332. Relishing Poetry, Relishing Lifestyle

Adam Kirsch, in the April Atlantic, glancing at the "free love and radical politics" in Greenwich Village in the 1910s and '20s, reminds us of "how little this kind of Bohemian playacting" had to do with "modernism" (the literary movement dominant in the first half of the twentieth century).  "The greatest poets of that era kept it at arms length." 

"Bohemian playacting."  Adopting the lifestyle of poets.  So appealing to those leading duller lives.  And so much easier than writing poetry.

See a name, what do you think?  "Kerouac."  Do you think lines?  Issues?  Insights?  Conflicts?  Connection to known life?  Maybe for some, yes.  The reviews in Goodreads on Kerouac now are all over the map but few in my sample (30) are of any of those things.  With Ginsberg it's not much different.  The appeal is lifestyle, Beat Generation lifestyle, Bohemian lifestyle plus, way plus.

Now try this name: "Wallace Stevens."  Lifestyle?  Who wants to know after they hear that he was an executive in an insurance company in Connecticut?  No, it's lines, lines, lines, lines that if you think of them while shaving you cut yourself (A. E.  Housman's test of great lines).  For me it's lines like these, especially the third one:

Take from the dresser of deal, 

Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet

On which she embroidered fantails once

And spread it so as to cover her face.

If her horny feet protrude, they come

To show how cold she is, and dumb.

It's those fantails, something fancy, the picture of the woman bending over her needle, a little art in a bare life, a bare culture, trying to "have things nice" — and it failed, oh god how it must have failed, with grown-up children treating her this way, at the wake not even covering her feet, displaying to anybody who looked into the bedroom the ugliness of ignorant labor, the poverty, what she tried to veil, down now to the animal fact, the bare body, looking like, treated like, a dead chicken.  So that they can get back to their ice cream.  Not  a single child to say, "Yes, yes, the fantails, lovely, Mother, I'll carry on with them, Mother, Mother."  The lines leave me saying it, and making connections with what I can see around me, and can now see better.  That woman carefully stringing Christmas lights on her trailer, yes, a mother, a mother, a single mother, trying to have things nice.

But I have to give you the lines preceding my whisker-raising lines.  Here, the whole opening stanza:

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress

As they are used to wear, and let the boys

Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.

Let be be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

First a word about connections.  We value poems that connect with — that is, that throw light, a new light, a brighter light, a better light on — things known in our lives.  I knew trailer parks and their occupants and then Stevens' embroiderer suddenly threw a beam on them, so bright that other instances — other mothers, other failed attempts to refine life, other triumphant coarseness, other failures in appreciation and gratitude — blazed up in my memory.  Those are connections to my life, and they give meaning to what my seventh-grade teacher taught me was the value of literature: that it expands your imagination and deepens your understanding. 

Then, beyond these connections are connections to things I have read, and taught.  Here it's the cry I hear the speaker of the poem ("The Emperor of Ice Cream") making that sharpens my sight — or, I should say, sensitizes my eardrums.  It's a cry against coarseness.  "Go ahead, do it this way, you uncomprehending animals."  No imagination, no sense of ceremony, no dignity.  In Stevens' cry I hear cries in Tennessee Williams (Blanche facing Stanley, the muscular one in Streetcar), in Salinger (looking at the small gift sent him by sensitive Esmé while listening to the crude speech of his fellow soldiers), in Chekhov (Nadya listening to her future husband's banalities), in Eliot (the whole Waste Land).  Stevens' cry strengthens a cry I want to make against hip-hop.  Other readers will hear other cries, all against coarseness. 

You don't have to be an English teacher; the connections are there, readied by Stevens for you, according to the liberality of your education, to activate. The ones made here are to things known in my life, and known or knowable, in the lives of those I talk to and in the publications I read.  We relish them, in the sad way of human discovery.

And what is there for the relishers of On the Road and Howl to relish"? There's the lifestyle I described, then oracular pronouncements that rule out other lifestyles.  Very few connections to anything beyond that lifestyle, hardly any for the liberally educated — in the way of my seventh-grade teacher and her followers — to activate.  Those connections take work.

Oh how Stevens must have worked over his poem.  Or worked until the flash came.  Look at the way he builds up to those fantails, in the image that catches our hearts. He's already set us up with a roll toward something  ("TAKE, from the dresser of deal"), and then, after holding us in suspense with an unemphatic aside ("Lacking the three glass knobs"), given us, in what always forces attention, adjacent heavy accents (a spondee), the something that's going to be huge ("that sheet"), the hugeness prepared for by a longer roll of weakly accented syllables ("on which she embroidered") before the big one, "FANTAILS."  Oh lordy, FANTAILS.  Of all things.  In a bedroom of cheap pine furniture where the knobs keep falling off.

And then the pause forced on us by our inability to slide from "-ails" to "once."  Try it, there at your electronic device.  Then a pause.  We see her bent over, supplying a little artistry.  You can't read that sentence, you can't pronounce it, without seeing their importance.  Careful Stevens makes sure of it.  So, slight pause.  Then "once."  Long ago.  When she had hopes.  Now the boys with perfunctory flowers, and the girls, become "wenches," in "the dresses they were used to wear," not anything special, don't even take time to cover her feet.  Too late now for effort.

Up to here the imperative is addressed to the children and friends:  "Go ahead, you animals, you Sweeney, you Kowalski, hold your wake this way."  But the last two lines in each stanza are addressed to us readers, wanting (it's human nature) to draw a conclusion, a lesson, from this scene, and it assumes a particular desire: to find something redeeming in animal life.  The lines are a rebuke to that desire. 

Let be be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

"You think something higher rules human beings? No, we're ruled by pleasures, and not even importance-bestowing pleasures, nothing that gives us dignity and stature.  Low-level pleasures, like for ice-cream.  Rule by anything higher is an illusion, a seeming, that will be corrected at the end, in scenes like this."

That's bold philosophy, man, that knocks people flat.  If they haven't already been flattened by those horny feet, that dead chicken, ugh so extreme.  How did it ever come out of this insurance man, the fellow we see in a suit and tie and vest on Wikipedia, wearing the rimless glasses of the upper administration.  Flaubert, from his pedestal where the French avant-garde put him, gives us the answer in his advice to writers: "Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

The work is the practice of writing, a craft.  Do it well and you can become a literary celebrity.  Quite different from what you have to do to become a lifestyle celebrity — a difference that makes it very tempting to say that the Beats are all just lifestyle celebrities, their work a collection of signals and badge-flashes, their popularity a result of eagerness to pick up the signals and, with such ease, belong to the fraternity.  We can't say that because there obviously is craft in poems like Howl and there is genuine literary appeal.  It's just so hard to separate that appeal from the appeal of signals and badge-flashing.  Too hard and too time-consuming, I think, to fit into the good life.