The Wor(l)d is New

This essay analyses the role of the artist in the interwar years, through the works of William Carlos Williams, Henry Miller, T.S. Eliot and John Dos Passos.

1. Introduction: crisis books for crisis times

2. Henry Miller and John Dos Passos: new forms of novels

3. William Carlos Williams: new poetic forms

4. Setting the scene: new scenarios for poetry

5. Williams and T.S. Eliot: renewal versus tradition

6. The Waste Land and Spring and All

7. Dehumanization of art or dehumanization of society?

8. Manhattan Transfer and modern progress

9. The metaphor of birth

10. Conclusion: art as the last form of salvation

11. Bibliography

1. Introduction: crisis books for crisis times

In his introduction to Imaginations, a collection of four early books written by William Carlos Williams, Webster Schott refers to them as crisis books:

Crisis books because they show Williams immediately after his first poems, barely known and desperately struggling to erect a platform of ideas from which he could make sense to himself and whoever would read them. (Williams, 1971:xii)

But not only we could ascribe this crisis feeling to Williams' own poetics: by the time these four early books of his were published – between 1918 and 1932 – all humanity was trying to make sense out of itself: these were the interwar years, decades in which mankind was digesting the trauma of what had just happened. Such an event made certainties crumble down definitively, but while some emerged from the fragments to witness the disaster, the majority remained crushed under them unconsciously. And thus from the pile of stony rubbish emerges the artist, whose task is to create, to chew what is prior to him and make something the new.

Now, if we place this figure in the interwar years, we could start seeing how important it was: the artist had to create in an era which had just witnessed destruction and which was obsessively questioning itself. The Great War was the watershed by which the old and the new were to be divided from then on, and was the artist's choice whether to stuck with the former or embrace the latter. The books I chose to analyze in this essay fit perfectly the leitmotivs explained above, as they are strongly infused by the zeitgeist of the era in which they were written: these all are crisis books, written in crisis times by crisis men. One can see how both in form and content, these books cannot be contained into boundaries: they are constantly questioning themselves, expanding their forms.

2. Henry Miller and John Dos Passos: new forms of novels

Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1932), for example, is commonly defined as a novel, but if one take a further look, it can be noticed in fact how tight this definition fits to this book. in Miller's book there is no progress but that of the author's mind: the characters and their anecdotes are nothing but expedients, mere sparks that make his mind burst with epiphanies, visions and reflections on human condition. In fact, it is the same Miller which says at the beginning of its novel that:

This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. (. . .) I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. (Miller, 2005:10)

But even the well consolidated 19th century realist novel was in crisis, as it cannot keep the pace of the changes which aroused with the turning century. At this point enters John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer, a novel which strives to represent the throbbing life of New York. Whereas this novel fails to make you sympathize with its characters or to be enchanted by its plot, its success lies in its impressionistic style of representation of the hectic reality that it depicts.This gives the novel a sense of hyperrealism, in which no filter of any sort is placed between its characters and the reader. If we compare this technique to that of film shooting, german critic Walter Benjamin helps us understand this phenomenon, saying that

The audience's identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera. (Benjamin, 2007:228).

Whereas Miller tries to crystallize the changing consciousness of modern men, Dos Passos tries to witness the consciousness of the changing society. Thus, in Manhattan Transfer, inhuman elements (such as droning, clattering sounds) have the same weight of the human ones, with one difference: while humans come and go all along the novel in a constant turnover of cameos, the inhuman elements remain always there. Immutable and indifferent, the inhumanity of the city is the real protagonist of the novel. In his seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin says that:

the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determ - ined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. (Benjamin, 2007:222)

If we start from this statement, we can see how and why so called novels of the time such as Tropic of Cancer were so slippery to be defined: as I said above these were the years of uncertainty, society was changing radically and so were the men swirling in its rush. This is why such a novel as Manhattan Transfer is forced to upgrade its form to capture the essence of such a dynamic scenario and to transmit it as a content to the reader: the old form such as fictional prose cannot get hold of the chaos of modern society. And this is something that is present in both Miller's and Dos Passos' works: both were trying to represent that chaos which

is the score upon which reality is written (Miller, 2005:10)

to say it in Miller's own words. But to truly witness this change in human perception and hence in its ways of communicating it, we need to engage men whose work depend on the form, on the medium itself: the poets.

3. William Carlos Williams: new poetic forms

In 1923, Robert McAlmon published, in a limited run of 300 copies, Spring and All by William Carlos Williams, a book which is, according to Webster Schott:

neither fiction, criticism, poetry nor fact. It is all – or parts of all. (Williams, 1971:86)

In fact, this book contains all the struggle and doubts of a modern poet trying to sharpen its tools: we could relate to it as meta-poetry, in which the process of writing is as important as its results. The work had a very limited distribution, nearly inexistent: in its primary intentions, it was not a book aimed to an audience, but a book aimed to himself. Thus, by reading it, one experiences a human being in all its shades. As a descendent of Whitman, Williams was aware of containing multitudes and made this one of the dominant aspect of his poetics. One particularity of this book is that the poems are framed by prose and, by doing so, he questions the role of both by contrast:

prose has to do with the fact of an emotion; poetry has to do with the dynamization of emotion into a separate form. (Williams,1971:133)

And a few pages later he continues by saying:

Prose, relieved of extraneous, unrelated values must return to its only purpose; to clarity to en - lighten the understanding. (Williams,1971:144).

From these reflections, we can deduce why the barrier between poetry and prose became more and more blurred: how can a work of art be characterized by clarity in such a restless times? I believe that a common denominator of the products of that era is that they try to grasp the ungraspable, to understand and to fix something which is in constant movement, and thus that can only be obtained by epiphanies which last a fraction of a second.

4. Setting the scene: new scenarios for poetry

THE WORLD IS NEW. With these words Williams Carlos Williams introduces the first poem of Spring And All. In fact, the first pages of this book set the scene in which his poems are to be delivered: the scenario of total

annihilation of every human creature on the face of the earth. (Williams, 1971:91)

In a sort of hysterical enthusiasm, Williams embraces the idea that progress has lead to nothing but destruction. Thus, by this acknowledgment, another creative force shall rise: the imagination, an energy which in Williams' thought has the power of destruction and of recreation. And here comes the metaphor of spring which has the task to create after the most devastating winter ever.

Paradoxically, the world after the great world was the perfect scenario for the artist: to the eyes of the artist, the post-war world was the blank canvas and his role was to fill it with brush strokes. And it is in the first poem of the book that the act of writing for Williams is described:

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches- They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all Save that they enter. All about them the cold, familiar wind. (Williams, 1971:95-6)

Here the objects of reality enter the mind of the poet, but they are naked and uncertain, which is they are deprived of their meaning: these objects doesn't carry the weight of the world on them, they're free of any human association. It is the role of the poet to bring them into life and give them a new meaning:

One by one objects are defined - It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf But now the stark dignity of entrance – Still, the profound change Has come upon them: rooted they grip down and begin to awaken. (Williams, 1971:96)

Williams celebrates the new and this is what makes him a true american in the vein of Whitman: he shares with the first settlers of the new world that enthusiastic spirit, that hope which can make overcome any situation. It is curious to see how Ezra Pound – in one of his hurried letters - accused him to be a blooming foreigner but in fact praised him for this quality:

You thank you've got enough Spanish blood to muddy up your mind, and prevent the current American ideation from going through it like a blighted colander. (Williams, 1971:10-11)

It is in this quality, of being a foreigner, that lies the true spirit of the american, the settler free of any tradition on his shoulders, light as a leaf of grass to go wherever he wants. In fact, it is the same Williams which in a response to a critique by H.D. writes:

I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it. (Williams, 1971:13)

5. Williams and T.S. Eliot: renewal versus tradition

This first poem of Spring and All is known to be written as a reaction to another crisis poem published the year before: The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. This poem, in contrast with that of Williams', sees no salvation and limits itself in portraying the drama of men after the catastrophe. As a result of Eliot's conservative poetics, it depends a lot on tradition, and this is a thing which infuriated Williams, as he was striving to find a new poetical voice.

This divergences between the two emerged from the previous works of both: Eliot's Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and Williams' Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920). In fact, there couldn't be more different books than these two: whereas the former finds its pleasures in erudite quotations, in over-elaborated forms, the latter praises the suddenness of the moment, as it consists of prose poems written by Williams in the brief moments in which he had spare time from his hard work as a physician.

In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, we find this almost comic personage wandering through the foggy dusk of an urban scenario as a flâneur: he observes the scenes but he's not part of them. His main characteristic is his ineptitude, as the poem flows as his indecisions progress:

Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. (Eliot: 2015:162)

And this is nothing but a metaphor of Eliot's reflections about the past: he, opposite to Williams, feels crushed under the weight of the past, and his poetic work is a negotiation with it. What he had in front of him at the moment of creation was not a blank page, but an exhausted page in which he tried to fit, to conform with what was already there. In fact, a few years later in 1921 he explains his poetic in an essay called The Tradition and the Individual Talent, in which he confirms what could be deduced in Prufrock:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.

In the preface of Kora in Hell, Williams speaks out making harsh criticism on his fellow poets. And above all on Eliot, which he calls a subtle conformist: he was just disgusted by the idea that Eliot's work, which flirted back with the classics, was regarded highly as a new poetic voice.

6. The Waste Land and Spring and All

Returning to their later works, one can see how spring is in both central theme, but whereas in Spring and All it has the power of creation, in The Waste Land we find it powerless and cruel. In fact, the entire poem of Williams could be an answer to that rhetorical question which is found at the beginning of its first section:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? (Eliot, 2015:254)

With that first poem, and with his whole book, Williams answers that the arts and the imagination have the power of re-creation: with this energy, he proposes himself as an artist to create an independent reality. In his words, thus, art is

Not a matter of “representation” - which may be represented actually, but of separate existence. enlargement – revivification of values. (Williams, 1971:117)

This is an important cleavage which differentiate the two poets' work, and it was already made clear by Williams in his response to Prufrock:

By a mere twist of the imagination, if Prufrock only knew it, the whole world can be inverted. (Wiliams, 1971:25)

According to Eliot, humanity had come to a stalemate, and thus he condensed all human knowledge prior to that moment in a last kaleidoscopic requiem to humanity.

On the other hand, Williams believes that there's a getaway to that deadlock: also in the prose sections of Spring and All, he comments on his previous work and the therapeutic effect that has made on him in a period in which he was contemplating suicide:

I let the imagination have its own way to see if it could save itself. Something very definite came of it. I found myself alleviated but most important I began there and then to revalue experience, to understand what I was. (Williams, 1971:98)

If we take this reflection in a broader sense, we could see how for Williams the imagination and the works of art can have the power of giving people their awareness back. Walter Benjamin, when commenting on the work of Baudelaire, found that the inability to get hold of the experience was one of the main symptoms of living in the modern industrialized society: as Proust regain his own experience with the mémoire involontaire, so does Williams by abandoning himself to the power of imagination.

These two views from these two very different poets can be described with two images from their works: whereas in The Waste Land the dominant imagery is that of dryness and sterility, in Spring and All we do find rain and it inspires the most profound insights, as it favored the growth of ideas in the poet mind. In this book, the sight of the poet is condensed in the third poem of the collection:

The farmer in deep thought is pacing through the rain among his blank field, with hands in pockets, in his head the harvest already planted. (Williams,1971:98)

In Williams' poetry, the imaginary reality has the same weight as the material one, as he transfigures himself in the farmer, whose work depends on his material labor: for him the harvest already planted in his head will give its fruits in another reality. It is not reality which triggers the imagination, but is the imagination which has an effect on it. On the other hand, in Eliot's Waste Land we find the figure of the poet represented at the end of the poem, yet after the catastrophe had come upon men, as it follows:

I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order?

His figure is embodied in the Fisher King, sterile and powerless, who cringes in anxiety: then again the ineptitude of Prufrock, for instead of acting, he just questions himself and his role.

7. Dehumanization of art or dehumanization of society?

In 1925, Spanish essayist and philosopher José Ortega y Gasset tried to put in order the new aesthetic sensibilities in his essay La deshumanización del arte: he shows with an empirical clarity that the art was going in an inhuman direction towards a purified form, the so called art pour l'art. What he sees as the main characteristic in the new arts is the tendency not to represent the human reality -as naturalism and romanticism did- but to invent new detached realities:

The poet begins where men ends. The destiny of men is to live their human paths; whereas the mission of the former is to invent what doesn't exist already. (Gasset, 1964:32)

Also in the prologue of Kora in Hell, Williams tells us of a conversation he had with modern art collector Walter Arensberg: when asked what those modern painters were about – referring to cubists such as Duchamp or Demuth – he answered that

The only way men differed from every other creature was in his ability to improvise novelty. (Williams, 1971:18)

Thus, whereas Ortega y Gasset finds in the modern art the triumph on the human, I believe that, on the contrary, they strive to regain the human from the inhumanity of society: what they were about was the recuperation of the subjectivity, the exaltation of the human ideas towards reality, hence, a triumph on the objectivity and inhumanity of the machine. The true human essence lies in the world of the ideas, in the imagination as Williams insists throughout his work. If this modern art was growing more and more unpopular, as Ortega y Gasset argues, it was not because the human element had been expelled from it: it was because the human element was being expelled from the whole modern society. It was the dehumanization of society, not the dehumanization of arts.

8. Manhattan Transfer and modern progress

As mentioned in the first section, a novel which strives to represent the new society is Manhattan Transfer. In fact, in it we find numerous vignettes depicting the triumph of the inhuman on men. For example, in the impressionistic prose poems which precede each character, we find human and inhuman elements merged on the same level, as it follows:

Dark presses tight the steaming asphalt city, crushes the fretwork of windows and lettered signs and chimneys and watertanks and ventilators and fireesapes and moldings and patterns and cor - rugations and eyes and hands and neckties into blue chunks, into black enormous blocks. (Dos Passos, 2000:108)

This aspect is not only depicted in its form, but also in its content: in the first section we follow the parable of Bud Korpenning, a naif young man full with that enthusiasm common to the americans, ready to start something from nothing. In fact, we assist to his rebirth as he arrives at New York, the center of things, but soon after we assist to his degradation by the shock experiences he undergoes. It was an idea that kept him alive, and it was the destruction of it, the crush with reality, that lead him to his death as a martyr of modern progress:

Her and me used to keep company in the old icehouse down in Sackett's woods an we used to talk about how we'd come to New York City an get rich and now I'm here I cant git work an I cant git over bein steered. (Dos Passos, 2000:117)

With his last lament cant go nowhere now, Bud embodies the last innocent human being crushed by the inhumanity of the city and their inhabitants. In fact, from then on, in the novel we find numberless characters which do not react to human stimuli, but to artificial ones: advertisements , market values, the tendencies of the show business, and so on and so forth.

9. The metaphor of birth

Indeed, in all the books discussed so far, the symbol of human generation is put under discussion. The birth is not so welcome in the urban scenario: in Tropic of Cancer, for example, birth becomes a metaphor for the devastating progress:

Forward! Time presses. The embryo is pushing through the neck of the womb, and there's not even a gob of spit to ease the passage. A dry, strangulating birth. (Miller, 2005:267)

Not to mention all the symbols of sterility and the references to abortion in The Waste Land. As a result, the new society seems unfit to welcome new human beings. But then again Williams finds salvation, and how couldn't he, who self proclaimed to have delivered 2000 babies as an obstetrician. In the eighteenth poem of Spring and All, the promiscuity under some hedge between a young careless couple brings to life to the pure products of America: the bastard Elsie, which embodies the true voice of humble humanity:

some Elsie- voluptuous water expressing with broken brain the truth about us. (Williams, 1971:132)

10. Conclusion: art as the last form of salvation

A kindred spirit to Williams, Henry Miller insists, with his prophetical monologues similar to those in Spring and All, on the redemptive power of the arts in an era which was filled with

men and women whose last drop of juice has been squeezed out by the machine -the martyrs of modern progress. (Miller, 2005:166)

In fact, the whole point of the withdrawal from New York was that of regain his humanity and not be absorbed by the atomic frenzy of the city. His whole experience and his work has a lot in common with that of Henry David Thoreau: Miller stands aside the devastating progress to witness it, but from this experience he comes back with a book which, as Walden, aims to awaken the consciousness of men. However, he does not find humanity in the Parisians, as they represent for him sleepwalkers flagging the death of the old world. Where he do find humanity is in the arts, and in particular in the work of Matisse:

I pause a moment to recover from the shock which one experiences when the habitual gray of the world is rent asunder and the color of life splashes forth in song and poem. I find myself in aworld so natural, so complete, that I am lost. (Miller, 2005:167)

And it's in this that the world of the arts acts as a counterforce to the cold, scientific driven progress which was -and is- leading to destruction: every man of arts has his weapons, his words, his brushstrokes to alter the reality which surrounds them. And it's at this point that Miller reaches the nexus of his thought, obviously with a transcendental epiphany:

Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity – I belong to the earth! (Miller, p.255)

If society is leading humanity to a machine behavior, it is the role of the artist to save it from drowning in the chopping sea of the civilized life.

11. Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations, 2007.
Dos Passos, John. Manhattan Transfer, 2000.
Eliot, T.S. Poesie, 1961.
Eliot, T.S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" in The Sacred Wood; Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 1921.
Miller, Henry. Tropic of Cancer, 2005.
Ortega y Gasset, José. La disumanizzazione dell'arte, 1964.
Williams, William Carlos. Immaginations, 1971.

Foto 1 da storemypic.com (data di ultima consultazione: 31/08/2021)
Foto 2 da lasepolturadellaletteratura.it (data di ultima consultazione: 31/08/2021)