1: Examination Paper

People who read books without writing them are likely to form a simple picture of any celebrated author. He is John X or Jonathan Y, the man who wrote such a fascinating novel about Paris, about divorce, about the Georgia Crackers---the man who drinks, who ran off with the doctor's wife---the bald-headed man who lectured to the Wednesday Club. But to writers, especially to young writers in search of guidance, the established author presents a much more complicated image.

Their impressions of the great author are assembled from many sources. It is true that his books are a principal source, but there must also be considered his career, the point from which it started, the direction in which it seems to be moving. There is his personality, as revealed in chance interviews or as caricatured in gossip; there are the values that he assigns to other writers; and there is the value placed on himself by his younger colleagues in those kitchen or barroom gatherings at which they pass judgment with the harsh finality of a Supreme Court---John X has got real stuff, they say, but Jonathan Y is terrible---and they bring forward evidence to support these verdicts. The evidence is mulled over, all the details are fitted together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, until they begin to form a picture, vague and broken at first, then growing more distinct as the years pass by: the X or Y picture, the James Joyce, Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot picture. But it is not so much a picture when completed: it is rather a map or diagram which the apprentice writer will use in planning his own career.

If he is called upon to review a book by Joyce or Eliot, he will say certain things he believes to be accurate: they are not the things lying closest to his heart. Secretly he is wondering whether he can, whether he should, ever be great in the Joyce or Eliot fashion. What path should he follow to reach this goal ? The great living authors, in the eyes of any young man apprenticed to the Muse, are a series of questions, an examination paper compiled by and submitted to himself :

1. What problems do these authors suggest?

2. With what problems, are they consciously dealing?

3. Are they my own problems? Or if not, shall I make them my own?

4. What is the Joyce solution to these problems (or the Eliot, the Pound, the Gertrude Stein, the Paul Valéry solution) ?

5. Shall I adopt it? Reject it and seek another master? Or must I furnish a new solution myself?

And it is as if the examiner had written: Take your time, young man. Consider all questions carefully; there is all the time in the world. Don't fake or cheat; you are making these answers for yourself. Nobody will grade them but posterity.

2: Readings from the Lives of the Saints

To American writers of my own age, or at any rate to those who went abroad in 1921, the author who seemed nearest to themselves was T. S. Eliot. Essentially the picture he presented was that of the local-boy-makes-good. He was born in St. Louis; he was in the class of 1910 at Harvard, where he took courses that any of us might have taken and belonged to three or four undistinguished clubs; he continued his studies at a French provincial university and got a job in London. Now, ten years after leaving Cambridge, he was winding himself in a slow cocoon of glory. But his glory, his making good, was not in the vulgar sense of making money, making a popular reputation: in 19231 the newspapers had never heard of this clerk in Barclay's Bank. His achievement was the writing of perfect poems, poems in which we could not find a line that betrayed immaturity, awkwardness, provincialism or platitude. Might a Midwestern boy become a flawless poet?---this was a question with which we could not fail to be preoccupied.

But it was not the only question that Eliot answered, or the only door by which he entered our secret minds. His early critical writings were concerned in large part with the dispute between form and matter, and he aligned himself with what we had learned to call our side of it. He effectively defended the intellect as against the emotions, and the conscious mind as against the libido, the dark Freudian wish. His poems, from the first, were admirably constructed. He seemed to regard them, moreover, as intellectual problems---having solved one problem, he devoted himself to another, From his early sketches in free verse, he moved on to "Portrait of a Lady" and "Prufrock"; thence he moved on to his Sweeney poems, thence to "Gerontion"; and it was certain that his new ambitious work soon to be published in the Dial would mark another departure. For he never repeated himself and never, in those days, persisted in any attitude or technique: once having suggested its possibilities, he moved on.

Eliot, of course, did not originate the idea of "moving on." It was part of the general literary atmosphere, part of a long tradition---for example, it closely resembled the "theory of convolutions" that developed among my high-school friends. But Eliot's influence had the effect of making the idea vastly popular among young writers. They began to picture the ideal poet as an explorer, a buffalo hunter pressing westward toward new frontiers---from the Shenandoah he marches into unknown Tennessee, thence into the Blue Grass, thence into Missouri, always leaving the land untilled behind him, but who cares?---there will be disciples to follow the plow. No other American poet had so many disciples as Eliot, in so many stages of his career. Until 1925 his influence seemed omnipresent, and it continued to be important in the years that followed. But in 1922, at the moment when he was least known to the general public and most fervently worshiped by young poets, there was a sudden crisis. More than half of his disciples began slowly to drop away.

When The Waste Land first appeared, we were confronted with a dilemma. Here was a poem that agreed with all our recipes and prescriptions of what a great modern poem should be. Its form was not only perfect but was far richer musically and architecturally than that of Eliot's earlier verse. Its diction was superb. It employed in a magisterial fashion the technical discoveries made by the French writers who followed Baudelaire.

Strangeness, abstractness, simplification, respect for literature as an art with traditions---it had all the qualities demanded in our slogans. We were prepared fervently to defend it against the attacks of the people who didn't understand what Eliot was trying to do---but we made private reservations. The poem had forced us into a false position, had brought our consciously adopted principles into conflict with our instincts. At heart---not intellectually, but in a purely emotional fashion---we didn't like it. We didn't agree with what we regarded as the principal idea that the poem set forth.

The idea was a simple one. Beneath the rich symbolism of The Waste Land, the wide learning expressed in seven languages, the actions conducted on three planes, the musical episodes, the geometrical structure---beneath and by means of all this, we felt the poet was saying that the present is inferior to the past. The past was dignified; the present is barren of emotion. The past was a landscape nourished by living fountains; now the fountains of spiritual grace are dry. . . . Often in his earlier poems Eliot had suggested this idea; he had used such symbols of dead glory as the Roman eagles and trumpets or the Lion of St. Mark's to emphasize the vulgarities of the present. In those early poems, however, the present was his real subject. Even though he seemed to abhor it, even though he thought "of all the hands that are raising dingy shades in a thousand furnished rooms" and was continually "aware of the damp souls of housemaids sprouting despondently at area gates," still he was writing about the life that all of us knew---and more than that, he was endowing our daily life with distinction by means of the same distinguished metaphors in which he decried and belittled it. The Waste Land marked a real change. This time he not only expressed the idea with all his mature resources but carried it to a new extreme. He not only abused the present but robbed it of vitality. It was as if he were saying, this time, that our age was prematurely senile and could not even find words of its own in which to bewail its impotence; that it was forever condemned to borrow and patch together the songs of dead poets.

The seven-page appendix to The Waste Land, in which Eliot paraded his scholarship and explained the Elizabethan or Italian sources of what had seemed to be his most personal phrases, was a painful dose for us to swallow. But the truth was that the poet had not changed so much as his younger readers. We were becoming less preoccupied with technique and were looking for poems that portrayed our own picture of the world. As for the question proposed to us by Eliot, whether the values of past ages were superior or inferior to present values, we could bring no objective evidence to bear on it. Values are created by living men. If they believe---if their manner of life induces them to believe---that greatness died with Virgil or Dante or Napoleon, who can change their opinion or teach them new values? It happened that we were excited by the adventure of living in the present. The famous "postwar mood of aristocratic disillusionment" was a mood we had never really shared. It happened that Eliot's subjective truth was not our own.

I say "it happened" although, as a matter of fact, our beliefs grew out of the lives we had led. I say "we" although I can refer only to a majority, perhaps two-thirds, of those already influenced by Eliot's poems. When The Waste Land was published it revealed a social division---among writers that was not a division between rich and poor or---in the Marxian terms that would later be popular---between capitalist and proletarian.(4) Not many of the younger writers belonged to either the top or the bottom layer of society. Some of them, it is true, were the children of factory workers or tenant farmers, but even those few had received the education of the middle class and had for the most part adopted its standards. The middle class had come to dominate the world of letters; the dominant educational background was that of the public high school and the big Midwestern university. And the writers of this class---roughly corresponding to Marx's petty bourgeoisie---were those who began to ask where Eliot was leading and whether they should follow.

But there were also many young writers who had been sent to good preparatory schools, usually Episcopalian, before they went on to Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Williams or Dartmouth. Whether rich. or poor, they had received the training and acquired the standards of the small but powerful class in American society that might be described as the bourgeoisie proper. These, in general, were the "young poets old before their time" who not only admired The Waste Land but insisted on dwelling there in spirit; as Edmund Wilson said, they "took to inhabiting exclusively barren beaches, cactus-grown deserts and dusty attics overrun with rats." Their special education, their social environment and also, I think, their feeling of mingled privilege and insecurity had prepared them to follow Eliot in his desert pilgrimage toward the shrines of tradition and authority.

There were exceptions in both groups, and Eliot continued to be recited and praised behind the dingy shades of a thousand furnished rooms, but most of the struggling middle-class writers were beginning to look for other patterns of literary conduct. We were new men, without inherited traditions, and we were entering a new world of art that did not impress us as being a spiritual desert. Although we did not see our own path, we instinctively rejected Eliot's. In the future we should still honor his poems and the clearness and integrity of his prose, but the Eliot picture had ceased to be our guide.

James Joyce also presented us with a picture of the writer who never repeats himself. From Chamber Music through Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, each of his books had approached a new problem and had definitely ended a stage of his career. Ulysses, published in Paris in the winter of 1921-22, marked yet another stage. Although we had not time in the busy year that followed to read it carefully or digest more than a tenth of it, still we were certain of one thing: it was a book that without abusing the word could be called "great."

Thus we learned to couple Joyce and Eliot in a second fashion. Joyce, too, had become a success picture to fire the imagination of young writers, even though the success was on a different plane. He was another local-boy-makes-good, but not a St. Louis boy or a Harvard boy. His birthplace was the lower middle class; his home, above which he seemed to have soared, was the twentieth century. Can a writer of our own time produce a masterpiece fit to compare with those of other ages? Joyce was the first indication that there was another answer to this question than the one we were taught in school.

But---here were more difficult questions---what were the methods by and the motives for which he had written his indubitably great work? Had he set an example we should try to follow?

It seemed that from all his books three values disengaged themselves, three qualities of the man himself: his pride, his contempt for others, his ambition. Toward the end of A Portrait of the Artist they stood forth most clearly. The hero, Stephen Dedalus, was lonely and overweening in his pride; he despised the rabble of his richer schoolmates for being his inferiors in sensibility and intellect; and he set for himself the ambition, not of becoming a mere bishop, judge or general, but of pressing into his arms "the loveliness that has not yet come into the world." He would be the spiritual leader standing alone; he was leaving Ireland "to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." Stephen Dedalus was obviously a more or less accurate picture of Joyce himself; but in life the author against any writer belonging to a modern national literature, but with the father of all the Western literatures, the archpoet of the European race.

And now this poor boy from the twentieth century had conquered his Peru and created his work of genius. We were not among the enthusiasts who placed him beside Homer, but this at least was certain: except possibly for Marcel Proust, there was no living author to be compared with him in depth, richness, complexity or scope. His achievement was there to urge us ahead; his ambition dignified our lesser ambitions. But obviously he had written Ulysses at a price---just how much had he paid in terms of bread and laughter ? How did a man live who had written a masterpiece?

We fitted together passages from his books with sometimes erroneous information collected from magazine articles about him, bits of café gossip and the remarks of people allowed to meet him. The resulting picture, the Joyce picture of 1923, was not wholly pleasant. The great man lived in a cheap hotel, not picturesquely sordid, but cluttered and depressing. He was threatened with Homeric blindness, and much of his meager income was spent on doctors, for the disease from which he suffered was aggravated by hypochondria. He had no companions of his own intellectual stature and associated either with family friends or else with admiring disciples. Except in matters concerning literature and the opera, his opinions were those of a fourth or fifth-rate mind. It was as if he had starved everything else in his life to feed his ambition. It was as if he had made an inverted Faust's bargain, selling youth, riches and part of his common humanity to advance his pride of soul.

Having been granted an interview, I went to his hotel. He was waiting for me in a room that looked sour and moldy, as if the red-plush furniture had fermented in the twilight behind closed shutters. I saw a tall, emaciated man with a very high white forehead and smoked glasses; on his thin mouth and at the puckered corners of his eyes was a look of suffering so plainly marked that I forgot the questions with which I had come prepared. I was simply a younger person meeting an older person who needed help.

"Is there anything I can do for you, Mr. Joyce?" I said.

Yes, there was something I could do: he had no stamps, he didn't feel well enough to go out and there was nobody to run errands for him. I went out to buy stamps, with a sense of relief as I stepped into the street. He had achieved genius, I thought, but there was something about the genius as cold as the touch at parting of his long, smooth, cold, wet-marble fingers.

Ezra Pound presented a less intimidating picture, since he was known not so much for his own creations as for his advocacy of other writers and his sallies against the stupid public. His function seemed to be that of a schoolmaster, in a double sense of the word. He schooled the public in scolding it; he was always presenting it with new authors to admire, new readings of the classics, new and stricter rules for judging poetry. It was Gertrude Stein who said that he was "a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not." Miss Stein herself seldom bothered to explain, although she liked to have young men sit at her feet and was not above being jealous of Pound's influence on the younger writers. The influence was extensive and well earned. He not only gave the best of advice to writers but often tried to organize them into groups or schools, each with its own manifesto and its own magazine; that is the second sense in which he might have been called schoolmaster.

In London he had started the Imagiste school and then, after relinquishing the name to Amy Lowell (who had dropped the "e" from it, together with most of the principles on which the group was founded), had assembled the Vorticists, who survived as a group until most of the members were called into military service. Besides these formal groups that Pound inspired he also had a circle of friends that included some of the greatest poets of our time. They deferred to Pound because they felt that he had shown an unselfish devotion to literature. He had fought to win recognition for the work of other writers at a time when much of his own work was going unpublished, and he had obtained financial support for others that he could as easily have had for himself During most of his career he had earned hardly more than the wages of an English day laborer. "If I accept more than I need," he used to say, "I at once become a sponger."

He was in somewhat better financial circumstances in 1921, when he left London for Paris. During the next two years I went to see him several times, but the visit I remember is the last, in the summer of 1923--- Pound was then living in the pavillon, or summer house, that stood in the courtyard of 70 bis, rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, near the Luxembourg Gardens. A big young man with intent eyes and a toothbrush mustache was there when I arrived, and Pound introduced him as Ernest Hemingway; I said that I had heard about him. Hemingway gave a slow Midwestern grin. He was then working for the International News Service, but there were rumors that he had stories in manuscript and that Pound had spoken of them as being something new in American literature. He didn't talk about the stories that afternoon; he listened as if with his eyes while Pound discussed the literary world. Very soon he rose, made a date with Pound for tennis the following day and went out the door, walking on the balls of his feet like a boxer. Pound continued his monologue.

"I've found the lowdown on the Elizabethan drama," he said as he vanished beard-first into the rear of the pavilion; he was always finding the lowdown, the inside story and the simple reason why. A moment later he returned with a worm-eaten leather-bound folio. "It's all in here," he said, tapping the volume. "The whole business is cribbed from these Italian state papers.

The remark seemed so disproportionate that I let it go unchallenged, out of politeness. "What about your own work?" I asked.

Pound laid the book on a table piled with other books. "I try not to repeat myself," he said. He began walking back and forth in his red dressing gown, while his red beard jutted out like that of an archaic Greek soldier (or, as I afterward thought, like a fox's muzzle). There was no attempt to play the great man of letters. With an engaging lack of pretense to dignity he launched into the story of his writing life.

At the age of twenty-two he had written a poem, the "Ballad of the Goodly Fere," that had been widely discussed and had even been reprinted in the International Sunday School. It was the first of the masculine ballads in the genre that Masefield would afterward exploit, and Pound might have exploited it himself. "Having written this ballad about Christ," he said, "I had only to write similar ballads about James, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and my fortune was made." If he had missed falling into the gulf of standardization it was partly because he didn't see it was there. Instead he had gone to England in 1908 and started a new career.

He was still convinced that he had been right to leave America. America was England thirty years before. America was England without the fifty most intelligent men. America didn't print his poems in magazines until they had been collected into books in England. Perhaps he had been misled by the early recognition he received there; perhaps it had made him willing for a time to write the sort of poems that friendly critics expected him to write. He had spent three years studying Oxford English before he learned that he was wasting his efforts; that English is not Latin and must be written as one speaks it.

He had lost many of his English readers when he published Ripostes in 1912. The public doesn't like to be surprised and the new poems had been surprising, even a little shocking; they had proved that Pound wasn't merely an author of masculine ballads or a new Browning who brought medieval characters to life in medieval phrases. Still more of his readers had dropped away when he published Lustra in 1916; they hadn't liked his use of colloquial language or the frankness with which he described the feelings of l'homme moyen sensuel. It was the same when he published the Mauberley poems and the first of the Cantos: with each successive book he lost old readers and, after a time, gained some new ones, who disappeared in their turn; he had always outdistanced his audience.

Pound talked about some of his associates. Gaudier-Brzeska, killed at the front in 1916, had been the most gifted of the new sculptors; Pound had helped to keep him alive when he was starving in London. Wyndham Lewis was the real Vorticist, a man of amazing intellectual force. Lewis had visited New York in the spring of 1917 and two weeks later---Pound paused for emphasis---the United States had declared war on the Central Powers. In earlier days Pound had worked to gain recognition for Lewis, just as he had worked for Joyce, Eliot and dozens of gifted writers. Now he was thirty-seven years old and it was time for him to stop doing so much for other men and for literature in general, stop trying to educate the public and simply write. It would take years for him to finish the Cantos; he wanted to write an opera and he had other plans. To carry them out it might be best for him to leave Paris and live on the Mediterranean, far from distractions, in a little town he had discovered when he was in villeggiatura....

I went back to Giverny, the village about sixty miles from Paris where I was living that year (not in villeggiatura), and reread all of Pound's poems that I had been able to collect in their English editions. I liked them better than on first reading and was less irritated by their parade of eccentric scholarship. What impressed me now was their new phrases, new rhythms, new images, and their resolute omission of every word that he might have requisitioned from the stockroom of poetry. I could see how much Eliot had learned from them (although I didn't know at the time that he had sent the manuscript of The Waste Land to Pound for criticism and had accepted almost all the changes that Pound advised). I could also see that E. E. Cummings had used Hugh Selwyn Mauberley as a model in writing his own satirical poems and I could trace other derivations as well. Pound deserved the credit for discoveries which other poets were using, yet it seemed to me that some of the others---notably Eliot and Cummings---had a great deal more to say. For all his newness of phrase Pound kept making statements that were simply the commonplaces of the art-for-art's-sake tradition, when they did not belong to the older tradition of the tavern minstrel. He kept repeating that the public was stupid, that the poet was happier living in a garret, that he wrote to shock the public and that his songs would live when his readers were dead:

In poems like this he was affronting the conventions in a fashion that was badly needed at the time and he was writing a declaration of independence for poets---but how could the songs live forever when they had so little fresh blood in their arteries? There was, moreover, another weakness in Pound's poetry that had been impressed on me by his remark about outdistancing his readers. He kept moving ahead into unexplored territory, like Eliot and Joyce, but it seemed to me that his motive was different. From his early ballads to Ripostes, to Lustra, to Mauberley, his poetic career might be explained, not as a search for something, but rather as a frantic effort to escape. I pictured him as a red fox pursued by the pack of his admirers; he led them through brambles and into marshes; some of them gave up the chase but others joined in. At present, in the Cantos, he had fled into high and rocky ground where the scent was lost and the hounds would cut their feet if they tried to follow, yet I felt that they would eventually find him even there and would crowd around muzzle to muzzle, not for the kill, but merely for the privilege of baying his praises. Then, with his weakness for defying the crowd, for finding crazily simple explanations and for holding eccentric opinions, to what new corner would the fox escape?

In November 1922 we heard that Marcel Proust had died, and it seemed that his death was the completion of a symbol. He represented an entirely different ambition from that of Pound or Joyce, for he strove neither to outdistance the public nor to create a work of genius by force of will. In Joyce the will had developed immoderately; in Proust it seemed almost to be atrophied. Not only his passions but his merest whims were stronger than his desire to control them, and he dispassionately watched himself doing silly things---it was almost as if the living Marcel Proust were an unpleasant but fascinating visitor in the house of his mind. Nevertheless, he had set himself a task and had carried it through. He had determined to take the living Marcel Proust that was weak and fickle and transform it, transform himself, into an enduring work of art.

Eager to execute this project while he still had strength for it, he shut himself off from friendships, public life, the world in general, spending most of his time in bed in a room hermetically sealed to prevent drafts---they say he would feel and suffer from a breath of fresh air three rooms away. Flowers, even, were prohibited, because they brought on his asthma. He rarely saw daylight. Sometimes very late in the evening, wrapped to the ears in a fur-lined overcoat, he attended a reception in the Faubourg St. Germain; but usually he spent his nights writing hurriedly in a study that was completely lined with cork in order to shut out the street noises. He was racing against time, his enemy. Here in seclusion he was trying to recapture and preserve his past in the moment before it vanished, like a mollusk making its shell before it dies. And his death, I wrote in an essay published at the time, "was only a process of externalization; he had turned, himself inside out like an orange and sucked it dry, or inscribed himself on a monument; his observation, his sensibility, his affectations, everything about him that was weak or strong had passed into the created characters of his novel."

When I came to read the last section of his book , which was not published until the end of the decade, I found that Proust had expressed the same idea about himself in different words. 'let us allow our body to disintegrate. since each fresh particle that breaks off, now luminous and decipherable, comes and adds itself to our work to complete it at the cost of suffering superfluous to others more gifted, and to make it more and more substantial as emotions gradually chip away our life." The passage must have been written only a few weeks before his final illness. By then his life was almost wholly chipped away and all its luminous particles were added to his work, which, in the process, had become the longest novel that had been written. Dying at a moment when Remembrance of Things Past was practically completed (only two sections remained to be revised), Proust had become for us a symbol of fulfilled ambition. And yet the symbol was too cold and distant to touch us closely. We had neither the wish nor the financial nor yet the intellectual resources to shut ourselves in cork-lined chambers and examine our memories. And Proust, moreover, had closed a path to us merely by choosing it for himself. He had accomplished his task so thoroughly that it would never have to be done again.

In 1921 Paul Valéry was fifty years old and had recently entered his second literary career, which in a short time would carry him to the French Academy. His first career had begun some thirty years before; it had been brilliant and very brief. And it was his abandoning of that career, it was his deliberate, twenty-year-long refusal to write for publication, that impressed us even more than the high poems and the noble essays he had printed since consenting once more to become a writer like anybody else.

He. had come to Paris in the autumn of 1892, a boy from the provinces with his road to make. Soon he attached himself to the circle of Symbolist poets surrounding Stéphane Mallarmé. Writing of that time he later said, "There was a certain austerity about the new generation of poets.... In the profound and scrupulous worship of all the arts, they thought to have found a discipline, and perhaps a truth, beyond the reach of doubt. A kind of religion was very nearly established." And again: "It was a time of theories, curiosity, glosses and passionate explanation. . . . More fervor, courage and learning, more researches into theory, more disputes and a more pious attention have rarely been devoted, in so short a time, to the problem of pure beauty. One might say that the problem was attacked from all sides."

Valéry himself chose the intellectual side. His ambition resembled that of T. S. Eliot's early days: he was obsessed by the idea of always moving through and "going beyond." Each poem could be translated into a problem capable of solution, capable of supplying a principle which could then be applied to the writing of other poems. But why bother to write them? "From the moment a principle has been recognized and grasped by someone," Valéry says that he said to himself, "it is quite useless to waste one's time applying it." Thus, he was always driven further, to attack new problems, discover new principles, until it became evident at a certain point in the process that literature itself was a problem capable of solution, and therefore was only an intermediate goal, a stage to be passed through and gone beyond. The poet was free to abandon poetry and devote himself to more essential aims.

For a young man of twenty-five, Valéry had won an enviable position; he had become a favorite disciple of Mallarmé and a leader among the younger Symbolists. His future seemed assured, and he abandoned it almost overnight. This deliberate choice, this apostasy, one might almost call it, exerted a powerful influence on the young French writers who followed him. Suddenly their highest value had been called into question, and not by the stupid public. Suddenly it seemed that the highest ambition might not be the writing of a great novel or poetic drama or the creation of any work of genius whatsoever. Apollo, after all, might be only a minor deity.

Valéry himself found his arguments so cogent that he had a hard time explaining, twenty years later, why he had once more begun writing essays and poems. He justified himself by saying on several occasions that literature was an exercise, a game worth playing for the same reasons that one plays tennis or chess or bridge. All these have difficult and arbitrary rules, but we observe them for the sake of the game; and the arbitrary and far more difficult conventions of classical. poetry may be observed for the same reasons. One might even assert that these laws and constant requirements are the true object of the poem. "It is indeed an exercise---intended as such, and worked and reworked: a production entirely of deliberate effort; and then of a second deliberate effort, whose hard task is to conceal the first. He who knows how to read me will read an autobiography, in the form. The matter is of small importance."---His justification would have been more accurate, I think, if he had admitted from the first that the sport of writing was not altogether non-professional: that he derived pleasure from the praise his poems received, and wrote his essays for magazine editors who ordered and paid well for them. But always, in reading Valéry, one must learn to expect a certain high pretentiousness that accompanies and dilutes and sometimes conceals his real acuteness.

Whether the new essays that he began to publish after 1917 were written for sport or hire, they contained a valuable record of his thoughts during the years of silence.

It seems that the starting point of his researches, his first great problem outside the field of poetry, was to re-create the mind of "the universal man," to discover the method that unified the extremely varied accomplishments in science, warfare, mechanics and the arts of a genius like Leonardo da Vinci. His essay on Leonardo, written two or three years before the great renunciation, is a magnificent defense of the conscious mind, and of "the poet of the hypothesis" as against the specialized poet of quatrains or the patient accumulator of facts. It also proposes a new type of ambition. Might we not, by discovering his method, produce a new Leonardo, able to work freely with the infinitely rich materials of the present? But Valéry rejected the idea and seems to say that it would be useless to put the method into action. To act, for any individual of the first magnitude, is only an exercise, and one that may end by impoverishing the mind, since it is equivalent to choosing a single possibility and rejecting all the others with which the mind is teeming. Even "the universal man" becomes a problem capable of being reduced to a principle, to something that "it is quite useless to waste one's time applying."

Once more Valéry moved on, and this time to a problem he now regarded as the most far-reaching and difficult of all, "the study of the self for its own sake, the understanding of that attention itself, and the desire to trace clearly for oneself the nature of one's own existence." But it soon became evident that even this problem was capable of further refinement. Within the "self," what is the universal and changeless principle ? It cannot be the body, which changes daily, or the senses, which tempt and deceive, or the mind, in which memories fade and ideas are dissipated; it cannot even be our personality, which we thoughtlessly mistake for our inmost characteristic even the personality is only a thing that can be observed and reduced to tables and statistics. No, underneath all these is something else, the I, the naked ego, an essence that can finally be reduced to consciousness alone, to consciousness in its most abstract state. "This profound tone of our existence, as soon as it is heard, dominates all the complicated conditions and varieties of existence. To isolate this substantial attention from the strife of ordinary verities---is this not the ultimate and hidden task of the man with the greatest mind?"

Again he says:

Everything yields before the pure universality, the insurmountable generality, that consciousness feels itself to be.... It dares to consider its "body" and its "world" as almost arbitrary restrictions imposed upon the extent of its functions . . . and this attention to its external circumstances cannot react upon itself, so far has it drawn aside from all things, so great are the pains it has taken never to be a part of anything it might conceive or do. It is reduced to a black mass that absorbs all light and gives nothing back.

And still again:

Carried away by his ambition to be unique, guided by his ardor for omnipotence, the man of great mind has gone beyond all creations, all works, even his own lofty designs; while at the same time he has abandoned all tenderness for himself and all preference for his own wishes. In an instant he immolates his individuality. . . . To this point its pride has led the mind, and here pride is consumed. This directing pride abandons it, astonished, bare, infinitely simple, on the pole of its treasures.

This was the cheerless ambition, this was the path and the goal that Paul Valéry was proposing to the young writers who followed him after an interval of thirty years. They should regard poetry only as a beginning: from this they should move on to the methods of poetry, thence to methods in general (and in particular the methods of genius), thence to the universal self, that determines all methods, and thence to mere consciousness, which is the only unchanging element in the self. Having reached this point, still undeterred by the bleakness of the way, they will discover that consciousness itself is a perpetual process of detachment from all things, from all emotions and sensations. Then, lest they still persist, Valéry paints an image to drive them back: "The man who is led by the demands of the indefatigable mind to this contact with living shadows and this extreme of pure presence, perceives himself as destitute and bare, reduced to the supreme poverty of being a force without an object. . . . He exists without instincts, almost without images; and he no longer has an aim. He resembles nothing. I say man, and I say he, by analogy and through lack of words." The supreme genius has ceased even to be human.

But the perfected consciousness, which "differs from nothingness by the smallest possible of margins," is not merely a goal and an abstraction. Like all ideals, it is something to be embodied in a man who eats, lives and suffers. In An Evening with M. Teste, almost the only work he wrote for publication during his long retirement, Valéry performs this labor of incarnation. M. Teste, "Mr. Head," is the thinking man, the modern Leonardo, and he is an almost wholly dehumanized creature. He does nothing, desires nothing, occupies no position, is almost completely cut off from society (which nevertheless continues to nourish him). He looks at people as if they did not exist. At night, when he retires to his chamber, he is left alone with three realities: thought, sleeplessness and migraine. He suffers from incurable headaches. And why, we asked ourselves when reading the story, does genius lead to this inhuman state in which suffering is the only reality? Why does it seem to exist in the atmosphere of a closed room, a sickroom, where the blinds are always drawn to exclude the movement and sunlight of the streets and where there is nothing living, not even a red geranium in a pot? Everything seemed to point in the same direction, James Joyce's blindness, Proust's asthma (no less real for being half imaginary), even Eliot's reiterated complaint of being devitalized, "an old man in a dry season"---all these seemed to possess the same symbolic value, as if life were taking revenge on these men for being eliminated from their calculations. These were the great literary men of our age and they resembled one another in proposing a future as cold as the touch of cold hands.

Without losing our admiration for them, we turned aside to wonder what the writers of our own age were doing in France. They might have no genius, but they were younger certainly, and might be warmer and nearer to ourselves.

3: Paris-Express

I don't mean to give the impression that all my time or my friends' time in Europe was devoted to this search for literary guidance. I wrote in the brief mornings, studied Molière and Racine, sat in cafés playing dominos, and traveled when we had money enough---there was always a new city where life was more agreeable or cheaper. After spending a month in Paris, and after the grape arbor at Dijon, I went south to Montpellier, where I registered at the university. The faculty adviser, asked me whether I knew M. Mitchell, also a sympathetic young American. Of course I did: he was the poet Stewart Mitchell, whom I had known both at Harvard and later in New York, when he was managing editor of the Dial.

In March I took an examination and received a Diploma of French Studies. I intended to continue my university work, but the Mediterranean coast in May grew insufferably bright; people walked the streets in smoked glasses; Montpellier under the sun was like a city of the blind. My wife and I wandered northward, spending another month in Paris, three weeks in Brussels, two days in Munich, three days in Vienna. The trip to Vienna was a sort of mission; I carried with me the material assembled by Gorham B. Munson and Matthew Josephson for the third issue of their little magazine, Secession. Five hundred copies of the magazine could be printed in Vienna for twenty-five dollars. Next we spent six weeks at Imst, in the Austrian Tyrol, where we heard that Josephson was going to be associate editor of another magazine, Broom, that was printed on rag paper and paid for contributions. It was on the shadowy veranda of the Gasthof Post, at Imst, that the proprietor's wife asked me whether I knew Herr Braun von Amerika. I answered, "Jawohl, gnädige Frau, I know Mr. Brown of America, I know him well." He was William Slater Brown, Bill Brown of Greenwich Village and Webster, Massachusetts, the Columbia boy who had been imprisoned with Cummings in the enormous room. In those days young American writers were drifting everywhere in West Europe and Middle Europe; they waved to each other from the windows of passing trains.

Again we traveled northward: it was October 1922, and Germany was entering its wildest period of inflation. When we crossed the border, German marks were selling eight hundred for the dollar; they had fallen to a thousand at Munich, twelve hundred at Ratisbon; in Berlin next morning a dollar would buy two thousand paper marks or an all-wool overcoat. In the station we were met by Josephson and by Harold Loeb, the publisher of Broom; together they were editing the magazine at a monthly cost of I don't and they didn't know how many marks or dollars. Art was a liquid product that flowed across international frontiers to find the lowest level of prices. For a salary of a hundred dollars a month in American currency, Josephson lived in a duplex apartment with two maids, riding lessons for his wife, dinners only in the most expensive restaurants, tips to the orchestra, pictures collected, charities to struggling German writers---it was an insane life for foreigners in Berlin and nobody could be happy there. We hurried back to France on an international express full of smugglers. An English officer had seven new suitcases full of German butter, which he purposed selling in Belgium at a profit of four shillings per kilogram. A Frenchman had a German baby carriage hidden under the seat. A French customs officer found it and forced him to pay duty under protest.---La Patrie was urging people to have children, and yet made them pay twice for a baby carriage! Why, it was outrageous, it was stupid, it was pro-German. And it was good, I thought, to hear French voices raised once more in an argument involving patriotism, money and the Categorical Imperative.

We were spending the winter in Giverny, the village where Claude Monet was still painting at the age of eighty. His stepdaughter had married an American painter, Theodore Butler, and some of Butler's friends had settled nearby; before the war Giverny had been an art colony almost like Woodstock in the Catskills. Most of the American artists who remained were now sober and academic and they looked without favor on the new incursion of wild youngsters. The village lay on the Epte, a river not twelve yards wide that was the immemorial boundary between Normandy and France. On the west bank were straggling towns, the homes of farmer-freebooters who feared nobody, not God or the French; on the east bank the villages were close-huddled each about its church, for spiritual warmth and self-protection. Giverny was Norman and its people said of a horse or a woman from the village a scant mile across the river, "That horse is no good, it's a French horse, that woman is French, she sleeps with all the world." We lived in three rooms over the blacksmith shop. In the mornings I wrote or studied; in the short winter afternoons I bicycled into France or watched the alternate bands of storm and sunshine moving over the hillside. The almond trees blossomed early in February and soon afterward I began fishing in the river, where it was rumored that there were three trout: I caught one of them in June. Once a week, sometimes once a fortnight, I spent the day in Paris.

Those Paris ventures were periods of unexampled mental activity. . . You rose before dawn, breakfasted on a quart of milk-and-coffee, just caught a branch-line train full of peasants dressed for market day, then changed at the junction for the Paris express---all this hurry and loss of sleep was a stimulant like cocaine. You could not sit still in your compartment, but picked your way up and down the crowded corridor, watching the Seine unwind as the train creaked faster, faster; thoughts, verses, situations were flashing into the mind, and there was never any time to write them down. Paris! You leaped into the first empty taxicab outside the station and ordered the driver to hurry. In Paris the subways were impossibly slow, and the taxis never drove fast enough as you raced from one appointment to another, from an art gallery to a bookshop where you had no time to linger, and thence to a concert you could never quite sit through---faster, faster, there was always something waiting that might be forever missed unless you hammered on the glass and told the driver to go faster. Paris was a great machine for stimulating the nerves and sharpening the senses. Paintings and music, street noises, shops, flower markets, modes, fabrics, poems, ideas, everything seemed to lead toward a half-sensual, half-intellectual swoon. Inside the cafes, color, perfume, taste and delirium could be poured together from one bottle or many bottles, from square, cylindrical, conical, tall, squat, brown, green or crimson bottles ---but you drank black coffee by choice, believing that Paris itself was sufficient alcohol. And, as the evening wore on, it was more than sufficient. Late at night, you took the last train. for Normandy, happy to be returning to your country routine.

It was during one of those Wednesdays in Paris that I was first introduced to the Dada group. "Matty Josephson is right about them," I said in a letter written that same week. ".They are the most amusing people in Paris. Andre Breton, who is no longer thirty and has a mass of light-brown curly hair brushed back from a high forehead---Breton, their present chef d'école, had discovered a play of which he approved. At least he was not half-hearted in his approval, and he brought along his twenty friends with their wives and mistresses. He attended the dress rehearsal, the first night, the second night, the third; I joined the party on the fourth night, and Dada still possessed its thirty seats in the balcony. There was a stupid one-act curtain raiser which Dada hissed; then comes the great crazy drama. 'Attention, attention!" says the hero, and Dada bursts into a storm of applause. 'But they will never understand!' At this remark, which might apply to any book or poem or story by any member of the group, they clap and cheer so loudly that the police are forced to intervene. Breton orates for half an hour to the parquet. The audience separates into little groups of arguing men. Really it is huge fun."

That was early in December 1922. By the following February I was describing the Dadaists more seriously. I found that they were divided into two warring factions, of which the one headed by Breton was the larger and more uncompromising. "Paris," I wrote, "is a city one enters with elation and leaves without regret. My last visit there was spent chiefly with the Dadas. For the first time in eighteen months, Tzara, Ribemont-Dessaignes and Picabia met together with Breton, Aragon and their followers. They fought, of course, but finally decided to stage a joint manifestation. About twenty of us signed a paper. . . . Their love of literature is surprisingly disinterested. At this memorable meeting it was proposed that none of them should write for any except Dada publications during the next three months. No Dada publication is widely read or pays. The proposal would have been carried except for the objection of one man out of twenty. It was tiring and stimulating to meet them. I left Paris with fifty new ideas and hating the groupe Dada. They are a form of cocaine and personally take no stimulants except their own company. Last Wednesday all the Americans I know went to a tea and got divinely drunk. It was vastly more exciting to attend this three-hour French meeting at which not even water was served."

Tiring and stimulating, crazy, huge fun.... I began to feel that the Dada movement was the very essence of Paris. It existed on a level far below Joyce's ambition and Valéry's high researches into the metaphysics of the self, but at least it was young and adventurous, and human.