Those lines were written in anticipation of the sea voyage that would take me and my pregnant young wife to England. Many of these poems were written there, of the oddities around me in a land whose details seemed lifted, page after page, from the illustrations to books of my childhood, and of an America that when glimpsed through the telescope of an overseas edition of Life also seemed quaint. England, where Belloc and Stevenson wrote their Cautionary Tales and Child’s Garden of Verses—models of the light mode—and where the present poet laureate is the supreme neo-Georgian Sir John Betjeman, indulges sheer versifying more freely than our no-nonsense republic, and this collection (titled in its British edition Hoping for a Hoopoe) is colored for me by a green English something that tinged as well my few years in gray Manhattan.
Like any art, light verse aspires to maximum density and an appearance of inevitability. On the other hand, any ordering of language by means of meter and rhyme and their ghosts partakes of that “encrustation of the mechanical upon the organic” which Bergson defined as the essence of the comic. There is a lightness to all poetry, it being so drastic a distillation, and an echo of the primitive chant raised against the darkness. Light verse’s hyper-ordering of language through alliteration, rhyme, and pun is a way of dealing with the universe, an exercise of the Word not entirely lacking in Promethean resonance. High spirits are what Nature endows us with, that we may survive her crushing flux long enough to propagate. It will brighten my second half-century to have these old evidences of my own high spirits still in print.
INTRODUCTION to the 1977 edition of The Poorhouse Fair.
The present is the future of the past. Driving back into Boston the other night, I looked across the river at the not especially spectacular skyline of East Cambridge and saw it as a nineteenth-century man might have seen it: as parabolic and luminous splendor continuously and coolly on fire, as pyramids piled of cubes of light, each high-rise apartment building a gigantic perforated lantern twinned in the black river and crowding the sky with golden outpourings of energy. Even the glowing advertising signs—FOOD FAIR, ELECTRONICS CORPORATION OF AMERICA—appeared magnificent, unaccountable, authoritative in their strangeness. Who had set such a marvel there? Only a race of gods, it seemed, could inhabit and power this ribbon of the future unrolling on the far shore of the Charles. I was amazed, an alien.
Twenty years before, I had stood by a low wall in Shillington, my birthplace in Pennsylvania, and looked down at the razed acres where for all my boyhood the poorhouse had been. I have described it elsewhere:
At the end of our street there was the County Home—an immense yellow poorhouse, set among … orchards and lawns, surrounded by a sandstone wall that was low enough on one side for a child to climb easily, but on the other side offered a drop of twenty or thirty feet, enough to kill you if you fell. Why this should have been, why the poorhouse grounds should have been so deeply recessed on the Philadelphia Avenue side, puzzles me now.… But at the time it seemed perfectly natural, a dreadful pit of space congruent with the pit of time into which the old people (who could be seen circling silently in the shade of the trees whose very tops were below my feet) had been plunged by some mystery that would never touch me. That I too would come to their condition was as unbelievable as that I would really fall and break my neck.2
Now the poorhouse was gone. Out of the hole where it had been, there came to me the desire to write a futuristic novel in commemoration of the fairs that I had attended here as a child.
Backward time, forward time carve the same abyss. The novel of the future seeks to give us in concentrated form the taste of time that flavors all novels, that makes their events more portentous than the events of our lives, where time passes unnoticed, but for the rare shudder, and the mechanical schedule. With superb and dreadful poetry H. G. Wells’s Time Machine moved its hero through time so fast that he “saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day”; upon acceleration “the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness” and “the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space.” The sun, simultaneous symbol of life and of its transience, is visited by the Time Traveller on the verge of its own extinction, when it hangs in the sky “red and very large, halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing with a dull heat.” He pushes thirty million years further on, to when “the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens.” It is bitterly cold. The sea is blood red and tideless. The sole signs of life are green slime and a vague creature out on a sandbank—“it was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about.” How horrifyingly real, to my thirteen-year-old imagination, was that animated-cartoonish survivor (oblong in my mind like an American football, instead of round like an English one) at the end of the world. The vision could not be dismissed; it was a nightmare that, as would my own death, would come to pass.
The totalitarian nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-four, like the Eloi/Morlocks class war of Wells’s fable, would not come to pass, at least in the United States: so it seemed to this patriotic adolescent. Reading Orwell’s novel in my late teens, I was titillated by its anti-Soviet allegory; but the book developed a claw of iron when O’Brien, Big Brother’s spokesman (and a cousin perhaps of my Conner), told the captive hero:
“You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you: not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.”
Orwell knew he was dying as he wrote that terrible imprecation; personal dread drove him to touch futurism’s black center: the death of everything. The ultimate fruit of the future is nonexistence. Not only our egos but all their memorials and progeny are swallowed by the sun’s bloating, by the stars’ slowing, by entropy. Congealed of gas, we return to gas. In Huxley’s Brave New World, which I read at a still later, admittedly less impressionable age, deaths occur, but without immensity. The Savage’s suicide at the end is mockingly objectified, trivialized even: the corpse’s dangling feet, slowly twirling, give the directions of the compass. As in our mundane reality it is others that die, while an attenuated silly sort of life bubbles decadently on. This is, one could say, the vision of the future offered in The Poorhouse Fair.
The novel was written in 1957, as a deliberate anti–Nineteen Eighty-four. Its events, I asserted in the solicitous flap copy that was then left off the first printing, occurred “about twenty years from now”—that is, now, twenty years later. The pre-dating was done with some accidental imprecision. John Hook, the hero, is ninety-four; in the first pages he remembers himself freshly graduated from normal school in “the fat Taft’s administration.” Taft was President from 1909 to 1913; assuming that normal school in Hook’s day meant a two-year post-high-school curriculum, he would be twenty years old upon graduation, which would put his birth between 1889 and 1893, and the time of my novel right around 1984. But I wanted it to fall short of that year, as its political ambience fell short of Nineteen Eighty-four’s dire absolutism; in the Modern Library edition (now out of print) I amended the administration to “the first Roosevelt’s,” Taft’s predecessor. TR’s ample reign (1901–9) places my future’s near rim in the late months of 1975 (McKinley was assassinated in September of 1901) and is amply congruent with the novel’s other muddled checkpoint, the anniversary of the St. Lawrence Seaway, whose opening in 1959 was itself in the haze of the future when I pinned my novel to it. At first I had the anniversary “silver,” the twenty-fifth, which again nudges 1984; for the Modern Library I altered this to “crystal,” which, as the fifteenth, places it too near; “china,” t
he twentieth, is about right, though it sounds brittle. But the entire editorial, as a piece of prediction, lives up to its quaint style.
How do they match up, the world of The Poorhouse Fair and the world that surrounds us now? As long ago as 1964 it seemed necessary to say, in a brief foreword to the Modern Library edition, that
I meant the future it portrays to be less a predictive blueprint than a caricature of contemporary decadence. Though I expected that some details would be rendered obsolete, I did not imagine that Hook’s rhetorical question…“Isn’t it significant, now, that of the three presidents assassinated, all were Re-publican?” might abruptly become impossible. I have let it stand, as a vivid anachronism. I thought, in 1957, fondly composing this latter version of the stoning of St. Stephen, that the future did not radically differ from the past; and this notion now seems itself a product of the entropic years of the Eisenhower lull.
Not only was John Kennedy assassinated in the twenty years prior to 1977, but another President resigned, and the Vietnam Involvement escalated and collapsed, and with it a wave of civil dissent such as has not been seen in this country since the Civil War. It is hard to know what Hook refers to when he says, “This last decade has witnessed the end of the world, if the people would but wake to it.” He cannot be referring to the Arab oil boycott and the rising squeeze on raw materials, for the automobiles that come to the poorhouse seem to be still of Fifties dimensions, and the poorhouse furniture has a reassuring ring of solid stuff, of brass and rubber and frosted glass; the tags on the porch chairs are sturdy metal, and simple “soybean plastics” represent our throwaway multitude of synthetic polymers. Nor can Hook be thinking of the global realignments that place the Soviet bloc with the “have” nations and turn Russia and China to enemies and encourage our own surprising rapprochement with the red dragon, for Truman is still remembered as the President who “gave away China to the Russians.” Something called the “London Pacts with the Eurasian Soviet”—a bow, it may be, to Nineteen Eighty-four’s division of the planet into Eurasia, Eastasia, and Oceania—dominates the peace wherein American population soars “like diffident India’s.” Our population no longer soars, as it turns out. The Poorhouse Fair foresees widespread voyeurism but not the pornography boom; its popular culture has a wrong Hispanic accent, but the brown tint seems right. The romantic vanities of Ted the truck driver and Conner the youthful poorhouse prefect savor more of a Forties boyhood than of our guarded, unenthusiastic Seventies. The characters reflect back through the riots and revolts of the Sixties as if they had never occurred—and so, to an extent, do we. There is a present truth in the sentence “The nation became one of pleasure-seekers; the people continued to live as cells of a body do in the coffin, for the conception ‘America’ had died in their skulls.” There are striking technological omissions: where are the computers, and the Xerox machines? Buddy should be using an electric typewriter, and can his typing table really be porcelain? Drugs, so much in our news and so prominent in Brave New World, figure only as a dose of flavored penicillin exclaimed over as a novelty by an anonymous fairgoer. An even stranger absence is that of television, crucial in Orwell’s scheme of tyranny and the present-day mainstay, the continuous electronic soma, of nursing homes and retirement villages. Nothing is quainter about my old people than their never seeming to watch television, and their having to fall back for entertainment upon reminiscence and mischief. But, if the next seven years bear me out, I was right where Orwell was wrong: no atom bombs have fallen, and the governmental forms of the major Western democracies have not succumbed to Big Brother. In 1977, Hook continues his inward walk down a “long smooth gallery hung with the portraits of presidents of the United States,” though a President Lowenstein has not been one of them.
The main flaw of my “predictive blueprint” inheres in any attempt to predict the course of multiple and intercausative phenomena such as make up the life of a nation or a planet. We can extend the graph curve of present trends and be certain that existent vitalities will decline, but we cannot conceive of the new, of the entities born by intricate synthesis from collisions of the broadly known. Models of the future tend therefore to be streamlined models of the present, the present with its corners cut off. But it is these very corners that move into the center and become the future. They move unexpectedly and perhaps unpredictably, even to the supreme intelligence hypothesized by Laplace, who said, “Nothing would be uncertain for such an intelligence, and the future like the past would be present to its eyes.” Determinist faith in essential predictability has been challenged, recently, by David Layzer, who, deploying the laws of thermodynamics and the concept of phase space, concludes that “not even the ultimate computer—the universe itself—ever contains enough information to completely specify its own future states. The present moment always contains an element of genuine novelty and the future is never wholly predictable.”3 It is such a future, an unpredictable one wreathed in mists as of nostalgia, a fuzzy old-fashioned non-future of a future, that I tried to render in this novel, imitating not the science-fiction classics mentioned above but the obscure poetic Concluding, by Henry Green. The Poorhouse Fair shares with Concluding an embarrassing number of particulars: an old estate housing a vague state-run institution (a girls’ school, in Green’s case), a not-too-distant time-to-come (fifty-five years hence, Concluding’s jacket flap stated in 1948), an elderly monosyllabic hero (Mr. Rock), a multilevelled action drifting through one day’s time, a holiday (Green’s fête, Founder’s Day, even falls, like the poorhouse fair, on a Wednesday), heraldic animals, much meteorological detail, and a willful impressionist style.
—Old and deaf, half blind, Mr Rock said about himself, the air raw in his throat. Nevertheless he saw plain how Ted was not ringed in by fog. For the goose posed staring, head to one side, with a single eye, straight past the house, up into the fog bank which had made all daylight deaf beneath, and beyond which, at some clear height, Mr Rock knew now there must be a flight of birds fast winging,—Ted knows where, he thought.
That is from Green’s first page; this is from mine:
In the cool wash of early sun the individual strands of osier compounding the chairs stood out sharply; arched like separate serpents springing up and turning again into the knit of the wickerwork. An unusual glint of metal pierced the lenient wall of Hook’s eyes and struck into his brain, which urged his body closer, to inspect.
The innocently bold eclecticism of my youth rouses my envy now. A million or more published words later, my sentences are less purely mine than these stolen from Green, with their winsome inversions confident as a child’s speech (“With the eye it was not difficult to follow the shining squares all the way down the line”) and their soft straining to combine sensual “touch” and subjective mythifying (“Despite the low orange sun, still wet from its dawning, crescents of mist like the webs of tent caterpillars adhered in the crotches of the hills”).
The novel, reread, seems best when it deals with John Hook and at its weakest with Conner; the antagonists rotate the novel in and out of credibility. Conner, in his thirties, was too young for me to understand; what goes on in his cupola I guessed at as I guessed at what went on in the principal’s office of my high school. (“A principle is a rule,” the teachers used to tell us, “but the principal is your pal.”) A nervous self-conscious shyness, and maneuvering around that shyness, dominate Conner and Buddy as if they were adolescents. Conner is a high-school goody-goody, trying to make his way among sardonic rowdies, tied by pious ambition to invisible grown-ups—invisible like the grown-ups in Peanuts, like the human beings in Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog.” He should have been more. Whereas Hook’s antiquity shrinks him to the scope of my still basically childish imagination. His physical and visual impairments impose the same magical discontinuities that a child’s handicaps of perspective and ability do. Like a child he is in love with the world and hopes that the world loves him. He is alert for clues, though blind to patterns. His
perceptual style controls the book; the parakeet, the rabbit on the lawn, the “silver zeppelins” of Lucas’s pigs (there are swine in Green, too) are seized upon with relief, as something alive but intelligible, by the presiding, animistic imagination. The flap copy went:
Animals haunt the landscape, and inanimate objects—a sandstone wall, a row of horsechestnut trees, a pile of pebbles—strain wordlessly toward the humans, who act out their quarrels of tradition versus progress, benevolence versus pride, on a ground riddled with omens and overborne by a massive, variable sky. The author seems to separate sense and existence; the chatter of the mob that comes to the fair in its sense illustrates the national decay that obsesses the pensioners, yet in its existence, isolated by bits in the air, shares with grass and stones a positive, even cheering, anima.
There is, then, a philosophical ambition here: an attempt, no less, to present the meaning of being alive, as conveyed by its sensations. Our eager innate life, rebounding from the exterior world, affirms itself, and the quality of affirmation is taken to be extrinsic, immanent, divine. I needed God to exist. My claim that the banal American chatter that dissolves the novel at the end manifests “a positive, even cheering, anima” is a leap of aesthetic faith sheerly—a child’s delight in being up late, eating licorice while grown-up conversations make a sky of safety above his head, recalled fifteen years later and forcibly assigned a clinching position in an argument sketched, I see now, along Thomist lines. Like a Thomist proof the novel moves from proposition to objections to counterobjections. The distinction between essence and being (essentia and ens) I took from Saint Thomas; with his help I sought to consecrate, to baptize into American religiosity, those three very atheistical Englishmen, Wells, Orwell, and Henry Green. The original manuscript ended a page sooner, upon the Chestertonian lament “to guard the gates of the deserted kingdom.” Small wonder the ending baffled what were to have been the book’s publishers; good luck or Providence led me to an editor, Stewart Richardson, and a publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, who to my lasting gratitude printed this book in a format as exquisite as my intentions, my text unaltered.