Don't mess with the cat ladies

Perhaps someone should have given the Republican vice-presidential candidate a history lesson:

Even a powerful park commissioner found the housewives and their perambulators blocking his way when he tried to rent out a bit of the green as a parking lot for a private restaurant he favored; and wild painters and cat-keeping spinsters united to keep him from forcing a driveway through lovely Washington Square.

Paul and Percival Goodman, Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life

The "powerful park commissioner" was of course Robert Moses.

Continuity

Two poems about change, stone, farming, New England — and, obliquely, the ancient world. First up, Robert Frost:

Of the Stones of the Place

I farm a pasture where the boulders lie
As touching as a basket full of eggs,
And though they’re nothing anybody begs,
I wonder if it wouldn’t signify

For me to send you one out where you live
In wind-soil to a depth of thirty feet,
And every acre good enough to eat,
As fine as flour put through a baker's sieve.

I’d ship a smooth one you could slap and chafe,
And set up like a statue in your yard,
An eolith palladium to guard
The West and keep the old tradition safe.

Carve nothing on it. You can simply say
In self-defense to quizzical inquiry:
"The portrait of the soul of my Gransir Ira.
It came from where he came from anyway."

Second, Paul Goodman:

Sawyer

These people came up here
only two hundred years ago.
A half a dozen names
of fathers in the graveyard
have brought us to the farmer
who used to be my neighbor.

But now his sons have quit
the beautiful North Country
for Boston where they will not find
a living or even safety.
The boy has joined the Navy
to bomb other farmers
where our Navy ought not to be.

“I set my mind on Ritchie.
I bought all the machinery for him
and the blue-ribbon cattle.
Now it has no point.”
So they have sold and gone
to San Diego
to see the boy on leave.

There will not be another
generation in America,
not as we have known it,
of persons and community
and continuity.
This poetry I write
is like the busy baler
that Sawyer bought for Ritchie,
what is the use of it?

But I am unwilling to be Virgil
resigned and praise what is no good.
Nor has the President invited me.

Frost's "eolith palladium" caught my eye. An eolith is a kind of flint nodule once thought to be artifactual in nature, but now considered to be the product of natural geological forces. The original Palladium or Palladion was an icon of Pallas Athena taken from the citadel of Troy and eventually transported to Rome by Aeneas; the word has since become generic for any kind of protective icon. The name of the element palladium is a later coinage, also ultimately derived from the compound epithet Pallas Athena.

Our Juggernaut seems to roll

Our Juggernaut seems to roll
by itself over people
but there are really men
who tend the wheels and engine

only a few hours a day
and jump off and go and play
at home or on the links
and eat well and drink drinks.

Many of them are certainly
much happier than I
and today one came with a poem
that he had made in his free time

(though I am still willing
to correct the writing of the young)
but I would not talk to him about his poem,
I would not talk about a poem to him.

--Paul Goodman, from North Percy (1968).

This little pamphlet, most of which was written in the aftermath of the death of the poet's son in a mountain-climbing accident, may be the most sorrowful book I know. It is out of print (like every volume of Goodman's poetry, as far as I can tell), and it is a not an easy book to read, not because of its style (which could hardly be more direct), but because of the bareness with which the author delineates his grief. I have chosen one of the few overtly political poems it contains in honor of the day, but the sadness that pervades its pages is mostly beyond all that.

The theory of dilemmas

One of the many interesting revelations of Jonathan Lee's documentary Paul Goodman Changed My Life is that Goodman saw The Empire City, his most ambitious (and in its weird way, most autobiographical) work, as a kind of Don Quixote in reverse, in which it is society that is delusional, and the Quixotic heroes are people who have determined to live with integrity, in a way that is not an affront to human dignity. He observed that the reversal wouldn't have made sense if only one character had chosen be be sane, for to be alone, to be without society, intrinsically led, in Goodman's way of thinking, to its own kind of derangement. As his articulated it in the somewhat cryptic "Theory of Dilemmas" he set forth in the novel (and how like Goodman it was to present a theory in a novel), "If we conformed to the mad society, we became mad; but if we did not conform to the only society that there is, we became mad."


Goodman will have been dead for forty years this August, and few people under fifty would be likely to know his name. Most of his books are out of print (The Empire City, however, is available), and the long-promised biography by Taylor Stoehr seems unlikely to appear soon, if ever. Jonathan Lee reports that when he approached Random House, which must have sold hundreds of thousands if not millions of copies of Goodman's books in the 1960s and '70s, about re-issuing some of them in conjunction with his film, the response he received from an editor was "Who's Paul Goodman?"

Is Goodman ripe for rediscovery? One would think that the generation that has produced Occupy Wall Street would find some food for thought in an anarchist and pacifist who advocated bottom-up, decentralized, community-based practical solutions and eschewed ideological loyalties and political allegiances, and who spoke out forcefully against the corruption he found to be pervasive in American politics, industry, commerce, urban planning, and education. The Dilemma of Political Action that Goodman articulated, that in the employment of the only political tools available one becomes part of the very system one opposes, remains relevant, and unresolved. But just as Goodman ultimately wore out his welcome with much of the New Left (not because he changed, but because they did), he would probably wind up as an awkward fit with today's protestors as well. In the end, Goodman was not an economic thinker at all, and only accidentally a political one; he was above all a moralist, one whose philosophy was grounded in the social ties which he saw as fundamentally arising from his tutelary deity, which was, of course, Eros.

Goodman opposed the Vietnam War and the nuclear weapons race because he found these things to be immoral, and for that he was adopted, for a while, as a father figure to draft resisters and others on the Left, but he had no patience with armed liberation movements or their sympathizers. Though no apologist for capitalism, he was never a Marxist (he may have had at most a brief fling with Trotskyism in his teens), nor did he ever become a neoconservative convert, as did many of his peers from the Commentary crowd of the 1950s and '60s. He instead became, or rather remained, what he called "a neolithic conservative," a traditionalist whose fundamental allegiance to human values (it wouldn't be amiss, in his case, to say "Western values") led him almost invariably to positions that were deemed "radical" by American society, whether those positions involved opposing the military-industrial complex, abolishing compulsory education as inimical to the free spirits of young people, or advocating the banning of automobile traffic from much of Manhattan.

He could be frustrating enough, as a writer and as a person, and with the possible exceptions of Growing Up Absurd and Communitas (the latter co-written with his brother Percival, a noted architect), his work seems ill-suited to the current directions of academic scholarship, even on the Left. His short fiction could be so stylized as to be virtually unreadable, he showed little interest in women's issues, and he was prone to ex cathedra statements that demonstrated a condescending assumption that he was the bearer of the accumulated wisdom of Western civilization and that everyone else needed to benefit from his insight. (To be sure, he was hardly alone in that regard; the New York intellectuals in general were not a modest crowd.) He was personally and politically disruptive, a scold, a prophet. And yet, as contrarian as his ideas could be, they were often prescient, and where they were not, in retrospect, what makes Goodman now seem dated is often simply an indication of how badly we have strayed away from a world in which his proposals just might have made sound good sense. The whole notion of "social criticism," that the ways in which society is organized, the "means of livelihood and ways of life" which Communitas addressed, should be open to inspection, debate, and reform, now seems sadly anachronistic, as the machine grinds on, inexorably, for its own sake.


As little as his poetry and fiction has in common with what has emerged as the contemporary canon over the last fifty years, much of his verse remains highly rewarding, and The Empire City, the sprawling novel he worked on, in fits and starts, for some twenty years, publishing it in sections, like The Dead of Spring above, is eccentric, messy, infuriating, arguably unfinished, but also often enlightening, invigorating, daring, witty, astonishingly beautiful, and certainly like little else published before or since. Is it his failing or ours that the book has hardly found an audience?

Goodman wrote little fiction in the last decade of his life, which brought him unexpected fame after decades of obscurity, but also a series of disappointments and personal tragedies before his death at 60 in 1972. One must thus return to the later sections of The Empire City, written during the Eisenhower years, to find a note of optimism that may have eluded him at the end of his life. Two brothers, Lefty and Droyt, who are part of the novel's second generation of main characters, leave New York for the West Coast. Some time later, Droyt resurfaces in Manhattan, bearing what seems -- to his jaded audience -- an inherently incredible tale: that Lefty has found a meaningful job and a place to live where he feels comfortable and among friends, that he has settled down with a woman whom he loves and who loves him, and that they have even produced a child who, rather than driving the couple apart, has only added to their joy. His listeners, long inured to the idea that society, and individual human beings themselves, will put up any number of roadblocks rather than permit simple happiness to flourish, are skeptical, raise any number of objections, but in the end they are convinced:

"You have come to us with a marvelous story. We find it hard to believe our ears. You speak of a free artist who has an immediate audience; of lovers who wish each other well; of a man who gets paid for a useful job that fits him; of the confidence that there will be some use for another human being in the world. All this is unlikely, yet you convince us that it is a fact. What does it mean? It means that all along the time a certain number of people are not committing an avoidable error."

Such happiness may have eluded Goodman, but to his credit he seems to have believed that the dilemmas were not, in the end, beyond all possibility of resolution.

New Directions in the 1940s

James Laughlin started his career as publisher in 1936 with the first New Directions in Prose & Poetry, but in addition to the flagship anthology he soon branched out into other projects, some small-scale, others remarkably ambitious for a small press (the family's steel fortune was put to excellent use). By 1941 the New Directions annual was well over 700 pages and encompassed writing by Bertolt Brecht, Delmore Schwartz, Julien Gracq, Franz Kafka, John Berryman, Ezra Pound, and many others.

The following year, well ahead of the celebrated Latin American literary “boom,” the house issued a similarly hefty bilingual Antología de la poesía americana contemporánea / Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry. Edited by the classicist Dudley Fitts, the anthology included poets like Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Pablo Neruda, and Cesar Vallejo, all of whom would remain largely unknown to the American literary audience for another generation.

But New Directions didn't just think big; it also thought small, and in fact Laughlin experimented with a variety of formats, from chapbooks to subscription publishing to limited editions. Some of these experiments didn't work out and were quickly abandoned; others became long-running series with lasting influence on both publishing and literature.

The Poets of the Year series, begun in 1941, was one early New Directions series. According to Laughlin, writing many years later,

I hit on the idea of a series of 32-page pamphlets of poetry, each one printed by a different fine printer, an artist of design. It seems incredible now but I was able to sell these for fifty cents, or $5.50 for a boxed set to subscribers.

Though Laughlin was enjoined by the Book-of-the-Month Club from calling the series “the poet of the month,” the chapbooks were in fact issued on a monthly basis for the first three years (1941-1943); in 1944, the final year, wartime paper rationing caused a reduction to six issues, including the one shown here.


Once again Laughlin was ahead of the curve: Alberti, a Spanish poet then living in exile in Argentina, would remain otherwise relatively little known in the English-speaking world until the appearance of Ben Belitt's rather poor translation in the 1960s and Mark Strand's much better one in 1973. This particular volume was printed for New Directions by the Press of Henry G. Johnson; the other volumes in the final year of the series were Selected Poems of Herman Melville, “designed by” Margaret Evans; Thomas Merton's Thirty Poems, printed by the Marchbanks Press; The Soldier by Conrad Aiken (the George Grady Press); A. M. Klein's The Hitleriad (the Samuel Marcus Press); and A Little Anthology of Mexican Poets (the Printing Office of the Yale University Press). The last of those was edited by Lloyd Mallan, who also translated the Alberti. The latter is a saddle-stitched paperback, with a removable dust jacket; the books were also published hardbound, for a dollar an issue.

Below is the fourth (and final) number of a short-lived New Directions periodical called Pharos, from 1947. The version of Confucius it contains is by Ezra Pound, a New Directions mainstay from almost the beginning of the house. Not having seen the other numbers I can't be sure, but its possible that in this instance the poet's name was left off the cover (but not off the title page) because its appearance on bookstore shelves so soon after World War II might have touched a raw nerve, given Pound's flirtation with Fascism.


The text ends on page 53 (page 49 is mistakenly paginated 39), and is followed by eleven pages of ads, including a full-pager from the Gothan Book Mart. (As in the early issues of New Directions in Prose & Poetry, the ads are arguably as interesting as the editorial matter.)

According to an editor's note inside, Pharos was being phased out in favor of Direction, an example of which, from 1949, appears below:


Unlike Pharos, which was wrapped in something resembling blotter paper, the volumes in the Direction series were jacketed hardcovers, retailing for $1.50 each. This particular one is in a “pocket-size” format, roughly 4 ½ x 6 ½. Although they were available on a subscription basis, they have now crossed the line from magazine to book. Other selections listed on the jacket include Albert Guerard's Joseph Conrad, Cyril Connoly's The Rock Pool, and Nabokov's Nine Stories. Although he isn't credited, I think the jacket design may be by Alvin Lustig, who did many covers for New Directions, in particular for its successful New Classics line.

Next is a bilingual anthology that wouldn't seem like the company's typical fare; in fact you could easily miss the fact that it was a New Directions book at all, since the only place that it's identified as such is at the bottom corner of the front flap of the dust jacket.


The jacket itself is unusual, having been made of some kind of transparent plastic, possibly acetate. The lettering you see is not on the boards but on the acetate (if that's what it is); the illustration, however, is on the book. According to the colophon, “three thousand copies of this book were printed in April MCMXLIX by the University Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” There are some nice illustrations inside, and the spine is ornamented with a decorative motif. It sold for $7.50, rather pricey at the time.

Finally, a more enduring literary monument (if an ambivalent one), sized to match. Here is an early (but not first) printing of Pound's collected Cantos, published in 1948.


The book, which sold for $5.00, is confusingly paginated, as each succeeding section starts the numbering afresh, and there's no table of contents. In later editions, at least since the 1970s, the dust jacket has been changed to a reddish-orange color, the typography has been redone, and the drawing of the poet (by Gaudier-Brzeska) no longer appears.

In my experience, innovative literary presses tend to follow a certain generational pattern. Companies like New Directions, Grove Press, Black Sparrow, the Ecco Press, or the original North Point Press — each of them closely identified with one or two innovative founders — find a niche in the marketplace with some fresh ideas, publishing authors and kinds of books that aren't being represented by the mainstream houses. A decade or two later the ideas are widely imitated or just don't seem that interesting anymore and the house, if it survives, gets absorbed by a major publisher or just settles into tame old age.

By most standards, New Directions under James Laughlin had a longer run than most. By the time I started reading New Directions books, in the early 1970s, the press had settled on the handsome and serviceable look of the New Directions Paperbook line.


It was a superb series in many ways, but the kind of experimentation with format the house conducted in its midcentury heyday was mostly in the past. Today, after Laughlin's death in 1997, New Directions continues to uphold a fine publishing tradition but it's no longer groundbreaking in the way it was in its first decades.

Update (January 2009): When I wrote the above I was not aware of Geoffrey Connell's translation of Alberti's Sobre los angeles (Concerning the Angels), which was published by Rapp and Carroll in 1967 and which also appeared, apparently in full, in — where else? — New Directions 19 in 1966.

Update (December 2013): New Directions is now revisiting some of its innovative marketing ideas, in the form of poetry and prose chapbook subscriptions. Hats off to them.

Confucius at the ford

Three versions of an incident from the Confucian Analects, Book 18, chapter 6.

First, the translation by James Legge (1815-1897); the italics are in the original and evidently represent passages added for clarity:

1. Ch'ang-tsü and Chieh-nî were at work in the field together, when Confucius passed by them, and sent Tsze-lû to inquire for the ford.

2. Ch'ang-tsü said, “Who is he that holds the reins in the carriage there?” Tsze-lû told him, “It is K'ung Ch'iû.” “Is it not K'ung Ch'iû of Lû?” asked he. “Yes,” was the reply, to which the other rejoined, “He knows the ford.”

3. Tsze-lû then inquired of Chieh-nî, who said to him, “Who are you, sir?” He answered, “I am Chung Yû.” “Are you not the disciple of K'ung Ch'iû of Lû?” asked the other. “I am,” replied he, and then Chieh-nî said to him, “Disorder, like a swelling flood, spreads over the whole empire, and who is he that will change its state for you? Rather than follow one who merely withdraws from this one and that one, had you not better follow those who have withdrawn from the world altogether?” With this he fell to covering up the seed, and proceeded with his work, without stopping.

4. Tsze-lû went and reported their remarks, when the Master observed with a sigh, “It is impossible to associate with birds and beasts, as if they were the same with us. If I associate not with these people, — with mankind, — with whom shall I associate? If right principles prevailed through the empire, there would be no use for me to change its state.”

Here is Arthur Waley's version:

Ch'ang-chü and Chieh-ni were working as ploughmates together. Master K'ung, happening to pass that way, told Tzu-lu to go and ask them where the river could be forded. Ch'ang-chü said, Who is it for whom you are driving? Tzu-lu said, for K'ung Ch'iu. He said, What, K'ung Ch'iu of Lu? Tzu-lu said, Yes, he. Ch'ang-chü said, In that case he already knows where the ford is. Tzu-lu then asked Chieh-ni. Chieh-ni said, Who are you? He said, I am Tzu-lu. Chieh-ni said, You are a follower of K'ung Ch'iu of Lu, are you not? He said, That is so. Chieh-ni said, Under Heaven there is none that is not swept along by the same flood. Such is the world and who can change it? As for you, instead of following one who flees from this man and that, you would do better to follow one who shuns this whole generation of men. And with that he went on covering the seed.

Tzu-lu went and told his master, who said ruefully, One cannot herd with birds and beasts. If I am not to be a man among other men, then what am I to be? If the Way prevailed under Heaven, I should not be trying to alter things.

And finally, a very free adaptation — probably based on Legge — by Paul Goodman (1911-1972):

"The Ford"

Analects, Bk. xviii, ch. 6

Of the boiling river ripped by fangs of rocks,
on the tranquil shore, in the pink sun, are plowing

bitter Chang, with pity swollen-hearted
and rational Chieh-ni, deep hermits.
And here comes in his dusty carriage
Confucius, humanely wandering
from prince to prince: “These are the rules of Order.”
Soon departing! when will his heart break?
“Tze-lu, go ask them where to ford this flood.”
The favorite bows low to the lonely sages.

Says Chang, “Is not yon noble with the reins
Confucius?” “Yes, Confucius my teacher.”
“He knows the ford! he knows the ford!
he wanders with advice from state to state!”
Says Chieh: “You see the flood! you see the fangs!”
—alas, Chieh-ni! the very shore is rotting—
“disorder like a flood has won its way

the Empire is raging. Who will change?
who will change? from state to state withdrawing
your teacher is traveling in disorder.
Once and for all withdraw. Is it not better?”
Without another word he falls to plowing.
“I asked them for the ford across the river:
they mention a philosophy of life.”
The Master said: “It's impossible to live

with birds and beasts as if they were like us.
If I do not associate with people,
with whom shall I associate?”

The two hermits make a joke: your master is the famous K'ung, who travels from state to state, thinking he can direct the course of the waters — he of all people knows the way across! But really, who can change the ways of the world? Instead of withdrawing from one tide here, another there, why not just withdraw from all men, like we have done? And Confucius answers, I can't live with birds and beasts as if they were people. Furthermore (Goodman omits this part), it's precisely because the true Way does not prevail in the world that I must continue to try to set things right.

I don't know whether Goodman wrote his poem during the years in which he was an outspoken opponent of American involvement in Vietnam; I suspect he may have. But in any case, even allowing for the enormous difficulties in interpreting the ancient Confucian texts, the essential issues posed in this brief encounter between two hermits and one sage seem to have changed very little between the first millennium BC and our day. Does it make sense to step into the flood of disorder (by which I think Confucius meant, wrong actions, bad rulers) knowing that one may be tainted or drowned, or is it better to stay pure, leave the waters to rage around those who stir them up, and simply withdraw into the hinterland? (There are many hinterlands, literal and otherwise.) Try to save others and — likely — fail, or save yourself?

We all of us, all who see the disorder, search for our own balance. Some dive in, others plough the fields; most of us teeter somewhere between. Nothing gets resolved.

Editions consulted: Legge: The Four Books. Shanghai: The Chinese Book Company, 1930. Waley: The Analects. New York: Everyman's Library, 2000. Goodman: Collected Poems. New York: Random House, 1974.