Who Wants To Be a Samurai?

Anytime from the mid-1950s, after the first wave of postwar Japanese films swept across Europe and America, until the late '60s, every male (and probably every female) cinephile wanted to be a samurai. Even Ingmar Bergman admitted in an interview that he wanted to be one, and it inspired him to make The Virgin Spring. 

From the beginning of film production in Japan, the samurai had been a staple of period films, or jidaigeki. Samurai - or chambara - films were as common a fixture of Japanese film as Westerns had been in Hollywood. While the two genres are often compared, more than one critic has observed that the central action of a samurai film - the sword fight - is immeasurably more cinematic than a gunfight.

Of course, there had been dissenting voices all along from Japan that tried to remind us, in films like Kobayashi's Seppuku, a scathing attack on bushido - the samurai code, that being a samurai wasn't necessarily such a good thing. And by the time the filmmakers of the Japanese New Wave were done, the image of the heroic samurai was in tatters. Kihachi Okamoto's 1968 film, Kill!, accelerated the decline. 

In Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character, one of those reference books that, in the 1970s, was considered "indispensable" for any student of Japanese film, Donald Richie wrote: "Kihachi Okamoto made the satirical comedy Age of Assassins (Satusujinkyo Jidai, 1966) and then went on to make such ordinary period films as Kill (Kiru, 1967-68) and such unexceptional war films as Human Bullet (Nikudan, 1968)."(1) So much for Kihachi Okamoto. Except that I have seen both Kill! and Human Bullet, and though they are not up to the level of the best films of the Sixties, pace Donald Richie, they are neither ordinary nor unexceptional.

Richie must have seen dozens of period films to have arrived at a definition of what was "ordinary" that is far more exact than my own. But I have seen enough Japanese period films to know just how boringly ordinary they can be in the hands of an uninspired director. (Hiroshi Inagaki's stylistically petrified version of Chushingura [1962] heaves to mind.) 

A formulaic samurai film is one that indulges in clichés rather than avoids them, that adheres strictly to the terms of the genre without attempting to expand them or explode them. For me, a good illustration of the difference can be found by comparing two films made back to back by Akira Kurosawa: Yojimbo and Sanjuro.(2) The first is a direct and brilliant send-up of the genre, while the second, which was a sequel to Yojimbo with the same scruffy samurai played by Toshiro Mifune, is a almost a self-parody. In Sanjuro, Kurosawa was clearly capitalizing on the success of Yojimbo. Audiences expecting him to repeat himself didn't realize that such a feat was beyond even Kurosawa's powers. In artistic terms, Sanjuro is a pallid shadow of Yojimbo.

By the time Kihachi Okamoto made Kill!, he had already distinguished himself as a versatile director in multiple film genres and was sought after by the biggest names in Japanese film. He had what can only be called a jaundiced view of Japan's past and present.  Age of Assassins, the title of his best film, could be the same title of many of his films of the Sixties. He made Samurai Assassin (Samurai, 1965) with Toshiro Mifune and Sword of Doom (Daibosatsu Toge, 1966) with Tatsuya Nakadai. In the latter, Okamoto was challenging the popular version of the well-known tale of Daibosatsu Pass (which first appeared as a serial novel by Kaizan Nakazato), made in color in 1960 with the screen idol Raizo Ichikawa in the role of Tsuke Ryunosuke. Okamoto's version was shot in freezing black & white and is uncompromisingly inky black in tone, making no concession to audience sympathies. As performed my Tatsuya Nakadai, Ryunosuke is an obvious psychotic murderer, made worse by the total absence of motivation for his evil deeds.

With Kill! Okamoto made a direct assault on the samurai as an institution in Japan. The film opens in a dusty, deserted outpost called Joshu in the year 1833 with a chance encounter between Hanjiro, a farmer who wants to be a samurai, and Genta, a samurai who quit his position two years before to become a yakuza. Both starving (we can hear their stomachs growling - at one point in harmony), they become embroiled in the criss-crossing plots of a murderous chamberlain named Ayuzawa trying to consolidate his power over a provincial fiefdom. 

Hanjiro has taken the name "Tabata" (rice paddy) because he sold his land for a sword. "Two years ago," he tells Genta, "There was a riot near my town. I saw peasants die like ants. I won't be an ant." But Genta is taking an opposite trajectory. Two years before, he was ordered to kill his best fiend for the sake of the clan. "I was disgusted with samurai life, so I left it." He watches as Ayuzawa orders his men to kill one another and recognizes it as familiar samurai treachery.

There seems to be a single prevailing message in so many samurai films - that the samurai as a class is corrupt and oppressive and it is better to be a poor farmer (or, in the case of Genta, a lowly yakuza). You find this message at the end of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, and in Yojimbo. At the beginning of Yojimbo, an old man tries to stop his young son from running away and becoming a gambler. "Who wants to be a gambler?" the father pleads. "Stay at home and farm!" 

"Who wants a long life eating mush?" his son replies. "A short, exciting life for me!" Near the very end of the film, this same young man is confronted by the nameless samurai played by Mifune. Screaming for his mother, he cowers as Mifune approaches him. "A long life eating mush is best!" Mifune tells him, as he lets the young man run away.

The same message also appears in Kill! At the film's climax, which takes place on the day of the spring equinox, all of Ayuzawa's plots end in a bloody melée. But just as Hanjiro learns of Genta's heroism and calls out for him in vain, a crowd of peasants arrive to celebrate a life-affirming festival. Ecstatic, hysterical life in the midst of death. Ending where the film began, in the same deserted outpost town (where it is now raining), Hanjiro tracks down Genta. After finally becoming a samurai, Hanjiro complains to Genta that his formal clothes make his shoulders ache and that his shaved head is "freezing." Then he tells Genta that he quit and wants to go with him, wherever he is going. Hanjiro, too, has learned what Genta knows - a very un-Eastern philosophy. As E. M. Forster put it, "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."

The film is superbly and quite elegantly constructed. Okamoto deploys a masterful technique, using the widescreen (2.35:1) with surprising ease. Tatsuya Nakadai is once again brilliant. Japanese film acting is often difficult to gauge by Western standards, but Nakadai, who was a favorite of so many great directors, including Ichikawa, Kurosawa, and Kobayashi, is remarkably versatile and a pleasure to watch. The same cannot be said, however, of Etsushi Takahashi, who plays the farmer Hanjiro. Evidently trying to imitate a horse, especially when he runs (or gallops), his facial expressions are too broad even for a partial comedy like Kill! One feels - or hopes - that no one could be that stupid. Masaru Sato's music is virtually a character in the film. Though it sometimes "telegraphs" some of the action, with a sound effect slightly anticipating the image it accompanies, it is as carefully intertwined with the action as Sato's music had been in Yojimbo and Sanjuro.

I couldn't help noticing some references to Kurosawa: there are seven young samurai (shichi-nin) who hole up on a mountain called Toride (Toride-yama, the word means "fortress," like The Hidden Fortress); Genta finds that he must defend the young samurai "to find out what I lost as a samurai," just as Sanjuro did; and, like Mifune in Yojimbo, Genta is captured and severely beaten before he triumphs using - instead of Mifune's knife - a pair of small sharpened fire tongs. These "references" may have been unintentional, but I noticed them - a clear sign that I've probably seen too many Japanese films.


(1) The Human Bullet, which Okamoto made for the Art Theater Guild, is like Soldier Svejk in the Pacific War. A young man is conscripted in the Imperial Army, but is found to be so useless, he is chosen to be a "human bullet" - piloting a surface torpedo in a suicide attack. At the close of the film, set today (1968), his skeleton is still at the controls of his torpedo, heading toward a beach crowded with unsuspecting bathers. 
(2) The story that Okamoto used as the basis of Kill! was derived from a collection of stories by Shūgorō Yamamoto - the same collection of stories that provided Kurosawa with the story for Sanjuro.

Grappling With "The Bear"

Reading Bright Book of Life, Alfred Kazin's book of ecstatic essays on American "novelists and storytellers," I got to part 2 devoted to the "Secret of the South," where Kazin singles out William Faulkner's "The Bear" as a great example of his "belief in thought as rumination over a past completed, final, irrevocable":

'Surely this explains the attempt, in "The Bear," to make a single sentence out of so many pages. This is the most famous instance of what Faulkner described as "my ambition to put everything into one sentence - not only the present but the whole past on which it depends and which keeps overtaking the present."'

My first encounter with "The Bear" was as a part of Three Famous Short Novels by Faulkner that I was assigned to read in my first college English course. The three "short novels" in the book, "Spotted Horses," "Old Man," and "The Bear," had been extracted from three previously published novels, The Hamlet, The Wild Palms, and Go Down, Moses. Like everyone else unaccustomed to Faulkner's style (which Malcolm Cowley, in his introduction to the Viking Press' The Portable Faulkner characterized as at times "putting the whole world into one sentence, between one capital letter and one period.") I found reading "The Bear" rough going. 

I didn't know it then, but "The Bear" first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on May 9, 1942. But it was published in only four sections. Two days after it appeared as a short story of a little more than 6,000 words, it appeared in Go Down, Moses And Other Stories, published by Random House. "The Bear," now with five sections, is the largest of seven stories in Go Down, Moses. Random House imposed And Other Stories in the title, despite Faulkner's insistence that it was a novel. Other sections had appeared as short stories as early as 1940 in four other periodicals. Faulkner wasn't being entirely misleading by calling his collection of the stories a novel. All of them bear a "family resemblance." In Go Down, Moses, "The Bear" takes up 140 pages, with the interpolated fourth section occupying 61 of those pages. Faulkner called this section "just a dangling clause in the description of that man [Ike McCaslin] when he was a young boy." In his introduction to the Viking Portable Faulkner, published in 1946 (when all of Faulkner's books except Sanctuary were already out of print), Malcolm Cowley wrote that "if you want to read simply a hunting story, and one of the greatest in the language, you should confine yourself to the first three parts and the last, which are written in Faulkner's simplest style."

The problem is, without the fourth section, a synopsis of "The Bear" makes it sound like a Hemingway paean to masculine virtues, a story one might find in the Juvenile section of a publc library. In 1955, Faulkner placed it in another collection called Big Woods, without its fourth section. Some critics suggest to readers that the fourth section should be omitted. 

Near the end of the story as it appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, the scope of "The Bear" is encapsulated in a single sentence: "He had heard about a bear, and finally got big enough to trail it, and he trailed it four years and at last met it with a gun in his hands and he didn’t shoot." But it would be an understatement to say that the fourth section of the story in Go Down, Moses takes the story to a greater depth. Within it, Faulkner explains to the reader why Ike McCaslin makes his peace with the wilderness. It isn't because of any bear or all the lore that Faulkner dwells on in rich detail about Ike's many encounters with it through the years and the many hunts in which he is included by his elders.

Relinquish. Relinquishment. Repudiated and relinquished. These are the words with which section 4 of "The Bear" ring out. At 21, Ike McCaslin stands before his second cousin McCaslin Edmonds and, in an impossible outpouring of words, refuses to accept his legacy, the legacy left him by his grandfather Carothers McCaslin, who first bought the land from a Chickasaw chieftan - the same Chickasaw tribe that was cast out of Mississippi in 1837:

"'I cant repudiate it. It was never mine to repudiate. It was never Father's and Uncle Buddy's to bequeath me to repudiate because it was never Grandfather's to bequeath them to bequeath me to repudiate because it was never old Ikkemotubbe's to sell to Grandfather for bequeathment and repudiation. Because it was never Ikkemotubbe's fathers' fathers' to bequeath Ikkemotubbe to sell to Grandfather or any man because on the instant when Ikkemotubbe discovered, realised, that he could sell it for money, on that instant it ceased ever to have been his forever, father to father to father, and the man who bought it bought nothing.

"'... Because He told in the Book how He created the earth, made it and looked at it and said it was all right, and then He made man. He made the earth first and peopled it with dumb creatures, and then He created man to be His overseer on the earth and to hold suzerainty over the earth and the animals on it in His name, not to hold for himself and his descendants inviolable title for-ever, generation after generation, to the oblongs and squares of the earth, but to hold the earth mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood, and all the fee He asked was pity and humility and sufferance and endurance and the sweat of his face for bread.'"

In their grandfather Carothers McCaslin's commissary, Ike and McCaslin Edmonds take down the ledgers with their heavy binding and yellowed pages in which their twin uncles, Theophilus and Amodeus accounted for every slave, their price at purchase, their dates of birth and death, how many offspring, for the decades before and after 1865. 

Having found the beneficiaries of Carothers McCaslin's legacy of $1,000 to each, Ike learns of another crime against nature committed by his grandfather - a child by his own daughter. It is all too much for Ike to inherit, not just his grandfather's land, but the "truth" ("there is only one truth and it covers all things that touch the heart"). After presenting his long argument to McCaslin Edmonds, his interlocutor in the fourth section, even he pronounces that Ike is "free." And then, topping it off - o'ertopping it - is the "silver cup" filled with gold coins, a last legacy to Ike from his drunkard uncle Hubert Beachamp. This is clearly a symbol of the heritage of the South, when Ike and McCaslin Edmonds take the object, wrapped in burlap, and place it on a table and Ike unwraps it to find the silver cup has been replaced by a tin coffee pot filled, not with gold but with copper coins and pieces of paper on which Hubert Beachamp wrote his I.O.U.s. "So you have plenty of coppers anyway," commented McCaslin Edmonds. That's all that was left of the story of the South - a fortune reduced to an unspeakable history, translated into the lowest currency and empty promises to pay all of it back.

After all this, with the course of the harmless story about the hunt for an old bear changed to the story of how a young man learns how power and corruption have changed his legacy into something obscene, repugnant, and unacceptable - with such an overwhelming change of course, one would think the story couldn't possibly end the same way it ended in The Saturday Evening Post. And, indeed, it does not. Ike returns to Major de Spain's land only to find a large part of it, the primeval Mississippi forest in which he had hunted for so many years, has been leased to a logging company. Granted permission to hunt once more, on condition that he bring back a "small squirrel" to Major de Spain, Ike follows the now familiar trails to a place he has treasured in his memory all his life:

"Then he was in the woods, not alone but solitary; the solitude closed about him, green with summer. They did not change, and, timeless, would not, any more than would the green of summer and the fire and rain of fall and the iron cold and sometimes even snow"

It is there that Ike finds Boon, the man who had shot and killed the bear Old Ben, sitting at the base of a gum tree, hysterically smashing to pieces the gun he used to kill him. A powerful image summing up Faulkner's "dangling clause," making "The Bear" one of his most compelling works.   

The Old Country

There has always been an Old Country. Find the most ancient civilization, in India or China, whose history stretches back into the Iron Age, and their mythology, their religious writings will tell of how they got there from somewhere else. 

In all their desperate wanderings in the world, human beings came latest to the Americas. The first people came across the frozen ocean from Asia 12,000 or more years ago. They are called Native Americans, even though their nativity can be traced, through their DNA, all the way back to what is now Siberia. And like all people, they, too, kept on wandering until they had settled the whole of North and South America. Only when they reached Patagonia, in southernmost Argentina and Chile, did they stop, because they had run out of new land. 

The first people from Europe to reach North America were Vikings, then fishermen from Ireland, who stopped in what is now northeastern Canada. Christopher Columbus was the first official delegation from Europe, who mistook the natives he met in the islands of the Caribbean for the natives of the East Indies, and called them "indios." The second wave of Irish immigrants didn't arrive in America until the 19th century, which is why I now call myself an Irish-American. Generations since, the descendants of those Irish people still speak fondly, if rather dimly, of The Old Country - a place only a small fraction of which is by now a real place, and the far greater part of which is a mishmash of memories and sheer fantasies. Americans who arrived from Europe have an insatiable homesickness because they have been Americans for only a few generations, not nearly enough time to develop a sense of belonging there.  

Last April, a relation sent me a package in which was enclosed a great gift - The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely, Irish novelist and storyteller, historian, travel-writer, broadcaster, and lecturer. I had read every Kiely story I could get my hands on some time in the 1980s, and one particular story had stuck in my memory more vividly than all the others. It is the story "The Dogs of the Great Glen" which was published in 1963 in Kiely's first collection of stories called A Journey to the Seven Streams. I remember it because it tells of an Irish-American who, after listening to the stories passed down to him from his grandfather, has decided to go and see if the stories are real. It is the same fantasy shared by everyone in the world who has listened to the stories of his parents and grandparents - stories many hundreds or even thousands of years old - about the place from which they came: going back, retracing the outward journey to the place of origin, their original home. In his introduction the book I got in the package last spring, Kiely quotes Antoninus Pius: "Whatever happens is as common and well known as a rose in the spring or an apple in autumn. Everywhere up and down, through ages and histories, towns and families are full of the same stories."

Strangely enough, the story is exactly as I remembered it from reading it once thirtysome years ago:

"The professor had come over from America to search out his origins and I met him in Dublin on the way to Kerry where his grandfather had come from and where he had relations, including a grand-uncle, still living.... 'All I remember is a name out of my dead father's memories: the great Glen of Kenareen.'"

All he knows for sure is that it's in County Kerry. No such place as Kenareen could be found on the most detailed maps of Kerry, but the narrator of the story - who may as well be Benedict Kiely - tells the professor, "At the back of my head I feel that once in the town of Kenmare in Kerry I heard a man mention the name of Kenareen."

So the two of them set off by car and are given the most vague directions pointing them up and up some mountains, which they eventually have to climb on foot. And as they ascend, the world around them seems to etherealize into a mist. It may be the altitude affecting the oxygen flow to their brains, but the higher the go, the more indistinct the landscape around them becomes, exactly as if they are entering not any real place but a dream they are dreaming together. "'Now that I am so far,'" the professor says, "'I'm half-afraid to finish the journey. What will they be like? What will they think of me? Will I go over that ridge there to find my grandfather's brother living in a cave?'"

Along the way the professor recounts the stories that his grandfather told to his father. "'He would tell stories for ever, my father said, about ghosts and the good people. There was one case of an old woman whose people buried her - where she died, of course - against her will, across the water, which meant on the far side of the lake of the glen. Her dying wish was to be buried in another graveyard, nearer home. And there she was, sitting in her own chair in the chimney corner, waiting for them, when they came home from the funeral. To ease her spirit they replanted her.

"'My father told me,' he said, 'that one night coming home from the card-playing my grandfather slipped and fell down fifteen feet of rock and the only damage done was the ruin of one of two bottles of whisky he had in the tail-pockets of his greatcoat. The second bottle was unharmed.'" 

When they reach the watershed, noticing how the trickling stream was flowing with them: "So we raised our heads slowly and saw the great Glen of Kenareen. It was what Cortez saw, and all the rest of it. It was a discovery. It was a new world. It gathered the sunshine into a gigantic coloured bowl."

"'It was there all the time,'" the professor says. "'It was no dream. It was no lie.'"

But was it hallucination? As the two of them walked toward some thatched houses, large dogs came to them and followed. As if he knew the way, the professor opened a gate and found an old man as tall as he was sitting there with some children. The old man got up and "He put out his two hands and rested them on the professor's shoulders. It wasn't an embrace. It was an appraisal, a salute, a sign of recognition.

"He said, 'Kevin, well and truly we knew you'd come if you were in the neighbourhood at all. I watched you walking down. I knew you from the top of the Glen. You have the same gait my brother had, the heavens be his bed. My brother that was your grandfather.'

"It was moonlight, I thought, not sunlight. over the great Glen. From house to house, the dogs were barking, not baying at the moon, but to welcome home the young man from the card playing over the mountain."

It is a beguiling fantasy for everyone who ever wished to return to the Old Country. 

Clive James Is Still Not Dead

For most people, dying is easy. Every few moments there are those who pass away, who expire, or who are extinguished like a candle snuffed out. Some suffer that most final of events, a cardiac arrest, which simply means that their hearts stopped. (Doesn't everyone's heart stop when they die? Even when they're decapitated?) Death is something that happens to us. Ready or not, here it comes. Finding the best way, the most meaningful way, to live the life we have left is the hard part.

Easily one of the most non-dramatic death watches of the past several years has been the decline, the dying fall, of Clive James. Since his diagnosis, or death sentence, of leukaemia, severe emphysema, and kidney failure in 2010, his inability to die has become a macabre joke, especially to James himself, who seems to spend much of his time announcing his survival. I must admit, living in the Boonies like I do, that I have to check up on him occasionally to make sure he is still there. My mother had an expression, "One foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel," that might fit James, except the banana peel has turned into something more like the abrasive Non-Skid used to surface the weather decks of aircraft carriers.

Like Poe's "M Valdemar," who was hypnotized - or "mesmerized" - moments before his death and who continued to speak as his body gradually putrified, James' condition has seemed to place him somewhere between life and death, so that he continues to write and appear occasionally on television from the precincts of his home in Cambridge - confounding even the most generous medical prognoses. His late, late poem "Japanese Maple," seems like it was written just a few months before his imminent quietus:

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colors will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

How unpoetic of James to live beyond such a lovely imagined end. Yet he lived well past autumn (in 2014) and into a wondrously lovely winter:

This Being Done

Behind the trees across the street the sun
Takes down its last pale disc. This being done,
No soft pale light is left for anyone.

There is a further comedown in the night.
Outside, unheard, asphalt is turning white:
White swarms of butterflies in the streetlight.

The morning comes, and through the spread of snow
In candy-coloured coats the children go.
Listen awhile and you can hear them grow.


"Japanese Maple" was published in a best-selling book of James' poems called Sentenced to Life. "This Being Done" is from a subsequent collection called Injury Time, an allusion to the extra minutes added at the end of a football (soccer) match. His Guardian column, Reports of My Death, follows Mark Twain's proof of life rebuttal to news reports that he was dead. I have always liked him - the man, Clive James - regardless of what he did. I can hear his distinctive voice in everything he has written. He has been a television critic (he likes television a lot more than I can), literary critic, novelist, and translator. He was the host of some irreplaceable TV travelogues (available on YouTube, dear reader), my favorite of which was Postcard from Bombay that contains a terrific gag. He is expiring from the heat and hails a taxi believing the moving air will cool him. He climbs in the back and waits for the taxi to move. "An oven would've been cooler," he says. When the taxi doesn't start and the driver gets out to push it, "An oven would've been faster!" His multi-volume memoirs, Unreliable Memoirs, is one of the best ever written. Now otherwise indisposed, he has returned to television viewing, which inspired his latest book, Play All: A Bingewatcher’s Notebook.

His poems are formal. No vers libre for James - it's really all about rhythm and rhyme, cadences that can be sung. He doesn't fuss about it. It works for him. He is an admirer of fellow Australian A. D. Hope, who was once described as "the 20th century's greatest 18th-century poet." In "A Perfect Market" he explains why:

Recite your lines aloud, Ronsard advised,
Or, even better, sing them. Common speech
Held all the rhythmic measures that he prized
In poetry. He had much more to teach,
But first he taught that. Several poets paid
Him heed. The odd one even made the grade,
Building a pretty castle on the beach.

But on the whole it’s useless to point out
That making the thing musical is part
Of pinning down what you are on about.
The voice leads to the craft, the craft to art:
All this is patent to the gifted few
Who know, before they can, what they must do
To make the mind a spokesman for the heart.

As for the million others, they are blessed:
This is their age. Their slapdash in demand
From all who would take fright were thought expressed
In ways that showed a hint of being planned,
They may say anything, in any way.
Why not? Why shouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t they?
Nothing to study, nothing to understand.

And yet it could be that their flight from rhyme
And reason is a technically precise
Response to the confusion of a time
When nothing, said once, merits hearing twice.
It isn’t that their deafness fails to match
The chaos. It’s the only thing they catch.
No form, no pattern. Just the rolling dice

Of idle talk. Always a blight before,
It finds a place today, fulfills a need:
As those who cannot write increase the store
Of verses fit for those who cannot read,
For those who can do both the field is clear
To meet and trade their wares, the only fear
That mutual benefit might look like greed.

It isn’t, though. It’s just the interchange
Of showpiece and attention that has been
There since the cavemen took pains to arrange
Pictures of deer and bison to be seen
To best advantage in the flickering light.
Our luck is to sell tickets on the night
Only to those who might know what we mean,

And they are drawn to us by love of sound.
In the first instance, it is how we sing
That brings them in. No mystery more profound
Than how a melody soars from a string
Of syllables, and yet this much we know:
Ronsard was right to emphasize it so,
Even in his day. Now, it’s everything:

The language falls apart before our eyes,
But what it once was echoes in our ears
As poetry, whose gathered force defies
Even the drift of our declining years.
A single lilting line, a single turn
Of phrase: these always proved, at last we learn,
Life cries for joy though it must end in tears.


There is some comfort in thinking that one is behind the times, when the times are currently what they are. We are all the beneficiaries of his experimental drug treatments. Perhaps James will find tears of joy at the end. If it can come too soon, it cannot possibly come too late.

A World More Attractive

I don't suppose it would surprise someone of my parents' generation, who lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and who engendered the Baby Boom, of which I am a part, that in the second decade of the 21st century, we have arrived at an interpretation of the words American Dream in purely materialistic terms. A bigger house in a nicer part of town, a better-paying job (that is less demanding and requires less effort) - a better life, in other words, is what we mean when we talk about the American Dream today. When we remind ourselves of the labor that our parents put into securing for us the better lives we now enjoy, does anyone ask themselves, as I have always done, if it is exactly the kind of life that they had in mind?

Looking back on American literary criticism of the 20th century, it doesn't surprise me that the politics of almost all of the great critics was at least of the Liberal persuasion and occasionally leaning further to the Left. In his great book, To the Finland Station, Edmund Wilson chronicled the intellectual (as well as quite emotional) roller-coaster on which communism took him from the 1920s all the way through to the Cold War and beyond. Though somewhat disillusioned by the experience, Wilson remained, I think, nostalgic for the debate that Stalinism effectively stifled, but which subsequent cultural critics have never let go. 

Irving Howe was perhaps the last, and I would say the par excellence, of the line of great American critics that included Wilson, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and Randall Jarrell, who witnessed and celebrated, as best they could, the rise and fall of the novelists Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Bellow, and the poets Stevens, Bishop and Lowell. Howe - alone it seemed - wanted to extent criticism to include life as he knew it and took it in, the life of the intellect as much as the conscience of his age. 

His introduction to a collection of essays that he called A World More Attractive, published in 1963, shows the extent to which Howe took the American Dream seriously, as a promise of something much more than just material comforts, of people rising not just out of poverty but into riches. He reminds us how hollow such promises ring when we examine the history of our country. Greater liberty (now known more simply as freedom) and equality are what upward mobility is about - a constant moving toward a better society. These values, however, are more threatened today than ever before. Conformity has intensified exponentially. Apathy is taking over. People have grown too comfortable to continue the struggle.

Howe would surely have cheered Bernie Sanders's run for the nomination of the Democratic Party as candidate for president. Even the failure of his candidacy was a thrilling spectacle for a democratic socialist (like myself) and every believer in the progressive political philosophy.  Here is Howe's introduction (I have taken the liberty of italicizing certain passages): 


Composed in the years between 1950 and 1963, the essays in this book range in kind from literary criticism to political analysis, from intellectual portraiture to cultural polemic. They cover a wide spectrum of topics and figures, but if varied in subject, they are, I believe, unified in outlook. Behind almost all of them can be found a stable complex of values and convictions, a persistent concern with problems and ideas, having to do primarily with that style of experience and perception sometimes called the "modern." By the "modern" I have in mind neither the merely contemporary nor the momentarily fashionable, either in our culture or our politics. I have in mind the assumption that the twentieth century has been marked by a crisis of conduct and belief that is perhaps unprecedented in seriousness, depth and extent.

The "modern," as it refers to both history and literature, signifies extreme situations and radical solutions. It summons images of war and revolution, experiment and disaster, apocalypse and skepticism; images of rebellion, disenchantment and nothingness. To claim that all of these are visibly present in the essays that follow, would be absurd; but I would say that the sense of their presence has been a dominant pressure, setting both the terms and the limits, of what I have written here. Whether it be strictly literary, or primarily political, or a crossing of the two — as in the study of T. E. Lawrence, which forms the centerpiece of the book because it brings together so many of its themes — the work presented in these pages takes its meaning and its shape as a response to the problem of the "modern."

A number of the essays are literary in character, written from the assumption that literary criticism, like literature itself, can be autonomous but hardly self-sufficient. There is strong reason to stress the integrity of the work of literature, as an object worth scrutiny in its own right and in accordance with its own nature; but I would also insist — and in the last two decades it has become quite necessary to insist — that the work of literature acquires its interest for us through a relationship, admittedly subtle, difficult and indirect, to the whole of human experience. The kind of detailed or close analysis of particular texts which has been favored in recent years and which I have occasionally undertaken in lengthier studies, will not be found here. What I have tried for has been to provide a description of the characteristic qualities, the defining mode of vision, by which a writer can be recognized and valued; I have hoped to isolate the terms through which he confronts the experience of our time.

The few strictly political pieces in this book are drawn from a larger body of writing in which I have tried to speak for, even while criticizing, the tradition of socialism. Being a socialist in the mid-twentieth century means, for anyone who aspires to seriousness, a capacity for living with crisis, doubt and reconsideration. The ideal of socialism has become a problematic one, but the problem of socialism remains an abiding ideal. Some traditional doctrines of socialism now seem to me outmoded or mistaken, but I remain convinced of the need for a democratic and radical renovation of society, through which to give a fresh embodiment to the values of freedom and fraternity. A good part of the effort to preserve the animating purpose of socialist criticism in the past decade can be observed by turning to the files of Dissent, the quarterly of which I have been an editor; but some of that effort, the more speculative and less topical side of it, can be found in these pages. 

If one side of my political writing has required the kind of self-questioning and reorientation which must today go on among serious socialists, another side has been devoted, in the years since the war, to an attack upon the growing acquiescence and conservatism of the American intellectual community. The early 'fifties in particular struck me as a time in which too many intellectuals abandoned their traditional privilege and responsibility of criticism. In "This Age of Conformity" — a polemic in which certain references maybe seem dated but the controlling ideas of which seem to me still valid — I joined in a counter-attack which a few intellectuals launched against the turn to political quietism and conformity, the acceptance of the social status quo, the dilution of liberalism into a kind of genteel conservatism. Now, only a few years later, I find myself especially eager that such writings speak to those younger people who have recently come to their intellectual maturity and seem not quite to recall what happened in this country only a decade ago. 

I have brought together in this volume about half my periodical writing over the last twelve or thirteen years. Whatever struck me as merely journalistic or too closely interwoven with a transient polemic, has been omitted. Yet I have included a few pieces that are journalistic and polemical, first because I believe them to possess a certain value in commenting upon significant discussions of the past decade, and second because I wish to write, not for some dim posterity, but for living men and women caught up, as I am caught up, with the problems and interests of our time. 

"In my eyes," Leon Trotsky once wrote, "authors, journalists and artists always stood for a world that was more attractive than any other...." One need not accept Trotsky's political outlook in order to appreciate the force of his remark, both as it indicates respect for the intellectual life and a complex, perhaps, ironic sense of the difficulties faced by those who would preserve a relationship between politics and literature, action and reflection. A world more attractive — from sentiments of this kind I have tried to live and work, . . .


A World More Attractive: A View of Modern Literature and Politics (New York: Horizon Press, 1963)