Heresies and Heretics

by George Watson

  that of being an American – a real American, and yet whose tradition it has scarcely taken sixty years to create.

  It may indeed be a privilege to be an American, in that century. But rare? And in the introduction to his anthology American Poetry(1969) Donald Hall, an American who knows Europe well, insists in equally implausible vein that being an American poet is quite unlike being a poet anywhere else – and again one can be sure that the implied contrast is European. There is always something ‘strange,’ he argues, about American poets: their relation to their native land, or lack of it, is somehow singular – instancing ‘Emily Dickinson in her solitary room’ (how about Emily Brontë in hers?), Walt Whitman as a bearded nurse in the American Civil War (easily more humdrum, surely, than the private life of Algernon Charles Swinburne) and Wallace Stevens in his insurance-office. And what, one asks incredulously, is so strange about working in an insurance-office? Poetry, Hall darkly concludes, is an un-American activity. And the myth runs wider. William Carlos Williams died in 1963 believing he had devised a distinctively American metre, and to the end of his life he seems to have thought of nationality as the natural place to start any literary argument. He excluded English writers ‘automatically’ from his early poetic influences, he once wrote, as if it mattered more that they were English than that they were writers; and when T. S. Eliot told about his own early life at Harvard in Poetry Chicago (1946) the same national emphasis was there: the literary scene in America, he said, was ‘a total blank.’ There is an obstinate consistency about all that. In the century or so between the first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1855 and the death of Carlos Williams, Robert Frost and Theodore Roethke in 1963 – the classic century, one might say, of American poetry – that poetry was nation-obsessed even when it was not openly nationalistic. By now everything looks different, to be sure, the 1960s having efficiently internationalised the culture of the Western world. But in earlier generations you could not just be a poet in America: you had to be an American poet.

  Why? To minds congregated on the eastern seaboard of the Atlantic Ocean that national obsession looks like the ecstasy of a collective hysteria. Any European reading Donald Hall’s roll-call of American oddbirds is bound to hear it with a sense of mounting incredulity. What in the world is so strange about it all? Shelley was easily more gentlemanly, easily more eccentric, than Edgar Allan Poe, whom Hall calls a southern gentleman; the Brontë sisters lived in a confined domestic circle much like Emily Dickinson’s; and if there are no bearded nurses in the British poetic tradition, there is Alexander Pope, a dwarf with a bent spine far more grotesque than Whitman. (Why, in any case, should a nurse not wear a beard, if male?) As for office-workers like Wallace Stevens, there has long been a sprinkling of desk-slaves in the British tradition: Peter Porter, for example, started his working life in London as one, writing poems in his spare time. At a guess Donald Hall is the least paranoid of men. But there is something disturbingly paranoid about calling poetry an un-American activity, as if fearful of some native hostility that is not plainly there. As seen from Europe, which perhaps has more exacting standards in eccentricity, American poets look so far from strange as to seem in their private lives a trifle humdrum. Carlos Williams was a hardworking local doctor in New Jersey who lived a working lifetime in the same provincial place, delivering as many babies (he used to say) as poems; Wallace Stevens is only odd in the imagination of those who are determined to see him so, walking to work in Hartford, Connecticut, devising poems as he went, and dictating them to an office secretary when he got there. In a late letter (July 17, 1947) he remarks he has only just noticed people might think there was anything remotely queer about ‘writing poetry and being in business at the same time’ – complaining, justly enough, that the critic often ‘types the business-man.’ And he is right. Surely there is nothing very queer, in fact, about writing a poem in an office. Many a European poet, what is more, would envy Americans their easy, well-paid posts as writers on campus or at the Library of Congress: the British laureate, after all –and there is only one of them at a time – is paid an annual pittance he is plainly not intended to subsist on. The successful American poet, moreover, like Robert Frost, can face adoring crowds of worshippers, mainly youthful – an experience British poets are so little exposed to that they sometimes emigrate to America in order to savour it. Frost spoke at President Kennedy’s inauguration in January 1961, an honoured guest: British poets, by contrast, have no noticeable place in coronations. And so on… What is all this about America not appreciating poets? What civilisation in all history, one might challengingly ask, has ever rewarded them better?

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  To such questions, which are not rhetorical, the best answers may not come from an outsider. The arts, along with sport, are arguably the last bastion of fervid nationalism in the United States – at least until recent years. A foreigner may criticise almost anything more easily than its literature. You do not have to be an American to revile the foreign or domestic policies of the United States, in the right company; and one can lecture across the land in a European accent on most topics of national or international concern to sympathetic, even enthusiastic audiences. But not, in a foreign accent, on American literature. Condemn the United States deficit, by all means, the way Americans eat or dress, or their behaviour in the Persian (or Arab) Gulf. They will love it. But no European had better try lecturing on Faulkner, Frost or Hemingway in the United States. I have seen American audiences turn pale with fury when a European offers even the most favourable account of the imposing American literary achievement since Leaves of Grass. An Italian professor of American literature once told me in near-faultless English and with tears in her eyes that though she could teach such things in an Italian university, and did, no learned conference in the United States would take her views about Hawthorne or Melville seriously, simply because she was not an American. And when Geoffrey Moore, British editor of the Penguin Book of Modern American Verse (1954), addressed an international audience on certain qualitative differences between the British and American poetic traditions, the indignation of learned Americans in his audience was boundless – for all that his first academic appointment had been in the United States and his account in no way disparaging of the American achievement. In a word, there is a national problem about American poetry, albeit a diminishing problem: less acute than a century ago, it is true, even half a century ago. But still there.

  Paranoia classically secretes a sense of inferiority, and many an American poet has spoken of his awed anxiety-of-influence before the tradition of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Keats. Wallace Stevens never set foot in Europe, and once justified his aversion as a fear of being ‘ossified by the stare of an Englishman’ (Aug. 25, 1950) – even if, as he put it in another letter, America left one eternally hungry for the sight of European treasures, being in itself no more than ‘a hamlet among elm trees and farms’ on a vast scale, full of the sort of people who are all too content with emptiness (June 25, 1945). Pound and Eliot, when they emigrated, gave no comfort to those who chose to stay at home. William Carlos Williams in his Autobiography tells how, when he first read The Waste Land in Criterion in 1922, he decided as a young man that Eliot’s poem gave him no place to stand and left no room for ‘anything I stood for’; and the admission is at once defiant and disarming. ‘We were so weakly based,’ he wrote to Robert Lowell (March 11, 1952), ‘so uncertain of everything’; and the search for a place to stand and a national certainty was his appointed task for forty years. ‘One has to bow down finally,’ he remarked in a last interview, published in the Paris Review in 1964, a year after his death; and what one bows down to, as a poet, is either ‘the English’ or ‘the American.’ In a word, he believed to his dying day that the poet’s choice in style and metre was above all else a choice of nationhood.

  The choice had its paradoxes. To choose the poverty of Europe, like Pound and Eliot, was to sell out: to stay at home in the m
aterial prosperity of America, like Williams and Stevens, was to feel dedicated, even faintly martyred. When Carlos Williams died in 1963, a few months before President Kennedy, he died in the illusion that he had invented a strictly American metre: ‘the variable foot – the division of a line according to a new method that would be satisfactory to an American.’ That remark now has a strong period flavour: I do not suppose any poet working in America today sees himself as nationally committed to one sort of line-scansion rather than another. In the age of inter-continental jets and instant media-messages bounced off satellites the claim looks fantastic even as a proposal, let alone as a boast. How could there now be a British metre, or an American? It would be imitated, if even halfway promising, from the moment it was announced. But the Williams view is much like the Whitman view, after all. Whitman saw himself as throwing off the shackles of European metre when he sang Democracy in free verse, even if much of Leaves of Grass reminds one now, metrically speaking, of that very British book, the King James version of the Bible.

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  The claim to poetic Americanness involved, more profoundly, a claim to a separate linguistic tradition.

  The claim has a long if dubious history. In 1789 Noah Webster, in his Dissertations on the English Language, thought the separation of the American language from the English ‘necessary and unavoidable.’ Twenty years later and more, in a famous letter of August 1813, Thomas Jefferson demanded ‘new words, new phrases,’ as well as ‘the transfer of old words to new objects’ – Jefferson evidently understood the Arbitrariness of the Sign – as something plainly required by ‘the new circumstances under which we are placed,’ meaning nationhood. But Webster and Jefferson, it is now clear, were mistaken prophets. So was H. L. Mencken, who in the preface to The American Language (1919) assumed there were already two great and diverging dialects of English, and that ‘one dialect, in the long run, will defeat and absorb the other.’ He was wrong on both counts. The speech of the two nations did not diverge, as he imagined, but converged. And converged not by domination, as he predicted, but by the gentle osmosis of long-standing amity. Ordinary experience suggests that the elderly on both sides of the Atlantic preserve usages more nationally distinct than the young.

  The Atlantic does not in any thorough-going sense divide two languages, though it is often difficult – even impossible – to persuade continental Europeans it is so. Modest differences of spelling apart, and a small and diminishing range of verbal and syntactical usages, Britons and Americans do not nowadays write distinct languages, whether in poetry or elsewhere, and the Atlantic Ocean is a relatively minor linguistic divider. ‘Perhaps I am unconsciously bilingual,’ T.S. Eliot once remarked dryly on receiving a dictionary of the American language. He was right to be derisive. In matters of pronunciation the dialects of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Glasgow are easily more remote from Standard British than is Standard American. That truth needs to be more widely understood. I am sometimes told by continentals that they would prefer to study at a British rather than an American university in order to immerse themselves in one kind of English rather than another, and usually fail to convince them that those differences are simply too minor to count: too minor, certainly, to turn down the golden chance of a visit to the United States. English is English: compared with German, Spanish, Italian and even French, it is remarkably homogeneous the world over – so homogeneous that it is doubtful if any two dialects of English are mutually unintelligible in any radical sense. A foreigner’s grasp of the language would have to be very advanced before any local or national differences began to matter. A British academic, to his amusement, was once asked at an international summer-school to translate a page of Henry James into British, and after a few minutes’ reading had the good luck to hit on the word ‘rowboat,’ which he obligingly anglicised for his continental audience into ‘rowing-boat.’ Let us hope they were impressed. The triviality of the case is after all representative.

  Native readers of English seldom have linguistic difficulties with poems from the other side of the ocean, or novels either – merely a delighted sense of an occasional difference. When I first read Raymond Chandler’s novels, which was before I ever visited the United States, I had no difficulty in guessing that a davenport is something like a settee in North America – and not, as in England, an antique writing-desk – if only because Chandler’s characters kept sitting on them. It would be an unusual poem by Robert Frost – though a far-from unusual poem by Robert Burns – that presented linguistic difficulties to an English reader that were nationally based; and when I first read Leaves of Grass I only knew it was American because Whitman himself kept telling me that it was.

  The Atlantic looks big on maps. It figures large in daily headlines. But it is nothing like the biggest dialect-divider in English that there is.

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  As for metre, there are no national metres peculiar to America or to Britain, and it may be strongly doubted if there ever were – at least for long.

  In an introduction to his Complete Poems (1949), ‘The figure a poem makes,’ Robert Frost briskly remarked that there are virtually only two metres in the language nowadays – ‘strict iambic and loose iambic’ – the latter admitting extra unaccented syllables. Frost himself, as he knew, used both. Consider his ‘Good Hours’:

  . . . . Over the snow my creaking feet

  Disturbed the slumbering village street

  Like profanation, by your leave,

  At ten o’clock of a winter eve,

  where the last line is loose and the first lines strict, apart from the unremarkable inversion of the very first foot in ‘Over.’ (I am making the probable assumption here that ‘slumbering’ is to be read as only two syllables). Frost might have added that this sort of thing has been going on in literary English in serious contexts at least since Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’, and in light verse for even longer:

  . . . . There is not wind enough to twirl

  The one red leaf, the last of its clan,

  That dances as often as dance it can,

  Hanging so light, and hanging so high

  On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.

  These are loose iambics, in Frost’s terms. Coleridge wrote them in 1797-98, though he did not publish ‘Christabel’ till 1816, by which time it had been metrically imitated by both Byron and Sir Walter Scott, who had heard the poem recited or seen it in manuscript. It heads an enormous shift in nineteenth-century English toward the license of the additional weak syllable. Pound, Eliot and Frost are among the multitudinous heirs of that tradition, but there is nothing national about it. By the time Pound settled in England in 1908 the tyranny of the iambic was already a dead letter, unless in his own imagination. If there ever was a chance of evolving metres in English peculiar to a single nation, that chance, in an age of instant communication, had already been irretrievably lost.

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  Why, then, did American poets of the classic age talk about themselves and their national origins so much?

  It may be said that British poets talk about themselves, too, at least since the Romantics. But in the full, uninhibited sense I am here concerned with, that is not really true. Wordsworth wrote but did not publish a poem of epic length about himself, to be sure, eventually called The Prelude. But he seems to have thought of it as no more than a preliminary to a great philosophic poem about the nature of perception; and when Tennyson allowed In Memoriam to appear in the same year as The Prelude, in 1850, after profound hesitation, he could plead that the poem is far more than personal, being above all an act of homage to a dead friend. Keats once remarked in a celebrated letter of October 1818 that the poetical character ‘has no self – it is everything and nothing,’ since it lives in the ‘gusto’ of all the world has to give. Byron hid himself under elaborate masks like Don Juan; and twentieth-century British poets in the Byronic tradition, like W.H. Auden, John Betjeman and Philip
Larkin, have set near-insuperable barriers between the reader and themselves, devising personae to baffle any radically betraying hint of self-revelation.

  All that is utterly different from Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself,’ which John Berryman once defiantly called ‘the greatest poem so far written by an American.’ It is certainly the most characteristic. It might have been written, one feels, to confirm Donald Hall’s suspicion that American poets are strange: what could be stranger, after all, than going on about oneself for hundreds of lines without revealing any serious autobiographical information? Whitman’s song is not in the least like The Prelude that had appeared five years before. It is also less open to the charge of conceit than Wordsworth, since he is clearly imputing virtue to a nation rather than at himself, and the reader is happy to applaud that virtue. In fact it is precisely himself that Whitman is not interested in. He is interested, rather, in being an American. And the doubts the theme of his poem reasonably raises, to be candid, are not about his conceit but about whether being an American is quite as interesting as all that. An Oxford professor, John Bayley, once perceptively remarked in a review of Robert Lowell that ‘all Lowell’s poems are specifically about being a Lowell’ – the Oxford professor being evidently uncertain, as anyone outside Boston might be, as to whether being a Lowell is quite as interesting as all that – and he mused that one can hardly imagine ‘the scion of a distinguished English family using that family now as a basis for poetic composition.’ Exactly so. No doubt it means a good deal in New England to be a Lowell. But on the only occasion I ever met Robert Lowell he talked about his family and nothing else; and his poems and prose works alike, if not literally about nothing else, seldom fail to mention or imply something specifically tribal or personal. Almost any Lowell poem might be subtitled ‘Song of myself and my relatives.’ The sixth Baron Byron, though of noble lineage, never behaved like that, and to the British eye the concern of American poets of the classic age with family and lineage looks little short of astounding. William Carlos Williams once wrote a whole book about his mother, which no British poet one can easily think of has done, although William Empson once wrote a remarkable short poem, ‘To an Old Lady,’ about his. Eliot, an American in London hungering for roots, wrote a poem called ‘East Coker’ (1940) simply because that is the name of a village in Somerset his forebears left in the seventeenth century. ‘In my beginning is my end . . .’