144
PAUL FUSSELL, JR.
putting it), but actually they naively capitulate to its norms. Sonnet VIII
("How Do I Love You?") is an example. The force of the rigid rhym–
ing system of the sestet invites Shapiro, devoid as he is of language
resources, to juxtapose warring idioms, and we end with a mixture,
destructive rather than explosive, of Mrs. Browning, Pope, Edna Millay,
the Beatles and Auden:
How do I love you? Is it just a game
To love your sadness and possess your name?
And now you have no reason to be sad
Do I lose the little of you that I had?
And if I've lost you who is there to blame?
(Faulty communications are my middle name).
Indeed. The reason the third and fourth lines have to be read at least
twice is Shapiro's omission of
that
in his anxiety - which has no reason–
able cause in one genuinely unworried about "literature" - not to ex–
ceed the decasyllabic limit
in
contiguous lines.
But one exposes the sleaziness of Shapiro's achievement at the same
time that one doesn't really dislike the familiar character he has under–
taken to play. It is the character of the bumbling, well-intentioned
Good American, too good to be wasted in the aluminum-siding busi–
ness, but not of course good enough to compete with sensibilities of real
literary delicacy and accuracy. Shapiro has carefully made himself into
a Sherwood Anderson or Sinclair Lewis character, the kind of American
who thinks opera silly but who is willing, if pressed, to contribute hand–
somely to his local "Cultural Center." Shapiro thinks
Herzog
a "bril–
liant novel"; Henry Miller seems to him a great writer; he considers
M. B. Tolson a distinguished poet who has not made it only because
"critics" can't stand poets who are black. In folk judgments like these,
Shapiro comes to resemble a sort of Yvor Winters reversed. In both, the
program has quite corrupted the perceptions, and perhaps it is a similar
kind of American parochialism, with all its invitations to crankhood,
that has actuated both.
The side of Shapiro that is most likable he shows us in the best
piece in
To Abolish Children,
a rambling, readable anti-essay titled "A
Malebolge
of Fourteen Hundred Books." Here he talks about his favorite
books in his library, considering them not according to any
a priori
system of groupings familiar in critical practice, but alphabetically, as
they stand on the shelves. Here we see him not thinking or formulating,
which he does badly, but recalling, embracing and sentimentalizing,
which he does convincingly once he escapes from some aristocratic
literary form with which he is uneasily quarreling. Honesty and human–
ity are in this piece, and a relative freedom from his usual embarrass-
