THE HUMOROUS ELEMENT IN MODERNIST POETRY
THE motto to Mr. Hemingway’s modernist novel _The Sun Also Rises_
is: ‘“You are all a lost generation”--Gertrude Stein, in conversation.’
The title (“The sun also ariseth”) is taken from Ecclesiastes, from the
passage in which occurs the better-known text: “Vanity of vanities,
saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” This is the
conclusion of the greater number of the modernist poets, though not a
counsel of altogether unrelieved gloom. Miss Sitwell’s chief message,
if she may be said to have one, is the endless, minute triviality of
life. Mr. Eliot’s _Waste Land_ is prefixed by a Latin motto which
relates how the Cumaean Sibyl, when asked by the acolytes what her
wishes were, replied (exhausted by her prophetic visions) “I wish to
die”. But in general, although the total effect of modernist poetry
on the reader may be depressing because it does not shine with those
convictions and grandeurs which have made poetry in the past a beacon
of seldom-failing optimism, the modernist poet himself is gay--if
drearily gay--under the triviality of life or the philosophy of gloom
to which he may be committed. The vanity of the world seen without
other-worldly compensation does, in fact, demand a wilful cheerfulness
in the poet. And it is this gloomy cheerfulness, if anything, which
produces an effect of gloom on the reader; and perhaps rightly, if
the reader’s temperament is not thus complicated. The temper of this
generation, however, is not to be confused with the temper of two other
previous lost generations, the generation of Byron and the generation
of the ’nineties. The first was gloomy because gloom gave a tone of
romantic defeat to fanciful ideals that could not be seriously lived up
to; the next was gloomy because gloom gave a tone of romantic defeat
to a fanciful want of ideals. The poet of the ’nineties could either
get over his gloominess by becoming successful, or by becoming a
blindly devout Catholic; or he could blow out his brains. The present
lost generation does not feel its lack of ideals as sinfulness, but
rather as sophistication. It does not love itself, but it does not hate
itself. It does not think much of life, but neither does it think
much of death. It is a cynically common-sense generation which would
not, for example, consider dying for the freedom of a small enslaved
nation or for literary fame, for that matter. The gloom, then, that it
seems to cast does not come from self-pity or emotional prostration;
but even from its painful wittiness, as extreme common-sense is always
witty. The intellectuality of the humour of this generation may indeed
be responsible for the impression of gloom it gives--its passion to
show that common-sense is not common, that it is, in fact, not of the
substance of happy platitudes but of hard wit.
Because it is a common-sense generation, it must claim experience,
it must have tried everything. Because it emphasises the wit in
common-sense rather than the common-sense in wit, and because wit is
cynical, it is a cynical generation; yet not a sentimental generation,
because of its common-sense; nor a pessimistic generation, because
pessimism is sentimental. It has tried everything and like Ecclesiastes
found it lacking. But it has reached a degree of sophistication which
is a stage beyond that of Thomas Hardy or Anatole France. It is not
interested in denouncing. It cannot be bothered any more about the
failure of Heaven to answer prayers, or the hypocrisy of the ‘unco
guid’, or the inconstancy of lovers and fortune. It declares, more
definitely, a drastic alteration in traditional values; but without
the violence characteristic of minds that have reached this stage by
more emotional paths. It is a generation opposed to stress; and to
go on living is always easier than to die. Above all things, it is
interested in self-preservation. It is therefore an intensely serious
generation in its way, whose wilful cheerfulness is often mistaken for
drunken frivolousness: a generation that the War came upon at its most
impressionable stage and taught the necessity for a self-protective
scepticism of the stability of all human relationships, particularly of
all national and religious institutions, of all existing moral codes,
of all sentimental formulas for future harmony. From the War it also
learned a scale of emotional excitement and depression with which no
subsequent variations can compete; yet the scale was too nervously
destructive to be wished for again. The disillusion of the War has been
completed by the Peace, by the continuation of the old regime patched
up with political Fascism, by the same atmosphere of suspense that
prevailed from 1911 to the outbreak of nationalistic war and now again
gathering around further nationalistic and civil wars.
The other set of experiences beside the War that have most
impressed this generation might be called knowledge-experiences.
It has witnessed, as well as a variegation, a fresh synthesis of
intellectual interests. It must not only revise traditional values;
it must appreciate new ones. That is, as a generation writing in the
limelight of modernism it has an over-developed historical sense and
professional self-consciousness. It is mentally uncomfortable--shrewd,
nervous, suspicious of itself. It rejects philosophy and religion in
the old drivelling romantic sense, but would welcome an intellectual
system--a permanently accessible mental cock-tail--that would be a
stiff, sane, steadying combination of both. It cares so much that in
all matters where the plain reader is accustomed to meet with earnest
conviction of one kind or another in the poet, it is hysterically,
gruesomely ‘I-don’t-care-ish’. It is like a person between life and
death: everything that would ordinarily seem serious to him now seems
a tragic joke. This nervousness, this superior sort of stage-fright,
is aggravated by the fact that in the new synthesis of values--even
in the system that he is attempting to realize for himself--the
historically-minded modernist poet is uncertain whether there is
any excuse for the existence of poets at all. He finds himself in a
defensive position; and in sympathy with his position; but also with
the system that has put him in this position. So he brazens out the
dilemma by making cruel jokes at his own expense--jokes which he
expects no one to see or not to be laughed at if seen.
The modernist poet, then, as a type (and a type can, of course,
contradict itself in its individuals) may be said to possess a peculiar
and a recognizable intellectual slant; or, if we feel ‘intellectual’ to
imply too bland a sort of seriousness, we may say that the modernist
has such and such a technique of opinion in his poetry. He does not
commit himself whole-heartedly to any obvious conviction. He does not,
on the other hand, waste himself in obvious attack. When any choice of
faith, action or habit is held to belong to the lower, less developed
processes of reasoning, the making of a choice is a vulgarism. It is a
point of intellectual pride with him to refrain from making utilitarian
choices: his choices are in the more serious realm of speculation. His
aversion to indulging in feelings merely because they are temporarily
pleasant to him or to others, or because they are the feelings expected
of him as a poet, or because they best show off his talents, or because
they are easy and obvious feelings to have--this emotional abstinence
amounts to a severe asceticism, as one modernist poet has himself put
it. But asceticism is an easily parodied position and the modernist
poet is aware of this. He is also aware, because he is a hard-headed,
common-sense creature, that asceticism is in practice impossible. So he
has common-sense even about his common-sense, which has led him to this
asceticism: he is able to do what no generation of poets before him has
been able to do--to make fun of himself when he is at his most serious.
The poet’s self-mockery is that feature of modernist poetry most likely
to puzzle the reader or the critic who has not properly appraised the
poet’s intellectual slant. A poem which is a joke at the poet’s expense
can obviously not be sympathized with as it should be unless the reader
sees it as in some respects a joke against himself too. Obviously he
cannot do this unless he is at least capable of discovering in the poem
clues to the poet’s wit and its direction: the reader himself must have
wit. The probable failure of wit in the reader, whether plain reader or
critic, removes from the poet that measure of _address_ which an
audience imposes. Relieved of the obligations of address the modernist
poem frequently leaps from formal clownishness to unrestrained
burlesque. The closing lines of a poem, _Winter Remembered_, by
John Crowe Ransom illustrates that formal clownishness which is the
poet’s rôle when he intentionally keeps himself within reach of his
audience’s sentiment:
Dear Love, these fingers that had known your touch,
And tied our separate forces first together,
Were ten poor idiot fingers not worth much,
Ten frozen parsnips hanging in the weather.
Mr. Ransom, therefore, though a modernist in his disrespect to himself,
leans rather toward the sentimental tradition of irony. He insists upon
the wit of his reader; he makes an appeal which it is impossible that
the reader shall overlook: if the reader be slow in discovering the
clues to the poet’s clownishness, the poet forces his clownishness in
a way that the reader cannot mistake. It is as if a performing clown
had made a deep but delicate joke against himself which the audience
had missed. Bound to have his audience appreciate his mood, the clown
slaps himself very hard and makes a long face. The audience now sees
the joke and laughs. But the clown was obliged to brutalize his joke in
order to soften his audience to him. It is a question whether irony, as
a means of self-mockery, does not fail, in overstepping the disrespect
which the poet wishes to do himself. For it adds a pathetic element, a
tearfulness, which rarely is entirely sincere.
In the main, however, the modernist clown, feeling a want in his
audience, turns his back on it and performs his ritual of antics
without benefit of applause. As he is not out to make anyone laugh
and cry in the same breath, and as his audience is not likely to
respond unless he exerts himself to do this, he relieves himself of the
burden of an audience. It is for this reason that we find in modernist
poetry so many examples of _pure_ burlesque, not in the trapeze
tradition, but in the tearless, heartless tradition of the early
Italian comedy. Miss Sitwell, as much as any modernist poet, belongs to
this tradition:
The wind’s bastinado
Whipt on the calico
Skin of the Macaroon
And the black Picaroon
Beneath the galloon
Of the midnight sky.
Came the great Soldan
In his sedan
Floating his fan,--
Saw what the sly
Shadow’s cocoon
In the barracoon
Held. Out they fly.
“This melon,
Sir Mammon,
Comes out of Babylon:
Buy for a patacoon--
Sir, you must buy!”
So far, so good. The poem is a fantasia, a sort of a mime-show, and the
antic figures are expressed by obsolete romance words like Macaroon
(a clown) Picaroon (a rogue) galloon (rich embroidery) barracoon
(convict-prison) patacoon (Spanish dollar). The clown and rogue come
out from the shadow of the prison dressed in their white calico
pierrot costumes (see the cover of Sacheverell Sitwell’s _Thirteenth
Caesar_) and offer a fruit to the great Soldan: as two old-style
poets might offer their works to the great Public.
Said il Magnifico
Pulling a fico,--
With a stoccado
And a gambado
Making a wry
Face: “This corraceous
Round orchidaceous
Laceous porraceous
Fruit is a lie!
It is my friend King Pharaoh’s head
That nodding blew out of the Pyramid....”
In effect, the Soldan, snapping his fingers (pulling a fico) with a
stoccado (a lunge as in fencing) and a gambado (gambol) said--but by
this time Miss Sitwell, who has been going very fast, has left her
audience far behind: they have either deserted her, or are a dozen
lines behind fumbling in the dictionary. So at this point she whips up
her horse and goes faster than she knows herself. Even the dictionary
sense, at this speed, falls to pieces and the words themselves turn
into clowns. It no longer matters that ‘orchidaceous’ means ‘belonging
to the orchid family’ or that ‘porraceous’ means ‘belonging to the
leek family’ or that (unless Miss Sitwell has a bigger dictionary
than ours) ‘laceous’ and ‘corraceous’ are mere nonsense-words. For
by this time nothing matters and nothing makes sense, not even what
the great Soldan says. Indeed the boisterous collapse is so sudden
and so complete that ‘laceous’ and ‘corraceous’ may be deliberate
misspellings to indicate the state of merry disintegration that the
poem has reached. The principal observation to be made about this
performance is, perhaps, that it has two separate aspects, a theatrical
aspect and a poetic aspect. The first is the poem as a visible
gesture which either is or is not a signal to the reader’s wit. If
it is, the reader may perceive the poetic aspect according to his
capacity or leisure. The theatrical aspect at any rate remains and,
if the eye is quick, includes the poetic aspect. For it is possible
that a sensitive audience which did not catch all her words, so to
speak, might by the excellence of Miss Sitwell’s pantomime follow
with perfect understanding her light-hearted gallop to despair and
self-stultification. If it could not, then be assured Miss Sitwell
would _not_ slap herself in the face.
Limitations in the sense of humour of the critic-reader have thus the
effect of making the modernist poem more and more difficult. For,
the poet tells himself, if the reading public is bound anyhow to be a
limited one, the poem may as well take advantage of its isolation by
using references and associations which are as far out of the ordinary
critic’s reach as the modernist sense of humour. When, for example,
Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell both introduce a Captain Fracasse into
their poems as a symbol of the comic opera sword-and-cape hero, they
are going too far for the average English reader and critic who is
perhaps entirely unaware of Gautier’s romance of that name or of
Catulle Mendes’ comic-opera drawn from it, but would immediately
recognize a character corresponding to Fracasse in English literature.
Fracasse is used because French comic opera heroes have an eccentric
quality not to be matched quite accurately in the English Classics; but
he would undoubtedly not have been used if a freer commerce in humour
existed between the reader and the poet. Again, when Miss Sitwell
writes of:
winding
Roads whose dust seems gilded binding
Made for “Paul et Virginie”--
(so flimsy-tough those roads are), see
The panniered donkey pass....
the reference is to a pastoral by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, an
old-fashioned French nursery-classic. It is a sentimental record of
true love in the picturesquely savage Isle of Mauritius, a mixed
flimsiness and toughness of story with which we may imagine the format
of Miss Sitwell’s school-room copy to have been analogous--heavy gilt
binding and the usual flimsy French paper. This is a little more than a
family joke, but certainly not a popular one.
A poem by Mr. Eliot may be quoted in full as an example of how limited
the humorous appeal of modernist verse may become. The extreme
particularity of some of the references may be called the teasing
element of modernist wit. Here is our poor understanding of the poem.
We do not pretend to be wise to all the jokes in Mr. Eliot’s poem;
undoubtedly the pertinaceous and joke-shrewd reader will be able to
carry the scent further; and of course Mr. Eliot himself could, if
pressed, make everything clear:
BURBANK WITH A BAEDEKER:
BLEISTEIN WITH A CIGAR.
Tra-la-la-la-la-la-laire--nil nisi divinum stabile est; caetera
fumus--the gondola stopped, the old palace was there, how charming
its grey and pink--goats and monkeys with such hair too!--so the
countess passed on until she came through the little park, where Niobe
presented her with a casket, and so departed.
Burbank crossed a little bridge
Descending at a small hotel;
Princess Volupine arrived,
They were together, and he fell.
Defunctive music under sea
Passed seaward with the passing bell
Slowly: the God Hercules
Had left him, that had loved him well
The horses, under the axle-tree
Beat up the dawn from Istria
With even feet. Her shuttered barge
Burned on the water all the day.
This is evidently modern Venice visited by two tourists, one an
American, who may or may not be called Burbank on account of Burbank
the botanist, the other a caricature-Jew. The Latin quotation means:
“Nothing is lasting unless it is divine: the rest is smoke.” The rest
of the introduction, with the exception of ‘with such hair too’ out of
Browning, may be by Ruskin or by some obscure diarist or by Mr. Eliot
himself: we cannot be bothered to discover whom. The best that we can
do for it is to apply it to the poem. The old palace is one of the many
show-places on the Grand Canal: the one possibly where Lord Byron’s
intrigue with the Countess Guiccoli took place. The goats and monkeys
may be part of the zoo that Lord Byron kept there and later conveyed
to Pisa; but also may symbolise lechery. Not only are monkeys permanent
features, like gargoyles, of Venetian palaces; but monkeys play a
symbolic part in the _Merchant of Venice_, and the _Merchant
of Venice_ is a suppressed _motif_, shaping the poem from
behind the scenes, so to speak. Jessica, it will be remembered, turned
her back on Jewry, took up with Christians and immediately bought a
monkey. The little parks are features of these Venetian palaces. Niobe
is the Greek emblem of sorrow; her children were slain as a punishment
for her pride in them. The casket is a memorial of Niobe’s sympathy
with Venice, whose pride has also been brought low. Princess Volupine
evidently represents the degenerate aristocratic romanticism of
Venice: she has an intrigue with Burbank who stands for the element of
sentiment in modern civilization--a sort of symbolical ‘decent chap’.
‘Defunctive music’ is from Shakespeare’s _Phoenix and Turtle_.
The last line of the first stanza, like the last two of the second
and the first two of the third, is possibly also a quotation, but
here again we leave pedigrees to more reference-proud critics than
ourselves. Burbank’s power leaves him. (The God Hercules is the Latin
god of strength and also the guardian of money.) The third stanza marks
an increase from the second in the mock-grandeur of the writing:
at this point it seems to fall in love with itself and threatens to
become serious. This in turn demands the sudden bathetic drop of the
fourth stanza. The manner of the third stanza accounts for the especial
artificiality of the symbols used: their grandiosity and the obscurity
of their source throw a cloud over their precise significance. The
horses under the axle-tree may be the horses of the sun under the
axle-tree of heaven; but they may also suggest the little heraldic
horses fixed at the side of every Venetian gondola, which may be said
to be under the axle-tree of the gondola, _i.e._ the oar. So this
may be a conceit that amounts to calling the sun a sky-gondola rather
than a chariot. Or it may not. Istria lies East from Venice on the road
to Vienna. Princess Volupine’s shuttered barge burns significantly on
the water all day, a sign that she is now closeted with someone else.
There is an echo here from _Antony and Cleopatra_:
‘The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water...!’
At this point the other half of the cast enters the poem: Bleistein
the Jew. Burbank walks through Venice with a Baedeker, that is, with
a melancholy respect for the past. Bleistein, on the contrary,
walks through Venice with a cigar, a symbol of vulgar and ignorant
self-enjoyment. The name Bleistein itself is a caricature of the common
Goldstein or ‘Goldstone’: it means ‘Leadstone’.
But this or such was Bleistein’s way:
A saggy bending of the knees
And elbows, with the palms turned out,
Chicago Semite Viennese.
A lustreless protrusive eye
Stares from the protozoic slime
At a perspective of Canaletto.
The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once.
The rats are underneath the piles.
The jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs. The boatman smiles,
Burbank sees the strength and wealth of Venice departed, the remnants
of her glory enjoyed by an upstart Chicago Jew who probably started
life as a tailor’s apprentice in Galicia (whose origin is Austria,
whither Hercules first went from Venice in 1814). Canaletto was a
painter of the eighteenth century whose aristocratic pictures of Venice
are a long way from Bleistein’s kind. The smoky candle end recalls the
Latin motto: ‘the rest is smoke’. Burbank pictures sorrowfully the
Rialto of other days. The rats are underneath the piles now, and the
Jew (the eternal Shylock) is the rat of rats. The jew (Jew is written
with a small initial letter like rat) is apparently a rat because he
has made money and because for some reason Jewish wealth, as opposed to
Gentile wealth, has a mystical connection with the decline of Venice.
This may not be Burbank’s private opinion or even Mr. Eliot’s. It at
any rate expresses for Mr. Burbank and Mr. Eliot the way Venice at
present feels or should feel about the modern Jew strutting through its
streets. ‘Money in furs’ refers not only to the fact that the fur trade
is largely in Jewish hands and that this is how Bleistein probably
made his money, but also to some proverbial witticism, perhaps, about
the ability of a Jew to make money even out of rats’ skins, out of
the instruments of decay, that is. The smiling boatman, who has for
centuries seen everything, stands as an ironic fate between Bleistein
and Princess Volupine.
Princess Volupine extends
A meagre, blue-nailed, pthisic hand
To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights,
She entertains Sir Ferdinand
Klein. Who clipped the lion’s wings
And flea’d his rump and pared his claws?
Thought Burbank, meditating on
Time’s ruins, and the seven laws.
Venice in the person of Princess Volupine (is this another French
comic-opera character; or a coined word compounded of the Latin for
‘pleasure,’ _Voluptas_, and the name of a play of Ben Jonson’s
_Volpone, the Fox_; or a character from one of the obscurer
dramatists of the _Mermaid Series_? We confess we do not care) has
now descended so low that, no longer content with Byronic intrigues
with civilization, she actually admits the Jew (in the person of Sir
Ferdinand Klein, an English financier) to her embraces. Sir Ferdinand’s
name is an epitome of contempt and pathetic comedy: the Jew, having
made money, has likewise conquered and corrupted English society;
his noble Christian name is stolen from the very country which most
persecuted him (now also in decay); his family name means ‘little’ and
is, appropriately enough, from the German (there is no sentimental
condolence with the Germans because, presumably, they do not suffer
from this peculiarly Mediterranean type of decay). So, in the person
of Sir Ferdinand Klein, Bleistein succeeds where Burbank fails; the
implication being that the Jew is not an individual but an eternal
symbol, each Jew always being the entire race. “Lights, lights!” is
a Shakespearianism further evoking the _Merchant of Venice_
atmosphere. The lion is the winged lion of St. Mark, the patron saint
of Venice; but also, in a secondary sense, the British lion, whose
wings have been clipped by the Jew. What the seven laws are in the
Venetian context will probably be found in Baedeker or the Classical
Dictionary or the _Merchant of Venice_ (where rats, the Rialto and
pet monkeys also occur).
This is not, of course, popular writing. It is aristocratic writing,
and its jokes are exclusive; but only exclusive if the reader has no
capacity or interest for sharing in them: the Baedeker is common to
all men, so are the Classical Dictionary and La Rousse. The jokes are
against modern civilization, against money, against classicism, against
romanticism, against Mr. Eliot himself as a tourist in Venice with a
Baedeker. One of the privileges of the comedian is to have prejudices
without being held morally accountable for them; and the modernist poet
is inclined to take full advantage of this privilege, to have caprices
without being obliged to render a dull, rationalistic account of them.
The anti-Jewish prejudice, for instance, occurs frequently in modernist
poetry, and the anti-American prejudice also. It is part of the comedy
that a Jew or an American may equally have these prejudices.
Although written in a mood of intellectual severity, modernist poetry
retains the clown’s privilege of having irrational prejudices in favour
of a few things as well as against a few things. It assumes, indeed,
the humorous championship of things that the last centuries have either
hated, neglected or mishandled. Toward poetical items that have been
worn out by spiritual elevation, such as motherhood, childhood, nature,
national pride, the soul, fame, freedom and perfection, it maintains
a policy of disinterested neutrality; not because of a prejudice
against motherhood, nature, etc., but because of a feeling that they
have had their day and that it is now the turn of other things like
obscenity, lodging-house life, pedantry, vulgarity, frivolousness,
failure, drunkenness, and so on, to be put into the scales. This is out
of a desire not for sensationalism but for emotional equilibrium. The
generation to which the modernist poet belongs is, as we have said, an
exceedingly common-sense, ‘sensible’ generation, to which most things
are equally poetic because equally commonplace.
The only way that traditional poetry could treat drink, for example,
was either with sentimental gaiety, as in Shakespeare’s:
Let the canakin clink,
And let the canakin clink!
A soldier’s a man
And life’s but a span,
So let the canakin clink!
or with irony, as in Gay’s song from _The Mohocks_:
Come fill up the glass!
Round, round, let it pass,
Till our reason be lost in our wine:
Leave conscience’s rules
To women and fools,
_This_ only can make us divine.
or with loathing for its fatal fascination as in Lefanu’s _Drunkard’s
address to a Bottle of Whiskey_:
Oh terrible darling,
How have you sought me,
Enchanted, and caught me,
See, now, where you’ve brought me
To sleep by the road-side, and dress out in rags.
Drunkenness, as a poetical subject, was either comic or disgusting.
Comic, as in George Colman’s _Toby Tosspot_: when the drunken man
on his way home at midnight saw a notice on a street-door “Please Ring
the Bell”, and did so vigorously out of mere friendliness. Disgusting,
as in Mr. Masefield’s _Everlasting Mercy_:
“Look on him, there”, she says, “look on him
And smell the stinking gin upon him,
The lowest sot, the drunk’nest liar,
The dirtiest dog in all the shire.”
The modernist poet, however, does not have, properly speaking,
‘poetical’ subjects, since most subjects are to him commonplaces. So
that when the fact of drunkenness gets into poetry, the poem does
not explain how the poet feels about drunkenness but, in a callous,
precise way, what drunkenness is. If, therefore, the poem is a ‘comic’
poem, it is not so because the poet thinks drunkenness a comic subject
but because it happens, as a shrewd mental condition, to share in his
wit. So Mr. Cummings:
death is more than
certain a hundred these
sounds crowds odours it
is in a hurry
beyond that any this
taxi smile or angle we do
not sell and buy
things so necessary as
is death and unlike shirts
neckties trousers
we cannot wear it out
no sir which is why
granted who discovered
America ether the movies
may claim general importance
to me to you nothing is
what particularly
matters hence in a
little sunlight and less
moonlight ourselves against the worms
hate laugh shimmy
The wit of drunkenness can easily be deciphered from this taxi-and-gin
shorthand. Drunkenness is a mental dare-devilry; one of the few
conditions, indeed, in which it is not disgraceful to be sentimental.
The last thing drunkenness takes notice of is drink; and it is not
sufficiently understood that a person in drunkenness is not drunk, but
only very serious and therefore very hilarious or very gloomy. Mr.
Cummings’ most serious poems, for example, are drunken poems; except
his love poems--but these, perhaps, may also be classified as drunken
poems. Therefore Mr. Cummings does not here say: “Death is more than
certain, fellow drunkards. Out of every hundred people born a hundred
die”, and proceed, as in _Down Among the Dead Men_:
Then come, let us drink it while we have breath,
For there’s no drinking after death!
He clips his grammar, increases his speed and goes on with the
argument, and does not stop until he has reached the conclusion that
all there is left to do under the circumstances is to ‘hate, laugh,
shimmy’--and speculate. For in drunkenness, it appears, one’s mind is
not less but more clear than usual. It holds more, it thinks faster,
it sees and understands everything; it is even like the taxi which,
we gather, is assisting the poet in his poetic argument. So death
triumphs, it is not left behind by the taxi (no sir!) together with
the shops, the crowds and our rake’s fast thoughts. Nothing matters,
therefore, (and here our rake turns, perhaps, to the other occupant of
the taxi) except a little bragging sunshine to show the worms we don’t
care and to hate, laugh, shimmy. And so Death does not triumph. Thus
reads an old comic subject in nineteen twenty-six.
The haughty intellectual slant of the modernist poet involves him in a
bright game of spite against the middle-classes, which are responsible
for the front of solemn good-breeding and politeness that poetry
acquired in the last century. He combines upper-class impeccability and
lower-class rough-neckedness into a disdainful modernist recklessness
on the road. The stalest joke of comic song (but not of poetry) is the
mother-in-law. Miss Sitwell’s _Fantasia for Mouth Organ_ dashingly
takes the mother-in-law joke and sends it round the world to India, the
North Pole and South Pole, the land of the red-skins, the land of the
humming birds and the equatorial isles where the savages sank upon one
knee--
For when they saw
My mother-in law
They decided not to tackle
Me!
She is tough as the armorian
Leather that the saurian
Sun spreads over the
Sea--
So she saved my life
Did the mother of my wife
Who is more than a mother to
Me!
The humorous element in poetry, it is seen, has undergone a complete
reversal and become part of the mechanism of fine writing; Miss
Sitwell’s mother-in-law poem, for instance, is not offered as a comic
poem. Even what appears to be an obvious comic satire of Victorianism
in many of her poems is, in reality, a spiteful championship of a
former comic subject--Victorianism as a bourgeois comic subject was
long ago worn out. The humorous element here lies in the spice which
a much abused institution acquires when restored by impudent artifice
to connoisseur sentiment. A sophisticated partiality for Victorianism,
is at any rate, one of the disingenuously irrational prejudices in
which the three Sitwells indulge themselves. The Queen becomes a rather
robustious and slangy old lady telling Lady Venus just where to get off.
“For the minx”,
Said she,
“And the drinks,
You can see,
Are hot as any hottentot and not the goods for me!”
Victorian fashions evoke literary enthusiasm:
Rose Castles
Those bustles
Beneath parasols seen!
Fat blondine pearls
Rondine curls
Seem.
Even Victorian rococo architecture and interior decoration become
semi-humorously aetherialized: Balmoral’s towers, its pitch-pine floors
and special tartan, the Crystal Palace, the Albert Memorial and the
horse-hair settees of Buckingham Palace.
On the other hand this serious poem of Miss Marianne Moore’s:
Openly, yes
with the naturalness
of the hippopotamus or the alligator
when it climbs out on the bank to experience the
Sun, I do these
things which I do, which please
no one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub-
merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object
in view was a
renaissance; shall I say
the contrary? the sediment of the river which
encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used....
or the many serious pieces of Mr. Cummings written in comic vernacular,
bring the full circle round to the professionally comic vein of
traditional poetry. A poem by J. W. Morris, a writer of the American
’sixties, should be brought face to face with Miss Moore’s poem to mark
the reversal that serious and comic elements have undergone in poetry.
It is called ‘Collusion between a Alegaiter and a Water-Snaik.’ The
scene is ‘Guatimaly’. It should be read as a parody of ‘unpoetical’
poetry, even perhaps as a prophetic parody. The following lines from it
in fact might have been written by Mr. Cummings were he a traditional
poet of the ’sixties, satirizing Miss Moore, a modernist poet of the
nineteen-twenties:
Evidently a good chance for a water snaik
Of the large specie, which soon appeared
Into the horison, near the bank where repos’d
Calmly in slepe the Alegaiter before spoken of
About 60 feet was his length (not the ’gaiter)
And he was aperiently a well-proportioned snaik.
When he was all ashore he glared upon
The island with approval but was soon
“Astonished with the view and lost to wonder”
(from Watts)
(For jest then he began to see the Alegaiter)
Being a natural enemy of his’n he worked hisself
Into a fury, also a ni position.
Before the Alegaiter well could ope
His eye (in other words perceive his danger)
The Snaik had enveloped his body just 19
Times with “foalds voluminous and vast”
(from Milton)
... But soon by grate force the tail was bit complete-
Ly off....
The mental agility required of the poet who wishes to reconcile
poetry to modernism and modernism to poetry gives him an exaggerated
nimbleness that one modernist poet may have had in mind when speaking
of the ‘athleticism’ of this generation. Much of his superfluous
energy is consumed in an ostentatious display--sometimes childish but
in general harmless--of the Protean powers of poetry. The badge of
the modernist poet might well be the one that the Stanley family gave
to the Isle of Man--three legs conjoined at the middle and the motto
“Wherever you throw it, it will stand”. For, though by his technical
flexibility he may seem to be continually standing on his head, by
his common-sense he inclines to be all legs; and however extreme the
comedy--however wilful his caprices, however grotesque the contrasts
between innocence and obscenity or brutality and preciousness--it is
a point of intellectual vanity in him to laugh last, to be found on
his feet when the performance is over. He completes and in a sense
contradicts his clownishness by revealing that even clownishness
is a joke: that it is a joke to be writing poetry, a joke to be
writing modernist poetry. By this token he belongs to the most
serious generation of poets that has ever written; with the final
self-protective corollary, of course, that it is also a joke to be
serious.
Sometimes, however, the modernist poet in his grotesque pantomime is
very nearly tempted, out of virtuosity, to leave himself standing
on his head. The following is a passage from _Causerie_, a
poem by Mr. Allen Tate. It is a rambling midnight pillow-cogitation
on the vulgarization and mechanization of the language of Homer,
Catullus, Shakespeare and Rousseau. The poem is otherwise historically
interesting as a psychological synthesis of the manners of his
contemporaries, among them T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, John Crowe
Ransom, Marianne Moore, and at least one other poet:
Hermes decorates
A cornice on the Third National Bank. Vocabulary
Becomes confusion, decoration a blight; the Parthenon
In Tennessee stucco, art for the sake of death. Now
(the bedpost receding in stillness) you brush your teeth
“Hitting on all thirty-two”; scholarship pares
The nails of Catullus, sniffs his sheets, restores
His “passionate underwear”; morality disciplines the other
Person; snakes speak the idiom of Rousseau; Prospero
Serves Humanity in steam-heated universities, three
Thousand dollars a year;--for simplicity is obscene.
Sunlight topples indignant from the hill.
In every railway station everywhere, every lover
Waits for his train. He cannot hear. The smoke
Thickens. Ticket in hand he pumps his body
Toward lower six, for one more terse ineffable trip,
His very eyeballs fixed in disarticulation. The berth
Is clean; no elephants, vultures, mice, or spiders
Distract him from nonentity; for his metaphors are dead.
_Notescatque magis mortuus atque magis,_
_Nec tenuem texens sublimis aranea telam...._
The motto to the poem is from an American newspaper:
... party on the stage of the Earl Carrol Theatre on February 23.
At this party Joyce Hawley, a chorus-girl, bathed in the nude in a
bathtub filled with alleged wine.
The comic technique is devoted to a contrast between Imperial America
and Imperial Rome in general conversational style. The mind, in being
democratized, runs the theme, has grown large, complicated, vulgar and
dead. The poet’s clownishness consists in swift and showy acrobatic
turns from present-day vulgar sophistication to the comparative
simplicity of classical manners and from classical civilization on the
other hand to twentieth-century vocabularistic vulgarity. A snobbish
prejudice in favour of classical phrasing is the special privilege in
which this poet indulges himself. The Latin verse from Catullus reads:
“And may he when dead grow more and more famous, nor may the spider
spinning its fine thread from above ... (make a web upon the forgotten
name of Allius).” The quotation, somewhat forced in its application we
must confess, is from an elegy on the death of Allius, a friend who has
helped Catullus in his intrigues by providing him and his Lesbia with
a rendezvous at the house of a mistress of his own: for which Catullus
thanks him in all frankness and simplicity. The vultures occur in this
poem of Catullus’: and “hitting on all thirty-two”--an advertisement
for a tooth-paste--is probably an ironic comment in the style of
Catullus’ ironic comment on the fine teeth of his friend Egnatius.
Prospero is the symbol of learning, which did not become, until
advanced times, humanitarian and democratic, commercialized and vulgar.
The element of humour in this poem is not entirely sincere because
the prejudice is somewhat too dogmatic, the poet failing to identify
himself with both subjects of the contrast. He was not willing, that
is, to be the complete clown and has thus very nearly left himself on
his head.
The bourgeois character of common convictions and of human progress
in the popular sense does indeed inspire in the modernist generation
a temperamental antagonism to old-fashioned democratic civilization.
In pseudo-modernist types this antagonism is inclined to manifest
itself in a social, political or literary gospel of pessimism. Genuine
professional modernism inclines rather toward the two extremes of
radicalism and conservatism, or aristocraticness and rough-neckedness;
not so much out of militant opposition to bourgeois liberalism as
out of peripatetic avoidance of a crowded thoroughfare--bourgeois
liberalism, being a position of compromise between all extremes, is
the breeding place of settled, personally secure convictions. At the
extremes instead of convictions there is a border-sense, a well-poised
mental hysteria, a direct exposure to time: there is the far-driven
boundary-line of humour: there is, in both, the callous haughtiness of
indifference to danger, of a more acute technique of self-preservation.
The mind, human nature, poetry, are at their best when they combine
the elements of both roughness and gentleness; and this is not a
politician’s trick or a philosopher’s trick or a sentimentalist’s
trick, but a clown’s trick.
The only flaw in humour of the modernist poet is his failure to include
the bourgeois in his intellectual scale. It is, we might say, the
only turn missing in his clownish repertory. Indeed James Joyce has
suggested that Shakespeare’s greatness lay in his power to play the
bourgeois impersonally, but as a bourgeois, without having a bourgeois
dummy to kick or yet slapping his own face:
And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of his
own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was
himself a cornjobber and moneylender with ten tods of corn hoarded
in the famine riots.... He sued a fellow-player for the price of a
few bags of malt and exacted his pound of flesh in interest for every
money lent. How else could Aubrey’s ostler and callboy get rich quick?
Death, a common bourgeois conviction, is the only progressive liberal
subject which the modernist poet sometimes treats without prejudice.
One contemporary poet actually writes of it:
This I admit, death is terrible to me,
To no man more so naturally,
And I have disenthralled my natural terror
Of every comfortable philosopher
Or tall dark doctor of Divinity.
Death stands again in his true rank and order.
But even with Death the modernist poet is in the main not quite at his
clownish best because of his awareness of its bourgeois applications:
it is very difficult to deal with Death and, considering its history,
not treat it as a religious conviction--to treat it as a dead-earnest
joke. A similar difficulty exists with Love, the twin bourgeois
conviction to Death. In Love even the most modernist of modernist poets
is bourgeois. He is narrowly idealistic and therefore incapable, except
in rare cases, of making it another dead-earnest joke: The clown in
this feat is afraid of not landing on his legs. The most he trusts
himself to is a few ribald high jumps.