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.
