Cool Hand Luke: What Louis Menand Gets Right – and Not So Right -- about Eliot & Modernism

I’ve written about Luke Menand here before and my problem, if it even is one, with his compelling brand of intellectual history. Just to be clear here: I came away from my experience as his teaching assistant for “Art & Thought in the Cold War” at Harvard with nothing but admiration. He is a brilliant lecturer, a consummate professional, and despite what appears to be at first a slightly distant, somewhat awkward, reserve, stemming entirely, I think, from an intense shyness, a decent, down to earth guy.

My frustration with the way he often frames his accounts of cultural history is inseparable from my fascination with the appeal of his style. As David Bromwich notes, somewhat snarkily, in his review of American Studies, once Menand covers something, it stays covered. Case closed. Bromwich is vexed, though, and he can’t be alone, in wondering what it is, exactly, that Menand stands for in any of his summary pronouncements. It’s less a matter of evading a position, then an aversion to taking positions at all. He’s like the Cheshire cat of intellectual history, a sly smile fading out over the scene of writing.

The success of that writing hinges on appealing to a reader’s craving for being in the know. Menand satisfies this craving with a carefully qualified performance of knowingness. But its often achieved more through rhetorical strategies than analytical persuasion. The fascination is frustrating – how does he do what he does? Where is that shaky line drawn, exactly?

In his new review of T.S. Eliot’s two-volume letters Menand draws on his earlier account of how Eliot invented himself. That book was about Eliot’s self-fashioning as a modernist. Indeed, self-fashioning is the thread that runs through many Menand essays. Such an approach provides a bright hook but I suspect Menand’s interest in it – whether writing of Holmes and James, Kerouac and MacDonald, or Friedan and Warhol – runs deeper than that. It’s not just that such a framing of literary and cultural history lines up with his pragmatist approach: things turn out the way they do because people are the way they are. There’s something autobiographical, or autotelic, to it as well. It takes a self-fashioner to know one.

What Menand gets right about Eliot is his centrality for the New Critics and the evolution of the modern English Dept. What annoys me about this is the reductiveness of such an explanation, as though modernism came about because Eliot had a bad case of the yips. Marked by his characteristic cannyness, his seductive sense of giving the reader the inside scoop, he somewhat naively follows the Hugh Kenner model – modernism was hatched on the spot by the valiant Men of 1914 (Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Lewis). I ate this up the first time I read The Pound Era, when I was 20. But there’s no room in this superhero origin story for Woolf, Richardson, HD, Moore, Stein, Loy, Cather, Williams, Hughes, or Stevens. Lawrence is slightingly alluded to in his clever (and pragmatic) riff on modernism as a turn inward and below the waist.

If this protest seems excessive, try to imagine this: a Menand essay (or one by the Salinger-idolizing Adam Gopnik -- Salinger? Really? But then The New Yorker is nothing if not self-congratulatory) of equal gravity and full-dress staging on the correspondence of William Carlos Williams. Right.

Menand is terrific at assessing the relation of the individual talent to the tradition of institutional history; not so good at detailing the fine grain of modernism as it actually happened. Granted, it’s a review of TSE’s letters – not a grand overview of a moment. That said, the bias of the piece is to collapse the moment into Eliot’s hollow soul. To reduce modernism to the Men of 1914 is rather like claiming that postmodernist poetry in America sprang from Lowell’s Life Studies, without mentioning Olson, Duncan, Levertov, Creeley, Ginsberg, and Baraka.

Reading The New Yorker piece alongside Michael Levenson’s excellent new book, Modernism, offers a useful counterpoint. Levenson, taking the wider range of reference that a book-length study allows, places Eliot’s prewar poetry alongside Blaise Cendrars. The value of such a comparison is that it rejects “the clarity of the contrast,” as he puts it, inviting us to “recognize the sheer spread of experiment” that marked this moment. But of course Levenson, a distinguished
scholar, is writing for a different audience.

This is where Menand as scholar hews a bit too closely to The New Yorker’s house style and its commitment to entertain. It’s a style that he’s both ably critiqued and exemplified. Scholarship and journalism are uneasy bedfellows, and the need to produce popularizing accounts of complex historical and aesthetic moments often leads a writer to lean too much toward his audience. I suspect Menand doesn’t so much acknowledge as wish to abolish the distinction. This is part of his success and charm as a writer. The Metaphysical Club, for instance, though dutifully more circumspect in tone, nevertheless reads like a very very long New Yorker article. (And much like a New Yorker piece, it all boils down to a simple comforting explanation: the Civil War produced American modernism out of the pragmatist’s aversion to totalizing theories). That is one of the reasons for its enormous appeal – the book is a sheer pleasure to read. And it's what I love about Menand’s work: he sees no reason why smart writing about difficult subjects shouldn’t also be pleasurable.

(Hence this slightly left-handed homage: as Ben Jonson translates Quintillian on writing: "First, seek to emulate the best").

In one of his essays – on Trilling, I think – he remarks that the process of becoming a writer is rooted in pleasure; it arises from wanting to learn how to make sentences the way someone like Trilling does. It’s a model I subscribe to myself. It’s something every writer feels, I think. Yet in treating such a significant figure as Eliot, the pleasure tends to get in the way of the history; the need to score the witty apercu overshadows the entanglements and ambiguities of modernism. T.S. Eliot didn’t invent modernism so much as suffer it.

Menand reproduces without comment Pound's famously flabbergasted remark to Harriet Monroe about Eliot having modernized himself. But did he really? This trucking in moth-balled myth does modernist studies no good. As Menand himself notes, "Prufrock" could not have been written without the example of Jule LaForgue (nor, before him, Baudelaire). So much for autogenesis.

Nor did Eliot, as Menand’s very good book on him puts it, even discover modernism. Rather, he made himself into a modernist through a combination of a violent, that is, original style, and some shrewd (if now rather hollow) obiter dicta which captivated the imagination and practice of a generation of scholars in search of a method. That it spread like crabgrass is no achievement on Eliot’s part, even if he did little to discourage it. Here’s where I could do with a little less pragmatist bottom-lining and a little more Frankfurt-style dialectics.

Menand is very good at locating Eliot’s poetics as both a symptom and a critique of modernity. And he’s certainly right, and funny, about the way the Notes to “The Waste Land” have been read by critics as some kind of paratextual holy of holies. It’s all in all a deft summation of a career whose influence it’s difficult to overestimate. But that deftness, which is driven more by narrative concerns than the needs of literary history, also feels impoverished; marked as much by what it excludes as what it includes. He’s rather too cavalier about TSE’s involvement with Action Francaise, while his account of Eliot’s marriage to Vivien strains for an impersonal and unsympathetic tone that is greatly at odds with the acute misery of the couple.

What Menand seems to find most admirable in Eliot is not the poetry, nor even the powerful early criticism, but the pace and resolve of Eliot’s industry. It’s not so much what he did as the impact that he had which he finds impressive, even enviable. That the critic should pay homage to the critic is no surprise. But is Eliot still, nearly a century after the publication of “The Waste Land,” “the most important figure in 20th Century English language literary culture”? I thought we’d moved beyond the Great Man cult. Menand’s co-editor for The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Lawrence Rainey, makes a more subtle case in his essay on Pound/Eliot about the critical obsession with literary hierarchies, and even Marjorie Perloff, whom Rainey is riffing on, seems, in her “Avant-garde Eliot,” to edge carefully toward their position, re-claiming early Eliot as an exotic species for her prewar garden of the avant-garde.

I’m not sure I buy it.

What’s at stake here, really? Verifying that Ivor Richards was right all along in consecrating Eliot as the Next Big Thing and that time and consequence have done nothing to change that? Eliot’s sphinx-like qualities lend him to all manner of template-making and revisionary ratios. we can read whatever we want into The Man Who Was Not There -- But Who Really Was. Personally, I’m at a loss as how to account for the distance between my own intoxicated enthusiasm for his pre-“Ash Wednesday” work when I was young and my defensive guardedness when I try to teach “Prufrock” or “The Waste Land” all these years later. What’s changed? Well, for one thing, I've learned a lot more about what modernism is and how it got that way. Same poem, different page.

Which is to say that all these years later it's Dr. Williams of Rutherford, NJ who seems to me more and more to claim the cardinal role in the early avant-garde.
Spring & All, recently re-issued in a beautiful facsimile edition by New Directions, came out in 1923, one year after "The Waste Land" set off its detonation, first in The Dial, then in the Boni & Liveright book, with the newly added Notes. (Rainey presents the definitive textual history of its publication, including all the background negotiations conducted by Pound and John Quinn -- who deserves his own monograph for his role in modernism -- and the extraordinary amount of money the poem fetched its author). And of course, Williams saw the writing on the wall. As he noted later, in his "Autobiography," the appearance of "The Waste Land" was “the great disaster to our letters — it gave the poem back to the classroom.”

More and more, Eliot's "modernism" looks like an extended freak-out about the erosion of self and the disappearance of the past -- one node in Marshall Berman's account of modernity -- while WCW's breakthrough book appears, alongside Stein's Tender Buttons, as the other node -- celebratory and truly innovative -- the singular exemplar of a modernism that was truly modern -- that is, that attended to the new while it contended with the ghosts of the old. "The Waste Land" mourned the dispersal of the Great Traditiion. Spring and All unapologetically made the case for a modernism without the tears.*

Eliot may have invented, willy-nilly, the modern English dept. Though even here Menand's account is biased in favor of the cult of genius. The trend toward a quantitative metrics in literary study was already underway. It would be more accurate to say TSE was its poster boy. At any rate, the tautology that places him as its fountainhead is also one that suppresses an enormous, vital, and equally significant history of literary development that opposed the Eliotic method and continues to flourish today. The history as Menand gives it is a bit too pat, and altogether too settled. The case is not closed.

* I credit Ron Silliman with making the case that nudged me to this consideration, That, and teaching the book for the first time last spring to my class at Amherst College, a week or so after the section on Eliot.

Is Literature Exceptional? (Reply to Menand)

Is poetry, is literature, a special case? Can we still speak, with straight faces, of poetic exceptionalism? Or is literature, as Luke Menand avers in his recent consideration of Lionel Trilling, merely a report on experience that enjoys no special privileges?

Menand closes his article on Trilling on an autobiographical note:

"I was taught to think about literature as part of the history of ideas, and to believe that people wrote novels and plays and poems because they had something to say. I still think that this is true. I think that literature is a report on experience. I just don’t think that it’s a privileged report on experience. It is, as Trilling felt in his darker, anthropological moods, simply part of the cultural activity of making meaning."

Admittedly, it takes a fine mind to make an argument for dethroning literary privilege from the pages of The New Yorker. I’d like to think Menand is wrong. I’d also like to ask him why he’s taking a paycheck from Harvard while masquerading as an English professor. But the question is a serious one; it deserves consideration.

Reared on the high modernism of Pound and Eliot, I’ve always taken it for granted that what poets do is special. Not in the sense that we have access to some higher fund of wisdom, or more penetrating insights into the human heart. But that the music itself, the making of it, and the making of it within a long tradition, within the continuities and communities of form, sets it apart from other forms of cultural activity; because that concern with form is at its heart utopian. It sees the world as always potentially otherwise. More importantly, it attends to the myriad details that go by everyday unnoticed. Not just the details, but the warp and weave of them into patterns of meaning and from those patterns, song – the re-affirmation of the body’s scope – its pleasures and and its tremblings – the bewilderments of living.

When Williams equated poetry with the daily news, observing that “men die miserably everyday for lack of what is found there,” was he making a case for poetry’s difference from ordinary reports on experience found in newspapers – the common run of things – or was he instead dethroning poetry as an exceptional case, placing it in the order of the common run, saying it is no different a report than what is found on the front page, only you must learn how to read it if you could receive what it has to offer – “you got to try real hard.”

As a culture critic, Menand wants see around every corner, map out every angle of a of particular social nexus. (It is what we do, after all). The instrument he uses to perform this magic feat is, of course, historicism. But while his approach shares much in common with that of Greenblatt, attending to the nuance and complex intertwining of public and private, social and literary, relations, it also seems to set too high a premium on continuity.

It's perfectly well to map the circulations between film noir and New Wave, as he does in his Cold War lectures, making persuasive claims about how they are linked as moments and movements of cultural exchange. But his lack of finer grained detail sometimes troubles me since it runs the serious risk of conflating disparate things for the sake of unity and at the expense of all the discontinuities, large and small, that also mark these exchanges. Back of it seems to lie a method founded more on sustaining a certain ironic tone than revealing either linkages or fissures. And while without irony, no real historical distance can be credibly maintained, it's sometimes a slippery slope to enlightened, that is to say, cynical false consciousness.

Two readings I attended this week brought all this home to me. The first was an appearance of Seamus Heaney at Sanders Theater in Memorial Hall, a grimly gothic Godzilla of a building, an enormous cenotaph for Harvard’s Civil War dead. The theater itself is a kind of culture barn: all warmly burnished wooden risers and balcony; the overall mood one of reverential hush. This, dearly assembled, is where Culture takes place: the epicenter of the Privileged Report. Heaney, a very sweet and, it must be said, gracious and humble, man, was almost up to the task of filling so august a space, though I thought it did his poetry no favors.

The work itself was uneven. A poem like “Rain Stick” I found to be a mash of cloying clichés and bardic imperative: “Listen now again” – a line which anxiously closes the poem, all but suffocating the delicacy that precedes it. “Two Lorries,” an attempt at the frisson of the dialectical image that dissipated any force it might have had by meandering through anecdote and then resorting to heavy-handed juxtaposition. The two lorries, one that carried coal (and a flirtatious coal man) to his childhood home; the other that carted an IRA bomb down the same road, are clumsily conjoined by the phrase “flash forward twenty years.”

The violence of the episode and its historical significance fail to get any traction. His newest work, based on Book VI of The Aeneid, mixed charming Irish colloquialisms with a graver classical idiom, but the final effect was not very moving. At his best, Heaney has a way with pitch and stress that is marvelous: constructing clusters of tessellated consonants that are deeply chthonic; an Orphic music that makes you feel (as in Sobin or Bunting or Johnson) that if the trees and rocks could speak, this is how they would sound. Though I can never think of this strain in his work without recalling Terry Eagleton’s take-down of Heaney’s version of Beowulf, in which he rips to shreds the etymological fallacy of Saxon fetishism and regional vernaculars.

The second reading I went to, about an hour later, was Bill Corbett’s at Harvard Book Store. If Heaney’s reading exemplified what Manny Farber called “white elephant art,” the kind of work that’s mired in its own self-importance, then Corbett’s was surely “termite art,” work that tunnels through its own boundaries, constantly dissolving them. Corbett’s performance, in a small room of the store, maybe 30 folding chairs, with many folks crowded around in nooks and aisles, was a complicated mixture of bravura self-display and genuine generosity. Through anecdotes about Groliers, Robert Lowell, and many others, both famous and obscure, and by mixing their work in with his own, he invoked a vivid sense of continuum and community. Not just poems, isolated instances of speech, but of what it means to be part of poetry. It was as charged and vital a reading as I’ve ever heard. To cap it off, there was Heaney, Bill’s old friend, sitting in the front row, obviously and hugely enjoying it all.

What do these two readings point to? First, each offered its own version of exceptional cultural space and experience, from the very public to the quite intimate. Second, both displayed how poetry creates a space for saying things where none had existed before. This space belongs to no particular cultural forum but comes out of the ways in which language is used. Poetic speech is predicated on and proceeds by the drive to say what can’t otherwise find its way into speech. And if that sounds too much like therapy, let me put it this way: poetry opens us to the danger and risk of having experience – whether as Erleibnis, the shock of the instant, or as Erfahrung, the mediated measure of that instant. The best poetry does both.

If this doesn’t make literature exceptional, then I fail to understand the meaning of the word. Because how we make meaning matters. How we construct a poem is different from how we report the daily news. They report experience at two vastly different registers: the one reified; the other tearing away at the fabric of social conventions for understanding and feeling.

Poetry is not the only way to report experience. But for me, it is the most powerful, the most musical, the most spiritual, that is, the most alive to the potential and promise of being: that which cuts closest to what it means to be alive. Poetry may not, in fact, be a report on experience at all, but more insistently, more urgently, an experience in its own right, one that brings us into the presence of being alive, here and now, in a body, and feeling all the risks of feeling, listening to them as we never could have before.

P.S. Since first writing these notes, in the Fall of 2008, I’ve become a teaching assistant for Menand’s “Art and Culture in the Cold War” class, an experience I’m enjoying a great deal. Menand himself strikes me as a thoroughly decent guy: sincere, witty, and even warm and affable, though the affability seems to be swaddled in insulation; it has some trouble rising to the surface. I suspect he's intensely shy, or else socially phobic. I’ve always thought him of as being more of an essayist than a scholar, but that's only because he's so nimble at what he does that you tend to forget your reading some truly fine intellectual history. He belongs to a certain tradition of American letters I've always admired, one that includes Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Robert Warshow, Dwight MacDonald, and yes, Pauline Kael. And despite my misgivings about what kind of axe he might be grinding, his remark, in lecture, that "art messes with biology" will endear him to me always.