literary history

Topical reflux

Even with our eyes upcast from the ground, we’ll probably have to acknowledge, sooner or later, that we are periodically overwhelmed from low within by something brute. The evidence is in the record. Twentieth-century Anglo-American literary history, for instance, yields up a whole alluvium of anecdotes about F. R. Leavis and Delmore Schwartz. Leavis, of Cambridge, was a critic who happened not to be able to write, read, or think; Schwartz, of Harvard, was a poet whose works are vanished now except for a single short story. But no one ever recovered from a seminar with Leavis or a conversation with Schwartz, and during their lifetimes those wordy men exerted a mute musclepower.

The nature of that relationship between us subordinates and those dominants has proved to be historically reversible. The century-old short story you’re about to read was forgotten long ago, and of course (you’re about to say) deservedly. Dating from the epoch of modernist literature, it never became literature itself. On the page before you it’s only old journalism: a few paragraphs on browned old paper, written in words whose developing language system moved out from under them and left them behind. But this year, see if this story doesn’t affect you in a way that seems new: new again for the first time in a century and therefore actually new. The developing language system has given you new powers and simultaneously deprived you of old ones.

During his shortened life (1878-1937), this story’s author, Don Marquis, expressed himself in genre after genre through persona after persona, but what lives on now in words is only the persona you see in fine print here: Archy the cockroach poet.

And Archy himself was later to undergo the defining final stage of his metamorphosis at the hands of a graphic artist who (unlike Marquis) had a line in modernist textuality. That was George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat.

Nevertheless: because the image that you’ve just seen probably moves you, the short story that you probably haven’t really read moved you too, whether or not you knew at the moment that the transport was under way. You can test that assertion by keying it to a single probative fact:

Like the protagonist of “The Mulatto,” George Herriman was a black man who passed as white.

I wrote and bolded that sentence on May 26, 2025. If it had been written on May 26, 2024, it wouldn’t be readable now in the circa-2025 way you have just read it. Its relation to the verisimilar would be deeper-rooted. The change occurred during the interval between 2024 and 2025, when history’s personal force came rushing in an inaugural January flood between you and 2024’s older, loamier way of reading. Upwelling from undetected whiteness, it washed away some of the words you used to read with. As it came, it didn’t just dumb language down; it rooted it up and dumbed it away.

You can see for yourself how blank the page beyond Marquis and Herriman looks now. Until the white subsides, it may be all there is going to be.

Technical note: why do Republicans talk that way?

Answer: because they talk Calvinist. Paranoia like theirs has been the language of American Protestantism since the days of the Pilgrims, and in the Presbyterian theologian Donald Trump it has found a poet for the twenty-first century. The video shock of his complexion combines with his pulpit-style sing-song audio to evoke a full spectral range of American culture. As of 2023, Trump is the lord of American language: a bard loved as perhaps no poet in English has been since Tennyson. He commands a tradition.

You can tell from the sample of print below, for instance, that the text being communicated through its words is old. But don’t the words themselves seem contemporary?

No doubt, but they date from 1704.  They were transcribed back then by Jonathan Swift, and the “he” on the page is Swift’s character Jack, who stands mostly for John Calvin. It is Calvin who lives on in this Irish page and thousands of subsequent pages by such American thinkers as Jonathan Edwards, Woodrow Wilson, and, yes, Donald Trump.

What — you thought the idea of a paranoid atavism was original with Trump? One thing poetry can teach you is that no stimulus to emotion is original. First comes an imageless desire and only then comes its realization in form. For any poet, realization — that is, making real — has always been the hard part. Trump’s achievement as a poet was to realize by transforming his uttering body into a bardic color: the color orange. Calvinists have always reveled in their pain, but Trump taught all America to revel orangely. After Trump, suffering was newly and lovably embodied in orange. Suddenly, at last! it seemed understandable. All you have to do is realize, murmured the TV while America was going to sleep, what color it is that irradiates when a lord of language rolls video and sing-songs, “Let there be light.”

 

An instinct

In the days of Betty Friedan, an object of feminist scorn was Phyllis McGinley, poet of suburban domesticity. The hate has gone away now, if only because the immensely successful writer of the middle twentieth century is now unread. A fast history of her representative evanishment from memory, if you need one, is Ginia Bellafante’s “Suburban Rapture,” New York Times, December 24, 2008.

Acting on the need isn’t mandatory, though. The historical point about Phyllis really makes itself. It has a completely self-evident background, for example, here on these four pages from The New Yorker. “War war war! Fiddle dee dee!” Miss Scarlett had protested a short time before they appeared, but by now the date on the cover had advanced to October 25, 1941. The war had been on for more than two years as of then, and Pearl Harbor was less than two months in the fully foreseeable future. So no, say the images on the pages to you, as of 1941 and also as of ever after: don’t ignore and don’t evade. Fiddle dee dee won’t work, and now you are obliged to know that it never did. You always had to look.

And you did look at this corpus. The prose is showing its age, but ah, the pictures . . .

But the consecutive corpus is actually five pages long, and you looked only at pages 1, 3, 4 and 5. Except for the little dog-doodle by James Thurber, page 2 is read-only, and one part of the reading it imposes on you is not in prose. There it is, below the dog: the poem by Phyllis McGinley.

See how The New Yorker’s typographers have helped you identify it the way a timetable identifies a train. Yes: Phyllis McGinley, poet of America’s northeastern burbs, classified this section of her lexicon into an English or Shakespearean sonnet, a consist actually devised by Surrey. That arrangement of words is a form, and it belongs to literature. After the war, when Americans who had survived the war needed to forget, literature went looking within its forms and found there a Phyllis technique for forgetting the whole by remembering parts. After a while, when the work of forgetting was complete, that phase in the history of form could be broken back down to the parts: octave and sestet, salvageable steam engine and children. Phyllis McGinley herself (1905-1978) could be trucked to the antique store, and while we’re at it ubi sunt the Spasmodic poets and Mrs. Humphry Ward?

But affection isn’t mortal on schedule.

Look at this Phyllis. If the looking gets you to think, as unerringly as birdsong, some such word as “face,” perhaps the association has evoked a notion of being loved face to face, regardless of what you know better. So a possibility remains that in some nest somewhere there always will be a Phyllis, regardless of the But you know better words that persist in saying things like “pathetic fallacy.” Ahistorically, just as a matter of biological necessity, a Phyllis nest may still be building somewhere for us, regardless of who the Phyllis of the moment may be.

Teaching aid: I prepare to teach “Ulysses” for the last time

A Note about Joyce and the Jews

Toward the end of the Ithaca episode in Ulysses, the conversation between Stephen and Mr. Bloom turns to the subject of their two ethnicities, Irish and Jewish, and Stephen sings Bloom a ballad about a Jewish woman who cuts off the head of a little boy named Harry Hughes. The ballad is a folk version of the legend of Hugh of Lincoln, which English majors will recognize (oh well: ought to recognize) from another version: the ending of Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale.

Chaucer died in 1400. The roots of the murderous canon of Christian tales about Jews go deep into English culture. As George Orwell’s excellent 1945 essay “Antisemitism in Britain” will demonstrate, Jew-hatred became impolite in England after the rise of Hitler, but it has always been present and – impolite or polite – it has never gone away.

Among Joyce’s important literary contemporaries, for instance, the expressed attitudes toward Jews generally ranged from snide (George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, and, yes, at the beginning of his career, George Orwell) through defamatory (the professional Catholic G. K. Chesterton and his collaborator Hilaire Belloc), with suggestions of genocide audible offshore from Eliot’s Jew-hating mentors Charles Maurras (French) and Ezra Pound (American). Virginia Woolf sincerely loved her Jewish husband, but she despised his family and every other Jew who crossed her path. Over the years a few non-Jewish authors have raised their voices against the general detestation, but only a few. From the Victorian era I can single out George Eliot and Charles Dickens; from the desperate years just before World War II, J. R. R. Tolkien and Basil Bunting; from today, J. K. Rowling. But today, also, literary England has a flourishing population of open Jew-haters with solidly established reputations, from A. N. Wilson on the political right to Tom Paulin on the left. About the hate, down the centuries, little to nothing has changed.

To all this the great exception is James Joyce.

One biographical explanation is straightforward. From 1905 to 1915 Joyce taught English in a commercial language school in Trieste, a city that’s now in Italy but was then part of the cosmopolitan Austro-Hungarian Empire, and one of his students there was a Jewish businessman named Ettore Schmitz. Schmitz was also a novelist, he and Joyce became friends, he introduced Joyce to some members of Trieste’s Jewish community, and the rest is literary history.

Or, say, a small part of the rest. The big part, the interestingly mysterious part, we might think about in the form of a question: what immunized Joyce against his culture’s normative attitude toward Jews?

No, I don’t expect you to answer. I certainly can’t, myself. But what I can ask you to do is be aware of how different Joyce was and is from his European Christian culture, how profound was his rejection of it, and how radical was his experiment in synthesizing a replacement culture out of words alone.

— English 440 (James Joyce), University of Hawaii at Manoa, spring 2019

Audio: Stephen Crane

At the Library of Congress’s wonderful National Jukebox site (new last May) I recently discovered this item, “Coming Home from Coney Isle,” by a duo, Ada Jones and Len Spencer, who recorded a whole stack of dialect novelty songs in 1905 and 1906.

http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/recordings/detail/id/1068

When I heard the disdainful “Aw, gee” and the plaintive, “Will I open the window?” I thought, “This sounds just like the dialogue in Maggie, A Girl of the Streets.” Well, it turns out that that was no accident. Your proof:

http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/recordings/detail/id/6020

— a song called “Chimmie and Maggie at the Hippodrome.”

Americanists may want to give this site a listen.