100. The Higher Hokum

Hokum: "something apparently impressive or legitimate but actually untrue or insincere; pretentious nonsense." The word originated, apparently, as a combination of hocus-pocus (magic) and bunkum (nonsense). We see snake-oil salesmen. Just the word you'd invent in the American heartland. Low class.

Watch commercials and listen to political speeches now, though, and you really understand the word. We're swimming in hokum, morning and night. And the more screens technology provides us with the deeper we sink. Oh for some purer air, some higher culture, before we drown.

Higher culture, that's what I came out of the heartland gasping for in 1944, and I thought I had found it in the high poetry my teachers, college teachers, introduced me to — T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden. How great to rise above vulgarity.

But it occurs to me now that to understand "hokum" fully I ought to consider more carefully the kind of reaction I had reading one of those high poems, the famous "September 1, 1939." Auden is sitting "in one of the dives/ On Fifty-second Street"

Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade.

And I am with him, oh am I with him. A terrible thing is happening, the start of World War II, and terrible forces, which I do not understand, have been at work producing it. Auden understands so much, the general sweep, "the whole offence/ From Luther until now/ That has driven a culture mad," and the crucial details, "what occurred at Linz," and "What mad Nijinsky wrote/ About Diaghilev" — which is still " true of the normal heart."

I can't tell you how thrilling it was to read this in the middle of the war. I know that every poet says, "Look at me," but he also says, "Have a seat beside me," and for me to be sitting alongside Auden as the world crumbled was just, well, English-major heaven. I understood the war, maybe all wars. This was pure truth, and I sucked it in like a surfacing porpoise.

What I failed to see was how much Auden resembled the salesman who put me alongside him in the Buick commercial. Both were appealing to a passion, one to a passion to feel rich, the other to a passion to feel wise. And both appeals were illegitimate. I could never really be rich and nothing Auden told me would make me wise.

To be really wise on his subject I'd have to know just what was dishonest about that thirties decade, and what, exactly, was clever about its hopes. Auden doesn't say, and he doesn't, in a poem, have space to say. He can only signal the power to say. So trust him, and enjoy the view. Or, buy the snake oil.

Now you may say, "That's poets for you, they can only signal power," and you may say, "That's poetry-readers, they have to trust signals," but, in college, you can't ignore for long the presence of people whose words you don't have to trust, scientists. They're there for you to test, there with the goods, willing to take the time, receptive to your questions, without limit on the length of their answers. In my case I could have gone to a historian, that kind of scientist, and gotten the alternative to Auden's hokum about the thirties: painstaking analysis. I'd see the difference between being wise and having the feeling of being wise.

Obviously, hokum-detection is essential and I know that beyond scientists are philosophers, like Plato, who can equip me, through the example of Socrates, to detect hokum in nearly everything a poet produces, but I'm not willing to go into that at this point. Maybe I'm too intuitively stuck on high poetry to want to bad-mouth it any more. And I must say that the Auden case taught me something about the meaning of "high," as in "high culture."

Here's how it did that. Equipped by Plato I went back to Auden's poetry with a more sensitive hokum detector than any I'd ever had. I came to "September 1, 1939." The detector was clicking like mad: "Pretentious nonsense, pretentious nonsense." Then I discovered, on Wikipedia, that Auden was way ahead of me. He had detected so much hokum in that poem that he couldn't stand it. He called it "trash." He "loathed" it. And he refused to let it be reprinted in his 1966 collection. All while the reading public was eating it up!

Well, there's the meaning of "high" for you. One who writes "high poetry" will have a high sensitivity to hokum. His detector (for Hemingway a "shit-detector") won't keep all the hokum out but it will keep out the really bad stuff, the cheap appeals to the passions, the sentimental pull. But not just that. It will, at the highest levels, keep out the intellectually subtle appeals, the kind that make very intelligent people think they know something when they really don't.