Man Criticizing
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING Man Criticizing By Stanley Edgar Hyman "It would be presumptuous to claim that this mixture creates a new form of literary criticism," says the jacket of George P....
...Certainly not...
...A discussion of his youthful romantic tastes in poetry (desert nature was not real nature—no nightingales or wild thyme) leads into an account of his contrasting present views...
...If "Getting Away from the Chickens" argues for escapist reading, another essay in the book dismisses the habit as using "literature as a drug for killing time and dulling anxiety...
...A Brown Fountain Pen" not only tells its parable of love and redemption, it is also a comprehensive intellectual history of its author...
...In the heart, if nothing else, there are cars...
...I cannot imagine other critics using the form, for reasons that I hope will become clear, but it is perfect for Elliott, and it is the first sign of blood in the veins of our pallid and anemic criticism for many years...
...It is far too long since we have heard these tones in American criticism...
...He lost it down the outhouse hole, and his father dug down out of love and recovered it for him—Elliott wrote with the pen for the next 20 years...
...I cannot imagine a statue of a reptile or of no-thing," he writes, "which could please as David does...
...Sailor with the Japanese Skull," and the poem is criticized technically but is ultimately justified as having "shown me a truth that matters...
...I guess I came of age in the usual, unshapely American way—that is to say, by turning 21...
...I can, having seen quite a few of them in ancient and primitive art...
...The remaining 10 essays in the book are of a more routine sort...
...The Sky and a Goat" is an argument against formalism or estheticism, a defense of "imperfect poems that contain a message...
...Five of the book's 15 essays are examples of a fascinating new form of literary and cultural criticism that Elliott has invented: criticism by autobiography and parable...
...Beyond that, these essays do not fully express Elliott's views either...
...Suddenly Elliott produces an emblem from the desert to explain his partiality toward imperfect poems...
...Elliott's positions are stances, necessary correctives...
...In putting his life and beliefs in the foreground, Elliott becomes something like an Emersonian figure of Man Criticizing...
...The danger is of falling into Philistinism, as when Elliott declares in "The Sky and a Goat" that he "would rather have a bucket full of goat's milk" than a Greek vase...
...It is cultural rather than literary criticism...
...The essay "Getting to Dante" is almost as good: it is hurt by a curious analogy of Dante with Freud as a reporter of the unconscious...
...Then it turns out that chance is one of the great themes of War and Peace, but that it is all controlled and determined by Tolstoy's art...
...Elliott writes, for example, of Southern California: "The sex is mostly in the nerves, very little in the heart...
...It is a parable of love, and somehow a demonstration of why Yeats is "the greatest poet of the age...
...Was that the son's coming of age, as the simplifiers would have it...
...Yeats' poetry is quoted and analyzed at length, and he is oddly compared to Elliott's father: both "believed and didn't believe" in mediums, both "believed history was not progressive but came in 2,000year cycles...
...The theme of mediocrity is mysteriously introduced...
...More accurately, it is a defense of the tragic movement, going down into the pit in order to arise transformed, otherwise the Dantean movement, reaching Paradiso by way of Inferno and Purgatorio...
...the son of friends died as the result of a fantastic series of coincidences...
...Let me say, if it needs saying, that my high opinion of Elliott's essays is not based on their speaking for me...
...Well, I am prepared to be presumptuous...
...Elliott's life with its history of family love bears witness to his views, and its events are emblematic because nothing is meaningless, because everything that lives is holy...
...The details of the work are revolting, and the reader does not find it surprising when Elliott writes: "Most of my free time I spent getting away from the chickens...
...Elliott quotes a passage from this book and one from Tarzan of the Apes, and challenges the reader to tell which is which...
...The essays are studded with insights, but these insights tend to be into life rather than art...
...I am formalist, materialist, and rationalist, where he is content-oriented, fantast, and Christian...
...Elliott at 13 suspected that his father might be mediocre...
...In briefly synopsizing these essays, I have not done justice to the complexity of Elliott's juggling, the intricacy of his weaving...
...Getting Away from the Chickens" has not only its final emblematic egg but a whole clutch of eggs: there is a Freudian egg, a Gravesian egg, a Jamesian egg, a dyed Easter egg, even a candy egg with a scene inside that becomes an ironic subplot...
...The best of the traditional essays is "Ezra Pound," which keeps a perfect balance of admiring Pound's technical mastery and despising the late Cantos as "muttery humming, with snarls," of admiring Pound's "generosity of soul" and detesting his fascism...
...The most ambitious of the essays, "A Brown Fountain Pen," is an attack on what Elliott calls "the muck-cult...
...This is a very unfashionable message at present, and Elliott is stating it as a corrective to what he sees as our Alexandrianism...
...For some reason, Elliott dismisses the explanation "He suffered from paranoia" as "vapid...
...If God is not protecting the Elliotts, Tolstoy is, in a sense, and the story of the piece of lettuce is a parable of the powers of the omnipotent artist...
...I see a paradigm of man," he writes in "A Brown Fountain Pen," "in one hand a puddle of mucus with a blood kernel, in the other a spiral of stars...
...a silly essay) interrupts its discussion of Leslie Fiedler's theories to tell the story of a chaste night Elliott once spent in bed with a truck driver named Smitty...
...WRITERS & WRITING Man Criticizing By Stanley Edgar Hyman "It would be presumptuous to claim that this mixture creates a new form of literary criticism," says the jacket of George P. Elliott's first book of essays, A Piece of Lettuce (Random House, 270 pp., $4.95...
...Finally Elliott tells the story of the brown fountain pen that his parents bought him for $5 out of their monthly income of $85 during the Depression...
...Coming of Age on the Carob Plantation" defends the rich complexity of life against oversimplification...
...Even here Elliott cannot entirely keep himself out...
...As they wrestled, the boy's "bones melted" and his "knees buckled," and the senior Elliott threw him...
...his conclusion is that The Princess is "Burroughs for sophisticates...
...Margaret Mead's anthropology is attacked as one sort of reductionism, imposing artificial patterns...
...It is "Eva, our three-titted goat, whom I used to milk...
...There is a brief account of the carob plantation in "Raymond Chandler," and "Who is We...
...It is the danger in the mode of realism employed in War and Peace...
...This literary argument is framed in what at first seems an irrelevant autobiographical excursion, Elliott's account of having grown up in a Southern California desert, on the edge of a carob plantation, and of a rude practical joke he once played on his parents...
...Ultimately he is limited by a preference for the representational over the abstract and for spirit over nature...
...I am as deeply skeptical of Life and Love as I would be of Hearts and Flowers...
...Getting Away from the Chickens" is a defense of fantasy and escapist reading against the reality principle, and a critique of James' The Princess Casamassima...
...This highly personal critical form is right for Elliott because it perfectly fits his message: the affirmation of Life and Love...
...as for mediocrity, Tolstoy "is not dedicated to hatred of mediocrity as was Haubert...
...His refuge from the chickens was fantasy literature, and it is as fantasy that he defends James...
...Interspersed with this jape is an account of Elliott's first job, the summer he was 16, tending several thousand chickens...
...Next chance is pursued: Elliott discovers the gaps in determinism by seeing a cigarette butt blown onto a clump of dandelion...
...Ultimately Elliott's strength lies not in straight criticism, but in following the bent of his genius (to borrow a pun from Thoreau) in the autobiographical pieces...
...Robert Penn Warren's John Brown is exposed as another, "saint-hating...
...The example discussed is Winfield Townley Scott's "The U.S...
...Each of the five essays has its own uniqueness...
...Then there is an attack on the muck-cultists, principally Henry Miller and Norman Mailer (the latter is given a blistering conjunction: "Who am I?" "Vote for me...
...If Henry James is only a tonier Edgar Rice Burroughs in "Getting Away from the Chickens," another essay in the book makes it clear that Elliott believes him to be preeminent among "a few writers of excellence" in his age...
...The Scott poem Elliott praises in "The Sky and a Goat" is a bad poem, and not because it is "true," but because it is badly written, as Elliott partially demonstrates, because its raw shock has not been digested into art...
...at 19 he decided that he must be mediocre himself...
...The title essay, "A Piece of Lettuce," argues chance against design, and the literature it concentrates on is War and Peace...
...Would he similarly dismiss "He suffered from gallstones...
...The answer to all this emerges as Elliott's wrestling his father when Elliott was 15, and bigger than the old man...
...his baby brother looked as though his eye had gone blind, but it was only a piece of lettuce stuck to the eyeball...
...There is a wonderfully funny account of the different ways each would wreck the story of Abraham going off to sacrifice Isaac...
...Milking Eva's comically deformed udder taught Elliott that rich nourishment may spurt from the imperfect and the unbeautiful...
...and personality-research in psychology is instanced as a third, quantifying the unquantifiable...
...The last two pages of the piece tell Elliott's bold parable: One night that summer a hen laid an egg in his mouth, and since then Elliott has been "ab ovo, a fantast...
...That is, he is writing counter-statements, like Orwell, whom he places "as a sort of corrective to the esoterics who have been overrunning literary criticism...
Vol. 47 • July 1964 • No. 14
