Equipment for Living. Kenneth Burke
is dark” . . . “fill in the coupon” . . . “how the moon still weaves upon the ground, through the leaves, so much silence and so much peace” . . . “Lunch With the Sole Survivor” . . . “is it the very same face seen so often in the mirror” . . . “not until we’ve counted the squares on the wallpaper” . . . “on the bedroom floor with a stranger’s bullet through the middle of his heart, clutching at a railroad table of trains to the South” . . . “It is posted in the clubrooms” . . . “a privileged ghost returned, as usual, to haunt yourself?” . . . “CAST IN THE ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE” . . . “tomorrow, yes, tomorrow” . . . “soothed by Walter Lippmann and sustained by Haig & Haig” . . . “if now there is nothing” . . . “the empty bottle again, and the shattered glass” . . . “as armies march and cities burn” . . . “ask the stones, so often walked” . . . “the natives can take to caves in the hills, said the British MP” . . . “wages: DEATH” . . . “Take a Letter” . . . “with the wind still rattling the windows” . . . “why do you lay aside the book in the middle of the chapter to rise and walk to the window and stare into the street” . . . “Dance of Mirrors” . . . “this house where the suicide lived” . . . “something that we can use, like a telephone number” . . . “Wait, listen.”
There is a risk here, in the “statistical” quality of the perspective by which the poet sizes up the “thousand noble answers to a thousand empty questions, by a patriot who needs the dough.” There is such limitation of subject matter as may come of taking the whole world as one’s theme. All people look like ants, when seen from the top of the a skyscraper—and the poet’s generalized approach often seems like the temptation of a high place. Connected with this is an over-reliance upon accumulation and repetition, traits that derive also from his disposition to establish a very marked pattern, which he expands as a theme with variations. Hence, for my part, the items I liked best were “Pantomime” (“She sleeps, lips round, see how at rest” . . . ), a poem of tenderness and meditation that is very moving, and the opening “Memo” (“Is there still any shadow there, on the rainwet window of the coffeepot” . . . )—where the generalized plaint is introduced in less head-on fashion. “Devil’s Dream” (a kind of “There but for the grace of God goes our author” theme) is another poignant accomplishment, by reason of a more personal note. The author’s rhetoric of attack ranges from the slap to a tearing of the hair (with perhaps his “En Route” among the most successful of the generalized statement); and all his lines bear convincing testimony—in speech swift and clear—of estrangement in a world awry, where many are asked to face the emptiness of failure in order that a few may face the emptiness of success.
Literature
We ask only to leave the entire matter vague—to say that a work may be popular and good, popular and bad, unpopular and good, unpopular and bad. It may be widely read and ineffectual, widely read and influential, little read and ineffectual, little read and influential.
—Counter-Statement (91)
Alcohol in the Eighties
Painted Veils by James Huneker. Boni and Liveright
The Literary Review (New York Evening Post) October 30, 1920
Mr. Huneker has just bridged a large lacuna in American letters. In Painted Veils he has given us our own little version of that panting period at the end of the last century which went racing though all the big cities of the Occident. We can now sit back proud in the knowledge that America was as ferocious as the rest of them. If France had its absinthe and its curacao, and England and Germany ditto, we now know on the authority of Painted Veils that vigorous young Americans went about with an occasional Dora whose “body was like a white satin stove,” and conquered frequent violent “hookers.” In Painted Veils, the Eighteenth Amendment is flaunted egregiously. The book should have three stars on the label. It is 110 proof.
The novel opens with Esther’s coming to New York back in the ’80s with only a hundred dollars in her pocketbook. But Esther is a difficult problem for the reader. Here is a young girl, coming to New York, poor and an orphan, yet she is neither duped, nor beset by plotting scoundrels, nor overwhelmed by the splendor of the city. In fact, as soon as Esther arrives she begins a business-like exploitation of every one who tries to befriend her. She has a voice, she has come to have a career, and she sets out on this career the first day. Within a short time she has used New York for all that it seems to be worth to her at that time, and goes off to Europe. With her temporarily out of the way Mr. Huneker turns attention to Ulick, who is a dramatic critic well up on the arts, with a Parisian training, but living in New York at the advice of his friend, Remy de Gourmont.
Ulick had had one brief mix-up, incognito with Esther before meeting her in New York, and the memory of it still itches him. However, there is nothing to do but find consultation in other fidelities, a predicament which Ulick manages quite well. But Esther has been going steadily ahead with her conquests, and returns to New York toward the close of the book a famous Wagnerian singer. Along with her fame she has considerably increased the range of her vices. The outcome of it all is a discovery which is as disgusting as the author intended it to be; then various characters are buried, and the book is over.
Painted Veils is a remarkable essay in assimilation, as I suppose a novel by a critic should be. With marked Baudelairean morals, it also has bits after the St. James version, a generous application of the psychoanalytic nomenclature, passages in the manner of our newest fragmentary writers, a few sentences of the thriller type, and, most of all, frequent borrowings from James Huneker, the critic. Mona at times has the flavor of Schnitzler’s Anna in “Der Weg ins Freie.” There is Huysmans, both in the intermingling of dogma and plot, and in the predilection for riot. The characters often mediate in a series of quotations from the most select authors. The purpureus pannus of Esther nude before the mirror is a newly imagined re-rendering of the classic theme of painting. For pages on end the author will transfer his authority to some other author he has read and admired.
The outcome of it all, then, is a “literary” novel. The characters are alternately ideological and mulierose, they are intelligent, and above all, talky. A continuous attempt at valuations—by no means new, but still vital—runs through the volume, although they are usually stuck in the mouth or head of some character. The book is allowed to fluctuate as it wills—action, criticism, analysis, generality; surely, Mr. Huneker was trying to do what Ulick contemplated: “To write a story, not all empty incident, nor yet all barren analysis. Neither Henry James, nor Dumas.”
I do not know how long it takes to make a bomb. But Mr. Huneker testifies that Painted Veils was written in barely more than a month and a half. It was written, then, as speedily as it seems. It was hardly more than a racy conversation. The rough spots were never corrected, but, in compensation, the good spots are all the swifter. Mr. Huneker took his little fling, and a fling is never quite beyond reproach. Again, a fling is more likely to be an hilarious affair, where the smile crystallizes on your face every now and then, turns sickly, but soon regains its spontaneity.
This spontaneity is the most striking quality of the book. The index cards in the public libraries have a record like this after Mr. Huneker’s name: (1859-); yet here comes Mr. Huneker with a volume that is nothing if not young. It is hard to believe when you read Painted Veils that Mr. Huneker was once a contemporary of waxed flowers and antimacassars, family albums, and the sheaf of wheat, “over the fence is out,” and fathers that asked young men who called three times in succession whether their intentions were honorable.
Uplifts having gone out of fashion, James Huneker is one of our leading down-lifters. For a time, at least, Gallicism seems to be climbing toward ascendancy over Victorianism. And with a sympathy for Gallicism comes a parallel questioning of America. We are coming to accept it not only docilely, but almost with gratitude, when we learn that “Ulick, despite his fondness for minced pie and Philadelphia scrapple, could not endure the national cuisine.’ ‘We are barbarians compared with the French,’ he openly asserted, ‘who know how to eat, drink, and think.’” In all probability, one nation is as stupid as another, however. But for better or worse, we are on our way; Victorianism never dreamed of such a neat cacophony as “They sang, and their voices