Assorted Prose (31 page)

One of Macdonald’s most thoughtful strokes is to include the original poems, by Isaac Watts, Robert Southey, G. W. Langford, and assorted female moralists, that Lewis Carroll transmuted into the stuff of Wonderland. To read these verses is to inhale the powerful brown vapors of the Victorian social engine. What is signal about them is not their piety but the utilitarian slant of that piety; behind these homiletic admonitions and consolations looms an explosive national machine steadied by the economic docility of the lower orders and the domestic gentility of the upper. A don and a bachelor, with no great stake, therefore, in the little gliding lies by which society keeps itself in order, and with a perhaps unusually large personal stake in what he called the “divinity in a child’s smile,” Carroll compulsively substitutes for every smooth piety a bristling absurdity. Southey’s unctuously efficient Father William becomes an idiotically adroit curmudgeon, benevolent stars become bats and soup, and Langford’s admonition

becomes

As a scientist, Carroll speaks for the unkind truth; which is truer to nature, Watt’s bee or Carroll’s crocodile?

Nonsense is as a rule subversive. Carroll—and Edward Lear and, in some poems, C. S. Calverley—attempted to strike up, through nonsense, an alliance with children against the heavy oppression of Victorian sense. Macdonald describes the “Alice” books as “systematic parodies of the grown-up world from the viewpoint of a child.” Her adventures touch on evolution, Newman, Disraeli, the rise of the newspapers, and many other topical concerns. And their general frame of amiable confusion and obstinate authority derives from the large middle-class Victorian households whose mixed decorums and alarums still echo in the childhood reminiscences of James Thurber and Clarence Day. In his poetic masterpiece “The Hunting of the Snark,” Carroll carried parody of his age into its troubled heart. The Snark, W. H. Auden has pointed out, represents the Meaning of Life, which, after being diligently pursued by a posse of respectable Victorian tradesmen, turns out to be a Boojum. Life is meaningless.

Simultaneously, Edward Lear—like Carroll, a solitary, but, unlike him, a wanderer—was populating the geographical vistas opened to British exploitation with persons who amid mad predicaments admirably manifested insular imperturbability and pragmatic resourcefulness. What Carroll did for children’s Sunday-school lessons Lear did for their schoolbooks. For both men, cruelty and
non sequitur
were attributes of the perfect freedom that is innocence; they would be appealed to again
in the children’s verses of Hilaire Belloc, but as the Victorian consensus disintegrated, parody itself went the way of Calverley and J. K. Stephen—subsided, that is, into literary criticism.

The parodist’s customary pose is to be more sensible than the parodee. An Age of Sense in literature is, then, a lean time for him. It is no coincidence that modern English parody began, with James and Horace Smith’s
Rejected Addresses
, shortly after the onset of romanticism. Between the romantic hallucinations of the dying Middle Ages, whose parodic monument in this collection is Chaucer’s
Sir Thopas
, and the appearance of that all-time favorite victim, William Wordsworth, there is precious little English parody—fifty-odd pages in this anthology. And outside of Swift’s classic mock meditation and three Shakespearean winks—at euphuism, Marlowe’s “mighty line,” and Nashe’s twittering “wit”—it oscillates between mild imitation and coarse vendetta. There is lacking the right combination of affection and asperity. In truth, the significant neoclassic writers defied parody. Isaac Hawkins Browne apparently had the ideal parodist’s temperament; he was a gentleman, wrote little, never finished his Latin masterpiece, and served two terms in Parliament without ever taking the floor. And the samples that Macdonald prints from Browne’s slim volume
A Pipe of Tobacco
show meticulous observation and some comic sense. A Popian couplet runs:

But the trouble is that a parody of Pope makes no effect qualitatively different from the original; parodied Pope seems second-rate Pope.

Parody is in essence anti-romantic; it is small and hard instead of big and soft, it is selfless instead of self-obsessed. Romanticism presented to parody’s gun sights a broad sweep of stylistic excess, a high seriousness, and—most important—an individual distinctness of literary personality. What is inviting about Wordsworth is that his written works behave so humanly. He takes us by the elbow and steers us along on our walk with him, exclaiming, explaining, expecting us to take delight in everything he sees simply because he sees it. When we are not delighted, his innocently wise old eyes seem to widen in astonishment on the face of the page. Milton, equally humorless, equally precipitate in his confident
claims on our attention, resists parody, though there are tons of bent burlesque heaped around the base of his monument. The reason lies, perhaps, in the curious impersonality of Milton’s poetry; it is unmistakably from a single hand, but the hand might be that of a god or a monster. Milton’s
oeuvre
has a consistent identity, and as a man he had a character, but the relationship between the two is, somehow, a deduced one. In Wordsworth the two are inextricable, and his literary face is susceptible of caricature.

Discounting pushovers like Southey and Swinburne, the most-parodied authors in our language are Wordsworth, Browning, Whitman, Henry James, and Hemingway. Why these five? Well, for one thing, these men are all
persons
. We know their faces; they led more or less publicly bardic lives. They are not, like Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, voices speaking from a hermit’s grave. Again, their work presents a constant face; they are not, like Tennyson and Joyce, too protean to catch at one grab. And obviously each carries his style to extremes that verge on the absurd. But extremism is not in itself enough. Shelley and Thomas Wolfe lead parody into extensions of dullness. Involuntary outpour gives parody no foothold; the stylistic eccentricity
must be a willed thing
. The style should contain the visible motions of conscious decision, of choice; to deliberate choices criticism can attach. All five, when they nod, expose the same chink to the arrows of parody: the gap between their literary sophistication and their pretensions to the colloquial. This is perhaps least plain in the case of James, but observe, in Beerbohm’s “The Guerdon” and, scarcely diminuendo, in the late James himself, how the scrupulously long sentences tiptoe forward through the demisemiquavers of qualification to offer us, like a dime-store locket on the end of the gold chain, some little cliché, or trinket, mounted proudly in quotes, of contemporary “idiom.” A kindred incongruity is present in Wordsworth’s and Hemingway’s doctrinaire simplicity; Browning’s chatty, snorting bookishness; and Whitman’s—in Emerson’s phrase—“mixture of the
Bhagavad Gita
and the New York
Herald
.” All five contain passages in which the style becomes Bergson’s encrustation of the mechanical upon the organic—when the author, like the cat in the animated cartoon, continues his stroll over the cliff edge and in serene incognizance pedals the air.

No author is completely invulnerable to parody. Shakespeare has dwarfed his contemporaries out of all comparison, but had one of them
(say, that Robert Greene who called him “an upstart crow beautified with our feathers”) executed a parody when Shakespeare was still a man among men, we would have a valuable clue to the character of a talent that now seems so uniformly successful as to be characterless.
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Like a painting in which each stroke equals a dab of detail or vibration of light, a good parody can be expanded, sentence by sentence, into an analysis of its object. To please us, this analysis should be just. Its malice (and there is always a little) should be cunningly disguised. “Myra Buttle” on Eliot, and Gilbert Highet on Pound—both included in this anthology—are not cunning enough. Highet’s imitation of Pound’s foul temper is rather too good; his sneers at the poet’s Idaho origins are downright painful. Parody perilously floats on the Philistine Sea, and a pinch of invective sinks it. Any overt reaching for gags shatters its illusion. An example, from Felicia Lamport’s parody of
By Love Possessed:

And I remember a parody of Lawrence Durrell
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referring to the “Copt on the beat.” The trouble with these puns is that they would not by any stretch of the imagination have occurred in the original. The main comic resource—the pretense of seriousness—has been dropped to pick up a jimcrack joke. As well as just and pure, a parody should be complex. It should not keep making the same complaint. Since parodies compress critical observations at a fearful rate, they can hardly be too brief. Cyril Connolly’s parody of Aldous Huxley keeps up a full head of steam for nine pages of this book—but what a wealth of devices Connolly pours into the boiler! At the other extreme are two very short, and very satisfactory, parodies by Firman Houghton of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, two poets somewhat off this particular beaten path.

Finally, a parody is not a piece of patient verbal construction like a crossword puzzle or a palindrome; it must be an inspired thing. It must have a grace, a pleased unfolding, of its own. In this respect, the too few parodies by E. B. White seem to me exceptional. Hemingway as a commuter, Whitman as the comradely afflatus of the Classics Club—White enters into these fancies with a sweet abandon that leaves the finicky problems of imitation far behind, solved as if they had never been posed. This quality, of surrender, seems increasingly rare in American parody, which too brusquely hastens to score points on its subjects. Robert Benchley’s parodies are guilty of this, but are redeemed by being, as apparently even Benchley’s check endorsements were, implacably funny. His parodies of children’s tales, opera plots, and a Spanish folk singer’s program notes probably contain the highest density of laughs per square inch attainable without microfilm.

Of the present relative dearth of parody, much might be said. For one thing, there
is
some, written and acted; the comedy team of Nichols and May and the old Sid Caesar television show have presented some delicious, if not strictly literary, parody. The shortage may be not so much of parodists as of parodees. Beerbohm and the American wits of the thirties and forties worked fertile ground; the contemporary men of letters were respectable and prominent. The literary landscape of the fifties, in retrospect (and with exceptions, all of which were hungrily snapped up by parodists), seems a landscape of ruins—of empty temples, jerry-built “developments,” exploded timber, and premature collapse. In such a wasteland, even the buzzards starve. Macdonald interestingly relates parody, as a subdivision of satire, to the centralization of civilization—in the English universities of the last century, in the Manhattan of this. It could be that our homogeneous and multitudinous nation no longer possesses a center from which the eccentric can be judged. A Hollywood gossip column recently quoted a young songstress as saying, “I’m strictly a conformist. Nowadays that’s the only way to be different.”

In any case, the decline of parody is part of the palpable decline in humor as a genre. This decline is generally viewed, by those interested enough to notice it, as a symptom of disease—nuclearphobia, Cold War chilblains, hardening of the emotional arteries, and so forth. With equal reason it might be viewed as a symptom of recovery, and the flowering of humor per se as a sign of unhealth. Laughter is but one of many potential human responses; to isolate humor as a separate literary strain
is as unnatural as to extract a genre of pathos or of nobility from the mixed stuff of human existence. Insofar as “serious” literature is indeed exclusively serious, then humor, as in the Victorian age, has a duty, in the Parliament of Man, to act as the loyal opposition. But when, as in this century, the absurd, the comic, the low, the dry, and the witty are reinstated in the imaginative masterworks, then humor as such runs the risk of becoming merely trivial, merely recreational, merely distracting. A skull constantly grins, and in the constant humorist there is a detachment and dandyism of the spirit whose temporary abeyance in this country need not be cause for unmitigated lamenting.

 
RHYMING MAX
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