A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers
Sisk, John P.
The movie does that for all the characters and for the whole story. It shows us a desperation and anger which is so close to what we actually see around us that we recognize that this is what our...
...Kenner (who is now a professor at Johns Hopkins) has remarked that "I do not live in a box labeled 'Eng...
...Indeed, the life of the twentieth century mind is such that it can be entered into only in proportion as the observer can come out of his box and move across the boundaries that separate social, political, and religious institutions, levels of culture, historical periods, philosophic perspectives, and academic disciplines...
...In -fffect, he is asking for the homemade norld that is Kenner's subject: the kmerican reaction to Modernism as seen n the writings of three overlapping gen.=.rations—those of William Carlos Wiliams, William Faulkner, and Louis 7_ukofsky—which resulted in "a fifty year eshaping of the American language.- -low Emerson himself would have -eacted to writing so strikingly and even ;hockingly homemade by his pre-Civil Vat- standards God only knows...
...Once you are no longer confined to the box of "Eng...
...For Kenner, certainly, the homemade vorld of American modernism does not top with the production of climactic nasterworks, but carries into the present ,ge of transition "when the very luestion gets raised, what the written vord may be good for...
...to the crippling simplicities of Sherwood Anderson...
...with the tendency of Hemingway's small fullwords "to contract and grow fewer and approximate to a grunt...
...It shows us a desperation and anger which is so close to what we actually see around us that we recognize that this is what our world has come to...
...we will work with our own lands...
...If there are less gaudy hopes, there is less disappointment...
...Sinuous, tough, a nice combination of the formal and the colloquial, Kenner's style might suggest to the hasty reader a mind discursive to the point of being haphazard...
...With the possible exception of Huey Long, no one in our history has used the power of the state to more devastating effect—steamrollering private rights for allegedly public purposes with more skill, zest, dynamism, and utter unblinking ruthlessness...
...And yet he always identified himself as (and no doubt truly believed himself to be) a conservative...
...That Kenner can do this about as well as anyone helps to explain the excitement his work can generate in his reader...
...I mean that dual commitment to genuine economic freedom on the one hand and to the use of state power for economic advantage on the other...
...A society which can make movies as splendid as The Day of the Locust is not beyond redemption...
...More important, however, none of his knowledge is rattling around loose in his head...
...to role playing in Joyce, Yeats, and Eliot...
...Nothing, however, is more important to the integrity of the hook than a factor one is not likely to be struck with in the writing of academic people: the presence of the author as style...
...People become corroded and full of hate from their frustrations...
...He has implicitly said that he will no longer live in the land where dreams are sustenance...
...Kenner moves as naturally from Zukofsky's poetry to the primitive Kitty Hawk airplane, or from Hemingway's style to the implications of Hefner's philosophy, as Fuller moves from southern California zoning ordinances to problems in geodesics...
...finally to the ultimate frustration of the one true sentence and the extent to which Hemingway's pursuit of it shares with Hugh Hefner's Playboy philosophy the terminal point of nada...
...All too often, as a mountain of muckraker documentation shows, conservative rhetoric has been a screen of words behind which men of wealth pillage the public domain...
...Lit.' out of which I occasionally climb...
...We have listened too long to the courtly •-nuses of Europe,- Emerson says in the peroration of this essay...
...The anger on that day will not only be against Dick Powell and Myrna Loy, but also against each other and society itself...
...In fact, it is this capacity to move easily across boundaries that made it possible for Kenner in Bucky to put Poe alongside Fuller in order to see in both the striking homemade combination of crank and genius...
...Only a specialist in literature could say of Miss Moore that "she never allowed a fear of being thought poetic to deter her from accuracy," or of Faulkner that he "shows no special signs of thinking the old South more doomed than any other sector of humanity...
...People become intensely ambitious, then frustrated, then angry...
...Until that day comes, the battle is fought within...
...His biographer is persuasive on the point...
...However,' there is hope...
...It is entangled in religion and philosophy: of course it is...
...It just lays out the situation...
...But the inventiveness of American writers has also been connected with a vein of charlatanry that could be combined, as in Pound, with purity of heart...
...The dream of a comprehensivism beyond specialization is probably as doomed as is Alex Comfort's dream of an anarchic-pacifist utopia achieved through the elimination of sex hangups...
...The Day of the Locust is a powerful social document as well as a personal and psychological statement...
...The final upshot, says West, is The Day of the Locust...
...In any event, Kenner is first and everywhere, in this as in previous books, the specialist in literature—which is only to say that he speaks with authority when he writes as wonderfully as he does about the poetry of Moore, Stevens, and Williams, or about the fiction of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner...
...Robert Moses played this game to near-perfection, but with the difference that he measured his score in power rather than wealth...
...It is not enough to say that he built all but one of New York City's 24 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1975...
...next to pertinent developments in the early cinema and to anticipations of the cinema in Flaubert...
...But since the book "neither a survey nor an honor roll" we pend no time at all with Robert Lowell, Robert Frost, Hart Crane, Thomas Wolfe, or E. E. Cummings...
...To put it another way, specialization is itself our indispensable hangup...
...As we shall see, it was a Rockefeller who laid him low, but that doesn't dull the point...
...This inventiveness is why they were able to hammer out a poetic "as American as the Kitty Hawk plan...
...to Yeats on the equation of the perfection of life with the perfection of style, and Pater on the maximization of special moments...
...The real bonus in the book is Kenner's ability to explicate literature out of the awareness of such entanglements...
...In beween we spend time with Amy Lowell, 'itzgerald, Wallace Stevens, Williams, ,larianne Moore, Hemingway, Charles )lson, and Faulkner...
...we will speak our own minds...
...He will go to a place where expectations are more normal and down to earth...
...It talks about what happens in a society which creates stars (in this case, movie stars), tells people that they should be stars too, and also tells them that they should worshipwhat they are not but "should" be...
...But it was a writer's crisis purely, a poet's crisis, an episode in the history of nature poetry since Wordsworth...
...The subject of all my books is the twentieth century life of the mind...
...The figures he has hitherto chosen to write about—Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Beckett, Wyndham Lewis—indicate a sharp eye for the points of observation from which this life can be most instructively viewed...
...Lit.," The Joy of Sex —like the Kitty Hawk plane, the Model-T, the Geodesic Dome, and all those sensitive backpage lonely souls—is a legitimate concern of the critic who wants to see his subject in its proper con- text...
...Book Review/John P. Sisk The Motherland of Invention • Perhaps the best approach to Hugh Kenner's new book would be that declaration of American literary indepenknee, Emerson's "American Scholar...
...This is why A Homemade World has so few of those low-pressure moments which one learns to tolerate in even good books...
...In any event, we )egin his book in 1912 with Ezra Pound's :.mersonian declaration of belief "in the mminence of an American Risorginento" ; and we end it with the fiction of ,labokov, Barth, and Pynchon, struck /ith the oddity that "the American novel las been yielding to that sense of the aritrariness of language that provided the ,oets' opportunity of the 1920s...
...We will walk on )ur own feet...
...It is our situation, by and large, in America, and it is dangerous...
...to the rhetoric of evasion in relation to the objective correlative...
...It is a very "busy" piece of writing: one's expectation that unexpected and significant connections will be made is continually being fulfilled...
...That he lost as badly as he did is testimony to his own monumental ineptitude for electoral politics...
...In fact, some might say that in the anger of people at their institutions generated by the constant whipping up of false expectations by the media, we are already seeing a slow-motion day of the locust...
...The problem Moses presents to conservatives is symbolic, to be sure, but The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro Knopf $17.50 none the less anguishing for that...
...That he lost, in 1934, is testimony to the times...
...The movie makes no overt statementabout how to improve the situation...
...I think we do, not simply because of a splendidly A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers by Hugh Kenner Knopf $8.95 clarifying emphasis on the "homemade" quality of American modernism, but also because of Kenner's skill in relating this theme to his awareness that "American literature is tricky for the critic" since American writers "invent the criteria by which we must understand them...
...After forty years of unparalleled opportunity for graft, a position from which any ordinary politician would certainly have emerged a multimillionaire, Moses is ending his days still needing to earn a living through writing and consulting...
...with the homemade deficiencies that so often make Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway "sententious to a boring degree...
...Some Kenner-watchers may have been startled to see in a recent New York Times Magazine the report of his encounter with the Joyboy of sex, Alex Comfort...
...But only a man who is at once a specialist and a good deal more besides could say of Stevens that "He tended to suppose that he was at grips with a religious or a philosophic crisis...
...This is why (as I suspect Kenner knows) the New York Review of Books is not properly read if one omits the "personals...
...I am not as enthusiastic about he Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1975 23 Buckminster Fuller (the subject of his previous book) as Kenner is, but I can believe that he is attracted to Fuller because he sees in him an image of the holistic comprehensive imagination that they both admire...
...And in his one fling at elective politics, Moses ran for governor as a conservative Republican challenger to that quintessential New Deal liberal, Herbert Lehman...
...No one concerned with the life of the mind in these times will fail to notice how that mind has complicated itsproblems with its hopes for sexual liberation...
...The focus is all richly under control, ultimately all about Hemingway, all preparatory to the discovery not only of a weakness in Hemingway's strength but to a flaw in his nurturing environment...
...In the brilliant chapter "Small Ritual Truths," for instance, the focus begins on Hemingway but shifts quickly to Fitzgerald, Eliot, and the objective correlative...
...Do we really see anything new this time out...
...Kenner is properly admired for knowing a great deal about a great number of subjects...
...How else ex-plain the fact that a man named Moses, a pure-blooded Jew, would repeatedly and angrily deny—in New York!—that he was Jewish...
...why Hemingway's fiction resembles the poems of Stevens and Moore, "who resemble one another in having invented new kinds of poems...
...But it existed, neatly, on the poetic plane...
...with the fact that in Stevens' world "there are no actions and no speeches, merely ways of looking at things," that Williams flounders about as he tries to explain imagination and his variable foot, and that Olson, in the process of graduating from amateur to impresario, "indulged in a rhetoric not easily distinguished from bluff...
...But Kenner's interest in Comfort (who since his arrival in America may himself have become homemade) is as inevitable as his interest in Pound and Fuller...
...For he is in an important sense the living embodiment of that schizophrenia that has characterized American conservatism since the time of Hamilton...
...Tod Hackett shows what his solution is by simply leaving the scene...
...The movie of West's book is a guidebook to understanding what people around us are feeling and, more important, what we are feeling ourselves...
...Still, the movie is not a preachy movie...
...It is quite )ossible that he would have said somehing similar to what Wordsworth once ;aid about him: "Where is the thing vhich now passes for philosophy in 3oston to stop...
...The Wizard of Concrete It is almost impossible to convey in less than book length the range of Robert Moses' powers and activities over four decades...
...Book Review/Karl O'Lessker Building Bridges in the East • • Robert Moses is a problem for conservatives...
...The boundary crossings have the effect of intersecting crosscuts that increase the tension of his prose...
...With or without the latter group of writers, the book goes over territory that since World War II has been beaten hard by the insistent feet of critics, and not a few of the footprints have been made by Kenner himself...
...why "the new language (new to each user) is like the new world...
...You never know what you are going to find...
...But it would be a mistake to think that Kenner quite literally climbs out of his box and leaves it behind him—just as it is a mistake to believe that one can be effectively at home in many cultures without being grounded in one of them...
...It was simply the sector he knew...
...why Williams when he called a poem a machine made out of words "was setting it in the field where America's prime energies have been expended since Henry Ford...
...What is more, through most of his forty-year career as Construction Czar of New York City he was allied with some of the greatest capitalist institutions in America, not least of them the Rockefellers' Chase Manhattan Bank...
...And those who prated loudest about free enterprise were those who most assiduously corrupted state legislators in the quest for law-endowed privilege...
Vol. 8 • August 1975 • No. 10
