by John Updike
CREDOS AND CURIOS
CREDOS AND CURIOS, by James Thurber. 180 pp. Harper and Row, 1962.
The appearance, in the yellow dust jacket that has become traditional, of one more collection of pieces by the late James Thurber is a happy event, even for the reviewer obliged to report that the bulk of the pieces are from his last years and as such tend to be cranky, formless, and lame. “The claw of the sea-puss,” Thurber once wrote (quoting F. Hopkinson Smith), “gets us all in the end”; and toward the end Thurber’s humor was overwhelmed by puns and dismay.
The puns are understandable. Blindness, in severing language from the seen world of designated things, gives words a tyrannical independence. Milton and Joyce wrung from verbal obsession a special magnificence, and Thurber’s late pieces, at their best—for example, “The Tyranny of Trivia,” collected in Lanterns and Lances—do lead the reader deep into the wonderland of the alphabet and the dictionary. But in such weak rambles as, in this collection, “The Lady from the Land” and “Carpe Noctem, If You Can,” logomachic tricks are asked to pass for wit and implausible pun-swapping for human conversation.
As to the dismay: Mrs. Thurber, in her graceful and understated introduction to this posthumous collection, defends her husband against the charge of “bitterness and disillusion.” But stories like “The Future, If Any, of Comedy Or, Where Do We Not-Go from Here?” and “Afternoon of a Playwright” do display, by way of monologue in the ungainly disguise of dialogue, an irritation with the present state of things so inclusive as to be pointless. Television, psychoanalysis, the Bomb, the deterioration of grammar, the morbidity of contemporary literature—these were just a few of Thurber’s terminal pet peeves. The writer who had produced Fables for Our Time and The Last Flower out of the thirties had become, by the end of the fifties, one more indignant senior citizen penning complaints about the universal decay of virtue.
The only oasis, in the dreadful world of post-midnight forebodings into which he had been plunged, is the Columbus, Ohio, of his boyhood, which he continued to remember “as fondly and sharply as a man on a sinking ship might remember his prairie home.” In Credos and Curios, for a few pages entitled “Return of the Native,” his prose regains the crisp lucidity and glistening bias of The Thurber Album. Then the murky verbosity closes in again.
However, Credos and Curios should be cherished by every Thurberite for the seven random tributes he wrote, between 1938 and 1960, to seven artistic colleagues—Mary Petty, Elliott Nugent, and five writers. His acute and sympathetic remarks on Scott Fitzgerald remind us that Thurber, too, was one of the curiously compact literary generation that came to birth in the twenties and whose passing has left the literary stage so strikingly empty. His affectionate memories of John McNulty and E. B. White, two friends who in their different ways achieved the literary tranquility that eluded Thurber, better capture the spirit of New Yorker bonhomie than all The Years With Ross. His generous appreciation of Robert Benchley is most welcome of all, especially when taken as an antidote to the oddly curt paragraph with which The New Yorker noted the death, in 1949, of this remarkable artist. For if Thurber, whose international celebrity made him seem to loom unduly over the other American humorists of his vintage, is to be measured against his peers, the first name we strike is Benchley’s. The surprising thing about Benchley is that he remains rereadable. His writings were so ephemeral they seem to defy being outdated; their utterly casual and innocent surface airily resists corrosion. It is doubtful how much of Thurber will weather so well.
Thurber’s cartoons, of course, are incomparable; they dive into the depths of the dilemma that he felt beneath everything. His great subject, springing from his physical disability, was what might be called the enchantment of misapprehension. His masterpieces, I think, are My Life and Hard Times and The White Deer—two dissimilar books alike in their beautiful evocation of a fluid chaos where communication is limited to wild, flitting gestures and where human beings revolve and collide like planets glowing against a cosmic backdrop of gathering dark. Thurber made of despair a humorous fable. Small wonder that such a gallant feat of equilibrium was not maintained to the end of his life.
BEERBOHM AND OTHERS
PARODIES: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm—and After, edited by Dwight Macdonald. 574 pp. Random House, 1960.
This anthology is a book so manifoldly praiseworthy that the reviewer puzzles where to begin. The publishers should be praised for constructing a compact and dignified volume. The dust jacket does not try to cozen us into premature jollity; the necessarily various type does not dance an impudent jig on the page; the paper, without succumbing to translucence, modestly understates the book’s considerable bulk. These things matter. What is worth reprinting is worth printing well. Too many lovingly assembled collections emerge from the binderies as fluffed-up jumbles shamelessly aimed at the Christmas trade. Except for a trifling misprint in the parody of Jack Kerouac, this anthology seems to me a physical model of its kind.
The editor should be praised—for his industry, his seriousness, his taste, his ingenuity. Indeed, Macdonald is rather too ingenious. To print the delirious babble of the dying Dutch Schultz as a parody of Gertrude Stein is an excellent joke only if excellent jokes can ever be played upon dying men. “Please mother don’t tear don’t rip. That is something that shouldn’t be spoken about. Please get me up, my friends, please look out, the shooting is a bit wild and that kind of shooting saved a man’s life.… Police mamma Helen mother please take me out.” Who’s laughing? There is something vulgar about this editorial prank, and the equally prankish printing of a bit by Samuel Foote (d. 1777) as a parody of Edward Lear (b. 1812). Also, I could have done without all the self-parodies, conscious and unconscious. Authors are in no position to see themselves; conscious self-parodies lack shape and bite. The classic specimen is “Nephelidia”; Swinburne apparently thought his only sin was alliteration. As for the unconscious self-parodies, where they are not mere boners they demand a rather harsh shift in the gears of our attention. While not too great a suspension of sympathy is needed to raise a smile over Poe’s beginning a poem, “I dwelt alone / In a world of moan,” Dr. Johnson’s effusion on glass will probably strike as ludicrous only those already disposed to grow restive under the great man’s ornately balanced Latinisms. Myself, I found his noble style no less appropriate to the subject of glass than to the subject of virtue.
But anthologies, if they err, should err on the generous side, and Macdonald’s venturesomeness brings in dozens of welcome surprises. The contributions of Jane Austen, Bret Harte, Firman Houghton, Oliver Jensen, and G. K. Chesterton were all new to me, and it was delightful to make their acquaintance. Among old friends, I was glad to greet again Henry Reed’s irreproachably deadpan imitation of T. S. Eliot; Edmund Wilson’s most unkind treatment of Archibald MacLeish; Wolcott Gibbs’ famous tour de force in early timestyle; Maurice Baring’s pathetically reasonable letter from Goneril to Regan; C. S. Calverley’s immaculate, crackling reductio of The Ring and the Book; Swift’s “A Meditation Upon a Broom-Stick”; Robert Benchley’s modernization of a Dickensian Christmas; and J. K. Stephen’s resonant and—remarkably—brief parody of Whitman. The section of this anthology called “Specialties” is the one that must have given the editor the most pleasure. It makes up half the book and contains, among many diligently unearthed oddments, the originals of the poems travestied by Lewis Carroll in the “Alice” books; twenty-one pages of French; ten pages of Hemingway’s obscurely motivated mock-novel Torrents of Spring; several political speeches more apt to amuse Democrats than Republicans; and two scientific papers that may not amuse scientists at all. Throughout, Macdonald shepherds his chosen texts with notes, now appreciative, now informative, that in their relaxed pedantry nicely suit the pedantic and exquisite form of humor he has—for some years to come, I should think—definitively anthologized.
And of course the contributors, quick and dead, must be praised. The appointed hero of the collection, quite
rightly, is Max Beerbohm. Macdonald considerately resurrects from obscure sources much that is not present in A Christmas Garland, as well as much that is. A Christmas Garland is surely the liber aureus of prose parody. What makes Max, as a parodist, incomparable—more than the calm mounting from felicity to felicity and the perfectly scaled enlargement of every surface quirk of the subject style—is the way he seizes and embraces, with something like love, the total personality of the parodee. He seems to enclose in a transparent omniscience the genius of each star as, in A Christmas Garland, he methodically moves across the firmament of Edwardian letters. Anyone who has forgotten the difference between Chesterton and Belloc could have no better refresher than Beerbohm’s parodies of them. Chesterton’s preposterously nimble good cheer and Belloc’s robust and defiant angoisse are each crystallized in absurdity, but the amber is so clear we can glimpse even the sombre spots. “Pray for my soul,” the puppet-Belloc abruptly concludes, and the reader is touched by a real shadow. Whereas most parodies are distinctly written from beneath their subjects, Beerbohm for the occasion rises to an equality with his great victims; a vintage parody by him is, as the Greek etymology would have it, “a parallel song.” In his imitation of a Shavian preface, Beerbohm develops the minuscule plot of a village mummers’ play into an allegorical drama of ideas with a fertile virtuosity worthy of Shaw himself. We can see the play when he is done; with a hairline difference in gravity, it could be an actual work in the canon, somewhere between Heartbreak House and Saint Joan. One puts down A Christmas Garland wondering why the man who wrote it did not, in his own voice, write great things. Parody this fine is rare perhaps because it requires gifts that usually drive a man to try something more important. When all due homage has been granted to the uniform refinement of Beerbohm’s total production—and special tribute paid to those famous radio broadcasts whose impeccably enunciated nostalgia borrows gallantry from the context of blitzed London—there remains something abortive and not entirely pleasing about Beerbohm as a literary figure.
Pure parody is purely parasitic. There is no disgrace in this. We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters. Beerbohm, introducing A Christmas Garland, explains his parodies thus:
I was already writing a little on my own account. I had had some sort of aptitude for Latin prose and Latin verse. I wondered often whether those two things, essential though they were (and are) to the making of a decent style in English prose, sufficed for the making of a style more than decent. I felt that I must have other models. And thus I acquired the habit of aping, now and again, quite sedulously, this or that live writer—sometimes, it must be admitted, in the hope of learning rather what to avoid.… [A Christmas Garland] may be taken as a sign that I think my own style is, at length, more or less formed.
But “decent” is exactly what his style remained. His criticism, so acute and daintily just, is rendered pale by our impression that he himself was never burned. His own efforts at fiction are bounded by a landscape of books. His most extended invention, Zuleika Dobson, miscarries, it seems to me, in its climactic holocaust; he treats his paper creations too heartlessly. His essays do show flashes of terrestrial daylight, of felt experience. The most memorable of them, “The Golden Drugget,” tells of a strip of light projected across the road through the open doorway of an inn near Rapallo. This sign of human company comforts him as he walks the dark road; he is tempted to enter but, to preserve his illusions, never does. “Don Quixote would have paused here and done something. Not so do I.” Art imitates Nature in this: not to dare is to dwindle. S. N. Behrman’s fascinating memoir of talks with the octogenarian Max presented, in the kindliest light, a portrait of a miser. Beerbohm’s persistent gloating upon his own “littleness” became somewhat grating, and in the end his delicate belittling of the lack of littleness in others seemed virtually nasty. Magnanimity was reduced in his conversation to a species of conceit, zeal to a form of presumption. Everything withered under the gentle touch of Beerbohm’s equanimous depreciation, and his creative energy, which he could never refine quite out of existence, was solipsistically focussed on the ornamentation of his private library with private jokes. As, in his amniotic cave in Rapallo, he continued to play the young man’s game of parody, it turned into a childish fiddling with scissors and paste, footnotes and mustaches; in his own drawings of himself, the wispy, ethereal, top-hatted Puck of the London days evolved backward into an elderly fetus with a huge square head, bulging eyes, and a tiny hunched body—an emblem, as ominous as wonderful, of the totally non-quixotic man.
If great parodists are not great writers, great writers, conversely, are not great parodists. Once the spirit has made that harsh emergence, and learned to feed on the sights and sounds of the outer air, there is no returning. Contrast with Beerbohm the contemporaneous young Irishman who set out to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. Macdonald includes in his “Specialties” section excerpts from the “Oxen of the Sun” passage in Ulysses, wherein Mrs. Purefoy’s son comes to birth through progressive contractions, as it were, of English style. By labelling the excerpts with the names of specific parodees, Macdonald somewhat falsifies the generality and integrity of the passage, and places Joyce in an arena where, at heart, he disdained to compete. A Christmas Garland is a program of flawless impersonations by an actor whose own personality is invisible. The “Oxen of the Sun” episode is a boisterous “turn” taken in an antic succession of loosely fitting costumes; behind the bobbing masks we easily recognize the vaudevillian himself, Shem the Penman, the old flabbergaster. There is hardly a sentence of this parodic caper that lacks Joyce’s own tone—the compacted incantation, the impelling commaless lilt, the love of rubble that turns history itself into a stream of trash. In reading these excerpts, disconnected as they are, we become caught up in the subterranean momentum of Joyce’s earnest obsessions, of a narrative we can hardly see; the glimpses of Bloom and Stephen Dedalus take our eye, and the verbal hurly-burly screening them from clear view becomes something of a nuisance. These paragraphs tell us little about the authors imitated—Dickens was sentimental, Carlyle fulminated, etc.—but they strive to tell us everything about things. Their power as fiction mars them as parody—or, rather, they are not parody at all but acts of conquest, a multiple annexation, an assimilation of all previous prose into a “chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle” and into Joyce himself. The culminating section, which Macdonald terms “the death of English in the gutter,” contains vivid elements of (very possibly) conscious self-parody; that is, as Mrs. Purefoy gives birth to her boy, the English language gives birth to James Joyce.
Passionately creative spirits use parody, rather roughly; and if the tool snaps in their hands, what of it? The Aeneid is a parody of sorts and is most admirable where it is least Homeric, and we may be grateful that the parodic vestiges in Madame Bovary (e.g., the descriptions of Emma’s girlhood reading) are all but dissolved by Flaubert’s sympathetic immersion in his heroine. Some novels might be fairly described as ruined parodies. The little dolls whittled in fun escape the author’s derision and take on life. Joseph Andrews and Northanger Abbey are examples; Don Quixote is the towering instance. Cervantes’ masterpiece lives not because it succeeds as parody but because it immensely fails. Setting out to demonstrate the folly of romantic aspirations, Cervantes ends by locating in just this folly, this futility, such aspiration’s grandeur, and so provides at the outset of the modern era an adjective and a metaphor for the new human condition.
Parody becomes significant in proportion to the dimensions of the thing parodied. At the bottom of the scale are those burlesques, achieved by crude verbal substitutions, of such specific works as “Excelsior,” “Hiawatha,” “The Raven,” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Their humor springs from an instinctive sense of reality that rejects the jingling high-flown; they are parody’s folklore. At the middle of the scale—a temper
ate zone most congenial—are those comprehensive and critical imitations of the manner and style of individual authors that define our modern sense of parody. At the top, reaching into the altitude of (for want of a better word) Literature, are those imaginative creations that, taking certain writings as an excuse, attack the assumptions of an age. If the parodied works present themselves to the parodist as emissaries of a truly formidable threat, the parody may outlive its occasion and become a human, rather than a merely literary, document.
One of Macdonald’s most thoughtful strokes is to include the original poems, by Isaac Watts, Robert Southey, G. W. Langford, and assorted female moralists, that Lewis Carroll transmuted into the stuff of Wonderland. To read these verses is to inhale the powerful brown vapors of the Victorian social engine. What is signal about them is not their piety but the utilitarian slant of that piety; behind these homiletic admonitions and consolations looms an explosive national machine steadied by the economic docility of the lower orders and the domestic gentility of the upper. A don and a bachelor, with no great stake, therefore, in the little gliding lies by which society keeps itself in order, and with a perhaps unusually large personal stake in what he called the “divinity in a child’s smile,” Carroll compulsively substitutes for every smooth piety a bristling absurdity. Southey’s unctuously efficient Father William becomes an idiotically adroit curmudgeon, benevolent stars become bats and soup, and Langford’s admonition
Speak gently; it is better far
To rule by love than fear
becomes
Speak roughly to your little boy,