Assorted Prose (30 page)

Thurber’s cartoons, of course, are incomparable; they dive into the depths of the dilemma that he felt beneath everything. His great subject, springing from his physical disability, was what might be called the enchantment of misapprehension. His masterpieces, I think, are
My Life and Hard Times
and
The White Deer
—two dissimilar books alike in their beautiful evocation of a fluid chaos where communication is limited to wild, flitting gestures and where human beings revolve and collide like planets glowing against a cosmic backdrop of gathering dark. Thurber made of despair a humorous fable. Small wonder that such a gallant feat of equilibrium was not maintained to the end of his life.

 
BEERBOHM AND OTHERS

P
ARODIES:
An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm—and After
, edited by Dwight Macdonald. 574 pp. Random House, 1960.

This anthology is a book so manifoldly praiseworthy that the reviewer puzzles where to begin. The publishers should be praised for constructing a compact and dignified volume. The dust jacket does not try to cozen us into premature jollity; the necessarily various type does not dance an impudent jig on the page; the paper, without succumbing to translucence, modestly understates the book’s considerable bulk. These things matter. What is worth reprinting is worth printing well. Too many lovingly assembled collections emerge from the binderies as fluffed-up jumbles shamelessly aimed at the Christmas trade. Except for a trifling misprint in the parody of Jack Kerouac, this anthology seems to me a physical model of its kind.

The editor should be praised—for his industry, his seriousness, his taste, his ingenuity. Indeed, Macdonald is rather
too
ingenious. To print the delirious babble of the dying Dutch Schultz as a parody of Gertrude Stein is an excellent joke only if excellent jokes can ever be played upon dying men. “Please mother don’t tear don’t rip. That is something that shouldn’t be spoken about. Please get me up, my friends, please look out, the shooting is a bit wild and that kind of shooting saved a man’s life.… Police mamma Helen mother please take me out.” Who’s laughing? There is something vulgar about this editorial prank, and the equally prankish printing of a bit by Samuel Foote (d. 1777) as a parody of Edward Lear (b. 1812). Also, I could have done without all the self-parodies, conscious and unconscious. Authors are in no position to see themselves; conscious self-parodies lack shape and bite. The classic specimen is “Nephelidia”; Swinburne apparently thought his only sin
was alliteration. As for the unconscious self-parodies, where they are not mere boners they demand a rather harsh shift in the gears of our attention. While not too great a suspension of sympathy is needed to raise a smile over Poe’s beginning a poem, “I dwelt alone / In a world of moan,” Dr. Johnson’s effusion on glass will probably strike as ludicrous only those already disposed to grow restive under the great man’s ornately balanced Latinisms. Myself, I found his noble style no less appropriate to the subject of glass than to the subject of virtue.

But anthologies, if they err, should err on the generous side, and Macdonald’s venturesomeness brings in dozens of welcome surprises. The contributions of Jane Austen, Bret Harte, Firman Houghton, Oliver Jensen, and G. K. Chesterton were all new to me, and it was delightful to make their acquaintance. Among old friends, I was glad to greet again Henry Reed’s irreproachably deadpan imitation of T. S. Eliot; Edmund Wilson’s most unkind treatment of Archibald MacLeish; Wolcott Gibbs’ famous tour de force in early timestyle; Maurice Baring’s pathetically reasonable letter from Goneril to Regan; C. S. Calverley’s immaculate, crackling
reductio
of
The Ring and the Book
; Swift’s “A Meditation Upon a Broom-Stick”; Robert Benchley’s modernization of a Dickensian Christmas; and J. K. Stephen’s resonant and—remarkably
—brief
parody of Whitman. The section of this anthology called “Specialties” is the one that must have given the editor the most pleasure. It makes up half the book and contains, among many diligently unearthed oddments, the originals of the poems travestied by Lewis Carroll in the “Alice” books; twenty-one pages of French; ten pages of Hemingway’s obscurely motivated mock-novel
Torrents of Spring
; several political speeches more apt to amuse Democrats than Republicans; and two scientific papers that may not amuse scientists at all. Throughout, Macdonald shepherds his chosen texts with notes, now appreciative, now informative, that in their relaxed pedantry nicely suit the pedantic and exquisite form of humor he has—for some years to come, I should think—definitively anthologized.

And of course the contributors, quick and dead, must be praised. The appointed hero of the collection, quite rightly, is Max Beerbohm. Macdonald considerately resurrects from obscure sources much that is not present in
A Christmas Garland
, as well as much that is.
A Christmas Garland
is surely the
liber aureus
of prose parody. What makes Max, as a parodist, incomparable—more than the calm mounting from felicity to felicity and the perfectly scaled enlargement of every surface quirk of the
subject style—is the way he seizes and embraces, with something like love, the total personality of the parodee. He seems to enclose in a transparent omniscience the genius of each star as, in
A Christmas Garland
, he methodically moves across the firmament of Edwardian letters. Anyone who has forgotten the difference between Chesterton and Belloc could have no better refresher than Beerbohm’s parodies of them. Chesterton’s preposterously nimble good cheer and Belloc’s robust and defiant
angoisse
are each crystallized in absurdity, but the amber is so clear we can glimpse even the sombre spots. “Pray for my soul,” the puppet-Belloc abruptly concludes, and the reader is touched by a real shadow. Whereas most parodies are distinctly written from beneath their subjects, Beerbohm for the occasion rises to an equality with his great victims; a vintage parody by him is, as the Greek etymology would have it, “a parallel song.” In his imitation of a Shavian preface, Beerbohm develops the minuscule plot of a village mummers’ play into an allegorical drama of ideas with a fertile virtuosity worthy of Shaw himself. We can
see
the play when he is done; with a hairline difference in gravity, it could be an actual work in the canon, somewhere between
Heartbreak House
and
Saint Joan
. One puts down
A Christmas Garland
wondering why the man who wrote it did not, in his own voice, write great things. Parody this fine is rare perhaps because it requires gifts that usually drive a man to try something more important. When all due homage has been granted to the uniform refinement of Beerbohm’s total production—and special tribute paid to those famous radio broadcasts whose impeccably enunciated nostalgia borrows gallantry from the context of blitzed London—there remains something abortive and not entirely pleasing about Beerbohm as a literary figure.

Pure parody is purely parasitic. There is no disgrace in this. We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters. Beerbohm, introducing
A Christmas Garland
, explains his parodies thus:

But “decent” is exactly what his style remained. His criticism, so acute and daintily just, is rendered pale by our impression that he himself was never burned. His own efforts at fiction are bounded by a landscape of books. His most extended invention,
Zuleika Dobson
, miscarries, it seems to me, in its climactic holocaust; he treats his paper creations too heartlessly. His essays do show flashes of terrestrial daylight, of felt experience. The most memorable of them, “The Golden Drugget,” tells of a strip of light projected across the road through the open doorway of an inn near Rapallo. This sign of human company comforts him as he walks the dark road; he is tempted to enter but, to preserve his illusions, never does. “Don Quixote would have paused here and done something. Not so do I.” Art imitates Nature in this: not to dare is to dwindle. S. N. Behrman’s fascinating memoir of talks with the octogenarian Max presented, in the kindliest light, a portrait of a miser. Beerbohm’s persistent gloating upon his own “littleness” became somewhat grating, and in the end his delicate belittling of the lack of littleness in others seemed virtually nasty. Magnanimity was reduced in his conversation to a species of conceit, zeal to a form of presumption. Everything withered under the gentle touch of Beerbohm’s equanimous depreciation, and his creative energy, which he could never refine quite out of existence, was solipsistically focussed on the ornamentation of his private library with private jokes. As, in his amniotic cave in Rapallo, he continued to play the young man’s game of parody, it turned into a childish fiddling with scissors and paste, footnotes and mustaches; in his own drawings of himself, the wispy, ethereal, top-hatted Puck of the London days evolved backward into an elderly fetus with a huge square head, bulging eyes, and a tiny hunched body—an emblem, as ominous as wonderful, of the totally non-quixotic man.

If great parodists are not great writers, great writers, conversely, are not great parodists. Once the spirit has made that harsh emergence, and learned to feed on the sights and sounds of the outer air, there is no returning. Contrast with Beerbohm the contemporaneous young Irishman who set out to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated
conscience of his race. Macdonald includes in his “Specialties” section excerpts from the “Oxen of the Sun” passage in
Ulysses
, wherein Mrs. Purefoy’s son comes to birth through progressive contractions, as it were, of English style. By labelling the excerpts with the names of specific parodees, Macdonald somewhat falsifies the generality and integrity of the passage, and places Joyce in an arena where, at heart, he disdained to compete.
A Christmas Garland
is a program of flawless impersonations by an actor whose own personality is invisible. The “Oxen of the Sun” episode is a boisterous “turn” taken in an antic succession of loosely fitting costumes; behind the bobbing masks we easily recognize the vaudevillian himself, Shem the Penman, the old flabbergaster. There is hardly a sentence of this parodic caper that lacks Joyce’s own tone—the compacted incantation, the impelling commaless lilt, the love of rubble that turns history itself into a stream of trash. In reading these excerpts, disconnected as they are, we become caught up in the subterranean momentum of Joyce’s earnest obsessions, of a narrative we can hardly see; the glimpses of Bloom and Stephen Dedalus take our eye, and the verbal hurly-burly screening them from clear view becomes something of a nuisance. These paragraphs tell us little about the authors imitated—Dickens was sentimental, Carlyle fulminated, etc.—but they strive to tell us everything about
things
. Their power as fiction mars them as parody—or, rather, they are not parody at all but acts of conquest, a multiple annexation, an assimilation of all previous prose into a “chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle” and into Joyce himself. The culminating section, which Macdonald terms “the death of English in the gutter,” contains vivid elements of (very possibly) conscious self-parody; that is, as Mrs. Purefoy gives birth to her boy, the English language gives birth to James Joyce.

Passionately creative spirits
use
parody, rather roughly; and if the tool snaps in their hands, what of it? The
Aeneid
is a parody of sorts and is most admirable where it is least Homeric, and we may be grateful that the parodic vestiges in
Madame Bovary
(e.g., the descriptions of Emma’s girlhood reading) are all but dissolved by Flaubert’s sympathetic immersion in his heroine. Some novels might be fairly described as ruined parodies. The little dolls whittled in fun escape the author’s derision and take on life.
Joseph Andrews
and
Northanger Abbey
are examples;
Don Quixote
is the towering instance. Cervantes’ masterpiece lives not because it succeeds as parody but because it immensely fails. Setting
out to demonstrate the folly of romantic aspirations, Cervantes ends by locating in just this folly, this futility, such aspiration’s grandeur, and so provides at the outset of the modern era an adjective and a metaphor for the new human condition.

Parody becomes significant in proportion to the dimensions of the thing parodied. At the bottom of the scale are those burlesques, achieved by crude verbal substitutions, of such specific works as “Excelsior,” “Hiawatha,” “The Raven,” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Their humor springs from an instinctive sense of reality that rejects the jingling high-flown; they are parody’s folklore. At the middle of the scale—a temperate zone most congenial—are those comprehensive and critical imitations of the manner and style of individual authors that define our modern sense of parody. At the top, reaching into the altitude of (for want of a better word) Literature, are those imaginative creations that, taking certain writings as an excuse, attack the assumptions of an age. If the parodied works present themselves to the parodist as emissaries of a truly formidable threat, the parody may outlive its occasion and become a human, rather than a merely literary, document.