies Black Boy and American Hunger. In what ways can Wright’s works be viewed as pieces of travel writing? 3. How, in your opinion, is the United States today both similar to and different from the country as Steinbeck depicted it when he wrote this book? What subsequent developments does he seem to have foreseen? In what ways is the country today better than and/or worse than it was as seen through Steinbeck’s eyes?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON STEINBECK AND HIS WORK 1. Read a number of Steinbeck’s works and then discuss the ways in which Billy Buck, in The Red Pony

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stories, represents a kind of ethical, psychological, and social ideal for Steinbeck. For instance, what traits does Billy Buck share with (say) Tom Joad of The Grapes of Wrath? How is Billy Buck similar to George in Of Mice and Men or to Kino in The Pearl? How do all these characters relate to other people? In what ways are they well balanced compared to others? In what ways are they comparatively mature, sensible, and sane? Read The Grapes of Wrath in conjunction with Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was published at around the same time. How do the two works reflect, in different ways, a concern with contemporary political issues? How is the importance of a small community emphasized in each work? In what ways does Robert Jordan resemble Tom Joad? In what ways does Ma Joad resemble Pilar? How do the styles of the two works compare and contrast? How is the style of The Grapes of Wrath similar to and/or different from the style of such other Steinbeck works as The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men, and The Pearl? How is the style of each work appropriate to its themes, characters, and setting? How and why might the style of one work be inappropriate in another? For instance, why would the style of The Grapes of Wrath be an inappropriate style for The Pearl? Read one of the fictional works by Steinbeck not discussed here (such as Tortilla Flat, In Dubious Battle, or East of Eden) and discuss any continuities or differences between that work and one or more of the works discussed. How are the works similar and/or different in the kinds of characters they present, the kinds of themes they explore, the kinds of settings they depict, and the kinds of styles they employ? Read Steinbeck’s nonfiction book The Log of the Sea of Cortez and discuss its relationship to a work (or works) of his fiction that you have read. How are the works similar (for instance) in themes, setting, and/or characterization? How is Steinbeck’s depiction of his friend Ed Ricketts in The Log relevant to his presentation of various male characters (such as Tom Joad or Billy Buck) in his fiction?

John Steinbeck

6. Discuss the ways women are presented in several of Steinbeck’s works. Are there any continuities in the ways they are depicted? What qualities does Steinbeck seem to admire in women? Are those qualities different in any ways from the traits he seems to admire in men? Which of Steinbeck’s women do you consider most memorable and/or admirable? Explain why. 7. View one or more of the numerous fi lms and/or television productions that have been based on work(s) by Steinbeck. How well does a given fi lm or program do justice to Steinbeck’s text? What changes did the director of the fi lm make in adapting the text for the screen, and in what ways were those changes either appropriate or inappropriate? Study one of Steinbeck’s own fi lm adaptations of one of his works, such as his screenplay for The Red Pony. What changes did he make in his own work, and why? 8. A number of Steinbeck’s texts were adapted for theatrical presentation, even as musicals. Compare and contrast one of those adaptations with the original text. What kinds of changes were made in the movement from one genre to another, and what is the logic behind those changes? Is one version of the work more effective than another, or is each version effective in its own way? Explain your responses in detail. 9. Examine one of Steinbeck’s lesser-known works—such as Sweet Thursday, The Wayward Bus, The Short Reign of Pippin IV, The Winter of Our Discontent—and discuss that work in relation to his better-known writings. How is the lesser-known work similar to and/or different from his more famous writings in themes, style, characterization, plot, and so forth? Does the lesser-known work deserve to be more widely read and appreciated? If so, why? If not, why not? 10. Choose a relatively brief section (a page or two at most) from any one of Steinbeck’s works, and then discuss that passage in detail. How is the passage typical of Steinbeck’s writings in style, theme, characterization, setting, and other characteristics? How does the passage contribute to

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the work of which it is a part? How does it relate to what has preceded it in the work; how does it connect to what follows? How is the passage effective simply as a piece of writing? WORKS CITED

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Bloom, Harold, ed. John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Broomall, Pa.: Chelsea House, 1996. DeMott, Robert. “Chronology.” In The Grapes of Wrath and Other Writings 1936–1941, by John Steinbeck, edited by Robert DeMott and Elaine A. Steinbeck, 1,031–1,049. New York: Library of America, 1996. Ditsky, John, ed. Critical Essays on Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989. Donahue, Agness McNeill, ed. A Casebook on The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Crowell, 1968. French, Warren. “John Steinbeck.” In Sixteen Modern American Authors: A Survey of Research and Criticism, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 499–527. New York: Norton, 1973. ———. “John Steinbeck.” In Sixteen Modern American Authors. Vol. 2, A Survey of Research and Criticism since 1972, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 582–622. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990. Hayashi, Tetsumaro, ed. A New Study Guide to Steinbeck’s Major Works, with Critical Explications. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1993. Lisca, Peter. The Wide World of John Steinbeck. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1958. National Steinbeck Center. Available online. URL: http://www.steinbeck.org/MainFrame.html. Accessed April 7, 2009. Steinbeck, John. “The Chrysanthemums.” In 50 Great Short Stories. Edited by Milton Crane. New York: Random House, 1988. ———. The Grapes of Wrath and Other Writings 1936–1941. Edited by Robert DeMott and Elaine A. Steinbeck. New York: Library of America, 1996. ———. Novels and Stories 1932–1937. Edited by Robert DeMott and Elaine A. Steinbeck. New York: Library of America, 1994. ———. Novels and Stories 1942–1952. Edited by Robert DeMott. New York: Library of America, 2001.

Robert C. Evans

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all. (“Adagia”)

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lthough poets are often assumed to lead exciting, romantic lives, the outward existence of Wallace Stevens was largely uneventful. He spent most of his adulthood as a prominent insurance executive, composing his poems in the time he spared from overseeing a department concerned with surety bonds. Shy, retiring, but self-assured, he shunned publicity and kept his distance from most people; certainly he was not flamboyant in the ways other notable modern poets (such as EZR A POUND or Dylan Thomas) have been. Ideas for poems often occurred to him as he walked to and from work, and it was later the job of his secretary to type the poems after deciphering his nearly impenetrable handwriting. His poetic career began late, was interrupted by a lengthy period of silence, but then developed steadily and productively, so that by the end of his life, he was widely regarded as one of the best, most distinctive, and most innovative voices in modern American literature. He is now often considered one of the fi nest modern poets, although his works are often so complex in phrasing, tone, and theme that he never achieved the wide public fame of writers such as ROBERT FROST or even T. S. ELIOT. He is often called a poet’s poet—an author whose true greatness is best appreciated only by other workers in the craft. Stevens was born on October 2, 1879, in Reading, Pennsylvania, where his father was a lawyer and where his mother encouraged an interest in Christi-

anity and music. Stevens received a solid education in the local schools, where he eventually excelled as a student and where his interest in writing (especially for the school newspaper) first developed. After graduating from high school in 1898 with various distinctions, he entered Harvard as a special student (on a three-year course of study). There he read widely, studied with noted scholars, rose to prominence on the staff of the college newspaper, and increasingly began to compose stories and especially poems. After leaving Harvard in 1900, he settled in New York, working as a journalist for various newspapers before deciding (at the urging of his practical-minded father) to study law. Nevertheless, while pursuing his legal studies he maintained and even increased his commitment to creative writing, vowing to write something each evening, no matter how little. By 1903 he had graduated from law school, and by 1904, while back in Reading, he had met an attractive young woman—Elsie Viola Kachel Moll— who would eventually become his wife. Meanwhile, he worked in New York as a lawyer, reading widely, writing to Elsie, and even composing a book of poems for her. His parents, however, strongly disapproved of this romance, considering Elsie socially inferior. Angered by their opposition, Stevens proposed marriage in 1908 and began avoiding his family during trips home to Reading. Stevens’s early devotion to Elsie (whom he considered physically stunning) are reflected in his fre-

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quent letters to her, in his composition of another gift book of poems, and, fi nally, in their marriage on September 21, 1909—an event his family boycotted. Although the couple established a home in New York, Elsie was frequently back in Reading. The deaths of Stevens’s father in 1911 and then of his mother in 1912 helped him reestablish some connections with the rest of his family, although for years he remained rather distant, both geographically and emotionally. Meanwhile, he was enjoying growing success in business, having begun working in the insurance business, and in 1914 he was made a local vice president for the Equitable insurance company in New York. He was at this time also increasingly writing poems and submitting them for publication. In fact, he had by now already written some of his most memorable works, particularly “Sunday Morning” (considered by many one of the greatest poems of the 20th century). He began to interact with other poets and artists and had begun to win a reputation as a significant writer. In 1916, however, the Equitable collapsed, and so Stevens was forced to leave New York to begin working at the Hartford insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut, where he would spend the rest of his life and make his name both as a poet and a highly competent executive. During this period immediately preceding and following the end of World War I, he composed a few plays, traveled on business, won several literary prizes, and broadened his connections (mostly through correspondence) with other literary figures. In 1922 he visited both Cuba and Florida, finding the latter most appealing and using it as a backdrop for some of his most famous poems. By that same year, also, he had collected some of his works and submitted them for publication as a book; this volume, eventually titled Harmonium, was issued in fall 1923 by Alfred A. Knopf (a prominent publisher), after which Stevens and his wife left on an extended vacation to Cuba, Central America, California, and then back across the United States to Hartford. Their only child (Holly) was conceived during this trip and was born on August 10, 1924. Reviews of Harmonium were mixed. Some critics praised it for its brilliance, wit, cleverness, innova-

tion, and exoticism, while others condemned it for some of the very same reasons, censuring Stevens for being a dandy, an aesthete, and a writer whose highly wrought style failed to conceal a lack of human substance (Sharpe 116–118). Ironically in the years following the publication of what is now considered one of the most important books of modern American poetry, Stevens largely ceased to write. He attributed this lack of productivity to the demands of his job and the constraints of his family life, but his health was also poor during this period. Whatever the reasons, during the late 1920s and early 1930s he wrote very little, although a few new works were included in a revised version of Harmonium published in 1931. By this time, of course, America was in the depths of the Great Depression, but Stevens, the successful executive, was relatively immune. Indeed, by 1933 he had purchased a large home in a fashionable neighborhood of Hartford and was employing a local woman to help look after the house and care for his daughter. Relations with his wife had been strained for some time and never really improved; the couple seemed to have less and less in common, and Stevens rarely if ever invited his few friends to visit him at home. Business associates often remembered him as aloof but industrious; many considered him ironic, reserved, yet highly competent. He could be secretly kind and openly sarcastic; he was loved and respected by people who knew him well and disliked and distrusted by others. Although he often enjoyed a good drink and a bad joke, he was hardly a “hail fellow well met,” and his relations with his wife, daughter, family, friends, colleagues, and fellow artists often seem to have been stiff, distanced, reserved, and formal. Nevertheless, he did well at any task he set for himself, particularly in business, and by 1934 he had been named a vice president of the Hartford, which was now one of the most successful insurance companies in the country. By this time Stevens had begun writing again, and in 1935 his important book Ideas of Order was issued by a small press and then reprinted the following year by Knopf. During 1936, too, occurred the one incident in Stevens’s life that seems surprising: a drunken brawl in Florida with ERNEST HEMINGWAY

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(in which Stevens had the worst of it), although the two men soon reconciled. Ideas of Order was well received, and Stevens was increasingly recognized as one of the country’s major poets—a status acknowledged, during the coming years and decades, through an increasing shower of prizes, awards, honorary degrees, and invitations to speak on the campuses of leading colleges. The year 1937 saw the publication of his collection The Man with the Blue Guitar (with its significant title poem), and, by 1939, when Stevens turned 60, he enjoyed not only widespread respect but also the friendship of wealthy and influential people and broad connections in the literary community. Unfortunately he did not enjoy much happiness at home, where relations with his wife were as distant as ever. As World War II broke out in Europe, Stevens was entering a new period of literary productivity and was the focus of increasing attention from sympathetic critics. More and more he composed essays as well as poems, and in 1942 (with America now fully involved in the war) his book Parts of a World was published by Knopf and his poems “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” were issued by a small private press. Ironically by 1943–44 he found himself as vigorously opposed to his daughter’s choice of a mate as his own parents had once resisted his own marriage to Elsie. Nevertheless, although Stevens considered Holly’s fiancé socially inferior, she married him anyway, and her marriage would soon prove even less happy than that of her parents (Brazeau 277). In 1945 Stevens’s book Esthétique du Mal was issued by a small but respected press, and further recognition of Stevens’s growing status was signified when he was named a fellow of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The next year he received a major poetry award, and in 1947 he was not only invited to speak at Harvard but received an honorary degree from Wesleyan University and saw the publication of his Harvard lectures by a private press. In 1948 he spoke at both Yale and Columbia Universities, and in 1949 he used a speaking engagement in Connecticut to read one of his most important poems, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” He was awarded the prestigious Bollingen Prize in 1950, witnessed the publication of his book The

Auroras of Autumn by Knopf, and was pleased when Knopf also committed itself to reprinting all of his previous books. The Auroras of Autumn received the National Book Award in 1951, the same year in which some of his prose was published in book form as The Necessary Angel. Speaking engagements and honorary degrees were now commonplace for Stevens, and he was also more and more often an official judge of others’ poems for prizes and awards. In 1953 a volume of his Selected Poems was fi nally published in England, and the following year his monumental Collected Poems was issued by Knopf in time for his 75th birthday, which was celebrated by many of the most important writers of the time. He was offered the chance to be Harvard’s professor of poetry for 1955–56 but declined, but in 1955 he did accept an honorary degree from Yale, won his second National Book Award, and was also awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Despite his growing public stature, however, his good fortune was not unblemished. His wife suffered a stroke in January 1955, and in April Stevens himself was hospitalized with intestinal troubles. Surgery revealed severe stomach cancer, and during the next few months he shuttled back and forth from his home to a convalescent facility to the hospital where he would soon die. His mood was surprisingly cheerful; his family had concealed his ultimate diagnosis from him, but he must have realized that his life was coming to an end. A priest who often visited him in the hospital later claimed that Stevens, who had always been an atheist or agnostic with a strong interest in religion (and in poetry as a possible substitute for religion), converted to Roman Catholicism shortly before his death, but that this news was withheld from his wife and daughter. In any case, when Stevens died on August 2, 1955, he was widely hailed as one of the most distinctive and important poets in the history of American literature (Brazeau 289–298).

“Sunday Morning” (1915, 1923) A woman stays home on a Sunday morning rather than going to church, but, instead of merely enjoy-

Wallace Stevens 445

ing herself or simply feeling guilty, she reflects on the role of religion in human life and ponders possible alternatives to it. “Sunday Morning” is widely considered one of Stevens’s very fi nest poems. It opens by depicting a woman relaxing on a Sunday morning, apparently having skipped the church service that would have been considered obligatory by most people in her time. Yet even as she enjoys the physical pleasures of fruit, drink, sun, and nature, she nevertheless cannot help thinking of Christianity, which was born in “silent Palestine, / Dominion of the blood and sepulchre” (or burial place) (ll. 14–15). In this splendid opening stanza, already full of vivid imagery and mesmerizing sound effects (especially assonance and alliteration), Stevens introduces the basic thematic tension that dominates the work: Should we enjoy the world or renounce it, indulge the flesh or nourish the spirit, live for the present or focus on the past or future? The second stanza opens appropriately with questions, which in this work are far more important than answers. The woman wonders why she should renounce pleasure to worry about death or the dead; she wonders why divinity usually seems so insubstantial and why earthly joys do not seem (to most people) as precious as a merely imagined heaven. And then, as if to save the poem from a sentimental romanticism, Stevens ends the stanza by acknowledging the complexities of earthly life—its pain as well as its pleasures, its losses as well as its gains. For a brief moment the poem seems to reach a resolution in the fi nal line of stanza 2, but the poem’s great glory is that Stevens never rests, nor ever allows us to rest or stop thinking, and so the meditation begins anew with stanza 3. This stanza briefly surveys past religious ideas, especially classical mythology and the Christianity that replaced it. Jove (king of the Greek and Roman gods) once commanded devotion, but, because he seemed too distant, too remote and imperious, human beings imagined a different kind of god (Jesus Christ) who was both human and divine. The stanza ends, however, by asking whether it might not be possible (and might not be better) simply to dispense with gods altogether. Instead

of inventing a fictitious heavenly paradise, might it not be best simply to acknowledge that earth itself may be “all of paradise that we shall know?” (l. 41). If we were willing to give up our dreams (or illusions) of supernatural perfection, nature itself might then seem more satisfying. Yes, our life here has its labors and pains, but it is also full of beauty, joy, and love, and, if we could accept the earth as our home (rather than merely as a brief stop on the way to a supposedly glorious heaven), our lives here and now might be more satisfying and contented. Once again, however, Stevens ends with only a temporary resolution, for in stanza 4 the meditation begins anew. The woman now admits that although she is indeed happy with earthly joys and pleasures, she knows they can never last. Once they fade, how can we then be happy? The answer seems to lie in the cycles of natural existence: Yes, spring ends, but it also returns, and the palpable reality of nature is far more substantial and reliable than the merely imaginary pleasures of myth or religion. But again, in stanza 5, the apparent answer is once more undercut by new questioning: Yes, the pleasures of nature may return each year, but she still longs for a personal happiness that will not fade, that will be permanent. In response, Stevens offers one of his most compelling statements: “Death is the mother of beauty”—a claim so important that he states it twice (ll. 63, 88). In other words, it is precisely our realization of our mortality and mutability that makes anything beautiful seem beautiful and precious. It is the consciousness of loss that makes us value beauty; that consciousness also makes us want to create beautiful things, whether they be works of art, acts of love, or children. The impulse to love and procreate is partly an effort to cheat and defeat death, to make beauty from mortality, to wrestle something precious from inevitable loss. Stanza 6 amplifies this argument, suggesting that the merely imaginary paradises of myth or religion are static and sterile because they lack (or deny) change. Although they are usually described in ways that make them resemble beautiful places of nature, such heavens are unreal, and they lack the mutability that defi nes true, natural existence. Once again the poem states that “Death is the

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mother of beauty,” but now it also insists that from the realization of death are born the mothers who themselves give birth to others: Human procreation is one long, continuous chain of acts designed to defeat death by creating and re-creating life. In stanza 7 the poem becomes almost visionary and ecstatic, as the speaker imagines a time when people will praise the glories of the sun and when all of nature will be united in one large choir of celebration. The sun, however, will be praised not as a god (for to praise it thus would merely repeat past mistakes), “but as a god might be” (l. 94). Thus, in this new ecstatic vision, we will appreciate nature’s beauties without foolishly deifying nature. If human beings can accept their mortality (rather than denying it or wishing it away), they will “know well the heavenly fellowship / Of men that perish.” They will see their lives to be as beautiful (but also as brief and precious) as the morning dew (ll. 102–103). By accepting our common mortality we can begin to overcome our divisions, enjoying our brotherhood as children of the earth. Finally, in stanza 8, the poem and its meditations come full circle: The woman comprehends that the “tomb in Palestine” is not a site of divine resurrection; it is simply “the grave of Jesus, where he lay” (l. 109). It is, in other words, the fi nal resting place of a man like the rest of us—a man precious not because he was God’s son but merely because he was our human brother. In its fi nal lines the poem reminds us that in one respect we are fundamentally alone: In reality, no gods protect or terrorize us; we live like an island’s inhabitants, “unsponsored, free” (l. 112). But our island (this earth) is full of beauty; it is our home, and we share it with lovely creatures. Graceful sights and charming sounds are all around us. In the end, however, we must acknowledge that night follows day, that death follows life, and that fi nally we, like the birds Stevens so beautifully describes, must sink “Downward to darkness, on extended wings” (l. 120).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this poem with another important modern poem on religion, T. S. ELIOT’s “Ash Wednesday.” In particular, discuss

the two poems in terms of their images, tones, moods, and implied points of view. Which work seems more complex? Which (if either) seems more “convincing,” and why? 2. Compare and contrast the presentation of nature here and in JACK L ONDON’s “The Law of Life” or in Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat.” In particular, what aspects of Stevens’s view of nature make him seem more “romantic” than the other writers? How, in this poem, does he try to guard himself against excessive romanticism or sentimentalism? In other words, how does he try to ground the poem in realism? 3. Can a religious person appreciate and value a poem like this? If so, how and why? If not, why not? Is it necessary to agree with the message of a work of art in order to appreciate the work’s beauty, skill, and complexity? 4. Examine the attitude toward death in this poem. How does the work imply the value of being constantly aware of death? Is it open to an accusation of sentimentality? Why or why not?

“Anecdote of the Jar” (1923) The anonymous speaker places a jar on a hillside in Tennessee, and this simple act transforms his (and our) perceptions. This mysterious little poem, with its odd title and even odder “plot,” is typical of Stevens in its tendency to provoke thought without providing clear or simple answers. Its wit begins already in its title, since the word anecdote (which refers to a short narration concerning something real, but which can also imply an unreliable account) derives from a Greek term meaning “things unpublished.” Obviously, however, Stevens’s “anecdote” is published, and its inclusion in a book of poems implies that it will have some significant meaning. Who, however (besides Stevens), would think of writing a poem about a simple jar? Well, John Keats wrote a famous lyric about a Grecian urn, and surely Keats’s poem is somewhere in the background of Stevens’s work, influencing its interpretation if only through our reactions to the poems’ differences. Keats’s urn, for

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instance, is elaborately decorated, whereas Stevens’s jar is plain and unadorned. Keats’s urn is associated with the artistic glories of a great, exotic civilization; Stevens’s jar, on the other hand, exists in isolation in a rural Tennessee landscape and seems to serve no present purpose, not even the utilitarian one for which it was presumably designed. Yet both Keats’s urn and Stevens’s jar do seem to symbolize something created, something man-made, and thus some aspect of human skill and art as opposed to uncomplicated nature, and just as Keats’s urn invites our contemplation and meditation, so does Stevens’s jar. A simple, ordinary object to which we would usually pay no great attention becomes an object of fascination when it is placed in an unusual context. In this sense, the speaker’s “plac[ing]” of the jar symbolizes the creative act of the artist, who, by inserting something man-made into the midst of nature, alters our perception not only of the object itself but also of the surrounding landscape and of relations between the two. The poem’s simple, spare language (so different from the elaborate, punning pyrotechnics we often encounter in Stevens) is perfectly appropriate to its clipped, blunt tone; its brief, declarative syntax; and its clear, formulaic structure (just three four-line stanzas, with just two sentences in each of them). The poem is simultaneously plain and provocative, ordinary and strange, clear and yet compellingly odd.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Although this poem profits from plain language and simple structure, discuss some examples of how it also employs “poetic” devices such as repetition, assonance, rhyme, structural circularity, and inverted sentence structure. 2. Taking your cue from the preceding discussion, compare and contrast this poem and Keats’s “Ode.” In particular, discuss the different titles of the works and their differences in length, stanza forms, points of view, tone, and meaning. 3. Compare and contrast this work with William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.” In particular, discuss the poems in terms of their lengths, themes, tones, points of view, and kinds of diction.

“The Emperor of Ice-Cream” (1923) A burly worker is summoned to a domestic gathering where male and female youths have begun to congregate and where the worker is given the task of preparing ice cream. The gathering, apparently, is a wake for an old woman who has recently died, and whose stiff, silent body lies on her bed, illuminated by lamp light, as the ice cream is prepared. Beginning (as he often does) with a tantalizing title, Stevens immediately arouses our curiosity: Who or what is an “emperor of ice-cream”? The poem itself commences with a commanding, accented verb and a striking image: The “roller of big cigars” is presumably a strong, “muscular” laborer whose strength makes him the ideal person to “whip” (another active, accented verb), in normal, everyday “kitchen cups,” the “concupiscent” (or pleasurable) “curds” of ice cream (ll. 1–3). In a mere three lines, then, we are in the midst of a typical Stevens poem: The basic situation is unclear but intriguing and makes us want to read further; the heavy use of alliteration (especially in line 3) implies a playful tone; and the juxtaposition of opposites (such as concupiscent and curds) exemplifies Stevens’s typically ironic double vision. We are unsure just what is happening, but we want to learn more. Girls (although here called by the archaic term wenches, which implies sexuality) are present, and so are boys (the word implying their youth and thus also their sexuality); the girls are dressed plainly and the boys bring flowers plainly wrapped. The scene is thus one of ordinary beauty and ordinary vitality, but it is one of beauty and vitality nonetheless. Not until the second stanza do we discover that the occasion for this gathering is a wake—a celebration of a person’s life after that person’s death. The dead woman (like her mourners) was presumably poor or at least lower-middle-class: Just as their clothes and flowers are unelaborate, so the dresser near her deathbed is damaged, but while she lived, she was capable of creating beauty by “embroider[ing] fantails” on the “sheet” now used to “cover her face” (ll.10–12). Her dead body may now be cold, silent, and even ugly (ll. 13–14), but it is as much a fact of life, which must be confronted unflinchingly, as is the pleasure symbolized by the ice cream. Death happens, but life goes on; indeed, it is the fact of death that gives meaning

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and intensity to our passing fleshly joys. One woman has died, but the community continues and is drawn together by her passing to renew its affi rmation of life.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In Stevens’s poem “Sunday Morning,” the speaker asserts, “Death is the mother of beauty.” How, specifically, is that assertion relevant to this work? In what ways does death enhance our appreciation of beauty and even lead to the creation of beautiful things? 2. Discuss all the different kinds of pleasure implied throughout this work, and then discuss how they relate to one another and how they contribute to the poem’s larger theme. What role (if any) does religion play in this poem? How is the tone of this work (and its attitude toward death) different from that in EDWIN A RLINGTON ROBINSON’s poem “Luke Havergal”? 3. Research the meaning of the term carpe diem, and in particular examine some poems in the carpe diem tradition (such as Robert Herrick’s “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”). Then, discuss how this work by Stevens falls into that tradition. What is the role of sexuality in such poems?

“A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” (1923) An anonymous, unidentified speaker addresses the woman of the title, informing her that poetry is “the supreme fiction” (l. 1) and imaginatively suggesting that the impulse to morality and the impulse to sensual pleasure may share common roots. Indeed (the speaker implies) perhaps the people who seem most rigorous in their sensual self-denial derive pleasure from their apparent pain, so that pleasure may be the ultimate source of much human conduct, even if it bothers some persons to consider this possibility. This poem, from Harmonium, is typical of Stevens’s work as a whole, especially his early work. As often in Stevens, the title is important: Each

adjective is significant, for the fact that the woman addressed is “High-Toned,” “Old,” and “Christian” implies that she is somewhat stuffy and pretentious; that her thinking may be traditional to the point of being outmoded and that she represents the kind of conventional, unthoughtful religion that Stevens often questioned. Although the poem is explicitly addressed to her (as the fi rst line makes clear), she is never given a chance to reply; we hear only the speaker’s side of the dialogue, but we can easily imagine the views he is critiquing. Like many of Stevens’s poems, this one is explicitly concerned with poetry in particular and with the imagination in general. Stevens considered the imagination, and the arts it produced, as among the most precious of human possessions, and indeed he saw the imagination as perhaps the “supreme” feature of the human mind and life. In this poem he implicitly defends poetry against religion, implying that religion itself is largely an imaginative construct. His tone, here as so often elsewhere, is hypothetical and speculative (as in line 1), but the speaker also tries to imply the logic of his views, especially in such words or phrases as “Thus” (ll. 3, 9) and “That’s clear” (l. 6). In addition, the tone is also whimsical, ironic, and even somewhat sardonic; even the repeated use of the word madame can be seen as simultaneously respectful and sarcastic. The heavy emphasis on assonance (as in lines 2, 10, 12, 18, and especially 21–22) and the even heavier use of alliteration (as in lines 2–5, 8–10, 12–13, 15–16, 18–19, and especially 21–22) are typical of the verbal playfulness and cleverness (some would say “self-indulgence” and “frivolity”) so often found in Stevens’s speakers, who love the sounds their words make both in the ear and on the tongue. The poem suggests, however, that earthly pleasure (even the pleasure of mere sounds) is a positive good that should not be despised in favor of “haunted heaven” (l. 3).

For Discussion or Writing 1. This poem shares similar themes and arguments with “Sunday Morning.” Why, however, is the latter poem a considerably greater work of art? In particular, compare and contrast the two poems in terms of their tones, their uses of

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ambiguity, and the fairness with which they deal with opposing points of view. 2. Choose five words or phrases from this poem that seem to you especially striking or effective and discuss how and why they have their effect. Discuss them in terms of their denotation, their connotation, their qualities of sound and rhythm, and the ways they fit into the larger design of the poem as a whole. 3. How can you justify (or how might Stevens justify) the use of a line such as line 18 in a serious poem? How does this line contribute to the larger themes or meaning of the work, and how does it reflect the larger attitude of the poem’s speaker?

“Peter Quince at the Clavier” (1923, 1931) As Peter Quince (perhaps the comic stage manager in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream) plays at a keyboard and thinks of a beautiful woman, he is reminded of the biblical figure of Susanna, herself a beauty, who, as she bathed, once inspired dangerous lust in some elderly voyeurs. When the old men tried to rape her, Susanna resisted. The poem ends by reflecting that although merely abstract beauty fades, beauty embodied achieves immortality, if only through memory. This poem illustrates many common characteristics of Stevens’s verse. In its opening and closing stanzas it is highly meditative, even philosophical—musing on the relations between music and emotion and then on the connections between beauty in the mind and in the flesh. The two middle stanzas, meanwhile, are highly evocative; they, in particular, are full of vivid, sensuous images, so that as readers we, too, like the elders, almost become voyeurs. Quince is a kind of artist, and the poem (as do many by Stevens) partly concerns art itself and the act of artistic creation. Many commentators have suggested that the poem has, appropriately enough, a musical structure (perhaps indebted to the sonata or sonatina forms), and certainly musical imagery provides much of its unity. But Stevens also uses his characteristic emphasis

on repetition of all kinds, just as he also typically exploits the full range of sound effects, especially through alliteration and assonance (see especially lines 13–15). Each section has its own shape, structure, and rhythm, from the tercets of section 1, to the alternating long and short lines of section 2, to the rhymed couplets of section 3, and concluding with the irregular rhymes and unpredictable stanzas of section 4. These alterations and variations make the work resemble even more a musical composition, yet the poem also gains unity through its underlying theme of beauty, its imagery of music, and its abiding concern with Susanna as a symbol of both loveliness and love.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss in detail some of the specific techniques Stevens uses in this poem. For instance, in the fi rst section, how does he instantly create a sense of immediacy? In the same section, how does he introduce a sense of argumentative logic into a poem that otherwise emphasizes emotion? Why and how does he use colors in this section? Here and elsewhere, discuss the poetic effectiveness of his word choices as precisely as possible. 2. Compare and contrast Stevens’s poem with the biblical episode of Susanna and the elders. How closely does Stevens follow the biblical account? What details, if any, does he change or omit? Is it possible to understand the poem without knowing the biblical report? 3. Compare and contrast the imagery used to describe Susanna with the images used to describe the elders. Discuss the connotations of the various images. For instance, why are the elders described as “red-eyed” (l. 12) and “white” (l. 62)? Why is Susanna associated with “water” that is “green,” “clear,” and “warm” (l. 16)? Discuss these and other word choices as precisely as you can.

“The Snow Man” (1931) In this poem Stevens meditates on possible human responses to a winter landscape. He suggests that


to appreciate such a landscape properly and accurately, one must not impose meanings (especially tragic meanings) upon it or derive such meanings from it. Typically enough, Stevens begins with a double-edged title: At fi rst we might imagine a pleasant winter scene in which children have playfully constructed a stereotypically jolly, cheerful man of snow. But this, of course, is a Stevens poem, and so the mood and tone are thoughtful and philosophical rather than whimsically quaint. Of course, because it is a poem by Stevens, we cannot be easily or precisely sure what it means, although it seems to deal with a problem his writings often confront: the relation between man and nature, the connection between the observer and the thing observed. In other words, here as elsewhere Stevens seems to be concerned with the way the imagination relates to reality. The poem has been linked by critics to ideas associated with Schopenhauer, Heidegger, William James, and Eastern Buddhism (among others), but more important than what the poem may or may not mean is its craft. The work is more significant for the thoughts it provokes than for any answers it provides. What, for instance, does Stevens mean by the open reference to a “mind of winter” (l. 1)? Does he mean a mind attuned to winter? Does he mean a mind stripped bare of preconceptions, as winter itself seems bare and blank? In any case (and these are just two possible meanings), the phrase already suggests the two poles between which Stevens’s thought characteristically moves: between the perceiving mind and the real thing or real fact (in this case, winter) that the mind perceives. Although Stevens implies that winter is a season of nothingness, in lines 2–7 he splendidly evokes it with crisp, precise images that place it before our mental sights. Not until the second half of line 7, however, does the main argument enter: It takes a particular kind of mind to resist imposing a human meaning on what is, after all, a mere landscape. The landscape’s proper viewer must be one who (1) sees clearly all that can be seen, (2) introduces nothing extraneous into his vision, and (3) can also see “the nothing” before him (ll. 14–15). Yet the poem is not merely a philosophical puzzle. If it works as a

poem (as a work of art), it works because of the poet’s skill with words and rhythms—a skill that in this case involves striking imagery, effective repetition, puns, paradoxes, and an apparently simple diction that can nonetheless imply extraordinary complexity of thought and feeling.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Examine the depiction of winter in this poem. What does the poem imply about the relationship between man and nature? 2. Compare and contrast the depictions of landscape in this poem and in Stevens’s poem “Sunday Morning.” In particular, how do the two poems seem to differ in their attitudes toward man’s relationship to nature? Which poem is more consoling or comforting, and why? 3. Compare and contrast this poem with ROBERT FROST’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” In particular, how do the poems contrast in their views of the relationship between man and nature? How does Stevens’s speaker try to resist the kinds of thoughts emphasized in Frost’s work?

“Of Modern Poetry” (1942) This poem is striking in its almost programmatic clarity: It both sums up and enacts Stevens’s ideas of what modern poetry (and a modern poem) must be if it is to “suffice” (ll. 2, 10), or seem credible and convincing. Stevens asserts that poems can no longer (as they once did) merely restate conventional ideas or repeat standard social, religious, or political orthodoxies, for these no longer exist. The modern poem, like the modern people it must serve and satisfy, must be an act of continual questing, of ceaseless fi nding, of constant discovery and rediscovery. It must be vital and must address people living here and now: It must address crucial aspects of reality (such as war), and it must speak so convincingly, and so much in the modern idiom, that those listening will think they hear their own speech. A successful modern poem can describe the simplest actions (“a man skating, a

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woman dancing, a woman / Combing” [ll. 27–28]), but it must do so in language that rings true to a modern ear and a modern mind. Appropriately enough, Stevens here composes the kind of poem he commends: His language is simple and lucid; his sentence structure is uncomplicated; he writes with exactly the plainness and precision he praises. Yet the poem is not without art or craft, for it uses repetition effectively; it exploits and develops several controlling images (such as the imagery of stages and actors); it shifts between short sentences and long; and its final sentence is a fragment that both echoes and modifies the fragment with which the poem opened. In its loose structure, flexible rhythm, and unpredictable meter, the poem exemplifies the very colloquialism it calls for, so that the work is the perfect marriage of meaning and form, of substance and style.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this poem with a more “difficult” poem by Stevens, such as “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.” What factors, exactly, make the present poem easier to understand than that other work? Which of the two appeals to you more, and why? What are the potential virtues and faults of each work? 2. Compare and contrast this poem with Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants.” In particular, discuss how Hemingway’s story is a “modern” work of art in the ways suggested by Stevens’s poem. How does Hemingway’s story satisfy many of the criteria set out by Stevens?

“Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself” (1954) When the speaker hears the weak sound of a single bird outside at the very beginning of a late winter day, he realizes that the sound is the fi rst indication of the rising sun and of the coming spring. The realization strikes him as an epiphany. Here as in other poems (as the very title of this work suggests), Stevens is concerned with the relations between the mind and reality, between the

imagination and the world. The speaker is certain the sound he heard was not imaginary or part of a dream but something real, and (what is more) he associates it with even larger realities, such as the rising sun, the changing seasons, and nature’s response (symbolized by the coming “choir” of the birds [l. 14]) to both these transformations. Typically, at the very end of the poem the speaker is still somewhat tentative: He does not claim that his revelation is in actual fact “A new knowledge of reality”; instead he merely says it is “like” such knowledge (ll. 17–18). Stevens was too intelligent to think that the human mind can ever have pure, unmediated access to reality; he knew that our knowledge could only be approximate. Nevertheless, it is the business of this poem (and of his poetry in general) to help us share quick flashes of insight and revelation that seem to take us closer to the truly real. This particular poem accomplishes its goal of seeming credible through its plain, simple diction; its calm tone; and its lucid but unobtrusive structure. This work is an example of Stevens when he is seemingly most simple but also most profound.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss all the ways this poem deals with states or moments of transition or transformation— conditions of “in-betweenness.” How, for instance, does the fi rst stanza repeatedly stress such states, and how and why is this condition relevant to the poem’s larger meaning? 2. Compare and contrast this poem with Ezra Pound’s brief lyric “In a Station of the Metro.” In particular, discuss the two poems as examples of epiphanies, or sudden, brief revelations. How are the revelations similar (especially in their implications about beauty), and how do they also differ?

“The Plain Sense of Things” (1954) When summer gives way to winter (or youth gives way to age), things seem to become simpler and more clear, but even to perceive or describe this change still requires the shaping power of the imagination.


Despite its title, which seems to promise straightforward simplicity, this poem is more complex than it at fi rst appears, and so the title itself is already somewhat double edged and ironic. The title’s three main monosyllabic words imply directness, clarity, and solid substance, but we should never expect Stevens to deliver anything merely simple or clear-cut. The poem begins with a standard image of autumn, suggesting not only the movement from one natural season to another (from summer to fall), but also the shift from one stage of human life to the next (from vigorous maturity to declining old age). Just as the natural landscape becomes more visible “[a]fter the leaves have fallen” (l. 1), so human life seems to become more “plain”— less adorned, less magical, less mysterious, but also more comprehensible—as we near its end. Here as in other poems by Stevens, “imagination” (l. 3) is a major theme (indeed, perhaps the major theme), and although it temporarily seems “as if” (l. 2) imagination disappears as summer becomes fall or as youth becomes old age, we should already realize well before the fourth stanza arrives that for Stevens the imagination is indispensable. Thus, even to try to imagine the lack of imagination paradoxically requires the ability to imagine. Even the list of seemingly plain, factual statements in lines 7–12 is full of sharp, vivid imagery that exemplifies (while proclaiming loss) the poet’s power, the power of the shaping human mind. Even to write convincingly of the loss or waning of vitality requires the vital, penetrating force of the poet’s insight and imagemaking craft, and this craft is nowhere better displayed than in the extended, powerful description of the barren pond—a pond whose very barrenness is so vividly set before our eyes through Stevens’s poetic talent (ll. 14–19).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss Stevens’s emphasis on the word we in the opening stanza. Why does he want to emphasize this word? What is the effect of such emphasis? How would the poem be different if he had stressed I instead? 2. Discuss the effectiveness of certain words or phrases in this poem. What, for instance, are

some implications or connotations of the word turban in line 8, and how are they relevant to the poem’s meaning? Why, of all things, is it the “greenhouse” that ironically needs paint? What is suggested by the aging, slanting chimney? Why, of all possible insects, does Stevens mention “fl ies” (l. 12)? How do all these images contribute to the total effectiveness of the poem? 3. Compare and contrast this work with Philip Larkin’s “Aubade.” Both works deal with the realization of approaching death, but how do they differ in tone, imagery, and ultimate meaning? Which is the more optimistic or “romantic” of the two poems?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON STEVENS AND HIS WORK 1. Compare and contrast Stevens’s poem “Of Modern Poetry” with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. In particular, discuss how The Waste Land exemplifies the kind of modern poetry Stevens defi nes and defends, especially in its language, form, and attitudes. 2. Compare and contrast the title character of “Peter Quince at the Clavier” with the character by that name who appears in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. How (if at all) is Shakespeare’s Quince relevant to the figure created by Stevens? In particular, discuss the two Quinces in terms of their personalities, actions, concerns, and symbolic functions. 3. Compare and contrast “Sunday Morning” with Philip Larkin’s “Church Going.” In particular, discuss the two works in terms of their diction, imagery, points of view, and attitudes toward the passing of conventional religion. 4. Compare and contrast the depiction of women in “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Sunday Morning,” and “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” Why, in each case, did Stevens choose to focus on a woman rather than a man? What different symbolic functions do the women serve in each poem? Discuss the images associated with each of these women.

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5. Compare and contrast Stevens’s “Of Modern Poetry” with his own “Sunday Morning.” In particular, discuss how “Sunday Morning” exemplifies the kind of modern poem Stevens endorses. Pay special attention to such matters as the poem’s diction, the actions it depicts, its emphasis on questing and questioning, and its imagery. 6. Discuss the depiction of nature in at least three different poems by Stevens. How is nature presented differently in each poem? Are there any similarities of presentation? What symbolic functions does nature serve in each work? How is Stevens’s concern with nature relevant to his ideas about the relations between imagination and reality? How do Stevens’s presentations of nature seem (or not seem) stereotypically “romantic”? 7. Compare and contrast the depictions of death in “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” and in “Sunday Morning.” Why do both poems emphasize the presence of young men and women? Why do both poems emphasize the idea of sensual pleasure? Why do both poems emphasize the creation of beauty? How are all these topics relevant to their larger concerns with death? 8. Drawing on the discussions of Stevens offered earlier, discuss how his poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is typical of his work. In particular, discuss the poem’s structure, themes, tone, attitudes, and methods, including its use of such techniques as repetition, variation, alliteration, and assonance. How is the poem typical of Stevens in its depictions of nature and in its implications about the role of the imagination? 9. Study some ideas contained in Stevens’s prose work The Necessary Angel and then discuss their relevance to one or more of his poems. For example, you might focus on Stevens’s ideas about the purposes of poetry, the relations between poetry and religion, the relations between poetry and the physical and social worlds, or the relations between reality and the imagination.

10. Using the poems discussed earlier as examples, what (if anything) do you think can be inferred about Stevens’s social or political views? What evidence (if any) do the poems provide for believing that Stevens was a “conservative” or a “liberal,” a “traditionalist” or a “progressive,” and so on? To what degree do these poems suggest that Stevens was concerned with politics or society? On what specific evidence do you base your conclusions? WORKS CITED

AND


Brazeau, Peter. Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered: An Oral Biography. San Francisco: North Point, 1985. Brunner, Edward, John Timberman Newcomb, and Cary Nelson. “Modern American Poetry: Wallace Stevens.” Available online. URL: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/stevens/stevens. htm. Accessed April 7, 2009. Kermode, Frank, and Joan Richardson. “Chronology.” In Collected Poetry and Prose. By Wallace Stevens. New York: Library of America, 1997. Serio, John N. Wallace Stevens: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994. Sharpe, Tony. Wallace Stevens: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. Sukenick, Ronald. Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure. New York: New York University Press, 1967. Vendler, Helen. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969. ———. The Wallace Stevens Journal. Available online. URL: http://www.wallacestevens.com. Accessed April 7, 2009.

Robert C. Evans

Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton) (1865–1914)

I give my right hand to the Occidentals and my left to the Orientals, hoping that between them they will not utterly destroy the insignificant “connecting link.” (“Leaves”)

S

ui Sin Far is the pen name adopted by a woman born in England and raised in Canada who lived at various times in New York, Jamaica, San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston before dying in Montreal at age 49. The daughter of an English father and Chinese mother, she had been given the name Edith Eaton at birth, but it is as Sui Sin Far that she achieved some measure of contemporary fame as well as lasting historical significance. She was the fi rst author of serious fiction in North America to write as a Chinese person about Chinese (and Chinese-American) topics. Although her physical appearance would easily have allowed her to “pass” as white, and although most of her 13 siblings did indeed blend (and marry) into the dominant culture, Sui Sin Far chose to identify with, and speak up for, a minority population that was strongly discriminated against in her era. In her journalism as well as in her fiction, Sui Sin Far sought to understand and depict the experiences of the Chinese (especially in America) in ways that would undermine the negative stereotypes that affected the ways they were viewed and treated throughout the English-speaking world. As an unmarried woman of mixed ancestry who struggled throughout her life to make a living, and as an author whose unconventional writing earned her little real income, she chose an independent path that provided little material comfort but that obviously answered a deeper need for personal integ-

rity, self-respect, and empathy with an oppressed people. Sui Sin Far’s father, Edward Eaton, was born in England in 1839; by the early 1860s he was in Shanghai, China, working as a merchant despite his interest and training in art. There he met a Chinese woman named Lotus Blossom Trefusis. Born in 1846, she had apparently been taken from China and educated in England, as a child; she may have returned to China as a Christian missionary. Despite their similarities of faith and education, Edward and Lotus Blossom were divided by race, yet they chose to defy the traditions of their nations and families by marrying. This decision, however, would have even more impact on their children than on the couple themselves. The fi rst of their children, Edward Charles, was born in China in 1864; the second child (and fi rst daughter) was Edith, who was born in the small village of Macclesfield, England, in 1865. Over the years, 12 more children arrived at regular intervals, and Edith (as the eldest daughter) was deeply involved in raising and supervising them. She thus knew from an early age the time and effort demanded of a mother, and these experiences may have affected her later decision not to marry or have children of her own, especially once she had decided to be a writer. However, another factor perhaps influencing her decision to remain single may have been her own experience with the sometimes violent preju-

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Sui Sin Far

dice faced by children of mixed racial backgrounds; she knew fi rsthand that such children were often taunted and even attacked by other children and were then later subject to legal discrimination as adults (White-Parks 39). Some of Edith’s most vivid childhood memories centered on the experience of being treated as “different” because of her mixed racial parentage. In a memoir written years later, she recalls being scrutinized as a child by curious adults, and she also recalls later being abused, through attacks and taunting, by other children. Even when quite young, she defended herself, verbally and physically, from such assaults and sought reasons to feel pride in her Chinese heritage, but her early exposure to prejudice left a lasting impact. Moreover, such exposure became, if anything, even more intense after her parents left England for North America in 1871 or 1872. Settling briefly in Hudson City, New York, by 1872 or 1873, they had arrived in Montreal, Canada, the city where Edith would spend most of her childhood and adolescence. By this point, the growing family was increasingly poor; they lived in a city divided ethnically between English- and French-speaking whites as well as by chasms of class. The Eatons lived in a section of Montreal with one of the highest rates of infant death on the planet (White-Park 21), but Edith’s father seems to have been less and less interested in making a conventional living. Instead, he spent much time painting, and Edith herself, despite physical frailty, was put to work in the streets, selling lace and hawking her father’s artwork. She was educated in private schools and by her parents (although she never mastered written or spoken Chinese), and by 1883 she had found work as a compositor and stenographer for a Montreal newspaper. Stenography, in fact, would be the practical means by which she would earn her living for most of her life, but her work at the paper also allowed her entry into the world of writing, which would provide the focus of her truest and deepest ambitions. Her earliest known story, “A Trip in a Horse Car,” is a human-interest sketch published in 1888 in a new Canadian periodical, the Dominion Illustrated. Over the next two years the same periodi-

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cal printed seven more works authored by “Edith Eaton”; in some of these (such as “The Origin of a Broken Nose” and “Albemarle’s Secret”) the writer mocks romanticism, sentimentality, and unrealistic behavior; in others (such as “A Fatal Tug of War” and “Robin”) her subjects and tone are darker. None of these early works, however, reveals the Chinese-oriented focus that would later become her hallmark. By the early 1890s, however, she had begun to take a deeper personal interest in Montreal’s tiny Chinese community, and it is even possible that two anonymous sketches published in 1890, and focusing on discrimination against Chinese in Canada, were written by her (White-Parks 78–80). Two similar pieces appeared in 1894 and 1895, but it was in 1896 (the year she also visited New York’s fairly large Chinatown) that her growing commitment to Chinese people and topics became especially obvious. During that year she published a letter to the Montreal Daily Star titled “A Plea for the Chinaman.” Although the letter was signed E. E. (White-Parks 30), in a series of stories printed that same year (“The Gamblers,” “Ku Yum,” “The Story of Iso,” “A Love Story of the Orient,” and “A Chinese Feud”) she began publishing on Chinese topics under the name Sui Sin Far, a phrase meaning “lily” or “water lily” and associated with love for family and homeland (Diana 74). Her career as the fi rst significant Chinese-American writer on Chinese-American subjects had now begun. The word career is probably too strong, for Sui Sin Far never made a successful living as a full-time professional writer of fiction. Instead, she almost always had to rely on stenography and journalism. She practiced both professions, for instance, during a brief stint in 1897 in Jamaica, where she was exposed to yet another highly complex multicultural and multiracial society (about which she wrote 30 separate pieces of journalism). It was there that she also (unfortunately) contracted malaria. By 1898 she was back in Montreal, but her doctors soon advised her to head west to a healthier climate, and so by the end of that year she had moved to San Francisco and then, eventually, to Seattle. Even in Seattle she moved at least seven times, often living in single rooms while


eking out a modest living. (Throughout her life she sent home money to her parents and siblings.) Meanwhile, her exposure to the relatively large Chinese community in San Francisco (as well as to the much smaller one in Seattle) fed into her work as a journalist and author of short fiction. In 1898 she published “Sweet Sin” and “The Sing-Song Woman”; 1899 saw the publication of “Lin John,” “The Story of Tin-A,” and “A Chinese Ishmael” (an especially fine work). In 1900 she published “The Smuggling of Tie Co,” “A Chinese Tom-Boy,” “Ku Yum’s Little Sister,” and “O Yam—a Sketch.” Most of these works of 1898 and 1899 appeared in the California-based periodical Land of Sunshine, but one appeared in the Chicago Evening Post, and increasingly Sui Sin Far would begin to attract a national audience through widely distributed periodicals. In 1902, for instance, her story “The Coat of Many Colors” appeared in the Youth’s Companion; in 1904 “A Chinese BoyGirl” was printed in the influential Century magazine; in 1905 the Chautauquan printed “Aluteh”; and by 1909 Sui Sin Far was sufficiently prominent that a national magazine, the Independent, printed her autobiographical memoir titled “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian.” Nevertheless, Sui Sin Far never had as much time or money to devote to her writing as she desired. In this respect she was much less fortunate than her sister Winnifred, 10 years younger and married to a white man, who had adopted a fictitious, aristocratic Japanese ancestry (since the Japanese were less discriminated against than the Chinese) as well as a Japanese pen name (Onoto Watanna). By 1899 Winnifred had become a successful published novelist whose numerous books would be issued by major presses; Sui Sin Far, in contrast, won far less acclaim and earned much less money; most of her publications in 1903 and 1904 were small pieces of journalism printed in Los Angeles, and she apparently published nothing at all in 1906, 1907, or 1908. (Many of her manuscripts seem to have been destroyed, unfortunately, in a 1907 train wreck [White-Parks 46–47].) A steady stream of publications resumed, however, in 1909, which saw the printing of at least 20 different works (including adult short fiction, children’s stories, and occasional journalism).

A similar flood of at least nine works (including some of Sui Sin Far’s most notable stories, such as “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” “A White Woman Who Married a Chinaman,” “The Inferior Woman,” “Her Chinese Husband,” and “The Bird of Love”) appeared in 1910, often in major periodicals. Only one tale (“A Love Story from the Rice Fields of China”) seems to survive from 1911, although that is also the year that saw the publication of a frank autobiographical essay titled “The Persecution and Oppression of Me,” which has recently been attributed to her by Dominika Ferens (98–99). It was in 1912, however, that Sui Sin Far enjoyed her greatest achievement, when the A. C. McClurg publishing company in Chicago brought out 2,500 copies of a handsomely printed selection of her short fiction and children’s tales titled Mrs. Spring Fragrance. Nevertheless, despite generally positive reviews and a feature article on the author in a newspaper in Boston (where she had moved in 1910), there is not much evidence that the book sold especially well (no second printing is recorded). At least two other stories were printed in 1612 (“Chan Hen Yen, Chinese Student” and “Who’s Game”), and an article, “Chinese Workmen in America,” appeared in 1913; after that, however, nothing else seems to survive from her pen, even though she claimed to be working on another book (possibly a novel). At some point (perhaps as early as 1911) she seems to have returned to Montreal, and it was there that her death notice appeared on April 7, 1914. An obituary attributed her demise to heart trouble, and it also noted the irony that she had died just when her career had begun to flourish. A handsome monument was erected to her in a Montreal cemetery, but for the next 60 years she was largely forgotten. Only in the last decades of the 20th century, with the rise of feminism and ethnic studies, did interest begin to revive in the life and works of this remarkably unusual writer.

“Mrs. Spring Fragrance” (1910, 1912) “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” describes the way the title character, a sprightly Chinese-American woman

Sui Sin Far

from Seattle, helps ensure that her young friend, Mai Gwi Far (also known as Laura), can marry her true love (Kai Tzu) rather than Tsen Hing, whom Laura’s traditional Chinese parents have selected for her. While visiting San Francisco, Mrs. Spring Fragrance meets Tsen Hing and the woman he would prefer to marry and assures him that Laura will not object to such a match. When Mr. Spring Fragrance learns that his wife has been seen with Tsen Hing, he fears she may be falling in love with the young bachelor, but when she returns to Seattle, his misunderstandings are laid to rest, and the story ends by affi rming the genuine affection between the Spring Fragrances and also by clearing the way for Laura’s marriage to Kai Tzu. This tale is Sui Sin Far’s most often-reprinted work. In many ways it typifies her writing, both in style and theme, but in some respects it is not one of her strongest tales. Readers who find it flawed should not assume that it represents her at her best. In numerous respects, however, the story is indeed representative. It is set, for instance, in a genteel, middle-class neighborhood; the Spring Fragrances live between a stereotypical white family and a traditional Chinese family. Sui Sin Far thus demonstrates that not all Chinese Americans live in “Chinatown” ghettos, that not all are poor, and that not all are divorced from “mainstream” America. Both husband and wife speak English well; both are well mannered and even “cultured” (especially the wife); and both exhibit not only respect for others but a good deal of self-respect as well. In all these ways, Sui Sin Far refutes anti-Chinese stereotypes prevalent in her day; she depicts the Spring Fragrances as, in many respects, a “normal” American middle-class couple. Nevertheless, they also typify her characters in being members of two cultures that often confl ict in their values, behavior, and assumptions. Moreover, the story is also characteristic of Sui Sin Far’s stories in its focus on such topics as divided identities, the power of romantic love, the complications of marriage, confl icts between children and parents, friendships between women, misunderstandings between the sexes, tensions between and within cultures, and the willingness of women to make a difference by asserting themselves, although often in

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subtle ways. Stylistically the story is typical of Sui Sin Far in its relatively simple and straightforward language, its use of dialect (both Chinese and American), its subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) ironies, its somewhat mannered dialogue, its occasional satire, and its structural sophistication. This story, however, is more consistently comic than many of her best works; its resolution seems somewhat simplistic; and its title character may strike many readers as too quaint, cheerful, and contrived (see WhiteParks 165–169, 206). Readers who prefer darker, more realistic, and more “tragic” tales can fi nd them in abundance in Sui Sin Far’s other works, but this is not such a story.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the presentation of marriage in this story and in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour.” Is one work more “realistic” than the other? If so, why and how? How do the heroines of the two works differ, not only in their motivations but also in the freedom available to each of them? How do issues of economic class play important roles in both works? 2. Compare and contrast the depiction of romantic love in this story with its depiction in Sui Sin Far’s tale “A Chinese Ishmael” (which is available on the Internet). Which story do you prefer, and why? Which story seems more sentimental? Discuss the style and dialogue of the two works. 3. Which aspects of this work do you fi nd most effective, and which aspects do you find least effective? In both cases, explain why. Discuss such matters as characterization, diction, and tone. 4. Compare and contrast this story with ZOR A NEALE HURSTON’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, which also deals with a minority population. Which work seems more plausible or credible? Which seems more psychologically complex? Discuss the use (or absence) of dialect in each work. 5. How does the genre of this piece (in other words, the kind of work it is) affect the presentation of marriage? How would the presentation be different if the work were less comic? Is it fair to judge one kind of work by the standards of another?


6. Discuss the ways in which characters in this story are differentiated by such characteristics as race, class, gender, cultural background, and age. For example, how do the Chinese-American characters differ from the “Anglo” characters, and how do the males differ from the females? What do people of the same generation have in common with one another despite differences of (for instance) ethnicity?

“The Chinese Lily” (1912) Mermei, a young Chinese woman who has been handicapped and severely disfigured by an accidental fall, lives an isolated life in the upstairs room of a dwelling house in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where she is often visited by her devoted young brother, Lin John, who is her only friend and companion. One night, when Lin John cannot visit, Mermei weeps from loneliness, and her weeping is overheard by Sin Far (whose name means Chinese Lily), a young and beautiful neighbor woman who is also lonely and who gives Mermei a Chinese lily as a sign of friendship. Eventually Lin John falls in love with his sister’s new friend, but suddenly he is informed one night that his sister’s apartment building is on fi re; as he reaches the top of a fl imsy ladder (surrounded by flames), he and the two female friends realize that there is enough time for him to save only one of the girls. Thus, a fateful choice must be made. Sui Sin Far’s fiction is often most powerful when it is most brief, and the current story is a fi ne example of the memorable effects she can often achieve in a limited amount of space. Her style seems best when (as here) it is plain, simple, and straightforward—when it is least flowery and sentimental. This is a story that could easily have lent itself to melodrama, both in depicting Mermei and in depicting the fi nal fate of Sin Far, but in this tale the author mostly resists any temptations to indulge in maudlin emotions. Instead, for the most part, the story depends on subtle understatement—a trait that actually enhances the emotional impact of this stingingly tragic work.

To say that Sui Sin Far’s style in this story is simple, however, is not to suggest that it lacks sophistication. Often, for example, she manipulates syntax (or sentence structure) in ways that give her tale maximum impact. Thus, early in the story she emphasizes the isolation of both Mermei and Lin John in a way that might at first seem improbable: “Their mother had died the day she entered the foreign city, and the father the week following” (Mrs. Spring Fragrance [1995] 102). The abrupt deaths of both parents seem, at first, too coincidental to believe, but then the sentence continues: “both having contracted a fever on the steamer.” Now the deaths seem sadly credible. Likewise, Sui Sin Far again uses syntax effectively when she explains how the orphaned children were cared for by their father’s brother: “although he was a poor man he did his best for them until called away by death” (102). Thus, just when the prospects of the unfortunate children might seem to be looking up, the final five words of that sentence appear. The untimely deaths of both the parents and the uncle foreshadow, significantly, the tragic ending of the present story. In this tale (in contrast to some of her better-known works), Sui Sin Far never lets us forget how dark, unpredictable, and unforgiving life can be. The moral dilemmas faced by all three characters at the end of the story and the moral maturity all three display make this tale a brief but unforgettable gem in Sui Sin Far’s body of work. The story’s richly ambiguous final sentence is especially effective; it literally raises more questions than it answers and thus contributes to the haunting impact of a brief, beautiful, but finally very disturbing work.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Does Lin John make the right choice at the end of this tale? Why or why not? What would you have done if faced with his dilemma? What details from earlier in the story help foreshadow the choices made by all three characters at the end? Was there a third option that none of the characters seems to have considered? 2. In setting, characterization, tone, atmosphere, and style, how does this story contrast with Sui Sin Far’s most famous tale, “Mrs. Spring Fragrance”? To which genres does each of these

Sui Sin Far

tales belong? How are the roles of women similar and/or different in the two tales?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON SUI SIN FAR AND HER WORK 1. Compare and contrast Sui Sin Far’s journalism with her fiction. In particular, discuss such matters as style, tone, point of view, characterization, and theme. Pay special attention to her autobiographical nonfiction; how are the details of her own experiences reflected in her stories? 2. Compare and contrast the stories Sui Sin Far wrote for adults with the ones she wrote for children. How does she adapt each kind of work for its intended audience? Are the stories for children sufficiently interesting and stimulating and subtle to appeal to adult readers? What similarities or differences can you see in the diction, themes, and tones of the two kinds of works? 3. Select one story by Sui Sin Far that you especially admire and analyze it in as much detail as possible, paying special attention to any aspects of its phrasing or structure that you fi nd especially effective. Contrast the story with one by Sui Sin Far that you fi nd particularly ineffective; what specific differences in the works account for your divergent reactions to them? 4. Trace one theme—such as marriage, confl ict between generations, or tensions between cultures—over the course of several stories. What differences and/or continuities are there in the treatment of the theme from one work to another? What differences are there in the effectiveness with which the theme is treated? What, precisely, makes one treatment of the theme more effective than another? 5. Read a biography (such as the one by Annette White-Parks) and discuss the ways Sui Sin Far’s life may have affected one or more of her stories. Does the effectiveness of the story depend on knowing the biographical facts behind it? Is a story based on the “real life” of the author likely to be more powerful than one based on a wholly invented story?

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6. Study the works and career of Sui Sin Far’s sister, whose pen name was Onoto Watanna, and compare and contrast her life and writings with those of Sui Sin Far. Is there a difference in the quality of the two writers’ works? If you think so, justify your response by pointing to precise details. How do you explain the fact that Onoto Watanna was far more highly regarded in her time than Sui Sin Far was, but that today the situation is essentially reversed? 7. Research the history of the Chinese in America in the years leading up to 1912 and discuss how that history is reflected in Mrs. Spring Fragrance, the collection of stories published that year by Sui Sin Far. Is the book still “relevant” today? Has the situation of Chinese Americans changed so substantially in the past century that Sui Sin Far’s writings now seem out of date, or do her works still have continuing value? If so, why and how? 8. Do some research into the life and writings of Sui Sin Far and then discuss any controversies that surround her career or works. Do these controversies affect your evaluation of her writings? If so, how and why? If not, why not? 9. Compare and contrast the career of Sui Sin Far with the careers of other “minority” writers from the same period, such as W. E. B. DUBOIS or BOOKER T. WASHINGTON. Although Sui Sin Far was an Asian American and they were African Americans, how were their lives and writings similar? What common themes do their writings share? What differences exist between their works? What ideals or aspirations did these writers share? 10. How were Sui Sin Far’s life and writings affected not only by the fact that she was a woman but also by the fact that she was of mixed race and was relatively poor? Discuss issues of class and gender in her stories. For instance, in “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” how would the title character’s life be different if her economic class were different and/or if she were a male? Of the three factors (class,

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gender, ethnicity), is one more important than another in determining the fates of the characters? Does this relative importance change from one story to another? WORKS CITED

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Ammons, Elizabeth. “Audacious Words: Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance.” In Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Bloom, Harold, ed. American Women Fiction Writers: 1900–1960. Vol. 3. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 156–177. Diana, Vanessa Holford. “Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton) (1865–1914).” In Asian-American Short Story Writers: An A–Z Guide, edited by Guiyou Huang and Emmanuel S. Nelson, 73–83. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2003. Ferens, Dominika. Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Ling, Amy. “Edith Eaton: Pioneer Chinamerican Writer and Feminist.” American Literary Realism 16 (1983): 287–298. Novak, Terry D. Available online. URL: Edith Maude Eaton (Sui-Sin Far). Accessed online. URL: http:// voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/eatonEdith.php. Accessed July 11, 2009. Solberg, S. E. “Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton: First ChineseAmerican Fictionist.” MELUS 8, no. 1 (1981): 27–39. Sui Sin Park. “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian.” Independent 66 (January 21, 1909): 125–132. ———. Mrs. Spring Fragrance. Chicago: McClurg, 1912. ———. Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings. Edited by Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. White Parks, Annette. Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

Robert C. Evans

Jean Toomer (1894–1967) “Th form that’s burned int my soul is some twisted awful thing that crept in from a dream, a godam nightmare, an wont stay still unless I feed it. An it lives on words. Not beautiful words. God Almighty no. Misshapen, split-gut, tortured, twisted words.” (Cane)

A

lthough often considered one of the most important voices in the history of AfricanAmerican literature, Jean Toomer was sometimes quite ambivalent about being labeled a black person. His personal ancestry was highly complicated, and his skin was light enough that he could even pass as white, as was also true of other members of his immediate family. Toomer thus often preferred to think of himself as the fi rst fully aware member of a new “American” race—a people derived from many different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Nevertheless, Cane—the idiosyncratic amalgam of prose, poetry, and drama for which he is almost solely famous—deals at length with the lives, thoughts, and feelings of American blacks, and Toomer himself obviously identified deeply with African-American culture. Most of the key facts of Toomer’s life are outlined in the excellent biography by Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge. He was born Nathan Pinchback Toomer (he only much later began referring to himself as Jean) on December 26, 1894, nearly nine months to the day after his mother, Nina Pinchback, had married the much older Nathan Toomer on March 29 of that year. Nina was the daughter of a wealthy and influential man named P. B. S. Pinchback, who had once been elected lieutenant governor (and had even briefly served as governor) of Louisiana in the era following the Civil War, when political opportunities for blacks

and persons of mixed race had suddenly (but only briefly) opened. P. B. S. Pinchback possessed skin so light that in some photos he strongly resembles the Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie, and in the Reconstruction era he was able to use his mixed racial background to political and social advantage. After his political career ended in the South, he moved his family to Washington, D.C., where they lived a life of significant privilege. Pinchback was a strong-willed and imperious man, and he greatly disapproved of Nina’s relationship with Nathan Toomer. He was not surprised, then, when Toomer, in 1895, deserted his new wife and young son. In 1896 Nina reluctantly moved back into her parents’ home and agreed to her father’s insistence that she rename her boy Eugene. During the early years of his life, young Toomer thus lived in a mostly white and mostly affluent neighborhood, under the influence of his successful but domineering grandfather—a man he would both respect and resent. By 1899 Nina had officially divorced Nathan Toomer, who now essentially disappeared from his son’s life. Eugene’s main male influence, in addition to the imposing example provided by his grandfather, was that of his uncle Bismarck, a man who loved to read and socialize but who, as did all the children of P. B. S., never quite lived up to the old man’s expectations. From 1901 to 1905 young Eugene attended a school for blacks in Washington,

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and although his heart was not in his schooling, he did enjoy his friendships with other local children, especially their chances to play outdoors in an area that was still largely rural. This relatively happy life was disrupted, however, when in 1906 his mother married a man named Archibald Combes, with whom she moved to Brooklyn, New York. Then, in 1907, the family relocated again, this time to nearby New Rochelle. Young Eugene apparently disliked his stepfather, and when Nina died in 1909, the boy returned to Washington to live once more with his grandparents and his beloved uncle. In 1910 he began high school in a noted all-black institution, but by the time he graduated, his grandfather’s fi nances were no longer sufficient to support the kind of university education both of them thought he deserved. Instead, Toomer headed off in 1914 to study agriculture at the University of Wisconsin. Although he worried that he would suffer discrimination there if people discovered he had attended an all-black high school, his light skin shielded him from obvious prejudice, and in fact he was popular with his classmates (some of whom thought he was an Indian). Nevertheless, Toomer’s college years were unsettled. He soon left Wisconsin, in 1915, intending to study agriculture in Massachusetts, but by 1916 he had arrived in Chicago to study physical training. While there, he also dabbled in atheism and socialism; by 1917 he was in New York City, taking classes at various colleges and supporting himself through odd jobs. Although he never did fi nish a college degree, all during these years he was actively studious, reading widely (especially the writing of Walt Whitman) and even beginning, in 1918, to produce serious literary work. His story “Bona and Paul” (later included in Cane) dates from this year, and Toomer now began increasingly to think of himself as a professional writer and intellectual. In 1920, for instance, he produced his important poem “The First American,” in which he outlined his ideas about transcending standard racial distinctions, and it was around this time, too, that he met the influential writer Waldo Frank and began calling himself Jean Toomer. Frank took an immediate interest in Toomer’s writings and career and helped

promote both. Fortunately it was in 1921—during a brief stint as a school principal in rural Sparta, Georgia—that Toomer was suddenly inspired to begin writing most of the material he subsequently collected in Cane. Meanwhile, his relationship with Frank was prospering, and he was also gaining contact with ever-growing circles (both in Washington and in New York) of like-minded, ambitious, and unconventional young writers. Many of these new contacts were black, and some of them saw Toomer as part of an emerging “New Negro” movement that would lead to a cultural and artistic renaissance in the black community. By 1922 Toomer was at the height of his own artistic productivity. His stories, sketches, and poems—many of them soon to be included in Cane—began appearing in avant-garde magazines around the country. By the end of that year Toomer had assembled most of these pieces into the puzzling hybrid he titled Cane, which was soon published (thanks in large part to Waldo Frank’s encouragement and glowing introduction) in 1923. The book did not sell well, and Toomer seems to have been bothered by the emphasis—both in Frank’s introduction and in the publisher’s advertising—on his identity as a “Negro” writer. Nevertheless, most reviewers praised Cane, and Toomer seemed on the verge of a significant literary career. It was just at this moment, however, that he not only began an affair with Margaret Naumburg, the wife of his friend and patron Waldo Frank, but also became increasingly fascinated by the teachings of the Armenian mystic Georges I. Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff’s philosophy—and the rigid discipline it required—seemed to offer Toomer a prospect of wholeness, of integrated identity and personal stability, that he had long felt was missing from his life. In any case, his devotion to Gurdjieff’s ideas soon became so intense that in 1924 he journeyed to France to study at the master’s feet. It was not long before Toomer himself became an instructor in “the Gurdjieff work,” and as he became more and more preoccupied with this sort of spiritualism, his interest in creating “literature” declined. He would never cease writing, but Cane would be his one significant literary work.

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By 1925 Toomer was back in the United States, spreading the Gurdjieffan gospel not only in Harlem but also in Taos, New Mexico, where he won the support of the wealthy patron Mabel Dodge Luhan. By 1926 his relationship with Margaret Naumburg had ended, but his fascination with Gurdjieff continued. In the summer of that year he was back at Gurdjieff’s headquarters in France, then returned to the United States to teach Gurdjieff’s ideas in Chicago, and then in summer 1927 was back in France again. The written works he did produce during 1927 and 1928 were often rejected, a pattern that continued, for the most part, into 1929, the year in which he completed a collection of short stories that remained unpublished during his lifetime. By 1930 serious tensions had arisen in his relations with other Gurdjieffians, and in the same year Toomer’s autobiography was rejected. Further rejections of his literary work (including a book of poems) followed in 1931, but on October 30 of that year Toomer did marry a woman named Margery Latimer, who gave birth to their daughter (also named Margery) on August 16, 1932. Unfortunately the elder Margery died during childbirth, and so Toomer found himself a widower with an infant to raise. Nevertheless, he continued to write and sometimes did fi nd publishers for his work, and in 1934 he also married Marjorie Content, daughter of a wealthy businessman. She would remain his wife for the rest of his life and would help raise his “Argie,” his only child. The patterns that had now been established in Toomer’s life continued for most of the rest of it. He continued to write, but most of his works remained unpublished until long after his death. In 1935 he ended his close connection with Gurdjieff, although he never completely lost his interest in Gurdjieff’s ideas. In 1936 he and Marjorie bought a house in Doylestown, Pennsylvania (near Philadelphia), where Toomer maintained his interest in spiritualism—an interest that led in 1939 to a lengthy journey through India. Even before leaving for this trip, however, Toomer and his wife had begun an involvement with a local group of Friends (or Quakers), and on their return to the United States they both became more and more tightly

connected with the Friends movement. Toomer continued to write, and he sometimes found outlets for his work, especially in publications sponsored by the Friends. He even continued his teachings of Gurdjieff’s philosophy (much to Marjorie’s frustration). By the mid-1940s his health had begun to falter, but during this time his involvement with the Friends also became more and more official: He was now a speaker, adviser, and pamphleteer. By the end of the 1940s, however, his ties with the Friends began to decrease and he took up a new interest in the teachings of the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung. By 1950 he had even become intrigued by the ideas that would eventually become known as scientology, and by the mid-1950s he was not only fascinated by nutrition and dieting but had also become heavily involved, once more, with the Gurdjieffians. By the end of that decade, however, his health was increasingly frail. His last years were often spent in nursing homes, and when he died on March 30, 1967, his passing was almost unnoticed in the literary world. It was not long, however, before his work was rediscovered by a new generation of black writers interested in the accomplishments of its predecessors, and Toomer ironically soon achieved far more recognition and appreciation in the years and decades following his death than he had ever enjoyed during his long and unsettled life.

“Seventh Street” (1922; 1923) This very brief sketch—the opening piece in the second section of Cane—marks the book’s transition from its early emphasis on rural Georgia to its new emphasis on the urban North. Seventh Street was a main thoroughfare in the mostly black section of Washington, D.C., and in a few brief brush strokes Toomer manages to suggest its chief characteristics, in the early 1920s, as a place of materialism, crime, and modernizing, mechanizing innovations. As he does elsewhere in Cane, Toomer in this sketch uses a brief, repeated poem to frame an impressionistic piece of prose. “Seventh Street” has


no real plot; it is instead designed to create a mood and set a tone. The poem’s fi rst word—Money (41; l. 1)—suggests the emphasis on materialism and acquisitiveness that will be crucial not only to this sketch but also to much of the whole second section of Cane. Seventh Street is a place of “Bootleggers in silken shirts” (l. 2)—a place, that is, where profits can be made from breaking the law, and where wealth and self-display have replaced any concern with higher or more spiritual values. It is a place where machines play increasingly prominent roles in human life—a place where “Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs” go “Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks” (ll. 3–4). Seventh Street is (in language designed to be crudely blunt) “a bastard of Prohibition and the War” (41). It is, in other words, a reflection of the wholesale and widespread social changes unleashed fi rst by World War I (one of the most catastrophic confl icts in human history) and then by the ill-fated ban on alcohol sales that soon followed (a ban that only encouraged the rise of organized crime). As Toomer attempts to convey the sensuous complexity of Seventh Street, he piles adjective upon adjective, image upon image, ignoring neatly conventional sentence structure to suggest, in kaleidoscopic prose, the sheer variety of the place: It is a “crude-boned, soft-skinned wedge of nigger life breathing its loafer air, jazz songs and love, thrusting unconscious rhythms, black reddish blood into the white and whitewashed wood of Washington” (41). Seventh Street is a place of paradoxes and contradictions, of opposites blended and contrasted, and in attempting to describe it, Toomer often lapses into phrasing that becomes (as in the heavy emphasis on alliteration in the last words just quoted) almost musical and jazzlike itself. By the middle of the passage the clarity of explanation, sentence structure, purpose, and meaning have largely broken down: “Wedges rust in soggy wood. . . . Split it! In two! Again! Shred it! . . . the sun” (41). By this point the prose has become almost hallucinatory and surreal, and indeed the tone soon becomes almost violently hectoring. Questions pile up; images accumulate; verbs are emphasized by being placed at both the beginnings and ends of fragmented sentences. Finally the

prose reaches a crescendo of accusatory bluntness: “God would not dare to suck black red blood. A Nigger God! He would duck his head in shame and call for Judgment Day. Who set you flowing?” (41). The tone has become sarcastic, satiric, almost apocalyptic. And then the whole structure suddenly repeats (and closes with) the opening poem. Such symmetry, however, only calls added attention to the disordered images and chaotic emotions crammed between the two brief snatches of verse.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with CARL SANDBURG’s poem titled “Chicago.” What seems to be the purpose of each poem? How do they differ in tone, effect, and point of view? Why does Toomer’s text seem relatively more chaotic than Sandburg’s? 2. Read this sketch alongside CLAUDE MCK AY’s poem titled “Harlem Shadows.” Discuss the depiction of big-city life in both works. Discuss the ways both texts deal with the theme of materialism. Comment on the structure, design, diction, and tone of each piece. 3. In theme, imagery, diction, and tone, how does this section of Cane relate to the sections that preceded it? In all the same respects, how does it foreshadow later developments in the book? In other words, how is this section pivotal in the structure of the work?

“Song of the Son” (1922, 1923) One of numerous poems interspersed throughout the prose of Cane (especially in the fi rst of the book’s three sections), this lyric employs many of the images, symbols, and themes that help unify the opening portion of the book. As do other parts of Cane, this poem emphasizes the theme of mutability—of time passing and conditions changing, of a vital cultural heritage being lost, but not before it can partly be preserved in art. The speaker implies that he has arrived in the South just in time to hear and re-create, through his own poem, the fading music of a once-enslaved people.

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The poem begins with an emphatic, heavily accented verb that is then immediately repeated (“Pour O pour” [14, l. 1])—techniques frequently used elsewhere in Cane. The tone of the poem is both celebratory and elegiac, for the spirit that the speaker wishes to pour forth in song is a “parting soul” (l. 1). This phrasing implies a kind of life that is all the more beautiful because it is also being lost. Light-and-dark imagery, so prominent throughout Cane and so appropriate to its pervasive racial themes, is soon stressed in line 2, and so is a strong emphasis on natural rural beauty, which is also highly typical of the fi rst section of the book. The speaker of the poem creates a characteristic sense of immediacy (as when he refers, for instance, to the “air to-night” [l. 3]), and he also (as so often elsewhere in Cane) uses repetition and refrains to good effect, as in the closing couplet of the opening stanza. All five stanzas use rhyme, but the rhyme never seems artificial or contrived; instead, the poem echoes the works of Walt Whitman in the plainness of its diction but also in the rapturous, almost prophetic tone of its voice. The Whitmanesque elements of the poem become especially apparent later in the work, where the speaker describes himself as the “son” of the rural southern “land and soil” (ll. 9, 6). He has arrived just in time to capture, in the music of his own verse, “thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone” (l. 14). By this point it has become clear that the poem is intended both to echo and to elevate the dying but nonetheless compelling folk music of a “song-lit race of slaves” (l. 12). That last phrase, in fact, is typical of the subtle skill of Toomer’s own poem: It uses the technique of synesthesia to combine the senses of sight and sound in the phrase “song-lit,” and it implies that this supposed “race of slaves” has nonetheless produced a rich cultural heritage worth recording, imitating, and preserving. The poem ends on a typically paradoxical note, as it describes songs—both those of the past and this song of the present—“Caroling softly souls of slavery” (l. 23). The fi nal effect is one of tenderness combined with pain—of beauty emerging from degradation.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this poem with W. E. B. DUBOIS’s lyric “The Song of the Smoke.” How are the poems similar and/or different in setting, tone, structure, style, and purpose? Which poem is more obviously “propagandistic”? Discuss the points of view and the voices employed in each work. 2. Read this poem in conjunction with L ANGSTON HUGHES’s lyric titled “The Weary Blues” and then discuss the ways music is used as a metaphor in both works. How does each poem use details of setting? How does each use tones of voice? What does each poem suggest about the role of music in dealing with suffering? 3. How—in diction, structure, subject matter, and point of view—does this poem resemble the kind of spiritual songs associated with black culture in the South, and how does it also differ from those songs? Discuss, for instance, the use of such words as epoch’s, scant, profligate, and plaintive. Would such words be likely to appear in a spiritual? If not, why not? What does their appearance in this song suggest about the singer? What element commonly found in the spirituals is missing from this poem?

“Blood-Burning Moon” (1923) This relatively long story—the concluding piece in the opening third of Cane—deals with an interracial love triangle centered on a beautiful black working woman named Louisa, who is desired not only by Tom Burwell (a black worker also known as “Big Boy”) but also by Bob Stone, son of a prosperous white family for whom Louisa cooks. Tom is a large man with a violent past and is intensely jealous of Bob’s attentions to Louisa; Bob, meanwhile, cannot understand why he is so attracted to a woman his culture has taught him to consider inferior. After Tom easily beats and slashes Bob in a fight over Louisa, Tom is hunted down by a gang of local whites and is burned alive as Louisa sings a song of pain. “Blood-Burning Moon” comes closer than many pieces in Cane to being a conventional story, with

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a number of developed central characters, a relatively clear plot, and a fairly standard structure. It opens, appropriately enough, with imagery of gathering darkness, but at fi rst the tone and atmosphere seem appealing (and thus contrast powerfully with the story’s shockingly brutal conclusion). The narrator, using effective alliteration as well as Toomer’s gift for coining unusual expressions, describes how dusk “soft showered the Negro shanties” in a village described, almost archetypally, simply as “factory town” (30). As do many pieces in Cane, this one revolves around a beautiful, desirable woman; here as elsewhere, Toomer implies the power women enjoy because of their sexual attractiveness, and he also sets sexuality within an environment that implies the continuity between the natural and the human, between animal impulses and personal desires. Thus, when Louisa sings, hounds yell and chickens cackle, as if stirred by the urgent rhythms of her song (30–31). Even more stirred than the animals are Tom and Bob. Toomer takes us inside the minds and feelings of both characters, often presenting their thoughts through a kind of stream-of-consciousness technique that effectively conveys the erratic, uncertain fluctuations of their responses. Thus, Bob’s thoughts are described as follows: “He was going to see Louisa to-night, and love her. She was lovely—in her way. Nigger way. What way was that? Damned if he knew. Must know” (33). Through the use of these abrupt starts and stops, these jarring fragments and clipped phrases, Toomer conjures up the perplexed, perplexing mind of a complicated character—a man who is able to think of love one second and then call his supposed lover a “Nigger” in the very next moment. This kind of contradictory, ambivalent complexity is typical not only of the main characters in this story but also of their entire culture. Toomer repeatedly finds methods in his prose to convey the uncertainties lurking within his people, as when Tom tells Louisa, “Bob Stone likes y. Course he does. But not the ways folks is awhisperin. Does he, hon?” That last, plaintive question—which contradicts and undermines all the confident assertiveness that precedes it—nicely conveys Tom’s sense of psychological vulnerability despite his obvious

physical strength. Tom knows that in the competition for Louisa, the mere facts of Bob’s race, wealth, and social status give Bob advantages that Tom can never match, and although Tom easily defeats Bob when they fight one on one, Tom is soon defeated by his victory. A story that began by emphasizing an idyllic setting, a beautiful woman, and the easy rhythms of a relaxed rural life ends with fiery violence by a brutal mob.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read this story in conjunction with the poem titled “The Lynching” by Claude McKay. Which of the two works is more complicated in tone, topics, and point of view? Discuss the stylistic traits and technical devices used in both works. How does each work use irony to achieve its goals? 2. ZOR A NEALE HURSTON’s story titled “Spunk” also deals with a love triangle involving poor blacks in a small southern town. Discuss the attitudes of the women in both stories; discuss the role of violence in both works; and discuss the role the community plays in each narrative. Discuss some of the effects of Hurston’s decision to make all her characters African American. 3. Discuss the use of moon imagery in this story. Where does it tend to appear? Where does it tend to be absent? How do its appearances contribute to the structure of the story? How does the imagery contribute to the story’s tone and atmosphere? How and why is the imagery of a white moon against a black sky relevant to the story’s plot and themes?

“Box Seat” (1923) This piece, a story of frustrated courtship, appears in the second section of Toomer’s Cane; it describes how Dan Moore, a young black man living in Washington, D.C., visits a house owned by the respectable Mrs. Pribby. Also living in the house (apparently as a boarder) is Muriel, the young woman Dan is courting, but when Dan becomes too ardent in expressing his desires, Muriel emphatically rejects him.

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Later that night, after both Muriel and Dan arrive separately at a vaudeville theater, Dan nearly comes to blows with another member of the audience after Dan disrupts the show. “Box Seat” opens with sentences that typify Toomer’s penchant for using striking metaphors, vivid images, blunt language, fragmented syntax, and unexpected shifts of tone: “Houses are shy girls whose eyes shine reticently upon the dusk body of the street. Upon the gleaming limbs and asphalt torso of a dreaming nigger. Shake your curled wool-blossoms, nigger” (59). Prose like this is close to poetry, especially in its assonance and alliteration (as in “shy eyes . . . shine”), and such inventive coinages as “curled wool-blossoms” (to describe hair). Toomer seems less interested, in this kind of prose, in simply depicting facts than in suggesting or evoking moods. For every sentence that simply relates dry details (such as “Dan Moore walks southward on Thirteenth Street”), there are many more that sketch vivid pictures and play clever games with the sounds and meanings of words: Chestnut buds and blossoms are wool he walks upon. The eyes of houses faintly touch him as he passes them. Soft girl-eyes, they set him singing. Girl-eyes within him widen upward to promised faces. Floating away, they dally wistfully over the dusk body of the street. Come on, Dan Moore, come on. Dan sings. His voice is a little hoarse. It cracks. (59)

In passages like these, Toomer employs many of his favorite devices, such as repeated phrases, shifts of perspective, sudden irony, and quick, abrupt sentences. It is ironic, for instance, that just when Dan sings at the end of this appealingly lyrical passage his voice “cracks,” but this shift from lyricism to dissonance actually epitomizes the structure of the whole story. As so often in Toomer, relations between the sexes quickly prove tense and unsatisfying; no sooner do we meet Muriel than we begin to sense the discord underlying her relations with Dan. Toomer takes us inside the mind and feelings of each character so we can glimpse the discrepancy between what he or she really thinks and what he or she

openly says. The drift of the entire story is a movement toward frustration and disappointment—a movement that has been ironically prepared for, and emphasized by, the contrast established by the appealingly lyrical opening. By the end of the story, Dan is once more walking alone, too distracted and too indifferent even to fight with the man he has repeatedly annoyed in the theater. Dan thus begins and ends the work in isolation, unable to connect either with the woman he desires or with anyone else in the tale. His alienated plight symbolizes (or so Toomer seems to suggest) the essential loneliness of most persons in modern urban culture. At the start of the tale Dan had been walking alone but in hope; at the end he is merely walking alone.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss this story in connection with Ralph Ellison’s work titled “King of the Bingo Game.” How do both works use crowded theaters to emphasize human isolation? In what ways do both works seem “surreal”? How are relations between the central character and the woman he loves differently depicted in each work? 2. Compare and contrast this story with T. S. ELIOT’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In particular, discuss the themes of alienation and the relations between the sexes in both works. How do Prufrock’s attitudes toward himself and society resemble and/or differ from those of Dan Moore? 3. Closely examine the first several pages of this story and discuss the ways in which Toomer violates “normal,” conventional, traditional narrative methods. How and why would his writing in these pages have seemed highly unusual to most readers in the 1920s? Rewrite some of his passages using more conventional methods and techniques, and then discuss the advantages and/or disadvantages of the techniques he chose to use.

Cane (1923) Universally considered the most significant of Toomer’s surviving writings, Cane is a difficult-to-classify


medley of character sketches, short stories, brief poems, and dramatized fiction. It contains no single plotline or consistent set of characters, and its style is sometimes lyrical, sometimes realistic, frequently dreamlike, and often highly experimental. The fi rst section is set in the rural South; the second is set in the urban North; and the third and final section is set once again in the rural South, but all three parts of the work tend to focus on the complicated relations between men and women and between the black and white races. Analysts of Cane have expended much ink trying to comprehend what kind of book it is and what kind (if any) unity it achieves. Some interpreters consider the text a miscellaneous hodge-podge—a deliberately experimental and unconventional artistic notebook to which Toomer never intended to give an obvious sense of shape or coherence. Others compare the work to similar collections of seemingly discrete pieces (such as SHERWOOD A NDERSON’s Winesburg, Ohio), but those books are at least unified by a consistent narrative voice, common themes, a shared tone, and repeated images and symbols. Toomer’s text, by contrast, is much more puzzling, and much less conventionally coherent, and its larger shape and deeper purposes are much less easy to explain. Some critics think that Toomer intended to contrast the spontaneity, vigor, and basic health of life in the rural South with the corruption, repression, and distemper of life in the mechanized, modernized North, but this distinction is far too simple, for Toomer shows with unblinking clarity the moral and social limitations and even sickness of southern culture. Perhaps the best way to think of the overall shape of Cane, therefore, is to consider it a kind of dream, and indeed the word dream crops up with astonishing frequency in its pages. Like a dream, the book is sometimes beautiful and sometimes nightmarish, sometimes lucid and sometimes confusing, sometimes smoothly flowing and sometimes full of abrupt and jerky transitions. Poems are mixed with prose and prose is mixed with drama, and just as dreams can be both revealing and cryptic, both suggestive and opaque, so the same is true of Cane. Dreams can be compelling and are often difficult

to analyze, and much the same can also be said of Toomer’s book. Partly the work is interesting as a contribution to the local color tradition of American writing: It reveals the distinctive customs, rhythms, sights, and sounds of life in particular regions and cities of the country, especially through the use of local dialect and slang but also through its emphasis on distinctive physical settings. Notably in its sections dealing with the South, Cane reveals the impact of traditions that can seem by turns either strange, quaint, charming, ugly, or even horrific, but even in its depictions of life in the big-city North, the book can seem revealing about the particular ways in which life was lived in what is now an increasingly remote era. Toomer had a generally good ear both for rural southern idioms and for trendy, “sophisticated” northern slang, and much of the genuine interest of the book derives from overhearing its characters speak. Toomer seems to have realized this, for much of the book (especially in its second and third sections) is formatted almost as if it were a play, so that the speech of the characters emerges directly and in relatively unmediated fashion. Even when the narrator sometimes does insert explanatory comments or evaluations, these often sound like the stage directions in a play. For the most part, however, the “overheard” and literally dramatic qualities of much of the book’s speech contribute to its effects of vivid directness; as we listen to the characters talk, we get a sense not only of them as individuals but of the kind of larger society in which they live and move and have their being. Toomer takes his readers to unfamiliar places and confronts us with often odd and peculiar manners of life, and he does so without much obvious moralizing or sermonizing. His purpose does not seem primarily didactic; he does not seem to be trying to teach or preach in any obvious sense. He tends, instead, to let his characters, settings, facts, and depicted customs speak for themselves. This is not to say, however, that the voice of the narrator (or narrators) is totally absent from Cane, nor that such voices consistently refrain from overt commentary. At one point, for instance, the narrator refers openly both to himself and to the reader

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when he explicitly observes, “You and I know, who have had experience in such things, that love is not a thing like prejudice which can be bettered by changes of town” (18). This sort of direct address to the reader (as in “Your thoughts can help me, and I would like to know”) contributes to an unusual sense of immediate contact between narrator and audience that helps (as does much else) to make Cane seem so strangely unconventional. Ironically, the book often describes characters who seem isolated and alienated, yet the work itself frequently creates a sense of strong connection between its narrators and their audience. Not only do the narrators (who sometimes seem Toomer’s alter egos) comment openly on their own thoughts and feelings, but they also frequently speak forthrightly to the reader, as if to imply that a bond may exist between speaker and audience even if bonds are often lacking among the characters described. Thus the narrator of “Fern” states that “When a woman seeks, you will have observed, her eyes deny,” and a few sentences later he comments, “As you know, men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it is a woman” (16). The male speaker thus makes common cause with his (presumably male) readers, and this intimate connection between narrator and audience deliberately violates the kind of distanced, objective tone that had become so conventional in fictional prose before Toomer. In this way as in so many others, Cane is a surprising and unpredictable book. A reader can never guess what, exactly, the next sentence may hold. Nevertheless, Toomer’s style exhibits many characteristic traits. Often his sentences are short, simple, direct, and unconfusing: “Carma, in overalls, and strong as any man, stands behind the old brown mule, driving the wagon home” (12). Frequently the narrators also stress emphatic verbs: thus, Carma’s wagon “bumps, and groans, and shakes as it crosses the railroad track” (12). Fragments, or other kinds of nonstandard syntax, appear regularly, as do unexpected phrases: “She, riding it easy. . . . Nigger woman driving a Georgia chariot down an old dust road” (12; italics added). Nature, especially in the fi rst part of Cane, is an inescapable

presence, and Toomer’s imagery is often so vivid that it seems lyrical: “The sun, which has been slanting over her shoulder, shoots primitive rockets into her mangrove-gloomed, yellow flower face” (12). Here as elsewhere, Toomer’s prose is almost poetic, just as his poems sometimes have the long, loopy rhythms of prose. And, throughout, the effect is often a kind of “you-are-there” immediacy, as if events are taking place not in a recounted past but in an eternal present. Cane opens by focusing on backwoods Georgia, where life is lived close to the land, where the influence of history is omnipresent, and where complex relations between the races and sexes affect the facts and rhythms of daily life. Typical of this section of the book is the brief character sketch titled “Becky.” As do many of the prose pieces in the opening section of Cane, this one focuses on an intriguing, somewhat mysterious woman. The sketch’s fi rst sentence—“Becky was the white woman who had two Negro sons” (7)—is typical of much of the book in its emphasis on a female character, her implied sexual conduct, and the paradoxically intimate relations between whites and blacks in a culture supposedly committed to racial segregation. As Toomer well knew from his own biographical background, race mixing was far more common in the South than southern whites wished to acknowledge, and indeed race mixing is an important theme not only in “Becky” but in Cane as a whole. The opening sentence of “Becky,” however, is typical of the larger work not only in the topic it deals with but also in the style Toomer employs. He begins abruptly, with no introduction or explanation and no attempt to set a scene; instead, he merely states a fact, and his phrasing in this sentence is simple, declarative, and apparently uncomplicated. Yet complexities, on closer inspection, soon begin to emerge. Becky is not simply “a” white woman with two black offspring; she is “the” white woman with a pair “Negro sons.” The simple use of the word the implies that Becky is well known and even notorious; the single word thus foreshadows a central theme of the tale, which concerns Becky’s relations with the community as a whole. She is, paradoxically, both famous and


mysterious, both well known and rarely seen, and the fact that she is a white who also somehow has two “Negro” sons is paradoxical in one sense but perfectly explicable in another: Even though Becky herself was Caucasian, her sons would still have been considered black in the racially segregated culture Toomer describes. As he himself knew all too well, even the merest drop of black blood could cause a person to be considered black, even if one of that person’s parents was white. The opening sentence of “Becky,” then, is typical of Toomer’s style in Cane, which can often appear superficially simple and uncomplicated but frequently implies complexities just beneath its surface. Also typical in many ways of Toomer’s phrasing is the passage that opens section 5 of “Kabnis,” the third portion of Cane: Night, soft belly of a pregnant Negress, throbs evenly against the torso of the South. Night throbs a womb-song to the South. Cane- and cotton-fields, pine forests, cypress swamps, sawmills, and factories are fecund at her touch. Night’s womb-song sets them singing. Night winds are the breathing of the unborn child whose calm throbbing in the belly of a Negress sets them somnolently singing. Hear their song. (105)

Here, as so often in Cane, repetition features strongly in Toomer’s writing. Reiterated words such as night, Negress, South, and song give the passage a hypnotic, almost chanting effect and help exemplify how Toomer’s prose, which is often concerned with songs and singing, is also frequently musical and songlike itself. Equally typical is Toomer’s emphasis on metaphor (as at the beginning and end of the opening sentence), sensual overtones, alliteration (such as “sets them somnolently singing”), coined phrases (such as “womb-song”), personification, natural imagery, catalogs and lists, and direct address to the reader (as in the brief fi nal quoted sentence). In passages such as this, the influence of Walt Whitman’s poetry is clearly discernible in Toomer’s prose,

and indeed that influence is even more obvious in many of the literal poems contained in Cane. In its structures and effects, in fact, Cane frequently resembles Whitman’s Song of Myself, for neither writer is concerned to abide by traditional literary structures and forms, and both try to communicate a sense of the immense complexity of the sights, sounds, thoughts, and feelings they describe. Indeed, even when he is being most appealingly lyrical (as in the passage just quoted), Toomer never lets us forget for long the less savory aspects of human existence, especially in a society preoccupied with race. Thus, the chantlike description of night’s “womb-song” is followed immediately by this more disturbing lyric: White-man’s land. Niggers, sing. Burn, bear black children Till poor rivers bring Rest, and sweet glory In Camp Ground. (105)

Startling juxtapositions of this sort—in which the polite word Negress is set against the crude word Niggers, or in which the soil that seems fertilized and made “fecund” by the dark night is suddenly and plainly revealed to be “White-man’s land”— are often found in Toomer’s book, and indeed if Cane has a larger method at all, it seems to consist in this kind of jamming together of unexpected combinations. Thus the inviting phrasing “Hear their song” is soon followed by the abrupt command “Niggers, sing,” and the imagery of night winds as “the breathing of the unborn child” is followed by the frank reminder that “black children” must “Burn” (perhaps as they work in the sun, perhaps as they are being lynched) in a land preoccupied with racial distinctions. Yet the imagery of burning is itself juxtaposed with imagery of rivers, and the idea of work is itself juxtaposed with the idea of rest. This whole brief passage thus illustrates, in microcosm, the artistic, moral, social, and psychological complexity of Cane.

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For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Cane and W. E. B. DuBois’s work The Souls of Black Folk. How are they similar and/or different in structure, style, point of view, and purpose? How are poor southern blacks depicted in both works? How are songs or poems used in both works? Pay special attention to the fictional sections of DuBois’s work. 2. Discuss the fi nal section of Cane (titled “Kabnis”) by placing it in relation to “An Indian Teacher among Indians,” by GERTRUDE SIMMONS BONNIN (Zitkala-Ša). How do Kabnis and his experiences resemble and/or differ from the protagonist and experiences described in Bonnin’s work? 3. How are northern and southern settings, characters, and culture used both in Cane and in NELLA L ARSEN’s novel titled Quicksand? Which work presents a more attractive image of the South? How are their presentations of the North similar and/or different? Discuss the styles, techniques, and themes of both books. Do you consider one work more effective than the other? If so, explain and justify your opinion. 4. Discuss the style, techniques, and structure of Cane in relation to the same aspects of WILLIAM FAULKNER’s The Sound and the Fury. In what ways can both books be described as modernist texts? How does each work violate older ideas about the organization and effectiveness of a relatively long piece of fiction? 5. How does Cane resemble the poem titled “The Bridge” by H ART CR ANE (whom Toomer admired)? Discuss the works in terms of phrasing, structure, purpose, and effectiveness. In what ways are both works representative of avant-garde tendencies in modern writing? 6. Many critics think Cane is built around contrasts between the North and the South. In what ways does this seem true, and in what other ways does Toomer suggest similarities between the two regions? How and why would this book be likely to appeal (if at all) to non-American readers? How and why does it speak (if at all) to uni-

versal human concerns? Why would someone in Finland or Japan (for instance) fi nd this book worth reading?

“Karintha” (1923) Originally written as part of an unpublished drama and then included as the opening piece in Cane, “Karintha” describes the growth, from childhood to womanhood, of a girl who was so beautiful (even when very young) that she captivated old and young men alike. Karintha’s beauty and natural grace win her the attention and deference of the entire community, and as she matures she becomes the object of increasingly obvious sexual desire among competing males. Eventually she becomes pregnant and gives birth, and the sketch concludes by suggesting that men give her monetary gifts—or payments—to win her favors. “Karintha” exemplifies many of the stylistic and thematic traits employed elsewhere in Cane. It begins, for instance, with a four-line poetic stanza, thus emphasizing the lyricism of the entire work. The poem immediately emphasizes a woman’s beauty—a major theme stressed throughout Cane, especially in the fi rst of its three sections. The poem directly addresses its audience (“O cant you see it, O cant you see it” [3])—a technique used repeatedly in Cane to enhance the book’s impact. Meanwhile, the poem’s stress on “dusk” and on the setting sun already foreshadows the theme of mutability, a central motif that is emphasized throughout the entire sketch as well as throughout the book as a whole. Sexual desire is also a major theme of Cane, and Toomer highlights that topic in the fi rst prose sentence in “Karintha”—a sentence that also illustrates the unusual syntax (or sentence structure) that makes Cane such an unconventional work. Finally, the opening paragraph of the sketch concludes with the kind of suggestive foreshadowing that helps Toomer create suspense and sustain interest both here and elsewhere in this book. As does much of the rest of Cane, “Karintha” not only sketches a central character but also

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suggests the customs and behavior of a larger community—in this case, a rural Georgia hamlet populated largely by blacks and thus a community whose habits of life would have seemed unfamiliar to many of Toomer’s readers. The narrator even acts, at one point, as a kind of tour guide, explaining that “Homes in Georgia are most often built on the two-room plan. In one, you cook and eat, in the other you sleep, and there love goes on” (3–4). In some ways, then, the sketch is a piece of local color, but in other ways it is not local at all, since it deals with the most universal and most basic of human motives, especially the motive of sexual desire. In this sketch as so often elsewhere in Cane, Toomer links elemental, almost archetypal impulses with a lush natural landscape, as if to suggest an intimate connection between man and nature. Typically, too, he ends the piece on a note of ambiguity: By whom, precisely, does Karintha become pregnant? What, exactly, happens to her baby? Does Karintha (as some have suggested) become a prostitute? The narrator leaves all these matters unclear, but by the end of the sketch its tone has defi nitely darkened. Although the opening poem is repeated at the conclusion, such symmetry only emphasizes how much has changed and how much has been lost during Karintha’s growth. The emphatic fi nal phrase, appropriately enough, is “Goes down” (4), and the sketch as a whole records changes that also amount to a decline.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the central character of this sketch with Melanctha, the central character of the second section of GERTRUDE STEIN’s book Three Lives. How are the two characters similar and/or different in their relations with men? How are the styles, settings, and outcomes of the two works comparable and/or distinct? 2. Read this sketch alongside WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS’s poem titled “The Young Housewife.” Discuss the relationship between men and women, and between observers and observed, in both works. In what ways do both works communicate an element of pathos? How

does physical setting contribute to the moods of both works? 3. Specifically where, how, and why does this sketch manage to combine lyricism with more dark and disturbing tones? Why does Toomer seek such a combination; what is its effect, especially on our perception of Karintha herself? What, specifically, is disturbing about this tale? What does the story suggest about human nature and the deepest human desires?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON TOOMER AND HIS WORK 1. Some analysts have accused Toomer of sexism in Cane—of treating women merely as sexual objects and of depicting them in fundamentally simplistic ways. How would you respond to this charge? What specific evidence can you fi nd to support and/or refute such accusations? How (if at all) are the women in this work complex and powerful? 2. Quoted speech and dialogue play important roles in many parts of Cane. Choose two extended passages of quoted speech—one that you consider especially credible and effective, and one that you consider less than completely plausible or convincing. Explain, in detail, why you think one passage is successful and why you think the other passage falls short. 3. Trace references to dreams and dreaming throughout Cane and discuss their particular impact as well as their larger significance. Why do you think Toomer refers so often to dreams? How are dreams relevant to the structure, style, and meanings of Cane? 4. Toomer often resisted efforts to classify him strictly as an African American; instead, he emphasized his highly mixed racial and ethnic heritage. Discuss the theme of race relations (and especially race mixing) in Cane. How does the book suggest the actual complexity of relations between the races, especially in the supposedly segregated South?

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5. Would Cane have been a better, more powerful, more effective work if it had been written in a more conventional style and manner, or would a more traditional approach have hampered the book’s effectiveness? In what ways are the style and structure of Cane especially suited to its ideas, meanings, and intended impact? 6. Choose several of the separate poems in Cane and discuss how those works contribute to the larger impact of the entire book. How do the chosen poems emphasize key themes, fit into the larger structure, or relate to the pieces that immediately precede or follow them? 7. Examine some of the little-known writings by Toomer that are reprinted in the volumes edited by Darwin Turner and by Frederik L. Rusch. How (if at all) do some of these works seem relevant to Cane, either in theme, style, or both? Which of these writings strikes you as being most interesting and effective? Explain your response. 8. Although the fi rst and last sections of Cane are often considered convincing depictions of life in the rural South, Toomer was actually raised for the most part in the North and spent only a few months in Georgia before composing his book. How does his depiction of the life of southern blacks compare and contrast with those of other black writers of his time, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, or R ICHARD WRIGHT, who had spent much more time in the South? 9. Do some reading, in some standard reference works, about modernism in literature, and then discuss the ways in which Cane can be described as a modernist work. What traits of style and structure and what thematic features might lead this work to be considered a modernist text? Which other modernist writings may have influenced Cane?

10. Soon after fi nishing Cane, Toomer became strongly influenced by the teachings of the mystical philosopher Georges I. Gurdjieff. What were Gurdjieff’s basic teachings, and why might they have appealed so forcefully to the author of Cane? How (in other words) does Cane perhaps already reflect aspects of Gurdjieff’s beliefs? WORKS CITED

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Fabre, Geneviève, and Michel Feith, eds. Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Griffin, John Chandler. Biography of American Author Jean Toomer, 1894–1967. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 2002. Hutchinson, George. “Identity in Motion: Placing Cane.” In Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Geneviève Fabre and Michel Feith, 138–156, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Kerman, Cynthia Earl, and Richard Eldridge. The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Larson, Charles R. Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993. O’Danniel, Therman B., ed. Jean Toomer: A Critical Evaluation. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1988. Rusch, Frederik L., ed. A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Scruggs, Charles. “Modern American Poetry: Jean Toomer.” Available online. URL: http://www. english.illinois.edu/Maps/poets/s_z/toomer/ toomer.htm. Accessed April 7, 2009. Toomer, Jean. Cane. Edited by Darwin T. Turner. New York: Norton, 1988. Turner, Darwin, ed. The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980.

Robert C. Evans

Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) The Negro who hates a white man is usually little and narrow. The white man who hates a Negro is usually little and narrow. Both races will grow strong, useful and generous in proportion as they learn to love each other instead of hating each other. (The Story of My Life and Work)

B

ooker T. Washington was the most prominent and influential African American of his time; he was widely respected by both blacks and whites for his innovations as an educator, and whites in particular admired his emphasis on economic training, self-help, and patience in the pursuit of full civil rights for blacks. Many members of his own race, however, were troubled by Washington’s “accommodationist” tendencies, and he was sharply criticized even during his own era as being too conciliatory—too willing to defer the dream of complete social and political equality for African Americans. In the decades since his death, his legacy has been highly controversial, and the title of a recent book about Washington (Uncle Tom or New Negro?) suggests that the controversy continues. Few will deny, however, that Washington was a talented and determined man who had a major and at least partially positive impact on the lives of blacks in the United States. Washington was born a slave in spring 1856 on the farm of James Burroughs near Hale’s Ford, Virginia (presently part of West Virginia). Washington himself later described the place as “about as near to Nowhere as any locality gets to be,” saying that it was “a town with one house and a post-office, and my birthplace was on a large plantation several miles distant from it” (10). He never knew the identity of his father and never seemed especially interested in knowing, although the man

was almost certainly a white person living nearby, perhaps even a member of the Burroughs family itself. Young Booker’s mother, Jane, was an unmarried cook on the Burroughs farm; only later did she marry an escaped slave named Washington Ferguson, and only later still did young Booker adopt his stepfather’s fi rst name as his own surname. His middle name, Taliaferro, had been given to him by his mother at birth, and although a family by that name lived about 20 miles from the Burroughs farm, their connections with Booker’s mother seem to have been minor or nonexistent. The boy, in short, was scarred from birth by the confusions of breeding, heritage, and parentage that were among the most common and unfortunate results of the American system of slavery. Young Booker grew up in a tiny, ramshackle cabin with a dirt floor and with rags for bedclothes, and indeed Washington later wrote that the “fi rst time that I got a knowledge of the fact that my mother and I were slaves, was being awakened by my mother early one morning, while I was sleeping in a bed of rags, on a clay floor of our little cabin. She was kneeling over me, fervently praying as was her custom to do, that some day she and her children might be free” (9). During his years as a slave the boy was often literally naked or poorly clothed, and although he regarded his master as “above the average in the treatment of his slaves” (since “except in a few cases they were not cruelly whipped”), an

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especially vivid childhood memory involved “seeing a grown man, my uncle, tied to a tree early one morning, stripped naked and someone whipping him with a cowhide” (12). When the South lost the Civil War and the slaves were emancipated, Booker and his mother, brother, and sister made the trek to Malden, West Virginia, to join his mother’s husband, who soon found employment for Booker and his brother John in the salt furnaces and coal mines, where Booker labored until around 1871. Meanwhile, he was growing increasingly interested in learning; he managed to persuade his stepfather to permit him to attend a school after he worked from four to nine each morning in the salt furnace, and he also tried not only to teach himself but also to work with private teachers at night. His mother eventually found him a position as the house boy in the family of General Lewis Ruffner, the town’s most prominent citizen, and it was Washington’s contact with Viola Ruffner, the general’s stern, demanding, but self-disciplined wife, that he later considered one of the best influences on his own development. She encouraged his schooling and helped teach him the habits of hard work, reliability, and even personal cleanliness that he later would value so highly. In 1872, however, Washington left Malden with the hope of attending the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, in Hampton, Virginia, a college for blacks run by a white general, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who had commanded black troops in the Civil War. Washington was not immediately admitted to Hampton; he fi rst had to prove his talents as a janitor before the head teacher would accept him as a student. Impressed with his sweeping and dusting, she allowed him to stay on, and for much of his time there he earned his bread and board through janitorial work. Washington immensely admired General Armstrong, later calling him “the most perfect specimen of man, physically, mentally and spiritually, that I had ever seen” (21), and he always considered Armstrong (along with Mrs. Ruffner and his mother) one of the best and greatest influences on his life. During a vacation back in Malden after two years at the institute, Washington lost his beloved mother.

He later wrote about her that “the lessons of truth, honor and thrift which she implanted in me while she lived have remained with me, and I consider them among my most precious possessions” (23). After graduating from Hampton in summer 1875, by fall Washington was back in Malden, where he became the teacher at the very school he had attended part-time in his youth, occupying that position for three years. He also taught at night and additionally taught at two different Sunday schools. He organized a local debating society and had a prominent role himself as a public speaker in a campaign to make Charleston the capital of West Virginia. In 1877 or 1878 he attended the Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C. Although for a time he studied the law with the idea of becoming a lawyer, he thought that his true calling was in education, and in 1879, after delivering a successful commencement address at the Hampton Institute, he was invited to return there as a teacher and graduate student. He gladly accepted and soon found himself not only running a rapidly growing night school but also supervising the education of about 75 American Indians. “My daily experience with them,” he later wrote, “convinced me that the main thing that any oppressed people needed was a chance of the right kind and they would cease to be savages” (27). The main turning point of Washington’s life occurred in 1881, when some leading citizens of Tuskegee, Alabama, contacted General Armstrong to ask whether he could recommend a white man to become principal of a new school they were founding to educate the area’s blacks. Armstrong instead recommended Washington, and the recommendation was accepted. Arriving in Tuskegee in mid-June, Washington opened the school in a dilapidated church on July 4, at fi rst instructing 30 students (who were themselves mostly local teachers) under a roof so poorly maintained that a student had to hold an umbrella over him when it rained. Washington soon sought to acquire a more modern and permanent structure for the school so that students could live there full-time and could not only master their academic subjects but also learn

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good personal habits as well as useful trades. With fi nancial assistance from Hampton, he was able to purchase a farm near Tuskegee and begin turning it into the institute that would later become so well known and highly respected. Local residents, white and black, contributed money or goods to the project and helped raise money for it, and by November 1882, with the additional help of some northern philanthropists, Porter Hall was completed. The growth of the Tuskegee Institute had begun, and Washington’s personal life had also undergone a major change with his marriage, earlier that year, to Fanny Norton Smith, whom he had known since his childhood in Malden. Their daughter, Portia, was born on June 6,1883, but unfortunately Fanny herself died less than a year later, on May 4, 1884. Despite this personal setback, Washington’s school (which emphasized practical training in useful skills) was beginning to flourish: A month after his wife’s death he was invited to speak before the National Education Association, and in spring 1885 Tuskegee Institute graduated its fi rst class of students. Students at Tuskegee were expected to work as well as study, and in fact many of the campus buildings were constructed by the students themselves from the bricks they also fashioned on campus. With further support from the state legislature, the local community, and the northern philanthropists to whom Washington frequently spoke and wrote, the institute continued to prosper, and Washington’s personal life also improved in 1886, when, on August 11, he married Olivia A. Davidson, a dedicated teacher at the institute who had also been one of its most vigorous advocates and leaders. Their fi rst son was born on May 29, 1887, and a second arrived on February 6, 1889, but tragedy again struck Washington’s life when Olivia died on May 9 of that same year. Eventually he married for a third and fi nal time, wedding Margaret James Murray (the Lady Principal of the institute since 1890) on October 12, 1892. Meanwhile, progress at the school had been rapid and substantial. Whereas enrollment had consisted of 169 students in 1884, by 1895 that number had increased to 1,013, and

by 1893 the campus had grown from two buildings to 30, nearly all of them constructed by the students themselves. Even so, many applicants had to be turned away for lack of space, despite Washington’s continuous efforts to raise funds in the North and despite continuous generosity from the residents of Tuskegee themselves. In a decade and a half the institute had become one of the most important centers of black education anywhere in the world. Meanwhile, Washington himself had become perhaps the most widely respected black person in America, and his fame was also growing abroad. Washington’s status was both recognized and confi rmed when he was invited to address, on September 18, 1895, the Cotton States and International Exhibition in Atlanta, Georgia. On that occasion he gave perhaps the most famous address of his career—one that would win him even wider recognition and respect among many blacks and whites across the country, but one that would also ignite an eventual fi restorm of disagreement and dissent among blacks who believed he had conceded far too much to the interests of prejudiced whites. In the speech Washington argued that the interests of blacks would best be served if they initially focused mainly on economic development: By mastering trades and building reputations as productive citizens, they would eventually win the respect of whites and then, having won that respect, they could hope one day to be granted their full civil and political rights. In the meantime, the races could cooperate as the separate fi ngers of a united hand do. This was music to the ears of many whites (especially in the South), and at fi rst many blacks also were enticed by Washington’s vision of economic progress. It was not long, however, before a reaction set in among many other black leaders (particularly W. E. B. DUBOIS), and Washington found himself subjected to growing criticism from his own people despite the admiration he enjoyed among whites. The Atlanta speech, more than anything else, led many blacks throughout the 20th century to condemn Washington as an “Uncle Tom.”


By the beginning of the 1900s, Washington was a powerful man who consorted with other powerful people, especially in the North. In 1899 he had traveled to England, where he had tea with Queen Victoria. In 1901 he dined with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House (a dinner that caused great indignation in the South), and in that same year he published his best-selling autobiography, Up from Slavery (one of scores of books and articles, many ghostwritten, published under his name throughout his long career). In 1903 Andrew Carnegie, one of the world’s richest men, donated $600,000 to Tuskegee, but this stroke of massive good fortune was offset by the publication, during that same year, of DuBois’s stinging criticism of Washington in his famous book The Souls of Black Folk. DuBois himself had followed the lead of William Monroe Trotter, a black leader from Boston who had assailed Washington in print the year before. Washington, meanwhile, was not above retaliating against his opponents: He set spies on them, kept academic critics in line through his relations with the presidents of other black colleges, and, through his influence with white benefactors and black businessmen, could stifle the careers and projects of anyone he disliked. He has been compared, in his fi nal decade, to the other political “bosses” who dominated much of American life during this period, and his behavior has sometimes been called hypocritical or dishonest. There can be little doubt, however, that he was sincerely committed not only to the progress of Tuskegee Institute but also to advancing the interests of his people, even when his notion of advancement seemed excessively tame or cautious to others. Openly preaching accommodation and cooperation, he secretly fi nanced legal challenges to some of the most egregious forms of racial discrimination, and when he died on November 14, 1915, he was widely hailed as the most important African American of his era. No one—not even his fiercest opponents—could deny the legacy he had established in Tuskegee or the larger impact he had made on American life in general.

“Atlanta Compromise Speech” (“Atlanta Exposition Address”) (1895) In 1895 Washington was invited to address the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, a major trade show designed to showcase and promote the economic progress of the South. Addressing a huge audience of southern blacks, southern whites, and whites from the North, Washington argued that the best immediate path to black advancement was through economic success, cultural self-improvement, and cooperation with fair-minded southern whites. Once blacks had shown themselves to be productive, responsible citizens, any reasonable objections to giving them full citizenship rights would wither away, but, until that day, blacks and whites could cooperate as the separate fi ngers of a single hand do. Washington himself realized the historic importance of this speech; he reprinted it in full, and described its genesis and the responses to it, in both of his early autobiographies (The Story of My Life and Work and Up from Slavery). The reaction to the speech among the audience who fi rst heard it was electrifyingly positive, and Washington’s words were soon reprinted, with much acclaim, in newspapers throughout the country. The speech instantly made him the most recognized spokesman for his people across the nation. Whites (especially southerners) were particularly gratified by Washington’s ideas. Eventually, however, a negative reaction began to set in among various rival black leaders, who thought that Washington had been too ready to compromise with white racism—that he had been too willing to postpone the achievement of complete civil and political rights for his people. Ironically, then, the speech that at fi rst had won Washington such wide acclaim later became a main count in indictments accusing him of being an “Uncle Tom” (accommodationist). Washington began the speech by emphasizing a central fact and deducing an important conclusion from it: “One third of the population of the South is of the Negro race. No enterprise seeking the material, civil, or moral welfare of this section can disregard this element of our population and


reach the highest success” (73). After praising the exposition’s managers for generously highlighting African-American contributions to southern life, Washington urged blacks to focus more of their attention on practical economic development than on ineffective political organizing. In a particularly striking passage, he proclaimed: To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are”— cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded. Cast it down in agriculture, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. . . . Our greatest danger is, that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life that we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities. (74)

Although these words were enthusiastically received by most of the people who originally heard them, they later created great controversy, especially among other black leaders. These critics (particularly W. E. B. DuBois) felt that Washington had conceded too much to his white listeners, especially by placing so much emphasis on the value of “common labor” for blacks rather than on the more traditional forms of higher education. DuBois emphasized the importance of cultivating

the intellectual development of the mentally gifted portion of the black population—the so-called talented tenth—who would provide crucial leadership for the rest of the race. Washington (according to DuBois and other critics) was too willing consign blacks to the lower rungs of the intellectual, social, and economic ladder; he was (they believed) too willing to sacrifice long-term political, social, and cultural gains in favor of immediate and minor economic advantages. Washington, on the other hand, believed that true and solid progress in all these other spheres could not be made without fi rst laying a solid economic foundation. After urging blacks to cast down their buckets where they lived, Washington offered the same advice to whites, advising them not to depend on imported foreign labor but to make use of their 8 million black neighbors and encourage their further development: “While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen” (74–75). In perhaps the most famous sentence of the speech he declared that in “all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fi ngers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress” (75). Indeed, the full progress of the South depended (Washington proclaimed) on the full progress of its black citizens: Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upwards, or they will pull against you the load downwards. We shall constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or one-third its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic. (75)

Washington asserted that the “wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and con-


stant struggle rather than of artificial forcing” (76). He ended by looking forward to a “blotting out of sectional differences and racial animosities and suspicions” and to a “determination to administer absolute justice, in a willing obedience among all classes to the mandates of law” (76). Perhaps more than any other speech or piece of writing he ever composed, Washington’s oration to the Atlanta Exposition sealed his fate as the preeminent (but also the most controversial) black leader of his time. After delivering this speech, he became the object of growing praise by most whites and many blacks, but he also became the target of increasingly severe criticism by black leaders who disdained his emphasis on what they regarded as excessive compromise and complacent cooperation.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In composing this speech, Washington faced the difficult task of trying to appeal simultaneously to northern whites, southern whites, and blacks across the country. Examine the speech in detail and discuss specific ways in which Washington tried to appeal to each group individually and to all three groups at once. 2. What different kinds of persuasion does Washington use in this speech? For instance, how does he use humility, and how does he use implied threats? How does he use objective facts, and how does he appeal to emotion? How does he use such rhetorical devices as parables, statistics, repetition, heightened rhythm, striking imagery, literary allusions, moral arguments, practical arguments, and religious language?

Up from Slavery (1901) Up from Slavery is not only Washington’s most famous and most influential book, but also one of the most notable of all American autobiographies. It tells the story of his life from his boyhood as a slave to his eventual success as the leader of one of the nation’s most important institutions of AfricanAmerican education and as the foremost national spokesman for his people. The book appealed to

early readers because it showed how much could be accomplished, in spite of enormous odds, if a person were determined, optimistic, and willing to work hard to accomplish sensible, practical goals. For all these reasons, however, many later readers have condemned the book as naive and simplistic. Up from Slavery was actually Washington’s second attempt at a book-length autobiography. The fi rst, titled The Story of My Life and Work and fi rst printed in 1901, had been published for sale by subscription, mainly to a black readership. Although the narratives of both works are often highly similar, the earlier book is longer, less efficient, and less clearly structured than its sequel. It often includes lengthy excerpts from speeches, letters, official documents, and newspaper articles, and although these features give the earlier work some genuine historical interest, they detract from its narrative flow and literary effectiveness. Up from Slavery, on the other hand, is well designed, well written, and consistently interesting. Washington had help from ghost writers in composing both works: Eugene Webber, a black journalist, assisted with the fi rst; Max Bennet Thrasher, a white journalist and public relations man, assisted with the second. In the case of Up from Slavery, however, Washington seems to have exercised fi rm control; he would dictate notes to Thrasher as they traveled by train; Washington would then prepare drafts based on those notes; then Thrasher would go over those drafts. Washington, however, had the fi nal say as to content, structure, and style. The book’s style is in fact one of its most striking features. In the preface, Washington says that he has “tried to tell a simple, straightforward story, with no attempt at embellishment” (211), and certainly that is the effect he achieves: His phrasing seems utterly lucid and impressively direct, creating the impression of an honest man speaking truthfully to others in a spirit of goodwill and common humanity. It is as if Washington has no ax to grind, no agenda to push, no grudges to nurse; by relating the facts of his life calmly and without rancor, he invites his predominantly white readers to respond sympathetically rather than defensively, encouraging them to focus on helping to build a productive future rather


than dwelling on the injustices of the past. Washington does not deny the sufferings his people endured, but neither does he emphasize them in any dramatic fashion. Instead, his dry, unemotional commentary on the lives of the slaves is often stingingly understated, as when he notes, “My mother, I suppose, attracted the attention of a purchaser who was afterward my owner and hers. Her addition to the slave family attracted about as much attention as the purchase of a new horse or cow” (215–216). Readers (especially whites) cannot help but wince at such statements; Washington knew he had no need to make the point emphatic. Yet even whites will sometimes fi nd themselves agreeing with black readers who believed Washington was sometimes excessively willing to forgive and forget. This is especially true, for instance, of his concluding comments on his white father: Of my father I know even less than my mother. I do not even know his name. I have heard reports to the effect that he was a white man who lived on one of the near-by plantations. Whoever he was, I never heard of his taking the least interest in me or providing in any way for my rearing. But I do not fi nd especial fault with him. He was simply another unfortunate victim of the institution which the Nation unhappily had engrafted upon it at that time. (216)

It is hard not to feel that Washington, here and elsewhere, seems too eager to turn the other cheek and that his attitudes are therefore either impossibly saintly or perhaps even calculated and insincere. Washington’s description of the tiny, rundown, dirt-floored cabin in which he spent his fi rst years are vivid and affecting, and his account of life among the slaves and their owners, especially during the closing days of the Civil War, is detailed and complex, showing both the eagerness of the slaves for their freedom and the real affection many felt toward the whites with whom they had lived for generations. Washington is careful to reject any notion that “some of the slaves did not want freedom,” for he insists, “This is not true. I have never seen one who did not want to be free, or one who

would return to slavery,” and he announces that he pities “from the bottom of my heart any nation or body of people that is so unfortunate as to get entangled in the net of slavery” (222). Yet a few sentences later he asserts that “notwithstanding the cruelty and moral wrong of slavery, the ten million Negroes inhabiting this country, who themselves or whose ancestors went through the school of American slavery, are in a stronger and more hopeful condition, materially, intellectually, morally, and religiously, than is true of an equal number of black people in any other portion of the globe. . . . Ever since I have been old enough to think for myself, I have entertained the idea that, notwithstanding the cruel wrongs infl icted upon us, the black man got nearly as much out of slavery as the white man did” (222–223). Such statements made some blacks feel that Washington had gone much too far in his efforts to conciliate southern white opinion. Washington’s account of his early years as a freed black is fascinating, especially when he recounts his own hunger for education as well as the widespread passion for learning among his people as a whole, or when he describes his years at Hampton, or when he details his early service as a schoolteacher back in Malden. Throughout these pages his emphasis is on hard work, self-discipline, the virtues of cleanliness, and selfless commitment to others. He extols the value of manual labor by showing its positive influence on his own life, and he candidly criticizes certain black teachers and preachers who turned to those professions merely to avoid hard work. He also criticizes blacks who relied too heavily on the federal government for assistance, or who placed excessive hope in merely political progress, or who emphasized a “liberal arts” education to the exclusion of practical training, or who engaged in wasteful spending on frivolous activities or possessions. His willingness to find these kinds of fault with his fellow blacks can, of course, be seen as part of a cynical ploy to ingratiate himself with whites, but this reading of his motives seems cynical in itself, since he makes many of the same points in The Story of My Life and Work, the autobiography written with black readers mainly in mind. His entire career, both in words and deeds, suggests his sincere commitment to the val-


ues he espouses in Up from Slavery, and in reacting to his life and writings it always is important to recall the exceptionally complex historical circumstances in which he found himself. One passage that suggests the exceedingly complicated state of race relations during Washington’s era involves his assignment, after his return to Hampton as a teacher, to instruct a large group of uneducated American Indians: At fi rst I had a good deal of doubt about my ability to succeed. I knew that the average Indian felt himself above the white man, and, of course, he felt himself far above the Negro, largely on account of the fact of the Negro having submitted to slavery—a thing which the Indian would never do. The Indians, in the Indian Territory, owned a large number of slaves during the days of slavery. Aside from this, there was a general feeling that the attempt to educate and civilize the red men at Hampton would be a failure. (266)

Thus, whites looked down on blacks and Indians, Indians looked down on whites and blacks, and many blacks were dubious of the prospect that Indians (who had once enslaved blacks) would ever be successfully educated! Nevertheless, despite all these crisscrossing prejudices, Washington (with his typical combination of optimism and determination) took on the task and succeeded, and in an immediately ensuing passage he makes clear his willingness to criticize whites just as bluntly as anyone else: The things that they [the Indians] disliked most, I think, were to have their long hair cut, to give up wearing blankets, and to cease smoking; but no white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man’s clothes, eats the white man’s food, speaks the white man’s language, and professes the white man’s religion. (266)

This is a kind of frankness for which Washington is often given too little credit. It was in this kind of highly charged racial atmosphere—an atmo-

sphere of multiple suspicions, mutual distrust, and reinforcing bigotries—that he had to operate, and the fact that he was able to operate so productively shows a good deal about his talent, his diligence, and his innate diplomacy. All these traits made Washington an ideal choice to found and lead the new school for African Americans in Alabama. His account of its founding and early years is, of course, central to the narrative substance and historical importance of Up from Slavery; as he himself realized, his own life was interesting and significant primarily because of his successes at Tuskegee. Nevertheless, he also used his book as an opportunity to comment on many other matters, such as the efforts of numerous southern communities to deny blacks the right to vote. At one point, for instance, he argues that such practices are more harmful to whites than to blacks: The wrong to the Negro is temporary, but to the morals of the white man the injury is permanent. I have noted time and time again that when an individual perjures himself in order to break the force of the black man’s ballot, he soon learns to practice dishonesty in other relations of life, not only where the Negro is concerned, but equally so where a white man is concerned. The white man who begins by cheating a Negro usually ends by cheating a white man. The white man who begins to break the law by lynching a Negro soon yields to the temptation to lynch a white man. (303)

In passages such as this, as in others that might be quoted, Washington seems anything but accommodating; here as often elsewhere, his tone is more complicated and assertive than is sometimes acknowledged. Washington believed that progress for blacks, like progress for the human race in general, would be slow and incremental, but he also believed that if people lived by the values of hard work and moral decency, their progress would also be inevitable and unstoppable. At one point, for instance, Washington asserts his belief that “the whole future of the Negro rested largely upon the question as to whether or not he should make himself, through his skill,


intelligence, and character, of such undeniable value to the community in which he lived that the community could not dispense with his presence” (322). Blacks (or indeed whites or anyone else) who made themselves indispensable in this way would not only improve their own lives but enhance the prospects of their personal descendants and of humanity as a whole. “One might as well try to stop the progress of a mighty railroad train by throwing his body across the track,” Washington wrote, “as to try to stop the growth of the world in the direction of giving mankind more intelligence, more culture, more skill, more liberty, and in the direction of extending more sympathy and more brotherly kindness” (323). Perhaps such optimism was naive; perhaps it was misguided. During his lifetime, however, it inspired many persons of all races, and it attracted millions in donations, not only for the Tuskegee Institute but for hundreds of other schools for blacks around the South. In the end, Washington knew that his legacy would be measured not simply by his theoretical pronouncements but by his practical achievements, for, as he remarks in Up from Slavery, “I have always had more of an ambition to do things than merely to talk about doing them” (320).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Up from Slavery with Washington’s earlier autobiography, The Story of My Life and Work. Which incidents does Washington include in one work but omit from the other, and why? Why, for instance, does Washington omit from Up from Slavery the account of his uncle’s severe beating, which he included in the earlier book? How do the tones or perspectives of the two works differ? 2. Read the fi rst section of R ICHARD WRIGHT’s novel Native Son and then discuss how Washington would react to the novel’s protagonist, Bigger Thomas. How would Washington respond to Bigger’s attitude toward his family, religion, whites, education, and the prospects of employment? How would Bigger respond to Washington’s views on those same topics? 3. In his tone, attitudes, and diction, how does Washington try implicitly to refute the preju-

dices whites commonly held toward blacks in his day, especially in the South? How does his awareness that whites will be reading his book affect the style as well as the substance of the work? How and why does Washington sometimes quote the speech of other blacks, especially those less educated than he was?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON WASHINGTON AND HIS WORK 1. Compare and contrast the life of Washington, as depicted in Up from Slavery, with the lives of the characters in the second section of GERTRUDE STEIN’s Three Lives. Which of the characters depicted by Stein would Washington have admired most, and why? Which of Stein’s characters would Washington have admired least, and why? How would Stein’s different characters have reacted to Washington’s life, and why? 2. Compare and contrast Washington’s account of his experience as a teacher of American Indians (in chapter 6 of Up from Slavery) with the account of Indian education offered by GERTRUDE SIMMONS BONNIN (Zitkala-Ša) in “The School Days of an Indian Girl.” How do the two accounts resemble or differ from one another in the incidents they describe, the tones they adopt, or the attitudes they imply? 3. Compare and contrast Up from Slavery with Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. How are the two works similar and/or different in style, tone, attitudes, and subject matter? How might Washington have reacted to Stein’s work, or how might she have reacted to his, and why? Which work appeals to you more? Explain your reaction. 4. Compare and contrast Up from Slavery with Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy. What advantages or disadvantages did each writer face? How did each respond to opportunities or challenges? How might Washington have reacted to Wright’s story, and why? How might Wright have reacted to Washington’s story, and why?


5. Compare and contrast Up from Slavery with The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. How do the two works resemble and differ from one another in their purposes, tones, attitudes, styles, and subject matters? What values did Franklin and Washington share? How did Washington’s race make his life fundamentally different from Franklin’s? 6. Frederick Douglass wrote three substantial works of autobiography. Choose one of them, and then compare and contrast it with Up from Slavery. How do the works resemble or differ from one another in the incidents they describe, the perspectives they adopt, and the implied lessons they teach? 7. Compare and contrast a section of Up from Slavery with an account of the same period in Louis Harlan’s two-volume biography of Washington. In what specific ways does Harlan offer a more complex presentation of the same material than Washington offers? What motives are implied by Washington’s presentation? What motives are implied by Harlan’s? 8. Trace a theme throughout Up from Slavery and discuss the ways Washington’s treatment of that theme shows consistency and/or development. For example, discuss his depiction of women throughout the book, or discuss his comments on religion, or discuss his comments on liberal arts education. 9. Washington is listed as the author of numerous other books besides Up from Slavery, yet these are rarely read. Find one of these books (such as My Larger Education or The Life of Frederick Douglass), read it, and then compare and contrast it with Up from Slavery in terms of its themes, style, tone, attitudes, and implied arguments. 10. In its basic plot and themes, Up from Slavery has often been compared to the novels of Horatio Alger, which usually describe a poor boy’s rise from poverty to success. Read one of Alger’s novels (which are freely available on the

Internet) and compare and contrast it with Up from Slavery. WORKS CITED

AND


Andrews, William L., ed. Up from Slavery: Authoritative Text, Contexts and Composition History, Criticism. New York: Norton, 1996. The Booker T. Washington Papers. Available online. URL: http://www.historycooperative.org/btw. Accessed April 7, 2009. Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, ed. Booker T. Washington and Black Progress: Up from Slavery 100 Years Later. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003. Carroll, Rebecca. Uncle Tom or New Negro? African Americans Reflect on Booker T. Washington and Up from Slavery One Hundred Years Later. New York: Harlem Moon, 2006. Harlan, Louis R. Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. ———. Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. ———. “Booker T. Washington in Biographical Perspective.” In Up From Slavery: Authoritative Text, Contexts and Composition, edited by William L. Andrews, 204–219. New York: Norton, 1996. Olson, Ted. “Booker T. Washington (1856–1915).” In African American Authors, 1745–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 440–447. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000. Thornbrough, Emma Lou, ed. Booker T. Washington. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1969. Verney, Kevern. The Art of the Possible: Booker T. Washington and Black Leadership in the United States, 1881–1925. New York: Routledge, 2001. Washington, Booker T. The Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Louis R. Harlan and John W. Blassingame. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972.

Robert C. Evans

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our “gros public” to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One’s friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don’t think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most déplacé and useless class on earth! (letter to Sara Norton, June 5, 1903)

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ith a background of wealth and refi ned culture, and aware of her family heritage, Edith Wharton exhibited inquisitive intelligence and a perceptive eye when she put the world of her time under a magnifying glass, analyzing malefemale interpersonal relationships and revealing the weaknesses of the social hierarchy in New York City. In a literary career that lasted almost 50 years and produced novels, novellas, short stories, and nonfiction writing, Wharton described accurately and unfl inchingly the world of the American upper class. She chronicled the transformation that occurred in that world as its original inhabitants, descendants of old, venerable European families, were replaced by the power brokers of New England industry. Wharton also directed her attention to more socially relevant topics such as labor and political confl icts and the rise to power of American women. As an author, Wharton enjoyed success and popularity among the literary elite and the general public. After her death, some critics began to distance themselves from her work, claiming that her focus on one particular setting and time was more a limitation than a virtue. Although one might quibble with Wharton’s choice of setting and subject matter, her ability as a writer and judge of human character attracts an ever-increasing number of admirers to her fiction. One of three children, Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, in New

York City. Her father was George Frederic Jones, who supported his family through money earned from real estate holdings in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Her mother, Lucretia Rhinelander Jones, had the reputation of being a woman devoted to the world of high society, including its parties, clothing, food, and social graces. Both parents placed great value on a traditional education and upbringing for their daughter. While they encouraged her acquisition of any knowledge and talents that would help her in her future life as a wife and mother, they discouraged her curiosity about new intellectual trends and artistic movements. As a child, Wharton traveled extensively with her parents, and this travel ignited within her the desire to discover foreign lands and instilled in her a critical attitude toward her homeland. As an author, Wharton attempted to capture the allure of—and sense of culture and history found in—foreign lands, but she also devoted significant energy to depicting what she knew best: the good and the bad of fashionable New York society. From the days of her youth to old age, Wharton directed her attention to this milieu again and again. She was critical of many aspects of this segment of society, and her right to judge was warranted by personal experience. Wharton knew well the limitations of this group. The main emphasis of a woman’s education was to prepare her for the role of a wife, who was supposed to run a household, entertain, and

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support her husband in his endeavors. Wharton herself suffered under the demands of this environment, and in her writing, it is clear that her native intellectual curiosity rebelled against the pressure to conform. In spite of her dislike for much of the upper-class environment, Wharton also enjoyed certain benefits from being born to socially prominent parents. She was taught to read at an early age and had access to her father’s extensive library. She had the luxury of free time, which allowed her the opportunity to explore her own intellectual interests. Left to her own devices, Wharton also acquired the discipline required for successful self-study. Even though she was not able to experience the benefits of a formal education, she developed a taste for, and knowledge of, history, literature, foreign languages, art, and architecture. At about the age of 12, Wharton began her fi rst attempts at composing poems and prose. At age 13, she enjoyed an early publishing success: Some of her translations of German poems appeared in an American magazine. In general, her mother was not supportive of her writing, and mean-spirited negative comments discouraged Wharton from further attempts at prose fiction for a number of years. Her mother did, however, support her interest in poetry, it has been suggested, because she considered writing poetry a more suitable occupation for a debutante and future society wife. Wharton’s mother bears a great deal of responsibility for Edith’s later anxieties as an author. From letters and conversations, we know that Wharton complained of feelings of inadequacy, worrying about the quality of her work and questioning her calling to the art. On the surface, Wharton’s life might have seemed to be carefree and fi lled with pleasure, but it was also marked by stress and worry. Her family was not immune to the financial pressures and economic turndowns that confronted the United States after the Civil War. As a result of strained fi nances, George Frederic Jones moved his family to Europe in 1866. There the cost of living was lower, enabling the family to maintain its extravagant lifestyle. In

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1872 the family returned to America, and in 1880 they were again forced to live in Europe. They returned in 1882 after her father died in Cannes, France. Although Wharton profited greatly from her stays in Europe, she never forgot the troubled circumstances that caused her travels, and recognition of the transient nature of security and happiness had a profound impact on her. When Wharton’s family returned the fi rst time from an extended stay in Europe, she was subjected to rigorous preparation for life as a woman in high society. While she might initially have been spellbound by the splendor and excitement of the wealthy and cultured, she quickly noticed the drawbacks of their way of life. She observed that women, goaded on by class-conscious parents, were pitted against each other in an unnatural competition, with the prize being a man who would replace the parents and become a new captor. Afterward, a woman’s life with its social obligations and expectations would resemble the existence of a valued circus animal that is expected to hop through hoops and perform other tricks on command. Surrounded by camouflaged despair and desperation, Wharton saw the impact of this unnatural struggle. Women were unable and unwilling to initiate and experience true friendship with other women, and the supposed goal of the competition, a wealthy, prominent husband, might not lead to intellectual stimulation, emotional fulfi llment, and sexual satisfaction for a woman. When Wharton’s family moved to Newport, Rhode Island, her outlook on life changed, and she approached her duties with renewed energy. She made her formal entrance into society in 1879 and appeared to be on the way to realizing the dream of many young women: to be admired and envied, to be wealthy, and to be advantageously married. During the years after Wharton’s debut, she was courted by a series of men, including Henry Stevens and Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton. In 1885 she married Wharton, older by 12 years, who was considered athletic, socially prominent, and fi nancially secure. During the fi rst few years of their married life, the Whartons traveled extensively, and

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they spent much time satisfying social obligations. Although Edith appreciated the companionship of her husband, she found his lack of interest in intellectual matters disappointing and his inability to satisfy her sexually frustrating. As her initial intoxication with her new status as wife ended, she began to seek the acquaintance of men whom she could consider her intellectual equals. Turning her attention away from the limited social circle of New York City’s elite and directing her energy toward her writing, Wharton began to experience artistic success. The Greater Inclination, her fi rst short story collection, was published in 1899, and The Touchstone, a novella, appeared in 1900. She also authored articles and books on formal gardens, architecture, and interior design. Her fi rst novel, a historical romance titled The Valley of Decision, was published in 1902. During this early period of artistic activity, she earned most critical acclaim for The House of Mirth, published in 1905, in which she examines New York society and highlights what a woman must sacrifice for the sake of money, marriage, and family. In 1907 Wharton completed The Fruit of the Tree, a novel in which she left the setting of her earlier fiction to explore the changes occurring in the United States as a result of the Industrial Revolution. As Wharton widened the scope of her prose, she suffered a setback in her artistic success. Although her collection of short stories titled Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910) enjoyed critical acclaim, other works were received with less enthusiasm. In fact, it was not until 1911 and the publication of Ethan Frome, a novella set in rural Massachusetts, that Wharton again garnered praise from the literary world. In this work, as in her successful short stories and novels, she limits the subject matter of her fiction to a very specific environment and cast of characters. In so doing, she can linger in her depiction of characters’ thoughts and emotions and contemplate the scenery without overwhelming or weakening the novel’s focus. As Wharton’s creative life took shape, her private life was also in transition. Since her marriage to Teddy Wharton, she had been making regular trips to Europe, and shortly after the turn of the

century, she decided to live in Paris to escape the emphasis on wealth and possessions that she saw in the United States. At this time Wharton met Henry James and began to correspond regularly with him. She valued his critical judgment greatly, and their friendship lasted until James died in 1916. In 1907 Wharton met Morton Fullerton, a journalist and friend of Henry James, and found herself attracted to him physically. They began a sexual relationship in summer 1909, but the meetings lasted only until the fall. During her relationship with Fullerton, Wharton experienced sexual satisfaction and physical and emotional intimacy with a man for the fi rst time, and she began to realize the importance of those aspects of life to the creation of believable, realistic fictional characters. At the same time, Wharton’s marriage to Teddy began to suffer as a result of his struggle with mental illness. In due time, she discovered that he had stolen money from her and that he lived with a mistress. As his condition deteriorated and he was institutionalized, Wharton struggled with feelings of duty and obligation, but in the end, the desire to be free of her husband’s instability and harmful influence won out. Wharton fi led for divorce, and the marriage was terminated in 1913. Regardless of the personal problems Wharton faced, she found the energy to remain intellectually active and socially committed. Soon after her divorce, World War I broke out. Wharton, who had long ago acquired a love for Europe and an insatiable desire to discover as much of it as possible, decided to settle permanently in France and distinguished herself through her efforts to ease the suffering of wounded soldiers and to improve the living conditions of the many refugees who went to Paris during the war. In recognition of her valuable work, France awarded her the Legion of Honor in 1916. Wharton was the fi rst woman to receive that honor. Her endeavors and experiences were chronicled in works such as Fighting France (1915) and The Book of the Homeless (1916). Wharton remained active in the writing of fiction as well. Shortly before the war, she completed The Reef (1912), a novel that depicts the romantic relationship between middle-aged, respectable

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Anna Leath and the American diplomat George Darrow, recording the emotional and psychological suffering brought about by Darrow’s earlier affair with Sophy Viner, a young governess in the employ of Leath. The novel was criticized for many reasons, including its rather exaggerated concern for propriety and its stylistic indebtedness to Henry James. In The Custom of the Country (1913), Wharton exhibits the more admirable aspects of her literary style, including her knack for satire, her ability to capture time and place, and her willingness to create a strong story line. The novel, featuring the character Undine Spragg and attacking a preoccupation with upward mobility and the consumption of goods, chronicles Undine’s efforts to use marriage to gain wealth and social prestige. During the postwar period, Wharton remained active in the literary arts. In 1920 she completed The Age of Innocence, a novel portraying the love of Newland Archer for two women, May Welland and Ellen Olenska, and the moral, social, and cultural dilemma he faces as he tries to choose between them. In 1921 Wharton was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel. Wharton also directed her attention to the creative process; The Writing of Fiction (1925) represents her most extensive discussion of a writer’s craft. By the time the book appeared, she had been practicing her art for 30 years, and in her text, she relates her views concerning European and American authors, the role of tradition in writing, the choice of appropriate subject matter and form, and the traits of effective, memorable prose. Further information about Wharton’s opinions concerning the education and formation of a writer can be found in her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934). Common wisdom states that Wharton’s later writing does not live up to the strength, vigor, and incisiveness of her earlier prose fiction, and she is accused of writing too much too quickly. Novels written after 1922 are often numbered among her least successful books. Works such as The Glimpses of the Moon (1922), The Mother’s Recompense (1925), Twilight Sleep (1927), Hudson River Bracketed (1929), and The Gods Arrive (1932) received at best mixed reviews. However, toward the end of her life, Wharton appeared to

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recapture her former skill and energy. At the time of her death in 1937, she was at work on The Buccaneers, a novel in which she portrays the life and exploits of five young American women who set out to use traditional forms of courting and marriage to take the London social world by storm. The novel appeared posthumously as an unfi nished work in 1938 and was completed by Marion Mainwaring and published in 1993. Wharton’s growing disillusionment with the United States and its preoccupation with consumerism and bourgeois values made her homeland increasingly unpalatable to her. In fact, in the years following World War I, she traveled to the United States only once, in 1923, to receive an honorary doctor of letters degree from Yale University; otherwise, she remained in Europe, choosing to acknowledge from afar other awards such as the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 for The Age of Innocence and the Gold Medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1924. Wharton remained active until she suffered a stroke in June 1937. She died on August 11, 1937, and was buried at Versailles. Wharton’s commitment to France and her support of the French during World War I were greatly appreciated—so much so that French war veterans served as pallbearers for her coffi n. In her own way, Wharton became a controversial figure during her career as a writer. She never hesitated to criticize the milieu of her birth and education, yet she enjoyed all the advantages that money and preferred social standing could offer. She revealed herself to be a fi ne judge of character and motivation, yet happiness eluded her as she suffered through unsatisfactory personal relationships. She was a sharp critic of literature as an art form (including its subject matter and mode of expression), yet she was accused of sacrificing quality in her own writing to satisfy publishers’ demands for quantity. She mocked America’s lack of cultural sophistication, yet she chose to remain abroad and avoid a direct role in improving standards. In the end, Wharton became known for her ability to evoke a feeling of place and time in her writing, for her psychological and emotional insights, and for her dedication to writing as an art.

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“Souls Belated” (1899) This story, taken from Wharton’s fi rst collection, titled The Greater Inclination, focuses on the experiences of two Americans, Lydia Tillotson and Ralph Gannett, as they travel through Italy during an extended tour of Europe. Lydia has left her husband in the United States and is traveling with Ralph as they wait for her divorce to become fi nal; looking for a new life that will free her from the yoke of social convention, offer her emotional and physical satisfaction, and provide excitement, Lydia realizes, while staying with her lover at an Italian resort, that she has grown accustomed to Ralph and that their relationship is becoming predictable. Recognizing that she is fleeing from one conventional relationship to another, she tries to explain her fears to her lover, but his responses reveal that he does not regard her any differently, or with any more appreciation, than her former husband did; in the end, Lydia, who attempts to leave Ralph in order to avoid surrendering to conventionality, is observed by him as she returns to the hotel. Using different points of view to convey her characters’ thoughts and feelings, Wharton portrays two people held prisoner by social convention. Lydia seems to be the more perceptive individual, but she is unable to use her insights to break free of the chains of prejudice, social etiquette, and self-doubt. She dreams of leading an adventurous, stimulating, independent life, but she is rendered powerless by her lack of options. Indeed, she has numerous opportunities to see how guests at the Italian resort, representatives of respectable society, ruthlessly condemn and ostracize anyone who does not conform to their view of proper behavior. Moreover, society does not take a woman seriously and offers her few options outside marriage. Ralph, a product of 19th-century American upbringing, is convinced that a woman achieves identity through the man she marries. Although he is attracted to Lydia’s intellect as well as to her beauty, he is willing to accept the fact that her possibilities for selfrealization are limited and does nothing to improve her situation. In the end, when he sees her walking back to the hotel, he is convinced that she has rediscovered her passion for him and that her love

has motivated her to return; he cannot imagine the possibility that Lydia might be returning because she believes she has no other choice and that she might be disappointed in her lack of strength and resolve to abandon the idea of socially appropriate behavior and risk comfort for personal independence. What Ralph interprets as physical and emotional desire might very well be Lydia’s surrender to feelings of powerlessness.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this story with EDWIN A RLINGTON ROBINSON’s poem “Eros Turannos.” In particular, discuss the ways in which both works present the social contexts of private relationships and the ways both works depict the constraints faced by women in relations with men. How were women’s options limited during the era in which both authors wrote? 2. Compare and contrast the relationship described in Wharton’s story with the marriage depicted in SUI SIN FAR’s (Edith Maude Eaton’s) tale “Mrs. Spring Fragrance.” How do matters of ethnicity and class affect the relationships depicted in both works? Which of the women in the two stories seems happier with her life, and why? 3. Read Wharton’s story in conjunction with “The Second Choice,” by THEODORE DREISER . Discuss similarities and differences between the two works in terms of theme, characterization, setting, and socioeconomic milieu. 4. Discuss Wharton’s use of phrases set off by quotation marks, as when she writes “she had made it ‘do’ ” or when she notes that the “men would probably back Gannett to ‘do the decent thing.’ ” What does such phrasing suggest about the relations between language and society in this story? Whose voices are being “heard” in such phrases, and what effects do such voices have on the characters in the story?

The House of Mirth (1905) Wharton’s fi rst major commercial and critical success tells the story of Lily Bart, a member of

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the elite of New York City, who faces fi nancial difficulties and must fi nd a socially prominent, wealthy husband in order to secure her position in the only world she has ever known; Lily’s search for an acceptable husband is complicated by the fact that she has a strong streak of independence, making it impossible for her to accept a man for whom she does not feel an intellectual or emotional attraction. Although Lily suffers a steady decline in social standing as time passes and is eventually forced to seek employment and move to a boarding house, she refuses to compromise her moral principles by resorting to blackmail, lies, or manipulation in order to fi nd a husband; one man, Lawrence Selden, attracts her attention and meets her approval, yet circumstances never allow them to express their feelings for each other or even spend much time together. As Lily becomes poorer and poorer, she is rejected more and more fi rmly by her friends and family, including Selden, and she eventually dies of a partly accidental, partly intentional overdose of chloral, a drug she purchased to combat bouts of sleeplessness. The morning she is found dead, Selden appears ready to profess love and offer marriage, but it is too late: Their feelings for each other have been sacrificed on the altar of social demands and prejudices among New York’s elites. Critics commonly agree that life circumstances schooled Wharton during her youth and young adulthood to write a novel like The House of Mirth. As is the case with Lily, Wharton learned, from an early age, to place great value on physical beauty, decorum, and traditional female roles. Also as with Lily, Wharton wrestled with the idea that a woman should be willing to enter into a marriage that was not based on mutual attraction but rather on mutual social and fi nancial benefits. Unlike Lily, however, Wharton eventually managed to escape from the narrow world of New York society by fighting against the constraints of marriage, taking a lover, and seeking out a life of challenge and satisfaction in her writing and charitable efforts. One can say that Wharton, in novels like The House of Mirth, is warning herself and other women with a similar background of what awaits them if they

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accept, and limit themselves to, the traditional upbringing offered to girls in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Works by Wharton preceding The House of Mirth include short story collections such as The Greater Inclination (1899); a novel, The Valley of Decision (1902); a novella, Sanctuary (1903); and works of nonfiction such as The Decoration of Houses (1897) and travelogues. In response to these efforts, Wharton is often praised for her eye for detail, her ability to describe vividly and accurately, and her insight into human character and motivation. In 1903 she began work on The House of Mirth, a novel that tested her ability as a writer as well as her specialized knowledge of New York high society. Critics say that Wharton, when writing this novel, put her environment under intense scrutiny, isolating and describing the manners, morals, and shortcomings of this world. Published serially by Scribner’s Magazine in 1905, The House of Mirth proved to be a great success. Although commentators valued the text primarily for its nonspeculative, nonabstract style and its use of irony and sarcasm, the general reading public was more interested in the tale of romance involving Lily Bart and Lawrence Selden. Mention should be made of another factor that played a role in Wharton’s decision to write the novel and her choice of writing style: her disdain for many other female writers of her time. Wharton believed that these writers did not live up to the high standards demanded by true literature. She faulted these women for their provincialism and their unrefi ned way of expressing themselves. She also thought that they chose uncontroversial subject matter as a way to satisfy a prejudiced American reading public. In her eyes women writers allowed themselves to be forced to write about socially acceptable, often cheery topics. Unlike these authors, Wharton set out to avoid nostalgic generalizations, sentimental romantic vignettes, and pointless descriptions of nature and family. Originally Wharton chose “A Moment’s Ornament” as the title of her novel. With that title, the focus is clearly on Lily and the transitory, inconsequential nature of what she, in the eyes of others, can offer the world around her. Lily’s world believes

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that women have their value as decorative statues and that marital matches should be made according to how well the woman complements the man; little thought is given to what might benefit the woman. Wharton, however, reconsidered her decision about the title and chose, instead, The House of Mirth. This phrase can be found in Ecclesiastes 7:4: “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” Many verses in Ecclesiastes function as reprimands or warnings, and this particular verse counsels against living solely for short-term enjoyment; a life devoted to more meaningful pursuits is advisable and preferable. In the context of Wharton’s novel, the phrase from Ecclesiastes can be understood in two ways. First, it presents an ultimatum to Lily: Will she follow the example of thousands of women before her in similar circumstances and seek an existence as a beautiful, charming, witty work of decoration, thereby renouncing other aspects of life, including intellect and soul; or will she expect more of herself and her environment, daring to demand that she be offered the same possibilities as men and be judged with equal harshness? Second, the phrase “house of mirth” raises a provocative question concerning New York high society: On the surface, amid the many parties, evenings at the opera, fancy dress balls, and polite manners, life might seem to be fi lled with amusing diversions, but does reality match appearance? In her novel Wharton gives a resounding condemnation of the elite of New York. For the sake of decorum, rigid principles govern the lives of members of that society. Exceptions are not tolerated. Society demands, for example, that an unmarried woman never be alone with a male who is not a member of her family except in certain circumstances. Society frowns upon women who smoke or gamble. And society discourages female initiative, bonding, and self-discovery. Rather than a happy environment as appearances might indicate, New York high society is revealed to be restrictive, inflexible, and intimidating. Noteworthy is the fact that members of this group accept the demands placed on them by tradition. Indeed, it would only take a small rebellion to change certain rules and

practices, but members willingly support the status quo. Their greatest desire is to maintain the existing social order and its institutions; individuals who challenge customs or practices are marginalized quickly and ruthlessly. Members fail to see that they are being held captive in a self-created prison and that they are their own guards. In the hands of Wharton, Lily remains a rather dubious figure. At fi rst glance, Lily appears to be different from other women of her social class and age. She does not fully agree with the emphasis society places on social graces, and she seems ready to marry for something other than material gain. However, she is never able to leave this world completely. She views a woman’s standing in society with a critical, perceptive eye, yet she is unable to turn her observations into new standards for conduct. As the novel progresses, Lily grows increasingly desperate to fi nd a husband, and we see her doing and saying things that are incompatible with an enlightened outlook. Readers grow angry with a society that treats women as objects but also become frustrated with Lily: Although her life and thoughts could have been catalysts for change, she lacks the strength and insight to act. Only at the end of the novel does Lily experience a state of heightened self-awareness. In a condition of complete physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion, she reviews her life and passes judgment on herself; she realizes that she has become a plaything of society, making its goals her goals and accepting its interpretation of events and people as her interpretation. Even as she reaches this understanding of her life and environment, she sees the threatening possibility of a new plunge into the darkness of ignorance, a return to old habits, old opinions, old expectations. She states that she has grown tired and that sleep is what she seeks most of all. She takes chloral, knowing the risks as she counts out a higher dose than normal, but at this point, her only concern is sleep, a relief from the recognition of her failings and limitations. Since its appearance, The House of Mirth has remained popular, attracting new admirers with each successive generation of readers. As is the case with other works by Wharton, this novel has been

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adapted for the big screen, most recently by Terence Davies in 2000. It is, however, questionable whether Wharton would have approved of Davies’s fi nal product since the fi lm concentrates on depicting the romance between Lily Bart and Lawrence Selden rather than on examining the issues that were of central concern to Wharton and her time. It seems odd that a divide still exists, a little over 100 years after the publication of the novel, between those who are willing to recognize and consider the shortcomings of society or the problematic nature of male-female relationships and those who become mesmerized by the tale of romance. Wharton’s statements concerning the seductive power of wealth, beauty, and class and her analysis of the influence of tradition and heritage are as timely as ever.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the depiction of women’s lives in this novel and in GERTRUDE STEIN’s collection of stories titled Three Lives. In both works, how are the lives of women shaped and constrained by their social circumstances? What roles do social class and romance play in both works? Discuss the differences in style and characterization employed by Wharton and Stein. 2. Read Wharton’s novel in conjunction with “The School Days of an Indian Girl” and “An Indian Teacher among Indians” by GERTRUDE SIMMONS BONNIN (Zitkala-Ša). What special pressures does the protagonist of the latter works face that are not faced by Lily Bart? What roles, if any, does ethnicity play in Wharton’s novel, and what role does social class play in the works by Bonnin? 3. How do the style, purpose, and characterization in Wharton’s novel differ from the same aspects in (say) R ICHARD WRIGHT’s Native Son? How do you think Wright might have reacted to Wharton’s book, and how do you think Wharton might have reacted to Wright’s? In what ways is social class important in both works? How are women presented in both novels? 4. Discuss Wharton’s novel in relation to EZRA POUND’s poem “Portrait d’une Femme.” In what ways do the main characters of both works

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resemble and/or differ from one another? How are their social circumstances similar and/or different? What is the implied attitude of the narrator of each work toward the woman he presents? 5. Read WILLIAM C ARLOS WILLIAMS’s poem “The Young Housewife,” and then discuss it in relation to Wharton’s novel. In particular, discuss such matters as social class, social setting, the roles of women, and the satisfactions of marriage (or lack thereof). 6. Choose one particular chapter from somewhere near the middle of the novel and discuss that chapter in relation to the chapters that precede it and follow it. How do the preceding chapters lead up to (or prepare for) the chosen chapter? How do the succeeding chapters follow from the chosen chapter? In other words, how is the chosen chapter crucial to the book in terms of such matters as themes, characterization, structure, and tone?

“The Eyes” (1910) At the end of a long, enjoyable evening of telling ghost stories in the smoke-fi lled, cozy library of the home of Andrew Culwin, a self-appointed judge and supposed connoisseur of literature and art, it is fi nally the host’s turn to relate a supernatural tale, and he speaks of his experiences over the last several years, during which he has been haunted off and on by two eyes that stare accusingly and relentlessly at him—eyes that appear calculating, spiteful, and insensitive. In the end, Culwin and one guest in particular, Phil Frenham, realize that the eyes symbolize Culwin’s conscience, which confronts him whenever he contemplates—or is in the process of—harming someone emotionally or intellectually; our fi nal image of Culwin is of a broken, abandoned man. Wharton gives her well-known ghost story, first published in Scribner’s Magazine and included in Tales of Men and Ghosts, the form of a framework narrative in which the present can interact with, and pass verdict on, the past. Claiming to have experienced the events he recounts, Culwin, an older man,


reveals himself to be egotistical and manipulative; he does not consciously set out to harm others, but his emotional coolness and his fear of commitment allow him to abandon others at will, often when they are in greatest emotional need. All his life Culwin has been attracted to youth and youthful beauty, especially male youth and male good looks, and he enjoys the company of these young adults until they place too many demands on him. Once that occurs, Culwin severs contact with the individuals, often destroying them in the process, and in his mind, he prepares an elaborate rationalization and justification for his behavior. As the short story progresses, readers grow to know the real Culwin, whereas it appears that he entertains certain romanticized ideas about his attitudes and actions. As the frame story draws to a close, Culwin— looking into a mirror and realizing that the eyes that have haunted him are his own eyes—is finally confronted with his callousness, coldness, and speculative ways, and he recoils from the impact. At the same time, Phil Frenham, Culwin’s latest youthful male companion, catches a glimpse of the real Culwin, is overcome with fear and realization of the rejection that awaits him, and turns away from the older man. Critics respond variously to the homosexual themes in this story. Some commentators downplay this aspect of the text, focusing instead on Wharton’s portrayal of an obsessive lack of trust toward oneself and others; many reviewers, however, see in Andrew Culwin a figure reminiscent of Morton Fullerton, a bisexual journalist, with whom Wharton had a brief passionate affair and whose often ambivalent attitude toward women frustrated her.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss this story in relation to the tale titled “Hands” by SHERWOOD A NDERSON. How do the two central characters resemble and/or differ from one another? Which of the two characters is presented more sympathetically? How do social values current during the time of composition affect the authors’ presentation of both characters? 2. Study the use of eye imagery in this story and in Flannery O’Connor’s tale titled “Revelation.”

What personality traits do the central characters of both works have in common? In what ways does each character achieve a kind of revelation? How do the tones and styles of the two works differ? 3. Make a list of some of the story’s allusions to other literary works, to artworks, to classical figures, and/or to foreign persons or places. How do these allusions function in the tale? How do they relate to the themes of this story? How do they help characterize the speakers who use them? What do they imply about the nature of the intended audience for this work?

Ethan Frome (1911) His curiosity aroused about Starkfield, Massachusetts, and especially about three residents in a remote farmhouse, an unnamed narrator tells the story of Ethan Frome; his wife, Zeena; and her cousin, Mattie Silver; pieced together from the narrator’s personal observations and various conversations with local residents, the story focuses on the uneasy relationship between Ethan and Zeena and dissects Zeena’s jealousy and fear of Mattie. Readers learn that Ethan is dissatisfied with his marriage to Zeena and that he is attracted to Mattie, who sees in him hope for her otherwise grim future; feeling that he is caught in a cheerless marriage to Zeena, Ethan fantasizes about running away with Mattie and leaving his wife, Starkfield, and his obligations on the farm. Within a short period, he realizes that his dream will never become reality; he and Mattie make a suicide pact on the spur of the moment; and once their attempt to commit suicide fails, they are forced to return, spiritually broken and physically deformed, to Zeena and lead an existence fi lled with fi nancial anxiety, emotional strain, and self-recrimination. Destined to become Wharton’s best-known work, Ethan Frome was strongly praised by her contemporaries and retains a place of honor today on university and secondary school reading lists. It is, indeed, often the only work by Wharton to which many Americans are exposed. In general, the short novel,

Edith Wharton

fewer than 200 pages, is known for its effective narrative structure, its depiction of female interpersonal relationships, its treatment of sexual tension, and its comments on the pervasive influence of nature, society, and family on matters of everyday life. Also, it is said to be a commentary on Wharton’s feeling of imprisonment in her unsatisfying marriage to Teddy Wharton and her yearning for sexual and emotional fulfi llment elsewhere. Wharton’s novel has inspired two movie versions: a fi lm made in 1960 by Alex Segal and one in 1993 by John Madden. Many readers are intrigued by Wharton’s choice of narrator and mode of narration. She chooses an outsider to tell the story of Ethan, Zeena, and Mattie since that individual can proceed objectively and gain access to a variety of sources. In essence, the novel is as much about the narrator as it is about the main characters. Readers learn where the author’s sympathies lie while analyzing the narrator’s personality and his view of the role of the past in Starkfield. In general, the narrator feels admiration for Ethan and views his efforts to support Zeena and Mattie and maintain the family farm as a noble sacrifice. It is important to note that the narrator does not present a reportlike listing of events; he uses interviews, face-to-face interaction with Ethan, and knowledge of human nature to create a work that explains as well as describes the past and present. Equally noteworthy is Wharton’s nuanced portrayal of women and their emotional and psychological composition. At fi rst, a reader might be tempted to be critical of Zeena, calling her selfish and cold, and to favor Mattie, who seems to be warm and natural. But by the end of the novel, readers, having gained insight into what causes Zeena to act the way she does, might be willing to excuse some of her behavior. Moreover, originally sympathetic to Mattie, some readers grow critical of her once they discover her quick transition to a shrew after the accident. Indeed, Mattie is just as desperate for understanding and acceptance as Zeena, and she is equally driven in her struggle for Ethan’s heart and soul. Each woman sees Ethan as her only chance at a life with some happiness, autonomy, and security.

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Readers are also fascinated by Wharton’s treatment of determinism in the text. Within the fi rst few pages of the novel, the narrator illustrates how the climate and the natural world exert influence on the mood of Starkfield’s inhabitants, preparing the way for consideration of how family heritage, physical environment, and social class shape individuals and affect events. As the narrator relates Ethan’s history, readers discover a man who feels overwhelmed by family responsibilities and who cannot free himself from what he believes to be family expectations. Even though most members of his family died long ago, Ethan senses their presence; in his eyes, the headstones on their graves, located near his farm, are like sentinels who guard and enforce family custom. The farm on the outskirts of Starkfield has been in the family possession for years; Ethan feels that it is his duty to maintain the property to his dying breath. What is more, memories haunt Ethan and cause him to feel obligated to Zeena. He remembers, for example, that Zeena took good care of his mother, and the image of Zeena looking after his sick mother reminds him that he is in her debt. In addition, the cold, stark, repressed atmosphere surrounding Ethan’s everyday life mirrors the snow-covered, frozen portrait of nature. Passages in the novel dwelling on winter storms, ice-packed ponds, and mind-numbing cold are juxtaposed with descriptions of Ethan’s despair and inability to act. Furthermore, the lack of social mobility in rural Massachusetts plays a role in Ethan’s acceptance of the idea that he has no chance for advancement. Reflecting the frozen state of nature, the structure of society and its economy are unchanging and unchangeable; an invisible, yet permanent wall stands between the haves and the have-nots. Wharton’s text may also be read with an emphasis on sexual themes. A reader can easily view the story as a tale of inhibited sexual satisfaction. To all intents and purposes, Ethan and Zeena lead a sterile, passionless marriage. Although Ethan is described as a robust, virile, athletic farmer who is good-looking and successful in attracting the attention of the opposite sex, Zeena is depicted as sexless, shriveled, and unapproachable. When Mattie


arrives to stay with them, Ethan begins to sense that he may have found an outlet for his pent-up sexual energy. While Zeena has always acted aloof and reproachful, Mattie gives Ethan admiring looks, laughs at his jokes, and encourages him to communicate with her. Wharton presents Mattie in a very favorable light when describing her appearance and personality. She unleashes feelings in Ethan that he was scarcely aware of, and he falls totally under her spell. Once Mattie realizes that she has no chance of experiencing a passionate relationship with Ethan, she proposes a suicide pact: She suggests that they go on a wild sled ride together and collide with a huge tree; the crash will kill them instantly and allow them to be together in eternity. Ethan, feeling equally desperate and frustrated, agrees. Some readers see in the description of the sled ride—a rushing, bumpy adventure ending in a head-on collision with a tree—a reference to sexual intercourse and climax. Ethan and Mattie’s sled ride, however, does not provide the satisfaction or release they hoped to achieve. As Ethan and Mattie start down the hill, the image of Zeena seems to be waiting for Ethan at the bottom, and he is unable to crash the sled head-on into the tree, veering to the right instead. As a result, the two would-be lovers are cheated out of their ecstasy and eternal togetherness, and they are forced to lead the lives of handicapped people. Our fi nal image of them as they spend the rest of their miserable lives together in the rundown farmhouse is of two failed lovers who never achieve physical intimacy. Not all reviewers give the novel unequivocal praise. One criticism is that Ethan Frome is too bleak and that it paints a picture of a world completely without hope and without relief. Some commentators claim that the New England fall with its vivid colors or the summer and spring with their rejuvenating effects on nature are not sufficiently considered. If the frigidity of winter imprisons the residents literally and figuratively, what are the effects of spring and summer? Why does winter overshadow the other seasons? Finally, some readers quibble with the reasonableness of the suicide pact and its enactment. They cannot empathize with Ethan and Mattie’s grief, their desperation, and their emotional and psychological stress, and

they regard the sled ride into the tree as a fairly ridiculous way to commit suicide.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the issue of suicide (or attempted suicide) as it appears in this novel and in EDWIN A RLINGTON ROBINSON’s poem “Richard Cory.” How do the motivations that lead to suicide differ in the two works? Which characters—Wharton’s or Robinson’s—seem to lead more desperate lives? What are the implied attitudes of the authors toward the suicide attempts they describe? 2. Discuss the use of seasonal imagery in this novel and in JACK L ONDON’s short story “The Law of Life.” How does the imagery contribute to tone, meaning, and atmosphere in both works? Do the works share any similarities of theme? What does each work imply about the nature of life? 3. Discuss the use of rural New England settings in Wharton’s novel and in ROBERT FROST’s poem “The Death of the Hired Man.” In each work, how does the setting contribute to the mood, tone, and meaning of the piece? What kind of life (and what kind of socioeconomic status) is taken for granted in each work? 4. Compare and contrast Wharton’s book with NELLA L ARSEN’s novel Quicksand, especially the closing chapters of that book. What are some obvious differences between the two works in terms of setting, plot, and characterization, but how do both books end bleakly and emphasize fi nal frustration? What are the sources of frustration in each case? 5. How, if at all, does Wharton prevent Zeena from becoming a completely unsympathetic character? How does she present Zeena so that she seems complex rather than simplistic? How, by the same token, does Wharton do the same with Mattie and Ethan? How does she darken and complicate our views of them?

Summer (1917) Employing elements of a 19th-century sentimental tale of romance and a traditional coming-of-age

Edith Wharton

saga, Wharton tells the story of four months in the life of Charity Royall, a 17-year-old girl from North Dormer, a small town in Massachusetts, who experiences sexual awakening and independence but who eventually renounces her freedom in favor of small-town social order and security. Intellectually, emotionally, and sexually frustrated at the home of her guardian, Lawyer Royall, Charity, who works at the local library and who is ripening physically in the way fruit matures as spring passes to summer, meets Lucius Harney, an attractive, stimulating man from New York; becomes infatuated with Harney; is seduced by him; and agrees to regular meetings in an abandoned house in an orchard. Harney eventually leaves town, intending never to return, and Charity, learning that she is pregnant, decides to run away to an impoverished place called the Mountain, where her mother still lives. Once there, Charity learns that her mother has died, and, recognizing that she will never feel comfortable among the primitive, unfeeling people of the area, she chooses to return to North Dormer; trudging toward an uncertain future, Charity is met by Lawyer Royall, who offers to marry her. Although disappointed that Harney regards her as a mere summer fl ing, Charity does not succumb to melancholy; she makes a match with Lawyer Royall, obtaining security and social standing in the community, but she retains in her heart and mind memories of her fi rst exhilarating experience with sexual, economic, and social freedom. Calling Summer her “hot Ethan,” Wharton gives a clue about what she saw as the main theme of the story. While the cold, bleak, snow-fi lled winter in Ethan Frome freezes any outburst of human emotion and puts obstacles in the way of social advancement or change, Summer’s sense of warmth, promise, and vigor encourages the expression of sexual desire and the testing of social constraints. The physical world reinforces Wharton’s themes of romance and education. Charity is presented early in the text as a moist bud on the verge of opening. She gains knowledge of physical love through Lucius Harney, a stranger who visits North Dormer. Introducing a sense of the exotic and forbidden, he seduces Charity, and readers become witnesses to

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their passion when the two meet in a small home in a garden setting. Wharton avoids all comparisons with tawdry tales of sexual exploits; instead, her accounts of the meetings between Charity and Harney emphasize the spiritual and emotional benefits of mutually satisfying sex. Some commentators claim that by writing this novel, Wharton is paying tribute to the life-changing sexual liaison she had with Morton Fullerton eight years earlier. Fleeing a marriage characterized by sexual coldness and emotional aloofness, Wharton discovered a realm of experiences and sensations of which she had scarcely been aware. Eager to incorporate this sensory world into her writing, Wharton took the opportunity to use Summer to highlight her new thematic concern. Of special interest is the way in which Wharton deals with the topic of sex. She does not present sex as a prelude to any type of idealized home life in which the woman assumes the roles of wife and mother; in fact, Charity, successfully putting all thoughts of marriage out of her mind, regards sex as an antidote to boredom and is chiefly interested in the momentary pleasure that the sexual act offers. Just as summer must pass to fall, Charity’s relationship with Harney cannot last forever. He has fulfi lled his mission of enabling her to see the world around her in a different light, to question rules of propriety, and to view her existence without pretense. As her time with Harney ends, Charity suspects that she is pregnant and must quickly fi nd her place in the world. Although she initially experiences a period of desperation, Charity is no longer the inexperienced girl she was previously. She looks at her environment with critical, calculating eyes and discovers admirable qualities in a man she previously detested: Lawyer Royall. Royall is Charity’s guardian, and the girl Charity rails against him at the beginning of Summer in the way an uncooperative prisoner fights against a guard or warden. Originally Royall, his home, and her life there symbolize tradition, dependence, and denial. Charity’s work at the library, her relationship with Harney, and her fl ight to the Mountain represent rebellion against Royall. Toward the end of the novel, Charity observes Royall with a different attitude and

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judges him according to different standards. What she saw before as stifl ing tradition takes on the aura of security. What she saw as monotony turns into reliability. And what she took to be inflexibility has the positive attributes of strength. The novel ends with Charity’s accepting Royall’s offer of marriage and returning to his home in North Dormer. Our fi nal glimpse of Charity is not of a young, carefree girl or of a sex-starved harlot; instead, we fi nd a rather contemplative figure. At this point, Charity seems to be most concerned about the welfare of her child and her own freedom from hardship. Earlier she turned to Harney for physical pleasure; now she turns to Royall for future comfort. Many critics have commented on the rather ambiguous ending that Wharton provides. Is the fi nal image of Charity one of a woman who is pondering her inability to make significant changes in her destiny? Does she feel that Royall has taken advantage of the fact that she has few other possibilities in the rural Massachusetts community? Has Charity sacrificed adventure and personal freedom for stability and social respectability? Has she accepted limitations created by a society dominated by self-serving males? Wharton does not provide a direct answer to these questions. The reader must determine whether Charity, in the future, will behave like a young, wild woman, unable to focus her energy on accomplishing any one given task, or whether she will put the knowledge gained from her adventures of the past months to use in order to fi nd and maintain her position in the world and pass on her spirit and zest for life to her baby. In keeping with the idea that Summer represents Wharton’s “hot Ethan,” critical response to the novel has been heated, and the text is regarded as one of Wharton’s most controversial works. On the one hand, critics praise the author’s ability to mold characteristics of popular fiction, especially the romance novel, to form a unique work of art without creating a mawkish story that strives to bring tears to the eyes of readers. Also, Wharton does not create a nostalgic tone for the end of her novel. Readers have the feeling that Wharton wants to emphasize Charity’s capacity for the future— not dwell on a melancholic Charity, who pines

for the past. Furthermore, according to commentators, Wharton writes a believable text, one that points to the long-standing abuse and exploitation of young women by predatory men. On the other hand, some reviewers—especially those writing in Wharton’s day—have viewed the subject matter and the incidents as shocking and inappropriate for cultured readers. Although most people in the 21st century no longer fi nd the text and its events to be an affront to their sensibilities, Summer’s subject matter and the text’s language and descriptions are still used by some individuals to criticize the text; however, in this day and age the reasoning is different: Readers—especially young readers—fi nd the text lacking in details and written too delicately and fi nely to satisfy their prurient tastes.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read Wharton’s novel alongside Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, and then discuss the two works as coming-of-age stories. How do the two main characters differ from and/or resemble one another? How are the conclusions of the two books comparable and/or distinct? What role does geographical setting play in each work? 2. Compare and contrast Wharton’s book with Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. How does each work present a young woman’s development? How are the male characters in both works similar and/or different? How do the conclusions of the two works differ? Discuss the use of imagery of nature in both works. 3. Discuss Wharton’s novel in relation to the novel titled Quicksand by Nella Larsen. How are the two works comparable and/or distinct in terms of plot, central characters, themes, and conclusions? What roles do race, ethnicity, and gender play in the two books? Which of the two central characters is more appealing and/or sympathetic? 4. Compare and contrast the fi rst and fi nal chapters of this novel. Discuss their similarities and/ or differences in such matters as imagery, tone, atmosphere, characterization, and setting. How, specifically, has the main character changed

Edith Wharton

between the opening and fi nal chapters? What is the fi nal “moral” or “message” or “meaning” of this book?

The Age of Innocence (1920) Set in New York in the 1870s, The Age of Innocence tells of the engagement and marriage of Newland Archer and May Welland, two members of high society’s most prestigious families; although Newland admires May and her standing amid the rich, cultured, and influential, he gradually develops an interest in Ellen Olenska, May’s cousin, who married a count in Europe but who has returned to New York amid talk of marital infidelity and an impending divorce. Newland feels drawn to both women: On the one hand, May represents respectability, status, and tradition; on the other hand, Ellen appears exotic and ushers in hints of passion, forbidden excitement, and freedom. In the end, even after much talk of love and desire for Ellen, Newland chooses a life with May, guaranteeing for himself comfort, security, and companionship; however, there is an opportunity years later, once May has died and Newland and May’s children have grown up, for Newland to be reunited with Ellen, but he rejects it, giving Wharton’s novel an ambiguous ending: Is Newland yielding to the power of society and its expectations, or do the many years together with May mean more to him than he at first thought? Drawing on memories from her childhood and youth and supplementing them with knowledge gained from conversations with family members and friends, Wharton paints a realistic portrait of the social elite in New York during the last quarter of the 19th century. On occasion, the novel strikes the reader as somewhat nostalgic since members of the New York elite of the 1920s, the time when Wharton was writing her novel, bore little resemblance to the people described in Wharton’s novel. Elsewhere, she deals with the transformation that New York experiences as the elite of birth and heritage are replaced by the rich industrial barons and their families. Some critics focus on Wharton’s commentary on New York society. All the characters—includ-

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ing Ellen—live their lives in the shadow of what they believe society expects of them. They see their existence as one demanding obedience to rules, fulfi llment of duties, and conformity to standards of proper behavior. People are expected to sacrifice their individualism in order to preserve social order and harmony. It is important to note that the code of conduct is not written down; it has been internalized by every member of the elite. Members of this class normally do not consciously consider their actions and attitudes; they act on instinct. Characters who behave differently are considered outcasts. Newland might toy with the idea of abandoning social conventions and daydream about ignoring the demands of respectability, but he never arrives at the stage of acting on his ponderings. He unconsciously restrains himself and yields to the pressure of society. In the end, he acts as superficially well bred and refi ned as any other member of the elite. Ellen, too, submits to the authority of society. Although she appears to rebel, she does not have the strength to confront the power of social expectations for long. Quickly and efficiently, she is marginalized and expelled—fi rst to Washington, D.C., and then to Europe. While she might continue to exhibit her maverick tendencies abroad, she turns out to be no match for high society in New York. Wharton’s novel is, therefore, often read as an attack on that group’s suppression of individualism. Other commentators divide their time between analyzing Newland Archer and contrasting May Welland and Ellen Olenska. Criticism of Newland is harsh. For some people, Newland is weak and unable to break away from traditions that threaten to crush him and his chance at happiness. At first glance, Newland resembles the men around him. He dresses as they do, talks as they do, has the same type of career as they do, and worries about the same types of issues as they do. Gradually, the narrator gives hints that Newland has started to question the oppressive power of tradition and society. We learn that he hesitates to accept prevailing opinion about events of the day and the alleged missteps of other members of high society, but he never risks any type of open rebellion, fearing the cost to his reputation and future prospects. However, after he has had


more and more contact with Ellen and sees how New York society rejects her, he begins to act on what he had only thought before. For example, he talks and interacts with Ellen in a public forum when decorum would dictate a type of shunning. He visits her home when others would rather cross the street to avoid contact with her. And he is less than convincing when he carries out his assignment to urge her to think of her family and friends and to put an end to her plans to divorce her husband. During the course of the novel, Newland’s feelings for Ellen change from admiration to desire. Ellen symbolizes everything that is far from Newland’s existence: spontaneity, emotion, independence, and defiance. Although members of the same family, May and Ellen represent opposing types of women. May epitomizes New York society’s ideal of young womanhood. Everything she says and does is in accord with that group’s expectations; in fact, it is noteworthy that she spends little if any time reflecting on what is proper. May knows instinctively what is appropriate. She is aware, for example, of the proper behavior of a daughter in matters of engagement and marriage. She knows how to navigate the tricky waters of partygoing and partygiving. She also behaves automatically in the proper manner when interacting with her fiancé. Descriptions of her physical appearance and clothing praise her natural beauty and grace, but she is also made to seem like one of a mass of attractive, well-dressed, wealthy young women. Even in her place of residence, readers fi nd that May chooses something that is luxurious but not ostentatious. After all, her acquaintances live in well-outfitted, noteworthy homes, and it would not be proper that May’s house should attract any more attention than murmurs of approval. Conversely, Ellen delivers a slap to the face of society. There is no chance that she will blend in with the other young women. From childhood on, she has exhibited a streak of strongwilled defiance. She married someone not only outside the elite group of families in New York but a foreigner. She has led a high-profi le existence rather than one of modesty. And she is rumored to have given in to a woman’s yearning for emotional and physical satisfaction by abandoning her husband

and running away with his male secretary. Even in matters of dress and appearance, Ellen is unusual. Her clothing is striking in color and memorable in cut; she exudes vitality and unrestrained physical charm. Even the way she holds her body and her manner of speech are different from what society expects. Finally, while in New York, Ellen rents a home that is not located in the fashionable part of town, and she regularly invites outcasts from high society to her home for entertainment. Quite often, critics dwell on the view of Newland as a man caught between these two women. He professes love for both, but he is referring to two kinds of love. His attraction to May rests on his familiarity with New York and high society. By marrying her, he can assure himself of continued acceptance by that group. His interest in Ellen is tied to his skepticism about social propriety and decorum, and his pursuit of Ellen reflects his curiosity about a world with which he is completely unfamiliar. Throughout much of the novel, a battle rages in Newland’s soul. Obligation to May is countered by thoughts of adventure with Ellen; understanding and compassion for Ellen are ambushed by reminders of May’s stellar reputation and Ellen’s failure to gain the respect of New York’s powerful elite. In the end, Newland pursues a life with May, following the established pattern of engagement, marriage, and parenthood. Many readers assume that weakness alone drives Newland to marry May. At the end of the novel, Wharton tells of the death of May and an opportunity for Newland to rekindle his romance with Ellen. Once again, Newland does not reach out to Ellen. Many readers feel that Newland is still concerned about Ellen’s bad reputation in society or that he is still wrestling with indecisiveness. Other readers believe that different emotions and concerns are at work here. Even though Newland initially speaks of his marriage with May in what might sound like disparaging or indifferent terms, readers quickly learn that the bond that grew between them was strong, even if it was a bond of shared interest and mutual respect rather than one of excitement and romance. Newland might not want to be so quick to question that bond. Also, Newland has grown more percep-

Edith Wharton

tive with age. He realizes that some of the longing for Ellen that he experiences at the moment is really a veiled longing for his youth and the past. He asks himself what he really knows about the present Ellen and seems to doubt that one can recapture the dreams and desires of youth. The fi nal factor in his decision not to meet Ellen is an incident recounted by his son. Newland learns that May understood him better than he thought and that she realized what he gave up for her sake; she held him in high esteem for the rest of her life, and he is reluctant now to act in a way that would dishonor the memory of their life together. By the time the novel was published, Wharton had been traveling in Europe and living in France for several years. She was already an established writer with an excellent reputation, and The Age of Innocence shows her in top form. In fact, Wharton was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1921. Her novel has inspired fi lmmakers since its appearance; a movie version of the text was directed by Martin Scorsese and released in 1990.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Wharton’s book with the novel by W. E. B. DUBOIS titled The Quest of the Silver Fleece. How are the two works similar in plots, themes, protagonists, and the moral choices they present? How are they dissimilar in setting, characterization, style, and the socioeconomic and ethnic details they depict? 2. Discuss Wharton’s book in relation to Gertrude Stein’s novel The Making of Americans. How do the books differ in style? How are they similar and/or different in their presentation of issues of social class, economic status, and family relationships? How are gender relationships, the roles of men and women, presented in both works? 3. What role does social class play not only in Wharton’s novel but also in F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’s The Great Gatsby? In what ways are both Gatsby and Ellen outsiders? To what degree and in what ways are both of these characters sympathetic or appealing? In what ways are the conclusions of both books tragic? How does each

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author depict the relations between individuals and the larger societies in which they live? 4. Focus on some descriptions of the ways people dress in the novel and discuss how their costuming is relevant to their characters or personalities. How much variation is there in the ways people dress in the book, and how and why are the differences revealing?

“Roman Fever” (1934, 1936) Alida Slade and Grace Ansley have lunch together on the terrace of a restaurant overlooking the Coliseum and Forum in Rome. World War I has ended, and the women take advantage of the calm to discuss the present and the past. Quickly Alida and Grace reveal themselves as fierce competitors who duel spitefully over who has had the happier life. Alida is dissatisfied with her daughter, but she feels that she is luckier than Grace because she won Delphin Slade, the man both women desired, and was married to him for 25 years; she mocks Grace by revealing a cruel joke: Alida sent a note to Grace in Delphin’s name and invited her to a rendezvous at the Coliseum; Alida imagined that Grace would never respond to such a bold offer. Grace, less combative and more reserved, has produced a socially graceful, beautiful daughter who will become a leader in high society; as she is taunted by Alida, she admits that she answered the note, met Delphin at the Coliseum, had sexual intercourse with him, and as a result became pregnant by him, the latter information given in the form of a vicious stab at Alida’s pride. First published in the magazine Liberty and later in the short story collection The World Over, “Roman Fever” is generally considered a fi ne example of Wharton’s skill and sensitivity, and it is also admired for many other reasons. Some critics praise Wharton for her ability to detail the impact of the past on the present: That is, to show that our understanding of the present depends on the way we interpret the past. If our view of the past is challenged and found to be faulty, it means that our concept of the present might be just as incorrect. Other critics take special

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note of Wharton’s portrayal of female relationships. Both Alida and Grace derive a great deal of strength and pleasure from their rivalry with each other. Unlike men, who (according to some commentators) normally tend less to harbor long-term grudges or allow resentment to smolder over a period of many years, women allegedly seem to fixate on perceived injustices and allow feelings of bitterness to harm their relationships with other women. According to this view, Wharton points out that women are often their own worst enemies. Other readers note the discrepancy between the historical importance of the setting and the shallowness of the matter the two American women debate. Given Wharton’s critical stance toward the United States and its culture of commercialism and superficiality, it seems likely that she intends to comment on the narrow-mindedness of Alida and Grace and to emphasize their shocking lack of appreciation of place and time.

2.

3.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the behavior of competitive women in this story and in Nella Larsen’s novel titled Passing. What role do men play in the competitiveness depicted in both works? How do the conclusions of the two works differ? What role does a concern with socioeconomic status play in both works? 2. Discuss the ways competitiveness is presented in this work and in Zora Neale Hurston’s story “The Gilded Six-Bits.” How are issues of class and sexuality connected in both works? Are there any fundamental differences and/or similarities between the ways men and women compete in these works? 3. Discuss the relevance of the title to the story. In what various ways is the title appropriate? How does the significance of the title grow and expand as the story develops?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON WHARTON AND HER WORK 1. One of Wharton’s admirers (and a good friend) was Henry James, and their styles of writing are

4.

5.

sometimes said to be similar. In fact, Wharton has at times been accused of being too indebted to James. Research and describe the main elements of James’s style of writing, compare his style with Wharton’s, and explain whether or not you think such claims of excessive indebtedness are justified. Some commentators ignore the sexual themes in Wharton’s writings. Read three general discussions of the treatment of sexual themes in literature and discuss the ways in which two of Wharton’s novels incorporate these themes. What statement does Wharton make about the relationships between men and women? Are the relationships depicted in the novels healthy or unhealthy? In her prose, Wharton makes use of the socalled narrative frame or frame story, which was especially popular among 19th-century western European authors. Provide a brief defi nition of that structural device. Identify two practitioners in world literature. Compare their use of that style of narration with Wharton’s. Why do you think authors might choose to write a frame story? The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence both examine the role of women in New York City’s high society in the second half of the 19th century. What advantages and disadvantages did women experience at that time? How were they prepared for their roles? How aware were men and women of social expectations? What was the fate of a woman who challenged society? How does Wharton feel about the status of women at that time? Justify your responses. Often a careful reading of an author’s nonfiction texts can offer insight into the creative process and suggestions for an interpretation of a novel, short story, or poem. Select one of Wharton’s novels discussed in this entry and fi nd relevant commentary in The Writing of Fiction and A Backward Glance. What does Wharton say about the origin, genesis, and understanding of the particular work of fiction? What information does she supply that you do not fi nd in the work itself?

Edith Wharton

6. Reread the quotation at the beginning of the biographical entry. Consult relevant sections of Wharton’s autobiography, A Backward Glance, and identify which aspects of early 20th-century American society are viewed by the author with disapproval. How are these negative American “tastes” treated in two of her novels? 7. Wharton often examines the role of determinism in shaping the lives of her characters. Examine her portrayal of Zeena in Ethan Frome and Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence. How do society, family heritage, and the physical world in which these characters live impact their present and govern their future? 8. On the one hand, Wharton is praised for her realistic depiction of women in New York City’s high society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and for her keen eye for motivation. On the other hand, she has been faulted for her reluctance to present women in meaningful, mutually beneficial relationships with one another. Examine The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence, identify the main female characters, and evaluate their relationships with other women. How do the women interact with one another? Why do they behave the ways they do? 9. Common themes in works by Wharton include the quest for freedom and the repressive power of propriety and decorum in social intercourse. Both male and female characters are shown struggling against limitations and restrictions created by members of their social class, yet these characters ultimately acquiesce to the demands of their surroundings. Examine how Wharton treats these themes as she writes about the lead male characters in Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence. 10. Many of Wharton’s novels have been turned into movies, and fi lm companies often choose to emphasize a social concern or plot device that readers might consider of secondary importance. Compare the book and movie versions of The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. Identify two issues in each novel that you think Wharton wants to highlight. View the fi lms and list two issues that the

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screenwriter and director underscore. How do the differences impact one’s understanding of the works in question? WORKS CITED

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Ammons, Elizabeth. Edith Wharton’s Argument with America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980. Auchincloss, Louis. Edith Wharton: A Woman in Her Time. New York: Viking, 1971. Bell, Millicent, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ———. Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Story of Their Friendship. New York: Braziller, 1965. Benstock, Shari. No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. New York: Scribner, 1994. Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Edith Wharton. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Campbell, Donna. The Edith Wharton Society. Available online. URL: http://www.edithwhartonsociety.org/index.html. Accessed April 7, 2009. Erlich, Gloria C. The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Garrison, Stephen. Edith Wharton: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990. Goodman, Susan. Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1990. Holbrook, David. Edith Wharton and the Unsatisfactory Man. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Howe, Irving, ed. Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962. Joslin, Katherine. Edith Wharton. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Kellogg, Grace. The Two Lives of Edith Wharton: The Woman and Her Work. New York: AppletonCentury, 1965. Killoran, Helen. The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton. Rochester, N.Y., and Suffolk, England: Camden House, 2001. Lauer, Kristin O., and Margaret P. Murray. Edith Wharton: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1990.

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Lubbock, Percy. Portrait of Edith Wharton. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1947. The Mount Estate and Gardens. Available online. URL: http://www.edithwharton.org. Accessed April 7, 2009. McDowell, Margaret B. Edith Wharton. Rev. ed. by Twayne Series. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. Pennell, Melissa McFarland. Student Companion to Edith Wharton. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2003. Singley, Carol J., ed. A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Walton, Geoffrey. Edith Wharton: A Critical Interpretation. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970. Wershoven, Carol. The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton. London: Associated University Press, 1982. Wharton, Edith, ed. The Book of the Homeless. New York: Scribner, 1916. ———. The Buccaneers. Completed by Marion Mainwaring. New York: Penguin, 1993. ———. Collected Stories, 1891–1910. Edited by Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America, 2001. ———. Collected Stories, 1911–1937. Edited by Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America, 2001. ———. Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort. New York: Scribner, 1915. ———. The Fruit of the Tree. New York: Scribner, 1907. ———. The Glimpses of the Moon. New York: Appleton, 1922. ———. The Gods Arrive. New York: Appleton, 1932.

———. Hudson River Bracketed. New York: Appleton, 1929. ———. The Letters of Edith Wharton. Edited by R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis. New York: Scribner, 1988. ———. Novellas and Other Writings: Madame de Treymes, Ethan Frome, Summer, Old New York, The Mother’s Recompense, A Backward Glance. Edited by Cynthia Griffin Wolff. New York: Library of America, 1990. ———. Novels: The House of Mirth, The Reef, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence. Edited by R. W. B. Lewis. New York: Library of America, 1985. ———. Sanctuary. New York: Scribner, 1903. ———. Selected Poems. Edited by Louis Auchincloss. New York: Library of America, 2005. ———. The Touchstone. New York: Scribner, 1900 ———. Twilight Sleep. New York: Appleton, 1927. ———. The Uncollected Critical Writings of Edith Wharton. Edited by Frederick Wegener. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996. ———. The Valley of Decision. 2 vols. New York: Scribner, 1902. ———. The Writing of Fiction. New York: Scribner, 1925. Wharton, Edith, and Ogden Codman, Jr. The Decoration of Houses. New York: Scribner, 1897. White, Barbara A. Edith Wharton: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1991. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

David V. Witkosky

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” (The Bridge of San Luis Rey)

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lthough Thornton Wilder is the only writer ever to win Pulitzer Prizes both for fiction and drama, and although his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey has been read by millions while his play Our Town is one of the most frequently performed dramas ever written, Wilder has not been accorded the kind of intense attention from scholars and critics that these achievements would seem to warrant. On the one hand, his very popularity has made some analysts suspect that his writing may be somewhat superficial; on the other hand, the bookish qualities of some of his works have led, over the years, to accusations that his work is too literary, too much a product of libraries, and thus too remote from everyday life. Paradoxically, then, Wilder has been accused of being both too popular and too elitist, and both charges have inhibited a fuller appreciation of his accomplishments. Wilder, along with a twin brother who died immediately at birth, was born on April 17, 1897, in Madison, Wisconsin, to Isabella Niven Wilder and Amos Parker Wilder. Both parents were well educated and comfortably middle-class. Amos, a graduate of Yale University, was the editor of the Wisconsin State Journal at the time of Thornton’s birth; he was a deeply religious but also an eminently practical man who believed both in being godly and in doing good. His commitment to public service led to his appointment, in 1906, as consul general in Hong Kong. Thornton, his mother, and his two sis-

ters lived there briefly at first, but Mrs. Wilder and the children returned to the United States later that year, and Thornton attended school in Berkeley, California. The family was briefly reunited in 1909 when Thornton’s father became consul general in Shanghai, China. Thornton and one of his sisters, however, were soon attending a school fairly distant from Shanghai, and then in 1911 Mrs. Wilder and two of her daughters (including Janet, born in 1910) moved to Italy. Meanwhile, in 1912 Thornton himself returned to California, where he and his elder brother, Amos, attended school together in Ojai before Thornton graduated from high school in Berkeley in 1915. By this stage in his life his intense interest in reading and writing literature had already manifested itself; he had already authored some short plays, and his commitment to the imagination was already so strong that his father worried that he was raising an impractical son. Wilder entered Oberlin College in Ohio in 1915. While there he continued to pursue his literary interests; he wrote a number of plays, authored stories and poems, and had the good fortune to have contact with a particularly inspiring teacher (Charles Wager), who helped broaden his intellectual horizons even further by encouraging him to study numerous classic writers, especially the ancients and the continental Europeans. By the time Wilder transferred to Yale University in 1917, his commitment to the literary life had grown even

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stronger; he wrote a prizewinning play, was strongly involved with a collegiate literary society, and made friends with other campus writers. Problems with his eyesight prevented him from serving in the regular military after the United States entered World War I in 1917, but he did serve for half a year in the coast guard artillery and was always strongly patriotic. After graduating from Yale in 1920, he studied archaeology for a year at the American Academy in Rome—an experience that not only helped shape his strong view of the vastness of historical time, but also helped lead to the production of a partly autobiographical fi rst novel, originally titled “Memoirs of a Roman Student” and later published (in 1926) as The Cabala. When Wilder returned from Rome in 1921, his father had already found him a practical job as a teacher at a prestigious boys’ boarding school in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, not far from Princeton. Wilder was a committed and successful teacher, but he also managed to fi nd time to continue writing, publishing various short works in a number of small literary magazines. In 1925–26 he left Lawrenceville temporarily to pursue a master’s degree in French at Princeton University, and he also began his long affi liation with the MacDowell Colony (a retreat for writers and other artists) in New Hampshire. When The Cabala appeared in spring 1926, many reviewers praised it. During the summer Wilder was in Paris, where he met a number of significant literary figures (including ERNEST H EMINGWAY), and by the end of that year he saw his play The Trumpet Shall Sound produced in New York. All these achievements of 1926, however, were as nothing compared to the life-transforming events of 1927. Having returned to his teaching duties at Lawrenceville, Wilder awaited the publication of his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which appeared that fall. A brief, lyrical, and philosophical book set in a remote time and place, it was not expected to earn a wide readership, but such expectations proved spectacularly wrong. The novel was widely praised by reviewers, was snapped up enthusiastically by hundreds of thousands of readers, and soon became an international sensation. By 1928 it had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize and was already

earning Wilder so much money that he was able to end his teaching career, travel widely in Europe, and, in 1929, build a large house for himself, his parents, and a sister in Hamden, Connecticut. By the end of the 1920s he was one of America’s bestselling and most widely respected authors; he lectured throughout the country and, in 1930, even began teaching part-time at the University of Chicago. At the beginning of that year his new novel, The Woman of Andros, appeared in print. Wilder seemed to be riding high. In October 1929, however, the country had suffered a stock market crash so severe that the resulting economic disaster, which quickly engulfed the whole world, soon became known as the Great Depression. Desperate times and desperate feelings lasted for much of the 1930s, and, at the beginning of the decade, Wilder was suddenly accused of being hopelessly out of touch with the realities of ordinary American life. In October of that year Michael Gold, a prominent Marxist critic, used the pages of the New Republic (an influential journal of opinion) to attack Wilder, and especially his latest novel (set in classical Rome), of catering to a taste for frivolous escapism among the leisured classes. Although many prominent writers rose to Wilder’s defense, and although Wilder himself never explicitly responded to the charges at any length, the ensuing controversy damaged his reputation and may even have shaken his own confidence in the kinds of directions he had previously been pursuing. In any case, as the 1930s wore on, he turned his attention increasingly to the theater, publishing in 1931 a collection of one-act plays called The Long Christmas Dinner, staging a translation of a play by André Obey in 1932 (published in 1933 as Lucrèce), and then issuing, in 1935, his fi rst novel set in the United States (Heaven’s My Destination). By this point, too, Wilder had become friends with the eccentric but highly influential and idiosyncratically pro-American writer GERTRUDE STEIN, who helped encourage his new enthusiasm for American topics and experimental styles of writing. During 1937 (while in Europe), Wilder was at work on three different plays: an adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, an adaptation of Johan Nestroy’s

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Einen jux will er sich machen, and a play largely of his own invention that would soon make him even more famous, even more respected, and even more wealthy. This play—titled Our Town—puzzled and perplexed many of its initial audiences, especially when it opened in Boston. With its mostly bare stage setting and its highly unconventional use of a character called the “Stage Manager” (who functions partly as a narrator and partly as an interpreter, in the manner of the ancient Greek chorus), the play proved problematic for many who first saw it, and initial audiences were also unsure how to react to the appearances of “dead” characters speaking in a cemetery at the end. Soon, however, the play—with its focus on small-town American life and its theme that humans do not appreciate the beauty of existence until they have lost it—became a sensation. After its highly successful run on Broadway, it began to be widely performed in regional theaters and by amateur companies (including those in many high schools) around the nation and throughout the world. It was released on film in 1940 and has been produced and revived almost continuously in the decades since it first appeared, becoming one of the most popular serious plays in the entire repertoire of American theater. The claim has often been made (and it seems accurate) that Our Town is always being performed somewhere in the United States on almost every single night of the year. Needless to say, the work won Wilder his second Pulitzer Prize in 1938. Wilder would never again enjoy successes quite as striking as The Bridge and Our Town, but he remained a dedicated and productive author for another 30 years or more. In 1938 his play The Merchant of Yonkers had a brief run in New York, and by 1940 he was at work on a new play, The Skin of Our Teeth, which opened in 1942, by which time he had enlisted in the air force during World War II. Although two scholars accused the play of plagiarizing James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake (a book Wilder immensely admired), Wilder and most impartial observers considered his debt to the novel a case of legitimate literary influence rather than any sort of dishonorable theft. Indeed, in 1943 Wilder won his third Pulitzer Prize for the play, but most of his attention during this time was

consumed by his military duties. When the war ended in 1945, Wilder worked on an updating of Euripides’ ancient play Alcestis, but his next major literary production was his 1948 novel The Ides of March, which was set in classical Rome and which was chosen as a main selection by the influential Book of the Month Club. Meanwhile, Wilder was increasingly being acknowledged by the academic world: In 1950–51 he was invited to lecture at Harvard, which (along with Northwestern University) awarded him an honorary degree, and in 1952 he won the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1954 a revised version of The Merchant of Yonkers (now called The Matchmaker) was successfully staged, while in 1955 the Alcestis adaptation, titled A Life in the Sun, was staged in Edinburgh, Scotland. By the early 1960s Wilder had become an elder statesman of American letters—a status signaled by celebrations of his work performed for the presidential cabinet (in 1962), by his selection as a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, and by his reception in 1965 of the National Book Committee’s Medal for Literature, presented at the White House. Wilder, however, was not content to rest on his many laurels. In 1964 a musical adaptation of The Matchmaker (now called Hello, Dolly!) appeared on Broadway and became one of the most successful musicals ever staged, while in 1967 Wilder’s novel The Eighth Day not only became a best seller but received the National Book Award. Later, in 1973, Theophilus North, a novel loosely based on Wilder’s own experiences, was published and became another best seller. When he died on December 7, 1975, in his home in Hamden, Connecticut (in “the house The Bridge built”), Wilder was not only widely honored as an author but also widely respected as a man whose life had been characterized by enormous vitality, intelligence, generosity, and humility. Most people who met Wilder not only admired him but liked him, and even after his death he continued to receive recognition. When Our Town was restaged on Broadway in 1988—half a century after its fi rst production—it won a Tony Award, and the play remains a staple of the American theater, just as The Bridge of San Luis Rey maintains its status as

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a widely read and widely respected novel. If Wilder lacks the kind of critical reputation enjoyed by some other writers of the modern period, he nonetheless enjoys the affection and regard of many ordinary readers and theatergoers, who never seem to grow tired of his two greatest works.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) On July 20, 1714, a Catholic priest named Brother Juniper witnesses five people abruptly plunge to their deaths when an old but very fi ne suspension bridge high in the mountains of Peru suddenly collapses; the event leads Juniper to try to discover whether those particular five people died purely as a result of random chance or because of some deeper fate or providence. The five included the elderly marquesa de Montemayor and her youthful and devoted attendant, Pepita; a surviving twin brother named Esteban, who had been in deep mourning for the earlier death of his identical and much beloved sibling, Manuel; and fatherly Uncle Pio, who was accompanied on the bridge by the young son of a once-great actress named Camila Perichole, whose career Pio had shaped and nurtured from her youth. Juniper’s rationalistic efforts to make sense of the deaths lead, ironically, to his own persecution and death by the Inquisition, while the survivors of the victims—including the marquesa’s once-distant daughter, the aging actress who lost both a son and a loyal friend, and the charitable abbess who had been a kind of mother to Pepita—are left with enriched appreciations of their lost loved ones. Wilder’s novel was something of an anomaly in the serious fiction of the 1920s in America: While other authors were producing books set in the present day and describing in often exhaustive and even cynical detail the sometimes less-than-savory facts of contemporary life (including the grimmer aspects of urban living, the psychological scars left by World War I, the realities of an increasingly materialistic culture, and the growth of looser sexual behavior), Wilder set his book in a faraway time and place and produced a highly meditative

and reflective work, with religious and mystical overtones, whose central theme was the value and importance of love. The immense and immediate success of the book surprised everyone (including Wilder himself); readers were apparently ready for an alternative to documentary naturalism, with its gritty descriptions of external facts. There was (it seemed) an audience eager for a book such as Wilder’s, which dealt profoundly with the mysteries of human hearts, souls, and minds and with the subtleties of human relationships—a book that tried to explore such issues as the meaning (if any) of life, the role of accident or design in the universe, and the existence (or nonexistence) of God. During an era that prided itself on its tough-minded skepticism, hedonism, and sophistication, Wilder had produced a subtle, philosophical novel celebrating morality and old-fashioned charity. Wilder’s novel has been praised, over the years, for such stylistic qualities as simplicity, grace, picturesqueness, delicacy, and restraint, as well as for its allusiveness, subtle wit, understated irony, and avoidance of sentimentality (even though it deals with issues in which sentiment plays a vital role). One passage that illustrates many of the qualities mentioned describes how the previously selfi sh marquesa, transformed by her sudden realization of the selfless love displayed by young Pepita, vows to live a new life: She opened the door upon her balcony and looked at the great tiers of stars that glittered above the Andes. Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations. Then she took a candle into the next room and looked at Pepita as she slept, and pushed back the damp hair from the girl’s face. “Let me live now,” she whispered. “Let me begin again.” Two days later they started back to Lima, and while crossing the bridge of San Luis Rey the accident which we know befell them. (49)

Here, in miniature, are many of the typical features of Wilder’s style: the plain language that sometimes

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becomes almost lyrical; the simple gestures (such as the pushing back of the damp hair)—gestures that are full of implied meaning; the beauty of the universe set against its apparent senselessness; the moral focus combined with a tough-minded refusal to moralize. A different kind of writer might have used this moment as an excuse to produce a sermon; Wilder, instead, simply describes, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions, if any, from the events he recounts. The gentleness of the marquesa’s gesture and the fervor of her prayer are suddenly juxtaposed with the implied ugliness of her and Pepita’s abrupt and seemingly meaningless deaths, yet the tone is not designed to shock but merely to recount what happened. The narrator speaks to us directly (as in his use of the word we), taking us into his confidence but never pretending to know too much. Although some analysts have criticized the novel for being unexpectedly dull, for lacking the kind of drama that the opening might have led us to expect, and for being too bookish, too episodic, and too much the product of a self-conscious and sometimes obtrusive narrator, most readers have praised the book for its understatement, its psychological shrewdness, its effective use of dialogue, and its occasional flashes of social and religious satire. Thematically the book has been seen most often as an exploration of the varieties and complexities of human affection (from the selfish to the selfless, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the shallowest desire to the most profound kind of love), and it has also been hailed for its suggestive, undogmatic approach to the philosophical and religious questions it raises. Both skeptics and believers have found the book worth reading; Wilder never claims to offer any fi nal answers to the complex problems he explores, although the ending of the book does imply the value of earthly love as a source of whatever deeper purpose exists in life. By the conclusion of the novel, the survivors (especially the marquesa’s previously cynical daughter) have achieved a deeper, truer appreciation of the victims of the accident, and in the fi nal words of the book Wilder suggests that between the land of the living and the land of the dead, the only “bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning” (148).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with ERNEST HEMINGWAY’s novel The Sun Also Rises (published in 1926), which also describes life in a distant Hispanic culture and also deals with complex human relationships. Discuss the works in terms of tone, style, characterization, narrative point of view, and philosophical implications. 2. How does Wilder’s book resemble and/or differ from THEODORE DREISER’s An American Tragedy (published in 1925)? Discuss the books in terms of such themes as love, chance, and destiny and in terms of such technical features as setting, style, symbolism, and characterization. 3. How and why does a novel such as Wilder’s seem at variance with a book such as JOHN STEINBECK’s The Grapes of Wrath? Consider such matters as style, structure, characterization, purpose, underlying philosophy, and even sheer length. Why does Steinbeck’s novel need to be so much longer than Wilder’s? 4. Choose one particular passage from the novel—a passage approximately 500 words long— and then discuss the ways that passage is typical of the total effect and effectiveness of the book in terms of such matters as style, theme, characterization, tone, and atmosphere. How does that passage fit into (and contribute to) the larger design of the book?

Our Town (1938) Set in an archetypal New England village called Grover’s Corners in the decades immediately after the beginning of the 20th century, Wilder’s play immediately presents a Stage Manager (a kind of choral figure who directly addresses both the audience and the other characters); he in turn introduces us to, and continually comments on, the rest of the people on stage, including not only young Emily Webb and her family but also young George Gibbs and his parents, sister, and friends. Act 1 (titled “Daily Life”) depicts the citizens as they go about their typical routines; act 2 (titled “Love and Marriage”) shows how Emily and George fall in love and marry; act 3 (“Death”)

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jumps significantly ahead in time, after Emily has died while giving birth. After taking her place in a cemetery full of other dead citizens of the town, she convinces the Stage Manager to allow her to return to a past moment of her life (her 12th birthday), but she finally and painfully realizes that humans never fully appreciate the preciousness and beauty of their lives while they actually live them. In various respects Our Town is a paradoxical work. It can be seen, in some ways, as a response to the criticism Wilder had received in the late 1920s and early 1930s for writing novels apparently remote from the lives and concerns of typical American citizens; his new play was populated with everyday folks speaking the common language of New England. Yet the play is far from merely current or documentary in its basic concerns; it is not an obvious response to the Great Depression (still in force as Wilder wrote), nor especially political in theme or propagandistic in tone, although such traits were common in the writing of the 1930s. In setting, then, the play is a departure for Wilder, but in subjects and stance it is not. In method, too, the play represents an interesting mixture of the new and the familiar. Wilder had begun to believe that drama could present life more immediately and vividly than the novel, and yet the character of the Stage Manager can be seen almost as a novelistic device—an omniscient narrator turned into a speaking theatrical presence. Various features of the play—including the Stage Manager, his unusual interactions with the other characters and with the audience, the use of a mostly bare stage with few props, and the sudden jumps in time from one era to another—made this drama a highly experimental work in Wilder’s day, and yet for all its technical boldness Our Town deals thematically with such standard themes of Wilder’s writings as the brevity and fragility of human existence, the value of love, the richness of even the most apparently simple lives, and the failure of most people to appreciate or savor that richness (or each other) as they live one moment to the next. Thematically, then, the play is highly traditional and even commendably old-fashioned; most of its key ideas had already been sounded in The Bridge of San Luis Rey. In some ways the play was thus a new departure for

Wilder, but in other ways it clearly echoes his earlier writings. It exalts the past—particularly the American past—in a fashion that has led some critics to accuse it of sentimental nostalgia, but it was seen as a shockingly daring and even unsettling work when it was fi rst performed. Nevertheless, in the decades since it was originally staged, it has become one of the most popular works of the American theater. In writing Our Town, therefore, Wilder had created a paradoxical work, blending the unusual with the conventional to produce a text that continues to enjoy widespread popular appeal. Nevertheless, controversy has surrounded the play from the beginning. Critics in Wilder’s time and in the decades since have found various faults with the work and have attacked both its meanings and its methods. Some have argued, for instance, that the play fails to deal with the darker aspects of small-town life, ignoring any hint of real evil and thus presenting an essentially superficial, saccharine view of middle-class existence. The reason the play has proven so popular on high school and amateur stages (these critics allege) is that it ratifies the way “average” Americans like to think of themselves and of their essentially bourgeois values; it fails to issue any fundamental challenge to “normal” ways of feeling or behaving; it glorifies mediocrity; its characters are superficial; and its tone is essentially smug and complacent. Its people lack depth; their language lacks poetry; and despite (or because of) its nostalgic emphasis on the past, it fails to engage with complex historical forces. The play has also been attacked, moreover, not only in terms of its meanings but also in terms of its style, structure, characterization, and techniques. Some critics fi nd it insufficiently dramatic; others think the Stage Manager and lack of props are mere theatrical stunts; still others fi nd the pace of the work hopelessly slow and its manner overly didactic. The characters (according to some critics) are merely stick figures used to illustrate a monologue by a Stage Manager who is simply a stand-in for Wilder himself; the play thus becomes a kind of lecture— and a sentimental lecture at that. Neither the characters nor their thoughts, feelings, or actions are complex; the play is simple to a fault, despite its

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“stagey” theatrical gimmicks. These (at least) are some of the charges leveled by Wilder’s critics. Obviously, however, many other readers and theatergoers have strongly disagreed with these views. Thus, admirers of the play have contended that the work, despite being set in such a specifically American setting, has a universal appeal because it deals so effectively with the basic facts and rhythms of common human life. These elemental features of life include relations between parents and children, relations within a broader community, the process of individual maturation, the rituals of courtship and marriage, and the inevitable cycles of birth, aging, and death. The play thus deals with eternal human problems and truths, not with any particularly American dilemmas. Wilder sets his work in a small New England village, but the basic processes the work depicts could (and do) take place anywhere. Admirers of the play also value it for the ways it exhibits and extols the common lives of the average folk who are the social, spiritual, and material backbone of any community or nation; from this perspective, the claim that the characters lack much individual complexity or depth testifies to their representative natures: They are not meant to be complicated, idiosyncratic personalities but function, instead, as archetypal fathers and mothers and daughters and sons. Their very commonness contributes to their effectiveness; Grover’s Corners is a microcosm of the world at large, and its citizens are typical humans. The play is less a celebration of American life than of common, ordinary life as it has been lived anywhere and always, and indeed part of the point of the play is that no life is really common or truly ordinary—that all lives consist of precious moments whose preciousness is rarely grasped as we live them. In some respects the play is part of the long literary tradition of carpe diem, in which readers are urged to “seize the day” by appreciating, and making the most of, every available minute of life. Wilder implicitly urges us to value each moment of our own lives while also appreciating the lives and links we share with our friends, families, and communities. In this respect, the underlying themes of the work are not unlike the themes already sounded in The Bridge of San

Luis Rey, which had been set in a time and place quite distant from 20th-century New England. Defenders of Wilder’s play, however, admire not only the themes of the work but also its style, structure, tone, techniques, and use of characterization. The work has been praised for its gentleness, wisdom, simplicity, and humor; the language is mostly plain and therefore credible in the mouths of these plain and unaffected characters. Indeed, the very simplicity of much of the speech prevents it (in the view of Wilder’s advocates) from seeming overblown or sentimental. Wilder has been praised for his skill at crafting convincing dialogue, and even the play’s monologues, far from seeming didactic or preachy, have been defended as being consistent with the characters of the play’s various speakers. The episodic structure of the work has been praised for reflecting the haphazard, zigzag motions of life itself, while the use of the omniscient Stage Manager (who knows the future fates of all the characters), along with the abrupt shifts from one distinct historical moment to the next (focusing, for instance, on Emily as a young girl, then on Emily as a late adolescent, then on Emily as a dead parent who briefly returns to her life as a young girl), have been commended for contributing effectively to the work’s thematic concern with mutability, fragility, and the passage of time. Meanwhile, the simple, mostly bare stage and the general absence of props have been defended as enhancing the universal significance of the work: Our Town may be set in a particular New England village, but the style of staging encourages us to imagine it as taking place almost anywhere. The absence of props helps suggest that material things are finally less important to human existence than other humans—that what we ultimately remember most about our lives are not pieces of furniture or other possessions but our interactions with friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances. In its literal movement from the dawn of act 1 to the darkness of act 3, the play symbolically traces the movement of each individual human life, and in its simultaneous focus on past, present, and future, the play mimics the way all people experience time: as a complicated blending of memory, sensation, and anticipation. For the many admirers of Our Town, the play succeeds


as an organic whole in which every element contributes to a larger effect and a general effectiveness. The continued success of the play on stage (according to this view) is not the result of smugness or complacency, either in the playwright or in the audience, but instead of the craft with which the work has been composed. Far from being sentimental, this play, in the view of its defenders, is a sobering, thoughtful, and thought-provoking work that leaves each reader or viewer with a fundamentally renewed appreciation of life and other people. Ultimately the success or failure of any literary work depends on the specific details of its phrasing and structure, and in these respects Our Town has much to recommend it. The general simplicity of its diction as well as the complexity of its temporal perspectives are already apparent, for instance, very early in the play when the Stage Manager is describing Grover’s Corners. He announces, in colloquially clipped syntax, “First automobile’s going to come along in about five years—belonged to Banker Cartwright, our richest citizen . . . lives in the big white house up on the hill” (5). This single sentence exemplifies many of the most common but also most effective traits of Wilder’s play, including both its plain speech and its complicated blending of past, present, and future: Cartwright will have a car, but the car has already “belonged” to him (perhaps suggesting that the Manager already knows of Cartwright’s death?), but Cartwright, at the present moment, still “lives” up on the hill. Almost as God supposedly does, the Stage Manager perceives all aspects of time at once. Meanwhile, the fact that Cartwright lives in a large house distant from the rest of the town implies distinctions of class and status, but Cartwright is still “our” richest citizen and is thus still regarded as a valued member of the broader community. The fact that he is identified by his profession (“Banker Cartwright”) rather than by a first name exemplifies Wilder’s tendency, in this play, to treat characters as types rather than as fully individualized persons; Cartwright is more important for the role he fulfi lls than for any specific personality he displays. Yet even the particular phrasing Wilder uses here is more subtle than it might seem at first: There is some irony, for instance, in the fact that a man named Cartwright (a

maker of carts) will own the town’s first automobile (thus symbolizing the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy), while the fact that his car will “come along” is a phrase that describes both its emergence as a historical fact and its literal movement down the street. Here and in many other places, Wilder’s language is more complex, and more artistically appropriate, than a quick glance might suggest. Our Town merits more close attention to its details than it has tended to receive; for a play that ranks so high in American literary history, it has prompted surprisingly little detailed analysis. The play, however, is full of memorable moments and wonderful lines—lines that become even more memorable upon reflection. When the Stage Manager tells us, for example, “Nobody very remarkable ever come out of [Grover’s Corners], s’far as we know” (6), his comment at fi rst seems merely a statement of simple fact. By the end of the play, of course, we realize that from another perspective all lives are remarkable, and that part of the purpose of this play is indeed to help us “know” and appreciate that fact. Likewise, young Emily’s proud boast to her mother that she has “a wonderful memory” (15) will eventually seem ironic when, at the end of the play, her memory of her youth becomes a central focus of the play’s pathos. Wilder’s play is brimming with moments like this—moments that seem (as do the lives the play depicts) fuller and richer in retrospect. But the play is also full of lines whose impact is instantly felt, as when Emily’s mother, exasperated by her daughter’s repeated questions about whether she is pretty, fi nally tells her, “You’re pretty enough for all normal purposes” (32). Inevitably this reply generates a laugh, both when reading and when watching the play, and the sure comic touch the line reveals helps contribute to the overall tonal complexity of Wilder’s work. The play is, by turns, touching and wry, funny and dark, pleasing and sad. It captures (in other words) some of the genuine richness of life itself, and it helps us comprehend that richness in vivid and deeply memorable ways.

For Discussion or Writing 1. How does Wilder’s depiction of small-town American life resemble and/or differ from the

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way such life is presented in SHERWOOD A NDERSON’s collection of stories titled Winesburg, Ohio? Discuss such matters as marriage, sexuality, economic conditions, relations within families, and the lives of eccentric citizens. Which work presents a more comforting view of American life? Compare and contrast Wilder’s depiction of two American families with the depiction offered in GERTRUDE STEIN’s novel The Making of Americans. How are the works similar and/or different in themes, style, structure, and tone? Discuss Our Town in relation to EUGENE O’NEILL’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night (1940). How are the plays similar and/or different in their presentations of family life, in their treatment of the relations between past and present, and in their depictions of the value of love? Discuss the relationship—in tone, setting, theme, characterization, and philosophical implication— between Wilder’s Our Town and EDITH WHARTON’s Ethan Frome. Is one work more pessimistic than the other? If so, how and why? Is one work more realistic? If so, how and why? Compare and contrast this play with WILLIAM FAULKNER’s novel As I Lay Dying, focusing particularly on setting, characterization, family life, and the themes of life and death. How are both works innovative in technique? How does Faulkner’s novel partly resemble a play, and how does Wilder’s play partly resemble a novel? Using the preceding discussion, make a list of both the faults and the virtues that have been found in this play, and then fi nd examples of either the failings or the successes (or both) in one of the episodes of the play. How effective, in your opinion, is that chosen episode? Explain your response.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON WILDER AND HIS WORK 1. Discuss the theme of love in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Our Town, and at least one other work by Wilder. What common threads appear in all three works? How is the treatment of the theme

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distinctive in each text? In which work is the theme treated most complexly and effectively? Wilder was a friend and admirer of Gertrude Stein. Can you see any connections between one of Wilder’s works (such as Our Town) and the ideas, style, and structural techniques advocated by Stein? What, if anything, seems surprising about their friendship? What, precisely, did Wilder admire about Stein, and what did she admire about him? Sentimentality is a fault that some readers have detected not only in The Bridge of San Luis Rey but also in Our Town. What, exactly, is sentimentality, and why do so many critics consider it a flaw? Which of Wilder’s two most famous works is more open to the charge of sentimentality? How does Wilder try to avoid sentimentality in either or both of these works? To what extent does he succeed? Despite his enormous popular and critical success, especially in the first two decades of his career, Wilder is not widely studied today, even though Our Town remains a frequently staged play. Why do you think Wilder’s reputation has declined? What social and cultural changes have contributed to the loss of serious interest in his work? Do you think Wilder’s works are worthy of continued close study? Explain and justify your responses. Wilder earned an especially strong reputation in Germany, particularly in the decades after World War II. How would you explain this phenomenon? Why, of all people, would Germans take an especially intense interest in Wilder’s work? Does this interest continue in the present day? Choose at least three works by Wilder and discuss the ways women are presented in those works. How does Wilder depart from or affi rm any stereotypes about women that were common during his day? How, if at all, does Wilder’s presentation of female characters differ from the ways he tends to depict males in his work? Choose one or more works by Wilder and discuss the ethical views or attitudes they apparently imply. Which moral values does Wilder seem to endorse or satirize? What kind of life does Wilder seem to consider most valuable, and why? Be sure to support your argument with specific evidence.


8. Choose a particular passage from one work by Wilder and discuss, in as much detail as possible, the ways in which that passage contributes to the larger impact of the work as a whole. How does the chosen passage function as part of the rest of the work in terms of such matters as theme, style, structure, tone, mood, and characterization? How is the chosen passage effective as a piece of writing? 9. Track down one or more of the adaptations of Wilder’s works (such as the two fi lmed versions of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the Hollywood fi lm of Our Town, or the various televised productions of that play) and discuss the effectiveness of the adaptation(s). How and why is one of the chosen adaptations successful as a realization of the potential inherent in Wilder’s text? How and why is the adaptation successful in its own right, as an independent work of art? Compare and contrast two different adaptations of the same work, such as the two fi lms of The Bridge or two fi lmed versions of Our Town. 10. Examine one of Wilder’s lesser-known works and discuss the ways in which that work seems typical of the author of The Bridge and Our Town, the ways in which the work seems different from Wilder’s most famous texts, and the relative success or failure of that work as a piece of writing. What specific features make the work either effective, ineffective, or some combination of the two?

WORKS CITED

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Bloom, Harold, ed. Thornton Wilder. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. Burbank, Rex. Thornton Wilder. 2nd ed. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Castronovo, David. Thornton Wilder. New York: Ungar, 1986. Goldstone, Richard H. Thornton Wilder: An Intimate Portrait. New York: Dutton, 1975. Haberman, Donald. Our Town: An American Play. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Harrison, Gilbert A. The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1983. Kuner, M. C. Thornton Wilder: The Bright and the Dark. New York: Crowell, 1972. Simon, Linda. Thornton Wilder: His World. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979. Stresnau, Hermann. Thornton Wilder. Translated by Frieda Schutze. New York: Ungar, 1971. The Thornton Wilder Society. Available online. URL: http://www.tcnj.edu/~wilder. Accessed April 7, 2009. Walsh, Claudette. Thornton Wilder: A Reference Guide, 1926–1990. New York: G. K. Hall, 1993. Wilder, Thornton. The Bridge of San Luis Rey. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. ———. Our Town: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Perennial Library, 1985.

Robert C. Evans

William Carlos Williams (1883–1961)

In the work of the poem, the joining of phrases, the trimming away of connectives, the joining of stone to stone, as a Greek column was joined, as the Incans joined their great wall—there is virtue. (qtd. in Mariani, 1981 597)

A

lthough his poetry and other writings were largely ignored and/or disparaged during the early decades of his career as an author, William Carlos Williams remained convinced of his own talent and insisted (in the face of numerous discouragements) on pursuing his own independent path. He wrote novels, essays, short stories, hundreds of lyric poems, and also a lengthy verse “epic”—all the while carrying on a demanding practice as a small-town physician (delivering, for instance, more than 3,000 babies during more than 40 years as a full-time doctor). In his private letters he was often foul-mouthed and raunchy, while in his public comments he was often belligerent, arrogant, prickly, and self-defensive. Nevertheless, by the end of his life he had earned the respect and affection of many of his fellow writers and had won the loyalty of many younger poets, who saw him as a man totally committed to his art and to the ideal of constant innovation. Most of the facts of Williams’s life are laid out in the exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) biography by Paul Mariani, who takes the reader from the poet’s birth to his death in 770 highly detailed pages (not counting notes). Williams was born on September 17, 1883, in Rutherford, New Jersey, the eldest son of William George Williams and his wife, Raquel Hélène Rose Hoheb Williams. As her name might suggest, the future poet’s mother was partly of Jewish and partly of Puerto Rican

ancestry; his father’s roots were mainly British. The future poet, however, would later pride himself on being a solidly American writer, rooted in a locale, language, way of life, and ways of thinking that sometimes struck others as narrowly provincial. He was always close to his mother (she lived past age 100 and spent her last frail decades under the poet’s roof), and his childhood seems to have been “normal” and happy. The main unusual event was a yearlong trip to Europe with his mother and his brother Ed in 1898–99; Williams was able to study in Switzerland and visit Paris. After returning to the United States, he and his brother began attending a very fi ne high school in nearby New York City, and it was there that the future writer fi rst became enthralled with poetry. He began to write verse, and although he had decided to study dentistry (later changing to medicine) at the University of Pennsylvania, he never lost his ambition to be a serious author. Fortuitously, his years at Penn (1902–06) put him in contact with the irrepressible EZR A POUND, a younger fellow student who was, if anything, even more preoccupied with poetry that Williams was. Pound, of course, would go on to become one of the most influential figures in modern literature, and his long if often frayed friendship with Williams was one of the most important in the latter’s life. The highly opinionated and cocksure Pound was sometimes an inspiration, sometimes a source of frustration to

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Williams, but the two men always remained in creative contact. Interestingly enough, Williams also at this time (through Pound) became friendly with another young person who would later make a significant literary mark—a young woman known as Hilda Doolittle, whom Pound, years later, rechristened H. D. when he was promoting her startlingly new “imagist” poems. Although Williams was often lonely at Penn, he made solid progress in his medical studies. After graduating in 1906, he interned in New York City for the next several years, all the while producing poetry (heavily influenced by Keats) that he selfpublished in a volume titled Poems in 1909. During that same year Williams realized that he was in love with the very same woman in whom his younger brother was interested; when they fi nally asked her to choose between them, she chose Ed. Williams, crushed, within a few days proposed on the rebound to her sister, Florence Herman, who accepted. Williams, however, soon left the United States to study pediatrics in Germany, and while in Europe he also visited many other countries, including England, where his old friend Pound was making a name for himself as a highly innovative modern writer. Back in the United States by 1910, Williams began practicing medicine in Rutherford, his hometown, where he would live and work for the rest of his life. On December 12 he married Florence (whose nickname was Flossie), and although he was occasionally unfaithful to her over the coming years, their marriage endured for the rest of his life, and generally it was a happy union. The older he grew, the more he appreciated his loyal wife, and the more he also regretted his early infidelities. In the meantime, William Eric Williams, the fi rst of two sons, was born on January 7, 1914. The year before, the boy’s father had also produced his second book (The Tempers), and during 1915 and 1916 Williams also became closely connected with a group of writers involved with a “little magazine” published in New York City called Others, which was in competition with the better-established Poetry (published in Chicago). Williams spent much time in New York, getting to know a variety of up-and-coming cultural fig-

ures (including M ARIANNE MOORE and WALLACE STEVENS). He was also in steady correspondence with Pound and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), who were both now in London, but although many of his friends or acquaintances were earning recognition and praise for their writings, Williams’s work failed to produce the same immediate impact. The steady stream of publications he issued in the next few years—including Al Que Quiere! (1917), Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1918), and both Spring and All and The Great American Novel (1923)— aroused little widespread interest. Certainly they aroused nothing like the interest that greeted the early publications of T. S. ELIOT, Pound’s latest London protégé, for whom Williams felt instant and enduring contempt. He believed that Eliot (with his learned, allusive verse and his thorough immersion in the entire Western literary tradition) would make poetry academic rather than alive—a product of the schools, not the streets. Williams wanted to write poetry that was rooted in things, not ideas; he claimed to favor sharp perception, not meditation or reflection. His hatred of Eliot (often viciously expressed in his private letters) was one of the ruling passions of his life. Williams was now 40 years old; he was married, was the father of two children (a second son, Paul, had arrived in 1916), and was known in his hometown mainly as a doctor, not an author. Although he published in a variety of little magazines and corresponded with a number of better-known writers, and although he considered himself (and was considered by some others) to be on the cutting edge of the avant garde, he was frustrated by his lack of obvious literary success. Sometimes he doubted his real worth, but mainly he remained stubbornly committed to pursuing the goals he had set for himself, especially the development and use of authentic “American” diction and rhythm in verse. A trip to Europe in 1924 allowed him to visit Paris, at that time the hub of world literature (Pound, of course, was already there), where he made various useful contacts, and in 1925 his well-regarded prose work In the American Grain was published by a major press. In 1926 he won a significant award from Dial magazine (although he was also sued for libel for


one of his short stories), and in 1927 his novel titled Voyage to Pagany was issued by the innovative New Directions Press, which would champion his work for decades. Increasingly, then, Williams was beginning to attract attention and admirers, including the young poet Louis Zukofsky and the young novelist Nathaniel West. In 1934, the year after Williams turned 50, his Collected Poems, 1921–1931 (with a preface by Wallace Stevens) appeared, followed by An Early Martyr and Other Poems (1935), a collection of poems called Adam & Eve & The City (1936), an opera libretto called The First President (1936), a novel titled White Mule (1937), a collection of stories called Life along the Passaic River (1938), and The Complete Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, 1906–1938. Williams was nothing if not prolific, although his letters are full of crude complaints about his patients for distracting him from his writing. At the same time, he was also known as a careful and caring doctor. In short, he was a complex man—sometimes generous and considerate, sometimes full of petty jealousies, vulgar language, and ugly prejudice. By the late 1930s it was obvious to most people that another world war would soon begin. Although Williams often sympathized with the economic ideas of his old friend Pound (who spent the war making propaganda broadcasts for Fascist Italy), he generally considered himself either apolitical or a man of the Left. His main interest, in any case, was in his own writing, and he was especially interested in trying to develop new kinds of poetic lines and innovative rhythms. By the time the war ended in 1945, he had been devoting most of his creative energies to producing a long poem—a kind of small-town epic—titled Paterson. Book 1 of this work appeared in 1946 to notable acclaim; even critics who had never much admired Williams considered Paterson (particularly its fi rst book) a significant achievement. Book 2 appeared in 1948; book 3 was published in 1949; and book 4 (supposedly the fi nal section) was issued in 1951. (Later, in 1958, he belatedly added a fi fth book, much to the surprise of readers, who thought the project was already fi nished.) Finally, then, by the late 1940s and early 1950s, he had begun to attain the kind of

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public recognition and honor he had long craved. He even began to make some money from his writings, and certainly he had long since ceased to pay to see his work in print. His Selected Poems (with an introduction by the noted poet and critic Randall Jarrell) appeared in 1949, and his Collected Later Poems was published in 1950 (the year in which he won the National Book Award), followed by the Collected Earlier Poems in 1951. Also in 1950 Make Light of It: Collected Stories was published, and in 1951 he issued his Autobiography. Unfortunately in 1951 he also suffered his fi rst stroke, followed by another one (this time more serious) in 1952. Although his novel The Build-Up was published that year, Williams’s ill health made writing difficult. Ironically, then, just when he began to receive widespread acclaim, his body began to fail him. Little wonder, then, that in the early months of 1953 he was confi ned in a mental hospital, where he was treated for severe depression. Never, however, did Williams give up his interest in literature (especially his own); even when he could only peck out poems with a single fi nger on his typewriter, he refused to abandon his lifelong goal of being a noted and innovative author. The rest of the 1950s saw new publications and further recognitions. In 1953 he and Archibald MacLeish were cowinners of the prestigious Bollingen Prize (the fi rst of which had been won several years earlier by Pound, who was now himself confi ned long-term to a mental hospital, having been accused of treason for his wartime broadcasts on behalf of Mussolini). In 1954 Williams’s The Desert Music and Other Poems as well as his Selected Essays were published; in 1955 he issued a collection of poems titled Journey to Love; and in 1957 The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams was published, along with “The Lost Poems of William Carlos Williams.” Unfortunately, a third stroke hit in 1958, but even this did not prevent him from publishing Yes, Mrs. Williams: A Personal Record of My Mother in 1959, the same year in which his play Many Loves was successfully staged in New York. By now he had become a widely revered figure, especially among the newer, more iconoclastic wave of younger American poets, including such Beat

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figures as Allen Ginsberg (also from Rutherford), whom Williams “adopted” as a kind of poetic son. Williams’s way of writing was seen as a more freespirited alternative to the highly intellectual work of T. S. Eliot and his imitators, and it was also seen as a rebuke to the more highly structured, more self-consciously formal verse of such younger poets as Richard Wilbur. Some readers, of course, continued to see Williams’s writing as relatively shapeless, unmusical, and bland, but by this point any criticism just made him all the more attractive as a father figure to the young Turks of American verse. It was a period of growing intellectual rebellion, and Williams had seen himself as a rebel for half a century. Many others now agreed. More strokes occurred in 1961, and Williams fi nally had to abandon serious writing. This was also the year, however, that saw the publication of Many Loves and Other Plays: The Collected Plays of William Carlos Williams and The Farmers’ Daughters: Collected Stories. Finally, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems appeared in 1962. Thus, when Williams was found dead in his bed by his wife on the morning of March 4, 1963, he had departed as one of his country’s most respected poets. Later that year he was awarded both a Pulitzer Prize and the Gold Medal for Poetry by the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Such recognition had been long delayed and sometimes grudging, but by the end of his life he had become one of the most influential American poets of his time—even more influential, in some ways, than his old friend Pound. Williams was an easier poet to imitate than either Pound or Eliot or Wallace Stevens; his subjects were more commonplace than theirs, and his style and forms were both more lax. He remains a potent force—a writer clearly in the line of Whitman—and will probably always appeal to younger poets who see themselves as rebels and who disdain conventional discipline and form.

“The Young Housewife” (1916, 1917) In this poem, the speaker describes his reaction to imagined and actual glimpses of a young married woman—a woman he seems to fi nd erotically

attractive, although his overt response to her is literally distanced and even somewhat courtly. The poem opens with a precise reference to time, although we soon wonder how the speaker can possibly know what is happening at 10 in the morning to a “young housewife” dressed in a “negligee” “behind / the wooden walls of her husband’s house” (ll. 1–3). Presumably he knows her routine because he himself has routinely driven by her house in the past at this time and seen her emerge regularly at this hour—a presumption implied by the word again when he tells us that “again she comes to the curb” to interact with various delivery men (l. 5). The speaker, however, does not himself seem to be one of these latter types, who have a commercial interest in visiting the woman; instead, the speaker seems to be a kind of voyeur, and he turns us (his readers) into voyeurs in turn. We watch him as he watches her, and thus we watch her as well. His attitude, however, in the end seems neither predatory nor creepy; instead, he seems simply to appreciate (and perhaps yearn for) the woman’s beauty, and in the poem’s fi nal words he even seems to pay her gentle tribute. The speaker is distanced from the young woman in various ways. Presumably he is older than she (since he emphasizes her youth), and he is also cut off from her partly because she is married (in conventional terms, she belongs to her husband much as the house is also his). He is further separated (at first) by the walls of the house and the doors of his car. The first stanza, in particular, provides merely an external, imagined view: The woman is inside, the speaker is outside, and both are alone, or “solitary” (l. 4). Quite literally, the speaker is merely passing through; as yet, he has no contact at all with the woman. In the second stanza she at least becomes actually visible when she emerges from the house, and so we get more details of her actual appearance as she “stands / shy, uncorseted, tucking in / stray ends of her hair” (ll. 6–8). Although her manner of dress is sexually provocative, she consciously intends no provocation: She is “shy,” and her shyness is part of her beauty and part of her charm. The “ice-man” and “fish-man” (their very titles suggesting their identification with their jobs)


see her mainly as a source of income, whereas the speaker, more poetically, compares her “to a fallen leaf” (l. 9). The image implies his sense of her beauty, her fragility, her isolation, and her function as a symbol of mutability—of the passage of time. In a sense, then, she symbolizes (for the speaker) his own mortality; she is alluring precisely because she is younger than he and because her youth will pass, as his has. The poem freezes her in a moment of time, capturing her in all her unself-conscious freshness and vulnerability. The car in which the speaker moves is thus not only a symbol of his separation from this particular woman but a broader symbol of mutability in general. Just as the car crushes “dried leaves” (as it moves with a “rush” and produces “crackling” sounds— both instances of onomatopoeia [ll.11–12]), so the woman herself, who had earlier been compared to a “fallen leaf,” will be crushed and left behind by the passage of time. All the more reason, then, for the speaker to honor her with a courteous “bow” and smile (l. 12), since she not only is young and beautiful herself but is also anything or anyone that is full of youth, full of beauty, but also subject to the irreversible passage of time.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the appropriateness of the car as a symbol in this poem. How would the poem be different in the speaker were walking by the house or pedaling by on a bicycle? How does the car symbolize modern civilization? What does the poem imply about alienation in modern life? 2. How might a present-day feminist react to this poem? In what senses is the woman here turned into an object of a man’s gaze? Is the poem at all disturbing, or is it instead a delicate expression of feelings all humans—of both sexes—can share?

“Tract” (1917) In this relatively long poem, the unidentified speaker instructs his fellow townspeople on the proper way to conduct a funeral. He condemns the conventional elaborate trappings of most such

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ceremonies, preferring instead a plain, rough-hewn approach in which the reality of death is not prettied-over or denied. He wants a simple ceremony in which the mourners and the wider community participate without ostentation or polite repression. This poem is obviously indebted to the rhetorical style and manner of Walt Whitman, Williams’s great predecessor as a democratic bard. Significantly, the fi rst word of the poem is I, followed closely by you (l. 1), and we are never allowed to forget either the personality of the speaker or the fact that he is addressing a particular audience of his fellows. He adopts a bluff, plain-spoken, exclamatory, selfconfident, argumentative, and even hectoring tone. Although he often invokes God—“For Christ’s sake” (l. 9), “My God” (l. 16), “God knows what” (l. 40), “For heaven’s sake” (l. 46)—his attitude seems fundamentally irreverent; certainly he is anything but pious in the conventional sense of that term. The deity enters the work mainly as a source and subject of expletives, and indeed the rhetoric of the poem is at once unadorned and self-important: The speaker presents himself both as representative of the community and as its loud-mouthed, self-assured instructor. One might even briefly suspect that Williams could be mocking the speaker’s cocky pomposity, except that this imagined voice sounds so much like Williams’s own in some of his least humble moments. Certainly the person speaking in this work takes himself almost too seriously; it is almost as if the funeral is more about him than about the corpse. Through its broken syntax, its unpredictable line lengths, its abundance of dashes and exclamation points, and its heavy emphasis on questions and other forms of obviously direct address, the poem conveys the sound and rhythms of a speaking (even a shouting) voice. Sometimes the lines have all the force of the very actions they call for or describe, as in the heavily accented command “Knock the glass out” (l. 16)—an image that epitomizes the iconoclastic mood of this work). In general the poem is full of the vigor of lively speech, and although the speaker himself can sometimes seem an almost laughable combination of small-town rube and self-conscious orator, Williams seems to admire


him, and he seems to want us to share that admiration. Just as Williams saw himself as a poet intent on busting up the stale conventions of traditional verse, so the speaker is a revolutionist of funerals. He speaks the kind of idiomatic “American” lingo Williams often favored, and sometimes he uses the kind of homespun vernacular Williams himself affected (especially in his letters to Ezra Pound— letters in which the two often adopted the manner of Midwest cracker-barrel philosophers). The poem gives voice to Williams’s preference for all that is plain, simple, and unaffected. Ironically, however, the poem itself can sometimes seem comically if unintentionally pretentious in its own odd ways.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with CLAUDE MCK AY’s poem “If We Must Die,” especially in terms of such matters as form, style, structure, diction, and tone. Do you fi nd one poem more appealing than the other? If so, explain why; if not, explain how each is effective in its own way. 2. This poem is obviously a different kind of work from such other works by Williams as “The Red Wheelbarrow.” How would you characterize the differences? Do you have a preference for one kind of work rather than the other kind? If so, explain why. 3. Reread the account of the poem given here, especially its implicitly and explicitly critical comments. How might you defend the poem against such criticism? What, specifically, makes this an accomplished and effective poem?

“Portrait of a Lady” (1920, 1934) Discerning the “plot” of this poem is difficult, partly because it is unclear who is speaking to whom or whether any “real” discussion is actually taking place. Some kind of dialogue (whether actual or imagined) seems to be occurring, with one speaker, using painterly metaphors, attempting to describe a woman and another speaker (the woman herself? the speaker himself? the speaker’s

alter ego?) responding with questions. As do many poems by Williams, this one ends abruptly and (quite literally) raises more questions than it answers. The title of the poem suggests that the text will be the latest in a long line of literary and artistic works in which a woman is portrayed. (Henry James wrote a novel titled Portrait of a Lady, Ezra Pound wrote a poem titled “Portrait d’une Femme,” and there are so many paintings with this title that it would be impossible to name them all.) The title, in other words, suggests that the poem will be highly conventional, but the actual poem is anything but. It begins with an improbable, even preposterous metaphor: “Your thighs are appletrees / whose blossoms touch the sky” (ll. 1–2). Perhaps the speaker is having some fun with the woman he presumably addresses, or perhaps Williams is having some fun at the expense of the speaker. Although the imagery here seems a bit absurd, at least the sentence structure and meaning are clear, and the fact that each line contains six syllables, combined with the fact that both lines employ regular iambic meter (in which the even syllables are stressed), implies that the poem will proceed clearly, both in substance and in form. This assumption, however, is immediately undercut in the next line with the unexpected appearance of the question “Which sky?” (l. 3). Who is speaking this question? Is it the woman herself? Is it the speaker in a moment of inquisitive reflection about the two preceding lines? Williams leaves the matter unclear, and the poem soon seems to get back on track with an answer that alludes to a famous painter: “The sky / where Watteau hung a lady’s slipper” (ll. 3–5). With that matter out of the way, the poem then seems to return to its original purpose of describing the lady, this time with an awkward rhyme and oddly contradictory metaphors: “Your knees / are a southern breeze—or / a gust of snow” (ll. 6–8). Now, surely, the speaker is the subject of mockery; it is as if we are eavesdropping on the composition of a particularly inept poem and are overhearing either the speaker’s conversation with himself or with the lady he seeks to extol. In any case, as the rest of the poem proceeds in this


desultory fashion, both its form and its meaning becomes progressively less clear, especially when we reach lines 17, 19, and 22, which seem to appear almost out of nowhere. Thus a work that began as a hackneyed exercise in conventional meter and subject descends, by its end, into a kind of prosy, exclamatory chaos. It is as if we witness a kind of minor mental and artistic breakdown. Some critics have praised the wit, cleverness, and irony of the resulting poem.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this text with Pound’s “Portrait d’une Femme.” How do the works differ in purpose, tone, technique, and fi nal effect? Can Williams’s poem be read as in any ways a response to the kind of poem Pound composed? 2. Williams wrote a number of poems with portrait as the fi rst word of the title. Track a few of them down, read them, and then discuss any similarities and/or differences between them. Are there any significant likenesses? 3. In what specific ways (if at all) is this poem witty, clever, and/or ironic? If you were commending the poem to a friend, on what grounds would you commend it? If you were condemning the poem, on what grounds would you condemn it? How would you defend either your commendation or your condemnation to someone who disagreed with you?

“The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” (1921) In this poem, a widow’s grief for her lost husband is intensified by her observations of natural beauty. As its very title suggests, this poem is full of juxtapositions of sorrow and beauty: The fi rst three words of the title emphasize gloom, while the last two stress the joy of renewal. This same basic contrast between opposites helps structure the rest of the work. In the fi rst line, for instance, the word Sorrow is juxtaposed with yard, with the fi rst word implying pain and the second implying a relatively

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small grassy area, thus suggesting the continuance of life. The word yard implies, on the one hand, a familiar place (a place connected with the comforts of home), but it also implies a relatively confi ned and constricted place. The widow’s grief has so transformed her outlook that sorrow becomes her yard; she feels bounded by and contained by her pain; it has become the psychic “place” she inhabits. The new grass metaphorically “flames” (l. 3—a paradoxical verb that mixes colors even as it suggests the dynamic energy of renewed growth), but (in another bit of paradox) the widow’s mood makes the flames seem merely a “cold fi re” (l. 5). That last phrase epitomizes Williams’s technique in this poem: He constantly jams together contradictory images, thoughts, and emotions, and as the widow meditates on the death of her husband, she inevitably contemplates her own demise. As in most of Williams’s works, the language of this poem is plain, simple, and “ordinary.” The words spoken by the widow are the kinds of words a real person might use: The diction is colloquial; the rhythms are unobtrusive; the brief lines and absence of rhyme distance the work from anything that might seem conventionally “poetic.” Nevertheless, the poem does contain subtle touches that give the language a slightly intense effect; these include the emphasis on specificity (as in the references to “plumtree” [l. 9] and “cherry branches” [l. 12]), the varied references to colors (such as “white” [l. 9], “yellow,” and “red” [l. 14]), the use of repetition (as in lines 10–11), and the use of the fi rst words or initial syllables of lines to emphasize key nouns or verbs (as with “Sorrow” in line 1, “flames” in line 3, “Masses” in line 11, or the strongly stressed “load” in line 12). Throughout the work, Williams fi rst creates an effect and then subverts it: The poem begins by emphasizing sorrow, then it shifts to emphasizing growth, and then that growth gives way to a sense of coldness and confi nement. Likewise, in the next phase the beauty of the flower trees is stressed, but then that beauty is undercut by an explicit reference to “grief” (l. 15). The “joy” (l. 17) once associated with the flowers is momentarily mentioned, but that happiness is soon forgotten (l. 19). The aging


woman next mentions her “son” (who might symbolize the continuation of life, a source of consolation, and a hope for the future), and the fact that he tells her of having seen “trees of white flowers” in “meadows” at “the edge of the heavy woods” (ll.21–22, 24) again suggests a possible change in mood to something more positive. Obviously the son is trying to revive her spirits, and the lush natural language used to describe his vision does temporarily give the poem a more upbeat tone. The widow’s response can even, for a brief moment, seem almost ecstatic, as if she intends to abandon her grief by uniting with nature: “I feel that I would like / to go there / and fall into those flowers” (ll. 25–27). As befits the apparent new mood, the language becomes a bit heightened: We notice (for instance) the echo of “feel” and “fall” and the alliteration of “fall” and “flowers.” Yet the word fall is inherently ambiguous: On the one hand, it can suggest a surrender to natural pleasures, but, on the other hand, it can imply a kind of death, and it is this second mood that Williams chooses to emphasize in the poem’s last line, when the widow imagines that she would like to “sink into the marsh” near the flowers (l. 28). In its fi nal words, therefore, the poem comes full circle: It returns to its opening emphasis on sorrow, and it concludes with a memorable image of nearly suicidal grief.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare this widow’s response to the death of her husband to the response of one twin to his brother’s untimely demise in THOR NTON WILDER’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. How are their thoughts and feelings similar? How are they distinct? In which case is the grief more intense? Why? 2. How does the woman here resemble and/or differ from the main character of K ATHERINE A NNE PORTER’s story “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”? What kinds of marriages are implied in both works? How are the women alike or different in their fundamental personalities? 3. Scan this poem (in other words, count the numbers of syllables in each line, and mark the syllables that are accented and unaccented). What

patterns do you detect? How does Williams emphasize key words or phrases? Where and how does Williams’s use of meter seem especially subtle or skillful?

“To Elsie” (1923) The speaker begins with a generalization about the way common people in the United States “go crazy” (whether literally or metaphorically); he then seems to focus on the inhabitants of northern New Jersey in particular, describing careless young men and fi lthy young women who engage in degraded sex that results in rootless, abandoned children. One such child is the “Elsie” of the title, who works as a maid in a suburban doctor’s home; physically unattractive, she wears “cheap / jewelry” to attract “rich young men with fi ne eyes” (ll. 46–48). The poem ends by contrasting a sense of fi lth, hunger, imprisonment, and aimlessness with a brief glimpse of merely imagined beauty. The poem opens with phrasing that seems paradoxical: “The pure products of America” (a phrase that sounds hopeful and uplifting) “go crazy” (a phrase that undercuts the promise suggested by the opening words; ll. 1–2). This pattern of ironic juxtaposition of opposites continues elsewhere in the text. Thus, lines 3–6 and the fi rst word of line 7 seem generally attractive, but that appealing tone is then immediately subverted by the reference to “deaf-mutes, thieves / old names / and promiscuity” (ll. 7–9), and this renewed bleakness continues for several more stanzas (ll. 10–24). In those ensuing lines, the speaker expresses contempt for the character, the appearance, and the basic morality of people he seems to consider social dregs, who have no taste and little sense of responsibility or ethics—people who seem driven merely by a desire for cheap sensations. He mocks their personal habits as well as their clothes, using them (apparently) as symbols of a broader social sickness, a wider failure of the national culture. When a touch of natural beauty does once again briefly enter the poem, the phrasing sounds either ironically violent (“chokecherry”) or foreign and abstract (“viburnum”; ll.


25–26), and it serves only to emphasize by contrast the mechanical, almost predatory sex for which it provides a backdrop. When the poem’s focus shifts from these disgusting generalities to the specific girl of the title, she is described as if she is something either vomited forth or washed ashore (l. 31), and she is depicted not only as ugly in her physical appearance (ll. 44–45) but as tawdry in her taste and motives (ll. 46–48). More repulsive imagery continues for a few further lines (ll. 49–54), is very briefly interrupted by a quick imagined glance at “deer / going by fields of goldenrod” (ll. 56–57), and then is followed by more depressing phrasing until the poem simply peters out. It ends with an image of aimless mechanical movement. As a satire of cultural corruption the poem has some force, although at times its contempt for the people it describes seems to border on the vicious and misanthropic. The speaker seems not only scornful of loose-living young men and the fi lthy young women who submit in “numbed terror” (l. 24) to meaningless sex, but also disdainful of “deaf-mutes”(l. 8) and even of those with “a dash of Indian blood” (l. 30). Most surprising are the repellant terms used to describe Elsie herself. The speaker shows her little pity and less consideration. Presumably Williams meant to avoid any hint of mawkish sentimentality, but when we discover that Elsie was in fact a real person, was an orphan, and was indeed the Williams family’s own maid, the publication of a poem about her (with “her great / ungainly hips,” her “flopping breasts,” and her “cheap / jewelry” [ll. 44–47])—a poem with her name in the title, no less!—seems more than a little cruel. Armed with this biographical information, one is tempted to regard the poem as an unintended satire on the poet himself, who can perhaps seem at least as crude as the vulgar cretins he disdains. The speaker’s sympathies, in any case, seem directed more toward the hardworking middle-class people who employ Elsie (“some doctor’s family” who live in a “hard-pressed house in the suburbs” [ll. 38–40]) than toward the slovenly, overweight, tasteless woman the poem presents. Indeed, the speaker even seems more sympathetic to attractive “rich young men with fi ne eyes”

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(l. 48) on whom Elsie has set her sights than he seems toward the gross and grasping servant. If Elsie could read (or cared to), one wonders how she might have felt about the poem in which her employer so carefully immortalized her name, appearance, and character.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with T. S. Eliot’s satirical poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Discuss the works in terms of setting, tone, imagery, and form. Which work appeals to you more as a satire? Explain why in detail. 2. Read this work alongside Williams’s “The Young Housewife.” How are women presented in the two works? What qualities of women seem important to each speaker? How are the views of women presented in the two works typical of attitudes commonly held in our culture? 3. Discuss the absence of periods in this poem. What effects are achieved by this absence of fi nal punctuation? How do those effects contribute (if at all) to the success of the poem? How, in its form and structure, does the poem seem both organized and somewhat chaotic?

“The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923) The speaker asserts that a significant connection exists between various details of an outside scene, including a rain-glazed red wheelbarrow and some white chickens. This brief and highly cryptic poem is one of Williams’s most famous works. It clearly seems to be an example of the kind of thinking about poetry that led to the creation of imagism, a style associated with the works of such writers as H. D. and the early Ezra Pound. Imagism insisted on emphasizing direct, specific, crisp, clear, brief, and unadorned glimpses of particular objects, with a minimum of commentary, interpretation, or obtrusive “artistry.” The images, if sharply enough presented, would themselves evoke a significant mood, emotion, perception, or understanding. Williams’s own version of this kind of writing is often called objectivism, in


which the focus is clearly on a few particular objects and in which the poem itself becomes a kind of object, like a painting or snapshot. In a poem such as “The Red Wheelbarrow,” Williams does not even seem especially interested (as the best imagist poets are) in creating an emotional epiphany or providing a moment of meaningful insight. Instead, his focus seems to be on things in and of themselves, in and for their own sakes. In its own day, Williams’s poem would have seemed highly iconoclastic. It rejects most of the features conventionally associated with poetry until then, including regular rhythms, relatively long lines, and predictable rhymes. Yet the poem is not without a certain shape and design: Each “stanza” consists of two lines; in each case the fi rst line contains three words and the second line contains just one; each single word of each second line consists of two syllables; fi nally, in stanzas 1 and 4 (the two outside stanzas) the fi rst line consists of four syllables, while in stanzas 2 and 3 (the two inside stanzas) the fi rst line consists of three syllables. In all these ways, then, the poem does attain a high degree of symmetry and form. Yet the lyric is also highly structured in other ways as well: The fi rst stanza, for instance, consists entirely of abstract language, while each of the next three stanzas zeroes in on a specific, discrete image. Moreover, in the second line of stanza 1 (the abstract stanza), it is the second syllable of the two-syllable word that is accented, whereas in the second lines of the three stanzas (the “imagistic” stanzas), it is the fi rst syllable of each two-syllable word that is stressed. Furthermore, in each the three fi nal stanzas, the line break separates an adjective (or modifying word) in the fi rst line from a noun (or substantive word) in the second: “wheel / barrow” (ll. 3–4), “rain / water” (ll. 5–6), “white / chickens” (ll. 7–8). By breaking these lines as he does, Williams thus emphasizes each component part of a significant phrase, and the nouns in particular are stressed by their relative isolation. For a poem as brief as this one (just 16 words long, with four words in each stanza), the work is relatively colorful: Not only do the colors “red” (l. 3) and “white” (l. 7) contrast with (and thus intensify) each other, but even

the word glazed implies a kind of glossy light. The poem juxtaposes a man-made object (the wheelbarrow) with rain, sunlight, and chickens (all of which seem to symbolize nature). The poem also juxtaposes stasis (the parked wheelbarrow) and movement (the presumably wandering chickens). In short, the poem is more complex than it seems; it is not as shapeless or as formless as it might at fi rst appear. What, if anything, does it all amount to? Surely Williams intended the work as a kind of “antipoem”—a rejection of all the grand rhetoric and grand subjects so often associated with conventional verse. This poem urges us to pause, linger over, and think about a few seemingly simple facts—the kinds of facts we too often ignore and too often fail to appreciate. As does a skillful painting or photograph, this poem invites us to notice (and ponder) small details we might otherwise fail to apprehend or enjoy. Williams chooses the most commonplace, least “lofty” sorts of objects (a wheelbarrow; chickens) and invites us to contemplate their beauty, especially when they are juxtaposed in a brief moment of time and in an appealing natural setting. The poem is thus, in some ways, a romantic poem written in an antiromantic style.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with Ezra Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro.” How are they similar in imagery, design, and fi nal effect? How are they different in all these ways? In which poem is the title more significant? Discuss the settings of the two works. 2. Read H. D.’s poem “Oread” and then discuss the ways in which it is similar to and/or different from Williams’s poem. In particular, discuss such matters as point of view, tone of voice, use of figurative language, and use of devices of sound. Does Williams employ any sound devices? (For example, can you fi nd any examples of assonance in his poem?) 3. This poem is often cited, by those unsympathetic to modernist poetry, as an especially memorable example of the flaws of that kind of writing. For such critics, the work seems trivial,


pointless, and not especially skillful. Whether you agree or disagree with such claims, how would you defend the poem against them?

“Spring and All” (1923) This poem describes the fi rst awakenings of life in a bleak, deserted landscape that is full of mud and weeds—a landscape that is just recovering from winter. The poem opens with a striking reference to a “contagious hospital” (l. 1)—that is, an institution for treating diseases easily spread from one person to the next. By the end of the work, however, the poem will have described life and vitality awakening fi rst in one plant and then in another and another. The landscape on the road to the hospital exists under the moving “surge” (with perhaps a pun on serge, to suggest the appearance of ribbed wool) of “blue / mottled clouds” (ll. 2–3), but then all this movement stops short (ironically) with the abrupt appearance of two heavily accented words (“cold wind”) that make the tone of the work seem suddenly bleak. The ensuing details suggest a lifeless wasteland, where even the potentially lifegiving water seems distributed in puny, stagnant mud holes (l. 7). Significantly, the word standing is repeated in adjacent lines (ll. 6–7) to emphasize the sense of dead stasis. Meanwhile, the language of the poem—like the landscape it describes—seems bare, naked, and nearly inanimate. The anonymous speaker makes no comments and issues no judgments; he merely describes. Sometimes the syntax (or sentence structure) of the poem is so stripped down that it is impossible, at fi rst, to know how lines are combined. Lines 7–8, for instance, seem to stand off by themselves, disconnected from the lines before them (thus creating a momentary confusion in the reading). Likewise, lines 9–13 amount to an extended, nongrammatical fragment, brimming with adjectives but cut off from any tight logical connection with either the two preceding fragments (ll. 7–8) or the grammatically coherent thought that follows (ll. 14–15). It is as if Williams seeks to imitate, in the broken syntax

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of his poem, the desolate, discontinuous setting he describes, where nothing seems quite connected except by a pervading atmosphere of forbidding bleakness. Even spring, when it makes its fi rst hesitant appearance, seems “Lifeless,” “sluggish,” and “dazed” (ll. 14–15). And then, just when we feel satisfied that after seven lines of fragments (ll. 6–13), we fi nally have a complete, coherent thought (ll. 14–15), Williams disorients us again, referring mysteriously to an unspecified “They” who “enter the new world naked, / cold, uncertain of all / save that they enter” (ll. 16–18). Who are these “They”? At fi rst the word might imply newborn humans, especially in view of the terms naked and uncertain (the latter word implying the ability to think or feel). Eventually it seems that the speaker is referring to the small plants that are now beginning to push sprouts above the surface of the ground. The momentary confusion seems deliberate, not only because Williams wants to keep his readers off their feet as they make their way through this poem, but also because he probably wants us to recognize the resemblance between our own lives and the lives of these newly budding plants—which will someday, of course, turn into the same kind of dead vegetation scattered about in the poem’s opening half. The shift from end of winter to start of spring occurs, in fact, at exactly the midpoint of the work (thus exemplifying the ways in which Williams’s poems are often more subtly structured than they may fi rst appear). In the closing lines Williams lists details of life that begin to counteract the details of death with which the poem opened. Significantly, the last line ends with an unpunctuated verb (“to awaken”) that is full of vitality and promise.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. How are the two works similar and/or different in imagery, mood, symbolism, and diction? How is Williams’s poem in some ways a response to Eliot’s? 2. Examine Williams’s poem alongside ROBERT FROST’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” How do both poets use details of scenery to evoke mood and imply larger meanings?

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Discuss the point of view used in each poem. Who is speaking in the Williams work? What does each poem imply about the nature of life? 3. Discuss the sound effects of this poem. How does Williams use rhythm, alliteration, assonance, punctuation, enjambment, and other such devices to give the poem maximum impact? How and why is the poem more effective (if at all) when read aloud rather than when read silently?

“The Dead Baby” (1927, 1935) The speaker of this poem urges the cleaning of a house in preparation for the arrival (from a hospital) of a distraught couple’s dead baby. The body of the baby, “surrounded by fresh flowers” (l. 25), will then be put on display for friends and acquaintances who seem more like “curious / holiday seekers” (ll. 2–3) than true mourners. Williams, who was a pediatrician himself and who delivered several thousand babies over a long career, surely had personal familiarity with many cases of stillbirths. The poem could easily have been mawkish or sentimental; instead, it seems strangely boisterous, with a strong undercurrent of sarcasm aimed at mourners who seem less interested in consoling the grieving parents than in gawking at the tiny corpse. For them, the baby is mainly a strange spectacle, a “curiosity” (l. 24), rather than a real person, whose loss is truly significant. Ironically, however, the present poem itself can be accused of much the same kind of gruesome insensitivity. The speaker seems at least as guilty as the “curious” mourners (l. 2) of treating the baby’s death as merely an odd spectacle. It is the speaker, after all, who turns the death into an occasion for a poem in which the focus is as least as much on the speaker’s own peculiar attitudes and tone of voice as it is on anyone or anything else. Presumably the speaker intends to impress us with his unconventional lack of sentimentality, but there are times (such as lines 18–19, with its weird echo of earlier uses of the word sweep) when his tone seems merely crude—almost as if

he were making a self-conscious and somewhat clumsy joke at a most inappropriate time. Like the speaker of Williams’s poem “Tract,” the speaker here sometimes seems a bit too full of himself to be taken completely seriously. The poem begins with a vigorous and heavily accented verb (Sweep) that sets a hectic tone for much of the rest of the work. The domestic details of the fi rst four lines are then suddenly juxtaposed with the fl at but shocking announcement in line 5 that “the baby is dead”—a statement made all the more surprising and emphatic by the poem’s single use of rhyme. The speaker adopts the tone of a brusque, busy observer; his one bit of emotional commentary on the scene (when he refers to the father as “pitiful” [l. 11]) seems almost insipid; certainly it lacks any kind of subtlety. The speaker seems impressed by his own take-charge fervor; he issues constant commands (“Sweep the house” [l. 1]; “Sweep the house clean” [l. 13]; “Hurry up!” [l. 20]); these, presumably, are meant to make readers feel personally involved in the action of the poem, almost as if we ourselves are being addressed. In the fi nal analysis, however, many readers are likely to feel more “curiosity” about the oddly detached and self-absorbed speaker than about the unfortunately dead baby.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with Williams’s poem “Tract,” particularly in such matters as tone, attitude, imagery, diction, and theme. How is death treated in both works? Explain in detail your responses to the speakers of both works. 2. Read this poem alongside C AR L SANDBURG’s “Grass.” Discuss the roles of the speakers in both poems; discuss the use of irony in both works; discuss the tones of the two poems and the attitudes toward death implied by each. 3. Discuss the use of dashes in this poem. How do they contribute to its tone? How do they almost mimic the actions the poem calls for? In what other ways does the poem create and achieve its peculiar tone?


“This Is Just to Say” (1934) The speaker apologizes to an unknown addressee for having prematurely eaten luscious plums that were probably being saved for breakfast. It is easy to imagine this poem being written as a note by a shamefaced husband to a potentially disapproving wife and being taped to the door of a refrigerator (or icebox). The work is typical of Williams in numerous ways, including its conventionally “unpoetic” subject matter, its simplicity of diction and structure, its almost prosaic rhythms, and its avoidance of all the typical features we commonly associate with figurative, “literary,” “lyric” language, such as metaphors, similes, alliteration, and assonance, not to mention rhyme and meter. Nevertheless, as is often true of Williams’s works, the poem is a bit more complex and structured than it might at fi rst appear. It consists, for instance, of three stanzas of four lines each. The fi rst stanza focuses on the speaker; the second stanza focuses on the addressee; the fi nal stanza (in its fi rst line) joins the two previous subjects, but then it immediately shifts to an emphasis on the plums themselves. The poem is also more rhythmically astute than a fi rst reading might suggest. Thus, in the fi rst stanza the accents all fall on the key fi nal words, which, taken together, provide a quick summary of the poem’s plot: “eaten . . . / plums . . . / in . . . icebox” (ll. 1–4). In lines 1 and 4 the accents fall on the fi rst syllable of two-syllable words; in lines 2 and 3 the accents fall on monosyllabic words. In stanza 2, on the other hand, the accents are much more randomly distributed, whereas in stanza 3 the accents fall back into a discernible pattern: In lines 9–10 the stresses emphasize the penultimate (that is, the next-to-last) syllables, whereas in the fi nal two lines they accentuate the fi nal words of each line. The opening stanza states a simple fact about the speaker’s behavior; the second stanza considers the probable (and prior) intention of another person; the fi rst line of the third stanza briefly raises a moral perspective; but the fi nal three lines stress the sheer physical pleasure of the eating. Sensuous joy literally gets the fi nal word. Each fi nal adjective (delicious, sweet, cold) becomes progressively

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less abstract, progressively more physical. Ironically, the poem ends with a word (cold) that often carries negative connotations but that, in this case, implies intense sensual pleasure. The apology gets two words (l. 9); the recollection and celebration of the joy of eating get eight (ll. 10–11). The poem, which appears modest and well shaped on the page, exults in a minor orgy of physical satisfaction. It is a romantic poem in a domestic setting, exemplifying Williams’s tendency to fi nd joy (when he can) in the details of everyday life.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the similarities and differences between this work and Wallace Stevens’s poem “Anecdote of a Jar.” In particular, discuss such matters as tone, point of view, imagery, and fi nal effect. Which work is more conventional in its use of poetic devices and structure? 2. Using encyclopedias and the Internet, read several overviews of Williams’s typical stylistic traits, and then discuss—in as much detail as you can—the ways in which this poem is typical of his writing in such matters as diction, form, imagery, and tone.

Paterson (1946–1958) Williams himself described this five-part work as “a long poem upon the resemblance between the mind of modern man and a city.” He sought to use “the multiple facets which a city presented as representatives for comparable facets of contemporary thought thus to be able to objectify the man himself as we know him and love him and hate him.” He also considered the poem to be about “the search of the poet for his language, his own language” (Paterson xii–xiii). Even critics who have often been unsympathetic in their comments on other works by Williams have found aspects to value in Paterson—or at least in parts of it. The poem has been praised for its ambitious scope, its imaginative invention, its intriguing imagery, its suggestive combinations of verse and prose, its rhythmic energy, and its general success

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as a suburban American epic that explores the complexities of modern life in language that is often colloquial and vernacular. As Kelli Larson notes (66–103), analysts have commented on such matters as the ways the poem treats the confl ict between the real and the ideal; the use of images of women; the autobiographical aspects of the text; the thematic emphasis on destruction, change, and renewal; the use of techniques of interlacing and juxtaposition; the interpenetration of past and present; the employment of irony, comedy, and multiple voices; the similarities between the techniques of this poem and the techniques of various modern painters; the emphasis on a specific, local, American setting; the anthropomorphic treatment of landscape (comparing a place to a human being); the emphasis on social and cultural satire; the ways the poem engages in dialogue (and sometimes confl ict) with works by other modern writers (such as Eliot and Pound); the influence of Whitman and other premodern precursors; the poem’s complex use of symbolism, especially geographical symbols; the poem’s overt and implied commentary on economics; the difficulties of writing a long poem in an essentially imagist style; the poet’s constant wrestlings with matters of form; the use of the so-called variable foot to structure individual lines; the poem as a meditation on the making of poetry; the appearance of “real people” (including the poet’s mother) as presences in the work; the relation between the poem and contemporary theories of literature; the poem’s pervasive use of wordplay and punning; the ways in which the poem is a reaction against the influence of British literature; the use of metaphors of marriage and divorce; the role of sexual symbolism; and the various kinds of unity that may exist beneath an apparently fragmentary surface. This list could easily be hugely extended, but enough has already been said to suggest the sheer complexity of the work, the ways in which it has fascinated and intrigued numerous critics, and the potential riches it has in store for any reader who is open to its style and methods. Although many critics argued (especially as the individual parts of the poem fi rst appeared) that the work declined in quality with each successive addition, becoming less coherent as it evolved, today the

poem is widely considered not only Williams’s masterpiece but also one of the best long poems written anywhere during the 20th century.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read at least one book of Paterson alongside a comparably long section of Ezra Pound’s epic The Cantos. Discuss resemblances and/or differences between the poems in terms of such matters as themes, techniques, styles, tones, and diction. Are there any ways in which Williams’s poem can be seen as a self-conscious response to Pound’s? 2. Choose one relatively short section of Paterson and then discuss that section as a “representative” portion of the work as a whole. How does the selection epitomize what Williams was trying to do and achieve in the larger work, especially in terms of theme, rhythm, and language?

“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (1962) The poem responds to a painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1525?–69) that depicts the fall of Icarus, a mythical youth whose father crafted wings for him that were assembled from feathers stuck together with wax. Icarus, however, despite his father’s warnings, flew too near the sun; the wax melted; and Icarus plunged into the sea and drowned. In the Brueghel painting, Icarus’s leg can barely be seen sticking from the water off to the side of the painting. In this late poem, Williams uses brief, abrupt lines; they lack any punctuation, and they also lack any capitalization. It is up to the reader, then, to determine through trial and error the syntax (or sentence structure) of the work. Each stanza consists of three lines; the lines range in length anywhere from one to six syllables; and only once (in stanzas 2 and 7) is the same pattern of syllables repeated. The fi rst stanza serves as a kind of introduction; it mentions the painter, Icarus himself, and the springtime setting. The next three stanzas then focus on that setting; the fi nal three deal with the plunge itself. In that sense, then, the poem has a symmetrical structure—a pattern that underlies its apparently


casual (or even negligent) design. The poem exemplifies many of the features common in Williams’s writing, including brevity; clear, simple language; absence of rhyme; absence of conventional meter; absence of explicit commentary or interpretation by the speaker; a flat, laconic, unemotional tone; and a general absence of figurative language (such as metaphors or similes). In one stanza Williams does indulge in a bit of alliteration (or the repetition of consonant sounds, as in “sweating in the sun” [l. 14] and “wings’ wax” [l. 16]), and one word (“splash” [l. 20]) does exemplify onomatopoeia, in which the sound of a word imitates the word’s meaning. For the most part, however, the poem lacks most of the features that would have been considered poetic in the centuries prior to the rise of such “innovative” writers as Williams, who sought to strip poetry down to its supposedly pure, bare essentials. In the present poem, Williams’s restrained, understated phrasing seems appropriate to the effect he seeks to achieve. Icarus was often interpreted, in earlier ages, as a symbol of self-destructive pride—of literally high-flying human aspiration brought low by foolish excess. Williams’s poem (like Brueghel’s painting) implicitly mocks Icarus by mostly ignoring him—shunting him off the very last line and mentioning his “drowning” (l. 22) almost as an afterthought. Certainly Icarus’s death is not the subject of frenzied lamentation; instead, it is just barely noticed. This death seems ironic, but Williams (characteristically) leaves the irony implied rather than openly spelling it out. In this as in some of his other notable works, he generally lets things and actions speak for themselves.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the use of classical legend in this work with its use in the poem “Helen” or “Leda” by H. D. Discuss the works in terms of form, diction, imagery, tone, and sound effects. Does the overall “style” of one poet appeal to you more than the other’s? If so, explain why in detail. 2. Track down the painting by Brueghel that inspired this poem and compare and contrast the two works. How (if at all) does Williams

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imitate the style of the painting? How does the painting differ from the poem? Does one work seem more effective to you than the other? Is each work equally effective in its own way? Justify your responses to these questions.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON WILLIAMS AND HIS WORK 1. Read at least one book of Williams’s late long poem titled Paterson, and then examine the various ways in which it resembles and/or differs from some of the early poems analyzed. Discuss such matters as theme, style, form, rhythm, diction, imagery, tone, and purpose. 2. Compare and contrast various works by Williams and by Wallace Stevens. Analyze (for instance) Stevens’s “Nuances on a Theme by Williams” and Williams’s “El Hombre,” or examine Stevens’s “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself” alongside Williams’s “Spring and All,” or read Stevens’s “Description without Place” in conjunction with Williams’s “A Place (Any Place) to Transcend All Places.” What are some characteristic differences between these poems? Do they resemble each other in any significant ways? 3. Choose a relatively short volume of Williams’s verse (such as Spring and All or An Early Martyr or Adam & Eve & the City) and discuss the collection as a collection. In other words, discuss any continuities between the poems in subject matters and style, discuss the effect of reading the poems in sequence, discuss the relationships between adjacent poems, and so on. Is there any evidence to suggest that Williams designed his collections in such a way that they would have any meaningful coherence? 4. Williams carried on a lifelong correspondence with his old friend Ezra Pound. What kind of impact did each man have on the other’s writing? How did Pound influence Williams? Did Williams influence Pound at all? Choose two works the two men wrote during the same decade and discuss the resemblances and differences between them.

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5. Compare and contrast Williams’s Paterson sequence with the wartime Trilogy by H. D. How are they similar and/or different in setting, theme, diction, techniques, and larger purpose? How is each work a response to its particular historical moment? 6. Williams detested the work of T. S. Eliot. Do some research, and then try to explain why he reacted to Eliot’s work as he did. Next, choose two “representative” works by Williams and Eliot and discuss the ways in which these two particular texts exemplify the distinct styles, concerns, and purposes of the two writers. 7. Women often play important roles in Williams’s poems. Choose between five and 10 lyrics by Williams and discuss the ways women are presented in them. What continuities and/or differences do you see? How might a current feminist respond to Williams’s depictions of women? (Explain why.) 8. Initially Williams was not widely read or widely valued in Britain. Why? Which poets were most often admired in Britain during the early to mid-20th century? How did the writings of those poets tend to differ from the work Williams was trying to do? Does Williams’s emphasis on “American” phrasing automatically limit the appeal of his poems? 9. Read through the poems discussed earlier. What kinds of social and/or political stances (if any) do they seem to imply? What role(s) do they seem to imply for the poet? How does Williams’s engagement with the world resemble and/or differ from the engagements of such other modern poets as Ezra Pound or Wallace Stevens or T. S. Eliot? 10. Using the volume edited by Charles Doyle, trace the development of Williams’s reputation. What kinds of faults have critics found with his poetry? What kinds of virtues have they identified? Do you see those faults and/or those virtues exemplified in any of the poems by Williams you have read? Which poem by

Williams appeals to you the most? Explain why in detail. WORKS CITED

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Doyle, Charles, ed. William Carlos Williams: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. Larson, Kelli A. Guide to the Poetry of William Carlos Williams. New York: G. K. Hall, 1995. Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981. ———. William Carlos Williams: The Poet and His Critics. Chicago: American Library Association, 1975. Mazzaro, Jerome, ed. Profile of William Carlos Williams. Columbus, Ohio: Merrill, 1971. Nelson, Cary. “Modern American Poetry: William Carlos Williams.” Available online. URL: http:// www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/ williams/williams.htm. Accessed April 7, 2009. Wagner, Linda Welshimer. The Poems of William Carlos Williams: A Critical Study. Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1963. ———. “William Carlos Williams.” In Sixteen Modern American Authors: A Survey of Research and Criticism, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 573–585. New York: Norton, 1973. ———. “William Carlos Williams.” In Sixteen Modern American Authors. Vol. 2, A Survey of Research and Criticism since 1972. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990. William Carlos Williams Review. Available online. URL: http://english.ttu.edu/WCWR. Accessed April 7, 2009. Williams, William Carlos. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. Vol. 1, 1909–1939. Edited by A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1986. ———. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. Vol. 2, 1939–1962. Edited by Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1986. ———. Paterson. Rev. ed. Edited by Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1992.

Robert C. Evans

Richard Wright (1908–1960) I felt that the Negro could not live a full, human life under the conditions imposed upon him by America; and I felt, too, that America, for different reasons, could not live a full, human life. It seemed to me, then, that if the Negro solved his problem, he would be solving infinitely more than his problem alone. (Black Boy)

R

ichard Wright rose from a background of poverty, hunger, abuse, abandonment, and crushing racial discrimination to become one of the most highly respected and widely read authors of his day. For a time he was considered the leading black fiction writer in the United States and perhaps the world, and although his reputation eventually declined after its brief high point, he is still regarded today as one of the most important and influential of all African-American writers. His most notable novel, Native Son, was an instant best seller, as was Black Boy, his memorable autobiography. Both books were at once highly praised, and both have remained continuously in print. Unfortunately Wright’s premature death when he was only in his early fi fties silenced an eloquent voice that might have continued to develop and evolve. Equally unfortunately Wright never lived to see the massive social changes that his own work helped inspire. Born on September 4, 1908, on a farm near Natchez, Mississippi, Richard Nathaniel Wright was the son of Nathan Wright, an uneducated tenant farmer, and Ella Wilson Wright, who briefly taught school before later working in a series of service jobs. Ella’s family considered the marriage a mistake, and certainly the young couple struggled fi nancially. In 1911 Richard; his new young brother, Leon Allan (born in 1910); and their mother moved in with her parents in Natchez, to

be joined later by Nathan, who began working in a sawmill. It was while living with his grandparents that Richard, at age four, inadvertently set their house on fi re—an incident vividly described in Black Boy. Wright claims that as punishment he was brutally beaten by his mother—one of many incidents in his young life that supposedly resulted in severe physical discipline. Even so, his relations with his mother were mostly positive, while his dealings with his father were anything but. In Black Boy the father is presented as shiftless, egocentric, and irresponsible—especially when he leaves his wife for another woman after the family had moved to Memphis in 1913. After not having seen his father for a quarter-century, Wright later describes him as a white-haired, toothless farmer, bent and broken by years of peasant labor (Black Boy 34–35). After the father’s desertion, Wright’s existence was mainly shaped by contact with his mother, her parents, and her siblings. Ella Wright worked for a time in Memphis as a cook, but by early 1916, when Ella became extremely sick, Wright’s maternal grandmother became a major influence on his life. She briefly moved to Memphis, and then Wright returned with her to Jackson, Mississippi (after spending a short time in a Memphis orphanage). Eventually Wright, his brother, and his mother moved to Elaine, Arkansas, where they lived with his mother’s sister, Maggie, whose husband, Silas Hoskins, operated a prosperous liquor store. When

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Hoskins was violently killed by whites who coveted his property, Wright and his family fled briefly to West Helena, Arkansas, then for a time to Jackson, and then fi nally back to West Helena, where Wright’s mother and aunt found work as domestics and where Wright was able to attend school for a time. However, when his mother’s health deteriorated once more, he was forced to drop out of school and take odd jobs to earn money. Finally, when his mother suffered a debilitating stroke, the small family moved back to Mississippi, where Wright stayed mostly with his grandparents but also (for a time) with a somewhat distant aunt and uncle. Wright’s assertive grandmother was a devout Seventh-Day Adventist, and the young boy soon found himself in constant confl ict with her (and an aunt) about religion. Even at this early age he was strongly independent and resisted most efforts to make him conform to others’ expectations. Nevertheless, he usually did well in school (whenever he was able to attend), and he was also capable of making friends, even becoming the unofficial leader of a small group of boys whose fun is reflected in the opening pages of his remarkable later story “Big Boy Leaves Home.” By the time Wright was an adolescent, his grandmother had ceased trying to convert him (although he did later allow himself to be baptized as a Methodist, chiefly to placate his mother). He took a wide variety of odd jobs when not attending school, and he also fell in love with reading, devouring as many books, magazines, and newspapers as he could lay his hands on. By eighth grade he had actually written a story of his own, and by the time he graduated from ninth grade in 1925 he was even selected as valedictorian—although, typically enough, he refused to read the speech the principal had written for him, insisting instead on delivering one of his own. After briefly attending high school that fall, he dropped out in order to work, but although his formal education had now ended, his informal selfschooling never ceased. Especially after he moved later in 1925 to Memphis (where he worked at various jobs, including one in an optical factory), his reading was voracious, particularly in recent American fiction. A white coworker allowed him

to use the coworker’s library card, although Wright sometimes had to resort to clever deceptions to get access to all the books he wanted. Once, for instance, he handed the librarian a note (supposedly written by the coworker, but actually authored by Wright) that read, “Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy . . . have some books by H. L. Mencken?” When the librarian worried that Wright himself might want to read the books, he deferentially (and falsely) replied, “Oh, no, ma’am. I can’t read” (Black Boy 236). However, reading had in fact now become Wright’s chief obsession, and the joint activities of reading and writing would become the main means by which he would eventually move beyond his present poverty and degradation. That transition, of course, did not happen overnight, but new horizons slowly began to open for Wright after he moved to Chicago in December 1927. After attempting in 1928 to win employment with the postal service (an attempt that failed at fi rst because of his poor health), he eventually did secure a steady post office job in 1929—a position that not only gave him a modicum of fi nancial security but also allowed him to make friends with various coworkers. He began associating with other local black writers, but the onslaught of the Great Depression (which hit in October 1929) eventually meant that Wright, as did many others, soon lost his steady position and was plunged into enormous economic uncertainty. Nevertheless, while working various jobs (including stints as an insurance agent and political campaigner), he continued to read and write, even managing, in 1931, to publish a short story in an African-American magazine. By this time he had also (like many impoverished Americans) become increasingly interested in communism, and by 1933, after working a further variety of odd and often menial jobs, he actually joined a group of mostly white writers affi liated with the Communist Party. He soon became prominent in the group, both as a leader and an author, and in 1934 he joined the party itself. He published widely in party journals (although he still had to do manual labor to earn an actual living), and he continued to read widely, especially in the works of great novelists. By 1935 he had himself fi nished a

Richard Wright

novel called “Cesspool” (published decades later as Lawd Today!), had published a number of poems, and was also at work on one of his best stories, “Big Boy Leaves Home.” He also had begun lecturing and writing on literature and politics, producing journalism, and working for the Federal Writers’ Project. Increasingly he thought of himself—and was seen by others—as a professional writer, no matter how he earned his actual income. By 1936 Wright was centrally involved in various literary and cultural activities in the Chicago area, including the Federal Theatre Project, the Negro Federal Theatre, the South Side Writers’ Group, and the Middle West Writers’ Conference. Although still a leftist and still often using his writing to champion leftist causes, by 1937 he had become increasingly uncomfortable with the demands made on his time, and the strictures placed on his intellectual independence, by the local Communist Party, from which he became more and more alienated. His experiences in Chicago, especially his relations with his former comrades, were now frequently tense. Therefore, rejecting the offer of a comfortable and permanent position with the Chicago post office, he moved in 1937 to New York City to pursue his literary ambitions. Despite his experiences in Chicago, he worked in New York as an editor for the communist newspaper the Daily Worker, eventually writing hundreds of articles on a wide variety of topics. By this time, though, he had also produced another novel (“Tarbaby’s Dawn,” which has never been published) as well as a story (“Fire and Cloud”) that won fi rst prize in a major national contest. By 1938 a collection of his stories called Uncle Tom’s Children: Four Novellas was published and received highly positive reviews, and by the end of the year he had fi nished the fi rst version of the novel that would soon make him famous: Native Son. In 1939 Wright received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, and, although attracted to two different white women (Ellen Poplar and Dhima Rose Meadman), he chose to marry the latter. One of his stories—“Bright and Morning Star”— was now being dramatized and was also selected for inclusion in two important anthologies, and

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Wright had also begun work on a new novel (“Little Sister”). Most important of all, however, he had fi nished Native Son, which was not only published by March 1940 but was also chosen as a main offering of the Book-of-the-Month Club, instantly guaranteeing the work a huge audience. In less than a month, nearly a quarter-million copies had been sold, and Wright—the onetime impoverished and hungry grandson of former slaves—was now perceived as one of America’s most talented writers and perhaps the most prominent black author of fiction anywhere in the world. Flush with money and glowing with his new-found fame, Wright now not only began to travel but also to involve himself in projects with other prominent artists, including the director John Houseman and the great actordirector-impresario Orson Welles, who both hoped to dramatize Native Son. Meanwhile, by the end of 1940, a new and expanded edition of Uncle Tom’s Children had appeared, and another of Wright’s stories had been included in another major anthology. His personal life, however, was less fortunate: His marriage broke down, and by the end of the year he was living with Ellen Poplar. After divorcing his fi rst wife, he married Poplar on March 12, 1941. Besides his new marriage, Wright had other reasons to be happy in 1941. He received a major award from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; the dramatic version of Native Son was a success; work began on a new novel (“Black Hope,” which was never fi nished); one of his songs was recorded by the noted black bass-baritone Paul Robeson; and Wright’s book 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States was published to wide acclaim. By year’s end Wright had also completed the first version of yet another novel, “The Man Who Lived Underground,” which later (in a revised version) became the basis of a novella by the same title. When the United States entered World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Wright (who could not be accepted for combat because he was his family’s sole provider) unsuccessfully volunteered for service as a propagandist. Meanwhile, in 1942 he further distanced himself from the Communist Party, even

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though by this point the United States had technically allied itself with the Soviet Union and even though the U.S. government would now secretly monitor Wright for the rest of his life because of his continuing Leftist sympathies. By 1943 he had begun work on his autobiography, titled American Hunger, which traced his life from his boyhood in the racist South to his eventual disillusionment with the northern communists. However, when the text was submitted to the Book-of-the-Month-Club in 1944, Wright was told that the club was interested only in the fi rst half. Thus the section dealing with his time in the North and his struggles with communism was dropped (although some of it appeared as magazine articles), while the fi rst half, retitled Black Boy, was issued in 1945 and became an enormous best seller. By early 1946 more than a half-million copies had been purchased, and some critics were calling the book an even better work than Native Son. Nevertheless, despite this success, Wright was becoming increasingly disillusioned with his life as a black in the United States, and so in 1947, having spent some time in France, he and his wife decided to move there for good. Thus, for the last decade or so of his life, Wright became an expatriate. While living in Paris Wright led an active intellectual and social existence. He was befriended by many key figures in French cultural life and was as involved as ever in various literary and political groups. During the next half-dozen years he traveled widely throughout Europe, South America, and Africa, and, collaborating with a French director, he even agreed to star as Bigger Thomas in a fi lm version of Native Son, which fi nally appeared (to mixed reviews) in 1951. In 1952 he completed the fi rst draft of a new novel, The Outsider, which reflected the influence of his recent interest in French existentialism, but when the book was published in the United States in 1953, it was neither a critical nor a popular success. Even so, Wright continued to produce: In 1954 he published a book on Africa titled Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos as well as a new novel called Savage Holiday (which was rejected by the prominent U.S. company that had published his previous books). In 1955 a work of political journalism was published in French

and was then issued in 1956 in the United States as The Color Curtain: A Report of the Bandung Conference. In 1957 his book Pagan Spain appeared, as did a collection of essays titled White Man, Listen! Meanwhile, by 1958 he had finished a new novel (The Long Dream) set in Mississippi and had begun work on a sequel (set in France). By now his relations with other blacks in Paris had deteriorated; moreover, when The Long Dream was published in 1958, it was both a critical and a commercial disappointment. By the end of the year his mother’s health had greatly deteriorated, his longtime editor had died; and Wright himself, increasingly isolated in Paris, was contemplating a move to England. However, if 1958 was bad, the next year was even worse. In January he learned that his mother was dead; his new novel was sent back with a request for substantial changes; his request for a major grant was rejected; a severe illness struck in June and then lingered; and the move to England was complicated by difficulties concerning his request for a resident visa—a request eventually rejected. Thus, 1960 found Wright living alone in France. He was facing growing worries about money, continuing poor health, and increasing disenchantment with his social and political circumstances. Nonetheless, he had been working on thousands of brief poems, had started a new novel, and looked forward to the imminent publication of Eight Men, a new collection of stories. Yet his sudden death of a heart attack on November 28 extinguished any hope of future work. He died just as the 1960s—the dynamic, transformative decade he would have been well qualified to interpret—had only just begun.

Uncle Tom’s Children (1938, 1940) The title of this collection of stories alludes to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous pre–Civil War abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), whose title character, a loyal slave, has long been a symbol of black subservience to whites. Wright’s collection not only depicts the vestiges and unfortunate consequences of such compliance, but also, more significantly, shows the growth of defiance and resistance

Richard Wright

among its African-American characters. Most of the stories describe the violence that, in Wright’s view, always lurked just beneath the surface of relations between whites and blacks, especially in the “Jim Crow” South, where racism was more overt than in the North and where it enjoyed extensive legal protection. The collection opens with a personal essay titled “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch.” Wright here recounts many of the same incidents later treated at much greater length in Black Boy, his full-scale depiction of his youth. In some cases the accounts differ—a fact that has led some scholars to question Wright’s fidelity to facts. In any case, here (as in Black Boy) he emphasizes the brutality of his youth (including some brutal treatment at the hands of relatives) as well as his growing distrust and fear of whites and his inevitable realization that his life down South could and would be stunted merely because of his race. In nine brief sections, he quickly recounts various incidents that educated him in the grim facts of life for African Americans, and he ends by quoting a black southern friend whose words foreshadowed the rebelliousness that eventually engulfed the region: “Lawd, man! Ef it wuzn’t fer them polices ’n’ them ol’ lynch-mobs, there wouldn’t by nothin’ but uproar down here!” (237). “Big Boy Leaves Home,” the fi rst piece of fiction in the collection, is a particularly powerful story. It opens by depicting the relaxed, jovial friendship of four young black males in the rural South; as they joke, josh, and sing, readers are lulled into a sense of complacent joy; we share in the boys’ adolescent fun, taking no more seriously than they do the chance that they might really be “lynched” (as Big Boy warns [242]) if they dare to swim in a local pond considered off-limits to blacks. The story’s tone suddenly changes, however, when they realize that a white woman has wandered near the pond; not only does she see them swimming, but she also sees them naked as they try hurriedly to retrieve their clothes. As she screams, her husband approaches with a rifle and, in seconds, joy gives way to horror as two of the boys are shot dead. When Big Boy tries to wrestle the husband for the gun, the husband himself is killed. The rest of

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the story recounts, in rapid and gruesome detail, the efforts of Big Boy, aided by his community, to escape to the North as well as the disgusting torture and execution of the other surviving boy, whose torment Big Boy overhears from his hiding place. The story’s style is crisp and clear; its pace is fi rst leisurely and then frenetic; and its second half is dominated by gripping suspense and irresistible terror. This tale offers an unforgettable opening to the collection and establishes many central themes of the entire book. It shows how easily, in the racially charged South, life can instantly shift from peace to murderous chaos. The story’s characterizations are superb; its structure and design are excellent; and its style is terse and efficient. “Down by the Riverside,” the next story, is often considered a less effective tale than “Big Boy Leaves Home,” partly because it allegedly relies too much on improbable coincidence. Mann, the central character, is a loving husband whose pregnant wife fi nds herself in protracted labor just as flood waters are surrounding their small house. A friend steals them a white man’s boat, but, as luck would have it, as Mann battles the current in the dark, he happens to steer the boat directly to the home of its owner, who recognizes the craft as his and begins fi ring at its occupants. Desperate, Mann pulls out a pistol, fi res twice, and kills the angry white man. When he fi nally succeeds in steering the boat to the hospital, he discovers that his wife has died, but he is immediately put to work rescuing other people from the flood. As luck would once again have it, he is sent in the boat to the home of the very same white family whose father he has recently killed; when the family recognize him, he is tempted to kill them, but luck again intervenes: The house suddenly tilts, and so Mann, instead of murdering the family, pulls them to safety. Later, however, when everyone is on dry land, the family members turn him in to authorities, and, in a desperate effort to escape, he is shot and killed. The fi nal paragraph focuses on his outstretched hand as it trails in the surging river. Admittedly this story’s plot twists are somewhat implausible and the tale itself is perhaps overlong; nevertheless, Wright does succeed in creating a memorable atmosphere; in addition, many

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details of mood and setting are convincing, and the tone is realistically tense. “Long Black Song,” the collection’s next tale, is often considered one of Wright’s best works and is therefore discussed separately later; it is followed by “Fire and Cloud,” a story often praised by the volume’s fi rst reviewers. It describes the confl icting pressures faced by the Reverend Mr. Taylor, a prominent black in a small southern city whose people are clamoring for relief from hunger during the depression. Some citizens want Taylor to help lead a communist-inspired protest march; the white mayor tries to persuade him not to lend his support; a devious figure in his own church tries to undermine Taylor’s authority; and members of Taylor’s own family offer confl icting advice. The mood of Taylor and the whole community becomes more decisive and determined, however, after he and others are brutally beaten by white thugs; only then does Taylor realize (in the story’s fi nal words) “Freedom belongs to the strong!” (406). The work concludes with a Marxist vision of poor blacks and whites united against oppression. If the tale sometimes seems too didactic and even a bit contrived (particularly in its middle sections, where Taylor shuttles from one room to another as he tries to juggle multiple meetings with confl icting pressure groups), it nonetheless suggests the kind of political solution Wright hoped for; in “Black Boy Leaves Home,” the only alternative to oppression is escape, whereas in “Fire and Cloud” the oppressed stay and stand together. Political themes are even more explicit in “Bright and Morning Star,” the story added to the 1940 printing of Uncle Tom’s Children. In this tale, Sue is the once-pious mother of two sons who are committed communists; one already has been imprisoned for his activities, but the other (Johnny-Boy) is out on a rainy night, informing local comrades of a forthcoming meeting. However, soon Reva (a local white girl with a romantic interest in the son) arrives at Sue’s home to inform her that the local sheriff knows of the meeting and that the Party members must be warned not to attend—a mission Johnny-Boy undertakes as soon as he returns. After he leaves, the sheriff and other whites arrive at Sue’s home, beat her when she refuses to answer their

questions about her son, and then depart in search of him. When Sue later realizes that she has revealed the names of the party members to a white traitor named Booker (an obvious dig at BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, the turn-of-the-century black leader whom many African Americans considered an “Uncle Tom”), she heads out into the night, carrying a gun and looking for Johnny-Boy and the treacherous Booker. She does fi nd her son, who has been beaten nearly to death by the sheriff and his gang; she is forced to watch as the men further torture him as he refuses to reveal the names of the party members, just as Sue herself also refuses to reveal the names despite witnessing the torture. When Booker suddenly arrives and begins to reveal the names, Sue, using the hidden gun, shoots him dead, and then she witnesses the killing of Johnny-Boy just before being executed herself. She dies, however, with the satisfaction of knowing that neither she nor her son capitulated and that she killed the traitor before he could betray anyone else. She and Johnny-Boy suffer for a cause larger than they are, and their suffering prevents the suffering of others. In place of the nonviolent resistance that concludes “Fire and Cloud,” the resistance here is violent, desperate, and at least partially effective. Readers of Uncle Tom’s Children have praised the book for its lucid style, its vivid dialect, its rapid pace, its emotional restraint, its skillful dialogue, and its emphasis on dramatic action. On the other hand, the book has sometimes also been criticized for lack of variety, for monotonous characterization (particularly in its depiction of evil whites), for inept reproduction of black speech, and for sensationalism in both its action and its style. Nearly all readers have admitted, however, that the work is frequently powerful and often unforgettable, and, as Wright’s fi rst published book, it stands as a remarkable debut.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast “Big Boy Leaves Home” with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. How are the works similar in their use of humor, their depictions of boyhood, their shifts in tone, and their concluding passages; how do they differ in

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2.

3.

4.

5.

their depictions of race relations, their presentations of violence, and their portraits of their central black characters? Compare and contrast “Down by the Riverside” with the description of the storm and flood in ZOR A NEALE HURSTON’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. In what ways are the two storms symbolic? What do they suggest about man’s relationship with nature? How do the storms help to advance the plots of both works and emphasize central themes? Compare and contrast the presentation of political pressures and political dilemmas in Wright’s “Fire and Cloud” and in W. E. B. DUBOIS’s novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece. How do such factors as class, gender, and setting affect the presentation of these pressures? For instance, how much difference does it make that one work is largely set in Washington, D.C., and deals with middle-class characters, whereas the other is set in a small southern town and focuses on the poor? How are the scenes of interracial violence in the two works comparable? How is “Bright and Morning Star” in some ways a response to, and refutation of, Booker T. Washington’s famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech? What do the two works suggest about the relations between blacks and whites in the South? What do they suggest about the most productive forms of political action? What do they imply about the role of religion in achieving full civil liberties? Choose a particular theme, symbol, image, or type of character and trace its appearances over the course of more than one of the stories. How is it used distinctively in each work? How are the tales in this collection bound together? What common motifs or concerns do they share? How are they similar—and/or distinct—in style, methods, and/or effectiveness?

“Long Black Song” (1938, 1940) This story, the third in Wright’s collection titled Uncle Tom’s Children, focuses at fi rst on Sarah, a

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young black wife and mother in the rural South, who thinks of Tom (with whom she was once in love, but who is now away at war) as she and her infant await the return of her hardworking husband, Silas, who has been gone for several days, selling cotton and buying supplies. As her baby plays with a broken clock, Sarah hears the approach of a white traveling salesman; although she refuses to buy the “graphophone” he tries to sell her, she feels powerless to resist when he forces himself on her sexually. Not long after the salesman departs, Silas returns, discovers evidence of the sexual encounter, and becomes enraged; Sarah escapes, but from a distance she watches as Silas commits murderous revenge when the salesman and a companion return; Silas then uses his gun to resist the white mob who descend on his house and who burn it (with him in it) to the ground. “Long Black Song” is sometimes considered the best story in Uncle Tom’s Children, particularly because of its skillful and complicated depiction of Sarah and its effective use of imagery. Nevertheless, the work has also been criticized for its allegedly simplistic presentation of Silas and for its purportedly overblown description of the sexual encounter between Sarah and the salesman. That encounter, however, seems tantalizingly complex; Sarah obviously dreads the prospect of having adulterous sex, especially with a white man; at the same time, and on another level, she seems lonely and desirous. From one perspective the encounter is a rape; from another perspective it is something more complicated, and Wright’s nuanced description of Sarah’s feelings and reactions makes her an especially intriguing character. On the one hand, she clearly loves and admires Silas; on the other hand, she just as clearly wonders how life might have been different—and better—if she had married Tom. Similarly, on the one hand, she tries to resist the salesman, but, on the other hand, she obviously is aroused by the encounter: “A wave of warm blood swept into her stomach and loins. She felt his lips touching her throat and where he kissed it burned” (338). In short, in creating Sarah, Wright also created one of the most complicated and fascinating female characters in his fiction. Although he is

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often criticized by feminists for his allegedly sexist presentations of women, it is possible to argue that Sarah is an exception to this supposed rule. Silas’s discovery of the sexual encounter has been criticized as improbable: First, he fi nds the white man’s straw hat in the couple’s bedroom, then he notices a “short yellow pencil” (an ironic phallic symbol? [343]) on the quilt of the bed, and fi nally he literally uncovers (in a moment reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Othello) the salesman’s handkerchief in the couple’s bedclothes. His violent reaction is appropriately shocking but is also comprehensible on several levels: He not only feels betrayed as a man by Sarah but also feels violated as a black man by the white visitor. As a hardworking African-American male, Silas has tried to play by the rules of bourgeois society, but now he feels as if all his devotion and diligence have been mocked and undermined. However, his bloody confrontation with the gang of whites at the end of the tale is merely personal and is also literally self-destructive; unlike the antiwhite violence that concludes “Bright and Morning Star,” it advances no larger cause.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Wright claimed to have admired, and to have been influenced by, GERTRUDE STEIN’s short story “Melanctha” in her collection titled Three Lives. Can you detect such influence here? How are Wright’s story and Stein’s comparable or contrasting in their use of dialect, their depiction of black female sexuality, and their presentation of psychological complexity? In which story is plot more important, and in which are racial politics a more obviously central concern? 2. Compare and contrast the relations between African-American males and females presented in this story and in W. E. B. DUBOIS’s novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece. How does each writer emphasize the complexity of those relations, and how does each imply the ways those relations are affected by social circumstances? 3. In what ways is Silas, in this story, the ideal black man as imagined by Booker T. Washington? What does the fate of Silas suggest about the ideals Washington championed in his “Atlanta

Compromise” speech? On the other hand, how is Silas’s situation too particular to be relevant as a refutation of Washington’s ideas? 4. Discuss the complexity of characterization— and/or the failure to achieve such complexity—in this tale. How, and to what extent, does Wright succeed in making his characters threedimensional? How, specifically, does he depict them as complicated human beings rather than as stereotypes? Which characters do you fi nd the most—and least—successful in this respect?

“The Man Who Was Almost a Man” (1939, 1961) Dave Saunders is a 17-year-old youth who works as a farmhand with other blacks on the plantation of a southern landowner named Jim Hawkins. Because he feels unrespected by his fellow workers and thinks that owning a gun will help him impress them, he convinces his reluctant mother to allow him to buy a pistol for his father, which Dave himself plans to shoot. While practicing in Hawkins’s field one day, Dave accidentally kills Jenny, the mule; although he tries to claim the death resulted when the mule fell on its plow, his parents force him to admit the truth and his father orders him to work to repay the cost of the animal, but Dave instead decides, at the end of the story, to fi re the gun a few more times and then hop a train for the North, where he hopes to fulfi ll his dreams of manhood. In this often-anthologized story, racial tensions are far less prominent than is true of many of Wright’s other works; instead, Dave’s main confl icts are with other blacks, particularly his fellow fieldworkers and even members of his own family. Jim Hawkins, despite his status as the owner of a plantation, is not the cruel brute he might have been: Even after discovering that Dave has killed his mule, he seems more understanding than one might have expected of a powerful white man in a different work by Wright. The story thus has a broader, more universal appeal than is true of some of Wright’s other fiction; it deals with themes, situations, and

Richard Wright

character types to which nearly any reader, of any color, can relate. It focuses, for instance, on the basic human transition from adolescence to adulthood and on the often complicated relations within nearly all families, particularly between teenagers and parents. Moreover, unlike many of Wright’s other works, this story depicts a relatively stable, intact African-American family (with hardworking parents and two basically respectful children), and it presents that family as respected members of a relatively benign and benevolent community that includes both whites and blacks, who work together and seem to share basic values and even a common sense of humor. Ironically the only person who calls Dave a “nigger” in this story is his own mother (16), and the only other person who refers to others as “niggers” is Dave himself (11). The story features a much stronger sense of humor than is typical in work by Wright, particularly in its affectionate depiction of Dave’s mother, who is presented as a no-nonsense parent who nonetheless possesses a genuine soft spot for her son. The tale benefits from many features that contribute to the effectiveness of other works by Wright, including its skillful manipulation of point of view (which shifts between Dave’s perspective and that of the omniscient narrator), its convincing use of dialect, its adept use of dialogue both to enhance characterization and to advance the plot, and its “local color” realism, which communicates a strong sense of the details of day-to-day life in a small southern rural community. The abrupt shift of tone from basically comic to fundamentally serious adds to the impact of the tale, and the story benefits by seeming nondidactic: It has no obvious “message” to push or “lesson” to teach, and Dave is neither an obvious hero nor a simple victim. He is, instead, a typically complicated teenage boy whose story is presented in simple, direct, straightforward phrasing.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the frustration that Dave feels about his life in the South with the similar frustration felt by the central character of NELLA L ARSEN’s novel Quicksand. Ironically, how and why are other black people, in both cases, a main

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source of frustration? What kinds of options are open to both characters, particularly in view of such matters as age, social class, and gender? 2. Compare and contrast this story with “Queer” by SHERWOOD A NDERSON. How are the two works similar and/or different in plot, characterization, and theme? Which of the two central characters is more appealing, and why? How are they alike in their basic motivations and in their relations with other characters? 3. Compare and contrast Dave with Bigger Thomas in Wright’s novel Native Son. How do the two characters differ in psychology, social circumstances, and ultimate fate? What role does an accidental killing play in the plots of both works, but how do the tones of the two works differ? How do Dave’s experiences with whites seem to differ from those of Bigger? 4. What different character traits of different persons in this story appeal to you most, and why? What, specifically, makes you admire the various characters you fi nd most appealing? What ethical traits do those characters exhibit? What kind of morality does the story implicitly endorse, if any?

Native Son (1940) Bigger Thomas is a black youth who lives with his mother, brother, and sister in a tiny, rundown apartment in the Chicago slums; he spends much of the rest of his time with a gang of friends, committing petty robberies. Although his fortune seems to improve when he is hired to work for the wealthy white Dalton family, his life turns truly tragic when he accidentally kills Mary Dalton (the daughter) and then murders his own girlfriend to keep the fi rst killing a secret. Eventually caught and put on trial, he is defended by a left-wing lawyer, whose lengthy pleas on his behalf, emphasizing his status as a black man in a racist culture, cannot prevent his eventual conviction and execution. Native Son was an instant best seller; it immediately propelled Wright to the front rank of African-American novelists and made him a national celebrity. Early reviewers almost uniformly praised

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the book (or at least the fi rst two of its three long sections) as fast-paced, exciting, and gripping. Wright offered insight into a kind of world and a kind of character that had previously received relatively little recognition in serious fiction; he deliberately chose to focus on a so-called bad nigger in order to preclude the kind of sentimental reaction sometimes provoked by the obvious victims featured in Uncle Tom’s Children, his earlier collection of stories set in the Jim Crow South. Instead, Wright set Native Son in a large northern city and made his protagonist somewhat sullen, amoral, and even occasionally violent; rather than making the protagonist confront redneck racists bent on lynching any black who showed initiative, Wright instead placed Bigger in the home of wealthy white philanthropists ostensibly interested in helping to lift blacks out of poverty. Moreover, he made the murder victims not only a progressive young woman even more outspokenly committed to the welfare of blacks than her parents but also a pitiful young black woman whose chief desire is to please the man who kills her. In short, Native Son is a more ethically complex work than some of Wright’s earlier fiction. It is hard to feel entirely sympathetic toward Bigger, and yet Wright sets himself the difficult task of trying to make Bigger not only comprehensible but even somewhat appealing. The novel opens with a memorable scene in which Bigger and his family awake in their small apartment and begin to dress. The apartment is so confi ned that Bigger and his brother must look away while their mother and sister hurriedly put on their clothes, and then the females must do the same while the males also dress. Immediately, then, Wright effectively dramatizes one of his major themes: the almost claustrophobic confi nement poor blacks suffer in nearly every aspect of their lives, from the moment they awake in the morning until the moment they sleep again at night. Bigger lives and moves and has his being in a world that seems cramped and narrow, both physically and psychologically. Almost instantly, too, Wright reveals his skill for often creating convincing, realistic, and fluid dialogue; each member of Bigger’s family is quickly and deftly sketched through his

or her words and tones. Finally, the opening scene is effective for yet another reason: Sudden dramatic action breaks out when Bigger’s mother sees a large black rat and frantically begs Bigger to kill it. The wild scramble that ensues as Bigger and his young brother Buddy try to trap and destroy the intruder foreshadows the frenzied excitement that will also dominate large later portions of the novel, when it is Bigger himself who is hunted. When Bigger does eventually succeed in killing the rat by hurling a heavy skillet at it, we catch a glimpse of his own skill at violence, and when he then torments his younger sister, Vera, with the rat’s dangling corpse, we briefly sense his own penchant for cruelty. In a few fast-moving pages, therefore, Wright manages to establish many major concerns of the rest of the book and to begin sketching a complex portrait of his novel’s central character. Our sense of Bigger’s complexity grows as the novel proceeds. Ironically it is Bigger’s own mother who offers some of the harshest assessments of him. She accuses him of often being irrational, self-centered, unmotivated, and irresponsible, particularly in seeking or accepting the kind of employment that might offer both him and his family some hope of a better life. She even prophesies his eventual unfortunate fate (452), and although Bigger has long since grown tired of her constant criticism, Wright does not immediately or obviously deny the validity of her views. Although Bigger feels powerless to help his family, and although this sense of impotence breeds the potential for violence (453), he never responds fully or cogently to his mother’s sensible advice, particularly her insistence that he should seek employment and that he should defi nitely take the job he has now been offered. He cannot share her plain religious faith, but neither does he seem to share her confidence in a simple ethic of work, even when she reminds him that if he does not take the offered job, his family may starve. He imagines that if he takes the job, his life will be miserable, but it is hard to see how his existence could be much more miserable than it presently is (455–456). As he leaves the cramped apartment and considers his options for the day, he considers buying a magazine, watching a fi lm, spending time in a billiards hall with his gang,

Richard Wright

or perhaps just killing time (456). The one option he does not seriously consider is acting immediately on his mother’s advice. Instead, he indulges in pointless fantasies, and although he complains about lacking money, he still is not sure that he intends to take the job with the rich Dalton family (456–457). From a middle-class point of view, or even from the perspective of a member of the working poor, Bigger is not at fi rst an especially appealing protagonist; many of his mother’s criticisms seem just, and Wright has certainly achieved his announced aim of creating a central character who does not initially arouse much empathy or sympathy. Bigger’s interactions with his “gang”—whose other members are three young blacks, Gus, G. H., and Jack—add to Wright’s complex characterization of his novel’s central figure. Bigger and the others have long been contemplating robbing a local white merchant (having previously robbed other blacks without hesitation), but so far they have been reluctant to proceed for fear of the official retribution that might follow if they commit a crime against a white. Although Bigger is warned by his sister to stay away from the “gang,” and although he realizes that he will be sent to prison (not simply a reformatory, as in the past) if he is found guilty of another theft, he does not immediately dismiss the idea of thieving once more (458). Instead, when talking with Gus, he expresses regret that because of his race he will never have a chance to be an airplane pilot (460), even though the novel has presented no evidence so far that he has ever attempted seriously to pursue any more practical ambition. Nevertheless, there is no denying that Bigger’s prospects are cramped and distorted by the racism of his society, and Wright achieves one of the novel’s few comic moments when he has Bigger and Gus “play ‘white’ ” (461), as they humorously imitate the speech and mannerisms of various Caucasian authority figures. For understandable reasons, comedy and humor are not prominent traits in much of Wright’s fiction (except, for instance, in his splendid story “Big Boy Leaves Home” and, to a lesser degree, in his tale “The Man Who Was Almost a Man”), but in this scene of Native Son he shows his skill in a kind of

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writing that adds not only to our sense of Bigger’s total personality but also to the tonal complexity of the novel as a whole. When Bigger is with his young male friends, he can relax and show a more attractive (even if sarcastic) side of himself than is usually glimpsed by others. It is not long, however, before the humor gives way to bitterness—a bitterness that seems intensified (in fact) by the preceding comedy. With his skill for authentic dialect and convincing conversation, Wright soon has Bigger complaining to Gus about racist oppression and restrictions: “Goddammit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain’t. They do things and we can’t. It’s just like living in jail” (463). Some African-American readers, when the novel was fi rst published, worried that Wright, in depicting Bigger as he does, would merely reinforce many negative stereotypes about blacks as shiftless, unmotivated, and self-pitying, and indeed a number of white reviewers (particularly in the South) did in fact condemn Bigger on precisely these grounds. His life, they alleged, is no harder than the lives of most poor people, whatever their color or background, and these reviewers also complained that Bigger makes no great effort to improve his condition. Nevertheless, it would be hard for any fair-minded reader to disagree with the words just quoted: Bigger’s life is (and has been) distorted by the racism of his society, and if he reacts against his oppression with more bitterness and anger than other blacks the novel describes (including most of his own family and many of his own friends), perhaps that is partly because he is more sensitive and observant and feels a greater sense of self-respect. That, at least, is how many of the book’s fi rst and later readers reacted to his plight. For them, Bigger symbolized all the potential that African Americans had been denied by their presence in a society that refused to accord them full human rights, equal opportunity, and even basic dignity. Many of the book’s initial readers wondered (as Bigger himself wonders) what the novel’s protagonist might have achieved, and how differently his life might have evolved, if he had merely been given the same chances whites could assume as their birthright.


Wright adds further to our sense of Bigger’s complexity when describing his discussion, with his friends, of whether or not to rob the white merchant. On the one hand, Bigger himself fears committing the crime; on the other hand, he is afraid to confess his fear, and he even shows contempt and hatred for Gus when the latter more openly demonstrates the reluctance that Bigger himself tries to conceal (468–469). This passage is one of a number in the novel that add to the psychological subtlety of the book, and the complicated nature of Bigger’s personality is underlined even more boldly when he later pulls a knife on Gus and makes him lick its blade (480–481). Partly his anger with Gus expresses his anger with himself, and, in his willingness to reveal the latent violence that lurks just beneath the surface of Bigger’s personality, Wright not only helps explain the novel’s later events, but also shows that he is willing to create a protagonist who may not be entirely sympathetic but who is defi nitely complicated, interesting, and credible. In the fi rst 50 or so pages of the novel, when Bigger is interacting with his family and friends, Wright is clearly describing a world, and a mindset, he knows intimately, from the inside out; rarely do these opening pages strike a false note, and a reader today can only imagine the sense of shock and revelation that must have been felt when the book was fi rst published. Nothing quite like this had ever appeared before in serious (or even nonserious) American fiction, and reviewer after reviewer commented on the convincing portrait Wright had drawn of Bigger and his cramped, confi ning environment. For the fi rst time the life of the black urban ghetto had been opened up and laid bare. Wright seems on slightly less fi rm ground when he tries to describe the personalities and lifestyle of the wealthy Dalton family, with whom Bigger has been offered employment through a local agency. Mr. Dalton, a millionaire, has become rich partly by renting rundown apartments to Chicago’s black poor (in fact he is, indirectly, Bigger’s own landlord); he salves his social conscience not only by donating large sums to African-American charities but also by routinely employing a live-in black chauffeur—the position Bigger is offered

and accepts. Mrs. Dalton, meanwhile, is a kindly white-haired woman who also happens to be blind (a repeated pattern of symbolism suggesting the imperceptiveness not only of the Dalton family in particular but of whites in general). Mr. and Mrs. Dalton seem reasonably kind, thoughtful, and generous; Wright resists the temptation to make them obvious villains, and he even has the white Irish maid testify positively on their behalf (497). Bigger himself fi nds the Daltons (especially Mrs. Dalton) appealing (502)—a fact that only enhances our sense of the tragedy that will soon ensue. That tragedy results from Bigger’s interactions with the daughter, Mary Dalton, and her communist boyfriend, Jan Erlone. On Bigger’s fi rst assignment as a chauffeur, the young couple try to befriend him, but their instant intimacy seems ostentatious and even somewhat condescending. It is as if they want to prove (partly to Bigger but mostly to themselves) their own left-wing good faith rather than genuinely considering how to make Bigger feel most comfortable. They talk him into taking them to a “typical” black restaurant, make him sit there and eat with them, get him and themselves partly drunk, and then require him to drive them around a park as they become intimate on the car’s back seat. Bigger himself is stimulated by what he watches in the rearview mirror: Here and elsewhere Wright dares to describe a black man’s erotic attraction to a white woman—a taboo subject in much American fiction and culture before Native Son was published. Eventually Bigger drops Jan off at his apartment, but when he arrives back at the Dalton home with Mary, she is so drunk that he decides he must carry her to her bedroom (and feels aroused as he does so). As he places her on the bed, her mother unexpectedly enters the room. Terrified by what might happen if he, a black man, were found alone in the bedroom of a “vulnerable” white woman, Bigger (in a scene reminiscent of the murder of Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello) inadvertently smothers Mary with a pillow as he tries to stifle the noise she has begun to make in the presence of her blind mother. When Mrs. Dalton leaves the room, Bigger realizes that he has killed the girl. Desperate to dis-

Richard Wright

pose of the body, he hauls it to the basement and tries to stuff it into the large coal furnace; when it will not fit, he frantically hacks off its head, forces both pieces into the furnace, and stokes the fi re. From this point forward, the novel’s pace momentarily quickens as Bigger at fi rst succeeds in disguising his crime and then even tries to extort money (through a concocted and somewhat improbable “ransom note”) from the distressed couple. Eventually, however, his responsibility for the murder is discovered, and, as he is pursued in a huge citywide manhunt, he even kills own girlfriend, Bessie, lest she reveal his guilt. As the exciting second part of the novel concludes, Bigger has been apprehended, beaten, and thrown into jail. In part 3 of the book, the narrative slows considerably, and many readers have complained about the abrupt shift in pace, tone, and technique. Much of this section reports the inquest and trial, and Bigger himself suddenly recedes in importance. Center stage is now occupied instead by his leftwing defense attorney, Boris Max (whose last name suggests his status as a spokesman for Wright’s own Marxist views). At the trial, Max offers a lengthy (and partly tedious) argument on Bigger’s behalf. He essentially indicts American racism and capitalism for the guilt of Bigger’s crime; he accuses Mr. Dalton of cheap charity, and he even turns on the blind mother, proclaiming, “And to Mrs. Dalton, I say: ‘Your philanthropy was as tragically blind as your sightless eyes!’ ” (814). Of the murder itself, Max insists, “It was the fi rst act of [Bigger’s] life; it was the most meaningful, exciting and stirring thing that had ever happened to him. He accepted it because it made him free, gave him the possibility of choice, of action, the opportunity to act and to feel that his actions carried weight” (817). This may be good existentialist philosophizing; whether it is an effective defense strategy is another question, and indeed much of this latter section of the book can sound literally like special pleading, as if Wright were suddenly less interested in convincing characterization or a credible plot than in scoring sometimes dubious political points. Meanwhile, the arguments of the prosecutor sometimes seem even less credible than those of Max; Wright for

541

once seems to stoop to the temptation to introduce an obvious villain and bogeyman. (In his defense, however, it must be noted that he took many details of the trial and its seemingly insane press coverage from an actual trial that occurred in Chicago not long before he wrote his novel.) Given the practical shortcomings of some of Max’s arguments and the fact that the system is rigged from the start against the defendant, it is not surprising that Bigger is convicted and sentenced to death. In the end, however, he accepts and even affi rms his status as a murderer, arguing to a terrified Max, “I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em” (849). From the beginning, Native Son provoked widespread commentary, most of it highly positive. Reviewers and critics praised for book for its realism, suspense, excitement, dialogue, dialect, crisp prose, vivid imagery, gripping terror, psychological subtlety, and general lack of sentimentality. On the other hand, the novel was sometimes variously criticized by early reviewers, who faulted its alleged melodrama, preachiness, repetitiveness, improbable plot developments (especially after the fi rst murder), and lack of memorable or complex characters aside from Bigger himself. Numerous reviewers complained that Bigger was often presented inconsistently: Sometimes he seemed largely thoughtless and inarticulate; sometimes he seemed more reflective and eloquent than either his education, his environment, or his characterization elsewhere would lead us to believe. Some reviewers thought that toward the end of the book Bigger became merely a convenient prop to be used in Max’s unconvincing speeches, while others found those speeches themselves both moving and persuasive. By some reviewers Wright was accused of slandering communists (especially Jan), while other reviewers argued that the communists were (rightly or wrongly) the true heroes of the book. Some commentators considered Bigger an unappealing thug; others found him a sympathetic victim and even, to some degree, a tragic hero. Few early reviewers, however, and even fewer critics and commentators since, questioned the genuine power of much of Wright’s book.


For Discussion or Writing 1. Many critics have noted both resemblances and differences between Native Son and THEODORE DREISER’s novel An American Tragedy. Discuss the two works in terms of the personalities of their central characters, the significance of the accidental killings, and the effectiveness of the trial scenes. How does race add a complicating factor to Wright’s book not present in Dreiser’s? How do the two works differ in their literary styles? 2. Examine the killings in Native Son. What is Bigger’s motivation in each case? Is he at all sympathetic? What difference does it make that his victims are female? 3. Native Son has sometimes been compared to Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. How are the two works similar in plot, protagonist, themes, tone, and atmosphere? How do the novels differ in the authors’ attitudes toward the central figures and in the ultimate fate of both characters? What is the role of religion in each work? How is conscience presented in each novel?

“The Man Who Lived Underground” (1942, 1944, 1961) Fred Daniels is a black man who has been forced by police to confess to a murder he did not commit; having escaped their custody, he takes refuge in the city sewer system, where he sets up residence in a small “cave” from which he ventures out on exploratory expeditions. He gains access to the basements of many different buildings and is able to observe (while being unobserved himself) the activities of many different kinds of people—a perspective that gives him a new and disillusioned insight into the life of the “normal,” aboveground world. He is able to steal money, diamonds, and other objects with which to decorate his “cave,” but when he eventually turns himself in to the police and offers to reveal his underground lair, an officer shoots him because he now knows too much. This obviously allegorical story is clearly indebted to such literary predecessors as Homer’s Odyssey,

Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Inferno, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, and Plato’s philosophical allegory of the cave. The tale is often highly praised for its depiction of the dark underbelly of American civilization in particular and of human life in general. Although Fred Daniels is black and although he defi nitely is persecuted because of his race, many critics see him as a kind of Everyman figure who represents not merely the sufferings of African Americans but also the larger predicament of mankind in general, which is haunted by feelings of guilt, alienation, rootlessness, and absurdity. Wright’s “message” here seems more existentialist than Marxist; in other words, he seems more concerned with the basically bleak and perhaps inescapable conditions of man’s meaningless existence than with proposing any specific political or economic remedy. Daniels fi nally dies not because he is guilty of any real “crime” but merely because he is a potentially disruptive, subversive presence in a civilization that prefers complacency and ignorance to any sort of genuinely disturbing insight. As the officer who kills him explains, “You’ve got to shoot his kind. They’d wreck things” (92). Anyone approaching this story as a “realistic” tale is likely to be disappointed. Daniels’s activities in the sewers—particularly his ability to access so many different buildings so easily and so rapidly without ever being discovered, and especially his ability to determine the combination of the safe from which he steals the money and diamonds— seem almost ridiculously improbable, especially since (for much the story) he depends simply on a few matches to provide necessary light. Daniels himself is not especially interesting or complex; he is, instead, more a literary symbol to whom a quick succession of symbolic events happen; he moves in a setting that is often vividly described but that does not seem especially believable. He observes and eventually even speaks with other characters who rarely seem convincing as “real” human beings; the policemen at the end, in particular, seem to function more as props than as genuinely credible persons. However, to judge either Daniels or his story by the criteria of conventional “realism” is probably to miss Wright’s intended purpose. He wanted, in

Richard Wright

this story, to deal with abstract ideas rather than with convincingly real people, events, or things, and many readers apparently fi nd his treatment of these ideas themselves a sufficient reward for reading this exceptionally long and relentlessly eventfi lled allegory.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this story with T. S. ELIOT’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Specifically, discuss the works in terms of their presentation of existence in a large city, their emphasis on individual alienation and isolation, and their use of grotesque imagery. How do matters of race and class complicate any comparison of the two works? 2. Compare and contrast this story with Dante’s Inferno in terms of structure, imagery, tone, and purpose. What is the role of religious belief in each work? How is Wright’s story in some ways even darker in tone than Dante’s? 3. Compare and contrast this work with JACK L ONDON’s novel The Sea-Wolf. In particular, compare the ways both works plunge their protagonists into strange new modes of existence. Discuss how each protagonist copes with the unfamiliar challenges he faces. How does the philosophy of Fred Daniels resemble and/or differ from that of Wolf Larsen? 4. Discuss the specific ways in which Wright presents his protagonist so that the latter seems a symbol of humanity in general rather than of one race in particular. To what extent, and in what respects, does the character function in both ways?

Black Boy (1945) Black Boy was originally the fi rst part of a substantially longer autobiography in which Wright described his life from his bleak early childhood to his break in adulthood with the Communist Party. However, Wright’s publisher suggested that the fi rst half of the book be issued separately with a distinct title, and so Black Boy recounts Wright’s

543

boyhood until his late teens, when he left the racist South and headed, full of hopes, for Chicago. The book emphasizes the real and threatened confl ict and violence he often suffered in his dealings not only with his own family but also with the intolerant whites with whom he had increasing contact. The opening episode of Black Boy variously sets the tone for the rest of the book. Wright recounts how, as a four-year-old, he defied the authority of his parents and other family members by literally playing with fi re, thereby starting an accidental conflagration that destroyed much of the house. To escape punishment, he crawled under the burning home and hid; when his frantic parents fi nally found and retrieved him, his mother allegedly beat him so harshly that he supposedly lapsed into unconsciousness, ran a high fever, and was even in danger of dying. This, in any case, is the dramatic story with which the book begins, thus establishing some major themes of the work as a whole. Even at the age of four the willfulness and independence that will become major elements of young Richard’s character are apparent; we see him rejecting, even then, the authority of others, particularly his family, and suffering often violent consequences. These patterns will be repeated again and again as the book proceeds. However, the opening episode already raises some troubling questions about the book’s credibility— questions that have bothered many readers. Is it believable that Wright could remember so distinctly an episode from so early in his life? Is it plausible that he could remember (and faithfully reproduce) the detailed dialogue spoken at that time? Was his mother’s reaction quite as violent as he claims, and was his young life really in such mortal danger from a beating? Possibly the answer to all these questions is “yes,” but many readers have found the book sometimes difficult to accept entirely at face value. Doubts have been raised repeatedly about its factual reliability; Wright has often been suspected of exaggerating for dramatic effect, of playing somewhat fast and loose with historical “truth,” and of making himself seem more a victim (and more central to his own story) than simple facts or historical probability might suggest. Critics have sometimes noted that


Wright’s accounts of events in Black Boy contradict accounts he offered elsewhere, while biographers have sometimes found discrepancies between the narrative provided in his autobiography and the records or testimony available from contemporary sources. For some readers, these kinds of concerns raise significant problems with the book; other readers, instead, believe that Wright merely used artistic license to draw a self-portrait that, while perhaps not strictly accurate in every single respect, nevertheless powerfully conveys an inner emotional truth—a truth that effectively exemplifies representative truths about the lives of black people in general in the American South in the first decades of the 20th century. The pattern established by the opening description of the fi re is repeated consistently throughout the book: Young Richard challenges or defies authority and is swiftly punished, and often the punishment is at the hands of his own family. Perhaps even more memorable (and credible) than the fi re episode is the anecdote in which Richard’s father, angered by the noise a kitten is making while the father is trying to sleep, impulsively orders his young sons to kill the cat—never assuming that Richard might actually take him at his word. Richard, though, sees the order as an opportunity to defy his father by (paradoxically) obeying him to the letter. Therefore, against his younger brother’s protests, Richard lynches the kitten, thus achieving a symbolic victory in a contest of wills with his unappealing parent (12–13). When Richard’s mother discovers his deed, she punishes him (this time) not by beating him senseless but by playing on his guilty conscience, thus establishing another repeated pattern: Of the two parents, the mother is the more admirable (despite her occasional violence). Much more than the shiftless, irresponsible, and disloyal father (who later deserts the mother and children for another woman), Richard’s mother emerges as a source of moral authority: She is hardworking, self-sacrificing, and devoted to her children, although eventually her persistent ill health prevents her from playing a major role in the narrative. Wright has sometimes been criticized for describing his mother (and indeed many members of his family) with little obvious warmth or

affection, and it is true that he often emphasizes their harshness and sometimes even their cruelty. Defenders of Wright, however, have argued that we should not be surprised if black adults—living in a racist society that denied them much dignity or autonomy—sometimes exercised what may have been excessive authority in dealing with their own children. Moreover, Wright’s defenders have also suggested that young Richard innately resisted nearly any and all authority, and so it was only to be expected that he would clash with the people with whom he most often interacted. To be an authentic person (Wright seems to have felt) he needed to assert his independence from everyone and everything, perhaps especially including the people who raised him. For some readers, Wright’s emphasis on the negative aspects of his own family makes the book seem more convincing, as if Wright intended to tell the whole, unvarnished truth, sparing no one in the process. However, even readers willing to accept his unattractive depiction of his relatives have often been troubled by his comments on blacks as a whole, especially since those comments are not the impulsive responses of an immature boy but the considered, retrospective reflections of the adult narrator. In one of the book’s most notorious passages, Wright comments on what he calls “the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how shallow was even our despair.” He says that when he “brooded upon the cultural barrenness of black life, I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man” (37). Wright, it is true, immediately notes that “Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it,” and thus that any defects in their culture resulted from their oppression. Nevertheless, many readers (both black and white) have objected to his charge that blacks lacked kindness and tenderness, arguing that the

Richard Wright

book itself implicitly refutes this view, particularly when it shows Wright’s relatives responding with generosity and compassion to his mother’s illness. Indeed, some readers have alleged that it is Wright himself who displays, in this book, defects of kindness and tenderness, not only toward his own family and race but also toward humanity in general and whites in particular, whom he rarely depicts in a favorable light—as if he never encountered a decent or thoughtful Caucasian. In the view of many commentators of both colors, the book is flawed by Wright’s allegedly innate egotism, his tendency to focus only on his own thoughts and feelings, his lack of genuine interest in the motives and psychology of others, and his habit of making self-justification and self-aggrandizement major themes of the book. The work, these critics claim, is too unbalanced, too unsubtle, too lacking in shades of gray. Wright’s defenders, on the other hand, have argued that his grim pictures of southern racism are accurate, that the narrative is presented with dignity and even restraint, and that the phrasing is clear, vivid, and at times even lyrically beautiful. Again and again in Black Boy, young Richard resists the people and forces that try to control and oppress him. He resists his authoritarian “Granny,” with her rigid views of religion, and he resists his domineering aunt Addie, who (both at school as his teacher and at home as his relative) tries to impose her narrow ideas of discipline on him. He resists the school principal who wants to dictate the content of his valedictory speech, and he resists many whites when he can do so safely (as when he refuses to sell a dog to a white woman who wants to buy it). He soon learns, however, that openly defying some whites can be dangerous, and he also learns that some whites will not hesitate to abuse their authority by seeking to intimidate blacks and prevent them from progressing. As the chapters pass and Richard ages, his detailed memories seem more credible and the book becomes more consistently convincing and effective. For instance, his account of his terrified dealings with two racist coworkers is (unfortunately) all too credible and frightening, while his description of his desperate but ingenious efforts to gain access to a local library carries the

545

ring of truth. There is even a hint of the kind of tenderness that often seems missing from the book when Wright describes his encounters with a kindly widow and her daughter in Memphis, not long before the narrator decides to abandon the South and head for Chicago. Although this move north was not originally intended to end the book (for Wright had written a whole second section detailing his disappointments once he arrived there), in its initially published form Black Boy ends on a note of artificial optimism. Its last sentence stresses the “terror” from which the narrator “fled” (246) rather than the new frustrations he would soon face. Reviewers and commentators have often reacted to Black Boy with strongly varying responses. Critics of the book, for instance, have sometimes suggested that the Wright who emerges from this text is so unappealingly self-involved and humorless that he makes a poor representative of his race; such readers contend that the Wright who appears in this book is so antisocial that he would have been unhappy no matter what his color. Readers who dislike the book also argue that its prose is undistinguished and that its psychology is superficial; they contend that the chronology is often unclear, that the text conveys little convincing sense of the larger era and environment, and that Wright tries to base generalizations about black American life on experiences that are far too idiosyncratic and abnormal to be truly representative. These readers often consider the autobiography a less powerful work than Native Son. In contrast, numerous other readers have praised Black Boy as a highly effective work, sometimes judging it even better than the novel in its style, psychology, and political effectiveness. The book has been praised for its accuracy, its frankness, its skillful characterization, and the insights it provides into the social and family life of African Americans, including their folklore and even their superstitions. Wright’s book has been compared to European autobiographies (which tend to emphasize certain key ideas rather than merely relating one event after another), and his emphases on such concepts as language, authenticity, loneliness, tragedy, and hunger (both literal and metaphorical) have been particularly


praised. Admirers have extolled the work for avoiding clichéd responses and for resisting the impulse to propagandize, while more than one commentator has expressed astonishment that Wright, in view of his impoverished environment and degrading early experiences, was able to resist turning either violent or indolent but instead turned his sufferings into the stuff of real intellectual achievement and great art.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Black Boy with BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’s autobiography titled Up from Slavery. Discuss the works in terms of their underlying assumptions, their tones, their credibility, their stylistic traits, and the purposes for which they seem to have been written. Discuss the ways they present “secondary” characters as well as the ways each author presents himself. In what ways does Native Son seem to be a deliberate response to, and refutation of, Up from Slavery? 2. Compare and contrast Black Boy and W. E. B. DuBois’s book The Souls of Black Folk. In what ways does Wright’s book confi rm many claims made by DuBois about the South? How do Wright and DuBois seem to differ in their presentations of African-American culture and society? When Black Boy was published, DuBois reviewed it and had some fairly negative things to say about the book. Which aspects of The Souls of Black Folk would lead you to expect that DuBois might dislike Black Boy? 3. Although Black Boy is ostensibly a work of nonfiction, and although ZOR A NEALE HURSTON’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is ostensibly a work of fiction, how can the works be compared and contrasted in terms of such traits as characterization, dialogue, dialect, symbolism, and imagery? Which work offers a more complex or convincing picture of life in the South or of relations between the races? How do the protagonists of each work face similar challenges? How are their problems distinct? 4. How would you defend Wright against the various criticisms the book has provoked? What are some of the specific arguments you might use?

In the fi nal analysis, how convincing do you fi nd the kinds of objections that have been raised to the book?

American Hunger (1977) This text was originally conceived as the second part of Wright’s autobiography, but while the fi rst part was published separately as Black Boy in 1945, the second section remained partially unprinted (except in excerpts) until the 1970s. The book describes Wright’s arrival in Chicago, his growth as a writer, and his increasing involvement in (and eventual disillusionment with) the Communist Party. The oppression Wright describes in this work is more ideological than strictly racial, and, as in Black Boy, he recounts his efforts to assert and maintain his individuality in the face of numerous pressures to conform. Whereas the 1945 version of Black Boy has received extensive critical attention, relatively little has been published about American Hunger, partly because the whole text was not printed until 1977, when interest in Wright’s work had temporarily declined from its initial high point in the 1940s. American Hunger is also significantly shorter than Black Boy, and, because it paints a largely unattractive picture of American communism, reactions to the work have often been affected, for good or ill, by the political orientations of its reviewers and commentators. Most Americans could agree that the racism depicted in Black Boy was reprehensible, but in the 1940s and even later, many Americans were less inclined to condemn communism with equal vehemence. Wright himself, in fact, never turned his back completely on Marxist ideas, even though he suspected communists of having helped suppress the originally planned publication of American Hunger in the 1940s. Critical reaction to the book when it was fi nally published in the 1970s varied, but much of it was tepid. Although a few commentators considered the work as powerful, precise, and masterful as Black Boy, many others thought it lacked the impact and the skill of its predecessor. These critics found the book too dry, didactic, and

Richard Wright

lacking in drama to make for consistently compelling reading; they condemned its style as mostly colorless, wordy, journalistic, and pedantic. Other reviewers attacked the book for alleged inaccuracies (especially concerning the date of Wright’s break with the communists), while still others found fault with the personality of Wright himself—a personality his critics considered cold, remote, arrogant, self-righteous, and judgmental. Critics of the work alleged that it could not stand by itself as an interesting autobiography, and they also claimed that it lacked the often violent intensity that made Black Boy so memorable for so many readers. Nevertheless, defenders of Wright praised the clarity of writing and thought in American Hunger, and they also argued that the later work transformed and deepened any understanding of the earlier book by undercutting the optimism with which Black Boy had seemed to conclude and by showing that the themes of hunger, alienation, and the need for independence, which had been emphasized in the fi rst book, remained central to Wright’s experience even after he escaped the South. Indeed, some readers have argued that in American Hunger Wright deals with universal problems—problems that transcend those of any particular race and region—and that the book therefore has a distinctive importance that is all its own.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast American Hunger with The Philadelphia Negro, by W. E. B. DuBois. How does each work present the life of African Americans in a large American city? How are the sociological data outlined in DuBois’s book confi rmed (or not confi rmed) by the more impressionistic details offered by Wright? 2. Compare and contrast the depictions of black life in Chicago offered by Wright in American Hunger with those offered by Nella Larsen in her novel Passing. In particular, discuss how the two works are affected by their different treatments of such matters as class, gender, politics, and ethnic tensions. 3. Compare and contrast the presentation of the Communist Party in this work and in two of

547

Wright’s earlier works—“Fire and Cloud” and “Bright and Morning Star.” How, specifically, does Wright’s view of the party seem to have changed between the early works and the later one, and what continuities also exist among all three works? 4. Choose one section of this work that you think is especially effective and then examine its effectiveness in detail. Discuss it in terms of such criteria as clarity, vividness, and skill in characterization and in the use of phrasing and imagery. Then choose another section of the book that you consider less strong in all these ways and compare and contrast the two sections.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON WRIGHT AND HIS WORK 1. By the mid-1940s, Wright had begun to show a defi nite interest in the philosophy known as existentialism. Read several analyses and discussions of existentialism, and then discuss the ways in which some of Wright’s works—particularly Black Boy, American Hunger, and “The Man Who Lived Underground”—might be called existentialist works. Compare and contrast Wright’s works with a classic example of existentialist literature, such as Albert Camus’s The Stranger. 2. Some commentators on Wright consider Native Son a more powerful work than Black Boy, while others hold the opposite opinion. Choose two extended passages from the works and compare and contrast them in detail, discussing in particular their qualities of style, including their use of imagery, diction, characterization, dialogue, and symbolism. Which work, in your opinion, is more effective in its use of all the various resources of the language? 3. Wright has often been accused of arrogance and egocentricity, particularly in his autobiographies. What evidence can you fi nd in these works either to support or to refute these charges? What possible explanations can you offer of these alleged traits in Wright? Does the effectiveness of an


autobiography depend on our ability to fi nd the protagonist appealing in some way? What qualities, in your opinion, make an autobiography worth reading, and how (if at all) do Wright’s autobiographies satisfy your criteria? 4. One of Wright’s initial admirers was James Baldwin, but Baldwin later attacked Wright on more than one occasion. Research Baldwin’s comments on Wright, examine the evidence he presented to support his views, and then explain whether or not you think his later opinions of Wright were justifiable. 5. Wright’s political opinions differed significantly from those of Zora Neale Hurston. Research the political views of the two writers and compare and contrast their points of view. Should our political agreement or disagreement with a novelist affect our reactions to the writer’s works of fiction? Is it possible to admire the work of a creative writer whose political opinions differ from our own? Discuss the relevance of Ezra Pound’s political opinions to this question. 6. When Wright’s Native Son was fi rst published, it was often compared to JOHN STEINBECK’s The Grapes of Wrath. Do some research into the economic and political conditions of the United States in the 1930s, and then discuss the ways in which both novels reflect the specific eras in which they were written. In particular, discuss the ways both books intervene in the political debates of the time. How do they seem similar and/or distinct in their political points of view?

WORKS CITED

AND


Butler, Robert J., ed. The Critical Response to Richard Wright. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1995. Felgar, Robert. Student Companion to Richard Wright. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Hakutani, Yoshinobu, ed. Critical Essays on Richard Wright. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. Critical Essays on Richard Wright’s Native Son. New York: Twayne, 1997. Mullen, Bill. “Modern American Poetry: Richard Wright.” Available online. URL: http://www. english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/r_wright/r_ wright.htm. Accessed April 7, 2009. Rampersad, Arnold. “Chronology.” In Early Works: Lawd Today! Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son. By Richard Wright New York: Library of America, 1991. Reilly, John M., ed. Richard Wright: The Critical Reception. N.p.: Burt Franklin, 1978. Wright, Richard. Early Works: Lawd Today! Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son. Edited by Arnold Rampersad. New York: Library of America, 1991. ———. Eight Men. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1987. ———. Later Works: Black Boy (American Hunger), The Outsider. Edited by Arnold Rampersad. New York: Library of America, 1991.

Robert C. Evans

Appendix I Alphabetical List of Writers Included in All Volumes of the Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Adams, Henry Adams, John, and Abigail Adams Albee, Edward Alcott, Louisa May Alvarez, Julia Anaya, Rudolfo Anderson, Sherwood Angelou, Maya Baca, Jimmy Santiago Baldwin, James Bambara, Toni Cade Baraka, Amiri (Leroi Jones) Bellow, Saul Bierce, Ambrose Bishop, Elizabeth Bonnin, Gertrude Simmons (Zitkala-Ša) Bradbury, Ray Bradford, William Bradstreet, Anne Brooks, Gwendolyn Brown, Charles Brockden Bryant, William Cullen Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez Capote, Truman Carver, Raymond Cather, Willa Champlain, Samuel de Cheever, John Chesnutt, Charles Child, Lydia Maria Chopin, Kate Cisneros, Sandra Cofer, Judith Ortiz

1838–1918 1735–1826 1744–1818 1928– 1832–1888 1950– 1937– 1876–1942 1928– 1952– 1924–1987 1939– 1934–

Volume 2 Volume 1 Volume 4 Volume 2 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 3 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 5

1915–2005 1842–1914? 1911–1979 1876–1938

Volume Volume Volume Volume

4 2 4 3

1920– 1590–1657 1612–1672 1917–2000 1771–1810 1794–1878 1490–1556

Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume

4 1 1 4 1 1 1

1924–1984 1938–1988 1873–1947 1570–1635 1912–1982 1858–1932 1802–1880 1850–1904 1954– 1952–

Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 3 Volume 1 Volume 4 Volume 2 Volume 2 Volume 2 Volume 5 Volume 5

Collins, Billy Columbus, Christopher Cooper, James Fenimore Crane, Hart Crane, Stephen Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de Cullen, Countee Cummings, E. E. Davis, Rebecca Harding Dickinson, Emily Dos Passos, John Douglass, Frederick Dove, Rita Dreiser, Theodore DuBois, W. E. B. Dunbar, Paul Laurence Edwards, Jonathan Eliot, T. S. Ellison, Ralph Emerson, Ralph Waldo Equiano, Olaudah Erdrich, Louise Faulkner, William Ferlinghetti, Lawrence Fern, Fanny (Sara Willis Parton) Fitzgerald, F. Scott Forché, Carolyn Foster, Hannah Webster Franklin, Benjamin Freeman, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freneau, Philip Morin Frost, Robert Fuller, Margaret Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

549

1941– 1451–1506 1789–1851 1899–1932 1871–1900 1735–1813

Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume

5 1 1 3 2 1

1903–1946 1894–1962 1831–1910 1830–1886 1896–1970 1818–1895 1952– 1871–1945 1868–1963 1872–1906 1703–1758 1888–1965 1914–1994 1803–1882 1745–1797 1954– 1897–1962 1920– 1811–1872

Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume

3 3 2 2 3 2 5 3 3 2 1 3 4 2 1 5 3 4 2

1896–1940 1950– 1758–1840 1706–1790 1852–1930

Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume

3 5 1 1 2

1752–1832 1874–1963 1810–1850 1860–1935

Volume Volume Volume Volume

1 3 2 2


Ginsberg, Allen Giovanni, Nikki H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) Haley, Alex Hammon, Jupiter Handsome Lake Hansberry, Lorraine Harjo, Joy Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harris, Joel Chandler Harte, Bret Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hayden, Robert Heller, Joseph Hemingway, Ernest Howells, William Dean Hughes, Langston Hurston, Zora Neale Irving, Washington Jackson, Shirley Jacobs, Harriet James, Henry Jarrell, Randall Jefferson, Thomas Jewett, Sarah Orne Kerouac, Jack Kesey, Ken King, Martin Luther, Jr. Kingsolver, Barbara Kingston, Maxine Hong Knowles, John Komunyakaa, Yusef Larsen, Nella Lee, Chang-rae Lee, Harper Levertov, Denise London, Jack Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth Lowell, Robert Malamud, Bernard Malcolm X Marshall, Paule Mather, Cotton

1926–1997 1943– 1886–1961 1921–1992 1711–1806 1735–1815 1930–1965 1951– 1825–1911

Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume

4 5 3 4 1 1 4 5 2

1848–1908 1836–1902 1804–1864 1913–1980 1923–1999 1899–1961 1837–1920 1871–1967 1891–1960 1783–1859 1919–1965 1813–1897 1843–1916 1914–1965 1743–1826 1849–1909 1922–1969 1935–2001 1929–1968 1955– 1940– 1926–2001 1947– 1891–1964 1965– 1926– 1923–1997 1876–1916 1807–1882

Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume

2 2 2 4 4 3 2 3 3 1 4 2 2 4 1 2 4 4 4 5 5 4 5 3 5 4 4 3 2

1917–1977 1914–1986 1925–1965 1929– 1663–1728


4 4 4 4 1

McCarthy, Cormac McKay, Claude McMurtry, Larry Melville, Herman Millay, Edna St. Vincent Miller, Arthur Momaday, N. Scott Moore, Marianne Mora, Pat Morrison, Toni Morton, Thomas Murray, Judith Sargent Oates, Joyce Carol O’Brien, Tim Occom, Samson O’Connor, Flannery Oliver, Mary O’Neill, Eugene Ortiz, Simon J. Paine, Thomas Piatt, Sarah M. B. Pinsky, Robert Plath, Sylvia Poe, Edgar Allan Porter, Katherine Anne Potok, Chaim Pound, Ezra Rand, Ayn Reed, Ishmael Rich, Adrienne Robinson, Edwin Arlington Roethke, Theodore Roth, Philip Rowson, Susanna Haswell Salinger, J. D. Sandburg, Carl Sedgwick, Catharine Maria Sexton, Anne Silko, Leslie Marmon Smith, John Snyder, Gary Soto, Gary

1933– 1890–1948 1936– 1819–1891 1892–1950 1915–2005 1934– 1887–1972 1942– 1931– 1579–1647 1751–1820 1938– 1946– 1723–1792 1925–1964 1935– 1888–1953 1941– 1737–1809 1836–1919 1940– 1932–1963 1809–1849 1890–1980 1929–2002 1885–1972 1905–1982 1938– 1929– 1869–1935

Volume 5 Volume 3 Volume 5 Volume 2 Volume 3 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 3 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 1 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 3 Volume 5 Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 5 Volume 4 Volume 2 Volume 3 Volume 4 Volume 3 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 3

1908–1963 1933– 1762–1824

Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 1

1919–2010 1878–1967 1789–1867


1928–1974 1948– 1580–1631 1930– 1952–


4 5 1 5 5

Appendix I 551

Stein, Gertrude Steinbeck, John Stevens, Wallace Stowe, Harriet Beecher Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton) Swenson, May Tan, Amy Taylor, Edward Thoreau, Henry David Toomer, Jean Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) Updike, John Viramontes, Helena María Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr.

1874–1946 1902–1968 1879–1955 1811–1896 1865–1914


3 3 3 2 3

1913–1989 1952– ca. 1642–1729 1817–1862 1894–1967 1835–1910

Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3 Volume 2

1932–2009 1954– 1922–2007


Walker, Alice Warren, Robert Penn Washington, Booker T. Welty, Eudora Wharton, Edith Wheatley, Phillis Whitman, Walt Wilbur, Richard Wilder, Thornton Williams, Tennessee Williams, William Carlos Wilson, August Wilson, Harriet E. Winthrop, John Wright, Richard

1944– 1905–1989 1856–1915 1909–2001 1862–1937 1753–1784 1819–1892 1921– 1897–1975 1911–1983 1883–1961 1945–2005 1825–1900 1588–1649 1908–1960

Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume

5 4 3 4 3 1 2 4 3 4 3 5 2 1 3

Appendix II Chronological List of Writers Included in All Volumes of the Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers, by Birth Date Note that authors are placed in the volume that covers the period during which they published their most important works. Some authors published their works relatively early or relatively late in their lives. This explains why, for example, certain authors placed in Volume 3 were actually born before certain authors placed in volume 2.

Christopher Columbus Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca Samuel de Champlain Thomas Morton John Smith John Winthrop William Bradford Anne Bradstreet Edward Taylor Cotton Mather Jonathan Edwards Benjamin Franklin Jupiter Hammon Samson Occom J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur Handsome Lake John Adams Thomas Paine Thomas Jefferson Abigail Adams Olaudah Equiano Judith Sargent Murray Philip Morin Freneau Phillis Wheatley Hannah Webster Foster Susanna Haswell Rowson Charles Brockden Brown Washington Irving James Fenimore Cooper Catharine Maria Sedgwick

1451–1506 1490–1556

Volume 1 Volume 1

1570–1635 1579–1647 1580–1631 1588–1649 1590–1657 1612–1672 ca. 1642–1729 1663–1728 1703–1758 1706–1790 1711–1806 1723–1792 1735–1813

Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1

1735–1815 1735–1826 1737–1809 1743–1826 1744–1818 1745–1797 1751–1820 1752–1832 1753–1784 1758–1840 1762–1824 1771–1810 1783–1859 1789–1851 1789–1867

Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1

William Cullen Bryant Lydia Maria Child Ralph Waldo Emerson Nathaniel Hawthorne Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Edgar Allan Poe Margaret Fuller Fanny Fern (Sara Willis Parton) Harriet Beecher Stowe Harriet Jacobs Henry David Thoreau Frederick Douglass Herman Melville Walt Whitman Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Harriet E. Wilson Emily Dickinson Rebecca Harding Davis Louisa May Alcott Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) Bret Harte Sarah M. B. Piatt William Dean Howells Henry Adams Ambrose Bierce Henry James Joel Chandler Harris Sarah Orne Jewett

552

1794–1878 1802–1880 1803–1882 1804–1864 1807–1882


1 2 2 2 2

1809–1849 1810–1850 1811–1872


1811–1896 1813–1897 1817–1862 1818–1895 1819–1891 1819–1892 1825–1911

Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume

2 2 2 2 2 2 2

1825–1900 1830–1886 1831–1910 1832–1888 1835–1910


2 2 2 2 2

1836–1902 1836–1919 1837–1920 1838–1918 1842–1914? 1843–1916 1848–1908 1849–1909

Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume

2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2

Appendix II

Kate Chopin Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman Booker T. Washington Charles Chesnutt Charlotte Perkins Gilman Edith Wharton Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton) W. E. B. DuBois Edwin Arlington Robinson Stephen Crane Theodore Dreiser Langston Hughes Paul Laurence Dunbar Willa Cather Gertrude Stein Robert Frost Jack London Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša) Sherwood Anderson Carl Sandburg Wallace Stevens William Carlos Williams Ezra Pound H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) Marianne Moore Eugene O’Neill T. S. Eliot Claude McKay Katherine Anne Porter Zora Neale Hurston Nella Larsen Edna St. Vincent Millay E. E. Cummings Jean Toomer F. Scott Fitzgerald John Dos Passos William Faulkner Thornton Wilder Hart Crane Ernest Hemingway John Steinbeck

1850–1904 1852–1930

Volume 2 Volume 2

1856–1915 1858–1932 1860–1935 1862–1937 1865–1914


1868–1963 1869–1935

Volume 3 Volume 3

1871–1900 1871–1945 1871–1967 1872–1906 1873–1947 1874–1946 1874–1963 1876–1916 1876–1938

Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume

1876–1942 1878–1967 1879–1955 1883–1961 1885–1972 1886–1961 1887–1972 1888–1953 1888–1965 1890–1948 1890–1980 1891–1960 1891–1964 1892–1950 1894–1962 1894–1967 1896–1940 1896–1970 1897–1962 1897–1975 1899–1932 1899–1961 1902–1968

Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3

3 2 2 3 3

2 3 3 2 3 3 3 3 3

Countee Cullen Ayn Rand Robert Penn Warren Richard Wright Theodore Roethke Eudora Welty Elizabeth Bishop Tennessee Williams John Cheever Robert Hayden May Swenson Randall Jarrell Bernard Malamud Ralph Ellison Saul Bellow Arthur Miller Robert Lowell Gwendolyn Brooks Shirley Jackson J. D. Salinger Ray Bradbury Lawrence Ferlinghetti Richard Wilbur Alex Haley Jack Kerouac Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Denise Levertov Joseph Heller James Baldwin Truman Capote Flannery O’Connor Malcolm X Harper Lee Allen Ginsberg John Knowles Edward Albee Maya Angelou Anne Sexton Paule Marshall Adrienne Rich Martin Luther King, Jr. Chaim Potok Gary Snyder Lorraine Hansberry Toni Morrison

1903–1946 1905–1982 1905–1989 1908–1960 1908–1963 1909–2001 1911–1979 1911–1983 1912–1982 1913–1980 1913–1989 1914–1965 1914–1986 1914–1994 1915–2005 1915–2005 1917–1977 1917–2000 1919–1965 1919– 2010 1920– 1920– 1921– 1921–1992 1922–1969 1922–2007 1923–1997 1923–1999 1924–1987 1924–1984 1925–1964 1925–1965 1926– 1926–1997 1926–2001 1928– 1928– 1928–1974 1929– 1929– 1929–1968 1929–2002 1930– 1930–1965 1931–

553

Volume 3 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 3 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 4 Volume 5

554


Sylvia Plath John Updike Cormac McCarthy Philip Roth N. Scott Momaday Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) Mary Oliver Ken Kesey Larry McMurtry Rudolfo Anaya Joyce Carol Oates Ishmael Reed Raymond Carver Toni Cade Bambara Maxine Hong Kingston Robert Pinsky Billy Collins Simon J. Ortiz Pat Mora

1932–1963 1932–2009 1933– 1933– 1934– 1934– 1935– 1935–2001 1936– 1937– 1938– 1938– 1938–1988 1939– 1940– 1940– 1941– 1941– 1942–

Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5

Nikki Giovanni Alice Walker August Wilson Tim O’Brien Yusef Komunyakaa Leslie Marmon Silko Julia Alvarez Carolyn Forché Joy Harjo Jimmy Santiago Baca Judith Ortiz Cofer Rita Dove Gary Soto Amy Tan Sandra Cisneros Louise Erdrich Helena María Viramontes Barbara Kingsolver Chang-rae Lee

1943– 1944– 1945–2005 1946– 1947– 1948– 1950– 1950– 1951– 1952– 1952– 1952– 1952– 1952– 1954– 1954– 1954– 1955– 1965–

Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 5

Student's Encyclopedia of Great American Writers, Vol. 3: 1910 to 1945

Student's Encyclopedia of Great American Writers, Vol. 4: 1945 to 1970

American Modernism: (1910-1945) (Background to American Literature)

Student's Encyclopedia of Great American Writers, Vol. 5: 1970 to the Present

Student's Encyclopedia of Great American Writers, Vol. 1: Beginnings to 1830

Great American Judges: An Encyclopedia

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation Vol 3

Encyclopedia of American Business (2 Vol. Set)

Encyclopedia of Law Enforcement (3 Vol Set)

Encyclopedia of Digital Government (3-Vol. Set)

Encyclopedia of chemical compounds. 3-Vol. set

New Encyclopedia of Africa Vol 3

American Writers (American Biographies)

Encyclopedia of African American Music 3 volumes

Great Women Mystery Writers

Sylvia Plath (Great Writers)

Kurt Vonnegut (Great Writers)

Charles Bukowski (Great Writers)

Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers

Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers (Two Volumes)

Kurt Vonnegut (Great Writers)

American Decades 1910-1919 (American Decades)

Encyclopedia of African American History 3 volumes (American Ethnic Experience)

Encyclopedia of American Literature of the Sea and Great Lakes

Encyclopedia of American Journalism

American Women Writers, 1900-1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook

Encyclopedia of American Business

New Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 3: Can-Col

U.X.L American Decades, 1910 - 1919

Encyclopedia of American Journalism

Student's Encyclopedia of Great American Writers, Vol. 3: 1910 to 1945

Student's Encyclopedia of Great American Writers, Vol. 4: 1945 to 1970

American Modernism: (1910-1945) (Background to American Literature)

Student's Encyclopedia of Great American Writers, Vol. 5: 1970 to the Present

Student's Encyclopedia of Great American Writers, Vol. 1: Beginnings to 1830

Great American Judges: An Encyclopedia

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation Vol 3

Encyclopedia of American Business (2 Vol. Set)

Encyclopedia of Law Enforcement (3 Vol Set)

Encyclopedia of Digital Government (3-Vol. Set)

Encyclopedia of chemical compounds. 3-Vol. set

New Encyclopedia of Africa Vol 3

American Writers (American Biographies)

Encyclopedia of African American Music 3 volumes

Great Women Mystery Writers

Sylvia Plath (Great Writers)

Kurt Vonnegut (Great Writers)

Charles Bukowski (Great Writers)

Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers

Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers (Two Volumes)

Kurt Vonnegut (Great Writers)

American Decades 1910-1919 (American Decades)

Encyclopedia of African American History 3 volumes (American Ethnic Experience)

Encyclopedia of American Literature of the Sea and Great Lakes

Encyclopedia of American Journalism

American Women Writers, 1900-1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook

Encyclopedia of American Business

New Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 3: Can-Col

U.X.L American Decades, 1910 - 1919

Encyclopedia of American Journalism

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