Showing papers in "American Literature in 1974"

Flannery O'Connor : a rage of vision

Abstract: IN DISCUSSING THE WRITER in America, A. Alvarez has noted that the ubiquitous violence which threatens to devour us in this age has been internalized by the artist who works out in the microcosm of his self the destructive potentiality of the time.' Certainly the times have provided spectacular metaphors for the darkest side of the mind; the violence of Dachau, Hiroshima, Mississippi too easily supports our most primitive fears. But the writer does more than assimilate the outer world to his purposes; he also projects his own corresponding impulses onto the macrocosm, shaping through his fictions a world which reflects his specific inner vision. For the writer, the inner and outer worlds merge in an imaginatively extended country, and in the fiction of Flannery O'Connor that country is dominated by a sense of imminent destruction. From the moment the reader enters O'Connor's backwoods, he is poised on the edge of a pervasive violence. Characters barely contain their rage; images reflect a hostile nature; and even the Christ to whom the characters are ultimately driven is a threatening figure, "a stinking, mad shadow" full of the apocalyptic wrath of the Old Testament. O'Connor's conscious purpose is evident enough, and has been abundantly observed by her critics: to reveal the need for grace in a world grotesque without a transcendent context. "I have found that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil," she wrote,2 and she was not vague about what that devil is: "an evil intelligence determined on its own supremacy." It would seem that for O'Connor, given the fact of Original Sin, any intelligence determined on its own supremacy was intrinsically evil. For in each work, it is the impulse toward secular autonomy, the smug

Mark Twain : God's fool

Abstract: After laughing their way through his classic and beloved depictions of nineteenth-century American life, few readers would suspect that Mark Twain's last years were anything but happy and joyful. They would be wrong. As Hamlin Hill reveals in "Mark Twain: God's Fool", contrary to the myth perpetrated by his literary executors, Twain ended his life as a frustrated writer plagued by paranoia. He suffered personal tragedies, got involved in questionable business ventures, and was a demanding and controlling father and husband. As Hill's book demonstrates, the difficult circumstances of Twain's personal life make his humorous output all the more surprising and admirable.

From Tale to Short Story: The Emergence of a New Genre in the 1850's

Abstract: WAVE OF TALES flooded American magazines during the expanA sive years of the i85o's. As art, all but a few of these works deserve the oblivion that time has bestowed, but because of them the period from I850 to the beginning of the Civil War has been discredited and generally ignored in the history of American short fiction. As a result, the early evolution of the American short story from the magazine tale has been overlooked. In this essay, I propose as a broad hypothesis that the decay of the immensely popular tale fostered the development of the short story as a new genre. If as a total body the fiction has but little aesthetic appeal, that mediocrity prompted a substantial reaction in the decade's literary criticism and among writers of short fiction. Until mid-century, Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne dominated the field, but by i850 Poe was dead and Irving and Hawthorne had all but abandoned the writing of tales. Melville's short works were condemned to their long obscurity, and not until Henry James was a notable tradition of American short fiction again established. A gap in literary history such as this should have inspired a reevaluation long ago. Yet in 1923 Fred Lewis Pattee fixed what has remained the usual verdict when he complained that the short story all but "ceased to be distinctive" and "seemed to disappear as a reputable literary form."' Since then scholars have skimmed the decade's short fiction, occasionally using the material for social and cultural history; but the historical changes that were revolutionizing the short forms have escaped notice. In retrospect, the major theoretical differences between tale and short story are fairly well known, although, unlike novel and prose romance, the short forms have not attracted much critical enquiry. Northrop Frye's distinctions, which are based on characterization,

Lily Bart and the Beautiful Death

Abstract: TN "The House of Mirth Revisited" Diana Trilling observes the parallel between Lily Bart's decline and "the inevitable defeat of art in a crass materialistic society."' Trilling does not develop all of the implications of this statement, though she goes on to remark that "Lily herself possesses the quality of a fine work of art" and that "her own ambitions are those of art."2 Certainly "new New York's" reduction of all values-emotional, ethical, artistic-to questions of portable property was a consistent object of Wharton's scorn and satire; yet at least insofar as the problem of art is concerned, Lily's role in The House of Mirth is a more complex one than Trilling's observation can describe. Within the world of the novel, both Lily and her friends perceive her confusedly: she is an uncertain blend of art and nature with a "streak of sylvan freedom in her nature that lent such savour to her artificiality."3 Often neither she nor her closest observers can distinguish between the merely spontaneous and the studiedly affecting (the careless lack of definition in her "suicide" is of a piece with the rest of her behavior). Indeed, it is not too much to say that this consistent confusion between the ideal and the real as it is manifested by all the characters in the novel-and the resultant depersonalization of the chrysalid character that is Lily's only inheritance-leads directly to the heart of the tragedy. Before we begin a detailed examination of the effect on Lily Bart of the confusion that attends her attempts at self-definition, we must digress to examine the notions of visual art and artistic expression that pervade The House of Mirth. (It is important throughout the course of this discussion to be clear that we are not examining Wharton's own notions of art, but the artistic environment that surrounds Lily Bart.) During this period newly wealthy

Visions of Chaos and Visions of Order: Dos Passos as Historian

Abstract: T HROUGHOUT HIS ACTIVE LITERARY LIFE John Dos Passos was intrigued by the pull of history on the mind of modern man. As a youth at Harvard he felt the fascination of Froude, Gibbon, and Pater; and in student essays he held up Renaissance culture and agrarian Spain as norms against which America's worship of industrial progress might be questioned. During the first decade of his literary career, however, the demands of historical understanding did not figure in his major creative work. His two antiwar novels, One Man's Initiation-I917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921), portray in the romantic vein the artist's alienation from society; Streets of Night (1923), begun while he was still an undergraduate, reflects the emotional consequences of his own childhood; and Manhattan Transfer (I925), written after he had heard the antihistoricist groan in Joyce's Ulysses, dramatizes urban estrangement through its esthetically discontinuous presentation of characters without personal histories. In USA the historical dimension first emerges in Dos Passos's work, both as a structural device and as a mode of comprehension. In this trilogy, which spans the years between the turn of the century and the economic crash of 1929, Dos Passos develops from youth to adulthood the lives of a series of interrelated characters, allowing the stream of events headlined in the "Newsreel" section to sweep them along. History as well as society becomes a protagonist. In the biographical sketches, history often speaks as the ironic chorus of conscience, in the voices of Debs, LaFollette, Veblen, and John Reed. In the biographies, however, history is all memory, studies of moral heroes who are actually noble losers, "masterless" men who, though not deceived by society, have nevertheless been defeated by the crushing might of historical events. Their lives sug-

Tragic Form in A Farewell to Arms

Abstract: T DOUBT VERY MUCH that we need a "new" reading of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. The novel has been discussed many times, often intelligently. No one would suggest that it is a "problem" in the sense that Billy Budd is a problem, or The Turn of the Screw. I do think, however, that a basic question about the book has been somewhat neglected. This is a matter of its form. A Farewell to Arms is probably Hemingway's most admired novel, but few critics have taken seriously his suggestion that the book is a tragedy. I think this is unfortunate, for it obscures Hemingway's contribution to the history of tragic form. There is little question that Hemingway conceived of A Farewell to Arms as a tragedy. He once referred to the novel as his Romeo and Juliet' and later wrote: "The fact that the book was a tragic one did not make me unhappy since I believed that life was a tragedy and knew it could only have one end."2 Why, then, have Hemingway's critics resisted this classification? Basically, they have asked how much we can feel toward such "victims" as Frederick Henry and Catherine Barkley, the novel's hero and heroine. They have argued that A Farewell to Arms is not a tragedy because its lovers make no fatal error in judgment or deed and suffer a "catastrophe" which is merely accidental. They have insisted that Hemingway's lovers are not responsible for what happens to them, whereas moral responsibility is at the heart of tragedy.3 Hemingway's critics have obviously read their Aristotle. And they are right, of course, in suggesting that A Farewell to Arms is not Aristotle's idea of a tragedy. Since Aristotle it has been thought

Thoreau: The Ear and the Music

Abstract: TN HIS journal for May I9, I856, Thoreau relates that while he was i sailing up the reach of the Assabet above Dove Rock that day, a traveler riding along the highway, watching the sail on the water, broke into sudden song. As always, when the murmur of ordinary conversation rises into song from a distance, or when any singing or instrumental music comes across the fields at the end of a day, the effect on Thoreau is inspiring and elysian. Such an experience paints the landscape suddenly as no agriculture, no flowery crop that can be raised. He feels it to be at once another land, the abode of poetry; perhaps the traveler's singing and his sail were equally poetic, and he and the traveler repaid each other. The singer seems to him "in the attitude of one inviting the muse,-aspiring." Thoreau then asks wistfully, "Why will not men oftener advertise me of musical thoughts ?"2 Music strongly stimulated Thoreau both emotionally and psychically and was vital to his total sensory experience, philosophical contemplation, and spiritual concept. It was also basic to his literary expression, and few readers are likely to progress very far through his work without becoming acutely aware of the author's frequent reference to musical experience, constant exalting of music, and consistent expression in musical metaphor. Thoreau's Journals through the late I850's continue almost as abundant in musical expression as those of the late I830's and early I840's; thus, music re-

The Curious Narration of The Bostonians

Abstract: HIRTY YEARS after creating The Bostonians, Henry James wrote: 1"All the same I would have liked to review it for the [New York] Edition-it would have come out a much truer and more curious thing (it was meant to be curious from the first)."' On the one hand, the novel's curious qualities-such as its confused plot, its lack of a central character, its unsettling narration-could account for its exclusion from the New York Edition. On the other hand, James clearly appreciated the novel's peculiarities: to make it curious was intentionally to challenge and disorient the reader. James gave the reader a curious text in order to make the reader curious, to make the reader work, and, in his own words, to make the reader.2 He puts in quest the probing reader by putting in question the relationships among the narrator, the characters, and the reader.3 As Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe have noticed, the world of The Bostonians is so beset by centrifugal forces as not to constitute a meaningful community.4 Within it, art and the taste for art disappear entirely or become inseparable from greed, publicity, and fraud. Family ties are less than desirable: sisters dislike each other, cousins become bitter enemies, families are broken up, and no one leads a normal life. The social cohesion usually provided by art, family, tradition, and community has dissolved, and the characters' personalities are consequently disoriented.

The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright.

Abstract: Explores the African American writer's literary odyssey and struggle for freedom from racism and materialism.

The Delicate Dynamics of Friendship: A Reconsideration of Kerouac's On The Road

Abstract: HEN NORMAN MAILER asserted, in Advertisements for Myself,' that Jack Kerouac "lacks discipline, intelligence, honesty and a sense of the novel," he was giving voice to an opinion so generally accepted that no critic to this day has attempted to refute or even qualify it. Yet Kerouac's books continue to be read, and even his unpublished manuscripts are receiving attention. (Visions of Cody, a work written in I95I-I952, was published in January I973 by McGraw-Hill.) In addition, a full scale biography has recently appeared (Ann Charters, Kerouac, Straight Arrow Press, I973), and another is in progress. Nevertheless, critical reassessment lags. Readers admire hesitatingly, even helplessly, as if they were unsure how to describe a writer for whom few terms, except pejorative ones, have been invented. What is needed to counteract the negative influence of unproved opinions like Mailer's is not, however, a vocabulary of praise but one of careful critical judgment like that recently accorded Mailer himself.2 Kerouac's work deserves understanding. If, after treating the work fairly, we find condemnation justified, we can pass with good conscience to worthier objects. A close look at Kerouac's work suggests that his "sense of the novel," though not identical to Mailer's, is carefully and rigorously developed; and his "discipline, intelligence, honesty" are indeed evident, perhaps most clearly so in the novel for which he is best known, On The Road. For though many readers of On The Road have thought it a modern version of the picaresque,3 its structure is formidably complex. Here is no loose scribbling of notes whose only organization is geographical and chronological, but a delicately con1 See Advertisements for Myself (New York: Berkeley Medallion Ed., I966), p. 428. 2 Particularly by Richard Poirier in Mailer, in The Modern Masters Series, ed. F. Ker

The Waste Land Manuscript

Abstract: m HE MANUSCRIPT OF The Waste Land was a hoard of fragments, accumulated slowly over seven and a half years. Only in the seventh year did the hoard assume the proportions of a major work. The earliest fragments, which go back to T. S. Eliot's last years as a student, show a different bias from the poem that emerged in the autumn and winter of I92I-22. It is curious to read The Waste Land in terms of the rather scrappy but emphatic vision from which it evolved and certain persistent notions that were edited or obscured only at the last moment. In order to trace the growth of The Waste Land through all the stages of its composition, I first grouped the fragments according to the different batches of paper Eliot used and then established a chronological order by means of a variety of clues, many of which were provided by Valerie Eliot's clear and well-annotated facsimile edition of the manuscript.' At the age of twenty-six, when Eliot was still at Harvard and living in an Ash Street attic in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he wrote three visionary fragments (pp. io8-iI5) on the same quadruled paper, punched for filing.2 All three are concerned with revelation and its aftermath: the attractions and problems of "turning" or conversion. Two fragments, "After the turning" and "So through the evening," foreshadow the climactic scene in the completed Waste Land, the dangerous initiating journey to the deserted chapel in the mountains. In the third, a voice speaks to Eliot, infusing him with divine power: "I am the Resurrection and the Life ... It is easy to dismiss these earliest fragments in the manuscript as inelegant scraps Eliot sensibly discarded, but together they an-

Eliot, the naked lady, and the missing link

Abstract: OW THAT the facsimile edition of The Waste Land manuscript N has appeared, it is easier to judge how far Pound was il miglior fabbro in the creation of the poem. Pound reshaped much of the first draft but immediately approved one passage in "The Fire Sermon," otherwise heavily marked for revision: what became lines i87-206 are annotated "O.K." and "STET."' He accorded the second draft of this passage the notation "Echt" and questioned only the use of "shall" in line 197:2

"She Doesn't Last, Apparently": A Reconsideration of Booth Tarkington's Alice Adams

Abstract: IT IS NOW over half a century since Alice Adams, pretty, pert and foolish, made her bittersweet way into the 1920'S to win Booth Tarkington a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, his second since the inception of the awards only five years before. Today Tarkington's literary stock has long since plummeted. Two and a half decades after his death he is remembered (if at all) as the author of some juvenile novels presently out of fashion. But the year 1921, when Alice Adams was published, found him at the height of popularity and a wealthy man. Throughout his career, which began in I899, he was famed for his charming costume romances and honored for his genial social portraiture in the manner of W. D. Howells, his chosen model and, among the fashionable circles which for Tarkington counted most, the pre-eminent man of American letters, whose blessing the younger midwestern novelist repeatedly received. By the time Harding's administration ushered in the Republican twenties, Tarkington had published two-thirds of the loose trilogy of novels, Growth, which was designed to secure his place in the American tradition. An ambitious work upon a subject of potentially monumental proportions, Growth was presented over a decade: The Turmoil (1915) was received as a sign of Tarkington's coming into his full powers; The Magnificent Arnbersons (I9I8) was his first Pulitzer Prize novel; and The Midlander (1923) signalled the close of his best period. (By the time the three works were collected into a singlevolume edition-I927, with The Midlander retitled National Avenue -Tarkington had already fallen from favor.) Growth documents the significant history of a representative midwestern American city from the close of the Civil War until after World War I. Tarkington's city, modeled after the author's own Indianapolis, represents an essential chunk of the geography of the American spirit during

Faulkner and the Cavalier Tradition: The French Bequest

Abstract: S AN ELEMENT IN THE LITERATURE of the American South the ALJN cavalier myth is generally regarded as a bequest from supporters of the Stuart monarchy in seventeenthand eighteenthcentury Scotland and England. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha chronicle participates in that aspect of the cavalier heritage in two distinct ways. Most obvious, of course, is the Scottish ancestry permeating his fiction, which, while not aristocratic itself,1 nevertheless brings with it a clear devotion to cavalier ideals and patterns of behavior. A second source, not entirely unnoticed by the critics and acknowledged by Faulkner himself, is the influence of Walter Scott.2 In addition to these distinctively Scottish contributions, however, the inhabitants of Faulkner's South are inheritors of the cavalier tradition from another less obvious but nevertheless significant source. As we receive it piecemeal from various sources in the fictional canon, the early history of Yoknapatawpha County records as well an influx of cavalier ideals which is distinctively French in origin. Although the French contribution lacks the direct family ties and the dimension of literary influence, it is perhaps even more fundamental to the cavalier heritage of Faulkner's South than that of Scotland. France was, of course, the direct historical source of Western Chivalry, and as such actually spawned the tradition out

The Allegory and the Radical Romantic Ethic of The Blithedale Romance

Abstract: OST READERS ASSUME there was a single "Hawthorne" lWl whose opinions were settled, values clear, responses consistent. Some posit two "Hawthornes" whose colloquy is traceable among his works and occasionally complicates and quickens individual ones. Psychoanalytical critics combine these assumptions in trying to define Hawthorne's basic conflict, an approach that assumes contrary forces but a single integration of them-though disintegration is possible, to be sure, and is often thought to "explain" Hawthorne's failure late in life to complete any works of fiction. My sense of the "Hawthorne" communicated in print and of the man who created this public self is somewhat different, although it is closest to the perception of those who see two Hawthornes. My Hawthorne is an allegorist, and allegory to me is a satisfying and inevitable mode for both embodying value and analyzing motives and actions.' I deny the assumption, made by most psychoanalytic critics, that allegory is per se evasive, oine of the ego's most elaborated defenses against unacceptable impulses and "truths," and I deny as well the more common assumption that makers of allegories are "rmerely" rhetoricians, fancifully marshalling figures as skilled debaters marshall arguments. On the contrary, allegory is a mode of apprehension and expression well suited to ambiguous and mysterious material, perhaps best suited of all to exploring the human mind and the ambivalences that are so typical of it. In its explorations and definitions allegory works by contrast, the elements of which are either resolved into parallel expressions of an impulse or truth, or left in conflict (that is, left ambivalent). By seeing doubly, it suggests that there are double viewers-in this case, two Hawthornes. But there may be more. Indeed, complex allegories are the result of complex "views"

Fourth Supplement to The Letters of Poe

Abstract: INCE THE I966 EDITION OF The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe,' new J letters in whole or in part, additional bibliographical information, and important Check List data have come to light.2 The present "Supplement" supplies this material, identifying each entry according to the plan adopted for the volumes and for earlier supplements.3 Of special importance are materials, available for the first time, from the Richard Gimbel collection, now in the Rare Book Department of The Free Library of Philadelphia, the location of James Russell Lowell letters to Poe in the Humanities Research Center of The University of Texas at Austin, and a list of letters by Poe that Thomas Ollive Mabbott labeled as possible forgeries in his personal copy of The Letters. The list is included here, not to identify such items as definite forgeries but to provide the opinion of America's distinguished Poe scholar. Where texts make authenticity questionable, perhaps the final word depends upon handwriting experts. By making positive identification of a letter as original manuscript or forgery, they will serve all people interested in Poe studies.