A song of innocence and of experience: rewriting Blake in Brodkey's "Piping Down the Valleys Wild." - William Blake, Harold Brodkey

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1994 by Martin Bidney

Harold Brodkey's book of short stories, First Love and Other Sorrows, shows his remarkable affinity with first generation Romantic poets. "The State of Grace," which opens the volume, is an ironic refashioning of Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" into a psychologically probing analysis of unconsciously hypocritical narcissism (Bidney, "Unreliable Modern 'Mariner'"). As I would like to show now, the book's penultimate tale, "Piping Down the Valleys Wild" (not yet analyzed in the secondary literature, so far as I can find) is a refreshing Romantic contrast: here Brodkey reshapes the lyric legacy of William Blake into a sophisticated study of innocence maintained not only in the face of, but precisely because of, the insights born of hard-won experience. "Piping down the valleys wild" is the first line of the poem "Introduction," which opens Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Brodkey allusively signals that in this tale he will offer us an illustrative examination of both Blakean contrary states.

"Without Contraries is no progression," says Blake in Plate 5 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Brodkey, too, tells the story of a sometimes contrarious but always progressing marriage, the occasionally conflicted but still healthily loving union of Laura and Martin. "Opposition," adds Blake in another bold paradox, "is true Friendship" (MHH 20).(1) Brodkey's tale similarly features an exemplary friendship, shown convincingly in the enjoyable conversational give-and-take or friendly opposition between Stu and Martin. The union of innocence and its contrary, experiential insight, is also clearly shown - in the rewarding exchanges between three-year-old Faith and the adults around her: her parents (Laura, Martin) and their friend Stu, whom she calls "Uncle."

The pleasant but lively summer evening that these four people enjoy in Brodkey's tale is no simplistic idyll: indeed, it begins with a quarrel, and no agreement is reached on the object of contention - a delft bowl Laura has bought for an ashtray, but which Martin feels they can hardly afford. Yet all of Brodkey's main characters in this story - Laura, Martin, Stu, and even the child Faith - have mastered one essential art: they know how to agree to disagree. Brodkey's group portrait of the four of them constitutes a truly Blakean "fourfold vision" ("With Happiness . . ." 84) of friendship thriving in kindly contrariety.

"Piping Down the Valleys Wild" is, then, a story about contrarieties. The events during the evening the four people spend together are structured so that the Blakean allusions these little episodes suggest will offer a quick tour, in sequence, of representative Songs of Innocence. Beginning with material reworked from "Introduction," Brodkey goes next, in Blakean order, to "The Ecchoing Green," "Nurse's Song," and finally "A Dream." (I suspect also a pair of allusions to "The Little Boy Lost" and "The Little Boy Found" - placed somewhat out of sequence with Blake's ordering.) But we also find sprinkled throughout the brief tale references to lyrics of a contrasting type - "A Divine Image" (a poem included only in one late copy of Songs of Experience), "Mock on Mock on Voltaire Rousseau," "Riches," "Eternity," and "He Who Binds to Himself a Joy" (notebook verses of Blake's) - as well as allusions to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. These are materials expressive of Blakean insights regarding, and won through, "experience."

Brodkey, I am suggesting, alludes freely in his story to Blakean visions of both innocence and experience. But he tends to avoid citing lyrics of the "London" type, deeply despairing poems about the miseries produced in society when Reason and Energy seek to destroy each other. For his goal in "Piping Down the Valleys Wild" is to offer a portrait of a marriage, a friendship, a family, that exemplify the harmonious union of contrasts in an atmosphere of love and mutual respect. If Brodkey's Coleridge-based story allowed him to anatomize moral failure, his refashioning of Blake has a quite different focus: fruitful, creative contrariety.

Balance tempers idealism throughout the tale: following Blake, Brodkey envisions even the state of innocence as filled with intuitions of tension and contrariety that experience will more fully reveal. Like "The State of Grace," Brodkey's "Piping Down the Valleys Wild" is very witty and highly entertaining, sometimes cleverly parodying or half-parodying Brodkey's poetic mentor. But it is also a profound neo-Romantic re-envisioning.

The opening stanzas of Blake's "Introduction" set the tone for Brodkey's story:

Piping down the valleys wild Ping songs of pleasant glee On a cloud I saw a child. And he laughing said to me.

Pipe a song about a Lamb; So I piped with merry chear, Piper pipe that song again - So I piped, he wept to hear. ("Introduction" 1-8)

The semi-parodic Brodkey version of Blake's "valleys wild" appears right at the outset when Laura begs her husband, "Oh, Martin, don't say anything more about that ashtray. You'll only make a dreadful gulf between us" (195). Feeling that the phrase is "terribly witty," she says the words again: "'A dreadful gulf, she repeated, smiling" (195). Laura is amused at the mountainous "gulf," the horrible deep declivity or valley wild, that her irate husband threatens to make out of the diminutive concavity of deft china.