Our Savage Art Read online

  our savage art

  Also by William Logan

  POETRY

  Sad-faced Men (1982)

  Difficulty (1985)

  Sullen Weedy Lakes (1988)

  Vain Empires (1998)

  Night Battle (1999)

  Macbeth in Venice (2003)

  The Whispering Gallery (2005)

  Strange Flesh (2008)

  CRITICISM

  All the Rage (1998)

  Reputations of the Tongue (1999)

  Desperate Measures (2002)

  The Undiscovered Country (2005)

  OUR SAVAGE ART

  Poetry and the Civil Tongue

  WILLIAM LOGAN

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS New York

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Publishers Since 1893

  NEW YORK CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 2009 William Logan

  Paperback edition, 2012

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-51961-8

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Logan, William, 1950

  Our savage art : poetry and the civil tongue / William Logan.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-231-14732-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—isbn 978-0-231-14733-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-51961-8 (e-book)

  1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Criticism—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.

  ps323.5.l644 2009

  811’.509—dc22

  2008036414

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  For Jane Alpert and Judith Vecchione

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  The Bowl of Diogenes; or, The End of Criticism

  Verse Chronicle: Out on the Lawn

  Verse Chronicle: Stouthearted Men

  The Most Contemptible Moth: Lowell in Letters

  Forward Into the Past: Reading the New Critics

  Verse Chronicle: One If by Land

  Verse Chronicle: The Great American Desert

  The State with the Prettiest Name

  Elizabeth Bishop Unfinished

  Elizabeth Bishop’s Sullen Art

  Verse Chronicle: Jumping the Shark

  Verse Chronicle: Victoria’s Secret

  Attack of the Anthologists

  The Lost World of Lawrence Durrell

  Hart Crane Overboard

  On Reviewing Hart Crane

  The Endless Ocean of Derek Walcott

  The Civil Power of Geoffrey Hill

  Verse Chronicle: God’s Chatter

  Verse Chronicle: Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Luff

  Pynchon in the Poetic

  Back to the Future (Thomas Pynchon)

  Verse Chronicle: The World Is Too Much with Us

  Verse Chronicle: Valentine’s Day Massacre

  The Forgotten Masterpiece of: John Townsend Trowbridge

  Frost at Midnight

  Interview by Garrick Davis

  Permissions

  Books Under Review

  Index of Authors Reviewed

  Acknowledgments

  No man who writes for money fails to owe a debt of gratitude to the editors who sign the checks; and I am grateful to the gentlemen who considered my opinions worth the trouble, even at a discount. Many of these editors made my debts the greater by pointing out my errors and infelicities, which more often than not I labored to correct. I’m grateful to the editors of the New Criterion, New York Times Book Review, Parnassus, Poetry, Southwest Review, TLS, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Wall Street Journal, as well as to Garrick Davis, the editor of Contemporary Poetry Review, who conducted a placable interview with me.

  I have placed two reviews of Thomas Pynchon in a volume otherwise about poetry because there is something, as there was for Melville, intrinsically poetic about the way he writes. They are also here for comic relief.

  It was my intention to reproduce, in the essay “Frost at Midnight,” eight passages from Frost’s notebooks in photofacsimile, so that the reader might judge for himself the flaws in the editor’s transcriptions. The Frost estate, unfortunately, refused permission.

  “Those mountains certainly do, my lord,” rejoined the Countess, pointing to the Pyrenees; “and this chateau, though not a work of rude nature, is, to my taste, at least, one of savage art.” The Count colored highly. “This place, madam, was the work of my ancestors,” said he.

  —Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)

  Yet, notwithstanding all the attention which these people bestow upon this savage art, for which they have public schools, they are outdone by savages. When one of the English squadrons of discovery was at Tongataboo, several of the natives boxed with the sailors for love, as the phrase is, and in every instance the savage was victorious.

  —Manuel Alvarez Espriella, Letters from England, 3rd ed., vol. 3 (1814)

  The cavalcade had not long passed, before the branches of the bushes that formed the thicket were cautiously moved asunder, and a human visage, as fiercely wild as savage art and unbridled passions could make it, peered out on the retiring footsteps of the travellers.

  —James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826)

  The more a man studies savage art, the more is he struck by the almost universal good taste which it displays. Every chair, stool, or bench is prettily shaped and neatly carved. Every club, paddle, or staff is covered with intricate tracery which puts to shame our European handicraft.

  —G. A. “Cimabue and Coal-Scuttles,” Cornhill Magazine (July 1880)

  A remarkable peculiarity of their pipe-carvings is that accurate representations are given of different natural objects, instead of the rude caricatures and monstrosities in which savage art usually delights. Nearly every beast, bird, and reptile indigenous to the country is truthfully represented, together with some creatures now only found in tropical climates, such as the lamantin and toucan.

  —Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Native Races (The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, vol. 4, 1886)

  This is just what I was told by a carpet manufacturer who was perfectly aware of the ugliness of his wares, who laughed at it, and regretted that it was a necessity. He illustrated it by showing me the kinds of carpets and rugs which “sold like hot cakes.” It was pitiful, for no Red Indian and no savage negro would ever have designed aught so repulsive. Savage art is never half so savage as that produced by the most enlightened nation on the face of the earth, and English carpets are little better.

  —Charles G. Leland, Practical Education (1888)

  I also got from another fellow a very pretty model of a New Guinea canoe. … It cost me no less than three sticks of trade tobacco to become the possessor of this masterpiece of savage art, for its owner evidently valued it highly, though of what use it could have been to him I cannot conceive.

  —E. E. Ellis, Cassell’s Picturesque Australasia, vol. 3 (1888)

  [The aboriginal’s] place in art—as to drawing, not color-work—is well up, all things considered. His art is not to be classified with savage art at all, but on a plane two degrees above it and one degree above the lowest plane of civilized art. To be exact, his place in art is between Botticelli and De Maurier. That is to say, he could not draw as well as De Maurier but better than Bot[t]icelli.

  —Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897)

  Some men were even relapsing from the point that art had reached on the earlier stage of “rim ram ruf”—on the rhythmical prose of alliteration either simple of itself or awkwardly be
dizened, like a true savage art, with feathers and gawds of inappropriate stanza and rhyme.

  —George Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature (1898)

  The Bowl of Diogenes; or, The End of Criticism

  A man must serve his time to every trade

  Save censure—critics all are ready made.

  —Byron

  He was so generously civil, that nobody thanked him for it.

  —Johnson

  The more criticism I write, the more I’m asked to write about criticism; and, the more I’m asked to write about criticism, the less I want to write about anything at all. Samuel Johnson once said, “When a man is tired of criticism, he is tired of life,” or words to that effect; but at times I’m just tired of criticism. Then something gets under my skin. The other day, I was sent the proofs of a book of poetry, introduced by a letter from the publisher. “The real trouble with most contemporary poetry,” the letter said, “is that it is piled high, mostly unread and gathering dust, in the attic of its own obscurity.” Imagine someone thinking contemporary poetry too obscure, when it isn’t half obscure enough! Just as I was feeling rather blue, there was a man handing me an ax to grind; and before I knew it I was writing criticism again. (Readers who persevere with this volume will eventually discover whose publisher wrote such rubbish.)

  In the first edition of his great dictionary, Johnson defined a critick as a “man skilled in the art of judging of literature; a man able to distinguish the faults and beauties of writing.” Later he added a new definition. What was a critick, on second thought? “A snarler; a carper; a caviller.” As a snarler in good standing (with oak-leaf clusters for carping and caviling), I would argue that a critic is a man—skilled, perhaps, in the judging of literature—who can’t resist the chance to criticize.

  There have always been poetry critics. I imagine that when Homer had sung the last lay of the Odyssey and laid down his lyre, some scruffy fellow in the corner said, “Oh, come on! Why would anyone drag a wooden horse into Troy? What were they thinking? And who’s going to believe that stuff about the sailors? Those pigs must be more of a metaphor or whatever. Then that bit about the one-eyed guy—that, now that, was a little hard to believe. I liked a few lines, I guess; but your earlier work, that battle kind of a thing, was much, much better.”

  Critics are insects, as everyone knows, one of the plagues that poets have to bear. When Coleridge complained that the “meanest Insects are worshipped with a sort of Egyptian Superstition, if only the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail,” he was talking about critics. We laugh now at the critics who, reviewing the Romantics, got things so horribly wrong—Francis Jeffrey on Wordsworth, say, or John Wilson Croker on Keats. How dare they! Why, William Wordsworth could lick his weight in wildcats, if there were any wildcats in the vicinity of Dove Cottage; and John Keats’s little finger could write better poems than any of the poetasters hurtling around London. Yet the poets who are giants to us often seemed to their peers no taller than anyone else—and sometimes rather shorter. Time is the great discoverer of quality, and the great magnifier of difference.

  When you read Jeffrey’s and Croker’s actual reviews, rather than rumors or opinions about them, you think those critics were blinded by their prejudices, certainly; but they saw clearly that such poets had their faults. Take Jeffrey’s infamous Edinburgh Review article on The Excursion, a review that starts, “This will never do.”

  Why should Mr. Wordsworth have made his hero a superannuated Pedlar? What but the most wretched and provoking perversity of taste and judgment, could induce any one to place his chosen advocate of wisdom and virtue in so absurd and fantastic a condition? Did Mr. Wordsworth really imagine, that his favourite doctrines were likely to gain any thing in point of effect or authority by being put into the mouth of a person accustomed to higgle about tape, or brass sleeve-buttons? … A man who went about selling flannel and pocket-handkerchiefs in this lofty diction, would soon frighten away all his customers.

  This is hilarious, in part because it is at someone else’s expense, someone whose poetry we admire. (Do we secretly resent those we love? I leave that to the psychiatrists.) Hilarious, too, because its strictures are so misplaced. Two hundred years later, we scarcely care whether Wordsworth chose a retired peddler, or the parish pauper, or the wife of a poor weaver, or a retired army chaplain (all of whom he did choose, and all of whom put the critic’s nose out of joint). We don’t care, because such occupations are almost as obscure to us as the doctrines Wordsworth put into their mouths. To us, it’s merely literature; and we enjoy it for what it is, as well as for what it is not. To Jeffrey, Wordsworth’s peddler was an affront to taste and to the plain evidence of a man’s eyes. Even Coleridge, though he indulged in a good deal of special pleading on behalf of that peddler, was willing to admit that “whether this be a character appropriate to a lofty didactick poem, is perhaps questionable. It presents a fair subject for controversy.”

  Reading such critics now, we laugh, and the world laughs with us; but we have the advantage of two hundred years of the slow grinding of critical analysis and the fine filtering of taste (however wildly mistaken in the short term, in the long run taste is as delicately tuned as analysis). We read, with our modern, sensible eyes, in the easy chair used by readers before us. Who cares about all the insignificant wretches who suffered when Jeffrey or Croker turned the screw? The difficult thing would be to like our Keats and our Wordsworth, if we have them, to scour out from anonymity our Hopkins and Dickinson, to call our Whitman a genius, instead of saying, as a critic of 1856 did, that Whitman must be “some escaped lunatic, raving in pitiable delirium” (another said he was “as unacquainted with art, as a hog is with mathematics”). Critics get things wrong all the time; if a critic ever suffered insomnia, it would be because he had dismissed the Emily Dickinson of his day. Yet critics know the future may pluck up some writer they think a nonentity and say, “Here, here, the critics were blind to genius!” Randall Jarrell said something similar fifty years ago, but Randall Jarrell often said fifty years ago the very things I want to say about poetry now.

  I once suggested to an interviewer that a critic could best be compared to a district attorney. “You mean judge,” he said, a little shocked. I took his point. A critic longs to be a Solomon, disinterested and wise, pronouncing impartial sentence upon the poetry of the age—the good, the bad, and the indifferent (many critics despise the age they were born in and look back with ill-concealed fondness to an earlier one, where they would have been equally miserable). Perhaps the critic starts by believing himself a judge, an incorruptible dispenser of justice; but there is so much bad poetry, and so little good, that often he ends by becoming an overworked prosecutor, presenting the case where the only crime is against art.

  A critic is, nonetheless, the most optimistic man alive, living in perpetual hope, like a Latter-day Saint. No matter how many times he is disappointed, he opens each new book with an untarnished sense of possibility. If, amid the dust heaps of mediocrity, he does find a few books rich and strange, such is the essential generosity of this peculiar craft that his first impulse is to call everyone he knows and to buttonhole strangers on the street. It’s his duty, however, to hold up weaker books to public scorn. Bad books do drive out good ones—it’s the Gresham’s law of literature. The shock is not how often critics are wrong; it’s how often they prove to be right. The first reviewers of Whitman, however wrongheaded they were, often saw clearly the weaknesses of the good gray poet; and we can only nod now in respect.

  However, if out of antiquarian curiosity we open the book reviews of the past, two things may surprise us: that often the harshest criticism was not nearly harsh enough and that mediocrities were praised to the skies (read some of the reviews Robert Southey received, and you’ll know what I mean). When critics get it wrong, it is usually in how kind they are. Open the old quarterlies and see how charitable the critics were to Harry Brown and Howard B
aker and Winfield Townley Scott, poets of whom most readers today will never have heard, yet all had books in the classiest publishing project of the 1940s, James Laughlin’s Poet of the Month series. Read the benevolent reviews of Robert Horan, Rosalie Moore, and Edgar Bogardus, all chosen in the Yale Series of Younger Poets by the best judge the series ever had, W. H. Auden—and he chose them with the same eye that chose Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, James Wright, and W. S. Merwin. Jarrell said it better: “When we read the criticism of any past age, we see immediately that the main thing wrong with it is an astonishing amount of what Eliot calls ‘fools’ approval’; most of the thousands of poets were bad, most of the thousands of critics were bad, and they loved each other.”

  The critic’s besetting vice is generosity. (His telling virtues—well, I’m not sure he has telling virtues, because the critic is a mythological creature, a monster with the jaws of a shark, the heart of a lawyer, and the eye of a pawnbroker.) The critic’s vice compares very favorably with a poet’s deadly sins, pride and paranoia. Many an author, stung by his bad reviews, nevertheless believes his work so original it cannot be appreciated by more than a happy few. (Sooner or later, every artist finds his few.) No doubt such a fairy tale warms the poet’s heart, for what author ever felt his reviews, no matter how larded with praise, were ever good enough? Indeed, many an otherwise sensible poet is certain a conspiracy of critics is out to get him. (Of course, such a conspiracy exists. We e-mail each other to arrange bad reviews and plan the blood rituals for our annual convention in Salem.) But how often does a poet, by the pool of Narcissus where he dwells, actually listen to what a critic says? What a critic sees as a poet’s sins are often the very signs, to the poet, of his saintliness.

  Coleridge claimed, according to John Payne Collier, that “reviewers are usually people who would have been poets …, if they could: they have tried their talents … and have failed; therefore they turn critics, and, like the Roman emperor, a critic most hates those who excel in the particular department in which he, the critic, has notoriously been defeated.” Words like that are painted on the wall over every poet’s desk, to console him. Things have changed since Coleridge’s day, however, because the twentieth century offered one long string of poets who turned their hands brilliantly to criticism: Eliot, Pound, Empson, Auden, Blackmur, Jarrell, Berryman, and Lowell. For these poets, who had not been defeated (except for Blackmur, who, though a brilliant critic, was a dreadful poet), criticism was high-minded, an attempt to explain the art to itself. It might seem wise to make a distinction between those who practice criticism in its drier and more erudite forms and those who take off their gloves for a bare-knuckle brawl. Yet most of these critics were bare-knucklers, some of the time.