I Am With You Part II: A 7 Part Series on American poetry & writing & the shape of America's poetry & punk to come
Dickinson, Haley, Helprin, Hemingway, Baldwin, Nico Walker, Lowry, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Black Lips, Souled American
II. Dickinson & Isolation
Emily Dickinson wrote poetry all her life…but she wrote for the drawer. (“Writing for the drawer” is a publishing industry - were there such an industry anymore - term for anyone who writes, & sometimes even writes well, but makes no attempt to publish). Because Dickinson did not title her poems, most readers go by the first line. For example, the below is titled “Because I could not stop for Death.”
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –
Or rather – He passed Us –
The Dews drew quivering and Chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –
Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –
I’m guessing those horses’ heads belong to the four horses of the Apocalypse: Death, Famine, War. & Conquest, in that order. For some writers, the apocalypse probably seems more likely to them than getting their works published.
Few editors at modern publishing houses enjoy the autonomy to just sign a book up. First the main editor has to talk to the advertising girl or guy, then the paperback person, then the marketing person, then the lawyer who draws up contracts, upon each visit realizing more & more that their enthusiasm is either not shared at all or if it is, is it enthusiasm with serious reservations. The paperback guy doesn’t know if anyone will want a non-hardcover over 500 pages unless its Harry Potter (and even then Harry Potter was rejected for publication 12 times)
Lord of the Flies was rejected 20 times. It took James Joyce nine years of solid effort to get Dubliners published. Dune by Frank Herbert, 23 times. Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance 121 times. A Wrinkle In Time, 26 rejections. Those Chicken Soup books everybody readers? Over 120 rejections.
Steve Erickson, one of my favourite authors, spent a decade trying to get published until he found a fantastic agent, who sold the M.S. to a publisher at Simon & Schuster who had already rejected it. Erickson, despite his talent, and despite his first novel coming armed with a laudatory quote from Thomas Pynchon, was not enough to get him out of the mid-list, and by the early 2010s he was teaching writing at a Southern California University, editing a literary journal called Black Clock1, all while trying to raise a son and a daughter and keep a marriage together. When, in 2014, he was granted a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, he was finally able to step back from some of his duties. Another novel followed Shadowbahn, in 2017. But Black Clock ceased publication in 2016.
But none of these compare to what Alex Haley had to go though, receiving over 200 (!) rejection slips for Roots. I can only imagine the “soft racism” contained within the rejections. As is, we already have Ralph Ellison. And James Baldwin. And Richard Wright. You can hear the strident rejections of white publishers, all essentially saying the samme thing: How many more Black writers are we supposed to publish?
How about, as many as demand allows? Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976) by Alex Haley, despite the phenomenon it went on to become, was rejected 200 (!) times. All this despite the fact that, according to Wikipedia, “The release of the novel, combined with its hugely popular television adaptation, Roots (1977), led to a cultural sensation in the United States. The novel spent forty-six weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List, including twenty-two weeks at number one.”
There is no greater measuring stick of demand than popularity. And this book sold and sold.
Roots was also sniped at by historians who questioned Haley historic method, when all the man had done was rely on oral history whenever possible, a hallmark of African-American story-telling tradition. And not just African-American either….Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do is a fairly self-explanatory book published in 1974, just as new management techniques & consultants were being brought into the American workplace, the distance between worker and the top brass increased exponentially, both the quasi-enforced physical distance between the two (separate parking lots, if not separate buildings than separate parts of the buildings and the vastly different compensation & benefits. It was difficult for a word-a-day fella or female to relate to union members who were not only comfortable in such fancy new digs, but seemed to prefer them.)
Roots & Working are opposite projects. Roots seeks out the beginnings of the Union & works its way upward, centred around the slave character Kunta Kinte, an African King ambushed by slave traders and bought to American on the British slave ship Lord Ligonier.
From Wikipedia:
Kunte is landed in Annapolis, Maryland. John Waller of Spotsylvania County, Virginia purchases Kunta at an auction and gives him the name Toby. However, Kunta is headstrong and tries to run away four times. When he is captured for the last time, slave hunters cut off part of his right foot to cripple him.
Hence the refrain in Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunta",” “everybody wanna cut the legs off him.”
Kunta is then bought by his master's brother, Dr. William Waller. He becomes a gardener and eventually his master's buggy driver. Kunta also befriends a musician slave named Fiddler. In the aftermath of the American Revolutionary War, Kunta marries Bell, Waller's cook, and together they have a daughter, Kizzy. Kizzy's childhood as a slave is as happy as her parents can make it. She is close friends with John Waller's daughter "Missy" Anne, and she rarely experiences cruelty. Her life changes when she forges a traveling pass for her beau Noah, a field hand. When he is caught and confesses, she is sold away from her family at the age of sixteen.
Kizzy is bought by Tom Lea, who rapes & impregnates her before losing all his money in a cockfight. Kizzy gives birth to George, who enjoys privileges most Black people don’t because of the white side of his lineage, and who later becomes known as “Chicken George” when he becomes his father's cockfighting trainer. Chicken George is a philanderer known for expensive taste and alcohol, as much as for his iconic bowler hat and green scarf. He marries Matilda and they have six sons and two daughters, including Tom, who becomes a very good blacksmith. Tom marries Irene, a woman originally owned by the Holt family.
When Tom Lea loses all his money in a cockfight, he sends George to England for several years to pay off the debt, and he sells most of the rest of the family to a slave trader. The trader moves the family to Alamance County, where they become the property of Andrew Murray. The Murrays have no previous experience with farming and are generally kind masters who treat the family well. When the American Civil War ends, however, the Murray slaves decide rather than sharecrop for their former masters, they will move from North Carolina to Henning, Tennessee, which is looking for new settlers.
They eventually become a prosperous family. Tom's daughter Cynthia marries Will Palmer, a successful lumber businessman, and their daughter Bertha is the first in the family to go to college. There she meets Simon Haley, who becomes a professor of agriculture. Their son is Alex Haley, the author of the book Roots.
There is simply not enough evidence to know that Dickinson was involved, in any way, in racial affairs, despite living through the American Civil War & even living long enough to hear the Emancipation Proclamation, which was published and disseminated all over American a good three years before her death.
It’s not as if Dickinson never conversed with an abolitionist.
From Wikipedia:
In April 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary critic, radical abolitionist, and ex-minister, wrote a lead piece for The Atlantic Monthly titled, "Letter to a Young Contributor". Higginson's essay, in which he urged aspiring writers to "charge your style with life", contained practical advice for those wishing to break into print. Dickinson's decision to contact Higginson suggests that by 1862 she was contemplating publication and that it may have become increasingly difficult to write poetry without an audience. Seeking literary guidance that no one close to her could provide, Dickinson sent him a letter, which read in full:
Mr Higginson,
Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?
The Mind is so near itself – it cannot see, distinctly – and I have none to ask –
Should you think it breathed – and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude –
If I make the mistake – that you dared to tell me – would give me sincerer honor – toward you –
I enclose my name – asking you, if you please – Sir – to tell me what is true?
That you will not betray me – it is needless to ask – since Honor is it's own pawn –
Benjamin Friedlander writes the following in Objects of the Mind: Emily Dickinson and Abolition:2
What were Emily Dickinson's opinions on the great moral issue of slavery, which so shook the foundations of her society? Neither letters nor poems offer direct testimony. We know, however, that Dickinson's father, elected as a Whig to the 33rd Congress, participated in the House debate on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill; we know, too, that she read newspapers and magazines avidly, and that her chosen “Preceptor,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was a prominent abolitionist.
She was, in other words, almost certainly well informed on the subject, but chose consciously (for whatever reasons) to keep close counsel with her beliefs. One indication that Dickinson did take note of the slavery debate is her oblique use of the language of abolition in poems that don’t directly address that topic.
We know that Dickinson abhorred commerce in all its forms, so it seems likely that she considered the selling of slave men and woman in chains at marketplace to be morally repugnant. But her decision to keep writing for the drawer meant that the issued of the day went unremarked by her. Whether this is excuse enough for her silence regarding the matter of slavery depends on your viewpoint. She lived through times that changed enough that she thought her own advocacy would be either not needed or, worse, ridiculed because it came from a woman?
Unions had been weakening in America for years, despite the unscripted screaming Jimmy Hoffa, & President Reagan firing every single Air Traffic Controller in America on August 5 1981, was not the nadir for unions, but the beginning of an inexorable slide toward obscurity. Just out of curiosity, for this post, I checked how many members are left in what was once the most powerful union in the world; nicknamed “The Wobblies,” probably a nickname slung by an enemy to make them sound unsure of themselves & willing to bend, the International Workers of the World.
Membership in 2020 is an anemic 9,351.
6,570 in the USA
2,481 in UK & Ireland (2019 fig.)
200 in Germany (2015 fig.)
100 in Australia (2019 fig.)
No Canada, you say? I noticed that too. I guess it’s cuz Canada, On September 24, 1918 (so that means under cuddly Trudeau) the Canadian government made membership in the Industrial Workers of the World illegal. The maximum sentence for membership in the IWW was five years to be served in one of 24 internment camps.
Jesus. ANYWAY enough about the Wobblies. Let’s get back to barely published authors.
After Roots became a hit, it not only showed the most-white run publishing houses that there was a Black audience out there voracious for some stories about themselves or their experiences. A hugely successful TV miniseries adaptation was released less than a year after the novel’s appearance in bookstores.
The original TV s followed by a that most American of things, the sequel, released in 1979 Roots: The Saga of an American Family, a gargantuan undertaking for a television show, with three times the budget as the original, producing seven episodes and an epilogue and running chronologically from the 1880s to the 1960s.
Lord of the Flies was rejected 20 times. It took James Joyce nine years of solid effort to get Dubliners published. Dune by Frank Herbert, 23 times. Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance 121 times. A Wrinkle In Time, 26 rejections. Those Chicken Soup books everybody readers? Over 120 rejections.
From Dickinson’s Wikipedia page:
Evidence suggests that Dickinson lived much of her life in isolation. Considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a penchant for white clothing and was known for her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, to even leave her bedroom. Dickinson never married, and most friendships between her and others depended entirely upon correspondence.
You wouldn’t guess that a person so isolated from humanity would be capable of a profound understanding of the menu of misery we humans daily choose from, but you’d be wrong. Dickinson knew people, their motives, their fears, their lifes & loves. Understanding does not require participation.
Maddeningly, for her biographers, while just a little strange for her readers, Dickinson refrained from titling poems, both greatly aggravating her editors & biographers - a trollish writerly strategy, from Johnson deliberately meeting Boswell late and forcing his own biographer to engage in “walk & talks,” seen as Aaron Sorkin as the only way people speak, but seen in English society @ the time as uncouth and rude. Deep maters wee discussed over the fire, with tea, not up & down the road where any idiot might selectively overhear something. Privacy was paramount in England. Johnson knew this. He just wanted to make his biographer work for it.
Now, keeping in mind the “no pleasure without the absence of it, no warmth without cold, and read the poem known as “After great pain, a formal feeling comes – (372)”
After great pain, a formal feeling comes – (392)
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
Here Dickinson is talking about the relatable & kind of amazing fact that once a terrible bodily pain has passed, it is neigh impossible to bring it back to the body. It can be loosely remembered & brought back to mind. But to totally recall its stormy depths & sharp stabs is impossible. Why is this?
It’s summertime now. Can you make your hand feel cold just by thinking about the cold?
Can you make that same glove-less hand warm while waiting for the bus in February, the bus that allegedly comes once every 40 mins and you just checked your phone (making your hand even colder & more numb) & it’s been 39 minutes.
This is Dickinson’s point. You can only remember the fact, the abstract fact of your discomfort, the obvious corollary being happiness & good times can only be recalled in abstract fragments, little shards of memory that got stabbed into our minds for whatever reason.
Dickinson does not come out & say this is a tragedy, but the seed is planted. Yes, all we have to live in is the ever-passing moment (my thanks to punk band MxPx for such a cool phrase) but our thoughts, our minds, which is where our living is done, tend to live either in the past or future. It’s like they are collaborators, crowding out the now so you can worry about the time you dropped something expensive at the LCBO & then pretended it wasn’t you, or worry if you will ever see your ex-wife again.
There’s a line like this in my own novel about people who don’t remember things. The example given is movies they’ve seen. They remember the fact of seeing it & may even have the ticket receipt, as recent as last fucking week (!) in their bag but they cannot remember the film.
This, to me, is tragic. And I think Dickinson feels so too, even if she never went out.
Here’s the passage line from my book, far inferior to anything Dickinson or Whitman wrote, I’ll tell ya that, Or Musil for that matter, even if his title ultimately was meant to describe himself:
And what are our lives if we can’t remember them? You are your memories. Such a shame to have so few, and of that few, so many forlorn ones: watching an elderly man struggle uphill, the bleak sky of November afternoons, the wordless gaze of a sleepy dog.
Dr. Samuel Johnson was famous for a his sharp wit & epigrams but - like Alexander Pope & Somerset Maugham, his fame decayed and continued to lessen with the corporeality of his corpse.
But, for some reason, the English have a tendency to overpraise some of their own exports. Remember that horrid band Test-Icicles? Was the similarity to “Testicles” just a joke? Devonté Hynes, the brainchild of the balls-based band, did go on to release slightly better music under the name Lightspeed Champion, but Test-Icicles were atrocious. They sucked in 2005, their few mins in the spotlight, they suck right now in the “ever passing moment,” and they will suck years from now by bargain binners digging up their two LPs, intrigued by the covers:
Here’s Lightspeed Chamption’s 2008 debut:
And here is their “anxiously awaited” (by whom..Wikipedia likes to ask. Who exactly was anxiously awaiting a sophomoric entry from Lightspeed Champion?) sophomore entry.
I would place the band Lightspeed Champion’s sound & album in the “emo-revival” section if I worked at a record store. Now, Lightspeed Champion are at turns both listenable & pleasantly ignorable but Test-Icicles were atrocious and always will be. Back then. They’re “meh” both right now in the “ever passing moment” and I have no doubt they will suck years from now.
According to Wikipedia (bold emphasis mine, as I would advise this man to follow that, much more lucrative path):
Hynes went on to record under the name Lightspeed Champion (also signed to Domino Records) releasing a successful [sic] album entitled Falling Off the Lavender Bridge in 2008, and second album Life Is Sweet! Nice To Meet You in 2010, before placing the project on hiatus. He has since gone on to become a highly successful producer, working with artists such as Solange, Sky Ferreira, and Mutya Keisha Siobhan.
He now records solo material under the moniker Blood Orange, releasing three albums to critical acclaim.
So Britain overpraises their shitty bands but it sounds like this Lightspeed Champion Hynes guy found a good calling & a home producing records for other artists.
Unlike with literature, the Brits had a centuries-long head-start on the Americans when it comes to literature. Americans did not have their own writing, per se, in their own vernacular, until Mark Twain first put pen to paper (whose Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is his true masterpiece yet he went to his grave thinking Adventures of Tom Sawyer his best work.) Another mentionable novel would be The Prince & the Pauper, set in England, featuring titular characters who looks so similar, & are so tired with their own lives, thst they decide to switch to see how the other half lives. But this one was so obviously written for an English audience, and relies too much on English social graces that I can’t say it warrants much attention aside from completists. The other vernacular writer, already covered here, was Walt Whitman.
But American Literature wasn’t so new as to lack rivalry. Have you read Mark Twain’s scathing takedown of James Fenimore Cooper’s writing? It’s called Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences & may have initially been published under Twain’s real name, Samuel Clemens, but his authorship was confirmed pretty quickly, if for the humorous attack of the style alone.
Twain’s outburst was due to the acclaim Cooper’s Deerslayer had been met with, but the criticism is fair, in that it is obvious Twain has done the reading. I think he was most offended by the fact that somebody had dared call the book art:
Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in 'Deerslayer,' and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.
Twain doesn’t actually list 115 offences. But of the ones he does list, they are here:
1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the Deerslayer tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air.
2. They require that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the Deerslayer tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.
3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.
4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.
5. They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the Deerslayer tale to the end of it.
6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. But this law gets little or no attention in the Deerslayer tale, as Natty Bumppo's case will amply prove.
7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the Deerslayer tale.
8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as “the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest,” by either the author or the people in the tale. But this rule is persistently violated in the Deerslayer tale.
9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. But these rules are not respected in the Deerslayer tale.
10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.
11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency. But in the Deerslayer tale this rule is vacated.
In addition to these large rules there are some little ones. These require that the author shall:
12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
14. Eschew surplusage.
15. Not omit necessary details.
16. Avoid slovenliness of form.
17. Use good grammar.
18. Employ a simple and straightforward style.
Even these seven are coldly and persistently violated in the Deerslayer tale. Twain’s biggest beef seem to be the sheer inconsistency of language coming from the titular Deerslayer:
In the Deerslayer story he lets Deerslayer talk the showiest kind of book-talk sometimes, and at other times the basest of base dialects. For instance, when some one asks him if he has a sweetheart, and if so, where she abides, this is his majestic answer:
“'She's in the forest-hanging from the boughs of the trees, in a soft rain—in the dew on the open grass—the clouds that float about in the blue heavens—the birds that sing in the woods—the sweet springs where I slake my thirst—and in all the other glorious gifts that come from God's Providence!'”
And he preceded that, a little before, with this:
“'It consarns me as all things that touches a fri'nd consarns a fri'nd.'”
And this is another of his remarks:
“'If I was Injin born, now, I might tell of this, or carry in the scalp and boast of the expl'ite afore the whole tribe; or if my inimy had only been a bear'”—and so on.
Later, Twain is in disbelief that the titular Deerslayer can claim to no only see, but hit, while riding a horse, a nail that has been nailed into a tree a good hundred yards away:3
How far can the best eyes see a common house-fly? A hundred yards? It is quite impossible. Very well; eyes that cannot see a house-fly that is a hundred yards away cannot see an ordinary nailhead at that distance, for the size of the two objects is the same. It takes a keen eye to see a fly or a nailhead at fifty yards—one hundred and fifty feet. Can the reader do it?
The nail was lightly driven, its head painted, and game called. Then the Cooper miracles began. The bullet of the first marksman chipped an edge off the nail-head; the next man's bullet drove the nail a little way into the target—and removed all the paint. Haven't the miracles gone far enough now? Not to suit Cooper; for the purpose of this whole scheme is to show off his prodigy, Deerslayer Hawkeye—Long-Rifle—Leather-Stocking—Pathfinder—Bumppo before the ladies.
“'Be all ready to clench it, boys!' cried out Pathfinder, stepping into his friend's tracks the instant they were vacant. 'Never mind a new nail; I can see that, though the paint is gone, and what I can see I can hit at a hundred yards, though it were only a mosquito's eye. Be ready to clench!'
“The rifle cracked, the bullet sped its way, and the head of the nail was buried in the wood, covered by the piece of flattened lead.”
There, you see, is a man who could hunt flies with a rifle, and command a ducal salary in a Wild West show to-day if we had him back with us.
The recorded feat is certainly surprising just as it stands; but it is not surprising enough for Cooper. Cooper adds a touch. He has made Pathfinder do this miracle with another man's rifle; and not only that, but Pathfinder did not have even the advantage of loading it himself. He had everything against him, and yet he made that impossible shot; and not only made it, but did it with absolute confidence, saying, “Be ready to clench.” Now a person like that would have undertaken that same feat with a brickbat, and with Cooper to help he would have achieved it, too.
By the end of it, Twain seems so mad you can feel his pen pressing through & ripping the very paper he wrote on:
Cooper's word-sense was singularly dull. When a person has a poor ear for music he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He keeps near the tune, but it is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he doesn't say it. This is Cooper. He was not a word-musician. His ear was satisfied with the approximate word. I will furnish some circumstantial evidence in support of this charge. My instances are gathered from half a dozen pages of the tale called Deerslayer. He uses “verbal,” for “oral”; “precision,” for “facility”; “phenomena,” for “marvels”; “necessary,” for “predetermined”; “unsophisticated,” for “primitive”; “preparation,” for “expectancy”; “rebuked,” for “subdued”; “dependent on,” for “resulting from”; “fact,” for “condition”; “fact,” for “conjecture”; “precaution,” for “caution”; “explain,” for “determine”; “mortified,” for “disappointed”; “meretricious,” for “factitious”; “materially,” for “considerably”; “decreasing,” for “deepening”; “increasing,” for “disappearing”; “embedded,” for “enclosed”; “treacherous;” for “hostile”; “stood,” for “stooped”; “softened,” for “replaced”; “rejoined,” for “remarked”; “situation,” for “condition”; “different,” for “differing”; “insensible,” for “unsentient”; “brevity,” for “celerity”; “distrusted,” for “suspicious”; “mental imbecility,” for “imbecility”; “eyes,” for “sight”; “counteracting,” for “opposing”; “funeral obsequies,” for “obsequies.”
There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now—all dead but Lounsbury.4 I don't remember that Lounsbury makes the claim in so many words, still he makes it, for he says that Deerslayer is a “pure work of art.” Pure, in that connection, means faultless—faultless in all details—and language is a detail. If Mr. Lounsbury had only compared Cooper’s English with the English which he writes himself—but it is plain that he didn't; and so it is likely that he imagines until this day that Cooper's is as clean and compact as his own. Now I feel sure, deep down in my heart, that Cooper wrote about the poorest English that exists in our language, and that the English of Deerslayer is the very worst that even Cooper ever wrote.
I may be mistaken, but it does seem to me that Deerslayer is not a work of art in any sense; it does seem to me that it is destitute of every detail that goes to the making of a work of art; in truth, it seems to me that Deerslayer is just simply a literary delirium tremens.
A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are—oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.
Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.
That’s just about the most badass literary takedown of all time. Worthy of Renata Adler’s The Perils of Pauline, just about the hardest takedown on a living writer in recent memory.
Next week, Part III: Hemingway’s In Our Time v. Dick Cheney’s In My Time. The prick didn’t just steal the title, he’s trying to steal it’s associate glory.
my copy of Black Clock 16 contains a great story from David Rice (A Room In Dodge City) called “In The Cabin Up On Stilts.”
Friedlander, Benjamin. “Auctions of the Mind: Emily Dickinson and Abolition.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory. University of Arizona. Volume 54, Number 1, Spring 1998 pp. 1-26.
100 yards: That’s an entire football field away. A nail. On a tree. A football field away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Lounsbury