AGEE by Peter Ohlin (1935 - )

As a result of his conviction that James Agee was virtually unsung and very much underappreciated during his lifetime (1909-1955), Mr. Ohlin’s seminal study of his work would seem a natural outcome, especially for someone whose doctoral dissertation at the University of New Mexico was based on Agee’s LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN. Probably best known for the novel for which he received a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, Agee mastered a wide range of literary forms: essays, poetry, journalism and film scripts, as well as critical reviews.

In this overview, Peter Ohlin most particularly examines the complexities of the esthetic problems James Agee encountered and faced up to in remaining faithful to his unbending commitment to the integrity of the real and the simplicity of the seen and felt, the unvarnished truth of humanity within his sights; his views and his style ran contrary to the cultural climate of his day. In his preface, Ohlin states his purpose: to show that “the works of James Agee demand, above all, a human cooperation, a willingness to respond as broadly and as inclusively as possible…” He has succeeded admirably well.

Mr. Ohlin neither attempts a biographical treatise, nor does he investigate the literary climate of Agee’s day to any great extent, but rather adheres to the works themselves. It is the author’s intention to correct the then prevalent and popular view that Agee was “a failure and an oddity in American literature” and above all, to guide the reader to the rediscovery of Agee’s work.  Here, too, Mr. Ohlin reveals himself to be an admirably observant and sensitive critic.

About the Author: Peter Ohlin (1935 - )

Born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1935, Peter Ohlin studied and wrote about the art of cinematography, a lifelong fascination of his, and a suitable pursuit for someone from Ingmar Bergman’s native country. A graduate of the University of Stockholm (1959) where he obtained his Master’s degree in English, literature and the Scandinavian languages, he was an early aficionado of the silver screen; he became president of the University Film Society during his final year there.

Mr. Ohlin’s career encompassed a broad range of interests that embraced literary history and American literature, as well as film studies. Determined to study in the United States, he received a scholarship to study at the University of Kansas in 1959. He went on to teach and study at the University of New Mexico in 1960, where he received his Master’s in 1962 and his Ph.D. two years later, both in American Literature. Beginning in 1964, Mr. Ohlin taught at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, as assistant, associate, and full professor (1976), then serving as Chairman of the Department of English (1974-79) until his retirement in 2004.

A prolific writer, Mr. Ohlin has written numerous articles, reviews, essays and books examining the work of prominent figures in the worlds of both film and literature, including Hemingway, Faulkner, Ingmar Bergman, Buster Keaton, Samuel Beckett and Donald Barthelme, as well as James Agee whom he regarded as one whose works were largely undervalued and unappreciated during the author’s lifetime. Time proved Mr. Ohlin’s evaluation to be correct: James Agee received the Pulitzer Prize in 1958—three years after his death--for his novel A Death in the Family.

Mr. Ohlin resides in Montreal, Canada, and is currently working on a book on Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona.
 

BITTER HARVEST: The Odyssey of a Teacher by CONSTANCE MELARO

Constance Melaro knows whereof she speaks, and she comes through on the subject of education, the school system, teachers, principals and students loud and clear.

A dedicated teacher herself, Bitter Harvest rails against a multitude of ills, deftly tempered with a Saharan sense of humor. Shining a pitiless spotlight on the sad state of affairs in the public school system during the early 1960s, Ms. Melaro has little patience for coddling students. Permissiveness and lack of discipline are not in her vocabulary, and blame is placed squarely on the teaching professionals and those parents lax enough to turn out a generation of irresponsible social misfits. In short, she sees little to recommend what she clearly views as tolerance in the face of belligerent behavior, disdainful disrespect, not to mention rampant sexuality. “For the past 15 years,” she says, “we have been reaping a harvest of heartaches which have resulted from putting into nationwide practice a host of John Deweyanisms.”

This blackboard jungle is a battlefield populated by disenfranchised, bored, but crafty teenagers and seriously misguided teachers who mistake schools for clinics aimed at social readjustment and even mild psychoanalysis. Ms. Melaro is of a mind where rules and regulations breed responsibility and are de rigueur. Discipline is part of the do’s, not the don’ts. Children after all, are children and should be regarded as such. The present educational system, she reasons, actually deprives the child of childhood. By 15, “the first everything is behind him”—the date, the kiss, the prom, the dinner jacket. What’s left? Adult firsts, for which a young teenager, barely out of baby fat, is hardly prepared.

But teenagers are not the only targets, so are the teachers. They fail to instill ideals, fail to instruct in an effort to make everything “fun,” and fail to etch within the student a desire for learning. Public schools, she states, would do well to observe the prevailing atmosphere of parochial institutions where education is treated as a serious business and children are made to understand that from day one. This is an environment where the child is not coaxed, cajoled, bribed, bargained with or tricked. Learning for learning’s sake is not a lost concept. Concentration, despite tedium, has its own reward—the beautiful and the exciting are just that much more so. In short, there is no light without shadow.

Parents, too, are chided. According to the author, they have absolutely no right to interfere with the curriculum, academic standards or discipline, up to and almost including not sparing the rod.

If Ms. Melaro’s jaded view of the American public school system may appear to some as downright old-fashioned, it is also enlightened. The values of yesteryear do not insist upon throwing the baby out with the bath water. Since this book was published in 1965, one shudders to think what slings and arrows Ms. Melaro would hurl today.

About the Author: Constance Melaro

Born in the small town of Oakland, Pennsylvania, northwest of Pittsburgh, Constance Melaro nonetheless pursued a serious education in both public and private schools. Fascinated by language, she obtained her B.A. in French at St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, and her master’s, also in French, from Middlebury Language School.

Her grounding and vocation led to her to teaching, mainly in the public school system in the area around Pittsburgh and Baltimore, from elementary school to university level. She has taught French at the American University in Washington D.C. and at the Dumbarton College, a Catholic school for girls in the nation’s capital.

Besides teaching, Ms. Melaro is a writer and has written extensively for many magazines including The Ladies Home Companion, The Progressive Teacher, and Contemporary (the Sunday magazine section of the Denver Post).

DEATH OF ANGER by Allan Seager (1906-1968)

Set in the Midwest (as is most of his work), Death of Anger by Allan Seager is the portrait of a well-to-do, rather patrician man, whose wife is so traumatized by their wedding night that she takes to her bed….for the next 12 years. Her husband’s pride and need for privacy will not allow him to succumb to divorce or even to despair, or at least so it seems. Instead, he serves her, attending to her every need, despite her sharp tongue and critical indifference to him.

Enter the nurse to help tend the recalcitrant spouse, and with her, boundless passion. But pride, admonishes the old adage, goeth before the fall, and Mr. Seager’s main protagonist falls at last. And he falls hard--- first in love, then in lust, and last in limbo.

Mr. Seager, a specialist in the vagaries of life’s hairpin curves, provides several very sharp ones for his cast of characters, most of whom, however bright, “blessed” and sunlit, are edged in darkness, where danger lurks and death is never far.

About the Author: Allan Seager (1906 - 1968)

Allan Seager was born in Adrian, Michigan, in 1906.  A Rhodes scholar, he studied at Oriel College, Oxford. During a suitably peripatetic life, his travels took him to Europe and South America.  Mr. Seager taught English at the University of Michigan for most of his adulthood. A critically acclaimed author of several novels and what the French would call “an illustrious unknown,” his reputation as an “unhousehold name” is not one that he deserves.

His novels, which include Equinox, Hilda Manning, The Inheritance and Amos Berry, were literary works, and only one—A Frieze of Girls---briefly hit the bestseller list.  Largely forgotten and overlooked by modern readers, Allan Seager is nonetheless a master of life’s irony wrapped in spare prose and dark wit. He was greatly admired for his style and his piercing perception of human frailty by an august audience--Hugh Kenner, Malcolm Cowley, Robert Penn Warren and Sherwood Anderson, to name just a few.

Mr. Seager died in Tecumseh, Michigan, just a few miles away from his birthplace, in 1968.

END OF INNOCENCE by Jacqueline Cummins

Set in the newspaper world in London, Paris and Rome during the waning days of World War II and its aftermath as a backdrop, Jacqueline Cummins’s sharp-eyed first novel starts off with a bang, or rather with a crash. An army jeep carrying a young American war correspondent in England, Gloria Sanderson, and a soldier with whom she has spent the night, careens into a tree, killing her one-night stand and wounding her, be it ever so slightly. Maurice Bergson, an idealistic journalist with a rigorous righteousness on his side, rescues her; and soon he will leave an indelible mark on her battered self, as well as on two others. His character links the tales of three women, all of whom love him. While he is the backbone of their stories, it is their tales that form the ribs of the author’s sinking ship in the waves of love, wonder, weariness and woe.

Gloria, the American, Margaret, who is English, and Luigia, the Italian, each carry their own burden of being. Gloria belongs to the hard-boiled, hard-knocks school of even harder drinking; abstinence is not her middle name. Disillusioned by all her previous relationships, Bergson impresses her enough to change her mind about the desultory race of the men in her life. It is not a change of heart that will last for very long.
 

About the Author: Jacqueline Cummins

THE LADY PERSUADERS by Helen Woodward

Ms. Woodward’s piercing gaze is that of an eagle-eyed insider; she pulls no punches and minces no words. Those qualities make The Lady Persuaders, a critique and analysis of 100 years of women’s magazines, fascinating reading. Meticulously researched, her book traces the history and influence those publications exerted and still exert over society, and how the pioneers in the genre set the mold for all those who came after them. Among them, two caught the author’s eye.

The first is Sarah Josepha Hale, founder and editor of the Ladies’ Magazine in Boston in 1828, who took over the editorship of Louis Antoine Godey’s Lady’s Book, published in Philadelphia two years after she had started her own magazine. Godey’s publication was less successful than Hale’s, and they joined forces in 1832. Mrs. Hale was highly educated, especially when one considers the era; Godey was self-taught, but he knew a good writer/editor when he saw one. That person was Mrs. Hale. 

In Helen Woodward’s view, Mrs. Hale was arguably the first American feminist before there was such a word, not an easy feat in crinolines and corsets. While her writing was in the “feather duster” prose style of the day, soft and often sugary, her ideas were not. Beneath the velvet glove reigned a hand of genteel steel. She championed the cause of education for women, promoted their self-confidence, insisting that their power lay not in competing with men, but proving that they could retain their femininity while pursuing “the useful avocations of life.”

The second, Edward Bok, the innovative editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, was to take up Hale’s banner and run still further with it. Under his tutelage, the “lady” image morphed into the idea of “woman.” His mother and grandmother were no-nonsense, no-frills, self-disciplined Dutch women of middle-class stock and high ideals. He adored and respected them and it showed up in the LHJ.  Ahead of his time in his attitude toward women, he viewed them “not as statuettes, but as human beings … thinking, working human beings.” He was of the opinion that even if women were paid less then men, it did not mean her work was worth any less. Bok was a man given to crusades, not all of them successful and some downright foolish. But one of his greatest achievements was his magazine’s self-promotion evident in a still-famous advertising campaign: “Never Underestimate the Power of a Woman.”

Both were forward-thinking individuals, even radical for their era, given the strictures of an overwhelmingly patriarchal society where women did not yet have the vote. Over time, they and their successors follow two major trends: toward democracy and toward matriarchal power. In their hands, the tools of domesticity become the tools of democracy. Women’s liberation was ladled out, one spoonful at a time—literally.

Intertwined with the main themes in The Lady Persuaders are the intriguing asides, aspects of other contributing forces that revolutionized women’s lives and by extension the shift in the content of their reading matter: the invention of the sewing machine, the detachable collar, the proliferation of clothes patterns, and simplified, more realistic recipes partially released women from the draining drudgery of everyday life. Other threads woven into the whole cloth of women’s magazines are those of the “patent medicine racket,” widely advertised in these publications. Good Housekeeping’s Dr. Harvey A Wiley, auteur of the magazine’s Seal of Approval, participated in a crusade against all manner of nostrums and cure-alls, which he enthusiastically aided and abetted. In essence, the very magazines that once supported the snake-oil syndicate--in a classic example of biting the hand that feeds you--fueled the Food and Drug Act.

The author also tracks the metamorphosis of women’s magazines as they bend, veer toward specialization, reinventing themselves to both mold and reflect the changing society to which their readers belong, thereby preserving their role and themselves in the process. That said, Woodward observes that women’s magazines have remained essentially the same over the decades; the accent may have changed, but the language and its basic grammar remain much the same.

Make no mistake. Ms. Woodward is far from being a great admirer of women’s magazines, of which she once said that they were often a source of endless irritation to her. She criticizes their “silliness” and “losing sight of the pattern that brought them up.” She bemoans the fact that today’s topics rarely stray from those of the past, and when they do are often handled wither badly or tastelessly. Women who are successful in business and the professions hardly ever read today’s so-called woman’s magazine, she explains. She is of the opinion that women’s magazines have generally done a poor job in changing the American family, especially in the areas of raising teenagers, sex, medicine and psychology, “ruinous in half-truths and over-simplification.” Since advertisers pay the piper, she says, the pipers, many of whom are in the red, have to make beautiful music to their ears. That kind of music makes the world go around, regardless of whatever else it may drown out.

Nowadays, the more recent magazines, with the trend toward specialization, which has saved many from insolvency, may have a new motto: “Never Underestimate the Power of a Woman’s Magazine.”

One cannot help wondering, were she alive now, what Helen Woodward would have said. Given her observations, it might well have been “Plus ca change, plus c’est la même chose.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: HELEN ROSEN WOODWARD (1882-1960)

Born in New York in 1882, Helen Rosen moves with her family to Boston in 1895 where she attends Girls’ Latin School. After graduating, she returns to her birthplace in search of employment. Of an intellectual bent and endowed with a lively, inquisitive mind, she works successively at a dizzying array of jobs: bookkeeper, librarian, typewriter demonstrator for Remington, traffic person and bookkeeper at the Hampton ad agency. There she questions their payment structure and promptly quits. Not yet jaded by the advertising industry, she decides to become a copywriter. It was the beginning of the slippery slope that culminates in a 20-year career in the ad business.

There were plenty of stops along the way: she writes ads for J.A. Hill (a mail order house) and Review of Reviews, She joins the Women’s Trade Union League where she writes circulars, makes speeches and tutors immigrants in English., but becomes frustrated with the cause and gives it up. J.A. Hill goes out of business, but Woodward joins up with the Women’s Home Companion…and, once again dissatisfied, leaves.

She freelances as a copywriter for a baby-food client and is eventually hired full-time by their agency where she flourishes at last... for a while. She writes ads for books by Mark Twain, O. Henry, Robert Louis Stevenson and pioneers several groundbreaking advertising methods still in frequent use to this day. While there, she marries W.E. Woodward, the former advertising manager of the now-defunct J.A. Hill.

In 1925, Helen Rosen Woodward abandons her career in advertising, the queen of all she surveys. As its doyenne, what she surveys is the world of advertising and what she sees is not good. Any trick played on the gullible public--considered fair game--was all right by the industry. “There was no standard of honesty,” she writes. “If you were able to pull a trick on the public, you did it.” The copywriter, too, is in for a good lambasting:  “To be a really good copywriter requires a passion for converting the other fellow, even if it is something that you don’t believe in yourself.” It is fortunate, she says, that copywriters do not have to sign their handiwork; if they did, she posits, they would seek another line of work. The press agent fares even worse--a job she describes as one that requires pretending something is what it isn’t, not to mention writing and speaking under a false name and a false voice. “Compared with the press-agent industry, advertising, as bad as it is, shines with honesty and directness.” Woodward damned with faint praise.

That year, questioning the meaning and morality of her chosen profession at which she excelled, she retires, goes to Paris, convinced that the industry “was as hollow as it was big.” She writes her autobiography, Through Many Windows, published in 1926.

She goes on to write the “Pocket Guide” columns for The Nation, in which she unmasks Madison Avenue, chastises political candidates and takes to task a number of other industries. In her mind the familiar adage, “truth in advertising.” is nothing if not a bald-faced lie. She continues to write a number of books: Lances Down: Between the Fires in Moscow (1932); Way of the Lancer (1932); Queens in the Parlor (1933); Three Flights Up (1935); It’s an Art (1938) where she skewers the advertising world;  and Money to Burn (1945).  Some of these books were written in collaboration with Richard Bolavski.

Helen Rosen Woodward was reportedly hard at work on a second book about her life when she died in 1960 at the age of 78.

THE ROLLICKING SHORE by E.R. KARR

You all but have to shake the sand out from between the pages of The Rollicking Shore, whose protagonist, Allie, has an alarming propensity of being somehow caught in the middle in the right place at the wrong time….depending on how you look at it. He has an equally alarming propensity of turning the term “innocent bystander” from a passive mode into a hilariously active one. In short, Allie is an ambulatory mishap waiting to happen, and happen it does. Often.

Set in a resort town of Vino in the Great Lakes where he spends his summers without benefit of parental supervision, Allie may be too young to drink any vino at the outset of this comic novel, but he nevertheless gets plenty of veritas in more ways than one. The book encompasses three summer seasons when he is 15, 16 and 17 respectively, and as promised, this narrative gets off to a rollicking start.
 

Allie, whose sexual reticence is the subject of a running joke among the town’s East Side boys, is surrounded by a wonderful and eccentric cast of characters: a fire-and-brimstone  father who nevertheless has faith in his son, which doesn’t stop him from extolling the hazards of cavorting with the opposite sex; a sanctimonious uncle who simply has The Faith, a self-described expert on sin,; a friend with the improbable name of Pickles Donatello; an even better friend, Voltaire Buto, a confirmed atheist the way others are confirmed bachelors in this largely Catholic and God-fearing small resort town; an acquaintance monikered Moon Malo, another nicknamed Little Flower, the pride of the community and a male; a girl called Frenchy with a  conspicuous figure and a dubious, reputation; an entire contingent of Sons of Davy Crockett, who lose their coonskins along with their moral rectitude;  Bugeye, a venerable angler who deplores the use of Yellow Wigglers to catch bass (“any color’ll do,” he maintains); not to mention the Yellow Wigglers themselves, construed by a passing old salt as bait of an entirely different sort, which in fact they turned out to be.

Vino has some architectural wonders, too, not the least of which is Big Ann’s cat house. Allie manages to leave the house of ill repute by executing a perfect dive off the roof and into the lake below with his virtue intact, but without his clothes. (Before long, this mode of exit becomes a habit, despite the fact that Allie appears to be the only inhabitant in the community whose virtue is not easy.) In fact, several of Vino’s inhabitants have difficulty in keeping their clothes on--including one such pillar of the Jehovah’s Witness ministry  last seen running in the raw on the shore of Lake Erie in the aftermath of a Sneaky Pete botched baptism. Owing to circumstances seemingly either beyond their control or orchestrated by the mischievous and Machiavellian Voltaire that include kinky neck muscles, domestic wooing, non-domesticated wine, wily weather, elaborate machinations, as well as good old-fashioned fisticuffs. But it was the kinky neck muscles that got to the virtuous Allie, who learns first hand that putting a woman on a pedestal or on a bed is one and the same thing.

Next thing you know, the slippery slope leads to demon drink, Dago Red if truth be told, and echoes of Wine! Wine! Wine! are heard throughout the land, if the land at hand is called Vino! Vino! Vino! and, in the mouth of this newly minted young man, it is. Demon drink leads to derring-do, aided and abetted by a .22, which, when wielded by another aptly named character—Angela--plows into Allie’s shoulder who just happened once again to be in the wrong place at the wrong time this time ‘round, the perennial innocent bystander.

Even a funeral—Little Flower’s, who is a man---gets the trappings of comedy, where even the corpse grins, one of the pallbearer’s wears a permanent half-smile, and the rest of the coffin-toters are as plastered as a Spanish wall, two of whom gain wobbly access to the open grave before the dearly departed does.

With The Rollicking Shore,  E. R. Karr reveals himself to be the consummate humorist on a par with Barry, Benchley and Thurber, a master of laughter, running the gamut from giggle to guffaw. A firm believer in humor as life’s saving grace, he depicts the pitfalls of youthful innocence while poking a merciless jab at religiosity and the bigotry of the so-called righteous. This is summer reading at its hilarious best and should be required for all seasons.

About the Author: E. R. KARR

E. R. Karr, a native son of Cleveland, Ohio, was born in 1918. An adventurous soul, he held a multitude of jobs where he doubtlessly honed his sense of humor. When last sighted by McDowell, Obolensky, Inc., he was living on a dairy farm in Saline, Michigan, with his wife and two sons, having completed another novel. He was already conceiving a third, while building a 40-ft. ketch in which he planned to circumnavigate the globe and make a trip up the Amazon.

THINGS FALL APART by Chinua Achebe

Hailed by the New York Times as “arguably Africa’s best author,” Things Fall Apart: the Story of a Strong Man has been praised as Chinua Achebe’s finest work. A prolific writer, Mr. Achebe’s 1958 novel portrays the Ibos of his native Nigeria at the very end of the 19th century, at a time when the country’s rural areas were just coming to grips with the cultural clash embodied by colonialism on the one hand and Christianity on the other. The ensuing conflict shook the very roots of tribal tradition in order to impose British imperialism upon its people. The chasm that opened up between the two factions exacted a profound toll on African and European alike

Achebe successfully harnesses the heart and soul of Africa’s voice—its oral tradition—to that of the novel, a purely European literary convention. His unvarnished view of Ibo tribal life and logic is presented simply and eloquently, leading us through its charms and its cruelties, its beauty and its brutality at a pace reminiscent of the very rhythm of life on the African continent.

The story traces the life of Okonkwo, the “strong man” of the book’s title, whose resistance to the onslaught of British rule, religion and customs eventually culminates in the ultimate tribal taboo among his people. In so doing, he becomes the symbol of a social fabric that unravels—the very thing that falls apart in the bloody battle waged between the conqueror, the conquered, and the cruel uncertainties of transition.
 

About the Author: Chinua Achebe (1930 - )

Albert Chinualumogo Achebe, a world-renowned African poet and novelist, was born of Christian evangelical parents and a member of the Ibo tribe in Ogidi, eastern Nigeria. Educated in English in his native land, he graduated in 1953 from University College in Ibadan, where he studied literature, medicine, history and theology. After graduating, he went to work for the Nigerian Broadcasting Company in Lagos.

 Mr. Achebe abandoned his career in broadcasting in 1966, when he became ambassador for the Biafran government during the Nigerian civil war. He began his academic career the following year as Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nigeria. Also in 1967, he founded a publishing company with the Nigerian poet, Christopher Ikigbo. He became editor for Okike, a literary magazine and founded Iwa ndi Ibo, a publication dedicated to Ibo culture, in 1984. He has received over 30 honorary degrees from universities all over the world and received Nigeria’s highest honor for intellectual achievement, the Nigerian National Merit Award in 1987. That notwithstanding, in 2004, Professor Achebe, who has been deeply involved in Nigerian politics since the 1960s, turned down his country’s second highest honor--­­­­Commander of the Federal Republic—in protest against Nigeria’s current state of affairs.

Things Fall Apart, his first novel, was published in 1958, acclaimed by many to be the finest of the five novels he has so far written; it has been translated into 50 languages and sold more than eight million copies worldwide. Considered the Father of the African novel in English, Chinua Achebe is also one of the world’s most highly praised writers. Things Fall Apart, a cold-eyed look at the clash between traditional tribal customs and beliefs and British colonialism, has appeared on numerous lists as being among the 100 best novels of all time.

All five of these works examine the conflict and effects of Western thought and culture on African soil and civilization in a style that ingeniously intertwined the art of the novel, a European concept, with African oral tradition. Aided and abetted by his acute ear for indigenous spoken dialogue, the blending of Ibo proverbs, vocabulary and speech with Western English was unique in its time. Nevertheless, Mr. Achebe is a firm believer in the African principle that “art is, and always was, at the service of man” and that “any good story… should have a message, [and]…a purpose.” By the same token, the author is the staunch enemy of the European idea “that art should be accountable to no one, and [needs] to justify itself to nobody.”

Mr. Achebe, a paraplegic, paralyzed from the waist down as the result of a car accident in 1990, currently lives in upstate New York where he teaches literature at Bard College. He is married and has four children.

In discussing Paterson by William Carlos Williams, Kenner comes to grips with the reality of Williams’s work and refutes, as did the poet-physician himself, that the poem is not a metaphor, but depicts a “wrestle with words [that] gets down what happens”— He comes by this, says Kenner, by dint of language “level and solid as ice a foot thick, but buoyed up by the whole depth and weight of the reality with which it is in contact…. This note of reality, this sense of the poem being in touch with something dense, not something that the writer has densified by mixing quick-drying ideas with it…” The word is used “as reality” and not “as symbol,” the building blocks of what he calls “solid writing.” The word does not stand for something, it is something. Further, the word as non-metaphor is related to music and, above all, to movement. It is Kenner’s contention that Williams is “the first American writer to discover, not the phases of America that reflect what was in Europe, but the core of America that is itself, new, and so far unvocal.” Williams, he suggests, gave America its first poetic voice.

In his appraisal of Walt Whitman, he deplores that which does not wear well and that are usually accepted as real “original” Whitman: misspellings, violations of diction and various indecorous transgressions. On the contrary, he declares, the real Whitman lies in his “utter contempt for the pentameter” or, for that matter, any other fixed rhythm. The poet, he says, is a man who knew what not to do when it came to that. Whitman’s talents are elusive, often more or less stymieing those who sought to dissect his work. Like Yeats, Whitman has since become fodder for biographers rather than critics. But Kenner holds that it is virtually impossible to use the usual documentary expose not because there is no “life,” there, but because the hapless biographer “cannot pin down the person living it”—a precarious spot for a biographer to be in, if ever there was one. In this essay, Whitman’s Multitudes, Kenner examines the writings of others discussing Whitman as much as he does delete “the poet” himself.

Kenner tracks Ezra Pound’s dazzling virtuosity of varying poetic techniques and rhythms, ranging from his Chinese translations from Houseman, the intricacies of Provencal and Tuscan rhymes, Elizabethan phrasing, Swinburne, and Browning. In short, Pound’s Chinese Book of Odes (The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius) in Kenner’s view is nothing short of a tour de force.

The author moves on to Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford, both of Edwardian solidity. Conrad’s literary formula is, above all, “to make you see.”  In Kenner’s view, Conrad out-Flauberts Flaubert, using the latter’s techniques in areas untouched by Flaubert’s practiced pen.  Ford, he counters, is a greater virtuoso than Conrad, a master of the impasse, the unresolved. “If Conrad wrote out of his capacity for skepticism,” he notes, “Ford wrote of his capacity for compassion and worry.”

Kenner penetrates Pope’s world from which the latter eventually recoiled as he peered into the “Universal Darkness.” As Pope sees it, one by one the arts disappear--those stars of civilization--“and all is Night.” Pope mirrored the conventions in the common currency of his time, rubbing them smoother, ignoring, as T.S. Eliot pointed out, that the 18^th century was merely an age in transition just like those that preceded him and those that were to follow. Nevertheless, he deems that Pope stood for a world interesting enough to write about.  From observations about Pope, Kenner leaps into an analysis of an analysis written by Donald Davie who dissects the role of syntax in poetry, and later still, into that of T.E. Hulme, who makes the case for imagery without structure.

Marianne Moore’s “artlessness,” particularly in her translations of La Fontaine, is the result that best demonstrates “that the specialization of one language may be the best possible parallel for the simplicities of another.” Moore, Kenner says, can utilize Latinate diction without sounding as though she had swallowed Virgil whole.  Moore’s deftness mastered the intricacies of La Fontaine’s rhyme and rhythm, his French “neatness” that would have translated into “empty English” were it not for Ms. Moore’s rendition with a vastly more complicated diction and an unfettered translation which would have no doubt taken La Fontaine himself by surprise. The result, however imprecise in the word-for-word sense, renders a text with depth and spirit—a translation of a tone, of an intent, of a “climate of mind.” Moore’s translations are not without lapses, however, and Kenner does not hesitate to point out when the translated version would have fared better had Moore more closely followed the original.  Nevertheless, Kenner praises Moore’s work as belonging to the tradition of true translations—convincing and miraculous. And this, especially coming from Kenner, is not faint praise.

From Moore’s “artlessness’ Kenner proceeds to the art of being Yeats, both the poet and the man—the passage from “diffident youth to passionate sage.”  Yeats strove to forge himself into “the hero of whom he dreamed,” and according to some, partially succeeded in that not-so-small achievement. Yeats himself concedes that inspiration does not exhaust one, but art does; and his was as much the art of being pure and simple—a person--as the art of being a wordsmith. Kenner proposes that the poet would have had a far greater following had he been more accessible, but at the same time exposes Yeats as far less dreamy than one is often led to suppose.  Yeats, poet or no, grappled with another art—that of business, but interestingly in so doing it was his craft that blossomed—his technical development, his style.  Kenner in the end bemoans the fact that a book had yet to be written that would examine only what Yeats actually had to say instead of “breathless peeps” into the patina of a persona.

Describing what a writer has to say is what motivates Kenner in his essay entitled The Devil and Wyndam Lewis, the author of The Human Age. Lewis, he writes, conjures up comparison with Swift and Milton. A curious “cross breed” of “ill-matched giants.” Depicted as the least literary of writers, he is the most straightforward in that he doesn’t flirt with the reshuffling of styles, but instead chooses the authentic sound of the what comes naturally in tone, and what he has to say is austere. In his hands the commonplace is chilling and as Lewis puts it, “a little terrifying.”

Mankind is mainly an “agglomeration of hopeless brutes” redeemed only by the presence of the very few of intelligence; what’s more, this view is not to be substituted for anything less harsh, because despite it all “God values man.” By 1955, with his The Childermass, Lewis goes against the glittering flow of the literati of the day: Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, the Paris expats, the Bloomsbury circle and the literary Freudians. His goal was to brilliantly outdo them all and freeze the Zeitgeist of its ‘20s apogee into a final rictus.  Lewis’s modus operandi lifts action out of time in an infinite documentarian’s present tense. Getting to the next idea, says Kenner, presents a challenge. Judging from the excerpt he selected, the reader has but little choice but to believe him.

It is Kenner’s belief that the authors examined here, exposed to Kenner’s critical eye, form a coherent whole, a cohesive literary circle in much the same way as the literary movements before them, such as Wordsworth and his fellow writers, and before him, Pope and his contemporaries.

Far more can be gleaned from this book than can be summed up here. Kenner not only kindles one’s curiosity with his own thoughts, but adroitly intertwines the observations of others equally erudite, but not necessarily of the same opinions. They are sometimes used for target practice, and Kenner’s scorn and his scolding his derision can be scalding. Rounding out this volume are his thoughts on a patchwork of topics including Freud, Blackmur and Empson, as well as his take on several textbooks about literature, anthologies and various other observations underlying the fine art of looking at and listening to the poetic tongue.

About the Staff Reviewer: Diane Lane Root