Modernist Quartet. - book reviews

National Review, Nov 21, 1994 by Jeffrey Hart

Professor Frank Lentricchia has made a drastic mid-career change. He is a denizen of the infamous Duke University English Department, a major center of the brand of literary "theory" allied with ideology that a large and aggressive segment of the professoriate has substituted for literature. Indeed, Mr. Lentriechia has been known as one of the foremost exponents of theory.

Then one fine day he had a revelation. He remembered that he actually liked literature. Like most of us, he had first gotten into the profession because he enjoyed reading poetry, novels, history, biography. But he had gradually turned away from literature to theory. Only recently did he discover that when you clawed aside the cobwebs of theory, the literature was still there.

And so he crossed the aisle. Theory he would write no more. He closed his Derrida and his De Man and opened his Frost, Stevens, Pound, and Eliot - the subjects of this book.

Its joys, indeed, attest to a conversion experience. John Stuart Mill closes his Bentham and Godwin, and opens his Wordsworth. Dorothy finds she isn't in Kansas any more. Newman looks in the mirror and is stunned to realize that all along he has been a Monophysite heretic. Saul changes his name to Paul.

Mr. Lentricchia now understands literary history as embracing, centrally, actual works of literature. He proves to be an expert, careful reader of his poets. He can provide unexpected revelations about what we might have thought familiar texts. Try him on Frost's "Mowing," Eliot's Quartets, Pound's great enterprise of the Cantos. He stitches the literary text firmly onto the canvas backing of the historical tapestry.

That tapestry includes: 1) the surrounding literary circumstance, i.e., the attenuation of the lyric tradition in English at the beginning of this century; 2) the feminization of taste in poetry; 3) the particular economic dilemmas of the poets, and other pertinent biography; and, 4) the larger economic circumstance ("capitalism").

All four of Mr. Lentricchia's poets have long been of compelling interest. (In his reconsideration, it seems to me, Frost and Eliot maintain their positions at the top, Pound rises heroically, despite disasters like the Adams and Chinese Cantos and the anti-Semitism, and Stevens goes down a little.) All four found ways to break out of a situation in which the lyric amounted to genteel watered-down Tennyson. They recovered the full male voice, the full range of experience, whether sordid or ecstatic. Their artistic success was extraordinary. They had to deal, however, with the cultural fact that a man was supposed to "make a living." (President Eliot of Harvard hoped that his relative would not stay in Europe and make a fool of himself like Henry James.) Lyric poets did not make a living, except for Frost, who slyly concealed this fact from an adoring audience.

That said, I think there are some difficulties with Mr. Lentricchia's account of the larger economic situation around 1900 ("capitalism," "culture of capitalism," "commodification") insofar as it affects art.

Modernist Quartet has a tendency not to look squarely at "the culture of capitalism" but to accept it as a large abstraction and then to treat the abstraction as if it were a real thing. "Capitalism" here means mass production, sameness, the cash nexus, the commodification of all things. The attenuated lyric of 1900 thus becomes an example of a massproduced and mass-consumed commodity. It doesn't matter that Pound believed exactly that. The historian need not accept Pound's opinion uncritically.

On the question of "capitalism," two comments. One is that people always choose abundance over scarcity. Is there a case to be made against a nice-looking dress, even if mass-produced? A case for wooden shoes? Are there really any votes for scarcity and hierarchy over democracy and industry?

Second, during the same time-frame in which the lyric had fallen on bad days, remarkable things were happening in other areas of the arts. If in New York City in 1910 Pound concluded that American culture was sterile, he must have been strolling through the heart of the city blindfolded.

The triumvirate of Stanford White, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Louis Tiffany were spectacularly transforming American architecture, sculpture, and design. White and Saint-Gaudens were in fact remarkably Poundian. They drew upon the past of Europe to transform the American present. On long trips through the cities of the Continent, they filled sketchbooks with old designs. Between 1900 and 1910, buildings and statues designed by them transformed New York. Their sketches were the architectual equivalent of Eliot's "mind of Europe," and what they produced was not servile imitation but creative transformation, a balance between the forces of tradition and the claims of originality. The art of Renaissance Italy, eighteenth-century France, and contemporary Paris were as important to these artists as they were to Pound and Eliot.

Subtract the buildings and statues that they and their contemporaries created, and the Manhattan of today would be sadly diminished. No New York Public Library, no Grand Central Station, no statue of Admiral Farragut in Madison Square or of General Sherman in Central Park, no Metropolitan Museum, no Morgan Library, no St. Bartholomew's Church, no Charles Dana Gibson home, and on and on. While Pound was wool-gathering in 1910, a great creative surge was creating a Cantos in stone. White and Saint-Gaudens had led the transformation of brownstone New York into a great world capital.