Pull in Your Head - We're Coming to a Transvaluation

It's a foundational narrative fallacy: If I know only a few things about a situation, and those imperfectly, I'll assume they're essential and sufficient. We know that Sappho was a woman, and so a few pullquotes from an unknowable context epitomize the feminine voice. We know that Shakespeare's sonnets mention a dark lady and a sexy young man, and so this tragic triangle molded his (or the Earl of Oxford's) career. We know a monster and we know the name Frankenstein, and so the monster's named Frankenstein.

Critic prepares a psychoanalytic reading for the MLA

We know the following about Lewis Carroll:

• Our favorites among his books feature a little girl named Alice.
• He named this character after Alice Liddel.
• He and the Liddel family broke off relations rather suddenly.
• He liked spending time with, writing flirtatious letters to, and photographing prepubescent girls.
• He never married.

From this, we realized he was an emotionally arrested pedophile whose heart snapped after his obsession with Alice Liddel was discovered by her appalled parents.

However, from this we were supposed to have realized that Lewis Carroll was a very nice man who would never think about anything as scandalous as sex.

What we didn't know (via The Little Professor) is that he also liked spending time with, writing flirtatious letters to, and photographing teenage girls, young women, and mature women, and that he was as likely to worry husbands, brothers, and employers as parents. The reputation-driven repression of his executors was taken for Lewis Carroll's own perversity-driven repression.

Lewis Carroll's "little girls" might then be along the blurry lines of Henry Adams's "nieces," a social category encompassing non-relatives, adult women, and even some men. And his biographies would then be along the lines of a reticence farce like Charley's Aunt or La Cage aux Folles— or, with corpse as lead dummy, maybe more like The Wrong Box or The Trouble with Harry.

What Goes On

It was exactly as if she had been there by the operation of my intelligence, or even by that — in a still happier way — of my feeling. My excitement, as I have called it, on seeing her, was assuredly emotion. Yet what was this feeling, really?

The Sacred Fount made Henry James's friends fear for his sanity. (Henry Adams offered the cheery consolation that "most of the rest of us" would be institutionalized with him.) James himself seemed taken aback by the tumorous growth of the novel. It remained his most extreme experiment: a postmodernist parody of a country house mystery avant la lettre; a mad (social) scientist in a meet-cute(-and-go-nowhere) romantic thriller; a locked room containing the foully-played corpse of realism. (Possibly a suicidal frame-up.)

And it's my sentimental favorite. But I've never tried to work out a way to write about it. The Sacred Fount scares off analysis by example. Some critics express bafflement or disgust; others take short simple pleasure in their manifest superiority to James's first-person.

So I doff my Santa cap to Michael Wood for "The Museum of What Happens", a compact essay which takes the risk of taking the book's problems seriously, starting with the infamous unreliability of its narrator.

Failing towards Freedom : Brooks Adams, 3

Early Darwinian historians simply swapped Nature's will in for God's: Nature evolved homo sapiens, and then Nature evolved late nineteenth-century Anglo-Americans, and now it's just a matter of mopping up the kitchen.

Brooks Adams knew better. Biological evolution describes a process, not a project; by analogy, any rules governing human culture would continue to grind through the Gilded Age. Anyone who thought they'd reached the end of history hadn't understood history.

Relinquishing the throne of creation freed Adams to found a different lineage of errors.

Take, for example, his assumption that biology and culture conserve a constant quantifiable "energy" which is divvied out across each generation. Or his asides about a force of history which can no more be argued with than gravitational acceleration. In both cases, he seems to misunderstand evolution as (singular) survival of the (winner-take-all) fittest under a (singular) law rather than as an intention-free account of species diversification. He mistakes Darwin for Newton.

He's hardly alone. Because technology depends on reliably replicable results, non-scientists tend to picture science as a matter of finding trustworthy laws and formulas. But that doesn't cover even all laboratory sciences: Medical and psychological journals describe barely distinguishable correlations rather than universally valid laws, and the pressures of research funding encourage flexibility in what's considered significant. In the twentieth century, physics itself became probabilistic.

Most drastically, the characterization doesn't cover historical science. Historical sciences such as geology and evolutionary biology study contingencies, not eternal verities. What makes them scientific are the materiality of their problems, their evidence, and their suggested explanations.

Darwin's problem was the appearance of new species over time. His solution was divergent descent driven by material means.

What's the historian's problem? It doesn't seem to be divergence. Like later scientizing historians, Adams rummaged through the polymorphic transtemporal promiscuity of human culture and found cycles. But evolution isn't cyclical.

Biologists in the tradition of Darwin should not speak of the coming into effect of selection if:

1. Already disappeared characters suddenly re-appear in subsequent generations (= false negative selection).
2. Characters which seem to have been positively “selected” during ontogeny never re-appear in subsequent generations (= false positive selection).

Usually, genes, genomes, characters, individuals, populations, and species never do come back once they have been negatively selected, and that is eliminated by Darwinian selection. This is the very simple, but fundamental essence of Darwin’s idea of “natural selection” which, in that respect, was a clearly materialist one....

The situation in operant learning – and, by the way, also in conceptual change in science and culture – is even more revealing. Cases 1 and 2 are in this view not rare exceptional cases, but rather they constitute more or less the rule.

- Adolf Heschl

And the problem's certainly not species. Although biological taxonomy may be fuzzy in spots, it's brick solid compared to what we grasp and mold from the blooming buzzing muck of human chronicles. So far as history is conceived as anything but a chronological collation of citations from unreliable sources, history is nothing but variations on observer bias, and misanthopic pessimism isn't enough to correct our myopia.

After only 110 years, Adams's biases seem sharp, and his (to him) clean abstractions seem (to us) to morph and merge. His towering account is stabilized by the shiftiness of its foundations. Even the line between "civilization" and "barbarism" is blurred by his fascination with torture.

Living where and when he did, Adams restricts the purview of his general law of "civilizations" to Western Europe and, occasionally, their colonies. The barbaric Crusaders contacted the Saracens at the peak of their civilization — but what laws governed that civilization? China, Japan, Persia — they were out there, we suppose; unchanging, decadent....

Living where and when he did, Adams's idea of "economy" focused on the movement of precious metals. But the "money" of contemporary wealth is as imaginary, as reliant on the power of orthodoxy and law, as any kingship or priesthood: a shared nightmare from which we're afraid to wake up.

Living where and when he did, Adams pictured religion and finance as opposite extremes. Protestantism had won because conscience is cheaper than icons. Taking what would seem — and would continue to seem, among the elite, for some decades — the natural next step, Henry Adams pointed out that "Atheism is still cheaper than reformed religion."

But then again Henry also pointed out that the leaders of the Catholic church appear to have accumulated more wealth than Luther, Calvin, and Fox. And then again, Brooks represents the Anglican capitalists who consolidated lands and lowered the value of productive labor as more economically evolved than the Puritan farmers who were thereby forced into exile. And then again, as the economic power of those exiles grew...?

Well, living where and when we do, none of it makes sense. If capitalism and religious faith were ever in conflict, they made up by the time of the Spanish Civil War. For those of us who've survived into the 21st century, it's hard to picture them as anything but allies. The age of expensive miracles isn't past. It's just that the expensive miracle cures consist of selfish murdering assholes getting to feel good about themselves. Taking the long view, though, is that really so novel?

And then there are his easy personifications of "race" and "breed". In their rush to scientize, even skeptics like Brooks and Henry Adams stayed blind to the flaws of these selectively weighted non-random outliers-scrubbed sample sets. They knew many more WASP millionaires than they knew Jewish bankers — Jay Gould was as American as apples with razor blades. But that hardly registered, they'd known so few Jews who weren't bankers.

Maybe it wouldn't have mattered if they had. Young Louis Zukofsky's stubborn refusal of either "all you Jews" or "unlike most Jews" gambits rolled off Adams fan Ezra Pound with as little effect as every other non-artifactual experience. I'm-rubber-you're-glue is a hard game to lose.

* * *

The reader may wonder why I feel compelled to exhume and whump the peaceful corpse of Brooks Adams.

The point isn't he was an idiot. While he was alive he was smarter than me, possibly even as smart as you.

But now that he's dead, we have a bit of an edge. And I think this is a fairly common pattern.

Adams couldn't escape his time and place. That's not a mistake we've grown out of.

Failing towards Freedom : Brooks Adams, 4

But simply because it is possible to model a process in Darwinian or quasi-Darwinian terms does not necessarily imply that it is useful to do so. Darwin himself invoked natural selection to explain the existence of adaptation in nature – a phenomenon which cries out for scientific explanation and was conspicuously lacking one until Darwin’s own theory. But in many of the recent attempts to discern Darwinian processes at work in other domains, for example, in the realm of human culture, there is no comparable phenomenon which clearly requires, but totally lacks, a proper causal explanation.

- Samir Okasha

We feel as though we ought to be able to tell the "story" of anything that changes over time — like America, or the vertebrates. But the things about which we can tell stories must either possess individuality, or they must be prepared to have individuality and all it entails — like ontogeny and closure — imposed upon them by the force of narrative.

- Bob O'Hara

That may be, but it's all pretty unsatisfactory.

- Nora Charles

Given how blatantly history and culture don't map the concerns of evolutionary biology, what attracts humanists to the rhetoric of evolutionary biology?

Darwinian evolution proposed to solve an otherwise unexplained mystery. In contrast, human history has too many explanations.

Somehow, though, on close inspection, they always seem to dissolve into a mist of unknowables, tautologies, unlikelihoods, and impossibilities.

Miasma in, miasma out. History amalgamates human actions into a reasonable narrative; human actions aren't rational. We intuit causality and teleology from our own experience of agency. But, fast talker though it is, human agency never quite finishes explaining things. Its story doesn't hang together.

In response, we might cook the books: haute cuisine chefs such as Objectivists and behaviorists eviscerate, blanch, bone, shred, filter, and pipe experience into occasional lever pushes by a mascaraed Gary Cooper.

Or we might find some supplemental force to fill the gaps of decision: gods, God, demons, spells, universal dialectic, conflicting drives, false consciousness, interfering modules, the selfish genes of our extinct ancestors.... But in describing them as "forces", we've only shifted the burden of teleological paradox on to where we hope it can't be questioned further, like a subpoenaed CEO's The Girl.

The principled skeptical historian, like the English professor who's sick of literature, would like to sweep the tainted debris of personality out of sight. "Evolution" appeals as a magically unliftable materialist carpet. But its magic material is Emperor's New Cloth. The explanations offered by evolutionary biologists are usually presented as not-disproven; the explanations offered by historians usually aren't presented in disprovable terms. The carpet can't be lifted because there's nothing there. Nothing except that same irritating multiplying dust-bunny.

Satisfaction will not be received. The scratch is just the itch's way of making another itch.

... what startles me in these paragraphs is the self-satisfied assumption of the finality of my conclusions. I posit, as a fact not to be controverted, that our universe is an expression of an universal law, which the nineteenth century had discovered and could formulate.

During the past thirty years I have given this subject my best attention, and now I am so far from assenting to this proposition that my mind tends in the opposite direction. Each day I live I am less able to withstand the suspicion that the universe, far from being an expression of law originating in a single primary cause, is a chaos which admits of reaching no equilibrium, and with which man is doomed eternally and hopelessly to contend.

- "Preface to New Edition" of
The Emancipation of Massachussetts: The Dream and the Reality
by Brooks Adams (1919)

Cavil, Foragers

In January, 1870, John Ruskin began Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, issued near-monthly through early 1878 and more spasmodically between 1880 and 1884.

1. As a zine, it seems worth its tenpence. Collected?

   Tastes have changed in 130 years, but the book remains weak, and weakens as it goes. The first and last frontispieces illustrate the progess from Giotto to ick.

   Between them, we're whiplashed between fulmination and namby-pamby; we plod through dull fiction, eccentric introductions to geology and entomology, a few close moralizing readings of paintings, histories, and saints' tales, bad-tempered quarrels with the well-meaning and mostly good-natured, daydream descriptions of imaginary coinage, comment-larded translations of Plato's Laws and the Bible....

   The arguments I found most cogent thin with repetition; pages dissolve into a welter of cross-references: "Let her read the account of our modern pastoral music, at page 90 of my fifth Letter,— of modern Venetian 'Barcarolle,' page 245 of Letter 19, and 257 of Letter 20..." And, as Ruskin himself points out, they only restated more bluntly what he'd written prettily before.

   It doesn't even excerpt easily: Ruskin was a manic monologist, not an aphorist.

2. Why plod then?

   The serial started forcefully enough, engaging a still-live issue: the moral and ecological costs of capitalism. And suspensefully enough while I waited for the author to reveal his plan.

   Post-revelation, the grounds of suspense changed. Now I wondered how long it would take for his plan to fall apart, and how completely it would fail before he admitted defeat.

   And then, a while later, how long it would take for him to become certifiable, and how that would show up in the "letters"....

3. The suspense of authorial decline.

   Oh, I've encountered successful works shaped by and incorporating their artists' mental collapse. Not here. Here I was drawn on by pure, if sympathetic, morbidness.

   It's not my favorite way to read a writer; it's not how writers prefer to be read. But after finishing the book, curious, I found that even its greatest champion, Tim Holt, reads it that way. He says that's why he likes it most.

   That's the best Ruskin's biographer can fish from the man's life work.

   From political prophet and model prose stylist to human interest story — the degradation's ours as much as Ruskin's.

4. I was surprised when I hit the bit about Whistler.

   All these decades I'd hosted Whistler's version of the story: a victory of wit and art over the opressive Establishment.

   But Whistler wasn't the only presumptious upstart in the case. Ruskin had climbed far in life, it's true; so far that, without realizing it, thrashing in the upper foliage, he'd left behind anything which could support his weight.

   In context, Ruskin's insult was a singular throwaway in an ever less coherent and ever more discountable flood of attacks on enemies much more Established than either disputant. Whistler was flogging a lame horse. The target of his suit would collapse into complete delirium long before the trial took place.

   This revision teaches a lesson worth learning. (Although I needed it more at eighteen.) Our license to rave isn't a sign of fear or respect, but of our fecklessness. Milords, miladies, & Most Reverend and Right Honourable Archbishops needn't soil their gloves chastising the fool. Sooner or later, some other thin-skinned desparate clown will do the job for them, unpaid.

5. It's the familiar place of the political poet:

   Unseated at the foot of the table, splattered with drumstick grease, wine dregs, and worse.

   And Ruskin's yen for the early Renaissance, his execrations of usury, his frantic vehemence, and the sad curve of his career all forced thoughts of Ezra Pound. (Some people even compare Fors Clavigera with the Cantos, although Pound's post-1930 prose seems a much closer match.)

   Both were convinced they stood on unassailable dignity even when hopping, frothing, screaming mad. They were both very fond of the word "Master". And they shared an abusive pedagogy: Disgusted Ruskin describes himself hammering a nail into our thick skulls; disgusted Pound describes slamming a dick into the passive vulva of London.

6. The terms differ, though.

   A dirty job that somebody's gotta do: Carpentry or rape?

   Pound wants credit for suffering through a purported source of pleasure.

   And one difference between Ruskin's and Pound's late madworks is who they're aimed at and how: discursive prose for the working class vs. high art for the perceptive elite.

   Both men were pushed off the path of pure aesthetism by the same conviction: Great art can only be created by a great culture, and so a great society must be remade.

   But Pound circles the argument around again to shape and keep a cozy bed. How does one set about creating a great society? Why, by making great art, of course.

7. Ruskin tried that; it hadn't worked.

   Fors wasn't written as literature or criticism; it documents an attempt to achieve more than words alone achieved, and to actualize fantasy by less comfortable means than continued fantasizing.

   Ruskin's choice was Quixotic, literally. With Quixotic results.

   But Quixote was at least a principled man.

   And, in the end, restricting himself to purely verbal labor protected Pound neither from guilt nor retribution.

8. Fail fast and principled, or fail slow and loose?

   Best not even go there.

   And so another American I think of's Henry Adams.

   Ruskin was a conservative Christian communist; Adams a "conservative Christian anarchist".

9. "Conservative."

   The adjective falls oddly against those nouns.

   Ruskin and Adams opposed it to a just-as-obsolete usage of "liberal": "rule by free-market capitalism."

   Outside of academia, it's been obsolete a long while. By Ruskin's time, all major Anglo-American political parties accepted capitalism as a given, and the only economic dispute between "conservative" and "liberal" was, and remains, whether government should provide welfare exclusively to the wealthy or to others as well.

10. "Christian."

    Although I haven't filled in the spreadsheet, Ruskin directed perhaps his most sustained and violent abuse against church leaders.

    Adams didn't, being more interested in politicians than in evangelicals, and there being, back then, a difference.

    Pound, of course, was a pagan.

    Yet Ruskin, the only fanatic gospel reader of the three, was the only one not to fall into the idiot trap of anti-Semitism. Deluded, he was at least able to clearly see the capitalists two feet in front of him and what churches they attended.

11. "Communist" or "fascist" if you can imagine a way out.

    "Anarchist" if you can't.

    Despair drives us mad; hope flies there. When Adams referred to himself and his friends as instutionalizable, the joke had teeth. He was careful to restrict his ravings to private letters.

    And he proposed no plan but to watch.

12. Ruskin's plan:

    Set up an inner nation to survive the crash. Bit by bit, donated acre by unmortgaged acre, volunteer serf by volunteer baron, neo-Medieval economy, religion, culture, and technology would re-establish themselves in England's green and pleasant land.

    The scheme anticipates Hari Seldon, but its goal anticipates the post-apocalyptic pastoral. Over and over, we've imagined the development of low-tech pseudo-feudalism after the big blow-up. Ruskin just wanted to have it ready to pivot into place early on.

13. No big blow-up's managed the job so far.

    The land which turns swords into ploughshares is always beaten by the land which turns swords into money.

14. And, although the Guild of St. George manifestly failed to meet its goals, no big blow-up's done it in.

    What Ruskin could build was ridiculously trivial next to his dreams. But he built its trivia soundly, and trivially it still stands.

    In the long disastrous history of attempts to make over society, Ruskin's fiasco counts as success. He managed to erect a molehill instead of a bomb crater.

15. The pure products of anywhere go crazy.

    Geography's not the issue. The conflict's between purity and productization.

When life makes you a lemon, give lemonade

SPOILER WARNING, but I felt Barbellion finished the Journal properly. (And capped it with the best hiatus announcement in proto-blogging history.) Exclamations and expletives aside, odds are high that "Self-disgust" will be my last thought as well. Although of course one tries to avoid directly addressing a topic that forces polite bystanders to dredge up ineffective protests: it's dull and egocentric and even deadlier to conversation than say dreams or SAT scores or incomes.

The need to not quite express oneself leads I guess to writing — but that hardly settles how much is not quite enough. Witness the "careers" of Barbellion or Henry Adams or Jean Eustache or so many others.... Three days ago for example I finished Dickinson's Misery despite the title. (Its true name is Dickinson's Genre. Virginia Walker Jackson justifies "Misery" as a generic metonym, like "Stars" or "Trillion Year" on a book about science fiction , but "Arch Playfulness" marks the same genre just as well, so tush.) While its argumentation may be knotty, it's not the usual loopy; anyway, the real joy's in the archival contextualizations and complications which re-establish Dickinson as unknowable: an Open and therefore Shut Case.

Yesterday for another example I finished an iffy novel by B. S. Johnson, an experiment marred by sloppy procedure, a eulogy uninterested in its subject, instead that imitable B. S. Johnson self-loathing, very understandable too, or "surprisingly accessible" as the critics say, it's the Malcolm Lowry problem, ha, he follows on Joyce and Beckett, but without the grasping or the distancing, we're flipping pages in his head, a fine fat one, still no room to breathe, we know how that ends.

Back to me though, about eighteen years ago for example I emerged upon a new plateau of despair and not long after began to write and then to publish. The triggers are clear enough; the motives are questionable. Just a week ago for example while I was in a frenzy of fatuous blundering the question arose. I have two pat answers and this being a social occasion I deployed the social one: I write to meet people. Now clearly that's false: I wrote before I met people, I write without meeting people, if these are advertisements for myself then they're the sort of ads that never mention what the product does. No, the primary motive must be my other pat answer, to get verbal structures "out of my head." But as I commented to Mr. Waggish ten days ago "out" is a vague word, and what I mean by the pat answer I used I guess is that meeting people is the only reward I receive from writing, which in turn determines the particular type of "out" I'm in: commercial writing pays too little, an academic position would make me go Stanford, and the thrill of seeing my name in print lasts thirty seconds to be followed by years of sore regret over my inability to edit the bylined piece, the unnecessary expense for readers who won't like it, and the unlikelihood of it ever reaching readers who will. Not that I don't suffer sore regret after meeting people but, you know, it's by far the best of the lot.

In conclusion then, The Unfortunates is another, Dickinson's Misery is good, Barbellion is better, and give me a call.

Henry James talks himself into a good mood

Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, 8 March 1914:

I've read Henry James’s last bundle of memories which have reduced me to dreary pulp. Why did we live? Was that all? Why was I not born in central Africa and died young. Poor Henry James thinks it all real, I believe, and actually still lives in that dreamy, stuffy Newport and Cambridge, with papa James and Charles Norton — and me! Yet, why!

Henry James to Henry Adams, 21 March 1914:

I have your melancholy outpouring of the 7th, & I know not how better to acknowledge it than by the full recognition of its unmitigated blackness. Of course we are lone survivors, of course the past that was our lives is at the bottom of an abyss — if the abyss has any bottom; of course too there’s no use talking unless one particularly wants to. But the purpose, almost, of my printed divagations was to show you that one can, strange to say, still want to — or at least can behave as if one did. Behold me therefore so behaving — & apparently capable of continuing to do so. I still find my consciousness interesting — under cultivation of the interest. Cultivate it with me, dear Henry — that’s what I hoped to make you do; to cultivate yours for all that it has in common with mine. Why mine yields an interest I don’t know that I can tell you, but I don’t challenge or quarrel with it — I encourage it with a ghastly grin. You see I still, in presence of life (or of what you deny to be such,) have reactions — as many as possible — & the book I sent you is a proof of them. It’s, I suppose, because I am that queer monster the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions — appearances, memories, many things go on playing upon it with consequences that I note & ‘enjoy’ (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing — & I do. I believe I shall do yet again — it is still an act of life. But you perform them still yourself — & I don’t know what keeps me from calling your letter a charming one! There we are, and it’s a blessing that you understand

— I admit indeed alone

— Your all-faithful Henry James

No Better than We Should Be, 2

Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James by J. Hillis Miller

Working at the top of his game, Miller explicates "beautifully," to use the Master's own term for such blends of caution and engagement. (Which is to say "carefully," if, unlike the Master, one prefers ambiguity to vagueness.) I happily recommend Miller's celebration to any non-Jamesians in the mood to understand what they're missing and to any Jamesians in the mood for intelligent companionship.

Even in our contested territory, Miller behaves with probity. When Martha Nussbaum delineates the ideal James reader (and by extension the ideal to which all citizens should aspire), she seems unaware how neatly her terms fit Fanny Assingham and The Sacred Fount's Nameless One. Miller meets both head-on:

We are not all that much better off than Maggie or than the narrator-participant of The Sacred Fount, except that we are permitted by the narrative voice to juxtapose several different perspectives. We have several different acts of reading the signs elaborately presented to us, most notably Fanny's and Maggie's. The Sacred Fount, however, focuses primarily on what is problematic and dismayingly unverifiable about the passive/active event of reading signs, making a global interpretation of a presented social scene, and then establishing a law of interpersonal exchange on that basis. The Golden Bowl focuses more on the way a reading of social signs can be performatively felicitous if others can be got to believe it or to act as if they believe it.

The book achieves its goals — and cannot step outside them without rupturing genre boundaries. Miller must leave one strand dangling:

When her husband asks what will be his punishment, Fanny answers, somewhat contradictorily: "Nothing — you're not worthy of any. One's punishment is in what one feels, and what will make ours effective is that we shall feel." ... If we are unimaginative readers, we can escape responsibility, but only by being grossly irresponsible. Either way we have had it, in a painful double bind that might lead one to conclude it would be better not to read The Golden Bowl at all.

I believe that conclusion should be taken seriously. For one thing, it reflects social reality: most people have not read The Golden Bowl at all. Even literate English-speakers of James's own time tended to leave James's novels unread; some did so with great vehemence. Is there anything to be said for someone (not our dear selves, I hasten to add) who refuses to become "the thoughtful reader of The Golden Bowl. I mean the reader who sees reading literature as James in the preface sees writing it, that is, as a particularly exigent and responsible part of 'the conduct of life'"?

Testimony isn't lacking should the unthoughtful reader seek it. James is dithering; James is timid; James would rather risk incoherence than risk coming to the point. James is a grotesquely pompous peeping-tom, unwilling to assume the responsibility of physical contact and unable to stop nosing around others' sex lives. James is an un-American sissy.

(That last would be Theodore Roosevelt's critique, and yes, I find it offensive. But given his offensive starting point, I can't argue with it any more than I can with the tastes of a later Roosevelt. Henry James and the Roosevelts aimed at different lives and different afterlives. They also serve who don't just stand and wait.)

Having admitted the possibility of refusal, let's tot up the benefits accruing to our own more enlightened status. We can begin with James himself; although he lacked Harlan Ellison reflexes, occasionally an attack did sting him into the indignity of self-defense. I've already had the pleasure of transcribing two examples; here's a very brief third, to his brother:

I’m always sorry when I hear of your reading anything of mine, and always hope you won't — you seem to me so constitutionally unable to ‘enjoy’ it, and so condemned to look at it from a point of view remotely alien to mine in writing it, and to the conditions out of which, as mine, it has inevitably sprung.... And yet I can read you with rapture —

Written to three very different skeptics, they all follow the same course: James points to his absolute certainty that he, Henry James, experiences life in a certain way and had no choice but to write what he wrote, that the only way for him to not do these things would be to not be Henry James, but that, as Henry James, he's not restricted to a diet of Henry James but delights even in the work of naysayers. Henry James was often sad and often disappointed, but Henry-James-ism was enough to provide inexhaustible and inextinguishable comfort:

If one acts from desire quite as one would from belief, it signifies little what name one gives to one's motive. By which term action I mean action of the mind, mean that I can encourage my consciousness to acquire that interest, to live in that elasticity and that affluence, which affect me as symptomatic and auspicious. I can't do less if I desire, but I shouldn't be able to do more if I believed. Just so I shouldn't be able to do more than cultivate belief; and it is exactly to cultivation that I subject my hopeful sense of the auspicious; with such success — or at least with such intensity — as to give me the splendid illusion of doing something myself for my prospect, or at all events for my own possibility, of immortality.

Which is to say that your objections would vanish if you could become "that queer monster," Henry James.

Well! This is an admirably modest argument which establishes an enviable position. But it has one flaw: most of us will not become Henry James. And that may be just as well. A world full of Henry Jameses, or even a summer house full of Henry Jameses, sounds a bit stifling. As Paul Kerschen once said, you need at least one dangerously naive young lady as leaven.

Henry James himself, of course, had no choice but to speak exclusively for himself; he was too polite to subpoena character witnesses. The curious thing is that Miller's defense also occasionally relies on muddling just who's doing what: "the reader who sees reading literature as James in the preface sees writing it" will surely be disappointed by her royalty statements.

We'll encounter this muddle again, but for now let us instead assume that reading Henry James will not make us Henry James. How else might we be influenced?

We cannot successfully "be one of the people on whom nothing is lost" because there will always be something going on outside our focal range, and a good thing too. Instead, James suggests trying to be such a person; that is, attempting to lose nothing of our particular small slice of existence. As role models, Henry James's late protagonists do almost nothing but look at and think about occasions that have been carefully selected and arranged for their benefit. As role players who are reading Henry James, we will look at and think about James's pages, carefully selected and arranged for our benefit. Monkey see, monkey sit.

And so to the extent that an ethics is directly derivable from Henry James, it happens to be the ethics of academic criticism and academic philosophy. His novels lend the characteristic activity of scholarship the glamor of narrative. But when his reader is "put on trial," it's merely play. The ethical difficulties of fiction are to the ethical difficulties of life as Tabasco sauce is to firefighting.

Let's look up from our book and imagine a common everyday example of inaction like ignoring a crying child. We may be exhausted, resentful, and drunk. We may be an Objectivist who knows that indulging our sentimentality would bring disaster upon the adult-to-be — and perhaps the world! We may be a devout Christian who believes it up to the Lord to decide the little angel's fate. We may be a novelist, finishing our thousand words for the day. Or we may be a critical pedagogue intent on settling questions like "Did Maggie do right? Did she act justly? Was her perjury an efficacious speech act? Was it 'felicitous'?"

Should one consider "conduct" not merely a matter of interpretive protocols but also a matter of how one behaves, one should go on to consider that the loudest champion of James's late work was Ezra Pound.

The Price of Admissions

Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon; translated by Michael Lucey
Sketch for a Self-Analysis by Pierre Bourdieu; translated by Richard Nice
The Bachelors' Ball: The Crisis of Peasant Society in Béarn by Pierre Bourdieu;
translated by Richard Nice

I came to Sketch for a Self-Analysis via —

— now, why would anyone feel compelled to begin in such a fashion? Do I presume that you (assuming you exist at all) care much, much more about me than you do about Pierre Bourdieu? Do I consider my trivial consumer decisions a "STORY THAT MUST BE TOLD!"?

Partly, I guess, I want to limit the implied context of the particular experience being described, so as to deny any pretense of authority drawn from a broader, less private context.

Of course that excuse-making dragged us even further from the point not yet at hand. As friends have sometimes informed me, apologizing at length for the nuisance of one's existence merely compounds the crime. Vanishing from view while signaling lack-of-authority (vice-signaling?) poses a knotty formal problem. Maybe that's why collage offers such a satisfying approach to the lyric-discursive.

Not for the particular experience I'd like to describe, however, and so, passing by that garbage strewn over the front yard, here we are (assuming you're here).

I came to Sketch for a Self-Analysis via references in Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon, which I came to because it had been recommended by someone somewhere at some time and I'd gotten that far down the recommendations list. By the time I reach an item I usually retain no memory as to why it's there, but a few pages of Eribon were enough to tell me it earned its place due to his status as what we call hereabouts a "first gen student" or elsewhereabouts a "class traitor."

Eribon's earlier book, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, described the process of claiming identification with a label previously only applied as (and for) punishment — how one might escape from a familial world of violent intolerance to an affinity-based world of volition while still carrying tools and scars (not always distinguishable) from the Bad Times.

In contrast, Returning to Reims attempts to re-claim (or at least acknowledge) identification with what he'd escaped: the racist, homophobic, unschooled, barely-scraping-by world of his childhood and adolescence. The phrase "coming out of the class closet" toddles easily to mind, but the two processes differed wildly in costs and rewards: by the end of this outing Eribon may have become able to see his mother and drop the posh accent more often, but he's not going to stop reading books and start working seventy hours a week at a precarious chain of shitty service jobs, pausing occasionally to be assaulted by drunks. His "return" sanely doesn't entail reimprisonment.

The book is fine, it achieves its intentions with reviewer-friendly smoothness. Unantagonizing; unrevelatory. Except, for me, in revealing two unsuspected bits about Pierre Bourdieu.

First, that Bourdieu was another issue of less-than-higher-educated stock: in his case, the agricultural peasantry of Béarn; in Eribon's, the factory workers of Reims. I'd presumed a securer home base for Bourdieu: I'd taken offense at his character-type of The Oblate — the character-type who, under a pound of pancake makeup and a flattering pink spotlight, finally got its big break as John Williams's insipid Stoner — and surmised it the product of snobbery along the long lines which stretch from Byron and Arnold to Yeats and Woolf. I should have recognized the extra tincture of venom in Bourdieu's portrait for what it was.

Secondly, and of more immediate interest, that Bourdieu's final book took himself as subject despite his loathing of autobiography. You see, for two years now I've struggled with a project whose goal sounds awfully autobiographical even though the idea of an autobiography sounds awful to me. Even the Henry Adams gambit sounds awful to me. Did Bourdieu find a swipeable way around that dilemma?

* * *

Sadly for both of us, Bourdieu did not. He put up a brave front, that's certain enough. "I do not intend to indulge in the genre of autobiography" opens the text; "This is not an autobiography" headlines the back cover. But as Jesse Carlson wrote in a well-judged review:

Bourdieu’s intention is to be both unconventional and genuine. It does not take an unusually exercised critic to note that such a claim could not be, for the genre of autobiography, any more conventional.

His most strenuous attempts to avoid the "personal" translate as interminable "professional" grousing: humble-brags, catalogued slights, the grossly preferential treatment given name after name I've never heard of — none of which sits comfortably with Bourdieu's unacknowledged but thoroughly evident fame and power. The most successful pages of the book are instead the most straightforwardly autobiographical, and they come close to providing a Unified Bourdieu Theory.1

Unlike Eribon, young Bourdieu wasn't driven to upward mobility by desperation: he and his father clearly loved each other; he even uses the phrase "childhood paradise." Offered the chance of a definitive break with his past, he chose near the beginning of his career to instead re-declare (in his own mind) allegiance with it — albeit a resentful allegiance, which granted him assured pride in his own down-to-earth hands-on no-fucking-round "sociological" fieldwork while somehow continuing to envy blowhards who engaged in the type of "philosophical" showboating that makes him sick. Even his notoriously ugly prose style begins to look deliberate, an attenuated version of that familiar counteroffensive against prejudice, the hyper-confirmation of stereotype: camping it up; shucking and jiving; the sub-Gomer yokel gawking at skyscrapers; the droning engineer and clumsy peasant. As a position, it's incoherent, but as a flavor mix I recognize good old home cooking.

The conflict itself manifested well before he found a way to more-or-less resolve it. Like Eribon, Bourdieu exhibited behavior which would be called "biting the hand that feeds you" by those who consider us dogs:

Perhaps because I loved it too much, the ambiguous alma mater provoked a violent and constant revolt, springing from debt and disappointment, which manifested itself in a whole series of crises, particularly at the time of examinations or in situations of academic solemnity, [...] which, by triggering the unease provoked by the tacitly imperative expectation of the signs of submission (what Spinoza called obsequium, the pure respect for institutional forms that institutions demand above all else, of which people say, in reproachful tones, that ‘it costs nothing’ and which costs me an infinite amount), bring out my hankering for dissidence, the temptation to spoil the game. And how can I not include in that series the refusal to submit to the unthinkable rite of the submission of a thesis, which I justified to myself with Kafka’s axiom: ‘Do not present yourself before a court whose verdict you do not recognize’? [...]

It is not the only time in my life when I have had the sense of being constrained by a greater force to do something that cost me dearly and the need for which was felt only by me.

Given this two-out-of-two sample population, and the sample population I've seen elsewhere, I wonder why Bourdieu's portrait of the oblate wasn't evil-twinned by a portrait of the smart-kid-bad-student, eager to sabotage himself so long as he can bring a bit of the institution down with him. Like his self-conscious burial of grand theses and celebrity critiques in footnotes or parenthetical remarks, it seems more an assertion of control than of humility. He is the boy that can enjoy invisibility.

Until this book, that is. The honest self-effacing work of interviews and number-crunching find no justification in a "self-analysis," or even a "self-socioanalysis." Bereft of that protective armor, Sketch is an unhappy, unsatisfied work, missing steps and lumbering under the weight of Bourdieu's discomfort. The mood brightens only when it memorializes the three ethnographic studies, published across three decades, of Bourdieu's home province, the Béarn.

Their personal associations triggered his characteristic guardedness — "which led me to refuse to this day any republication of texts whose appearance in scholarly journals with small circulation protected them against malicious or voyeuristic readings" — but at the end of his life he must have reconsidered, because they were collected and published as his next-to-final book, The Bachelors' Ball.

* * *

And yes, after l'emmerdement of the Sketch, The Bachelors' Ball comes as blessed relief. In the initial, novella-length 1962 article, you sense his simultaneous embrace of habitus-past and habitus-future, bringing the fiancé back home for one triumphant final visit with the folks before emigration — it almost bounces (in a thudding Bourdieu sort of bounce) with energetic engagement.

Like most of the ethnography I've read, it's also melancholic: acknowledging the rigidity of the old ways; mourning the loss of the old ways. But in this setting at least, Bourdieu seems glad to be unhappy. For someone you adore, it's a pleasure to be sad.

The quietly criminal pleasure of self-exposure by proxy is familiar enough from, oh, pretty much all types of writing? The bruise-kneading comfort a displaced person draws from ethnographic situating of that dissed place is a more specialized thing, but not unheard of — or (in this case) unviewed.

The solidarity between inhabitants of the same neighbourhood was also expressed at the time of collective labours — houdjère (from houdja, to hoe) and liguère, the hoeing and binding of the vines in the course of which the groups of workers alternated their singing from one hillside to the other, pélère, the slaughter and processing of the pig, ...

I find no evidence that Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Eustache ever met or even heard of each other, which just goes to show. Both spent childhood in rural areas: Eustache's Pessac is 120 miles north of Bourdieu's Béarn. Both were uprooted at pubescence and replanted in hostile ground: Bourdieu at age eleven to a boarding school in the nearest "big city" (Pau, population about 40,000 at that time), Eustache at age twelve to his not-noticeably-maternal mother and her lover in Narbonne. And both revisited their lost Edens early in their chosen careers and returned again a decade later: Bourdieu with the papers of The Bachelors' Ball, Eustache with the short films La Rosière de Pessac of 1968 and La Rosière de Pessac of 1979.

Like Eribon and Bourdieu, Eustache was a bright kid raised in anti-academic surroundings; unlike them he received no scholarship: Eustache was forced out of school at age 14 and never returned. He was never gifted the luxury of bourgeois arriviste guilt; instead he took lateral class mobility into low-budget-libertine bohemia.

In conclusion Jean Eustache was an unhappy man who made unhappy movies. Funny as hell sometimes, but with the humor of a miserable fuck.

You read a one-line summary of a one-hour cinéma vérité documentary devoted entirely to showing a communal hog slaughter followed by sausagemaking, in a chilly bleak landscape, with human speech represented by grunts in an unknown and unsubtitled dialect, and you'd anticipate the usual ghastliness but more so.

Certainly the hog looks aghast. And yet Le Cochon strikes me as by far the least miserable of Eustache's credits — I might even call it comforted.

I used to think that was another sign of Eustache's perversity. Now it seems only-to-be-expected. The comfort, like the concept and the homecoming, might originate with co-director Jean-Michel Barjol. Nevertheless its survival means Eustache felt able to share it.

* * *

Having established "your" interest in my trivial consumer decisions and producer obstacles, "you'll" be fascinated to learn that I've struggled to write about Jean Eustache for twenty-five years, and that to one extent or another all of Eustache's work is autobiographical.

But I don't want to swipe his gambit, either. Too many suicides.

Contraction : 1973 – 1976

Thus further constraints need to be applied to attempt to separate useful information (to be retained) from noise (to be discarded). This will naturally translate to non-zero reconstruction error.

- "Stacked Denoising Autoencoders" by Pascal Vincent, Hugo Larochelle, Isabelle Lajoie, Yoshua Bengio, Pierre-Antoine Manzagol

Braymer C-4 High School offered no advanced placement classes and no foreign language instruction. (Although librarian Mary Margaret McAllister could've taught French, doing so would have forced the school to raise her salary.) The irresistibly caricaturable math teacher, Russell Clodfelter (affectionately called "Felter" after he forbade us to affectionately call him "Clod"), only rehashed what I'd already learned, but that was enough to fetch us yearly trophies from the state mathematics championship. (Yes, there was such a thing.) The English teacher's favorite works of literature were Mandingo and Gone with the Wind; most of the other teachers were far worse. Aside from one touch-typing course, formal education had come to an end and I was left to my own devices.

Devices were thin on the ground. The bulk of the school library was assembled at the turn of the century, as close to a heyday as Braymer ever got — Artemus Ward and William Dean Howells; Thomson, Cowper, Whittier, and Longfellow — although somehow one paperback of Leonard Cohen's pre-crooner verse had slunk in; I read the sauciest bits aloud to prove that Poetry Is Cool.

The nearest public library was in Chillicothe, population 9500, about forty minutes away, and I relied on my parents' occasional shopping trips to get there. They were usually willing to drop me off for an hour or more, though, the collection was surprisingly ambitious,1 and the person responsible, Ms. DesMarias, became a supportive friend, gifting me with castoffs and lending Finnegans Wake unstamped from a locked cabinet. (Because local book-burners relied on a list last updated in the 1930s, filth-monger James Joyce needed to be kept off shelves where Berger, Pynchon, and Updike were safe.)

My own collection lacked funding. The queue for a grocery store job was years long, and the only farm chore I could handle was slapstick comedy: set the hook in the bale and get yanked off the flatbed; set the hook in the bale and get yanked off the flatbed.... The year before it closed for good, I picked up some cash as a substitute projectionist at my uncle's and aunt's movie theater. (A kid with a tremor maintaining a carbon-arc projector was probably more suspenseful than anything on the screen.) Then I pitched a local history column to the Braymer Bee.2 None of these ventures brought in much.

Walks or cycling offered little escape, since the town was empty of scenery but rife with untrained, unleashed, unfenced dogs. If I wasn't in the back yard with our own unleashed and unfenced dogs, I could sit with Grandma next door while she read her stories (True Confessions) or watched her stories (General Hospital, Beverly Hillbillies, All My Children). On a weekend, I might play chess with a friend at his family farm. Or, and mostly, I could pace my basement bedroom.

In short (ha!) I'd been sentenced to four years in a minimum security prison. And as a prisoner I now had two duties:

1. To survive until I could get out.
2. To resist authority to the furthest extent compatible with my primary duty.

For the first time, then, my ambitions coincided with those of my classmates. Bullying dwindled from a minute-by-minute concern to an occasional issue in gym.

I'd tried to keep my musical tastes on the can't-wait-to-grow-up straight-and-narrow — classical, lounge, and show tunes — but Braymer wasn't reached by the necessary radio stations. No matter how I studied Conrad L. Osborne in Chillicothe discards, I couldn't listen to what I couldn't hear, and I needed to hear something other than my chorus of inner hecklers.

The early-1970s rock market welcomed cynicism, petulance, and gossip. Since satire was a traditionally mixed genre with wide allowances for crudity and sketchiness, I wisely advised myself that satirical top-of-the-pops entries made aesthetic sense even if the rest of it was philistine garbage.

After a few months, having already directed my geek gaze away from artifacts as pure virtuosic-thingies-in-a-vacuum and towards a shared outside, I widened it to include more of their implied worlds: jealous songs ethnographically sampled the alien workings and sales of jealousy, boastful songs demonstrated the alien workings of confidence, and so on.

As for having a good beat and being able (or at least eager) to dance to it, I'd always bobbed like a parrot to Gould's Bach and Toscanini's Beethoven, so no issues there.

Aside from any immediate and intermediate gains, the autodidactic approach I'd used — search for an unlocked window or easily jimmied door; enter; make yourself at home; start dropping in on the neighbors — was applicable to other new territories, even if, for political reasons or out of pure cussedness, I didn't always apply it.

And a few months later still, I found discursive models in the Meltzered/Bangsian school of rock-crit, which acknowledged — celebrated, even, in its morose or desperate way — the triune of historical context, tenacious artifact, and fleshly encounter: indissoluble in itself; remixable as fresh context.

While pacing through my third year of exile, I had what might be described as an original thought, the first of my life and the most rewarding:3

The time capsule of my high school library established that America's nineteenth-century canon as currently defined differed in almost every respect from the canon chosen by the nineteenth century itself.

And in my limited wandering through the realms of what I'll call for convenience "Modernism" and "1970s New York Times Book Review recommendations," I repeatedly felt a deflation of energy, of risk, of interest in the latter, a diagnosis that even its practitioners sometimes admitted.

Rather than contemporary literature having attained a unique and history-ending exhaustion, what if it was merely the latest in a long sequence of self-inflicted delusions of exhaustion? In the twentieth century, the nineteenth century canon had been sweetened by sources distrusted or inaccessible in their own time: failed or trivial genre exercises; self-published, barely published, or manuscript-only oddities. What would I find if I looked for their contemporary equivalents — not in search of "lively junk" or "mind candy," not with the condescension of Leslie Fiedler's nod to science fiction or Gilbert Seldes's nod to jazz, but instead by granting ambitious practitioners their self-awareness?

Would-be-vocational pride 4 suggested poetry as a starting point, but gathering a critical mass of publications smaller-pressed than APR was impossible from central Missouri. (In fact, I didn't find an opportunity until life placed me and disposable income within walking distance of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop.) Westerns, romances, spy thrillers, and porn were almost as daunting. It seemed more efficient to survey one of the genres I'd read in prepubescence — mysteries and science fiction — since I already had some idea (even if inadequate) of the lay of their lands, both were well represented in the Chillicothe library, and both were widely available in relatively affordable paperbacks.

From mysteries, I remembered a noticeable mid-career shift in my childhood favorite, Ellery Queen, towards — to overstate the case in the way of latter-day superhero comics — maturity, realism, complexity, and relevance.5 That didn't give much to go on, though, and it would be another year before I bought a battered copy of The Long Goodbye (from the same garage sale as a battered copy of The Golden Hits of Leslie Gore; that garage had good taste), and another decade before I first read Patricia Highsmith.

On the other hand, my junior-high transition from science fiction had carried over more than one intriguing oddity — Dangerous Visions and Fun With Your New Head, for example — and its anthologies were easy to find and easy to track leads from.

As it happened, the world science fiction convention was being held in Kansas City later that year. If I could arrange transport, that might make a nice follow-up to the summer session classes I'd gotten permission to take at Mizzou.

Timing was good in another way as well: for sf as well as film, broad distribution of experimental work crested in the mid-1970s, and both New Waves would soon meet breakwaters engineered, in part, by some other MidAmeriCon attendees.

Expansion : 1976 – 1977

When I and another dorm resident pilgrimaged to the Columbia Anarchist League that summer, we found it sharing quarters with a naked woman who avoided conversation and with a member (or possibly the entirety) of the local Communist Party, who jovially assured me that Come the Revolution my sort would be first in front of the firing squad.

I saw both their points, and still do.

This is intended to be the origin story of an "image," not a Pooteriad, a Real-Life Top Ten-Zillion, an Apologia Pro Vita Mea, or My Life & Loves. It concerns the development of a survival tactic rather than what I did while surviving. Accordingly I'll knapp the wantons down.

Even if I don't inappropriately-touch on sexual practices, though, I at least need to skirt them. As lawyers and reviewers used to say, they are "essential to the storyline."

When my first lover launched herself at me in reassuringly unambiguous (if inexplicable)1 fashion, I anticipated some sort of relief. But solo training hadn't prepared me for the immersive expanse of that relief: a hitherto unknown knowledge of acceptance, affection, and communication, both verbal and not; an anything-fits-anywhere! security as incontestably Real as a low-hanging ceiling or an unexpected step, and yet not painful. Love served as shelter and shield even from a distance: my final oral surgeries were far less nerve-wracking than earlier installments.

Most unexpectedly, love brought silence. Throughout my life, my skull's been occupied by a 24-hour-theater unspooling and respooling an ever-extended can't-stop-won't-stop shuffle play of blooper reels with commentary — every private or public shame, every slight whether deservedly received by me or unjustly given by me, every mild embarrassment or grievous crime or grevious mispronunciation — sometimes deafening, sometimes subsiding to tinnitus, but always, always ready to intrude. And for the first time, rather than drowning it out or yelling over it, I could walk away.

In my senior year, Braymer C-4 dropped even the pretense of education. Mr. Clodfelter tried to prepare me and a few other students for calculus, an effort which proved about as effective as Charlie Chaplin's pre-fight warm-up. Otherwise it was gym and four study halls. I read, or I chatted with Mary Margaret McAllister, or we mocked the white-supremacist propaganda sheet someone had subscribed the library to, or I wrote letters to my lover or to zines, or I searched for a college.

My slot for a grocery job had finally come up, providing some financial relief. Even so I could only afford two final-application fees for out-of-state schools. I winnowed the target list to Haverford (as a twofer with Bryn Mawr) and Vassar.

Vassar's alumna decided on a group interview and hosted an afternoon garden party of applicants, most of whom dressed in some indefinably alien fashion, kept their hands steady near the glassware, and (I later came to understand) attended private schools. I suppose she meant to learn which of us would be "a good match," who would best "fit in" at Vassar, and I suppose she did so.

The Haverford alumnus met me at a diner, and then drove us around the neighborhood to extend the conversation. Topics ranged widely, but included a compare-and-contrast between modes of feminist satire in Russ's Female Man and Delany's Triton.

In his congratulatory letter after acceptance, the alum hoped I'd be able to sustain my idealism. In turn I hope that good-hearted man never found out.

The summer of '77 was glorious: I'd escaped high school, I'd finalized financial aid for Haverford, and I attended summer sessions in my lover's home city, just a bike ride away from Planned Parenthood. A survey class which included Chekhov and Ibsen was particularly enjoyable, even when its teacher tried to guilt-trip me about intellectuals who deserted their homeland in its hour (or centuries) of need.

In contrast, I don't remember I and my lover worrying much about it. Her parents were academics, mine were military, and so the thought of extended separations was maybe less alien than it would've been to our neighbors. I hadn't yet read enough Burroughs to predict what symptoms might accompany abrupt cessation of a universal anodyne. And neither of us could have imagined the grotesque mash-up of Goodbye Columbus and The Rocky Horror Show at our relationship's terminus. We were far too clever to risk anything so humiliating.

The Philosopher's Calculus, or Stone : 1977 – 1980

Fear of the irrational undoubtedly feeds on our lack of knowledge, but above all on those points of omission, on a certain impatience that keeps us from penetrating to the heart of the operative by confusing learning with the talent for rapidly consuming an "informational content." But to learn is to prepare oneself to learn what one in some way already knows. and to put oneself into such a state where the connection between things reverberates in the connection of the mind. The operation is not at first given as an arrow that links a source to a target, but rather emerges in the places where variables become merged and get tangled up without being policed by parentheses.

- Figuring Space (Les enjeux du mobile) by Gilles Châtelet

Have I no weapon-word for thee — some message brief and fierce?
(Have I fought out and done indeed the battle?) Is there no shot left,
For all thy affectations, lisps, scorns, manifold silliness?
Nor for myself — my own rebellious self in thee?

- "To the Pending Year" by Walt Whitman

The next few years were the most intellectually transformative, emotionally mercurial, and socially toxic of my existence, which I suppose is only to be expected when an eighteen-year-old autodidact is removed from years of rural seclusion (but not the gentlemanly sort) and deposited in two of America's finest colleges and near one of America's largest cities.

In that despised and now inconceivable final phase of public support for education, financial aid flowed but first-gen student advising did not. Ten years after I graduated, I discovered that my fellow students considered collaborative reverse-engineering of textbook-and-chalkboard proofs as essential for mathematics as language drills were for French or German classes. If I'd known, maybe I wouldn't have squandered so many opportunities.

On the other hand, who am I kidding? I was a stubborn cuss, and my introduction to the mores of prep-schooled young men — the differences money made and the differences it didn't — had started me on the cynical foot, a stance reinforced when Haverford's presidency passed from two-fisted activist Jack Coleman to dispiriting English toad Robert Bocking Stevens. Told what could be gained from a study group, I'd have said, "Who wants to hang out with math majors? It's bad enough I have to hang out with myself."

As was, I envisioned "college" as that phase of life in which massive blunders incur relatively minor penalties, and I behaved accordingly.

The result was the Great Work advertised by my self-assigned Yeats-and-Joyce-centered curriculum (pursued alongside a full externally-assigned course load): mortared and pestled; flamed and boiled in shit; buried to ferment; seasoned to taste. The most practiced of my little loves once confided on our way out of bed that she'd described me to her mother, a research psychologist, as "probably psychotic," and what shocked me about that was the idea of anyone disclosing their own life to their own parents.

If only to warn young people against the dangers of unsupervised reading, I suppose I should mention the precipitant of my greatest tumble, after which I saw only a choice of downhill slides: an all-out unrequited amour fou, an experience never to be repeated and best avoided in the first place. It's not that the Tudor poets and Baudelaire and Dowson and Yeats and the Confessionals and so on made the idea sound exactly desirable; more, I think, that there are only so many times you can rehearse a part before you put on the show.

Let's keep the rest on ice; there's way too much here for one meal. As a placeholder, though, and because COVID-19 isolation's got me nervy, and because I'm sick to death of writing without any identifiable human beings other than "I" and "me," and most people skip Acknowledgments anyway so no harm done, I'd like to cite some names. Bless this bed that I lie on.

• The initial name's a bit misleading, since Hilda Rooney was 100% Cuban (Wagnerian parents; an Irish-American ex-husband). Her freshman seminar, on African-Christian syncretism in Latin American fiction, appealed to me as a sequel to my Missouri summer-session class on West African empires. In turn, she was intrigued by my and my father's long-ago daytrip to Haiti from Guantanamo. Sharing a tendency to get high on the fumes of X-treme negative capability, we quickly hit it off, and she became my closest friend among the faculty, hosting dinner (a heavenly goat stew) or inviting me to parties several times a year.

  After college, I disappointed her by ignoring the possibility of graduate school — she'd somehow imagined my monolingual sunstroked carcass conducting anthropological field studies — and we lost touch.

  A dozen years later, when web search engines began to appear, hers was the first name I entered. I've tried again every year since then and never found results outside one digitization of an old Haverford course catalog.

• After deciding (to my own surprise) not to accompany mathematics with orthodox analytic philosophy (a breakfast of Spam and watered-down Spam), I barreled to the opposite extreme: Historical Introduction to Philosophy as taught by Paul Desjardins, a Platonist Catholic pert near busting with eudaimonia, and so exemplary of Haverford's approach as to approach caricature. (This overview of the Philosophy department in 1976 includes a photo of Paul in rumpled action, and this comment at J. E. H. Smith's site describes his and Rosemarie's home, proof-by-existence of the Good Life.)

  I found his go-to examples of basic human impulses — rape; shitting in public — a bit alienating, and he didn't fuss much with inclusiveness: in the midst of a dithyramb honoring athletics, he took care to except weightlifting because "it makes the mind slower," while a blush raised on the one weightlifter in our class. (I felt sorry for the guy until later that year I heard him trying to take offense at a WASP joke.) And I believed Desjardins when he (and Gangadean afterwards) said it would've been helpful for me to meet the department's representative pessimist-skeptic, Tink Thompson.

  Still, yes, he did sort of change my life.

• M'sieu' Gérard Defaux gave the only grade, good or bad, I ever enjoyed receiving:

  A+ pour la beauté de tes idées
  C- pour la grammaire et le vocabulaire
  = B

  And his was the only class whose final exam led me to request a meeting. When I entered his office he seemed atypically grim, but brightened up considerable when I asked for the source of the anti-poetical yet completely gorgeous prose translation exercise. (Answer: the opening of Madame Bovary.) He seemed sincere in regretting that I didn't continue French studies — « Gérard a toujours gardé pour les « gens curieux » — ces Ulysse inquiets et touche-à-tout condamnés par une certaine tradition chrétienne et par les livres de Rabelais lui-même — une sympathie profonde » — but one of my scholarships had a GPA requirement and mathematics represented risk enough.

• Across the long, noisy bottoming out of my sophomore year, my most reliably stable supports were Denbigh Hall neighbors Connie Coontz, Roz Cummins, and Sally Seggerman: all of them witty, sane, and generous to a fault. (I was the fault.)

  And I should add, I wasn't their main project, or even a special focal point! That's just how darn nice they all were.

  (My closest male friendship came to too gruesome an end to risk reconnection. Perhaps a shared ambition to mutter "Usurper" wasn't an ideal foundation on which to build.)

• Like Desjardins, logician-Aristotelian-Buddhist Ashok Gangadean was a legendarily inspiring teacher. Unlike Desjardins, Gangadean eventually (fifteen years after I was his student) began publishing, but he proved such a dreadful writer that I can't bear to give a link. Testimonials assure me he's still bringing enlightenment incarnate.

  This interview from 2000 may convey some of his charm and intelligence, and some of what he confirmed or encouraged in me, and where I was unable to follow.

• After sludging through the purgatorial semi-set concrete of calculus, I was rewarded with a series of classes taught by Dale Husemoller. Invariably arriving a variable number of minutes after official start time, Mr. Husemoller, more rumpled even than Desjardins, would stride directly from hallway to top-far-left blackboard and begin chalking a proof with the confidence of a quick-sketch artist gazing at a sitter, simultaneously translating into human speech with frequent exclamations of suspense or astonishment: "But look!" "Oh no!" "But that means!"

  Husemoller was far too distanced a personality (or I was far too mathematically unambitious) to support any illusion of friendship, but he so blatantly resided in mathematics, roaming a lushly self-sufficient world of comforts and novelties, that his willingness to exhibit material presence was in itself inspiring.

  It was my misfortune to take a leave of absence one year before Husemoller left for his own sabbatical, landing me with far too much of the worse-than-nothing Mr. T in my final years. But I understand: he had somewhere else to be.

Graduation : 1980 – 1982

No more education was possible for either man. Such as they were, they had got to stand the chances of the world they lived in; and when Adams started back to Cambridge to take up again the humble tasks of schoolmaster and editor he was harnessed to his cart. Education, systematic or accidental, had done its worst. Henceforth, he went on, submissive.

The Education of Henry Adams: a Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity

As my dropout year drew to its close, I took inventory:

• I'd been assaulted, home-invaded, threatened, and catcalled, but never raped, shot, stabbed, concussed, or fractured.
• I'd gone hungry for weeks and done some lasting damage to my innards, but never approached actual starvation.
• I'd taken too much of anything free and blacked out numerous times (it's hard to keep count when you're unconscious), but never stopped breathing or entered an extended coma, although I gather a "Street Hassle" discussion took place over my body after it met cocaine.
• I'd proffered my unprofitables widely and on too little pretext, but I hadn't contracted any (diagnosable) diseases or instigated any pregnancies, and I'd lost surprisingly few friends, considering.
• I'd lived with roaches, fleas, mice, freezing cold, steaming heat, and constant noise, but was never bitten by bedbugs or rats, and never lost access to water and power.
• I'd been hassled by cops — in Rizzo's Philadelphia, everyone was hassled but Rizzo — but never clubbed or jailed.
• I'd dressed unbecomingly, covered my arms with scratches, hammered my sconce, walked barefoot in the snow (so refreshing after the dog-shit-and-vomit stank of the locust tree fruits and the vinegar-and-smoldering-tire rot of my shoes), and generally made a spectacle of myself, but (forewarned by a tall stack of autobiographical poetry and prose) always fast-talked my way out of "seeking professional help."

This was as soft as a hardscrabble bohemian life was ever going to get. And I had not found the experience productive; it was not conducive to inspiration. All I'd achieved was that list of unpleasantries.

There was no way around it. Insofar as I had anything to offer existence (and we'll set that question aside for the nonce), I'd need a steady income.

Entry to the allegedly non-capitalist sanctuary of tenured Academe was barred by its Customs department: I considered grades and required classes cruel mockeries of education, and had resolved never to become a perpetrator.

Thanks to my tremor and lack of sustain, physical labor was out, as were (due to different uncorrectable flaws) most of the worthwhile jobs open to mouthy intellectuals. (Nowadays I guess I might find hire as the concern troll equivalent of an agent provocateur, but that sounds even less attractive than grifting throwaway money from a venture capitalist.)

I was rarely picked for retail positions, and when I won one, I'd be fired within the month. Having been cursed with a rubber, stage-ready face that exaggerates any fleeting emotion, I couldn't hide contempt and hostility well enough to keep any other sort of service job, either.

It would have to be some sort of clerical position, then, and I'd need a degree to paper over my too-evident defects. Petite bourgeoisie or bust!

And to obtain that degree, I'd need to clean up my act for the sake of the kiddies, stop flinging my Sad-Harpo-Marx seduction technique at all and sundry, buckle down more and under less.

But before and beyond all that, I needed then — as I needed later, as I need now — to invent some — "justification" is too presumptuous a word — some motivation which could be reconciled with my life as stubbornly lived: one which has always compulsively extracted, deformed, misapplied, modified, inverted, ripped, and generally not-left-the-fuck-alone abstract verbal models which then, in their own right, tend to go all Frankenstein's monster on my sorry ass.

Before the fiction grew threadbare, announcing myself as poet was meant to signal harmless redundancy. If asked to elaborate, I'd declare an ambition to be a minor poet — not a prophet, not a School-of-Me founder — with a job at the Post Office 1 and an apartment which could host friends. A downscale Eddie FitzGerald rather than a shitkickin' Al Tennyson.

Later, stripped of laurel and intimates, I sought guidance in others from that narrow intersection of people I admired and people I felt akin to: the exceptionists, the easily ignored; those who pursued eccentric interests or contributed to essential goals in oddly irrelevant ways; amusements or annoyances to more important names.

But I anticipate. Returning to 1980:

I'm only of use as a persuasively dissenting voice, but I must never be so persuasive as to dominate.2 If I couldn't talk I had nothing to contribute, but left unmuzzled I was a menace to the community. Well! A short leash, then, and a fenced yard for exercise. Try to avoid battlegrounds which might incur meaningful casualties. Reserve untrammeled discourse for nearest-and-dearests, preferably — as I decided not long afterward, post facto, based on new evidence, per SOP — preferably within the safe all-accepting bounds of a monogamous sexual relationship, where static build-ups and short circuits could be grounded by bed.

I didn't necessarily want to be worthless, but if that was the price of pointlessness, so be it.

The advent of this story's shaggy "Rosebud" dogsled, the "image", wasn't memorable. As previously admitted, it's been a cheap sturdy utilitarian thing for daily use, like my father's CPO mug, not a major purchase or knock-me-down Damascan reveal.

I re-entered college and lightened my course load.

With fewer sins to confess, there was less impetus to poeticize, and I diverted attention to my role as lyricist and lead vocalist in my friends' rock band. (I was lead vocalist because I had the least semblance of talent and the most brazen disregard for public humiliation. It was a very traditional rock band.)

Early in 1981 I wrote a song paying homage to my new lover. In honor of those of her friends and family who quite reasonably doubted my worth as boyfriend material, I also drew imagery from those exemplars of disappointing promise, Orson Welles and John Barth. That referential weave kept the lyrics memorable, and on long walks the happy yowl of its third verse still sometimes sets my pace:

After she hits the end of the funhouse or gets lost in the road,
The mirrors will be dusted and the ditches will be mowed.
Oh, but anything worthwhile must be empty, base, and vain!
Extremities are foolish. Even fools get paid.

Publishing the dissertation : 1989 – 2020

Eight years later the naysayers were proven right. In our last meeting, my newly-ex cheerfully remarked, "I feel like it's been years since I did my own thinking" (a hot roar flooded my ears) — that's not true! —
— how had I broken so much? —

Predictably enough, I fell apart — substance-abused, fecklessly self-harmed, shucked my duties, composed formal verse, rock-n-rolled all night (well, occasionally past midnight, anyway), re-entered social media (now including a new medium), made some friends, and received far more comfort than I gave.

But this new cycle of breakdown and crawl-from-the-wreckage didn't weaken my faith or smash the icon of my "image." It merely persuaded me to modify some expectations and some habits. (Massless sheets don't provide much warmth but they layer well.)

One of the latter modifications brought us together here today.

Hi. How are you?

Charles Francis Adams, Jr. : Most Annoying Adams Ever?

(Unless otherwise specified, all quotes are from Charles Francis Adams by his son Charles Francis Adams, published in 1900 as part of the American Statesmen series.)

The story is not lacking in interest; but it has already in main been told both by Henry Wilson, himself an actor in it, and by Edward L. Pierce, not only an actor in it, but subsequently an untiring investigator of it. Upon it Mr. Adams’s contemporaneous record throws much additional light. The period was, too, not only important, but, as revealed in his papers, extremely interesting. It has its distinctly humorous, as well as tragic, side. [...] It is absorbing, as well as impressive; but the narrative attains almost the dimensions of a history, and will not be compressed into a sketch. Its salient features only can here be referred to.

The as yet unwritten history of this gathering can here be no more than alluded to, though it still has an interest, and, at the moment, was of great historical significance.

The manner in which the wily and really good-natured Prime Minister, acting after his wont in such cases through the skillful cooperation of Lady Palmerston, subsequently, when he thought desirable so to do, renewed social relations, was interesting and eminently characteristic; but to recount it is beyond the scope of the present sketch.

The episode of the Howell-Zerman letter now occurred. Altogether a very entertaining and characteristic incident, the letter referred to caused at the moment great commotion, and for a brief space threatened gravely to compromise Mr. Adams; but the affair soon passed over, leaving no trace behind. Reference only can be made to it here.

Meanwhile a new contingency arose, and, to his own great surprise, Mr. Adams suddenly found himself a prominent candidate for a presidential nomination. The history of the movement which culminated in the Cincinnati convention of May, 1872, and the nomination of Horace Greeley as the opposing candidate to President Grant in the canvass of that year, is curious, and not without its humorous as well as interesting features. It can, however, here only be alluded to.

I'm glad the author was at least willing to share the curious and eminently characteristic reaction, not without continuing interest, of the London Times to the Emancipation Proclamation:

If the blacks are to obtain the freedom he promises them, it must be by their own hands. They must rise upon a more numerous, more intelligent, better-armed, and braver community of whites, and exterminate them, their wives and children, by fire and sword. The President of the United States may summon them to this act, but he is powerless to assist them in its execution. Nay, this is the very reason why they are summoned.... Mr. Lincoln bases his act on military necessity, and invokes the considerate judgment of mankind and the judgment of Almighty God. He has characterized his own act; mankind will be slow to believe that an act avowedly the result of military considerations has been dictated by a sincere desire for the benefit of those who, under the semblance of emancipation, are thus marked out for destruction, and He who made man in His own image can scarcely, we may presume to think, look with approbation on a measure which, under the pretense of emancipation, intends to reduce the South to the frightful condition of St. Domingo.... In the midst of violent party divisions, in ostentatious contempt of the Constitution, with the most signal ill success in war, he is persisting in the attempt to conquer a nation, to escape whose victorious arms is the only triumph which his generals seem capable of gaining. Every consideration of patriotism and policy calls upon him to put an end to the hopeless contest, but he considers the ruin is not deep enough, and so he calls to his aid the execrable expedient of a servile insurrection. Egypt is destroyed; but his heart is hardened, and he will not let the people go.

To be fair, Charles's fashionably obese prose was never built to carry conflicting emotions. He was bound to wheeze under the load.

Charles Francis Adams, Sr., had four sons, but the eldest, John, wrote nothing ever (and seems to have been by far the happiest):

As I look back upon the Uncles, I see them as always writing — Uncle Charles in a nice square house just below his own on President's Hill, which he had bought to provide space for his books and to insure him peace from the distractions of a growing family, and which he called the "Annex." Uncle Henry when he was in Quincy commanded undisputed possession of the Stone Library, while Uncle Brooks reigned in John Adams's study on the second floor of the Old House. It used to puzzle me what they all found to write about, for my father never seemed to write at all — but when I asked him about it, he said "I suppose it amuses them!"

[...] Uncle Brooks often told me how jealous he had always been of my father for possessing those social qualities of charm and conviviality which he himself so painfully lacked, adding in the same breath that John was far too lazy ever to make effective use of them.

- Education by Uncles by Abigail Adams Homans

The three writing brothers described their relative charmlessness as something passed through the Y chromosome, an unamiable rectitude which both determined and curtailed the social utility and historic importance of each generation's males. Charles Junior, in particular, associated this cursed inheritance with the familial habit of diary-keeping, a compulsion friendlier to future historians than to siblings and children. Here, for example, he writes about Charles Senior's earliest discernible achievement, publishing a life-and-letters of his grandmother Abigail:

Deeply gratified as he was at the success of this his first literary venture, Mr. Adams would have been more gratified yet could he have read his father's contemporaneous diary record; for J. Q. Adams was not a demonstrative man, and rarely, except when communing with himself, gave expression to his inmost feelings. So now, on Sunday, September 27, 1840, he wrote that, attending, as was his wont, divine service in the afternoon, whereat a certain Mr. Motte preached upon the evidences of Christianity from the text, John xx. 31, “my attention and thoughts were too much absorbed by the volume of my Mother's Letters which my son has published, and of which he sent me this morning a copy. An admirable Memoir of her life written by him is prefixed to the Letters, and the reading of it affected me till the tears streamed down my face.”

And Charles Junior, in particular, associated it with their father:

The sympathies of the aristocracy were distinctly on the side of the slaveocracy of the South, as against the democracy of the North; and this the American minister had been caused to feel with a distinctness almost peculiar to London, where the shades and phases of social coldness and incivility have long since been perfected into a science. Fortunately, Mr. Adams, by nature and bearing, was in this respect exactly the man the occasion called for. When the Englishman was cold and reserved, Mr. Adams was a little colder and a little more reserved than the Englishman. He thus played well the game to which he found himself called, for the very good reason that the game was natural to him.

Charles Junior only wrote the biography because John T. Morse, the editor of the American Statesmen series, asked him to, and because like the rest of the family he thought his father's Civil War diplomacy, which against very long odds stopped England from recognizing the Confederacy as an independent nation, had been unjustly forgotten by the ingrate Union. In his writing, however, this shared resentment had to contend with his own Adams-ish righteousness and with his more peculiarly Charles-ish resentments, both displayed in the letter he wrote to his brother Henry in the project's early stages:

I may respect the young man, as a young man; but I neither admire nor like him. The first thing I notice is the absence of anything large, human or sympathetic.... He took to diary writing early, and he took to it bad; and the disease grew in him as he grew older. It was just the thing he ought not to have done. Naturally reserved and self-centred, his nature required when young,— that is for its full development,— active contact with the world and social life; but at 22 he became a married hermit with a diary for his confidant and familiar friend. He wanted no other. Actually, he never was educated. This might not have been so bad, had there been the elements of warmth, humor, imagination in his intellectual make-up,— the geniality and friendliness among persons or the sympathy with nature,— which insensibly make what some persons write worth writing for themselves or worth reading to others. In his diaries there is nothing of the sort,— not a touch of humor, no power of description, no eye to the dramatic, no love of gossip, no touches of sympathy or fun....

- Charles to Henry, 15 April 1895

On paper, it would have made more sense for Morse to ask Henry, who held the unique advantage of having been present on their father's English mission, while Charles Junior had stayed home and joined the Union Army.

Off paper, Morse had rejected Henry's submission of an Aaron Burr biography fourteen years earlier, and would not have expected forgiveness or forgetfulness. And on Henry's side, after Clover Hooper Adams's suicide and the cheerless delivery of his contractual obligations, he considered himself done with American history and, so far as possible, with any public life whatsoever. When Charles asked him to serve as backup biographer, his answer was clear:

If you fail to carry out your plan for our father’s biography, do you think much loss will result? I do not know; but if you depend upon me to redeem your failure, I fear that you will make about as bad a miscalculation as you ever set to the score of the uncalculable. I should never touch it. Sad as this collapse may be, I am by no means sure that our honored parent might not be a greater figure for the shadows that would be left about his name.

- Henry to Charles, 26 April 1895

But Henry otherwise approved of the commission, and tried to talk Charles into a more lenient mood:

In the remote atmosphere which surrounds me, this debased and degraded race seems to care about us or our friends as little as they do for a Periplaneta Orientalis; and, to judge from the supreme indifference of this generation, that insignificant coleopter will be far more important than we, to the generations which may follow the present. Nevertheless I suppose we are bound to behave as though the universe were really made to glorify our works, so I heartily approve your proceedings. Pray make any use of me that you like, just as though I were real.

As for the governor, the world has little use for him, now that he is dead, and not much more, while he lived. Judging from the intolerable dulness ofthe various Lives already published: Seward, Chase, Sumner, Motley, Longfellow, &c—in fact, of all, except Lincoln and the Generals—I should say that the less we insisted on exhibiting our papa, the better. He stands on the merits of his course and speech in one session of Congress, and his diplomatic papers and conduct. For those two results, his character, mind and training were admirably fitted. His defects and limitations were as important, and as valuable, to him, as his qualities, within the range of those fields. Had there been a little more, or a little less of him, he would have been less perfect. As he stands, he stands alone. No other public man of his time begins to compare with him, within the range of his action. He is almost like a classical gem. From the moment he appeared anywhere—at Washington, London, Geneva—his place was never questioned, much less disputed. Russell, Palmerston, Disraeli, Bright, Cobden, Gladstone, Seward, and all the Americans, were bunglers in work compared with him, as his state-papers show. [...]

Of course you cannot expressly say all this, but this is really all that the public wants to know, and your business is to make them feel it. Sons are not the proper persons to do such work, but I know of no one better suited, so we may as well try.

- Henry to Charles, 16 April 1895

While the older brother worked at his old-school history, Henry became increasingly engaged by younger brother Brooks's more novel attempt to scientize history on a firm intellectual foundation of economics and antisemitism. His later replies to Charles were terse.

Still, Charles must have been eager to hear his opinion of the finished book. Henry certainly had one, and expressed it in a couple of diary-like letters:

Charles’ Life of his father, in the statesman series, is out, and I am making myself a martyr trying to read it. Thank my miserable cowardice that I did not write it! [...] At any rate, I have, at awful cost, learned to hold my tongue, except in letters, and am getting nervous even about them. No man that ever lived can talk or write incessantly without wearying or annoying his hearers if they have to take it in a lump. Thanks entirely to our family habit of writing, we exist in the public mind only as a typical expression of disagreeable qualities.

- Henry to Brooks, 4 March 1900

I’ve been trying to read my brother Charles’s Life of our father, and it makes me sick. Now I understand why I refused so obstinately to do it myself. These biographies are murder, and in this case, to me, would be both patricide and suicide. They belittle the victim and the assassin equally. They are like bad photographs and distorted perspectives. Luckily no one knows the difference, and the modern public is as dead to the feeling of historical atmosphere as it is to the color of the Chartres windows. I have sinned myself, and deeply, and am no more worthy to be called anything, but, thank my diseased and dyspeptic nervous wreck, I did not assassinate my father. I have also read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Letters with much the same effect on my mind. Cabot Lodge thinks them the best letters ever written. To me they rouse again the mystery of the hippopotamus and the dinner; they never leave enough for us. They exaggerate all one’s bigness, brutality and coarseness; they perpetuate all one’s mistakes, blunders and carelessnesses. No one can talk or write letters all the time without the effect of egotism and error. They are like a portrait by Sargent; they betray one’s besetting vices in youth, and one’s worst selfishness in middle-life, and one’s senility in Joe Choate.

- Henry to Elizabeth Cameron, 5 March 1900

(Despite his gift for irony, his frequent claims to mad senile laughter, and his generally successful attempts to circumnavigate despair in front of the children, Henry Adams never seems to have felt the power of deflationary comedy, or to have realized that something more than disillusionment might result when the virtue ethics of traditional history confront mere shared humanity.)

He wasn't so forthcoming with Charles himself. The excellent editors of Henry Adams's letters briskly summarize:

CFA2 and his family had been staying in Washington for the winter. On Feb. 28, after dining with HA, he noted in his diary that “not by word, look or line has he recognized the existence of my ‘Life.’” On March 25, after again dining with HA, he recorded the evening as “pretty dull and very restrained,—not a reference even to the ‘Life.’” On April 8 he recorded his “farewell call on Henry,—to the last dumb as an oyster on the ‘Life’” (CFA2 Diary, MHi).

Charles, Jr., never expressed pleasure in the labor of this biography, and no one was clamoring for more. And so, with true Adams doggedness, he immediately, and for most of the rest of his life, began working on a massive expansion — which would, as a matter of course for a completely objective historian like himself, sadly necessitate many more acknowledgments of his father's inadequacies.

The youngest Adams sibling, sister Mary, saw some of the work in progress, asked the author to reconsider, and called on Brooks and Henry for backup. Both demurred, claiming (reasonably enough) that interference would only make Charles more determined. But it's likely that Henry also preferred to maintain the "don't ask, don't tell" status quo. So far as I can gather from published records, the only opinion he ever offered his brother was the extremely indirect one of The Education of Henry Adams in 1907:

Please bear in mind that I don’t mean any harm. The motive of the first part is to acquit my conscience about my father. That of the second part is to acquit my conscience about Hay.

- Henry to Mary Cadwalader Jones, 11 April 1907,
sent with a copy of the book

Nine years later, Charles had the last (indirect) word with his posthumously published Autobiography, a long purge of regrets ("Few things do I envy the possession of in others more than the faculty of remembering faces or placing names") and recriminations: He wasn't given a bicycle. Harvard hadn't offered a course in chess. A hastily assembled mix of slaves and freemen given a few weeks of ten-foot-pole's-length cavalry training had failed to establish him as a brilliant military leader. And, most startling, and possibly unique in the annals of filial resentment, a complaint that his parents did not ship him away to a bullycratic boarding school: "I would so much have enjoyed it.... It might have made me 'a good fellow.'"

He gives his father credit for one good decision, though:

The common schools my father did not care to send his children to; and I have always been glad of it. I don’t associate with the laborers on my place, nor would the association be agreeable to either of us. Their customs, language, habits and conventionalities differ from mine; as do those of their children. I believe in school life; and I believe in the equality of men before the law; but social equality, whether for man or child, is altogether another thing. My father, at least, didn’t force that on us.

Detached from the manner of its telling, as Charles himself admits at the end, it would seem like a reasonably pleasant and successful life. Accompanied and sometimes overwhelmed by its drone of frets, chafes, and carps, it's a reasonably recognizable one. A dull book; a human document.

Oh, and to answer my initial question:

On paper, when writing about himself or his father or the pristine white manliness of Robert E. Lee, Charles Junior is hard to beat. But off paper everyone agrees that Brooks Adams was the most annoying by far — even Brooks:

He used to say, plaintively, "As soon as I join a group of people they all melt away and disappear," which was all only too true.

- Education by Uncles by Abigail Adams Homans

Plunger

Descended from the plaguey polis, we see stretched before us an expanse of flyblown Hot Takes baked and blanched by the sun, while patchy ungroomed Long Tails twitch and glimmer beneath the rainless orange horizon like a great lake of fuzzy caterpillars. By the barren banks of Babylon, let us sit down.

In this round of Pin the Longer Tail on the Caterpillar, I shall weep of Algernon Charles Swinburne, carrier of the Swinburne verse which infected a broad swathe of English speakers during the late nineteenth century. Early in the twentieth, herd resistance was achieved, and recent studies confirm that a fresh outbreak is unlikely.1

1. What's the deal with Swinburne?

Fifty-five years ago, my eye first passed over Swinburne's peculiar name atop "The Garden of Proserpine," the penultimate of the Little Leather Library's Fifty Best Poems of England (followed by that ne plus ultra in ultra-moderne verse, Francis Thompson's "Arab Love Song": "And thou — what needest with thy tribe's black tents / Who hast the red pavilion of my heart?"). It should've made a fine introduction: characteristic in mood and music yet uncharacteristically easy to parse. But until puberty I had no notion of oral pleasure, and I feared sleep (and immersion in cold water, and cats, and children, and beatings — pretty much all the Swinburnean goods really), and I preferred the cod-Ecclesiastes of Olive Schreiner's Dreams.

In maturity, however, I was impressed by Henry Adams's introduction to the not-yet-famous poet, at a small dinner hosted by Monckton Milnes:

The fourth was a boy, or had the look of one, though in fact a year older than Adams himself. He resembled in action [...] a tropical bird, high-crested, long-beaked, quick-moving, with rapid utterance and screams of humor, quite unlike any English lark or nightingale. [...]

That Swinburne was altogether new to the three types of men-of-the-world before him; that he seemed to them quite original, wildly eccentric, astonishingly gifted, and convulsingly droll, Adams could see; but what more he was, even Milnes hardly dared say. They could not believe his incredible memory and knowledge of literature, classic, mediæval, and modern; his faculty of reciting a play of Sophocles or a play of Shakespeare, forward or backward, from end to beginning; or Dante, or Villon, or Victor Hugo. They knew not what to make of his rhetorical recitation of his own unpublished ballads — "Faustine"; the "Four Boards of the Coffin Lid"; the "Ballad of Burdens" — which he declaimed as though they were books of the Iliad. [...]

The idea that one has actually met a real genius dawns slowly on a Boston mind, but it made entry at last.

Then came the sad reaction, not from Swinburne whose genius never was in doubt, but from the Boston mind which, in its uttermost flights, was never moyenâgeux. One felt the horror of Longfellow and Emerson, the doubts of Lowell and the humor of Holmes, at the wild Walpurgis-night of Swinburne's talk. What could a shy young private secretary do about it? Perhaps, in his good nature, Milnes thought that Swinburne might find a friend in Stirling or Oliphant, but he could hardly have fancied Henry Adams rousing in him even an interest. Adams could no more interest Algernon Swinburne than he could interest Encke's comet. To Swinburne he could be no more than a worm. The quality of genius was an education almost ultimate, for one touched there the limits of the human mind on that side; but one could only receive; one had nothing to give — nothing even to offer.

- The Education of Henry Adams

(Fifty-four years later into his own life, Adams still mumbled Swinburne's tenacious word-tunes:

Today, the death of Harry James makes me feel the need of a let-up;2 I must speak to some one.... Not only was he a friend of mine for more than forty years, but he also belonged to the circle of my wife's set long before I knew him or her, and you know how I have clung to all that belonged to my wife. I have been living all day in the seventies. Swallow, sister! sweet sister swallow! indeed and indeed, we really were happy then.

- Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron,
1 March 1916)

Then, in late middle age, I was moved by Jerome McGann's career-long efforts — from 1972's Experiment in Criticism through 2004's massive (and discriminatorily priced) selected works — to rehabilitate Swinburne's reputation. I encountered his parodies, which displayed self-awareness and made a pleasing noise, and was encouraged.

And so, upon senescence and retirement, I resolved to figure out what was up with Algernon Charles Swinburne anyway huh?

2. What's the deal with Swinburne?

I started as usual: top of the body of the text, subvocalizing down the lines, letting them dictate the pace. It quickly became manifest that Swinburne, like the Stooges, wanted to be played loud, and so I and my new playmate moved outside, where occasional bursts of muttering or worse would cause less disruption.

Pace presented a stickier problem. Each afternoon I'd set out well, with a measure of swing, and then, within a page or two, go off track. As one who seeks the spiritual renewal of a scenic walk, and ventures into a monotonous landscape in which every second step skids against ice or flat-foots into a sinkhole of slush, and who pauses again and increasingly again to reconfirm the obstinate distance yet to travel before one's targeted landmark, and who finally gives way and retreats, unrefreshed and a bit demoralized, so was I before Major Poems and Selected Prose.

This went on for weeks before I found the problem.

Swinburne's poetic themes are few. Swinburne's poetic vocabulary is slightly archaic, mostly monosyllabic, and very limited. (All soft things are snow-soft; snow has no attributes other than softness.) Swinburne's verbal music — rhythms, alliterations, rhymes, elaborate set patterns, the whole shebang and shboom — is in your face and all over the place; more insistent than Yeats, than Spenser, than Edgar Allen Poe or Vachel Lindsay for chrissakes. And Swinburne plays that music long; once he got started, the guy would not stop; he just keeps blowing, good stanza, vapid stanza, pivot-on-an-ambiguous-pronoun stanza, doesn't matter so long as they're coming.

All of which encourages the clueless reader to accelerate. And that's how the clueless reader stumbles, because Swinburne allowed himself one complexity amidst all this simplicity: sentence structure. While the syntax stayed transparent, I'd drift into the warm fuzz of noise, start to nod off, then be jolted awake and realize I'd completely lost my way.

Other Swinburne readers have struggled in similar fashion, and some would have warned me, given half a chance. I'll cite Morse Peckham's 1970 account at length since it's otherwise inaccessible:

Swinburne is at once an extraordinarily seductive poet and an extraordinarily difficult one. Because of this his charm has been dismissed over and over again, an untold number of times, as simply a matter of “word-music”: in Swinburne, it is alleged, there is nothing but a leaping rhythm that hurls you along and a completely irresponsible use of the various devices of euphony (or more precisely, phonic over-determination), particularly alliteration. He is recognized to be the greatest virtuoso of sound in English poetry, but that prodigious technique, it is asserted, is entirely without foundation or justification, for Swinburne says nothing.

It is not always recognized that the major Victorian poets are in fact difficult poets. To be sure, everyone knows that Gerard Manley Hopkins’ work is difficult; so difficult that many think of him still as a “modern poet,” though what of his technique he did not learn from Browning he learned from Swinburne. Arnold is admittedly quite transparent; Tennyson seems to be transparent to the point of simple-mindedness, but in fact is an exceedingly subtle, devious, and baffling writer. It is obvious that much of Browning is very difficult indeed, but the most difficult works of Browning are, for the most part, unread even by Victorian specialists, and are generally, though quite unjustifiably, dismissed. But the advantage of Browning over Tennyson is that he looks difficult, and over Swinburne that it is obvious that he is saying something. Swinburne, by contrast, seems to be almost contentless. Yet he is not. Quite the contrary . The difficulty of Browning, like the difficulty of Hopkins, is a difficulty of syntactic compression and distortion. Swinburne also offers a syntactic difficulty, but one of quite a different order. The effect of monotony comes not primarily from the unflagging splendor of the rhythm or the obviously beautiful sound, but rather from the fact that Swinburne constructs his sentences by building them up of long syntactic sub-units; the first sentence of Atalanta, for example, is sixteen lines long. What he exploits are the possibilities of parallel syntactic structure. The effect is that the unpracticed reader loses control over the syntax. In Hopkins and Browning the extreme use of elision and syntactic distortion confuses the reader. There is not, so to speak, enough syntactic redundance to keep the reader oriented. But in Swinburne there is too much syntactic redundance. In this he resembles to a certain extent Milton; but the difficulty of reading Milton comes from trying to follow a syntactic style of dependent syntactic units, while Swinburne exploits the possibilities of disorienting the reader by presenting him with parallel structures so far apart that it is difficult to remember and grasp their syntactical relationship. The consequence with all four of these poets is that the reader untrained in their syntactic styles loses semantic control. Yet he knows, at least, that Hopkins, Browning, and Milton are saying something; but Swinburne further confuses him by offering a continuum of beautiful sound which seems to have no relationship to anything at all. The result is that for the first three, the unpracticed reader, though baffled, is at least aware that he is not understanding what is before him, but with Swinburne he rapidly comes to the conclusion that there is nothing to understand.

To learn to read Swinburne it is necessary, therefore, to resist with all one’s power both the seductiveness of the rhythm and the seductiveness of the phonic character. One must read him slowly, very slowly. The mind must always remain focused intensively on the task of comprehending the syntax, of grasping how the parallel syntactic sub-units fit into the larger sentence construction; and it must do this as they come along, in the order in which the poem offers them. It may be said that there is at every cultural level an upward limit to both the complexity and the length of the syntactic structure that may be comprehended. Obviously, the higher the cultural level, the greater the complexity and the length of the syntactical structure that can be grasped. But the fact is that today the general simplification and deterioration of the cultural milieu have meant that most people are not exposed even in prose to much opportunity for extending the range of their syntactic grasp. The power to extemporize extremely long and complex syntactic structures with an extensive use of parallelisms is rapidly disappearing, and has been for some time; and at the higher cultural levels the sentence fragment, which presents precisely the opposite difficulty from Swinburne’s, has long been a standard device in both verse and prose. The first task, then, of the reader of Swinburne is to train himself by extending very far indeed the upward limit of his range of syntactic comprehension. The problem is analogous to that presented by Bruckner’s symphonies, which seem too long for people who have trained themselves on shorter symphonies, but are not a moment too long for those who have developed their capacity to maintain their attention span during a symphonic movement that lasts half an hour.

But when the reader who wishes to come to terms with Swinburne has conquered this difficulty—and it takes both time and a great deal of rereading to do so—he is faced with still further problems.

- Morse Peckham, "Introduction" to
Poems and Ballads / Atalanta in Calydon

Although Peckham describes the issue well, I can't recommend his proposed remedy. For myself, so long as I stubbornly maintained my straight stride down the path of the pages with no retracing of steps, reading "very slowly" proved ineffective: I became just as lost but even more exasperated.

Instead, at the start of each new syntactic unit, I began glancing ahead, silently, at its end, to get some notion of the terrain before blundering into it.

Success!

Reward?

3. What was Swinburne's deal?

My life has been eventless and monotonous; like other boys of my class, I was five years at school at Eton, four years at college at Oxford; I never cared for any pursuit, sport, or study, as a youngster, except poetry, riding and swimming; and though as a boy my verses were bad enough, I believe I may say I was far from bad at the two latter. Also being bred by the sea I was a good cragsman,3 and am vain to this day of having scaled a well-known cliff on the South coast, ever before and ever since reputed to be inaccessible. Perhaps I may be forgiven for referring to such puerilities, having read (in cuttings from more than one American journal) bitterly contemptuous remarks on my physical debility and puny proportions.

- Swinburne to E. C. Stedman, February 20, 1875

Swinburne understated the case. He didn't just swim: he swam outrageously, fearlessly, alarmingly into the coldest, deepest, most treacherous waters he could find. He didn't just ride: he galloped like a Dionysian centaur and had the broken bones to prove it.

And, because he was writing to an unknown American instead of an old crony, he also undercounted: he was notoriously just as "far from bad" at being whipped and getting drunk.

As Swinburne himself suggests, these high-risk behaviors are all ways by which a small tremulous slightly-built countertenor might assert his masculinity. But more to the point, I think, they're also all recognizable ways to (in present-day jargon) self-medicate a painfully manic case of ADHD by forcing focus upon the here and now.

As I expressed it at thirty years old, I really did want to get away from fiction and into something real. I'd spent ten years writing fantasy and I wanted to be in some kind of situation whereby if you made a mistake, what would happen to you would be real. That was the way I expressed it to myself: that if you fall off a rock climb above a certain height, something very real will happen to you. [...] The greatest thing about rock climbing is that if you suffer anxiety it gives you a reason. You know, your day really fires up when you're eighty feet above the ground and things are going wrong and you suddenly think, Wow, I've got a reason to be worried for today. It's a fantastic relief to have a reason to feel anxiety.

- M. John Harrison in conversation with Mariana Enriquez

The applicable jargon of Swinburne's own time comes to us through an at-fourth-hand diagnosis of his uncontrollable twitching, trembling, and jerking:

It made me unhappy to see what trouble he had in managing his knife and fork. Watts-Dunton told me on another occasion that this infirmity of the hands had been lifelong — had begun before Eton days. The Swinburne family had been alarmed by it and had consulted a specialist, who said that it resulted from ‘an excess of electric vitality,’ and that any attempt to stop it would be harmful. So they had let it be.

- And Even Now by Max Beerbohm

While essential tremor is no longer explained by "electric vitality," it remains untreatable, and marks the spazz as a social oddity from childhood on. Any initial awkwardness would have been intensified by Swinburne's other difficult-to-diagnose ailment, early-onset deafness. And that eventually overwhelming self-consciousness seems to have been what triggered Swinburne's near-suicidal binges (as well as his marathon monologues): when cozily secured with intimates or left to his own devices, Swinburne stayed sober; moved into urban sociality, he quickly got blotto.

No matter how we choose to clump these personal traits, their aggregate is familiar enough. Born into similar privilege a hundred years later, Swinburne would've raced cars or tested planes or OD'd. He needed to drown the unspeakable noise in his head, needed to drown the unparsable noise from outside it, even at the risk of drowning himself. What distinguishes Swinburne from fellow jitterbugs, and from the canonical poets who scorned him in the twentieth century, was his reliance on incarnate versifying — whether recited or improvised — as the most sustainable of his high-risk behaviors.

Outside the Modernist canon, I find some context even for that. Masters of freestyle will emit occasional sonorous ambiguities or nonsense; maximalists of flow never know when to take the horn out of their mouth. As Swinburne swam beyond his depth, climbed above his height, drank himself past consciousness, and was flogged within a quarter-inch of his life, so he needed to write too much if he was to write at all.

4. What wasn't?

Outside books I've hardly heard anything about Swinburne, and when I did it was dubious.

Anyone expecting a hero of gay pride will be disappointed, or awfully selective in their reading. Swinburne's only definitely established sexuality consisted of masochism, and although as a practical matter it didn't matter much who swished the birch, a preference for male beauty doesn't seem to have been one of the marks left by Eton: his published fantasies put women in charge, his privately expressed polite demurrals and homophobic slurs sound genuine enough, and his "actual admiration of Lesbianism" is hardly counterevidence. Poetically he positioned himself with Baudelaire, Gautier, Hugo, and the Rossettis rather than Symons, Whitman, Pater, or Wilde.

Nor, so far as accessible evidence takes me, did Swinburne quite follow the reactionary path laid down by Southey and Wordsworth. It's true that his first-written (but second-published) book caused a scandal and his third called for bloody revolutions, whereas later collections were far more soothing to his family and the rest of the British establishment. But his anti-colonialism had never extended to British colonies; he always idealized English military action, particularly at its most disastrous; he was always drawn to babies and children; he always idolized Shakespeare. The shift in his publications didn't reflect changes in his beliefs or preferred themes so much as which of those themes found expression at any one time.

Even those switches of filter or booster weren't the result of independent evolution. Despite his vehemence and bellicosity, Swinburne was eminently pliable.4 You could pick him up, plop him down in a different direction or location, and he'd accept it as readily as a good zombie or a good dog. When he was so drunk as to risk arrest, a cab would deposit him at Ford Madox Brown's, the servants would toss him into a bathtub and then into bed, and he'd receive all as his due. When Theodore Watts-Dunton transplanted him to the Pines for the rest of his life, he took the change for granted. Oh, we're sharing a house now? It's very nice here. Water, not whisky? Lovely. You won't mind if I scrape some toast in for flavor?

Thus, during the period in which Baudelaire and the Pre-Raphaelites were his peers, Swinburne scandalized; when Swinburne met Giuseppe Mazzini, he revolutionized; and at the Pines Watts-Dunton encouraged sedate respectability.

Watts-Dunton only stifled so much, though. Swinburne's sex-positive Tristram of Lyonesse may have represented a more fundamental assault on Victorian mores than any vampiric femme fatale, and, around the time his name was proposed for a post-Tennyson laureateship, he publicly called for the assassination of the Queen's cousin:

God or man, be swift; hope sickens with delay:
Smite, and send him howling down his father's way!
Fall, O fire of heaven, and smite as fire from hell
Halls wherein men's torturers, crowned and cowering, dwell!

- "Russia: An Ode"

And from first volume to last, Swinburne attacked the church — any church.

He fell into facile writing, and he accepted a facile compromise for life; but no facile solution for his universe. His unbelief did not desert him; no, not even in Putney.

- "Swinburne versus his Biographers" by Ezra Pound

5. What's the big deal?

In 1918 Pound very judiciously wrote that "No one else has made such music in English, I mean has made his kind of music [...] At any rate we can, whatever our verbal fastidiousness, be thankful for any man who kept alive some spirit of paganism and of revolt in a papier-mâché era, in a time swarming with Longfellows, Mabies, Gosses, Harrisons." However, many things can be unique without seeming worth the cost of extraction, and we're no longer threatened by Longfellow and Gosse, much less by whoever "Mabie" and that not-M.-John "Harrison" were.

Peckham promises we can learn "why for sixty years or so people of intelligence, learning, and exquisite taste thought Swinburne a great poet, and why a few people think so today," and is likely to meet similar objections.

Mark Scroggins proposes "the intensity with which Swinburne evokes erotic desire and the conjunction of pleasure and pain," and his poetry's "lush, hypnotic music, its ever-shifting deployment of a fairly restricted vocabulary, leading us through a series of emotional states, laying out in shimmering overlays a series of symbols that can induce in us a new relationship to the 'real' world of objects." (Or, as Yeats wrote and McGann later quoted, "hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols.")

I have no inclination to argue with any of that, but neither do I feel the same responses. I stubbornly remain as untransfigured by his symbols as by Blake's or Yeats's, and although young Swinburne's scandalous ditties are catchy and funny, their wicked ladies and sweet sweet dead-leper lovin' strike me as received fantasies; I'm not even sure he'd fully grasped the mechanics of the thing. (Do humans really need their lips bitten through to reach orgasm? Isn't that otters or something?) He'd worked the details out by Tristram, but it's harder to quote Tristram.

In 2004 Jerome McGann found a way to reformulate some of Swinburne's self-evident flaws as virtues:

a type of phenomenal awareness that is perhaps unique in English literature [...] a drama of poetic subjectivity diffusing into the language as such [...] as in life, its meanings spread and mutate and transform under our own pursuit. To read him is to be reminded that a full awareness of even the simplest human experience is unachievable. [...] The dissolution is scarcely to be observed, however, lest one imagine that it could be understood by being seen. It is understood, rather, by being undergone. To read these poems is necessarily to be swept away by tactile and auditional immediacies

Back in 1972, dropping into his own voice for the epilogue to his academic drama, McGann sounded less detached:

Swinburne has not merely given his thought and attention to all disastrous things, he has given them his heart. His world, moving though its ruinations, is a disaster redeemed only, but always, by an equally disastrous love. For Swinburne, the fidelity of such a love is witnessed most eloquently in art, where the presence of beauty is man’s best witness of the deep care in which he holds everything that is lost to him and to all men. [...] Such passages haunt one not merely for their exquisite beauty, but for the fact that they are about being haunted. At the center of both is a heart which forgets nothing, no matter how swiftly things pass or how long they are gone; and which forgets nothing not because he cannot but because he would not.

Share his sentiment or not, that added risk, the risk of sounding heartfelt, seems key. No one who thinks poetry should be written like Strunk-and-Whited-out prose, without repetition or ambiguity or grammatical irregularities — no one like Ford Madox Ford, who straightforwardly confessed to disliking all English verse written before Pound and Eliot — will ever feel, or have, a need to wrest pleasure out of this stuff, and "bully for them."

More generally he'll never be for the cool, laid back, or dignified. I heard a good writer call him a "clown car." That's fair. Swinburne was a weirdo, and although his poems stopped being scandals they're still embarrassments. After everything changed in 1910, he would never be taken up communally, was always only going to be an eccentric taste. If I (not "we") want to describe the attraction, I have to get personal.

Writing/speaking as a particularity, then, I've come to appreciate the corporeal experience of the reading itself, and two of Swinburne's most persistent and distinctive themes: his championship of mere mortality, and his passion for the sea. As John D. Rosenberg says, those two themes meld. Swinburne's love for the sea was carnal, spiritual, all-consuming; his devotion demanded full-body contact. Other poets pay tribute from shore or shipboard; none writes so approvingly of ocean-eroded cemeteries.

Although I won't follow Swinburne into literal deep waters, I can enter (not necessarily comfortably) his resentment of theistic abstraction, his inability to represent material particulars, and his reliance on the materiality of voice to gesture at their ecstatic (or agonizing, or embarrassing, or irritatingly repetitious) effects. Writing/speaking from a myopic body which meets the world nose first and mouth open, I warmly and wetly second Rosenberg's introductory remarks:

Swinburne is a poet not of natural objects but of natural energies — of winds and surging waters. His scale is macrocosmic, his focus [...] less upon things seen than forces felt. At times he is nearly a blind poet, all tongue and ear and touch.

What else seems germane? I don't play video games, and if I did, they'd incapacitate me quicker than rock climbing. I'm retired and can spare the time. I'm oral/aural and can feel the noize. I'm a socially awkward humanist and head-in-the-clouds materialist who can use a hymnal. As I pace within our vermin-blasted garden, mouthing off the verses, their current pulls me offshore; the weave of breath and stroke begins to snarl and splash; the rhythm gallops apace and faster, a bit too fast; I jerk at the reins; I even break a mild sweat. For a second or so I inhabit Swinburne's experience of verse, an immersive adventure sport in words.

Or maybe it's the plague; I haven't been tested in a while.

Next: J. Gordon Faylor!

A postcard to American scholars of history

Twenty years later, Marian Hooper Adams (AKA Mrs. Henry Adams, AKA Clover) has received two more biographies, featured prominently in at least one more group biography, and been cited in American history, American literature, and women's studies. And we still lack direct access to her extant writings.

A voice so vivid and so constrained deserves all the room we can offer it. "If I were twenty years younger"1 and sufficiently credentialed, I'd gladly devote a decade or two to a fuller edition of her own letters, preferably accompanied by contextual letters from her circle. Although I'm not, maybe someone else is?

Burn Before Reading

(Attention Conservation Notice: A dispiriting restatement of something you already know, posted in hope of dislodging this snake from my throat so I can return to my usual round of mildly novel trivialities.)

In "The New Puritans," Anne Applebaum repeatedly compares America's prevalent form of ostracism to the self-censorship and informal inquisitons of totalitarian governments, and repeatedly goes on to hedge the comparison since neither the USA nor the UK actually are totalitarian governments. We should have it so simple! In theocratic New England, Fascist states, the Stalinist bloc, or Maoist China, there was only one official line to toe at any one time, whereas here and now the grounds for violent threats or loss of job and reputation will shift whenever we move between city and sprawl, coast and interior, or one Facebook mob and another.

What remains stable is an overwhelming need to assert or assign allegiances, with partisans in each shard applying the same no-quarter-given tactics, and everyone subject to labeling, canceling, and relabeling. Meanwhile the factions represented by local police and courts retain exclusive access to routine literal violence, but they're rarely considered part of "cancel culture" or "fueled by social media."

If we want a historical analogy, a closer one would be society on the brink or in the midst of civil war, such as 1920s Germany, 1950s Algeria, 1960s Vietnam — or 1850s America.

If we want a historical story, here's one I tell myself at bedtime: Reaganauts, hoping to re-establish plutocratic sovereignty and replace the nonpartisan civil service with cronies, clients, and profiteers, had intended to brake their DeLorean at 1875 or so.1 But strategic allies tend to become more intrusive over time, and over time the Southern Strategy tugged at the wheel and kicked at the accelerator and now our dear plutocrats have to straddle a chaos of bushwacking and jayhawking true-believers.

I suppose my assigned partisanal shard might draw some small rainbow-with-a-pot-of-justice-at-the-end comfort from the result of 1850s' previous go-round:

"For my own part," he [Lincoln] said, "I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves."

– John Hay's White House diary, 7 May 1861

Stirring words, but they were only spoken because territory-hungry slaveholders had panicked in the face of the first popular vote to bring a (non-radical gradualist) abolitionist into the executive branch. As later events showed, they should have just waited the upstart out: the Supreme Court routinely favored slaveholder rights over state rights, the Democrats had kept control of the inherently minority-rule-friendly Senate, and the Republicans had lost ten seats in the House. Instead they took an option which was blatantly non-viable, since a Union and a Confederacy equally committed to expansion would've been forced to maintain a continent-wide fully militarized sequel to Bloody Kansas until one or the other was re-absorbed.

Alternatively, if impatient secessionists had been fortunate or sly enough to posess an in-power president to act as national figurehead, and nation-wide propaganda platforms, and a long-term plan for repressing majority rule, and widespread support amongst military and police and the wealthiest business class, they could've chosen the less complex option of a coup.

Lord Kelvin's Monkey
or, The Heat Death of the University

Vacationers returned from the Lands of Science can be expected to display the following reflections:

• Over-application of long-term or statistically relevant notions to a local, recent, or personally relevant context. (This winter is unusually long and harsh because the sun is contracting; this spring's line of Parisian hats was triggered by last year's degeneration of the species.)
• Mistaking analogy for definition. (The cultural force of Poincaré's arguments must be measurable in joules; entropy unexpectedly decreases when oil and vinegar separate; "the vital energy of a race" expresses anything more than a string of nonsense syllables.)
• Excessive allegiance to perceived orthodoxies, often based on obsolete, overblown, or fraudulent sources which happen to be more readily available than their corrections or dismissals.
• Alternatively, those of us eager to escape fellow tourists and immerse ourselves in the authentic native experience will become impatient with its authentic disputes, upheavals, and incomprehensible jibber-jabber, and conclude in premature despair or an ungrounded search for common ground.

Henry Adams displayed the usual range, and, like other humanist intellectuals then and since, came to suffer from science envy. His discipline must innovate to regain relevance, and relevant innovation means Science — or at least the sciences considered most newsworthy.

During Adams's decades as a professional historian, those sciences were geology and Darwinist evolution. Afterwards, at century's end and in his mid-fifties, he struggled to comprehend the hot topics of contemporary physics: thermodynamics and electromagnetism, and later, radioactivity.

His new studies were in some ways more intriguing and more satisfying than his old: the applications easier to see, the theories more convincingly law-like, the outlooks grimmer. Adams was particularly taken by Lord Kelvin's terse style and ultimate admission of FAILURE, announcing in one letter, "I am a dilution of a mixture of Lord Kelvin and St Thomas Aquinas" — a fair one-line summary of Adams's two best-known books.

But the physicists' mathematics were opaque; even their imagery could be daunting: "How then does the molecule bounce?" "Maxwell gives no definition of a dead molecule, yet a dead molecule must be something very different from a living molecule."

And Adams lacked a tutor or informant. In geology, he'd relied on his friend Clarence King, and even provided King with field reports from Polynesia. Brother Brooks served as prod and soundboard in the science of economics. (Economics has numbers, and numbers make a Science, and a Science must have Laws. As the big business monkeys at Cal used to state, if it's not quantifiable it doesn't exist. Quantify Excellence. Excel Excellence.™) In physics, however, Adams relied on the kindness of strangers, and the strangers often took their time about replying.

Hungry for explanations, corrections, angry denunciations, enthusiastic assent, or simple companionship, Adams slowly began to expose his worries and speculations more widely. By age 72, he felt ready to send a privately printed volume to a select audience of professional historians. To compensate for his deficiencies as a physics scholar, he equipped the Letter with a formidable barricade of quotes from eminent authorities and tried not to stray far from its protection.

And by this cautious route he stumbled into the final trap awaiting would-be straddlers of the Two-or-More1 Cultures: bad timing.

Kelvin's firm misguidance was no anomaly. As recounted by geologists Jeff Dodick and Nir Orion, mathematical physics has laid down the (dubious) law from James Hutton's perfectly Newtonian balance to Harold Jeffreys' proof that continents couldn't move. Underlying the law-laying was a hierarchy decided more by political than material realities: deduction from established premises encourages certainty; allowing a choice of narratives does not; in battles for dominance, certainty beats admitted fallibility.

Still, the historical sciences remain, for lack of a better word, "science": explicable, falsifiable, and governed by empiricism; agreeing on valid evidence, systematizing that evidence, and working toward (or against) consensus that the systematization matches the evidence in a worthwhile way.

"Soft" (that is, specifically human) sciences such as sociology and psychology should sit higher in the hierarchy of certainty insofar as they announce quantified generalizations which allow ample wiggle room for exceptions and can be tested at will by the generation of new evidence. Unfortunately, the result of regeneration's been a replication crisis. A labile pattern-making species will have no trouble finding patterns when it introspects. Isolating and stabilizing them is another story, and another.

Where does the intersection of "historical" and "soft" fit on this scientistic scale?

In 1852, Thomson contented himself by saying that a restoration of energy is “probably” never effected by organized matter. In 1910, there is nothing “probable” about it; the fact has become an axiom of biology. In 1852, any University professor would have answered this quotation by the dry remark that society was not an organism, and that history was not a science, since it could not be treated mathematically. Today, M. Bernhard Brunhes seems to feel no doubt that society is an organism [...] As an Organism society has always been peculiarly subject to degradation of Energy, and alike the historians and the physicists invariably stretch Kelvin's law over all organized matter whatever.

- A Letter to American Teachers of History by Henry Adams

In Adams's terms, I expect most of us have reverted to 1852. Inside the blip of human existence the crawl from Big Bang towards Big Lukewarm is barely detectable. Our sun is slowly expanding, not quickly shrinking, and by the time it blossoms no humans will be lolling on a beach to catch the rays. Narrative history incorporates more statistical analysis than it used to but hasn't become "mathematical" in a predictive or formulaic sense except when packaged as propaganda.

Instead of history hardening, sciences may have softened. The organism and the species have become more permeable and pluralistic concepts, and even the inorganic sciences have repeatedly struck limits on their ability to predict and control outcomes. Avoiding the over-trampled murk of post-Bohr physics, let's take the mundane field of meteorology as an example.

High on the success of their nuclear bomb simulations, post-WWII mathematicians, physicists, and engineers tackled weather as both natural threat and potential weapon, only to be halted at a durational border. Daily and weekly regional weather forecasts can be drastically improved by tracking technologies and computer analysis. And we seem able to make some broad generalizations about global climate trends. But the territory between is unmappable:

If Laplace’s mathematical intelligence were replaced by a computing machine of unlimited speed and capacity, and if the atmosphere below 100km were spanned by a computational lattice whose mesh size were less than the scale of the smallest turbulent eddy, say one millimeter… [all predictions would prove inaccurate within a month] not because of quantum indeterminacy, or even because of macroscopic errors of observation, but because the errors introduced into the smallest turbulent eddies by random fluctuations on the scale of the mean free path (ca 10-5mm at sea level), although very small initally, would grow exponentially… The error progresses from 1mm to 10km in less than one day, and from 100km to the planetary scale in a week or two.

- Jule Charney and Walter Munk, Institute for Advanced Study, 1972

Although history hasn't become the sort of "real" science Henry Adams had in mind, could it attain the relatively respectable status of a latter-day historical science? After all, like geologists and paleontologists, human-historians attempt plausible guesses at the service and the mercy of whatever evidence happens to turn up, no matter how irreversible, indeterminate, incomplete, or inconvenient it might be. Models tend to be narrative rather than timeless formulae, deductive along the lines of Sherlock Holmes rather than Euclid, attentive to anomalies rather than discarding them as noise. Any universally applicable systematization threatens to become a map larger and more rigid than the territory itself. Instead, simpler models of causality accrete with no clear way to quantify their relative effects.

I suppose, as with most such categorizations, it's a matter of degrees. In a (human) chronicle or history, outliers are even more likely to play leading roles. And since it's almost unheard of for us to perform any halfway complex action for only one reason, Ockham's Razor is more likely to maim than reveal, and potential models proliferate. Over the long run historians can provide as verifiable a prediction and exhaustive a summary as any lab report: "Everyone died." In the meantime, irreducible ambiguities and the tides, currents, backwaters, eddies, and catastrophes of human culture block most hope of objectively settled generalizations.

Which makes "history as a science" look an awful lot like the sort of history Henry Adams actually practiced: attentive to a wide range of evidence, aware of competing models, straightforward about his choices, and uncomfortably aware that his impressively coherent narratives might at any time be shattered by new or revived or rejected evidence, or swept away by an attractively novel interpretive angle, or might unknowably be built on little better than noise.

That may sound discouraging, but it's just another way of saying "Everyone hasn't died yet." Carry on, historian!

He [the historian] was therefore obliged either to deny that social energy was an energy at all; or to assert that it was an energy independent of physical laws. Yet how could he deny that social energy was a true form of energy when he had no reason for existence, as professor, except to describe and discuss its acts? He could neither doubt nor dispute its existence without putting an end to his own; and therefore he was of necessity a Vitalist, or adherent of the doctrine that Vital Energy was independent of mechanical law.

- A Letter to American Teachers of History by Henry Adams

Science circa 1900 taught that orgasms shortened lifespans and that thinking was unhealthy for women. Popular and academic presses were full of confident (if conflicting) and well-credentialed (if unfounded) pronouncements about Will and Vital Energy and Racial Degeneration. Evolution implied progress toward perfection, organisms were treated as if they were (ideally) closed systems, and social phenomena were theorized as chemical or mechanical phenomena.

In later decades straying humanists would be unattractively preserved by coats of Freud, Jung, Marxist millennialism, behaviorism, computer science, or the remnants of evolutionist-determinism. Science circa 1900 was the particular tarpit proffered to Adams, and he obediently submerged himself.

The posthumous result for him, like other interdisciplinary victims, was (a bit unfairly) unflattering. His bold 1 stuck-in-the-tar attempts to future-proof historiography now stiffen somewhere between tedious and offensive, whereas the dull stick-in-the-mud particulars of his political histories, art histories, and personal histories seem almost as vital as ever.

Out of his depth or not, Adams remained a brilliant writer and a clever thinker. Some of Adams's many prognostications of calamity happened to hit on genuinely calamitous years,2 and similarly some of the Letter's remarks still strike a spark:

For purposes of teaching, the figure is alone essential, and the figure of Rise and Fall has done infinite harm from the beginnings of thought. That of Expansion and Contraction is far more scientific, even in history. Evolution, again, is troublesome, and has already yielded to the less compromising figure of Transformation. Expansion and Transformation are words which commit teachers to no inconvenient dogma; indeed, they are so happily adapted for Galileos who are wise enough not to shock opinion, that they seem to impose themselves on the lecture-room.

...

Matter indeed, is energy itself, and its economies first made organic life possible by thus correcting nature's tendency to waste.

And he sketched one development as straightforwardly as anyone might.

Oftentimes processes which can't be precisely controlled to produce precisely predictable outcomes can be radically disrupted to produce grossly foreseeable catastrophes. Burning a library or museum, for example, is an experiment whose result is far more certain and far less costly than waiting out centuries of writing, painting, and sculpting would be.

Changes in human culture aren't micromanaged by the Second Law of Thermodynamics or by biological evolution, but human culture can easily make both of them more perceptible. To return to meteorology:

Probably intervention in atmospheric and climatic matters will come in a few decades, and will unfold on a scale difficult to imagine at present. [...] Such actions would be more directly and truly worldwide than recent or, presumably, future wars, or than the economy at any time. Extensive human intervention would deeply affect the atmosphere's general circulation, which depends on the earth's rotation and intensive solar heating of the tropics. Measures in the arctic may control the weather in temperate regions, or measures in one temperate region critically affect another, one quarter around the globe. All this will merge each nation's affairs with those of every other, more thoroughly than the threat of a nuclear or any other war may already have done.

- "Can We Survive Technology?" by John von Neumann, 1955

Neumann wrote those words about the prospect of intentional intervention, but they apply just as well to the unplanned intervention mentioned elsewhere in his essay:

The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry's burning of coal and oil — more than half of it during the last generation — may have changed the atmosphere's composition sufficiently to account for a general warming of the world by about one degree Fahrenheit.

Or, as Adams phrased it forty-five years earlier:

From the physicist’s point of view, Man, as a conscious and constant, single, natural force, seems to have no function except that of dissipating or degrading energy. Indeed, the evolutionist himself has complained, and is still complaining in accents which grow shriller every day, that man does more to dissipate and waste nature s economies than all the rest of animal or vegetable life has ever done to save them. “Already,”— one may hear the physicists aver —“man dissipates every year all the heat stored in a thousand million tons of coal which nature herself cannot now replace, and he does this only in order to convert some ten or fifteen per cent, of it into mechanical energy immediately wasted on his transient and commonly purpose less objects. He draws great reservoirs of coal-oil and gas out of the earth, which he consumes like the coal. He is digging out even the peat-bogs in order to consume them as heat. He has largely deforested the planet, and hastened its desiccation. He seizes all the zinc and whatever other minerals he can burn, or which he can convert into other forms of energy, and dissipate into space. His consumption of oxygen would be proportionate to his waste of heat. He startles and shocks even himself, in his rational moments, by his extravagance, as in his armies and armaments which are made avowedly for no other purpose than to dissipate or degrade energy, or annihilate it as in the destruction of life, on a scale that rivals operations of nature. What is still more curious, his chief pleasures, so far as they are his own invention, consist in gratifying the same unintelligent passion for dissipating or degrading energy, as in drinking alcohol, or burning fireworks, or firing cannon, or illuminating cities, or deafening them by senseless noises. Worse than all, such is his instinct of destruction that he systematically exterminates or degrades all the larger forms of animal life in which nature stored her last creative efforts, while he breeds artificially, at great expense of his own energies, and at cost of the phosphorus and lime accumulated by nature’s mostly extinct organisms, the feebler forms of animal and vegetable energies needed to make good the prodigious waste of his own. Physicists and physiologists equally complain of these tendencies in man, and a large part of their effort is now devoted to correcting them; but the physicist adds that, compared with this enormous mass of nature’s economies which man dissipates every year in rapid progression, the little he captures from the sun, directly or indirectly, as heat-rays, or water-power, or wind-power, is trifling, and the portion that he restores to higher intensities would be insignificant in any case, even if he did not instantly degrade and dissipate it again for some momentary use.” [...] The sun can keep up its expenditure indefinitely, subject to occasional fits of economy; while man is a bottomless sink of waste unparalleled in the cosmos, and can already see the end of the immense economies which his mother Nature stored for his support.