Humor in Modern American Poetry 9781501334733, 9781501304620, 9781628920253

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HUMOR IN MODERN AMERICAN POETRY

HUMOR IN MODERN AMERICAN POETRY

Edited by Rachel Trousdale

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Rachel Trousdale and Contributors, 2018 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Jean Humbert/Millennium Images, UK All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Trousdale, Rachel, editor. Title: Humor in modern American poetry / edited by Rachel Trousdale. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017014786 (print) | LCCN 2017030040 (ebook) | ISBN 9781628920246 (ePub) | ISBN 9781628920253 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781628920239 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: American poetry–20th century–History and criticism. | Modernism (Literature)–United States. | Humor in literature. Classification: LCC PS310.M57 (ebook) | LCC PS310.M57 .H86 2017 (print) | DDC 811/.509112–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014786 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3473-3 PB: 978-1-5013-5260-7 ePDF: 978-1-6289-2025-3 eBook: 978-1-6289-2024-6 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Nick

CONTENTS Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments

ix xi

INTRODUCTION: THEORIES OF HUMOR AND MODERN POETRY

Rachel Trousdale

1

HUMOR AND AUTHORITY IN EZRA POUND’S CANTOS Joel Elliot Slotkin

19

CUMMINGS’S EROTIC HUMOR William Solomon

39

EMOTIONAL COMEDIES: LORINE NIEDECKER’S “FOR PAUL” Marta Figlerowicz

59

LAUGHING IN THE GALLERY: MELVIN TOLSON’S REFUSAL TO HUSH Lena Hill

77

POETRY AND GOOD HUMOR: MARIANNE MOORE AND ELIZABETH BISHOP Hugh Haughton

97

CONVENTION AND MYSTICISM: DICKINSON, HARDY, WILLIAMS Alan Shapiro

121

PHYLLIS MCGINLEY: DEFENDING HOUSEWIFERY WITH A LAUGH Megan Leroy

133

TELL ME THE TRUTH: HUMOR, LOVE, AND COMMUNITY IN AUDEN’S LATE 1930s POETRY Rachel Trousdale

153

MERRILL, COMEDY, CONVERSATION Stephen Burt

175

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Contents

“THIS COMIC VERSION OF MYSELF”: HUMOR AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN JOHN ASHBERY’S POETRY AND PROSE

Karin Roffman Bibliography Index

195 209 219

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Stephen (also Steph, or Stephanie) Burt is professor of English at Harvard and the author of several books of poetry and literary criticism, among them The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (Harvard University Press, 2016) and Advice from the Lights (Graywolf, 2017), a book of poems. Marta Figlerowicz is assistant professor of comparative literature and English, and an affiliate of the Film and Media Program at Yale University, where she teaches courses on subjects ranging from world cinema to narrative theory and modernist literature. She is the author of two books, Flat Protagonists (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Spaces of Feeling (Cornell University Press, 2017, forthcoming). Hugh Haughton is professor of modern literature at the University of York. He is the author of The Poetry of Derek Mahon (Oxford University Press, 2007), the editor of The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry (Chatto and Windus, 1988), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the LookingGlass (Penguin, 1998), Second World War Poems (Faber, 2005), and Freud’s The Uncanny (Penguin, 2005) among other texts, as well as the author of numerous essays on twentieth-century British and Irish poetry. Lena Hill is associate professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. She is the coeditor of Invisible Hawkeyes: African Americans at the University of Iowa during the Long Civil Rights Era (University of Iowa Press, 2016), author of Visualizing Blackness and the Creation of the African American Literary Tradition (Cambridge, 2014), and coauthor of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: A Reference Guide (Greenwood, 2008). Her published work also includes articles on the intersections between black literature and visual culture as well as African American drama. Megan Leroy is an instructional designer and professional writing instructor at the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida. Her interests include digital engagement technologies, online and blended learning, American literature, women’s writing, and teaching. Megan received her BA at the University of Georgia, and her MA and PhD in English at the University of Florida where she primarily studied American women’s poetry.

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Karin Roffman is currently senior lecturer in humanities at Yale. Her first biography is The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life (FSG, 2017). She also published From the Modernist Annex: American Women Writers in Museums and Libraries (University of Alabama Press, 2010), and her essays have appeared in MFS, ArtForum, Raritan, and the Yale Review. She previously taught at West Point and Bard College. Alan Shapiro is professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has published thirteen books of poetry, including Reel to Reel (University of Chicago Press, 2014), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Night of the Republic (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), finalist for the National Book Award. He has been the winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award and an LA Times Book Award in poetry. Joel Elliot Slotkin is an associate professor of English at Towson University. His book Sinister Aesthetics: The Appeal of Evil in Early Modern English Literature is forthcoming from Palgrave in 2017. He has also published articles on representations of Islam in early modern English drama, memory and cyberspace in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and racial hierarchies and conceptions of the savage in Carlos Bulosan’s fiction of the Philippines. William Solomon is professor of English at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of Literature, Amusement and Technology in the Great Depression (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Slapstick Modernism (University of Illinois Press, 2016). He is currently editing a collection of essays on American literature and the 1930s for the Cambridge Companion series. Rachel Trousdale is assistant professor of English at Framingham State University. She is the author of Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination (Palgrave, 2010) and The Joking Voice: Humor and Empathy in Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), as well as a poetry chapbook, Antiphonal Fugue for Marx Brothers, Elephant, and Slide Trombone (Finishing Line Press, 2015).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book would not exist without help of many kinds from Steph Burt, Catherine Rockwood, Dana Goldman, Amy Lovell, and Isaac Cates; Agnes Scott College, Northeastern University, and Framingham State University; my parents, Bill Trousdale and Priscilla Meyer; and especially my husband, Nick Beauchamp, whose humor and insight I depend on. _______________ Excerpts from John Ashbery’s unpublished interviews, letters, and diaries quoted here are copyright © 2017 by John Ashbery. All rights reserved. Used by arrangement with Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the author. “Worsening Situation,” copyright © 1975 by John Ashbery; from SELFPORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR by John Ashbery. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. From POEMS by Elizabeth Bishop. Published by Chatto & Windus. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited. Excerpt from “Casabianca” from POEMS by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 2011 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Publisher’s Note and compilation copyright © 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. From COMPLETE POEMS: 1904–62 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Copyright © 1923, 1925, 1926, 1951, 1953, 1954 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1991 by George James Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. “A Short History of Cooks” and “Song of High Cuisine” Copyright © 1960 by Phyllis McGinley. Appears in TIMES THREE: SELECTED VERSE FROM THREE DECADES (Viking). Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. From THE COLLECTED POEMS OF MARIANNE MOORE by Marianne Moore. Copyright © 1935 by Marianne Moore, renewed 1963 by Marianne Moore. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. LORINE NIEDECKER: COLLECTED WORKS, by Lorine Niedecker, edited by Jenny Penberthy, copyright © 2002 by the Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press. Cantos IX, X, XI, XXII, XVIII, LIX, LXI, LXXIV, CXVI By Ezra Pound, from THE CANTOS OF EZRA POUND, copyright © 1934, 1937, 1940, 1948,

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1950, 1956, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1970, and 1971 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “'Spring and All, Section I,” by William Carlos Williams, from THE COLLECTED POEMS: VOLUME I, 1909–1939, copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “'Portrait of a Lady,” by William Carlos Williams, from THE COLLECTED POEMS: VOLUME I, 1909–1939, copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

I N T R O DU C T IO N : T H E O R I E S O F H UM O R A N D   M O D E R N P O E T RY Rachel Trousdale

Modernist poetry’s reputation for difficulty leads many readers to overlook the fact that poets of the modern era are continually joking, mocking, and making puns. But modernist poets’ playfulness underlies the very ambitions that make their poems so challenging and rewarding: their experiments with language, their reconception of traditional forms, their desire for sometimes drastic political change, and their radical reformulations of the relationships between readers, writers, and texts. Humor, in other words, is as integral to Ezra Pound’s experiments as it is to Phyllis McGinley’s light verse. Humorous modernist poetry ranges from comic rhymes published in popular magazines to the absurd juxtapositions of The Cantos. For the poets discussed in this book, the point of humor is not to provide “comic relief,” a brief counterpoint to the poem’s serious themes; rather, humor is a constitutive part of the poems’ projects. Poets use humor to establish their own poetic authority; to redefine literary tradition; to demarcate their audiences; to make political points; to attack their adversaries and rivals; and, perhaps most unusually, to increase their readers’ sense of community and capacity for sympathy. In his 1984 book God Be with the Clown: Humor in American Poetry (which examines Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, and Berryman), Ronald Wallace argues that “the lyric and the comic may derive from the same emotional burst of intensity, focusing and releasing the same exuberance.”1 Beyond this possible common origin, modernist poetry and modernist humor share several key impulses and structures. Both depend on efficiency and precision, demanding a high commitment from their readers; both are driven by the impulse to “make it new” through unexpected juxtapositions, plot twists, and puns; and both link the creative to the subversive. This fundamental playfulness may have been more evident to the poems’ first readers than it is today. While the placement of modernist texts in the classroom and the canon leads scholars to treat them as “serious,” Leonard Diepeveen argues that this recontextualization strips modernist texts of their original comic valences: “One of modernism’s central interactions with its public, one that helped the public posit what modernism was, was laughter.”2

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Bonnie Costello recently suggested the need for further study of the comic in American poetry.3 This collection is the first book to address the topic in a sustained manner since Wallace’s. The chapters in this book show how modernists make humor a tool for cultural innovation. At the same time, these chapters also show the need for new theories of humor quite different from the ones suggested by Thomas Hobbes, Sigmund Freud, or Henri Bergson, which still provide the dominant models. While Pound may conform to Hobbes’s model, laughing when he feels his own superiority over others, writers like W. H. Auden and James Merrill make laughter into a way of discovering what we have in common. For these poets, humor reveals how the other is like the self; for John Ashbery, it becomes a means of self-scrutiny, revealing how the self is like the other. Modern poets also find hitherto unexplored resonances in comic form. For writers like William Carlos Williams, the structure of jokes can teach a poet how to generate surprise; others, like Melvin Tolson, suggest that such comic-poetic surprises are uniquely capable of inspiring real-world political consciousness. Humor shows how the distance between us can be expanded or minimized, creating and removing sympathy among the poet, the reader, and the subject. Humor, in short, is at the center of modern poetry’s ethical debates about elitism, inclusivity, experimentation, political change, and authority. The chapters in this book launch a new conversation about modernist poetry, one that treats its lighthearted moments not as decorative but as structurally central. They also help to reframe a millennia-old discussion of humor’s origins, import, and effects. For these poets and for others, humor defines groups and marks social boundaries, but it also leads us to transgress those boundaries; it forges ties between the writer and the reader, blurs the line between public and private, and becomes a spur to self-awareness. This book’s goal is not just to illuminate the role of laughter in modern poetry; it is to show how modern poets demand that we develop new theories of humor to reflect the true complexity, and power, of laughter. In order to see why modern poets require new theories of humor, we must first examine the old ones. The oldest model of humor, superiority theory, dates back to Plato,4 but is most succinctly formulated by Thomas Hobbes, who says that we laugh when we experience the “sudden glory” of believing ourselves to be better than the person we are looking at (Morreall, 19). While superiority theory clearly does not account for all forms of humor, it has a profound influence on most philosophers who deal with laughter, and underlies the pervasive (if sometimes unstated) belief that humor is not just trivial but irresponsible, self-serving, and even immoral. Superiority theorists vary in how much they disapprove of the humor they describe, however. For Plato, laughter is not so much an evil in itself as something we should suppress because it will lead to other excesses. The Guardians of the Republic “must not be prone to laughter, for usually when we abandon ourselves to violent laughter, our condition provokes a violent

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reaction” (10). Aristotle says laughter should be taken in moderation; while he believes it is “a necessary element in life” (16) and can be instructive when we laugh at other people’s deviation from virtue, he warns that the wise “man who follows the mean” will never carry laughter too far. For Hobbes, whose version of superiority theory is the most disapproving of humor, laughter is a sign of weakness, indicating that the laugher is vulnerable and must reassure himself of his own excellence. Superiority theorists often view laughter either as unethical (because we laugh when we take pleasure in another’s misfortune) or, at best, as morally neutral (because we laugh when we do not really believe that the other is suffering). They tend to agree with Cicero, who asserts that we laugh only when we feel no emotional connection with the objects of our laughter. Mel Brooks’s formulation in “The 2,000 Year Old Man” summarizes the moral problem of superiority-based humor: “To me, tragedy is if I’ll cut my finger. That’s tragedy! ... And to me, comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die.”5 This kind of laughter rewards the laugher for their lack of empathy with others. Objections to superiority theory are also of long standing. In his Reflections upon Laughter (1750), Francis Hutcheson argues that if Hobbes is right, and laughter arises purely from a feeling of superiority, it is “strange!—that none of our Hobbists banish all canary birds and squirrels, and lap-dogs, and pugs, and cats out of their houses, and substitute in their place asses, and owls, and snails, and oysters, to be merry upon” (Morreall, 29). Clearly the sensation of unsympathetic superiority one might feel toward an oyster (even more than toward a canary or other more intelligent nonhuman animal) is not sufficient to make us laugh, and it may not be necessary, either. Superiority theory need not always involve such a grim view of human nature, however. Henri Bergson, whose book Laughter (1900) remains one of the dominant texts in humor theory, treats superiority-based laughter as a kind of social corrective. While he, too, sets laughter and sympathy in opposition to one another, saying that laughter involves an “anesthesia of the heart,” he nonetheless argues that it brings us into contact with others: while we feel no sympathy with the object of our laughter, humor brings us into a “secret freemasonry” of laughers.6 Bergson’s model of superiority theory might explain why we would laugh more at a canary than at an oyster, because he argues that we laugh when the object of our laughter appears to be partially human. This may happen when an animal resembles a human; when a human resembles an animal; or when a human displays what he terms “mechanical inelasticity”: an inability to react appropriately to circumstances, generally caused by pedantry, selfcenteredness, or absentmindedness.7 Canaries, this theory would suggest, are funny for the mannerisms they share with humans (whistled tunes, tilted heads, apparent cheerfulness) whereas oysters are too alien to provide amusing overlaps. (However, a person who could be described as resembling an oyster, perhaps because of an immovable facial expression, might be funny.)

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For Bergson, our aversion to being laughed at reminds us to be less abstracted and more flexible and responsive to our surroundings—which, he suggests, make us more fully human and actively part of the societies we live in. Bergson argues that this laughter reduces egocentrism and teaches us to see ourselves as others see us. Laughter thus helps us to correct our own faults even when we laugh at those of others. While individual cases of Bergsonian superioritybased laughter may be malicious, its overall tendency, he argues, is to make us more humane, accommodating, and aware of our relations with other people. Of course, Bergson’s theory does not account for all experiences of laughter. Wallace argues that “Bergson’s insistence on a necessary ‘anesthesia of the heart’ fails to conform to our experience of American humor in which the profoundest clowns (and poets) always engage our sympathies and emotions.”8 And despite his emphasis on laughter’s humanizing qualities, Bergson’s apparently positive treatment of humor has disturbing overtones. His description of laughter as a means of social education can easily be reframed as an account of how ridicule promotes conformity; to see ourselves as others see us may be limiting as well as illuminating. Still more troublingly, Bergson’s text provides examples of superior laughter diametrically opposed to the humanizing social awareness he describes. His account of laughing at things that appear to be almost human reveals a definition of humanity that twenty-first-century readers should find alienating: as he examines examples of the near-human, he muses, “Why does one laugh at a negro?”9 Bergson does not, apparently, expect his (presumably white) readers to consider “negroes” fully human. He also expects his readers to find dwarves inherently comical. While Bergson considers laughter at the “inhuman” to be humanizing, it may also uncover problematic aspects of the laugher’s beliefs about what it means to be human, and the limits of the laugher’s sympathy. Bergson’s laughter is humanizing, then, only to the extent that the social rules and assumptions it upholds are themselves humane. The fact that Bergsonian laughter may promote conformity and racism, despite Bergson’s own belief that it promotes almost the opposite, does not mean that his account of laughter’s origins is wrong. The world is full of racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic jokes, and superiority theory seems at least partially to account for why people laugh at them. The television program The Simpsons makes the notion of superiority humor itself a running gag, repeating a clip of the bully Nelson pointing a finger and saying “ha-ha!” when other characters fall down or are injured. But most readers need only refer to their own experiences of laughter to find the theory unsatisfactory as a universal explanation of humor. If we really laugh only from a sensation of superiority, how does that explain, for example, laughing at a pun? Strict superiority theorists like the psychologist Charles Gruner might maintain that our laughter at the pun is actually laughter at the (pretended) foolishness of the punster who conflates the meanings of two words, but this account does not explain why those who laugh at puns will explain their laughter strictly in terms of the

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linguistic joke rather than in terms of the joker.10 (People who groan at a pun, by contrast, will frequently engage in superiority-based humor at the punster’s expense.) Similarly, a superiority theorist might maintain that we laugh at a photograph of a cat wearing a sunbonnet because we are reminded by the cat’s placement in human clothing of our own species’ superiority over the feline— but this description may not tally with the laugher’s sensations, which as we will see in a moment might include identification with the animal rather than sheer derision. Superiority theory simply does not seem to account adequately for actual human behavior. When asked why they are laughing at the picture of the bonneted cat, many people respond with statements like “the cat just looks so mad!” which seems to indicate that they assign human-like emotion to the cat. This may be an example of Bergson’s humor of the near-human, and Hobbes or Aristotle might argue that we laugh at the cat’s anger because anger is an immoderate response, and we value our own superior tempers. Again, however, these accounts seem unsatisfactory; for one thing, laughers may feel that the cat’s anger is justified, which removes one of the primary grounds for superiority. While it is certainly possible that a laugher is unaware of the root causes of her laughter, the burden of proof in these cases is on the theorist. Important critiques and complications of superiority theory since Bergson have been offered by feminist theorists like Hélène Cixous and Regina Barrecca. These critics see superiority humor as a male genre, which can only be enjoyed by those in a position of power. Feminists identify a very different form of aggressive humor practiced by women (and more generally by people in subordinate positions). For Cixous, laughter need not place the laugher at the top of a clear, linear hierarchy, as it does for Hobbes. Instead, the object of Cixous’s laughter is at least in part the patriarchal system itself, which “volcanic” laughter disrupts and replaces.11 Barrecca, citing the bizarre and pervasive belief by male humor theorists that women have no sense of humor,12 argues that women “use comedy not as a safety valve but as an inflammatory device, seeking, ultimately, not to purge desire and frustration but to transform it into action.”13 For these critics, each instance of feminine laughter contributes to a larger critique of patriarchal dominance, an accumulating critique, which provokes protest, activism, and ultimately systemic change. Superiority humor also grows more complex and potentially productive when practiced by members of minority ethnic or racial groups. The psychologists D. Zillmann and J. R. Cantor argue that members of minority groups are more likely than members of dominant groups to laugh at jokes at the expense of their own identity category.14 Rod Martin suggests that this selfdirected laughter may happen when members of an oppressed group identify with their oppressors.15 But in some cases, especially that of jokes generated within the minority culture and apparently at members’ expense, there is another possible explanation. When the humorist does not understand himself to be at the top of a hierarchy, superiority humor can become recursive. This

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recursive superiority may, of course, take the form of a humor expressing self-hatred or offering oneself as a target for others’ mockery—“I can’t get no respect!” But, as Cixous argues, it can also transform the impulse to superiority and the system that rewards that impulse into object of the joke. That is, the feminist model of subversive laughter may also help explain why members of racial or ethnic minorities might laugh at some apparently derogatory jokes. Ruth Wisse, in her account of Jewish humor, suggests a modified version of superiority humor in which laughter is at everyone’s expense simultaneous, as each target is mocked for a different reason. To cite one of Wisse’s examples: Two Jews traveling by wagon along a narrow road see boulders blocking their path. They stop to consider what to do, and as they sit there, a wagon approaches carrying two peasants. The Gentiles get out, roll up their sleeves, and shove the rocks away. “There’s Goyish thinking for you,” says one Jew to the other: “always with force.”16 Wisse argues that the humor of this joke depends on an unstable play of superiority: on the one hand, the Jews believe that they are more subtle thinkers than the brute-force-using Gentiles; on the other hand, the Gentiles have gotten the job done; and on a third, hidden hand, the Jews’ supposed intelligence makes them a target for “Goyish force,” and the entire harmless encounter dramatizes both Jews’ oppression and their own possible complicity with their situation. While it is possible to laugh at the joke only out of a feeling of superiority toward the Jews’ misplaced disdain for “force,” the joke’s full humor constitutes a criticism of a social system based on just such assumptions of superiority. Similar approaches to superiority humor may be found in the comic traditions of many racial and ethnic minorities and of colonized populations—much of the comedy of (Irish) James Joyce’s Ulysses, (Indian-Kenyan) G. V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr, or (African-American) poet Sterling Brown’s “Slim Greer” poems may be productively read following this model, where humor is initially directed against an individual but is ultimately directed against the social system that renders the individual comic. Even modified to acknowledge that women and members of minorities laugh, however, superiority theory still does not provide a satisfactory overall account of why we find things funny. While a committed superiority theorist can usually find some element of superiority in any comic incident, we must stretch a long way to use the theory to explain phenomena like laughing at a really good pun, the pleased laugh of mutual comprehension, or absurdity. If we laugh at Dali’s lobster telephone, for example, it is probably not because we think that he is foolish for mistaking his dinner for a communications device. Incongruity theory appears to offer a more broadly applicable account of humor than superiority theory does. Incongruity theorists argue that we laugh when we encounter something that is contradictory in a pleasantly surprising way. According to this theory, a pun makes us laugh because a phrase which

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we are expecting to contain one meaning turns out to contain another. Dali’s lobster phone makes us laugh precisely because it is inconceivable that he has made it through some foolish error—rather, the completely incompatible components of telephone base and large plaster lobster are deliberately juxtaposed to provoke a striking contrast. The incongruity model of humor can at least partly explain many instances of superiority-based humor, as well: for example, we might say that mean girls mocking an unfashionable classmate are reacting to the fact that her clothing is incongruous with current trends. Of course, not all incongruities are funny, and one of the primary challenges of the theory is isolating precisely what kinds of unexpected juxtapositions provoke amusement rather than, say, bafflement or disgust. Elements of incongruity theory appear in Aristotle’s work (in the Rhetoric, he notes that jokes “deceive the expectation”), but the theory does not really develop as a separate branch until much later.17 Its proponents include Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Søren Kierkegaard, as well as many contemporary psychologists. Schopenhauer argues convincingly that the most effective incongruity humor reveals some underlying congruity or perception of congruity (Morreall, 52). While some theorists disagree, humorous incongruity seems to be significantly heightened when it reveals a hitherto unacknowledged commonality among incongruous objects even while it highlights their difference. According to this model, the humor of Dali’s lobster rests in part on its revealed congruity with the telephone: the lobster is approximately the same size and has the same curved back as the handset; both phone and lobster have a hard exoskeleton; and yet the lobster is misplaced in every other possible way. This simultaneous pattern-finding and patternbreaking, as we will see throughout this book, constitutes one of humor’s most significant points of dialogue with poetry. Like superiority theory, incongruity theory frequently assumes some degree of emotional detachment from the object of laughter. When Wile E. Coyote, attempting to catch the Road Runner, accidentally triggers his own trap and drops an anvil on his own head, an incongruity theorist might argue that we laugh not because we feel superior to the incompetent coyote but because the event is so different from his (and, until we become familiar with the pattern, our) expectations.18 In either case, however, we can laugh only because we do not seriously believe in the anvil, or the cartoon coyote it injures—the violence is funny because the coyote survives, bearing no long-term injuries and having learned no lessons. Of course, incongruity and superiority theories are not mutually exclusive. While Bergson’s discussion of “mechanical inelasticity” is framed in terms of superiority humor, his central premise is that we laugh at moments when a human being does something incongruous with humanity. But a strict incongruity theorist may overlook the specific pleasure of mockery, which, when we perform it, feels quite different from the comparatively innocent, less-judgmental laughter we experience at a pun. While incongruity theory

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seems to be more generalizable than superiority theory, then, neither one can be taken as a general theory of humor, and much laughter seems to contain elements of both. Nonetheless, incongruity theory is probably the most accurate current single existing theory of humor. Martin, in his ambitious and wide-ranging book The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach, resists millennia of pressure to identify a single fundamental theory of humor, but nonetheless concludes that “the idea that some sort of incongruity is the basis of all humor seems to be generally supported.”19 What precisely that claim means, however, remains subject to debate, as Martin emphasizes: “It is far from clear exactly how incongruity should be defined or conceptualized, and whether it is a single mechanism that applies to all forms of humor or whether we need to invoke different types of incongruity for different types of humor.”20 Incongruity theory and superiority theory both have their origins in philosophy. Modern psychology and neuroscience offer different explanations for why we laugh, concentrating on humor’s psychological utility and on the internal processes that produce it. Physiological theories of laughter go back to René Descartes, who believes laughter is caused by the motion of the blood next to the lungs, and Kant, who thinks it is caused by the motion of the intestines. The study of the physical causes of laughter continues among present-day neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio, who seek to identify its underpinnings in the brain.21 Many physically based accounts of laughter do not really attempt to identify what prompts us to laugh, however. Neurological research is still in its developing stages; for the moment, pointing to a nerve cluster which, when stimulated by an electrode, provokes laughter, does not yet illuminate how our brains determine which external stimuli activate those nerves after passing through the brain.22 The best physiological accounts of laughter are often also discussions of the overlap between body and mind: the interface between our interior selves and the physical world around us. Over the course of his career, Freud repeatedly addresses how the interplay of the physical and the psychological can lead to laughter. His most thorough discussion, in The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, draws on the nineteenth-century hydraulic model of energy, and argues that laughter releases energy which is unexpectedly freed up by the cessation of some mental process.23 This model of laughter, and its analogs, are known as relief theory, because they argue that laughter is caused by a relief from some effort or tension, often an effort which is habitual and of which we are not consciously aware. According to Freud, our minds continually exert energy to repress unacceptable thoughts (aggression, sexual desire, etc.); to stay in the realm of sense rather than of nonsense; and to produce and regulate emotions. When some stimulus (the mention of a taboo topic; a pun; a negative event reframed in lighthearted terms) frees us from the need to exert this energy, the liberated energy is released in the form of laughter. So, for example, a fart joke makes us laugh because we are exerting energy to keep ourselves from thinking about the

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taboo topic of excretion, and when the topic is suddenly brought into the open the redirected energy is released in a rush—rather like the fart itself. Similarly, Freud argues that we laugh at puns because our understanding of language depends on constant effort to stick to sense rather than nonsense; a pun, Freud suggests, makes nonsense of the system of language, and the effort we put into maintaining the system is abruptly relieved. We may laugh with a similar sense of relief when some experience turns out to be less harrowing than we expected. Freud distinguishes three different categories of the laughable, which he calls “jokes,” “the comic,” and “humor.” In jokes, the energy released has hitherto been devoted to repression; in the comic, it is intellectual energy we have gathered to understand some idea or problem; in humor, it is the energy we gather to brace ourselves for some strong emotion. Freud’s term “jokework” suggests the psychological value of relief from such efforts, and of the concomitant benefits of each kind of laughter. Laughter at jokes allows us to act indirectly on aggressions and desires which we cannot state openly; laughter at the comic allows a childlike vacation from the adult work of making meaning from the world; and the laughter of humor, which dissipates strong feelings, can be an effective and healthy coping mechanism. If we are able to laugh at things which would otherwise distress us, Freud argues, we will not be debilitated by them. Freud is, clearly, not a superiority theorist. The comic and the humorous do not necessarily entail any superiority. Much of the aggressive humor Freud discusses might be categorized as superiority humor, but Freud’s emphasis in his discussion of what he calls “tendentious” humor is on the pleasure of expressing an otherwise unacknowledged negative emotion rather than on the likelihood that the joker actually believes himself or herself superior to the object of the joke. Freud’s model is more compatible with incongruity theory, but his emphasis is on the changing interiority of the laugher rather than on the shifting stimuli that the laugher perceives. While, as Martin points out, Freud’s hydraulic model of psychic energy differs sharply from our current understanding of the operations of the nervous system,24 his theory contains components essential to a serious discussion of humor. Freud’s idea that we laugh when someone speaks the unspeakable provides a much-needed alternative to superiority theory; according to Freud, we laugh at a dirty joke not because we are superior to the subject but, on the contrary, because we share the subject’s desires. His discussion of laughter as coping mechanism is also an important alternative to superiority theory as an explanation of our laughter at negative events: rather than feeling Bergson’s “anaesthesia of the heart,” Freud suggests that we laugh precisely because we are prepared to feel so much. Freud also helps address one of the fundamental problems of incongruity theory, as he elucidates the social and psychological parameters that make incongruity funny: repression, for example, can help explain why a dirty joke provokes laughter when a surprising mathematical discovery does not. For literary scholars in particular, Freud’s approach to humor is useful because, unlike most other philosophers who study humor,

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he is attentive to humor’s multivalence, its simultaneous possibilities, and its profound emotional and psychological roots. At the same time, his hydraulic model of energy, which echoes Kant’s idea that laughter originates in the intestines, signals that we cannot declare his theory, either, the final word on the origins of humor. The dominant theories of humor, then, all fall short of offering a comprehensive model of laughter. Such a thing may not be possible. We laugh for such a wide variety of reasons (friendly pleasure, embarrassment, malice, recognition, shock, horror, delight, relief, etc.) that there may no more be a single root cause of laughter than there is a single root cause of speech. This may be why humor theorists disagree broadly on what the word “humor” actually means. Schopenhauer praises “humor” (as opposed to “wit” or “folly”) as “a quite peculiar species of the ludicrous, which … is related to the sublime” (Morreall, 63). Freud, distinguishing among “jokes,” “wit,” and “humor,” joins Schopenhauer in assigning “humor” more profundity than either of the others. William Hazlitt, publishing in the same year as Schopenhauer, defines the term almost in the opposite way: “Humor is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humor is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy” (Morreall, 74). (The difference in language between Schopenhauer and Hazlitt does not explain this discrepancy, as Schopenhauer refers to the English word “humor” and indeed says that the English “first discovered” the form of amusement he uses the term to describe.) This connection between humor and definitions of national character is an excellent example of how the “sense of humor”—a phrase meaning not the precise jokes a person finds funny but the whole tenor of what makes that person laugh—is frequently viewed as a significant marker of national and cultural identity. Discussions of humor frequently become discussions of identity: as we have already hinted at in the discussion of laughter among women and minority groups, humor is often taken as distinguishing a particular group, both by what they do and what they do not find funny. This treatment of humor as identitydefining ranges from the small scale of in-groups bonded by shared jokes, through the scale of national and ethnic identities with all their complicated divisions and subdivisions, to broad definitions of what it means to be human. This final category is telling, once again, not so much for its accuracy as for what it reveals about humor theorists and their understanding of humanity. Hazlitt opens his essay “On Wit and Humor” by asserting that “man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be” (Morreall, 65). While Hazlitt’s formulation seems designed primarily to emphasize the connection he sees between laughter and idealism, later writers often focus on the claim about species difference. Twentieth-century theorists who echo the phrase “Man is the only animal that laughs” (generally without the rest of the sentence) often take the ostensible uniqueness of human laughter to indicate our species’

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superior intelligence and sophistication. Unfortunately for those who seek to draw a clear line between the human and the animal, animal research does not support such a clear division. Chimps make a panting “laugh” in playful social situations, and some who are taught sign language appear to make verbal jokes with their trainers; much farther from humans on the evolutionary tree, rats engage in behaviors which look very like social laughter.25 The fact that animals appear to have laughter-like behaviors shows how deep-seated and instinctual laughter is; the fact that humans remain unaware of this commonality suggests something about our sense that laughter demarcates the boundaries of like and unlike. While, as several chapters in this book argue, laughter can indeed distinguish social groups, the social (or species) differences it identifies appear to lie in the nature or target of a group’s laughter rather than in its sheer existence. The fact that I laugh may distinguish me from an oyster, but that does not provide much insight into my character; the fact that I laugh at this joke but not that one may tell you something about my identity, my political convictions, my tolerance for aggression, my receptivity to language, and my sense of the absurd. What we find funny distinguishes us not by our species but by our interests, allegiances, philosophies, and contexts. Laughter, in other words, tells us not what we are but who we are, from moment to moment, as we respond with varying degrees of comprehension and sympathy to the ever-changing world we encounter. The dominant theories of humor disagree not just on what makes us laugh, but on what precisely laughter is. The words we use to discuss the phenomena associated with laughter and the comic are vexed and frequently used in contradictory ways. It is important, then, to state clearly how we are using these surprisingly ambiguous terms. For the purposes of this book, we will define “humor” as a discourse in which certain objects, conditions, processes, artifacts, and events are understood to provoke amusement, or the emotion that Martin calls “mirth.” This definition intentionally emphasizes humor as a cultural phenomenon. While Morreall includes tickling, for example, in his discussion of what makes people laugh (Morreall, 75). the chapters in this book will not enter into the question of whether the involuntary laughter provoked by physical sensations26 is continuous with the laughter provoked by a joke, a piece of slapstick, or a witty insight—all of which are stimuli requiring some degree of contextual knowledge to render them funny. Humor as we understand it here is linguistic, which is to say that it arises within a semiotic system of words and images containing flexible, context-dependent meanings. This preliminary definition of humor as a provocation to laughter arising from a contextually determined play of meaning is a deliberately broad one. It is not a theory but a description, one which can apply equally to superiority, incongruity, or relief theory. It also leaves room for new approaches to humor outside these established models. Rather than seeking to establish a unified field theory of humor, this collection will explore ways that humor suffuses, supports, and constitutes serious arguments within modern American poetry.

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The temporal and geographical lines of “modern American” also require some definition. We have construed both terms broadly, including poets born no later than 1928. The inclusion of Auden may stretch the designation “American,” as he had not yet become an American citizen when he wrote the works considered here; we justify his inclusion because of his influence on his contemporaries as well as later poets like Bishop and Merrill, so that his use of humor to construct a community is a touchstone for the community of American poetry itself. We have confined ourselves within these somewhat fluid boundaries not because modernists or Americans have any monopoly on humor, but because doing so helps illuminate both humor’s contextual nature (all the poets discussed in this book are writing in more or less the same era and place) and its multiplicity (nonetheless the poets take very different approaches to humor). While the kinds of humor examined in this book vary from the subtle to the overt, the tendentious to the whimsical, these chapters as a whole demonstrate two important theoretical points. First, they show that the dominant theories of humor do not adequately account for humor as practiced by these writers, particularly when they emphasize humor’s multivalence and capacity to keep several lines of thought in play simultaneously. And second, many of the chapters show that one of the major omissions in humor theory is humor’s capacity to promote fellow-feeling and mutual understanding. While superiority theory deals with laughter’s ability to unite malicious laughers against their common object, these chapters demonstrate that laughter can also help create a less superiority-based, more generous sense of community, either among a social group or between friends or lovers. The collection opens with Joel Slotkin’s discussion of Ezra Pound’s use of humor to establish his own authority in The Cantos. Of the poets examined in this collection, Pound’s comes closest to following the model of superiority humor, but as Slotkin shows, even Pound’s notoriously aggressive humor deviates from this model, and ends up undercutting the purpose for which he apparently deploys it. In contrast with Pound’s use of humor to place himself at the top of a hierarchy, E. E. Cummings uses laughter to circumvent authority. William Solomon examines Cummings’s use of bawdy humor to circumvent cognition and reinvigorate the senses. While Freud’s relief theory may partially explain why these poems are funny, their effect is more revolutionary than what Freud identifies as “jokework,” not just releasing tension but calling for the active creation of alternative systems of creation. Solomon argues that Cummings’s incongruity humor does not follow Schopenhauer’s model of pattern-finding; rather, it deliberately breaks patterns in order “to shake false impressions of security, to subvert comfortable, stabilized modes of inhabiting the world.” This subversion does not just allow us to express repressed desires; it makes original thinking possible. Classic superiority theory sees humor as directed against another person, but we also laugh at ourselves. Such laughter, like Cummings’s, can help lead

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us to significant insights about our subjects. Marta Figlerowicz argues that Lorine Niedecker treats mockery as a way to test the importance of emotions. Niedecker’s mockery differs from the superiority model not just because it is primarily self-mockery, but because it acknowledges that its subjects may actually be quite valuable. Figlerowicz suggests that Niedecker shows us the philosophical (rather than the psychological) value of comic detachment, which may allow us a dispassionate assessment of the value of our own emotional responses. This chapter and Solomon’s discussion of Cummings suggest how the tendentious humor that Freud sees as a release can also constitute a form of self-regulation, encouraging us to examine the value of self-restraint as well as its cost. Lena Hill, in Chapter 4, also examines how laughter can help us assess value—in this case, the value of a work of art. Hill argues that in Melvin Tolson’s Harlem Gallery, humor helps connect artist with critic and establish a cohesive black cultural sensibility. Niedecker’s laughter is directed inward, at herself; Tolson’s is multidirectional, targeting the individual’s insecurities and the cultural forces keeping that individual insecure. Tolson’s treatment of laughter promotes self-aware collective action in the name of artistic freedom. For Tolson, Hill argues, humor is a “cultural conduit” that is both subversive and constructive, a “glue” that unites artist, critic, and audience in a shared project of creation. Here we see an example not just of humor’s power to police cultural boundaries, as Bergson would have it, but to bring a community to a sense of shared purpose both within and beyond the scope of the joke. Hill argues that humor is a way to unite individuals; Alan Shapiro in Chapter 6 treats it as a way to resolve conflicting ideas, using punch lines as a model for poetic structure. Shapiro’s chapter on modernist conventions and comic form, which engages with the Schopenhauerean question of pattern and variation in incongruity humor, opens with a consideration of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Hardy, then turns to William Carlos Williams. Shapiro argues that Williams’s explicit undermining of poetic conventions can be understood through the theoretical lens of jokes, which similarly establish expectations in their audience only to subvert those expectations in favor of something stranger and more novel. While Shapiro’s chapter concentrates on the work of three poets, its structural implications reach much further. The place of the individual within groups or cultural categories emerges as a repeated subject of humor in twentieth-century poetry. Humor is a particularly useful tool for discussing the relationships among individuals, cultural identities, and stereotypes. This is in part because humor’s shorthand, condensed nature frequently leads humorists to draw on clashes between expectations and outcomes, in which stereotypes may provide the basis of expectations, the surprise that confounds those expectations, or both. In Chapter 7, Megan Leroy examines how laughter can help transform reductive stereotypes into substantive social critiques as she argues that the “housewife poet” Phyllis McGinley uses humor to individuate the idealized, stereotyped housewife. As Leroy shows, McGinley’s comic incongruities resolve into

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suggestions about how to negotiate the incompatible ideals and realities her verse places in tension. Leroy suggests that McGinley’s incongruity humor becomes a way to turn comic pattern-finding into a way to make apparently incompatible lines of thought into a coherent and empowering whole. Hugh Haughton, too, sees humor as individuating, the intellectual equivalent of fingerprints. Haughton argues that humor is essential to Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop’s distinctive styles. For Moore and Bishop, humor may sometimes be a coping mechanism, but more importantly, it allows the poets to move between registers, particularly the sacred and the profane. Neither the Freudian model of humor nor incongruity theory alone captures these interrelated functions of laughter for the poets. Rather, Haughton shows that Moore and Bishop deploy humor to resist dualisms by maintaining apparently incommensurable tones and imports. For Moore and Bishop, laughter provides a way to understand multiplicity. The theme of humor’s role as mediator between the individual and the group that develops over the course of this book becomes most explicit in Rachel Trousdale’s chapter on W. H. Auden (Chapter 8). Trousdale argues that Auden uses humor to find a new way to delineate literary tradition. Auden suggests that laughter creates and consolidates shared values. In the period immediately before the Second World War, he turns to humor as a substantive alternative to nationalist definitions of culture, finding in light verse an anti-Nazi, antinationalist, democratic approach to tracing his literary lineage. In a striking departure from theoretical models that posit conflict between laugher and object of laughter, Stephen Burt, in Chapter 9, also examines humor’s capacity to promote fellow-feeling, on the interpersonal rather than the national scale. Burt shows that for Auden’s younger friend James Merrill, humor becomes a form of intimacy. Merrill’s wit, Burt argues, follows the model of the comic exchanges between spouses familiar from classic films. Merrill’s comic gestures provide a portrait of his (legally unrecognized) marriage with David Jackson, and then extend that intimate comic communion to close friends, lovers, and the reader, who are drawn into the circle by shared laughter. Burt’s analysis of humor and enduring romantic love is groundbreaking in its discussion of how laughter can help create intimate bonds between individuals while at the same time maintaining and valuing their enduring individuality. Finally, Karin Roffman in Chapter 10 shows how humor is constitutive of John Ashbery’s poetic voice. Like Leroy, Haughton, and Burt, Roffman is interested in the way that humor is individuating; in this case, as part of a deliberate self-construction through irony and absurdity. For Ashbery, Roffman argues, humor is “a matter of survival” not just because, like Moore and Bishop, Ashbery uses it as a coping mechanism, but because the “comic version of [him]self ” is at the root of Ashbery’s performance of himself as a poet. Roffman traces Ashbery’s ironic humor from his first poem (written at the age of eight) through the laughter of his audiences at readings to show how humor enables the transformation of the self into public artist and the raw materials of life into

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poetry. Humor, Roffman argues, is both the vehicle through which Ashbery stages his artistic identity and the test by which he ascertains whether that identity is recognized. As in Figlerowicz’s chapter, humor allows the artist a viewpoint from which to view himself—not simply the Bergsonian model of laughter that teaches us to judge ourselves by social norms, but a kind of comic distance which allows dispassionate evaluation of one’s own work. Taken together, the chapters in this book give particular insight into how humor mediates between the individual, the interpersonal, and the collective. Laughter, these chapters suggest, does not only teach us to see ourselves from the outside as strangers would; rather, it can also give us privileged insight into our loved ones as into ourselves, and help us identify commonalities with others on scales from the intimate to the national. Without denying the existence of the many kinds of competitive, hostile, or tendentious humor, this book suggests a model of interpersonal humor in which laughter becomes both the instigation and the proof of shared values, of insight, and of originality. For many of the poets discussed here, the laugh is the payoff of mutual understanding and the reward for new discoveries. At the same time, they show that humorous incongruity can be not just a way to amuse the reader, but a fundamental part of a work of art that holds apparently incompatible ideas, images, and worlds in tension. Humor allows us, like the Red Queen, to believe six impossible things before breakfast, and thus to escape the humorless, realist pressure to arrive at a single answer to complex questions. Readers of this book will probably see glaring omissions in the subjects we discuss. Where, they will ask, are Gertrude Stein and Ogden Nash? Why not talk about Dada or the Futurists? Why does the book not deal with younger poets and cover Tony Hoagland, Billy Collins, Cathy Park Hong? Why omit humor from Britain, Ireland, the Commonwealth, the rest of the world? What about the absurd, which seems to follow a model entirely different from the interpersonal forms of humor on which this collection concentrates? What about the rich tradition of modernist satire? How does poetic humor differ from the humor in fiction, in film, in stand-up comedy? It is our hope that these omissions will be taken as invitations to join the conversation. Modern poetry requires a new range of more flexible theories of humor, which take into account humor’s capacity to promote fellow-feeling as well as to alienate, its ability (or failure) to transcend historical context, and its tendency to cross, as well as to mark, social boundaries. We will only understand it if we join in the laughter.

Notes 1 Ronald Wallace, God Be with the Clown: Humor in American Poetry (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), 11. 2 Leonard Diepeveen, ed., Mock Modernism: An Anthology of Parodies, Travesties, Frauds, 1910–1935 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 23.

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3 Bonnie Costello, “Tragicomic Mode in Modern American Poetry: ‘Awful but Cheerful,’” in A Companion to Poetic Genres, ed. Erik Martiny (New York: Blackwell, 2011). 4 For key excerpts from original texts and helpful contextual commentary, see John Morreall’s essential anthology The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987). Further references noted in the text. 5 Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, “The 2,000-Year-Old-Man,” https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=EQWDxrKS1Z4 (accessed August 3, 2016). 6 Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” in Comedy, ed., introduction, and appendix by Wylie Sypher (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 63–64. 7 Ibid., 67. 8 Wallace, God Be with the Clown, 11. 9 Bergson, “Laughter,” 84. 10 Charles Gruner, The Game of Humor: A Comprehensive Theory of Why We Laugh (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997). For an evaluation of Gruner’s position, see Rod A. Martin, The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach (Boston, MA: Elsevier Academic Press, 2007), 54. 11 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (summer 1976): 888. 12 This idea, while clearly false, is remarkably widespread and durable, and significantly affects even contemporary theoretical discussions of humor, whether overtly as male theorists dismiss women’s laughter or covertly as women are absent from the conversation. In Morreall’s otherwise excellent anthology, for example, there are no female contributors, and the only two women mentioned in the index are Alice in Wonderland and Picasso’s “Weeping Woman.” 13 Regina Barrecca, “Introduction,” in Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy, ed. and introduction by Regina Barrecca (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988), 8. 14 D. Zillmann and J. R. Cantor, “A Disposition Theory of Humour and Mirth,” in Humor and Laughter: Theory, Research, and Applications, ed. A. J. Chapman and H. C. Foot (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1976). Cited in Martin, The Psychology of Humor, 51. 15 Martin, The Psychology of Humor, 52. 16 Ruth Wisse, No Joke: Making Jewish Humor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 231–2. 17 Aristotle, The Rhetoric of Aristotle (London: Macmillan and Co, 1886), 264. 18 Not all viewers agree that incongruity applies for these cartoons. For a thorough exploration of the ways that the Road Runner cartoons may confound existing humor theories, see Timo Laine, “Sympathy for the Coyote,” http://www.timoroso. com/philosophy/writings/print-coyote-2009 (accessed August 18, 2016). 19 Martin, The Psychology of Humor, 110. 20 Ibid. 21 See Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003). 22 See Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011): 459–62.

Introduction: Theories of Humor and Modern Poetry 23 Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, translated by Joyce Crick, introduction by John Carey (New York: Penguin, 2003). 24 Martin, The Psychology of Humor, 42. 25 See Martin, The Psychology of Humor, 165. 26 Admittedly this is an oversimplification, as tickling is a social act; while an inanimate object may be said to tickle us, generally speaking only tickling by another person makes us laugh.

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Chapter 1 H UM O R A N D A U T HO R I T Y I N   E Z R A   P OU N D’ S   C A N T O S Joel Elliot Slotkin

Scholars have generally treated Ezra Pound’s Cantos as a work of “high moral seriousness,”1 and the poem certainly has an ambitious poetic and ideological agenda that seeks to advance values central to Pound’s idea of civilization. But although the sheer size and difficulty of The Cantos give the impression of a poem written entirely in earnest, the text actually contains significant attempts at humor that have important implications for considerations of Pound’s poetic voice, as well as for the poem’s polemical goals. The sense of humor manifested in The Cantos ranges from the extremes of sophistication to the extremes of crudity, and it encompasses sentiments that are at times laudable but frequently reprehensible, especially in the expression of various forms of bigotry. Both Pound’s admirers and his detractors have suggested that Pound juxtaposes various historical materials, voices, and linguistic registers in order to efface his own poetic voice and allow The Cantos to speak in what Michael André Bernstein calls “the objective speech of the entire tribal heritage and not merely of Ezra Pound, the individual.”2 Yet among these voices are some that disrupt the high seriousness of the poem. In fact, Pound’s own voice frequently performs this disruption. These moments typically rely on the introduction of elements of “low” culture or diction into the poem, which is for the most part so emphatically a product of “high” culture that very few people (if any) have the cultural literacy required to understand all its allusions.3 In this chapter, I argue that the particular sense of humor expressed in The Cantos serves a self-authorizing, indeed self-aggrandizing function. Pound sees humor primarily as a weapon to discredit the people and the viewpoints he opposes, while simultaneously instantiating and reinforcing his distinctive poetic voice and authority as the speaker of The Cantos. He uses high diction to demonstrate his intellectual prowess and superiority over speakers of low diction, while also employing low diction to demonstrate his hip, unpretentious, worldly wise superiority over social and intellectual elites. As a result, the

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heteroglossia of The Cantos comes to represent not the impersonal voice of history but a unique, protean voice that only Pound is capable of using. These varying levels of diction are frequently racialized, and indeed much of Pound’s humor is explicitly racist. Although Pound partly seeks to subvert racial hierarchies in the service of his own poetic persona and aesthetics, the overall effect of his racist humor is rather to reinforce white supremacist stereotypes while privileging his own borrowings from racial others, particularly African Americans. Most of the time, Pound’s humor supports the polemical goals of the poem. However, the parodic and/or bigoted edge of Pound’s humor does not always coincide with the ostensible thrust of his poem’s polemics—he frequently ridicules characters we might expect him to praise. Ultimately, Pound’s creation of this humorous, protean voice appears to become an end in itself, rivaling the supposed messages of the poem. *** As Bernstein has written, “Much of the richness of The Cantos, and a large part of their immense legacy to subsequent writers, arises directly from Pound’s struggle to unite two narratives—the personal and lyric affirmations of a single voice with the ‘objective,’ communally guaranteed certitudes of traditional epics.”4 But these two modes are not equal in Bernstein’s account. Rather, he argues that Pound’s primary or at least more laudable goal is the effacement of his own authorial voice, in order to present the poem as the collective voice of “the tribe.”5 Bernstein believes that “while Pound has not established any authoritative voice within the poem whose principles of selection and judgment we are ready to accept, he has also refused to let us see the text’s diverse enunciations as originating in a single, omniscient author standing outside the narrative.”6 Similarly, Peter Baker argues that “the new aesthetic that The Cantos point to must begin with discarding the notion of ‘voice’ as it implies an interior monologue, in favor of a model for enunciation by a necessarily ‘split subject.’ A polyphony of voices—personal, transpersonal, textual, intertextual—speaks through and across the surface of the text.”7 This scholarly emphasis on the effacement of Pound’s authorial voice in The Cantos reflects the poem’s pervasive use of collage. Vast sections of The Cantos consist of quoted fragments of historical documents, such as a list of the costs of producing and shipping tobacco in France, borrowed from a letter by Thomas Jefferson: “6 millions to manufacture . . . on which the king takes thirty million . . . in all it costs 72 millions livres to the consumer.”8 By inserting such primary sources into his poem, Pound attempts to efface the fallible, because subjective, voice of the poet and to show the objective and even quantitative nature of his work. Although this strategy is indeed central to The Cantos, it would be misleading to regard Pound’s great poetic work as primarily self-effacing. Pound’s voice intrudes explicitly and powerfully at crucial moments. One of the poem’s

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greatest moments of high seriousness—a crucial passage in which Pound reflects on his poetic project as a whole—foregrounds the authorial voice: Can you enter the great acorn of light? But the beauty is not the madness Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me. And I am not a demigod, I cannot make it cohere. (CXVI/815–16) In these lines, Pound represents his work as a great wreck. But as Pound describes it, the scope of his failure is in fact a measure of his own greatness (at least of poetic ambition and conception)—he is attempting a work that only “a demigod” could achieve. This moment of self-deprecation, then, is also a powerful self-assertion. It seems tied to a tragic mode, quite different from the objective mode he uses in the Thomas Jefferson passages and elsewhere.9 Together they form the axis of Pound’s high seriousness. Here, the sense of tragedy comes precisely from Pound’s loss of confidence in his ability to transmit his vision of the grand narrative of history without distortion or fragmentation. The idea that The Cantos are an objective collection of historical and cultural materials is, of course, a carefully crafted illusion, because any process of collage inevitably reflects the agenda and sensibilities of the artist.10 Rather than effacing the author, Pound’s polyglot assemblage of cultural data is in fact his most distinctive voice, a voice defined by its protean nature and ability to shift linguistic registers.11 The poem’s heteroglossia is itself an assertion that nobody other than Ezra Pound could have spoken it—and because Pound can sound like everyone he quotes, everyone he quotes sounds like Pound. This distinctively Poundian voice comes through most clearly when introducing what he considers humor to The Cantos, in moments both when Pound ventriloquizes other speakers and when he speaks as himself. Whether he is explicitly asserting himself or ostensibly getting out of the way to let a collage of texts speak through him, Pound’s humor always highlights his own perspective and serves to position himself in relation to the other characters and the reader. The poem’s opposing impulses toward collage and forceful personal rhetoric both contain the possibility of what we might call low humor that contrasts with the general tone of high solemnity. Ezra Pound’s publisher, James Laughlin, notes the centrality of humor to Pound and provides a list of the kinds of humor that Pound typically engages in: “tapinosis, the application of colorful slang to serious topics,” “interlingual puns” and “parody,” “a kind of deflationary mockery” or “put-down,” and “accents and dialects.”12 Although this list is not exhaustive or classified in a way that facilitates analysis, it does provide a helpful starting point for examining humor in The Cantos. As Laughlin suggests, Pound’s sense of humor is dominated by a combination of linguistic juxtapositions and put-downs. The former is frequently a product of Pound’s

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ostensibly objective collages of textual material, whereas the latter often results from the direct intrusion of Pound’s own authorial perspective. Humor thus becomes a crucial site for the debate over Pound’s assertion or effacement of his poetic voice. As we will see, the humor in The Cantos tends rather to highlight than diminish Pound’s authorial presence, but it also raises questions about Pound’s control over the poem’s voice and message. *** Some of Pound’s humor in The Cantos arises from the juxtaposition of two surprising elements, a not infrequent occurrence given the tremendous and varied amount of material that the poem incorporates. Humor through juxtaposition is an inherent property of the structure and premise of the poem, and one that serves Pound’s omnivorous appetite well, because it can work on almost any document that he appropriates. The humor sometimes simply results from a friction between two documents, as in the sincere, exaggeratedly grandiose style of six-year-old Sallustio Malatesta’s letter to his “Magnificent and Exalted Lord and Father” Sigismundo thanking him for a new pony, which follows an informal and avuncular account of Sallustio’s reaction to the same event by his tutor (IX/38–9). The tutor’s letter retroactively appears patronizing after Sallustio’s, but it also humorously emphasizes by contrast the boy’s precocious verbosity. Pound also achieves humorous effects by juxtaposing high and low diction in a more concentrated fashion. For purposes of this analysis, high diction includes educated or upper-class English, learned allusions, and foreign languages when used correctly or as part of macaronic passages, since these are all forms of erudition. Low diction includes less proper or educated speech, various accents and dialects, and other forms of nonstandard grammar or spelling. Often, Pound will follow an erudite classical reference with a very colloquial and seemingly irrelevant comment, deliberately creating bathos: “Oedipus, nepotes Remi magnanimi/so Mr Bullington lay on his back like an ape” (LXXIV/459). Even when Pound does not change the subject so drastically, the shift in diction or in the language being used has the humorous effect of moving from the sublime to the ridiculous: “Smaragdos, chrysolithos; De Gama wore striped pants in Africa” (VII/25). Although the line as a whole maintains a clear thematic connection (the excessive use of ornament), the precipitous descent from Greek to English and from jewels to pants still surprises the reader. In some cases, the junction between the high and low realms of thought can be so compact that it produces a single quirky image, as in phrases like “canned beef of Apollo” (XX/94). Not all of Pound’s humor works so directly by juxtaposition, but almost all of the humor in The Cantos relies at least partially on the contrasting high seriousness of the rest of the poem. At times, Pound uses these humorous linguistic shifts to humanize himself and the poem and render both more accessible to the reader. For example, Pound uses low diction in an explicit defense of high culture when he

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describes the emperor Ch’ien Lung: “literary kuss, and wuz Emperor/fer at least 40 years./Perhaps you will look up his verses” (LXI/340). Because Pound has just been praising the emperor’s filial piety and literary accomplishments, the term “kuss” brings the emperor down to earth, but the laudatory context also gives “kuss” a sense of friendly intimacy rather than mockery—as if Pound and the emperor were buddies. The low diction in the passage seems like a self-conscious attempt to convince the reader that Pound is just a regular guy, and that therefore, since he finds the works of an ancient Chinese emperor interesting, the reader may also. Thus, the humorous low diction attempts to defuse Pound’s own concerns about the difficulty of The Cantos themselves and the problem of who can read them. Similarly, a simple shift in language from French to English greatly enhances the self-deprecating irony of Pound’s admission that “J’ai eu pitié des autres/probablement pas assez, and at moments that suited my own convenience” (LXXVI/480). Here and throughout the poem, the epic voice switches languages at moments that suit his own convenience. Pound’s process of textual collage also involves the reproduction of actual jokes. For example, he describes a group of children chanting: “Martin/Van Buren, a bottle of urine” (LXXXIX/617), which he refers to in learned diction as an example of the “oral tradition.” In other words, what appears to be childish bathroom humor is in fact an important piece of cultural data and therefore a legitimate element to include in the poem. A similar impulse to collect examples of the “oral tradition” and preserve important cultural materials most likely animates Pound’s decision to quote a fellow prisoner, Mr. Bishop: “Ef my bull-dog . . . had a face like yours, hang’d if/I wouldn’t shave his arse and make him walk backwards” (LXXXIX/616). The comment is directed at a completely anonymous target (described by Pound in macaronic diction as “a co-detenuto”), so Pound presumably quotes it for its aesthetic and amusement value rather than as a specific satirical critique. These examples reflect the fact that jokes in Pound readily shade into insults or practical jokes; they are not merely amusing stories but function instrumentally as attacks. Pound describes a practical joke that Sigismundo Malatesta was accused of: “that he did among other things/Empty the fonts of the chiexa of holy water/And fill up the same full with ink” (X/44). The joke is doubly harmful. First, Malatesta’s prank is “making mock of the inky faithful”—a deflation of pretensions that Pound seems to approve of (X/45). Secondly, the joke is reported by Malatesta’s enemies as one of a series of trumped-up charges against him, in order to defame his character. These accusations outrage Pound, and he holds Malatesta’s enemies in the utmost contempt, partly because they can’t take a joke. Not only are they unamused by the initial prank, but they also fail to see how ludicrous their own hyperbolic list of accusations—which includes incest, necrophilia, priest-killing, and arson—appears when juxtaposed with Malatesta’s “youthful levity.” Since many of Pound’s contemporaries found his own attempts at humor offensive,

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Pound may be presenting Malatesta as a parallel to his own situation: the joker pilloried by a society with no sense of humor. Even when understood properly, though, jokes in Pound are nearly always directed against someone. Later, Malatesta makes a deal with Enricho de Aquabello that for four months You’ll stand any reasonable joke that I play on you, And you can joke back provided you don’t get too ornry (XI/52) Here too, jokes are things that are played on people rather than told to them, things that need to be endured rather than enjoyed, a view that seems symptomatic of Pound’s own understanding and use of humor. In the joke about the honest sailor that “Jim X” tells to a group of corrupt bankers, the punch line relies on the implication of homosexual sex: “‘I am not your fader but your moder,’ quod he,/‘Your fader was a rich merchant in Stambouli’” (XII/57). This joke uses the very idea of sex between two men as a weapon of contempt against the fat bankers, to show Jim’s disregard and disgust for “their bloomin’ primness . . . the way their mouths twitched/over their cigar-ends” and their usurious practices (XII/55). Pound was interested in the thematic association of usury and sodomy suggested by Dante,13 but the plot of the joke does not lend itself to interpretation as an allegorical lesson to the bankers. Although the joke itself seems oddly good-natured and perhaps even heartwarming, largely because of its likeable protagonist, it serves in context as a verbal attack with no intention of benefiting or amusing its audience. Indeed, the overriding effect of Pound’s humorous manipulations of high and low diction in The Cantos is to demonstrate the superior status of his authorial voice, usually by denigrating others. As the preceding examples suggest, Pound’s humor is almost always critical or insulting in tone. Both Mr. Bishop’s observation and the children’s rhyme about Martin Van Buren are essentially insults. Indeed, using a rhyme about urine to mock a political figure is a good example of the way humor tends to work throughout The Cantos. Most of the other examples of humorous juxtaposition also have a critical edge. Carroll Terrell sees an implied critique in the description of Vasco Da Gama’s ornate pants,14 and “canned beef of Apollo” is part of a passage spoken in tones of sincere outrage. Even the description of Ch’ien Lung is a sort of affectionate put-down. Rather than denigrating its target like much of Pound’s humor, it attempts to bring the poet, the emperor, and the reader together to a certain extent. Nonetheless, it still demonstrates Pound’s superiority as the only Westerner capable of recognizing the significance of this obscure (to Westerners) literary figure, bringing him down to earth, and introducing him to a modern English-speaking audience. ***

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Although Pound consistently aims at self-promotion, his methods for achieving this goal are extremely flexible. Pound deploys different linguistic registers to enhance his own stature, and in doing so he does not consistently demonize or valorize either high/erudite or low/colloquial diction. Thus, while Pound generally arranges things so that his voice appears to come out on top, the nature of that voice changes depending on the poetic context. Indeed, its changeability is one of its most distinctive features. At times, Pound uses his own erudition or the crude language of other characters to demonstrate his position as a member of the intellectual elite. For example, he describes a fight between the muse Calliope and a personification of Truth in language that humorously contrasts with the quoted conflict itself: “‘Slut!’ ‘Bitch!’ Truth and Calliope/Slanging each other sous les lauriers” (VIII/28). Here, Pound further emphasizes the inappropriately low diction of the insults by switching to French (which in an English poem counts as high diction) in mid-sentence. Beyond the humor that naturally results from the indecorous behavior of the two normally ladylike allegorical figures, Pound also demonstrates his superior control of language. Similarly, Pound says of the British, “On don’t pense./They’re solid bone. You can amputate from just above/ The medulla, and it won’t alter the life in that island” (XVIII/82). The tight mingling of French and English, and subsequently the hyperbolic notion of lobotomizing all of England, create humor, but more importantly they add force to Pound’s persona as one who wields multiple levels of language (including foreign languages and scientific terms) and is capable of passing contemptuous judgment on an entire country. Pound frequently delights in demonstrating his linguistic superiority over those who, because of their ethnic background or country of origin, speak English incorrectly or with an accent. Because The Cantos displays such fluency in literary English and a variety of foreign languages, characters in the poem who lack fluency in standard English are made to appear ridiculous to some degree. This mockery is usually racist in nature, but not always. Mr. Giddings’s cynical assessment of the economics of war sounds less authoritative because of the (presumably white) American accent in which he delivers it: “Peace! Pieyce!!” said Mr. Giddings, “Uni-ver-sal? Not while yew got tew billions ov money,” Said Mr. Giddings, “invested in the man-u-facture “Of war machinery. (XVIII/81) Pound deplores the arms dealer’s statement while recognizing the bitter truth behind it. But Giddings is perfectly happy with war profiteering, and his accent reflects the crassness of such an attitude. Pound’s fondness for making fun of non-native English speakers comes through in the fragment of a conversation with Michio Ito: “‘Jap’nese dance all time overcoat’ he remarked/with perfect precision” (LXXVII/489). The

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ostensible humor stems from the combination of the cryptically unidiomatic nature of Ito’s statement and the precision of its utterance, both of which are standard features of American anti-Japanese stereotypes. Pound sets up this line with a comment that emphasizes and derives amusement from foreignness: he says that Ito’s landlady “never believed he wanted her cat/for mouse-chasing/ and not for oriental cuisine” (LXXVII/489). The taboo against eating cats is sufficiently strong that Ito seems more alien simply because such jokes (a staple of anti-Asian prejudice) can be made about him. Not only does Pound’s joke divide Ito from the Westerners, it also allows Pound to maintain a tone of knowing amusement at the landlady’s fear, which serves his larger project of self-authorizing. In order to help establish himself as one who comprehends all cultures, Pound shows the reader that he knows Ito does not actually want to eat the cat. Similarly, Pound’s humorous comment on a black prisoner, Whiteside, attempting to pacify a dog raises Pound above the level of his “co-detenutos”: “‘ah certainly dew lak dawgs,/ah goin’ tuh wash you’/(no, not to the author, to the canine unwilling in question)” (LXXIX/505). After the accented speech of Whiteside, Pound’s exaggerated precision and delicate sarcasm emphasize his own cultural elitism—Pound regards the dog-washing with an almost anthropological detachment.15 The divisive nature of accents in Pound becomes even sharper in one of his invectives against usurious Jews, where he abandons the humorous potential of the accent and uses it as a marker of pure evil: “jews, real jews, chazims, and neschek . . . bomb-proof under their house in Paris/where they cd/store aht voiks/fat slug with three body-guards” (LII/257). Pound’s contemptuous insertion of the Yiddish-accented phrase “aht voiks” highlights Jewishness as an ethnically distinct identity worthy of disgust. Pound briefly alludes to the “poor yitts” who are demonized despite having nothing to do with usury.16 However, his invocation of the Jewish accent, and his repeated insistence on calling the corrupt financiers he attacks “jews,” without any additional modifier, reinforces the impression of an attack on an ethnic group rather than a profession (bankers) or a financial practice (usury). Although humor based on dialect and nationality in The Cantos often functions as a method for demonstrating Pound’s cultural refinement and elitism, Pound’s authorial persona depends on convincing readers of his mastery of both high and low diction. In a line from Canto LX, Pound descends so precipitously from French through standard English to dialect English that his linguistic playfulness eclipses the sense of the line: “En son Palais divers ateliers/ wanted the best European models/fer paintin’ an’ scuppchure” (LX/333). The mispronunciation of “painting and sculpture” suggests an ingenuous persona with little knowledge or respect for the arts, but that pose is disrupted by the use of French and the reference to “ateliers” in the very same line—to say nothing of the erudition of The Cantos as a whole. As Fabian Ironside notes, “Pound also defines himself self-consciously against the stereotype of effete, European

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‘book larnin’.”17 This counter-impulse can manifest itself in contexts as basic as the passage where Pound mocks the accent of the Oxford don who thought there were too many words in “The Hound of Heaven” a moddddun opohem he had read and there was no doubt that the dons lived well in the kawledg (LXXIV/465) By making fun of the stuffy academic elite, Pound is implicitly positioning himself outside the elite position he often assumes and claiming a different kind of superiority and authority: that of a down-to-earth, cynical outsider capable of diagnosing the pretentiousness and corruption of the rich, powerful, and educated. As part of this stance, Pound frequently employs a privileged form of low diction to mock entrenched social, political, and academic hierarchies. One example of this strategy occurs at the end of Canto XXII, where a medieval Florentine woman using low diction and playing dumb prevents a judge from enforcing the sumptuary laws she has violated. When told that her clothing has too many buttons, for example, she responds “Those ain’t buttons, them’s bobbles” (XXII/106). Through her low diction, she is able to assert her own independence, and while sounding stupid, she demonstrates that she is actually the smartest person in the room. One of the most important manifestations of Pound’s appropriation of low diction is his imitation of African American English. Michael North and Jonathan Gill provide instructive analyses of this practice, although they focus more on Pound’s correspondence than on The Cantos. Gill quotes Pound’s unpublished “For the Afro-American Language,” in which Pound castigates African Americans for aspiring to talk like “the cheap whites” or “a Haavud sophomore,” concluding “Damn it, nigguh; when you got som’thin’ better n the white man; why the hell can’t you keep it.”18 North argues that Pound ties defiance of the standard language, presented here as an essentially black habit, to the literary experimentation of modernism. Black dialect is a prototype of the literature that would break the hold of the iambic pentameter, an example of visceral freedom triumphing over dead convention. The dialect in modernism is a model for the dialect of modernism, since black speech seems to Pound the most prominent prior challenge to the dominance of received linguistic forms.19 Pound values African American English for its aesthetic qualities, not as an expression of black culture and experience per se. Indeed, by using African American English as a metaphor for modernist rebellion, Pound engages in a particularly reductive form of cultural appropriation.

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This linguistic appropriation extends to many other non-elite English accents and dialects. Within The Cantos, Pound frequently speaks, or assumes responsibility for, various forms of humorous low diction. For instance, he describes a Chinese nobleman mocking the Europeans in China using language that (by the end at least) is clearly American slang and not a Chinese accent: “You Christers wanna have foot on two boats and when them boats pulls apart you will d/n well git a wettin’ ” said a court mandarin tellin’ ’em. (LXI/336) Not only does the inaccuracy of the dialect imply that Pound’s voice is showing through, Pound supports the speech of the mandarin in the same dialect, indicating that the mandarin is “tellin’ ’em” what Pound thinks they should hear. The crucial difference between the authoritative speech of the mandarin and the speech of a character like Whiteside (who seems calculated to inspire patronizing amusement) is that the mandarin is the originator of the mockery, not its target, and that mockery is endorsed by Pound. Not all of Pound’s low diction in The Cantos consists of recognizable dialects or accents. Ironside observes that Pound uses willful misspelling, or “cacography,”20 as a technique in itself, over and above the spelling changes necessary to accurately transliterate dialects. Sometimes, Pound stretches the pronunciation of words into puns to maximize their mocking effect: “Louses of Parleymoot . . . Blaydon objectin’ to form ov these doggymints” (LXII/342). These lines move a bit beyond any attempt at duplicating a spoken accent. Instead, phrases like “Louses of Parleymoot” perform a childishly mocking linguistic transformation analogous to the process that produces the rhyme “Martin/Van Burena bottle of urine.” Of course, even at his most childish, Pound still tries to demonstrate his control over the language. Here, Pound creates a delicate philological joke by transforming “parliament” into two words that have the same general meaning as parliament but that derive from a French root and an Anglo-Saxon root respectively. “Parleymoot” thus combines high erudition and low cacography, demonstrating the precision and nuance of Pound’s self-positioning. Even when Pound’s playfulness with diction operates purely on the level of word sounds, the humor typically retains its edge, as in the passage of Canto IX, which says that Messire Alessandro Sforza is become lord of Pesaro through the wangle of the Illus. Sgr. Mr. Fedricho d’Orbino Who worked the wangle with Galeaz through the wiggling of Messer Francesco, Who waggled it so that Galeaz should sell Pesaro (IX/34–5)

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The elaborate titles of Italian noblemen serve to emphasize the ludicrous (and perhaps vaguely obscene) sound of the repetition of “wangle” and its variations. Yet this passage does not simply revel in aural silliness for its own sake. The main thrust of the passage is to convey contempt for the underhanded machinations of Malatesta’s enemies. The humor both strengthens the sense of disdain by attributing such a contemptible action as “wiggling” to the noblemen and, perhaps inadvertently, undercuts it by introducing an element of silliness into a passage intended to show sincere rage. Nonetheless, even when Pound himself employs various forms of low diction, he still manages to maintain his superiority over others who speak it. This delicate self-positioning is a crucial strategy for the persona Pound creates in The Cantos and in many of his letters. Pound is quite adept at switching between his own privileged mode of low diction and the ludicrous diction of other characters while preserving the distinction between the two. Immediately after a description of how “the rock scorpions cling to the edge/Until they can’t jes’ nacherly stand it,” which moves surprisingly from standard diction to colloquial diction for added emphasis, Pound introduces a character with a ridiculous accent: “‘Jeen-jah! Jeen-jah!’ squawked Mohamed,/‘O-ah, geef heem sax-pence’” (XXII/103). Mohamed’s squawking remains utterly farcical without impinging on the authority of Pound’s own knowing, vaguely sarcastic dialect voice. *** One of the most remarkable expressions of the negative aspect of humor in The Cantos is the almost obsessive use of derogatory ethnic or national designations. Given the polyglot, multicultural nature of the poem, Pound’s employment of ethnic slurs must be taken partly as an ironic mockery of his own incredibly cosmopolitan poetic enterprise. Yet Pound’s insistence on his own cultural superiority, his obvious delight in racist stereotypes, and the sheer ubiquity of racist terms prevent them from functioning purely ironically. Pound’s relentless deployment of pejorative ethnic labels also forces them to serve their normative purpose of signaling contempt and perpetuating ideologies of division and oppression. After mocking Whiteside’s African American English by juxtaposing it with his own deliberately pretentious diction (quoted earlier), Pound concludes that “whereas the sight of a good nigger is cheering/ the bad’uns wont look you straight” (LXXIX/505). Here, he simultaneously appropriates low diction and demonstrates his contempt for those who speak it. This ambivalence—or strategic triangulation—pervades The Cantos. In Canto XXII, there is a conversation in which Pound praises a Jewish tour guide that he meets in Gibraltar, An’ the nigger in the red fez, Mustafa, on the boat later An’ I said to him: Yusuf, Yusuf ’s a damn good feller. And he says:

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“Yais, he ees a goot fello, “But after all a chew ees a chew.” (XXII/105)21 The passage is deliberately ironic, because Pound labels Mustafa as a member of a despised group—a “nigger”—just as Mustafa does to Yusuf. Mustafa’s strong accent emphasizes his equivalence with Yusuf (who talks exactly like Mustafa on the previous page), and Pound crystallizes this irony by placing extra weight on the mispronounced word “chew,” which is repeated and set off with white space. This irony seems to cast doubt on the racializing impulse of The Cantos but does not really counter it—in the end, the episode serves as another instantiation of the racist ideology that it briefly calls into question. Later, Pound (mis)translates the Chinese word “Yntsa (meanin’ froggies)” in order to demonstrate that an unjust contempt for “barbarous” foreigners is a trait shared by Eastern and Western cultures (LX/330). Nonetheless, Pound also participates in this same provincialism, both here (where he provides the derogatory gloss of “froggies” with obvious relish) and throughout the poem. Since Pound puts almost all such epithets in his own voice, the contempt appears to be his own. When he says that “the dog-damn wop is not, save by exception,/honest in administration any more than the briton is truthful,” he seems perfectly sincere (LXXVII/490). The idea of a sign that revealed in a self-evident fashion the fundamental nature of its referent obviously appealed to Pound, as reflected in his belief that the Chinese characters in his poem would speak directly even to readers unable to read Chinese. In a much more pernicious manifestation of this habit of mind, he appeared to think that by labeling someone a “wop” he had established something meaningful about their character. Gill provides evidence that Pound also tries to use privileged low diction, particularly African American English, in his correspondence. For example, Pound uses quasi-black diction as well as cacography when predicting T. S. Eliot’s annoyance with Pound’s allusions to Asians, Africans, and African Americans: “how you gwine ter keep deh Possum in his feed-box . . . when I brings in deh Chinas and blackmen?? He won’t laaak fer to see no Chinas and blackmen in a bukk about Kulchur.”22 Here, Pound asserts that non-whites can make important cultural contributions, but he also demonstrates his desire to craft a low-culture persona for himself that allows him superiority over white European and American cultural elites. Finally, he reveals his pleasure in annoying and discomfiting others, even Eliot, a friend who collaborated with Pound in assuming low-culture personae. Presumably, annoying others with dialect humor was yet another way for Pound to demonstrate his superiority over them. Thus, as Gill reports, Pound wrote to Louis Zukofsky in a Yiddish-English that rarely stopped short of offense, addressed James Joyce in a mock IrishEnglish, and communicated with his publisher James Laughlin in an

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ornery Yankee-English. Nowhere, though, did Pound test the patience of a correspondent more than with Langston Hughes. Pound not only addressed the premier African American poet of the twentieth century in black English, but at one point in a 1951 letter went so far as to correct as inauthentic Hughes’s own language.23 Pound’s pedantry in the service of a form of English that he supposedly values for its natural and unaffected character says something about his poetic relationship to language. More importantly, though, his desire to demonstrate greater fluency in African American English than Langston Hughes suggests his absolute investment in his own linguistic flexibility and supremacy. The fact that Pound’s assumption of African American or other voices has more to do with maintaining his own status than with valuing people outside the Anglo-American racial and cultural elite is evidenced by comments such as the one Pound makes in a subsequent letter to Eliot that “neither of us likes sabages, black habits, etc.”24 North provides an excellent commentary on this masquerade, comparing it to a minstrel show: “Minstrel shows allowed white audiences to have it both ways, to mock tradition, aristocracy, European culture, by comparing them to something earthier, more natural, more ‘American,’ while simultaneously distancing all these qualities in a figure to which even the commonest white audience could condescend.”25 Pound and Eliot succeed in “affronting English propriety” with language that “appears natural and unaffected, but it achieves this effect only by mocking blacks. These white Harvardians can approach the lower depths by slumming in slang while simultaneously solidifying their position as whites by using racial slurs.”26 My analysis suggests that the same process characterizes Pound’s dialect humor and ethnic slurs in The Cantos.27 Pound usually takes scrupulous care to show who is the butt of any joke in The Cantos—and to make sure that it is someone else. A possibly unique exception to this rule occurs in Canto XXII, when Pound recounts his own visit to a synagogue, where he describes “the levite and six little choir kids . . . yowling the ritual/As if it was crammed full of jokes” (XXII/104). Eventually the rabbi arrives, seeming mysteriously amused, and takes a pinch of snuff: “he sat down, and grinned, and pulled out his snuff-box,/And sniffed up a thumb-full, and grinned.” Finally, they courteously or mockingly offer the snuff to Pound: And then the rabbi looked at the stranger, and they All grinned half a yard wider, and the rabbi Whispered for about two minutes longer, An’ the kid brought the box over to me, And I grinned and sniffed up my thumb-full. (XXII/105) The use of the simile formulation “as if ” indicates Pound’s doubt about whether or not those in the synagogue are joking, and what the joke might be. Yet the

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persistent, ubiquitous grinning demonstrates that there is some sort of joke that everyone but Pound understands. Moreover, the rabbi and congregation appear to find Pound’s presence particularly amusing. Although Pound pretends to get the joke by grinning along with the rest of them as he takes his snuff, it appears that he is, for once, the ignorant butt of a joke rather than the knowing perpetrator. The fact that Jews seem to be the only characters in The Cantos capable of turning the tables on Pound in this way suggests the intensity of his anxieties about them. Throughout the poem, Pound describes the usury he attributes to Jews as tremendously destructive on a geopolitical scale, but the Jews in this scene represent a much more personalized threat to Pound’s carefully constructed identity as the man who is on top of every joke. *** Pound displays tremendous flexibility and resourcefulness in establishing the authority of his poetic voice, and the identity of that voice is itself based on protean flexibility. However, there are also signs in The Cantos and elsewhere that Pound is not always fully in control of this voice, or at least that his desire to speak in a variety of dialects for humorous effect often undermines and supersedes other important goals he may have. Laughlin describes Pound’s humor as “instinctive” and wonders “was it intentional? Or did it just come out of itself, a product of his ebullience?”28 What Laughlin calls “instinctive ebullience,” other critics have viewed as compulsive behavior. Leslie Fiedler’s unsparing critique of The Cantos complains that in Pound’s habit of ventriloquism, “the puppets took over from the puppet master—their simulated voices drowning out his own real one” and views the result as unintentional parody and the product of mental illness.29 Fiedler also asserts that Pound uses dialects “almost compulsively in his personal letters.”30 More charitably, Jean-Michel Rabaté sees Pound’s parodic forays into a “more American, even slangy” speech as the controlled release of a primal id-like impulse: “The voice lets itself slide into this dialectical process of reading/writing, as if from time to time to release certain affects or drives which have been repressed for too long by the Confucian ethic which insists, ‘let nothing be added.’ It is not coincidental that the vocal additions take on parodic inflections.”31 Although Rabaté presents the recurrence of slang more as a deliberate and productive strategy, he shares with Fiedler and Laughlin the sense that this voice spontaneously bursts from Pound, and with Fiedler the idea that it requires an effort for Pound to restrain it. Without venturing into a psychological diagnosis of Pound, we might still say that his use of dialect resembles compulsive behavior, in that he sometimes persisted in it even when it was directly contrary to his best interests. Cameron McWhirter and Ramsay Muhly provide a notable example in their presentation of Pound’s brief correspondence with the critic and radio host Alexander Woollcott. Pound desperately wanted Woollcott’s help in publicizing his economic ideas. He writes to Woollcott in his typical mix of cacography and dialect, asking for time on Woollcott’s radio show. Woollcott rejects Pound’s

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request on the grounds that his theories would not be comprehensible to the radio audience, and he cites Pound’s dialect voice, which he calls “your atavistic and exhausting relapse into the prose style of the late Josh Billings,” as one of his primary reasons for refusing.32 Pound responds by reiterating his request more forcefully in the exact same style, with predictable results: Woollcott appears not to have responded to Pound’s second letter. In this case, Pound’s continued use of the dialect that irritated Woollcott is self-defeating, but Pound maintained this voice even after it became clear that it was sabotaging his chances for a fair hearing. Although Pound’s collage of voices in The Cantos suggests a nearinfinite flexibility, this exchange points, paradoxically, to a certain rigidity or inflexibility in Pound’s use of humorous low diction. The episode suggests that Pound is more committed to his dialect persona, or perhaps more specifically to using this persona to annoy people and thereby demonstrate his control over them, than he is to his own passionately held political and economic agenda. Similar episodes appear in The Cantos, where what Pound appears to consider humorous diction often becomes an end in itself, confusing or undermining his ostensible epideictic goals. Sometimes, the dialect simply competes with the content for the attention of the reader, upstaging the meaning of the words themselves. For example, Pound recounts a conversation between himself and Henry Slonimsky, who asks him, “Haff you gno bolidigal basshunts?” (LXXVII/489). Pound has no particular investment in discrediting Slonimsky, but by transcribing his accent so heavily into the line, Pound makes the episode more about Slonimsky’s accent and its marking of ethnic difference than about the question of political engagement. More consequentially, Pound often implicitly ridicules characters whose agenda he ostensibly supports. This contradiction frequently occurs as a result of Pound’s insistence on using derogatory labels to identify a character’s ethnicity or nationality whenever possible, seemingly without regard for his opinion of them. Sometimes, the slurs dovetail with his disapproval of a character, as when he calls Clemenceau the “frogbassador” as a deliberate term of humorous disrespect (LXXIV/464, Terrell 383). But elsewhere he uses similar language without any apparent criticism: and this was due to the frog and the portagoose Gerbillon and Pereira to Gerbillon in the most critical moment that he kept their tempers till they came to conclusion. (LIX/327) Pound uses “frog” and “portagoose” to describe Pereira and Gerbillon even though he seems impressed with their diplomatic abilities in forging a treaty between the Chinese and the Russians. The fickleness of such designations is quite clear throughout the poem, as in the instruction that the Portuguese be “referred to no longer as/The goddamned Porta-goose, but as/England’s oldest ally” (XXVII/129). The appropriateness or inappropriateness of the name

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“portagoose” thus depends on a constantly shifting political climate. Nonetheless, Pound himself uses “portagoose” consistently throughout the poem. In a similar display of perverse inconsistency, Pound misspells the word “Russians” in four different ways, two of which are humorously counterproductive attempts to explain what he meant the other two times: “the Oros (the O Rossians) . . . the rhoosians (Orosians)” (LIX/326–7).33 Pound therefore does not use derogatory ethnic names merely to reinforce a particular criticism of that ethnicity, or of a particular historical actor. Rather, he applies them indiscriminately, in an effort to maintain his own superiority and authority over his vast and diverse array of characters—to strengthen his own voice, even at the cost of rendering the poem’s polemical points less intelligible. Other aspects of Pound’s linguistic playfulness also appear to belittle those whom Pound seeks to praise. For example, the description of Dos Santos’s shrewd business deal degenerates (or evolves) into the pure play of piggish alliteration: “And bought sucking pigs, pigs, small pigs,/Porkers, throughout all Portugal . . . Porkers of Portugal” (XII/54–5). Pound probably approves of Dos Santos’s ability to generate useful food (pigs) from supposedly useless materials (the waterlogged corn), and the repetition of pig-related terms is probably animated by a simple joy in the pleasures of sound repetition, particularly the sonorities of the work “pork.” And yet, Pound’s language also has a belittling effect; indeed, his seemingly derisive tone convinced many critics that the passage was intended as a condemnation.34 Thus, playfulness in Pound is so strongly linked with disdain that it retains this quality even when the method of generating humor (word sounds) does not contain an explicit critique and the subject of humor (a truly productive character) calls for a positive tone. Both the use of sound and of belittling language in this passage take on a value independent of the appropriateness of their target. Pound’s attempts at humorous low diction risk not only clouding his message, but also undermining the very verbal authority they are meant to establish. First of all, since The Cantos most commonly elevate the epic voice through high diction, low diction risks debasing that voice by contrast. Secondly, readers may take Pound’s indiscriminate use of ethnic slurs as a sign of his bigotry, not his cosmopolitanism or force of character. Thirdly, cacography and the repetition of silly word sounds like “wangle” and “porkers” may cast doubts on the superiority of the speaker by their resemblance to nonsense. The fact that these strategies remain so prevalent despite their risks suggests their inherent value to Pound. Besides ethnic slurs, one of Pound’s favorite areas of humor is centered around the anus. For instance, the letter from Sallustio’s tutor, Lunarda da Palla, calls the stonemason Georgio Ranbutino by the name of “Georgio Rambottom” (IX/38, Terrell 47). Although the reference is only a passing one, its very lack of context suggests that Pound finds the suggestion of anal sex inherently amusing and/or insulting. Pound’s interest in this bodily region includes the scatological as well as the sexual, and when The Cantos ventures into bathroom humor, the

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emphasis on excrement sometimes obscures any other point that Pound might be trying to make. These jokes are not only potential distractions, but they also risk undercutting the authority of his poetic voice. Pound describes a parade in Siena with “four fat oxen/having their arses wiped/and in general being tidied up to serve god” (XLIII/216). These lines create a contrast that serves Pound’s cynical attitude toward religious pomp, but as the scene continues, the oxen’s bodily functions continue to interrupt the proceedings: “‘Mn-YAWWH!!!’/Said the left front ox, suddenly,/‘pnAWH!’ as they tied on his red front band.” The procession and the poem can only continue when “the fore ox had/been finally arse-wiped” once again (XLIII/216–17). Here, Pound seems to take pleasure in emphasizing the noises made by the flatulent ox, and the contrast between the filthiness of the oxen and the celebratory atmosphere creates humor.35 But as before, the bathroom humor seems to be an end in itself, regardless of the effect it may have on the poem’s other projects. In this case, the oxen seem to distract from and trivialize a celebration of a bank embodying the economic principles at the center of Pound’s political agenda. Finally, some of Pound’s humorous put-downs devolve into unrestrained invective, for example, in his tirade against Malatesta’s enemies: So that in the end that pot-scraping little runt Andreas Benzi, da Siena Got up to spout out the bunkum That that monstrous swollen, swelling s.o.b. Papa Pio Secundo Æneas Silvius Piccolomini da Siena Had told him to spout (X/44) The passage offers some humor in the alternation between insults and elaborate papal titles. But the potential playfulness is eclipsed by the sense of Pound venting his rage to the point where his insults grow incoherent. In particular, the redundancy (and temporally reversed order) of “swollen, swelling” gives the impression of a voice out of control. *** Although The Cantos reflect a powerful impulse to transcend the model of the epic poet as a unitary speaker, the poem is also suffused with the persona of Ezra Pound, and his voice becomes most apparent when it interjects what Pound considers to be humor. The creation and maintenance of this poetic persona helps to sharpen the satirical edge of Pound’s social, political, and cultural commentary, but it is also a goal in its own right, one that rivals his other poetic and polemical projects in importance. Humor in The Cantos usually has a victim, and therefore insults are common and jokes are often practical jokes. Pound’s jokes always have a right side and

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a wrong side on which to be, and his wit almost always cuts. The subjects he appears to find most amusing are those that lend themselves most readily to insults, including bathroom humor (urine, excrement, and farting), insinuations of sodomy, and, above all, markers of national and ethnic difference: ethnic slurs or labels, stereotypes, and accented or unidiomatic English. Pound’s humor functions not only offensively, to support his satire and various forms of bigotry (particularly white supremacy, anti-Semitism, and homophobia), but also defensively. By controlling who speaks language clearly and by making sure that he is on the right side of every joke, Pound maintains his own authority to speak to the reader. The juxtaposition of high and low diction, both on a small and a large scale, is central to Pound’s conception of humor and his strategic self-positioning in The Cantos. Pound’s ability to shift rapidly and continually between these registers defines his distinctive poetic voice. He uses the language of the educated elite to demonstrate his superiority to less advantaged groups, and he uses low diction to puncture the pretensions of the elite—albeit a privileged low diction that clearly distinguishes him from naïve speakers of dialect, who remain subject to his contempt. Within the realm of low diction itself, Pound engages in the repetition of silly-sounding or nonsense words, cacography that often generates puns, and a dizzying array of slang, accents, and dialects. Pound’s poetic persona is fundamentally dependent on his racist humor, which simultaneously functions as a form of low diction and reinforces Pound’s superiority. Pound thus creates a protean voice that is at once of the common people and above them. Pound’s use of dialect for his own voice helps to create a persona who is in control of the material in The Cantos, who can see through the self-serving and contradictory claims of the poem’s many source texts and provide the proper glosses. Nonetheless, whether from natural “ebullience” or psychological compulsion, Pound often persists in certain types of humor, particularly of a racist, homophobic, or scatological nature, even when this practice seems to undermine the ostensible message of a given episode in his poem—and even when it jeopardizes the authority of his carefully constructed and positioned voice.

Notes I am grateful to Peter Baker and to the late Michael André Bernstein for providing supportive and helpful feedback at different stages of this chapter’s development. 1 Wendy Stallard Flory, Ezra Pound and The Cantos: A Record of Struggle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 7. 2 Michael André Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 176. 3 As Bernstein observes, “The sheer mass of annotations necessary to understand The Cantos is vastly in excess of that needed for most major literary achievements” (ibid., 144).

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4 Ibid., 182. 5 Ibid., 7. Pound uses the term “tribe” in the Guide to Kulchur, typically to refer to distinct ethnic groups, but, for Bernstein at least, the phrase “the tale of the tribe” suggests a story of humanity more broadly. This ambiguity reflects the conflict between Pound’s impulses toward inclusiveness (or cultural appropriation) and more explicitly xenophobic forms of racism. 6 Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe, 176. 7 Peter Baker, Obdurate Brilliance: Exteriority and the Modern Long Poem (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1991), 93. Baker is writing against studies that “treat the issue of organization as one of voice and narrative technique, taking for granted that the central model for Pound and twentieth-century poetry is still the interior monologue of Browning” (92), and in this sense, he, Bernstein, and other like-minded critics provide an important corrective. Certainly, the poem as a whole is not the narrative of the psychological development of a unitary speaker, and the objective, depersonalized presentation these critics describe is one of the primary modes and goals of The Cantos. However, as Baker and Bernstein both acknowledge, Pound’s personal voice remains a vital presence in the text. 8 Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1993), XXXI/154. Further references noted in the text by canto and page number. 9 For a relatively recent take on Pound’s tragic persona in The Cantos, see William Pratt, Ezra Pound and the Making of Modernism (New York: AMS Press, 2007), esp. 139–43. 10 In fact, Pound even changes the numbers in the fragment from Thomas Jefferson’s letter, quoted earlier. Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 121. 11 Pratt also argues that Pound’s many voices are all “self-portraits” (132), citing the poet John Berryman’s claim that (in Pratt’s paraphrase) “the subject of all Pound’s Cantos was Pound himself ” (133), though Pratt adds the caveat that “‘Pound himself ’ means many other selves. Like his hero and alter ego Ulysses, Pound was ‘many-minded,’ a highly complex personality incorporating multiple individuals” (134). Pratt cites Pound’s early poem “Histrion,” in which Pound imagines channeling the spirits of the great writers of the past and claims that “the souls of all men great/At times pass through us,/And we are melted into them, and are not/Save as reflexions of their souls” (133). 12 James Laughlin, “Ezra Pound: The Lighter Side,” Paideuma 14, nos. 2–3 (1985): 367, 368, 369, 372. 13 Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, 60. 14 Ibid., 32. 15 Another sign of Pound’s ethnographic treatment of his fellow prisoners is his interest in the prevalence of presidential names among the African American population (see Richard Sieburth, “Introduction,” in The Pisan Cantos, by Ezra Pound [New York: New Directions, 2003], xx). 16 see Terrell, 200. 17 Fabian Ironside, “Pound and/or Jackson: Traces of Jacksonian Humor in Ezra Pound’s Writing,” in Ezra Pound: Language and Persona. Quaderni di Palazzo Serra 15 (Genoa: Dipartimento di Scienze della Comunicazione Linguistica e Culturale, Università degli Studi di Genova, 2008), 164.

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18 Jonathan Gill, “Ezra Pound and Langston Hughes: The ABC of Po’try,” Paideuma 29, nos. 1–2 (2000): 84. 19 Michael North, “The Dialect in/of Modernism: Pound and Eliot’s Racial Masquerade,” American Literary History 4, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 57. 20 Ironside, “Pound and/or Jackson,” 154, 157. 21 See Terrell, 91. 22 Gill, “Ezra Pound and Langston Hughes,” 85, quoting a 1937 letter to F. V. Morley. 23 Ibid., 79. 24 Ibid., 85. 25 North, “The Dialect in/of Modernism,” 62. 26 Ibid., 62–63. 27 Richard Sieburth, on the other hand, sees in Pound’s account of his detention a deep connection to his largely African American fellow prisoners: “In this heart of darkness, with his fate and identity still uncertain, the prisoner casts his lot not with the American military victors but with their victims, not with the masters, but with their slaves” (xix). As far as The Cantos themselves are concerned, this connection seems to me limited and strategic. The poetic speaker is always, as North puts it, “slumming in slang.” 28 Laughlin, “Ezra Pound,” 367. Laughlin’s obvious affection and admiration for Pound lead him to present Pound in the most favorable manner possible, even to the point of trying to explain away the notorious photo of Pound giving the Fascist salute as a “joke” (375). 29 Leslie Fiedler, “Pound as Parodist,” in Ezra Pound: The Legacy of Kulchur, ed. Marcel Smith and William A. Ulmer (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988), 140. 30 Ibid., 137. 31 Jean-Michel Rabaté, Language, Sexuality and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 123. 32 Cameron McWhirter and Ramsay Muhly, “Serious Character to Funny Man: Ezra Pound’s Brief Correspondence with Alexander Woollcott,” Paideuma 24, no. 1 (1995): 111. 33 These four versions of the name probably combine cacography with multiple languages and dialects. “Oros” is a Mongolian and Manchu word for “Russian,” whereas “rhoosians” could represent an exaggerated American accent, with the variations on these two forms representing playful combinations and misspellings. 34 Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, 59. 35 Although it should be noted that in Cantos XIV and XV the pervasiveness of excrement lacks any touch of humor, only the pleasure of wallowing in filth by condemning it.

Chapter 2 C UM M I N G S’ S E R O T IC H UM O R William Solomon

I have just realized something: the silences and the solidities which we call things are not things, but metaphors; metaphors are the hoppings of one thing to another which we mistakenly call ideas: they copulate in laughter E. E. Cummings1 In Semiotics of Poetry, Michael Riffaterre, having noted the frequency of humor in modern poetry, distinguishes between two main trends: in the first case, “the reader is able to rationalize the humor as a method of satire, a product of the author’s comic bent, or an expression of his attitude toward life”; in the second, “the reader cannot so interpret it.” Riffaterre’s interest is in the latter—a more gratuitous and unmotivated approach—because it provides an opportunity to examine the general “nature of literary language”: “For if we recognize that literature can be defined as a linguistic phenomenon in which form is more important than content, and that this phenomenon is above all a playing with words, then humor offers the most extreme and easily observable examples of these two features.”2 As he proceeds to analyze a prose poem by Francis Ponge, Riffaterre argues that in comic writing metaphors tend to function noncognitively. In humorous texts, the trope does not serve to increase our knowledge “because the semantic fields and descriptive systems of tenor and vehicle are so extremely remote from one another, and because there is no similarity or analogy to justify bringing them together” (129). Comic metaphors do not, then, seek to disclose what different entities have in common; epistemologically irresponsible, they bring things together unreasonably without stopping to worry about possible equivalences. This is very close to the stance Viktor Shklovsky famously adopted at the beginning of “Art as Device” (1917) when he polemically contested prevailing notions about poetic imagery as “a special mode of thinking.” At the time, the “raison d’etre of the image” was its capacity to assist in the organization “of heterogeneous objects and actions into groups,” as well as to explain the unknown “through the known.” The purpose of poetic imagery, from this orthodox point

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of view, was to bring the imaged “closer to our understanding, and since, without this an image has no meaning, then the image ought to be better known to us than that which is explained by it.” To challenge this widely accepted notion, Shklovsky mentions the difficulty one would have applying this purported law to a “comparison of summer lightning with deaf-and-dumb demons or to Gogol’s simile of the sky as the raiments of the Lord.”3 In these two instances, the cognitive process is put in reverse. Moving from summer lightning to deafand-dumb demons decreases our knowledge given the fact that we possess even less information or scientific data about the supernatural creatures than we do about natural weather conditions. Correlatively, figuring something visible (the sky) as a garment covering an invisible deity hardly improves our understanding of what we can empirically see. The rhetorical devices of art do not therefore necessarily function to enhance our comprehension of objective reality. What do they do then? Does comic metaphor have a purpose in the world, or is it (as Riffaterre suggests) a merely frivolous way of playing with words? The infrequently discussed second half of “Art as Device” supplies an answer to these questions. Turning to erotic (folk) art for his illustrations, Shklovsky proposes that amusingly incongruous figurations have the potential to revitalize our desires, to reawaken dormant passions. By making us, in his terminology, see rather than recognize the bodies of others, erotically charged analogies draw our attention to and perhaps excite us at the indirectly presented sight of sexual organs. Hamsun’s euphemism for female breasts in Hunger—“Two white miracles showed through her blouse” (10)—furnishes one example,4 Russian riddles several more. In the latter, “allegorical” “description of private parts in the form of a lock and key,” “or in the corresponding parts of a loom, or in the form of a bow and arrow, or in the game of rings and marlinspikes” make it apparent that “the author’s intent is clearly something other than a conceptual understanding” (10). In halting the automatizing behavior whereby we take the bodies of loved ones for granted, humorously defamiliarizing tropes break through our accustomed perceptual habits. Taking us on a sensory detour through the strange or unusual, the vehicle returns us to the tenor with a heightened appreciation of the corporeality of others. Moreover, “the whole range of colorful obscenities associated with the burlesque” intensify our awareness of the sometimes perverse pleasures and pains of sexual relations.5 The ethical promise (the realization of which is by no means guaranteed) of such affective figures of speech rests on their capacity to compel us to care more about our partners as fleshed human beings. We have thus arrived at a reasonable explanation for the social motivations underlying the recurrent combination in E. E. Cummings’s poetic oeuvre of the erotic and the comic. As Richard Kostalanetz puts it: “Where his [Cummings’s] predecessors wrote of ‘love,’ he portrayed copulation not once but many times—variously, wittily and lusciously. . . . It is fair to say that E. E. Cummings did for American poetry what Henry Miller did for American prose.”6 Below I will examine several examples of his licentious humor, but I want to underscore at the outset, as my epigraph suggests, the absolutely pivotal role metaphor,

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considered as a noncognitive force, played in his creative practice.7 I will confine myself (with one exception) to materials that appeared in his first two books—Tulips and Chimneys (1922) and is 5 (1926)—on the grounds that, as Norman Friedman, one of Cummings’s major exegetes has put it, his “earlier poetry” was more “marked by a density of vivid figurative effects” than was his later output.8 Friedman adds that “although there are many striking metaphors and similes in his early work . . . these are not a dominant characteristic of his mature style. . . . It is as if the function of metaphor and simile have been taken over by other devices” (89).

Talking Dirty Cop: Stop! Now yuh talking doity. Englishman: I mean—it’s jolly difficult to express the idea— Cop: Nevuh mine du idear. Gowon. E. E. Cummings, Him9 An early lyric, “her,” from Tulips and Chimneys, elegantly exhibits the figural play characteristic of Cummings’s brand of comic eroticism. Clearly we gain no new insight into heterosexual intercourse from its moderately amusing portrayal in the estranged form of the mixing of concrete. The two semantic series simply have next to nothing in common: her flesh Came at meassandca V ingint oA chute I had cement for her, Merrily we became each other humped to tumbling garble when a minute pulled the sluice emerging. 10

concrete

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Once the initial impediment to reading—the playful disruption of conventional spacing—has been mastered, the structure of the trope becomes apparent.11 Likened to sand, the female partner welcomes the male, who pours himself into her vagina (almost glimpsed anagrammatically, as opposed to anatomically, in the upper-case “V” of line 5 and the letters of the two subsequent stepped lines). The conventional association of hardness with “cement” indicates an erection, though the material is typically in powdered or granular form when added to sand to make concrete. Cement perhaps puns on semen, which is in a sense contained in the male organ, much as the sounds that constitute the word “semen” are embedded in the word “cement.” This foolish correlation (which possesses no stable semantic content) would in turn suggest an epistemologically ridiculous justification for the rhetorical equation in question: mixing concrete and sexual congress are both preconditions for (vastly different kinds of) labor. “Garble” is perhaps the most revealing term here, for Cummings’s compositional procedure in effect produces a barely intelligible, confusing message. Speech that jumbles meaning emerges as a figure for the inane figural tactics the poet employs. Given that the poem has no conceptual value, is there any rationale for imaging the joys of coitus in such an unfamiliar fashion? Or is it merely a comically indecent waste of linguistic talent and artistic energy?12 Should this type of verbal performance, a mode of prurient fun well suited to the burlesque stage, be kept off of the literary page? (In the foreword to is 5, Cummings likened himself to “the burlesk comedian” insofar as he is “abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement” [1994: 221]).13 R. P. Blackmur seemed to think so in 1930. In “Notes on E. E. Cummings’ Language” (1930), the critic, looking back at the poet’s first few volumes, complained that the principal aim of his verse was to generate the sensorial excitement associated with contemporaneous amusements: Cummings “resorts to language for the thrill that words may be made to give (emphasis in the original).” The exasperated critic then goes on to fault the poems on the grounds that they neither contain ideas nor point to things: their “movement” never leads to “concrete meaning” or “particular reference.” In sum, the critic is worried that the poet is, so to speak, taking readers for a ride. “We must know what thrills us; else being merely thrilled we are left gasping and aghast, like the little girl on the roller coaster.”14 Looking at a frequently anthologized lyric contained in is 5 will put us in position to begin trying to grasp the motivations underlying Cummings’s rhetorical obscenities. I quote it in full: she being Brand -new;and you know consequently a little stiff i was careful of her and(having

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thoroughly oiled the universal joint tested my gas felt of her radiator made sure her springs were O. K.) I went right to it flooded-the-carburetor cranked her up,slipped the clutch (and then somehow got into reverse she kicked what the hell) next minute I was back in neutral tried and again slo-wly; bare, ly nudg. Ing (my lev-er Rightoh and her gears being in A 1 shape passed from low through second-in-to-high like greased lightning) just as we turned the corner of Divinity avenue I touched the accelerator and give her the juice,good (it was the first ride and believe i we was happy to see how nice she acted right up to the last minute coming back down by the Public Gardens i slammed on the internalexpanding & externalcontracting brakes Bothatonce and brought allofher tremB -ling to a: dead. stand;Still) (1994: 246–47) Although at first glance the poem may appear to be little more than witty smut, it has had its defenders as well as detractors. In 1965, Schroeder, with a complacency toward its gender politics that seems at best dated today, found “she being Brand” to be “the most brilliant poem” of its vulgar type in that its sustained comparison of “the deflowering of a virgin with the breaking in [of] a new car” stands as “a perfect metaphor” (475). Roy Harvey Pearce was

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also impressed by the piece, characterizing it as a comic celebration of “the health and well-being of sex,” one we should delight in as we do “one of the Pills to Purge Melancholy or a burlesque show black-out.”15 More recently, Lewis H. Miller Jr. has praised it as a satire “whose sinuous mischief ” ridicules commodity fetishism, comically amplifying the anthropomorphic tendencies of the era’s advertising copy to attribute to inanimate automobiles the attractive qualities of animate women.16 In contrast, Irene R. Fairley considered the poem “to be in inexcusably bad taste” on the grounds that it offensively figures a woman as what she is not: a machine.17 Indeed, the lyric’s blatant figuration of a sexual initiation as the taking of an automobile for a spin around town participates in the always problematic “association of women with technologies of transportation,”18 manifested not only in the clichés underlying car marketing strategies but also in the form of a ubiquitous double entendre in twentiethcentury popular music.19 What no commentator to my knowledge has addressed is the additional, reflexive reading the poem’s rhetorical structure makes available. For we also are encouraged to take both operating an automobile and initiating a virgin as figures for the use of another mechanical device: the typewriter. From this interpretive angle, in “she being Brand,” the biological activity of two natural organisms is not the proper meaning or tenor of the automotive trope; sexual copulation is another vehicle in a double metaphor that draws our attention to the fact that Cummings’s literary performance, like many in his generation, takes full advantage of, and to an extent hinges on, establishing contact between human beings and modern technology. Driving an automobile is a trope for writing on a typewriter, and sexual intercourse is therefore an admittedly counterintuitive intermediary between the two. The surprising function of the middle, organic figuration is to invest the compositional act with erotic intensity, to transfer to it the stimulation and gratification associated with physical copulation. Thus an imaginative reconstruction of the scene the poem allegorizes would place Cummings at home at his desk sitting in front of a brand new typewriter. Perhaps a flashback would show him purchasing the item, and then a return shot to the present would depict him trying it out to see how well it works. Indeed for him, the typewriter was a bachelor machine the purpose of which was the production of powerful feelings or “intensive qualities.”20 The structure of the lyric resembles that of a joke (according to Freud) in the sense that what it gives readers to know—an apparent equivalence between sexual conquest and automotive testing—serves as a lure, as a distraction so that the more anxiety-inducing aspects of the process can catch readers unawares. In other words, the blatant metaphor is a façade put forward to fascinate. The laughter of those who get the joke would thus indicate the lifting or suspense of an inhibition related not to physical intercourse between two more or less adult partners but to the guilty (because onanistic) pleasures the writer secures while playing with his precious instrument.21

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The typewriter is revealed here to be the (absent) partner in an act of nonprocreative play, Cummings’s aesthetic enjoyment coming from his use (or abuse) of an artificial device.22 But the poem’s significance derives less from its disclosure of the vital role machine technology plays in modernist aesthetics than from its implicit assimilation (via an all too obvious pun) of the drive in the psychoanalytic sense to a linguistic or rhetorical process. The metaphorical detour through the organic female body maintains the desire of the speaker (and his listeners) as they travel in circuitous fashion around rather than toward an ultimately mechanized object. Tropes sustain passion, taking the desirer on a trip designed to defer its end as long as possible. Only in turning away from its actual point of departure—the poet sitting at his desk banging away at his typewriter—does the lyric enable us to detect the inanimate, material conditions of possibility (and final destination) of literary invention in the machine age. Moreover, if the poem’s climax suggests the small death of orgasm, it does so in a fashion that evokes the more lethal aspects of writing as a predominantly autoerotic activity, one that in bringing the enjoying subject into direct tactile contact with an inhuman other carries him away from any ostensibly natural partner.23 Support for this interpretation can be found in the names the component parts of the two mechanisms have in common: both entail the use of “keys” and the pulling of “levers,” not to mention the typewriter’s moving carriage. Additionally, the duration (or length of the poem) is perfectly synchronized with the amount of time the two other processes take. The text stops at exactly the same moment that sexual climax is achieved and the increasingly speedy car trip halts at its destination. All three come simultaneously to a “dead/stand/;Still.” (Emily Dickinson’s “I Like to See It Lap the Miles” offers a historical precedent for such a metaphorical ménage à trois; in the nineteenth-century lyric, the movement of a train across the landscape is troped in equine terms, but both the living animal and the iron horse turn out to be reflexive figures for the movement of the poem itself, with its quatrains or “horrid-hooting stanza[s].”24) One of the most apparent traces left behind in “she being Brand” of his general investment in the typewriter is Cummings’ erratic punctuation technique, which both retards the reading process and supplies a counterweight to the relatively speedy event the text recounts. In some places, alongside his equally trademark syntactical infractions and grammatical infelicities, punctuation marks are utilized expressively. The combination of dashes, semicolons, commas, and unorthodox spacing in line 15, for instance, mimic graphically the tentative rhythms of the initial stage of the male lover’s somatic thrusting: “again slowly;bare,ly nudg. Ing(my.” But elsewhere he employs the symbols in a more gratuitously decorative fashion, without semantic purposefulness, and on such occasions the effect is to foreground what customarily fades into the background for overly hasty readers: the degree to which comprehensible communication

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hinges on the writer’s adherence to the established rules of discourse, as well as to standardized models of capitalization and lineation. The seemingly random or arbitrary embedding of the final portions of the poem inside parentheses, for example, generates an awareness of how such marks typically function to determine significance and facilitate understanding (through the hierarchical subordination of one phrase or thought to another) when deployed correctly. Despite Cummings’s career-long devotion to typographical hijinks, which insistently draws attention to the materiality of the letters on the page, critical commentary has frequently justified his formal experimentation in aesthetic terms as a renewal of our sensory organs, of our capacity to perceive extratextual entities. One of the earliest cases in point is William Carlos Williams’s emphatic description of Cummings’s project as the desire “to make all our convictions evident by penetrating through their costumes to the living flesh of the matter.” According to Williams, Cummings avoided “the whole accepted modus of English” because he “wanted to feel. He wanted to see, see, see! and make the words speak of what he saw . . . and felt. For it must not be forgot that we smell and see with words alone, and that with a new language we smell, hear and see afresh.”25 Williams’s implicit affirmation of Cummings’s absolute belief in referential plenitude may, however, be qualified, for in the worksheet from which I drew my epigraph Cummings also proposed that we consume not real things but only metaphors: “they [metaphors] are eaten and drunken, we swallow them and we breathe them under different names: we do not stroke edges and feel music, but only metaphors . . . they are what we call sounds and flavours . . . there are no entities, no isolations, no abstractions, but there are comparisons, contagions” (Rutherford 5). Moreover, it is evident from Williams’s tone that seeing is for him serious business, which causes him to overlook the comic impulse guiding a good deal of Cummings’s rhetorically over-the-top eroticism. An early sexually explicit poem “as,” included among those left in Elaine Orr’s possession, is telling in this regard. Having fallen in love in early 1918 with Orr (at the time the wife of his Harvard classmate and close friend Scofield Thayer), Cummings fathered a child with her in 1919; they married five years later. Composed in the early years of the affair, “as” did not appear in print until the posthumous publication of Etcetera (1983). In it a female speaker makes a spectacle of herself by emblazoning her own body in the hope of establishing it as an object of desire. Lying in bed next to her lover, she expresses her state of arousal by figuring her breasts, or their erected nipples, as architectural protuberances, as “two sharp delightful strutting towers” (Cummings 1994: 963). She then articulates her readiness to engage in intercourse: “I shove hotly the lovingness of my belly against you.” Having shyly drawn the man’s attention to the lower half of her body while instructing him not to “laugh” at her thighs, the speaker proceeds to characterize genital foreplay in terms better suited to describing the impact of seasonal change on an urban milieu. “there is between my big legs a crisp city./when you touch me/it is Spring in the city; the

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streets beautifully writhe.” Continuing the strained analogy, she characterizes her vulva as a set of dwellings through whose narrow passageways her lover enters and ejaculates: “all the houses terribly tighten/upon your coming.” Lastly, she experiences his orgasm as an instantaneous impregnation, propagation of the species defined as a delightful mode of populating the environment: “they are glad/as you fill the streets of my city with children” (963). So silly are the epistemologically aberrant tropes here that one suspects Cummings’s goal in impersonating his lover is to mock his own investment in the metaphysical poet’s penchant for engaging in acts of lyric seduction via the use of tortuously elaborate conceits. For the primary effect of this laughable example of the yoking together of heterogeneous entities is to reveal the erotic urgency of the subject rather than to disclose any affinities between women and their objective surroundings. (Though a less generous reading might find him guilty of making fun of the woman’s attempt to live up to this predominantly male tradition in question.) “i will be,” the first of the seven poems in the “N” section of & [AND] (1925), amounts to a reprise of sorts of “as” in that Cummings once again employs the woman-as-city figuration to express the physiological dimensions of erotic interaction. This time a male speaker communicates his exploration of a female body as if he were taking a stroll through a crowded urban area (“M o ving in the Street of her/bodyfee l inga ro undMe the traffic of/lovely;muscles” [167]), he also begins to describe what it is like to be touched by her in musical terms (“her: hands/will play on,mE as/dea d tunes OR . . . Maybe Mandolins”), only to break off his discourse suddenly in order to draw his interlocutor’s (presumably Elaine Orr’s) attention to some birds swirling in the air: l oo kpigeons fly ingand whee(:are,SpRiN,k,LiNg an in-stant with sunlight then)ling all go BlacK we-eel-ing oh ver mYveRylitTle street where you will come … (167–68) The anacoluthon solicits a provocative interpretation of the verbal interruption as a consequence (and indirect presentation) of the speaker’s corporeal discharge of sexual tension. The speaker’s ejaculation in the verbal sense (“l oo k”) occurs quickly after he remarks that she has begun to play on or with him (“mE”),

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as if he were perhaps somatically comparable to a tightly strung instrument— “Maybe Mandolins.” The first syllable of the latter word encourages in turn the correlation of inanimate instrument and male body. Consequently, it is reasonable to propose that his penis, of which “pigeons” contains an anagram, is the focal point of the rest of the vision. The scattered sunlight images, from this perspective, figure the dropping of liquid particles down onto the surface of his partner’s street-torso. If his orgasm (and subsequent momentary loss of consciousness [“all go BlacK”]) seems in this instance a bit premature, he reassures his lover that her satisfaction will arrive soon enough “where/you will come,/at twi li ght/s(oon.” Taking interpretive liberties with letters in this fashion is entirely in the spirit of Cummings’s own penchant for obscene puns and vulgar witticisms. With this in mind, “when the spent day begins to frail,” the first portrait in the “A” section of &, constitutes a summary achievement of Cummings’s early work as an erotic humorist. As we learn at the end of the lyric, the speaker is a “blueeyed Finn” who, in the process of returning home from an escapade at a local brothel, anticipates encountering his displeased spouse. In the final stanza he utilizes the present tense (“I am”) and specifies that his departure from the “lovehouse” occurs at exactly “twenty minutes to one.” This reveals retroactively that the conditional statement voiced earlier in the poem—“if what I am at one o’clock”—was oriented toward a future situation in which he expects to be called upon to make a confession to his wife. The temporal precision notwithstanding, it remains ambiguous whether he is truly ashamed of his behavior or whether he plans to draw on it as an excuse for his inability to perform his conjugal duties after his return home. He may be preparing himself mentally not simply to apologize but to explain his own “spent” or exhausted physical condition as a logical consequence of his sexual venture earlier in the evening. Admittedly, it is not the most advisable rhetorical strategy for a husband to plead for forgiveness for sexual dysfunction in the marital bed on the grounds that he has successfully managed to display his virility admirably elsewhere. Yet in the gap between the final line of the second full stanza, in which the Finn is obviously pleading for pardon—“kneeling, your frequent mercy begs”—and the first line of the next stanza—“sharply believe me, wholly, well” (163)—the tone of his declaration shifts dramatically, as if for some reason he now feels compelled not to express his willingness to do penance but rather is ready to defend his threatened masculinity (due to the currently flaccid state of his penis). His mode of accomplishing this task is where my primary interest lies, for in accounting for his state of depletion he produces an intricate yet epistemologically absurd vision of the invisible: —did(wisely suddenly into a dangerous womb of cringing air) the largest hour push deep his din

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of wallowing male(shock beyond shock blurted)strokes, vibrant with the purr of echo pouring in a mesh of following tone:did this and this spire strike midnight(and did occur bell beyond fiercely spurting bell a jetted music splashing fresh upon silence)i without fail entered became and was these twin imminent lisping bags of flesh; (163) Evidently proud of the size of his erect organ, the protagonist chooses to narrate his exploit grandiosely as the penetrative assault on a feminized firmament by a masculine temporality. That the womanly air is encased in parentheses mimics typographically the curved hips of the atmospheric space into which a rigidified time plunges itself repeatedly. Though the imagery has already given flesh to an otherwise perceptually elusive and therefore ontologically uncertain event, the speaker adds to the phenomenality of time by metaphorically linking it to an architectural construct, the pinnacle (“spire”) of a church or clock tower. This association facilitates the further integration of aural effects into the genital trope. The striking of the bells, mediated by a partially homonymic allusion to gonads, to time’s balls, renders the male orgasm as a harmonic or euphonious climax to a previously cacophonous or noisy (“din”) action. Pleasantly sonic vibrations thus emerge as the spermatic conclusion to or “jetted” outcome of time’s aggressive, persistently rhythmic thrust into an initially wary, feminized space. As violently erotic contact converts the “cringing” air into ringing music, manly time may claim for himself another successful conquest. Such an unsettling combination of the sexually explicit and philosophically intricate is one of the challenges Cummings’s mode of comic obscenity persistently poses to the critic. The meeting of puerile subject matter and rhetorical mastery is indisputably a distinguishing feature of a considerable portion of his poetic corpus, yet we do not have ready to hand many convincing ways of explaining much less justifying this type of literary extravagance. Shklovsky’s notion that dirty jokes serve a restorative function, that they enable us to register the tangibility of bodies in a world in which we “live as if covered with rubber” is a speculative hypothesis that (as many have noted of his formalism) is of a piece with a certain strain of modernist aesthetics (one that Susan Sontag would rearticulate in the 1960s in several of the key essays in Against Interpretation).26 I have suggested the compatibility of his theoretical privileging of feeling or affect over cognition with Cummings’s methods and aims in the first phase of his career. I would like next to turn to one of the other great attempts between the wars to conceptualize (vulgar) humor. Composed

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in the late 1930s (though not published until the 1960s), Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World has made available an outlook on grotesque motifs that I would like to allude to in discussing Cummings’s wonderful prose poem (from Tulips and Chimneys) “at the ferocious phenomenon of 5 o’clock.” Examining this piece should put us in position to float a general thesis about the purpose underlying the poet’s overall project in the 1920s and 1930s.27

Wild Laughter in the Throat of the City One of primary images Bakhtin attends to in his study of carnival-grotesque cultural practices is the mouth. Since the “the encounter of man with the world . . . takes place inside the open, biting, rending, chewing mouth,” it “is one of the most ancient and most important objects of human thought and imagery.” The “gaping mouth, the teeth,” and “swallowing” have an “essential meaning in the Rabelaisian system of images,” play a crucial role in festive banquets, because the facial opening is the pathway downward “into the bodily underworld.” Symbolizing negation, “death and destruction,” consuming food and drinking are the preconditions for a positive renewal, for communal growth and development.28 In Cummings’s remarkable redeployment of this traditional folk figuration, it functions as the means of generating one of the more bizarre allegories of reading imaginable. In identifying himself as a tiny bit of food trapped inside a gigantic buccal cavity, the speaker in the prose poem in question presents the condition of the puny individual in the city at rush hour as a precarious one indeed: At the ferocious phenomenon of 5 o’clock i find myself gently decomposing in the mouth of New York. Between its supple financial teeth deliriously sprouting from complacent gums, a morsel prettily wanders buoyed on the murderous saliva of industry. the morsel is i. Vast cheeks enclose me.29 In this risky situation, the miniaturized person is in danger of being digested by his hungry surroundings, his ominous future foretold by the burps his illmannered milieu lets out after swallowing other portions of its daily meal: A gigantic uvula with imperceptible gesticulations threatens the tubular downward blackness occasionally from which detaches itself bumps clumsily into the throat A meticulous vulgarity: A sodden fastidious normal explosion;a square murmur, a winsome flatulence— The decidedly coarse imagery is obviously not to be taken seriously as a way of revealing the truth about the nature of existence in urban modernity, much less

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as a way to represent the metropolis accurately.30 Farcical in its figural excess, the passage cited above rests on the cognitively useless notion that Manhattan is comparable to the orifice of a gargantuan body. The anthropomorphic expansion of a facial hole into an image of the whole is designed to either amuse or amaze but certainly not to inform. Yet the poem has additional, even more disconcerting surprises in store for the reader, since the next stanza subtly inserts a critically self-conscious or reflexive dimension into the descriptive endeavor. At this point, the quintessentially modernist preoccupation with securing a sufficiently appreciative audience becomes the topic for a comically hyperbolic expression of authorial anxiety. In the soft midst of the tongue sits the Woolworth building a serene pastile-shaped insipid kinesis or frail swooping lozenge. . . . A ruglike sentience whose papillae expertly drink the docile perpendicular taste of this squirming cube of undiminished silence, supports while devouring the firm tumult of exquisitely insecure sharp algebraic music. (111) Having spied this strangely unsteady, quietly mobile building, the wandering poet enters for “the first time” the architectural monument (not yet a national landmark) and presumably takes an elevator to its fifty-seventh floor. The process whereby he rises to the top of the skyscraper is characterized in an exceptionally odd manner. I am conjugated by the sensual mysticism of entire vertical being, i am skilfully construed by a delicately experimenting colossus whose irrefutable spiral antics involve me with the soothings of plastic hypnotism.I am accurately parsed by this gorgeous rush of upward lips. The reason for selecting these particular verbs to recount the experience of ascent is initially perplexing. But what “conjugated,” “construed,” and “parsed” have in common is that they all refer to ways of dealing with language in an attentive, relatively meticulous fashion. The capacity to grasp grammatical distinctions at the level of the verb, to be able to list and analyze the component parts of a sentence, and then to adduce and comprehend meaning are precisely the prerequisite skills Cummings’s idiosyncratic style demands of its prospective readers. In this sense, the vertical building stands for an ideal recipient, one with the patience to tarry with formal recalcitrance rather than clutch at content. If one accepts this interpretation, it follows that the gluttonous city corresponds to the kind of readers that horrify the poet, those who consume, who approach reading as eating (the pun may be operative as the generative matrix of the prose poem). The latter are thus inscribed in the poem in the form of a pair of huge gaping jaws that will munch whatever they are fed indiscriminately, without good taste. And by strolling out onto the

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observation deck of the towering building, the poet puts himself in position to see what worries him.31 Perching on the sudden extremity of one immense tooth myself surveys safely the complete important profane frantic inconsequential gastronomic mystery of mysteries , life Far below myself the lunging leer of horizontal large distinct ecstasy wags and rages Laughters jostle grins nudge smiles push—deep into the edgeless gloamings gladness hammers incessant putrid spikes of madness. As the speaking subject splits into an elevated “myself ” and a lower case “i,” he perhaps gains a degree of safety from the unpleasant fate he fears. From his vantage point he may look down upon the mass hilarity of a humanity happily crushed together and eager to obtain the intense enjoyment that will bring them to the threshold of delirium. An additional virtue of the prose poem is that it enables us to catch a glimpse of the risk Cummings’s literary labors consistently ran. Specifically, he registers here the nightmarish horror that the realm of bodily depths constituted for his artistic experimentation. I stare only always into the tremendous canyon the, tremendous canyon always only exhales a dark exact walloping human noise of digestible millions whose rich slovenly obscene procession always floats through the thin amorous enormous lips of the evening. (112) For him, the burden of linguistic expression was to maintain the separation of eating and speaking since it is when the ground collapses and words split apart into material fragments that they become appetizing to gluttons, to voracious readers eager to feast on the sonorous meal the poet has provided them. Belching is an esophageal sign that he has indeed satisfied such alimentary cravings. But the last thing Cummings wanted to do as a writer was to drop into the hollows of undifferentiated noise and be chewed up. (The sexual dimension of this predicament is hinted at in the “amorous lips of the evening”; terror derives from this perspective from the all engulfing passion of an amorphous urban Other). Poems become edible when the frontier between things and propositions dissolves, when a loss of signification takes place due to the destructive bursting of words into letters and syllables and to the consonantal mush such explosions precipitate. For Deleuze this is also the dilemma of the schizophrenic who must struggle against the convulsive power of bodies and words as they mix together in the realm of affective intensity, of what he calls sub- or infra-sense.32 Antonin Artaud’s output furnishes an exemplary case in point, whereas Lewis Carroll’s work illustrates

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a more “perverse” method of verbal articulation, one in which humor occurs as an “art of the surfaces” (141). The task the author of Alice in Wonderland set for himself was to discover (as would Freud shortly thereafter) “the machinery of the unconscious by means of which sense is produced always as a function of nonsense” (72); and his way of doing so was to invent esoteric and portmanteau words. Cummings’s different but cognate strategy for steering clear of the cacophony lurking below was to mobilize figures of speech, the rapid proliferation of metaphors in his poetry serving to disclose the conditions of making sense without falling into the unbearable abyss of utter meaninglessness.

Coda: Cummings among the Black Humorists I have sought in this chapter to isolate the purposefulness of two strains of Cummings’s modernist humor, both of which hinge on his noncognitive use of figures of speech. First, his semi-obscene tropes were designed to affect his readers, to revitalize their sexual organs, so to speak. This approach is simply an eroticized variant of the canonically modernist aesthetic imperative to renew sensory perception, which was of course theoretically formulated in pioneering fashion by Shklovsky in the first half of his groundbreaking essay “Art as Device.” Second, Cummings pursued a comically excessive version of an equally characteristic modernist attentiveness to the materiality of the medium (of printed or typed letters) as well as to issues pertaining to proper modes of reading. With regard to the latter (also dealt with by Shklovsky, though most thoroughly in the chapter of Theory of Prose (1925) devoted to Tristram Shandy), we have seen that Cummings reflected critically (in “at the ferocious phenomenon of 5 o’clock”) on the distinction between a mass audience eager to satisfy its hunger and a more patient one presumably, willing to read with the analytical precision that the poet’s work ultimately demands. Here too, however, Cummings’s humor was operative, for the use of grotesque images of gigantic body parts and miniaturized persons invest his modernist self-consciousness with a cartoonish dimension, as if his goal was to mock (through hyperbole) the anxiety-ridden preoccupations of his equally difficultto-read peers. What his rhetorical humor foregoes is the task customarily assigned to metaphorical diction: the reconciliation of subjects with objective reality via the revelation of the qualities they purportedly have in common. Such knowledge would ideally supply readers with a measure of relief in the world, defending them against the fear that comes with recognizing the indifference of one’s natural or urban surroundings. Thomas Pynchon puts this ambition on stage in a pivotal chapter of his black humor classic V. (1963). In “The Confessions of Fausto Majistral,” the titular character, a decidedly melancholic member of a generation of Maltese poets strongly influenced by T. S. Eliot, comments on the perennial

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poetic mandate to furnish solace to those in distress and thus to contribute in a meaningful manner to the collective well-being of society as a whole: The poet is always acutely conscious that metaphor has no value apart from its persuasive function; that it is a device, an artifice . . . . Fausto’s kind are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the “practical” half of humanity may continue the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather share the same human motives, personal traits, and fits of contrariness as they. Poets have been at this for centuries. It is the only useful purpose they do serve in society: and if every poet were to vanish tomorrow, society would live no longer than the quick memories and dead books of their poetry.33 At first glance, Cummings’s numerous personifying figurations might appear to be a distinctively machine-age manifestation of this socially pragmatic imperative, one predicated on the notion that survival requires delusion. Certainly his myriad anthropomorphisms were often applied to the paraphernalia of modern existence: automobiles, typewriters, the city streets, and skyscrapers, not to mention building construction materials. This suggests in turn his impulse was to assimilate the environment, to disclose the traits humanity shared with its non-indifferent other. However, the case made above is that his project was in fact dedicated to an antithetical end. Cummings’s highspirited commitment to tropological playfulness was aimed, I have argued, not at the acquisition of a hidden knowledge of what persons and modern things had in common; on the contrary, his ambition in fabricating epistemologically aberrant combinations was to shake false impressions of security, to subvert comfortable, stabilized modes of inhabiting the world. (A critical interrogation of Cummings’s ubiquitous application of the rhetorical procedures under investigation to pastoral subject matter would, I believe, reach a parallel conclusion, demonstrating the degree to which his humorous undertaking caricatured the romantic tradition.) And as Georges Bataille has famously proposed, one effect of this loss of balance, of entering a state of nonknowledge, is laughter. “The strangest mystery to be found in laughter is attached to the fact that we rejoice in something that puts the equilibrium of life in danger.”34 We may in conclusion underscore the distinction between cognitive and noncognitive metaphors by going back to Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Life in an Extra Moral Sense.” After declaring “the drive toward the formation of metaphors” to be “the fundamental human drive,” the philologist turned philosopher describes the construction of “a regular and rigid new world” through the use of concepts (previously inscribed in an earlier portion of the essay inside the rhetorical category of metaphor) as a repressive act that does not truly vanquish the drive in question. Instead, it returns via “a new realm and another channel”: “in myth and in art generally.”35 Freed from the bondage of gloomy officiousness,

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this linguistic impulse indulges in an exuberant burst of creative activity, in the process wreaking havoc with the sharply bordered, rationally arranged (yet precariously grounded) edifice that conceptual or scientific knowledge has erected. Once the artistic drive to destructive metaphor is unleashed, we can no longer exist with repose, with the feeling of protection and safety that the illusion of comprehending things gives us: That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than concepts. (90) This is the boldly liberated attitude that the discussion above has sought to discover underlying the modernist poet as erotic humorist’s ventures. With this in mind, Pynchon may be identified as one of Cummings’s major inheritors since for the postmodern novelist, too, the production of hilariously elaborate tropes was a distinguishing feature of an amusingly odd literary accomplishment.

Notes 1 This epigraph is taken from a Cummings worksheet that Rushworth M. Kidder reproduces in E. E. Cummings: An Introduction to Poetry (New York: Columbian Press, 1979), 5. 2 Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 124–25. 3 Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 1. 4 Incidentally, the narcissistic protagonist in E. E. Cummings’s 1927 play Him employs this same figure in a conversation with his lover, Me. “These, these are the further miracles” (99). 5 I take this to be the point of the indisputably misogynist tale Shklovsky quotes in full in which assorted animals and insects are brutalized by a peasant and then interpret the man’s beating of his wife from the mistaken perspective of what he has done to each of them. “‘Oh, no, fellows, you got it all wrong,’ the horsefly announced solemnly: ‘Not at all. He wants to shove his stick up her behind!’” (12). It strikes me that one of the repeated risks of critical discourse on the risqué is the failure to do justice to the denigration or objectification of (not to mention the violence against) women. Cummings, for instance, in the foreword to Is 5 proposes (no doubt with Ignatz and Krazy Kat in mind) to explain his technique “by quoting The Eternal Question and Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz. ‘Would you hit a woman with a child—No, I’d hit her with a brick’” (New York: Liveright, 1985), ix.

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6 This quote is from Another E. E. Cummings, which Kostelanetz edited (New York; Liveright, 1998), 43. 7 I am not concerned in this chapter to distinguish sharply between the comic and humorous. Riffaterre has noted that “specialists in literary humor and aesthetics find it hard to agree on a definition of humor . . . because they try to see it either as a genre (or subgenre) of the comic or as a distinct style system.” He goes on to argue that it is simply a trope, and as such overlaps with but cannot be reduced to the comic. See Text Production, trans. Terese Lyons (New York: Columbia, 1983), 168. 8 Norman Friedman, E. E. Cummings; the Art of His Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960), 88. 9 E. E. Cummings, Him (New York: Liveright, 1927), 61-–62. 10 E. E. Cummings, “her,” Complete Poems 1904–1962 (New York: Liveright, 1994), 99. 11 On the retarding effect of Cummings’s innovations on the tempo of reading, see S. V. Baum, “E. E. Cummings: The Technique of Immediacy,” in E. E. Cummings: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Norman Friedman (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 104–20; and in the same volume, Robert E. Maurer, “LatterDay Notes on E. E. Cummings’ Language,” 79–99. 12 See Fred Schroeder, “Obscenity and Its Function in the Poetry of E. E. Cummings,” The Sewanee Review 73, no. 3 (Summer 1965): 475, for a previous consideration of “her” in the context of the offensive qualities of Cummings’s work.. 13 Incidentally, Steve Martin claims to have been profoundly influenced by this line early in his career: “it took me ten years to work out its meaning,” he writes in Born Standing Up (New York: Scribner, 2007), 75. 14 R. P. Blackmur, Form and Value in Modern Poetry (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1952), 305–07. 15 Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 361–63. The Pills refers to the ribald eighteenth-century songs of Thomas D’Urfey; a “blackout” is the closing of the curtain or turning off of the lights after the punch line of a short comedy routine. 16 Lewis H. Miller, Jr., “Sex on Wheels: A Reading of ‘she being Brand/-new,’” Spring 6 (1997): 58. http://www.gvsu.edu/english/cummings/Miller6.htm. 17 Irene R. Fairley, “Cummings’ Love Lyrics: Some Notes by a Female Linguist,” Journal of Modern Literature 7, no. 2 (April 1979): 213. Fairley’s distaste for “she being Brand” in particular should not be taken lightly, given her general investment in Cummings’s corpus as a means of access to exploring, in Roman Jakobson’s terms, “the poetry of grammar” and “the grammar of poetry” (205). See her important study, E. E. Cummings and Ungrammar: A Study of Syntactic Deviance in His Poems (New York: Watermill Publishers, 1975). 18 Karen Beckman, Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 13. 19 See Miller, “Sex on Wheels,” 57. The lyrics to Robert Johnson’s Depression-era tune “Terraplane Blues” are more interesting than run-of-the-mill linkages of women and cars in that he employs the trope to express sexual frustration and an inability on his part to excite his unfaithful lover: “the coils aint’ even buzzing/ Little generator won’t get the spark/Motor’s in a bad condition/You gotta have these batteries charged.” Appropriately, Kostalenetz claims that in the 1920s

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20 21

22

23

24 25

26 27

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and 1930s Cummings’s only rival in the field of sexual innuendo of this sort was “the blues” (43). Led Zeppelin explicitly reworks Johnson’s song in more masculinist fashion in “Trampled Underfoot” (Physical Graffiti, 1975: “Trouble free transmission helps your oil flow/Mama, let me pump your gas, let me do it all/Talking about love/Dig that heavy metal underneath your hood/Baby I could work all night, believe I got the perfect tools,” as does AC DC in “You Shook Me All Night Long” (Back in Black, 1980). See also Captain Beefheart’s “Tarotplane” (Mirror Man, 1967). In The First Pop Age, Hal Foster examines (by way of Marcel Duchamp) “the chiasmic” commingling of the female body and cars in the British artist Richard Hamilton’s postwar paintings (Princeton University Press, 2012), 25–51. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: A Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986), 71. For an excellent explication of this aspect of Freud’s understanding of the joke process, see Samuel Weber, “Laughing in the Meanwhile,” MLN 102, no. 4 (September 1987): 691–706. On the perpetual construction of dirty jokes as occurring at the expense of women, see Mary Ann Doane, “Film as Masquerade,” in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 30. Alenka Zupancic’s extension of Freud’s model is pertinent here as well. For her, “the libidinal tendentiousness of jokes (like their sexual and aggressive contents)” is a “smokescreen” that enables us to confront indirectly the otherwise intolerable revelation that sense presupposes nonsense. Obscenity lowers our inhibitions so that we can accept “the real, paradoxical, and contingent constitution of our world,” and this is the most profound (epistemological) anxiety at which wit enables us to laugh. The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 143–45. For a brief discussion of the historical significance of Cummings’s use of the typewriter, see Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964), 229–30. For a more life-affirming take on such a machinic connections, see Deleuze and Guattari: “A genuine consummation is achieved by the new machine, a pleasure that can rightly be called autoerotic, or rather automatic: the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new birth, a radiant ecstasy, as though the eroticism of the machine liberated other unlimited forces.” Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998), 19. Emily Dickinson, “I like to see it lap the Miles-,” # 585, The Complete Poems (New York: Little Brown and Company, 1960), 286. See also among many others Baum: “In defense of the vital quality of being, Cummings has had to evolve a manner of writing that would communicate concrete sensations and perceptions in all the immediacy with which they are experienced” (106). Viktor Shklovsky, Literature and Cinematography, trans. Irina Masinovsky (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), 13. As is well known, in the late 1920s Bakhtin either ghostwrote or oversaw the composition of The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928), a withering critique of among others Shklovsky’s critical approach. Many decades later, Shklovsky assessed the impact of Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais and Dostoevsky;

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Humor in Modern American Poetry see Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar, trans. Shushan Avagyan (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2011), 318–72. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helen Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 281, 325. E. E. Cummings, “at the ferocious phenomenon of 5 o’clock,” The Complete Poems 1904–1966 (New York: Liveright, 1991), 111. See along these lines, W. C. Williams’s “The Wanderer,” in Al Que Quiere (1917) in which the speaker asks: “How shall I be a mirror to this modernity?” The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams Volume 1 1909–1939 (New York: New Directions, 1986), 108–17; and of course John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925). It should be evident that we are not dealing here with what Michel de Certeau has influentially investigated under the heading of an “erotics of knowledge.” The scopic drive to obtain the voluptuous pleasure of seeing New York in its entirety via elevation and disembodiment is not at stake in this poem; the “lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more” is merely a step in a noncognitively oriented comic sequence. The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 92–93. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 82–93. In his tripartite scheme, Deleuze correlates irony with both height and manic-depressive conditions. Given the complexity of his philosophical enterprise, my remarks must remain suggestive rather than conclusive with respect to how the study might contribute to our understanding of Cummings’s oeuvre. Thomas Pynchon, V. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 349. Georges Bataille, “Nonknowledge, Laughter, and Tears,” in The Unfinished System of Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 144. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra Moral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth, trans. Daniel Breazeale (New York, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1979), 88–89.

Chapter 3 E M O T IO NA L C OM E D I E S : L O R I N E N I E D E C K E R’ S   “ F O R   P AU L” Marta Figlerowicz

In the backdrop of most of Lorine Niedecker’s poems are grand intellectual theories, grave social conditions, and severe personal disappointments. Within this world that seems full of great events and hopes, she keeps highlighting the smallness and fragility of her speakers’ immediate acts of emotional expression. Her speakers confront time and again the way in which a word or phrase might at once seem to condense a wide network of a person’s wishes and experiences, and fail to convey any of these associations to someone else. The tone in which Niedecker stages these doubts and disappointments is comic, in a way that is perhaps best understood by being opposed to the significant and the serious. Niedecker represents her speakers as always grasping for means of affirming the weight and resonance of their feelings but never quite securing them. Her poems construct daydreams about communion and connectedness whose naïveté they both mock and protectively memorialize: refusing to take these daydreams seriously as statements about the world but also to stop following their eager speculations. Critics who study Niedecker’s poetry usually see it as tending toward two primary aims. The first of these aims is to measure her speakers’ feelings against, and harmonize them with, the environments in which these speakers live. “Koch, Ashbery—there but for the grace of God and Louis Zukofsky go I,” Niedecker says of the more floridly lyric New York School poets. Drawing on these assertions and on the striking sparseness of Niedecker’s form, Michael Heller argues that Niedecker’s poems treat the material world as a corrective to excessively intense and self-aggrandizing inner experiences.1 Donald Davie describes her poems as explorations of the beauty and depth of geology and etymology, reminders of how much larger these scales of material and linguistic reference are than everyday human concerns.2 More recent critics argue that Niedecker’s poems aim not simply to curb subjective feelings by contrasting them against material environments, but to show that these inner and outer worlds are symbiotic and deeply interdependent. In most general

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terms, Michael Golston proposes that Niedecker reminds us how often the difference between introspective and externally oriented poetry is a matter of convention: she fuses these two directions of attentiveness and expression into each other.3 Refining and unpacking Golston’s point, Peter Nicholls memorably describes Niedecker as constructing a “rural surreal,” showcasing how rich and how deep an imaginative life can emerge out of one’s interactions even with a sparse and limited material environment: “There the full force of Niedecker’s own particular version of Surrealism is felt, as image yields to figure, and the syntax of the ‘subconscious’ displaces the too seductive curve of memory.”4 Following a similar line of thought, Rachel Blau DuPlessis describes Niedecker’s attentiveness to the material world as an attempt to ground her speakers’ subjectivity in a deeper and richer sense of their world and of themselves.5 The second aim critics attribute to Niedecker as a poet is to find ways of transforming her speakers’ immediate perceptions, thoughts, and feelings, into forms of more broadly resonant social critique. Jonathan Skinner thus describes her poetry as a form of mediation or “an instrument of balance,”6 creating channels between particular material details and larger histories these details document. Becky Peterson proposes that Niedecker’s poems fuse together personal feelings and social conditions: “To describe the condition of financial desperation, Niedecker employs the language of frustrated love— in her poems, everyday objects and human bodies circle around each other, eluding and longing for each other, generating questions about the relations among love, money, and the body.”7 Elizabeth Willis similarly describes the relationship between Niedecker’s aesthetics and her class self-perception as symbiotic: Art and labor are inseparably bound in Niedecker’s poems. Her often quoted metaphor for poetic production was the condensery (a dairy where condensed milk is prepared), a crossing point of agriculture, manufacturing, and distribution. The choice of term aptly describes Niedecker’s practice of producing highly concentrated poems intended for long-term consumption; it also asserts her intellectual activity as labor within the context and vocabulary of her local economy.8 For Elizabeth Savage, Niedecker’s poems are also sensitive to issues of race and American racism.9 Following critics who stress Niedecker’s preoccupation with the relationship between the material world and individual self-expression, I argue that Niedecker explores the process by which her speakers seek out harmonies and connections between the larger material world and their personal emotional states. With Niedecker’s socially oriented critics, I also believe that her speakers persistently test their feelings’ capacity to relate to or illuminate a broader interpersonal world. But I further propose that—rather than ground her poems in a belief that her speakers’ feelings and the larger

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social or material world are inherently connected to each other—Niedecker explores what it means to express feelings without more than a hope that they might eventually forge or discover such connections. In this shift of attention I follow two very recent critics, Ruth Jennison and Peter Middleton, who attribute to Niedecker an abstract preoccupation with the most basic means by which a person makes herself present to others, and makes this presence seem meaningful or significant. For Jennison, Niedecker seeks “to examine the material contingencies of subject formation.”10 Middleton describes her poems as mapping out the fine line between finding one’s proper place in the material world and losing oneself: “Behind these singular moments the poems perceive the danger not so much of extinction, or some specific risk posed by a river or a government, as of a complete loss of significance.”11 I develop these two critics’ analyses by pointing out that the particular focus of Niedecker’s explorations of subjectivity seems to be the perceived resonance and wider connectedness of a person’s feelings. I also expand on these analyses by suggesting that, rather than merely depict their feelings’ potential insignificance as a danger they must seek to avoid, Niedecker’s speakers explore it as a constant and necessary condition of their self-expression. The formal means Niedecker uses to explore these issues reach back to the longer tradition of folk humor that Ronald Wallace traces in American poetry from Walt Whitman to John Berryman.12 My reading of Niedecker extends Wallace’s genealogy of this tradition beyond the 1950s confessional poetry with which it ends. It also showcases how different Niedecker’s particular use of comic devices is from the ones he primarily describes. Unlike the poets on whom Wallace focuses—who use humor and comedy to enrich their understanding of themselves and of their world, and to confirm their detachment from it—Niedecker uses conventions of comic verse to draw attention to how little her speaker, and with her perhaps any other person, can do to transcend or increase the narrow span of her knowledge and her cares. She uses them to depict a speaker necessarily locked in spheres of reference that will always remain much smaller, vaguer, and flimsier than she hopes them to eventually become. In showcasing this speaker’s efforts to turn her feelings into meaningful presences or even sources of order within their world, Niedecker keeps stressing these feelings’ persistence and their independent creativity. She makes it seem wondrous that something as lasting as a poem could emerge out of, and in lasting testimony to, somebody’s fleeting emotional states. But for Niedecker, one’s ability to posit the connectedness and importance of one’s feelings in a poem does not thereby make these feelings inherently serious and valuable. Part of what her poems testify to—in ways that are at times more lightly humorous, and at times painfully self-mocking—is that the sheer expression of a feeling, and its persistence in a poem, cannot in themselves guarantee that the outer world will confirm the connections this feeling appears to follow or assert. The apparent insight it momentarily holds in the speaker’s perception might never be taken seriously or put into practice by anyone else.

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I take “For Paul” as my central example of these lyric tendencies and strategies. Addressed to a child whom the speaker at first appears to mentor, “For Paul” is staged as a form of interpersonal communion and instruction. It initially frames its speaker as its addressee’s mentor or teacher, and gives their intimate exchanges airs of ambitious social and historical critiques. “For Paul” then gradually unveils the similarity between this would-be teacher’s and her student’s relationships to the world, between the naïveté of a child and an adult believing that their emotional needs and attachments are just as unquestionable and important to others. Niedecker’s speaker falls into a bitter kind of self-mockery about the ungrounded ambitiousness of her hopes and wants. This bitterness then opens up onto more general and more lightly stated visions of the inherently comic smallness and simplicity of the environments and networks of connections any particular person can feel for or imagine; a comic smallness and simplicity that the form of her poem necessarily reveals even as it protects this feeling’s eager naïveté. The tension Niedecker stages between her poems as means of mocking feelings and of protecting them allows her to reframe her writing not merely as the record of her speaker’s particular emotional failures, but as a way of studying and weighing the inherent fragility of subjective self-expression. The backdrop or foil against which Niedecker develops these comic dimensions of her poem is a gradually subverted assumption or hope that its speaker is writing from a position of deep interpersonal and cultural knowledge and connectedness: a knowledge and connectedness that she unveils to and shares with her younger addressee. “For Paul” keeps tying the feelings its speaker expresses back to a network of much wider and more longstanding facts and associations. It stages a series of apparent discoveries in which expressing the speaker’s immediate emotional states seems to always showcase how much wider and deeper a personal and social history they illuminate and relate to. As Middleton puts it, Niedecker is self-consciously writing for a community whose lives are already tightly knit together.13 In an early analysis of this poem, Marjorie Perloff describes it as engaging not merely Paul, its immediate recipient, but also Louis Zukofsky, Paul’s father and Niedecker’s longtime friend and former lover. “For Paul” asserts and explores the complicated ties that continue to bind her to Zukofsky and to his current family.14 Peter Quartermain highlights that the poem seems deliberately to flaunt both this complicated network of intimacies, and the effort it takes fully to probe and make sense of them.15 The opening sections of “For Paul” are full of implied quotations from letters and conversations that appear to confirm how long-standing and rich these relationships are. These quotations seem to establish Paul’s family, and Niedecker’s speaker as its satellite, as purveyors of a long history of deep bonds and affections. These persons’ ongoing communications keep being reminisced about, fused together, embedded in each other. In one early sequence, what

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might initially seem like the words of Niedecker’s speaker turn out to be a fragment from a letter sent to her by “L.”—implicitly, Louis Zukofsky—in which “L.” himself is quoting “P.” or Paul: “do you really believe there were gods, all that hooey?” And his violin—improvising made a Vivaldi sequence his, better than I could have done with poetry at twice his age . . . so writes your father, L. before P.16 Paul’s question becomes a pretext for reminiscing about his father’s talents and personal development. Around these first two lines there instantly constellate markers of a much longer amount of time the father and son have spent talking to each other and training for their chosen professions. We are given hints of conversations, compositions, and performances that the poem itself does not represent but that seem to exist in these persons’ shared trove of memories. Referred to quickly and obliquely, the details and quotations Niedecker chooses give the impression of a much longer life re-telegraphed to a person who is already very familiar with it; of a communication that is brief because of how richly and deeply these persons already understand each other. At many other points throughout the poem, similar oblique, embedded quotations keep signaling what thus appears to be a dense and habitual mutual understanding. Niedecker’s speaker reminisces to Paul about what his “father [said] to me in your eighth summer” (146). She refers to relatives or friends without mentioning their names, as if their identity had already been established at an earlier point in the conversation. She also frames some of the poem’s sections as responses to Paul’s unquoted prior questions: “You ask what kind of boats in my country/on my little river” (153). As Anne Waldman puts it, these various forms of foreshortening and obliqueness carve out a sense of closeness out of how much the poem can gloss over, take for granted, compress, or omit.17 These immediate interactions inspire, and appear themselves to contribute to, considerations of wider social and natural histories, conditions, and conventions. Paul, the person to whom the poem is addressed, is a musical prodigy who seems acutely receptive to everything he hears. Niedecker’s assertions of intimacy are interspersed with suggestions that this poem seeks to enrich this child’s knowledge and sensitivity with a wealth of potential new experiences to which she tries to give him access. As such references to wider social environments and histories accumulate, it starts to seem as if the poem were a form of education in a strikingly vast variety of contexts and facts. In the course of the poem Niedecker thus refers to “the war” (144), and the “atomic

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bomb” (141). The persons whom her speaker discusses include “Homer” (138), “Vivaldi” (139), “Einstein” (139), “Baruch the blessed” (139), “Frederick the Great” (140), “the queen, Elizabeth” (142), “the marshal of France” and French politicians and generals such as “Laval, Pomeret, Petain,” and “Bourdet, Bonnet, Deladier” (144), “Thure Kumlien” (145), “Crevecoeur” (146), “Handle [=Handel]” (146), “Jesse James and his brother Frank,” “Teddy R.” (148), “the writing Jameses” (148), “Shakespeare” (150), “Corelli” (151), “Aeneas” (158), and “Chopin” (158). This sense of multiple, complex referentiality is enhanced by the way in which, as Elizabeth Robinson shows, Niedecker’s shifting line lengths and her speaker’s shifting time frames work together to relate each event she mentions to others in eddies of analogies and shared metaphors.18 Critics frequently focus on these smaller and larger scales of experience Niedecker’s poems bring together, and on the apparent synergies between them. These resonances are typically read as assertions of some symbiotic or mirroring relationship between the smaller and the larger scales of feeling and perception Niedecker’s speaker describes. The boundaries between her poem’s presence on the page and her speaker’s mental experience, between the persons she describes and their environment, between the ties that bind her small community together and the kinds of relationships that unite society in general seem easier to surmount than one might have assumed. Eleni Sikelianos and Richard Caddel point out that Niedecker’s poems seem to lift the barrier between humans and the nonhuman natural world. In Sikelianos’s words, “here and in other poems, her close attention to her physical surroundings evidences a world in which humans are not divorced from their environment, or even foregrounded necessarily, but participate in an ecosystem of mergansers, marshweed, and bombs.”19 Jeffrey Peterson proposes that Niedecker thus also elides the distinctions we might be tempted to draw between humans and the machines they use and create. For Willis, “we see Niedecker’s poems performing socially constructed acts of seeing—the poet assessing her surroundings, looking at herself, and contextualizing her labor among that of others, then imagining the returned gaze of the subjects within her poems, thinking all the way through to what they would say about it, how it would reenter the realm of public commentary and hearsay.”20 Savage makes a similar point as follows: The poem reads as a last stand, converting a site of barely suppressed violence into a record of resistance. Poetry as a genre connects Niedecker to the deeper history of her place, to the wilderness that preceded layoffs and museums and abided instead by Native American reason, whereby territory was defined by use and thus akin to poetry’s open form rather than to the ever-encroaching rectilinear expansionism of prose.21 For Jennison and G. Matthew Jenkins, Niedecker highlights connections between personal memories and material objects, between lived subjectivity and its objectified, publicly visible embodiments.22

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To read Niedecker’s poem through these rich implied contexts and spheres of reference is to think of it primarily as a serious and ambitious effort at condensation. Small details of everyday life appear to offer glimpses of and gateways into a much wider cultural and natural context, serving as its embodiments or implied critiques. Interpreted in this fashion, “For Paul” seems to be a poem of intensely serious, and—as some critics have put it— almost invasively confident efforts at asserting emotional intimacy and praising its importance. The central intimate relationships its speaker describes and furthers appear to be uniquely deep, and expressive of values and forms of self-awareness that might potentially matter to many other persons. Richly as this approach illuminates the larger political and historical context in which Niedecker is writing, it overlooks the much more fragile and tonally unstable relationship her poems establish to these larger realms of knowledge and experience. I study “For Paul” as an attempt not to affirm but to test an individual person’s capacity to connect her immediate experiences and feelings to such larger interpersonal or social contexts. “For Paul” explores both the power and the comic fragility of feelings such as love or longing, as this speaker experiences them. It stresses the capacity these feelings seem to have to organize her speaker’s immediate sense of her world, but also the untenability and unprovability of the harmonies and connections whose presence these feelings keep leading her to assert or take for granted. I follow and expand on a point made by Elizabeth Arnold, who shows that Niedecker often suggests the surprising, apparently significant connections she forges among larger and smaller, subjective and objective spheres of experience, to be fleeting and accidental.23 Rather than present such synergic connections as a fact, Niedecker stages them as an emotionally charged act of creation that her speaker keeps trying to bring into being: an act of creation she can never be quite sure of accomplishing despite the intensity with which she pursues it. As Peterson suggests, Niedecker thus depicts her poetry as potentially “useless” or “frivolous.”24 The seemingly rich, condensed worlds her poem captures are not assertions of but speculations about or hopes for meaning and connectedness. They are also expressions of how difficult it is for this speaker to give these hopes and speculations any greater degrees of reality or apparent seriousness. This reflexively comic, self-trivializing dimension of Niedecker’s poem often takes on lightly and conventionally humorous forms, to which I will turn later in the chapter. But it is just as strongly present—and indeed seems to find its sources—in some of its ostensibly most melancholy sections, whose humor is more bitter and understated. Niedecker’s speaker keeps channeling her feelings of loss and disenchantment into a self-mocking simplicity of tone and form—small words, hesitant syntax, singsong rhymes—that make her losses seem to reveal primarily her own unwavering naïveté. This naïveté seems to be the effective ground and inspiration for her speaker’s persistence in trying to describe her life as meaningfully and deeply connected to the lives of others. Niedecker’s tone is comic in the sense of suspending or always holding in

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doubt the capacity of the feelings her speaker expresses to be embodied in real, complex environments or serious events. She keeps forcing these feelings back into a sense of speculativeness, vagueness, and inconsistency. On a most immediate level, these self-mocking gestures keep undercutting the apparent confidence with which her speaker asserts the intimate ties between herself and her addressee. The opening section of “For Paul” thus celebrates this poem as one of the many gifts the speaker gives to Paul; yet it also gradually broadens the gap between the hopes of intimacy this gift is intended to stand for, and the speaker’s ever more obviously restricted ability to give these hopes any greater degrees of reality: Paul now six years old: this book of birds I loved I give to you. I thought now maybe Paul growing taller than cattails around Duck Pond between the river and the Sound will keep this book intact, fly back to it each summer maybe Paul (137) Niedecker’s speaker keeps emphasizing the relative smallness and frailty of her referents: cattails, birds, a pond, a book, a boy. Within these small objects and bodies the speaker tries to contain huge emotional commitments and personal histories. She then even folds some of these small individual bodies and objects into each other. The speaker expresses her love of this landscape and of the birds that live there by treasuring a book about them. Paul is to be the bearer of these affections, and he is already their partial embodiment: in her eyes he resembles a cattail around Duck Pond and might fly back to her book—hopefully also to the Pond itself—just like the birds she would like him to know and love. As Jennison and Charles Tomlinson variously put it, there is in sections such as this one a sense of immediate satisfaction with small sensations and exchanges. They seem propelled by a hope that these limited interactions (and the small poem they make up together) already lead the speaker into stable and enriching long-term bonds. In Tomlinson’s words, “These tiny poems are not the fruit of an anxious isolation. They are rather points of patience” as one hopefully waits for and speculates about some greater sense of connectedness and belonging that might develop out of them.25 However, this section keeps showcasing how inordinate a hope and weight are being placed in this one gesture of giving Paul a book or a poem; how vulnerable it makes the speaker to assume that these small offerings might create the kinds of expansive shared experiences and habits this speaker seems

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ultimately to long for. Niedecker’s speaker reaches out toward small objects that she hopes—without being able to actively make this happen—to be synecdoches of or paths toward much larger forms of experience and intimacy projected into an even more vague future. The more insistently she repeats these wished-for consequences of her offerings, the more tenuous the causal relationships she hopes for start to seem. The speaker initially seems to be testing the force and the scope of Paul’s attachment to her. She gradually starts to affirm instead the necessary, inherent fragility of any imaginative act by which she tries to predict or to assert this attachment. Her attention turns from Paul himself to the form and syntax of the imagined bonds she talks about, a syntax that the speaker begins to repeat and turn over in her mind. “Maybe Paul,” she reiterates in her last line, heightening the sense in which the hope she started to express a few lines earlier remains unanswered and speculative. Her more and more complicated and widely spaced words and phrases seem ever less strongly and reliably wrought together, ever less forceful in the effects she tries, time and again, to make them have. In what is perhaps the most overt formal indication of this sense of vulnerability and tenuousness, as this section progresses Niedecker’s speaker changes the personal pronouns with which she refers to Paul. The first four lines address him in the first person. In the fifth line Niedecker’s speaker begins to refer to him in the third person. It starts to seem as if this speaker had perhaps merely been talking to herself. The imagined possibility of Paul’s affection for the environments she loves might have been not even a demand she makes of him but a hopeful daydream that her speaker at once continues to indulge and begins ever more overtly to make light of. These gradual hints of the inconsistent groundedness of the speaker’s feelings are deepened by the fact that Paul, the child who is the poem’s addressee and the apparent object of its formal efforts, is never represented responding to its speaker or expressing toward her any kind of empathy or recognition. While the poem is being composed, this addressee might also be outgrowing the childlike tone this speaker adopts toward him: the last section shows him in what would have to be his late teenage years, giving his first concert at Carnegie Hall. As Perloff puts it, Niedecker is in this sense poignantly aware that “the presence of Paul, whether in person or in letters, cannot, in any case, do anything for Lorine: his ‘little/thin things’ are not hers.”26 The section to which Perloff refers seems staged as a gradual metaphoric revelation that this speaker’s relationship to Paul is nonexistent: Paul when the leaves fall from their stems that lie thick on the walk

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in the light of the full note the moon is playing to leaves when they leave the little thin things Paul (156) In earlier sections Niedecker’s speaker ostensibly tries to bridge the gaps that separate her from Paul. These later ones—which also include descriptions of listening to him play on the radio, rather than in real life—ever more emphatically record and acknowledge these distances. In this section, Niedecker turns what might at first appear to be an image of leaves falling from a tree into an image of leaf blades falling from their veins as they decompose on the ground. As the poem progresses, what initially seemed to be a rich picture of natural and cosmic cycles fragments into a set of thin skeletons and shadows that the moon illuminates but does not bring back to life. Starting and ending with Paul’s name, Niedecker’s speaker seems to beckon him repeatedly as if she could not be sure that her words have had any effect. As she does so, her poem itself keeps decomposing. The “leaves” “leave” their stems: the very word that at first registered the wholeness of her referents now documents the way they fall apart. The line breaks of these stanzas and their ever more complicated syntax—a complicated syntax that strings together ever simpler and smaller words and phrases—make the poem appear to be tearing at the seams, just barely holding itself together into a unit of meaning. The section ends with an intense awareness of the trivial smallness and disconnectedness of its referents and the increasing vulnerability of this speaker who apparently cannot bind even such small sounds and images into a clear confession or a lesson. The sense of comic naïveté that undergirds this section comes from the impression it gives that the breadth, connectedness, and responsiveness of its referents reveal themselves to be mostly just wishes or failed hopes. All its speaker can do in her intense, careful attentiveness is meticulously acknowledge and document her disenchantment. These bitterly comic undertones are eventually heightened by much more conventional, directly humorous means. This more overt use of humor begins to turn the speaker’s emotional plight from a passive predicament into an ever more boldly reasserted aesthetic statement. Niedecker finds in seemingly simple comic devices powerful means of exploring what it is like to try to give weight to feelings that the world around oneself has not yet fully acknowledged or accepted—affirming these feelings’ presence and persistence despite their continued lack of apparent resonance or ground. Here, in one of the poem’s

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longer sections, Niedecker comically meshes one of her most dramatic existential statements, with minor or surreally vague complaints strung together with singsong rhymes: Time is white mosquitoes bite I’ve spent my life on nothing. (147) This stanza’s last, potentially very serious line serves as a refrain to a series of strikingly similar stanzas—each of which has analogously disjointed, banal, or vague opening phrases. Rather than present this refrain as a dramatic conclusion toward which her poem might work its way gradually, Niedecker seems at once to mourn and to mock the ease with which this overarching statement seems to erupt at the slightest irritation the speaker experiences. It seems to present itself as a generalization of every small disappointment in her life. Playing with the double meaning of “nothing,” her speaker seems to say both that her life has been pointless in a deep sense, and that the little “nothings” she spends this life worrying about make her despair seem trivial. The disjuncture between this very general statement and the small details that lead Niedecker’s speaker up to it, time and again, presents the speaker’s melancholy as something for which she might be at pains to articulate easily understandable causes and equivalents, even to a person she feels very close to; as something whose apparently overwhelming, repetitive hold on her perception she seems unable to either quite justify or effectively break. Stressing the incongruities between the vague, constant expansiveness of her sadness and her small, rapidly changing immediate reasons for it, Niedecker’s speaker never resolves or even comments on these incongruities. These tonal gaps make the poem seem comic in an eerie negative sense: it is as if it kept trying, and failing, to become weighty and serious. Rather than merely make light of her speaker’s momentary sadness—and then overcome it—Niedecker lingers with and keeps returning to the way in which these distances between her speaker’s context and her self-expression reveal the creative agency it seems to take on this speaker’s part to assert her feelings in the first place, within an environment that makes them seem neither quite obvious nor quite understandable. She stages this section as at once an acknowledgment of how thin and inadequate are the means of self-expression this speaker has at her disposal, and as proof of these feelings’ presence despite their inability to find appropriate and reliable material contexts or correlatives. The poem’s apparent failure to achieve a sense of seriousness lets the feelings Niedecker’s speaker expresses persist while also showing how difficult it is for these feelings to find more conventional means of asserting their significance and depth. This double—both negative and positive—aim of her poem’s treatment of feelings becomes even more apparent when one thinks of “For Paul” as an

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attempt to compare its speaker’s voice against a child’s voice, and to create a sense of emotional closeness or communion between these two perspectives. Niedecker frequently suggests that Paul’s apparent defiance or ignorance of more conventional forms of expression and perception serves as a model for the forms of expression adopted by her speaker: “I want that chord, he cries,/ and the sun and moon and stars,” Niedecker’s speaker quotes Paul saying at one point in the poem. At another point she makes his violin, and the prodigious and lucrative talents it stands for, objects of a much smaller and childishly trivial exchange of gifts and affections: They smile and give you lettuce because you’ve brought your violin. (141) To consider the parallels between these statements and the ones in which the speaker is mocking herself is of course to become ever more aware of how ironic and sad it is that this speaker’s forms of self-expression seem nevertheless unable to reach Paul. His own naïve presumption seems much more selfsufficient and successful than hers. Yet these parallels also draw attention to the way in which Niedecker’s comic tone is a way of marveling at this poem’s sheer existence and persistence as a fragile realm of her speaker’s emotional expression. She marvels at it perhaps as tenderly as at the presence and growth of Paul’s body and mind. By making this simplicity of tone seem mocking but also attentive and compassionate, Niedecker is able to tread the line between acknowledging her poem’s thinness and vagueness, and appreciating it as act of creativity. She recasts the comic mode as a means of carefully attending to what seem to be the inalienable fragilities and limitations of any emotional state from which one might try to derive order or meaning. As “For Paul” progresses, Niedecker’s speaker expands the scope of these parallels and comic strategies to comment not only on the strength of her personal relationships, but also on the viability of her (and presumably also Paul’s) ambitions to see their immediate experiences and environments as reliable testing grounds of larger social histories and regularities. There is throughout “For Paul”—directed as it is to a child prodigy—a sense of wonder at how beautifully a young person’s notion of the world gradually accumulates. This sense of wonder is often conveyed by her speaker’s attempts to imitate what it must be like for this young person to take in the experiences and histories about which he learns day by day: They tried each other they sold out their brother the people of France. Let’s practice your dance. (144)

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To Paul now old enough to read: Once a farmer, Crevecoeur tried to save his heart from too much hurt. (146) By sharing and imitating these childlike descriptions and perspectives, Niedecker turns her poem into an assertion at once of their charm and of the reasons why recognizing this charm is not tantamount to claiming that the content of these naïve acts of noticing and associating is in itself significant and insightful. She shifts attention away from trying to use these observations as direct comments on or insights into one’s social or material world, toward examining them as expositions of the small circumference of any single person’s attention and care; the small circumference of the environments out of which and against which one develops one’s beliefs and insights. Adopting this perspective allows her to recast what might at first appear to be her poem’s claims to knowledge or connectedness as explorations of the persistent if comically unsuccessful process by which one tries to fit these larger spheres of associations and meanings into the small sphere of one’s experience. Here, in another section of the poem, Niedecker thus gives a comic air to what many critics have read as her speaker’s explicit attempts at social criticism. She reorients her speaker’s focus from this attempted social commentary in itself, to the environmental and emotional means a person such as her speaker has to intuit or comment on such larger social events and patterns: O Tannenbaum the children sing round and round one child sings out: atomic bomb (141) There is, of course, a way in which this section could be read as an ironic critique of nuclear warfare. But sections such as this one draw attention not only to the wider contexts on which this speaker seeks to comment, but also to the many differences of scale and scope that separate the world in which she thinks and acts from these larger questions of politics and power. As Rae Armantrout puts it, these sections offer a sort of “thumbnail sketch” of large social problems.27 But the joke that results from this distortion is as much on these social problems as on the speaker for whom they are embodied in such naïve, comically contingent, and broad-stroked fashion. If, as Armantrout also proposes, “like Dickinson, Niedecker ridicules the significance of publicity and exposure,” Niedecker also makes one aware of the vague comedy of positing a personal world of accidents and anecdotes as an alternative or a significant addition to a larger social conversation.28 Rather than merely, as Lisa Robertson

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has argued, vaunt the “incompleted” nature of her poems, Niedecker asks how one could transition from such a comically partial, small-scale collection of experiences and memories to a more overarching sense of the world.29 She showcases the difficulty of accepting that the kinds of worlds her poems recreate might testify to the energy and force of their expressed convictions without being able to present these convictions as anything more than, in this case, a small reported mishearing; that part of what they represent is the fragility of their acts of expression and the ease with which their attempted critiques or judgments might collapse into insignificance. In this later section, these forms of self-consciousness about the limits of any person’s ability to create or to comprehend a wider world based on their own immediate experiences become even more explicit: Yes, comes a measure marked Autumn the passing of the little summer people, schools of leaves float downstream past lonely piers soft still-water twilight morning ice on the minnow bucket. (154) Describing “Autumn” as a “measure,” Niedecker draws on her immediate addressee’s musical knowledge, stressing the way in which even this very general description is being tailored specifically to the interests and capacities of one particular boy. At the same time, both this metaphor and the section’s closing image of a small bucket of water that reflects the night sky and captures this season’s temperature changes, offer suggestions of some larger rhythm or span of experience that these small, intimate references might succeed in synthesizing. They gesture toward the way in which this exchange might convey not just one autumn day in Wisconsin but Autumn itself, communicating it not just to Paul but perhaps also to anyone else. Highlighting both the grandeur of this wish and the comically paltry means her speaker has of accomplishing it—the childish ambitiousness of trying to capture Autumn in a water bucket— Niedecker showcases ways in which her poem is able to catch subjectivity at work trying to create ties and resonances we might very much want it to have. She stresses the beauty of these attempted resonances and ties, as well as the fragility and narrowness of the conditions in which one might temporarily be persuaded they hold. One way to further generalize this series of tonal strategies would be to see it as Niedecker’s particular contribution to or expansion of Objectivism. An implied inspiration of these questions Niedecker voices about the shifting kinds of resonance a person’s emotional states can appear to have—and about poems as tests or mediators of these forms of resonance—is the aesthetic she first encounters in the writings of Objectivist poets such as Louis Zukofsky. As Zukofsky defines it in “Sincerity and Objectification,” the Objectivist aesthetic

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consists in treating the poem as an entity that holds and “objectifies” within itself carefully arranged facets of a person’s “sincere” relationship to her world. Sincerity for him consists in “thinking with the things as they exist.”30 Poetic objectification is “the arrangement, into one apprehended unit, of minor units of sincerity.”31 A poem thereby makes this feeling potentially illuminating and important to many more persons and contexts than the immediate ones by which it was inspired. One way to describe the dimension of Niedecker’s poetry I highlight is to say that—while accepting these general premises— Niedecker turns them around to wonder how solid, resonant, or valuable, such a poetic objectification of feelings can be. She wonders whether articulating her speakers’ sincerely felt relationships to their environments validates these feelings’ insightfulness and creativity, or merely makes more manifest how vulnerable and ungrounded are the bonds they attempt to confirm or to forge. Niedecker takes the Objectivists’ professed commitment to turning feelings into more widely accessible objects and uses this aesthetic method to think more broadly about the kind of “objective” or object-like weight any person’s feeling can ever claim to have—and about the means by which one might try to persuade oneself of its importance. In another, more abstractly philosophical sense, Niedecker models a way of thinking about comedy as a tool for testing fine distinctions among different kinds and degrees of apparent importance a person’s feeling might have moment by moment. In this sense Niedecker adds to our understanding not merely of comedy as a pervasive mode throughout American poetry—to which Wallace first drew attention—but also of the more general links between humor and subversive understanding or knowledge. Philosophers who study humor and the comic mode tend almost universally to stress their function as a means of detaching oneself from and gaining control over one’s subjective standpoints and attachments. Niedecker’s comic strategies hint at the hoped-for benefits of such detachment without ever allowing her speakers definitively to reach it. Lingering in the comic mode, her speakers instead discover limits to how meaningful any thoughts or feelings they have about their small circumference of cares can possibly be—limits to how much anyone would care about or gain from their attempted forms of detachment or transcendence. Her poetry highlights how much more there might be to learn about the comic mode and its twentieth-century inflections by studying it as just such a position of unredeemed ignorance. It also shows how much the comic mode can teach us about the ways in which we try to lift our lives out of such lightness and triviality.

Notes 1 Michael Heller, “The Objectified Psyche: Marianne Moore and Lorine Niedecker,” in Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1996), 229.

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2 Donald Davie, “Lorine Niedecker: Lyric Minimum & Epic Scope,” in The Full Note: Lorine Niedecker, ed. Peter Dent (Devon, UK: Interim Press, 1983), 72. 3 Michael Golston, “Petalbent Devils: Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, and the Surrealist Praying Mantis,” Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 2 (2006): 326–27. 4 Peter Nicholls, “Lorine Niedecker: Rural Surreal,” in Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1996), 217. 5 Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Lorine Niedecker, the Anonymous: Gender, Class, Genre and Resistances,” The Kenyon Review 14, no. 2 (1992): 96–97; Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Lorine Niedecker’s ‘Paean to Place’ and Its Fusion Poetics,” Contemporary Literature 46, no. 3 (2005): 410. 6 Jonathan Skinner, “Particular Attention: Lorine Niedecker’s Natural Histories,” in Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, ed. Elizabeth Willis (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 42. 7 Becky Peterson, “Lorine Niedecker and the Matter of Life and Death,” Arizona Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2010): 115. 8 Elizabeth Willis, “The Poetics of Affinity: Lorine Niedecker, William Morris, and the Art of Work,” Contemporary Literature 46, no. 4 (2005): 580. 9 Elizabeth Savage, “‘Bleach[ed] Brotherhood’: Race, Consumer Advertising, and Lorine Niedecker’s Lyric,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 28, no. 2 (2009): 291–313. 10 Ruth Jennison, “Scrambling Narrative: Niedecker and the White Dome of Logic,” Journal of Narrative Theory 41, no. 1 (2011): 60. 11 Peter Middleton, “The British Niedecker,” in Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, ed. Elizabeth Willis (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 256. 12 Ronald Wallace, God Be with the Clown: Humor in American Poetry (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984). 13 Middleton, “The British Niedecker,” 218. 14 Marjorie Perloff, “‘L. Before P.’: Writing ‘For Paul’ for Louis,” in Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1996), 157–70. 15 Peter Quartermain, “Reading Niedecker,” in Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1996), 220. 16 Lorine Niedecker, “For Paul,” in Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 139. All other quotations from “For Paul” are henceforth cited in-text. 17 Anne Waldman, “Who Is Sounding? Awakened View, Gaps, Silence, Cage, Niedecker,” in Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, ed. Elizabeth Willis (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 220. 18 Elizabeth Robinson, “Music Becomes Story: Lyric and Narrative Patterning in the Work of Lorine Niedecker,” in Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, ed. Elizabeth Willis (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 117. 19 Eleni Sikelianos, “Life Pops from a Music Box Shaped Like a Gun: Dismemberments and Mendings in Niedecker’s Figures,” in Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, ed. Elizabeth Willis (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 40; Richard Caddel, “Consider: Lorine Niedecker and Her Environment,” in Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1996), 281–86.

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20 Willis, “The Poetics of Affinity,” 584. 21 Savage, “‘Bleach[ed] Brotherhood’,” 602. 22 Jennison, “Scrambling Narrative,” 60; G. Matthew Jenkins, “Lorine Niedecker, Simone de Beauvoir, and the Sexual Ethics of Experience,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 23, no. 2 (2004): 321. 23 Elizabeth Arnold, “On Lorine Niedecker,” Chicago Review 49, no. 1 (2003): 98. 24 Peterson, “Lorine Niedecker and the Matter of Life and Death,” 117. 25 Jennison, “Scrambling Narrative”; Charles Tomlinson, “Introduction: A Rich Sitter,” in The Full Note: Lorine Niedecker, ed. Peter Dent (Devon, UK: Interim Press, 1983), 8. 26 Perloff, “‘L. Before P.’” 169. 27 Rae Armantrout, “Darkinfested,” in Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, ed. Elizabeth Willis (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 111. 28 Ibid., 105. 29 Lisa Robertson, “In Phonographic Deep Song: Sounding Niedecker,” in Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, ed. Elizabeth Willis (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 90. 30 Louis Zukofsky, “Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff,” Poetry 37, no. 5 (1931): 273. 31 Ibid., 274.

Chapter 4 L AU G H I N G I N T H E G A L L E RY: M E LV I N T O L S O N ’ S   R E F U S A L T O H U SH Lena Hill

Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the “white folks” laugh. Her characters … swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears. —Richard Wright, 1937 When Melvin Tolson submitted his master’s thesis on Harlem Renaissance writers to the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in 1940, he seemed sympathetic to Richard Wright’s stinging assessment of Hurston’s reliance upon humor. In his review of writers from the New Negro era, Tolson argued: “Most of the members of the Harlem Renaissance portrayed the sensational features of Negro life, which were exploited for the entertainment of white readers. The literature of today is earthy, unromantic, and sociological; and from it emerges Negro characters that are more graphically individualized.”1 But when he published Harlem Gallery (1965), the long ode that remains his most celebrated work, he rejected Wright’s comprehensive denunciation of humor. While Wright would go on to avow that his literature sought to deny readers the emotional luxury of either laughter or tears, Tolson grew to see the utility of such emotional responses.2 Humor in particular claims a special role in his verse. Within the structure of his modernist form, he explores not only how laughter proves central to both the black artist and the critic, but also how humor provides a means for innovative African American art to tackle difficult aspects of black life with

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creative force and confidence. Tolson seeks a middle ground that Wright never imagines. Unfortunately, few black critics admired Tolson’s most ambitious work or found it amusing. Contemporary African American reviewers of Harlem Gallery accused Tolson of belatedly embracing high modernism in an attempt to ingratiate himself with white critics.3 A number of scholars note that black critics often devoted as much energy responding to Tolson’s white reviewers as they invested in evaluating his work.4 Karl Shapiro’s introduction to Harlem Gallery drew the most ire with its declarations that Tolson’s verse succeeded in “outpounding Pound” and is noteworthy because “Tolson writes and thinks in Negro.”5 In her 1966 Negro Digest review, Sarah Webster Fabio famously took direct aim at Shapiro’s high praise: “Melvin Tolson’s language is most certainly not ‘Negro’ to any significant degree. The weight of that vast, bizarre, pseudoliterary diction is to be placed back into the American mainstream where it rightfully and wrongmindedly belongs.”6 Paul Breman, writing for The Black American Writer: Volume 2: Poetry and Drama (1969), piled on by asserting that Tolson “postured for a white audience, and with a wicked sense of humour gave it just what it wanted: an entertaining darkey using almost comically big words as the wasp tradition demands of its educated house-niggers.”7 Invigorated by the black pride at the heart of the Black Arts movement and turned off by Tolson’s dense metaphors, wide-reaching allusions, as well as his previous courtship of conservative white critics, these reviewers from the black press found little to admire in his complex ode. Tolson, however, felt that his high modern form in no way compromised his cultural legitimacy. In fact, he had hoped his modernist publications would help expand black critical autonomy and agency within the academy. He mused in his notebooks, “Hitherto, white critics have established the reputations of Negro writers—witness Wheatley, Dunbar, Wright—hereafter Negro critics, who are inside, will have perhaps the last say.”8 Even as he grew increasingly enamored with modernist verse and published works like Rendezvous with America (1944) that reflected his evolving aesthetic, Tolson remained open about the relationship between his poetry and his politics, the language of his verse compared to the timbre of his other writing.9 Although he surely did not expect a pass from African American critics, a group whose wrath he had experienced early in his career when he dared to defend Langston Hughes’s controversial “Goodbye, Christ” (1932), Tolson believed his modernist work would be seriously engaged across racial lines.10 Thus, when Tolson delved more deeply into modernism, he felt no qualms about publicly addressing his experiments with poetic form. As a black poet who had grown up the son of a Methodist minister in the Midwest, attended historically black universities for his undergraduate education, and spent his entire career not only teaching at black colleges but overseeing widely acclaimed drama and debate programs on these campuses as well, Tolson felt no need to prove his cultural bona fides.11 When he convinced the respected Allen Tate

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to write the introduction for Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), the dense poem he penned in honor of the centennial celebration of Liberia after he was appointed Poet Laureate of the African nation, Tolson celebrated his accomplishment in terms that echo his hopes for the impact his work might have on the position of black critics. Writing to Horace Bond, Tolson crowed: “At long last, it seems, that a black man has broken into the ranks of T. S. Eliot and Tate! We have been completely ignored before.” He was also not shy about declaring his belief that black poets needed to embrace modernism to remain relevant. He insisted, “Negro poets and professors must master T.S. Eliot!” In discussing the evolution of Harlem Gallery, he mused over the transformation of his aesthetic ideals: I stashed the manuscript in my trunk for twenty years. At the end of that time I had read and absorbed the techniques of Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Baudelaire, Pasternak and, I believe, all the great Moderns. God only knows how many “little magazines” I studied, and how much textual analysis of the New Critics. To make a long story short, the new Harlem Gallery was completed.12 Tolson passionately believed that the modernist idiom was suitable for expressing black modern experience, and he felt certain there was much to glean from the greatest high modern poets. By adapting their formal experiments to aesthetic explorations of African American culture, he strove to maintain artistic relevance to issues facing the larger society. Contrary to the accusations of his detractors, Tolson’s enchantment with modernism remained closely bound to his devotion to portraying black humanity with vigorous creativity. Explaining the differences between his appreciation for Eliot and his own poetic technique, Tolson observes: My work is certainly difficult in metaphors, symbols and juxtaposed ideas. There the similarity between me and Eliot separates. That is only technique, and any artist must use the technique of his time. . . . However, when you look at my ideas and Eliot’s, we’re as far apart as hell and heaven.13 Tolson embraced modernist verse as a fitting means for unleashing the black artist. The changing cultural landscape wrought by the civil rights movement demanded new techniques for displaying black art to a wider black and white US audience. He energetically parted ways with poets like Robert Hayden, who famously proclaimed that he “was a poet who happens to be black.” When both men sat on a panel at a writer’s conference at Fisk just four months before Tolson’s death from stomach cancer, Tolson thunderously rejected Hayden’s assertion. He countered, “I’m a black poet, an African-American poet, a Negro poet. I’m no accident—and I don’t give a tinker’s damn what you think.”14

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Tolson’s radical race politics did not, however, stop black critics from castigating Harlem Gallery or drive white scholars to teach it widely. Michael Bérubé’s comprehensive study of how Tolson’s work has been anthologized proves that although many white critics extolled Tolson’s work, they did not make sure it was widely published and studied. He explains Tolson’s failure “to cross over into the realm of ‘American’ as well as African-American academic recognition” as a consequence of this “anthologization effect.”15 The resulting dearth of serious work committed to Tolson’s verse has left many aspects of his poetry unexplored. His investment in humor has been virtually ignored. Scholars like Roy Basler insightfully applaud Tolson for his ability “to liberate the allusive, scholarly poetry Eliot created from the service of Eliot’s sterile tradition and philosophy . . . while embellishing it with large humor, to put it to use as a vehicle for his own ‘prospective’ view of human history,” but Tolson’s meaningful dependence upon humor and the freighted history of black laughter needs greater attention.16 I argue that as Harlem Gallery revolves around the conundrum of how a black critic might effectively support avantgarde black artists, humor functions as a cultural conduit between the black critic and the African American modernist artist. In other words, at a moment when black artists saw themselves at odds with the rarefied academic class, Tolson demonstrates how a shared cultural sensibility like humor keeps the black critic and artist not only connected but also dependent on one another for success.

Black Literature: No Laughing Matter By designating his principal poet speaker a curator in a museum, Tolson chooses the most unlikely of personalities in the most improbable of spaces to investigate the aesthetic value of African American humor. Over the course of the twenty-four cantos comprising Harlem Gallery, the Curator’s quandary about his role as a critic emerges through his uncertain relationship to humor and his desperate attempt to gain proper perspective of his cultural reservoir. Tolson highlights the tricky position humor holds in interactions between black scholars and artists as he examines the need for critics to understand the cultural nuances of the art they evaluate. Indeed, his turn to humor in Harlem Gallery signals his grasp of the complicated history black modernist artists inherited. The earliest US stereotypes of African Americans relied on comedic exaggeration, and black performance was regularly conflated with buffoonery. The black literary tradition emerged under the shadow of this reality. In Mel Watkins’s meticulous study of African American comedy, he traces the profound ways that humor, and more fundamentally laughter, came to define black humanity in the United States. Watkins recounts the disparaging view nineteenth-century mainstream writers—even in the more tolerant North—

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assumed toward black laughter. For instance, in their descriptions of black Americans in New York, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper demonstrate a similar contempt for African American mirth. Irving wonders at “the obstreperous peals of the broad-mouthed laughter of the Dutch negroes, who, like other negroes, are famous for their risible powers,” and Cooper marvels at the northern black Americans who “collected in thousands of . . . fields, beating banjoes, singing African songs, drinking, and worst of all, laughing in a way that seemed to set their hearts rattling within their ribs” (emphasis added).17 Against this backdrop, black writers pressed their texts into the service of rescuing the African American image by divorcing literary personalities from the laughing Sambo stereotype US popular culture projected upon all black Americans. Consequently, neither the poetry of the eighteenth century nor the slave narratives of the nineteenth century prominently featured comedic African Americans. In fact, beyond The Conjure Women (1899), Charles Chestnutt’s collection of short stories featuring the comical Uncle Julius, few serious African American literary works focused on humorous characters until the Harlem Renaissance. Black poets did, however, continue to struggle against expectations that they publish verse in dialect, a subtle reminder of the jovial Sambo image many Americans deemed the most accurate characterization of black humanity.18 Even when the confident writers of the New Negro movement began experimenting with humor in their 1920s work, many black leaders and cultural brokers frowned upon their subjects. Hurston, well aware of the misgivings leaders like Alain Locke and Du Bois harbored when it came to publishing literature spotlighting comic circumstances, attempted to defuse their anxiety by using her anthropological works to explain the complex nature of black laughter and humor. In Mules and Men (1935), she documents the subversive nature of black laughter that makes collecting black folk culture difficult: “The Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive.” When outsiders attempt to peer into their private cultural spaces, Hurston explains, the “Negro offers a feather-bed resistance. That is, [blacks] let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries.”19 Hurston’s perceptive explanation of black laughter did little to assuage the concerns of powerful African Americans who encouraged literary portrayals of black middle-class refinement to displace the minstrel images drilled into the US popular imagination. By the time Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) pronounced the “Negro’s cackling laugh” an “accommodation to class,” black leaders needed no further proof of the importance of eschewing comical subjects in serious African American literature.20 The emergence of protest realist literature that Wright ushered in with Native Son (1940) left little room for the black writers who dared to engage comedy in their work. When Ralph Ellison published Invisible Man in 1952, the discomfort surrounding African

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American humor in black literature was so deeply ingrained that white readers dared not laugh openly while enjoying a novel authored by a black man. Ellison mused, “I had white friends, sensitive readers, people who knew much of the world’s literature, reading my novel . . . and reacting as if it were against the law and in utter bad taste for a white reader to laugh at a black character in a ridiculous situation.”21 This history, and the harsh stigma associated with humorous black characters, made it difficult for cultural brokers to extol humor in African American literature. By the time Tolson began publishing, he was well aware of all sides of this argument, and he appears intent on diving into its messy middle. Harlem Gallery follows the Curator’s rumination over the appropriate function of a black art gallery, a quandary he confronts with the help of his philosophical friend and three black artists. In the end, he discovers the vital role of modernist art as well as the responsibility of those scholars sophisticated enough to support and publish it. Along the way, Tolson acknowledges both the danger and promise of engaging black humor, and through the Curator’s struggle, insists that readers deal with the challenge directly. I want to suggest that by forcing the Curator to discover the possibility of offering meaningful social criticism, promoting impressive black art, and maintaining a sense of humor, Tolson argues against the trend that called for divorcing humor from serious black writing. As the Black Arts Movement turned a harsh eye on comedic subjects, Tolson marched to a different beat.22 His creative disruption of a high-toned gallery with raucous laughter dramatizes his uniquely African American appeal to the high modernist form that so many of his critics accused him of aping without understanding.

A Philosopher’s Wit Within the world of Harlem Gallery, Doctor Obi Nkomo and Hideho Heights serve as the driving forces behind the Curator’s evolving attitude toward humor. Tolson devotes most of his energy to documenting his poet speaker’s uncertain conception of his position as a purveyor of art and champion of black modernist artists. Opposite the Curator’s fundamental question of whether his quest to publish black art is worth his efforts,23 Nkomo, his philosophical friend, and Hideho, his favorite artist, approach the conundrum of black avantgarde art from very different perspectives. Unlike the Curator, who berates himself for lacking sufficient courage and often hears the ringing laughter of judgment in his ears, Nkomo and Hideho put humor to good use as they join his contemplation of what black art needs to thrive. In order to discover his own talent, the Curator must move from aiming an abusive, disgusted wit at himself to understanding his importance to the promotion of great art. He begins Alpha with a desperate attempt to stir himself to action with a feeling of

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resolve, but he remains haunted by a fear of failure that taunts him in the form of laughter: As a Habletonian gathers his legs for a leap, Dead wool and fleece wool I have mustered up from hands now warm or cold: a full rich Indies’cargo; but often I hear a dry husk-of-locust blues descend the tone ladder of a laughing goose, syncopating between the faggot and the noose: “Black Boy, O Black Boy, is the port worth the cruise?” (209–10) For the Curator, the quandary of whether he possesses the temerity to perform his work with resolution and honor is complicated by his uncertainty about the merit of black art. As the question revolves in his mind, he hears a “blues” that descends like “a laughing goose,” and he adopts the derogatory term for black men in the South to question his endeavor: “O Black Boy,/is the port worth the cruise?” Tolson simultaneously introduces the title of Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy (1945), amid the white-fronted goose’s bluesy hilarity, thereby acknowledging Wright’s concerns about black humor even as he implies the impossibility of escaping the necessary laughter generated by African American music.24 Making little progress against his own insecurity, the Curator closes the canto with an escalating suspicion that he is the butt of a joke: Although the gaffing “Tò tí?” of the Gadfly girds the I-ness of my humanness and Negroness, the clockbird’s jackass laughter in sun, in rain, at dusk of dawn, mixes with the pepper bird’s reveille in my brain, where the plain is twilled and the twilled is plain. (210) His focus on his own complex humanity offers little relief to his mental jousting as he continues to hear the annoying “gaffing . . . Gadfly” and persistent “clockbird’s . . . laughter” mixed with the startling wake-up call of the pepper bird. Attempting to draw strength and confidence from the Gadfly’s Socratic question, he assesses the task before him—his desire to make his gallery a site of artistic innovation that deeply impacts the black community—through the

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unforgiving lens of his low self-esteem. But even as he judges himself harshly, the Curator retains a deep belief in the power of art to inspire individuals, and his own training as “an ex-professor of Art” (214) affords him a sophisticated understanding of this potential. He simply needs a different perspective, and he receives the first alternative from Nkomo. The Curator introduces Doctor Obi Nkomo in Eta as “the alter ego/of the Harlem Gallery,” and we immediately learn that Nkomo’s wry assessment of the Harlem ruling class differs markedly from the Curator’s posture toward this group. As he and Nkomo mull over the Harlem socialites and Regents who hold power over the gallery, Nkomo turns his sharp eye on his friend: He laughed down at me, a kidney without anchorage, and said: “You must see through the millstone, since you’re not like Julio Sigafoos and me— an ex-savage.” (236) Nkomo gently ribs the Curator, who is racially mixed and identifies as African American by choice, and suggests that he takes their discussions about art and culture too seriously, a result of his uncertain heritage. Silently agreeing, the Curator describes himself as a disconnected “kidney,” metaphorically imagining himself as an organ intended to maintain balance in the body by removing waste but unable to perform its job without the ureter, the necessary connector. The Curator wants to serve as a stabilizing agent between artists and the well-to-do patrons of the Harlem cultural body, but he has not discovered the confidence necessary to perform this role. Nkomo, however, offers relief, describing the complexity of African American history, so different from his unadulterated African heritage, as a “millstone” or difficult matter that the Curator must see beyond. Despite his playful posture, Nkomo pities the Curator’s difficult professional position and tangled ethnic heritage. The Curator, impressed by Nkomo’s confidence, believes his friend is the better man. But on the opening night of the gallery, he begins to question Nkomo’s ready laughter. Bowing dramatically and greeting the pretentious guests with a grinning “Aloha!,” Nkomo maintains a detached air of amusement (247). When Mr. Guy Delaporte III takes offense at John Laugart’s painting Black Bourgeoisie and threatens to make a scene, Nkomo is undisturbed and urges the Curator to laugh at the wealthy visitors who fail to comprehend the complexity of art: Dialectics? The midwife of reality. The cream separator of life. The sieve, Curator, of wheat and chaff.

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So, let our eyes, like Mohammed’s, disappear in the guise of a crocodile laugh! (256) For Nkomo, Delaporte’s response represents a necessary beginning of the process by which the naive begin to understand the more complex aspects of art. He interprets Delaporte’s angry confusion as the first step toward understanding for a man whose social status insulates him from wrestling with the complexities of life that Laugart’s masterpiece broaches. Nkomo counsels patience and a kind of condescending amusement.25 The Curator, however, is loath to adopt such an attitude. As he struggles to come to terms with his ethnic reality as well as how he might translate his understanding of art for the broader Harlem population, he renounces Nkomo’s philosophical disinterest: “A hurt sea dog, I cut his deck of metaphors:/‘On its shakedown cruise,/the Black Bourgeoisie runs aground/ on the bars of the Harlem Blues’” (256). The Curator views Nkomo’s logic as a shallow attempt to drape the tragedy of the black bourgeoisie’s rejection of great art—and their responsibility to the black community—under the soothing veil of “metaphors” or empty philosophy. Nkomo’s urbane response frustrates and saddens him, and he distinguishes his past from his friend’s in an effort to make sense of his refusal to adopt Nkomo’s mindset. He is a “sea dog” or time-tested sailor when it comes to the rough waters of African American culture, and he finds it painful to watch the trial voyage of the modernist painting fall victim to the Harlem attendees’ preconceived notions of art and black life. Upon discovering the painting in Laugart’s apartment, the Curator imagined Black Bourgeoisie would “wring from” the Harlem Gallery regents’ “babbitted souls a Jeremian cry” (228). He hoped powerful men like Delaporte would not simply be angered by the painting but inspired to mend their ways, to repent like the biblical Jeremiah. Their refusal to do so leaves him contemplating the larger implications of artistic failure. Nkomo, conversely, takes the long view, philosophically surmising that art impacts people slowly: “‘This work of art is the dry compound/fruit of the sand-box tree,/which bursts with a loud report/but scatters its seeds quietly’” (256). He counsels the Curator to consider Delaporte’s outburst as the “loud” response great art sometimes elicits when it first appears even as its deeper, more enduring impact settles less conspicuously upon its audience. Nkomo’s assessment is sound, but the Curator remains wary of his easy attitude. His refusal to laugh reveals both an immaturity and a noble seriousness that begs the question of how erudite African Americans should use humor as they strive to expand appreciation for black art. To achieve the correct balance, the Curator turns to an artist.

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The Bridge between Poet and Critic Hideho Heights, known as “the poet laureate of Lenox Avenue” and “the People’s Poet,” disrupts the gallery opening to offer the Curator yet another perspective (267, 335). Having just departed a jazz club, the favored site of the dynamic poet, Hideho bursts into the upscale gathering with his sardonic laughter and immediately challenges the Curator’s contribution to its pretentious atmosphere: “Hey, man, when you gonna close this dump? Fetch highbrow stuff for the middlebrows who don’t give a damn and the lowbrows who ain’t hip! Think you’re a little high-yellow Jesus?” No longer was I a boxer with a brain bruised against its walls by Tyche’s fists, as I welcomed Hideho Heights, the vagabond bard of Lenox Avenue, whose satiric legends adhered like beggar’s-lice. ... His belly laughed and quaked the Blakean tigers and lambs on the walls. (258) The Curator’s positive response to Hideho’s impudent entrance is curious. The poet not only derides his gallery and designates it a “dump,” but he also mocks the Curator’s professional goals, suggesting that he is impelled by selfrighteousness. Hideho accuses the Curator of pandering to the bourgeois set who lack aesthetic judgment but possess the financial wherewithal to support him. At the same time, Hideho indicts him for taking advantage of unsophisticated lower class visitors. Denouncing him for imagining himself a “high-yellow Jesus,” the poet hints that the Curator’s messianic delusion also reflects an unseemly pride in his light-skinned appearance. Nevertheless, the Curator “welcome[s] Hideho Heights,” and credits the poet with relieving him from his internal jousting. Hideho’s irreverent laughter and cultural confidence promise the ex-art professor a new way of conceiving of his work as a critic. Unlike Dr. Nkomo, who draws on his African heritage and intellectualism to shape his worldview and understanding of art, Hideho unapologetically grounds his artistry in African American culture: The metal smelted from the ore of ideas, his grin revealed all the gold he had stored away. “Just came from a jam session At the Daddy-O Club,” he said. “I’m just one step from heaven with the blues a-percolating in my head. You should’ve heard old Satchmo blow his horn! . . .” (258–59)

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His contagious “grin” that bespeaks the “gold he had stored away”—a clear reference to both his gold-toothed smile and deep stores of black cultural experience—attracts the Curator, who has not learned to trust the importance of his unique experiences nor his distinctive ethnic legacy. Although he holds a doctoral degree, has traveled the world, and possesses a catholic knowledge of visual art, the Curator remains uncomfortable with his role as a critic and associate of the Harlem elites. Then again, he feels insecure about his passion for art and belief in the working black artist. In striking contrast, Hideho boldly announces the location of his inspirational goldmine when he declares the sanctity of black art in the person of Louis Armstrong, whom he fondly refers to as “Satchmo.” He wastes no time ruminating over the state of African American art; instead, Hideho immediately strives to put his belief in black verse into action. Armstrong’s blues, performed in the communal atmosphere of a “jam session/at the Daddy-O Club,” pay immediate creative dividends for Hideho, who promptly shares the fruits of such a space: “Like a bridegroom unloosing a virgin knot,/from an inner pocket he coaxed a manuscript./‘Just give Satchmo a one-way ticket/to Immortality,’ he said. ‘Pure inspiration!’” (259). Hideho reserves his reverence for the process of creative productivity. His attitude, however, seamlessly mixes a sense of humor with his professed veneration. Unlike the self-important Delaporte, who sanctimoniously and hilariously declares, “God knows I love pictures!” in an effort to perform his cultural sophistication, Hideho strives to demonstrate the authentic power of art even when it is attached to a comedic performer like Armstrong (309). The Curator’s description of Hideho producing his latest poem with the seriousness, adoration, and unexpected tentativeness of a bridegroom reveals his sharp critical eye. The tenderness that the Curator discerns attests to Hideho’s sincerity, a striking contrast to the other gallery opening attendees. What is more, the poet’s swaggering entrance cannot conceal his commitment to performing his poem for the gallery crowd, his desire to broaden his sphere of influence beyond the Harlem nightclub scene. Yet Hideho’s attempt to expand his audience does not prompt him to deny his cultural roots. Nor is he willing to adopt the pompous air of the Harlem bourgeois. His declaration that Armstrong serves as “pure inspiration” signals the way he hopes to combine humor with serious artistic production. For while Armstrong’s big grin defined his stage look, his virtuosic skill distinguished his artistry. The poem Hideho shares at the gallery opening extols blues greats of the past whom he credits for Armstrong’s artistic birth and success. By transforming King Oliver, Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton, Papa Handy, and Leadbelly from blues performers to artistic progenitors, he suggests that Armstrong’s musical genius keeps their music alive and relevant. What is more, Hideho reveals the expansive nature of the legendary trumpeter’s artistic inheritance. He pronounces figures from Wyatt Earp to John Henry—white and black legends alike—as competitive influences for Armstrong’s artistic

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heroism. With a bit of tongue and cheek, Tolson celebrates Armstrong’s musical genius while he also addresses his contemporaries who maligned Armstrong as insufficiently serious and too ready to entertain white audiences with minstrel behavior. Hideho unequivocally proclaims the trumpeter’s greatness and uses the black elite’s opinion of Armstrong as a barometer to assess their aesthetic sophistication. If the Harlem bourgeois cannot appreciate Armstrong’s music, do they possess the wherewithal to judge great art? As Hideho concludes his poem, he offers a case in point. Although his verse is not difficult in metaphors or form, like John Laugart’s Black Bourgousie that riles the artistically dense Guy Delaporte III, Hideho’s poem challenges the most powerful class in Harlem. He contrasts his personal reverence for Armstrong’s music with the gallery attendees’ likely contempt: Old Satchmo’s gravelly voice and tapping foot and crazy notes set my soul on fire. If I climbed the seventy-seven steps of the Seventh Heaven, Satchmo’s high C would carry me higher! Are you hip to this, Harlem? Are you hip? (260; Italics in the original) By intertwining his acknowledgment of Armstrong’s impact on his own creativity with his incredulous inquiry about Harlem highbrows’ aesthetic taste, Hideho slyly indicts the gallery crowd for refusing to embrace his own work. They fail to comprehend the fullness of Armstrong’s music just as they fail to appreciate Hideho’s newly minted verses. The Harlem elite are manifestly not hip to the power of black art, particularly art laced with cultural humor. Hideho’s celebration of Armstrong also announces his refusal to trade his jovial artistic persona for the stiff-backed demeanor of the Harlem upper crust. Even his name asserts his dedication to retaining a sense of humor rooted in African American art. The jazz musician Cab Calloway, who became known as “The Hi De Ho Man” after the chorus of his famous song, “Minnie the Moocher,” was not only mentored by Armstrong but was also known for performing with comedic verve. A master of scat singing and impressive dancing, Calloway’s band grew from being a popular mainstay of the Cotton Club during the 1930s to breaking down color barriers in films and shows throughout the nation. Nevertheless, his pioneering role did not sit well with all African Americans, who questioned whether his wide smiling performances truly advanced a respectable image of black Americans on the national stage. Tolson invokes Calloway’s sometimes controversial reputation through Hideho whose very name reenacts the jazzman’s famous call-and-response verse at the heart of his most popular song. Indeed, readers are clearly intended to recall Calloway’s exuberant vocals and frenetic dancing upon reading Hideho’s name. Calloway’s grinning, head-shaking performance carried by his energetic singing that

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demanded his audience participate in the African American call-and-response tradition became a national sensation in black and white spaces alike. With his name serving as a stark reminder of Calloway’s successful appeal to diverse audiences, Hideho’s unsuccessful performance at the gallery starkly highlights the elite crowd’s lack of taste and singles out the Curator’s bridge-building possibilities. Hideho understands the power of African American humor, but he has not figured out how to use it profitably in promoting his work. For that he needs the Curator’s critical expertise.

The Critic’s Smile Hideho’s failure to rouse the gallery crowd does not hinder the Curator from perceiving the poet’s aesthetic perspicacity. He intuitively senses that somewhere between Dr. Nkomo’s knowing wit and Hideho’s performative jesting lies the path toward understanding how humor might contribute to his promotion of black modernist art. The opening cantos prove that the Curator is not above poking fun at his rarefied experiences and ethnic complexity, but his self-derision impedes his ability to exploit his education and cultural exposure, distinctions that position him to make a special contribution to the world of art. He devotes a good deal of energy throughout the ode to bewailing the plight of the critic and bemoaning his lack of agency, and to a certain extent, his lament serves as an extension of his distress over the state of the modern African American artist. His sincere distress has not, however, rendered him a more effective advocate for black artists and their work. Although their methods are different, Nkomo and Hideho both suggest that the obstacle separating the Curator from truly nurturing and promoting black art is his inability to comprehend the potential of humor for changing his conception of his professional identity and his relationship to modern artists. Nkomo’s detection of the Curator’s extreme solemnity inspires his musings on the difference between the African’s clear-eyed view of the world and the Western black man’s insistence upon making things unnecessarily complex: (Eagles dying of hunger with cocks in their claws!) That rebel jukebox! Hear the ghetto’s dark guffaws that defy Manhattan’s Bible Belt! Aeons separate my native veld and your peaks of philosophy: (238) Notwithstanding his education, Nkomo retains a basic sense of scale in the world that never confuses what is truly significant with that which philosophers declare important. While elite African Americans—potential eagles according to Nkomo—suffer from feelings of hunger amid abundance, the less-educated urban dwellers laugh with “dark guffaws” that flout the rarefied ruminations

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of philosophers. The mass’s ability to retain a humorous outlook sustains and fortifies them. Subtly agreeing with Hideho, Nkomo declares black musicians, who are often products of such a mindset, the true “rebel[s]” who refuse to pipe down no matter the airs of the self-important Manhattan crowd. Hideho draws a similar conclusion about his art-loving friend, and jokes, “Yonder Curator has a lean and hungry look;/he thinks too much” (266). His reference to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar hints at the certain tragedy of the Curator’s ambition if he fails to understand his position. The Curator, Hideho chuckles, risks having his dreams defeated if he fails to comprehend the battle he engages on behalf of modern black art. Both the poet and the philosopher, comfortable in their own skin, encourage the Curator to wise up and also lighten up. But even as the Curator recognizes the perils of his personal and professional insecurity, he remains wary of the dangers associated with misplaced humor. At the gallery opening, he responds to Nkomo’s calm amusement with a cutting assessment of the privileged position he and his friend share. The Curator suggests that African Americans have existed so long without great art that when he offers works of poor quality instead of daring to provoke those men in powerful positions, no one complains: “The chef, I, mixes black and yellow and red/images, leaves You at the table with brown bread” (257). In other words, when he and Nkomo make light of the poor aesthetic taste displayed by the Harlem bourgeois, they abdicate their duty of introducing serious art to the masses. Thus, the Curator confesses, “My humor is ill” (257). Likewise, when he accompanies Hideho to the Zulu Club, the poet’s creative stomping ground, the Curator recognizes the latent menace lurking beneath the conviviality of the club scene while Hideho initially discerns only a good time and communal support.26 His performance of John Henry, a folktale familiar and beloved by his audience, invites the call-and-response Hideho deeply admires in jazz greats like Calloway. But unlike Calloway’s masterful skat singing that eventually excluded his audience from participating and forced them to acknowledge his superior artistry, Hideho’s poetry is ultimately usurped by his audience under the guise of good fun. The Curator, apparently alone in his earnest desire to support Hideho’s creativity rather than promote himself, recognizes the obstacle thwarting the catharsis Hideho and his listeners seek. He describes Hideho’s voice as that of “the Laughing Philosopher’s,” but the Curator peers beyond the poet’s façade: “In spite of the mocker’s mask,/I saw Hideho/as a charcoal Piute Messiah/ at a ghetto/ghost dance” (269). Hideho’s jovial persona cannot hide his deep hope that his poetry, and its communal legacy, will genuinely impact his audience. But like the Paiute nation who embraced Wovoka’s teaching that the Plains Indians would eventually rule the earth after the passing of white men and therefore behaved with “a certain recklessness in their conflicts with whites,” Hideho displays a lack of judgment in his performance.27 What begins as a healthy, symbiotic exchange between artist and audience quickly

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devolves into individual members of the audience attempting to dominate Hideho’s performance. As the evening turns increasingly raucous, the Curator observes, “The hilarity of the Zulu Club Wits/(unconsecrated like blessed bread)/grows as public as the paeans of Artemis” (275). Their “hilarity” in no way constructively contributes to Hideho’s creative process or the audience’s communal sustenance; instead, it represents the club attendees’ egotistical selfpromotion. In glaring contrast to the way poets like Sterling Brown recount the communal release blues singers like Ma Rainey aroused, Hideho’s performance ends in his collapse and his audience’s empty revelry.28 By the night’s end, even Hideho recognizes the dangerous underbelly of a collective creative space turned self-seeking. Mixing a favorite black lament with Christ’s dying words on the cross, Hideho “slobbers and sobs/,‘My people,/my people—/they know not what they do’” (282). In the space of the club, humor exploits rather than benefits artistic creation. The Zulu Club debacle inspires the Curator with new resolve. As he ruminates over the plight of two other black artists who ultimately fail to launch successful careers with their modernist works, he discovers the careful balance he must strike in turning to humor. He appreciates how his understanding of black culture and humor enables him to form and maintain intimate relationships with black artists, whereas his intellect allows him to contribute conscientiously to their development and exposure. In other words, his willingness to laugh with Hideho does not compromise his dedication to supporting the poet’s development as long as he simultaneously works to expand the cultural experience of Harlem dwellers across class lines. The Curator rejects Nkomo’s patient derision but he concurs with his friend’s contention regarding the eventual efficacy of art. He simply needs to find the right balance for his humor and passion for art. His return to contemplating the plight of the black artist leads him closer to adjusting his scales effectively. As he prepares to launch into an extended contemplation of “Black Boy,” he proclaims in an imagistic “I,” I join the great laughers . . . Gogol . . . . . . Dickens . . . . . . Rabelais . . in the black world of white Manhattan. (324) The Curator aligns himself with artists whose writing offered sharp social criticism even as humor claimed center stage in their work. Unlike Richard Wright and black writers who believed responsible art could not afford to mix humor with its presentation of US race relations, Tolson aligns the Curator with writers who meld their crusade for social issues with a high sense of comedy to great effect. The difference, of course, is that while the Curator adopts the disposition of “great laughers” who hail from Western cultural ideas of comedy,

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the humor he uses to form intimate relationships with black artists is distinctly African American. The spaces in which he communes with artists, the subjects he discusses, and the art they eventually produce all bear the distinct marks of black cultural experience.

Constructive Laughter The Curator’s access to the complex heritage of black humor results in his successful support of Hideho’s artistic development. After repeated poetic misfires and disappointments, Hideho finally prepares to deliver his tour-de-force poem, and the Curator is ready to assist him: My blab-blab-blab was a dip to free his sheep of vermin and scab: ... To Hideho Heights, at that moment in the throe of creation, I was a half-white egghead with maggots on the brain. I ate my crow, for the unconscious of the artist cannot say to itself No. (329) The Curator, fully cognizant of the emptiness pervading the philosophical talk preceding Hideho’s moment of inspiration, subordinates himself to the poet’s creative needs. His “blab-blab-blab” becomes the cleanser that unleashes Hideho’s artistry from the infected notions of authenticity that too often suffocate black art. The Curator’s awareness that Hideho converts their banter into a productive instance of call-and-response that operates as a kind of inside joke attests to his growing understanding of how literary criticism might be enhanced by humor. Their playful conversation does not weigh down Hideho’s creativity but rather inspires it. Thus, even though the Curator perceives Hideho’s exploitative posture, he readily subjects himself to serve as the poet’s imaginative fodder. He realizes that their intimate jesting, even when not explicitly acknowledged, provides just the creative platform Hideho needs. The poem Hideho crafts and performs within the space of the Zulu tavern reflects a new artistic confidence and communal relevance without compromising originality. His subject of the sea-turtle and the shark—in which the weaker turtle is swallowed whole by the shark only to gnaw “his way to freedom” through the shark’s stomach—achieves what Hideho’s previous verses have not: it speaks directly, powerfully, and uniquely to the black men in the tavern (331). After hearing Hideho’s poem, the Jamaican bartender

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exclaims: “God knows, Hideho, you got the low-down/on the black turtle and the white shark,” at once racializing and personalizing the poet’s verse (332). The bartender proceeds to recount his service for Great Britain in the Second World War and the pain he felt when “white Churchill” read “If We Must Die” by “black Claude McKay” without acknowledging McKay’s authorship (332). Upon hearing his heartfelt response, both the Curator and Hideho appreciate the power of the poet’s words, and Hideho is further inspired to reveal his creative process. In what the Curator describes as a “Promethean gesture,” Hideho proclaims: “‘Everybody has a private gallery’” (333). He recognizes the power and beauty reverberating within individual experiences that his verse eloquently articulates. His audience need not participate directly in the performance of his work in order for his words to engender the cultural release his listeners seek. Hideho no longer depends on an inside joke to make his art relevant. The artist is responsible for finding new words to give voice to modern feelings, and the literary critic must be willing to explain those words to an audience that may not grasp the fullness of their meaning. The Curator, reflecting on the trap the critical world often sets for black artists, embraces a new posture toward Hideho who comes to represent the persevering modernist African American artist: Poor Boy Blue, the Great White World and the Black Bourgeoisie have shoved the Negro artist into the white and not-white dichotomy, the Afroamerican dilemma in the Arts— the dialectic of to be or not to be a Negro. (336) All joking aside, the Curator faces the reality of Hideho’s predicament and takes pity on him. Why should African American artists be forced to choose between producing art recognized as authentically black or be deemed desirous of white approval? And why do the black bourgeois and black masses join hands with white critics in making this demand?29 The Curator, whose training, appearance, and position grant him access to both worlds, vows to free Hideho from the strictures of this dialectic imposed upon his creativity. Consequently, when he discovers Hideho’s poem “in the modern idiom,/a poem called E. & O. E./(A sort of Pasternakian secrecy . . .),” he sympathizes with the poet instead of condemning him for showing one face to his adoring fans even as he hides his flexible artistic instincts from public view (336).30 What is more, the Curator’s sympathy arises from the painful knowledge that he has failed more spectacularly as a critic, muting his support for artists who dare to defy the expectations of powerful patrons of art.

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But unlike his acknowledgment of his past failures, the Curator’s final admission rests upon newfound assurance of his cultural legitimacy. The proof of his constructive laughter, his helpful participation in the humorous exchanges Hideho needs to fuel his creativity, gives the Curator new confidence. His friendship with the poet rests on the sturdy foundation of shared humor that suggests new possibilities for both the artist and critic. Thus, in his closing canto, the Curator divulges a revised sense of his critical prospects: I confess without regret in this omega of my education: I no longer have the force of a gilbert, nor have I ever had the levitation to sustain a work of art. I have only pilgrimed to the cross street (a godsend in God’s acre) Where curator and creator meet— friend yoked to friend at the candle end. (360) How, Tolson asks through the learned ruminations of his speaker, can humor be off-limits for black artists when it so often acts as the cultural glue that holds people together? His Curator’s ironic smile recognizes the payoff of learning to laugh with Hideho rather than solely at himself. Although he concedes his weakness when it comes to creating art, he remains encouraged by the lessons he learns during his journey with Hideho. He claims new agency for his gallery even as he keeps “half an eye” on “the Great White World,/where,/at the crack of doom,/potbellies bellylaugh” (361). Instead of worrying that the joke is on him, the Curator exhibits faith in his cultural knowledge that gives him special insight into US history. His ethnic mélange and wide-ranging aesthetic appreciation endow him with the élan that understands the African American capacity to enjoy a “bellylaugh” when others would fear “doom.” The Curator now recognizes such laughter as a sign of cultural sophistication and strength, and he revels in his vision of a gallery that serves the special needs of African Americans. With the help of Doctor Nkomo and Hideho Heights, he embraces the constructive power of laughing in the gallery.

Notes 1 Melvin B. Tolson, The Harlem Group of Negro Writers, ed. Edward Mullen (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 136.

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2 In “How Bigger Was Born,” Wright declared that the reviews of his short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children shaped his attitude toward the creation of Bigger: “I realized that I had made an awfully naive mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.” 3 For a comprehensive discussion of Tolson’s literary reputation, see Michael Bérubé’s “Chapter 3: Tolson’s Neglect: African-American of Modernism and Its Representations,” in Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 133–206. 4 In addition to Bérubé’s masterful overview, Aldon Nielson cogently examines the relationship between Tolson’s black critics and white reviewers. See “Melvin B. Tolson and the Deterritorialization of Modernism,” African American Review 26, no. 2 (summer 1992): 241–55. Rita Dove also convincingly makes this argument in “Telling It Like It I-S ‘IS’: Narrative Techniques in Melvin Tolson’s ‘Harlem Gallery,’” New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly 8, no. 1 (autumn 1985): 109–17. 5 Melvin Tolson, Harlem Gallery (New York: Twayne, 1965), 12. 6 Rita Dove includes Fabio’s quotation in her introduction to Harlem Gallery and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson, ed. Raymond Nelson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), XVIII. 7 Ibid., XIX. 8 Quoted in Bérubé, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers, 144. 9 For instance, in a 1943 “Caviar and Cabbage” column, his well-known weekly published in the Washington Tribune from 1937 to 1944, Tolson acknowledged: “Some people say the language of my poetry is very different from the language of ‘Caviar and Cabbage.’ Well, when you go to a formal ball of the Big Boys, you have to put on evening clothes . . . A woman doesn’t cook cabbage in her Sunday best. In ‘Caviar and Cabbage’ I try to be so simple that only a Howard professor can tell I am a professor.” His joking remarks reveals his belief that a “Howard professor” will possess the wherewithal to unearth the hidden meaning of his words, ideas less-educated readers might miss. In other words, he imagined black critics alone would be privy to the deepest implications of his writing. See Caviar and Cabbage: Selected Columns from the Washington Tribune, 1937–1944, ed. Robert Farnsworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982), 271. 10 In “The Odyssey of a Manuscript” Tolson recalled the heated environment Hughes’s poem ignited: “I had defended his constitutional and literary right to write as he pleased, when he published that sensational powem ‘Goodbye, Christ,’ which created a tempest of indignation in Black America and a thousand mass meetings. . . . Writers in the Negro press denounced me as a corrupter of youth. . . . I was puzzled, hurt.” See New Letters (fall 1981), 12. 11 The 2007 biopic film The Great Debators, starring Denzel Washington, tells the story of the legendary success of the Wiley debate team under Tolson’s leadership. 12 Quoted in Bérubé, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers, 64, 69. 13 Robert Farnsworth, Melvin B. Tolson, 1898–1966 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), 145. 14 Ibid., 297.

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15 Bérubé, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers, 184. 16 Roy Basler, “The Heart of Darkness—M.B. Tolson’s Poetry,” New Letters 39, no. 3 (March 1973), 68. 17 Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 16, 17. 18 Paul Laurence Dunbar publically lamented the popular expectation that he pen verses in dialect and blamed William Dean Howells, who extolled Dunbar’s dialect poems, for unfairly limiting his career. 19 Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008), 2–3. 20 See Watkins, On the Real Side, 17. 21 Ibid., 428. 22 There are, of course, exceptions. For example, Ismael Reed’s hard-hitting satires were well received. 23 Keith Leonard’s reading of Harlem Gallery thoughtfully examines the central question of whether “the port is worth the cruise” by arguing that the Curator’s transformation represents the “constitution of the ‘intelligent mind’” and proves how “elitist ideals of art . . . can effectively be married to the folk heritage and social purpose of African American literary culture.” Although he draws a different conclusion about the Curator and Hideho Heights’ relationship, Leonard offers an important analysis to consider against my argument. See Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 227, 226. 24 Raymond Nelson also notes Wright’s use of “Black Boy.” He proceeds to explain that Tolson used the term “as a generic form of address to his audience in the columns on social issues he wrote for the Washington Tribune.” See Harlem Gallery, 371. 25 Ibid., 405. Nelson explains that “imitating Mohammed would . . . be a restrained or deceptive laugh.” 26 Craig Werner makes a similar argument about the “potential problem of a call-and-response dynamic” enacted in the Zulu Club. See “Blues for T. S. Eliot and Langston Hughes: The Afro-Modernist Aesthetic of Harlem Gallery,” Black American Literature Forum 24, no. 3 (autumn 1990): 461. 27 Nelson, Harlem Gallery, 417. 28 See Sterling Brown’s “Ma Rainey” (1932). 29 Aldon Nielsen forcefully reveals the difficulty Tolson faced as black critics like Fabio were joined by white critics like Laurence Lieberman in their critique that Tolson’s language was inaccessible to black readers. See “Melvin B. Tolson and the Deterritorialization of Modernism,” 243. 30 Michael Bérubé and Keith Leonard offer compelling readings that interpret the Curator as closely aligned with Tolson and therefore highly critical of Hideho. See Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers, 118–32, and Fettered Genius, 240–51.

Chapter 5 P O E T RY A N D G O O D H UM O R : M A R IA N N E M O O R E   A N D E L I Z A B E T H B I SHOP Hugh Haughton

Irony and humor are the great inventions of the modern spirit. —Octavio Paz1

1 Speaking of Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore wrote, “One’s humor is based upon the most serious part of one’s nature.”2 In “The Pangolin,” moreover, she observed, “Among animals, one has a sense of humor” and that “humor saves a few steps, it saves years.”3 “Humor,” like “cheerfulness,” is a serious word for Moore, and one of her unlikely gifts is a modernist good humor (in more than one sense). It involves an ability to combine intense aesthetic and ethical ambition with a distinctive wit and equanimity. Something similar might be said of her younger friend Elizabeth Bishop, for all their many differences of belief, temperament, and lifestyle. I don’t think there is a single poem by either, however serious or troubling their subject, that doesn’t make the reader (or at least this reader) smile at some point, and think “how funny!” This is true even though both poets are also acutely aware of the limits of the comic. Moore’s “The Wood-Weasel,” for example, begins by describing how it “emerges daintily, the skunk -/don’t laugh—in sylvan black and white chipmunk/ regalia.” However, though it counters the stereotypically dismissive comic associations of the skunk and so-called wood-weasel with that “don’t laugh,” at its close the poem establishes a different valuation of humor, saying “this same weasel’s playful and his weasel/associates are too.”4 This is certainly true of Moore, who is never less than playful. In her “associate” Bishop’s humorous and good-humored poem “Manuelzinho,” an exasperated portrait of “the world’s worst gardener since Cain,” the poet reproves herself for laughing at him in his painted green hat, saying, “Unkindly,/I called you Klorophyll Kid./My visitors thought it was funny./I apologize here and now.”5 The apology doesn’t

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detract from the joke, however; it only complicates it. Even her subsequent mortification has a comic as well as ethically corrective effect: “You helpless, foolish man,/I love you all I can,/I think. Or do I?” In other words, humor is not only a question of local effects but also connected with larger and deeper questions, a recognition of the inherently comic dimension of being human and the balancing acts this involves. This is as true of small things as of big, and questions of scale matter in their work quite as much as questions of travel. Before looking in more detail at Moore and Bishop, I want to think about what might be at stake in what Moore calls “one’s humor,” glancing at a couple of modern commentators on the subject. Humor was something Moore’s older contemporary Sigmund Freud also took seriously. In his 1928 essay “Humor” he speaks of “the humorous attitude” that people adopt toward their difficulties and the tonic effects this has on their audience. Taking the example of a man joking before execution “Well, this is a good beginning to the week,” he goes on to argue that “the essence of humor is that one spares oneself the affects to which the situation would naturally give rise and overrides with a jest the possibility of such an emotional display.”6 “Like wit and the comic,” he says, “humor has in it a liberating element”; it signifies the “triumph of the pleasure principle which is strong enough to assert itself in the face of adverse real circumstances.” In Freud’s picture, where wit and the comic (as explored in On Jokes of 1905) depend on the contribution of the unconscious, humor works through the agency of the otherwise severe superego. It generates a pleasure in self-overcoming that also paradoxically endorses our primary narcissism, our refusal to give in to the reality principle. For Freud this meant that the pleasure derived from humor, though “not as intense as that derived from the comic,” has a “higher value,” a “peculiarly liberating and elevating effect.” In giving the superego a role, Freud brings a potentially ethical and critical dimension into play, even if acting in the service of a narcissistic pleasure principle. It is this wrestle between self-serving and self-critical impulses which complicates most accounts of the comic, including Simon Critchley’s On Humor (2002). Takings his bearings from Freud and others, Critchley argues that “humor is a form of sensus communis, common sense,” a “distinctively modern notion” which he links to the “rise of the democratic public sphere.” According to him, “Jokes are the expressions of sociality and possess an implicit reasonableness.”7 This means that “the eccentricities of humor light up the eccentricity of the human situation,” making humor “one of the conditions for taking up a critical position with respect to what passes for everyday life, producing a change in our situation which is both liberating and captivating, showing all too clearly the capture of a human being in the nets of nature.”8 Quoting Henk Driessen’s claim that “anthropology shares with humor the basic strategy of defamiliarization” whereby “common sense is disrupted,” Critchley asserts that “the comedian is the anthropologist of our humdrum everyday lives.”9 For him, as for Freud, “humor,” which he sees as built upon the smile, is ethically (and aesthetically) preferable to comedy, which is based upon the

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laugh. As an instance, he quotes Beckett’s 1945 report from bomb-torn postwar France, where he celebrates “that smile at the human conditions as little to be extinguished by bombs as to be broadened by the elixirs of Burroughs and Welcome—the smile deriding, among other things, the having and the not having, the giving and the taking, sickness and health.”10 His study leaves us with a view of humor as a complex survival strategy, a way of dealing with contradictions between personal and social life, body and mind, human and natural that involves stepping back and distancing oneself from immediate emotional involvement or a fixed investment in any one position. He makes one wonder about the “sense” of a “sense of humor” and ponder the relationship between having a “good sense of humor” and “good humor” of the kind you find in Moore and Bishop. In terms of poetry, there is a case for saying that the humorous dimension of poetry, having been rerouted into the separate category of comic verse during the later nineteenth century, flowed back into the mainstream in the early twentieth, becoming an important element in the work of major poets like T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, and Wallace Stevens as it had been in earlier years for Byron, Pope, or Donne. Something comparable could be said of twentieth-century music and painting. With Satie, Stravinsky, Ravel, Poulenc, Cage, and others, humor became as important resource in musical language as it had been in the age of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, while with Picasso, Paul Klee, the Dadaists, and Hannah Höch, humor and the harlequinade of comedy came to play a major role in the decomposition and re-composition of the visual field of modern painting.11 In The Symbolist Movement in Literature, published at the start of the new century, Arthur Symons proclaimed, apropos Laforgue, that “the old cadences, the old eloquence, the ingenuous seriousness of poetry, are all banished, on a theory as self-denying as that which permitted Degas to dispense with recognisable beauty in his figures.”12 Laforgue, Symons said, “composes love-poems, hat in hand,” “smiles with an exasperated tolerance before all the transformations of the eternal feminine,” and “thinks intensely about life, seeing what is automatic, pathetically ludicrous in it, almost as one might who has had no part in the comedy.”13 Comedy and thinking intensely about life go hand in hand here with a critique of “the ingenuous seriousness of poetry.” Symons offers a foretaste of Eliot’s Laforgueian Prufrock, but he also anticipates a larger shift in the poetic climate of the twentieth century, heralding a move away from romanticism and the sublime “in the old sense,” and intimating a sense of the comic incongruity between earlier styles of “eloquence” and a self-mocking awareness (“hat in hand”) of poetry under modern conditions. You find a comparable humorous dimension much later in the poetry of the New York School, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery, serious avant-garde poets who emerged from the overcoat of Dadaism but kept a foothold in metropolitan “Camp.” In this chapter, I want to suggest that humor is an integral dimension of the work of two of the most influential modern American women poets, Marianne

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Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, neither of whom had any truck with the “eternal feminine” but have some kinship with one of the great feminine founders of modernism, Gertrude Stein. All three writers have a sense of humor which, while not exactly “Camp” or coterie-oriented, could be thought of as equally queer (in many senses), linking back to Emily Dickinson and on to Kay Ryan. In a letter to Moore of 1953, Bishop recommends Huizinga’s Homo Ludens as a book she thinks Moore would like, and there is a sense in which all three writers might be thought of in terms of Mulier Ludens. Moore and Bishop make a familiar pairing, but few bar Maureen McLane in her brilliant 2012 exploratory homage to predecessors entitled My Poets, have associated them with Stein.14 Both wrote about Stein, however, albeit briefly, and Stein’s astonishing authorial identity might offer a useful prelude to discussing them in this context. In Everybody’s Autobiography Stein wrote, “And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.”15 Whether writing about everybody’s autobiography or in Tender Buttons of everyday objects, Stein brought a comic ordinariness to everything she wrote, as when she said of herself in the third person in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: “She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and arresting.”16 After the publication of Tender Buttons unleashed a flood of parodies in the newspapers, she reports writing to the editor of Life to say that “the real Gertrude Stein was as Henry McBride had pointed out funnier in every way than the imitations, not so say much more interesting, and why did they not print the original.”17 It might be said that, for all her dislike of the abnormal, Stein also embodied it as a very public and “original” Lesbian at the heart of Parisian avantgarde, and new kind of “genius.” Her work certainly set about redefining the relationship between the normal and abnormal as well as between the serious and the comic. Moore told Bryher that “Gertrude Stein for all her strangeness is inspiring” and wrote of “the precisely perplexing verbal exactness” of Tender Buttons, a work where it is impossible to distinguish the humorously playful from the searchingly serious.18 Moore could have been talking of herself in talking of “precisely perplexing verbal exactness” and inspiring “strangeness.” Bishop wrote with more wary but equally humorous appreciation of Stein in “Time’s Andromedas,” an essay on modernist narrative time. There she wrote that Stein’s “characters are turned slowly on an enormous wheel, like so many St Catherines, and for a while both they and the readers are fooled into thinking they’re getting somewhere.”19

2 Like Stein in Paris and T. S. Eliot in London, Moore definitely got somewhere in New York. She played a highly visible role as literary editor of The Dial, helping

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mobilize and redefine American modernism (William Carlos Williams likened her to a “rafter holding up the superstructure” like “a caryatid”).20 In one of her commentaries in The Dial Moore appropriated a phrase from T. S. Eliot’s great essay on “Andrew Marvell” when she said of him: “T.S. Eliot often recalls to us, the verbal parquetry of Donne, exemplifying that wit which he defines as ‘a tough reasonableness under . . . lyric grace.’”21 Her remark might make us wonder about the relationship between the two poets’ notions of wit. Moore’s mention of “parquetry” adds a touch of her shiny surface polish to Eliot’s account of Marvell’s “wit” as “a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace,” and she wittily reapplies Eliot’s phrase to Donne and Eliot himself.22 In a later essay she notes that Eliot’s “epitomes and hypotheses are in their inherent equilibrium, detaining,” though she confesses that she enjoys an image Eliot deemed “undesirable,” that of Marvell’s fishermen who “like the Antipodes in shoes,/Have shod their heads in their canoes.” You can see why Moore might have particularly relished Marvell’s image, with its startling combination of deadpan incongruity and mock-pedantry. Nevertheless though she takes issue with Eliot’s disparagement of the “Antipodes in shoes,” she silently recycles his account of “wit’s inherent equilibrium,” and her approbation of Eliot’s account of the “alliance of levity and seriousness” in Marvell tells us something about her own brand of wit. This is how Eliot originally defined his23: With our eye still on Marvell, we can say that wit is not erudition; it is sometimes stifled by erudition, as in much of Milton. It is not cynicism, though it has a kind of toughness which may be confused with cynicism by the tender-minded. . . . It is confused with cynicism because it implies a constant inspection and criticism of experience. It involves, probably, a recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience that are possible, which we find clearly in the greatest as in poets like Marvell.24 What Eliot says of Marvell applies marvelously to Moore. Her poetry involves “constant inspection and criticism of experience” as well as a bracing recognition that “other kinds of experience are possible.” In fact Eliot’s word “inspection” occurs in Moore’s paradigmatic 1919 poem “Poetry” as she imagines poets as “literalists of the imagination” who “can present/for inspection, ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’” (PMM, 135). Inspecting real toads in imaginary gardens is not quite the same as Eliot’s inspection of “experience” but is a characteristic instance of her ability to bring together apparently incommensurate kinds of experience and apparently incongruous categories of perception for witty scrutiny in a poem. Reviewing Moore’s Observations in The Dial in 1923, Eliot relished her relationship to humor. In particular he celebrated her “satirical (consciously or unconsciously it does not matter) refinement of that pleasantry (not flippancy, which is something with a more definite purpose) of speech which characterizes

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the American language, that pleasantry, uneasy, solemn, or self-conscious, which inspires both the jargon of the laboratory and the slang of the comic strip.”25 Eliot’s laborious hesitation as to whether Moore’s tone is “consciously or unconsciously” satirical suggests some condescension or unease in the face of Moore’s stance. Nevertheless he noted that “Moore works this uneasy language of stereotypes . . . with impeccable skill into her pattern,” giving some telling instances of her fastidious vocabulary (including “fractional,” “infinitesimal,” and “vestibule of experience”). Eliot also insisted, however, that if this were all, Moore would be no different from her imitators, and that her “merit consists in the combination, in the other point of view which Miss Moore possesses at the same time.” This is not so far from his remark on wit in the essay on Marvell written a couple of years after “Poetry” and a couple of years before his review of Moore. It offers a suggestive guide to her distinctive twentieth-century “wit,” with its rigorously comparative approach to the world, its investment in acknowledging “other kinds of experience” and “points of view,” and its buoyant mobility as it moves between “jargon” and “comic strip,” embodying a refined version of the “pleasantry . . . of speech that characterizes the American language.” “Speech” is the nub of the matter. “Poetry” opens with a notoriously dismissive declaration, which establishes its author’s voice: “I too dislike it, there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle” (PMM 135). “Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it,” Moore nonetheless finds a “place for the genuine” in it, and goes on to make a virtuosic case by way of a series of incongruous and humorously inflected instances, which include “the bat/ holding on upside down,” “the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea,” and (back to sport) the “base-/ball fan.” The case culminates in the already quoted affirmation that good poets should be “literalists of the imagination,” with the capacity to “present/for inspection, ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them.’” The poem weighs numerous different ways of life and language (including “business documents and/schoolbooks”), and through dexterous juggling, enables the poet to measure and redefine “poetry” in a more flexed and flexible way, which establishes it beyond the usual “fiddle” of poetics, inserting questions about aesthetics and ethics into a discursive context irreducible to either, leaving us unsure as to where the boundaries between them are, and quite how seriously this humorous radical takes her own propositions. The definition of poems as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” jokingly undoes the opposition between the “real” and “imaginary” it seems to underwrite, but it is this paradoxical account of a future in which poets become “literalists of/the imagination” which the poet leaves us with in the “meantime” as a paradigm of poetry. Though we register her commitment to the raw, the genuine, and the real as well as her recoil from the “insolence and triviality” of “half-poets,” the poem leaves us in the end with the word “poetry” shorn of all its usual associations, now provisionally redefined in a language of fastidious discrimination but in terms of disconcertingly “unimportant” and

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incongruous things: an upside-down bat, a horse twitching due to a flea, a baseball fan, a statistician, and real toads. In a tribute to Moore herself, W. H. Auden said he saw from the first that she was “a pure ‘Alice,’” with all the Alice qualities of “distaste for noise and excess” (added emphasis) plus “fastidiousness,” “precision,” and “astringent ironical sharpness.”26 In support, he quoted a series of extracts from poems, including “Poets, don’t make a fuss,” “I have seen this swan and/I have seen you; I have seen ambition without understanding in a variety of forms,” “punctuality is not a crime,” “One may be a blameless/bachelor and it is but a/step to Congreve,” and “There must have been more time/in Shakespeare’s day/to sit and watch a play.” What Auden calls “pure Alice” is a reflex of Moore’s unique voice, which somehow combines a taste for the eccentric and idiosyncratic with a tone of brisk, no-nonsense, epigrammatic rationality (“beyond all this fiddle”). Moore enjoyed Carroll herself, and in a short essay on Alice of 1926, she praises the books’ “appropriate espièglerie,” the “personable, self-contained, human completeness of the rabbit” and the “attentive uncontradictoriness of Alice.” According to Moore, “A precision of unlogic in Lewis Carroll is logic’s best apologist” while “Alice has become our mentor and is at no-one’s mercy.”27 The Unicorn suspects Alice as a child to be a “fabulous monster,” and there is a touch of the fabulous monster about Moore too with her own “precision of unlogic” and distinctive eccentric voice. In her poem “England,” for example, Moore talked jokingly of America as a “grassless, linksless, languageless country in which letters are written/not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,/but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!” (PMM 141). Her own English nonetheless was unapologetically intellectual, however chatty in her mannered way. Far from being “plain American,” it is marked by a high decorum all her own. In “Marriage,” after saying “it is frightful to have everything afraid of one,” she invokes “Henry James ‘damned by the public for decorum,’” adding “not decorum, but restraint” (PMM 171). This unique decorum (or “restraint”) gives an ambiguous edge to the “serious” dimension of her humor and the humorous dimension of her seriousness. We might link it to what Moore in the poem of that name calls “Armour’s Undermining Modesty.” In “Bowls,” she notes the survival of “ancient punctilio,” asserting that “I learn that we are precisionists,/not citizens of Pompei arrested in action” (PMM 154). In “Silence,” a pithy memorial to the politesse of an earlier generation, she opens, “My father used to say,/‘superior people never make long visits,/ have to be shown Longfellow’s grave/or the glass flowers at Harvard’,” a sentence that both aligns herself with and humorously distances herself from her father’s “pleasantry” about “superior people.” The poem ends by saying, “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;/not in silence, but restraint./Nor was he insincere in saying, ‘Make my house your inn.’ Inns are not residences” (PMM 163). The drily aphoristic note of “Inns are not residences” represents Moore taking off from her father’s reported style, and captures her (not his) distinctive

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tone of voice. Elizabeth Bishop’s “Manners” reads like a sequel, offering a comparable commentary on her grandfather’s sense of decorum, relishing her relative’s remarks as well as establishing some humorous distance from obsolete good humor, or what she calls elsewhere “interior humor.”28 Moore’s poems bring high-mannered but unpredictably and pedantically variegated language to unlikely subjects. Indeed unlikeliness is one of her strongest suits (as it is of Bishop). She is one of the wittiest exponents of the poetic title in the language, as is evident in the dazzlingly misleading titles of some of her greatest poems. “A Grave” turns out to be about the sea, “An Octopus” about a particular mountain, “To a Peacock of France” about Molière, “Radical” about a carrot (returning to the word’s radical root), and “Melanchthon” not about the German Protestant theologian but about an elephant.29 The innumerable elaborate portrayals of animals, like “Melanchthon,” are likewise unlikely amalgams of concrete descriptions of particular creatures and moral essays constructed out of apothegms and aphorisms. The effect is brilliantly evocative of other life-forms but also teasingly and quirkily reflects back on ours, so that it is hard to tell what is the “real subject.” The elephant’s back in “Melanchthon” is described as “a manual for the peanut-tongued and the/ hairy toed” (a deliciously literal pun on a “manual”), and the creature itself is portrayed (as in an Anglo-Saxon riddle) as “black earth preceded by a tendril” (PMM 122–24). Nevertheless, Moore closes the poem by presenting it with luminous and ludicrous sublimity as “an instance/of the indestructibility of matter; it/has looked at electricity and at the earth-/quake and is still here,” leading her to ask at the close “Will/depth be depth, thick skin be thick, to one who can see no/beautiful element of unreason under it?” That “beautiful element of unreason,” like Carroll’s “precision of unlogic,” marks not a divine comedy exactly, but a divining comedy, a humorous sense of the limits of reason all the more palpable because of her commitment to the language of rationality. All Moore’s animal poems combine zoological observation with parable-like reflections on human values like this, often with the most unpredictable and unstable results in terms of the “beautiful element of unreason.” One of her finest zoological portraits, “The Pangolin,” for example, opens with the animal described as “this near artichoke with head and legs and grit-equipped gizzard,/the night miniature artist engineer is,/yes, Leonardo da Vinci’s replica -/impressive animal and toiler of whom we seldom hear” (PMM 224). That unsettling move from “near artichoke” to Leonardo-like “artist engineer” (with the subliminal pun on “art” aligning them) humorously mocks, not the creature, but our categories and hierarchies of scale and importance. It is in this poem that, after speaking of “the being we call human, writing-/master to this world,” Moore affirms “among animals, one has a sense of humor.” For the translator of La Fontaine’s fables, the human sense of humor plays out in dialogue with the otherness of the animal world, resulting in endless comparative studies of human and animal. This leads Rachel Trousdale to

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argue that “The Pangolin” is “about humor’s indispensable role both in defining individual identity and in bridging conceptual and interpersonal divides . . . not just between individuals but between species.”30 The human capacity for humor “saves steps, saves years,” implying a saving sense of relativity and the grace to recognize other ways and forms of life than our own in our role as “writing-master to the world.” “The Frigate Pelican,” another anthropo-zoological poem, begins in ornithological mode, albeit with a Johnsonian resonance: “Rapidly cruising or lying on the air there is a bird/that realizes Rasselas’ friend’s project/of wings uniting levity with strength” (PMM 204). After elaborating on the “hell-diver, frigate-bird” as “a marvel of grace,” the high-flying poem veers sideways via a humorous analogy into different territory: “An impassioned Handel -/meant for a lawyer and a masculine German domestic/career— clandestinely studied the harpsichord/and never was known to have fallen in love, the unconfiding frigate-bird hides/in the height and in the majestic/ display of his art.” The analogy between the bird and an “impassioned Handel” is as incongruous as “the Antipodes in shoes,” whichever way we read it. Nonetheless the poem successfully conjures an unlikely image of both the composer and the bird, with its analogous “display” of “unconfiding” art. As with Leonardo and the Pangolin, no one before Moore could have dreamed of associating the great musician and a frigate pelican. Such incongruous comparisons generate an expansive eco-comedy that gives something akin to cultural grandeur and sophistication to the creature, while giving human art and artists the creaturely vitality and morphological specificity of the animals invoked. Something comparable is at work in the elastic epigrammatism of “To a Snail,” a poem that is simultaneously a portrait of a snail and an apologia for a modest style that is never less than stylish. Combining Johnsonian aphorism with the kind of particularity that Johnson’s Imlac distrusted as “numbering the streaks of the tulip,” it starts as if it were a poem about language but, in elaborating its central conceit, ends up as a zoological study: If “compression is the first grace of style,” you have it. Contractility is a virtue as modesty is a virtue. It is not the acquisition of any one thing that is able to adorn, or the incidental quality that occurs as a concomitant of something well said, that we value in style, but the principle that is hid: in the absence of feet, “a method of conclusion”; “a knowledge of principles,” in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn. (PMM 174)

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The loftily Baconian or philosophical tone has a quizzical comic effect. To say “humility is a virtue” would be conventional enough, but to say that “contractility is a virtue” (rather than “concision,” say) makes us raise our eyebrows. Oxford English Dictionary reminds us that “contractility” is a primarily physiological term applied to muscular tissue, as in such phrase as “the contractility of lymphatic vessels” or “the contractility of the pupil.” To compare it to linguistic compression and “modesty” takes a big leap of the imagination (but then Moore, like her Jerboa, is a great, albeit highly decorous leaper). Yet with its punning implications of contact, contract, tact and tactility, the word paradoxically generates an unexpected scope in this poem where literary allegory and natural history make such strange but decorous bedfellows. The notes explain that the quotations are from the philosophers Democritus and Duns Scotus but not their relevance to Moore’s praise of “compression,” “contractility,” and (less abstractly) “the absence of feet” (something metrically conscious poets rarely praise). The poem seems to pay homage to the idea of a well-armored as well as ungendered writer hidden beneath his or her shell, while also celebrating the writer’s discreet and economical fidelity to “the principle that is hid” (the principle of motion on the one hand, and concise and seamless composition on the other). If there is comedy in this decorous ode to “the absence of feet,” the final acknowledgment of “the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn” stretches the poem elastically beyond the bounds of allegory and analogy. What could possibly be the stylistic analogy to the snail’s “occipital horn”? However we answer that, it is a convincing reflex of Moore’s signature idiosyncrasy, a formal embodiment of her well-armored hypersensitivity to complex surroundings. Its invocation at the destination of the poem in close proximity to “a knowledge of principles” is both comic and beyond a joke. It is a sign that the snail is being inspected in the artificial garden of the poem with awed respect for—as well as amusement at—its morphological distinctiveness. Morphology, whether biological or aesthetic, is one of Moore’s abiding fascinations from first to last. In Moore, amusement and amazement go hand in hand. Some of the earliest poems Moore includes in her letters from Bryn Mawr are bagatelles. They include a limerick, valentines, and witty miniatures like the one which begins: “Ennui I call it -/He often expressed/A curious wish/To be interchangeably/Man and fish” (added emphases).31 Some of her last ones are too, like “To Victor Hugo of my Crow Pluto” (PMM 361) and the Edward Lear–like “Prevalent at One Time” (“I’ve always wanted a gig/semi-circular like a fig/for a very fast horse with long-tail/for one person of course”). From beginning to end her work is characterized by a trim, dry wit, an incongruously promiscuous sense of decorum, and a quicksilver capacity to make stately jumps from instance to instance, setting the most unlikely things together and swerving through abrupt transitions and oblique sidesteps with a deadpan obliviousness to conventional thinking. The effect is nearly always of a buoyant elasticity of spirit, as well as good humor (in both senses). Taken together, it is

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a concerted act of resistance to what “In the Days of Prismatic Color” she calls “the dismal/fallacy that insistence is the measure of achievement and that all/ truth must be dark” (PMM 136). The difference between humor and seriousness in Moore is often a hair’s breadth, if any. She noted such hair-like differences in a blurb she wrote for a record by Cassius Clay, where she said “I am the Greatest, if meant seriously is comic and if meant comically, is comic. It is romantic comedy, it is poetic drama, it is poetry.”32 She goes on to note that “altitude is saved by a hair from being the flattest, peanuttiest, unwariest of boastings; saved one might say with Shakespeare, by one of Caesar’s hairs.” With that move from the “smiling pugilist” Cassius to Julius Caesar, Moore demonstrates her nifty literary footwork, combining “altitude” and down-to-earthness while playfully comparing boxing, drama, and poetry. Moore’s poetic speciality is observing things—Bishop called her “The World’s Greatest Living Observer”—but she always turns observations of things into observations about them, or rather about the world of human values, observations which, for all their serious scope, involve a humorist’s capacity for switching registers. Any Moore poem is an unlikely acrobatic exercise in comparative anatomy, interdisciplinarity, and analogy. It depends on a combination of the apparently linguistically straitlaced and the intellectually far-fetched, and tends to hover on or near the border between earnestness and play, philosophy and comedy. “Marriage,” for example, subjects the most zealously affirmed institution of our culture to what Randall Jarrell calls “the Northern lights of her continual irony,” resulting in a sparkling heterodox critique which Jarrell calls “the most ironic poem, surely, written by man or woman,” and Harold Bloom “a poignant comic critique of every society’s most sacred and tragic institution.”33 Moore begins her spicily irreverent reflections by musing humorously “I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by now” (PMM 155) and she later reflects on the “munificence of humor” itself (PMM 160). The OED defines Moore’s munificent word as meaning “great generosity of giving,” citing a writer of 1425 appealing regally to “Royal Munificence” and Gladstone in 1892 appealing civically to the “quality of munificence” of the people of Liverpool. The word “humor” is a word of Empsonian complexity, and the OED defines its new Enlightenment sense as meaning “that quality of action, speech, or writing, which excites amusement; oddity, jocularity, facetiousness, comicality, fun,” as well as the related “faculty of perceiving what is ludicrous or amusing, or of expressing it in speech, writing, or other composition.” The puzzling relationship between the quality which excites and the faculty of perceiving is crucial when we reflect on Moore’s munificent humor, with its constant teasing of the reader by its investment in “jocose imagination,” “oddity,” and unpredictably funny “treatment of a subject.” Speaking of “Marriage” years later, Moore said it wasn’t in any way a “philosophy of marriage; but a little anthology of phrases that had entertained me, which I did not wish to lose and conjoined as best

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I might.”34 Eliot called poetry a “superior form of entertainment,” but Moore’s use of the verb “entertained” here suggests a pretty capacious sense of it. It involves a certain detachment—a withdrawing from the fray—as well as a measure of independent intellectual enquiry, a standing back to “inspect” the language used by others about this normally sacrosanct social institution while articulating her own conflicted feelings about it. In heterodox poems like this, Moore deploys the whole arsenal of propriety. “Marriage,” with its skepticism toward its subject, is in many ways a bravura exercise in decorous impropriety, and much of the hard-to-identify charge and charm of Moore’s style depends on her extraordinary combination of politeness and incongruity, an air of old-fashioned orthodoxy but unprecedented combination of material. She has a poem called “Propriety,” which begins with Moore defining the word in musical terms and appealing to the “chord/Brahms had heard/from a bird/sung down near the root of the throat” (PMM 265–26). Moore speaks of “Bach’s cheerful firmness/in a minor key” and her own firm “humor” embraces comparable “cheerful firmness” as she goes on to invoke propriety as “an owl-and-a-pussy-/both-content/ agreement” and something that is “mixed with wits.” Invoking Edward Lear’s good nonsensical celebration of the unlikely marital pair of animals, Moore yokes Bach and Lear under the same heading of “propriety,” associating the two of them botanically with “resistance with bent head, like foxtail/millets” and “the unintentional pansy-face/uncursed by self-inspection.” It’s an intensely musical poem about music and order, with a mastery of pause and home-made ceremony that is sui generis. Its elaborate divagations on the idea of “propriety” change the terms out of all recognition in a way that is both firmly comic and cheerfully in earnest. The reference to Bach’s “cheerful firmness” calls to mind Afred Brendel’s brilliant essay called “Must Classical Music Be Entirely Serious?” For Brendel, Haydn is the prime exemplar of musical comedy, citing an early biographer of the composer’s remark that “a sort of innocent mischievousness, or what the British call humor, was a principal trait of Haydn’s character.”35 He also cites an early-nineteenth-century commentator who spoke of his “short, nimble movements that reach the highest degree of comicality” while being “worked most seriously, diligently and learnedly,” “teasing us from every side until we . . . give up all attempts to predict what will happen next.” Brendel suggests that the classical music of Haydn and Beethoven lends itself to comic effects like these because it reflects “in its solid and self-sufficient forms and structures, the trust of the Enlightenment in rational structures that rule the universe.”36 Moore’s cheerful Presbyterianism and relish for eighteenth-century moralists such as Samuel Johnson suggest something comparable, even though her forms are very much her own invention. The unpredictable playfulness of her verse seems to revolve around an assured worldly tone of voice that depends on a heroically anachronistic sense of social propriety at the heart

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of twentieth-century New York. In one of his many astute commentaries on Moore, Randall Jarrell observes: One critic has said that Miss Moore’s poetry is not poetry at all, but criticism—actually even her criticism is not criticism but an inferior sort of poetry. She not only can but must make poetry out of everything and anything; she is like Midas, or like Mozart choosing unpromising themes for the fun of it, or like one of those princesses whom wizards force to manufacture sheets out of nettles. And yet there is one thing Miss Moore has a distaste for making poetry of: the Poetic. She has made a principle out of refusing to believe that there is any such thing as the anti-poetic; her poems restore to poetry the “business documents and school books” that Tolstoy took away.37 Jarrell’s argument that Moore, like Mozart and Midas, chose unpromising material “for the fun of it,” applies to both her subjects and her idiom. She has fun breaking down the barrier between poetry and prose while managing to sound not like an American Dadaist but a high-toned, Jamesian from an earlier era. There’s a lovely instance of this in “The Jerboa,” where she praises the “desert rat” and its “leaps of two lengths,/like the uneven notes/of the Bedouin flute,” suggesting “its leaps should be set/to the flageolet; pillar body erect/on a three-cornered smooth-working Chippendale/claw” (CP 194). With its unique syllabic syncopations, the poem is an apotheosis of a tiny and obscure desert rat which combines nimble musicality and elegant eighteenth-century values. She notes that “Pharaoh’s rat” was praised for “its wit” and “restlessness,” and she praises the Jerboa democratically for comparable wit and virtuosity (a word she often uses in her criticism). In her memoir of Moore, Bishop comments wryly on the “old-fashioned,” even “otherwordly,” atmosphere of the Moore apartment at 260 Cumberland Street, saying it was like entering “a diving bell from a different world, let down through the crass atmosphere of the twentieth-century,” and that it was hard, when leaving it, to reconcile its “exquisitely prolonged etiquette” with “the New Lots Avenue express” outside.38 Nevertheless, Bishop says that she always left the Moores feeling “happier,” and that, despite all the “subaqueous pressure at 260 Cumberland Street—admonitions, reserves, principles, simple stoicism— Marianne rose triumphant, or rather her voice did, in a lively, unceasing jet of shining bubbles.” Bishop’s humorous account of the Moore way of life and of poet’s voice with its “lively, unceasing jet of shining bubbles” offers a biographical insight into the idiosyncratic convergence of anachronism and modernity in her poems as they negotiate twentieth-century metropolitan experience with both comic equanimity and the virtuosic decorum of Haydn or Mozart. Few poets are so wittily unpredictable in their agile associative logic as Moore, but none write

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with her air of democratic politesse. Her apparently old-fashioned linguistic manner simultaneously disguises and licenses an intellectual mobility that makes much of the poetry of Dada look like a vicarage tea party.

3 Moore wrote a great essay on “Idiosyncracy and Technique,” and in Moore and Bishop comedy is always, I think, a reflex of such idiosyncrasy.39 It is where the normal and abnormal, the ordinary and sophisticated, meet. It also marks the poet’s resistance toward pretentiousness, a refusal to take herself too seriously, a measure of that “democratic” stance toward the world and writing Bishop praised in her. In a “sentimental Tribute,” Bishop praises her “willingness to respond to all normal interest and requests, the democratic refusal to consider herself a privileged being, a White Goddess, to drape herself in chiffon and assume a deep dark voice.”40 In praising Moore’s “democratic stance,” Bishop moves inevitably into the comic mode, a mode rarely far away in her many invocations of Moore in letters and essays. Comedy is also at the heart of her virtuosic poetic tribute “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore.” In the essay she pokes fun at more vatic and portentous versions of the modern poet than Moore’s. She also likens Moore’s poems to the work of other “supremely original, nevertheless unpretentious, small-scale” artists, such as Klee, Bissier, and Webern, asking “How deep does their self-consciousness go? I certainly cannot measure it, and there is always the perfectly agreeable possibility that I am being teased a little on purpose.”41 These questions about scale, originality, unpretentiousness, self-consciousness, and teasing apply to Bishop as well as Moore, Klee, and the others. They are all artists for whom the intimate relationship between seriousness, scale, and comic sense is primordial. Bishop’s “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore” conjures a playful, Chagalllike version of Moore as a mock-heroic Brooklyn version of Mary Poppins, soaring over the city with her hat and cape, “bearing a musical inaudible abacus,/a slight censorious frown, and blue ribbons” (64). Bishop told Moore in a letter of December 1940 she was writing something with her “in mind” and that it would be a “very cheerful poem” (709). It cheerfully presents her “mounting the sky with natural heroism,” a figure that is simultaneously heroic and comic: Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe trailing a sapphire highlight, with a black capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots, with heaven knows how many angels all riding on the broad black rim of your hat, please come flying. (63–64)

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The poem everywhere acknowledges Moore as a poet, with that abacus suggesting her syllabics, and her travel through a “Manhattan” that is “awash with morals this fine morning” her distinctive ethical stance, but the angelically peopled Quangle-Wangle-like black hat and “capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots” also suggest Moore’s characteristic dress-style and literary persona, making the two almost indistinguishable. Bishop’s celebration hovers between the sublime and the ridiculous, but, as Betsy Erkkila observes, it was written soon after the two poets had quarreled over “Roosters” and, in its guise of “brilliant and comic imitation of Moore herself,” can be read as both a tribute and a critique, a celebration that marks not only Bishop’s affectionate admiration but also her “difference and distance from Moore.”42 Comedy helps keep the poem light and air-borne all the same, leaving one unsure how far the “teasing” goes. Bishop speaks of not knowing whether Moore is teasing her readers purposely or not, and her humorous apotheosis of her flying mentor offers a cover for her own ambivalence. Humor is certainly integral to the complex and buoyant sketch, which, like her later essay “Efforts of Affection,” another masterpiece of literary portraiture, brims over with observant detail in a way that celebrates Moore’s intellectual distinction and distinctiveness in a comic key. Bishop’s poetic invitation is modeled on a “serious” poem by Pablo Neruda, she told Anne Stevenson, adding “(Mine is not serious)” (857). She told Moore Neruda “is not the kind I—nor you—like—very, very loose, surrealist imagery etc.” It also, of course, affectionately parodies Moore’s idiosyncratic poetic manner, though injecting it with a looser, air-borne surrealism. Comedy is never far away in Bishop from her lightest rather surrealist early poems like “The Gentleman of Shallott,” a mirror-poem parodying Tennyson’s medievalist classic, and “Large Bad Picture,” a humorous commentary on “a big picture” by a great-uncle, to her darkest such as “Visit to St. Elizabeths” and “One Art,” poems which, despite their tragic subjects (Pound’s incarceration in a mental hospital, and the suicide of her lover Lota), are touched with humor. Pound, for example, or “the tragic man/that lies in the house of Bedlam,” is conjured up in a very un-Poundian version of the nursery rhyme “The House that Jack Built,” where he is accompanied by “a Jew in the newspaper hat/that dances joyfully down the ward/and into the parting seas of board” (128). The Jew and newspaper conjure memories of Pound’s notorious anti-Semitism and support for Mussolini, as well as the very public journalistic debate that surrounded his trial for treason and eventual hospitalization in St Elizabeth’s. As in the comic poem to Moore, the playful translation of the epic poet of the Pisan Cantos into a figure in a nursery song enables Bishop to intimate a complex range of feeling, offering an implicit critique of Pound’s imperious and misplaced intellectual confidence. The poem is shot through with a poignant recognition of Pound’s grandeur and absurdity as well as the pathos of his predicament as a mental patient. Jeredith Merrin has argued that the story of Bishop’s poetry is “less lugubrious” than previous criticism might suggest, and that we should shift our attention from her “ruefulness” to “her playfulness and wit.”43 Comedy is part of

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Bishop’s repertoire, like Moore’s, from the beginning, as we find in early poems such as “Casabianca”: Love’s the boy stood on the burning deck trying to recite “The boy stood on the burning deck.” Love’s the son stood stammering elocution while the poor ship in flames went down. (5) The poem takes off from Felicia Hemans’s poem of the same name, the poem that the boy here is “trying to recite” on the burning deck, which begins: The boy stood on the burning deck Whence all but he had fled; The flame that lit the battle’s wreck Shone round him o”er the dead. Yet beautiful and bright he stood, As born to rule the storm; A creature of heroic blood, A proud, though childlike form. In Hemans’s poem, the boy is a “heroic” emblem of naval steadfastness in disaster, stoically loyal to his dead father on the flaming ship. Bishop’s boy, by contrast, is a Cupid-like figure of “Love” burning with different desires, caught up in an absurd mirror-image of the lines he is trying to recite, “stammering elocution” while the “poor ship in flames went down.” Bishop’s poem parodies Hemans’s celebration of patriotic family values, converting everything—“obstinate boy, the ship/even the swimming sailors, who/would like a schoolroom platform too”—into playful figures of homoerotic amorous crisis (“And love’s the burning boy”). Each five-line stanza has a syncopated rhyme scheme of abbbb, and the effect of the ten-line bagatelle is both spoof emblem-book-verse and comic postcard, converting a Victorian “schoolroom” anthology piece into a camp jazzed-up Valentine. As Moore’s “Marriage” offers a humorous, many-angled critique of the great institution of heterosexual love, in poems like “Casabianca” Bishop offers a queerly pitched angle on the love-poem, bearing out Merrin’s claim that “Bishop’s gaiety or delight in the possibilities of change is . . . inextricable from her gayness.”44 “The Man-Moth” has no such literary precedent to play upon, but is a more lugubrious creature born of a “newspaper misprint for ‘mammoth’” (as Bishop’s note tells us), a mesmeric dream image which is the outcome of one of those slips Freud saw as a source of comedy. The poem conjures another surrealist mirage but in a hypnotically oneiric style, chronicling the movements of a shadowy nocturnal figure who haunts the streets of the metropolis and climbs Batmanlike “up the facades,/his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind

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him” (11). The poem’s enigmatic charm depends on its unlikely combination of the Kafkaesque uncanny and American strip cartoon. The Parisian poems, “sleeping on the Ceiling,” which opens “It is so peaceful on the ceiling!/It is the Place de la Concorde” (22), and “sleeping Standing Up,” which reports that “the bureau lies on the wall” (22), play comparable tricks with perspective, humorously inviting us to see the world from other dreamier but also ludicrous angles, as does “Cirque d’Hiver,” with its vision of a “little circus horse” flitting across the floor, with “mane and tail . . . straight from Chirico” (23). With their images from Chagall or De Chirico, these grotesques and fantasias translate the often portentous images of surrealism into humorously quizzical keys more akin to the contemporary paintings of Klee, hovering between a relish for pure invention and the worldly comedy of unlikelihood. As Bishop develops, the poetry grows darker and takes on more ambitious subjects, but it never entirely leaves the comedy of unlikelihood behind. “How—I didn’t know any/word for it—‘unlikely,’” she says in “In the Waiting Room,” a particularly charged autobiographical instance. Viewing—and viewed from—the standpoint of her seven-year-old self, the poem switches dizzyingly between different views and viewpoints: of the grown-ups in their “arctics and overcoats,” of “Osa and Martin Johnson/dressed in riding breeches” in The National Geographic, “babies with pointed heads,” “black, naked women with necks/wound round and round with wire,” her “foolish aunt,” and herself, who is caught between all of these: But I felt: you are an I, you are an Elizabeth, you are one of them. The dentist’s waiting room becomes a Through the Looking-Glass hall of mirrors that combines horror and comedy, dramatizing her child self as dizzy with perplexity about her identity, not only in the room, in language, and society, but the world itself, given she feels she is “falling off/the round, turning world”: “I was my foolish aunt,/I—we—were falling, falling,/our eyes glued to the cover/ of the National Geographic,/February, 1918” (149–51). Toward the end of the poem, she asks, “How had I come to be here,/like them, and overhear/a cry of pain that could have/got loud and worse but hadn’t?” The question suggests that the poem’s numinous sense of absurdity might be a way of dealing with material that is potentially catastrophic, converting the subjectively overwhelming into a potentially comic as well as cosmic key. Writing to Anne Stevenson in 1964, Bishop said she hated the “oh-the-painif-it-all poems” of Emily Dickinson and the “humorless, Martha Graham kind of person” who likes her. She says she had been lucky herself in having so many “witty friends—and I mean real wit, quickness, wild fancies, remarks that make one cry with laughing” (858). Marianne Moore was “very funny,” while her favorite aunt, most of her close friends, and her partner Lota were also all “funny

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people.” She thought she needed such “usually stoical, unsentimental, and physically courageous people” to “cheer me up.” Commenting that the “sense of humor” of Brazilians is all that makes Brazil “bearable,” she observed that “I have learned most—from having someone suddenly make fun of something one has taken seriously up until then . . . I mean about life, the world, and so on.” The entire letter is an improvised manifesto for the importance of being humorous, an apologia for gaiety. Though she describes herself as a “pessimist,” she says “I think we should be gay in spite of it, sometimes even giddy—to make life endurable and to keep ourselves ‘new, tender, quick’” (864). In fact in her later work Bishop characteristically works with a quickened sense that the most serious things, looked at from another angle, are potentially humorous, or that humor is a way of mastering the potentially tragic. Bishop’s comedy can be seen as a way of sidestepping the high-style of both the romantics and modernists while not making too much of a song and dance about her own pretentions. It can be read, that is, in terms of the theorists invoked by Alfred Brendel in his discussion of musical comedy, including Jean Paul Richter who defined “humor” as “the sublime in reverse” (das umgekehrte Erhabene), and Schiller who thought the comic writer used humor to “shun pathos” and “defend himself against passions.” A poem like “Exchanging Hats” shows Bishop in full comic mode, even if it is at the expense of “Unfunny uncles” (198), but we can also see humor in play in the attempt to “shun pathos” and “defend against the passions” in some of her most ambitious poems like “At the Fishhouses,” which ends with Bishop’s immanent version of a “sublime” moment of recognition by the sea, and in “Crusoe in England,” a wide-ranging, heart-searching poem which treats its vision of multiple kinds of psychological and ontological loneliness with a distinctive “home-made” irony that insinuates a ruefully comic, queer, and postcolonial resonance into Defoe’s story (“Friday was nice, and we were friends./If only he had been a woman!”). The Bishop who in “One Art” said that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master” (166) and remembers her dead lover Lota’s “joking voice” is at work in all these artful poems, exhibiting a kind of post-traumatic mastery and treating potentially desolating losses, like Crusoe’s of Friday, with a desperation that is tempered by stoic comedy. Much of this comedic dimension, like “Friday was nice,” is a matter of colloquially un-poetic tones of voice, whether hers and others: in “Manners,” “‘A fine bird,’ my grandfather said/‘And he’s well brought up’” (119); Crusoe, musing “Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?” (153), or wondering why a local museum would want his old parasol which “looks a plucked and skinny foul” and exclaiming “How can anyone want such things!” (156); the speaker in “Poem” asking “Would that be Miss Gillespie’s house?/Those particular geese and cows/are naturally before my time” (165); Elizabeth in “In the Waiting Room” asking “Why should I be my aunt,/or me, or anyone?” (150); passengers in the bus in “The Moose” overheard saying of the animal that “it’s awful plain” and “Look! It’s a she!” (162). Such phrases carry the quirky plainness of everyday

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speech, commenting on the oddity of the world in comically ordinary and ordinarily comic terms. “Filling Station” begins with another of these everyday exclamations, “Oh, but it is dirty!,” before overcoming its initial recoil to dwell with horrified fascination on its domestic world, noting “on the wicker sofa/a dirty dog, quite comfy,” “some comic books” providing “the only note of color -/or certain color,” and asking “Why the extraneous plant,?/Why the taboret?/ Why, oh why, the doily?” (123–24). If the poem offers a wry vignette of shabby domesticity, it also mocks its own tone of shocked gentility, and ends with a bemused, more empathetic vision of the garage interior where “somebody embroidered the doily./Somebody waters the plant,/or oils it rather,” and “somebody loves us all.” Combining the poignant and the absurd, this offers a vision of human grace under pressure, of the normal and anomalous in an updated lyrical ballad. It incorporates a humorous recognition of solidarity as well as serious sense of social inequality. The question of seriousness is raised with comic effect at the start of “Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” (44–46): Thus should have been our travels, serious, engravable. The words imply her own travels are no such thing, highlighting the humorous gap between the “serious, engravable” (and engraved) versions in the encyclopedic Wonders of the World with its complete concordance and panoptic views, and the miscellaneous, makeshift memories of her own trips abroad. The poem begins by sampling the book’s versions of the ethnographical picturesque in a tone of wry disenchantment. “The Seven Wonders of the World are tired/ and a touch familiar,” she comments as she evokes illustrations of the “squatting Arab,/or group of Arabs, plotting, probably,/against our Christian Empire” and notes that “the cobbled courtyard, where the Well is dry,/is like a diagram” with “the human figure/far gone in history or theology,/gone with its camel or its faithful horse.” With dry comedy, the poet foregrounds the mediating role of the pictorial medium, with its “scenes arranged in a cattycornered rectangles” and “lines/the burin made,” constructing a stiltedly concordant view of the whole world as an illustration of “God’s spreading fingerprint.” Against this, the poem conjures a miscellaneous list of incongruous scenes and quirky memories that interlace the sacred and important with the trivial and incidental, the “bleat of goats” that reached the ship “Entering the Narrows of St Johns,” the Collegians in St Peter’s “crisscrossing the great square with black, like ants,” dead volcanoes in Mexico that “glistened like Easter lilies,” an “Englishwoman” pouring tea telling her “the Duchess was going to have a baby,” and finally “A holy grave, not looking particularly holy” where “In a smart burnoose Khadour looked on amused.” Through all this quirky incidental detail, Bishop lays out an intensely individual but disconnected vision of the world that counters the “serious, engravable” world of the encyclopedia, ending punningly with a grave that

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is not particularly grave-seeming and an Arab figure looking “amused.” This globally dispersed and quirkily local poem has something of the disconcerting multiplicity of Moore’s “Marriage,” suggesting a bewildering heterogeneity which strains any comfortable sense of either belonging or not belonging, ultimately generating a sense of human solidarity based on a potentially shareable sense of incongruity. Taking in “the Tomb, the Pit, the Sepulchre” as well as “little pockmarked prostitutes” in “brothels in Marrakesh,” the poem moves unpredictably between sacred and profane, important and trivial, serious and humorous, presenting a world where “everything is only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and’” (a run of three “ands” which make perfect grammatical sense but fail to make sense of the world). It’s not, however, as if skeptical comedy displaces the numinous or sacred, as, with a final twist, we return at the end to the constructed geography of the “heavy book,” with the poet asking, “Why couldn’t we have seen/this old Nativity while we were at it,” imagining that if she had, she would have “looked and looked our infant sight away.” This final vision of an unconsummated vision gives the poem a paradoxical completeness even as it competes with the obsolete comprehensiveness of the old-fashioned book with its implicit theodicy. It sets up its own weird intermixture of the “familiar” and the “foreign,” de-familiarizing the “wonders of the world” even as it leaves us wondering at the poet’s vision, which is simultaneously unpredictable and quirky, comic and uncanny. In taking a detached, often humorous stance the poem offers a critique of the seriousness represented by the “heavy book” and comparably heavy poems. Humor provides a leaven to give a more robust, complicated, worldly texture to the poem’s account of travel in a multicultural but still numinous postChristian world. The same is true of a very different, much more grounded local poem “At the Fishhouses” (50–52). Having established with memorable quotidian detail a bare subsistence-level seaside place, where an old man sits “netting” and talking about the “decline in the population/of herring,” Bishop takes us to another dimension, leading us on to the most intensely uncanny moment of ontological revelation in all her poetry. She takes us there, however, by way of a casual-seeming, jokey anecdote: Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, element bearable to no mortal, to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly I have seen here evening after evening. He was curious about me. He was interested in music; like me a believer in total immersion, so I used to sing him Baptist hymns. I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” (51–52) The anecdote ends with her saying the seal would dive and then emerge again “with a sort of shrug/as if it were against his better judgement.” After

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this Bishop immediately returns to speaking about the “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear” element of water, drawing us on to share the “briny” taste on the tongue as a revelation of “what we imagine knowledge to be,” something “forever, flowing and drawn, and since/our knowledge is historical, flowing and flown.” The playful account of the curious seal and her Baptist hymn-singing, along with her joking affirmation of their shared belief in “total immersion,” offers a gently self-mocking version of herself and her rather different version of “total immersion” in the sea and scene to a conventional Baptist’s. In doing so, it acknowledges her distance from both Christian belief, the otherness of the seal’s experience, and the sea, that “element bearable to no mortal,” of which Marianne Moore said “it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing/but you cannot stand in the middle of this.”45 The account is a warmly humorous, balancing the prosaic Canadian seaside setting and the final epiphany evoking the “cold hard mouth/of the world.” The sublime vision gathers force from the slightly ridiculous seal anecdote, though both bear witness to the poem’s sense of loneliness and solidarity, with the comic hymn-singing sealing the bond between them, in a way that acknowledges but redefines Richter’s sense of humor as the “sublime in reverse.” It also, I would argue, embodies a more good-humored version of Eliot’s account of poetic “wit” as involving “a recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience that are possible.” “2,000 Illustrations” and “At the Fishhouses” turn on a sense of human comedy in a natural world without religious dispensation. The comedy doesn’t dissipate when Bishop describes nature itself, however, as in “seascape” where there is a “skeletal lighthouse standing there/in black and white clerical dress” (31), in “Questions of Travel” where rain is like “politicians’ speeches” (75), or in “Crusoe in England” where waterspouts are like “sacerdotal beings in glass” which are “Beautiful, yes, but not much company” (150). Likewise in “A Cold Spring,” the fireflies rise “exactly like bubbles in champagne” (44), while in her bleakly muddy birthday poem “The Bight” she describes the way “Pelicans crash/into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard . . . rarely coming up with anything to show for it,/and going off with humorous elbowings,” as “All the untidy activity continues,/awful but cheerful” (46–47). The “awful” and “cheerful” are never too far apart in Bishop’s poems, like the “humorous” and engravably “serious.” This sometimes, as in “One Art,” with its memory of her lost lover’s “joking voice,” calls up the child in “sestina” who is reported as “reading the jokes from the almanac,/laughing and talking to hide her tears” (120). At other times, it is more a measure of ordinary complexity or complex ordinariness, a recognition that acknowledging the humorous doesn’t diminish “awe” or the awful. As she told Anne Stevenson in the letter quoted earlier, “I think one can be cheerful AND profound” (864). For Bishop, as in a different way for Moore, each poem is a difficult balancing act, weighing the vulnerably personal with an almost anthropological sense of other worlds beyond the self,

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and thereby embodying something comparable to the kind of wit Eliot found in Marvell, tonally calibrated to capture gravity and grace. It is beautifully exemplified by the luminous invitation Bishop extends to Marianne Moore at the end of the poem to her: Come like a light in the white mackerel sky, come like a daytime comet with a long unnebulous train of words, from Brooklyn, over Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, please come flying. (64) Cheerful, but awesome.

Notes 1 Octavio Paz, The Bow and the Lyre, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973), 208. 2 Marianne Moore, “Well Moused, Lion,” in Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, ed. Patricia Willis (London: Penguin, 1986), 93. 3 Marianne Moore, The Poems of Marianne Moore, ed. Grace Shulman (London: Faber, 2003), 226. All subsequent references will be followed by page references from this edition unless specified otherwise. 4 Ibid., 247. For a fuller discussion of this poem and humor in Moore more generally, see Rachel Trousdale, “Humor Saves Steps,” Journal of Modern Literature 35, no. 3 (Spring 2012). 5 Elizabeth Bishop, Poems, Prose, Letters (New York: Library of America, 2008), 80. All quotations from Bishop will be followed by page references to this edition. 6 Sigmund Freud, “On Humor,” in Collected Papers, vol. 5, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), 214–21. 7 Simon Critchley, On Humor (London: Routledge, 2002), 79–84. 8 Ibid., 41. 9 Ibid., 65–66. 10 Beckett, “The Capital of the Ruins,” cited in ibid., 110–11. 11 For modern ramifications of this, see also Jennifer Higgie’s The Artist’s Joke: Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel, 2007). 12 Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1919), 57. 13 Ibid., 60–62. 14 See Maureen McLane, My Poets (New York: FSG, 2012). 15 Gertrude Stein, “Everybody’s Autobiography,” quoted in ibid., 44. 16 Gertrude Stein, Writings: 1903–1932 (New York: Library of America, 1998), 743. 17 Ibid., 828. 18 Marianne Moore, Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, ed. Bonnie Costello, Celeste Goodridge, and Cristanne Miller (New York: Knopf, 1997), 200. 19 Bishop, Poems, Prose, Letters, 790, and 650.

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William Carlos Williams, Autobiography (New York: New Directions, 1951), 146. Marianne Moore, “Comment,” in Complete Prose, 149. T. S. Eliot, “Andrew Marvell,” in Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1932), 293. Moore, Complete Prose, 159. Eliot, “Andrew Marvell,” 303. T. S. Eliot, “Marianne Moore,” The Dial LXXV, no. 6 (December 1923): 596. W. H. Auden, “Marianne Moore,” in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber, 1963), 298. Moore, Complete Prose, 170–71. Ibid., 633. In Observations, the poem was entitled “Black Earth.” Marianne Moore, Becoming Marianne Moore, ed. Robin Schulze (Oakland: University of California Press, 2002), 87. Trousdale, “Humor Saves Steps.” Moore, Selected Letters, 63 Moore, Complete Prose, 659. Randall Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (London: Faber, 1965), 180–81; Harold Bloom ed., Marianne Moore (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002), 14. Moore, Complete Prose, 607. Alfred Brendel, Music Sounded Out (London: Robson Books, 1995), 12–36. Ibid., 22. Randall Jarrell, “The Humble Animal,” in Poetry and the Age, 162. Bishop, Poems, Prose, Letters, 484. Moore, Complete Prose, 506–18. Bishop, Poems, Prose, Letters, 709. Ibid., 710. Betsy Erkkila, The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History and Discord: Women Poets, Literary History and Discord (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 132. Jeredith Merrin, “Elizabeth Bishop: Gaiety, Gayness, and Change,” in Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender, ed. Marilyn May Lombardi (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 153. Ibid., 154. Moore, Becoming Marianne Moore, 102.

Chapter 6 C O N V E N T IO N A N D M YST IC I SM : D IC K I N S O N , H A R DY, W I L L IA M S Alan Shapiro

A guy falls into a well; as he plummets down the well shaft he grabs hold of a root, breaking his fall, and dangles there, terrified. He looks down into the black abyss below him, then up at the tiny circle of blue sky overhead. “Anybody up there?” he shouts. “Anybody up there?” A bright light fills the circle, and out of the light a voice booms—“I am the Lord Thy God, let go of the root and I shall save you.” The guy looks down into the blackness, thinks for a moment, and then looks up again and shouts, “Anybody else up there?” Like all jokes, what makes this one funny is the turn it takes. What begins as a sacred parable pivots in the punch line into something utterly profane. The spiritual pattern the story leads us to expect (spiritual salvation requiring trust in things unseen) deflates into something all too ordinary and of this world (physical survival at any cost). Another way to describe this would be to say the joke depends on our knowing the sacred narrative it solicits and then subverts. It works by upending the convention or norm of expectation. By evoking and then breaking the pattern of something old and familiar (biblical story, conversion narrative), it generates the sensation of something new and different. Without the foil of some already established convention, or norm of expectation, there is less chance of surprise. And it follows from this that the more conventions or patterns a joke or any work of art can put in play, the greater opportunity there is for meaningful surprise. Here’s a famous poem by Emily Dickinson that flips frames on us the way the joke does. The poem is a kind of joke, at least on the speaker’s and reader’s spiritual expectations: I heard a fly buzz when I died. The silence in the room Was like the stillness in the air Between the heaves of storm.

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The eyes around had rung them dry, And breaths were gathering firm For that last onset when the king Be witnessed in the room. I willed my keepsakes; signed away What portion of me be Assignable, and then it was There interposed a fly With blue uncertain stumbling buzz Between the light and me, And then the windows failed, and then I could not see to see.1 The arc of the poem describes the speaker’s contracting vision, moving in from hushed room and the depersonalized eyes and breaths around the deathbed, to the speaker’s failing eyesight/windows, then into the mind’s last guttering of consciousness. She is expecting or hoping for Christ the king to come and escort her to a better place. The religious yearning is ironically intensified by the poem’s meter, which is hymn meter, the conventional music of such yearning. The speaker is hoping for a good death, a death that leads to heaven, the sign of which would be the king’s arrival, but all that shows up is a fly, coming, one assumes, for its portion of what the speaker has just signed away, which of course would be her body. The language of spiritual faltering implicit in the diction of the last five lines—the fly’s stumbling, uncertain buzz, the window failing, and the speaker unable to see—turns on its head the prototypical salvation narrative celebrated in so many hymns—amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wreck like me; I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now can see. This reversal of expectation suggests two equally disquieting possibilities—either the king does not show up and the speaker’s damned, not saved; or worse the king does show up but turns out to be a fly, not a god, which means we live in a material universe in which there is no god, no heaven or hell (which perhaps is why the dead speaker describes what it’s like to die but tells us nothing at all about what it’s like being dead), a universe of death whose king is the fly, a carrion feeder. The metrical form reinforces the speaker’s sly questioning of the tenets of belief, the reversal of expectation, for the form, again, is hymn meter, the conventional music of Christian piety. To use a form, a meter, so intimately associated with religious faith, with conventions of worship, to express such a delicately blasphemous idea, is like using a limerick to express a devastating sorrow (“my mother’s now dead from bone cancer/when the tumor swelled up then they lanced her . . .”). That Dickinson pulls it off so subtly, so movingly, without inadvertent bathos (“but the tumor still spread/all the way to her head/and the pain made her dance like a dancer”) is no small part of the poem’s achievement.

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Any good poem, metrical or not, depends on an expressive, mutually entailing dance of something fixed with something changed. By pattern we mean more than repeated arrangements of accented and unaccented syllables; we also mean rhyme, line lengths, stanzas, even sentences, and how sentences are drawn through lines and stanzas. In every case, the creation of surprise is intimately tied to any number of recurring structures. And as the joke and the Dickinson poem demonstrate, this is not just a sonic principle but a semantic one as well. Repetition with modification is a fundamental means by which a writer can dramatize or vocalize a felt change of consciousness. Metaphors that discover similarities (repeated properties) between dissimilar objects, linguistic or imagistic motifs in which the same or similar word or image is repeated in different contexts in order to dramatize change and continuity, words recurring in different grammatical forms—these are all expressions of the same basic principle of interdependence between pattern and variation, the familiar and the new. As in the old song “Love and Marriage,” they go together like a horse and carriage, let me tell you brother, you can’t have one without the other. I could pick any poem in any form to illustrate this principle but for starters here’s Thomas Hardy’s famous poem “The Oxen,” a poem that employs a looser version of the same meter as “I heard a fly buzz” but to very different effect: Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. “Now they are all on their knees,” An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in hearthside ease. We pictured the meek mild creature where They dwelt in their strawy pen, Nor did it occur to one of us there To doubt they were kneeling then. So fair a fancy few would weave In these years! Yet I feel If someone said on Christmas Eve, “Come. See the oxen kneel, By the lonely barton in yonder comb, Our childhood used to know,” I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so.2 Before looking in detail at “The Oxen,” I want to offer a warning about the sort of dangers that often attend metrical analyses. Discussions of meter and formal strategies of any kind can easily degenerate into sentimental impressionism if one isn’t careful to connect form to content, style to subject matter, metrical properties to semantic meaning. No form or style is inherently significant or

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meaningful in isolation from the meaning of the words themselves. I remember my old teacher J. V. Cunningham discussing an analysis of Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” by a famous critic, in which the critic claimed that the feeling of desolation and bereavement of the last line was a direct consequence of the heavily stressed syllables in the last foot: “And no birds sing.” The critic made no mention of words themselves, their particular meaning and how the narrative prepares us for that feeling of tragic loss. Rather, he claimed that the effect was caused by the sound of the last three equally stressed monosyllabic words themselves (the accented syllable of the first foot followed by the spondee, or heavily stressed iamb, of the second), as if that weight of feeling existed inside the weight of the stress, the sound, the rhythm, independent of semantic meaning. If that were true, Cunningham remarked, then presumably the poem would convey the same feeling if Keats had used different words that replicated the same sound, the same cluster of three monosyllabic words, all equally stressed: “And no cows moo.” Anybody else up there? Or to take another example, according to this way of thinking there’d be no difference whatsoever if Edgar Allen Poe had decided to stick with his original choice of bird for his most famous poem: “Quoth the parrot never more.” Dodged a bullet there. Metrical effects depend on meaning, on context. So do many of the terms we use for our experience of form in general. When I say a stanza or quatrain is closed or open I’m treating the terms as wholly dependent on the particular poem in which they occur. Let’s say we’re looking at a gnomic poem in which the majority of lines ends with a full stop, and there’s one line in the middle that cuts into the sentence at a relatively stable place, say, after a clause, but that doesn’t need punctuation—that line in this poem will seem open compared with all the other lines. “Church Monuments,” by George Herbert, beautifully illustrates the context-dependent nature of what we call open or closed effects. The poem is a religious meditation. While the soul focuses on her devotion to God and heaven, the body meditates down in the catacombs, where it concentrate on death and mutability: While that my soul repairs to her devotion, Here I entomb my flesh, that it betimes May take acquaintance of this heap of dust; To which the blast of death’s incessant motion, Fed with the exhalation of our crimes, Drives all at last. Therefore I gladly trust My body to this school, that it may learn To spell his elements, and find his birth Written in dusty heraldry and lines; Which dissolution sure doth best discern, Comparing dust with dust, and earth with earth. These laugh at jet and marble put for signs,

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To sever the good fellowship of dust, And spoil the meeting. What shall point out them, When they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat To kiss those heaps, which now they have in trust? Dear flesh, while I do pray, learn here thy stem And true descent; that when thou shalt grow fat, And wanton in thy cravings, thou mayst know That flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust That measures all our time; which also shall Be crumbled into dust. Mark here below How tame these ashes are, how free from lust, That thou mayst fit thyself against thy fall. This is a poem about instability within apparent stability. The church monuments erected to celebrate the family name, that invest that name with an illusion of permanence, of imperishability, are themselves disintegrating like the perishable bodies they contain (who shall point out them//when they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat . . .”). The figure introduced in the final stanza that captures the mutability of all material things is the hourglass, which like the sand running through it is also crumbling. Think of the stanza as the sonic manifestation of the monuments themselves, and think of the syntax, as it is drawn through the lines and stanzas as the sonic equivalent of the sand. And then notice how the enjambments proliferate in the first four lines of the final six-line stanza. Not only that but if you read these lines from caesura to caesura you get four more iambic pentameter units laid across the pentameter units of the lines themselves. The rhythm consequently quickens, diminishing without entirely destroying our experience of the line. But even as we experience the line we can’t help but hear that second pentameter unit stealthily running from caesura to caesura threatening that linear structure. The apparently stable line, like the apparently stable glass, is holding the very forces wearing or eroding it away. The relation between sentence and line in the previous three stanzas is more “closed,” and when there is enjambment in one line either the line that follows has no pause or pauses less emphatically or if the pause is longer, the unit reaching from one caesura to the another is either tetrameter or hexameter with one exception—“that it may learn//to spell his elements.” Nowhere till the last stanza do we get four consecutive run overs creating that double pentameter effect. The sudden openness coincident with the image of the hourglass has been prepared for, has been set up by being set off against the way the sentence courses through the lines of earlier stanzas. On the other hand, if you compare even the most open line in Church Monuments to the short line free verse of W. C. Williams, in which the line often cuts into the sentence after a preposition or a pronoun, the “open” Herbert line will seem safely closed. Closure and openness, in other words, are relative terms, and their effects are wholly dependent not just on the formal properties

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of the poems in which they appear but on the poem’s semantic, rhetorical, and vocal properties as well. With respect to the metrical conventions of “The Oxen,” the first thing to notice is that it’s written in hymn or ballad meter—four-line stanzas (quatrains) of alternating four beat and three beat lines, rhymed abab. The first two quatrains are closed, that is, the end of the quatrain coincides with the end of the sentence. The third quatrain is open, relative to the first two, in that the sentence extends beyond the border of the four-line unit. Metrically, the first two quatrains of “The Oxen” are unusual. While the majority of feet are iambic, every line has at least one or two anapestic substitutions, and the first foot of the first line is monosyllabic, followed by two iambs and a final anapest: Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock The pattern of alternating anapestic and iambic feet is broken in the third quatrain in which every foot is iambic though with varying degrees of stress among accented and unaccented syllables. Then Hardy returns to the anapestic substitutions or some facsimile thereof in the concluding quatrain. Of course, none of this is very interesting on its own, or even meaningful in isolation from the content. With respect to content, the first thing to notice is the temporal structure, how the poem moves from past to present, from childhood to adulthood, and from faith to skepticism. The speaker recalls sitting with other children on Christmas evening while the elders tell them that the oxen too are kneeling in celebration of the birth of Christ. The innocence of the children, their unquestioned faith in what the elders tell them, and the sensation of unity between the supernatural and natural, and the human and the animal, is suggested by the metaphors which animalize the children (as we sat in a flock) and humanize the animals (now they are all on their knees). As the present replaces the past, adult skepticism replaces belief. But the important thing to notice is not the skepticism per se, but the elegiac tone expressing emotional attachment to what the speaker intellectually disbelieves. Whereas in childhood he took on faith what the elders told him, as an adult empiricist, he needs proof; he can only believe what he sees with his own eyes, so he imagines going out to the barn to see if the oxen are really kneeling. The simplicity of childhood gives way to adult complexity, a complexity the very syntax embodies. Just as his vision is no longer contained by the stories he grew up with, so the syntax in the third quatrain (again, relative to the first two) is no longer contained by the four-line stanza. The very structure of the sentence too enacts the change of point of view. The relatively simple sentences in the first two quatrains become in the third and fourth a long, conditional sentence. Belief for the speaker is now conditional, not unconditional, and the implied premise of this particular conditional is that, of course, no one nowadays in such a skeptical age would ever invite him to go see if the oxen are kneeling. The remoteness of that folk belief from the present-day world of fact is nicely

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captured by the heavy alliteration in stanza three, which in this instance calls attention to the fancifulness or artificiality of the belief, that it’s just a fancy, not a fact, and by the archaic diction in stanza four. Again, what makes the “open” quatrain feel significantly open is the pattern of closed quatrains that precede it, and the coincidence of those closed quatrains in this poem, with childhood innocence, with taking things on faith. What makes the complex sentence of the last two quatrains meaningful, what even gives it the feeling of complexity, are one, the coincidence of that sentence with the complex perspective of the adult speaker, the unlikely thought experiment he conducts, of someone inviting him out to see if the oxen are kneeling, and two, the simpler sentences of the first two quatrains about childhood that precede it. And what makes those anapests feel like sonic extensions of the speaker’s lost faith and childhood innocence is the inexorable drumbeat of iambs that replace them in the third quatrain, iambs which are the normative foot in the poem, the underlying but always audible grid over which those variations play and in relation to which they have their meaning. Think of the metrical norm as the sonic symbol of a reality in which there is no divinity, and the rhythm as the sonic symbol of the speaker’s emotional longing for or persistent attachment to what he knows is false. Both sonic symbols are prominent in the concluding quatrain, especially in the last line, which begins with a trochee, followed by two iambs. What the trochaic substitution in the first foot does, though, is create the illusion of an anapest because the accented first syllable (hope) is followed by two unaccented syllables leading to the accented “might.” As we move from first syllable to fourth, from “hope” to “might,” we recapitulate the movement of the entire poem. The ghost of the earlier anapestic line, in which childhood belief still haunts the speaker, gives way here to the speaker’s own resistance to that belief: the speaker is indulging in a fantasy while reminding himself that a fantasy is all it is. So the reversed first foot, in this instance, because of the semantic/ metrical coincidences leading up to it, conveys both the feeling of resistance, an intellectual pulling back, or reversal, and of indulgence, an emotional giving in, hence the anapestic illusion. Norms of expectation, pattern, convention, experiential, linguistic, and literary associations established by what’s repeated over time provide the necessary if not sufficient conditions for our experience and understanding of what is constantly changing, on and off the page. Isn’t the very concept of “news” itself inversely proportionate to an event’s expectedness? And if it’s not too much of a stretch, how do we recognize individual talent except against the background of some tradition? One might even say that the enemy of an ongoing, vital tradition is the very predictability that would freeze it in place, and not the innovations that would keep it responsive to a changing world. And yet many poets of my generation have assumed, in theory anyway if not in practice, that any and all conventions or predetermined forms (and by this I mean not just poetic forms but grammatical forms as well) are inherently

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mechanical and stale, and thus the enemy of individual expression. This is an unfortunate legacy of modernism, or at least of an incomplete grasp of what modernism stood for. Ironically, nobody better understood how tradition and individual talent were intimately entwined than many of the very poets we invoke to justify this false dichotomy. From the modern period, no American poet is more associated with experiment and innovation than William Carlos Williams. He famously described Eliot’s Waste Land as a catastrophe for American letters because it turned away from the new American scene to the European past and thus gave poetry back to the professors. He promoted disjunction and fragmentation, once even claiming that the reason we prefer the previews of coming attractions to the movies themselves is because the trailers in giving us only the most intense disjointed moments of a story eliminate what he calls “the banality of sequence.”3 Yet despite his anti-conventional, anti-traditional stance, in his poems, early and late, if not always in his essays, he was exquisitely attuned to the many ways in which convention and originality were interdependent, mutually entailing, not mutually exclusive. His best poems play off some unconventional perception against an implied conventional screen. Sometimes the conventions are experiential, as in “Sorrow,” where he sets up a scene of a father walking home from work, enjoying the sassafras leaves and the evening light, and then when he’s greeted by the happy shouts of his children he is crushed, not exhilarated, as we’d expect. Sometimes the conventions are literary or formal, as in “Queen Anne’s Lace,” his rewriting of Shakespeare’s sonnet, “My Mistress’ Eyes are nothing like the Sun”—crossing images of woman and flower, he begins with a series of negatives, just as Shakespeare does, in order to explode conventional assumptions about female sexuality, passivity, and purity—this woman/flower is “not so white as anemone petals, nor so smooth nor so remote a thing”; she isn’t sexually weak or passive but rather “takes the field by force”; aroused and arousing she embodies “a pious wish for whiteness/gone over,” that is, got beyond, “or nothing.” Likewise, in the first poem of his great experimental book Spring and All, his pastoral landscape of creative renewal is American/urban, not European/rural, and the month is March, an even crueler month than April, on a cold, cloudy windy day by the road to a contagious hospital: under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the waste of broad, muddy fields brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen patches of standing water the scattering of tall trees

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All along the road the reddish purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy stuff of bushes and small trees with dead, brown leaves under them leafless vines— Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches— They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter. All about them the cold, familiar wind— Now the grass, tomorrow the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf One by one objects are defined— It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf But now the stark dignity of entrance—Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken4 From our past experience of spring poems, we expect a pastoral landscape, vaguely Italianate—instead we get New Jersey. Anybody else up there? The Virgilian renewal, though, which pastoral is supposed to celebrate, does, in fact, take place exactly as it should and yet is all the more surprising because it emerges where we least expect it. What makes the poem so original is that it manages to celebrate the return of spring in a way that avoids the clichés both of the pastoral convention and of the dystopian irony of Eliot’s Waste Land, which by the mid-1920s had already become a convention in its own right. Williams ironizes Eliot’s irony by invoking it to show how far he’s gone beyond it into what finally is a wholly un-ironic, even somewhat traditional celebration of creative energy in the American scene as well as in the self. Or consider the following poem, “Portrait of a Lady”: Your thighs are apple trees whose blossoms touch the sky. Which sky? The sky where Watteau hung a lady’s slipper. Your knees are a southern breeze—or a gust of snow. Agh! What sort of man was Fragonard? —as if that answered

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anything. Ah, yes—below the knees, since the tune drops that way, it is one of those white summer days, the tall grass of your ankles flickers upon the shore— Which shore?— The sand clings to my lips— Which shore? Agh, petals maybe. How should I know? Which shore? Which shore? I said petals from an apple tree.5 I don’t think, as some do, that Williams is alluding to Henry James’s great novel Portrait of a Lady. I think rather he’s playing with the conventions of portrait painting, with its devotion to the physical image of the person being painted, to the face especially. When we bring these expectations to the poem we notice right away that the speaker/poet/painter is less interested in this woman’s literal appearance than in his own poetic abilities. She seems almost incidental to his desire to show off his metaphorical skill and his knowledge of art, which turns out to be shaky at best. The heart of the poem has less to do with the “portrait” the speaker is trying to paint in words, which are loosely based on an eighteenth-century rococo painting, than with the woman’s implied interruptions, her refusal to let the speaker’s tune “drop” where it will. Well, if he’s going to compare her to a famous painting, he’d better know whose painting it is, which he doesn’t, and what kind of man would put a girl on a swing and place a voyeur under her (is it the painter himself?) so he can look up her dress? He wants to write his poem the way he wants to write it, but she won’t let him. She corrects his misidentification of the painter, she asks annoying questions about where exactly the poem is taking place (which shore, which shore?), and, worse, about the moral character of the painter. She affirms the biographical fallacy. In her view, the life of the artist, his moral character, should influence or inform our experience of the art. For the poet/speaker, though, art should be autonomous, self-enclosed, free of any and all extrinsic considerations. And as a poet, he should be left alone to write whatever he wants, however he wants to write it, responsible to nothing beyond his imagination. But for this lady, no artist, certainly not Williams himself, is ever only an artist, especially not if he’s married to this woman and going to make her the subject of his work. Williams does in the end give us a portrait of this lady but not, as we’re first led to expect, of her physical beauty. Instead, he paints a vivid picture of her character in and through the very poem she will not let him write, the very poem she constantly interrupts. By means of her interruptions, we learn that she’s a stickler for details, she’s not someone to be bullied, and she knows more

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than he does about the very art he’s tries to praise her with. By the end of the poem, the speaker is completely discombobulated by her refusal to let him wax poetic, by her insistence that he pay attention to her, not just to his idea of her (the thing itself, not the idea of the thing). The lady is never literally described, but we end up with a memorable portrait of the kind of person she is. In a sly, self-deprecating way, Williams paints a wonderful and utterly unconventional portrait of a lady’s character and of a marriage. The originality of the poem depends on our holding in mind a set of expectations about portrait painting, ekphrastic poetry, and the extravagant gestures of rococo art, as well as the newer but no less conventional disjunctive strategies of modernism. Williams establishes these multiple frames and patterns of expectation so he can show us how to look beyond them, to something never before expressed, at least not in the particular way that he expresses it here. Sometime between 1910 and 1915, Williams composed “Love and Service,” an essay that makes several assertions about the spiritual aim of poetry (and of all art by extension) in the modern world. “Two things,” Williams says, we must avoid. We must not forget that we praise the unknown, the mystery about which nothing can be said; and second, that we praise in silence, the rest being but perishable signs. Then lest we mistake our signs for the reality let them be ever new, forever new for only by forever changing the sign can we learn to separate from it its meaning, the expression from the term, and so cease to be idolaters.6 The goal of art, Williams says, is the unknown, the mystery, which is less an entity than an action, a principle of change and disruptive transformation that is simultaneously hard to grasp and impossible not to feel. His insistence on the new and perpetual revolution as the goal of art is both quintessentially American and Modern. It echoes Pound's slogan “Make it new,” Emerson’s call in Nature for an original relation to the universe, and beyond Emerson it hearkens back to the Puritan’s distrust of mediation and idolatry. But Williams’s sense of language as a system of perishable signs that displace the realities and meanings it solicits looks forward as well to certain postmodern forms of skepticism. Of course, what qualifies this “postmodern” quality is the faith espoused here in some transcendent, genuinely life-enhancing principle, something that is both within and beyond language, separable from signs yet inextricably bound up with them, something that cannot be approached at all except through the very medium that obscures it. Williams is often thought of as an iconoclast, someone who in the name of individual expression discards all predetermined forms and conventions. But what this picture distorts is the extent to which his unconventional perspective, as I have argued, depends on the very conventions it resists, in the same way that the unknown, the mystery, can only be approached through the very perishable (socially constructed and therefore conventional) signs that displace

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it. Williams is also seldom thought of as a spiritual or religious poet. Referred to most often as either an imagist or an objectivist poet who believed in no ideas but in things, that everything in life as well as art depends on looking carefully at a red wheel barrel glazed with rain, and the green shards of a broken bottle between the walls of a hospital, most readers overlook the extent to which his poetry isn’t really all that visual, or ever merely so, the extent to which his attention in his best poems is continually moving among things, never resting in any one thing, and that what motivates the movement is a love of surfaces that distrusts the surfaces it loves, including linguistic ones. This tension in Williams between his desire to deflect attention from the conventionality of the sign to the mystery beyond it, and his recognition that the sign itself, the convention, the norm of expectation, is unavoidable, intractable, and the mystery in and of itself unspeakable, governs all aspects of Williams’s prosody, it shapes the very shape and movement of his poems, which typically consist of short lines of free verse that cut into and break up long syntactical units. As the syntax courses through the lines, Williams formalizes his linguistic ambivalence by never letting our attention rest for very long on any one image or clause, by shifting our focus from the lines themselves to the restless, everchanging energy among them. Williams also once remarked that poems are machines made out of words. This may seem inconsistent with his assertion that the purpose of poetry is to praise the unknown and mysterious in such a way that somehow preserves by separating meaning from the very means by which that meaning is discovered and expressed. But for Williams, the quintessential American poet, the Protestant poet, distrustful of the very signs or conventions he cannot do without, the mystic and the pragmatic, the everyday and the unknown, are never far apart. In his view, poetry is a machine of words, of conventional signs, whose work is the controlled release of sacred (unconventional) energy. What good is the machine without the energy it runs on, the energy that enables it to work. And what good is the energy without the machine that gives it shape and texture, and connects it to the world in which we live, the world we share with others.

Notes 1 Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), 223–24. 2 Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 468. 3 William Carlos Williams, “The Use of Poetry,” unpublished essay. 4 William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems, Volume I, 1909–1939 (New York: New Directions, 1938), 39–40. 5 Ibid., 129. 6 William Carlos Williams, The Embodiment of Knowledge (New York: New Directions, 1974), 182.

Chapter 7 P H Y L L I S M C G I N L EY: D E F E N D I N G H OU SEW I F E RY   W I T H A L AU G H Megan Leroy

In the one monograph devoted to Phyllis McGinley, Linda W. Wagner pinpoints a persistent frustration which any scholar writing on McGinley (or admittedly many other subjects) must immediately grapple with. Wagner writes: Poets, like any other public performers, can easily become typed. One kind of poem, one insistent theme, one predominant image—and readers think automatically of the writer as so marked. In modern poetry, the satiric couplet belongs to Ogden Nash; the lengthy catalogue reminds one of Whitman; the flower asphodel suggests William Carlos Williams. And—for several reasons, poems like “Song of High Cuisine” are often associated with Phyllis McGinley.1 Wagner continues to point out how poems like “Song of High Cuisine” are “clever, timely, critical,” attentive to form but teasing in formulaic expectations, guiding social criticism without being directly didactic, and overall “good light verse.”2 Wagner’s astute readings of McGinley’s poems offer much to be considered and are still today the only lengthy investigation of McGinley’s work, yet Wagner rarely details the purpose behind McGinley’s humor. What I find intriguing about McGinley’s “type” is that it is twofold: she is both humorous and domestic. So while poets like Dorothy Parker and Ogden Nash become icons of wit and satire, McGinley is neglected for her own use of similar skills because her technique was so closely tied to her defense of the American housewife. The irony, however, is that the power and influence in McGinley’s verse is found in exactly what has come to type her so predominantly: her domestic humor. McGinley’s effectiveness stems from her intentional purpose and ability to break binaries imposed on housewives in postwar America. She neither conforms to advertised domestic ideals nor neglects to acknowledge the skill and intellect involved in housewifery. McGinley’s own skill and strategy only

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reifies her purpose. Unexpectedly pairing domestic humor with high poetic form, McGinley mimics the merging of unlike categories. Bridging ideals and realities, form and content, McGinley uses humor to craft a new understanding of domesticity that transforms housewifery from idyllic constraint to an honorable, albeit practical and entertaining, profession. McGinley (1905–78) publically and unabashedly wrestled with those types— domestic humorist, light verse poet, housewife poet—and in fact proudly labeled herself the “housewife poet” long before Anne Sexton popularized the term. Yet, no matter how astutely McGinley defended her type, label, and purpose, the negative and derogatory perception of her followed McGinley throughout her life and legacy; critics like Betty Friedan and Sylvia Plath labeled her a sellout. Most recently, on December 24, 2008, Phyllis McGinley appeared in the New York Times as the forgotten author of “Suburban Rapture,” briefly resurfacing into cultural consciousness as the adept light verse poet who “seemed to find roses where so many others were turning up crabgrass.”3 This lighthearted perception of McGinley has persisted throughout contemporary culture and academic scholarship alike. In its most positive, good-intentioned categorization, such a view becomes a politely patronizing summary of a lifelong passion. Such a common, blithe view of McGinley’s work negates the complicated nature of her humor and misconstrues McGinley’s view of women’s domestic poetry. While McGinley lacks the brash tone of Dorothy Parker or the rebellious image of Anne Sexton, she actually finds much more than “suburban rapture” and certainly more than just roses. McGinley finds roses, yes, but she also finds crabgrass, thorns, barren gardens, flowering beauty, and sweet-smelling memories. The genius behind McGinley’s findings, however, is that she often makes light or makes fun of every discovery. Roses or thorns, McGinley defends the art of housewifery while poking fun at the institution and the facilitators of and administrators within it. To see how she does so, one might consider three strategies within her work. First, McGinley disarms a skeptical audience with humor to gain a more neutral reception and to relieve the expectations of idealized domesticity. Secondly, she defends the institution of housewifery and its patrons, claiming housewifery as a worthy institution. Keeping a good house, raising a family, becoming a welcoming hostess, and intelligently abiding by social etiquette took skill, practice, and knowledge. McGinley’s ability to laugh at the institution she wrote about and found herself living within does not erase her desire to defend its value. Finally, McGinley also stubbornly adheres to high form in the height of an era of free verse experimentation to masterfully combine both “high” and “low” cultural expectations. With these three strategies, McGinley complicates the notion of American domesticity and uses humor to showcase the implausibility of both the complete endorsement of and total rejection of American midcentury domestic ideals. It likely seems reasonable to most people that 1950s advertisements showcase idealized images of American domesticity with the

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typical housewife in pearls and high heels vacuuming the floor of the home that houses the perfect nuclear family. Just as implausible for most middleclass women, however, was the complete rejection of domesticity. Many of McGinley’s readers did not have the income or the desire to wholly release all domestic duties. Thus, McGinley’s humorous light verse creates a middle ground that allowed so many housewives to both find value in their daily life and lighten the domestic load with a laugh.

McGinley: A Brief Introduction Born in 1905, McGinley graduated from the University of Utah and moved to New York in 1929, where she simultaneously taught high school English and published poetry. She married Charles L. Hayden in 1936, and had her first child, Julie, by 1939 and a second, Patsy, in 1941. Traversing both personal and professional expectations, McGinley was an educated, published writer with a college degree, yet she still had two kids, a husband, and an in-home job. She portrayed traditional domesticity while she became quite invested in her poetry. It is also important to note that despite her passion for and defense of housewifery, McGinley was not the average housewife in all her valorized duties. She did have a maid/nanny for part of her life, which created more time for her poetic profession, a profession that was impressively prolific. McGinley published eight volumes of poetry, as well as a constant stream of individual poems published in acclaimed magazines, such as Harper’s, the New Yorker (NY), Ladies’ Home Journal (LHJ), and the Saturday Evening Post (much to the frustration of Sylvia Plath). Magazines like LHJ and the NY reveal the breadth of McGinley’s work. A best-selling popular poet from the 1930s to the 1960s, McGinley won both the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award in 1954 for The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 for Times Three (selected poems). In addition to the books of poetry, McGinley also wrote several children’s books and two collections of prose essays, The Province of the Heart (1959) and Sixpence in Her Shoe (1964), in which she published her opinions of American social codes and traditions, gracefully yet persistently embracing domesticity as a worthy institution. She graced the cover of Time in 1961, wrote introductions to cookbooks, was included in The Woman Question in American History (an edition of America Problem Studies), and is still found on the DVD information as the author/inspiration for the annual claymation Christmas movie The Year Without a Santa Claus. Though McGinley has long since ceased to be a best-selling author, she was quite popular throughout her career. J. D. McCarthy comments on McGinley’s recognition in one of the few books inclusive of her work, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, and Phyllis McGinley: “So popular was her work, and so canny were her portraits of middle-class matrons, their hapless husbands

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and conniving children, that for two generations McGinley’s work—her books flew off the shelves, tens of thousands of copies at a time—was as well-known and as well-heeded as anyone’s.”4 McGinley’s popularity with middle-class wives and mothers likely contributed to the scorn from critics, adding another rationale to their litany of reasons to exclude her from the poetic canon. Few popular works and popular poets have been embraced by anyone other than consumers.

McGinley’s Cultural Climate McGinley wrote amid a complex social setting. In postwar America at the height of McGinley’s career, the cultural climate regarding women’s issues (including their place in professionalism or within the home) could easily be categorized as polarized. While feminist critics were proudly and publically proclaiming women’s lib, women’s magazines were in their heyday of idealizing domesticity and the nuclear family. Each perspective claimed its spokesperson—LHJ continued to be an icon for domestic perfection and Betty Friedan emerged as the antithesis to an industry revolving around housewives’ consumerism. Thus, writers like McGinley who embraced domestic ideals may have been popularly accepted but did not fit into feminist critics’ strategic platform for equality and liberation. The first side of this postwar social dichotomy—idealized domestic advertisements—so saturated American society that many images still linger in the minds and memory of the current generation. Most remember Frigidaire’s “Queen for a Day” campaign that turned into a nationally broadcast television show in the 1950s. This television series immortalized the housewife as a queen of domesticity. In the show, Jack Bailey interviewed four women and whoever was in the worst shape—assessed by the audience “applause meter”—was crowned Queen For A Day . . . TV Guide called Bailey television’s “No. 1 mesmerizer of middle-aged females and most relentless dispenser of free washing machines.” . . . It was exactly what the general public wanted. . . . We got what we were after. Five thousand Queens got what they were after. And the TV audience cried their eyes out, morbidly delighted to find there were people worse off than they were, and so they got what they were after.5 The chosen woman was literally “draped in a sable-trimmed red velvet robe and a jeweled crown” to publicly announce her ineptness as a housewife in addition to her publicized queendom. The media of the 1950s offered unachievable expectations and guilt-laden models with few alternative images for women; housewifery was the epitome of success and happiness in life, not to mention a patriotic symbol of security amid the looming Cold War.

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The greatest abundance of images that bombarded housewives, however, graced the covers and glossy pages of women’s magazines. LHJ ranked at the top of widely read women’s magazines; “over 5 million women . . . subscribed to the Journal in 1955.”6 The women’s magazines of the 1950s were not simply a place for the latest appliance ad or the most recent marriage column, but rather an entry into American society and an influence on it. Women bought LHJ because they saw themselves, as well as who they wanted to be, reflected in it. It was, in fact, “The Magazine Women Believed In.” Housewives were a popular subject of discussion. At the same time, LHJ also reflected changing social customs and codes, a guidebook for women and a mark of American culture. Nancy Walker summarizes the impact of LHJ in her intriguing article “The Ladies’ Home Journal, ‘How America Lives’ and the Limits of Cultural Diversity”: Magazines for women are not the result of monolithic editorial visions, but instead the product of complex negotiations with a variety of cultural forces. . . . Fluctuations in the economy brought about by the Depression, World War II rationing and shortages, and postwar prosperity affected everything from fashions to household design and technology. New products and new areas of expertise were reflected in articles and advice columns. Developments in medicine, child care, and education, not to mention changes in tastes and values, launched new features and series. Most importantly, of course, these magazines were (and are) businesses, heavily dependent upon advertising revenue for their continued existence. Not only do product manufacturers buy advertising space in periodicals whose readers are apt to be interested in them, but advertisements become part of the “message” of the magazine.7 It is these advertised messages within the magazine that most glorified the happy housewife. I do not mean to suggest that LHJ solely presented the perfect housewife, nor do I mean to suggest that women solely aspired to become June Cleaver or Donna Reed. Many women, in fact, still held jobs after the Second World War, and many women voiced their discontent through responses to the content and material of LHJ. The magazine portrayed a mainstream domesticity, but it also published sections on domestic problems and concerns. I do posit, however, that the advertisements in magazines such as LHJ created the socially accepted view of the housewife, offering women the choice of either conforming to pristine images or enduring the guilt of being a bad housewife, a label we have already defined as combining the multiple roles of mother, wife, and hostess. Women weren’t just bad housekeepers, they were triply disappointing throughout their lives. These magazines were shaping the image of postwar domesticity, an image McGinley sought to correct. On the other side of the social debate, Betty Friedan specifically pointed fingers at magazines like LHJ as displaying happy housewives and overwhelming

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the average reader with a monthly onslaught of perfection while maintaining the national status quo.8 Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Friedan sought to identify issues and publicly address conclusions that were already prevalent in the 1950s. Like McGinley, Friedan addressed white, middle-class, educated women, but she viewed professionalized housewifery as incredibly limited and contained, stifling women’s potential and allowing them only “insular domesticity.”9 Faulting “women’s magazines . . . advertisements, televisions, movies, [and] novels” as instigators of “the problem that has no name,” Friedan famously proclaimed for housewives, “We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says, ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.’”10 Friedan documented the majority of white, middle-class housewives as unhappy and unsatisfied with their roles. According to her evidence, the ads in the 1950s suffocated women by creating unachievable ideals and prompting the feminine mystique. Such was the choice for women—either embrace your inner June Cleaver or recognize your suffering and turn to a new occupation. It is important to note that Betty Friedan was not only targeting a general audience; she actually called McGinley out by name. Friedan saw McGinley as stifling women’s options, and promoting unhappy housewifery. Freidan comments about domestic women writers: A new breed of women writers began to write about themselves as if they were “just housewives,” reveling in a comic world of children’s pranks and eccentric washing machines and Parents’ Night at the PTA. . . . When Shirley Jackson, who all her adult life has been an extremely capable writer, pursuing a craft far more demanding than bedmaking, and Jean Kerr, who is a playwright, and Phyllis McGinley, who is a poet, picture themselves as housewives, they may or may not overlook the housekeeper or maid who really makes the beds. But they implicitly deny the vision, and the satisfying hard work involved in their stories, poems, and plays. They deny the lives they lead, not as housewives, but as individuals.11 Friedan saw these “Housewife Writers” as a group of women duping their readers by offering them temporary humor. She credits McGinley as a “good craftsman,” but criticizes her for lending no substantial ideas that will change the majority of housewives’ lives, and, in fact, actually diminishes their selfworth by erasing their individual identities.12 Throughout her investigations, Friedan found educated women in suburbia to be living in problematic situations. In her book A Feminist Critique, Cassandra Langer describes Friedan’s issue as one of untapped potential: “Rarely did [housewives] have the energy to pursue professional careers, take university courses, or fulfill their creative possibilities in any way. When they complained

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of feeling listless or told their doctors their lives were pointless, they were told to take Miltown or Valium, buy a new dress, or try a new hairstyle.”13 Housewifery, for Friedan, limited women to the contained role of mother/housekeeper/wife, offering them no option for furthering their own interests and careers—the presumed highest achievement—and instead leaving them with the presumed misery of housework. From this perspective, McGinley seemed to be only critically useful as a target example of “domestic poet.” She was easily typed, and easily cast aside. Friedan was not McGinley’s only enemy; Sylvia Plath chose to call McGinley out by name as well (though only in her journal). Plath commented, “Phyllis McGinley is out—light verse: she’s sold herself.”14 Clearly, Plath thought little of McGinley and her work. Plath is now cherished as a poet of domesticity but was never as popular as McGinley, nor nearly as widely published, a fact that likely caused Plath’s frustrated journal entry. But Plath has become “one of America’s major poets” and “literature’s great commodity.”15 Plath began publishing at the height of McGinley’s career, also using magazines like LHJ and the NY as a marketplace. McGinley and Plath actually appeared in the same LHJ December 1959 issue, McGinley publishing “Office Party” and Plath publishing “The Second Winter.” McGinley published multiple children’s books; Plath wrote a children’s book but couldn’t get it placed. Plath wrote many poems referencing domesticity, often mocking the role of housewife, but nonetheless shaping it. In “Plath, Domesticity, and the Art of Advertising” Marsha Bryant proposes Plath as an author who “like ads . . . explores performative as well as mechanical dimensions of domesticity. She draws the reader into the intimate spaces of the home (kitchen, bedroom, nursery), only to reveal a stage.”16 Also in the middle of second-wave feminism, Plath could be embraced by feminist critics because she revealed the ludicrous performativity of the perfect housewife. Women writers like Plath were precursors to the official movement eventually placed alongside Betty Friedan. While she tackled domestic issues, we can safely assume she would have balked at the label “housewife” poet, and though Plath published satirical verse and poems about domesticity, she rarely, if ever, wrote light verse. McGinley, however, was not as clearly aligned with feminist revisions and was thus typecast with great ease. Her light verse and use of humor were only added fodder for critics like Friedan and Plath. She still seems to exist somewhat lodged in that category of average domestic poet, in conservative opposition to the radical labels of the aforementioned women. But McGinley is an important figure, complicating our notions of postwar, women’s, and humorist poetry, and questioning how those canonical categories were constructed. She does not adhere to the pristine perfection often advertised in women’s magazines, nor does she embrace Friedan’s feminist platform. A closer look at McGinley’s work and her strategic use of humor will show her complex negotiation of domestic ideals and prevent her, and her poetry, from being so easily stigmatized.

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Thorns Become Swords: Disarming the Skeptics and Defending the Housewife Much of McGinley’s humorous poetry was published in LHJ. It has long been a strategy of satirists to use humor as a form of disarmament, for when a reader laughs, she continues to read. Amid the polarized climate in which she was writing, McGinley used this strategy with two purposes in mind. She used humorous light verse to write about housewifery in order to both disarm a potentially skeptical/critical audience (via the sheer entertainment of reading her work) and veil the shame and guilt in being a non-model housewife. McGinley posits laughable images of the housewives, hostesses, cooks, wives, mothers, and other key models of domesticity in order to show that those idealized images are, in fact, laughable. The bumbling housewife and inept cook are icons that were simultaneously extreme and familiar. These characters did not inhabit the pristine pages of LHJ ads and did not succumb to the critiques of Friedan. They persisted, through humor, as a median, realistic view of domesticity. One of McGinley’s best poems that emphasizes her strategy to un-idealize housewifery is “A Short History of Cooks.” In this poem McGinley snickers about the difficulty in finding the perfect cook. While the multiple layers of rhyme and cadence entice her reader to laugh at a series of incompetent cooks, those same lines and skills show the impossibility of achieving stereotypical 1950s domestic ideals placed upon housewives themselves. By placing the focus on the cook, McGinley’s target reader (the average mid-century housewife) also understands the unrealistic expectations she possibly upholds for herself. The poem begins much like a nursery rhyme: Dorcas broke the dishes, Clara slumbered late, Norah’s sauces Were total losses, And Sigrid stole the plate. Mabel burnt the entrees And wooed the handy man, But rich and rare And beyond compare Are the works of Katharine Anne.17 This ten-line stanza breaks down the inadequacies of cooks, and their primary faults, creating comical characters whose sole traits, excluding Katharine Anne, are based upon ineptness. McGinley emphasizes active voice to show how each cook’s agency produces such foibles. “Broke,” “slumbered,” “stole,” “burnt,” and “wooed” all imply that these cooks are so inept that either they have no other abilities to produce positive results

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or that they have intentionally tried to err in their domestic duties. There is no confusion that it is Dorcas who “broke the dishes.” Such childlike rhymes teach us, like any good nursery rhyme, what kind of behavior is unacceptable. Additionally, McGinley’s rhyme underscores the consequences of folly in the kitchen: “sauces” that are “losses,” being “late” and a missing “plate” are all reasons for dismissal. In this poem, rhyme and active voice combine to create a laughable list of naughtiness. At the same time, however, McGinley’s lines define the ideals of housewifery by offering its opposite. If magazines have taught us anything, a good cook or a good housewife should be polishing dishes, up early with a smile, able to cook delicious sauces (one of the hardest culinary tasks), be ethical and straightlaced, and never burn a meal. However, McGinley uses humor to think about idyllic characteristics from an “othered” perspective, disarming her target audience from the very beginning of the poem. Reading about the cook displaces concern about one’s own inadequacies from one’s self to a fictional yet realistic character of the cook. Mishaps like those must only happen to someone else, and better yet, someone else’s employee. As the poem continues, we learn from this seemingly cute didactic poem what is to be lauded about a cook. Katharine Anne is “beyond compare” because of her natural and inspirational abilities: For Katharine Anne is a cooks of cooks. She throws away the recipe books To bake by ear or by inspiration And her meagrest stew is a World Sensation. She lives to nourish the urge that’s inner. She doesn’t mind if there’s ten to dinner. Katharine Anne is so full of natural talent that she can “bake by ear.” Cooking, like playing an instrument, technically requires training, but the best musicians, like the best cooks, can adapt and improvise. They are attuned to changes, emotions, and different tastes. Furthermore, McGinley points out the equally valuable “musician” who is self-taught. Katharine Anne is not a classically trained chef, but she is an impressive home cook with skills and talents to be acknowledged—she is a cook but she is also an artist inspired by inner creativity. Additionally, McGinley is smirking at the over-the-top abilities of Katharine Anne. McGinley’s lines shift at this point in the poem to a much more steady rhyme scheme and very similar line lengths. She produces a much tidier stanza for a much more praiseworthy figure. Her tone shifts from finger-pointing (with active voice) to a breathy description of Katharine Anne’s remarkable skills. Katharine Anne is idolized, a celebrity no one else can become. Compared to the previous stanza, McGinley presents her readers with a similarly humorous idea of what is to be expected of a good cook or housewife: innate talent to cook sensational stews, and a deep desire to live for feeding however many guests

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come to dinner. Katharine Anne’s sole purpose in life is to cook, a notion that certainly would have caused McGinley to raise an eyebrow. McGinley continues throughout the poem to push this dualism, comparing a litany of comical cooks to the ideal of Katharine Anne. Nellie is a cook who always “kept me in my place,” “Emma’s seasoning/Lacked rhyme or reasoning,” and Idabelle was too much of an “Evangelist.” But perhaps the most disheartening notion of all is knowing that “ennui troubled Grace.” The poem lists nine different laughably hopeless cooks, with each addition making the reader laugh more and more but also question the truth in what now seems to be exaggeration. Each stanza describing the shortcomings of a group of cooks is always interrupted by praise of Katharine Anne. She “is merry and humble/Her cakes don’t fall and her pies don’t crumble,” “There are no lumps in her mashed potatoes,” she is “learned with herbs and versed in spices/She has no sins and she owns no vices.” Thus, McGinley’s structure allows equal time for each extreme. Combined with her repetition of character traits about Katharine Anne, she makes both sets of characters equally laughable and impossible. A slightly more nuanced reading might even contradict Friedan’s claim that McGinley refuses to recognize the individualism in her domestic figures. “Evangelist” Idabelle and Grace and with her “ennui” are slightly more interesting as characters, despite Katharine Anne’s skills in the kitchen. With “no sins” she is almost reduced to “no interest,” only useful in her domestic knowledge and action. While McGinley lauds Katharine Anne’s cooking talent, she simultaneously parodies the perfected housewife ideals of women’s magazines that produce such a flat, unexciting character. In the end, McGinley directly recognizes the similar nature of both extreme ineptitude and extreme perfection in “Short History of Cooks.” Her final lines reveal about Katharine Anne: “She likes our kitchen, she praises her bed/And I’ve made her up out of my own head.” Ultimately, McGinley erases any confusion about the idealized image of Katharine Anne, both literally understating what can be expected of any hired help and un-idealizing the image of the housewife. Inserting her personal voice, McGinley highlights the imaginative nature and irrationality of perfect domestic work. It’s impossible; it’s fiction. Adding the “I’ve” transitions the entire poem into a testimony, or a confession. McGinley has made up the cook just as she has made up her poem.

Defending the Honorable Institution In McGinley’s view, the image of the housewife needed revitalizing. In an effort to combat both the ads and second-wave feminism, she published a short essay entitled “The Honor of Being a Woman.” She passionately felt the need for upcoming women to understand what role they were marrying into. She wanted women both to know their possibilities in life and also recognize their limitations. McGinley exalted the decision to be a housewife not as entering

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into a lifetime of unhappiness, but as gaining the respect and honor of having a domestic occupation. She ends her essay with an urgent plea: Our greatest victories have always been moral ones. Without relinquishing our new learning or our immediate opportunities, we must return to a more native sphere. Let us teach our daughters not self-realization at any cost but the true glory of being a woman—sacrifice, containment, pride, and pleasure in our natural accomplishments. Let us win back honor. The honors will take care of themselves.18 For McGinley, women needed to embrace their skills as housewives without complete release of the progress women had made. Such an action was imperative to educate “daughters” who would soon question whether to embrace domestic ideals or pursue their own careers. McGinley broke through the ads, and broke through the criticism to allow women to be both housewives and occupational women, hoping these women, regardless of their choice, would recognize and acknowledge their honorable position in life. McGinley viewed housewifery as a professional choice, a good choice, and an honorable choice. But for her, it was always a choice. She sought to showcase the honor, the intellect, the skill, and the complexity of choosing housewifery as a profession. Thus, when McGinley writes directly about or to her housewife audience, she does not shy away from her slapstick humor, but she also does not leave that to be all her readers infer about the housewife. McGinley saturated her humorous poems about housewives and their duties with educated, respectable, and desirable qualities. Housewives in McGinley’s poetry are multitalented, powerful individuals; they are managers, multitaskers, intellectuals, corporate decision-makers, knowledge bearers, hostesses, event planners, reporters, social critics, mothers, and wives. They have “delicate hands among the demitasses” (“Hostess,” 155); “keep a cool head in the grocery emporium” (“Why, Some of My Best Friends Are Women,” 225); read the New York Times (“The Doll House,” 53), and keep up with the morning papers (“Monday Is Fish Day,” 236); they have “vision and thrift” (“Marriage of Convenience,” 261), financial savvy to “sav[e] for rent” (“Recipe for a Marriage,” 268), and the wherewithal to keep up with a busy “Calendar for Parents.” These housewives are skilled beyond measure and such skills lend them prized power to negotiate their everyday lives. In “Hostess,” McGinley values the skill found in strategic hospitality. Beyond having delicate hands, McGinley’s hostess “smiles, and from her smiling mouth releases/A shower of words/Shrewdly designed.” Immediately, McGinley acknowledges the talent and skill in hostessing. Similarly, in “A Word to Hostesses” McGinley provides key instructions on how to be a good hostess and emphasizes the skills it takes to succeed at this job. The experienced speaker relays how “Celebrities are lonely when/They congregate with lesser men” (68) because when “Wrenched from their coteries, they lack/Mirrors to send their image back.” There are parameters to throwing a good dinner party;

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men must have equally interesting guests to reflect their own high character or they will pout and become bored. Therefore, careful selection of guests proves a primary rule in succeeding as hostess. For seat men “next [to] a Name, and lo!/How they most instantly will glow.” But this masterminded guest list and preplanned table seating that will produce a successful party are not solely intended on behalf of the satisfied guests, but are more necessary to expose the hostess as a skilled and trained success. For a hostess who is not trained by the poem will have guests who do not “sparkle” or “luster” or “glow,” whereas one who pays attention to instructions even a little can “make him glitter.” Sparkles are the recognizable reward of the flawless housewife, a reward that women’s magazines suggested was the ultimate goal. But while McGinley pokes fun at the set routine of dinner parties and the expectation of hostesses, she also points out how skilled they actually are, and the positive outcomes of their strategies: personal satisfaction and fulfillment, opportunities for furthering their income, networking, companionship, an influx of communal knowledge, a new option for carpooling or babysitting, and an escape from the daily routine of domesticity. The power of the hostess develops through her skill and talent to make her guests comfortable, happy, engaged, and “glowing-glittery” guests are certainly worth working for. If guests are happy and “sparkly,” the hostess enjoys endless options for advancement, including—as McGinley would quickly note—the valuable achievement of personal satisfaction and entertainment. McGinley clearly marked and marketed herself as the witty author of poems like these and like “Calendar for Parents,” which was published in the February 1952 issues of LHJ. In magazines like LHJ, she is able to laugh about the practical nature of motherhood and defend the skill involved in keeping up with kids. In this amusing poem, McGinley transforms the monotony of raising children into a comical, yet still realistic, rant: Call the birthday party off: Junior’s down with the whooping cough . . . Let no Christmas kin invite us. That’s our date for tonsillitis . . . Lives there tot with health so firm He never harbored festal germ? If such there be, God save his powers, But he’s not chick nor child of ours.19 This poem laughingly comments on domestic life while occasionally alternating to a more serious practical tone. It is clear, however, that “Calendar for Parents” embraces the family and motherhood as worthy content. McGinley comically depicts the 1950s family life as one that revolves solely around the children, showcasing humor and illustrating both the burden and joy of kids, the sparkling and the dirty sides of being a housewife.

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“Scientific Explanation of a Monday” provides a great example of McGinley both lauding housewifery and exploiting its comic drudgery, offering yet another layered view of the rewards and frustration that come with being a housewife. This poem was published in the March 1954 issues of LHJ and it presents a comically apt analysis of why Monday has become loathed by many housewives, emblematic of the day-to-day weekly solo routine that starts with the first household workday. McGinley lists reasons Monday “can’t abide existence” (18), as compared to other days of the week.20 Stanza by stanza she systematically logs each day of the weekend with fun and routine events, culminating in her detailing of Monday as completely dull and meaningless. The speaker comments: Saturday’s a splendid day With merriment ahead. The day to pick a winner Or to hie to country climes. Sunday’s the intended day For lying later in bed. For church and early dinner And the puzzle in the Times. Both Saturday and Sunday are weekend days, days when housewives would often have another parent at hand. These days exude merriment and relaxation—time for families to reconnect. Sunday proves a relaxing day, time when even mothers perhaps could complete the Sunday “puzzle in the/Times” (10–11), showing her intellect by completing one of the harder puzzles of the week. Remembering the context of LHJ and its audience, this poem reflects its audience’s competence and interest in the Times puzzle, indirectly touting women as smart and educated within their housewife roles. The poem also heralds housewives as being active mothers and organizers of household events. The poem follows with the comparatively banal Monday, the day there’s “nothing in the mail”: No word from my kinfolk, no line from my dear. Not even a postal with a “Wish you were here.” The speaker longs for communication from those she holds dear—those outside her nuclear family—and becomes annoyed that Monday only brings what is, to her, unimportant mail. McGinley exalted relationships and used them as

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key centers for many of her poems, similar to other LHJ entries. This speaker clearly reveals her familial honor by missing communication with her family; it is neither “Life’s Meaning” nor “Remorse” that produces the speaker’s lament, but her own intuition: It’s my soul’s own warning I have never known fail: There’ll be nothing but a Catalogue Nothing but a Bank Statement Nothing but a Tax Form Monday morning in the mail. The annoyance comes with what is absent from the mail, not what is present. Family relations take precedence while tax forms and bank statements only symbolize the monotony of what the week will hold. The housewife, here, has been forgotten. She is heralded as fueling those relationships (children/ husband) that she most misses, but she herself is left alone. McGinley writes of the speaker’s frustration with Monday in a very comic tone, a tone which makes light the “[a]nger, pain, frustration, and weariness” within the housewife role, sloughed off to “counterattack” with a “just kidding.”21 Light verse “demands that subject matter be familiar, that poems contain wit or humor, that language be immediately clear.”22 McGinley uses a common construction of the days of the week and common conventions like getting the mail to illustrate a more powerful poetic position within the cultural and historical binary. The speaker in this poem may be relegated to the household, but she is very much aware of those things out of her domestic sphere, and she is in charge of official paperwork. The light touch of McGinley’s work doesn’t weigh further on the routine of the house, but lightens the load of the housewife reading this poem by offering her an easy read, a momentary escape, a laugh, and recognition of her important connections beyond the domestic sphere.

Mimicking Content in Form As in “Short History of Cooks,” McGinley’s form in “Scientific Explanation of a Monday” mimics its content. The poem begins with lazily falling lines that end with that day’s destination—“climes” or the “Times.” Because Saturdays and Sundays are relaxed, so are McGinley’s lines. Friday is “not a bad day” so its stanza is shorter; Friday offers nothing extremely pleasant or extremely negative. Monday’s lines, however, stair step down to find only the “mail.” At this point in the poem McGinley’s tone and form shift quite distinctly. The negative list associated with Monday creates a line-by-line complaint—“No,” “Not,” “Nothing,” “But.” The frustration of the speaker shifts the form of the

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poem to a stanza that reads like a bullet-pointed list or angry refrain in a song. The last stanza repeats this refrain with the triple nothing: “nothing but a/ catalogue/Nothing but a bank statement/Nothing but a Tax Form.” The triple rhythm of nothings is repeated in the last line as well through alliteration: “Monday morning in the mail.” McGinley toys with form throughout her writing. She most often writes in alternate versions of iambic tetrameter or trimeter, adhering to convention in a poetic world that was focused on breaking tradition. Ironically, at the time, it seems that to write in high form with light subject matter was rebellious, albeit conservative. In a community of writers who were lauding the ability to “make it new,” McGinley utilized old forms, making only the content new. She must have infuriated New Critics. She whole heartedly embraced form but often paired form and poetry very directly with authorial intent and the daily life of housewives. I’m not saying that her poems do not rest on their own merit and could not be explicated from a New Critical point of view, but it is quite difficult to do so when McGinley includes titles and epigraphs that very directly place her poetry at a certain place and time. From poems like “Lines Scribbled on a Program” to “Lady Selecting Her Christmas Cards,” to “Complaint to the American Medical Association,” McGinley often situated her poetry within the routines of everyday life. Occasionally, she even includes epigraphs or subtitles that further the detail about when and why a poem was written. In “Song of High Cuisine,” McGinley captions the title with the epigraph as follows: “Written upon reading in the New York Times that Bloomingdale’s grocery department now offers stuffed larks from the region of Carcassonne as well as one thrush from the French Alps” (87). What makes this poem humorous beyond its comical content is that McGinley pairs high cuisine with high form, making fun of Bloomingdale’s extremely elite choice of grocery items by mimicking the structure of an ode. Thus McGinley is using high form to poke fun at the idyllic high culture of New York City. She takes it one step further with a nod toward Shelley’s “Ode to a Skylark,” Hardy’s “Darkling Thrush,” and Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” The poem, in full, reads as follows: At Bloomingdale’s, At Bloomingdale’s, Who would not wish to be— Where horned are the Gallic snails, Where curls the anchovy! For palate stales as winter fails And rainy spring comes on. So they have birds at Bloomingdale’s That flew in Carcassonne. Yes, hark! The lark At heaven’s gate,

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That lately sang so pure, There trussed and truffled for the plate Invites the epicure. And, sheltering from the Alpine wind In more than Alpine hush, Arrives most elegantly tinned A solitary thrush. Ah, few the sales At Bloomingdale’s, Amid imported straw, Of tongues of foreign nightingales Or pearls in Malaga. But they have many a merry thing. So who’ll go there to buy The little larks with parsleyed wing That speak so eloquent of spring, The single thrush that does not sing? Well, gentlemen, not I. “Song of High Cuisine” is not technically an ode, but it certainly can be considered a riff on one. In her epigraph, McGinley points out an event of “great significance.” She then begins the poem in very formal tone and cadence as a meditation on Bloomingdale’s new offerings. It is easy to see McGinley’s allusion to Shelley, Hardy, and Keats. Using the high form of the ode, she rebukes Bloomingdale’s use of birds and the audience that consumes romantic songbirds. One might even suggest she mocks the romantic habit of idolizing birds in high form by referencing three iconic romantic bird poems in one poetic page. Given McGinley’s propensity to use repetition satirically and mock high form, she is perhaps getting in a quick dig by subtly suggesting Romantics overuse birds as inspiration for their craft. Starting with a formal address to an event and a place—Bloomingdale’s— McGinley uses the typical exclamation marks to emphasize the true passion behind an inspirational occurrence—the Gallic snails and curls of anchovy have arrived. She continues in her mocking tone to address the seasonal reference found in many odes, illustrating that the seasonal shift at Bloomingdale’s has not, for McGinley and New York City, brought a change in passion but a change in consumption. The first stanza reads almost like a meditative parody comparing Bloomingdale’s, the reader/consumer, and a trifecta of romantic poets and odes. The inspirational birds are now “trussed and truffled” with a “parsleyed wing” and have lost all their creative inspiration through 1950s consumerism. McGinley continues to use the ode form to mock American elite consumerism by addressing Shelley’s lark “that from Heaven or near it/Pourest thy full heart/In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.” McGinley, in turn,

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references Shakespeare and heralds the lark “at heaven’s gate”23 and questions why it is now “trussed and truffled for the plate.” Moreover, she connects the “foreign nightingales” and the poor thrush that “does not sing.” McGinley compares this thrush, so luxuriously advertised in its elegant tin, with the beauty of Keats’s nightingale who once sung with “full-throated ease.” What is the point of having a thrush in a tin can amid a million other offerings when the purpose of a songbird is to sing? The levels of humor and ludicrousness pile on top of each other as McGinley unabashedly laughs at the advertisement by Bloomingdale’s in the New York Times. By referencing romantic poets in their highest form of ode, McGinley is once again merging “high” and “low” culture and once again poking fun at both. She questions “who’ll go there to buy” an item so luxurious and ludicrous and perhaps questions who wants to read odes written to mass-marketed birds. Again McGinley shows her readers how each extreme is equally laughable (on the surface) and how combining high and low brow culture reveals the weaknesses of each. McGinley doesn’t stop at ode in her recreation of traditional form. Apostrophe and elegy frequent her work as well. In “Text for Today” found in “The Fifties” section of Times Three, McGinley includes another note for her readers about how and why this poem was created: “A cheerful poem written upon reading in the New York Times that Dr. Robert Cushman Murphy, of the Museum of Natural History, has discovered on Bermuda several specimens of the cahow, a bird believed to be extinct since 1620” (14). She goes on to laud how the cahow outwits man and stands as a model of hope: O brave cahow, so stubborn-linked To your own island, palmed and surfy! I’m happy you are not extinct, But got espied by Dr. Murphy. You lend me hope, you give me joy, Whom Total Man could not destroy. McGinley’s mocking of the apostrophic form teases us throughout the poem. On the surface, McGinley is heralding the newly rediscovered bird through her use of the formal “O”—addressing the “brave cahow” who was assumed to be extinct, but is in fact no longer dead. Writing a mid-poem apostrophe to a still living bird is certainly questionable. This irony continues further through the rhyme scheme when McGinley links “stubborn-linked” with “not extinct.” The cahow is of course stubborn for not giving in to extreme conditions (and thus has reason to be lauded), but the poem itself is stubborn too. McGinley uses her humor to underscore her use of form. The stubborn poem refuses to be constrained by appropriate content (in an apostrophic poem, the bird should conventionally be dead); it knows the bird is not extinct but stubbornly inserts apostrophe to laud the one being able to outdo Total Man. McGinley emphasizes that this refusal to give in to the “Total Man” is what gives the

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cahow its due recognition during its own lifetime. The poem and the poet, however, hold the true power, wielding the ability to revere or ignore their subject through manipulating or subverting poetic form. High form can be found throughout McGinley’s work. In poems like “Monologue to a Pet Shop,” where McGinley laments the upkeep of pets; “Memo for Duncan Hines,” where McGinley touts the relish platter; and “Apostrophe to a Nephew,” where she comically lists the expectations of (living) toddlers, McGinley uses high poetic form to showcase what is stereotypically considered low brow content. Through her combination form, McGinley strategically allows her domestic humor to disarm her readers and subtly defend the institution of housewifery. In McGinley’s poetry, nothing seems more prevalent than her undying tribute to housewives and their feminine capabilities as at least theoretically equivalent to professional work. One of McGinley’s essays provides an example of what seems at first to be a random, laughable portrayal of women, but further illustrates women’s “common sense and self-reliance.” For “woman, as McGinley identifies her, is also a realist; she is perceptive to the worlds around her and to the relationships within them.”24 McGinley writes about women: I like them for their all-around, all-weather dependability. I like them because they are generally so steady, realistic, and careful about tidying up after a hot shower. I admire them for their prudence, thrift, gallantry, common sense, and knobless knees, and because they are neither so vain nor so given to emotion as their opposite numbers. I like the way they answer letters promptly, put shoe trees in their shoes at night, and are so durable physically. Their natures may not be so fine or their hearts so readily touched as man’s, but they are not so easily imposed on either.25 This playful revision of traditional gender stereotypes shows how McGinley viewed housewives as intensely practical and virtuous; they were not advertisement models and they, realistically, could not have all become professional working women. Both ideals were exclusive extremes. Thus, McGinley positions Friedan as actually similar to the ads that Friedan so vocally opposed. Forcing women to feel guilty about not being career-strivers was linked to forcing them to feel ashamed of their inabilities as domestic models. McGinley treats the “housewife poet” as the encompassing figure of a dual role for women in the 1950s, mimicked in her dual high/low poetic form. McGinley was a conservative critic and writer and played toward a white middle- and upper-class audience, but she forces us to reconsider the categories of domesticity and domestic humor. Using light verse as a means to captivate a wide popular and intellectual audience, she offered women humor instead of boredom or dissatisfaction. And through humor, McGinley offered validation; she addressed and acknowledged her readers’ agency, professionalism, intelligence, and esteemed imperfection. Forgotten by the academy, McGinley

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deserves to reside beside her fellow women advocates like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. She too was writing for the everyday woman, writing to break ideas of containment within society. She just offered comprise instead of complete rejection. She commented, “Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy.”26 While McGinley may have been seen as comprising feminism and writing in constrained poetic form, she had a very obvious goal and strategy in using humorous domestic poetry to release the constraints placed on the American housewife. Domesticity was neither perfection nor prison. For McGinley, a housewife could show off her pearls and laugh at them too.

Notes 1 Linda Welshimer Wagner, Phyllis McGinley (Chicago: Twayne Pub, 1970), 15. 2 Ibid., 20, 17. 3 Ginia Bellafante, “Suburban Rapture,” New York Times, December 24, 2008, http:// www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/books/review/Bellafante-t.html?_r=0. 4 J. D. McCarthy, ed., Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, and Phyllis McGinley (New York: Random House, 2003), 43. 5 All quotations taken from Shawn Hanley, “Queen for a Day,” History Web Pages, December 16, 1996, http://history.sandiego.edu/GEN/projects/hanley/queen.html (accessed October 24, 2007). 6 Eugenia Kaledin, Daily Life in the United States, 1940–1959 Shifting Worlds (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 103. 7 Nancy A. Walker, “The Ladies’ Home Journal, ‘How America Lives’ and the Limits of Cultural Diversity,” Media History 4, no. 2 (2000): 130. Walker continues astutely: “Rather than setting out to espouse a philosophy, then, the women’s magazines largely responded to an array of social, business, and even political institutions in determining what to publish. And even a cursory survey of the letters to the editor that the magazines printed demonstrates that readers were not uniformly brainwashed by what they read; they criticized the fiction, took issue with the advice offered by various experts, and questioned the perfectionist standards for home and family life that the magazines often projected” (130). 8 Term taken from David Abrahmson, quoted in Walker’s article: “because the large mass-circulation magazines were predicated on a sense of national community, all had an editorial interest in perpetuating the status quo (5)” (ibid., 130). 9 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1963), 51. 10 Ibid., 19, 32, 43. 11 Ibid., 57. 12 Ibid. 13 Cassandra L. Langer, A Feminist Critique: How Feminism Has Changed American Society, Culture, and How We Live from the 1940s to the Present (New York: Icon Editions, 1996), 132. 14 Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (New York: Anchor, 2000), 360. 15 Marsha Bryant, “Plath, Domesticity, and the Art of Advertising,” College Literature 29, no. 3 (2002): 17.

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16 Ibid., 22. 17 Phyllis McGinley, Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades with Seventy New Poems (New York: Viking Press, 1961), 250. Further references noted in the text. 18 Phyllis McGinley, “The Honor of Being a Woman,” in The Province of the Heart (New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1959), 22. 19 Phyllis McGinley, “Calendar for Parents,” Ladies Home Journal, February 1952, 156. 20 Phyllis McGinley, “Scientific Explanation of a Monday,” Ladies Home Journal, March 1954, 96. 21 Penelope Fritzer and Bartholomew Bland, Merry Wives and Others: A History of Domestic Humor Writing (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland and Company, Inc., 2002), 22. 22 Wagner, 27. 23 Cymbeline, II.iii.19. 24 Wagner, 23. 25. Phyllis McGinley, Sixpence in Her Shoe (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1965), 23. 26 Phyllis McGinley, “Suburbia, of Thee I Sing,” in The Province of the Heart (New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1959), 114.

Chapter 8 T E L L M E T H E T RU T H : H UM O R , L OV E , A N D C OM M U N I T Y I N A U D E N ’ S L AT E 1 9 3 0 s P O E T RY Rachel Trousdale

Auden’s poetry is as full of humor as of considerations of the power and frailty of love. Humor and love are, in fact, inseparable for Auden: they are where individual and universal meet, mediating between impossible ideals and flawed realities. Whether in “serious” poetry or light verse, laughter is an expression of Auden’s ethics, and humor is both a test of common attitudes and a defining feature of humanity. Like love, humor bridges gaps between individuals. Unlike Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson, who locate the comic in the differences we perceive between ourselves and others, Auden suggests that humor reveals commonality at every level of intimacy and belonging, from private connections between lovers, to the in-jokes of a literary circle, to the grand scale of literary canons. Humor is an ethical and affiliational category which defines history and community, and by which Auden distances himself from prescriptive definitions of national identity. Auden begins using humor as a marker of community membership after his “vision of Agape” in 1933. In poems and prose written between 1933 and his move to America in 1939, Auden explicitly connects humor to community identity. In the mid-1930s, humor, lightness, and laughter are among the prime components Auden uses to differentiate his own flexible, inclusive community from the rigid communities he criticizes—whether the British bourgeoisie, high modernists, or Nazi Germany. While Auden’s circle is unusual in its valorization of humor and play, Auden suggests that lightness is a defining feature of humanity, the sign of living literary traditions and free societies. At the same time, Auden’s humor performs the same acts of exclusion it critiques, and suggests the limitations and failures he perceives in his own work. Despite his lifelong revisions and changes of mind, Auden’s discussions and deployments of humor in the mid- and late 1930s continue in his later work, as he makes shared laughter the site of mutual appreciation, the marker of insider/outsider status, and an ethical test.

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Posing the Problem: Light Verse and the Poet’s Community Most critics who comment on Auden’s humor do so in passing. Some use it against him. Early readings of Auden as “an unserious poet,” as Lucy McDiarmid suggests, frequently “distort and misread some of his greatest work,” perhaps because of critics’ discomfort with Auden’s sexuality and ethics.1 Stan Smith notes that F. R. Leavis and Donald Davie disapprovingly linked Auden’s humor to his homosexuality;2 as Richard Bozorth shows, these critics read humor and homosexuality as similarly “immature.”3 Auden himself suggests an overlap between the two meanings of “gay” (the pun is clear to his circle, but less so to a general reader in the 1930s) when he treats homosexual desire as an in-joke among a coterie of reader-friends. This linkage between sexual love, especially gay love, and poetic lightness has important consequences as Auden addresses the ways love is both personal and universal. For Auden, lightness keeps both registers in play, equivocating the real but permeable line between friendship and erotic love. In poems Auden wrote between his “vision of Agape” and meeting Chester Kallman in 1939, treatments of love and sex which are gay in both senses of the word seek to entertain the poet’s friends and to establish the poet’s place in literary history. Auden’s earliest work is far from funny. Edward Mendelson argues that “the [1920s] poems’ central subject is their own failure to be part of any larger interpretive frame. . . . Separated like all the modernists from both audience and tradition, Auden could not, in his ruined world, enjoy a stable relation with any subject matter he might share with his readers.”4 Bozorth reads this loneliness as an exploration of “unspeakability and the closet”;5 the unstable relationships identified by Mendelson as quintessentially modernist are further complicated by an inadmissible yearning for sexual, emotional, and intellectual intimacy and belonging. But as Michael O’Neill notes, “Auden’s seriousness in his early poems ... links with the elusiveness of pinning down how serious he is being.”6 As McDiarmid shows, Auden’s 1930s drama combats this alienation by building communities.7 In the program for the Group Theatre’s 1935 production of Sweeney Agonistes and The Dance of Death, Auden writes, “Drama began as an act of the whole community. Ideally there would be no spectators. In practice every member of the audience should feel like an understudy.”8 Drama reminds audiences of truths they already know, showing them how much they have in common. The flashes of humor in the plays (Karl Marx’s entrance in The Dance of Death, for example) depend on significant shared knowledge and beliefs, reflecting this emphasis on continuity between participant and audience. Poetry, on the other hand, is a terrible model for community, because it is highly controlled, not collaborative. Auden addresses poetry’s inherent authoritarianism throughout his career, most clearly in the 1961 essay “The Poet and the City”: A society which was really like a good poem, embodying the aesthetic virtues of beauty, order, economy and subordination of detail to the

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whole, would be a nightmare of horror . . . such a society could only come into being through selective breeding, extermination of the physically and mentally unfit, absolute obedience to its Director, and a large slave class kept out of sight in cellars.9 To build community in poetry as well as drama, Auden must find an approach which is neither prescriptive nor didactic. This can be done, he suggests, through levity. Poetry is valuable to a community because despite the constraints governing individual poems, art is playful, and thus humane and antiauthoritarian. Auden associates these values of play and antiauthoritarianism equally with poets and peasants, who sniff in any official world the smell of an unreality in which persons are treated as statistics . . . . There is one political principle to which they both subscribe, namely, that among the half dozen or so things for which a man of honor should be prepared, if necessary, to die, the right of play, the right to frivolity, is not the least. (DH 88–89) The poet and peasant’s suspicion of the “smell of unreality” and their defense of “frivolity” are interdependent; both are essential to our individuality and our recognition of the individuality of others. While poetic order provides a fascist model for society, the poet himself is almost an anarchist, and the community he creates must also be self-creating—its other members must participate in its formation. Thomas Fink argues that a poet’s humor is so idiosyncratic as to preclude the identification of “a ‘community’ of anomalous comic authors,”10 but Auden seems to differ, treating the comic impulse as the means of preserving individual freedom within the constraints of group membership. Auden’s concern with community-building is intertwined with his interest in placing his work in a literary tradition. Long before “The Poet and the City,” Auden makes a case for an anti-elitist history of poetry in his 1938 introduction to the Oxford anthology of light verse. While light verse need not be funny, and humorous poetry need not be “light,” the terms Auden establishes in his introduction show how humor defines and refines the relationship between poet and reader. Auden claims that light verse is the product of a homogeneous society, in which poets and readers have the same concerns: When the things in which the poet is interested . . . are much the same as those of his audience, and that audience is a fairly general one, he will not be conscious of himself as an unusual person, and his language will be straightforward and close to ordinary speech. When, on the other hand, his interests and perceptions are not readily acceptable to society, or his audience is a highly specialized one, perhaps of fellow poets, he will be acutely aware of himself as the poet, and his method of expression may depart very widely from the normal social language.11

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Romantic and high modernist poetry privilege the poet,12 but light verse, a term Auden applies to Shakespeare and Pope as well as to folk songs, is the work of poets who consider themselves on equal terms with a broad audience. While verse’s lightness is most easily identified through its humor, lightness comes not from the presence of jokes but from the fact that we can understand and laugh at them. Enduring light verse retains its accessibility as society and language change: Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale” and Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” appeal to the audiences of their days and to contemporary readers. The anthology’s popular history of English poetry overlaps and contrasts with the more serious history in the Oxford Book of English Verse. Auden thus gives his own definition of an “English readership,” prefiguring Benedict Anderson’s discussion of how novels help create nations: Auden implies that poets and readers of light verse have an imagined sense of community stemming from the shared interests and self-conceptions found and expressed in poetry. Auden’s treatment of light verse as demarcating communities may surprise readers of his difficult and unfunny early poetry. Odder still is the note of nostalgia. The light verse anthology was published in 1938, when Auden was highly critical of patriotism and social homogeneity. His plays The Dog Beneath the Skin and The Ascent of F6, written with Christopher Isherwood in 1935 and 1937, attack bourgeois conformity and imperial propaganda; their 1939 On the Frontier lampoons fascist dictators. He would describe with horror GermanAmericans chanting “Kill the Poles” during a newsreel in a Yorkville, New York, cinema in 1939;13 argue that “loyalty and intelligence are mutually hostile” in 1939;14 and write that “of all the modes of self-evasion open to the well-todo, Nationalism is the easiest and most dishonest” in the 1939 “The Public vs. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats.”15 But Auden’s skepticism of nationalism grows out of his ambivalent relationship with the “romantic conception of personality.” While the society he describes in the light verse anthology accepts the poet as an ordinary member, these plays treat the patriotic country as the natural habitat of the exceptional hero-artist, like the D. H. Lawrence figure he attacks in The Orators.16 The plays suggest a vague utopian ideal, but their critiques of social and political power leave few viable social structures, and the alternative to the hero-artist is never fully articulated. Thus when Auden treats light verse as a pressing contemporary issue, he also argues for the necessity of rethinking community and national identity: The problem for the modern poet, as for every one else to-day, is how to find or form a genuine community. . . . The old pre-industrial community and culture are gone and cannot be brought back. Nor is it desirable that they should be. They were too unjust, too squalid, and too custom-bound. Virtues which were once nursed unconsciously by the forces of nature must now be recovered and fostered by a deliberate effort of the will and the intelligence. In the future, societies will not grow of themselves. They will either be made consciously or decay. A democracy in which each

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citizen is as fully conscious and capable of making a rational choice, as in the past has been possible only for the wealthier few, is the only kind of society which in the future is likely to survive for long. In such a society, and in such alone, will it be possible for the poet, without sacrificing any of his subtleties of sensibility or his integrity, to write poetry which is simple, clear, and gay. For poetry which is at the same time light and adult can only be written in a society which is both integrated and free. (Light Verse xxxii) Auden criticizes homogeneous national cultures, but ends by calling for an egalitarian society without class distinctions and educational inequalities. As Christopher Yu argues, Auden “debunks the masquerade of egomania as high seriousness and the monolithic historical narrative that such a posture presumes.”17 The society which fosters “poetry which is simple, clear, and gay” rejects nostalgia for the “custom-bound” “pre-industrial community,” but like that community, it treats poets and peasants as basically similar. In Auden’s democratic culture, homogeneity is replaced by “integration,” a word implying not only a collection of unlike individuals but also an even distribution of power and resources. Auden articulates a utopian ideology of light verse, which provides a test to see if a society is working—the canary in the social coal mine. The moments of humor in serious poems throughout his career—the strange overlay of light and dark, political and personal in “A Bride in the 30’s”; the Master and Boatswain’s speech in The Sea and the Mirror; the invented words of “Thank You, Fog”—echo this concern with community and audience and equivocate the “lightness” or “seriousness” of the contexts in which they appear.

Letters from Iceland, Lineage, and Auden’s Audience Auden’s odd test of the “integrated and free” society, and his rejection of the “unjust,” “squalid” societies producing the light verse in his anthology, arise from his desire to distinguish his attachment to the English literary lineage from the Nazi linkage of cultural history to genetics. The communities Auden creates in the late 1930s are designed to counter fascist literary-historical claims. Auden’s identification of a national tradition of light verse responds to the Nazi ideal of racial unity through both overt mockery and an emphasis on the malleable, temporary, and participatory nature of literary traditions. En route to this critique, Auden briefly lampoons modernist claims of cultural superiority by treating the allusive, multilingual work of poets like Ezra Pound as coterie writing, equivalent to his own mockery of his friends—a pleasant but limited alternative to a more inclusive literary tradition.18 Auden tests several approaches to literary tradition and community formation in Letters from Iceland, the travel book he and Louis MacNeice published in 1937. Like Auden’s ideal community, Letters from Iceland contains

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a surprising diversity: lyric verse; letters to friends; tourist listings; quotations; Auden’s long poem “Letter to Lord Byron,” interspersed in five sections among the other chapters, narrating the trip and digressing on English verse; and the satirical “Auden and MacNeice: Their Last Will and Testament.” The book is less a portrait of Iceland than of two English poets traveling there, containing almost as much discussion of England as of its official subject. Auden had long been interested in Iceland. His father believed the family was of Icelandic descent.19 Auden had adapted the poetic forms of the sagas in his verse as a way of “find[ing] independence from his literary ancestors while at the same time finding a language to write in”20: the medieval texts provide “light” yet serious underpinnings which place him in a Norse-Saxon “literary continuity.” The sagas provide form and subject matter for Paid on Both Sides, placing the play’s violence in a millennium-long tradition of murder and revenge.21 The sagas are no longer readily accessible to contemporary readers, but Auden finds in Iceland a lineage stemming from the kind of “integrated” society he describes in the Light Verse anthology. The trip to Iceland is a quest to discover what such a community would be like. The book examines Auden’s lineage in less literal ways too. Robert Caserio argues that Letters from Iceland contains “Auden’s inward conversations, collaborations, and conflicts with ... preceding generations of gay elders,” placing Auden within and apart from the main stream of European poetry.22 Bozorth argues that Auden treats Byron as a “queer uncle” who provides a model for the freedom and the loneliness of the gay writer.23 At the same time, Auden toys with different conceptions of his audience, imagining his readers as a generalized British public, a rarefied poetic circle, and the in-group of his friends. As the book shows, none of these limited audiences is quite sufficient to his needs. As a model for art-producing society, Iceland has one drawback: I went up to the school to see its collection of Icelandic paintings. They may not be very wonderful, but at least they are of interest to the Icelanders. The artists are trying to amuse their friends, and their friends are not only artists. The pictures are not canned art from a Paris store which the locals must take because there is no other.24 Independent art is admirable, and the Icelandic artists’ attempt “to amuse their friends” is normal: Auden writes in “Letter to Lord Byron” that “art, if it doesn’t start there, at least ends,/Whether aesthetics like the thought or not,/In an attempt to entertain our friends” (100). (As Yu argues, an overtly anti-fascist version of the “polis of our friends” appears in “New Year Letter” (1940).25) Nonetheless, Icelandic art is “not very wonderful,” and while “of interest to the Icelanders” it evidently does not interest Auden. Icelandic art attains the artistaudience dialogue Auden claims to strive for, but the audience is limited and

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the art mediocre. The difficulty of making a literary community, then, seems to be finding an audience sophisticated enough to demand good work, but not so limited as to reduce art to in-joke. Auden articulates the difficulty of finding an “integrated and free” readership in “Letter to Lord Byron,” which equivocally—and humorously—defends light verse. It begins with an apology for approaching Byron uninvited, and for his choice of rhyme royal: “Ottava Rima would, I know, be proper” (22). He continues, however, by suggesting that the oddity of his work lies in its tone as much as its form: “Light verse, poor girl, is under a sad weather,” with only “Milne and persons of that kind” (presumably, and dismissively, writers for children) and “the more bourgeois periodicals” publishing it at all (22). Auden suggests a stratification of the contemporary poetry-reading world into highculture readers and the bourgeois or childish readers of “démodé” light verse. But in the next stanza, that divide breaks down: “The fascination of what’s difficult,” The wish to do what one’s not done before, Is, I hope, proper to Quicunque Vult, The proper card to show at Heaven’s door. Gerettet not Gerichetet be the Law, Et cetera, et cetera. O curse, That is the flattest line in English verse. (22) “The fascination of what’s difficult” is Yeats’s description of his own (modernist, nationalist) work at the Abbey Theater. Auden’s quotation suggests that his letter to Byron and search for a lineage are similar to Yeats’s work in both difficulty and community-forming ambition. Quicunque Vult suggests the project’s importance: the words come from the Athanasian Creed, Quicunque vult salvus esse, ante omnia opus est, ut teneat Catholicum fidem (Whosoever would be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic faith). For Auden, the necessary condition of salvation is the desire to do, rather than to produce, something difficult, and he demonstrates the difficulty of his project when he continues into “the flattest line in English verse.” But while desire is a necessary condition for salvation, success is not: Parnassus after all is not a mountain, Reserved for A.1. climbers such as you; It’s got a park, it’s got a public fountain. The most I ask is leave to share a pew With Bradford or with Cottam, that will do. (22) Poetry is not, for Auden or his Byron, the realm of the abstract genius. Even if the image is in praise of Byron, Auden is suspicious of “A.1. climbers,” condemning them in the hubristic hero of The Ascent of F6. Auden instead endows the

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realm of poetry with room for variation, mediocrity, and tomfoolery. As Yu notes, “The key to the harmony of this society seems to be the skeptical selfdeprecation of the modern artist.”26 It is a community determined not by artistic merit but by artistic desire. Or so the speaker claims. It is difficult to believe that Auden, who announced “I mean to be a great poet,” is entirely serious in his modesty.27 His pretended willingness to “share a pew/With Bradford or with Cottam” may render his support of “not very wonderful” democratic art suspect, as well; despite his commitment to equality between artist and audience, Auden is more attracted— ideologically and sexually—to the romantic artist-hero than he admits. Bradford and Cottam are minor Oxford poets who wistfully celebrate gay love, and Auden implies that they are secondary not just in the quality of their writing but in their self-construction as members of a gay poetic lineage. The heroic, self-ironizing Byron, as Bozorth argues, provides a more ambitious model.28 Auden mocks the abstruse humorlessness he sees in the high modernist admiration of the poet as an “unusual person”: The fact is, I’m in Iceland all alone —MacKenzie’s prints are not unlike the scene— Ich hab’ zu Haus, ein Gra, ein Gramophone. Les gosses anglais aiment beaucoup les machines. To καλov. glubit. che . . . what this may mean I do not know, but rather like the sound Of foreign languages like Ezra Pound. (18) This stanza invokes Pound but sounds like Eliot, suggesting the multilingual fragments at the end of The Waste Land. But instead of “ces voix d’enfants chantant dans la cupole”29 we have “les gosses anglais aiment beaucoup les machines”: not references to Verlaine (“and oh, those children’s voices, singing in the dome!”) but an autobiographical French-textbook self-description— “English kids like machines.” “To καλov” (Greek, “the beautiful”), followed by “glubit” (Latin, “sucks off ” or “gives a blowjob,” from Catullus 58) and “che,” becomes babble and sexual joke instead of beauty, and the high modernist reclamation of literary tradition through carefully assembled fragments is dismissed as a “foreign language” in its own right. In this account, modernist poetry, too, becomes an in-joke, available to the coterie of readers with the right poetic and classical educations. Auden demystifies modernist ambitions, placing Pound and Eliot in a lineage including Verlaine, the Greeks, and the Vedas, but also Bradford and Cottam, scurrilous Catullus, and witty, popular Byron. The tradition Auden sketches in the Letter is both broadly accessible and, as it identifies a lineage of gay poets, of particular interest to Auden’s circle. Its goal for any audience, however, is friendship and entertainment. The apparent triviality of this end is, Auden suggests, what makes it worthwhile, as it constructs and cements

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communities which are freer and more participatory than the grander but totalitarian communities implied by “higher” art.

Humor against Fascism Letters from Iceland’s attempt to reclaim poetic tradition from hubris and sententious quotations contains a more pressing argument against tying literary history to national identity. While, as Marsha Bryant argues, Auden as documentary writer is concerned with “the politics of representation,”30 Iceland also provides outsiders with an opportunity for self-representation and self-critique. Auden and MacNeice frequently describe Iceland through comparisons to England and to the sagas, which have led them to expect something exotic: MacNeice, writing as “Hetty,” remarks, The people themselves are not nearly so foreign as the Irish or the yokels of Somerset. You can’t imagine any of them behaving like the people in the sagas, saying “That was an ill word” and shooting the other man dead. Disappointing, still one needn’t travel if one wants to see odd behavior. (186) Letdown becomes relief as Auden and MacNeice meet other tourists examining the country with an eye to validating their own versions of history. The rival historians are uncomfortable company: Great excitement here because Goering’s brother and a party are expected this evening. . . . The Nazis have a theory that Iceland is the cradle of the Germanic culture. Well, if they want a community like that of the sagas they are welcome to it. I love the sagas, but what a rotten society they describe, a society with only the gangster virtues. (119) This description anticipates the language of the light verse essay, in which Auden describes “virtues . . . nursed unconsciously by the forces of nature.” Here, however, the supposedly “natural” virtues “nursed” or “cradle[d]” by Iceland and praised by the Nazis are condemned as those of “gangsters”: for the first time in Letters from Iceland, Auden admits that Iceland, for all its light verse, has an alienatingly—rather than romantically—violent past. In one of the letters, Auden treats the “virtues” the Nazis admire as selfparodying: “I have just been staying in the Njàl country. I gather the Nazis look on that sort of life as the cradle of all the virtues. The enclosed laws and regulations seem so dotty, I thought they might interest you” (94). The “dotty” laws are actually fairly reasonable. The “Formula of Peace-Making” forbids antagonists further hostilities: “If case of quarrel or feud arise between you . . . it shall be booted or paid for with money and not by reddening the dart or arrow” (95). Other rules civilize single combat: “If one of them be wounded so that blood come . . . they shall not fight any longer” (97). Even the Viking Law,

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which instructs its followers not to “bind a wound till the same hour next day,” contains common-sense rules for a military company, forbidding nepotism and prescribing equal distribution of the spoils of battle. Calling these rules “dotty” seems less an evaluation of their practicality than a refusal to countenance violence. Auden rejects the “gangster virtues” a violent society promotes: unquestioning group loyalty and physical courage. As James Wilson notes, Goering’s appearance in Letters from Iceland “serves as a frightening and preposterous incarnation of the conservative anthropological interests of high modernist writing in general.”31 The Nazis are on a parodic version of Auden’s quest for Icelandic roots. Auden’s condemnation of the society they admire suggests that his interest in Iceland as a model for the light-verse-producing society must be ambivalent and skeptical. National lineages cannot be accepted uncritically, and the “virtue” of shared culture may come at the price of fascist violence. The Goering episode appears in a letter to Erika Mann (daughter of Thomas Mann), whom Auden married in 1935 so she could obtain a British passport. As Susanna Young-Ah Gottlieb argues, Auden sees marriage as “immensely serious and entirely frivolous,” “a legal formality” and a deep “moral commitment . . . Something unites these two forms of marriage, however: the absurdity of voluntarily making oneself subject to another’s will,” whether it is of “the state” or “the lover.”32 Lucy McDiarmid argues that the 1939 “Epithalamium,” written for Mann’s sister’s marriage, enacts a hope for “human unity” while ducking the question of how marriage could affect “public policy.”33 Auden’s marriage to Erika, however, lacks emotional import but has a tangible effect, as it saves her from the death camps (her mother was Jewish). Letters from Iceland’s treatment of Auden’s marriage skirts the border between public and private meaning, dealing with major geopolitical events in personal terms. Unlike his “light verse,” Auden’s letter to Erika is addressed to an individual, not a group, and his critique of the Nazis is visible only to readers who recognize the names behind the chapter’s heading “WHA to EMA.” This opacity becomes legible in the final chapter, Auden and MacNeice’s “Last Will and Testament.” After bequests satirizing celebrities for the amusement of friends like Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis (jointly bequeathed “Our minor talents to assist in the defence//Of the European tradition and to carry on/The Human heritage” [246]), Auden leaves “hope that Erika, my wife, may have her wish/ To see the just end of Hitler and his unjust rule.” The private jokes in the Will make a striking contrast with the address to Erika: turning to his wife, Auden has it both ways, speaking intimately (husband to wife) and publicly (the end of Hitler’s rule is of immediate concern to all Europe). “Erika, my wife” becomes a turning point for the Will. Auden and MacNeice abandon satires of Lady Astor and Baden-Powell in order to leave To all the dictators who look so bold and fresh The midnight hours, the soft wind from the sweeping wing Of madness, and the intolerable tightening of the mesh

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Of history. We leave their marvelous native tongue To Englishmen, and for our intelligent island pray That to her virtuous beauties by all poets sung She add at last an honest foreign policy. (257) The poets leave “their marvelous native tongue/to Englishmen” who already own it as a counterpart to the “madness” they leave to “dictators”: the English language, while capable of dishonesty, contrasts with the “bold and fresh” evils of fascism. At the same time, Auden and MacNeice acknowledge a disjunction between poetry and politics: poets who sing England’s “virtuous beauties” have had no effect on “foreign policy.” Indeed, Auden has hitherto used the word “virtues” only ironically, to describe what the Nazis admire in the sagas. National “virtues” are largely rhetorical if they are not reflected in an “honest foreign policy.” Presenting this disjunction between speech and action turns out to be yet another role of light verse: the shift in registers which makes these lines funny reveals England’s failure to live up to its rhetoric. Letters from Iceland contains portraits of several societies, none of them quite plausible. Rather than a consistent vision of an ideal society, Auden offers several options, beginning with Iceland itself, and continuing in the literary community of Parnassus and finally the in-group of the Will. Unlike Nazis who take the sagas literally, Auden does not offer his groups as concrete models. While the people mentioned in the Will are real, the group cannot be duplicated nor its “virtues” emulated. Instead, the Will models humorous interaction springing from group intimacy, in contrast to the intimacy between two individuals or the homogeneity of prescriptive nationalism. The Will leads us to identify the way in which a group communicates, rather than the individual qualities fostered within it, as its defining feature.

The Individual in the Group Despite saying “they can have it,” Auden seeks to reclaim Iceland and its poetic tradition from the Nazis. Oddly, in part II of the Letter, he does the same thing for Byron: Suggestions have been made that the Teutonic Führer-Prinzip would have appealed to you As being the true heir to the Byronic (57) Auden’s first defense of Byron from those who claim him as an ancestor of fascism is to list a series of logical and aesthetic absurdities as equally likely (“Someone may think that Empire wines are nice”). But his more rational defense is interestingly double. He begins by asserting that Byron is too much the individualist to be a fascist: “You liked to be the centre of attention,” whereas “in modern warfare, though it’s just as gory,/There isn’t any individual glory.” Byron

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is also too concerned for others to be a fascist: “You never were an Isolationist;/ Injustice you had always hatred for.” Auden takes Byron’s involvement in the Greek revolution to mean that he “might indeed/Have walked in the United Front with Gide.” This version of Byron, like Auden’s light verse, is divided between the personal and the political, the urge to resist dictators and the urge toward unity. This ambivalence makes Byron Auden’s chosen link to the revised English canon: he combines appeal to a popular audience, direct political action, and a self-skeptical sense of humor which leavens his egotism and saves him from literary and literal isolationism or nationalism. By defending Iceland and Byron from Nazi incursions, Auden also defends himself. Part IV of the “Letter” shows that this self-defense is necessary: My passport says I’m five feet eleven, With hazel eyes and fair (it’s tow-like) hair, That I was born in York in 1907, With no distinctive markings anywhere. Which isn’t quite correct. Conspicuous there On my right cheek appears a large brown mole, I think I don’t dislike it on the whole. My name occurs in several of the sagas, Is common over Iceland still. Down under Where Das Volk order sausages and lagers I ought to be the prize, the living wonder, The really pure from any Rassenschander, In fact I am the great big white barbarian, The Nordic type, the too too truly Aryan. (201) The passport is an official portrait, associating Auden’s “truly Aryan” ancestry with German and British bureaucracy. Auden undermines official descriptions and definitions, however. His passport misses his distinctive “large brown mole.” No wonder he doesn’t dislike it: the mole proves he is not precisely who his passport says he is. Auden’s account of his “Aryan” status, free from “Rassenschander” (mixed Aryan and non-Aryan ancestry), is further undercut by the campy “too too”—hardly the diction of the Nazi masculine ideal. This self-portrait decouples lineage and citizenship from cultural affiliation, separating Auden from the “caricature of aggressive, flaxen-haired egomania” he would perform in “Secondary Epic”:34 we learn more from Auden’s tone than from the “official” attributes of birthplace and physique. In fact, his selfdescription constitutes an argument against the terms on which the Nazis base identity: if cultural identity came from shared bloodlines, Auden would be one of them. Nazi terms cannot account for Auden, his poetry, or his readership. Instead, Auden identifies humor as a way to differentiate a fruitful national literature

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from the propaganda of dictatorship—not only because dictators make few jokes, or because humor entails a carnivalesque subversion of authority, but also because laughing at shared jokes is more demanding and more inclusive than ancestry as an entrance requirement into a literary tradition. At the same time, a fluid tradition must abandon elements we can no longer laugh at, whether because they have become obscure or because our values have changed. Lightness and an inclusive tradition, Auden suggests, are mutually constitutive. While Auden’s late-1930s writings make this case most clearly, comic moments dependent on the reader or audience’s participation in the text begin as early as The Dance of Death, and continue in texts like “Under Which Lyre” (1946), which explicitly ties humor to cultural insidership; “The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning” (1953), which depends on the reader’s familiarity with self-ironizing gestures; and “The Ballad of Barnaby” (1968), which stages art as a performance at once comical and transcendent. Some comic poems are aimed at specific in-groups rather than at an “integrated” community, like “The Platonic Blow” (1948), written for (and, Mendelson says, in consultation with)35 gay friends and not intended for publication. The humor in Letters from Iceland exemplifies an attitude toward community formation which recurs, in varying degrees of commitment and ambition, throughout Auden’s career: unlike Nazis, who base identity on bloodlines, Auden demarcates identity by shared response to literary texts, which can be passed on and reinterpreted over the generations.

The Individual in Love The definition of humor in Auden’s light verse and essays on comedy shares important structural elements with the understanding of love which arose from his “vision of Agape,” in which he “knew what it was like to love his neighbor as himself.”36 Auden’s most moving love poems are not particularly funny, but love performs a balancing act in which the lover, like the humorist, mediates between the individual and the universal, at once preserving his own uniqueness and treating the emotional experience as a test of common humanity. Even as Auden views love and humor as private—the domain of a particular couple or a coterie—he understands each as inherently multiple, flexible, subject to reinterpretation, and recognizable by people with common values. Both emotions share this fundamental balancing act with poetry itself, which provides the medium in which commonality is created through the juxtaposition of apparently incongruous elements. As Ronald Wallace argues, “The lyric and the comic may derive from the same emotional burst of intensity, focusing and releasing the same exuberance.”37 The ties between the human and the sublime are clearer in love than in humor, but the principle is the same: both unite the small and large scales of human experience.

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Auden shows us that we already share his understanding of love’s multiplicity. Auden’s 1938 “Some say that love’s a little boy” lampoons the idea that love has a single, definable face. The poem appears frivolous, but Auden told Alan Ansen that “for me personally it was a very important poem.”38 The anatomy of love it contains may explain why. The opening contrasts physical and spiritual definitions of love: Some say that love’s a little boy, And some say it’s a bird, Some say it makes the world go round, And some say that’s absurd, And when I asked the man next-door, Who looked as if he knew, His wife got very cross indeed, And said it wouldn’t do.39 The first stanza switches between metaphorical and mythological registers: love is played by “a little boy”—Eros—and a bird—the dove, which was sacred to Venus, the image of the Holy Spirit, and a nineteenth-century cliché of faithfulness. At the same time, the poem reminds general readers of scientific truths (it is physically absurd to suggest that love makes the world go round) and coterie readers of insider sexual knowledge (Auden was attracted to boys). The variation among these registers is highlighted by the speaker’s absurd naïveté when he asks the man next door what love is; clearly, whatever makes him appear to know the answer, it is not his relationship with his wife. The opening stanza combines traditional, all-too-familiar images of love (Eros, Christian iconography, Victorian valentines, straying husbands) with coded references to illicit sexuality (little boys, angry wives) to remind us of something we all know: that love is greater than its various representations. The poem continues to reveal the absurdity of asking physical questions about love at all: Does it look like a pair of pajamas, Or the ham in a temperance hotel? Does its odour remind one of llamas, Or has it a comforting smell? Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is, Or soft as eiderdown fluff? The humor here comes not from the idea that love is definable—an object or creature with clear, recognizable physical attributes—but from the idea that someone could even ask us to define love in these terms. The “truth” the speaker asks for, of course, is that love is both “sharp” and “quite smooth at the edges,” “prickly” and “soft”; it “howls” and “sings,” is “courteous” and “rough.”

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The poem’s playful literalization of metaphor reminds us how much we actually know about love: it will not “stop when one wants to be quiet,” cannot be found like a misplaced object in “the summer-house” or “underneath the bed,” and is indeed liable to “come without warning” and “alter my life altogether.” At the same time, while we know that love is multifarious and intimately tied to the physical, the individual attributes of the beloved (as distinct from love itself) may be difficult to predict and quite separate from the experience of love itself. “Some say that love’s a little boy” gets its initial humor from the speaker’s naïve belief that love can be explained in physical terms. Its deeper humor, however, comes from the reader’s participation in the speaker’s mistake: while we cannot tell anyone the kind of truth the speaker asks for, we find ourselves reaching for local, physical answers (why yes, it did “tread in the bus on my shoes,” and we’ve been happy ever after). Our answers contain the same mistakes as the speaker’s questions, invoking tropes from Romeo and Juliet through Hollywood romcom. The poem’s dualisms (metaphor/fact; myth/reality; abstract/specific) turn out to be our own, and we are incapable of describing love without recourse to opposite extremes. Love is revealed to be made of these opposites, and the speaker’s attempt to oversimplify in the physical, specific direction directs us not to oversimplify in the spiritual, general direction. “Tell me the Truth” suggests that love, like humor, consists of juxtapositions of elements from very different cultural, linguistic, and metaphysical registers: the Roman, Christian, and Victorian doves all at once. Humor in Auden’s late 1930s work, then, serves a double function: it is a test of unity, demonstrating how much a poet and his audience have in common, and it is also a means of unification, within which previously opposed categories (high/low, self/other) become juxtaposed and intermingled. In the process, humor makes room for the personal experience of love—and in Auden’s case, a veiled expression of gay desire—without prescribing those specifics to all lovers. Humor enables an antiauthoritarian lovers’ discourse: by reminding us of the lover’s partiality and our own, it maintains the difference between individuals while directing us toward the shared center of mutual experience. Humor’s capacity for heightening mutual understanding remains important for Auden long past the 1930s. In his 1952 essay “Notes on the Comic,” Auden emphasizes the interplay of humor and sympathy in a society of free individuals. Auden defines the “comic” as follows: A contradiction in the relation of the individual or the personal to the universal or the impersonal which does not involve the spectator or hearer in suffering or pity, which in practice means that it must not involve the actor in real suffering. . . . A sense of humor develops in a society to the degree that its members are simultaneously conscious of being each a unique person and of being all in common subjection to unalterable laws. (DH 371–72)

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This definition is visibly influenced by Bergson’s incongruity theory of humor in both its emphasis on “contradiction” and its reminder that the person laughing must not feel too much sympathy with the person being laughed at. Auden differs importantly from Bergson, however, in his insistence that we may not withhold sympathy when it is called for: “it must not involve the actor in real suffering.” For Bergson, it is sufficient that sympathy not be felt, as we habitually laugh at disability and otherness.40 Auden rejects failures of sympathy as a means of producing the comic: “A situation in which the actor really suffers can only be found comic by children who see only the situation and are unaware of the suffering . . . or by human swine” (DH 371). By the 1950s, Auden’s sense of humor demands explicit recognition of our common humanity. If sympathy is essential for true comedy, so is a sense of individuality—not only awareness of one’s own uniqueness, but also recognition of the uniqueness of others. Auden distinguishes individualistic modern society from “primitive cultures” which “have little sense of humor . . . because their sense of human individuality is weak” (DH 372). (This anthropology seems flawed, but that is a separate problem.) The society of individuals, on the other hand, treats as comic anything which makes an individual appear less in control of himself, for example, the operation of physical laws upon inorganic objects associated with a human being in such a way that it is they who appear to be acting from personal volition and their owner who appears to be the passive thing. (DH 373) Humor reminds us of our own individuality and of that of the people around us. As Richard Johnson explains, for Auden, “frivolity, because it is unpredictable and irresponsible, reminds man that there exists no facsimile of himself, and that what the world may well regard as his weaknesses are the bases of his uniqueness.”41 But rather than simply helping us enjoy our own uniqueness, humor demands that we recognize the value of the person we laugh at. Auden’s theory of humor, then, is almost precisely the opposite of Thomas Hobbes’s: while Hobbes claims that laughter comes from a sense of superiority over the person we laugh at, for Auden, laughter depends on a recognition of his equal worth.

Conclusion: “Individual Beauty” and the Comic Community Auden links group identity to individual love in his personal writings as well as his public ones. In a 1939 letter to his brother, Auden announces romantic news in political terms: Just a line to tell you that it’s really happened at last after all these years. Mr Right has come into my life. He is a Romanian-Latvian-American

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Jew called Chester Kallman. . . . This time, my dear, I really believe it’s marriage. The snag is I think I shall have to become an American Citizen as I’m not going to risk separation through international crises.42 Auden frames news about his love-life in ethnic and national terms: Kallman’s first attribute after being “Mr Right” is his ethnicity (Romanian-LatvianAmerican Jew), and the “snag” of the “marriage” is that looming “international crises” will require Auden “to become an American Citizen.” The very personal—Mr. Right, marriage—is inextricably linked in this letter, and in the practicalities of life, to citizenship and geopolitics. As in his marriage to Erika Mann, and in the society constructed through light verse, Auden sees his largeand small-scale affiliations as interdependent and interdeterminate; national allegiance is subordinate to and determined by personal loyalty. In “Lay your sleeping head, my love” (1937), this relationship between love and group identity plays out on several levels. This poem, while far from funny, demonstrates the ethical import of the community humor helps establish. Nicholas Jenkins argues that the poem is addressed to Auden’s student and lover Michael Yates (who joined Auden and MacNeice in Iceland), incorporating echoes of William Butler Yeats, particularly “Prayer for My Son,” as coded hints at his beloved’s identity.43 Written on the eve of Auden’s departure to drive an ambulance in Spain, when Yates was sixteen, the poem is at once intensely personal and so impersonal that Cyril Connolly, attacking Auden’s overt homosexuality, hailed it as “by far his best thing.”44 The first stanza establishes the poem’s scope as dealing with individuals (a pair of people in love) and the human (a species and its attributes), with no attention to communal or national groups: Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral: But in my arms till break of day Let the living creature lie, Mortal, guilty, but to me The entirely beautiful. (CP 157) To readers without insider knowledge of Auden’s imminent departure, the possible crisis is in the future behavior of the “faithless” lover, whose infidelity, whether through deliberate action or eventual death, is painfully certain. The “child” is ephemeral because he is individual, but is also part of the larger, eternal group of human, thoughtful children. While the “living creature” is unique, it is also familiar in its combination of guilt and beauty. Love, here, is

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a recognition of individuality in the face of commonality; and what we have in common, evidently, is death and faithlessness. “Lay your sleeping head, my love” affirms the value of love in the face of mortality, suggesting that the lovers’ temporary union also unites “soul and body,” enacting the unity of the soul and body within the individual. Individual love provides us with a “vision . . . Of supernatural sympathy,/Universal love and hope,” comparable to the “abstract insight” of the divine which “wakes . . . The hermit’s sensual ecstasy.” “Lay your sleeping head” breaks down boundaries between body and soul, self and other, in order to suggest that transient love’s value is eternal, and for all its ephemerality is the closest we come to experiencing immortality. “Lay your sleeping head,” in other words, takes the same approach as the naïve speaker of “Some say that love’s a little boy,” defining love in physical— and only partially sexual—terms: prickles, pajamas, a head on one’s arm. The poems have the same payoff: each reminds us that pretending to know “the truth” about love reduces love to cliché. We make this mistake when we attempt to disentangle the physical from the abstract or the individual from the human: like the hermit’s, our “abstract insight” is still “sensual” (or, in the revised version, “carnal”),45 and our sensuality is potentially insightful. The point is not just that it is difficult to distinguish love from sexual desire. More importantly, love makes it difficult to distinguish between self and other: we must see ourselves in each of the lovers and also in the hermit, because each—speaker, beloved, ascetic—shares the common human lot of exaltation, disappointment, and flawed, physical perception of the intangible. Bozorth argues that Auden is wary of the lover’s desire to subsume the beloved,46 but when kept in perspective, this individual love, as McDiarmid suggests, forms the basis of community, which comes from “spontaneous, voluntary love of one neighbor for another.”47 The only aliens or others of the poem are the “fashionable madmen” who raise “their pedantic boring cry,” insisting that “every farthing of the cost,/All the dreaded cards foretell,/ Shall be paid.” The “fashionable madmen” are boring because they are right; we know we are mortal. Their madness is not proven by their conclusions, but by their pedantry; they count the “cost,” but miss the value of what is paid for. The in- and outgroups of “Lay your sleeping head”—the people who “get” the poem as the reader of light verse would get a joke—are not literary circles, or nations, or a “folk,” but pedants and non-pedants: people who do and do not insist upon the primacy of a single truth like the Nazis’ bloodlines. The “fashionable madmen” who warn of disaster are outside the speaker’s group not because they announce the “cost” of love, but because they think it too high. Non-pedants, Auden’s fellow lovers, see the juxtaposition of self and other, like and unlike, “individual beauty” and individual mortality, as both the source of humor and the way we can touch “the entirely beautiful.” If the comic is the

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apparent failure of the individual to retain his individuality, love is both deeply comic and not comic at all: in love, we gain an awareness of our individual uniqueness and our essential similarity to other people. “Other people” is a broad category, and Auden always returns to a more bounded sense of his audience. As Jeffrey Donaldson argues, “Letter to Lord Byron” “repeatedly ironizes the poet’s attempt to make contact with his reader.”48 But Auden is not writing only to Byron, who is unlikely to buy many copies of Letters from Iceland. As he addresses a group beyond his friends, his contact with his public remains strangely intimate. Auden excuses the “liberty” he takes in addressing Byron by explaining that writing to writers has become an alternative to confession, since its abolition from the Anglican ritual: Englishmen must make theirs now by post And authors hear them over breakfast toast. For, failing them, there’s nothing but the wall Of public lavatories on which to scrawl. (81) Writers, to the public, are a cross between priests and bathroom walls: intercedents with higher powers, and places in which base physical needs are met (and gay hook-ups arranged). The writer, like the lover, is the meeting ground of the high/abstract and the low/physical. Byron gives Auden a model of how a poet can meld the playful, the sexual, and the practical with abstract civilization, enjoying physical and metaphysical not only equally but also interdependently. Auden uses Byron to show what kind of group you get if you define love and humor as sharing the same basic structure: a flexible, humane, and inclusive society, capable of producing poetry which is “simple, clear, and gay” without sacrificing “subtleties of sensibility.” The word “gay” refers to Auden’s sexuality, but individual loves are to be understood as part of the larger human phenomenon of love itself. Humor, like love, reveals our commonality with those around us and our internal multiplicity. At the same time, the flippant “Letter” ironizes its own ambition, reminding us that the real work of love and community takes place off the page. Auden’s poetry makes humor the test of local commonality and largescale community: it creates the one and demarcates the other. Perhaps more unusually, Auden shows that humor, love, and his own writing share a fundamental structure: each is made from the temporary, frangible, lifesustaining union of unlike elements, and each demands that we recognize our common experience of transcendence amid the mundane. For Auden, the shared structure of love and humor leads to an ethical commitment to the lightness of life; to laugh at Auden’s light poems is also to recognize the value of ephemera, the coexistence of the physical and the spiritual, and the seriousness of pleasure.

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Notes 1 Lucy McDiarmid, Auden’s Apologies for Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), ix. 2 Stan Smith, “Auden’s Light and Serio-comic Verse,” in The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden, ed. Stan Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 96. 3 Richard Bozorth, Auden’s Games of Knowledge: Poetry and the Meanings of Homosexuality (New York: Columbia, 2001), 8. 4 Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 10–11. 5 Bozorth, Auden’s Games of Knowledge, 11. 6 Michael O’Neill, “The 1930s Poetry of W. H. Auden,” in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry, ed. Neil Corcoran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 110. 7 Lucy McDiarmid, Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden Between the Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 73. 8 W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Plays and Other Dramatic Writings 1928–1938, ed. and introduction by Edward Mendelson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 497. 9 W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand (New York: Vintage, 1968), 85. Further references noted in the text. 10 Thomas A. Fink, “The Comic Thrust of Ashbery’s Poetry,” Twentieth Century Literature 30, no. 1 (1984): 14. 11 W. H. Auden, W. H. Auden’s Book of Light Verse. Preface by Edward Mendelson (New York: New York Review Books, 2004), xxiii. Further references noted in the text. 12 David Rosen discusses Auden’s equivocal relationship with poets as exceptional individuals in Power, Plain English, and the Rise of Modern Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 147–55. 13 Richard Davenport-Hines, “Auden’s Life and Character,” in The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden, ed. Stan Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 20. 14 W. H. Auden and T. C. Worsley, Education Today—and Tomorrow (London: The Hogarth Press, 1939), 40. 15 W. H. Auden, The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, Volume III: 1949–1955, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 4. 16 John Fuller, W. H. Auden: A Commentary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 86. 17 Christopher Yu, Nothing to Admire: The Politics of Poetic Satire from Dryden to Merrill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 125. 18 As Patrick Query argues (588), Auden thinks writers in his circle are capable of creating community, but not communion. Patrick Query, “Crooked Europe: The Verse Drama of W.H. Auden (and Company),” Modern Drama 51, no. 4 (2008). 19 Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 7. 20 Mendelson, Early Auden, 42. 21 Paul Beekman Taylor finds “four distinct stages” in his “life-long artistic commitment to Iceland”: Auden’s father’s telling “stories out of Norse Myth”; “listen[ing] to J.R.R. Tolkien read aloud Old English verse” at Oxford; the 1936

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23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

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visit to Iceland; and his 1964 solo return. Paul Beekman Taylor, “Auden’s Icelandic Myth of Exile,” Journal of Modern Literature 24, no. 2 (2000–01): 213. Robert L. Caserio, “Letters and Iceland: W. H. Auden and Generational Differences among Gay Modernists,” in W. H. Auden: A Legacy, ed. David Garrett Izzo (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 2002), 198. Stuart Christie sees a more extreme, anticolonial revision of gay elders in the “Sonnets from China.” Stuart Christie, “Disorientations: Canon without Context in Auden’s “Sonnets from China,” PMLA 120, no. 5 (2005): 1576–78. Bozorth, Auden’s Games of Knowledge, 153. W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), 121. Further references noted in the text. Yu, Nothing to Admire, 146. Ibid., 149. Davenport-Hines, Auden (New York: Vintage, 1999), 55. Bozorth, Auden’s Games of Knowledge, 166. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 67. Marsha Bryant, “Auden and the ‘Arctic Stare’: Documentary as Public Collage in Letters from Iceland,” Journal of Modern Literature 17, no. 4 (1991): 537. James Matthew Wilson, “Explaining the Modernist Joke: W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and Letters from Iceland,” Contemporary Poetry Review (October 2007): n. p. Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb, “‘With Conscious Artifice’: Auden’s Defense of Marriage,” Diacritics 35, no. 4 (2005): 31. McDiarmid, Saving Civilization, 15. Yu, Nothing to Admire, 130. Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 298. Mendelson, Early Auden, 159. Ronald Wallace, God Be With the Clown: Humor in American Poetry (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), 11. Fuller, W. H. Auden, 280. W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1991), 143. Further references noted in the text. Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell, in Comedy, introduction and appendix by Wylie Sypher (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 86. Richard Johnson, “Man’s Place: An Essay on Auden,” in Critical Essays on W. H. Auden, ed. George W. Bahlke (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1976), 129. Davenport-Hines, Auden, 188. Nicholas Jenkins, “Historical as Munich: Auden at 100: Who Is He Now?” Times Literary Supplement, February 9, 2007, 13. Stan Smith, introduction to The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden, ed. Stan Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 6. Compare CP 157 with W. H. Auden, Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1989), 50. Bozorth, Auden’s Games of Knowledge, 176. McDiarmid, Saving Civilization, 24. Jeffrey Donaldson, “The Company Poets Keep: Allusion, Echo, and the Question of Who Is Listening in W. H. Auden and James Merrill,” Contemporary Literature 36, no. 1 (1995): 43.

Chapter 9 M E R R I L L , C OM E DY, C O N V E R S AT IO N Stephen Burt

Kay Young wrote a good book called Ordinary Pleasures, by which title she meant the mutual and continuing interplay, in word, in gesture, and in sensibility, between happily married, or soon-to-be-married, or married-in-all-but-name couples, in novels, on stage, on television and on film (especially in studioera comedies). These pleasures, she argued, are signaled, as well as maintained, by conversation, whose “self-disclosure” invites self-disclosure in kind, whose “experienced ritual . . . keeps happening” and yet becomes different each time: couples’ banter, their flirtation, their verbal exchange—sometimes bravura, sometimes apparently mundane—“makes possible an intimacy and happiness of the everyday.”1 Nondramatic poetry does not enter Young’s study, nor would we expect it to be there; conversation in real time, kept interesting by what surrounds it, by how it is acted, or by its contrapuntal relation to a plot that takes place before and after it, seems antithetical to the songlike concentration (on the one hand) or the inward, meditative seriousness (on the other) that we have come to expect from lyric poems. Indeed, most poets who try to produce banter fail: they generate, at best, light verse, in which one imagined voice seeks a communal assent. James Merrill, however, stands out: he is not alone, but he is preeminent, in his ability to make the features of comic conversation, the banter and knowing chatter and backtalk, of happy couples, friends of long acquaintance, into aesthetically significant, emotionally pivotal features of verse. Sometimes he uses those features to depict his long companionship with David Jackson (called, in the poems, DJ to Merrill’s JM), a marriage in all but name. Thom Gunn in 1979 called Merrill’s long poem The Changing Light at Sandover, based on the Oujia-board seances conducted jointly by JM and DJ, “the most convincing description I know of a gay marriage.”2 Yet Merrill’s poetry extends the features of intimate banter, of high-spirited, often humorous, and above all continuing conversation, beyond JM and DJ. The poems use quoted speech, self-quotation, self-reference, reference back to

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previous Merrill poems, allusion, puns (lots of puns), and direct address to the reader to import into his poetry the features of Young’s successful conversation, with its “embodiment of intimate continuity.”3 These features give his poems the qualities—humor among them—that make them so identifiable. Whether or not they quote other speakers, the poems bring in effects of conversation as a game that keeps going, from the self-quotations and selfrevisions of “An Urban Convalescence,” through the wry, rueful conversations of “The School Play,” the nested chat-sessions that make up “Losing the Marbles,” and the camp exclamations of “Rhapsody on Czech Themes.” Especially in the late work, where the imagined reader often takes the place of an absent friend, the poems establish a kind of couple-hood, a relation of knowing banter, between the poet and the reader, where we are the intimate other the poems invoke, “as though the very/Here and now were becoming a kind of heaven/To sit in, talking.”4 In the late, exemplary poem “To the Reader,” anyone reading the poem becomes, for the day, for the nonce, Merrill’s lover. That lover, like the husbands and wives in Young’s movies, anticipates and maintains not a plot involving change but a happiness vulnerable to irony and inseparable from repetition, whose “final thought tonight/Before you kiss my picture and turn the light out/ Is of a more exemplary life begun/Tomorrow, truer, harder to get right” (616). Comic effects of continuing conversation help Merrill depict—decades before legal same-sex marriage—at once a couple and a gay milieu. These comic modes grew in power as Merrill’s oeuvre grew, since some of them depend on a shared past, a shared body of experience to which both partners in conversation refer. And these forms of high-spirited conversation help Merrill (and not only Merrill) imagine and live with grief, with fear, with mortal distress. “The ancient comic theater had it right,” begins Merrill’s last great comic poem, “Nine Lives” (591). The tones and verbal effects of Merrill’s poetry, learning from and sometimes duplicating happy couples in conversation, show us how Merrill’s verse could get it right too. * It seems almost inevitable in retrospect—though one might not have guessed it from his early poems—that Merrill would evolve a style uniquely suited to high spirits and to intimate conversation. Merrill once said that as a young man, he did not feel “at ease” on his own: “Being alone was not my long suit,” Merrill continued; “Aside from activities that might loosely figure as aesthetic—going to the opera or a museum, reading, writing a term paper or a poem—I was not in the habit of doing things by myself.”5 People in Merrill, as Nick Halpern observes, tend to exist in relationship, in conversation or intimate memory, usually in relationship to the poet; we rarely see them on their own.6 In the early poems, however, we see them from the outside; sometimes we can barely see them at all. The early poem “Charles on Fire,” which some readers (David Lehman, for example) take as paradigmatic of Merrill’s strengths, now seems at once to anticipate and to exclude them.7 It lacks repartee; its reader

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was not at the party. Charles, whose arm catches fire, responds with sangfroid, but does not initiate verbal exchange—instead, he silently “sank down among us.” Other early poems also show a sociable world closed to us, a table whose talk readers cannot even overhear: “A Narrow Escape,” for example, concludes: It was then Charles thought to wonder, peering over The rests of venison, what on earth a vampire Means by the inner adventure. Her retort Is now a classic in our particular circle. (77) What did she say? We will never know. Such characters stand aloof, nearly camouflaged, like “Midas in Goldenrod,” another early Merrill creation: “It is helpful to think of him fast in a golden fist./Is he protected? Yes. But mischievously” (78). Merrill’s growth as a writer from the 1950s through the 1990s would have him learn to share that mischief with us. It began as a sharing of allusions, quotations, and puns, some of them sexual. “The Dunes” contains jokes about the kinds of serious, Wordsworthian, or “confessional” poetry that Merrill would not write: People come out here to lose things. The dunes Permit themselves the first airs of a Site. A flowered compact, lying too deep for tears, Remains unsought. Yes. “We do not give away Our secrets to all comers,” say the dunes Bridling like sphinxes at the hush of gears. (82) What do people go to the beach to lose? Inter alia, virginity; sometimes they leave a “flowered compact” (a portable mirror, or an ornate promise) behind. These dunes can keep, not promises, but secrets; things buried there are like Wordsworth’s “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” but they are also ridiculous, spur-of-the-moment or bathetic, better lost. In any case we will not hear of them again; the humor here coexists with an effort to cherish secrecy. With its allusion to Lot and Lot’s wife, “The Dunes” also evokes a specifically gay secrecy and sexual regret, topics for Merrill’s more explicit jokes later on. If Merrill’s verse could hide shared secrets (like sand dunes), it could also mimic an ongoing collaboration. In the most unprepossessing of his early figures for his art, Merrill would liken his poetry to notepad doodles, capable of infinite elaboration, dependent on continuing (telephone) conversation, without single serious purpose, and unlikely to settle down: Shapes never realized, were you dogs or chairs? That page is brittle now, if not long burned. This morning’s little boy stands (I have learned To do feet) gazing down a flight of stairs.

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And when A. calls to tell me he enjoyed The evening, I begin again. Again Emerge, O sunbursts, garlands, creatures, men, Ever more lifelike out of the white void! (99) Like doodles, this poetry emerges from a white page; like doodles, like repartee, the poetry may begin as comical improvisation, as asides, on a social occasion; like doodles, the poetry thrives on illusions and tricks, on self-reference (“again. Again”); like doodles, like banter, the poetry tries to seem more alive by working against its own end. To engage in repartee at length is to show verbal powers, but it is also to reconcile oneself to the demands of improvisation; it is to seek originality, but also to take up a language used, a language given by and handed off to other people, other users, other speakers. It is, then, to reconcile oneself— with qualifications, but nevertheless—to cliché. And Merrill does: he repeats, undermines, examines, mocks cliché, but does not try consistently to avoid it. Indeed, the pivotal moments in his pivotal poem, the one that first gave us the recognizable, witty, informal, Merrill “voice” or tone, turn on Merrill’s recognitions that try as he might he cannot avoid cliché; he can, however, recognize it, make light of it, and share the light he has made. That poem is, as many critics agree, “An Urban Convalescence,” and it “announces . . . a decisive change” (to quote J. D. McClatchy) in what Merrill believed that his poems could do.8 It begins with demolition: “As usual in New York, everything is torn down/Before you have had time to care for it.” You? Perhaps not you, but an imagined you: Merrill assumes that (whether or not you live there) you know New York, know what’s usual there, or at least want to act as if you knew. You know, too, the spoken language that Merrill adapts, and that he adapts again, and then repudiates, as he decries “the sickness of our time,” a phrase that “Bright/but facile,” “enhances, then debases, what I feel.” In this moment when he “suddenly turns on himself, or turns, perhaps in a double sense, into himself ” (as Stephen Yenser avers) “Merrill’s most characteristic work began.”9 But “An Urban Convalescence” shares more than cliché, and more than a neighborhood; it also shares in-jokes, literary and historical references. The demolitions Merrill sees call “to mind the close of The White Goddess”; “the massive volume of the world,” which McClatchy sees as allusion to Henry James, also cites Elizabeth Bishop’s “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” with its “volume” (both book and architectural space).10 The poem hopes to amuse, to undercut the self-importance of Graves (and of graves). And it hopes, as well, to replace an outmoded or inappropriate vision of heterosexual marriage—“that honey-slow descent/Of the Champs-Elysées, her hand in his”—with something else, though it does not yet say what. A more explicit statement about the sort of comic space that Merrill hopes to build comes in the poem that bookends Water Street, “A Tenancy”: “If I am host at last/It is of little more than my own past./May others be at home in it.” (Judith

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Moffett rightly calls this passage “a seminal epigraph for the whole future” of Merrill’s work.)11 “Merrill’s wordplay is,” as David Lehman writes, “inseparable from the tasks his sense of poetic vocation demands of him.”12 Those tasks include not only the prophetic or mock-prophetic goals pursued in the trilogy, but also the more modest, and more achievable, and more sociable goals articulated at first in Water Street, where Merrill first (to quote Lehman once more) attained “the figure of the suave host whose conversational brilliance and fondness for camp humor disarm the invited guest.”13 Merrill’s poetry of the 1960s and 1970s sometimes proposed neither eros nor wisdom but conviviality, the ability to feel alive together, as the highest good: the homunculi (perhaps garden gnomes) in another poem from Water Street arrange a fake meal of geranium, berries, or pebbles, That there may arise from them An illusion of food and drink, A hunger then, a zest for life Peculiar to those not quite alive. (145) To become real, to prove that he is real, Merrill must interact with people who are already alive, and he must make the interactions (a) verbal and (b) pleasurable for both parties; sometimes the parties are friends, sometimes they are readers, sometimes they are figures for one or the other, like the imaginary speaking partner, the candle, we see in “The Broken Home,” whose “tongue” does not produce new words: “Tell me, tongue of fire,/That you and I are as real/As least as the people upstairs” (197). Those lines are not funny; Merrill is, really, speaking to himself. But look what comes next: “My father, who had flown in World War I,/Might have continued to invest his life/In cloud banks well above Wall Street and wife” (197). The rhythms accelerate and grow irregular, the puns obtrusive: Merrill has begun to entertain. Merrill made himself into a poet of marriage, or of a state very much like marriage, characterized by shared houses, a shared life, a set of in-jokes that could also (though never completely) be shared, with other named characters and with Merrill’s implied readers. As Eric Murphy Selinger has noticed, erotic couples in Merrill are always becoming “once again theatrical,” their constantly revised performance, looking back at itself and out at the audience.14 To write about Merrill and erotic desire, in risqué prospect or in retrospect, is to write about Strato, to whom I will return. But to write about Merrill in love is to write about his decades with David Jackson, and about his long collaboration with Jackson in the seances that became the trilogy, “a collaborative venture that is an extension of their erotic relationship” (to quote Merrill’s biographer Langdon Hammer).15 “The Book of Ephraim” describes the experiences of reading, of conversation, of writing, even of remembering as pleasurable to the extent that they draw on and even consume a shared past. These experiences,

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which may characterize a long marriage, are not the same as a lustful fling, even though they “burn” too: We’ve wanted Consuming passions; these refine instead. Lifted through each level I call mine, Deposits rich in elemental C Yield such regret and wit as MERRILY GLOW ON when limbs licked blazing past recall Are banked where interest is minimal.16 Rather than “consuming” anything, the passions that animate “Ephraim” are like a coal fire, keeping a household warm. “Limbs” are “licked” in sexual play, defeated by the end of sexual play, remembered (as signs of intimate connection) when sex has become less interesting, or infrequent; JM and DJ are “LIKE COAL,” as against the unseasoned timber of Strato (the passage also sexualizes, and secularizes, the “seasoned timber” of George Herbert’s “Virtue”). The same section of “Ephraim” has JM and DJ back in Greece, enjoying a series of misunderstandings that have to do with shared households and warmth: Upstairs, DJ’s already at the simmer Phoning the company. He gets one pair Of words wrong: means to say “kalorifér” (Furnace) but out comes “kalokéri” (summer): Our summer doesn’t work, he keeps complaining While, outside, cats and dogs just keep on raining. (Sandover 53) If Merrill’s poems suggest, as Piotr Gwiazda says, “an indispensable element of role-playing in all romantic relationships,” that does not mean (as Gwiazda says) that they are “exuberantly inauthentic,” that they do not distinguish truth from untruth (47).17 Rather, they suggest that successful companionship depends on velleities and surfaces, not kept up (much less immaculate) so much as kept in motion, made light, performed to be shared. “Throwing voices, playing dressups, dancing a routine, exchanging banter, expressions of sublimated passion,” as Young writes, “point to some of the ways a partnership invents itself, knows the experience of its intimacy, and encounters some of its joys—as comic.”18 And that comedy sometimes, for Merrill, solicits an audience. “Clearing the Title,” one of few poems addressed directly and wholly to David Jackson, is one of Merrill’s many poems of social invitation. It is as if JM and DJ planned to throw a party not in their new house but for their new house, which they would have to feed with new furniture: And fresh as paint the bare rooms, if you please, Having consumed whatever came before,

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Look up unblinking: will we bring Their next meal—table, mirror, bed, lamp, chair? Serve the ravenous interior With real-life victuals, voices, vanities, Until it lolls back purring?—like our slum Garden zonked by milk bombs from two old bent trees. (407) Here Merrill has set off all the remaining fireworks in his verbal repertoire: the cliché become pun (“fresh as paint”), the extended conceit (house as eater), the burst of alliteration (into v’s), and the dive into comically low diction (“zonked”). There is no way to read this stanza consistently, or seriously, or without silliness; nor is there a way to read it without seeing it as a sign of intimacy—DJ is the sort of person to whom Merrill can say “zonked.” But so, reader, are you; so are we. Merrill understood his trilogy as collaboration in several senses—not only with Jackson, but also with the spirits, with his living friends (who sometimes joined the later seances), and with literary legacies such as that of W. H. Auden. Aidan Wasley notes, “When Merrill autographed copies of The Changing Light at Sandover, he sometimes signed them ‘James Merrill & Co.’”19 “THESE WORKS YOU UNDERSTAND? THAT OTHERS WRITE,” the ghost of T. S. Eliot explains, “ARE YET ONE’S OWN” (Sandover 558). Sandover includes many modes, only some of them conversational, and only some of them comic. But the whole poem could end (in “Coda: The Higher Keys”) only when it resumed its aspect of sparkling comic performance: “Something Miss Austen whispers makes Hans laugh” before “I begin: ‘Admittedly . . .’” (Sandover 559–60). To whom does Merrill, the poet within the poems, speak? To DJ; to the spirits; to other named friends; to you. It is not always possible to distinguish them, even within the sublimities of the trilogy, which are always giving way to in-jokes, to asides, to knowing backward looks, as in the ballade “Samos,” whose passage after passage starts in vatic mode and ends in self-referential comedy: We want unwilled excursions and ascents, Crave the upward-riplling rungs of fire, The outward-rippling rings (enough!) of water . . . (Now some details—how else will this hold water?) (Sandover 370) In the ballade, as elsewhere in Merrill, verbal repetition indexes the experience of repetition-with-a-difference that is also a sign of comedy, and of time passing, and of self-conscious, virtuosic performance (time after time, we manage to stick together; time after time, we attempt to be ourselves). Young distinguishes the banter of team stand-up comedy, such as Mike Nichols and Elaine May, where the duo must know that a third party watches and listens,

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from the banter of caper films such as Bringing Up Baby, where “the audience functions as voyeur.”20 But Merrill’s poetry scrambles such a distinction. Bound neither to the conventions of live stand-up comedy nor to the conventions of narrative film, a Merrill poem will often shift back and forth between addressing a partner (DJ, in particular) as if nobody else were there with them, and addressing us. That shift, undertaken with embarrassment or with glee, became one of Merrill’s signatures. Asked in 1982, “Do you have a particular reader in mind as you write?” Merrill replied, “It changes. Sometimes I have written poems which seemed to be for one other person only, but never really” (Prose 95). In an earlier interview he confessed, “I think one should try in what one does to charm the reader” (Prose 70). When the poems act out failures of intimacy, failures of knowledge, between Merrill and some other character, they often invite us in, so that we can recognize jokes other people cannot; we readers, as it were, hold up our end, and stand with Merrill ruefully or gleefully (as an intimate partner could) against the uncomprehending outer world. “The Emerald” makes an obvious example: Merrill’s mother has just offered him the eponymous gemstone, in trust for his future wife: I do not tell her, it would sound theatrical, Indeed this green room’s mine, my very life. We are each other’s; there will be no wife. The little feet that patter here are metrical. (342) As Merrill (in Gwiazda’s words) “chooses to play with the clichés of gay-selfrepresentation,” we not only recognize him as a gay man (which for Merrill meant a man who would not have children), but also get the consequent jokes.21 Just as in “An Urban Convalescence,” jokes transfigure cliché (“the patter of little feet”); what to the mother is only a “green room,” a place of preparation for the real act of fatherhood, is for Merrill as for us a topos for his literary, and witty, and childless, adult life. Conversation can play more assuredly with itself and its participants when it can draw on shared history. “The shared connection that enables acquaintance,” Young notes, “will lead to teasing and the referencing of a shared past.”22 Young’s sentences, meant as a gloss on Northanger Abbey, describe the relationship that Merrill’s poems set up between him and his readers: we are understood to share, to take a partly comic interest in, his embarrassment when he refers to the past (and especially to the amorous past) that he has shared with friends and lovers, and with us. The type case here is “Strato in Plaster”: “Everything changes. Nothing does,” the poem opens, as if to say to us (not just to himself), on seeing the older, less beautiful, man: Here we are again (296). All Merrill’s poems about Strato replace a no-longer-felt, or no-longerintimate, connection to Strato himself with a more intimate relation between the poet and his readers, readers who will both understand Merrill’s middle-

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aged disappointment and get his jokes. “Strato in Plaster” has both broken his arm and in effect broken up with James: Like stars, the fracture’s too complex, Too long unmended, for us to be friends. I, he hazards, have made other friends. The more reason, then, to part like friends. (337) Strato will not appreciate the ironic, ruefully playful dwelling on “friends,” three line-ends in a row (more repetition); but we may. The past that we share with a lover, a spouse, a close friend, is personal, part of a potential autobiography; the past that Merrill as poet can share with his implied readers is a literary past, a matter for allusion and quotation, not least to his own works, among them the “ill-stared novel” he lost in a cab (Sandover 47). Merrill failed as a novelist—so “The Book of Ephraim” implies—because his novels could not imagine the right kind of intimate, knowing, ultimately participatory audience that “Ephraim” (at least) implies: his abandoned novel, read as a novel, would sound solipsistic, overelaborate, though—retooled as material for “Ephraim,” retro-fitted with puns—it can entertain as well as instruct: “Since it had never truly fit, why wear/The shoe of prose? In verse the feet went bare” (Sandover 4). Halpern describes the “highly concentrated interplays of voices” throughout Merrill’s work.23 One of Merrill’s aesthetic goals throughout the trilogy, but especially in “The Book of Ephraim,” seems to have been the elevation of these interplays—these multiple voices, more or less playful, with their comic, allusive norms—to a point where they can plausibly convey supernatural power, though “plausibly” might be just the wrong word. The best moments throughout the trilogy can be those where the effort to annunciation, to seriousness, gets postponed or falls flat: in the trilogy’s final episode of death and rebirth, the spirit of Robert Morse prepares for reincarnation, taking his leave of Unice the unicorn: “FOND AS I AM/OF UNI, ONE CANNOT SAY NEIGH TO LIFE!// SIRS HE WAS LAUGHING WHEN HE LEFT” (Sandover 531). “Left” is a halfrhyme with “leaf,” and with “life”: “neigh” is the last of Morse’s many puns, which link Morse’s posthumous voice to Merrill’s own. (To be unable to pun, and unable to camp, in Sandover is not to be sanely human: it is, sometimes literally, to be bats.) Rhyme becomes one of many ways in which Merrill’s trilogy connects the upper and the earthly, the real and the apparently unreal, worlds, since (as Halpern emphasizes) “lowercase and uppercase lines” (i.e., earthly and unearthly speakers) “can rhyme with each other”; stichomythia, too, becomes “a sign of rapport.”24 At the same time as it is a witty echo chamber, a way to bring together living and dead friends, the trilogy depicts a married couple’s created world. “Neither law nor sexuality,” writes Stanley Cavell, “(nor, by implication, progeny) is sufficient to ensure true marriage”; instead, “what provides

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legitimacy is the mutual willingness for remarriage, for a sort of continuous reaffirmation, and one in which the couple’s isolation from the rest of society is generally marked; they form as it were a world elsewhere . . . in which good dreams come true.”25 Another world, but not an impermeable, inaccessible one; it is of the essence of Merrill’s linguistic exchanges that we understand them as exceptional, as removed (not everyone is that witty, just as not everyone is that privileged, and not everyone has access to the Other World) but it is equally of their essence that we can visit them, that the poems invite us in. Nor are these effects of knowingness, double entendres, running jokes, and in-jokes always dependent on the trilogy’s cosmic machinery. Indeed, the same effects blossom in Merrill’s poetry of the 1980s and 1990s. “Losing the Marbles” takes off from dense layers of remembered language, repurposing— and satirizing—quotations: Here in the gathering dusk one could no doubt “Rage against the dying of the light.” But really—rage? (So like the Athens press, Breathing fire to get the marbles back.) (572) What invites “rage” from another poet, but levity from this one, is the progressive extinction of one’s own faculties with the approach of old age. The same poem ends in a vision of intimacy, of conviviality, “sparkling” conversation, as the very best we can achieve (579). “The Ring Cycle,” too, combines flip literary allusion with more serious acknowledgment that time has passed, that Merrill has grown old: That man across the aisle, with lambswool beard, Was once my classmate, or a year behind me. Alone, in black, in front of him, Maxine … It’s like the Our Town cemetery scene! (611) Another tour de force at once of allusion, and of high-spirited satire, and of the repurposing of cliché, comes at the very start of “Santorini: Stopping the Leak,” in quasi-Yeatsian pseudo-ottava rima: Five sessions of God willing lethal Rays on a live target purple-inked For isolation, and the plantar wart (Girt by its young, one throbbing multiplex Neither knife nor acid could abort) Active half my adult life’s extinct —Whereupon, sporting a survivor’s grin, I’ve come by baby jet to Santorin. (479)

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Merrill is flattering—by amusing—his implied reader, who must get the jokes (it is at least the third time that Merrill has satirized “Sailing to Byzantium”); he is also placing himself amid a series of Merrills, a series of poems—this one being far from the first. And he is placing himself amid an already-spoken language, one in which other people say “God willing” and “live target” and “multiplex” without understanding that they are quotations. Here and elsewhere “Merrill presumes a listener with whom the only possible wavelength of communication is the assumption of perfect equality,” as Helen Vendler put it, “and this tone is a great compliment to us. We are meant to understand the jokes, the puns, the allusions.”26 These comic effects are ones Merrill’s critics have noticed, but critics have not connected them—or not often—to the way that Merrill handles personal and literary history, nor to the history of comic effects as signals of something like marriage, something like intimate bonds among human beings. “The mere tone of knowing,” as Merrill once remarked, can do the same “trick” as allusion and wordplay (Prose 30). I have been arguing that Merrill’s poetry extends to its implied readers, to an implied social circle, and sometimes to Merrill’s past selves—as well as to at least one real long-term partner, David Jackson—the modes of comic ongoingness, of intimate humor, of shared jokes, associated in novels, on stage and in film with successful marriage. Not by coincidence, Merrill’s social circle included a lot of gay men, who—in Merrill’s imagination, in Merrill’s time—would not legally marry, nor would they raise children. We cannot hear Merrill as comic without hearing camp, the overstylized, backward-looking register of art and speech, long associated with gay men, that tries very hard to treat everything as artifice, to make nothing matter. But camp in Merrill is never nihilistic, and only sometimes does it sound defensive; more often it is positively highspirited, a way to keep it up. Merrill’s last travel poem is his campiest. “A mauve madness has overrun Moravia,” it begins, noticing “mauve workpants, mauve shopfronts, mauve sunglasses,” perhaps “an early symptom of one of those/Artistic movements (mauvements in this case)” (859). The torrents of puns, like the tokens of gay identity, come without letup, without apology: they invite us, and entertain us, as if we belong. All Merrill’s best poems are, at least, inflected by a tone we might label as camp, though few can be labeled as campy—as a mauve madness—all the way through. Gwiazda, quoting Edmund White, suggests that wit in the years before Stonewall served gay men as a defense, a “self-abnegating, if not altogether self-negating, stance.”27 And yet in Merrill, as Gwiazda implies, wit and camp can also be constitutive, celebratory, bringing people together while making light of whatever might drag us down. Merrill’s detractors (to quote Moffett) find his “‘puzzle-setting,’ witty puns, and verbal hi-jinks . . . outrageous, inappropriate, even offensive in a ‘serious’ poem,” though even the highest jinks have motivation: “cleverness and virtuosity seem to him the best way for Art to make Pain bearable.”28

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Even more than most of the shorter poems, Sandover and especially “The Book of Ephraim” determine to treat heavy things lightly, to turn signs of isolation into tokens for intimate conversation, to treat death and bodily decay as (sometimes morbid) jokes: “Now/The plants, the sorry few that linger, scatter/Leaflets advocating euthanasia” (Sandover 90). The spirits in Sandover are absolutely forbidden to give the living practical advice; what they can share, of course, are running jokes, the bridge between another life and our own. “To share jokes with Maria—a godsend/Among her flowers; then the gasping purr/ From humor’s blackest bedside telephone” (Sandover 104). Ephraim himself belongs with JM and DJ, fits into the tone of “Ephraim” (as the bat-spirits will not fit, but distort, their tone in the sequels), because he shares their camp— their ability to exaggerate, to exercise tongue-in-cheek tastes, to find ironies and double meanings and sexual subtexts anywhere. Seeing JM and DJ in a tailor’s mirror, Ephraim remarks “MY DEARS I AM BEST SUITED WHEN YOU STRIP” (Sandover 36). Some of Ephraim’s running jokes are campier than others. At least one involves drag, a young man called “La Beata” who gave birth, or pretended to give birth, to the amusement of David Kalstone (DK): A CULT FORMS ROUND THIS MINX OF A YOUNG MAN PRAYED TO BY STRAIGHT FACES IN MILAN Laughter that by magic liquefies Is flowing helplessly from DK’s eyes —When into our midst They stride in great ill-temper Using the cup like a riding crop, directing QUENCH YR CANDLES U LISTEN TO NO ONE WORK TOMORROW (Sandover 124) The interrupting bats are the principle of seriousness, the limit to comic performance, that distinguish Mirabell and Scripts from the rest of JM’s poems (including “Ephraim”). At the same time they are a kind of satire, themselves, on straightforward—or straight—authority; if we must have unfunny teachers who interrupt our class jokes, at least let them be inhuman, monstrous, absurd. As for the class and its students, Sandover—as all its critics note—presents its cast of childless, accomplished gay men as an elite whose creative talents might save the world: it updates, exaggerates, turns into science fiction, E. M. Forster’s “TOUCHING THEORY/THAT GOD WANTS EDUCATED HIGHCLASS QUEERS/TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE & TO HAVE ONE MADE” (Sandover 205). Sociability itself, the ability to act in high spirits and in concert, appears to be one of those talents—neither the Ouija board sessions nor the dialogue that they produced could be the work of one man, or woman, alone. Reviewing “The Book of Ephraim,” Vendler noticed its “refusal to take large issues seriously,” a tonal choice that Merrill’s style made into a virtue: “By taking conversation . . . as the highest form of human expression,” she continued, “Merrill becomes susceptible to charges of frivolity, at least from readers with a

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taste only for the solemn. But this espousal of the conversation as the ultimate in linguistic achievement is a moral choice.”29 Merrill’s camp is a moral choice too. In the words of Scott Long, “Camp assaults a society that presumes it knows what is serious and what is not. It strives not to imitate this authority in distorted form but to expose it explicitly as inadequate.”30 This camp effect—at once tongue-incheek and hand-in-glove—might explain why the same poetry that strikes some readers as cold, as disengaged, may strike some others as affectionate, intimate: the same aspects that make it, at times, conversational, and even intimate, seem to refuse the weights and measures that other poets assign. For John Unterecker, writing in 1984, Merrill’s work must belong both to the tradition of “comedy” in the sense of the Divina Commedia, of literature whose systems produce happy endings, and to the “much simpler tradition . . . of comic wit,” whose “literature resemble very high conversation.”31 Merrill’s title Divine Comedies tries to unite the two meanings, to be both at once. Perhaps the most often quoted bit of the trilogy distinguishes it from humor and from tragedy: JM and DJ ask Ephraim, “Must everything be witty? AH MY DEARS/I AM NOT LAUGHING I WILL SIMPLY NOT SHED TEARS” (Sandover 17). But Ephraim protests too much: sometimes he is laughing. (This particular couplet follows an outrageous joke about cannibals and George Bernard Shaw.) Merrill’s poetry more generally, I have been arguing, keeps up something like laughter, or at least like high-spirited, ongoing talk. This sense of repartee brings to mind models of marriage, performances of marriage, from prose, film, and stage, and it includes the language that the Merrill of the poems shares with David Jackson. It includes, also, the language the Merrill shares with other friends, with guests; it can include Merrill’s colloquies with his past self, and it certainly includes the many ways in which Merrill keeps up a jocular connection to his readers. Sometimes that connection marks Merrill, and Merrill’s social circle, as gay. More broadly—and whether or not it is sexually marked—it requires references back, to shared experience of shared knowledge: the past— personal or literary—has to be there as a source for pleasurable reference for Young’s sense of talk, and for Merrill’s poetics, to work. As the late poetry grew more explicitly elegiac, more attentive both to bodily decay and to the collective illness of the planet, Merrill drew more explicitly on the humor within language, on errors and puns, as well as on ways to look back at his previous work. In “164 East 72nd Street” puns and outrageous metaphors—outrageous, but entertaining—may acclimate us, along with the poet, to old age and death: Today’s memo from the Tenant’s Committee deplores Even the ongoing deterioration Of the widows in our building. Well. On the bright side, Heating costs and street noise will be cut. Sirens at present like intergalactic gay Bars in full swing whoop past us night and day. (663)

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Merrill shares—he trusts that we would want to know about—the ridiculous typo, and also a sense that the bar scene has become ridiculous, that time has sped up around him, that he and we might be too old to stay out: “The point’s to live in style/Not to drop dead in it” (663). The stylish lines stop short and speed up like the years. Though for Ronald Wallace modern “comic poetry points out the discrepancy between the limits of language and the limitlessness of reality,” the comic styles in Merrill do the reverse: “style,” shared language (he suggest) can take us anywhere together, even to “zonked” gardens and “intergalactic gay/Bars,” but our real lives all end up in the same private place, the grave, where “ambulances” must go “unheard.”32 I have been describing a particular strength of Merrill’s—his representations of witty repartee, of continuing, intimate, partly funny relationships, between characters, and between the poet and his implied reader. These representations incorporate, but are not identical with, Merrill’s lightly worn high-culture allusions, double entendres and other puns, references back to previous poems by Merrill himself. Merrill’s repartee, or banter, or intimate wit, shows how to take heavy materials lightly, how awful news or awful memories can be made partly comic, by being rightly shared. Continuing comic intimacy in Merrill can serve as a sign of long-term romantic connection, such as the de facto marriage he had with DJ; the same comic intimacy, within the poems, can substitute for failed narratives (whose events do not end happily) or for the absence of a partner in real life. Merrill’s comic mode interrupts, or colors, or finds itself within, poems dominated by other modes, among them “The Broken Home,” “Days of 1941 and ‘44,” “Lost in Translation,” and “Self-Portrait in Tyvek Windbreaker.” It comes into its own, like so much else in Merrill, with Water Street, and it is never more fully realized than in his final book, A Scattering of Salts, where it controls his last great poem of comic banter and comic theatricality, which is also his last major poem about Greece, and his last major poem with Ouija board elements, the ten-part, twelve-page effort “Nine Lives.” The poem has a plot, and summary might help: returning to Greece, where they have not lived for years, JM and DJ learn from the Ouija board that their friend Maria Mitsotáki, long associated with cats, has been reincarnated as a boy from India who will be visiting Athens. JM and DJ try, but fail, to glimpse the boy; Merrill also tries and fails to rescue a trapped kitten, but DJ turns out to have seen the kitten, set free. Merrill does not ask us to envision the poem as a narrative; instead, he introduces it as “comic theater”: “Thrilling to find oneself again on stage,/In character, at this untender age” (591). Reena Sastri objects to critics (Vendler among them) who emphasize Merrill’s “mannerly conversation”: to see the poetry as a form of talk, Sastri explains, “underemphasizes the poetry’s theatricality, its quality as performance.”33 And yet Merrill’s form of talk is itself theatrical: we may imagine ourselves as its actors, or re-enactors, as well. (The poem reenacts, in particular, “Ephraim,”

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part O, where cats are “selves in animal disguise” [Sandover 53].) To step into Merrill’s life by reading his poems is to enter a theater familiar from other performances, a theater devoted to lightness, if not to laughter; and it is to recognize the quasi-rhyme royal stanza, familiar from “The Book of Ephraim” and from Auden’s “Letter to Lord Byron,” Merrill’s proximate model for his most casual tones. Those tones continue, and they incorporate puns, along with references to previous poems: the “headlines/Whose upper-case demotic holds the floor” are very much like the ones in “Losing the Marbles” (591). Moving temporarily back into the house they once occupied, JM and DJ resume the tone in which they explain—as if to each other, though really to us—who else has lived there, now deceased: “Good old Miss Pesmazóglou and her cat,/Or cats. They seem to have made do without her./Now we’ll be on hand to mind them” (591). These lines incorporate cliché (“Good old”) as well as puns (“mind”) and reported speech. They end up nimble, winsome, almost flip, doing justice to passing (rather than permanent) feelings; and what isn’t passing, in the longue durée? Why not treat the cats as seriously, or as un-seriously, as we treat human beings? “David calls the cats/Our latest Holy Family. Why not?” (595). This poem about reincarnation and revisiting could also be—in fact, it becomes—a poem about death and irrevocable loss; but Merrill lets the moments of confrontation with death (and reincarnation), with human powerlessness (and feline power), turn into new jokes: With nimbleness approaching the sublime, Seizing a bathtowel against fangs and claws And lunging like an avatar of Shaw’s Life Force, I overtook my prey in time To see him scuttle—not the slightest pause Or pity for one instant laughingstock— Into a vine-wreathed hole I’d failed to block. (595) As in “An Urban Convalescence,” Merrill incorporates cliché (“approaching the sublime”), knowing allusion (Shaw) and a big pun (“pause”). Merrill has traveled solo in other poems, but here he gives DJ a lot to say, as when they visit a cruising spot: DJ: The big thing is, they’ve all made money. These young men don’t have waistlines any more. Do they still dance in pairs on the dirt floor? JM: Would they still think our jokes were funny? (597) Maybe not (maybe they never did). If the experience of Greek people in Greece has changed, the experience of foreignness has not; it reminds Merrill of The

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Waste Land, whose polyglot stanzas get multiple sendups, among them a tourde-force of sexual comedy, with punning repetitions: [Spetsai.] The Gräfin: No, no, I am Greek, My husband was a Hamburger. He spoke The Ursprache. Oh later, perfect Greek, But not our first year. I’m remembering— Nelláki tells me you adored Maria— Didn’t we all—the party where Maria And Helmut met for the first time. Without A single word in common they communed. They sat down on the sofa and communed All evening long. Well, forty minutes. Thirty. Quite long enough to make a bride of twenty Run home in tears and lock herself in the bathroom. I’m ashamed for her to this day, I am! (599) Maria, we learn, felt fine not long after that: she reappeared in a show of confidence, “Waving the coachman’s whip like a conductor” (599). Comedy, here, is tragedy plus time. The last part of “Nine Lives” (part ten) returns to rhyme royal as it makes a case for comedy as a mode of continuing happiness, a case for the “moment comedies beget,” when “vows are renewed, masks dropped,” and a spectator careless of tragedy “will shed, O Happiness, a furtive tear” (600–01). “Comedy” here means happy endings, and (as in Byron’s quip) marriage, or something like marriage; and it means taking things lightly, nimbly, like a cat— The teacup-stirring eddy Is spent. We’ve dropped our masks, renewed our vows To letters, to the lives that letters house, House they shutter, streets they shade. Already Empty and dark, this street is. Dusty boughs Sleep in a pool of vigilance so bright An old tom skirts it. The world’s his tonight. (601) Merrill has renewed his connection to Greece, to DJ, to the prior self who wrote the trilogy, “to letters” in general, perhaps to that gloomier poet of panEuropean literature, T. S. Eliot, the “old tom” who also wrote about comedic cats. The episode with Maria’s next incarnation was a tempest in the teacup that JM and DJ used for planchette, as well as a final “eddy” of the universe-stirring currents that moved the epic: the comic escapes from the cosmic after all. Only some kinds of comic performance let us expect a happy ending (since tragedies have comic interludes); all such performances, however, in Young’s view, “hold traces of well-being” when they are shared. “In being audience to

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or readers of these comedy teams, we feel ourselves to be in the company of people who know how to play and who live in a world that makes play what it values most.”34 That is how “Nine Lives” feels: that poem, as W. S. Merwin writes, “invites the reader to attend it . . . as a piece of intimate theater,” at once a comedy, a farewell performance (Merwin compares it to Prospero’s breaking his wand), and (as Merwin does not say) a wedding, at whose end JM and DJ have “renewed our vows.”35 They are vows of the kind that Stanley Cavell has described: at the end of certain Hollywood comedies, as Cavell explains, no new vow is required, merely the picking-up of an action which has been, as it were, interrupted; not starting over, but starting again, finding and picking up the thread. . . . It is as though you know you are married when you come to see that you cannot divorce, that is, when you find that your lives simply will not disentangle. If your love is lucky, this knowledge will be greeted with laughter.36 To see “Nine Lives” in the context of Merrill’s life, and as a legacy of the Ouija board trilogy, is to hear in it this sort of laughter. It is also to hear the comedy as an achievement, since the real events ended in tears: according to Hammer, JM and DJ in Athens failed to “glimpse their friend Maria reborn as a boy from India,” Merrill’s “diary (not his poem) admits that, after he came home from the café, he cried.”37 We may not want—as Merrill does not want—to connect our sense of play, of felicitous interaction, of happiness itself, too closely to the events that can make up a narrative. “An understanding of happiness which works from the premise . . . that it is an end state,” Young explains, “precludes the possibility that happiness can be fluid and evolving, and that it can include the problematic.”38 Happiness may be a style, more than an outcome; a way to speak, as much as a thing to find. Confirmed repeatedly in their relationships (not only in and as themselves) by their repeated play of conversation, the couples in Young’s analyses—from Antony and Cleopatra to Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball—come close to presenting identity as a matter of style: Merrill’s poetry comes close, too, and for the same reasons. Their verbal work takes place “between confirmation (or prediction) and discovery (or rediscovery)” of who they are and can be for each other, and “this renewal of conversation suggests an experienced ritual . . . that keeps happening.”39 Rachel Cole has proposed that lyric poetry presents “a model for how we might treat others and an occasion for us to experience what others, if we treat them well, might enjoy.”40 Problematic as a generalized prescription, deliberately controversial when applied (as Cole applies it) to Wallace Stevens, the claim seems just right if we take its subject to be not something called lyric in general, but a smaller set of lyric or quasi-lyric poems: for example, Merrill’s. Despite Merrill’s own emphasis on his light touch, his critics have often focused on weightier topics: they have examined his “apocalypse,” the globe-spanning

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matter of the Sandover trilogy, or else considered his late poetry in the light of HIV/AIDS. Both approaches are ones that some of the work requires. And yet Merrill’s work at its best—even when it addresses such large, and sad, matters— retains its sense of intimate conversation. Stevens at his loneliest, Cole says, “imagines the reader not as an other but as a partner, someone a speaker will seek to satisfy.”41 Such satisfactions appear in Merrill as the echoes or mirrors of the conversational satisfactions that Merrill has already given, or almost given, to the people (ourselves among them) who are imagined, and entertained, within his poems.

Notes 1 Kay Young, Ordinary Pleasures: Couples, Conversation and Comedy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001), 4, 69, 80. 2 Quoted in Nick Halpern, Everyday and Prophetic: The Poetry of Lowell, Ammons, Merrill and Rich (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 176. 3 Young, Ordinary Pleasures, 154. 4 James Merrill, Collected Poems, ed. J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser (New York: Knopf, 2001), 572. Further references noted in the text. 5 James Merrill, Collected Prose, ed. J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser (New York: Knopf, 2004), 462. Further references noted in the text. 6 Halpern, Everyday and Prophetic, 152. 7 David Lehman, “Elemental Bravery: The Unity of James Merrill’s Poetry,” in James Merrill: Essays on the Poetry, ed. David Lehman and Charles Berger (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 23–60, 34. 8 J. D. McClatchy, “On Water Street,” in Lehman and Berger, James Merrill, 60–96, 61. 9 Stephen Yenser, The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 4–5. 10 McClatchy, “On Water Street,” 76. 11 Judith Moffett, James Merrill: An Introduction to the Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 37. 12 Lehman, “Elemental Bravery,” 25. 13 Ibid., 26. 14 Eric Murphy Selinger, “James Merrill’s Masks of Eros, Masks of Love,” in Critical Essays on James Merrill, ed. Guy Rotella (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1996), 145–74, 170. 15 Langdon Hammer, “James Merrill and the Other World: Langdon Hammer in Conversation,” Academy of American Poets website, http://www.poets.org/ viewmedia.php/prmMID/23154 (viewed September 18, 2013). 16 James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 50. Further references noted in the text. 17 Piotr Gwiazda, James Merrill and W. H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 47. 18 Young, Ordinary Pleasures, 97. 19 Aidan Wasley, The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 92.

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Young, Ordinary Pleasures, 110. Gwiazda, James Merrill and W. H. Auden, 53. Young, Ordinary Pleasures, 18. Halpern, Everyday and Prophetic, 138. Ibid., 179. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 142. 26 Helen Vendler, The Music of What Happens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 351. 27 Gwiazda, James Merrill and W. H. Auden, 12. 28 Ibid., 118. 29 Helen Vendler, Part of Nature, Part of Us (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 216, 217. 30 Scott Long, “The Loneliness of Camp,” in Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, ed. David Bergman (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 78–91, 79. 31 John Unterecker, “Foreword,” in Moffett, James Merrill, xi–xx, xii. 32 Ronald Wallace, God Be With the Clown: Humor in American Poetry (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), 30. 33 Reena Sastri, James Merrill: Knowing Innocence (New York: Routledge, 2007), 5. 34 Young, Ordinary Pleasures, 111. 35 W. S. Merwin, “The End of More Than Just a Book,” in Rotella, Critical Essays on James Merrill, 70–3, 72. 36 Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 127. 37 Hammer, “James Merrill and the Other World: Langdon Hammer in Conversation.” 38 Young, Ordinary Pleasures, 117. 39 Ibid., 80. 40 Rachel Cole, “Rethinking the Value of Lyric Closure,” PMLA 126, no. 2 (2011): 383–97, 388. 41. Cole, “Rethinking the Value of Lyric Closure,” 388.

Chapter 10 “ T H I S C OM IC V E R SION OF M YSE L F ” : H UM O R A N D   A U T O B IO G R A P H Y I N J O H N A SH B E RY ’ S P O E T RY A N D P R O S E Karin Roffman

“There are times, Fabia,” Dr. Bridgewater said, “when I wonder where my children got their sense of humor. Certainly not from your mother or me.” —John Ashbery and James Schuyler’s A Nest of Ninnies (1969) Early in John Ashbery’s reading at Harvard University in 1978, he recites “Worsening Situation” from his best-known volume, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), and a thin trickle of laughter begins to punctuate an otherwise quiet room. Throughout his delivery of the poem’s first verse paragraph, which is serious and reflective, there is rustling among an audience uncertain about whether or not what they hear is funny. At the beginning of the second section, when the poem shifts from a mood of quiet reflection to the narration of a much more dramatic scene, the audience’s reaction begins to build, as though in anticipation of a good punchline. Yet Ashbery’s deadpan reading style—flat, nasal, dry—confounds this expectation, for his voice suggests he hears nothing odd or humorous about what he says at all: One day a man called while I was out And left this message: “You got the whole thing wrong From start to finish. Luckily, there’s still time To correct the situation, but you must act fast. See me at your earliest convenience. And please Tell no one of this. Much besides your life depends on it.” I thought nothing of it at the time. Lately, I’ve been looking at old-fashioned plaids, fingering Starched white collars, wondering whether there’s a way To get them really white again. My wife Thinks I’m in Oslo—Oslo, France, that is.1

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The audience giggles at the phrase “you got the whole thing wrong,” and laughs at “I thought nothing of it at the time,” which Ashbery delivers with beguiling understatement. The final sentence—“My wife/Thinks I’m in Oslo—Oslo, France, that is”—receives, however, another hesitant chuckle. Seemingly in response to their uncertain reaction, Ashbery addresses the audience just after concluding the poem. He mentions that, in case they were wondering, there is no Olso, France, as far as he knows, nor does Ashbery have a wife. “These are examples of what is called creative license,” he says in nearly the same flat, deadpan voice he has used so far. This ad-libbed line receives the biggest laugh of the evening. The educated audience knows it is being teased. Ashbery gently chastises them for missing the joke (and for secretly wishing to know whether or not a story is true). In revealing his wry sense of irony more directly, Ashbery establishes a new level of intimacy between poet and audience. They know each other better now. Throughout the rest of the reading, laughter among the audience is much more frequent and uninhibited.2 Despite the audience’s uncertainty about whether or not to laugh, Ashbery had not only declared his comic intent in a poem more than twenty years earlier but also revealed a little bit about the formation of his sense of humor. In “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” which he completed during one intensive afternoon of writing in April 1950 (and published in Some Trees [1956]) he narrates the discovery of “this comic version of myself ” as a necessary poetic and personal creation. The poem opens with a phrase which describes the overwhelming experience of becoming deeply depressed: “Darkness falls like a wet sponge.” Throughout the first and second sections, the speaker has fragmented, disconnected memories of difficult, unhappy moments from childhood. He explains his distress at being trapped by these dark thoughts and a distant hope “that even these lives” might eventually “pass through” a struggle and “be blessed.” In the third and final section of the poem, the speaker’s efforts to survive leads suddenly and finally to a plan for how humor might possibly help him to do so: III Yet I cannot escape the picture Of my small self in that bank of flowers: My head among the blazing phlox Seemed a pale and gigantic fungus. I had a hard stare, accepting Everything, taking nothing, As though the rolled-up future might stink As loud as stood the sick moment The shutter clicked. Though I was wrong, Still, as the loveliest feelings Must soon find words, and these, yes, Displace them, so I am not wrong

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In calling this comic version of myself The true one. For as change is horror, Virtue is really stubbornness And only in the light of lost words Can we imagine our rewards. While the speaker recognizes that he “cannot escape” who he is, he discovers he can change the way he describes himself. Rather than see himself forever as a “gigantic fungus” with a future that will “stink,” he will displace this image with a different version of himself. He will employ a new vocabulary for himself, a technique that begins to help him feel more optimistic: “so I am not wrong/In calling this comic version of myself/The true one,” he concludes. The choice to use “lost words” to imagine a better future gives him the chance to escape his painful past and not only survive but also thrive. Even visually, the poem’s final epigrammatic statement overthrows the suffocating sense of “darkness” in which the poem begins. The speaker has been “blessed”; “this comic version of myself ” is a form of salvation. While this claim for the value of “this comic version” of a self in “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers” served to that point as Ashbery’s clearest poetic statement of the idea, the belief already had deep roots in Ashbery personal and artistic life by the time he wrote the poem. Some of his earliest memories of his life involved making his serious, nervous mother laugh. At the age of three, he was able to make her smile while she was ill by improvising an amusing dance. A few years later, a pun he coined about the cleaning agent Lysol pleased his mother one afternoon while she did the housework, and she memorably stopped her work to say: “Oh, John, you are so funny.” During the winter of 1935, his second grade teacher came over to the family’s farmhouse in Sodus, New York (a small village in upstate New York about thirty miles from Rochester), for dinner one night. There was a very popular song playing on the radio that year called “Throw Another Log on the Fire.” Toward the end of the meal, as the fireplace in the living room was dimming, Ashbery said, “So shall I throw another log on the fire?” Everyone laughed uproariously, which he liked, for it was a rare treat to get such a spontaneously strong positive reaction from any adults he knew.3 While Ashbery’s verbal expressions of humor elicited praise, his first attempt at writing something funny produced what felt to him at the time like genuine acclaim. During early December 1935, the eight-year-old Ashbery penned his first poem, “The Battle.” The poem was his delighted, mischievous response to the film of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which his grandparents had recently taken him to see. The new film, directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle, starred Mickey Rooney as the forest spirit Puck, Olivia de Haviland as Hermia, Dick Powell as Lysander, and James Cagney unexpectedly as the hilariously sweet, philosophical, and foolish Bottom the Weaver, whom Puck temporarily transforms into an ass-head. The black-andwhite film opened with a still image of a full moon among stars and trees as

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Mendelssohn’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture” played; Mendelssohn’s music was then woven throughout in a score by the great composer Erich Korngold. Although the film received mixed reviews (including one from The New York Times, which praised “its fun and haunting beauty” without actually giving it an entirely positive review), no official analysis mattered to young Ashbery, who discovered through the film the mysterious and magical play.4 The film was his first experience with Shakespeare, and he was fascinated by its combinations of darkness and light, silly and somber moods. The film and play together illuminated for Ashbery a view of the world as tragic but full of mirth that he felt instinctively drawn to, but only began to articulate slowly as his own thoughts over the next few years. Ashbery felt creatively inspired by the play’s unwillingness to allow any character to take itself too seriously even though almost everyone in it at some point cogently expresses dark and anxious thoughts. Even Theseus’s opening remarks, as he announces his upcoming nuptials to Hippolyta, notes the fine line between “mirth” and “melancholy” the play treads: Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments. Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth. Turn melancholy forth to funerals— The pale companion is not for our pomp. He sends out messengers to “stir up” the young characters to “mirth.” He tells them to sequester any melancholy for the time being. Theseus demonstrates his power over Athenians by commanding them to show happiness for his upcoming festivities. In Ashbery’s first poem, he also recognizes the fine line between “the pale companion” and “merriments.” He, too, chooses to “awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth”: The Battle The trees are bent with their glittering load, The bushes are covered and so is the road. The fairies are riding upon their snowflakes, And the tall haystacks are great sugar mounds. These are the fairies camping grounds. Their swords are made from glittering ice, They sparkle and shine and look very nice. But Mother Earth’s soldiers—they’re bushes and trees, Then there are some rabbits who would venture out. But that all depends on what they’re about. The battle’s beginning! It’s a fight to the end. The rabbits pitch in! Some help they must lend.

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The bushes are conquered! Well that was short. How shall they celebrate their victory? Well, my dears, that’s a long story. They celebrated their victory with a feast, With turkey and dressing and cakes of yeast. But let us get back to the trees and the bushes. They are weighted down with snow that pushes and pushes. But who should come along then little boy Ned? With muffler of blue and mittens of red. He freed them from their tiresome load And then was off again down the road. BUT—when the fairies came out again they were angry, every one! But burst out in laughter at having such fun. They vowed they would never again have a battle That was so much ado about nothing. While the witty narrative of a battle between fairies and bushes, composed in a series of six rhyming stanzas, draws on the beauty and wit of the film, it also transforms the play’s story and even its season (Ashbery’s poem takes place in a more Rochesterian winter). Its playful humor, its insistence on merriment, and its efforts to incorporate the film’s stunning images of immortal and fairy children as impish and mischievous demonstrate an impressive understanding and transformation of the play. Most importantly, the poem skirts its potentially serious and dark subject, just as the play had also done, by being so silly, celebratory, and joyous. In the battle between fairies and bushes, the fairies play a bit of a naughty, impetuous group. The bushes and trees, on the other hand, take their roles on earth quite seriously. The fairies see some snow and think of playing; the trees feel too weighed down by the burden of snow. In a battle between them, totally one-sided because some rabbits pitch in to help the fairies, the bushes and trees only feel their burden more deeply. Along comes a child, jumping up and down to hit snow off branches as children do, and he lightens their load. The fairies are briefly furious at the trees’ unexpected advantage, but then they toss off their anger because it is so much more fun to play! In writing this mock-epic, Ashbery actively practiced not only the creation of a funny plot, but also a likable, impish narrative voice. The primary joke in the poem is that an epic battle built up over the first two stanzas culminates in a fight lasting all of two-and-a-half lines in the third. The climax of the poem’s humorous perspective, however, isn’t the victory, but the punch line that succeeds it: The battle’s beginning! It’s a fight to the end. The rabbits pitch in! Some help they must lend. The bushes are conquered! Well that was short.

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Funniest in these lines isn’t the punchline itself—about an epic battle that isn’t epic at all—but the self-conscious whimsy of the narrator aware of the silliness of it all. The voice Ashbery uses here—blunt, happy, observant—charms as it narrates. It sounds pleasantly surprised by the poem’s recitation of such a quick turn of events. The witty, cutting observer of it all, is a whimsical and confident (but unnamed) Puck-like narrator. Ashbery’s first poem required almost no revisions and demonstrated his innate talent. Even more than that, it demonstrated total naturalness in his youthful assumption about why one might write a poem and what it might be for: to communicate a bit of fun and joy, a mischievous thrill, some sparkling images of things. He watched a film he liked and then wrote a poem that captured what he had enjoyed most in it. There were fairies and Shakespeare in his poem. There were trees and a sparkling night sky. The poem also demonstrated some instinctive technical skill; eight-year-old Ashbery had no literary training, but he naturally had a sense of rhyme and rhythm. Since he had no training, he had no knowledge of a set of rules that might weigh him down either. He instead invented some rules to use and to break. He started with five-line stanzas where the middle line did not rhyme. He abandoned that for quatrains divided into rhyming couplets. He let that pattern go to end the poem unrhymed but with a joke. He also ended the poem with a perfect iambic pentameter line, a meter of which he had certainly never formally learned. Since the poem was inspired by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to end it by naming (instead) Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing was clever in a wry and understated way. For an eight-year-old, the poem was a tour de force and suggested a promising literary future. Because of a family connection, his poem ended up being read in the Fifth Avenue apartment of the novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart, a circumstance that only cemented for Ashbery the idea that writing humorous poetry offered a ticket to a better life. Nonetheless, though he sometimes tried, he did not write another poem he liked as much for many years. He knew intuitively that he relished the joyousness of A Midsummer Night’s Dream but its intimations of darkness too. He loved its forest with frightening but also cozy and protecting trees. He was delighted by the fairies, so good-hearted yet naughty, so impish and impetuous. He liked humor that had a dark underbelly. The entire play was a rather joyous revelation to the young boy. He had instinctively responded to both its comic and tragic elements, but he also wondered how to combine darkness and humor again in new ways in future poems. While it may seem dubious to build a theory of Ashbery’s humor from a poem he tossed off as a preadolescent, Ashbery’s sense of humor developed from a perspective on the world—simultaneously experiencing it and pleasantly shocked by it—already intact in the narrative voice of “The Battle.” He eventually shaped, deepened, and ironized that voice through his developing realization that a child’s expressions of excited bewilderment at the newness of all his experiences were poetically resonant. Like the punch line to a joke, a surprised and bewildered reaction could create a freshness, a new way of seeing what

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had come before and what might still follow. One of the techniques Ashbery uses in “The Battle” to make it funnier is one he will also employ in his mature poems: the use of (unstated) ellipses to skip to (and highlight) the conclusion or punchline. Even in much more overtly serious poems such as Flow Chart (1991), the narrator will suddenly address the audience to state that he will hurry through some of the more somber or difficult parts of the story, humanely impatient and in tune with a reader wanting to find out what happened. “Everybody/Likes a joke,” Ashbery concludes in “A Wave” (A Wave, 1984), his poem about childhood. This conclusion was one he recognized after the success of “The Battle,” but one he complicated as he matured and included even more humor in his poems and stories, but much of it less overtly or directly funny material. In his essay on the work of artist Trevor Winkfield, he further explains this statement by discussing the linguistic aspects of Winkfield’s paintings and their connections to everyone’s experience of childhood: But it is obvious that some similar punning mechanism is at work in his paintings. Puns are a childish form of humor (and imagery from childhood, albeit transformed and distressed, peoples Winkfield’s tableaux); they also catapult us into the adjacent world of the unconscious where aerial pile-drivers are a not uncommon sight. In the case of both Roussel and Winkfield, we can see the result of the puns but can rarely trace the images back to their raw material.5 Ashbery recognizes puns as a form of “imagery from childhood,” and he mourns being unable to trace the development of Winkfield’s (and the writer Raymond Roussel’s) mature senses of humor from the “raw materials” of its inception. In Ashbery’s case, however, we have the unique opportunity to trace his sense of humor back to its “raw material” in early poems and letters. During the years between the ages of thirteen and sixteen (1941–44), he kept a daily diary and wrote a steady stream of amusing letters to close friends, explaining what he was reading, what radio shows he liked, and particularly how he viewed himself. Through these early works, he offers a rare glimpse of how he honed his “comic” self. He read and commented on the humor in O’Henry stories (September 9, 1941). He listened to the radio: “We heard, among others, the program Hap Hazzard. It is so funny I go into fits of laughter” (September 16 and 23, 1941). At the Rochester Public Library, which Ashbery visited at least once a week, he borrowed “the book of humorous verse” (April 7, 1943).6 Throughout the diaries, he also copied down jokes when he overheard them: “Sunday—Cute joke: about a knight of the round table who rode a St. Bernard. Stopped at inn, asked for lodging; landlord demurs, later says, ‘Wouldn’t turn a knight out on a dog like this’” (August 8, 1943). While he was clearly interested both in remembering jokes and in understanding some of the mechanics of joke-making, the funniest parts of

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his diary and his letters emerge in the comic persona he creates to describe his daily travails. Almost immediately after beginning his first diary, the act of writing and reflecting on his daily life leads him to make fun of himself. Nothing about his own experiences escapes his developing sense of irony, for he repeatedly tries to express a disjunction between how he tries to seem versus how he actually feels: “I made a pretense of mowing the lawn” (September 20, 1941), he writes wryly one afternoon, the word “pretense” suggesting his level of self-awareness. On another entry, which he entitles “My Unlucky Day,” he narrates an afternoon out with his grandfather where he loses a quarter, and then while circling back to find it, also loses a dollar. Running down the side of the entry, however, is a comment he added later stating that while undressing for bed, he discovered a hole in the pocket of his pants, “which absolves me of shame” (October 3, 1941), he explains dramatically. “Shame,” however, in this context has a double meaning, for it refers both to his horror at losing money and the melodramatic way he composes the initial description. In many other entries, he describes himself as he knocks over candles, breaks plates, is unaccountably hounded by fierce dogs, or is involved in other similar sorts of mishaps and pratfalls. Through his combination of narration and analysis, a picture emerges of earnest effort at being good constantly thwarted by the larger forces of the world working against him. As he notes with humorous melancholy several times throughout the four diaries: “I have often observed that nothing ever seems to happen to me on Tuesdays” (October 14, 1941). (Later, in “A Wave,” he writes: “And it could be that it was Tuesday, with dark, restless clouds.”) This persona, which he perfects in four years of daily writing, becomes increasingly evident in the voice he uses for letters to friends. Shortly before college, he describes what he looks like to a friend who has not seen him for a long time: You must be awfully grown up by now. I too have changed—I am now seedy and gangling, with a limburger complexion and dandruff, goodlooking only from certain angles in poorly-lit rooms. But lest I may be frightening you off, I hasten to add that I still have my pleasant nature and am always kind to dogs and little children.7 Since other entries describe his genuine anxiety about how he looks as his body changes in adolescence, this self-deprecatory comment suggests the ways he practiced turning dark thoughts and experiences into the very raw materials of his wittiest voice. Ashbery not only practices putting a humorous spin on his own voice and difficult experiences in his adolescent writing, but also begins to focus especially on the serious and earnest comments—everyday expressions—he hears his parents and their friends make all the time. He remembers ordinary comments and develops new ways of inflecting them with what he, in retrospect, finds so funny. Since he listens so carefully to the adults around him during his

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childhood, he is able as an adult to recall not only what they once said, but also what it suggested about their worldview. Once, his mother, exceedingly impressed by a clean floor at a tourist hotel they visited during a family trip, said it was “so clean you could eat off of it,” which struck Ashbery as one the of the first of a kind of ridiculous statement if one thought about what was being said literally.8 A version of this sort of comment became the title of the poem, “Crazy Weather,” which he explained in an interview: The title comes from one of my earliest childhood memories. I was walking on the street with my mother, and we were joined by a friend of hers who said, “Isn’t this funny weather?” And I don’t know why I should have remembered that, except that perhaps it struck me that all weather is funny or crazy and that there really isn’t any norm for weather. It’s always either unusually bad or unusually good or unusually indifferent. This is something which I wanted to bring to the reader’s attention, perhaps.9 “I don’t know why I should have remembered that,” he commented blandly, yet it was exactly those sorts of comments that he recalled best. Many of his poems included similar kinds of humor built from everyday expressions and clichés heard anew. For example: They had a good idea when they named this place Plainville. Of course it is plain and it sits on a plain, but there are other facets of its plainness. It has a “Poodle Parlor,” from which schnauzers are not excluded, nor any dog downright mad I should think. A table with magazines. Some of them dog-eared. (The Vermont Notebook, 1975) Or, We were talking about cats, I said you should have one not so much for companionship as for the extreme urgency of not letting it out of the bag. (Flow Chart, 1991) The narrator in both examples stops the story to cleverly elevate ordinary expressions to illuminate their underlying ridiculous. Particularly in Flow Chart, the book-length philosophical poem about the often tragic experience of living and simultaneously reflecting on the earnest absurdity of that life, the joke both serves as lighter moments and underscores the absurdity and mysteriousness of the ways we communicate to understand ourselves and each other. The Nest of Ninnies (1969), the novel Ashbery wrote with James Schuyler, is the fullest realization of the sense of humor he developed out of the raw material of his childhood. Completed in 1969, but begun in early July 1952, in the back of a car on a ride from Eastern Long Island to New York City, the two

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friends, both of whom grew up in similarly small towns in upstate New York, inspired each other to recall the things people said that, on reflection, were rather sad but also very funny. Schuyler and Ashbery shared a sense of humor. According to Ashbery, they had “similar kinds of wavelengths of wit,” which is partly why it is especially difficult to parse who wrote which part of Nest.10 For Ashbery, it was his mother and her female friends who provided the material for some of the funniest lines in the novel. The view of life these comments captured was one that took neither delight nor disappointment in experience, but accepted the “hazards of the course,” and learned “to accept / The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out.”11 Underlying these comments was a vision of the world that was tragic but accepting, but Ashbery learned to put his own ironic, witty spin on the kinds of things his mother and her friends said. For example, a Sodus friend, who owned an antique store, said one day to Ashbery: “I am my own best customer.” The phrase was said straightforwardly, but Ashbery loved how it pithily explained her lack of business success, for her store was failing. In the novel, Mrs. Kelso has a thought about herself that she wishes to share: “She turned to the others. ‘They think I’m funny,’ she said, ‘but I never take sugar in my coffee after a sweet dessert’” (38). This comment was one made verbatim by a neighbor over dinner at the Ashbery’s farmhouse one evening.12 It was spoken flatly and earnestly, but Ashbery found it beguiling in the way it encapsulated an expression of discomfort, so worth inflecting with an irony it did not originally have. While this style of gentle but sharp irony became the hallmark of A Nest of Ninnies once he and Schuyler completed it in the late 1960s, the first work in which Ashbery achieved this comic vision was much earlier, in his one-act play, The Heroes, which he composed during one intensive week of work at the end of January 1950. After graduating Harvard University in June 1949, Ashbery moved almost immediately to New York City, where he had always wished to live. The fantasy of an artistic city of great freedoms met the reality of trying to begin a career as a poet. Anxious and depressed, having started a master’s program in literature at Columbia University that he did not like and struggling with the expense, exhaustion, and distractions of living as a young adult in New York City, Ashbery wrote nothing in the city for the first six months he lived there. In late January, however, as spring semester began, he discovered a new course, the first that felt worthwhile and exciting: Moses Hadas’s “The Classical Drama and Its Influence.”13 Hadas, who had recently published a book on Greek drama, was in total command of the material and enthusiastic about it. The course stoked Ashbery’s curiosity in Greek drama and dramatists, plays written by men whom he later, gleefully, deemed “all obviously mad.”14 The course reawakened Ashbery’s interest in plays, but, even more importantly, reminded him of the insouciance in his early attempts at writing humorous poetry. Early in the semester, New Directions published Andre Gide’s prose work, Theseus, which Ashbery read again in the context of the course; he had already liked it when it earlier appeared in Partisan Review. Reading Gide’s

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work reminded him of his first two introductions to the Theseus legend: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which Theseus had appeared, rather improbably, as the Duke of Athens (and only the king and queen of the fairies, Titania and Oberon, seemed aware of his semi-immortal provenance); and the more straightforward version of the Theseus legend in Charles Kingsley’s children’s myths Heroes, which Ashbery read a few years later. Remembering these earlier introductions to Theseus’s character in light of his new reading, he composed The Heroes very quickly. It was an affectionate parody of Greek drama, but it also was touching and hilarious on its own. Although he felt he had borrowed “outrageously” from Gide, the play’s treatment of Theseus actually harkened back much more to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which had used Theseus’s mythological past delightfully freely to create, by the end of the play, a rather modern and rompish vision of Athens.15 In Ashbery’s The Heroes, Theseus arrives as an invited guest to what is described as a kind of midcentury modern-esque beach house, in which Patroclus and Achilles, who bicker like an old married couple, have settled together following the Trojan War (a war in which—contrary to what occurs in The Iliad—they haven’t perished). Other heroes show up: Ulysses and Circe among them, with intense and painful memories of former encounters. Theseus is in an emotionally fragile state, and he resents that everyone keeps asking him to talk about his experience killing the Minotaur, which he feels was not even the most interesting event of his life. What he really wants to communicate is how that experience inside Daedalus’s maze helped him to understand clearly, and for the first time, who he is: The horror and fascination with which I navigated that last wooden passage! How dark it was! A waterfall is sounding all around me. It is inside my head. But I was so happy—happy, Patroclus! For now at last I was seeing myself as I could only be—not as I might be seen by a person in the street: full of unfamiliarity and its resulting poetry. This vision was to that what music was to poetry. Before I might have seemed beautiful to the passerby. I now seemed ten times more so to myself, for I saw that I meant nothing beyond the equivocal statement of my limbs and the space and time they seemed to occupy.16 Patroclus, who is irritated by Achilles’s habits and a little bit in love with Theseus, is attentive to the story and yells, “Go on!” Theseus reaches the climax of his story: I realized that I now possessed the only weapon with which the minotaur might be vanquished—the indifference of a true aesthete. Drawing my sword with as much assurance as you might deal a card, I kicked open the door to the little privy-like enclosure where he lay. There was nothing but a great big doodle-bug made of wood and painted canvas.

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Patroclus becomes confused here. He had heard, as had everyone else, that the reason Theseus had to vanquish the Minotaur was because he devoured Athenian maidens each year, but how was that possible if the creature was not even real? Theseus never resolves this contradiction, and gets irritated because various characters continue to hound him about inconsistencies in his story. Despite these irritations and bickering, Patroclus and Theseus dance together touchingly at the end of the play, and other characters have brief moments of understanding. The combination of the absurdity of the story, the campiness of some of the characters’ bickering, the deep misery of the war-torn characters, and the tenderness of their occasional interactions creates a play as moving as it is hilarious. In The Heroes, Ashbery elevates his characters’ ordinary conversations to the condition of art and establishes, more vividly than ever before, his tragicomedic vision of life. While his belief about the close relationship between tragedy and comedy was one he had been instinctively honing since his earliest creative work, his new play deepened these ideas by allowing views about the difficult circumstances of human relationships to be spoken by characters whose semiimmortal provenance and epic experience gave them added gravitas. At the same time, to see these God-like men behave like children, bickering over small and even imagined grievances, brought to heights of seeming eloquence and then insulted by one another in the ordinary, contemporary American language was campy fun. While The Heroes was a continuation of an approach to creative work and humor Ashbery had been thinking about since he was eight, it was equally Ashbery’s response to and criticism of midcentury American art and ideas. Just as Ashbery was writing the play in New York City, Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman was in the midst of a nearly two-year run, dying every night in front of sold-out Broadway crowds in The Death of a Salesman. Like Miller’s play, Ashbery’s wrestled with the miseries of suburban American life but forged an alternative artistic conclusion through the sheer force of his irreverent comic vision. As Achilles, Patroclus, Theseus, and Ulysses—seeming pillars of classical literature—vacation together in an oddly contemporary beach house in what appears to be present-day America, they suffer under the weight of their reputations and expectations, emotionally exhausted by years of war, and desperate for some other conclusion to their stories than the ones they retell. As Miller’s play fought against the destructive myths of American life, Ashbery’s mock-epic more literally, and more comically did too. In Ashbery’s vision, the heroes cry, laugh, and talk about themselves and their most famous exploits. Giving these heroes new insight into their characters and allowing them to comment—usually self-deprecatingly—on their achievements and fame, Ashbery honed a humanely and humorously self-aware lyrical wit. Ashbery’s play offered just as sharp a criticism of contemporary American life as Miller’s had done, yet his characters’ whimsical responses to examples of oppression, harshness, and stupidity they regularly faced allowed them to

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survive, almost thrive, under similar conditions that destroyed Loman. For Ashbery, the one-act comedy, which was the very first piece of writing he completed in New York City, was a breakthrough and clearly established what would become his mature tragicomedic poetic voice. Less than three months after Ashbery completed The Heroes, he wrote “The Picture of J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers” and explicated “this comic version of myself.” Given the broader artistic context in which he was writing this seemingly autobiographical poem, the statement of “this comic version” was as much a comment on his poetic perspective as his American sensibility. During a period when those who wanted to say something serious or critical about the direction of American life were writing tragic American dramas, Ashbery was staking a claim to an entirely different style of criticizing America: what the Frenchwoman Claire in A Nest of Ninnies would call “America and her tragic suburbs!” (79). Even in such a blunt criticism as the one Claire makes, Ashbery ironizes it. While the phrase itself is its own form of criticism, it is further ironized by the description of how she says it: “‘America and her tragic suburbs!’ Claire fetched a sigh.” The inclusion of the word “fetched” adds a double layer of irony to the entire comment, for making such a statement, even if it is true, the novel suggests, is its own form of posing. In the 1990s, Ashbery continued to reflect on his role as a humorist, what it meant to maintain “this comic version of myself ” for so many years. He made fun of this role and questioned whether one could be funny for so long and what that meant: “Often, in the evenings, he’d rant about Mark Twain, how that wasn’t his real name, and was he hiding something? If so, then why call himself a humorist?” . . . And he said, “You know I was wrong about Mark Twain. It was his real name, and he was a humorist, a genuine American humorist for the ages.” (From “Chapter 11, Book 35” in Can You Hear, Bird, 1995) In this later poem, Ashbery plays with this persona even more: what does it mean to be a humorist? What about an American humorist? Humor was a matter of survival for Ashbery’s characters and himself. It sweetened the serious and enabled the displacement of the tragic; it offered a response to the underlying question as to “why there is . . . so much unhappiness” (“Melodic Trains” in Houseboat Days). After the success of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror in the mid-1970s, the number of readings Ashbery gave increased dramatically. At each of these early readings, a version of what happened at the 1978 Harvard reading recurred. The audience initially laughed hesitantly. As Ashbery spoke more directly to the audience to preface a poem or to explain something afterward, usually saying something self-deprecatory and funny in the process, the audience began

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laughing more often during poems. By joking with his audience, Ashbery was encouraging them to listen for the comic elements in his poems. Yet by the mid-1990s, it seemed that the audience was catching on to Ashbery’s modes of being comic. In Ashbery’s reading of “My Philosophy of Life” (Can You Hear Bird) at the Academy of American Poets, his poem about the funny relationship between thought and behavior, something unusual happened. The audience laughed first, their laughter made Ashbery laugh, and it took few seconds for the reading to resume. This reversal in what had happened twenty years before suggested that in the years since he first began reading his poetry to audiences in the 1960s, he had managed to “awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth.”17

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (New York: Viking, 1975). UPenn Sound: John Ashbery, Harvard University reading, 1978. Author interview with John Ashbery, July 8, 2012. New York Times Review, October 10, 1935, by Andre Sennwald. John Ashbery, “Winkfield’s Dissecting Table,” Art in America 74, no. 6 (1986): 106–09, 108–09. Interesting to note that the book Ashbery borrowed alongside the “Book of Humorous Thought” was Andre Gide’s The Crisis of Modern Thought. Letter from John Ashbery to Mary Wellington, June 2, 1945. Mary Wellington Martin letters. Houghton Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Author interview with John Ashbery, March 16, 2013. Hudson, New York. AM6 Box 46 Folder Lehman David a Conversation With John Ashbery, October 17, 1977. Author interview with John Ashbery, April 6, 2013. Hudson, New York. “Soonest Mended,” The Double Dream of Spring, 1970. Author interview with John Ashbery, April 6, 2013. Hudson, New York. Comp Lit 256. Letter from John Ashbery to Jane Freilicher, August 8, 1950, Freilicher Papers. Houghton Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Author interview with JA, March 16, 2013. Hudson, New York. This early (unpublished) version of the speech is from the draft John Ashbery gave to Judith Malina. In the Beinecke Living Theatre papers. The published version later Z Press, 1982, excluded the line “This vision was to that what music was to poetry.” Ashbery reading “My Philosophy of Life” at the Academy of American Poets, 1994. Available at https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/my-philosophy-life (accessed February 24, 2017).

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INDEX Abrahmson, David 151 n.8 accent, humor with 26–8, 30 “For the Afro-American Language” (unpublished) (Pound) 27 Against Interpretation (Sontag) 49 agency 69, 78, 89, 94, 98, 140, 150 Alice (Moore) 103 All About H. Hatterr (Desani) 6 An American Dilemma (Myrdal) 81 American domesticity 134–51 Anderson, Benedict 156 “Andrew Marvell” (Eliot) 101 Ansen, Alan 166 “anthologization effect” 80 anti-elitist history of poetry, case for 155 “Apostrophe to a Nephew” (McGinley) 150 Aristotle 3, 5, 7 Armantrout, Rae 71 Armstrong, Louis 87–8 Arnold, Elizabeth 65 “Art as Device” (Shklovsky) 39–40, 53 Artaud, Antonin 52 “as” (Cummings) 46 The Ascent of F6 (Auden) 156, 159 Ashbery, John 2, 14–15, 99, 195–208 “At the Fishhouses” (Bishop) 114, 116, 117 Auden, W. H. 2, 12, 14, 99, 103, 153–71, 181 “Auguries of Innocence” (Blake) 156 authoritarianism 154–5 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Stein) 100 bagatelles 106 Bailey, Jack 136 Baker, Peter 20, 37 n.7 Bakhtin, Mikhail 50, 57 n.27 “The Ballad of Barnaby” (Auden)

165

Barrecca, Regina 5 Basler, Roy 80 Bataille, Georges 54 bathroom humor 34–6 “The Battle” (Ashbery) 197–201 Baum, S. V. 56 n.11, 57 n.25 bawdy humor 12 Beckett, Samuel 99 Beefheart, Captain 57 n.19 Bergson, Henri 2–5, 13, 153, 168 Bernstein, Michael André 19, 20, 36 n.3, 37 nn.5, 7 Berryman, John 37 n.11, 61 B érubé, Michael 80, 95 nn.3–4, 96 n.30 “The Bight” (Bishop) 117 Bishop, Elizabeth 12, 14, 97, 99–100, 104, 107, 109–18, 178 The Black American Writer (Breman) 78 Black Boy (Wright) 83, 96 n.24 black humor 77–94 Black literature 80–2 Blackmur, R. P. 42 Bloom, Harold 107 Bond, Horace 79 “The Book of Ephraim” (Merrill) 179–80, 183, 186, 189 “Bowls” (Moore) 103 Bozorth, Richard 154, 158, 160, 170 Bradford, Edwin Emmanuel 160 Breman, Paul 78 Brendel, Alfred 108, 114 “A Bride in the 30’s” (Auden) 157 Bringing Up Baby (film) 182 “The Broken Home” (Merrill) 179, 187 Brooks, Mel 3 Brown, Sterling 6, 91 Bryant, Marsha 139, 161 Burt, Stephen 14 Byron, Lord 163–4, 171

220

Index

cacography 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38 n.33 Caddel, Richard 64 “Calendar for Parents” (McGinley) 144 Calloway, Cab 88–90 Cantor, J. R. 5 The Cantos (Pound) 1, 12, 19–36 Carroll, Lewis 52, 103, 104 Casabianca (Bishop) 112 Caserio, Robert 158, 173 n.22 Cavell, Stanley 183, 191 The Changing Light at Sandover (Merrill) 175, 181, 183, 186, 187, 189, 192 “Charles on Fire” (Merrill) 176 cheerful firmness 108 Chestnutt, Charles 81 Christie, Stuart 173 n.22 “Church Monuments” (Herbert) 124–5 Cicero 3 Cixous, Hélène 5, 6 “The Classical Drama and Its Influence” (Hadas) 204 Clay, Cassius 107 “Clearing the Title” (Merrill) 180–1 “A Cold Spring” (Bishop) 117 Cole, Rachel 191, 192 comic 9. See also individual entries definition of 167–8 metaphors 39 obscenity 49 “Complaint to the American Medical Association” (McGinley) 147 The Conjure Women (Chestnutt) 81 connectedness 59, 61–2, 65, 66, 68, 71, 80, 98, 116 Connolly, Cyril 169 convention and mysticism 121–32 Cooper, James Fenimore 81 Costello, Bonnie 2 Cottam, S. E. 160 Coyote, Wile E. 7 “Crazy Weather” (Ashbery) 203 creative license 196 Critchley, Simon 98 “Crusoe in England” (Bishop) 114, 117

cultural conduit, humor as 13 cultural legitimacy 78, 94 Cummings, E. E. 12, 39–55 black humorists and 53–5 Cunningham, J. V. 124 Damasio, Antonio 8 The Dance of Death (Auden) 154, 165 Davie, Donald 59, 154 Day-Lewis, Cecil 162 “Days of 1941 and ’44” (Merrill) 187 de Certeau, Michel 58 n.31 defamiliarization 98 Deleuze, Gilles 52, 57 n.23, 58 n.32 Desani, G. V. 6 Descartes, René 8 The Dial 100, 101 dialect humor 31–3, 36 Dickinson, Emily 13, 100, 113, 121–3 diction, Pound’s appropriation of 22–7, 29, 30 Diepeveen, Leonard 1 dirty jokes 9, 41–50 at expense of women 57 n.21 Divine Comedies (Merrill) 187 Doane, Mary Ann 57 n.21 The Dog Beneath the Skin (Auden) 156 Donaldson, Jeffrey 171 Dove, Rita 95 nn.4, 6 Driessen, Henk 98 Du Bois 81 Dunbar, Paul Laurence 96 n.18 “The Dunes” (Merrill) 177–8 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau 60 “Efforts of Affection” (Moore) 111 Eliot, T. S. 30, 31, 53, 79, 80, 99–102, 108, 118, 128, 129, 160, 181, 190 Ellison, Ralph 81–2 “The Emerald” (Merrill) 182 emotional comedies 59–73 “England” (Moore) 103 “Epithalamium” (Auden) 162 Erkkila, Betsy 111 Etcetera (Cummings) 46 ethnic slurs 29, 31, 34 Everybody’s Autobiography (Stein) 100 “Exchanging Hats” (Bishop) 114

Index Fabio, Sarah Webster 78 Fairley, Irene R. 44, 56 n.17 fascism, humor against 161–3 The Feminine Mystique (Friedan) 138 A Feminist Critique (Langer) 138 Fiedler, Leslie 32 Figlerowicz, Marta 13, 15 “Filling Station” (Bishop) 115 Fink, Thomas 155 Flow Chart (Ashbery) 201, 203 “For Paul” (Niedecker) 62–73 Foster, Hal 57 n.19 Freud, Sigmund 2, 8–10, 12, 13, 44, 57 n.21, 98, 153 Friedan, Betty 134, 136, 137, 150 Friedman, Norman 41 “The Frigate Pelican” (Moore) 105 “The Gentleman of Shallott” (Bishop) 111 Gide, Andre 204–5, 208 n.6 Gill, Jonathan 27, 30 God Be with the Clown (Wallace) 1 Golston, Michael 60 “Goodbye, Christ” (Hughes) 78, 95 n.9 good humor and poetry 97–118 Gottlieb, Susanna Young-Ah 162 “A Grave” (Moore) 104 group identity and love, relationship between 169 Gruner, Charles 4, 16 n.10 Guattari, Félix 57 n.23 Guide to Kulchur (Pound) 37 n.5 Gunn, Thom 175 Gwiazda, Piotr 180, 182, 185 Hadas, Moses 204 Halpern, Nick 176, 183 Hamilton, Richard 57 n.19 Hammer, Langdon 179, 191 Hamsun, Knut 40 Hardy, Thomas 13, 123, 126 Harlem Gallery (Tolson) 13, 77–82 Black literature and 80–2 bridge between poet and critic in 86–9 constructive laughter in 92–4 critic’s smile in 89–92

221

evolution of 79 philosopher’s wit in 82–6 Harper’s 135 Haughton, Hugh 14 Hayden, Charles L. 135 Hayden, Robert 79 Hazlitt, William 10 Heller, Michael 59 Hemans, Felicia 112 Henry, John 90 Herbert, George 124–5, 180 The Heroes (Ashbery) 204–7 heteroglossia 20, 21 Higgie, Jennifer 118 n.11 Hill, Lena 13 Him (Cummings) 55 n.4 “Histrion” (Pound) 37 n.11 Hobbes, Thomas 2, 3, 5, 168 Homo Ludens (Huizinga) 100 “The Honor of Being a Woman” (McGinley) 142 “Hostess” (McGinley) 143 Howells, William Dean 96 n.18 Hughes, Langston 31, 78, 95 n.9 Huizinga 100 “Humor” (Freud) 98 Hunger (Hamsun) 40 Hurston, Zora Neale 77, 81 Hutcheson, Francis 3 hydraulic model, of energy 8, 9–10 Icelandic art 158 identity, humor as 10 “Idiosyncracy and Technique” (Moore) 110 incongruity theory 6–9, 12, 14, 16 n.18 individual. See also individual entries beauty, and comic community 168–71 in group 163–5 in love 165–8 in-jokes 153, 154, 159, 160, 178, 179, 181, 184 interior humor 104 interpersonal humor 15 “In the Days of Prismatic Color” (Moore) 107 “In the Waiting Room” (Bishop) 113, 114

222

Index

Invisible Man (Ellison) 81 “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore” (Bishop) 110–11 Ironside, Fabian 26, 28 Irving, Washington 81 is 5 (Cummings) 41, 55 n.5 Isherwood, Christopher 156 Jackson, David 175, 179, 180, 185 Jackson, Shirley 138 James, Henry 130, 178 Jarrell, Randall 107, 109 Jefferson, Thomas 20, 37 n.10 Jenkins, G. Matthew 64 Jenkins, Nicholas 169 Jennison, Ruth 61, 64, 66 Johnson, Richard 168 Johnson, Robert 56 n.19 The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (Freud) 8, 98 jokes 2, 5–11, 13, 23–4, 26, 28, 31–2, 35–6, 38 n.28, 41–50, 57 n.21, 71, 83, 90, 92–4, 98, 106, 117, 121, 123, 153, 154, 156, 159, 160, 162, 165, 170, 177–9, 181–7, 189, 196, 199–201, 203, jokework 9, 12 Joyce, James 6 juxtaposition, humor through 22–4, 29, 36 Kallman, Chester 154, 169 Kant, Immanuel 7, 8, 10 Katharine Anne, ideal of 141–2 Keats, John 124, 149 Kerr, Jean 138 Kierkegaard, Søren 7 Kostalanetz, Richard 40 “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (Keats) 124 Ladies’ Home Journal (LHJ) 135–7, 139, 140, 144–6 “Lady Selecting Her Christmas Cards” (McGinley) 147 Laforgue, Jules 99 Laine, Timo 16 n.18 Langer, Cassandra 138 “Large Bad Picture” (Bishop) 111

“Last Will and Testament” (Auden and MacNeice) 162–3 Laugart, John 84, 85, 88 Laughlin, James 21, 30, 32, 38 n.28 Laughter (Bergson) 3 “Lay your sleeping head, my love” (Auden) 169–70 Leavis, F. R. 154 Lehman, David 176, 179 Leonard, Keith 96 nn.23, 30 Leroy, Megan 13–14 Letters from Iceland (Auden) 157–63, 165, 171 “Letter to Lord Byron” (Auden) 158, 159, 163–4, 171, 189 Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (Tolson) 78 Lieberman, Laurence 96 n.29 lightness, of verse 153, 154–62 “Lines Scribbled on a Program” (McGinley) 147 Locke, Alain 81 Long, Scott 187 “Losing the Marbles” (Merrill) 176, 184, 189 “Lost in Translation” (Merrill) 187 “Love and Service” (Williams) 131 The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley (McGinley) 135 ludicrous 10, 29, 139, 149 McBride, Henry 100 McCarthy, J. D. 135 McClatchy, J. D. 178 McDiarmid, Lucy 154, 162, 170 McGinley, Phyllis 1, 13–14, 133–51 cultural climate of 136–9 McLane, Maureen 100 Malina, Judith 208 n.16 McLuhan, Marshall 57 n.22 MacNeice, Louis 157, 161–3, 169 McWhirter, Cameron 32 “The Man-Moth” (Bishop) 112 Mann, Erika 162, 169 “Manners” (Bishop) 104, 114 “Manuelzinho” (Bishop) 97 “Marriage” (Moore) 103, 107, 108, 112, 116

Index Martin, Rod 5, 11, 16 n.10 Martin, Steve 56 n.13 Mawr, Bryn 106 May, Elaine 181 mechanical inelasticity 3, 7 “Melanchthon” (Moore) 104 “Memo for Duncan Hines” (McGinley) 150 Mendelson, Edward 154 Merrill, James 2, 12, 14, 175–92 Merrin, Jeredith 111, 112 Merwin, W. S. 191 metaphors 27, 39–41, 53–5, 60, 64, 67, 72, 78, 85, 88, 123, 126, 130, 166, 167, 187 metrical effects 27, 122–7, 147, 200 “Midas in Goldenrod” (Merrill) 177 Middleton, Peter 61, 62 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (film) 197–8 Miller, Arthur 206 Miller, Henry 40 Miller, Lewis H. Jr. 44, 56 n.19 “Miller’s Tale” (Chaucer) 156 mirth 11, 81, 198, 208 mockery 13, 25, 27–9, 31, 59, 86, 104, 148, 160, 178, 179, 199, 206 modern American 12. See also individual entries modernism/modernity. See individual entries Moffett, Judith 178–9 “Monologue to a Pet Shop” (McGinley) 150 Moore, Marianne 14, 97, 99–113, 116–18 “The Moose” (Bishop) 114 moral choice 187 Morreall, John 2, 3, 7, 10, 11, 16 nn.4, 12 Morse, Robert 183 Muhly, Ramsay 32 Mules and Men (Hurston) 81 Murphy, Robert Cushman 149 “Must Classical Music Be Entirely Serious?” (Brendel) 108 “My Philosophy of Life” (Ashbery) 208 My Poets (McLane) 100

223

Myrdal, Gunnar 81 “My Unlucky Day” (Ashbery) 202 “A Narrow Escape” (Merrill) 177 Nash, Ogden 133 national identity and community, necessity to rethink 156–7 Native Son (Wright) 81 Negro Digest 78 Nelson, Raymond 96 nn.24–5 Neruda, Pablo 111 A Nest of Ninnies (Ashbery and Schuyler) 195, 203, 204, 207 New Yorker 135 New York Times 134, 143, 147, 149, 198 Nicholls, Peter 60 Nichols, Mike 181 Niedecker, Lorine 13, 59–73 Nielson, Aldon 95 n.4, 96 n.29 Nietzsche, Friedrich 54 “Nine Lives” (Merrill) 176, 188, 190, 191 non-native English speakers, humor with 25–6 North, Michael 27, 31 nostalgia 156 “Notes on E. E. Cummings’ Language” (Blackmur) 42 “Notes on the Comic” (Auden) 167 objectivism 19–22, 37 n.7, 40, 47, 53, 65, 72–3, 132 “An Octopus” (Moore) 104 Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, and Phyllis McGinley (McCarthy) 135 O’Hara, Frank 99 O’Henry 201 “One Art” (Bishop) 111, 114, 117 “164 East 72nd Street” (Merrill) 187 O’Neill, Michael 154 On Humor (Critchley) 98 On the Frontier (Auden) 156 “On Truth and Life in an Extra Moral Sense” (Nietzsche) 54 “On Wit and Humor” (Hazlitt) 10 The Orators (Auden) 156 Ordinary Pleasures (Young) 175 Orr, Elaine 46

224

Index

“Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” (Bishop) 115–17, 178 “The Oxen” (Hardy) 123, 126 Oxford Book of English Verse (QuillerCouch) 156 Paid on Both Sides (Auden) 158 “The Pangolin” (Moore) 97, 104, 105 Parker, Dorothy 133, 134 Partisan Review 204 Passos, John Dos 58 n.30 Paz, Octavio 97 Pearce, Roy Harvey 43, 56 n.15 Perloff, Marjorie 62, 67 Peterson, Becky 60, 65 Peterson, Jeffrey 64 “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers” (Ashbery) 196, 207 Plath, Sylvia 134, 135, 139, 151 “The Platonic Blow” (Auden) 165 Plato 2 Poe, Edgar Allen 124 “Poem” (Bishop) 114 “The Poet and the City” (Auden) 154–5 “Poetry” (Moore) 101, 102 Ponge, Francis 39 “Portrait of a Lady” (Williams) 129–31 Pound, Ezra 1, 2, 12, 19–36, 37 nn.5, 11, 111, 131, 157, 160 bathroom humor and 34–6 dialect humor of 31–3, 36 on diction appropriation 22–7, 29, 30 ethnic slurs by 29, 31, 34 on linguistic appropriation 27–8 linguistic playfulness of 26, 28, 34 Pratt, William 37 nn.9, 11 “Prayer for My Son” (Yeats) 169 “Propriety” (Moore) 108 The Province of the Heart (McGinley) 135 The Psychology of Humor (Martin) 8 “The Public vs. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats” (Auden) 156

puns

4–7, 9, 28, 42, 48, 51, 106, 154, 185, 187, 189, 190, 197, 201 Pynchon, Thomas 53, 55 Quartermain, Peter 62 “Queen Anne’s Lace” (Williams) 128 “Queen for a Day” (television series) 136 Query, Patrick 172 n.18 “Questions of Travel” (Bishop) 117 Rabaté, Jean-Michel 32 Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin) 50 racism 4, 20, 25, 29, 30, 36, 37 n.5, 60, 78, 84, 93, 157 “Radical” (Moore) 104 “To the Reader” (Merrill) 176 Reed, Ismael 96 n.22 Reflections upon Laughter (Hutcheson) 3 relief theory 8–9, 12 Rendezvous with America (Tolson) 78 “Rhapsody on Czech Themes” (Merrill) 176 rhyme 1, 24, 28, 65, 69, 111, 112, 123, 126, 140–2, 149, 159, 183, 189, 190, 200 rhythm 45, 49, 72, 124, 125, 127, 147, 179, 200 Richter, Jean Paul 114 Riffaterre, Michael 39, 56 n.7 “The Ring Cycle” (Merrill) 184 Robertson, Lisa 71 Robinson, Elizabeth 64 Roffman, Karin 14–15 Rosen, David 172 n.12 Ryan, Kay 100 Sastri, Reena 188 Saturday Evening Post 135 Savage, Elizabeth 60, 64 A Scattering of Salts (Merrill) 187 “The School Play” (Merrill) 176 Schopenhauer, Arthur 7, 10, 12 Schroeder, Fred 56 n.12 Schuyler, James 99, 195, 203, 204 “Scientific Explanation of a Monday” (McGinley) 145, 146

Index The Sea and the Mirror (Auden) 157 “Secondary Epic” (Auden) 164 self-consciousness 23, 26, 51, 53, 62, 72, 102, 110, 181, 200 self-directed laughter 5 self-expression 60–2, 69, 70 self-mockery 13, 61, 62, 65, 66, 117 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Ashbery) 195, 207 “Self-Portrait in Tyvek Windbreaker” (Merrill) 187 Selinger, Eric Murphy 179 Semiotics of Poetry (Riffaterre) 39 “sentimental Tribute (Bishop) 110 Sexton, Anne 134, 151 Shapiro, Alan 13 Shapiro, Karl 78 Shklovsky, Viktor 39–40, 49, 53, 55 n.5, 57 n.27 “A Short History of Cooks” (McGinley) 140, 142, 146 Sieburth, Richard 37 n.15, 38 n.27 Sikelianos, Eleni 64 “Silence” (Moore) 103 The Simpsons (television program) 4 “Sincerity and Objectification” (Zukofsky) 72–3 Sixpence in Her Shoe (McGinley) 135 Skinner, Jonathan 60 “Slim Greer” (Brown) 6 Slonimsky, Henry 33 Slotkin, Joel 12 Smith, Stan 154 “To a Snail” 105 Solomon, William 12 “Some say that love’s a little boy” (Auden) 166–7 “Song of High Cuisine” (McGinley) 133, 147–8 Sontag, Susan 49 “Sorrow” (Williams) 128 Spender, Stephen 162 Spring and All (Williams) 128–9 Stein, Gertrude 100 Stevens, Wallace 97, 99, 191, 192 Stevenson, Anne 111, 113, 117 “Strato in Plaster” (Merrill) 182–3

225

subjectivity 20, 59–62, 64, 65, 72, 73, 113 “Suburban Rapture” (McGinley) 134 superiority theory 2–9, 12–13 objections to 3 recursive 5–6 Sweeney Agonistes 154 The Symbolist Movement in Literature (Symons) 99 Symons, Arthur 99 sympathy and humor, interplay of 167–8 Tate, Allen 78 Taylor, Paul Beekman 172–3 n.21 “Tell me the Truth” (Auden) 167 “tendentious” humor 9, 13 Tender Buttons (Stein) 100 Terrell, Carroll F. 24, 37 n.10 “Text for Today” (McGinley) 149 textual collage, process of 23 Theseus (Gide) 204 Time 135 “Time’s Andromedas” (Bishop) 100 “To a Peacock of France” (Moore) 104 Tolson, Melvin 2, 13, 77–94, 95 nn.9–10 Tomlinson, Charles 66 tropes 39, 40, 42, 44, 45, 47, 49, 53, 55, 56 nn.7, 19, 167 Trousdale, Rachel 14, 104–5, 118 n.4 “The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning” (Auden) 165 Tulips and Chimneys (Cummings) 41, 50 “The 2,000 Year Old Man” (Reiner and Brooks) 3 Ulysses (Joyce) 6 “Under Which Lyre” (Auden) 165 Unterecker, John 187 “An Urban Convalescence” (Merrill) 176, 178, 182, 189 V. (Pynchon) 53 Van Buren, Martin 24 Vendler, Helen 185, 186, 188 The Vermont Notebook (Ashbery) 203

226 “Virtue” Herbert, George 180 “vision of Agape” (Auden) 153, 154, 165 “Visit to St. Elizabeths” (Bishop) 111 Wagner, Linda W. 133 Waldman, Anne 63 Walker, Nancy 137, 151 n.7 Wallace, Ronald 1, 4, 61, 73, 165, 188 Washington, Denzel 95 n.11 Washington Tribune 95 n.9 Wasley, Aidan 181 The Waste Land (Eliot) 128, 129, 160, 189 Water Street (Merrill) 178, 179, 187 Watkins, Mel 80 “A Wave” (Ashbery) 201, 202 Weber, Samuel 57 n.21 Werner, Craig 96 n.26 White, Edmund 185 The White Goddess (Merrill) 178 Whitman, Walt 61 Williams, William Carlos 2, 13, 46, 58 n.30 101, 125, 128–33 Willis, Elizabeth 60, 64

Index Wilson, James 162 Winkfield, Trevor 201 Wisse, Ruth 6 wit 10, 14, 36, 57 n.21, 82–5, 89, 97, 98, 101, 102, 106, 109, 111, 113, 117–18, 133, 146, 185, 187, 188, 199, 204, 206 The Woman Question in American History 135 “The Wood-Weasel” (Moore) 97 Woollcott, Alexander 32, 33 “A Word to Hostesses” (McGinley) 144 Wright, Richard 77, 81, 83, 91, 95 n.2, 96 n.24 Yates, Michael 169 Yeats, William Butler 159, 169 Yenser, Stephen 178 Young, Kay 175, 180–2, 191 Yu, Christopher 157, 158, 160 Zeppelin, Led 57 n.19 Zillmann, D. 5 Zukofsky, Louis 30, 62, 63, 72 Zupancic, Alenka 57 n.21