Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

My readers will recall, I hope, an essay in this series, "Joseph Conrad and the Quest for Truth," in which I wrote of a new movement in art lasting from the 1890s into the 1930s, a movement which took art very seriously, almost religiously. I also discussed a critical technique (New Criticism) allied to it that offered a way to analyze and understand this art. Problems arise, however, when it is used indiscriminately to analyze work that does not belong to the modern school. There's nothing wrong with close textual analysis per se, the main method of New Criticism, but it will yield less when applied to Wordsworth than to T. S. Eliot, and the animating idea behind the analysis, that the text will reveal profound and subtle ideas about life, can be greatly exaggerated, leading to very fanciful readings.

I have written that little preface to a consideration of the work of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) because he was not a modern writer in the sense that Conrad was, although they were contemporaries. In fact, Hardy gave up novel-writing just a couple of years after Conrad began, and went on to write and publish only poetry -- but I'm getting ahead of my story. Born in humble rural circumstances in the county of Devon, an area rich in folklore that would greatly influence his work, Hardy became an architectural draughtsman, with a yearning to write poetry. Recognizing that he couldn't make a living at that, he tried writing fiction, unsuccessfully at first, but his second novel earned some money, as did the next, and his fourth novel, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) was quite successful. Now he was able to give up his architectural job and get married.

Writing novels was a way to make a living, and he was very deferential, especially in the early years, to editorial opinion. Beginning with his fourth novel, his works were serialized, and editors insisted on bowdlerizing them before they appeared in magazines (Hardy would restore the cuts in the book edition), but after all, editors controlled access to his audience. He was always scrupulously professional, delivering copy on schedule, fulfilling promises, doing his best.

The original vein that he worked so well in his best novels was the life of the Dorset countryside, which he immortalized as "Wessex," taking the name from the ancient post-Roman kingdom. Farm laborers are omnipresent as a chorus, while the central figures are somewhat higher in the social scale, e.g., farmers or merchants. The country life and work is not background but is woven into the life of the characters. Hardy was intensely interested in the old customs and folk tales, and they contribute to the density of his work, making the reader feel that the characters are embedded in history, that we see them moving against a tapestry of which they are a part. Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and Far from the Madding Crowd are his only novels with happy endings. The first is slight, a pastoral idyl, but the second is more complex and interesting. The protagonist, Gabriel Oak, naive and impetuous in the beginning, suffers trials that endow him with great patience and good-humored gravity, growing him into a very attractive figure, both to the reader and to the spirited and willful Bathsheba Everdene, who Gabriel eventually wins in a wonderful scene at the end.

The next Wessex novel, The Return of the Native (1878), brings up what I shall call Hardy's metaphysical problem. He had a dour outlook, and he rejected the Christian God, substituting a vague force indifferent to humanity and its concerns. But he had an unfortunate habit, especially in his later novels, of dropping remarks ("'Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals had ended his sport with Tess") that suggested that he thought the force was not merely indifferent but malign. The notion that the gods are cruelly playing with our lives deprives a novelist's characters of integrity, making them hapless victims. He denied this, claiming that such remarks were only his fanciful way of expressing himself, but that's absurd: an author cannot say things in his own voice in a novel and then dismiss them. In Return, the many crucial coincidences that help to wreck the lives of the characters make them seem like puppets. Some of the characters and scenes are vivid, but everything -- plot, people, conversations -- is heavily melodramatic, as if Hardy's skill as a writer was distorted when the metaphysical pressure was too great. His last novels, Tess of the d'urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1897), suffer from the feeling of supernatural doom, and while the plot of Tess is improbably melodramatic, Jude's is absurd and repellent. Hardy had an unhappy marriage, and this is an anti-marriage tract (anti-Christian, to boot), grim and desolate. He was so annoyed by the harsh critical response that he gave up writing novels and turned to his first love, poetry. Over the next thirty years until his death he published eight volumes of poetry as well as the three-volume verse drama, The Dynasts. He is that unusual case (Sir Walter Scott is the only other I can think of) of a writer equally famous as a novelist and a poet.

The next Wessex novel after Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), is Hardy's masterpiece, a tragedy caused by the character of its protagonist, Michael Henchard. The first scene (as in classic tragedy) contains the seeds of future calamity, and its coarse brutality and underlying sensitivity shadows the book, lurking behind a gesture or a word, building a sense of uneasiness in the reader. Henchard, a skilled farm laborer in search of work, with his wife and very young child, appears at an annual country fair. We know already from their description as they approach the fair, that he is taciturn and she is submissive. They stop at a refreshment tent where he proceeds to get drunk and put up his wife at auction. The scene, fantastic in itself, is made grimly real by Hardy's descriptions of the reactions of the witnesses, who take it as a joke at first, but when a passing sailor makes a bid and actually puts down the cash, ". . . the jovial frivolity of the scene departed. A lurid color seemed to fill the tent, and change the aspect of all therein." Susan throws her wedding ring in Henchard's face and leaves with the sailor, "sobbing bitterly." A sense of shock is apparent in the subdued remarks of the spectators standing at the door wondering about the sailor. Henchard returns "doggedly to his seat," declaring he won't go after her.

The guilty regret just hinted here is enough to endow the scene with tragic foreboding, which unalloyed brutality would never have done. The combination of hasty anger followed by sore guilt is the master motif of Henchards' character, and Hardy's subtle portrayal of it in this initial scene shows his artistry. The others leave and Henchard falls asleep. The next chapter opens with the dawn when Henchard awakens, remembers what he has done, and determines to find Susan and the child. First he goes into an empty church and swears a vow on a Bible not to drink liquor for twenty years. His fruitless search goes on for months, and eventually he gives up and heads for Casterbridge. The next chapter takes place eighteen years later at the same place and time of year and once again Susan and her daughter are approaching the fair. The sailor, Newson, has died (it is supposed) in a shipwreck off Newfoundland, and Susan is seeking Henchard, telling Elizabeth only that he's a "relative by marriage." She speaks to the woman who ran the refreshment tent and learns that Henchard left word with her that he went to Casterbridge. Thither they go in the next chapter to discover Henchard, mayor of the town, at a banquet. They learn that he's a prosperous merchant, a hay and grain dealer. I won't tell more of the plot, but the reader can see that Henchard's initial brutal act is bound to have momentous consequences for a man in his position, especially because he is the same man with the same character: impulsive, uncalculating, fierce in his loyalties and repulsions. The rest of the book is the story of his downfall, brought on entirely by himself, by his greed for love that makes him alienate everyone even as love is within his grasp. When he dies, rejected and broken in spirit, he leaves this statement:

Michael Henchard's Will

That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me. & that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground. & that no sexton be asked to toll the bell. & that nobody is wished to see my dead body. & that no murners walk behind me at my funeral. & that no flours be planted on my grave. & that no man remember me. To this I put my name. --Michael Henchard.

It is a characteristic act, defiant but an implicit admission of guilt, and it is very moving.

The Mayor of Casterbridge would not be a tragedy if it were marred by the supernatural determinism of his later novels, nor would it be so impressive if Hardy had not portrayed, with unerring insight, not only Henchard but all the other major characters by showing them in thought and action in and around the town, peopled by the kind of Wessex characters we know so well from other Hardy novels. The town, closely surrounded and permeated by the countryside, pulsates with life, a vibrant milieu in which the characters move and mingle. Hardy is not subtle like Henry James, nor a truth-seeker like Conrad, but he wrote a tragedy which has no equal in English literature since Shakespeare.

A Postscript of Interest

I don't know how far my message reaches, but it is not far enough, because I still see conservatives committing assault and battery on literary culture, as in a recent National Review, where "Ten Great Conservative Novels" are considered, and all are lousy for reasons that regular readers of this column should understand: they are admired for their message, not their writing. I haven't read all ten, but I've read, or tried to read, most of them.

Midcentury, by John Dos Passos. The author made his name with the USA trilogy, but even at his best (in the first volume, The Forty-Second Parallel, when he's drawing on childhood memories) he's not a very good writer. His characters are cardboard because he was more interested in ideas than people. Midcentury is absolutely inert. When Dos Passos was a lefty in the 1920s, and 1930s, his faith burned bright and gave USA whatever life the trilogy had, but no matter how conservatism stimulated his mind, it could not give life to his fiction. I have always admired Dos Passos. When he saw in Spain what the Communists were up to, he repudiated them, taking a lot of flak from the Left (including Hemingway), and wrote a pretty good novel about his disillusion, Adventures of a Young Man. He was a good man, and his memoir, The Best Times, is worth reading. But he was not a first-rate writer, and Midcentury is one of the deadest books I've ever tried to read.

Another one of these prize novels is Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet. He wrote only one good novel, a picaresque affair called The Adventures of Augie March. The rest of his novels suffer from the author's preoccupation with ideas at the expense of characters. It's very simple: if the characters do not live, what they supposedly think is of no interest. Bellow was fascinated by himself and his thoughts, a fatal fixation for any writer.

Walker Percy, another conservative writer revered for his message, is praised here for The Thanatos Syndrome, another novel I tried to read but couldn't because I was immediately put off by what I call conceptual cliches, platitudes, not of language but thought. One, beloved by second-rate writers, is the reversal of expectations. So the character who's conventionally disreputable will turn out to be the hero, the character who seems liberal and sophisticated will wind up a bigot, and the one who seems a bigot will finally be the one with a big heart, etc. Percy was another writer ruined by ideas, because he considered characters only means to an end.

Cormac McCarthy's crudities and vulgarities overwhelm his books. I don't know about his ideas in No Country for Old Men because I couldn't stay with him long enough to find any.

Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities is the "conservative" book I most detest because it is so trashily written, because it revels in the excrement that two generations of wretched writers have made of our fiction. Every description is a cliche and a sour one, and every occurrence and character is a cliche, mostly disgusting. To read the book is to feel dirty. It directly inspired the creation of this column a few years ago when I saw conservatives falling all over themselves to praise it. Not only is this another case of a writer concerned more with ideas than characters, but Wolfe is a writer who's joined the ranks of the destroyers of culture. *

"If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy." --Thomas Jefferson

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

I've written a bit about American history and historiography in this series, mainly in number 18 about Bruce Catton's Civil War books, but to get to the root of things, to the first consciousness of Americanness, we have to go back to the War of Independence, to the year 1776 and two books published in 2004, David McCullough's 1776 and David Hackett Fisher's Washington's Crossing.

The action begins in March with the end of the siege of Boston when the British took to their ships and sailed away to Halifax, while Washington started his troops for Manhattan. Without a navy, without command of the waters around New York, defense of the island was really not feasible, but Washington determined to try, for reasons that are very interesting. Of course, there were the strictly military reasons: resisting the invader, refusing to abandon an important strategic location; but there were significant political reasons: the Continental Congress didn't want the city abandoned, and Washington felt that to surrender New York without a fight would strike a heavy blow against American morale. One of the difficulties American commanders had to cope with from the beginning was the interference of politicians in the details of military affairs. They withheld militias, wanting to keep them for home defense, and they wanted Washington to mount an all-round defense of everywhere, an impossible task. In the last week of December 1776 this problem would be tackled in a way that became characteristically American when the Congress passed a resolution giving Washington absolute command of military affairs for six months, but ultimately accountable to Congress, a solution that became the model for civil/military relations in America. An implicit corollary is that commanding generals, if they are to retain the confidence of their political masters, must be sensitive to the political context of the time. General George MacClellan ignored the pressures on President Lincoln, which is why, after 1862, he sat out the war in Trenton. And General George Patton was superseded in World War II by the second-rate Omar Bradley because he ignored public sensitivities.

Although Washington had some military experience in the French and Indian war, he was facing seasoned professionals in Generals Howe, Clinton, and Cornwallis, and by comparison he came off very badly in the New York campaign, from late August to the end of November. His best move was the overnight withdrawal of his army, after the battle of Long Island, from Brooklyn across the East River to Manhattan, but wars are not won by retreats. After nearly having his army bottled up in Manhattan, he managed to escape Howe's clutches and cross to New Jersey, although he lost nearly 3,000 men as prisoners of war when Fort Washington was captured, another blunder. Washington was curiously indecisive at this time, letting General Nathanael Greene persuade him, against his qualms, to garrison the fort when it no longer served any purpose. Losing so many men was a terrible blow at a time when enlistments were expiring and his army was melting away. Another factor was the lack of military intelligence. The New York area was a loyalist stronghold, and the British were better informed about his movements than he was about theirs. But I think the root of his problem was his inexperience at maneuvering large bodies of troops (there were nearly 30,000 troops in the area during the summer), especially these troops. David Hackett Fisher, in Washington's Crossing, is very good on the difficulty Washington had in dealing with an army of free men who came from colonies where their conception of the Cause were so diverse -- and so different from his.

To a Virginia gentleman like Washington, liberty was a hierarchal concept: men of independent means had it, but smaller property owners had less and so on down the line to slaves, who had no liberty at all. Assuming command at Boston, he was disgusted by the "leveling spirit" he met in New Englanders, whose conception of liberty was free men in a community of equally free men. And it took him a while to accept the presence of free Negroes in the ranks of the Marblehead contingent. Fisher shows how Washington learned to accommodate these conflicting ideas and put together an effective army, but it took time and patience. When a court martial convicted some backwoods riflemen from Pennsylvania of mutiny, Washington did not have them shot (as would be done in the British army) -- Americans, especially these borderers whose idea of liberty was intensely individual, would not stand for that -- but instead fined them and appealed to their "honor, reason, pride, and conscience." They apologized and promised to reform.

Howe sent Cornwallis across New Jersey in pursuit of Washington, but he did not press too hard, and all the American troops collected on the west side of the Delaware by December 20. Taking most of his army back to New York, but leaving a handful of garrisons in place, Howe offered amnesty to those taking a loyalty oath, and many did. To New Jerseyans, the War of Independence brought civil war plus the uncertain brutalities of occupation, because the troops, despite strenuous efforts by commanders to prevent it, plundered and raped and murdered civilians, alienating supporters and outraging everyone else. Inevitably, bands of militia staged harassing attacks against the garrisons and their foraging parties, wearing down the troops, especially around Trenton. Washington was already thinking of an attack across the river when his adjutant, Joseph Reed, wrote to urge a bold stroke to revive American spirits and credit, suggesting Trenton as the target.

Washington immediately (December 22) called a council of war, and the rest is history: on the night of Christmas day, three columns of Americans tried to cross the river, but only one, led by Washington, was able to get through the ice, and the next morning, with 2,400 men, he routed 1,400 Hessians, capturing nearly one thousand. After escorting the prisoners across the river to Pennsylvania, he went back to reoccupy Trenton, where on January 2 he fought Cornwallis to a standstill at a fortified position, and then stole away at night to defeat a British force at Princeton, returning afterwards to safety in the mountains of the northwest. The crossing alone was an amazing feat.

To understand the great effect those eight days had on Americans, bear in mind the context: independence had been declared in July and within a few weeks Washington's army suffered one defeat after another, and was finally driven across New Jersey to Pennsylvania, when the Congress hurriedly decamped to Baltimore. The Declaration looked pretty hollow then. As if to herald the turn about to come, Thomas Paine published The American Crisis ("These are the times that try men's souls") on December 19 to instant, tonic effect. There followed the miraculous eight days of marching and fighting, and a tide of the whole year was turned. Whatever happened after that, America would be independent.

David McCullough is a skillful writer of popular books on discrete subjects -- the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Panama Canal, Teddy Roosevelt's early years. He tells the story accurately, honestly, and fluently, and he grasps the importance of that great year in our history, eloquently captured in this quotation from the English historian G. O. Trevelyan:

It may be doubted whether so small a number of men ever employed so short a space of time with greater and more lasting effects upon the history of the world.

To understand in depth what that year tells us about the complex nature of nascent Americanness, however, Fisher's book is the one to read. An historian with a wide breadth of visions, he probes deeply into the problems of the actors, elucidating their thoughts and feelings and motives. Like McCullough, he covers the year from the siege of Boston to the battle of Princeton, but he carries the story forward into the spring of 1777, describing the so-called Forage War, militia raids by New Jersey militia (aided by Washington) against enemy garrisons. The main emphasis, however, is on the battles of Trenton and Princeton, and the book opens with a description and analysis of the famous painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware. It is a brilliant beginning, and the text (well-illustrated) that follows fulfills its promise in depth and breadth.

The events of 1776 are not the beginning of American Exceptionalism, but its fruition. It began with the desire of the Pilgrims and Puritans to separate themselves from those they thought ungodly, and it was strengthened by the Mayflower compact, the agreement for self-governance signed before they landed. They did not know it, but they were already a people apart from the mother country, and subsequent colonial history drove them further and further apart. Great Britain's needs, expressed in orders from the king and his ministers, did not mesh with the needs of those living on the edge of wilderness, and it became harder and harder to bridge the gap, to reconcile opposing desires. Before 1776, very few of the colonists thought of themselves as Americans, but they had been in the process of becoming so for more than 150 years, and in 1776 they suddenly knew who they were, a new people, a new nation, and when they ratified the Constitution in 1787, establishing a radically new form of government, they set the seal on our unique identity.

In these days we need to fortify our sense of the specialness of our country, and these books will do it. *

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The premise of this series of essays is that conservatives can expand their mental horizons, enrich their lives, by reading the kind of books that are rarely written or published today. The goal of life is consciousness and literature is an excellent way to increase it. These essays are not reading lists; they are extended analyses intended to arouse your interest in books. I enjoy writing them because they are a challenge, and I increase my own consciousness by learning more about writers and writing. In this case, for instance, I thought I'd reread a couple of Willa Cather's (1870-1947) books to see if they'd be suitable for the series. I'd read them decades ago and wasn't impressed, but now I'd try one I hadn't read, My Antonia. When I was done I was bowled over, and I saw how unusual her writing was. So I reread her novels, and this is the result, which I hope will inspire my readers to appreciate this fine writer.

Consider American imaginative writers. In the first rank: Melville, Twain, James, Hemingway. In the second rank: Hawthorne, Faulkner, Dreiser, Wharton, Fitzgerald, Norris, Crane, Howells. If you think about their work, they are all dramatic writers. They come to us bearing urgent messages about sensational matters, soul-searching quests, struggles between good and evil, stirring revelations, stories of profound and wrenching truth, tales of the darkest shades and brightest lights. Howells, least dramatic of them all, would have been dramatic if he could, but his imagination was dim. Willa Cather is the great exception. Although there is some drama in her novels, it is the subtle working-out of man's relation to the overpowering presence of place, of the land, that is the theme of her fiction. What "happens" in her books is not very important in itself, and she was not very good at writing a story in the conventional sense. Critics consistently underrated her because they could not really grasp what she was dong; they could only see that by their usual standards she failed.

Now let me tell you what she could do. No other writer has such an acute perception of landscape. Think back for a moment to the seventh essay, "Huck Finn and Friends" in which I discussed Hemingway's great story, Big Two-Hearted River.

The river was there. It swirled against the log spikes of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.

His descriptions of the natural world as perceived by a character are instinct with life, unsurpassed, beyond praise, but they are not, nor are they intended to be, portraits of a landscape, of the essence of a whole region. They are artifacts of the character's consciousness, just as Huck's description of the Mississippi at dawn tells us more about Huck than it does about the river. In Cather's best work the landscape is present in itself. What she does is to bring landscape and character together in a moving, satisfactory way with a quiet intensity that gives her books great emotional power.

Her progress can be chartered by the gradual jettisoning of conventional plotting. Her first novel of any distinction, O Pioneers! (1913), is about the lives of immigrants who settled the Nebraska prairies in the last decades of the 19th century, and the beginning, describing the early struggles of Alexandra Bergson with her stupidly conventional brothers and with the land and climate, is good, but then the book jumps ahead to a time when the struggle is over, Alexandra is prosperous, and the prairie becomes nothing more than a backdrop for an absurd plot. Although the book put her on the literary map, it must be judged a failure. Her next novel, The Song of the Lark (1915), is much better, although it, too, is marred in its later part by intrusive plotting. It is the story of Thea Kronborg, a child of Swedish immigrants raised in semi-desert Colorado, who becomes a great opera singer. The book centers on Thea and her development, by no means easy, and the Colorado landscape influences the girl all her life. The early years are the best part of the book, but Thea's artistic struggles are fascinating throughout the book. Cather was an idealist about art, as these quotations show.

. . . what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself -- life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? . . . Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

My Antonia (1918) followed, and this is a triumph, the novel which a first-time reader of Cather should start with, the story of a Czech farm girl growing up on the Nebraskan prairie. Look at this description:

All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of day. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero's death -- heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of the day.

The first sentence announces the subject plainly, but the last clause suggests something striking. The next two sentences vividly describe the simple elements of the scene, grass, cornfields, haystacks, a colorful description that begins to stir the reader's feelings. The fourth sentence, with its Biblical reference to the appearance of God to Moses, endows the scene with momentous significance, and the last two sentences with their rich language complete the intimation that the physical world is a manifestation of meaning beyond itself. It looks simple, but it takes great artistry to write so effectively.

At the end of the book the narrator explicitly defines Antonia's significance.

She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true. I had not been mistaken. She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. . . . She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.

There is a key phrase there whose significance may be missed: "the meaning in common things." That was one of Cather's great gifts, to see those meanings and express them, as in the previous passage about fall afternoons. It is a rare gift for any artist, and it is not appreciated enough.

Five undistinguished books followed, and then in 1927 Death Comes For the Archbishop, her masterpiece, was published. A fictionalized account of the career of Archbishop Lamy, who from 1851-1889 ran the diocese, centered in Santa Fe, that covered the whole southwest, it is essentially plotless. It tells of the trials of the Archbishop and his vicar, traveling hundreds of miles on horseback, dealing with refractory priests, building a cathedral, planting fruit trees, civilizing the area, but as much space is given to the Archbishop's observations of the Indians, to his retelling of miracles observed by Junipero Serra, to his memories of his youth in France, and his friendship with the man who became his vicar, and permeating everything is the presence of the desert landscape of the southwest. Cather's skill is so developed by this time that she does not really describe the scene -- there are no set pieces -- but she creates an unforgettable impression of the landscape by little touches here and there, so you are always aware of where you are: you feel the heat, you note the ever-changing colors of the rocks, you breathe the clear air, you feel the sand as it is blown against you. This is a book in which nothing "happens," but when you are done you know you have been privileged to be in the presence of a man's life, an uncommon man, one of those who have made life sweeter by their presence. The book is very moving.

Willa Cather was a writer with an unusual gift, a quiet voice full of passionate intensity. *

"Nothing is more essential to the establishment of manners in a State than that all persons employed in places of power and trust must be men of unexceptionable characters." --Samuel Adams

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The prophet Jeremiah, active from 625 BC through the fall of Jerusalem in 585, was a shepherd who, in his denunciations ("jeremiads") of unrighteous Israelites, worshipers of pagan idols, traced their apostasy to farming, a way of life richer and more complicated than that of pastoralism. He thought that shepherding offered a return to a state of purity and obedience to the one God. The Rechab family, Jeremiah claimed, embodied the ideal: they didn't build houses or sow fields or plant vineyards, they didn't drink wine (a symbol of cultivation), and they chose to live in tents. This is, so far as I know, the first recorded call for a return to the simple life where one is free to live uncontaminated by the struggles and compromises of ordinary life.

Just a couple of centuries later the Greek poet Theocritis wrote the Idyls, the first pastoral poems, celebrations of the simple shepherd life. So some of the earliest writings in the Western tradition express utopian visions, specifically of a simple life in the past that, if we will it, can be lived again. We call them utopian, because Sir Thomas More called his imaginary ideal society Utopia (in Greek, "nowhere"); and the name has come to mean something inherently unattainable. Fulfillment would suspend the laws of nature: we cannot recall the past, we cannot suspend time, and we cannot simplify life in more than superficial ways. The idea turns up again and again in our literature (As You Like It is Shakespeare's satire of its sentimentalities in the setting of the Forest of Arden). Why should this be so?

The fantasy is characterized by yearning for an imagined past and aversion to the present, contrasting a warm, simple life with the cold complexities of modernism (every present, whether two thousand years ago or today, is regarded as modern by its contemporaries). In the imagined past, or in a contemporary variant, the Beautiful Simple Country Life, people are warm and sincere, living in true community, and relations are direct, uncomplicated by the demands of mundane necessity, whereas in the modern world people are cold and selfish, there is no sense of community, and life seems a complicated muddle. That these notions are silly -- every moment in time is, to those living in it, complex; only the backward glance of nostalgia makes it seem otherwise -- has never prevented people from believing them, if only for a time.

Speaking of time, it is well known that children's sense of it differs from that of adults. Think back to your own childhood and remember how slowly time moved. A week stretched to the horizon, a month was practically forever, and a year was inconceivable. All too soon, however, time begins to accelerate. I recall when it happened to me. I was climbing the stairs in school when I noticed a poster exhorting us to buy war bonds, illustrated by large, vividly colored figures seen in a long perspective -- "1943." I was shocked! I had hardly used up 1942! At the age of ten I had had my first intimation of the variable velocity of time. I think that soon thereafter we begin to create in our minds a nostalgic version of the past. A year later I toured all my childhood haunts, the vacant lots where I had built "huts" out of cardboard boxes, the woods where we used to play Robin Hood, a frankly acknowledged tour of nostalgia since I had outgrown childish things. How uncomplicated the past seemed now!

If time moves with a softly measured tread for children, we all know with what mounting haste it hurries past us in our days and years as we grow older. Now there are whole decades that I seem hardly to have used. And now we know what we could not even guess at the age of ten: that time is the measure of our mortality. Is it any wonder that we create fantasies about the past (and future) that were at first responses to a feeling of time hurrying by?

To summarize: because we are physical organisms living in time, we are reminded by its passing and by our changing perceptions of it, of our mortality. Seeking to evade this knowledge, or at least to console ourselves, we like to imagine a happier past, one that might be revived, untouched by the forces within us and around us that move us forward in the relentless tide of life. That's why its imagined simplicity is contrasted with a complex present.

Although there were occasional futuristic utopias, like Sir Thomas More's, the fantasy did not come to life as a collective ideal until the 19th century, thanks to the Romantic movement, a reaction against Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th Century who, it was thought, overemphasized rationality at the expense of feeling and imagination. We think of it as a literary movement -- Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, et al. -- and the revolutionary expectations in the work of many writers (Coleridge entertained the idea of joining a utopian community in Pennsylvania) are discounted as poetic hyperbole. It is at this time that the fantasies became ideas about how to organize the future, witness the writings of Robert Owen and Fourier, and the many experimental communities like Brook Farm. These fantasies are what I call Romantic Utopianism, not a movement but a trend of thought, a set of affinities among the like-minded, that would come to exert a powerful influence on social thought for more than two centuries (It may be that enough wealth had been created in the Western world at that time to allow individuals and small groups to indulge themselves in this way).

The best way to understand this fantasy is to examine a book which is animated by it, a brilliant, fascinating text wherein the fantasy is enunciated by a writer, superbly articulate, who was wholly captivated by its ideas. Rebecca West (1892-1983) wrote Black Lamb and Gray Falcon (1942), a book of over a thousand pages about Yugoslavia based on her travels there in the late 1930s. It is said by people enamored of her vision that this is the book to read about the country, but in fact the reader will learn almost nothing about the place because Miss West was transfixed by Romantic Utopianism, and Yugoslavia was only a screen on which her vision was projected. With a style that is direct and immediate, precise and passionate, she creates the illusion (no small feat) that nothing stands between the reader and what's described. From the first sentence we are in the presence of a sensuously vivid, perceptive sensitivity that makes us seem to feel the heat and cold, smell the flowers, taste the food, see as she does the people, the churches, the streets and houses, the landscape, the rutted roads. It is a tribute to her powers that I have read the book three times and have not skipped a word.

Equally brilliant is Miss West's management of structure, the way the mass of disparate material -- travelogue, ancient and modern history, political analysis, artistic and literary criticism, impassioned polemic -- is put together so as to make all of it interesting, often fascinating, and at the same time that the skill with which it's done enhances the author's authority; we believe, we trust her.

A brief description of the Prologue shows her method. It opens with Miss West speaking to her husband in the train in 1937, but he's asleep, and she thinks:

. . . certainty that this train was taking us to a land where everything was comprehensible, where the mode of life was so honest that it put an end to perplexity.

This, despite the fact that she went there for the first time only the year before (1936), and first spoke its name in 1934 when, recovering from an operation, she heard the news of the assassination of Yugoslavia's King in Marseilles. That led her (in 1934) to think of other violent deaths affecting the Balkans: Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1897, Crown Prince Rudolf in 1889, the King of Serbia and his wife in 1903, finally Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. The circumstances are described, and the characters and ideas of many of the actors are assessed. The narrative returns to Miss West's hospital bed (in 1934), where she reflects on this series of deaths, frightened because she fears that:

. . . man was going to deliver himself up to pain, was going to serve death instead of life.

Out of hospital, she sees the newsreel film of the assassination in Marseilles, describing it closely. She is so impressed by the King's face (she reads a great deal in faces), seeing in it a "peculiar wisdom" drawn, she thinks, from Yugoslavia, she feels she must learn about the country. Her ignorance is a calamity because:

. . . there proceeds steadily from that place a stream of events which are a source of danger to me.

In 1936 she goes there on a lecture tour. Afterwards, stricken by dengue fever, she stops to rest outside Vienna, and there her husband finds her, weeping over dresses bought from Macedonian peasants which have been ruined, bleached in the convalescent home.

I had not properly protected the work of these women that should have been kept as a testimony, which was a part of what the King had known as he lay dying.

She tries to explain to her husband what Yugoslavia means to her, but it is difficult to express in words; it has to be seen, experienced, and she realizes she has to see it again to fix it in her mind.

In a panic I said, "I must go back to Yugoslavia, this time next year, in the spring, for Easter."

In just twenty-three pages, Miss West has meditated on events from 1889 to 1937, involving the reader in her thoughts, feelings, and memories in such a dramatic way as to make this journey seem of paramount importance. The immediacy of her expression and the depth of her sensibility dictate the pace and shifts in the narrative; we are swept up into her confidence, her imaginative world. A certain intimacy is established, and since this is a book intended to persuade us of some extravagant ideas, winning our allegiance is vital. We are ready for the quest, we can't wait to be on our way.

It should be clear by now that Rebecca West is a romantic who dramatizes her emotions, but this conclusion is possible because I have quoted selectively; when you read the full twenty-three pages you are carried along in the narrative that pulsates with her feelings, and it is very difficult to stand aside, to see the subjective extravagance.

To get to Zagreb, the first stop, we must take the train from Austria, and here we meet a major problem in the book -- Germans. The book was addressed to the looming threat of the time, Nazism and Fascism, so inevitably Germans, like the West's fellow passengers, are portrayed as unlovely people. We do not doubt her observations. We may demur when she says, as she frequently does, that Germans hate all Slavs, but then we recall that the Nazis intended to enslave the Slavs and we let it pass. The problem arises, however, when this attitude distorts her perception of Yugoslavia. As we press through the book, wending our way around the country with side trips into its tangled history, we realize that all the troubles of the Yugoslavs have been caused, according to the author, by outsiders -- Turks in the south, Italians in the west, Bulgarians in the east, and preeminently, the Austrian empire (and now the Germans) in the north -- and we know the account is biased. She does not exactly hide internecine frictions, but she glosses them over, and this inhibits our understanding of Yugoslavia. Despite the constant physical presence of the scene, the Yugoslavia in this book is an imaginative creation. Miss West created it as a message to the West, and the book is the elucidation of the message.

The first part of the book, the West's travels around Croatia, Dalmatia, Herzegovina, and Bosnia, is the simplest and most agreeable; the message is there, but it is not so insistently pressed. The narrative seems to ramble in space -- landscape, people, places, and time, excursions into the past prompted by sites (e.g., the history of Dubrovnik), but this is artfully constructed, a deliberately easeful introduction preparing the reader for the reception of future crescendos.

The positive theme, the romance of Yugoslavia --

In Yugoslavia there was an intensity of feeling that was not only of immense and exhilarating force, but had an honorable origin, proceeding from realist passion, from whole belief.

(They) cared for loveliness with the uncorrupted eye of an unmechanized race.

-- has its opposite negations --

Such conversation demanded attention, discrimination, appreciation, all forms of expenditure which we Westerners, being mean, are apt to grudge.

. . . the cityish [Western man] who wears spectacles without shame, as if they were the sign of quality and not a defect, who is overweight and puffy, who can drive a car but knows no other mastery over material, who presses buttons and turns switches without comprehending the result, who makes money when the market goes up and loses it when the market goes down.

-- especially urbanism --

. . . it takes the supreme assault of urban conditions to bring on humanity the curse of a craving for insipidity.

-- even against literacy --

. . . only a small proportion of literature does more than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered by learning to read.

-- and of course, against capitalism: --

The West . . . is vulgar and superficial and economically sadist.

This is a natural consequence of the utopianism that's part of the romance of Yugoslavia; in the utopian vision, our arrival in the Promised Land is always hindered by enemies who must be vanquished. We are apt to miss the utopianism in this part of the book, passing over occasional remarks -- ". . . the world [must] at last abandon its bad habit and resolve into mercy, justice and truth" -- as momentary hyperbole, just as we may ignore other negative indications of utopian thinking -- "There is no use denying the horrible nature of our human destiny." Her feminist sallies we may also take cum grano -- ". . . man is a hating rather than a loving animal." The author is always making sweeping statements, some so blatantly silly -- ". . . wood, that clean, moral substance." -- that we tend to discount the wilder declarations.

In Sarajevo, the Wests team up with Constantine, a well known Serbian poet and government official with whom the author traveled the year before, and after some expeditions in the area they go on to Belgrade to meet Constantine's wife Gerda, who is German, all too German (she is later apotheosized by the author's husband as the spirit of all that's worst in Germany). Revolted by everything about Yugoslavia that Miss West most prizes, contemptuous of the English in general and the Wests in particular, her presence on their jaunts around Serbia is a constant source of discord and unpleasantness, and when she insists on accompanying them to Macedonia, the Wests are in despair. From a literary point of view, however, as a foil for Miss West, she is a godsend, and the reader feels that if she didn't exist, the author would have had to invent her. Macedonia is the heartland of the romance of Yugoslavia, the place where Miss West's imagination is worked up to its greatest intensity, and without Gerda sneering in the background we might begin to doubt, our allegiance might weaken, but we always recoil from Gerda's crassness to the author's side. Her use of Gerda is the most brilliant stroke in the book.

Throughout there are allusions to a force for life, identified with women, and a force for death, identified with men, and that this is the ultimate explanation, the first cause of all the distinctions made herein, is made clear, almost hysterically so, in Macedonia when she witnesses the slaughter of a black lamb on a rock in a fertility ritual.

I knew this rock well. I had lived under the shadow of it all my life. All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing . . . this stone, the knife, the filth, the blood, is what many people desire beyond anything else . . .

How the taste for death achieves its triumph is explained a little later when they visit the plain of Kosovo where the Serbs were defeated by the Turks in the 14th century. Constantine recites an ancient ballad about the Serb leader and a gray falcon, the purport of which, in Miss West's interpretation, is that good people, to preserve their goodness, allow themselves to be defeated by evil, the force of death.

They listen to the evil counsel of the gray falcon. They let their throats be cut as if they were black lambs.

This revelation illumines the author's deepest convictions, bringing the issue down to the specific, personal present.

. . . the left-wing people among whom I had lived all my life had in their attitude to foreign politics achieved such a betrayal. They were always right, they never imposed their rightness. . . . Not one of them . . . has ever been a Caesar as well as his kind self; and until there is a kind Caesar every child of woman is born in peril. . . . I should ask myself whether I have done everything possible to carry those principles into effect, and how I can obtain power to make them absolutely victorious.

That some of these ideas were justified, I have no doubt. It is even more obvious now than it was then that the Nazis were bent on a career of death and destruction, and most of the leaders of the countries in the way of that career were suspended in attitudes of fatuous futility, ready for self-immolation. At this point, I want to move beyond the book to discuss the whole set of ideas embodied in it, but before we leave Miss West, I should acknowledge her great achievement. This is a stunning tour de force of remarkable literary grace and polemical power.It is for that very reason, clarity of writing, high sensibility of thought, that we are able to see and analyze its ideas in a way that would be much more difficult with a less articulate writer.

Romantic utopianism is readily identified by its preferences, those things it labels "authentic" (its antipathies are "false," "contrived"), exalting the peasant over the townsman, the countryside over the city, indigenes over Westerners, feeling over thought, sexual license over restraint, charismatic leaders ("kind Caesars"), men who'll use "power . . . for virtuous action," as opposed to workaday politicians, and so on. The utterances of its devotees are characterized by grand simplicities, by sweeping judgments, by stark apocalyptic choices, by exquisitely sensitive discernment (this gets tiresome in the book; in exasperation we want to shout that there are times, and they are not few, when a chair is only a chair, and a man passing in the street is no more than himself).

The essence of Romanticism, its full meaning, is to be found in its ambivalence toward the classic liberalism of the Enlightenment, which was, after all, the party of liberty -- insufficiently so for the Romantics, however, who scorned its bourgeois outlook, its worldly calculations, its cool-headed restraint. And, as one of liberalism's proud landmarks, the U.S. Constitution, demonstrates, it was definitely not utopian. As for liberals, they saw in Romanticism only a literary phenomenon with risque, bohemian overtones, an overheated inspiration to the freedom fighters of 1848 and Garibaldi's Red Shirts.

Romantic utopianism remained a fringe enthusiasm, witness its adherents in the U.S. before World War I -- eccentric radicals, utopian socialists, free love advocates like the Claffin sisters, aging Transcendentalists -- but its influence began to spread after the war, first, because classic liberalism became the reigning political system in the West, and second, because of the widespread postwar disillusionment, self-consciously celebrated by the modernist writers of the 1920s, embodied in these lines by Ezra Pound:

There died a myriad,

And of the best, among them,

For an old bitch gone in the teeth,

For a botched civilization. --Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, V

Romantic utopianism has dual attractions: the simplicity of its main assertion, that the world can be a garden of truth, mercy, and justice if we embrace life and forsake nastiness, gives blessed relief from harassing thought about the complexities of human action; its compassion for peasants, psuedo peasants, and indigenes, perceived (falsely) as living simple lives close to the earth, lifts its believers above the Yahoos grubbing in Consumerland; its hypersensitivity is similarly ennobling. It is very difficult not to count oneself among the elect, by Rebecca West's side. And taking sides is very, very important. That's how the stark choices work. If you don't assent to the grand simplicities, you're on the side of beastliness, of death, one with gross urbanites, insensitive clods, the smug Gerdas of the world. This is its negative attraction, and as the Habsburgs and Hohenzollens departed, the ambivalence of romantic utopianism toward classic liberalism gave way to increasing antagonism, finally becoming its primary motive.

Aside from their perennial enthusiasm for the initial stages of revolutions -- the storming of the winter Palace, Castro's entrance into Havana, Uncle Ho surrounded by smiling children, Mao on the Long March -- and the accompanying faith in those kind Caesars, Romantic utopians were never serious fellow travelers; sympathy for Communism was only a way of expressing antagonism to the West, of being more sensitive than those crude servants of death in the Pentagon. I would venture to guess that this was true of nearly all fellow travellers, which explains why the collapse of Communism failed to cause any soul-searching. It was only a stick to beat liberalism with; there are others to hand.

Anyone who attended a liberal arts college in the 1950s, as I did, could see how skepticism about the values of classic liberalism was coloring the thought of the cultural elite of the time. What had been eccentric in Greenwich Village in the 1920s was unthinkingly echoed by my professors thirty years later, staunch liberals all, partisans of Adlai Stevenson, teaching the modernist writers, revelling in their contempt for the hypocritical lies of the West. Pound again:

Came home, home to a lie,

Home to many deceits,

Home to old lies and new infamy;

Usury age-old, age-thick

And liars in public places. Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, IV

How could anyone be surprised by the abject collapse of the universities in the Sixties?

The Sixties represented the triumph of Romantic Utopianism over classic liberalism, as the attractions of its spurious freedoms spread far beyond the cultural elite. Insatiably hostile to the moderate values of classic liberalism -- rational discourse, civility, ordered change, free markets, conventional morality, political realism, respect for religion, anti-utopianism -- Romantic Utopianism created new crusades with which to belabor its enemy. Surveying contemporary movements like Greenism, multicultualism, feminism, sexual libertinism, anticapitalism in all the forms it takes today, what do we see? Grand simplicities, sweeping judgments, exquisite sensibilities, starkly apocalyptic choices (life vs death again), authenticity vs falsity, peasants and indigenes vs citified Westerners, feelings vs thought, and rancorous animus against the West in general. Romantic Utopians, both as leaders and followers, are furiously active in all these destructive movements.

It does not take a moment's thought to see how these stupidities characterize the Obama administration in all its policies, foreign and domestic. The former echoes the 1960s line that America was the cause of all the trouble in the world, and that the lamb could lie down with the tiger if we'd just be loving and trusting and lefty. The hard masculine hydrocarbon industry is to be suppressed as our energy needs are met by solar panels and windmills. As for the economy, hitherto in the hands of greedy businessmen, the government is taking on a distributive role, passing out money in enormous amounts to fulfill all our dreams. Will these policies arouse significant opposition, certainly not by those many citizens, yuppies mostly, still in thrall to the pieties of the 1960s, which, after all, were created by Romantic Utopianism.

The 20th century will be remembered by its disastrous utopias, Nazism and Communism (it is not widely known that Marx's vision of the future was a pastoral utopia in which he would be a shepherd in the morning, a fisherman in the afternoon, and a philosopher in the evening). Now the 21st century seems destined to see the United States, the greatest bastion of liberal democracy, ruined by Romantic Utopianism.

If classic liberalism is not dead but has changed its name to conservatism, nevertheless it is fighting for its life, routed from its commanding position by an unorganized movement begun two hundred years ago by a few poets and eccentrics loosely committed to a set of absurd simplistic assertions that can hardly be called ideas. Amazing. All we lack now is the kind Caesar. Or will Obama assume that role? *

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions." --G. K. Chesterton

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Somerset Maugham, a very popular writer from the1920s through the1950s, presents the critic with a real problem because, although he had undeniable gifts, his achievement was mediocre. The gifts, a lucid, supple style and a born storyteller's ability to move all the elements -- characters, actions, words -- in one direction to a destined end, are admirable and you keep expecting them to produce a masterpiece, but they invariably disappoint. "Why?" is the question the critic must answer.

The first thing he published, in 1898, was a novel, and he continued to write novels and stories, but from 1907 until the 1930s he was mainly known as a writer of witty drawing-room comedies. His semi-autobiographical novel, Of Human Bondage (1915) is of some interest, but the novel as a form was really beyond him. The short story running to about 10,000 words, was his medium; much longer stories are unfocused, and much shorter ones tend to be inconsequential. His aim, as he said, was to tell interesting stories, and he worked to create a style that was clear, simple, and euphonious. No one can read his stories without recognizing these qualities.

Here's the opening of "The Treasure":

Richard Harenger was a happy man. Notwithstanding what the pessimists, from Ecclesiastes onwards, have said, this is not so rare a thing to find in this unhappy world, but Richard Harenger knew it, and that is a very rare thing indeed.

In those two sentences the clarity and simplicity are obvious, and the balance and emphasis of the second sentence is beautifully graceful. There is something else here which Maugham always spoke of when he wrote about his technique: plot. He thought that stories should have a beginning, middle, and end, that they should have a point, and that the material should be so arranged -- the plot -- as to move inexorably to its end. Although we will not know it fully until the last sentence, we are reading a story about the nature of Richard Harenger's happiness, and the announcement here alerts our attention. The clever plotting is furthered, and disguised, by the smooth surface of the story which half-conceals the writer's subtle effects. Note this description of the maid:

. . . she was certainly comely, in another class of life you might almost have said a handsome, woman.

The fastidious, class-based choice of adjectives -- "comely," "handsome" -- tells us how, with the faintest touch of irony, the protagonist's class consciousness pervades his smallest thought, advancing the plot and point of the story.

What happens is that Richard Harenger hires a maid (Pritchard) who turns out to be the treasure of the title, perfect in every way. Then one evening, quite by chance and contrary to their usual behavior, he and Pritchard go to the movies, have supper, go dancing, and wind up in bed together. When he awakes next morning, he's horrified by his behavior: "How idiotic to lose the best parlor maid a man ever had just for an hour's folly. . . . Richard Harenger was a very unhappy man." Then Pritchard comes in as usual, bringing him his letters and the papers, putting out his clothes for the day, selecting a tie and so on, behaving as if nothing had happened.

He knew that never by word nor gesture would she ever refer to the fact that for a moment their relations had been other than those of master and servant. Richard Harenger was a very happy man.

How are we meant to read this story? On the surface -- and remember how smooth it is, giving the impression that surface is everything -- this is an amusing story about how a moment's indiscretion threatens a man's happiness, but it is precisely the harping on happiness/unhappiness that makes us question the surface; we are forced to question the context of the dichotomy. He is unhappy when faced with the consequences of normal human behavior, happy when that is suppressed, replaced by the "master and servant" relationship. In that light, Richard Harenger is a pathetic figure and his characterization as the perfectly appointed gentleman is seen as hollow.

But there are problems with that reading. For one thing, the tone of the whole thing is light and there is no feeling in the story, no emotion at all beyond Harenger's momentary chagrin when he thinks he has spoiled the perfect maid. The absence of feeling is only consistent with the first reading. For another thing, that isn't the way Maugham's mind worked. As he makes clear in The Summing Up, a book about his ideas, and as all his fiction demonstrates, he was an extreme latitudinarian, and he had no strong feelings about anything. He believed, for instance, that people were capable of love, but not for long, and then they might as well move on with no hard feelings. It is very difficult to believe he would have disapproved of Richard Harenger or seen him as a human failure. It remains a light, amusing anecdote neatly finished with some small irony, no more than a shrug of the shoulders.

I've spent a lot of time on "The Treasure" because it tells us, in a small compass, a great deal about the writer. He had a wonderful gift of fluency: he could tell a story beautifully, but then, what kind of story was it? When you finished it, did any residue remain in your mind? He was voluble about the unpredictability of people, about their hidden capacities, but he didn't see very deeply into them, so the characters he created are, like Harenger and Pritchard, very shallow. These are anecdotes, things complete in themselves, finished off with a resounding end. But all good fictions are, like Conrad's Jim, "inscrutable at the heart," and when we finish reading them we are not finished with them at all; they live in our hearts and minds where we turn them over and over again, because good fiction is like life itself -- there is a mystery at its heart.

There are two volumes of his collected stories, The World Over and East and West. The light ones like "The Treasure" are the best. He also wrote some amusing comic satires. When he tried to write weighty stories, the situations he imagines are always melodramatic cliches. He traveled widely, especially in the Pacific and Far East during the 1920s, and many of his stories are set there, with the writer as narrator, staying for a few days with a District Commissioner, say, in a remote station in Borneo, relaxing on the verandah with a cheroot and a gin stengah while the Commissioner tells him a story and the jungle looms in the background. I must say that he manages the role very well, and I'm usually a sucker for it, but sometimes it gets a bit tiresome.

When Maugham defended his writing methods, which ran counter to the canons of the day, his tone was aggrieved, as if he were being persecuted. In The Summing Up, a book about his literary and philosophical ideas, he says again and again that he doesn't care about his critics, an obvious giveaway. Literary people certainly regarded him with contempt, but I doubt if it were for his style; it's much more likely that it was because he made a lot of money writing for magazines and was admired by Philistines. Of course he resented their attitude; in fact resented the whole serious literary world he could never break into, and his insinuations are a little pathetic.

Some people have taken up Maugham as a case of a good writer maligned by fashionable snobs, and I'm sorry to say they're conservatives. The argument is that since the cultural elite, lefties since the 1920s, dislike such a fellow, conservatives must rally round to his support. Unfortunately, no matter how sympathetic we may be, we cannot evade the judgment that he was a second rate writer, and conservatives make themselves look stupid by championing him. Partisanship of this sort is contemptible.

This kind of partisanship is also apparent in the admiration for Flannery O'Connor, a very second-rate writer. Being a devout Catholic and scorning the fashionable literary scene does not, alas, make one a good writer. Her conceptions of the way her characters think, like her plots, are always cliches, and no amount of piety will make her a good writer.

I have not yet answered the question: why, with all his gifts, Maugham is mediocre? He himself attributed his limitations to the absence of love. As he says in The Summing Up:

Though I have been in love a good many times, I have never experienced the bliss of requited love . . . never having felt some of the fundamental emotions of normal men, it is impossible that my work should have the intimacy, the broad human touch and the animal serenity which the greatest writers alone can give.

It is true that homosexual writers often suffer from the limitations he describes, but I don't think it's the whole answer. A clue lies in his remark that he's been in love "a good many times." No one who knows love could say that, and the reason he could never know love, I think, was his point of view, his extreme latitudinarianism. We have considered writers with all kinds of views in this series, and that has never been an issue. Victorians thought a writer had to be moral to be good; Communists that he had to believe in the proletariat; modernists that he couldn't be a conservative; reactionaries that he couldn't be a modernist; postmodernists that he had to be amoral and unintelligible; and so on, but so far we have rejected the idea of an indispensable quality. After studying Somerset Maugham, however, I'm tempted to offer, provisionally, one thing I think a writer must have: a passionate feeling about something. Everything follows from that. *

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" --Mark Twain

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

My subject, country magazines since the 1960s, is probably quite unknown to my readers, but since this series is intended to broaden the horizons of conservatives beyond the immediate confines of politics, and since the subject ultimately has a political bearing of some importance, I think it shall be of interest.

In the late 1960s and on through the 1970s there sprang up a number of magazines with names like Wood Heat Quarterly and Farmstead, cheaply printed on newspaper stock, founded by hippie homesteaders, and some of the editors were surprisingly able. Practical articles (e.g. "How to Build a Hen House") predominated, but there were reflective pieces, too. Here are some of the contributions my wife and I made to a monthly, Rural Delivery, in Nova Scotia: Jo Ann, the garden editor, wrote a monthly column about growing flowers and herbs, and some of the things I wrote about were: my teenage years on a farm, signs of the seasons, cutting and storing ice from a pond, how to make a dill pickle crock, and the significance of material objects in our lives. At the same time another columnist wrote about language, one covered forestry, a couple wrote a column about their sheep farm, a Newfoundlander wrote about his life on an island, and they were all well written. RD was better than most country magazines, but it was not unique.

At the same time, a slick upscale magazine, Country Journal, was published in Vermont, catering to a new population, inspired by the general Greenism of the time, that had been taking over the State since the mid 1960s. I've never thought of a better name than the one I gave them at the time, Country Fakes. They came to Vermont to live a nice, clean country life and, in search of its signs and symbols, they turned to Country Journal. It contained practical articles, but they lacked the earnestness of those in the hippie homesteader magazines. As an editor once explained to Jo Ann, "None of our readers are going to do any of these things, but they're entertained by reading about them." Country Journal was a very sharp production, the most sophisticated country magazine I've ever seen. Everything about it -- layout, typography, its whole appearance -- was tasteful, while it retained an overall impression of rustic Vermont solidity. A friend told me that the two owners had worked at Life magazine.

General interest magazines -- Saturday Evening Post, Life, Colliers -- were popular from the 1920s into the 1960s because they appealed to a large and growing homogenous middleclass market, people who, despite regional variations, listened to the same popular music, watched the same movies, and shared a patriotic faith that carried them through World War II. That much of that culture was superficial; that there were stronger currents under the surface is irrelevant to the argument: general interest magazines collapsed with the dissolution of the middleclass consensus in the 1960s, as the audience fragmented. A similar audience shift happened to the country magazines later. The first hippie homesteaders completely disappeared by 1980, leaving their yurts and communes for jobs in Daddy's bank, killing off the hippie homesteader country magazines. A few tried to adapt by becoming slick and dropping the old country articles for lavish photo spreads about home decor or fancy gardens, hoping to capture the interest of the new audience now dominating the countryside, the hybrid of Country Fakes and yuppies, but those magazines failed, too. The Country Journal owners were smart; they sold out at the top of the market, and the magazine immediately began to deteriorate. Passing through the hands of various publishing conglomerates, getting worse and worse, it finally perished in the early 1990s.

Looking back at all those magazines, the most interesting thing about them today is their freedom from ideology. Aside from a generally pro-countryside orientation, they had no axes to grind. A writer could champion "organic" gardening or the use of chemicals, could advocate clear cutting or selective forestry, could preach tractors or workhorses.

The successors to those magazines today are not many, they are all slick, and they are relentlessly ideological. Some are frankly politically left, but all share the same Green ideology and ardently support "organic" farming and all the practices associated with it. While some of the practices are sound, the ideas behind them are not.

Their audience is composed of the spiritual descendants of the first readers of the country magazines of the 1970s, the hippie homesteaders, and like their earlier counterparts, they aspire to the country life but don't do much about it. Satisfaction comes from browsing the pages, soaking up the rays of heartfelt concern for Nature, of a blissful future on the smiling land, etc., etc. It is the old utopian vision, peculiarly American, of the Beautiful Simple Country Life, peddled by gurus since 1790, when J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur published Letters From an American Farmer, to the present day when Wendell Berry is the guru. That has always been the mission of these magazines -- to push a vision of an illusory countryside. That it should take on such a rigid, doctrinaire, militant form now is a consequence of the informal alliance with the Greens, who are intent on gaining power, via legislatures, courts, and administrative fiat over our lives. It is a Cause of Great Import, and while they are not consciously directed, there is a clear feeling in these magazines that a struggle is in progress and it's Us against Them.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of country utopianism is revealed in this anecdote. One of the country magazines we wrote for was the Canadian counterpart of Country Journal published in Ontario, Harrowsmith. An editor commissioned us to write an essay telling how to raise an orphan lamb from birth to chops. Such lambs are not uncommon; a ewe may die or have twins or reject one. The nursery rhyme about Mary and the little lamb is such a one. We knew enough by then (the early 1980s) about the audience of such a slick magazine to know they would not relish a description of slaughtering and butchering, so we wrote to the editor about it and he reassured us. Still leery, I hitched the mare to the express wagon and drove three miles to a phone to call the editor, warning him that there'd be a lot of metaphorical blood in the article, but again he brushed off my fears. We had raised many animals, but never sheep, so I did much research and consulted local sheepmen. Jo Ann did the nice bits about Mary's little lamb, and I handled the practical side: how to house and feed the lamb, how to wean it, how to build a manger, and finally, how to kill and skin and cut up the carcass.

In such an essay I try to be absolutely clear, simple, and cogent, and I was proud of it. Even if you knew nothing, you could read that article and do the job from start to finish. They were aghast at Harrowsmith. First we had to cut out all the horrid bits. When the lamb was ready for, uh, slaughter it should be taken to someone who did that sort of thing, and nothing more should be said about it. Then they suggested places in the rest of the piece where it could be tarted up with cute phrases. The point here is the aversion to reality; the countryside must be presented in a sanitized form.

Now my country writing career is again threatened (when we refused to alter the essay, Harrowsmith dumped us), and for the same reason. We write for a slick country magazine, a piously Green, "organic" quarterly edited by a couple, ardent believers in The Beautiful Simple Country Life, happy with my innocuous vignettes of old-fashioned country life. Unfortunately, I'm running out of that sort of thing, and there have been signs that the editors are uneasy with the realistic tones in my recent work. Now they have rejected my latest piece, on predators, saying readers wouldn't stand for it, and I should submit something more "benevolent." So if I describe the shooting of a wildcat that was killing my chickens, it is the same faux pas I committed when I described the slaughter of a lamb; that is, I have told the truth about something squeamish folks would rather not hear about.

I have gone on about this because it illustrates, in an obvious way, the aversion to realism of the countryside branch of Greenism, itself a movement based on lies and fantasies. If we examine this theme, we see that it is the predominant note of the present moment. It is not an exaggeration to point out that the policies, both foreign and domestic, of the present administration are fantasies. To think that posing as guilty penitents before the rulers of Russia or Iran will advance our interests, or to think that virtually nationalizing our economy will restore prosperity -- what are these notions but fantasies, and like the silly ideas of country magazines and the preposterous ones of Greens, they are peculiarly childish and unserious. This is the keynote of our time, the public voice of yuppieism, expounded by a cohort who never grew up.

Conservatives criticize the administration, but the childish nature of their fantasies and even the fantasies themselves, are not seen for what they are: I mean, to criticize the administration's foreign policy as if it were a debatable strategy is absurd -- it is nothing more than juvenile wishfulness. It is, perhaps, too much to expect conservatives to know anything about countryside utopianism, but their ignorance of the dire significance of Greenism is a calamity. Of course, they have been poorly served by conservative publications, which display astonishing ignorance of the subject; they regularly publish articles that accept the theses of global warming and man-made climate change. I have been trying, for more than 20 years, to interest conservative editors in the subject, and I have gotten nowhere (except in these pages). The point is that fantasy is all-pervasive today, not just in the political administration but also in a major movement, Greenism, destructive of the environment, private property, and prosperity, and is a related utopian movement directed at our agricultural economy. If we can recognize these distinct entities for what they are, and if we can see the thematic link between them, we can generate much more effective criticism, especially because conservatives have one advantage: they are realists. Fantasy is attractive so long as it remains a dream; put into practice it is a disaster. We have a great opportunity before us -- to expose the puerile fantasies so prevalent today by the constant criticism of well-informed realism.

And your first act will be to find a magazine that will publish my country essays! *

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." --John Bright

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Born to a genteel, but broke family, Melville went to sea at the age of 18, but seven years later we find him settling in New York to become a writer. Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) are about his adventures in the South Pacific; Mardi (1849) is an imaginary allegorical quest; Redburn (1849) and Whitejacket (1850) are novels about seafaring. He was a moderately popular novelist, regarded as a writer of "yarns." In 1850 he began The Whale, which was evidently going to be a whaling story, but two things intervened: he reread Shakespeare, and he struck up an intense friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne who lived nearby (Melville had moved to the Berkshires). The two men had long discussions, plumbing the depths of each others' minds on the kind of subjects natural to the author of The Scarlet Letter and to the author of the future Moby Dick: the truth of Christian revelation, the Manichean nature of the struggle between good and evil, the relation of esthetic truth to philosophic truth, the validity of Transcendentalism, and so on. The result was that Melville changed and deepened the book, now called Moby Dick. It remained a terrific sea story, but now it was also a profound meditation on the subjects he and Hawthorne discussed. It is deeply humorous and movingly lyrical, America's greatest and most characteristic novel.

When he changed his mind about the book, he did not discard it and begin again, but incorporated the old material in the new structure. The first fifteen chapters, tracing Ishmael and Queequeg to Nantucket, must be from the original version, while the chapters in Nantucket are mixed, and chapter twenty-three to the end is the new version, with some additions from the original woven in. There are a few trivial anomalies, but the unity of the book is not affected, the principal difference being that the early chapters are lighter in style, marked by the brash tone of the 19th century American humor, that mixture of tall stories, jokes, and folk wisdom we know from Mark Twain. Here's the opening:

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off -- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Although Melville never entirely drops this style, the writing becomes more lyrical and rhetorical as the book progresses, as in this description of Moby Dick:

A gentle joyousness -- a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! Did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.

For a subtler passage, wonderfully evocative and suggestive, on the disposal of a whale's carcass:

The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal. Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.

As an epic, the novel celebrates the customs, occupations, and types of heroic humanity characteristic of the culture, hence in 19th century America, men who struggle with Nature. So we are treated to the lore of whales and whaling, including detailed descriptions of its tools and methods. And over all, there is the tragic quest of Captain Ahab to wreak revenge on Moby Dick, his solipsistic mania that finally dooms the ship and crew (except Ishmael). This theme, preoccupation with self, is predominant in Emerson's Transcendentalism, and is still with us. That's why I call Melville our keenist critic.

It is possible, I suppose, to be bored by such a capacious narrative, but I have taught it twice and read it five times, and as soon as I picked it up to write this essay, I was caught once again in the net of Melville's words. All I can say is that I hope you'll read it.

Although the novel got as many good as bad reviews, and some were perceptive, no one saw the magnitude of the achievement, and it didn't sell well. A year later he published Pierre, a semi-Gothic novel so strange and obscure that it defies description. A fire at his publisher's destroyed the plates of his books, and most of the unsold copies. He published an undistinguished novel, Israel Potter, in 1855, a year later a book of stories. The Confidence Man (1857) is the last prose work published in his lifetime. A curious book, it describes the adventures of a con man on a Mississippi steamboat, and while the first half of the book is entertaining, as the con man changes roles and works his clever wiles on the varied passengers, the rest drags as the con man engages in convoluted monologues. None of the issues raised -- Nature, Charity, Christian Providence -- is explored more than superficially, and the tone is very light. Billy Budd, a novella written shortly before his death, was published in 1924, after the Melville revival that followed his centennial. It is highly regarded, but it does not show any thematic development since Moby Dick, and the style is stiff and creaky, the work of an old man. From 1866 to 1886 he supported his family as a customs inspector on the New York docks. What is so marked about his career is not its arc of rise and decline, but the suddenness and completeness of its collapse. From the heights of Moby Dick his work plunges to a nadir and never recovers. The subjects that had inspired and energized him when he was writing his great novel now bedeviled him. He saw Hawthorne in Liverpool in 1856 and talked endlessly of the dilemmas of truth and belief but could neither believe "nor be comfortable in his disbelief." He could not find any philosophical or religious synthesis to believe in. We may say that when he was writing his first five books he was a conventional writer (but with hints of other tendencies), but in the midst of writing Moby Dick he was transformed: the conventions fell away, his deepest thoughts and feelings found expression in a long book that combined folk humor, lyric poetry, scientific reporting, drama, philosophic speculation, and novelistic narrative. So where could he go from there? Moby Dick, in the exuberance of its artistry, is probably as close as he could get to an answer to the insoluble questions of life, but it wasn't close enough for Melville. With the publication of Moby Dick, Melville's career was essentially over. He could not go back to being a conventional novelist, and he could not go forward: Moby Dick was as far as he could go, and it was much too far for his contemporaries.

I used to feel sad about Melville's later obscurity, about his humdrum employment, but when you consider the fates of other writers who ran out of steam in mid-career, there is a steadiness and solidity about him that is impressive. So Faulkner and Hemingway, both steeped in alcohol, spending their last decades writing parodies of themselves; Sinclair Lewis, after the promise of Babbit and Main Street, churning out self-infatuated lifeless novels year after year; Fitzgerald, writing insipid stories and a second-rate novel after The Great Gatsby, finally winding up pathetically as a reformed soul in Hollywood.

And we must not forget Melville's poetry, which he wrote all his life. Although his best poetic effects were achieved in prose (as in the whale's carcass passage, quoted earlier), some of his poems are very powerful.

"The Portent" (1859)

Hanging from the beam,

Slowly swaying (such the law),

Gaunt the shadow on your green,

Shenandoah!

The cut is on the crown

(Lo, John Brown),

And the stabs shall heal no more.

Hidden in the cap

Is the anguish none can draw;

So your future veils its face,

Shenandoah!

But the streaming beard is shown

(Weird John Brown),

The meteor of the war. *

"There never was a bad man that had ability for good service." --Edmund Burke

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

I don't know what the fashion is today, but in my youth it was widely supposed that a writer, to be any good, had to have "experience," and lots of it, usually of a proletarian nature, so book jackets claimed that the author had been a field hand, roustabout, gandy dancer, cowboy, bartender, fireman, used car salesman, smuggler, and so on. What would the composers of such fanciful biographies have made of Jane Austen?

One of eight children of a clergyman of gentle lineage and no fortune, living in the countryside with few diversions aside from family theatricals and reading, largely educated at home, she began to write in her early teens, and before she was twenty-five had completed three novels, unpublished for a dozen years. After the success, in 1811, of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice was published two years later, and then followed Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. It is an amazing career, especially considering the wit and sophistication of her work.

Her stories are romances in the sense that at their conclusion the hero and heroine, after grievous misunderstandings, finally come to terms and marry, but they are both more serious than the term suggests and more lighthearted, the former because Austen is a moralist of character, the latter because her vision of people is comic, and nothing is so fatal to romance as humor. As the characters converse and react to each other, they reveal themselves, and in the case of secondary characters the revelations are soon made obvious. For instance, on the first page of Pride and Prejudice, after the famous opening sentence:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

There follow two pages of colloquy between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet about Mr. Bingley, a well-off young man who has just moved into the neighborhood. She wants her husband to call on him, but he, fending her off with bland irony, pretends not to understand. We soon realize that Mrs. Bennet is silly, and her husband amuses himself at her expense. The last paragraph makes these judgments explicitly.

Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.

For the rest of the book, these and other characters will enact and reenact their traits to comic and dramatic effect. But because Austen is a moralist of character and everyone's behavior has consequences, all will be judged by the end, even though our feelings about them will always be tempered by laughter. So the technique of the book, movement of plot and revelation of character by conversation, is clear at once, and the book's theme -- the nature of a happy marriage -- is hinted at. And, although it seems a joke at first, Mrs. Bennet is proved right: by the end of the book, three of her daughters are married, one to Mr. Bingley and one to his best friend.

Austen's handling of characters is brilliant. The physical scenes, the houses and grounds are hardly described, they are marked and varied by the characters in each place: the Bennets at Longburn, the Bingleys at Nethersfield, Darcy at Pemberly, and so on, and a change of place means a change of characters, hence progression in the plot. We are always looking forward to exchanges of gossip and comic displays of character. Our appreciation is enhanced by complicity. For instance, after reading Mr. Collins' letter of introduction, Elizabeth asks her father, "Can he be a sensible man, sir?" Which he answers:

No, my dear, I think not. I have great hopes of finding him quite the reverse. There is a mixture of servility and self-importance in his letter, which promises well. I am impatient to see him.

The only inferior novel Austen wrote was Sense and Sensibility, and by looking at it we can better see the excellence of Pride and Prejudice. In Sense she does not vary the characters enough, so when the scene shifts it does not change sufficiently to excite our interest -- the characters are too similar. And too many of them are disagreeable. Their speeches are often too long and too formal, so there is a stiltedness about them never felt in Pride, where rapid, often witty, exchanges are the rule. Finally, the good characters, the ones who achieve happiness in the end are uninteresting; no one has the liveliness of Elizabeth Bennet or the power of Darcy. Austen's improvement from one novel to the next is extraordinary, as her prose became smoother, surer, more pointed, and more economical. Nevertheless, Pride remains the favorite of most readers because she never again created such an appealing hero and heroine or assembled such an entertaining cast of characters.

If my readers will take up the June issue of the Review and look again at my essay on Henry James, I think we might learn something from a comparison of the two writers. Consider the passage I quoted from the novella Daisy Miller, Randolph's remarks and Winterbourne's revealing interpretation. It is realistic in a plausible sense -- people speak like that -- and it subtly tells us something important about Winterbourne. Now Austen has her subtleties, chiefly in nuances of personality, but her presentation of characters and appraisals of conduct are not subtle in the Jamesian sense, and the dialogue is hardly realistic. We accept them as real, just as we accept other fictions as real, but we know that no one quite talked like that, even in Jane Austen's drawing room. We can see, then, that genteel fiction in the course of the 19th century became more realistic, but what it became more realistic about was techniques of representation, imparting to that fiction the illusion of gravity, of substance. James was concerned with fine distinctions of conscience and consciousness, and these are not inconsequential, as we see in Daisy Miller: Winterbourne's fastidiousness leads him to misunderstand Daisy and so to remain a figure of futility. Austen, on the other hand, writes about broader questions that go beyond individuals, questions about how to live a useful, happy life, about the nature of marriage, and qualifications for a happy one, about the moral life and its obligations. Jane Austen is really a child of the tough-minded 18th century, a descendant of the same sturdy stock as Swift, Fielding, and Smollett, who looked at life in her restricted circle with their steady realism. You never feel, when you read her books, the Victorian missishness you often feel in James' work. What genteel fiction gained in technique it lost in substance, which is one reason it was pushed aside by the coarse naturalism of Norris and Dreiser. But that's a story from another opera.

Probably what most impresses a reader encountering a Jane Austen novel for the first time is the difference in manners, which must seem very distant and punctilious compared to ours. I have heard students express scorn for the "artificiality" of the characters' manners, implicitly contrasting them with their own "sincere" directness. But this is to misunderstand manners entirely. Politeness is way of keeping people apart or, to put it another way, bringing them just within hailing distance. It structures, provides a code for, encounters, and every society has its own tactics of politeness. We think of our own deliberate informality and seeming frankness as more honest than the constraining conventions depicted in Austen's novels, but in fact our ways are also rituals designed to maintain relations at a certain distance, and we adhere to them with strict conformity.

One of the benefits of reading a book like Pride and Prejudice is that it presents us with a culture different from our own so that we have to exercise our minds to interpret its codes. This is one of the justifications for the course of reading I have been proposing in this series of essays: that by meeting different minds at their most articulate (which is what good writers are), we expand our own minds and sympathies. We realize, long before the novel is done, that Austen is concerned with the same moral issues that confront us, and that the rituals of manners, fascinating in themselves, are only different expressions of the same humanity. *

"He is a man of sense who does not grieve for what he has not, but rejoices in what he has." --Epictetus

We would like to thank the following people for their generous contributions to this journal (from 11/13/2008 to 1/14/2009): Reid S. Barker, George D. Barrett, Carol & Bud Belz, Charles Benscheidt, C. W. Borklund, Jan F. Branthaver, William G. Buckner, Terry Cahill, Mark T. Cenac, Betty G. Davis, Peter R. DeMarco, Edwin J. Feulner, The Andersen Foundation, John B. Gardner, Robert C. Gerken, Gary D. Gillespie, Lee E. Goewey, Hollis J. Griffin, Alene D. Haines, Violet H. Hall, Anthony Harrigan, Bernhard Heersink, Richard L. Herreid, David Ihle, Burleigh Jacobs, Marilyn P. Jaeger, Robert R. Johnson, Michael Kaye, Margaret Kearney, John S. Kundrat, Allyn M. Lay, Alan Lee, Herbert London, Cary M. Maguire, Will K. McLain, Eugene F. Meenagh, Edwin Meese, Delbert H. Meyer, Robert P. Miller, John Nickolaus, King Odell, Michas M. Ohnstad, Harold Olson, Arthur J. Perry, Gregory J. Pulles, Richard O. Ranheim, Harry Richard Schumache, John M. Segal, Dave Smith, Carl G. Stevenson, Clifford W. Stone, Frank T. Street, Elizabeth E. Torrance, Jack E. Turner, Thomas Warth, Thomas H. Webster, James J. Whelan, Gaylord T. Willett.

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

We do not realize how much we, individually and collectively, are shaped by the history of our country. The ways we think and behave, how our actions as community members, our social and political expectations, all grow out of our past. We did not know this until we went to live in Canada, where our efforts to understand the habits and thinking of our neighbors made us see, in action as it were, how our differences were determined by our contrasting histories. The elements that went into the making of Americans began to appear even before the Pilgrims landed, when they drew up the Mayflower Compact aboard ship, but it is a mistake to think that the deepest currents of history are always to be found in treaties and covenants and compacts; that the frontier, with all that it implied, was but a few day's distance from tidewater until after the Revolution, was one of the greatest formative influences. My point is not an analysis of the origins of American character, but an assertion that the shaping forces were at work from the beginning. If we would perpetuate American character and culture, each rising generation must be taught anew the old lessons, but we know that since the 1970s this task has been so neglected that historical illiteracy is rife. Another development has been the success of radical historians in taking over the curriculum. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is a favored text, read now by countless numbers of high school students. That at least one generation of Americans have had their minds poisoned against their own history is a disaster; that they have also been deprived of some of the most moving and profound stories in any national history is a tragedy.

*****

It may seem hard to believe today, but until the l950s there was not a lot of interest in the Civil War, and its historiography was dominated by Southerners. After 1865, Northerners turned to the tasks of getting on with their lives in a dynamically developing society; they had won the war, settled its issues, and that was that. Reconstruction did not attract their attention for very long, and by 1876 that was over, too. For Southerners, however, who faced a devastated land, a ruined economy, and a drastic social upheaval, the war was a trauma not to be forgotten, and for the rest of the century and a good part of the 20th they brooded over it (witness the obsessive novels of William Faulkner). Inevitably, the Southern point of view colored these histories, especially of Reconstruction, which didn't begin to be adequately treated until the end of the l950s. The first significant general histories written from a Northern point of view were by Bruce Catton (1899-1978), the story of the Army of the Potomac in three volumes -- Mr. Lincoln's Army (1951), Glory Road (1952), A Stillness at Appomattox (1953). He followed that with the Centennial History of the entire war -- The Coming Fury (1961), Terrible Swift Sword (1963), and Never Call Retreat (1965). This is inferior to the Army of the Potomac volumes, because it lacks their incisiveness.

Bruce Catton's, of course, are not the only popular general histories. The Army of the Potomac series was followed in a few years by Shelby Steele's The Civil War, A Narrative, and its success may be due in part to the cynicism and ignorance so widespread today, because it is essentially ahistorical, the War Between the States in three volumes. Approaching the subject from a Southern point of view, he does not discuss causes and does not see the salient points; it is no more than a well-described military scrimmage. There are plenty of readers (so-called Civil War buffs) for that sort of book.

Another, much more interesting history that started coming out in the 1950s, was Kenneth Williams' Lincoln Finds a General, five volumes of a projected seven, uncompleted at the author's death. Williams concentrates on the military aspects, especially on Grant's career, and he describes all the movements from First Bull Run to Chickamauga, doing so in unusual detail, quoting the official records at great length. The footnotes are fascinating. If you want to know what was involved in maintaining armies in the field, and what qualities were needed to make a successful commander, these are the volumes to read.

For a general history, however, Catton is the choice. His Centennial history, of course, covers more ground than the Army of the Potomac volumes, but the latter makes all the essential points about the war, and it is much better written. He is superlative on the war's causes, and after a long discussion of the Northern and Southern arguments about slavery, he says this:

Perhaps the essential fact about slavery was that it could neither be kept alive nor done to death rationally. Its foundations went far down into the pit, down to blackest wrong and violence, and when the foundations were torn out, wrong and violence would surely be loosed for a season. (The Coming Fury, p. 244)

This is the truest and most succinct explanation of why the decades-long debate about slavery ended in civil war, and it is the answer to those who say that it wasn't really a problem at all, that it would have faded away by itself in a few years. All the rational people with rational solutions. But Catton sees the truth and says it, and there is no more to be said. That's what is meant by grasping a salient point.

Catton is also excellent on McClellan's failings (though not so severe as Williams, who closely analyzes his performances in the field), especially in dealing with his civilian superiors. As he puts it, "A capacity for getting along with civilian authorities is just as essential a part of [a commander's] equipment as his ability to plan campaigns and win battles."

The most striking passage occurs at the end of Glory Road. It is November 1863, and the cemetery at Gettysburg is being dedicated with a long, long speech by Edward Everett and a short one by Lincoln. While Everett is speaking, Catton mentions a few wounded veterans present who adjourn to Cemetery Ridge and talk "quietly about what they had seen and done there." A paragraph follows not in the soldiers' words, but about the things they might have spoken ("The veterans by the trees looked about them and saw again the fury and the smoke and the killing."). Then there's a paragraph, with a reference to Ezekiel 37, beginning "this was the valley of dry bones, waiting for the word, which might or might not come [in Everett's speech]." He writes about the bones and what the men had been like and their motives:

They had come here because of angry words and hot passions in which they had not shared. They had come, too, because the drums had rolled and the bands had blared the swinging deceitful tunes that piped men off to battle . . . three cheers for the red white and blue, here's a long look back at the girl I left behind me, John Brown's body lies a-moldering in the grave but we go marching on, and Yankee Doodle on his spotted pony rides off in the eternal smoky mist of war.

The next paragraph voices puzzlement at the meaning of war:

Back of these men were innumerable long dusty roads reaching to the main streets of a thousand youthful towns and villages where there had been bright flags overhead and people on the board sidewalks cheering and crying and waving a last good-by. It had seemed once that there was some compelling reason to bring these men here -- something so broad that it would encompass all of the terrible contradictory manifestations of the country's pain and bewilderment, the riots and lynchings, the hysterical conspiracies with their oaths written in blood, the hard hand that had been laid upon the countryside, the scramble for riches and the scheming for high place, and the burdens carried by quiet folk who wanted only to live at peace by the faith they used to have.

The penultimate paragraph expresses the hope that "the word," the meaning of it all, will be revealed here.

Perhaps there was a meaning to all of it somewhere. Perhaps everything that the nation was and meant to be had come to a focus here, beyond the graves and the remembered echoes of the guns and the wreckage of lives that were gone forever. Perhaps the whole of it somehow was greater than the sum of its tragic parts, and perhaps here on this wind-swept hill the thing could be said at last, so that the dry bones of the country's dreams could take on flesh.

And then the last paragraph of the book:

The orator finished, and after the applause had died away the tall man in the black frock coat got to his feet, with two little sheets of paper in his hand, and he looked out over the valley and began to speak.

That Catton does not here print Lincoln's address, because we know it or should know it, is a master stroke because he sends us back to it, makes it stand out more sharply as the answer to the quest for meaning in these paragraphs. By making it seem a meditation by the veterans, at the same time that the language transcends their articulation, he gives these passages of meditation physical grounding, the lives and experiences of actual soldiers, and simultaneously gives the thoughts a breadth and depth they could not themselves express. In these two pages Catton encapsulates the significance of the Civil War, and he does it so cleverly, so beautifully, so eloquently that once read it is not easily forgotten. No other Civil War history that I know of has done this so well.

The Civil War is a Northern story because the victory of the Federal government meant that from then on the development of the United States would be a national not a sectional story. The latter had been fostered by slavery, which made the South a backward-looking, a stratified agricultural economy peopled by slaves, a depressed class of ignorant poor whites, a ruling class of plantation owners and their business collaborators. The outcome of the war meant, as Lincoln prophesied, that the Declaration would finally be nationally fulfilled.

To read the story of the Civil War as he tells it is to know again what Americans have done to build "a new birth of freedom -- that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth," -- and to rededicate our lives to it.

Catton also wrote the two excellent concluding volumes -- Grant Moves South (1960) and Grant Takes Command (1968) -- of a trilogy by Lloyd Lewis, who wrote only the first volume, Captain Sam Grant (1950), before his death. *

"Christmas in Bethlehem. The ancient dream... the incarnation of perfect love." --Lucinda Franks

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Fifty and more years ago, when I was a downy-cheeked undergraduate, certain names always turned up in essays or critical articles which showed the writer's gravity, that the discussion was being conducted on the highest level. The usual number was four, and they came from this list: Proust, Joyce, Eliot, Conrad, Mann, Kafka, James. They were regarded as high priests of Art, which was the standard bearer of the cause of the Humanities, and their invocation signaled that the writer was no trifler. Only recently, in the course of writing these essays, have I realized that my own conception of literature was shaped by that high seriousness. But what exactly am I talking about?

When it began I do not know, but both Henry James and Joseph Conrad were apostles by the mid-1890s. In America it began to appear among serious critics in the 1930s, but it really spread after the war when the New Criticism movement became dogma in English departments across the land. The New Criticism was a method of understanding literature (embodied in a book, Understanding Poetry, by Cleanth Brooks and Austin Warren, 1938) that paid close attention to the text, to the words and their denotations and connotations, to their tone, to their emotional implications, and so on. It ignored, so far as possible, historical or biographical information. What it replaced was a moribund system which my older readers may recall, of meaningless sentimental gushing over "pretty" verses, or deadly biographical readings: Keats wrote the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" because he was dying of tuberculosis and missed Fanny Brawne.

The methods introduced by the New Criticism were exciting, especially compared with the old regime; they made poetry, for instance, seem vital, and they swept away its sissy associations. To those of us affected by it (not everyone was) it was exhilarating to see how close analysis of a seemingly simple poem could reveal depths of meaning and feeling. You can see how this would reinforce the ideal of high Art, of which the New Critics were advocates. Reading, whatever its pleasures, was an endeavor of great seriousness, and from it we learned lessons of life. I do not mean that the critics or our teachers preached or even suggested that we draw such lessons; they were inherent in the act. Conrad's protagonists are not always heroic, but the books about them are. For instance, Jim (in Lord Jim) commits a cowardly act which dogs him throughout the book, but we're never exactly sure of how he sees it. In fact, as we are presented with different views of the affair, our own view changes and develops. When he regains his self-respect in Patusan, we realize (as Stein, who sent him there, recognized) that Jim's self-conception is not merely heroic but romantic, so his death is appropriately a dramatic act of expiation. Here is what Marlow, the narrator, says of him at the end:

But we can see him, an obscure conqueror of fame, tearing himself out of the arms of a jealous love at the sign, at the call of his exalted egoism. He goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct. Is he satisfied -- quite, how I wonder? We ought to know. He is one of us -- and have I not stood up once, like an evoked ghost, to answer for his eternal constancy? Was I so very wrong after all? Now he is no more, there are days when the reality of his existence comes to me with an immense, with an overwhelming force; and yet upon my honour there are moments, too, when he passes from my eyes like a disembodied spirit astray amongst the passions of this earth, ready to surrender himself faithfully to the claim of his own world of shades. Who knows? He is gone, inscrutable at heart. . . .

Doesn't such prose make life seem heroic, or at least terribly serious? What reading like this did was not just to make me switch from a History major to English, but it strengthened what must already have been my bent -- it made me an idealist. I was not alone. That kind of literature and the reverential approach to it appealed to budding intellectuals who, instead of business careers, went on to grad school and teaching, or tried to be writers themselves.

The evidence that Conrad believed in an exalted idea of art shows in the preface to his third novel (and the first good one) The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (1897).

And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.

This is a man who takes his writing seriously and expects his readers to take it seriously, too. It isn't mere entertainment, it's about Truth, with a capital T. Of course, he would not have been read at all if his work wasn't entertaining, and at this point we should look at his great novella Heart of Darkness (1902) to see how he creates a work of art that is both entertaining and inspiring.

Marlow, who also narrates Lord Jim and Youth, tells the story to four men who share "the bond of the sea" on board a yacht waiting in the Thames for the turning of the tide. He prefaces his narrative by the ominous remark, "And this also has been one of the dark places on the earth." By "dark" he means uncivilized, and he goes on to speak of the Roman conquest of Britain as "robbery with violence," but:

. . . what redeems it is the idea only, an idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea -- something you can set up, bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.

There we have the whole theme of Marlow's experience as he tells the story of his trip, as captain of a steamer, up the Congo River to his fateful meeting with the company agent, Kurtz. In just a few pages, before the trip even begins, Marlow has laid out the main lines of his narrative, but what is most important, he has made the reader feel that the story is momentous and ominous, charged with brooding feeling. You see how the reader is drawn in, how his interest is aroused, how he is made to feel that the theme and its working out is of the highest importance.

I won't analyze the whole story. The point is that Kurtz, who started out as an apostle of civilization and progress (in his case a "sentimental pretense"), gave in to the darkness, collaborated with the natives in various abominations, and in a final revelation before his death, said "The horror! The horror!" Marlow says:

He was a remarkable man. After all, this was an expression of some sort of belief; it had candor, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth. . . . It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory!

Then there is a final great scene where Marlow goes to see Kurtz's fiancee, and while she carries on, full of illusions, Marlow keeps seeing and hearing the last scenes of Kurtz:

"Repeat them," [his last words] she murmured in a heart-broken tone. "I want -- I want-something-something-to-live with." I was on the point of crying at her, "Don't you hear them?" The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. -- "The horror! The horror!" "His last word -- to live with," she insisted. "Don't you understand I loved him -- I loved him -- I loved him!" I pulled myself together and spoke slowly. "The last word he pronounced was -- your name.". . . It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark -- too dark altogether. . . .

The last sentence of the story:

The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost end of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky -- seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

What a final note: the reader feels that the tale has been an immensely significant experience, more than a moment of truth. Is it any wonder that stories like this make quotidian existence seem very small beer indeed?

As befits a man who could write like that, Joseph Conrad (1857-1926) had an extraordinary career. Born and raised in Poland, at the age of 20 he signed on a British freighter bound for Constantinople with a cargo of coal, thus beginning his 16-year career as a seaman and eventually a master mariner. About a dozen years later he began writing a novel, and when it was published in 1895, he finally gave up seafaring. Amazingly, he wrote in English. His first two novels are not very good, but from 1897 to 1903 he published what I think are his finest works: The Nigger of the "Narcissus," Youth, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Typhoon. Other notable works are Nostromo (1904), Victory (1915), The Shadow Line (1917) and The Rover (1923). Two novels about revolutionaries -- The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911) -- are of some interest, the first for its persistent ironic tone and portrait of Mrs. Verloc, wife of the would-be revolutionary, the second for Conrad's conception of European revolutionaries. It must be said that while his ideas are not as absurd as those of Henry James (in Princess Cassimassima), they are not very realistic. Recommended stories are "An Outpost of Progress," "The End of the Tether," and "The Secret Sharer."

But what of the subject with which I began, the question of high Art? As a creative phenomenon it lasted from the 1890s into the 1920s, and as a critical conception it was still the reigning orthodoxy as late as the early 1960s, (when I was teaching), but it must have been swept away in the general wave of destruction we know as "the 1960s." I see no trace of it now, but of course there is no literature and no criticism of the sort we associate with the heyday of that practice -- Leavis, Tate, Wilson, Winters, et al. It seems strange that literature should reach an apogee of self-consciousness and then quickly dwindle to nothing, but after all, literature is not separate from its culture. Perhaps when an activity, like literature, becomes fully self-conscious it has reached the end of its present incarnation and then must descend into decadence and nullity so long as destructive social forces remain dominant, arising in new forms only when society itself is reborn.

Think for a moment of writers before the advent of high Art -- did Dickens, for example, think about his writing in that way? Or Thackeray? Or Fielding? The great artists of the culture's noontide may be self-conscious about technique, but that is quite a different matter from thinking consciously about one's dedication to a sacred task. I cannot say why, and of course my observations may be quite wrong, but it seems to me that when art is seen in almost a religious light, and when the artist becomes self-consciously an instrument of Truth, it's a sign that the lights are about to be dimmed. *

"I don't pass the buck, nor do I alibi out of any decision I make." --Harry S. Truman