Modernism and After

...Writers &Writing MDDERNISM AND AFTER BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL seems only yesterday that Ezra Pound and T S Eliot were avant-garde iconoclasts, James Joyce's Ulysses was considered both obscene and opaque, and Ernest Hemingway's style was seen as expressing only the brave disillusionment of a generation growing up in the aftermath of World War I Today, books by these writers are classics along with the works of Browning, Tennyson and Dickens, while scholarly annotations make them accessible to schoolchildren In his graceful Introduction to Memories of the Moderns (New Directions, 248 pp ,$15 95) Harry Levin, reminiscing about the bygone early days of modernism, remarks that "to live through such periods of change is to be confirmed in the realization that the word contemporary, in its literal meaning, signifies being temporary together" Levin is ideally qualified to write a valediction to modernism His James Joyce A Critical Introduction (1941) was a work of pioneering scholarship His far-ranging erudition makes him equally comfortable with writers from Europe or the Anglo-American literary tradition And he has the additional advantage of having been an eyewitness to the strengths and foibles of many moderns The pieces collected in this book are true labors of love, essays about those authors who have meant most to Levin Some were close friends F O Matthiessen, first his teacher and later his colleagueat Harvard, Edmund Wilson, a neigh-boi, I A Richards and W H Auden Others are admired heioes whom he did not meet loyce, Mann, Eliot, Hemingway But whether he knew his subject personally or not, passionate tairmindcdncss and generosity ol spirit pervades Ins clcar-cvcd obsci vations Levin is that rare being among sullies who can hate the sin and love the sinner He accuses JeanPaul Sartre of conducting "a furious and infuriating assault on nothing less than literature itself " Yet in a preface to the piece, speaking of Sartre's blindness-enforced silence, he says, "I hope one may, while retaining the kind of literary reservations here expressed, sincerely regret the recent loss of his courageous voice in formulating timely social problems and dramatizing perdurable moral issues " Levin subscribes to no critical ideology, relying instead on insight to make his best points Dogmatism can be a treacherous method, as he pointed out to Matthiessen after reading his The Achievement of T S Eliot Taking issue with the book's favorable assessment of Eliot's value as a critic, Levin countered that, "in the last analysis, Eliot's critical technique is impressionistic, his dogma based on nothing less ephemeral than good taste, and his authority is a personal authority," a kind of "flickering guidance of the inner light " Indeed, the unsystematic criticism of Matthiessen and Levin has the advantage of allowing their flashes of perception to cast illumination unhindered by dogma upon the ways of writers Levin pays Matthiessen the best compliment a good student can pay a great teacher by displaying the same powers of penetration and humanistic breadth An example of Levin's gift is demonstrated in his linking the late Edmund Wilson's idiosvncracies and critical method "It throws some light on Wilson hmiselt to recall his penchant for sleight ot hand He had a uav ot fascinating children bv creating a mouse out ot Ins handkerchief Because I showed no interest in his card tricks, he once accused me of lacking intellectual cunositv There vv as an clement ot tins concern in his critical approach, as it vveie, tothemasicis ol hlerarv legerdemain \ resolve that the eve should be as quick as the hand, and undistracted by a patter, in discerning how the effects of magic are produced Thus a parlor magician is the very opposite of a guru, he lives in a rationalistic, not a mystical, world, his mysteries exist in order to be de-mythologized Those [critics] who complained of too much plot synopsis and summarizing failed to appreciate how much decoding and unriddling had been involved—in a process which ultimately carried Wilson back to the original hunting ground of exegesis, the Bible " Levin finds it supremely fitting that Wilson's "tombstone, in the Wellfleet cemetery, bears a Hebrew inscription [a language the critic studied in old age] echoing the words of God to Joshua after the death of Moses, and traditionally recited when the reading of a book of the Torah has been completed 'Be strong, and of good courage '" Levin is just as effective in his perception of the contrast between the careers of two famous Midwestern expatriates "Underneath the many-colored mantle of his cosmopolitanism, his self-vaunting 'world citizenship,' [Pound] remained provincial in many ways Eliot had put down roots in England, and had acquired a British accent along with a furled umbrella and bowler hat The longer Pound stayed away from the United States, the more American he considered himself, parodying the rustic stereotypes of his bygone youth, and modeling his epistolary style on the nasal dialect of the crackerbarrel philosopher" The debonaire essay that is the source of the above quotation pursues the theme of being rooted to a region with references to Amy and Robert Lowell, both of whom fell under the influence of the Eliot/ Pound school and then set themselves against it as rivals, re-pudiators and regionahsts Levin is marvelously shrewd at spotting unfortunate developments in postmodern culture Musing on the vagaries of current biography, with reference to what he considers a tasteless invasion of privacy in Louis K Hyde's Rat and the Devil Journal Letters ofF O Matthiessen and Russell Cheney, he dryly points out that the editor's candor "in exposing sexual intimacy is ironically counterweighted by his discretion in veiling" Matthiessen's membership in the secret honor society, Skull and Bones O tempore, o mores' It is, as Levin observes, fitting that Memories of the Moderns should be published by that evangelist of the avant-garde, New Directions, first to print the books of many of the authors he discusses For those too young to remember modernism when it was new, Levin's insight, scholarship, and style will prove an admirable introduction w ? ? hele the moderns were obsessed with fragments shored against the ruins of past cultural wholeness, postmodernism has mainly turned inward toward the ellipses of self-knowledge, that dark inner world with nothing but language for a companion Descending Figure (Ecco, 48 pp , $9 95) explores Louise Gluck's latest journey into the interior The title sequence of poems mourns the death in infancy of a sister who, by her very absence, overshadowed the living Far away my sister is moving in her crib The dead ones are like that, always the last to quiet Because, however long they he in the earth, they will not learn to speak but remain uncertainly pressing against the wooden bars, so small the leaves hold them down The tension between the unquiet and the unspeaking lends deep pathos to these stark verses whose words, while few, proclaim life in the teeth of encroaching silence Birth is precariously near death in Gluck's universe, and often one process reverses into the other As if excusing infantile behavior, she gently explains about "The Drowned Children" "You see, they have no judgment /So it is natural that they should drown," adding wistfully, "But death must come to them differently/so close to the beginning " In "Pieta," instead of the conventional representation of the Virgin cradling the dead Christ in her arms after His descent from the cross, Gluck portrays Mary as a young mother, trying to protect him from life "because he had no father /So she knew he wanted to stay/in her body, apart/from the world/with its cries, its roughhousing,/but already the men/gather to see him/born they crowd in/or kneel at worshipful/distance, like/figures in a pamting/whom the star lights, shining/ steadily in its dark context " In another poem, ironically titled "Thanksgiving" (probably because of the conjunction of deer-hunting with that autumn holiday), cold winds defoliate orchards, bringing in the foraging deer whose footprints in the first snowfall allow them to be easily tracked and shot The beasts are "the summoned prey whose part/is not to forgive They can afford to die /They have their place in the dying order " This grim ritual note springs from Gluck's childlike, unsentimental vision of the world where losses, although inevitable, are nonetheless heartbreaking Often Gluck's voice cries out in lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children, uncomforted because they are not But sometimes she sings of creation as shiny as new paint How beautiful it must have been, the earth, that first time seen from the air she exults, imagining God flying over the newformed planet In "Illuminations" she perceives her toddler son's first words as winter trees, not yet leafed out "How clear their edges are,/no limb obscured by motion,/as the sun rises/ cold and single over the map of language ' If this image is spare, it still carries the promise of abundant growth The techniques that shape the voice of Louise Gluck are very different from Joyce'sand Eliot's Her vision owes Jittle to their modernism Her devotion to the unquenchable radiance of language, however, is shared by all true writers in every age...