1~2
PAUL
FUSSELL, JR.
plainer art." What he wants is a turning from received and thus discred–
ited English and European techniques of focus in favor of honest en–
counters with the stuff of local experience, which I'm afraid he takes to
be uncomplicated. His masters in this enterprise have been Whitman and
W. C . Williams, but he has served neither very well, lacking the sensi–
tivity to idiom of the one and the talent for a rude and consistent
honesty of the other.
The title piece of
To Abolish Children
is a reactionary put-down
of the youth revolution that might perplex but certainly would not
offend George Wallace. The quality of both the thinking - wanned-over
early Fiedler - and the expression can be gauged from this: "The
American adult must battle 'youth' to the death. 'Youth' is a figment
of the American imagination which is destroying America itself."
To
the death
is pure Shapiro; so is
a figment of the imagination.
Indeed,
the main reason Shapiro's Philistine and square-primitivist guise fits him
so snugly, the reason he has worn it so comfortably and so long, is that
he possesses by nature none of the taste and tact of the literary dandies
he has set himself to despise. In
To Abolish Children,
although he is
presuming to discourse about poetry and its relation to public reality,
he addresses us sometimes in the idiom of a Pentagon press conference,
sometimes that of a small-town PTA meeting, and sometimes that of
General Jack Ripper cautioning us against the indiscriminate expendi–
ture of our bodily fluids. We find babu grammatical effects of the sort
committed by the nervous genteel: "All the poets sat on the edge
of their seats while Jarrell, whom everybody had to admit had earned
the right to do so, put together the jigsaw puzzle of modern poetry
before our eyes." Throughout are offered a prose texture which inno–
cently achieves a realization of
lumpen-Amerika
itself.
Shapiro manages to install even Randall Jarrell within this world
of cliche: we are told quite seriously that he "faced the music of the
American Way of Life." Likewise Baudelaire becomes "the alpha and
omega of modern poetry," Eliot "hits the nail on the head," and Frost
manifests a "disinterest in ideologies." Sometimes a more hep idiom
takes over, as when Whitman is described, in the language of the
martini suburbs, as "bright-eyed and bushy-tailed." Then the voice will
shift to that of the rewrite man on the local weekly, and we hear of
"members of the third sex," "the garrison state," and "the world to–
day," or we are infonned that "Ours is one of the greatest periods of
art in history." We are forced to apply to Shapiro what he says of Hart
Crane: "He would have liked to be illiterate but he was only unedu–
cated. He was ... cursed with a touch of the poison of culture, want–
ing to be cured and wanting another bite."
