The Revolt of the Pendulum (10 page)

With Shakespeare, Donne and Marvell she has merely to convince her students, fresh from their gender studies, that a poet could call a woman his mistress without belittling her. With Herbert she
has to convince them that a poet could feel the same passion about God. (‘We follow the path of the all-too-human quester as he advances towards God, then retreats in confusion.’ That
‘we’ could be a bit optimistic, but she might get lucky.) One of her best attributes is well brought out: her refusal to modernise the past. Her thorough background in cultural history
– the Italians, who should be proud of her parentage, would call her
preparatissima
– is always in play. Her entertaining wealth of up-to-date pop-culture allusion is merely the
top dressing, and she is usually careful not to strain after a faddish point. In her exemplary analysis of Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, for example, she could easily have referred to
the last scene of
Planet of the Apes
, when Charlton Heston looks up at Liberty’s head just as the Traveller from an Antique Land looked up at the truncated legs of stone. I was rather
expecting her to. Perhaps she has realised, however, that the pace of forgetfulness is always accelerating, and that we have moved from an era of people who have never heard of Shelley to an era of
people who have never heard of Charlton Heston.

When she calls Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’ ‘the greatest poem of the twentieth century’ she makes one of her few sweeping statements. It isn’t a bad one, but
it doesn’t do enough to offset an equally sweeping question from us. When the book moves towards modern times it moves towards America. Whatever happened to the old world it left behind?
After Coleridge (a bold and convincing interpretation of ‘Kubla Khan’), Yeats is the last European, living or dead, to get an entry. Still, there are probably copyright reasons for
choosing nothing by, say, Auden, and meanwhile there is the compensation of the way she can treat great American poets as accomplished artists without merely abetting the worship of icons. This
coolly enthusiastic emphasis shows up clearly in her detailed admiration for Emily Dickinson. Paglia can see the epic in the miniature: an especially important critical gift when it comes to a poet
who could enamel the inside of a raindrop. One would be glad to have a complete Dickinson annotated by Paglia. An utter contrast of destinies, it would be a meeting of true minds. Paglia, too, has
a kind of solitude, though it might not sound that way. The media attention she attracts does little to modify her opinions. That might be partly why she attracts so much of it. The proud motto of
every suckerfish is: we swim with sharks.

But the most threatening thing about her, from the American viewpoint, is that she refuses to treat the arts as an instrument of civil rights. Without talent, no entitlement. She has the powers
of discrimination to show what talent is – powers that add up to a talent in themselves. A critical scope that can trace the intensity uniting different artistic fields is not unprecedented
in America, but she is an unusually well-equipped exponent of it. Making a solid attempt to pin down the sliding meanings of Wallace Stevens’s little poem ‘Disillusionment at Ten
O’Clock’, she brings in exactly the right comparison: a piano piece by Satie. She compares the poem’s ‘red weather’ with a Gaugin seascape: right again. These
comparisons help to define the post-Impressionist impulse from which all the verbal music of Stevens’s Blue Guitar emerged, while incidentally reminding us that Paglia, before she made this
bid on behalf of poetry, did the same for painting, and with the same treasury of knowledge to back up her endeavour. But above all, her range of allusion helps to show what was in Stevens’s
head: the concentration of multiple sensitivities that propelled his seeming facility. ‘Under enchantment by imagination, space and time expand, melt, and cease to exist.’ Nobody has a
right to a creative mind like his. It’s a gift.

Students expecting a poem by Maya Angelou will find that this book is less inclusive than the average line-up for Inauguration Day. But there is a poem by Langston Hughes; and, even better,
there is ‘Georgia Dusk’, by Jean Toomer. A featured player in the Harlem Renaissance of the early 1920s, Toomer transmuted the heritage of southern slavery into music. So did the blues,
but Toomer’s music was all verbal. He was a meticulous technician, which is probably the main reason why his name has faded. Paglia does a lot to bring it back, but she might have done even
more. She concedes too much by saying his ‘flowery, courtly diction’ was more Victorian than modernist. The same might have been said of John Crowe Ransom, and with equal inaccuracy.
Toomer sounds to me like a bridge through time from Elinor Wylie, whom Paglia doesn’t mention, to Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, neither of whom she mentions either.

If she has a deaf spot, it lies on that wing. Favouring, with good reason, the American vernacular, she tends to set it up as something that supersedes European formality, as if it were possible
for a poem to be over-constructed. But it can’t. It can only be underpowered. If she had paid the same pin-point attention to the complex interplay within Toomer’s four-square quatrains
as she pays to William Carlos Williams’s free verse in ‘The Wheelbarrow’, she would have been able to show how a superficially mechanical form can intensify conversational rhythms
by the tightness with which it contains them. It would have been a useful generosity. Anthony Hecht’s reputation was injured when Helen Vendler found his forms limiting. On the contrary, they
were limitless. As for Wilbur, his fastidiously carpentered post-war poems were part of the American liberation of Europe. Whether that liberation was a new stage in American cultural
imperialism’s road to conquest remains a nice question. One would like to have heard her answer. Such a discussion would lie well within her scope. But our disappointment that she stops short
is a sign of her achievement. It we want a book to do more than what it does, that’s a condemnation. If we want it to do more
of
what it does, that’s an endorsement.

Occasionally there is cause for worry that her young students might listen too well. Three short poems by Theodore Roethke are praised without any warning that most of his longer poems, if the
reader goes in search of them, will prove to be helpless echoes of bigger names. Ambition undid him, as it has undone many another American poet infected by the national delusion that the arts can
have a Major League. The short poem by Frank O’Hara should have been marked with a caveat: anything longer by the same poet will be found to have a lot less in it, because the urge to find a
verbal equivalent for the apparent freedom of New York abstract expressionist painting led him to believe that he could mean everything by saying anything. Nor are we told that Robert Lowell would
spend the later and incoherently copious part of his career making sure that he would never again attain the rhetorical magnificence of the opening lines of ‘Man and Wife’. But Paglia
knows why, and how, those lines are magnificent: and in Lowell’s case, among her specific remarks, there is a general one that typifies her knack of extending an aesthetic question into the
moral sphere. Lowell’s ‘confessional’ streak insulted his loved ones. The same question is posed again by Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’, an agonised masterpiece by
which Paglia is driven to a stretch of critical writing that stands out for its richness even in a rich book.

Applying her particularised admiration to rescue the poem from those who cite it as a mantra, Paglia points out an awkward truth about Plath as a feminist Winged Victory: that her poetry was in
‘erudite engagement with canonical male writers’. A still more awkward truth is that the manner of Plath’s suicide helped to set up her husband Ted Hughes as an abuser of women.
Paglia defends Hughes against Plath, a defence that few feminists have dared to undertake. She also defends Plath’s father against Plath, which might seem a quixotic move in view of the
poem’s subject matter, but does help to make the point that Plath, by calling her father a Nazi and identifying herself with millions of helpless victims, was personalising the Holocaust in a
way that only her psychic disturbance could excuse. Leaving out the possibility that Plath might have been
saying
she was nuts, Paglia does Plath the honour of taking her at her word. But
you can’t do her that honour without bringing her down off her pedestal. The poet used her unquestionable talent to say some very questionable things, and there’s no way out of it.
Paglia is tough enough to accept that conclusion: tough enough, that is, not to complain when she winds up all alone.

She seems to enjoy being alone. It’s a handy trait for the sort of thinker who can’t see an orthodoxy form without wanting not to be part of it. Google her for half an hour and you
will find her fighting battles with other feminists all over cyberspace. Telling us how she became, at the age of four, a ‘lifelong idolator of pagan goddesses’ after seeing Ava Gardner
in
Showboat
, she tells us why she is less than thrilled with Madonna. It’s a view I share, but at least Madonna manufactured herself. Ava Gardner from South Carolina was manufactured
in a Hollywood studio, as she was the first to admit. And what is Paglia doing, saying that an actress as gifted as Anne Heche has ‘the mentality of a pancake’? How many pancake brains
could do what Heche did with David Mamet’s dialogue in
Wag the Dog
? And what about her performance in
One Kill
? No doubt Heche has been stuck with a few bad gigs, but Paglia, of
all people, must be well aware that being an actress is not the same safe ride as being the tenured University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in
Philadelphia.

Paglia by now should be famous enough to start throttling back on some of the stuff she is famous for. She might make a start with bitchery, for which she has a taste but no touch. The media
want snide remarks from her the same way that the Sahara wants rain. But writers capable of developing a nuanced position over the length of an essay should not be tempted into believing that they
can sum it up in a sound-bite. Liberal orthodoxy will always need opposing, but not on the basis that all its points are self-evidently absurd. According to Paglia, gun abuse is a quirk of the
sexually dysfunctional. That might be right, but people aren’t necessarily deluded when they want a ban for the sort of gun that can kill a dozen people in half a minute. Waiting until
everybody is sexually functional would be a long time to hold your breath.

Nor does Paglia’s useful conviction that feminism, as an ideology, is as debilitating for individual responsibility as any other ideology make it true that women are now out of the woods.
Only the misapprehension that she can be wise like lightning could explain her brief appearance, in
Inside Deep Throat
, to tell us that the cultural artefact in question was ‘an
epochal moment in the history of modern sexuality’. On the contrary, it was a moronic moment in the history of exploitation movies made by people so untalented that they can’t be
convincing even when they masturbate.

But all these posturings by the madly glamorous Paglia happen only because, in the electrified frenzy of the epochal moment, she forgets that the light-storm of publicity makes her part of the
world of images. In her mind, if not yet in her more excitable membranes, she knows better than to mistake that world for the real one. This book on poetry is aimed at a generation of young people
who, knowing nothing except images, are cut off from ‘the mother ship’ of culture. The mother ship was first mentioned in her 2002 lecture called ‘The Magic of Images’. In
the same lecture, she put down the marker that led to this book. ‘The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words.’ She can say that again, and let’s hope she does,
in a longer edition of a book that shows her at her true worth. When you have proved that you can cut the mustard, it’s time to cut the malarkey.

New York Times
, March 27, 2005

Postscript

One way of summing up Camille Paglia would be to say that she looks like the classiest number in the bar until the fight breaks out. It isn’t that she doesn’t
watch her words: she watches them to make sure they are going the wrong way. One is forced to conclude that publicity is the sea in which she swims, beating it to a phosphorescent froth. But we
should not let her effulgence blind us to her importance.
Break, Blow, Burn
is an important book in a movement we should all favour: the movement to restore the ideal of the self-contained
poem to a superior position over the more marketable notion of poetry as a generalized and infinitely teachable commodity. I thought my review had unmistakably praised her for this initiative, so I
was quite stunned to find some of the American cultural bloggers accusing me of having done a knife-job. The noisiest bloggers are often the most stupid, and probably the worst you can say of
Camille Paglia is that she sometimes sounds as if she might like to hang out with them, always granted that hanging out is something they ever do. You would expect someone with so formidable a mind
to fight shy of petty quarrels. I can think of no contemporary cultural figure who would so benefit from being less available. She should stay in more.

THE GUIDEBOOK DETECTIVES

If you’ve spent a couple of years being unable to get past the opening chapter of one of the later novels of Henry James, it’s hard to resist the idea that there
might be a more easily enjoyable version of literature: a crime novel, for example. After all, quite a few literary masterpieces spend much of their turgid wordage being almost as contrived as any
crime novel you’ve ever raced through. On page thirteen of my edition of
The Wings of the Dove
, Kate Croy is waiting for her father to appear. ‘He had not at present come down
from his room, which she knew to be above the one they were in . . .’ But of course she knew that; knew it so well that she wouldn’t have to think about it; she is only thinking about
it so she can tell us. If a narrative is going to be as clumsy as that, can’t it have some guns?