SOME AMERICAN MASKS

...They have chosen instead to explore the apocalyptic vein, writing death-of-the-novel novels about the death of the world, and demonstrating perhaps more convincingly than they had reckoned that theirs is a garbage apocalypse...

...Even his pains will be joy if they are true, even his helplessness will not take away his power, even wandering will not take him away from himself, even the big social jokes and hoaxes need not make him ridiculous, even disappointment after disappointment need not take away his love...

...And I believe that any man at any time can come back to these axial lines, even if an unfortunate bastard, if he will be quiet and wait it out...

...It was some time before I understood that Percy, indeed a skillful and even a charming writer, was lazy...

...Extended quotation from almost any of his better poems will show how much authority he takes from the one aspect of Stevens which I have tried to illustrate...

...Unstoried, artless, unenhanced," Frost's words for the American wilderness, nicely describe the character of Augie March...

...These characteristics hover in the background of almost everything he writes, and they are there in "Definition of Blue...

...I notice this in Alvin Feinman's "November Sunday Morning," to me a great poem, from which I quote a representative passage where the poet sees wonderingly That the actual streets I loitered in Lay lit like fields, or narrow channels About to open to a burning river...

...Mailer seems to be carrying out a strict inversion...

...The novel has nothing really to do with Senator Joseph McCarthy, and is not much concerned either, I should say, with Marx or Lenin or Trotsky...

...Could Mailer even hope to imitate the pastoral reductions of "Big Two-Hearted River...

...On one side Augie generates the embattled ironists, Moses Herzog and Artur Sammier, while the rest of his progeny appear in the guise of Enemy—drifters, petty inverters—in a good part of the later fiction...

...The new wilderness in its darkest negative image can be found in Hollander and also, powerfully, in Lowell: "For the Union Dead," "The Mouth of the Hudson," and many of the redeemable things in Notebook...

...There is another case of the same phenomenon in Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam?, which I read several years ago and thought energetic but hopeless...

...The best thing about the novel is its imitation of a pleasantly reeling drunkenness, but the groundlings of another age, if not the critics of our own, would have seen that the big hunt which is its climactic episode fails because it is a big fake—so much literary bull-bull, to quote Mailer himself in another context...

...I was open to feelings that had no obstacle in coming to cover me, as I was, in darkness and to the side, scorched, bitter, foul, and violent...

...Where he might have been encouraged he was discouraged, and his existence as a novelist seems to have been very nearly terminated...

...It is the distance rather than the closeness here that strikes a reader—a distance that evidently liberates the poet from his visual subject while fixing him to his visionary theme...

...We have to remember sometimes that popular culture and intellectual culture, sub- and superculture, have the same roots...

...Yet Barbary Shore is a book unique in our literature—America has nothing else to show quite in this vein, unless one counts "The Man Who Studied Yoga," also written by Mailer at about the same period...

...Such are the intervals of self-consciousness with which our best artists have been afflicted or blessed...

...Still, I should like to single out a novel that moves close to the center of my concern, Mary McCarthy's Birds of America...

...Truth, love, peace, bounty, usefulness, harmony...

...If one feels disappointed with most fiction one will not naturally read much fiction...

...But the defect has its compensation in a generously drawn episode in which Angie rejects his rich girlfriend, whom Bellow has unabashedly named Lucy Magnus, for the sake of a girl in trouble named Mimi...

...Augie, darling, don't do it...

...It was James, too, in the same statement, who warned against our putting too high a value on Europe...

...It was either an astute critic or Mailer himself who remarked that this was above all else a claustrophobic novel...

...If we think of two of the most diverse passages among those quoted, taken from Bellow and Strand respectively, we see that these personae are so closely related that they have no trouble crossing the boundary that separates poetry from prose...

...Perhaps the truest solace can be drawn once again from James, who, having fought through puzzling disguises more determinedly than most artists, discovered beneath them the romantic faith which a good number of his admirers have rejected...

...They carry sobriquets like Captain America, and they are played by actors like Peter Fonda...

...Bellow, then, in this aspect, was never far from the affirmations of Strand and Roethke and Whitman...

...John Ashbery, to take one example, has lately emerged as a strong individual voice, after a somewhat zany interim volume called The Tennis Court Oath...

...DAVID BROMWICH My parents rise out of their thrones into the milky rooms of clouds...

...But how far does Bellow succeed in conveying that deeper sense of revolt...

...It is not a question of grim reality but of plain reality...

...The narrator is a writer trying to make sense of a bad time for the imagination, sorting through the fragments of his broken life to find a pattern, lighting at last on the ersatz remedy which is History...

...Angie at the end of the novel is compared to Columbus...

...In poetry of an altogether different kind, influenced mainly, one would guess, by Hart Crane, and open at times to the apocalyptic impulse, there is yet a self-correction toward abstracting just enough which owes something to Stevens...

...Meanwhile, the poetry that seems to be lasting is at once personal and reticent, both hiding and revealing more than we can know...

...they cannot apply to everyone...

...There is, surely, a case for reading Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Stevens as our essential writers, and the one feature common to them all is their constant alternation between these two modes...

...Again this procession of the speechless Bringing me their words The future woke me with its silence I join the procession An open doorway Speaks for me Again This is still nature poetry, though of an odd sort: not only has the poet's connection with the landscape broken off, even the landscape's integration of its own parts is uneasily tentative...

...That day, and the next, he marched no further...

...The ambition of something special and outstanding I have always had is only a boast that distorts this knowledge from its origin, which is the oldest knowledge, older than the Euphrates, older than the Ganges...

...The very newest volumes by Lowell, and by the late John Berryman, do not lead me to modify this opinion—quite the contrary...

...One that I read not long ago was Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins...

...Yet something had gone wrong at the core of his book—wrong in what ought to be an unusual way...

...Barbary Shore had a reception so poor, and so uncomprehending, and Mailer is so sensitive to his own special audience, that I do not think we can avoid realizing that the episode changed his career...

...But occasionally, occasionally, during the past twenty very odd years, American art has gone past the sobriety that preceded Strether's own conversion, and has realized its particular being unenhanced...

...The narrative pitch is absolutely controlled, but the form of observation here is not in the least realistic, nor yet is it allegorical...

...More perhaps than any other hero in the picaresque tradition, he lives imaginatively as a type, not an individual...

...Its conclusion, where the narrator takes for his own the embassy of revolutionary communism, in fact means nothing, because History saves no one...

...Bellow, like everyone else, was busy discovering America...

...It is there intermittently in Bellow, and in some of Mailer's journalism...

...Nothing good can come of criticism that ignores this fact, and though fools may step in without compunction, the rest of us will hesitate before drawing the line between them...

...The altogether mad cultural careerings of the last two decades will then look something like a normal state of affairs...

...Night comes and I am alone with a candle...

...In discussing some of the recent turns in American poetry I shall try to quote generously, since poets, even when their achievement is more substantial, tend to be less anxiously followed than novelists...

...Nurses coming to bring infants for the breast now and then, there were whispers and crimped cries and sounds of turning in bed, and of coaxing and sucking...

...However, I do not wish to prolong this any further: I mean simply to explain why some of us read less fiction than we might, and search for some of the qualities peculiar to fiction in modestly satisfying films like Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show...

...He is dreaming and the city is imaginary and the cab is imaginary...

...Broadly speaking, we may consider it a "problem" book of a kind which looks increasingly central to our literature, the most notable early example being Melville's The Confidence Man...

...This was forcibly brought home to me some years ago in reading William Gass's fine short story, "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country," where something of the weight of the oldest American wonder is restored...

...The object is of course to purge oneself of anything false...

...For such poetry, if it comes, the ultimate model is likely to be Thomas Cole's great series of paintings "The Course of Empire," and especially the last of the group, "Desolation," where Emerson's own contemporary beheld the sublime ruin to which the American dialectic of nature must lead...

...About the purging Stevens is surely correct...

...We can say that realism is a central current, the testing ground for original talents who will then want to depart from it...

...For myself, I read novels these days quite by chance, when friends or more rarely critics can persuade me...

...Here also I arrive at what may seem a second oddity in these reflections: that I have spoken so much more of poets than of novelists...

...The judgment is wrong, but this matters less than the authority he summoned to speak as an author following his own sharply different path, not ready to be troubled by what looked like toy-room antics...

...We feel, reading his poem, that this is the kind of thing our poetry now can do, and we are grateful for the change...

...The worst thing about American art that evades its own identity is its absence of humor...

...I have spent time on the merely physical texture of the novel because it needs to be approached as a difficult work, slowly...

...And we are reminded of another novelist, Norman Mailer, who wrote a first novel which is impressive yet in some ways not surprising, who also made his break, and who in contrast to Bellow has severed all his past connections...

...This is hardly Mailer's strength as a novelist anyhow...

...There is much, I think, to admire in this novel, and much (as in all of Bellow's work) to applaud humanly even if one cannot justify its fictional setting...

...You are wrong, I cry, although he does not hear me...

...This does not seem to me a contradiction...

...Without having read his previous novels I surmise that this is not his best, and conclude that he is the victim of a trend...

...It would be fanciful to discover Whitman behind such writing, but it is very much the generosity and the discrimination of Emerson's observing eye that is being imported here, with all appropriate urbanity, to the poetry of cities...

...As quotation shows, however, where poetry about the city is most subtle it is still at the stage of test sighting, and one cannot yet say whether the major efforts will prove as astonishing as the minor...

...Whether or not I am right about the persistence of our realistic tradition, Mailer's true awakening as an artist coincides with his departure from it...

...Those are the words I use, and then the image shatters...

...Americans live for the moment and for themselves, and at best their way leads to a deeper identity...

...This is so far from the commonplace notions about Barbary Shore that I hesitate to go any further...

...Augie is their legitimate ancestor because, Jewish in name, he is subtly Unitarian at heart—because he SOME AMERICAN MASKS accepts, mostly, and his "no" hardly ever sounds in thunder...

...The fallacy of the fashion, and even of its distinguished inventor, is that confessional verse is indeed too easy, vulgar, and disgusting when all verse is necessarily afflicted by self-consciousness anyway...

...This was perhaps inevitable, but it brings me once again to my warning about popular culture...

...Taken together, the two parts of his observation are likely to seem either obvious or gnomic...

...The mobile and the immobile flickering In the area between is and was are leaves, Leaves burnished in autumnal burnished trees And leaves in whirlings in the gutters, whirlings Around and away, resembling the presence of thought, Resembling the presences of thoughts, as if, In the end, in the whole psychology, the self, The town, the weather, in a casual litter, Together, said words of the world are the life of the world...

...To judge by the articles in literary quarterlies this novel has now achieved the status of a classic, and why...

...We are right to think of these authors as living at opposite poles of our culture...

...To live, Augie says, is to be open to experience, and therefore necessarily to appear transparent...

...What has been fanciful is now concrete...

...What we have lost in the process is a general recognition of the disinterestedness which is an essential condition of all worthwhile fiction, and which we find quietly beneath the surface in great literature of any kind...

...He will live with true joy...

...But Strand's echo is in any case more resonant than the original...

...This school, after an interesting start in Robert Lowell's Life Studies, has gradually assumed the status of a Church of the Self, encour aging all that is most static and least inventive in any number of poetic selves...

...Yet the novel is too long by half, the plot too thin, and for the rest, it is shot through with all manner of queer and specious allegorical devices, such as a war in South America being made to stand for the war in Vietnam so that we may receive all the details and relevancies thereof...

...The effect is one which we associate with certain French novels and films—Mailer would recognize an ally in the director who made Vivre sa Vie—but his contribution is original in being fleshed out with broad American types, almost grotesques...

...This is from Mark Strand's "The Remains," a poem typical enough, and extraordinary enough, to conclude my own privately culled embarras de richesse...

...One may suggest that James is speaking of a certain kind of American, the artist, and cautioning us to stay on the lookout for disguises...

...I was lying on the couch here before and they suddenly went quivering right straight through me...

...Against the shifting background of our popular culture, I should like to trace the development of a few artists whose achieve ment seems to me to be lasting...

...It is the two women of his life, Thea and Stella, who make the complaint, sound ing a good deal like each other...

...Lal, and Miss McCarthy draws for her hero the necessary ethical consequence: there is a limiting, a narrowing down, a constriction of all life...

...His predominant mood belongs to a pessimistic dreaminess, which brings on some genuinely inventive moments...

...What the author does not quite accomplish is a steady portrayal of the soul that lies beyond this particular recalcitrant force...

...There is, after all, a part of Bellow that looks fairly close to the mask of Augie: it is the side of him we begin to understand when he cites Lawrence in interviews, saying that he, too, can live without an umbrella to shut out the sky...

...but in those SOME AMERICAN MASKS two closing lines the certainty, the weight, come from Stevens—though the superb rhythms belong, of course, to Ashbery alone...

...Now, however, it is the migratory habits of hippies that most absorb the energies of an observer, a tourist research expert who puts one in mind of Bellow's Dr...

...We are victims of an ethos—a time, a place, a set of possible opinions—more than we can ever know, and it happens every once in a while that we wonder how an artist would have been affected if a given work of his making had been received in a slightly different spirit, if the spectrum of opinions about the work had been a bit more colorful...

...Augie's commitment goes past the aesthetic to the ethical: his axioms are not merely geometrical...

...But no matter, we admire even this as we admire the poem for its single and magical Whitmanesque catalogue, "hands, eyes, voices, ephemera...

...When the midnight noise exploded, the tooting, sirens, horns, all that jubilation, it came in rather faint, all the windows being shut, and the nursery squalling continued just the same...

...SOME AMERICAN MASKS if Leaves of Grass remains our great original poem, and Huckleberry Finn our novel, we can see at once how considerably writers like Bellow and Mailer have swerved from the secure American consciousness which begins and ends in nature, and which was still going strong in the work of Hemingway and Faulkner...

...It cannot be fortuitous that one recurs alDAVID BROMWICH ways to the sense of possible masks, necessary selves: this is the abiding concern of our literature, and the relative success of our poets in dealing with it is what makes them worth reading...

...We hear a reader praising this or that writer with the puzzled affection to which American literature frequently drives its admirers, we think of the famous phrase about the "complex fate" of being an American, we say to ourselves, yes, how well Henry James understood our peculiar anxieties...

...Certainly it is a great theme, the subject of more substantial novels even than A ugie March, and yet in Bellow's hands it may seem curiously vulnerable to misreading...

...Our new discoverers carefully steer between the highest seriousness and the lowest put-on...

...But I have written about such things elsewhere, and will leave the floor to another critic, Harold Bloom, who makes the point concisely in a recent afterword to his survey of English Romanticism...

...The central power is no longer Stevens, we seem to be encountering some more general influx into the poetic idiom, when W. S. Merwin, who once seemed a nature poet going against the currency of his contemporaries, can approach his subject in the startling manner of "Daybreak...

...Nevertheless, let me offer an illustration...

...It was Mailer, almost alone among his contemporaries, who could dismiss The Adventures of Augie March as a travelogue for timid intellectuals...

...All brick and window vivid and calm As though composed in a rigid water No random traffic would dispel .. The poem sounds like an experiment in defining urban pastoral, but Feinman, happily, is liberated from the compulsive ironies that used to be required of American poets...

...He is, certainly, a man of many faces: in Of a Fire on the Moon, where he begins to write sentences that would make Carlyle blush, there are those sudden and rather tender moments about his disastrous private life, from which he is trying to escape through contemplation of a gigantic technological enterprise...

...Each new diversion adds its accurate touch to the ensemble, and so A portrait, smooth as glass, is built up out of multiple corrections And it has no relation to the space or time in which it was lived...

...A recurring dream takes its shape as a leitmotif: a man returning home from a journey feels suddenly estranged from all that surrounds him...

...But we must not leave out of account the question of masks, which has a peculiar importance in Mailer's instance...

...Lying longest, most still Along the unsigned blank Of sidewalk, the narrowed Finger of shade left by Something, thicker than trees, Taller than these streetlamps, Somewhere off to the right Perhaps, and unlike an Intrusion of ourselves, Unseen, long, is claiming It all, the scene, the whole...

...The discovery is there in Barbary Shore, his least recognized work but I think his best, for which I shall pause to make a small appreciation...

...One scene from Augie March can speak for those qualities in Augie which mark him as a capable rebel like Huck Finn, and unDAVID BROMWICH like the fashionably impotent avatars who have followed him...

...It is a dream, he thinks, hugging his body in the rear of the cab...

...To describe the qualities of this long reflective poem would be a hopeless undertaking: it 40 is the only thing of its kind in Stevens's later work, a poem made with complete authority, yet it has nothing of the rhetorical wit, the doctrinaire huff, of Stevens's shorter poems of the 1940s...

...the atmosphere is well managed and comes only in part from Browning's poem of a similar title...

...That is to say, the order really need not be imposed...

...SOME AMERICAN MASKS It is rather a common practice to distinguish the visionary from the visual as I have done, but Stevens is referred to under both headings at different points in the discussion...

...When a reader mentions Barbary Shore, this is what I see—not anxious left-wing posturing, and not the kind of single-mindedness which traces our darkest disease back to politics...

...It was our shaky resolution in keeping to such disinterestedness that James might well have been considering when he made reference to the complex fate of the American writer...

...Twice during the course of the novel Augie gets warned about the empty mirror which one day will greet the man who travels as he does, dangerously, in a world without shadow...

...For what is meant by disinterestedness is precisely the ability to 44 shed one's masks, and so to write from one point of view without closing off perspective, and while preserving and declaring one's own identity from another...

...He has emptied his life of his self and his self remains, beyond all need for disguise...

...Twilight came, and across the harbor, skyscrapers reflected the sun...

...I shout at him...

...And yet it results in a downward motion, or rather a floating oneIn which the blue surroundings drift slowly up and past you To realize themselves some day, while you, in this nether world that could not be better Waken each morning to the exact value of what you did and said, which remains...

...There may, however, be a hint in Stevens's own correspondence, where he remarks of "An Ordinary Evening" that "my interest is to try to get as close to the ordinary, the commonplace and the ugly as it is possible for a poet to get...

...One's cry," Stevens magnificently says, "of 0 Jerusalem becomes little by little a cry to something a little nearer and nearer until at last one cries out to a living name, a living place, a living thing, and in crying out confesses openly all the bitter secretions of experience...

...This, I should think, is becoming a characteristic American mode: metaphysical musings on the physical fact...

...I empty myself of my life and my life remains...

...At all events, grant for the sake of argument that James was indeed writing about the masks our artists require—grant that he saw to the center of the problem better than anyone else has done...

...That there is not beneath it something of a secret corruption sets him apart from the less distinguished incarnations of his type...

...As Lambert Strether remarks to the young man who would too soberly take his example, "prepare yourself, while you're about it, to be more amusing...

...His reply comes near the end of the novel, in the charmingly improvised theory of "axial lines...

...Bellow writes like this now and then, expansively...

...Gritty realism: it cuts across the arts, and stays respectable in films like All the King's Men and The Hustler...

...One may bear in mind the metaphysical celebration of a physical world, a process which the poem explicates and demonstrates in the same stroke...

...He exists as a force without self, and this, we are to believe, is the curse that haunts us all...

...There I sat by her bed, it being half-darkness...

...It is one part of his charm that the disguises should go on and come off at such a frightening rate...

...They will make you suffer from what they are...

...Trasimeno When Hannibal defeated the Roman army he stopped at Trasimeno...

...There is a recent fashion for confessional verse, stemming from the conversion of Lowell's style that took place in Life Studies...

...I must have had a feeling since I was a kid about these axial lines which made me want to have my existence on them, and so I have said "no" like a stubborn fellow to all my persuaders, just on the obstinacy of my memory of these lines, never entirely clear...

...The depressive mood comes out of details, but the final order of the book belongs to a tenebrous world of neurosis...

...Indeed, so plain is his falling short, so nearly does he become what he describes, that eventually the two halves of Augie's character, his timidity and his waywardness, split off into their natural antagonism...

...Our disease is not so much alienation as it is solipsism, and the subject of modem poetry is endlessly solipsism, or more simply the hopeless question: why is there no subject...

...I don't have any place special to go...

...In Mailer's later work there is only one character, the author, unwinding an inexhaustible but necessarily tiresome conversation with himself, a scheme that may strike the reader as imaginatively less daring than what was attempted in Barbary Shore...

...This is, for me, one of the great moments in recent American fiction, and one will search in vain for anything quite as dramatic in the later Bellow: Lucy says goodbye with a pinched smile and Augie, a wanderer once more, ends up beside Mimi in the maternity ward of a hospital, waiting for the new year to strike...

...The drifter whose energy Bellow loved, and whose content he came to reject, is now the celebrated dark angel of our representative mass fictions, from Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider to the most recent production of the first slick novelist one might care to name...

...These are strong words...

...For that gesture, and for the comic richness that remains this author's surest gift, the book was adequately praised...

...Gass's story, though, is a curiously detached pastoral, the product of a consciousness deliberately held separate from the things around it, and so rather metaphysical in its celebration of the simply physical...

...Memory is the creative element here as in so much of recent American poetry, including the following example by Louis Simpson...

...and yet the very stiffness here, talking at rather than to, squares in some sense with the larger plan of the book...

...So far, the enterprise has been carried through with varying degrees of success...

...the futuristic setting has possibilities, or so one would think...

...He will be brought into focus...

...Through Stevens this has come down to us very potently indeed, as in John Hollander's "Sunday A.M...

...Only its existence is a part of all being, and is therefore, I suppose, to be prized Beyond chasms of night that fight us By being hidden and present...

...The first lines have set the scene, and the last offer a metaphysical gloss...

...on the contrary, his comment is significant precisely as a queer moment of subjective clairvoyance pretending to be objective...

...The obliqueness of The Auroras of Autumn is selfrevelatory, while the directness of Lowell's recent volumes is not...

...His hands fold upon his heart to still its beating...

...I confess that I do not feel at all guilty on this count, and my reason is that poets in recent years have written at extremes of our two modes in the best American manner, while novelists have not...

...Though the great speech about "life" in The Ambassadors is delivered with a show of conscious humor, it is for James a speech DAVID BROMWICH without irony...

...far more natural writers of dialogue can be found among our lesser figuresSalinger, Updike, and others...

...Perceptions are gathered somewhere at the edge of consciousness, where they wait, never quite moving across to make a convincingly real image...

...and these feelings receding by and by, I was aware of others full of great suggestion and of this place where I was cast up...

...The great American temptation is to an undiscriminating openness...

...When striving stops, there they are as a gift...

...So the blind lead the blind and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost...

...At about one o'clock, alert enough to hear me stirring, Mimi whispered, "What are you doing here...

...This strength, a strength of sympathy and yet of individuality, has been rare enough in our literature...

...His "no" is meant to be more, in other words, than an assertion of style...

...Yet it is to be found chiefly not in fiction but in poetry, for our poets have discovered selves more natural in every sense than those of our novelists, and their triumphs as a result are nowhere near so equivocal...

...Again I plead guilty to thinking this quality characteristically American, and again the paraphrase makes no sense without quotation...

...And all noise and grates, distortion, chatter, distraction, effort, superfluity, passed off like something unreal...

...but after The Naked and the Dead he has always surprised...

...Yet, in a queer way, Barbary Shore appears to be the one place in which public relations were for a time abandoned...

...In America, nothing goes by so easily as a change of dress, yet in art such changes have permanent effects on the wearer...

...What has been fanciful is now concrete...

...Time passes and I wait by the door, listening to the footsteps of roomers as they go out to work for the night...

...Consider the last few lines of a mysterious and lovely poem, "Definition of Blue," which begins with an unlikely trope —"The rise of capitalism parallels the advance of romanticism/ And the individual is dominant until the close of the nineteenth century"—and then proceeds to extrapolate from history a given moment, and from the perception of historical trends the perception of separate shapes and colors...

...However, it deserves some quoting...

...The trouble, they say, is that Augie defines himself too much as a medium for other people: "They live through observation by the ones around them, and they want you to live like that too...

...And here is the unwitting portent...

...and it seems a perfect accident that Augie should marry the second of these after running away from the first...

...Although the room in which I write has an electric circuit, it functions no longer...

...There was a change of heart in the style here, as if finally the novelist, together with his hero, had stepped down into the vulgate of experience...

...Time tells me what I am...

...Miss McCarthy isworried in an immediate way about nature, and in the long run about human nature...

...And he goes on...

...In both style and substance the obvious source is Cavafy, and yet the tone of quiet resignation, which ought to be pure, is moralized in what must seem a peculiarly American fashion...

...But lately I have felt these thrilling lines again...

...To the extraliterary public he has become, according to plan, another Hemingway: more intelligent but just as well esteemed by those who do not ordinarily read fiction, just as sternly a champion of manhood, just as chronically unable to create a woman who lives on the written page...

...The shift to novelists who begin and end in cities may at one time have looked complete, yet it will probably appear in the long run to have been a temporary phenomenon, or at any rate one tendency among others...

...I was gone for hours and ended at the docks where I sat on a deserted quay, flipping pebbles into the oily water which swirled about the piles...

...I refer to the school of "confessional" poetry, which counts among its practitioners our most widely honored and indeed our most faithfully read poets...

...We may surely assume that Augie's persona in such a passage has widened to include the author's, so that we have the argument of the book served up to us on a platter...

...However, it is also a proof of grace—the American grace, after Emerson, after Whitman, after Augie's myriad precursors who spoke jauntily freestyle and made the record in their own way...

...Lowell's confessional worries protect the most impenetrable of masks, but the remoteness of any mask from Stevens's poem helps to purify it, and sets the self bare in a way far deeper than the autobiographical...

...Unfortunately, the novelists (a few of the better ones) and not their former readers (roughly the same few) have defected...

...this city is the real city, the material city, and your vehicle is history...

...We may conclude that Augie stands among his creator's most disarming masks...

...Ashbery is the possessor, among other things, of a terribly saturnine sense of humor together with a sense of burlesque, all of which reminds one a little of Keaton...

...It is not only the prophetic cadence of Whitman that matters—subdued but still audible in Simpson's poem, freer in the same author's "Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain," cacophonous throughout Allen Ginsberg's work—but also Emerson's settled preoccupation with the visual for its own sake, the disturbances of a random leaf or stone...

...To this one merely adds that Lowell has been from the first essentially a poet of public themes, and that the greatest difficulty of his continuing self-exposure will be an ennui which he shares with his readers— ennui which, as Baudelaire reminds us, can swallow the whole world in an enormous yawn...

...His tent lay in the moonlight, his sword shone in the moonlight, what thought kept him from moving, no one knows...

...I empty myself of my life and my life remains...

...I change and I am the same...

...Why a poetry of this tone should have become so influential I cannot with any certainty say: among Stevens's longer poems "The Auroras," "Sunday Morning," and "The Man with the Blue Guitar" all seem to me plainly greater...

...To impose some kind of order on the foregoing chaos of writers is a less difficult task than one might have feared...

...and it is starting to flourish, thank goodness, in our poetry...

...At any time life can come together again and man be regenerated, and doesn't have to be a public servant like Osiris who gets torn apart annually for the sake of the common prosperity, but the man himself, finite and taped as he is, can still come where the axial lines are...

...Obvious, universal, and hopelessly dull if he is telling the American Character to take care of its own interests: but what else can he mean...

...The figure of Wallace Stevens looms behind much of what is now alive in our poetry, but one may venture that it is the Stevens of "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" rather than "The Auroras...

...Before entering on so large and fruitful a subject one ought perhaps to apologize for that part of it which one does not intend to speak about...

...Why does the poet appear fairly to serenade the barbarians who make his last image...

...We have our continuities after all...

...Bellow started as a writer of realistic prose, and broke with his own past in a novel that contains better than its share of outrageous metaphors, classical allusions, invocations of various muses...

...I ate my solitary meal in a lunchroom and returned to my desk in an attempt to write...

...That James himself never shook off a rather advanced case of Europe in the head need not really trouble us...

...The old man walking the twilight beach, oppressed by creative loss and pondering the lesson of the northern lights, is as genuinely open to our understanding as the perplexed poet confronting the leach-gatherer was, but the middle-aged man shown in all the personal, even clinical detail that a wry nobility turns against itself remains as opaque to our apprehension as he is to his own...

...Stranger, when you go to Rome, when you have placed your hand in the gargoyle's mouth, and walked in the alleys .. . when you have satisfied your hunger for stone, at night you will return to the trees and the ways of the barbarians, hands, eyes, voices, ephemera, shadows of the African horsemen...

...I note in passing a slight echo of Theodore Roethke—"My secrets cry aloud./ I have no need for tongue./ My heart keeps open house,/ My doors are widely swung"—and my only reason for neglecting Roethke is that he has been rather widely written about already, and is getting at least some of the appreciation that he deserves along with the other sure poets of his generation, Elizabeth Bishop and Randall Jarrell...

...Again, 38 DAVID BROMWICH the dialogue has been rendered brittly out of touch with the way people actually talk...

...Death will not be terrible to him if life is not...

...Not in Manhattan," though more specifically this poet has in mind the insinuations of light which we 42 wonder at in certain of Hopper's paintings...

...This is what the novel is about...

...She marks how surely nature stands at the center of American civilization, she sees that Americans, in their restless attempt at self-definition, have made of it only a last frontier to conquer, and she is appalled...

...It is Bellow's largest failure in the novel that he relies too heavily on his readers to infer such qualities—generally we see the hero drifting, simply drifting, with the current...

...Mailer has of course failed at a good many things...

...Yet the tradition probably will remain stronger than the rebels against it...

...The discussions of a revolutionary past in poorly lit tenement rooms are counterpoint...

...I was open to feelings that had no obstacle in coming to cover me...

...Out of such strange amalgams most of our surviving recent poetry has been made...

...Through this novel as through much of its author's recent work there runs a solemn expatriate pessimism which the rest of us cannot afford to share, but her point, so delicately made, about the crowding of human monads into a space once held by transcendent nature has its relevance to the survival not only of Americans but of American artists as well...

...How can I sing...

...It is scatological, it is pop, it is Faulkner updated...

...Yet I think this is the kind of writing that may come to dominate the next generation of poets, as our cities devolve ever more rapidly into wildernesses...

...And the more we read in American literature, the more we see of such identities...

...Take as an example a book like The Adventures of Augie March, which comes close to being a great novel...

...Yet our novelists are not satisfied to perform good works in the ordinary way, and now, in a longer perspective, we can recognize in Saul Bellow's novel a rallying cry and an unwitting portent...

...I began to breathe by my own normal measure and grew much calmer...

...Now, a good many critics like Percy, and as I found there are good reasons for liking him...

...In fourteen hours they will be back...

...he has sometimes even offered his failure as our proper aesthetic experience...

...Shortcomings like these in a talented writer have to do with some broader fashion, in which a leading role is played, I fear, by the lamentable simple heart Vonnegut...

...When it was birds that migrated we could at any rate spot them as a point of existence outside our own, and qualifying our own...

...The amnesiac solitude of the postwar years has its oblique reflection in a book which reads like a meditation on Eliot's line, "These fragments I have shored against my ruins...