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

But the ashtray opens up no gulf, precipitates no rift, because these people, like the Blakean child in "Introduction," have preserved their spontaneity, volatility, impulsiveness and freedom of emotion. Why is it that the child in the Blake poem "wept to hear" the piper's cheerful song? Blake's answer to this question may be found, I think, in a Proverb from his Marriage: "Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps" (MHH 8). Spontaneous emotions mutually correct or balance each other by a natural internal dynamic: when we are too happy, we cry; when we are overburdened with sadness, we make jokes.

This Blakean dynamic operates effectively throughout the story "Piping Down the Valleys Wild." Laura is so filled with delight over her left ashtray that when Martin perseveres in his displeasure we notice her eyes have suddenly "filled with tears" (196). But he considerately explains he's saving money for their prospective child, and after an interlude of good-humored mutual raillery Laura is suddenly happy again: she "roar[s] with laughter" (197).

The Blakean dynamic of counterbalancing emotional contraries continues apace as more exchanges of wisecracks result in a comparable quick switchover from gloom to hilarity on Martin's part:

"God damn it!" Martin howled, bent over the washbasin. "Do you have to insult me?" But his back quivered. Laura saw he was on the verge of laughing. (197)

Suddenly Martin is in such good spirits that after he flicks his washcloth at Laura and she runs squealing down the stairs, Martin halts at the landing, "lean[s] over the banister, and squeeze[s] the last drops in the washcloth over her head."

"Not in front of the child!" Laura said. "I'm infantile," Martin said, looking at her in a funny way, confused and tender. "I'm too young to have a wife," and he turned back up the stairs. (198)

"Infantile," "too young to have a wife," Martin childishly sprinkles droplets down onto Laura's head as if the washcloth were a raincloud - a witty variation on the line from Blake's "Piping" poem, "On a cloud I saw a child" (3). These married people have the innocent spontaneity of youth; they act like kids, and their emotions can be trusted to enforce their own inherent self-balancing dialectic of alternating "excesses."

But sometimes a danger arises. Occasionally, so-called "Reason" (what Blake called "Heaven" in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) gets the better of Energy, Emotion, or Passion (what Blake called "Hell"K), thereby disrupting the ideal psychological "Marriage" or balance of psychological contraries for Martin, or for Laura. Martin is irritable with Laura partly because he's suffering from the heat, and he's overheated because it's "only May" and he claims it isn't "proper to wear a summer suit until June" (195); he talks as if dressing comfortably would contravene some abstract rule of principle. Laura, angry with Martin over the ashtray, explains to him "querulously" that she has "just straightened" the drawer, so he shouldn't "mess it up" while he looks there for a new shirt - but the drawer had actually been straightened "two weeks before" (196). When Laura and Martin get angry, at themselves or at each other, they defend themselves by citing silly and arbitrary rules.