Stargazers of Beauty

Jonathan Bate's book Bright Star, Green Light finds striking parallels in the life and work of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Matt Hanson

11 May 2022, 2:34 pm

Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald
by Jonathan Bate (Yale University Press, 432 pp., $15.78)

Oscar Wilde once quipped that the two greatest tragedies in life were not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. F. Scott Fitzgerald admired Wilde, recommended his plays, and shared in his idolizing of the brilliant, doomed poet John Keats. In Bright Star, Green Light Oxford scholar Jonathan Bate appreciatively explores the similarities in the life and work of Fitzgerald and Keats.

It's easy to link the two thematically and biographically, but only to an extent. Though Bate's parallel narratives mostly work, there are some crucial and irresolvable differences between the two men. One glaring example is that Fitzgerald was suddenly served far more than his share of literary fame and fortune very early in life and then desperately watched it all slip away, while Keats died too young to expect anything other than to take his haunting epitaph literally: "Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water."

Both Fitzgerald and Keats came from humble origins, had lively and distinguished peers, and were possessed by a genius that wasn't fully recognized until after their deaths. Romantics to the bone, Fitzgerald and Keats were equally motivated by their human muses, Zelda Sayre and Fanny Brawne, as by their longing for Beauty with a capital B: the ideal, the unattainable, that which is so imaginatively close and yet so physically far away. Wilde also said that "we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." In their own distinct ways, Fitzgerald and Keats were some of our finest stargazers.

Fitzgerald's passion for Keats, Bate notes, came with a teacher's careful eye. Beneath his "pose of charm and insouciance," we should remember that Fitzgerald was a "grafter, a craftsman, who worked and reworked his sentences." He was fascinated by the way Keats' line "the hare limp'd trembling in the frozen grass" worked. Bate perceptively appreciates how Fitzgerald's hushed recitations of Keats and Shakespeare—which, luckily, survive—are moving because he feels every last syllable. Fitzgerald wisely suggested Keats as a never-fail standard for distinguishing "between gold and dross in what one read."

Bate insightfully compares the twinkling light at the end of Daisy's dock, the object of Gatsby's lifelong aspiration, with the "bright star," distant but glimmering, "in lone splendor hung aloft the night," addressed in what was probably Keats' final poem, a sonnet written on a boat on his way to his deathbed in Rome. In contrast, The Great Gatsby (1925) was by no means Fitzgerald's swan song. He had plenty more good writing left in him, even if his readership decreased. Bate includes an anecdote of Fitzgerald, wanting to perk himself up late in life while grinding it out in Hollywood, going to a bookstore and asking if they had any of his books in stock, only to find that the clerk had never heard of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The juxtaposition of these two images, Keats' star probably inspiring Daisy's green light, illuminates something important. Whether or not your ideal is actually possible, there is nevertheless value in pursuing it anyway. Keats' line "beauty is truth, truth beauty" resonates because while all things must inevitably pass, true beauty tends to have some staying power. Bates movingly writes that "year by year, the future recedes before us, always elusive, just out of reach of our outstretched arms, like those lovers on the Grecian urn, always in mad pursuit." Meditating on unattainability, particularly in a culture that constantly urges us to consume and acquire as much as possible, may help keep our wants and needs in perspective.

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In this thematic sense, Fitzgerald and Keats are a useful comparison. Yet the more we know about them, the more it's clear that important parts of their lives and work are quite divergent, which complicates the parallel Bate wants to establish.

Bate's narrative slightly overemphasizes Fitzgerald's half of the story. Plenty of high schoolers are assigned Gatsby in English class (at least one hopes they are) and so it's reasonable to assume that Fitzgerald's dramatic life story—epic benders, infamous friends, tortured relationships, insomnia in exquisite European hotels—is probably already known by anyone who might pick up Bate's book. Fitzgerald has the benefit of having lived a life that was at least as interesting as his fiction. In some ways the glittering public image Fitzgerald created for himself slowly faded as the Jazz Age sunk into the Great Depression.

In terms of lifestyle, the two couldn't be farther apart. Dead at twenty-five, Keats would probably have given anything for another few months in a modest cottage with Fanny Brawne, but he was too busy dying of tuberculosis. Keats, the son of a Cockney stable hand in Georgian London, never came anywhere close to the kind of life Fitzgerald lived, for a time, to the fullest. Fitzgerald, Bate tells us, had plenty of romantic sorrows and died prematurely of a heart attack at forty-four. That said, Fitzgerald did get to enjoy living the high life with his "golden girl," the vivacious but manic Zelda.

Keats' premature death is one of literature's great tragedies because it robs us of so much potential. His best work, according to some, outpaces what other greats had written in their mid-twenties. Keats didn't even die as Fitzgerald did, as so many artists and poets tend to do, through overindulgence or self-destruction. A surgeon by training, Keats must have caught something contagious while tending to the sick and the next thing he knew he was withering away, coughing up blood, and beginning what he called a "posthumous existence."

When death-haunted Keats wrote about haunted and mysterious beings, femme fatales, and nightingales and urns, he's not straining for effect: As much as he believes (or wants to believe) in beauty as truth, he never forgets for a moment that joy's "hand is ever at his lips bidding adieu." Keats can write so beautifully about bodies and nature in part because he knew viscerally the raw facts of life that working in a 19th-century surgical ward can teach. Keats was no daydreamer or fantasist; he craved beauty because he was keenly aware of what it was like to be without it.

In contrast, Fitzgerald wrote with plenty of lyricism but crucially matched it with a profound social conscience that wasn't present in Keats, who certainly hung out with outspoken radicals like Percy Shelley and Charles Lamb and who deeply admired the revolutionary Milton. Had he lived longer, it's certainly possible that Keats might have developed more of a social critique, but his literary interests tend to be more abstract and elevated than social commentary.

Fitzgerald's anguished but literarily advantageous position of being on the outside of elite circles looking in gave him a penetrating awareness of the boom and bust cycle of American life. He understood that beauty, often described in terms of the moneyed life of ease, wasn't all it was cracked up to be. It's not accidental that his stories often concern ambitious, prominent men and women in various stages of moral and economic decline and that Gatsby's fate is sealed by a sudden car crash.

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Bate doesn't emphasize this as much as he might have, but both writers have something unique to offer to us today. Keats' emphasis on the imagination, and the worlds he conjures in an impressively small number of words, open up a quiet space for our own imaginations, constantly ruptured by technology's endless interruptions and distractions, to grow. Despite his flamboyance, Fitzgerald was no fool about the steep precipice waiting at the end of all those "vast filling stations filled with money." Roughly a century ago, Fitzgerald diagnosed the self-obsession and materialism of our time by looking squarely at his own. At his best Fitzgerald diagnoses the diabetes of the soul that results when getting what we want is not enough, while Keats reminds us, especially after a pandemic, that we should be grateful to have anything at all. Bate's tidy set of parallels collides with the untidy reality of two rich and complex lives and bodies of work.

Matt Hanson is a contributing editor of American Purpose and The Arts Fuse, Boston's online independent arts and culture magazine. His work has appeared in The Baffler, The Guardian, The Millions, The New Yorker, The Smart Set, and Three Quarks Daily.

WRITERS SHOULDN'T TALK

When do writers find the time to do any actual writing? It sometimes seems as though they are always speaking — delivering lectures, pontificating in bookshops, opining on talk shows. If they are lucky enough to win awards, they clear their throats and make grateful remarks; when the books they have somehow secreted between their speaking engagements are at last released, they discuss their "inspirations" and their "process" on podcasts or radio shows. More and more, the life of a professional author involves not writing but talking.

Of course, most people talk all the time and think nothing of it, life being a regrettably non-epistolary phenomenon. They explain their ailments to their doctors; they chat with their coworkers and complain to (and about) their friends. If they spew a few inelegant or inapt phrases in the course of all this nattering, well, they have no choice but to continue fumbling: conversation does not allow for revision or retraction. Why should writers be exempt from an otherwise universal indignity? They, too, are people, and people speak and misspeak. Still, I have always thought that there is something peculiarly invidious, even offensive, about the expectation that writers talk, at least in their capacity as writers.

No doubt I am biased by my own distaste for the exercise. I can imagine few horrors greater than an editor proposing the torment of a phone call, or a podcaster innocently inviting me to record a segment. Fortified by the protections of print, I have the courage to ask them: Who in their right mind would want to talk, much less listen, to a person who has contrived to spend as much of her life as possible crouched over her computer in isolation, deleting unsatisfactory variants of a single sentence for upwards of an hour? Nothing in my daily practice has prepared me for the gauntlet of a tête-à-tête. Writing is an antidote to the immediacy and inexactitude of speech, and I resent any attempt to drag me back into the sludge of dialogue.

But I also balk at the prospect of a speaking writer for reasons that more or less generalize. For one thing, authors are often poor orators, inept at the most basic mechanics of verbalization. They hum and halt and hesitate, interrupting themselves, appending caveats to their caveats, thrumming a chorus of tentative "ums." They are drafters and amenders, if not by vocation than by profession, and in conversation, their strongest pronouncements tend to be timid, as if they were editing in real time. Even when a writer musters a declaration or masters the rhythm of a spoken sentence, her voice often betrays her. I once made the mistake of watching a video of a distinguished philosopher at a conference — and thereby discovering that he emits squawks as discordant as his papers are crisp and crystalline. And then there is the perennial challenge of pacing. Accustomed to laboring at length in seclusion, many writers speak glacially, as if they are lowering themselves into cool water, venturing one word and adjusting to its temperature before cautiously proceeding to the next.

At least as embarrassing as all these failures of delivery are the things that writers actually say. Books and essays are the product of long bouts of thinking, which makes writers fantastically ill-suited to summoning opinions instantaneously. In spoken interviews, Jonathan Franzen has confessed, among other things, that he considered adopting an Iraqi war orphan as a means of understanding the younger generation — an admission that he surely would have found occasion to excise from an essay. Indeed, it was his New Yorker editor who later talked him out of the idea.

Nabokov, who famously insisted on preparing answers to interviewers in writing and then reading them aloud, was averse to talking precisely because he had the good sense to worry that utterances excreted on the spot would be graceless or inane. When one journalist accused him of trying to cultivate a more exciting persona by eliminating "dull patches" from his public appearances, he explained, in characteristically polished prose,

I'm not a dull speaker, I'm a bad speaker, I'm a wretched speaker. The tape of my unprepared speech differs from my written prose as much as the worm differs from the perfect insect—or, as I once put it, I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

He agreed to talk only under very regimented conditions: "questions have to be sent to me in writing, answered by me in writing, and reproduced verbatim." In this way, in-person encounters were elevated into exchanges of letters.

Admittedly, many of Nabokov's peers have fared much better at the podium. Dorothy Parker was renowned for her quick wit, and David Foster Wallace held his own when he was grilled by Charlie Rose on late-night television. But even if a writer happens to be a good speaker, her gift is entirely incidental. To be adept at honing sentences for weeks or months is no guarantee of any aptitude for improvisation. Nor does skill at fictionalizing life or theorizing about it correlate with any facility for entering into the thick of things. Writers who succeed at talking do not succeed qua writers but qua something else.

For a confirmed anti-talker like myself, it is hard to resist the temptation to declare the era of the podcast uniquely debased. But in fact, the impulse to favor speech is not unprecedented. The history of thought is full of reading-bashers: Derrida prefers speaking to writing for convoluted reasons I can't quite comprehend, and Socrates opposes writing on the grounds that a text cannot answer questions or respond to objections. (In fairness, he dislikes pre-written speeches for the same reason.) As the philosopher argues in The Phaedrus,

Writing is unfortunately like painting, for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence….if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot defend themselves.

Instead, he recommends dialogue.

It is true that speech has the benefit of allowing for direct confrontation, but it also enmeshes us in imprecisions, which may explain why Plato himself wrote things down. What use is the ability to pose questions when their answers are as shoddy as Franzen's? Conversation extorts immediate responses, but it does not permit us to mull over our replies, or to sharpen the terms in which they are expressed.

It is demoralizing enough that even Nabokov sometimes degenerated into inarticulate normalcy; there is no need to add insult to injury by documenting or publicizing his lapses. The reader's mania for catching writers speaking is worse than misguided or voyeuristic: it is downright sadistic, the literary equivalent of the paparazzi's fetish for capturing celebrities in compromising poses.

Most writers are not talkers for a reason. Stop encouraging them to humiliate themselves in conversation so that they can return to the impossibly difficult business of perfecting themselves in print.

Becca Rothfeld is working on an essay collection, to be published by Metropolitan Books. She is a contributing editor at The Point and, beginning in the fall of 2022, will also become a contributing editor at The Boston Review

The Pope of Russell Square

T. S. Eliot's conservative modernism

By Terry Eagleton

June 6, 2022

For much of the twentieth century, the most revered, influential figure in English literary criticism was unquestionably T. S. Eliot. He was poet, critic, dramatist, essayist, editor, reviewer, publisher, and public intellectual; and although he had rivals in some of these fields and superiors in others, none of them could match his authority as a whole. Eliot's consecration as high priest of English letters was all the more remarkable given the outrage that had greeted his early work as a poet. In the words of one of his first champions, F. R. Leavis, he had been regarded as "literary Bolshevik," audaciously avant-garde and bafflingly opaque; yet by the early 1930s he was being hailed as the preeminent literary mind of his generation.

Like many of the leading writers and intellectuals of twentieth-century England, Thomas Stearns Eliot was not in fact English. He was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of a family so patrician that they refused to use the term "OK," and could trace their residence in America back over two hundred years. The Eliots were prominent among the intellectual aristocracy of the city, though Eliot's own father was a businessman. His grandfather had founded the local university, and championed an ideal of public service by which his grandson was to be deeply influenced. The current of Christianity associated with the St. Louis elite was Unitarianism, a moderate, high-brow form of religious faith at odds with the crude evangelical passions of the Puritan middle classes.

Yet the civilized, socially responsible class to which the Eliots belonged was being gradually displaced in the city by industrial and commercial forces, as a philistine middle class rose to power. The cultural leadership of the Eliots and their colleagues was in steep decline, as St. Louis became flagrantly boss-ridden and corrupt. The Eliot who would later speak sourly of the "dictatorship of finance" found himself an internal émigré in the place where he grew up, and would shortly become an exile in reality.

After studying at Harvard, Eliot abandoned his homeland for Paris and Oxford, and was persuaded to stay on in England by his friend, mentor, and compatriot Ezra Pound. Like a number of other expatriate writers (Wilde, Conrad, Henry James, V. S. Naipaul, Tom Stoppard), he compensated for his status as an outsider by seeking to outdo the English Establishment at its own game. He worked in a London bank and later for the distinguished publishing house of Faber & Faber, and had connections with the Bloomsbury Group. In 1927, he sealed his loyalty to his adopted country by converting to the Church of England and professed himself a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion. The divine right of kings was in his eyes a "noble faith." Truly to flourish, he maintained, meant being rooted in a single spot. "To be human," he remarked, "is to belong to a particular region of the earth." That the local and regional take priority over the national and international is a familiar article of conservative faith. "On the whole," this refugee from St. Louis to London shamelessly announced, "it would appear to be for the best that the great majority of human beings should go on living in the place in which they were born" (Notes Toward a Definition of Culture).

There was, however, some benefit to be reaped from living on the margins of Europe on a small island that was formally European but, like the United States, ethnically Anglo-Saxon. His compatriot Henry James, Eliot wrote, no doubt with himself in mind as well, was a European in the way that only a non-European could be. He meant, presumably, that the outsider is more likely to be conscious of the spirit and culture of a place as a whole than those brought up within it, who tend to take it for granted and to lack an overall view of it. So there were advantages to not being a native European, as well as not having grown up in provincial Britain. Eliot may have been a pinstriped London publisher—he was jocularly known as "The Pope of Russell Square," which was where his publishing house, Faber & Faber, was located—but like many leading modernist artists he was nothing if not cosmopolitan, roaming freely in The Waste Land across a whole span of civilizations, appropriating chunks of them in order to cobble together a synthesis that suited his own spiritual needs. He was an unstable compound of bourgeois stuffiness and literary saboteur, moving between genteel Mayfair and bohemian Soho.

 

For most moderately enlightened readers today, Eliot's social views range from the objectionable to the obnoxious. In The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), he portrays his ideal social order, which seems more rural than urban. There will be a culture of values and beliefs shared in common; but though society will thus constitute an organic unity, it will also be strictly stratified. There will be a governing elite, consisting of the traditional English rural class along with an intellectual coterie of men not entirely unlike Eliot himself.

The task of this elite is to protect and disseminate the (largely Christian) values of the society as a whole. It is a vital undertaking, since if Christianity were to founder the whole of Western civilization would collapse along with it. Yet since the mass of men and women are in Eliot's view incapable of what might properly be called thinking, their participation in the culture will be less conscious than that of their superiors. Instead, it will take the form of custom and tradition, myth and sentiment, ritual observances and spontaneous habits of feeling. All individuals will share in the same form of life, but they will share in it in different ways and at different levels of consciousness. The organic and the hierarchical can thus be reconciled.

Eliot's poetry is full of journeys either not undertaken, abandoned, or ending in disenchantment.

The ideal, then, is a common but stratified culture; yet the social reality is very different. Like many of his fellow modernists, Eliot had little but contempt for most aspects of actual civilization, with its godless materialism, worship of the machine, cult of utility, spiritual vacancy, and bogus humanitarianism. The love of man and woman, he remarks witheringly, is either made reasonable by a higher (i.e., divine) love, or else it is simply the coupling of animals. "If you remove from the word 'human' all that the belief in the supernatural has given to man," he warns, "you can view him finally as no more than an extremely clever, adaptable, and mischievous little animal" ("Second Thoughts on Humanism"). He praises Machiavelli, of all rebarbative thinkers, for his low estimate of humanity as well as his promotion of order over liberty. It is Eliot's conviction that the number of individuals in any generation capable of intellectual effort is very small. Indeed, he seems to derive a well-nigh erotic frisson from the phrase "only a very few."

Most men and women, like the "hollow men" of Eliot's poem of that title, are too spiritually shallow even to be damned, which means that "the possibility of damnation is so immense a relief in a world of electoral reform, plebiscites, sex reform and dress reform." In a faithless age, the idea of hell is to his mind a considerable source of comfort. Writing in the age of Auschwitz, he declares in the spirit of Charles Baudelaire that it is better to do evil than to do nothing. Evil people, as opposed to the merely immoral, are at least acquainted with higher spiritual realities, in however negative a fashion. Humanism overlooks what for Eliot is perhaps the most fundamental of all Christian dogmas: original sin. Humans are wretched creatures, and humility is consequently the greatest of Christian virtues. (For the Christian orthodoxy that Eliot is supposed to uphold, the greatest virtue is in fact charity, of which the other virtues are so many versions.) The Romantic faith in the potential infinitude of humanity is a dangerous illusion. So is the ideal of progress so zealously promulgated by the middle classes. Eliot's poetry is full of journeys either not undertaken, abandoned, or ending in disenchantment. It would seem that history neither improves nor deteriorates. In "Thoughts after Lambeth" he writes, "I do not mean that our times are particularly corrupt; all times are corrupt." Yet it is clear elsewhere in his work that the modern era represents a drastic falling-off from the age of belief that preceded it. Like many a conservative thinker, Eliot equivocates between the view that things are getting steadily worse and the claim that they have been pretty appalling from the outset.

By this point, the enlightened reader may well be wondering whether anything of value can be salvaged from this full-blooded reactionary. The answer is surely affirmative. For one thing, Eliot's elitism, demeaning estimate of humanity, and indiscriminate distaste for modern civilization are the stock in trade of the so-called Kulturkritik tradition that he inherited. Many an eminent twentieth-century intellectual held views of this kind, and so did a sizeable proportion of the Western population of the time. This doesn't excuse their attitudes, but it helps explain them. For another thing, such attitudes put Eliot at loggerheads with the liberal-capitalist ideology of his age. He is, in short, a radical of the right, like a large number of his fellow modernists. He believes in the importance of communal bonds, as much liberal ideology does not; he also rejects capitalism's greed, selfish individualism, and pursuit of material self-interest. "The organization of society on the principle of private profit," he writes in The Idea of a Christian Society, "as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and so to the exhaustion of natural resources...a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly." There is nothing here with which an ecologically minded socialist would disagree. His first published review, of a handful of books on India, is strongly anti-imperialist. He is hostile to a social order that exalts the solitary ego and jettisons the past as dead and done with. For his part, Eliot understands that the past is what we are mostly made of, and that to nullify it in the name of progress is to annihilate much that is precious. It is thus that he can write that by abandoning tradition, we loosen our grip on the present.

In the modern age, Eliot protests, there is a provincialism not of space but of time, for which history is merely the chronicle of human devices that have served their turn and have now been scrapped—a viewpoint for which "the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares," as he writes in "What Is a Classic." The Marxist Walter Benjamin would have heartily agreed, along with critics of the conversion of history into a readily consumable commodity known as "heritage." Eliot goes on to speak of "our continued veneration for our ancestors"; but in practice, his approach to the past was a good deal more innovative and iconoclastic than such piety would suggest.

Nor does Eliot accept the arid rationalism that underpins the modern order, with its indifference to kinship, affection, the body, and the unconscious. Confronted with the creed that men and women are wholly self-determining, he insists instead on their finitude and fragility, an awareness of which belongs to the virtue of humility. Human beings are dependent on each other, as well as on some larger whole. For Eliot, as for D. H. Lawrence, we do not belong to ourselves. The idea that we can "possess" our selves like a piece of property is a bourgeois fantasy. The attachment to a specific place that Eliot admires may have sinister overtones of blood and soil, but it also serves in our own time as a rebuke to global capitalism—to the jet-setting CEOs who feel at home only in an airport VIP lounge. A belief in social order need not be authoritarian; it may rather be an alternative to the anarchy of the marketplace. It may also be preferable to a liberal civilization in which everyone may believe more or less what they want—but only because convictions don't matter much in any case, and because the idea of human solidarity has withered at the root.

 

Poets, in Eliot's view, must be both the most primitive and sophisticated of creatures. If they are more alive to the present than others, it is largely by virtue of being the bearers of a living past. There is a parallel here with Eliot's concept of tradition, in which the past still lurks as a shaping force within the present. It is this primitive bedrock of our being to which Freud and his disciples give the name of the unconscious—a region that is both antique and unchanging, like the mythological archetypes that secretly inform The Waste Land. For Freud, the unconscious is a stranger to temporality, rather as for Eliot the most fundamental emotions remain constant from Homer to Housman. In this way, one of the most scandalous, ground-breaking projects of Eliot's time—psychoanalysis—can be yoked to a conservative view of humanity as essentially unchangeable.

The modern poet must see not only the beauty and the glory but also the boredom and the horror of human existence.

The unconscious, with its attendant myths and symbols, can also be used to underpin Eliot's aversion to individualism. True selfhood lies far deeper than individual personality. It has its roots in a submerged domain of collective images and impersonal emotions. The individual, not least the individual author, is of relatively trifling significance. He or she is merely the tip of an iceberg whose depths are unsearchable. We are dealing here with an early version of what would later be known as the "death of the author" theory, or at least with the author's drastic diminishment. The poet, Eliot remarks in a passage of unusual emotional intensity, is haunted by a demon, an obscure impulse that has no face or name, and poetry is an exorcism of this "acute discomfort" ("The Three Voices of Poetry"). It is a darker version of the Romantic idea of inspiration. When authors have finally arranged their words in an appropriate form, they can purge themselves of this demonic urge and in doing so rid themselves of the poem altogether, handing it over to their readers so that they can relax after their labors. It sounds more like a peculiarly painful childbirth than a piece of imaginative creation. Poetry is something to get out of your system. And whatever its mysterious source, it is certainly not the individual mind.

Poets cannot predict when these obscure upsurges will occur: they must simply devote themselves to the task of perfecting their craft in anticipation of such spiritual seizures. There is, then, a good deal of conscious labor involved in the poetic process, but it is not what is most essential to it. It is rather that the poem forces itself into the poet's consciousness like a blind, implacable force of Nature; and when it has taken root inside them, something has occurred that cannot be explained by anything that went before. The most powerful poetry in Eliot's view sets up an enormous echo chamber of resonances and allusions, all of which will infiltrate the reader's unconscious in a way quite beyond the poet's control. Perhaps the most magnificent example of this process in Eliot's own work is "Gerontion." If modern reality is spiritually bankrupt, one can compensate for this to some extent with a richness of experience, and much of this is a subliminal affair. It is no wonder, then, that Eliot is so casual about conscious understanding—about, for example, the scholarly business of tracking down allusions and explicating difficult passages. The Notes to The Waste Land purport to do just this, but it is now generally accepted that they are there mostly to fill in a few blank pages. Conscious meaning is not the issue—indeed, readers may well be understanding a poem at some unconscious level whether they know it or not. It is welcome news to the student who timorously opens Pound's Cantos or the poems of Paul Celan.

The idea of poetic impersonality is closely related to Eliot's self-declared classicism. The classic in Eliot's view is not in the first place the work of an individual genius. It is rather a piece of literary art that is resonant of a specific civilization—one whose language gives voice to a particular culture and history at the peak of its maturity. The unique genius that produces it is not that of an individual author but the spirit of a particular age and a particular people. Virgil's greatness springs from his place in the history of the Roman Empire, as well as in the evolution of the Latin language. The classical work brings a national language to a point of perfection, and its ability to do so, ironically, is what makes its appeal so universal.

There is, however, a problem here. A classical civilization represents Eliot's social and cultural ideal, and the classical author who molds his mind most deeply is Dante. Yet though he produces a stunning pastiche of Dante's verse in a passage in Four Quartets, the influence is strictly limited when it comes to the composition of his own work. There are two reasons why this is so. If the classical work thrives on shared values and standards, the liberal pluralism that Eliot finds so displeasing in modern society means there can be precious little of this. Poets can no longer assume that they and their readers share the same sensibility. There is no longer a community of meaning and belief. At the same time, if a classic is to capture the spirit of an entire civilization, it must be in touch with its common life and language. But to stay faithful to the common life and language of early twentieth-century Europe involves registering a sterility and spiritual devastation that is nearer to Baudelaire than to Dante. It is thus that Eliot announces that the modern poet must see not only the beauty and the glory but also the boredom and the horror of human existence.

For Eliot to be loyal to one criterion of a classic, then, is to flout certain others: order, balance, harmony, nobility, and the like. It means producing a poetry marked by spiritual disorder, sordid imagery, broken rhythms, banal snatches of speech and barren inner landscapes. It was from Baudelaire, Eliot tells us, that he learned that the poet's business was to make poetry out of the unpoetical. Order and harmony can be hinted at only obliquely, either by dim allusion, ironic juxtaposition or (as in The Waste Land ) through a mythological subtext that intimates the possibility of regeneration. Baudelaire, Eliot remarks, draws some of his most striking imagery from the common life, but at the same time makes that life gesture to something more than itself. It is a familiar strategy in his own early poetry. By presenting a situation in all its squalor, you can suggest the need to transcend it without having to spell out an alternative, which might demand a verse with too obvious designs on the reader. It is not until Four Quartets that this negative form of transcendence becomes explicitly thematized. If poetry must cling to the unregenerate nature of the present, it is partly because its language must be wedded to everyday experience, and partly because literary works that propose an abstract ideal will fail to engage skeptical modern readers. Instead, their language must infiltrate their reader's nervous system, sensory organs, and unconscious terrors and desires, all of which a remote ideal is unlikely to accomplish.

For this reason, the classical is more to be admired than imitated. More relevant to the modern age is a period which in Eliot's view is distinctly unclassical, that of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans. "The age of Shakespeare," Eliot comments in "A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry," "moved in a steady current, with back eddies certainly, towards anarchy and chaos." It was an era of muddled skepticism and clashing faiths, along with a confusion over what counts as a literary convention.

Yet it is just these aspects of the early-modern period that Eliot can bring to bear on his own tumultuous times. The "anarchism" of the Renaissance is also the unleashing of a wealth of complex feeling and exhilarating new modes of language, so that, to adopt a phrase of Karl Marx, history progresses by its bad side. In an essay on Seneca, Eliot writes, "If new influences had not entered old orders decayed, would the language not have left some of its greatest resources unexplored?" It is this fertile legacy that authors like Eliot himself will inherit some centuries later. The loss of social and cosmic order may be a spiritual disaster, but it also represents an inestimable gain for language and sensibility, which break through traditional constraints to become more subtle, diverse, volatile, and exploratory. The textures of poetry grow finer and their images more richly compacted. It is a language close to the bone yet fast-moving, packed with perception but intellectually agile. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries bear witness to "a progressive refinement in the perception of the variations of feeling, and a progressive elaboration of the means of expressing these variations" (The Sacred Wood). That this stretch of time is also the matrix of much of what Eliot detests—materialism, democracy, individualism, secularization—is an instance of the cunning of history, which takes with one hand what it gives with the other.

Strange, Slippery and Beautiful: A Master Essayist at Work

THE UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK

In "The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick," the late author compares writing an essay to catching a fish with your hands. Her own are so strange, surprising, slippery and beautiful that we can see how this might be true.

Among the subjects taken up in this whimsical, uneven collection are grits souffle, the Menendez brothers, Kennedy scandals, Christmas, the end of love and female suicides. As always, Hardwick is elegant, sharp-witted, eccentric, exacting, dreamy.

One can't help feeling that the prickly and controlled Elizabeth Hardwick might not have cared for a collection of her leftover writings, many from places like "Mademoiselle" and "House & Garden," even one as thoughtfully curated as this. This doesn't mean the reader isn't grateful to have it. There is a bit more idiosyncrasy and wildness in this book than in her more willfully collected volumes. One gets to know a writer in her casual offhand pieces, churned out for money or on assignment.

One of the pleasures of the collection is lovely evocation of place. Her pieces on Maine, "where you can take little for granted beyond the gorgeousness of the storm-tossed landscape," and on her hometown of Lexington, Ky., are so vivid they almost serve as little vacations. There is also a superb and transporting essay on summer: "The weekend, commuting distance, bread and cheeses and bottles of wine, Vivaldi on the cassette, and a lot of work to be done and gladly." She elaborates on the Midwest iteration of that season: "Little of the charm of the ocean view and the table set with blue linen, and the delectable salmon, so well designed for painterly display, laid out on a platter among scattered stems of watercress. Still the American town streets — those angling off the main drag seen on the way to the airport — are a landscape of the American summer. And why should we groan with pain at the sight of the plastic flamingo on the lawn or the dead whiteness of the inflated duck coming into its decorative own nowadays? There is not much else to buy downtown, for one thing." Her prose has an entrancing power of description, a formidable prettiness combined with razor precision.

If one is the sort of person who takes pleasure in intelligent meanness, Hardwick is certainly one of its master practitioners. She is sharp in her satirizing, icy in her judgments, shrewd in her takedowns. She is what Janet Malcolm once called "fearlessly uncharitable" and what the editor of Partisan Review called "one of our more cutting minds." Take, for instance, her description of Monica Lewinsky: "Monica, who is still in the matter of discretion running a big deficit, as nurses name it when describing the victims of a stroke."

One bracing and refreshing aspect of Hardwick's work is that she does not spare herself from her own critical rigor and fierceness. She pins herself down just as she skewers other people. At one point she confesses, "As a writer I feel a nearly unaccountable attraction and hostility to the work of other women writers. Envy, competitiveness, scorn infect my judgment at times, and indifference is strangely hard to come by in this matter." Her highly fraught attitude toward other women writers will not have eluded close readers of her work, but there is something about her grappling openly with this tendency on the page that is disarming. As a critic, she doesn't shy away from the complications, ambiguities and self-incriminations many other people would leave simmering but unmentioned.

In these pages, she does not directly address the pain of the messy end of her marriage to the poet Robert Lowell or the excruciating public humiliation of his use of her letters in his poetry collection "The Dolphin." But she writes eloquently about the collapse of one's life in middle age: "Nothing is more pitiful than an older woman thrown into 'freedom,' lying like some wounded dragon in a paralysis of rage and embittered nostalgia." The disorientation and recalculation that accompany the breakdown of a marriage seem to filter into her essays on the culture at large. There is a personal urgency, a sense of the world cracked open, that makes its way into many of her interrogations of the climate of the 1970s and her more philosophical inquiries into life's difficulties.

In a peculiar and remarkable essay, "When to Cast Out, Give Up, Let Go," she speaks in general or ruminative terms of personal calamities like her own. "In love, the despair that comes from loss, from deprivation, throws us into the desert. Sometimes it is only by stark and splendid renunciations that hurt persons can find the water in the sand." She wrestles on the page with the possibility of coming to accept the loss of love. She writes that "then affection is not the weird, ambivalent manipulation of the death of love, but a sort of salute to its happier beginning."

Her unpredictable, wildly conflicted, bemused views on feminism are perhaps the biggest revelation of this edition. In a series of essays clustered around contemporary womanhood, she writes about the burdens of the new freedoms women experience, the new pressures they generate and the new problems created by the loss of domestic scripts. Is the modern, liberated world better for women? Hardwick is not sure. Elsewhere, she has commented on Simone de Beauvoir's "brilliantly confused" thinking, and we see a bit of her own here. In some of her essays on the women's movement, she seems rather lost; the authority and confidence we associate with her falters into tangled thoughts and wistful musings. She writes in 1971, "I look at little girls with wonder and anxiety. I do not know whether they will be free — the only certainty is that many will be adrift."

Some of the weaker essays in the collection feel perfunctory, slight, but they are always stylish.

The glimpse this collection gives of Hardwick, the woman, is intriguing. We experience her mind in darts and flashes. Browsing these essays is what I imagine it would be like to be standing next to her in the corner of a crowded party, in a cloud of smoke: at times uncomfortable, thrilling, alarming.

One falls a little in love with her sentences. I had to give up annotating as I read; I had marked too many lines. Some of her paragraphs are as intriguing as little novels, like a passage about a girl she knew in childhood who became a prostitute, or a college classmate who grew up on an estate on Long Island as the daughter of servants: "But this girl, her whole life scarred by a brilliant and somehow accommodating intelligence, was inarticulate and bitter and wild with rage … She, with her eternal reading of James and Proust, hated the very smell of the evening air, filled with the unsettling drawl of debutantes; but true hatred came to rest in the sound of her father's gardening shears at the hedge and the swish, swish of her mother in rubber-soled nurse's shoes and a hairnet, bending forward with a bowl of vegetables resting expertly on her open palm."

Hardwick's comment on essays generally is particularly true of those gathered here: "The most interesting will have the self-propelled interior life of imaginative literature." 

In Praise of the Academic Cliché

Opinion | In Praise of the Academic Cliché

Chronicle of Higher Education · by Alex Williamson for The Chronicle · June 10, 2022

"These ideas, … cliché as they are, are actually, today, this 'modern' day, the fancy damned zeitgeist itself."

—Jack Kerouac

I've always been fond of the ordinary, homespun cliché. But I chafe at its more rarefied cousins, the catchphrases of critical theory as they mellow into middle age: "the male gaze," "Orientalism," "intersectionality," "queer performativity," "the epistemology of the closet," "bare life" (and so on). My trouble isn't with "jargon," a word that continues to appear regularly in debates about the humanities. "No more jargon!" cry attackers; "complex ideas require complex language," counter defenders. Perhaps. But I'm concerned not with terms that express complex ideas but with those so depleted by repetition that they sometimes express nothing at all.

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"These ideas, … cliché as they are, are actually, today, this 'modern' day, the fancy damned zeitgeist itself."

—Jack Kerouac

I've always been fond of the ordinary, homespun cliché. But I chafe at its more rarefied cousins, the catchphrases of critical theory as they mellow into middle age: "the male gaze," "Orientalism," "intersectionality," "queer performativity," "the epistemology of the closet," "bare life" (and so on). My trouble isn't with "jargon," a word that continues to appear regularly in debates about the humanities. "No more jargon!" cry attackers; "complex ideas require complex language," counter defenders. Perhaps. But I'm concerned not with terms that express complex ideas but with those so depleted by repetition that they sometimes express nothing at all.

Most of these terms were, at the outset, startlingly revelatory. Many still carry a vestige of their original charge. They remain insignia of belonging, the currency of academic cultural critique: still-valuable properties in a high-risk market. But overuse has sapped their strength. Easily reproduced, they now serve as fodder for academic satire, mocking the revolutions they once dreamed. When I see them, I wince precisely because I hear the still small voice: "Do not ask at whom the satire points, it points at thee."

Such terms lie at the heart of a paradox in the humanities. Among our central missions is to challenge the assumptions of the world as we know it: Uproot conventional wisdom; attack the conceptual status quo. While we may also serve as guardians of culture — memorializing the catastrophes of history, defending knowledge and beauty against the onslaughts of barbarity — mostly we view ourselves as critics of dead thought. "Our work … strives to understand the world in new terms," explains the Modern Language Association. "Humanistic study … encourages [us] to refuse to take things for granted." We break open the locked rooms of the present, in all its blindness. We defamiliarize the future. Clichés are by nature conservative: They preserve ideas, congealed in truism. We thus stand united against the cliché, that great bearer of atrophied thought.

And yet, somehow we produce our very own. These circulate within the coterie world of the critical humanities, where, instead of challenging the norms of the realm, they affirm them. Guardians of the status quo, they mock one of our most cherished aspirations, the aspiration to original thought. They serve the very thing that cultural critique seeks to dismantle: adherence to groupthink.

You might protest that these are not clichés, but useful terms of art. And yet they conform to classic definitions of the cliché: a phrase "that has become overly familiar or commonplace" and now "betrays a lack of original thought." The word "cliché" began as an onomatopoeia: initially a verb (clicher) that mimicked the sound a printer's mold made when it struck molten metal to create the stereotype plates used by 19th-century printers. Soon the verb became a noun denoting the plates themselves. Sometime in the mid-19th century, its usage expanded to designate style: stock phrases; trite fashions, melodies, images, ideas. Perhaps a printer-cum-scribbler opened a dull pamphlet one day and observed grumpily, "Nothing here, just clichés," then said with a swagger, "Nice figure!" A cliché was born.

The origin of the word "cliché" in a once-clever metaphor reminds us that no cliché begins life as a cliché. Each arises from a startling insight or analogy, one that we repeat until it grows so natural that we hardly hear it anymore. Ours may spring from epiphanies. But so do they all.

The cliché generally has a bad name. George Orwell famously warned that clichés reflect the mental conformity that lies behind political conformity, preparing the way for fascism. For Orwell, clichés enable political double-talk, making "lies sound truthful and murder respectable." Hannah Arendt saw Adolf Eichmann's relentless clichés as a symptom of the banality of mind on which evil thrives. Composition textbooks admonish students: "Steer clear of clichés"; "eliminate clichés." Writers who use them "are too lazy to find [their] own words."

Still, clichés have their defenders. A cliché (they say) can establish familiarity and trust. Clichés are democratic, capturing the inflections of everyday speech and codifying popular wisdom. To scorn them may bespeak a narrow-minded disdain for the common. Clichés hide profound insights in plain sight. When they brush against the windows of thought uninvited, one can put them to work against their own fatigue by flaunting them. In implicit quotation marks, the ironic or parodic cliché can reveal our rote habits of mind. It can function homeopathically, offering just a drop of poison to work a cure.

But academic clichés are harder to defend. Far from being populist, they are the status markers of a particularly exclusive community, shoring up higher-than-highbrow privilege. They are esoteric, seeming to say: "You, of course, cannot understand." If they were to express popular wisdom or capture everyday speech, they would lose their raison d'être. And while others may parody them, we ourselves rarely use them ironically. They are far too politically weighty for that. When ordinary clichés become dead metaphors — so common that they no longer appear as metaphors — they serve as a kind of lexical compost, enriching the language. Academic clichés die too. But like toys dumped on landfill, they rarely decompose. They just grow grimy with age.

How does a critical term make this sorry trip? It starts, of course, at precisely the moment the term begins to gain dominion. To do so, it must capture the academic zeitgeist, but it must also seem radically new. Someone might have said something similar before (Erving Goffman, Simone de Beauvoir, Heraclitus …), but never quite this way, and not with such radical point. People begin to repeat it. They find its insight transferrable. It gains traction, then currency, then charismatic authority, and eventually oracular power, rising in crescendo with each repetition. Soon it becomes a kind of magic talisman: pointing to an idea, perhaps, but also performing its own virtuosity. It expresses an attitude. It declares your allegiances. It positions you against something: capitalism, or neocolonialism, or heteronormativity (the precise thing is not always so clear). Its occultism is central to its glamor. Merely invoking it announces: "Complex ideas at work here!"

It doesn't matter whether judges use these terms with all the nuance of high theory. What matters is that in such places, we can see — concretely and demonstrably — how the humanities does things with words.

Then its spread accelerates, and the slide begins. Applied mechanically to an ever-widening pool of objects, the term suddenly appears in the most surprising places. (How, exactly, is llama farming "posthumanist"? Are Chicken McNuggets really "bare life"?) Losing its bearings, it starts to stand for propositions that are dubious at best. Or, with theoretical pomp, it proclaims the obvious. No longer cutting-edge but blunted for general use, it becomes commonplace, then flatly imitative, then mind-numbingly predictable.

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The 28th time in the space of a week that I read the word "anthropocene" (six times in conference programs, 15 times in journal articles, seven in student papers), I sigh. Not quite a cliché, but maybe on its way. We always hope such words will change the world. Sadly, the words of even the best of us seem fated to die within the walls of the university. Did Fredric Jameson's dazzlingly obscure Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism contribute a microparticle to thwarting the tyrannical dominion of capital? Has Giorgio Agamben made the slightest dent in neo-despotism or the permanent state of exception? If we try to trace the political impact of cultural theory's most revolutionary ideas, it often seems doubtful they do anything at all.

But look more closely: Such ideas do sometimes travel. And when they travel, they do so — most palpably, most traceably — by riding the backs of our clichés. In fact, it is only at the moment that a term has so saturated our sentences and jammed our journals that we can no longer bear to hear it that its real political work may begin. It is then that it may surreptitiously slip through the gates of the university and into public speech. Such terms don't go viral but appear gradually, without anyone particularly noticing at first. They quietly wriggle through discourse, swimming from theory to classrooms to highbrow essays or blogs, surfacing on Facebook and Twitter, in podcasts and cafe conversations. As a term picks up speed, it begins to appear in mainstream journalism and popular entertainment. Converging with other forces, it starts to change how people see, what they think, and, ever-so-slowly, what they do.

1991, The New York Times: "You thought modern was bad enough. … Post-modern is going to be a lot worse. … How about making up a sentence using 'performativity'? … Performativity?" (incredulous jeer). 1998, Slate: "How long will it be before some cultural-studies professor writes a paper for the MLA called: '[The] Politics of Deconstructive Video-Tape Performativity?'" (satiric chuckle). 2004, The New York Times: "The preferred term nowadays seems to be performativity" (slightly raised eyebrow). 2013, television comedy-drama Glee: "[Sam]: I'm taking over this Monster Ball since … as a former teen stripper I understand the power of … performativity" (wry wink). 2021, Rolling Stone: "The fact that younger generations are now courting LGBTQ+ audiences through explicit queer performativity is … progress" (earnest nod). 2022, BBC Radio, interview with the opera star Kangmin Justin Kim: "I'm a Korean American man sometimes singing an Egyptian prince or African princess or anything, you know … the performativity of gender, a different attitude to masculinity" (gesture that means: "we take this for granted").

Some of our clichés turn up in court as legal decrees. One finds "performativity," "deconstruction," and "normativity" in judicial opinions. "Intersectionality" has transformed antidiscrimination law. In Lam v. University of Hawaii (1994), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that "where two bases for discrimination exist, they cannot be neatly reduced to distinct components," citing Kimberlé Crenshaw's foundational 1989 paper. "Genderqueer" now appears in countless legal decisions defending rights and mandating pronoun choice. It doesn't matter whether judges use these terms with all the nuance of high theory. What matters is that in such places we can see — concretely and demonstrably — how the humanities does things with words.

Academic clichés die too. But like toys dumped on landfill, they rarely decompose. They just grow grimy with age.

Admittedly, academic buzzwords don't always do what they should. They may go rogue. If one catches on, it may show up in caricature and turn on you. Sixteen states have now banned the teaching of "critical race theory," and nearly 20 more have a ban in the works. Far-right protesters around the world hold up signs: "stop teaching critical racist theory"; "say 'no' to gender theory"; "performativity destroys the family." In Brazil, protesters burn an effigy of Judith Butler wearing a pink bra as they scream, "Burn the witch." One Twitter comment: "How can you know if your research is having an impact? When a mob holding Bibles and crucifixes burns an effigy of you." Who will be louder? It's anyone's guess. Clichés are plutonium nuggets of thought: They might power a revolution, or they might explode on you. That is the risk, but maybe it's the risk of any political work.

My colleagues are at a rally. They wave signs in the air: "Feminism against patriarchy!" I picture them the next day scrawling "Avoid clichés!" in the margins of a paper titled "Feminism Against Patriarchy." We divide our thinking: political slogans, yes; clichés, no. These are two different things, belonging to two different spheres, politics and pedagogy. But how can this be right? For if we insist on this segregation, we've clearly forgotten the precept we hold most dear: Rhetoric is politics. Orwell and Arendt knew that — but they were wrong about clichés. Clichés are the indispensable glue of political change. It's just better when they're the right kind.

Not all of our students will be original thinkers, nor should they all be. A world of original thinkers, all thinking wholly inimitable thoughts, could never get anything done. For that we need unoriginal thinkers, hordes of them, cloning ideas by the score and broadcasting them to every corner of our virtual world. What better device for idea-cloning than the cliché? These don't live forever: Most are bubbles and will waft away on the breezes of change. So why should we seek to kill off those that remind us of things worth remembering, bear within themselves a dream or a promise, and might just repair lives along the way? Maybe we should instead strive to send our students forth — and ourselves too — armed with clichés for political change.