#340

The secret is not praise. It’s just being accepted

as something like the figure where you put your worth

anywhere on the bloody earth,

especially abroad. We must keep our spirits up

anyhow. Of course, praise is nice too,

particularly when it comes to a stop.

When it comes to a stop, so one can think ‘Yes, that happened.’

It’s not so good while going on: an element of incredulity

enters & dominates.

The shadows of the gray ash on my page,

I can’t get out of this either with youth or age,

I’m stuck with middle.

Such hard work demands such international thanks

besides better relations with one’s various banks,

slightly better.

So many have forgotten me, I forget some

and there will never come a congregation

to see needing Henry home.

All I can think of at the moment in response to this poem is how spoiled we can get sometimes. Okay. The speaker of this poem has a right to a certain confidence in the attention he’s gotten. The Pulitzer will confer that to some degree, I suspect. I grant that. And the rumination on what all that attention brings to one and what it is worth, all that, what kind of attitude one is supposed to take toward accolades and reputation—if it’s where the speaker is at, then that’s the world he lives in and examining that world is legit. It’s this line that stirs me up a bit: “Such hard work demands such international thanks.” Is there an overtone of entitlement here? I don’t know. I wonder. Plenty of writers with all the necessary talent and work ethic have gone unnoticed by the international community. Something is bothering me about the assumption that talent and hard work will always win the day; therefore, if you do garner prizes, books, academic appointments, worldwide fame, these things come only because you earned them through your hard work and talent. Nothing of luck, social networking, butt-kissing, tired editors retreating into fad and fashion, daddy’s golfing and country club acquaintances, marketing, empty bullshit. Luck. Yes, talent, determination and savvy balance the scales. Hard work is one important element. But it’s not the only one. It doesn’t lead inevitably to international thanks, so to demand such makes me wonder if this whole sentiment isn’t a bit dismissive of the non-elect. I’m probably being oversensitive, acting like such a bitter non-elect myself at the moment. I’ll keep working.

A week or two ago I ran into an essay that B. wrote. He wrote lots of essays. I don’t even recall at the moment what it was about—some poet—but that’s not important. It was the tone of the thing, and I had mixed reactions to it. It glowed with this aura of unassailable authority and gravitas. The expert speaks. I’m not even going to dig up the essay and give excerpts in support, which would be the rigorous next step after such an audacious claim. All that matters at the moment is that I had a feeling about it. It struck me as aristocratic in approach, condescending to the reader even as it communicated an esoteric knowledge from its rarified academic hothouse—which is actually to the good. I admire that. It wasn’t his language or his deep and specialized knowledge. It was his tone. And I realize too that it was mainly a mannerism, a mannerism situated in a culture where admiration for intellectual pursuits had some cultural currency left. (Listen to a recording of Sylvia Plath reading her poetry sometime. Important, passionate, wrenching poetry. But her delivery strikes my current sensibilities as almost completely insufferable—except that it’s all mannerism, faddish in its moment in the 1950s, superficial. [My dad told me a story of hearing a teacher admonish one of her students, back in the 50s, about the way the girl pronounced “Tuesday.” “Pronounce it ‘Chewsday,’” she said.] In the end that nonsense doesn’t matter. Plath’s poem is still great.) Professors are still sought for their knowledge, so the cultural appeal to intellectuals is not gone. I hear such and such a professor being interviewed about anything and everything on NPR almost every morning. But I think that a cultural tolerance for elitist intellectual mannerisms has dissipated a lot in the last half century. When I hear such things, or feel it when I read, my response is a reflexive go fuck yourself and my middle finger stands up straight, with little more volition than I might have over goose bumps or a sneeze. Shine a flashlight in my eyes and my pupils contract; I have no control over it. I have to respond to these convulsive anti-intellectualist hypos like Ismael: “it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off.” Crank that finger down, I’m able to tell myself out of sheer moral principle. Shut your yap. Get over it. I do get over it; it’s not like I’m stuck in a rut of raging bitterness over intellectualist posing. I’m just talking. But, yeah, the assumptions underlying that line triggered this sneeze.

I’m thinking it’s probably because I so despise aristocrats, entitled snobbery, elitism, posing, and the social machinery that supports such orientation. It’s not the content, and it’s not about complex or subtle or rarified thinking at all. It’s not the big words. It’s the tone, the orientation toward the reader or listener, a tone that justifies itself through an ostentatious demonstration of capital—money, power, status. I have it; you don’t. Expensive sports cars and expensive suits rankle me. I’m really not impressed by your diamonds, and you need to believe that if you care anything at all about me. I respect your hard work and the cultural capital it garnered for you. But keep it down.

Back in college, my friend and I were talking about some praise he had gotten, for what I don’t remember. He had rejected it, and we were close enough that he admitted to me that he didn’t want the praise because he didn’t respect the source. And this wasn’t point-specific; it was broader, more general. He basically acknowledged no peer to whom he could extend admiration enough to permit that person to offer him praise. Yikes, I thought at the time, though in retrospect this turned out to be just a young moment. He’s grown into a caring, responsible adult, with more than enough humility. But this was the same adolescent movement that prompts B. into his same admission: “an element of incredulity / enters & dominates.” Partly this is a lack of faith in his own work, the shadow or gray ash on the page. But I also sense a countervailing compensation of elitist arrogance: I can’t believe they don’t want something, is what he’s saying. They want what I have, the peons. Silk suit, diamond studded. He’s made it to that level of articulated tone that Pynchon so perfectly skewers in Gravity’s Rainbow: “Eastern prep-school voices, pronouncing asshole with a certain sphinctering of the lips so it comes out ehisshehwle.” The point is that they’re the ehisshehwles, eh? Sorry, but Plath sounds to me like a full-blown lady-ehisshehwle when she reads “Daddy.” B. does a bit here too.

Then there’s that bit of whining right at the end that no one recognizes it: Woe is me. I’m being forgotten. That’s another issue for another day.