Family Ties (Raisin, Foxes, Journey, Juno)

I set this blog up for summer, but now, well into fall, I find that blogging about my reading helps me think out loud (which I need in order to process information). So, I'll continue to try to tie things together here from reading. Comps are now less than four months away.



I read Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun. After Dr. Power suggested parallels between this work and Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock. Reading it through that lens, I have to say there did seem to be some very obvious comparisons. First, surface similarities such as an unwanted pregnancy (Mary and ...). Then, of course social class similarities, and the money motive inspiring and driving everything. On a deeper level, there is the family dynamic in both plays, which seems to be breaking apart. The major difference is that in the American play (Raisin) the family seems to come together finally, in opposition-- dare we say solidarity-- to oppose the exclusionary practices of the all white neighborhood association. In the Irish play (Juno) the family breaks in to splinters, with the death of one, and the mother and daughter leaving at the end to live to raise the coming child with two mothers and no father.



I also read the Little Foxes by Lilian Hellman last week, and that particular play immediately made me think of Eugen O'Neil's Long Day's Journey into Night. Both plays are realistic depictions of American families, and these families are dysfunctional. In fact you could describe both plays as a painful protracted glance at dysfunction-- dysfunction on display. An interesting contrast to the Irish plays, which do not allow this intimate glance into family life (at least in O'Casey's case), and though you are in the home of the family, you are not in the head of the characters so deeply. Both O'Neil and Hellman seem to write from within the family secret they have been party to.



One of the most helpful, and fun, things I've been doing in conjunction with my reading and meeting with Dr. Power has been finding films version of the plays and novels I've been reading. There is an old version of Juno directed by Alfred Hitchcock, a film version of Raisin in the Sun with Sidney Poitier, a film of Long Day's Journey with Katherine Hepburn and Jason Robards, and a Bette Davis version of Raisin in the Sun. All of these are worth watching and the O'Neil, the Hansberry, and the Hellman stay very close to their original sources.
The Little Foxes

He Didn't Quit His Day Job

My father worked in the Insurance industry for thirty years, first as a salesman, and later as a sales manager. There was a moment just after finishing my BA in 1990, when I thought, maybe I should go to work for Dad. At that time, I thought I'll teach High School, and finish my PhD in the evenings, on weekends, and over summers. Also, I'll find time to write. Fast-forward twenty years. I've been teaching since 1991, and now doing admin work, and am still trying to finish my education.

Perhaps if I'd have read Wallace Stevens seriously (more than the Emperor of Ice Cream in an anthology), I would have gone to work selling insurance because I would have seen it as a viable 'day job' for an aspiring academic.  To me though, teaching was the job of choice for those who wanted to pursue higher education, and business was for those who wanted only to pursue money. Two modernist luminaries, though, worked in the hurly burly of the business world, and produced some of the greatest writing of the twentieth century.

I had know something about TS Eliot and his work in banking, but I never equated his job with banality for the simple reason that he lived in London. 'Expatriate' banker somehow still seems revolutionary, non-conformist, and appropriate to a writer. But Wallace Stevens is unaccountable within my universe. He breaks stereotypes, and I enjoy the experience of having prejudices or biases questioned. It is not only that he is a poet and an Insurance Company Executive, but that he is an Insurance Company Executive, and writes amazing poetry.

I was not deeply interested in Stevens and thought I would just read a few of his poems from an anthology, but after my experience with Sunday Morning, I wanted to read everything he's written. So I bought a collection of his poems I found at Page One called The Palm at the End of the Mind

So far, several poems have made very strong impressions:

1) Sunday Morning. Apparently, when asked about this Poem Stevens replied it was a Pagan work, and I love that idea reading this. I can imagine a woman on a Sunday morning coping with the sudden rush of beauty from a moment, and then the let down of, "oh yes, but this is all temporary", and the diminished quality of comparing the earthly, physical world to the otherworldly, spiritual, divine. A dichotomy is set up dividing the material from the spiritual. Maybe there is a possible thematic connection to Frost's the Oven Bird. In fact, the idea of 'what to make of a diminished thing' may be a rhetorical question in Frost's work, but it is as if, in some way, Stevens answers the rhetorical question. And perhaps he answers it by saying, "this thing is only diminished if you are operating within a certain epistemological frame". How do we know that a beautiful. Sunday Morning isn't really the most important thing, and that a bird diving down in the present moment isn't just as real as an eternal form, beauty.

There is some suggestion that Matisse and Stevens are kindred spirits. I can really see the greens and the oranges in this painting by Matisse in much the same way that the poem's oranges an cockatoo are imaginable, though I think the kindred nature is more in the vision, the world view. Though, I don't know enough about Matisse to pretend to understand that.

2) Peter Quince at the Clavier is another very interesting poem, which draws on the biblical story of Susana, who was condemned to death, after she refused to succumb to some elders who had seen her bathing and pursued her. She is defended by Daniel who uses a series of puns to secure her safety and condemn the elders to death. The picture by Gentileschi is one of many paintings based on the Susana story.

I am struggling to comprehend the full weight of the possible inversion of Platonism which has been pointed to in this poem by critics. The idea that there is not ideal form of beauty, but only the transitory beauty existing in the mind. The challenge to Plato is in many ways a challenge to the foundations of modern Christianity in the same way that Sunday Morning challenges a world view dependent on the unseen, and somewhat suspicious of the seen, actual, material world, as corrupt, or at best devoid of truth.

3) The Idea of Order at Key West is a poem I am still coming to understand, and will look at it more closely during the fall term's independent study.

Again, I've just been struck by how much I love Steven's work, and again at the surprise at his position in the world seeming to be so out of step with my stereotype of 'the artist'. I like that about Stevens, and maybe my reading his work and my deep appreciation of it is that wonderful accident of finding a certain work or collection or artist at exactly the right time in life.

Backyard like Mississippi

Finished reading Absalom, Absalom this afternoon (actually listened to the last part of it on tape; actually on CD; actually on my I-pod) while cooking meals for the week (pork chops with mango and cilantro, and tuna salad for sandwiches)... after a nap and while typing up notes on Long Day's Journey into Night, and Juno and the Paycock, I heard a clatter out on the lawn... springing from my computer. No, springing is not exactly it-- it was vexatious, no not really vexatious, but a desire nonetheless, a desire, that's how it might be said in a Faulkner novel, or perhaps it would be an ardor, or a hunger or a thirst, or some other such thing as might be said of a will brought about by a thought, or maybe it is the other way around, and I can only say that I heard some imperviously vexing, lugubrious resonance and moved from my place at the computer, and there, high in the old apple tree, with its eyes on me like I was a demon straight out of Sutpen's hundred-- there, up in the billowing, bending, pliancy of those branches was a Raccoon-- a salacious, determined, nocturnal, little creature, and it was ingratiating itself of my apples and it's kin-- another black-faced, ring tailed mammalian, acrobat-- was just scuttling about up the tree, over the wall and onto the shed. 
That was my attempt at a Faulknerian sentence, and the pictures are here as well.

It did seem very Mississippi to have the "coons outch younder thayre". Weird! Raccoons in Nob Hill-- well I declare Miss Colfield, it's strange aint it....

Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden

I read The Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden earlier this month. Below are some key quotes from this text.

(P.3/ para 3) "The 'Auden effect' lay in that ability to catch the changing moods of the time in luminous images, magical phrases and breathtaking apercus, expressing sentiments that people were unaware they shared until they read him."

(P.7/ para 2) "For the younger Larkin Auden was of course the first "modern poet", not just in his ability to employ modern properties unselfconsciously but primarily in the 'dominant and ubiquitous unease' at the heart of his poetry. Auden's outlook was completely dislocated..."

(P.9/ para 3) "...his sleeping around with poetic forms and his plagiarism of other poet's voices, constitute a deliberate assault on the idea of autonomous authentic self, speaking with its own unique accents." "All art is ventriloquism."

(P.11/ para 3) "He denounced Stephen Dedalus' remark...as an impossible ambition, since it is precisely this attempt to escape being a historical creature that makes man's history a nightmare..."

(P.13/ para 3) "Art is born of humiliation."  "(Auden was) The first poet at home in the 20th century."

(P.17/ para 4) "...his language and anxieties in the early 1930s entranced the young intelligentsia...they heard...political injustice and human pain clarified and amplified in his words."

(P.19/ para 3) "Many of his young admirers felt betrayed by the departure...the belief that he had deserted Britain during a dangerous crisis..." (seems an interesting pop-parallel when Bob Dylan went electric in the mid-1960s, and many in the folk community criticized him for selling out. Martin Scorcher's documentary No Direction Home outlines this process of following one's art, and the resultant alienation of some followers).

Too brief, Edward Estlin, too brief

I have not consulted any critical sources for E.E. Cummings, so if this ends up as a part of my exams I will need to do more work with this poet. This is a brief note or two from the five poems I looked at.

1) All in green went my love riding-- Early poem/ may be allusion to the Knight's Tale by Chaucer or refers to or retells story of Diana or Artemis/ Actaeon observes Diana bathing, and because of this Diana turns him into a stag and he is eaten by his own dogs... the myth really takes a fearful attitude to the corrupting power of female beauty.

2) O Sweet spontaneous--describes the rape of the earth, but allows that spring returns anyway.

3) The Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls-- this is a form of the sonnet, not as experimental in form as other works by Cummings. Seems to suggest a dead sort of religion/ an interpretation that limits one's direct experience or the real, actual physical reality/ an anit-Tao...

4) I was Sitting in McSoreley's-- poem uses strange, experimental syntax and punctuation. Shows Cumming's "manunkind" concept, lack of harmony between the organic world and human society. Maybe written to simulate 'sloppy' way the brain processes language when intoxicated.

5) A Man Who Had Fallen Among Thieves-- There is an obvious comparison to the story of the Good Samaritan. May be a comparison to "manunkind" who ignores-- contrasted with speaker in the poem who picks up the 'puke covered wretch'....

Catching up with Frost

I have been so busy with reading that I've had little time to post, but I want to keep up with my posting, so I have another layer of reflection on my readings. I read several of Robert Frost's poems during the last week of June, and now in the last week of July, I'll try to remember some of my observations, with the help of some very sketchy notes.

1) Mending Wall-- two neighbors walk a wall in spring putting the stones back in place. Speaker perhaps sees the neighbor as from some outmoded era...written in blank verse, but few lines match iambic pentameter. Most lines have five stressed syllables, but feet vary extensively to sustain the feel of natural speech. There are no patterns of rhyme, but much assonance (i.e. wall/ hill, bulls/ walls...)...why do we put up walls? Segregate, alienate ourselves? It's really impossible and yet we persist in attempts to cloister. Some have suggested this poem comments on the act of writing creatively, or any kind of creation, is a kind of duality of construction vs. destruction...also, the idea that destructive acts can result in creations, and constructions can sometimes disrupt.

2) After Apple Picking-- after a hard day of picking apples, speaker wonders about sleep coming on (is it just sleep, or something deeper?) This is a rhyming poem, but it has no regular rhyme scheme. The changing rhythms keep the reader "awake" as the speaker drifts off to "sleep". Is this the big sleep that comes at the end of human endeavor? Apples have obvious symbolic meaning in the western tradition (Adam and Eve/ Eden/ the Fall/ Genesis). Apples may represent knowledge and a punishable claim to godliness/ creation.

3) The Wood Pile-- on a walk in a frozen swamp, a speaker considers going back, follows a bird, finds a woodpile, and wonders why someone left it there to rot. This poem has typical Frostian 5 stress lines/ no discernible rhyme pattern/ looks like poetry, but sounds like speech. Something urges the speaker to get thoroughly lost. There seems to be despair in the poem's final line "the slow, smokeless burning of decay". Somehow bring Shelly's Ozymandias's last line to mind, "  Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away..."...makes me wonder is there is some sense of futility here???


4) The Road not Taken-- speaker stands at a fork in the road and chooses which road to take. He may take the other road later, but that's unlikely. He will tell this story to someone later, but will say he took the less traveled road. This is strict masculine rhyme scheme (ABAAB). For me, I think I've misunderstood this poem ever since memorizing it in 8th grade. This is not a simple Hallmark card which proclaims "I've made the hard choice; I'm an American rugged individualist; because of my trueness to myself, I've benefited in the long run." The idea that we can not know what we are choosing when we choose, makes perfect sense to me, now at 41, and feeling somewhat disappointed. I mean, we may know what we are going to get, but we can not predict how getting it is going to feel. We can't really know "what" we are choosing when we choose. The speaker in this poems, proclaims that he "will be telling this with a sigh"....is that sigh because he knows he is lying to himself and to someone else when he tells some young person, "stick to your guns and choose the road less traveled..."? In fact, we aren't really sure the speaker has actually chosen a less traveled road; the poem does say "the passing...had worn them really about the same..." So this poem is really--whether less common or more common-- about the road we did not take. There is something fascinating about that path we didn't go down, and we will try to tell ourselves we made the right choice to bring some peace of mind, but this is really just rationalizing. Is there really a right and a wrong path? We can never know. Wrong decisions? Right decisions? Who Knows? Reminds, me as I mentioned in an earlier post on Frost or the old Buddhist story of the farmer who finds the horse (Sae-ung-ji-ma) in Korean.


5) An Old Man's Winter Night-- An old man alone in the wintry climate of New England. This poem has been described as having a complicated, even Miltonian, structure-- long sentences (lines 8-13), with much enjambment (breaking of lines in mid-sentence). This is a dark, lonely story of going to one's maker alone, but is there really any other way to do it?


6) The Oven Bird-- The oven bird sings during the height of summer, perhaps near the vernal equinox. He sings that the spring's bloom was more beautiful than the bloom of mid-summer ("as one to ten"), and hints of the coming fall. This poem is a non-traditional sonnet (fourteen lines with rhyme). It seems to be a meditation on mid-life, and, once again, I completely relate and understand this feeling. I immediately related this poem to Ulysses, in terms of the setting. Ulysses takes place in Bloom's middle years, and it also takes place in the summer (June 17, the longest day of the year). By this point, the year is half over, life is half over, and maybe this is the peak. If it isn't what you'd hoped, well, that's sad. If it is all you'd hoped, well, you realize this is the beginning of the end. The "highway dust" that the oven bird acknowledges is "over all" reminds me of Eliots "handful of dust" from the Wasteland. 


7) Birches-- Ice storms have weighed down and bent birch trees, and the speaker fantasizes a young boy has climbed to the top and pulled them down. There is a tension evident between the real world and the world of imagination.


8) Putting in the seed-- A sonnet. A meditation on creation/ the creator/ the earth/ mother earth/ springtime's fruit as "love child of nature"...the physical act of planting and of sex results in new life...

The Ambassadors

The Ambassadors

I began listening to an audio book version of Henry James's The Ambassadors on my trip back to Oklahoma over the fourth of July weekend. This book, according to the introduction of the edition I have, is a sort of connection between the Victorian and the Modern Novel. In many passages, listening to this very civilized work, I felt a sameness to two summers ago listening to Ulysses. The samenes is not in terms of the story structure or lack thereof, or in terms of the images or the types of characters, but there is a sameness, in certain passages, in terms of language. There is-- and the introduciton to the book pointed to this-- a similarity with any of the Moderns (Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf) who use a stream of consciouness technique. James's novel has that feel in parts, but at the same time it is simply not as hard to follow as Ulysses or The Sound and The Fury or Mrs. Dalloway. James, perhaps, has not completely gone over to the experimental techniques so common among modernist authors, but is breaking groung all the same, and so really bridges victorian 19th centruy fiction with modern 20th century writing.

It is interesting the way James always details the psychological aspects of his characters. I've heard the argument that his brother William was a gifted psychologist who could write like a novelist, and so made his ideas more accesible, and that Henry was a novelist who could think like a psychologist, and so created amazing psychological depth among his characters. This fixation on the internal working of characters' minds, even the acknowledgment of a subconscious world, again prefigures much that is great in modernist novels.

I am very interested in some of the thematic contents of this novel: the 'innocent' American (Strether) coming into contact with the more cultured, refined Europeans; the idea of 'living one's life' to some fullness, conflict between personal pleasure and duty. That idea of enjoying one's life occured to James after a conversation with a friend, novelist William Dean Howells. Howell's had traveled to Paris to visit his son, and had been positively ovewhelmed by the european capital, and had come to doubt whether or not he had really lived-- if he had not wasted his life.