[written 3/21; posted 4/12: for some reason, I hesitated on this one]

 
            Samuel Johnson – Doctor Johnson – wrote The Rambler, the blog of its day, a two or three times a week sheet with a single essay. An interesting time. Does anyone teach Addison and Steele in high school anymore? The passion for the 18^thcentury seems to have faded. But when I was young it was still the rage in certain circles. The discovery of Boswell’s journals was recent enough to titillate the elite masses, revolutionary enough in the frank sexuality to act as a discrete bludgeon against the Mrs. Grundys, like the days when it was still risqué to show the bedroom door in a movie – shortly before my time.
            But, of course, I detested them all. I read the standard cropped edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and execrated it both in the act and in my critical appraisal. They all seemed like self-conscious, flatulent old men, repeating themselves in some twilight – not of the gods – but of the fallen false idols, perhaps. A strange miasma of acid dipped statues mouldering into formlessness in some swamp of inconsequence. That weird self-consciousness, like performing seals with human intelligence, slapping their fins while balancing a multi-colored plastic ball on their noses. A style like a would-be fashionista looking into doubled mirrors, the contortionist’s dream of intentional replicating distortions.
            Recently, I picked up the Life again in a complete edition, and it instantly made sense. The essence is not, strictly speaking, the flatulence, the nose picking, the toothpicks and dirty forks, if I may be metaphorical. But the inclusiveness is part of the key. Abridgement creates a false cogency. The real cogency is the scattering of fragments, the suggestive elements. We learn of Johnson’s massive body as well as his brilliance as a child. Some of his schoolmates would carry him to school out of deference. But the sense of an unnamed harassment and abuse hovers in the background. Schoolchildren have not changed that much. The discontinuous mass of detail is subsumed by the amplitude of the style, the peculiar rhythmic tidewater of the ‘period’ – not only the rise and fall of the language, but flow and regress apparently casually governed by the substance of the statement, so that it has much of the feel of common speech while retaining the full rhetorical turn. How different from the contemporary artifice of common speech that in fact flattens the writing out of any semblance of the natural rhythms of language. Finally, we have a poetry that rejects all linguistic conventions of poetry out of fear of ‘purple prose’. But poetry is precisely purple prose – language for its own sake, for the sake of music. No wonder we have a street reaction in the form of hip-hop – although hip-hop is at least as narrow in its way as the so-called poetry in the New Yorker.
            I read a New York Times review of a recently published biography ofThomas Hardy. The reviewer cites a passage concerning the gradual drift of Hardy’s marriage: “their childlessness, as Pite operatically suggests, ‘the unexplored hinterland of their estrangement.’” Granted that ‘unexplored hinterland of their estrangement’ is a figure of speech, but to describe it as ‘operatic’ calls more attention to the arbitrary critical strictures of the reviewer than to the actualities of the language. Without the natural range of rhetoric, language becomes less than lapidary. Flaubert is lapidary. Perhaps he stands at the head of this modern movement of narrowing expression. But his language moves through a larger range of cultural and linguistic possibility – a grand range compared to the critical matrix of a mind that holds the least rhetorical figure as ‘operatic’. This narrowness has destroyed the poetry of our era. We can trace it directly back to the New Critics, who received the laid-on hands of the master, T. S. Eliot. But if Eliot had written according to his own critical dicta, he would have died an unknown. Nothing in his durablecorpus falls within the frame of his own later constraints.
            Now exactly why poetry should be reduced to ‘common speech’ remains something of a mystery. But ‘common speech’ in writing is also an absolute artifice. The written word inherently precludes it. Any approximation of speech in writing is achieved either with the double mirrors of conscious artifice or through a legitimate creative act. It’s like Burns’ ‘Scottish’, which is in fact an invention. So we can create the artifice of speech or revert to the origins of poetry in the natural music of language itself. Perhaps the hiatus was necessary, since American differs radically from English. Undoubtedly we had to dispense with the Anglo-Saxon roots, since American is both quantitative and stressed. French, being more or less purely quantitative, not only adheres to the rule, but points directly to the source of the New Criticism. Eliot’s writings emerge from the transitional Anglo-American sphere of his own disposition, but he subsequently made up his formal rules out of his love of the French modernists and proto-modernists.
            Butthe result is the New Yorker style poetry, which insists, rhetorically, that it is anything but poetry. And, as a consequence, it succeeds perfectly. Absolutely, it is anything but poetry.

             I understand now that Johnson and the other Augustans were the last full-blown Latinate rhetoricians. When we accept the linguisticconventions, as well as the personal conventions for the ‘literary gentleman’, the literary equivalencies that preclude familiarity and imposition, but allow for integrity and a powerful directness in the rhetorical indirection, what seems most remote at the outset becomes nearest and what seems most obscured by artifice turns out to be only slightly veiled by apparent delicacy, namely, an intimacy that sometimes verges on rawness.
            But one has to grasp the double ear of the Augustans, that when they speak in English, they hear a Latinate alternative. And the Latin models and linguistic parallels resonate throughout. One need not know the Latin to hear the doubleness, or begin to fathom the resonances. The rhetoric is inherently alien. One need only follow it out of the natural rhythms and structures of the English to recognize its presence.
            But the Latin models also exhibit the same subtending arrogance, the self-recognition of the important  litterateur, the peculiar self-consciousness of a Virgil, for example.

             I began with Keats. And since my family was aesthetically atavistic, if scientifically au courant – (so that the Augustans were unread paragons) – Keats is direct speech after powdered wigs and paper flowers. Only later am I aesthetically sophisticated enough, in terms of the history as well, to understand why the late Augustan critics still functioning through the self-appointed organs of the professional writing community would deem Keats to be something other than a legitimate writer or poet. It’s not simply Leigh Hunt’s soft lines and mentoring of Keats. All of the important younger poets were challenging the salon of their day, the neo-classical artifices which, by the beginning of the 19^th century, were no longer effecting the cultural ambit or guarded intimacy of the Johnson circle.
            You would think, with their love of literary history and referential base in conscious craftsmanship, that the New Critics would have discovered an equally healthy skepticism about dominant critical schools – how invariably they entrain a degenerate aesthetic. That is, since the New Criticism, itself, was presumptively both a product and theoretically a justification of revolutionary forces, one would have assumed that itwould attempt to inculcate a doctrine of critical as well as aesthetic renewal. But from the first, the New Criticism was a political movement in the arts, an attempt to establish the hegemony, not of a new aesthetic, but a of new theory that justified an old aesthetic –specifically in face of a revolution that had called aestheticism itself into question. In other words, the so-called New Criticism was in fact reactionary, in just about the worst sense of that word. The New Criticism raised craft over creativity and sought political hegemony, rather than a creative critical theory that actually explained the ‘new’ that was emerging throughout the literary arts.
            Unfortunately, the New Critics had natural allies in the nature of New York and the burgeoning educational system. It is not accidental that the bulk of the theorists were academics. Craft is teachable, creativity is not. But they also found their media allies in New York – the same New York professionals who a hundred years earlier had sat at Pfaff’s and laughed at Whitman. Is it any wonder that one of the two native-born New Yorkers who were true literary artists wound up in Camden, New Jersey? New York is a commercial center, and apparently always will be. It builds empty towers, not a cultural center. The artists of the Max Perkins era were all outlanders, including Perkins himself. And one would not have to go far to prove that the actual force of New York on that generation was destructive rather than creative.

             When I was in school, T. S. Eliot was still a basic industry. Off in the background, more as a kind of media game – although not a few academics participated – was the floating question of ‘the great American novel.’ The great question, however, focused on ‘Faulkner or Hemingway’.
            The envelope, please, Ms. Bimbo.
            And the answer is. . . .

            Henry Miller!

 
            Precisely because Miller was not a litterateur, not a professional writer. He was a musician and a letter writer. Maniacal, but ambulatory. A genius to his friends. Precisely because his sentences do not fall within the prescribed strictures of lapidary narrowness. My goodness, many of them show no signs of aggravated labor at all. He just spewed them forth in all their wild brilliance. And granted he wrote enough survival hackwork. But the bulk of Black Spring, the two Tropics, and, above all, The Rosy Crucifixion constitute, not only works of genius, but a presentation of the American panorama as is unlikely to be replicated.
            In this rotwanger era of ‘neo-conservative’ domestic colonialism, someone cavils about the finally discovered fact that Miller wrote pornography, and that’s the last we hear of him for the time being. Deep-sixed with the hippies, the yippies and other basically anti-American types. But any ‘critic’ who did not know that Miller could not have written what he wrote without having first written pornography should be instantly fired and forced into a ten-year apprenticeship as a bricklayer. Although it’s likely that even then he won’t be able to lay a straight course.
            Miller is our first moral pornographer. Go look. And after you get through being titillated, notice that even on the third, the fourth, the seventh reading, the prose is still fresh – still revealing hidden oddities, maniacal humor and basic genius. This is the difference between genius and professionalism. Who wants to read a New York Times bestseller a second time? If we were only watching the language, we would have been bored to tears on the first. The New Critics have succeeded in producing schools, god bless them. Not cliques, but actual academies. Go to New Hampshire or Iowa and learn to write. So now it’s all this professional dodgeball of the technical new plot twist. But once we’ve caught it, who wants to go there again?

             Anais Nin calls the figures in Miller’s urban landscape, ‘caricatures’, but that just tells us she’s never been on the streets. Miller’s not Henry James, so, if Nin appears there, we probably wouldn’t recognize her. It’s a special viewpoint. But the madness, tragedy and survival on the streets is the pure reality of America. The illusionary goddessof the novel who inhabits the body of his inamorata, ‘for whom this is written’, as he says, turns up at the end of his life as a shrunken little woman who has spent a substantial part of her adulthood in institutions. But this is just as it should be. She is not different from the naked, darkhaired vision, the cigarette dangling from her lips, who seats herself before her dresser and prepares for a day that may end in Tehran or Irkutsk. A dark bird, spreading her wings.
            Perhaps it’s time we looked at him again.
            And perhaps it’s time we shed our pseudo-aesthetic of professionalism and technique and started to consider the basic questions of art and creativity.