The Muse, Postmodern and Homeless
If you’re a writer and if you’re by nature Sublime and
Magisterial, but you need cash—lots and lots—
don’t try to change your literary spots.
Spot-changing won’t get you any dough or even any cereal.
You’ll only end up feeling gypped, not to mention funereal.
So if you’re a hifaluting ineffable Artist of noble intent,
you might as well stick to your last,
since nobody who reads for fun will read you for fun
because it’s impossible to read you fast.
These are lines Ogden Nash did not write. Henry James did, sort of, in the form of a melancholy comic tale called “The Next Time.” Its hero is a genius novelist who, in the hope of making his fortune, attempts to become a popular hack. Again and again he feels sure he has finally gotten the hang of it—grinding out a best-selling quick read—but each time, to his disappointment, what emerges is only another masterpiece.
James himself once contrived to write a letter of Paris chat for the New York Tribune. He managed to keep it going for months, but the column was a failure. He could not “entertain.” When the editor complained that James’s themes were “too remote from popular interests,” James snapped back: “If my letters have been ‘too good’ I am honestly afraid that they are the poorest I can do, especially for the money!” “I thought in all conscience,” he said privately, “they had been flimsy enough.”
“The Next Time” appeared in 1895; modernism was not yet born. But in his portrait (however teasing) of the artist as a sovereign and unbetrayable focus of authenticity, James had put his finger on what modernism was going to be mainly about.
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” That, we used to think, was the whole of modernism—Yeats mourning the irrecoverable old assurances while the surprising new shapes of things, symbols and fragments, flashed by in all their usurping alterations. Now we know better, and also, in a way, worse. Yeats hardly foresaw how our dissolutions would surpass his own— but where we are now is, after all, what he was describing.
And where we are now is the no-man’s-land that more and more begins to inherit the name postmodern—atomized, leveled, thoroughly democratic turf where anything goes, everything counts, significance is what I say it is, literature is what’s there for the exegetes: comic strips, 1950s sitcoms, fast-food hamburger ads. The elitism of High Art was vanquished long ago, and not only by the Marxists. The divide between Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas is plugged by critical egalitarianism; so is the difference between poet and critic. Allee samee, as Allen Ginsberg once remarked of the great religions—as if wanting to repair the world and wanting to get out of it were indistinguishable. History is whatever selection most favors your cultural thesis. Movements move so rapidly that their direct ancestors are on to something else before they can be undermined and undone as rival precursors. Whether in painting or in literary theory, there is the glee of plenitude and proliferation along these postmodern boulevards, and a dogged pluralism, and individualism splintering off into idiosyncratic fits of unconventionality desperate to pass for original. With so much originality at hand (originality without an origin), and no center (or any number of centers, one to a customer), what’s left to be called eccentric?
Modernism had its own widening gyres and ruptures—ruptures enough, hollow men and waste lands, the smashing of every rooted assumption and literary guaranty—but one center did hold, one pledge stuck. This was the artist’s pledge to the self. Joyce, Mann, Eliot, Proust, Conrad (even with his furies): they knew. And what they knew was that—though things fall apart—the artist is whole, consummate. At bottom, in the deepest brain, rested the supreme serenity and masterly confidence of the sovereign maker.
Prior to modernism, genius scarcely needed to be centered—selfcentered, “magisterial”—in this way. Jane Austen and Trollope had their village certainties to keep the balance, to pull toward the center: society, tradition, “realism,” the solid verity of the vicar’s wife. Even the Romantics, haunting the lonely periphery, deserting the matrix, still had a matrix to desert. The moderns looked all around, saw that nothing held, and began to make themselves up as law, and sometimes as religion. James, preparing in his Notebooks for a new piece of work, secretly crooned down at his pen: mon bon, caro mio. His dearest good angel, his faithful Muse, was housed in himself.
Almost no writer, not even the most accomplished, is like that now. Postmodernism, for writers, means fear and flux, unsureness, inward chaos, self-surprise. Virginia Woolf’s Common Reader in full sail may suggest she is among the moderns, but her diaries show her trembling. Of contemporaries we read in English, only Nadine Gordimer, Joseph Brodsky, and V. S. Naipaul seem to own that central stillness, pride, and genuinely autocratic play of the humors that the moderns had; all three have been embattled by dislocations (Naipaul aggressively, by choice), and it is hard to tell whether it is the seizures of history we feel in these writers, or a true residue of modernist authority.
Those born into American indulgences are less flinty. John Updike in an interview last year spoke of the writer’s work as “a little like handwriting. It comes out to be you no matter what you do. That is, it’s recognizably Updike.” A tendril of astonishment in that, as if there might reasonably have been an alternative. The moderns were unsurprised by their consistencies, and expected to come out what they were: inviolable. The characters in Philip Roth’s The Counterlife are so wilily infiltrated by postmodernist inconstancy that they keep revising their speeches and their fates: you can’t trust them even to stay dead. It goes without saying that we are forbidden to speculate whether the writer who imagined them is as anxiously protean, as cleft by doubt, as they.
Literary modernism, despite clangor and disjunction, was gilded by a certain voluptuousness: it came of the writer’s self-knowledge—or call it self-anointment, a thing that properly embarrasses us today. But there was mettle in it; and also prowess, and defiance, and accountability. If the raggedy improvisations of postmodernism have killed off the idea of the Sublime and Magisterial Artist, it suits and gratifies our democratic temperament; the Sublime and the Magisterial were too long on their deathbeds anyhow.
Still, without modernism to give her shelter in the supernal confidence of genius, where can the Muse lodge now?
Published in The New York Times Book Review, January 18, 1987
North
One dark wet November afternoon a few years ago, I flew in a small plane from Copenhagen to Aarhus, Jutland, and landed in a cold and pelting storm. The wind drove more powerfully than any wind I had ever known before; it struck with a mythic moan, like that of the wind in the nursery rhyme: The North Wind will blooowww, and soon we’ll have snooowww. Afterward, shivering over tea in the refuge of a snug little hotel, I looked around the dining room, all shining mahogany, and felt myself a desolate stranger. I was traveling alone. The hotel had once been a way station for missionaries heading for foreign parts; no New Yorker, I thought, could be at ease in such a place. I was banished, lost. I ached with forlornness. The people in the dining room seemed enviably at home. They shuffled their newspapers and hardly spoke, and when they did, the alien syllables shut me decisively out.
And suddenly, just then, I found myself assaulted by a brilliant eeriness; enchantment swept me through and through. It was very nearly a kind of seizure: an electrifying pang that shook me to tears of recognition. It was, to choose the palest term for it, a moment of deja vu, but also something vaster, more tumultuous, bottomless. Though I was incontrovertibly new to this wind-ghosted place, it came to me all at once that north was where I had once belonged, north was the uncanny germ of my being.
Northernness—the shrouded poetry of northernness—is why we crave the Scandinavian autumn and winter. It may be that July and August beam down on Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, and Helsinki as attractively as they do elsewhere—who can doubt it? But say it ou
tright: summer in Sweden is for the homebody Swedes. The imagination of a Stockholm-bound traveler is transfixed by a crystal dream of low, cold, tilted light.
We go north “enamored of a season. . . . cold, spacious, severe, pale and remote,” misted over by “trouble, ecstasy, astonishment”—C. S. Lewis’s apparition of Northernness, drawn from childhood susceptibility, and from the icy glimmer of Norse fable. We go north to reclaim something buried, clouded, infiltrating, unsure, or else as sure as instantaneous sensation.
For me, it was, I think, a grain of historical memory in the gleam of that little hotel, a secret idiosyncratic autobiographical Jutland jot: a thousand ancestral years lived to the east, just across the Baltic, along the same latitude, in old Russia’s Minsk province. But there are more universal reasons to seek out the north when it is most northern in aspect. The blinding late-October sun-slant on Copenhagen walks; the pewter pavements of Stockholm under a days-long autumn rain—in all of that there lurks a time-before, whirling up from storybooks and pictures and legends, and from some idea we have of our hot inward life set against a rind of frosted light.
Mystically, in sheets of clarified air, the north reminds.
Published as “The Apparition of Northernness,” The New York Times Magazine, Part II: The Sophisticated Traveler, October 4, 1987
The Shock of Teapots
One morning in Stockholm, after rain and just before November, a mysteriously translucent shadow began to paint itself across the top of the city. It skimmed high over people’s heads, a gauzy brass net, keeping well above the streets, skirting everything fabricated by human arts—though one or two steeples were allowed to dip into it, like pens filling their nibs with palest ink. It made a sort of watermark over Stockholm, as if a faintly luminous river ran overhead, yet with no more weight or gravity than a vapor.
This glorious strangeness—a kind of crystalline wash—was the sunlight of a Swedish autumn. The sun looked new. it had a lucidity, a texture, a tincture, a position across the sky that my New York gape had never before taken in. The horizontal ladder of light hung high up, higher than any sunlight I had ever seen, and the quality of its glow seemed thinner, wanner, more tentatively morning-brushed; or else like gold leaf beaten gossamer as tissue—a lambent skin laid over the spired marrow of the town.
“Ah yes, the sun does look a bit different this time of year,” say the Stockholmers in their perfect English (English as a second first language), but with a touch of ennui. Whereas I, under the electrified rays of my whitening hair, stand drawn upward to the startling sky, restored to the clarity of childhood. The Swedes have known a Swedish autumn before; I have not.
Travel returns us in just this way to sharpness of notice; and to be saturated in the sight of what is entirely new—the sun at an unaccustomed slope, stretched across the northland, separate from the infiltrating dusk that always seems about to fall through clear gray Stockholm—is to revisit the enigmatically lit puppet-stage outlines of childhood: those mental photographs and dreaming woodcuts or engravings that we retain from our earliest years. What we remember from childhood we remember forever— permanent ghosts, stamped, imprinted, eternally seen. Travelers regain this ghost-seizing brightness, eeriness, firstness.
They regain it because they have cut themselves loose from their own society, from every society; they are, for a while, floating vagabonds, like astronauts out for a space walk on a long free line. They are subject to preternatural exhilarations, absurd horizons, unexpected forms and transmutations: the matter-of-fact (a battered old stoop, say, or the shape of a door) appears beautiful; or a stone that at home would not merit the blink of your eye here arrests you with its absolute particularity—just because it is what your hand already intimately knows. You think: a stone, a stone! They have stones here too! And you think: how uncannily the planet is girdled, as stone-speckled in Sweden as in New York. For the vagabond-voyeur (and for travelers voyeurism is irresistible), nothing is not for notice, nothing is banal, nothing is ordinary: not a rock, not the shoulder of a passerby, not a teapot.
Plenitude assaults; replication invades. Everything known has its spooky shadow and Doppelganger. On my first trip anywhere—it was 1957 and I landed in Edinburgh with the roaring of the plane’s four mammoth propellers for days afterward embedded in my ears—I rode in a red airport bus to the middle of the city, out of which ascended its great castle. It is a fairy-book castle, dreamlike, Arthurian, secured in the long-ago. But the shuddery red bus—hadn’t I been bounced along in an old bus before, perhaps not so terrifically red as this one?—the red bus was not within reach of plain sense. Every inch of its interior streamed with unearthliness, with an undivulged and consummate witchery. It put me in the grip of a wild Elsewhere. This unexceptional vehicle, with its bright forward snout, was all at once eclipsed by a rush of the abnormal, the unfathomably Martian. It was the bus, not the phantasmagorical castle, that clouded over and bewildered our reasoned humanity. The red bus was what I intimately knew: only I had never seen it before. A reflected flicker of the actual. A looking-glass bus. A Scottish ghost.
This is what travelers discover: that when you sever the links of normality and its claims, when you break off from the quotidian, it is the teapots that truly shock. Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. Nothing shakes the heart so much as meeting—far, far away—what you last met at home. Some say that travelers are informal anthropologists. But it is ontology—the investigation of the nature of being—that travelers do. Call it the flooding-in of the real.
There is, besides, the flooding-in of character. Here one enters not landscapes or streetlit night scenes, but fragments of drama: splinters of euphoria that catch you up when you are least deserving. Sometimes it is a jump into a pop-up book, as when a cockney cabdriver, of whom you have asked directions while leaning out from the curb, gives his native wink of blithe goodwill. Sometimes it is a mazy stroll into a toy theater, as when, in a museum, you suddenly come on the intense little band following the lecturer on Mesopotamia, or the lecturer on genre painting, and the muse of civilization alights on these rapt few. What you are struck with then—one of those mental photographs that go on sticking to the retina—is not what lies somnolently in the glass case or hangs romantically on the wall, but the enchantment of a minutely idiosyncratic face shot into your vision with indelible singularity, delivered over forever by your own fertile gaze. When travelers stare at heads and ears and necks and beads and mustaches, they are—in the encapsuled force of the selection—making art: portraits, voice sonatinas, the quick haiku of a strictly triangular nostril.
Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by. Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers—and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye.
Published as “Enchantments at First Encounter,” The New York Times Magazine, Part II: The Sophisticated Traveler, March 17, 1985
The Question of Our Speech: The Return to Aural Culture
When I was a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, a trio of women from the provinces took up, relentlessly and extravagantly, the question of my speech. Their names were Miss Evangeline Trolander, Mrs. Olive Birch Davis, and Mrs. Ruby S. Papp (pronounced pop). It was Mrs. Papp’s specialty to explain how to “breathe from the diaphragm.” She would place her fingers tip-to-tip on the unyielding hard shell of her midriff, hugely inhaling: how astonishing then to see how the mighty action of her lungs caused her fingertips to spring apart! This demonstration was for the repair of the New York voice. What the New York voice, situated notoriously “in the throat,” required above everything was to descend, pumping air, to this nether site, so that “Young Lochinvar came out of the west” might come bellowing out of the pubescent breast.
The New York palate, meanwhile, was consonantally in neglect. T’s, d’s, and l’s were being beaten out against the teeth, European-fashion—thi
s was called “dentalization”—while the homeless r and n went wandering in the perilous trough behind the front incisors. There were corrective exercises for these transgressions, the chief one being a liturgical recitation of “Tillie the Toiler took Tommy Tucker to tea,” with the tongue anxiously flying up above the teeth to strike precisely on the lower ridge of the upper palate.
The diaphragm; the upper palate; and finally the arena in the cave of the mouth where the vowels were prepared. A New Yorker could not say a proper a, as in “paper”—this indispensable vibration was manufactured somewhere back near the nasal passage, whereas civility demanded the a to emerge frontally, directly from the lips’ vestibule. The New York i was worst of all: how Mrs. Davis, Mrs. Papp, and Miss Trolander mimicked and ridiculed the New York i! “Oi loik oice cream,” they mocked.
All these emendations, as it happened, were being applied to the entire population of a high school for girls in a modest Gothic pile on East Sixty-eighth Street in the 1940s, and no one who emerged from that pile after four years of daily speech training ever sounded the same again. On the eve of graduation, Mrs. Olive Birch Davis turned to Mrs. Ruby S. Papp and said: “Do you remember the ugliness of her diction when she came to us?” She meant me; I was about to deliver the Class Speech. I had not yet encountered Shaw’s Pygmalion, and its popular recrudescence in the form of My Fair Lady was still to occur; all the same, that night, rehearsing for commencement, I caught in Mrs. Davis and Mrs. Papp something of Professor Higgins’s victory, and in myself something of Eliza’s humiliation.
Our teachers had, like young Lochinvar, come out of the West, but I had come out of the northeast Bronx. Called on to enunciate publicly for the first time, I responded with the diffidence of secret pleasure; I liked to read out loud, and thought myself not bad at it. Instead, I was marked down as a malfeasance in need of overhaul. The revisions and transformations that followed were not unlike an evangelical conversion. One had to be willing to be born again; one had to be willing to repudiate wholesale one’s former defective self. It could not be accomplished without faith and shame: faith in what one might newly become, shame in the degrading process itself— the dedicated repetition of mantras. “Tillie the Toiler took Tommy Tucker to tea,” “Oh! young lochinvar has come out of the west, Through all the wide border his steed was the best.” All the while pneumatically shooting out one’s diaphragm, and keeping one’s eye (never one’s oi) peeled for the niggardly approval of Miss Evangeline Trolander.
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