p.343:
Ireland and the US both gained their independence from Great
Britain, though we did it 190 years before the writing of this poem and the
Irish did it just 40-some years before. The Brits are the “masters” here, and the
implication is that having fought and won their freedom in 1919, nothing has
really changed for the Irish. Ireland still struggles, while in London the
double-decker buses still trundle past Trafalgar Square, where English
prosperity reigns as always. The poem begins in establishing this common ground
between the Irish and Americans. So, the poem is partially about the
Irish/American cultural relationship, but the key lines move it into a critique
of American culture: “We can’t help you.” Why? “Your filthy cousins will come
around to you, / barely able to read.” While cousins, we are “filthy” and functionally illiterate and thus
have little to offer in the way of high culture to a people producing “masters”
in the “high Irish style.” Notice the repetition of “masters”? The meaning has
morphed away from the first use, referring to the Brits as owners, virtual
slave-holders over the Irish even, certainly the ones historically in political
and economic control. The second use refers to the high literary accomplishment
of the Irish masters, poets and masters of the magnificent Irish-inflected
English, embedded in the politically ravaged “foul ground” of the great green island.
The first use of “master” is filled with irony and more than a touch of
contempt for political/economic domination. The second use is literal; the
great writers of indigenous Irish are true cultural masters. This poem is
interesting in how it flashes so abruptly with irony, with fairly crude
condemnation, and with fairly exalted praise.
It is marked most of all by an underlying sense of artistic
elitism. To call Americans “filthy” is actually pretty strong stuff; meaning something
like “low” or “unwashed.” Consequently all of the world-wide influence that
American culture had garnered through the twentieth century—jazz, McDonald’s
and Coca-Cola, Broadway musicals, all of our folk arts—is painted with a
single, broad sweep: low and unwashed, not serious, implying that we might imagine
it associated with Negroes, hillbillies, gangsters, shallow Philistine
business-men in plaid suits, all lumped into an abrupt, bigoted dismissal. He does something similar with Ireland: ruin and squalor predominate, the enemies of fine accomplishment, but out of that have nevertheless arisen moments of rarified art.
Berryman’s technique can sometimes be bafflingly flat and
dull, but even the highest, most brilliant literary master has those days. He just
gets rid of the stuff, either by cramming it in a folder and hiding it in some forgotten
drawer, or crumpling and flinging it into a trash can. B’s main issue in The Dream Songs is that in putting the
volumes together, he wasn’t ruthless enough with his crappier work. Bad poems
that should have been thrown out weren’t thrown out. Instead, they were
inexplicably published, probably because when it came time to engage in this
work, his mental faculties and physical vitality were ravaged. But when he’s
good, he can be really good, and an endless lineup of critics and writers have
kept their attention on his work over the last half century because of that. He’s
almost universally recognized as one of the great American stylists. His
daring, candid inventiveness, his jarring juxtapositions, the linguistic
collisions, the collage aspect of his work, and his sensitivity to semantic
nuance are all pretty impressive, and they are emblematic, even defining, in
terms of his artistic moment. This poem, for instance, has a neat take on a
single word, “master,” and the use he makes of that is great in how it arranges
and frames the progression of the poem’s ideas. But I’m acutely aware at the
moment that there’s also this other thing all through his work that begins to
really grate, especially in the kind of sustained engagement that I’ve had with
it for going on a year now. It’s not stylistic, it’s not about technique, not
about literary brilliance, and it’s not about the confessional record of
addiction, physical decline, age, humiliation, an appetite for sex and booze,
racist and misogynistic bigotry, all that. I can deal with all that. What
grates on me more than anything else is this snotty elitism, coupled with an
obsequious fawning at the feet of those who have achieved membership in the
Elite Pantheon of the Greats, which he so pins his hopes on joining. This poem
is governed by that. The English are masters, but of a brutalizing and vulgar
kind of self-absorbed mastery—at least that’s the implication I detect. The Americans
are simply low and filthy, because their vast democratic energy obviates the
kind of titled literary exclusion that B. professes to value. That literary exclusion is rarified, and more than anything else it’s patrician and aristocratic. To
say this must sound odd in Berryman’s case, because he’s such an obvious,
self-professed schmuck. And it sounds odd to ascribe this kind of literary
aristocracy to Irish literature also because that literature and language is so
indigenous and has such a folkish quality. But this is all part of B.’s overall
comfort with irony. Ultimately, though, there is an unreachable, unstainable
reserve regarding just one thing with him: Some masters have made it, and once
they’ve made it, they’re untouchable. He grovels in front of that, but also in
proclaiming them as masters he makes a bid at inclusion in their membership,
because only the highly educated elite are capable of recognizing other elites.
He’s the groveling aristocrat, the filthy-born American who has worked his way
into the company of the exalted. B. doesn’t let go of this, and probably can’t
let go of it. It’s what enables the kind of sweeping proclamations he tosses
off here.
Agreed
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