101. "Hokum" and its Hazards

Wasn't it fun calling lines by W. H. Auden "hokum" (Post #100, below)? There he was in all the anthologies, the whole educated world was cheering, but we weren't fooled, no, we hung in there and nailed him. And best of all, we got his blessing for it! He knew he was off base.

Auden strayed into lofty words, a view of history from too far up. When you asked for details — the support, the goods, the beef — he, unlike the historian, could only wave. Can we say that, in principle, loftiness in poetry is a bad thing?

If we do we've got poets like Yeats to deal with. Here's Yeats in "Two Songs from a Play":

Odor of blood when Christ was slain

Made all Platonic tolerance vain

And vain all Doric discipline.

How's that for lofty? And later he says,

The Roman Empire stood appalled:

It dropped the reins of peace and war

When that fierce virgin and her Star

Out of the fabulous darkness called.

You can't get any loftier than that. And you with the Midwest accent, are you ready to make your speech to the cheering world? "Got to have some facts naow. Pretentious nonsense. Pretentious nonsense."

Who wants to say anything like that about Yeats's words? I don't. I get a tingle just typing them out. So, should we academics shun these these blunt terms? We've got so many of them — claptrap, bunk, eyewash, bullshit, hogwash, humbuggery, malarkey, moonshine, poppycock, tommyrot — and so few fit a subject this complicated. They may be all right for the street, but literary criticism? Please.

I think the test will come when we're facing a poem for which all our other words seem inadequate. Like Ossian's Fionnghall, the poem the intelligentsia of Europe (including Napoleon and Goethe) called the great primitive epic, and we call...well, let's wait. It's not an epic at all, it's just full of epicky details, exactly the ones the primitivists of the time would lap up — the battles, the speeches, the lifestyle (oh the lifestyle, the noble, savage lifestyle) of the ancient Highland chiefs. We don't have to wait to find out it's all a fake ("Ossian" was a smart contemporary Scotsman named Macpherson) to start calling it names. It's not poetry, it's a lifestyle pitch. Pure, pure...ah yes, hokum! That Macpherson, could he ever sell snake oil.

I would also, with qualifications, nominate Alan Ginsberg's "Howl," the defining poem of the Beat Generation with the famous beginning:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix...

Who says those are the best minds of Ginsberg's generation? Ginsberg does. Trust him. Did we trust Auden when he told us the thirties were low and dishonest? If we did we shouldn't have, and in the end he was embarrassed for wanting us to. We, and apparently he, saw hokum in the loftiness.

Ginsberg is lofty (on war and capitalism and the military industrial complex) but memories of Yeats have undermined our easy use of "hokum" for loftiness so we hold back. Then we finish "Howl" and realize that the whole thing is lifestyle. Nothing but one picture after another of the way Ginsberg and his friends lived — sitting up "smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,...investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets," and so on. Cool, but still only lifestyle. And with a pitch. Ginsberg is selling it. Is there any word better than "hokum" for this?

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.