The Newer Criticism

A Primer of Ignorance.
by R. P. Blackmur.
Edited With A Preface by Joseph Frank. Harcourt, Brace & World. 273 pp. $5.95.

The literary criticism of the late R. P. Blackmur has suffered a strange reversal of fortune in this country. In the 30’s and even more so in the 40’s—heyday of the New Criticism—he was a living legend while still young, commonly described as the ideal critic. In the 60’s, however, his work has just as often been rejected as tortuous and unreadable. His last book, Eleven Essays in the European Novel, which appeared not long before his death in 1965, received almost no attention though it reprinted some extraordinarily good work. Lionized but not much appreciated at Princeton, where he taught, dismissed or respectfully ignored by the literary world at large, Blackmur gathered together in that book what he called “fragments of an unfinished ruin,” the shored-up remains of a number of separate volumes he had planned to devote to the novel. It was a sad end, and the book did nothing to recapture the audience that had long since deserted him. Now a posthumous collection has appeared, titled and partly planned by Blackmur himself and edited by his distinguished literary executor, Joseph Frank. It is not a good book, and it has already suffered an even chillier fate than its predecessor. Yet it is a dense, almost a rich book, which should enable us to take stock of the later Blackmur in a more complex way than we have done until now.

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If most readers judge Blackmur’s later work harshly, it is partly because he himself established so high a critical standard. Though the essays that he wrote in the 30’s on the modern poets have begun to lose some of their force in the present climate of taste, they still constitute one of the notable critical projects of the century: a frontal assault on an elusive, demanding, and arrogantly new body of literature, an adventure not only in exegesis but in evaluation. Today poetry is changing in exciting ways, but Blackmur’s individual essays on Eliot, Yeats, Pound, Stevens, and Hart Crane still have more to tell us than most book-length studies of these poets.

It would be a false emphasis to say that Blackmur never again found a subject so congenial to his powers. Henry Adams, James, and the European novel all were to evoke great work from him after 1940, and in fact two superb examples of this work are collected in the last section of A Primer of Ignorance: a study of James’s artist fables, “In the Country of the Blue,” and a brilliant discussion of Henry Adams’s novels. But both these essays—included by the editor, it seems, largely to fill out the volume—are quite early, dating from 1943, and one comes upon them only after 175 pages of prose alternately murky and brilliant, gnomic and pompous, contorted and eloquent. They seize their subjects with a directness and lucidity, a sense of communicable purpose, that was all too often absent from Blackmur’s work after 1950 or 1951.

This is especially true of the writings of the late 50’s reprinted in the middle section of this volume, most of them ostensibly travel essays but actually very personal meditations on European and American cultural style. No reportage could be less journalistic than Blackmur’s. In most journalism we get many facts, but recorded discretely rather than coherently so that their meanings remain enshrouded. In Blackmur the opposite is true: meaning is everything, but meaning is vitiated by the paucity of fact, the weak grasp upon the actual. His method is poetic rather than discursive: he turns objects into emblems and recurrent images, slight narratives into allegory, and elusive phrases into choruses and leitmotives. Strange juxtapositions lead to gnomic observations and conclusions, a wisdom that often seems arbitrary and self-reflexive.

The Jamesian obliqueness of these essays is very much a part of Blackmur’s design. He listens for the timbre of a culture and watches its small, revealing gestures, seeking to put himself in touch with that culture’s momentum and energy rather than to be taken in by its ideas about itself. This, I think, is the key to the book’s title: the sense of “intimacy,” Blackmur tells us in an obscure passage, is a “primer of ignorance.” It is clear that “ignorance” is far from a pejorative word for the later Blackmur. In The Lion and the Honeycomb, he adopts for himself Santayana’s plea that he is “an ignorant man, almost a poet.” Ignorance to Blackmur means the poet’s way of knowing, knowledge that is in the ear, the eye, and the fingertips as well as in the mind. It is precisely out of a quest for intimacy—and perhaps at the same time a lingering embarrassment at intimacy—that these travel essays become intuitive and haphazard, in style as well as in substance.

Paradoxically, it is the critic’s sense of style that sometimes redeems the essays and makes Blackmur’s intuitions convincing. In the best of them, “The Swan in Zurich,” a comparison of American and European ballet companies, of brilliant technical precision versus human warmth and vibrancy, he moves effortlessly from observations on styles of dance to generalizations about national style. Much to his own surprise, he opts in the end for intensity of life and plenitude of content over perfection of form. Watching a Spanish company “reputed to be very low stuff indeed as ballet goes,” he is overcome:

The “aesthetic distance” was there all right, but something in you crossed the distance, into the living unity that flowed in face and voice and body. . . . I was withdrawn into them and their clamor: into intimacy which was also access of knowledge.

In such a response—and these moments are the didactic texts in Blackmur’s primer—we see a Blackmur very different from the skeptical rationalist and formalist of the 30’s. In the 30’s this autodidact rehearsed his education in public (like his hero, Adams), and the resulting primer taught everyone how to read. In the 50’s he undertook to teach a generation of trained explicators to be ignorant again, for the sake of intimacy and a deeper access of knowledge.

Much of the strength and weakness of Blackmur’s later work can be attributed to this undertaking, which seems to have been provoked not only by cultural changes but by a deep, perhaps unconscious disaffection with his own previous positions. It may perhaps be misleading to call the early Blackmur a formalist, for nowhere does he separate form from content or reduce his discussion to the externals of prosody or meter. Yet no one is more committed to “aesthetic distance,” to an art which transmutes the chaos of personal emotion into order and objective form. Blackmur, like the rest of his generation, had gone to school with Eliot and learned from him the doctrine of the “objective correlative,” learned from him that “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion . . . not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” It is no wonder that both Blackmur and Eliot felt so strong an animus toward Lawrence. Blackmur’s early essay on Lawrence’s poetry—where he accused Lawrence of the “hysteria” of disproportionate emotion, expressed in “language common-place for everything except its intensity”—was one of his most tendentious and wrongheaded.

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In the 40’s when Blackmur turned from poetry to the European novel, particularly to Dostoevsky and to such modern masters as Mann and Joyce, he did more than change subjects. He moved to investigate the genesis of order in the chaos of immediate experience and to broaden his notion of form by studying writers who more closely reflected that chaos. Beyond the well-wrought urn loomed the loose and baggy monsters which seemed to embody so much of our turbulent inner life, and our public life as well. At the same time he began gingerly to distinguish himself from his friends, the New Critics, among whose number he had rightly been counted. He criticized their emphasis on analysis over judgment and showed how it tended toward a more narrow preoccupation with form. In an essay on Tate, Ransom, and I. A. Richards in A Primer of Ignorance he finds in their work “a tendency to make the analyzable features of the forms and techniques of poetry both the means of access to poetry and somehow the equivalent of its content.” Of Ransom’s essay on “Lycidas” (“A Poem Nearly Anonymous”) Blackmur observes that

there are no statements of importance in it as to what “Lycidas” is about; only statements about formal aspects of texture and structure. . . . There is no sense at all of that side of Milton which made the poet a builder of cities and maker of men or which made a good book the precious life blood of a master spirit.

Much of Blackmur’s later project is revealed here, in words that shade off characteristically toward rhetoric. One can see that his travel to foreign cities is as much a part of the project as his meditations on Dostoevsky and his increasingly revisionist essays on criticism. His transformation becomes most decisive, however, in the four lectures on modern literature which comprise the first section of A Primer of Ignorance. The very titles suggest the extent to which Blackmur is willing to relax his commitment to order and give sway to the irrational and demonic explosions in modern writing: “Reason in the Madness of Letters” (the subtitle of the whole), “The Great Grasp of Unreason,” “The Techniques of Trouble,” “Irregular Metaphysics.” Blackmur remains what he calls a “bourgeois humanist,” but only by redefining bourgeois humanism into the broad and subversive doctrine it may once have been: “the treasure of residual reason in live relation to the madness of the senses.” He is, as he says of Mann’s heroes, a bourgeois humanist tainted by art, and this double perspective enables him to give so inward and yet so ambivalent an account of modern literature. We have here no academic embalming, but a testimony from within, the culmination of a lifetime of practice and contemplation and struggle. Blackmur grew up with these books, and he deserves to be heard.

Yet hearing him clearly is far from easy. The style is ruminative, the thought condensed but far from tight; as in travel essays, he eschews consecutive reasoning for odd confrontations and elusive paradoxes, in a language at once eccentric and exact, epigrammatic and quirky. He aims not to explicate these books but to prove them upon the pulses, to be intimate with them. But the abnegation of discursive procedure all too often turns intimacy into obscurity, and we are left merely puzzled when we should be amazed. The lecture on the poets, the third and weakest of the four, is a collection of page-long comparisons, at first obvious (Crane and Stevens, Pound and Whitman) but growing gradually more playful and arbitrary to the point of weirdness (Cummings and Dryden, Auden and Tennyson, Lord Byron and William Carlos Williams, Rilke, Herrick, and Emily Dickinson). By the end we feel trapped in a morass of intellectual gymnastics and merely verbal ingenuity—and this talk was delivered for the supposed edification of an audience at the Library of Congress! The more Blackmur sought intimacy and “the great grasp of unreason” the more clotted became his channels of communication, the more he resigned himself to a soliloquy in a void.

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This is not true of the fourth and best of these lectures, a quiet coda aptly titled “Contemplation,” in which Blackmur for once allows himself the old luxury of extended observation, first of Ulysses, then of the criticism that accompanied the modernist upheaval. But on the whole, despite all the passages and formulations that merit our own extended contemplation, these lectures are unsatisfying, in content as well as in style. Even while his procedure forgoes rational design, Blackmur’s reading of modern literature leaves too little room for the irrational. Thus, we find him quoting once more Eliot’s attack in “East Coker” on “the general mess of imprecision of feeling/Undisciplined squads of emotions,” without noting the repressive cast of mind on which it is based. Instead, he sees Eliot “finding reason in the madness that grasps him all about.” For all his invocations of the demonic and the chthonic, there is a fundamental WASP civility about Blackmur that makes one feel he is only slumming in the lower depths. Reading Kafka could not have been easy for a man who had so closely identified himself with Adams and James, albeit with versions of these writers a good deal more subversive than their images in the academy.

But though art to Blackmur is necessarily subversive—providing “images of the deep anarchies out of which the order of the state must be remade if that order is to be vital”—in the end it was the commitment to order that remained paramount; Blackmur’s attempt to be “ignorant” and to encompass unreason and anarchy was part of his intellectual growth, but his ultimate aim was to domesticate them and put them at the service of culture rather than of individual self-fulfillment.

This bias leads to some valuable emphases. Blackmur tells us that the irrational elements in modern literature were not ends in themselves but were pursued by writers with deep roots in the humanist tradition, with the hope—Blackmur’s hope as well—of fulfilling rather than abolishing that tradition. The supposed neo-humanists of the 20’s found Joyce’s work chaotic, immoral, and scarcely intelligible. But to Blackmur it was only lesser writers like the dadaists who renounced form and critical perspective, captitulating to “pure behavior,” to produce a fragmentary art which deified “things as they are.” But he goes on to level the same charge in different ways against a number of greater writers as well. He creates a kind of classicist line in modern letters which enshrines joyce, Mann, and Gide (perhaps even James), but which excludes not only the dadaists, but also Kafka, Lawrence, Faulkner, and Proust. Ulysses alone, he says, “is the book that made an order out of the substance of the dadaist imagination.” One is reminded at moments of another bourgeois humanist, Georg Lukács, who wrote a book to prove that only Thomas Mann—but not Kafka—might be admitted to the Great Tradition. The controlling animus of Blackmur’s 1935 essay on Lawrence is softened in these lectures, but not rescinded.

This classicist conception of form, though untenable as a critique of Lawrence or Kafka (whose work is no less organized for being organized uniquely), does raise serious questions about some recent art, such as pop painting, happenings, theatrical assaults like The Brig, or Burroughs’s “cut-up” method, in which the syntax of significant organization does really suffer under the often random domination of “things as they are,” much in the manner of dadaism. Are we to understand these developments as post-modern and post-humanist, or as radical continuations of the modernist movement of the 1920’s? Blackmur was deeply concerned about this question. He saw the continuity between American art and American society and feared our tendency to give way to our own momentum and be mindlessly dominated by sheer behavior. (The bombing of North Vietnam began in the same month he died.) At a time when we have more than enough advocates of the New at any cost, who insist that art is “anything you can get away with,” he comes to us as a voice from an old-fashioned literary culture, demanding of both our art and our conduct the exercise of humane intelligence.

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