Occasional Prose (32 page)

The truth was, he wrote extremely well. I do not think that we on
PR
were fully conscious of that. Knowing the pain he suffered over those pieces, we were conscious of the process rather than of the result. Only now, reading the essays over, I see how brilliant they are in what appears to be an effortless way. He is amusing, observant, nonchalant. The tone is that of conversation. The continuing flashes of insight appear almost casually, like heat lightning. There are many offhand lines, let drop as it were negligently, in an undertone. Kafka’s letters are reminders of “the lost art of being unhappy.” James Baldwin’s sentences “suggest the ideal prose of an ideal literary community, some aristocratic France of one’s dreams.” Writing of
Pale Fire
, he lightly observes that Nabokov has made a “team” of the poet and the novelist in himself. Recalling James Agee, he mentions the Luce connection and lets fall the dreadful phrase “captive genius,” without stress, without follow-up. In his essay on “difficulty” (a theme that recently took George Steiner a whole book to deal with), he calmly wonders whether “a high degree of difficulty is not an aspect of the modern poetic style just as a peculiarly brilliant and aggressive clarity was a stylistic aspect of the school of Pope.” And, of Flaubert, very simply: “He lived amid a clutter of dormant manuscripts.”

He has a wonderful gift for quotation, bearing witness to a memory stuffed with luscious plums, which he pulls out one by one for our benefit. He gets his title for the 1965 collection from words Yeats is supposed to have spoken on hearing from his sister that Swinburne was dead: “I know, and now I am king of the cats.” The quotations he pulls out often have juicy traces of anecdote clinging to them, e.g., the following, drawn from Burton’s “Terminal Essay” to his translation of
The Arabian Nights
: “How is it possible for a sodomite Moslem prince to force a Christian missionary against his will and the strong resistance instinctively put up by his sphincter muscle? Burton could tell us: by the judicious use of a tent peg.”

Dupee’s criticism, in fact, is strongly anecdotal throughout. That is what gives it worldliness—both kinds, the terrestrial and the social. As he came to understand this of himself as a literary artist, we can watch his work grow. In his unsurpassed essay on
L’Education sentimentale
—one of the last pieces he published—he asserts the sovereignty of the anecdote for a kind of new and modern epic, whose nature is “mock” or comic. The enthronement of the anecdotal means that the work affirming it will be flooded with irony. Flaubert’s feat in
L’Education
was “to have made an epic novel out of an accumulation of anecdotes.” It follows that “each episode extracts from the situation a maximum of irony and then, having made its point with a precision consonant with its brevity, is caught up in the furious current of the enveloping narrative.” This accords with the mood of drift, so terribly modern, so twentieth-century, that pervades
L’Education
, which might have been subtitled “The Story of a Drifter,” just as well as “The Story of a Young Man.” No doubt it means something that our first glimpse of Frédéric Moreau is on a river boat that is bringing him home from Paris to Nogent-sur-Seine; he is susceptible to tidal currents, the ebb and flow of the age, the eddies of art and politics, and the net effect of the novel is of a general purposelessness. Dupee likens it to Joyce in its rigorous impersonality but distinguishes it from Joyce by the coldness Flaubert shows toward his characters, in comparison to which Joyce is “warm.”

In this late and splendidly written essay, we seem to see Dupee at last finding himself. Always brilliant, succinct, intelligent, informative, “French,” in Wilson’s word, here he is decidedly more—emotionally moving, electric. I had often suspected, fancifully, that Fred identified himself with Frédéric Moreau, a bit because of the name and a bit because he too, in his younger years, had known “the melancholy of steamboats,” if not in the most literal sense. But this penetrating essay is an act of total self-recognition (if Frédéric is Flaubert, he is also, transparently, Fred); it is the apotheosis of a wry, self-observing nature, and, as always happens at such moments of confrontation, the reader feels caught in the mirror too.

There is little left here of his faithful old models, Macaulay, Mencken, and the others. In some respect, even before this, he had left Wilson, his immediate mentor, behind: in the Gertrude Stein essay (cf. the
Axel’s Castle
handling of her); in the several essays on Nabokov and
Lolita
; in the Samuel Butler foreword (“In Butler, the man and the writer were entangled as the drowning man is entangled with his rescuer”), which, after the Flaubert, is my favorite and shows a fineness of intuition of which Wilson with his wounds and bows was incapable; finally in his sympathetic short book on James (cf. Wilson on “The Turn of the Screw”). The difference, as I see it, is that Wilson took on himself the “heavy,” huffing-and-puffing role of educator to his readers while Dupee made himself into a teacher in real life, first at Bard, then at Columbia, and in his writings did not seek to instruct but instead learned from his subject with a jaunty grace. The result was the sense of a mind and personality growing that buoys us up as we reach the end of this volume, knowing regretfully there will be no more. And it is perhaps not complete chance that the visible growth of Dupee coincides with the birth of the
New York Review
(1963), where he had not only a more amused, appreciative, in short, more sympathetic audience in Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers but also more space. The earliest essay in the new collection that seems unmistakably and uniquely his is from the
New York Review
: the Burton portrait—“Sir Richard and Ruffian Dick.” Moreover, it was in the
New York Review
that the final, Flaubert, essay appeared.

One aspect of Dupee I miss in what I have been saying is the side that—after Yale, after a short-lived little magazine called the
Miscellany
he and Dwight Macdonald edited with another friend, after a year of semi-slumming in Mexico—became an organizer for the Communist Party on the New York waterfront and concurrently literary editor of the
New Masses
. I do not see where a CP “streak” in him fits, unless he got it from the
Zeitgeist
, like a thirties Frédéric Moreau. He was always against authority, but that fails to explain it—the Party was authority incarnate. It was at some
good
urging, I now feel, that he joined and bravely passed out leaflets. He wanted to be helpful to our poor, foolish, grotesque old society. Could that have had something to do with coming from Joliet, which after all is a prison town? Prison towns are sinister and hateful, and in Marxism he may have seen a set of burglar’s tools to smuggle past the guards to the inmates. You cannot grow up in the shadow of prison walls without a few generous daydreams of escape for those inside.

Maybe so, but I wonder where the boyish idealism
went
when the Party let him down. Stalinism, now advertising itself as twentieth-century Americanism, had shown its colors in the Moscow trials and the Spanish betrayal, and it was not too hard for Macdonald to convince him to leave the Party and the
New Masses
, taking the correspondence files with him. He appeared blithe about it; indeed, nobody breaking with Stalinism ever seemed to suffer regrets. And his sojourn there with Trachtenberg’s “boys” had not been long: I first met him, just back from Mexico, at a party to raise money for the sharecroppers, given by Macdonald in 1935; by 1937, at the second congress of the League of American Writers, he was on our side. And I don’t think he lost his idealism in the course of that adventure. It must have turned into an underground stream, making his teaching (he was very popular) fertile. Was it out of pure non-conformity that he never got his Ph.D.? I cannot find the idealism, as such, in his later writing. But it may be its long-term effects I notice in the growth indicators exuberantly branching and swelling in his later work. In 1968, anyway, at Columbia during the student strike, he risked some brand-new dentistry to join a line of faculty drawn up to protect another group of “boyish idealists” from the forces of order and got a black eye for doing so.

October 27, 1983

*
A preface to a new, University of Chicago Press edition of
The King of the Cats
.

The Paradox of History
*

W
HEN THIS BRILLIANT, SEARCHING
book was brought out in England in 1970, it got generally respectful, even laudatory reviews, which differed from each other only in their degree of deafness to what the author was saying. To his misfortune, “Signor Chiaromonte” had run up against British practicality, empiricism, dread of abstraction—all aspects of Blimpishness. In
The Paradox of History
a man was visibly
thinking
about his topic, musing, almost meditating, not English practice in expository prose: if you want to muse and ponder, verse is your medium.

The reviewers felt fairly sure—if not quite positive—of what Chiaromonte was getting at. Anthony Powell (
A Dance to the Music of Time
) put it in his own plain English. “What have we got to do about it all?” he summed up on behalf of the reader. In other words, what does this Italian recommend doing in a thoroughly bad situation when “things have got finally and totally out of hand through a combination of action, blind interpretation of history and doctrinaire theory”? Some people might call for “something positive” to combat “the ... political abstractions of Communism/Fascism, and their aggressive tactics,” but not Chiaromonte, if Powell has understood him. In reality Chiaromonte has been proposing that we accept the fact that the world and our perception of it are “only fragments of an eternally impenetrable whole,” and Powell, God bless him, “take[s] that to mean” that “Mr. Chiaromonte thinks we are much better rubbing along as best we can, dealing with problems as and when they arise, rather than committing ourselves to more oppressive theory.”

Another reviewer concluded, more cautiously, that Chiaromonte “has set himself a problem which is central to the contemporary human predicament and will continue to be so, as long as men are unable to resolve it. Nicola Chiaromonte does not claim to have done so; what he has done brilliantly and convincingly,” etc., etc. Still a third, writing in the
Times Literary Supplement
, saw disturbing evidence of “fatalism” in Chiaromonte and/or the writers discussed, fatalism being the conviction that events “do not cause each other: all of them are independently caused by some single, external, superhuman agency of which human beings are merely blind instruments.” Absorbed in his private nursery game of dividing fatalists between optimists and pessimists (Dr. Pangloss, I guess, would be an optimistic fatalist), the reviewer failed to notice that the “blind instrument” notion was expressly and vigorously rejected by Chiaromonte. A few sentences later the
Times Literary Supplement
was cheerily reassuring the reader: “There is no need to feel disappointment that Mr. Chiaromonte veers sharply to a pessimistic conclusion.” An “interim judgment,” surely; given time, there was every reason to hope that Chiaromonte would change his outlook. Finally, a writer in
Tribune
, i.e., a Labourite, voiced a sorrowful suspicion: “Chiaromonte’s prescription for twentieth-century nihilism ... would appear to be some kind of religious commitment.”

All these reviews, wherever they sprang from, right, left, or center, had one thing in common: a “problem-solving” approach. That in itself may explain the above absurdities, since if there is any predictable result that the reading of this small volume might lead to, it would be loss of faith in arriving at results through an act of thought, however prolonged. Yet results, prescriptions, solutions, remedies, optimists vs. pessimists, “What are we to do”?—the whole vocabulary of those reviews speaks of a cultural gulf, not to say chasm, between audience and writer. One feels that the reviewer ought to have been told to remove his pack of preconceptions on the threshold of this experience, as shoes are removed on entering a mosque or Japanese restaurant.

It is too bad, I think, looking back, that this deeply thoughtful and original six-part essay should have been exposed at its launching to the well-meaning philistinism of the English educated class. Fortunately this reissue, in our different climate, offers the book—and its readers—another chance. We Americans have our share of British-style insularity, but not to the same point of saturation. Other strains—ethnic, racial, religious—have made our reviewers, when literate, less resistant by instinct to abstract ideas, indeed in some cases not resistant enough. Nor are we as deadly empirical as the English, even though pragmatism is supposed to be our national faith. It will be interesting to see how Chiaromonte’s thought (so very well translated, by himself with his wife’s help) will “take” in this country.

Yet, before going on, I want to say a final word about the English press reception of
The Paradox of History
. The odd fact is that the book is anti-abstract, empirical, non-theoretic. In all his writing and throughout his life (he died in 1972), Chiaromonte was always a stubborn rebel against the dictates of theory. Of course what was abstraction to him could be demonstrable reality for another mind—and vice versa. For example, the notion of material progress, so palpable and on the whole desirable to everyone else, to Chiaromonte was not only odious but also an immaterial illusion or, at best, a theoretical conception requiring careful testing to determine its actual existence. Similarly, the “arcane but ubiquitous realm beyond the world of events,” which for him was the realm of Fate for the very practical reason that, by definition, it was the enormous realm of the unknown; might be dismissed by others as pure mystic claptrap, for an almost identical reason,
because it could not be known
.