CHAPTER IX
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.