But ended differently: when the Prince kissed her on the lips
She wiped her lips
And with a little moue . . .
Turned over and went back to sleep.
[CP, 308]
Despite these potential failures and rejections, Jarrell remained both imaginatively and practically dedicated to the possibility of transformation. What Fred Chappell, his colleague at Greensboro, has said about his poems is also true of his classroom: "In Jarrell's poems the discourse of books and pictures and statues and buildings and music impinges upon the characters and makes a real difference in their lives." 46
To assess this real difference, emphasized repeatedly by his students, is to understand not only Jarrell's investment in his work as a teacher but also to understand what poetry meant to young women at a small-town college at midcentury. I suggest that the now-suspect notion of the transformative power of poetry, which motivated Jarrell's commitment and which he knew was rooted in a highly romantic ethos, seemed viable at Greensboro precisely because of the feminine nature of the institution and its students. Robert Watson told me that Jarrell "hated teaching at Princeton. Their attitude was, 'Show me. I'm bright. I'm very bright. I may be brighter than you are. I know I am going to be much richer than you are and more powerful.'" 47 He spent his time there answering challenges that distracted attention from the poetry. The Greensboro women were not without questions, nor did Jarrell simply hold forth in the classroom. On the contrary, he customarily encouraged discussion and response. But the Princeton experience was, for Jarrell, infected with the competitive atmosphere of professional criticism in ways that Greensboro was not. In preferring his quiet principality at Greensboro, then, he was opting out of that particular contest. His was not merely a negative choice or evasion, however; it was taking a stand.
If the history of New Criticism's influence on the academy may be seen as a series of strategems to separate the reading of poetry from the emotional, the personal, the feminine, and all taint of the self-indulgent, then Jarrell's choice seeks to restore gravity to what had been deemed trifling. In the same letter to Allen Tate in which he explains his "semifeminine mind," he reports an anecdote about a conversation with Philip Rice. "Rice was talking the other day about women--and Southerners, as I remember--taking people just as people, and putting too much importance on that, instead of considering mostly their ideas . . . and I laughed to myself and thought, 'I should hope.'" (L, 21) Jarrell's defense of the particular and ordinary human being, linked paradigmatically to southerners and women even in this early letter, is the sign of his opposition to a programmatic criticism that makes expertise in critical vocabulary and "ideas" necessary concomitants of reading, and thus the province of sophisticated male experts. Did he, in his defense of the feminine, romanticize women in ways that make his defense of them suspect? Considered from some perspectives, the answer must be yes. Heather Ross Miller recalls that "it was always a shock for him to discover how much we knew about mules and sex and hard work and other crudities." 48 Suzanne Rodgers Bush (class of 1955) remembers having to educate him about majorettes and cheerleaders: it was possible to lead cheers and be a serious student of poetry. 49 Although he took these lessons with grace and good humor, he remained faithful to an idealized femininity that was unspoiled and humble. To assume that he would therefore see the women as inferior, however, is seriously to misapprehend his principles. Jarrell consistently affirmed the superiority of unspoiled humility, particularly that of readers unspoiled by the sophistications of the critical profession and humble before artistic achievement. He wished himself to be such a reader. His culture, in any case, presented him with narrow choices: to be attached to the things he was attached to was, within his time, to be "semifeminine" in one's preferences. To be a poet at all, as Frank Lentricchia has demonstrated, was to wrestle with anxieties about gender. 50 Sentimentality about women's education looks daring in that context.
For the women at Greensboro, the Jarrell era was not sentimental, but thrilling. The Woman's College sponsored a student-edited literary magazine, Coraddi, that published the writing not only of Greensboro students but of students all over the country. The 1947 issue included work by Anthony Hecht, Donald Justice, and Flannery O'Connor; the 1948 issue included Guy Davenport and "Jim" Dickey; the 1951, Donald Hall. At a yearly Arts Forum, student writing was discussed by visiting artists and critics. Between the years 1944 and 1964 visitors included Lowell, Lionel Trilling, Robert Frost, Robie Macauley, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, Jean Stafford, R. P. Blackmur, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bowen, Karl Shapiro, John Dos Passos, Caroline Gordon, and Adrienne Rich. 51 Every year, the largest room on campus was filled to capacity, and not only by the students who considered themselves artsy but by the Home Ec. and Phys. Ed. students as well. These were the wonder years; every teacher or student I spoke to expressed a sense of astonishment that this could have been happening at Greensboro, never a wealthy school. The students were the beneficiaries of the network of Jarrell's and other faculty members' professional contacts. Some undoubtedly came to the Arts Forum the way another student might go to a football game, as something to do. Some may have been lured by the famous names, the phenomenon of poet-as-celebrity. These are motives with which Jarrell would have had little patience. He wanted his students to see and hear as people the poets whose poems they were reading. Poetry was to be an ordinary occupation, as Robert Watson put it: "People like Randall and Peter [Taylor] expected their students to turn out to be writers. . . . It was the natural thing to do. It wasn't something special and different that you were doing." 52 The visiting poets read and discussed the students' poems as if they mattered--and to Jarrell they did. He was, Betty Watson said, "wild with joy when he liked something." 53
What Jarrell kept in the foreground of his teaching, in the classroom and out, was the idea of reading and writing poetry as a normal human activity. "Mr. Jarrell was good," as Suzanne Rodgers Bush put it, "for us ordinary students." 54 Pritchard notes that "his method was unacademic, insofar as he did nothing more complicated--or more difficult--than to read poems and stories aloud and then discuss them with his students . . . [who] were held by the look of his face and the sound of his voice." 55 His methods were intense and perceptive appreciation, excited praise, an enactment of the series of discoveries that careful reading revealed. The "ordinary" student, Mrs. Bush, recalled with pleasure that as she wrote her examinations she was quoting the poems from memory, so strongly had her teacher's readings impressed her. Forty years later, she was still able to quote lines from poetry she studied under Jarrell. 56 In the context of modernism's argument for poetry as a specialized language requiring specialized techniques of analysis--a context that worked to separate form from content and erudite from common readers--Jarrell's method looks retrogressive, a throwback to the "appreciative" writing of the previous century. His method was in fact a conscious protest against the elevation of poetry to a "members only" status. And paradoxically his insistence on the ordinariness of poetry worked simultaneously to restore an aura of enchantment around poetry, a point not lost on his students. Heather Ross Miller detects a subversive underside to the story of Sleeping Beauty: "the possibility of danger: the dangerous bride. You remember what happened to all those first princes who tried to get through the thorns to her? . . . [Jarrell] certainly brought to me the strong sense of something going on, an enchantment, that was both beautiful and dangerous--and you'd better be careful how you woke that thing up." 57 It is the interdependence of the enchanted and the quotidian ("What a girl called 'the dailiness of life,'" as he expresses it in "Well Water" [CP, 300]) that shaped Jarrell's writing and teaching.
At the conclusion of "Poets, Critics, and Readers," Jarrell writes, "The work of art, Rilke said, says to us always: You must change your life" (K, 318; Jarrell's emphasis). Jarrell knew that such metamorphosis, though a powerful possibility, would remain for most merely that--a possibility. But on the strength of that possibility he imagined his students waking up not as brides, voters, and shoppers, but as readers and poets. Contra James Joyce, he restored the idea of poetry for ladies, but with the difference that Jarrell did not consider "ladies" a derogatory term. A point that has been made repeatedly in recent years--and with considerable force of persuasion--is that Jarrell sentimentalized women, appropriated them, and impersonated them. 58 Another interpretation, one that does not necessarily foreclose those readings, is that Jarrell chose to align himself with the feminine as a means of advocating values that had been dismissed by the modernist movement. The Lost World, Jarrell's last volume of poetry, is a compendium of the forbidden sentimental subjects--animals, women, children, nostalgia--tough-minded modernism thought it had left behind. And, as James Longenbach has remarked, Jarrell is now speaking in his own voice, not through a female mask. 59 These are, I believe, his best poems; they evince a settled air of accepting his own sentimentality and a finely nuanced understanding of its consolations and liabilities. These would include the danger of writing poetry that would be dismissed as self-indulgent and tear-jerking. In a 1942 appreciation of Marianne Moore's What Are Years, Jarrell concludes by noting the usual objection to her poems: "'They are so small.'" "Yes," he responds, "they are as small as those animals which save the foolish heroes of fairy tales--which can save only the heroes, because they are too small not to have been disregarded by everyone else." (PA, 184) Jarrell might be said to have made a speciality of regarding what others disregarded. His oppositional stance is similarly "small" in dimension. Writing his poems, crafting his essays, teaching his students, he undramatically but persistently labored to deflate the self-importance, pretension, and mystification that separated the reader from her book.
Gail McDonald, Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is the author of Learning to be Modern: Pound, Eliot, and the American University . She is currently completing a book to be called Collaborative Sin: American Naturalism and the Languages of Responsibility.
1. Peter Taylor, "Randall Jarrell," in Randall Jarrell: 1914-1965, ed. Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren (New York: Noonday Press, 1967), 243; this volume is hereafter abbreviated RJ. The emphasis is Taylor's. For an analysis of the divisions in Jarrell's temperament, see Wendy Lesser, "Randall Jarrell's Sinister Beings," in her His Other Half: Men Looking at Women Through Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 145-65.
2. Randall Jarrell, "A Girl in a Library," in Randall Jarrell, The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 18; this volume is hereafter abbreviated CP.
3. Randall Jarrell, quoted in William H. Pritchard, Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 105. This comment is drawn from an unpublished letter, by permission of Mary Jarrell.
4. Randall Jarrell to Allen Tate, April 1939, Randall Jarrell's Letters, ed. Mary Jarrell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1985), 19; this volume is hereafter abbreviated L.
5. Langdon Hammer offers a stimulating reexamination of Jarrell's relationship to the academic and literary professions in "Who Was Randall Jarrell?," Yale Review 79 (spring 1990): 389-405. His essay is in part a review of Pritchard's Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life. Neither Hammer nor Pritchard considers the women's college environment in detail.
6. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 165.
7. See Guillory, "Ideology and Canonical Form: The New Critical Canon," in Cultural Capital. I have analyzed the relationship of the academy particularly to T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in my Learning to be Modern: Pound, Eliot, and the American University (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
8. One can, of course, find exceptions: the critic and poet R. P. Blackmur is notable for developing his powerful intelligence without benefit of university instruction.
9. Pound to Harriet Monroe, London, 30 September 1914, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1971), 40; the emphases are Pound's.
10. Richard Poirier, "Modernism and Its Difficulties," in his The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections (New York: Random House, 1987), 95-113.
11. John Crowe Ransom, quoted in Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 157. This narrative is largely drawn from Graff.
12. Graff, ibid.
13. See Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (1976; London: Verso, 1985) and Harold Bloom, "Reflections on T. S. Eliot," Raritan 8 (fall 1988): 70-87.
14. One among many examples of the valuable work of feminist scholarship is Bonnie Kime Scott's anthology The Gender of Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
15. Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 79.
16. See Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).
17. In this as in other regards, Jarrell seems more like Elizabeth Bishop.
18. Thomas Travisano has argued recently that Jarrell may not be so unsystematic as he has commonly been considered; see his commentary on a previously unpublished Jarrell essay, "Levels and Opposites: Structure in Poetry": "Randall Jarrell's Poetics: A Rediscovered Milestone," Georgia Review 50 (winter 1996): 691-713.
19. It is true that Agrarian philosophy called for a return to gentility. In doing so, however, it also reinforced a hierarchy in which "feminine" values were marks of a secondary or lesser intelligence.
20. Joseph Bennett, "Utterances, Entertainments and Symbols," New York Times Book Review, 18 April 1965, 24.
21. W. S. Graham, "Jarrell's Losses: A Controversy," reprinted in Critical Essays on Randall Jarrell, ed. Suzanne Ferguson (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1983), 22, 23. This essay, along with its other half, a defense of the poems by Hayden Carruth, originally appeared in Poetry in 1948.
22. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), s. v. "sentimentality."
23. Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 5; hereafter abbreviated SM.
24. See Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987).
25. See Ezra Pound, "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste," Poetry 1 (March 1913): 200-206.
26. Randall Jarrell, "The End of the Line," in his Kipling, Auden & Co.: Essays and Reviews, 1935-1964 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 77; this volume is hereafter abbreviated K.
27. Randall Jarrell, "Fifty Years of American Poetry," in his The Third Book of Criticism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 314-15.
28. Ibid., 315.
29. T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in The Sacred Wood (1920; London: Methuen, 1980), 51.
30. Jarrell's annotated teaching copy of T. S. Eliot's The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 is in the Jarrell Collection of the Jackson Library at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Jarrell's annotation is quoted with the permission of Mary Jarrell.
31. Randall Jarrell, "The Age of Criticism," in his Poetry and the Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 73; this volume is hereafter abbreviated PA.
32. Pritchard makes the sensible point that indeed pigs do not know anything about bacon and remarks Jarrell's attraction to the loose, and sometimes inappropriate, analogy. He also notes, however, and more to my point, that this kind of analogy appealed to Jarrell because of its association with a "live" thing. See William H. Pritchard, "Randall Jarrell: Poet-Critic," in Critical Essays on Randall Jarrell, ed. Ferguson, 128.
33. Von Schrader married Jarrell in November 1952.
34. "Embarrassment" comes up frequently in discussions of Jarrell. Hammer notes that the poems are "somehow embarrassing" (Hammer, "Who Was Randall Jarrell?," 390) and Pritchard, in describing Jarrell's profound affection for his cat Kitten, writes, "one feels slightly embarrassed, and partly on Jarrell's account" (Pritchard, A Literary Life, 249).
35. W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," in The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1977), 242.
36. The Woman's College is now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
37. For the sociology of higher education in North Carolina, see Linda Flowers, Throwed Away: Failures of Progress in North Carolina (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990).
38. Jarrell refers to "the poet in the Grey Flannel Suit" in a 1956 letter to Elizabeth Bishop (L, 413).
39. During an interview at her home, I asked Mary Jarrell about this possibility. Her response: "by all means" (Mary Jarrell, interview by author, tape recording, Greensboro, N. C., 10 May 1995).
40. Hammer, "Who Was Randall Jarrell?," 402.
41. Mary Jarrell, interview, 10 May 1995.
42. Bertha Harris Wyland's essay is among a sheaf of typed comments by Jarrell's former students in box 8, folder 14 of the Jarrell Collection of the Jackson Library at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
43. Heather Ross Miller's comments are in a 5 May 1995 letter to me, in response to questions I had put to her by mail.
44. Robert Watson, interview of Robert and Betty Watson by author, tape recording, Greensboro, N. C., 13 April 1995.
45. Mary Jarrell, interview, 10 May 1995.
46. Fred Chappell, "The Indivisible Presence of Randall Jarrell," in his Plow Naked: Selected Writings on Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 45.
47. Robert Watson, interview, 13 April 1995.
48. Ross Miller, letter-interview, 5 May 1995.
49. Suzanne Rodgers Bush, interview by author, tape recording, 13 May 1995. This interview occurred in the common rooms of a dormitory at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
50. See Frank Lentricchia, Modernist Quartet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
51. Jennifer Weaver, an M. A. candidate in my spring 1995 modernism seminar at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, assembled the research on Coraddi and the Arts Forum.
52. Robert Watson, interview, 13 April 1995.
53. Betty Watson, interview, 13 April 1995.
54. Bush, interview, 13 May 1995.
55. Pritchard, A Literary Life, 276.
56. Bush, interview, 13 May 1995.
57. Ross Miller, letter-interview, 5 May 1995.
58. See Christopher Benfey, "The Woman in the Mirror: John Berryman and Randall Jarrell," in Recovering Berryman: Essays on a Poet, ed. Richard J. Kelley and Alan K. Lathrop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 153-68.
59. James Longenbach, "Randall Jarrell's Semi-Feminine Mind," Southwest Review 81 (summer 1996): 384-85.
.
"Why," Wittgenstein asks himself, early in part two of Philosophical Investigations, "does it sound queer to say: 'For a second he felt deep grief'?" The tentative response that follows ("Only because it so seldom happens?") seems to posit an empirical basis for the impression. Yet the full "remark," or Bemerkung, suggests that the oddity is due not to empirical limitations but to logical and grammatical ones: "'For a second he felt violent pain.' --Why does it sound queer to say: 'For a second he felt deep grief'? Only because it so seldom happens?" 1 The syntactic similarity of the two utterances juxtaposed here--"For a second he felt violent pain," "For a second he felt deep grief"--turns out to be misleading, because "the concept of grief" is used differently, and therefore differs grammatically from "the concept of a sensation" like pain. Wittgenstein explains: "'Grief' describes a pattern which recurs, with different variations, in the weave of our life. If a man's bodily expression of sorrow and of joy alternated, say, with the ticking of a clock, here we should not have the characteristic formation of the pattern of sorrow or of the pattern of joy." (PI, 174e) Grief just isn't the sort of thing that possesses the regularity of the ticking of a clock, which can be timed to the nearest second, as a sensation may be measured. This account certainly does get at some of the queerness of "For a second he felt deep grief." Even so, it seems to me that Gertrude Stein offers a better, albeit a complementary, explanation, one that is more radically grammatical and hence, in the end, more Wittgensteinian.
"A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is," Stein famously wrote, arriving at this gnomic conclusion, which served as the subtitle of her 1930 study in grammar, "Sentences and Paragraphs," in the course of meditating on sentences that sound queerly like Wittgenstein's: "He looks like a young man grown old." "It looks like a garden but he had hurt himself by accident." "A dog which you have never had before has sighed." "Once when they were nearly ready they had ordered it to close." 2
"For a second he felt deep grief." In her recent study of Wittgenstein as literary modernist, Marjorie Perloff demonstrates how for each of these sentences of Stein's, a narrative context may be devised in which it would make sense for someone to utter so extraordinary a remark. 3 Of course one would have to wait a long time for the appropriate situation to arise. As Wittgenstein observed, "it so seldom happens" that one finds the occasion to say, for instance, "He looks like a young man grown old," and not turn out to be misspeaking, or speaking inexactly. In composing sentences like these, however, Stein was no more interested than Wittgenstein in narrative completion. Rather, she was interested in how the grammar of such sentences enabled them to form emotionally resonant wholes--as sentences in ordinary prose cannot--even as her well wrought compositions-in-minimum remained unmoored and open-ended, so obviously, deliberately, incomplete.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas provides a charming account of Stein's "discovery" of the precise manner in which sentences and paragraphs differ:
We now [the spring of 1929] had our country house, the one we had only seen across the valley and just before leaving we found the white poodle, Basket.  A new puppy and a new ford we went off to our new house and we were thoroughly pleased with all three. Basket although now [the summer of 1932] he is a large unwieldy poodle, still will get up on Gertrude Stein's lap and stay there. She says that listening to the rhythm of his water drinking made her recognise the difference between sentences and paragraphs, that paragraphs are emotional that sentences are not. 4
Stein had written to Sherwood Anderson in February that she was "making a desperate effort to find out what is and isn't a sentence, having been brought up in a good old public school grammar and sentences are a fascinating subject to me." 5 The same month she informed Virgil Thomson, "I do want to know if there is a sentence, I thought perhaps there wasn't but I am almost beginning to be able to explain that there is." 6 Having completed "Sentences," a hundred pages of "sentences about the sentence," shortly after arriving that spring at the new house, she continued her "intensive study . . . of the sentence" over the course of the next year, in Paris as well as in the countryside. 7 From "Saving the Sentence" she graduated to "Sentences and Paragraphs" and then on to "More Grammar for a Sentence."
The first of these works expressly concerns the "caniche" Basket, beginning with the French phrase, "Qu'est-ce que c'est cette comédie d'un chien," and including such grammatical observations as "When a dog is no longer a lap dog there is a temporary inattention" and "Hers and his the houses are hers and his the valley is hers and his the dog named Basket is hers and his also the respect of the populace is hers and his." 8 In this work the sentence requiring "saving" was still the locus of Stein's attention. By contrast, "Sentences and Paragraphs," as the title suggests, is an intermediate work in which Stein sought to determine, as she put it in 1934, "exactly what the balance the unemotional balance of a sentence is and what the emotional balance of a paragraph is and if it were possible to make even in a short sentence the two things come to be one" ("PG," 225-26). The result was the "series" of attempts "to save a sentence" cited above, such portmanteau sentences as "He looks like a young man grown old" and "A dog which you have never had before has sighed": so like, and yet unlike, Wittgenstein's "For a second he felt deep grief." 9 What Stein takes to be an unambiguous expression of a manner of being (or more exactly, of a manner of being there and hence of a particular experience), Wittgenstein perceives to be an error of judgment. Finally, in "More Grammar for a Sentence," as its original title ("Paragraphs") confirms, the emphasis is less on the sentence and more on the "More" and just what it is that distinguishes paragraphs from sentences. It is here, in the sequence of passages excerpted below and in particular those I've emphasized, that Stein portrays the connection between the emotional nature of paragraphs (although she uses the term "emotional" only once in the piece) and the rhythm of Basket's drinking. "To think well of any paragraph," she writes, "they must have affection":
Did he drink out of his water because of well well; 10
There can be natural sentences if they are halting which whichever that is with renown that without that waving that if they or through. This is a sentence ["MG," 369];
Sentences are not natural paragraphs are natural and I am desperately trying to find out why ["MG," 371];
What is a paragraph, no place in which to settle. Because they have been moved ["MG," 371];
A paragraph is different that is it affects me. That is it it is why they are relished. As for a sentence in what way do they stop ["MG," 371-72];
A sentence is a hope of a paragraph ["MG," 372];
What is a paragraph. Right off. Write often. What is a paragraph. He drinks as if in wishing. He drinks of if in washing ["MG," 372];
A paragraph always lets it fall or lets it be well and happy or feels it to be so which they never were themselves as worried ["MG," 372];
A paragraph has to do with the growth of a dog ["MG," 372];
A paragraph is never finished therefore a paragraph is not natural ["MG," 372];
There is a difference between natural and emotional ["MG," 373];
A paragraph is natural because they feel like it ["MG," 375];
A sentence it is so easy to lose what a sentence is. Not so easy with a paragraph it is not so easy to lose what is a paragraph ["MG," 377];
A sentence can not exist if it does not come back no not if it does not come back. A paragraph finishes.
This is it. ["MG," 378]
With these last sentences, and the closing, "never [quite] finished" three-word paragraph, this sequence of grammatical investigations into the grey area that lies outside the confines of the sentence comes to a ringingly ostensive conclusion.
To be sure, Stein's thinking about sentences and paragraphs didn't end here. In 1935 she summed up the current state of her investigations in the second of her lectures on narration: "[T]hink," she instructed, "how a sentence is made by its parts of speech and you will see that it is not dependent upon a beginning a middle and an ending but by each part needing its own place to make its own balancing, and because of this there is no emotion, a sentence does not give off emotion." 11 Despite the fact that anything "balanced within itself does not give out nor have within any emotion," when sentences are arranged "in succession one after the other and make a paragraph," they turn out to "have the emotion that any succession can give to anything" (N, 22). Whereas each sentence "exists within by the balance within[,] . . . the paragraph exists not by a balance within but by a succession. Anybody really anybody can realize this thing" (N, 22), just as "anybody listening to any dog's drinking will see what I mean" ("PG," 223). "He drinks as if in wishing. He drinks of if in washing. . . . A paragraph always lets it fall or lets it be well and happy or feels it to be so which they never were themselves as worried." The rhythm of canine drinking exists not by achieving a balance within (like a sentence, with its parts of speech) but by means of succession (like a paragraph, with a beginning, middle, and end). "[O]ne sentence coming after another sentence makes a succession and the succession if it has a beginning a middle and an ending as a paragraph has does form create and limit an emotion" (N, 23).
Having demonstrated that sentences and paragraphs are logically or grammatically distinct, Stein proceeded to speculate on the possibility of deconstructing the traditional, empirical form of the distinction. She did this by calling into question the apparent inevitability of widely accepted norms of prose composition or, to use Wittgenstein's phrase, the "language game" of prose composition: prose having, as she put it, "for a long time . . . been made of sentences and paragraphs" (N, 22). "[P]erhaps now there is no longer any need for a sentence to be existing," she suggested, no need, that is, for a paragraph to require the "internal balancing" of individual sentences (N, 18). Moreover, she cautioned, "do not forget that . . . [s]ucceeding one thing succeeding another thing is succeeding and having a beginning a middle and an ending is entirely another thing" (N, 23). Because "these are two things" and "not one thing," paragraphing might avoid the rather limited progressive form that it had traditionally taken, so long as it continued to "make a succession" and therefore conveyed the impression of movement and emotion (N, 23). Indeed, sentences like "He looks like a young man grown old" and "Once when they were nearly ready they had ordered it to close" were neither sentences in the traditional sense nor did they "depend upon a beginning a middle and an ending" (N, 22-23). In addition to being internally unbalanced, if not exactly unhinged, they utilized nonprogressive succession to "create and limit an emotion." Sentences like these "save[d] the sentence," although at the expense of the traditional rationale for sentences, which so long as it required internal balancing couldn't be saved. As the language games of the twentieth century have often brutally revealed--with "language game" understood as applying broadly to all forms of organized human behavior as well as, more narrowly, to writing like Stein's and Wittgenstein's and yours and mine--such internal balancing is and has always been an empirical rather than a logical necessity, hence not a necessity at all.
In a 1934 lecture Stein offered a set of complementary descriptions of her "discovery" of the fundamentally combinatory nature of language games. The account itself partakes of the combinatory logic it outlines, and takes the following form: first Stein announces that "in a book I wrote called How to Write" (which included "Sentences," "Saving the Sentence," and "Sentences and Paragraphs"), "I made a discovery which I considered fundamental," namely "that sentences are not emotional and that paragraphs are." She then proceeds to "something else" that she found out at the same time: "I found out about language that paragraphs are emotional and sentences are not and I found out something else about it. I found out that this difference was not a contradiction but a combination and that this combination causes one to think endlessly about sentences and paragraphs because the emotional paragraphs are made up of unemotional sentences." 12 At one level, that of relatively abstract thought, Stein proposes a disjunction between unemotional sentences and emotional paragraphs; yet at the more concrete level of experience, she posits a conjunction of the same ("emotional paragraphs are made up of unemotional sentences"). This is Stein's argument and at the same time it is the mechanism by which her argument is realized: three sentences and a paragraph combined in a heterogeneous dialectic, the beginning of endless thought. Moreover, the picture of the sentence swimming in the stream of thought that Stein revises here, the picture sketched with such vividness by William James in his Principles of Psychology, is the very picture Wittgenstein sought to emend in his grammatical investigations. Stein's beloved mentor played an equally significant role in the development of Wittgenstein's philosophy, and it is largely due to James that the relation between these two life-long students of grammar isn't merely analogical.
In June of 1912, at the end of his first year in Cambridge and shortly after having turned twenty-three, Wittgenstein wrote to Bertrand Russell, "Whenever I have time I now read James's 'Varieties of Religious Experience.' This book does me a lot of good. I don't mean to say that I will be a saint soon, but I am not sure that it does not improve me a little in a way in which I would like to improve very much: namely I think that it helps me to get rid of the Sorge (in the sense in which Goethe used the word in the Second Part of Faust)." 13 Brian McGuinness alludes to this letter when he comments that a year later Wittgenstein still "felt that his life had no meaning, he was afflicted with the sense of futility, the Sorge, he mentioned to Russell in the previous summer. He could recognize his own condition in William James's chapter on 'The Sick Soul,'" in which James quoted extensively from Tolstoy's "A Confession." 14 ("A wonderful account," James commented, "of the attack of melancholy which led [Tolstoy] to his own religious conclusions.") 15 In a letter to Ottoline Morrell in late 1919 reporting his first meeting with Wittgenstein in six years, Russell recalled the early influence of James's Varieties and filled in some of the details of Tolstoy's subsequent effect on the young logician:
I had felt in his book [the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus] a flavour of mysticism, but was astonished when I found that he has become a complete mystic. He reads people like Kierkegaard and Angelus Silesius, and he seriously contemplates becoming a monk. It all started from William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, and grew (not unnaturally) during the winter he spent alone in Norway before the war, when he was nearly mad. Then during the war a curious thing happened. He went on duty to the town of Tarnov in Galicia, and happened to come upon a bookshop which however seemed to contain nothing but picture postcards. However he went inside and found that it contained just one book: Tolstoy on the Gospels. He bought it merely because there was no other. He read it and re-read it, and henceforth had it always with him under fire and at all times. But on the whole he likes Tolstoy less than Dostoewski (especially Karamazov). He has penetrated deep into mystical ways of thought and feeling, but I think (though he wouldn't agree) that what he likes in mysticism is its power to make him stop thinking. 16
Traces of James's Gifford lectures may readily be discerned in the "syntactical mysticism" that Russell attributed to his former student, and Wittgenstein continued to have, as one of his own students reported, "a great admiration for James," with Varieties being "one of the few books he insisted I must read." 17
It has also been suggested, quite plausibly, that the notion of "family resem-blance" derives from James's account of the "varieties" of the subject under study. 18 K. T. Fann thus notes that
[a]t the beginning of his second lecture on The Varieties of Religious Experience, James writes that "Most books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise definition of what its essence consists of"; and a little later says: "The theorizing mind always tends to the oversimplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which both philosophy and religion have been infested. Let us not fall immediately into a one-sided view of our subject but let us rather admit freely at the outset that we may very likely find no one essence but many characters which may alternately be equally important to religion." 19
All the same, it was principally Russell whom Wittgenstein sought to build on and correct in the Tractatus. Yet by the time Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge a decade later, Russell had long ceased to provoke him into thought, and over the next decade James came to assume a role in Wittgenstein's meditations comparable to that formerly occupied by Russell: not as the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, however, but of the earlier masterpiece, The Principles of Psychology.
Before World War I, experimental psychology had provided Wittgenstein with much-needed diversion from his work in logic, and after he resumed his philosophical studies in the late 1920s he often quarried psychology for examples of grammatical or "philosophical mistakes" 20 due to the virulent combination of "experimental methods and conceptual confusion" (PI, 232e) that characterized experimental psychology and cast doubt on the discipline's legitimacy as an empirical science. Instead of leading to valid empirical propositions, Wittgenstein argued, the experimental methods of psychology compounded the conceptual confusion endemic to the discipline. "The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by" (PI, 232e). Or, as he observed in Remarks on Colour (1950/51), where he linked "James's psychology," in particular his theory of emotion, with Goethe's Farbenlehre (Theory of colors): "Goethe's theory of the origin of the spectrum isn't a theory of its origin that has proved unsatisfactory; it is really not a theory at all. Nothing can be predicted with it. It is, rather, a vague schematic outline, of the sort we find in James's psychology. There is no experimentum crucis for Goethe's theory of colour." 21 Ever careful to distinguish his own "remarks on the philosophy of psychology" from the empirical study of psychology (which he regarded as based on sleight of hand, or sleight of mind, since psychology was neither empirical nor theoretical in the way that physics was), Wittgenstein typically used statements made by James in The Principles of Psychology as starting points for the psychological investigations that preoccupied him in the mid- and late 1940s, and which were already central to part one of Philosophical Investigations. 22 The 1970 Wittgenstein Workbook, for instance, lists nearly a fifth of the remarks in part one (composed between 1936 and 1945), and fully a quarter of those in Zettel (dating for the most part from 1945 to 1948), as directly paralleling passages in James's textbook on matters ranging from "feelings of if, but, etc." to "feelings of tendency," "'fringe' experiences," "producing and understanding sentences," "thought without language (the Ballard case)," "the Self of selves," and "emotions and bodily feelings." 23 In investigating how we talk about psychology, Wittgenstein was in fact investigating how James talked about psychology. One student recalled him "frequently referr[ing] to James in his lectures, even making on one occasion--to everybody's astonishment--a precise reference to a page-number!" 24 Another student reported that "[w]hen he was lecturing on belief," Wittgenstein uncharacteristically read aloud "from James's Principles of Psychology, and discussed [it] critically." 25 The grammatical investigations of psychology of this most independent-minded of philosophers turn out largely to have been grammatical investigations of The Principles of Psychology.
Of particular interest, in the context of Stein's claims for the emotional character of paragraphs and the unemotional nature of sentences, are several remarks of Wittgenstein's in which he revisits James's theory of emotion. The first of these dates from 1934-35, making it exactly contemporaneous with Stein's six-month tour of the United States during which she delivered her Lectures in America and the four lectures on narration at the University of Chicago. "You will find," Wittgenstein observes,
that the justifications for calling something an expression of doubt, conviction, etc., largely, though of course not wholly, consist in descriptions of gestures, the play of facial expressions, and even the tone of voice. Remember at this point that the personal experiences of an emotion must in part be strictly localized experiences; for if I frown in anger I feel the muscular tension of the frown in my forehead, and if I weep, the sensations around my eyes are obviously part, and an important part, of what I feel. This is, I think, what William James meant when he said that a man doesn't cry because he is sad but that he is sad because he cries. The reason why this point is often not understood, is that we think of the utterance of an emotion as though it were some artificial device to let others know that we have it. 26
James first proposed his account of emotional experience in an 1884 article entitled "What Is an Emotion?" "My thesis," he wrote, "is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes is the emotion." 27 In attributing the experience of "emotional consciousness" to its "so-called 'expression,'" James reversed the viewpoint implicit in the characterization of certain bodily movements as "expressions" of emotion. 28 Emotional consciousness, he asserted in his final article on the subject, "The Physical Basis of Emotion" , was "not a primary feeling, directly aroused by the exciting object or thought, but a secondary feeling indirectly aroused" by "the organic changes, muscular and visceral, of which the so-called 'expression' of the emotion consists." 29
James's point of departure for these claims was Charles Darwin's classic study The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals , yet whereas Darwin had focused on the causal mechanism linking prior sensation to subsequent bodily movement within an overall context of emotional experience, James proposed that movement and emotion were related causally as well. To the Darwinian mechanism of a sensation undergirding "the perception of the exciting fact" and automatically causing the body to move, James added a further physiological step, with the body registering its own movement by means of a second, or "secondary," sensation. It was this auto-sensation, the body feeling itself move in response to an initial sensation, which one experienced as emotion. This, in a nutshell, was James's theory of emotion, although it was not the theory Wittgenstein attributed to him. Consider, for example, the following remarks, which date from 1946/47:
451 And how does it come about that--as James says--I have a feeling of joy if I merely make a joyful face; a feeling of sadness, if I make a sad one? That, therefore, I can produce these feelings by imitating their expression?  Is that an empirical proposition? And is it one if it is said: "Make a sad face, and you will feel sad"? . . .
456 Now granted--although it is extremely doubtful--that the muscular feeling of a smile is a constituent part of feeling glad;--where are the other components? Well, in the breast and belly etc.!--But do you really feel them, or do you merely conclude that they must be there? Are you really conscious of these localized feelings?--And if not--why are they supposed to be there at all? Why are you supposed to mean them, when you say you feel happy?
457 Something that could only be established through an act of looking--that's at any rate not what you meant.
For "sorrow," "joy" etc. just are not used like that. [R1, 88e-89e]
A decade earlier Wittgenstein had quite correctly suggested that James's theory of emotion differed from ordinary accounts in that James held the "expression" of the emotion to be "a constituent part" of the emotion's internal composition--hence contributing to the way the emotion feels to the person feeling it--and only secondarily a symptom, or sign, permitting an external viewer to infer the emotion from "gestures, the play of facial expressions, and even the tone of voice."  This is, I think, what William James meant when he said that a man doesn't cry because he is sad but that he is sad because he cries." Had this been all James meant, then he was guilty only of expressing a noncontroversial or "obvious" point in a rather exaggerated manner. In his subsequent criticism, however, Wittgenstein took James's manner much more seriously; the neat inversion of "a man doesn't cry because he is sad but . . . is sad because he cries" turned out to involve considerable cognitive distortion, in particular the supposed reduction of emotions to sensations no different in kind from those one feels "around [one's] eyes when one is crying."
Wittgenstein insisted that, due to the grammar of his theory, James mistakenly imposed a third-person perspective on an inherently first-person experience. It was as if an emotion were "[s]omething that could only be established through an act of looking," whether by inspecting one's own face in order to determine "the muscular feeling of a smile" or by introspecting "localized feelings" "in the breast and belly etc." Now, it is quite true that James alluded to feelings that were "localized" internally, as in his comment in "The Physical Basis of Emotion" that the sensations of internal bodily activity that accompanied externally observable bodily movement were undoubtedly "localized in divers parts of my organism," however "hard" it proved "to describe" them. 30 Yet James distinguished these sensations from the "sensible quality" that initiated the bodily movement in the first place. The experience of an emotion wasn't simply the summation, in no particular order, of a set of sensory "components" (such as "the perception of the exciting fact" plus "the muscular feeling of a smile" plus several localized feelings "in the breast and belly etc."), but the experience of a particular "succession" of sensations, sensations that, in Stein's phrasing, "make a succession" together.
James did not wish to "shew that muscular sensations are sadness," nor that such sensations are "part of sadness" in the sense that there is something prima facie emotional about them. As Wittgenstein himself observed a year later, even as he was yet again taking James to task for supposedly equating a "bodily sensation," in this case an imagined one, with an emotion or "something like it": "Is it clear a priori that whoever imitates joy will feel it? Couldn't the mere attempt to laugh while one was feeling grief bring about an enormous sharpening of the grief?" (R2, 61e). The only problem with this remark, practically speaking, is that, far from demonstrating the inadequacies of James's theory, it actually proves quite consistent with it. Despite Wittgenstein's contention that James relied on a misleading analogy between sensation and emotion, the formulator of radical empiricism no more identified sensation and emotion than Stein equated sentences and paragraphs. Just as "emotional paragraphs" were "made up of unemotional sentences," emotions were composed of unemotional sensations. 31 What Stein recognized as she watched her poodle drinking water was that sentences and paragraphs were related in exactly the same way that sensations and emotions were; indeed, her thesis concerning the emotional nature of paragraphs was itself a variation on James's theory of emotion, only extended to writing.
Wittgenstein's own mistake in the Tractatus, he explained to Friedrich Waismann and Moritz Schlick late in 1929, a year after his return to Cambridge, was in having relied on too circumscribed a notion of syntax. As a result he had failed to attend to "the inner connection of propositions," that is, the grammatical connections between propositions that formed "a more comprehensive syntax about which I did not yet know anything at the time." 32 Consequently, his "philosophical task," as Ray Monk observes, "now lay in describing this more complicated syntax, and in making clear the role of 'internal connections' in inference." 33 Nevertheless, what Stein demonstrated in her investigations of the paragraph, composed coincidentally the same year that Wittgenstein began to map his more comprehensive syntax, is that even as he extended the parameters of syntax, his conception of grammar remained overly circumscribed. The model of a sentence swimming in the stream of a particular language game rather than in the stream of consciousness, an emendation both of James and of his own earlier conception of the sentence entirely removed from the stream of consciousness, left no place for the paragraph. Despite, or perhaps more exactly, due to his conception of "a more comprehensive syntax," the sentence remained the largest grammatical unit short of an entire language game. Yet, as anyone familiar with Wittgenstein's later work will know, the basic compositional unit of his own writing shifted from the discrete sentence in the Tractatus to the paragraph, whether in the form of "remarks" (Bermerkungen) or "cuttings" (Zettel). This makes the neglect in his "philosophical grammar" of the intermediate unit whose grammatical significance Stein was investigating in compositions like "More Grammar for a Sentence" all the more striking.
The difference between Stein and Wittgenstein on the subject of grammar may be summed up (although it certainly doesn't exhaust their differences) in the contrast between the phrasing of what each took to be the minimal requirement for judging the import of a proposition: "a more comprehensive syntax," in Wittgenstein's case, and in Stein's, "more grammar for a sentence." Whereas Wittgenstein proposed an expanded notion of syntax that remained continuous with the ordinary notion, Stein speculated on the possibility of a grammar that, without contradicting the syntactical structure of the sentence, nonetheless combined syntactically discrete units to provide "more grammar," more breathing room, more life, as it were, "for a sentence" than the exclusively spatial forms of even an extended syntax were capable of doing. The so-called syntax of a paragraph wasn't anything like the syntax of a sentence, and consequently Wittgenstein's expansion of the notion of syntax from sentence to language game skipped over a crucial stage in the production of meaning. In the Wittgensteinian universe, sentences only made sense in the context of use determined by particular language games; for Stein, by contrast, the minimal context in which a written sentence made sense was the paragraph. Although a given language game provided a more or less stable background, the sentence made unambiguous sense only with respect to the manner of "succession" that determined the "emotional balance" of the paragraph containing it. The meaning of any particular sentence proved willy-nilly a function of emotion (and ultimately of physiology). Wittgenstein, on the other hand, eschewed both emotion and physiology in seeming to bridge sentence and language game without a hitch.
Needless to say, emotion returned through the back door in Wittgenstein's writing. For what he didn't say, he showed: not because it was logically impossible to state, as he suggested in the Tractatus, but because it was inconsistent with his theory. Wittgenstein once observed that Russell's, and his own, failure to provide specific examples of the elementary propositions posited by Russell's logical atomism should have indicated to them that there was something wrong with the theory. The equivalent problem with his own "practical holism," as David Stern has labeled the perspective expressed in Wittgenstein's later philosophy, wasn't, to be sure, the insufficient number of examples--there is no shortage of these--but rather just what the examples are examples of. 34 Does the imagined utterance "For a second he felt deep grief," for instance, acquire its significance or lack thereof (as an example of the sort of senseless non sequitur Wittgenstein sought to expose throughout his career) in the broader language games of English and German syntax, or only in the context of his immediate remarks, remarks that so often took the form, in his later writing, of discrete paragraphs?
Although Wittgenstein's idiosyncratic manner of composition was part of a long tradition of aphoristic, paragraph-length meditations in German- and French-language philosophical prose, he tended unsurprisingly to narrate the development of his style within the frame of his own career. In the most celebrated of these accounts, the 1945 preface to Philosophical Investigations, he confessed that "after several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into . . . a whole," in which "the thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in a natural order and without breaks," he
realized that I should never succeed. The best I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination.--And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction.--The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings. [PI, ve]
In other words, because his "natural inclination" was to presume that everything was connected, and yet he rejected (on the basis of his own argument in the Tractatus) the idea that a part was capable of synecdochically serving as a key to the whole, the only viable option was to "travel . . . criss-cross in every direction." Yet, in characterizing the resulting "album" as "the precipitate of philosophical investigations" that had "occupied" him, as of 1945, "for the last sixteen years" (PI, ve; my emphasis), Wittgenstein confirms the impression suggested by his subsequent reference to the "short paragraphs" in which he had "written down [his] thoughts" (ixe) as comprising "a number of sketches of landscapes . . . made in the course of . . . long and involved journeyings" (PI, ve). Clearly, he conceived of grammatical phenomena as features of an external rather than an internal landscape, in which meaning was a function of precipitation (on the model of chemical processes) rather than of emotion (on the model of physiology). This is not to say, of course, that he understood philosophy to be a sort of chemistry or physics, but rather that the increasingly comprehensive syntax he outlined was consistent with the external perspective of physics rather than with the internal or physiological perspective of James's radical empiricism.
Another account of his compositional practice, dictated to a student a dozen years earlier, took its lead from "Schopenhauer's view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction." 35 Wittgenstein continued, "One difficulty with philosophy is that we lack a synoptic view. We encounter the kind of difficulty we should have with the geography of a country for which we had no map, or else a map of isolated bits. The country we are talking about is language, and the geography its grammar." (WA, 53) Observing that each problem in philosophy might be likened to a road on a map of this country, he added that "[i]n philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say, 'Let's get a rough idea,' for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads." "So I suggest repetition," he concluded, "as a means of surveying the connections" (WA, 53). In Philosophical Investigations he elaborated:
The same or almost the same points were always being approached afresh from different directions, and new sketches made. Very many of these were badly drawn or uncharacteristic, marked by all the defects of a weak draughtsman. And when they were rejected a number of tolerable ones were left, which now had to be arranged and sometimes cut down, so that if you looked at them you could get a picture of the landscape. [PI, ve]
This is the closest Wittgenstein gets to discussing his compositional practice of "remarks" and "cuttings," but it is enough to demonstrate that although he denied the possibility of a "synoptic view" of the geography of language, he still conceived of grammar as "[s]omething that could only be established through an act of looking" and hence from the third-person perspective of traditional science (as he quite rightly suggested emotion could not be). Although Stein also stressed the centrality of looking in her compositional practice--"it is her eyes and mind that are active and important and concerned in choosing" (AA, 75), she observed of herself--there was one crucial difference. Stein conceived of such "active" looking along physiological lines rather than, like Wittgenstein, exclusively as a function of optics. "[Y]ou see," she might thus explain to Toklas in the Autobiography, concerning the "surpris[ing]" absence of anything written in French among her reading matter: "I feel with my eyes and it does not make any difference to me what language I hear, I don't hear a language, I hear tones of voice and rhythms, but with my eyes I see words and sentences"--and, one might add, paragraphs (AA, 70). "[T]here is for me only one language and that is english" (AA, 70). "Feeling with one's eyes" is not exactly what Wittgenstein had in mind in composing Philosophical Investigations as he did, yet his writing inevitably calls forth some such experience in the reader determined to make sense of this most Emersonian of twentieth-century albums.
"The actual key to understanding" Wittgenstein's philosophy, Michael Nedo has suggested, "is the study of the connections between remarks: the complex trains of thought which run from one to the other" (WA, 53). This is no doubt true, and it is certainly what Wittgenstein himself implies, yet it also raises two questions: first, why should the remarks so consistently take the form of paragraphs; and second, what is such blatantly psychological phrasing ("complex trains of thought") doing here, when Wittgenstein expressly sought to substitute a logical and syntactical account of meaning for the traditional psychological account? The answer to both questions is not, it seems to me, that Nedo has made an embarrassing slip but that Wittgenstein's paragraphing does the work, in his adamantly nonpsychological account, of the emotional or physiological mechanisms of psychology, without which neither he nor his readers would be able to get on with the masterful job of "surveying the connections." Such surveying requires the projection of "body feelings" whereby, as Susanne Langer argues, one models "the very existence of 'things' . . . on [one's] own inward expectation of strains, directions, and limitations of [one's] felt actions," in addition to modeling the "wholeness and simplicity of molar objects on that of [one's own] soma." 36 To acknowledge this is certainly not to deny the great value of Wittgenstein's account of grammar, and the even greater value of his grammatical investigations, yet it does require that one reject the residual appeal of an elegance capable of producing the sort of self-contradiction that exists between his elegant, homogeneous model of grammar as syntax and the actual grammar of his investigations, composed of differences that, in Stein's terms, function not as contradictions but as combinations. This state of self-contradiction, it should be noted, contrasts sharply with the phoenix-like self-immolation that concludes the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Late in part one of the Investigations Wittgenstein rounded off a brief remark with the obscure observation, "Meaning is a physiognomy" (PI, 151e). He was alluding here to a line of reasoning that stretched back at least a dozen years, to the "Big Typescript" of 1933, where he had characterized the procedure of grammatical investigations such as his, in gradually mapping out "a more comprehensive syntax," as "mak[ing] a tracing of the physiognomy of every error" in order to make sense of its lack of sense. 37 "The point is to hit upon the physiognomy of the thing" ("P," 165). By contrast, for Stein, as she put it in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (composed in 1932, published in 1933), "the human being essentially is not paintable," due to the inherently flat surface of painting (AA, 119). Hence, from her perspective, Wittgenstein's likening of meaning to a physiognomy that one might trace was an error of precisely the kind he was using the analogy to specify. "If I correct a philosophical mistake," he had proposed,
and say that this is the way it has always been conceived, but this is not the way it is, I always point to an analogy . . . that was followed, and show that this analogy is incorrect. . . . The effect of a false analogy . . . is as if a thing seemed to be a human being from a distance, because we don't perceive anything definite, but from close up we see that it is a tree stump. ["P," 163]
Drawing an analogy between meaning and a traceable physiognomy had the consequence, from Stein's perspective, of removing the emotional or physiological dimension from human beings and, in effect, reducing "the human form and the human face" to something compositionally analogous to a tree stump. 38
"The philosopher strives," Wittgenstein continued in his remarks in the "Big Typescript," "to find . . . the word [or the correct choice of words] that finally permits us to grasp what up until now has intangibly weighed down our consciousness": to "make a tracing of the physiognomy" of this "grammatical unclarity," this false analogy or "false thought process" ("P," 165). For in grasping the error as an error, in "hit[ting] upon the physiognomy of the thing," one rids oneself of something whose effect has been "a constant battle and uneasiness" ("P," 163). Wittgenstein further likens this constant irritability to the experience of having "a hair on one's tongue: one feels it, but cannot grasp it, and therefore cannot get rid of it" ("P," 165). When "the irritating character of grammatical unclarity" is removed, one is then able to move forward unimpeded: "the car [now] placed on the tracks precisely so . . . can keep rolling correctly" ("P," 166, 165). "Philosophical problems arise," as Wittgenstein famously remarked in the Investigations, "when language goes on holiday" (PI, 19e). "The confusions which occupy us arise," that is, "when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work," with the idling experienced as a quasi-neurasthenic irritability (PI, 51e).
In hitting upon the physiognomy of the thing, then, one sees its true face and its true character. One sees what it means--meaning is a physiognomy--and in the case of error, or false analogy, one sees that it is actually a non sequitur, and therefore without meaning. Within this framework meaning is understood to be a function of "a more comprehensive syntax" that operates on an exclusively analogical basis. Hence "tracing the outline of [a] thing's nature" (PI, 48e) involves tracing the network of analogies that constitutes it. Yet is this physiognomic frame itself immune from the criticism Wittgenstein directed in Philosophical Investigations at "philosophical problems" in general and at those that had concerned him in the Tractatus in particular?  For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. And here we may indeed fancy naming to be some remarkable act of mind, as it were a baptism of an object. And we can also say the word "this" to the object, as it were address the object as "this"--a queer use of the word, which doubtless only occurs in doing philosophy. [PI, 19e]
Similarly, he remarked, in commenting on proposition 4.5 of the Tractatus ("The general form of propositions is: This is how things are"): "That is the kind of proposition that one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing's nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it." (PI, 48e) In the Tractatus "[a] picture held us captive," Wittgenstein concluded: "[a]nd we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably" (PI, 48e). Such idling, the compulsive repetition of this picture of propositional syntax, was due to "grammatical unclarity," and could only be resolved by exactly tracing the physiognomy of the false analogy in terms of which it was framed.
Yet a picture held Wittgenstein captive in the Investigations as well: the picture of looking (understood exclusively as a form of analysis, the tracing of syntactical relations) that he carried over to philosophy, analogically, from physics. Hence, according to Wittgenstein, when "William James got the idea," through a process of introspection, "that the 'self' consisted mainly of 'peculiar motions in the head and between the head and throat'" (PI, 124e), what such "introspection [actually] shewed" was "not the meaning of the word 'self' (so far as it means something like 'person,' 'human being,' 'he himself,' 'I myself'), nor any analysis of such a thing, but the state of a philosopher's attention when he says the word 'self' to himself and tries to analyse its meaning" (PI, 125e). Wittgenstein is mistaken here, however. James's state of attention was not the ordinary "state of a philosopher's attention," not at least of the sort of philosopher who compulsively repeats "this" or "this is how things are" or even "this is how things look, analogically speaking." In fact, Jamesian introspection didn't show a "state" of attention at all, but a physiological process of attending; and Wittgenstein's description of James may usefully be contrasted with Stein's description of Picasso's manner of looking, in her 1938 account of his career--a very different form of physiognomic attention, indeed: "[T]he souls of people do not interest him," she observed; "that is to say for him the reality of life is in the head, the face and the body and this is for him so important, so pertinent, so complete that it is not at all necessary to think of any other thing and the soul is another thing" (P, 40).  [P, 41]
In other words, the child does not see the parts of its mother's face as being each in an analogous relation to a whole, and consequently the child cannot trace its mother's physiognomy, "trace the outline of [her] nature." It isn't that there is something there that the child fails to see; rather, as Stein said of Picasso, it is a matter of "things [being] seen not as one knows them" (P, 41), not as a function, that is, of one's prior "convictions about what people are" (P, 40) and what "the human form and the human face" (P, 40) are, but of things seen "as they are when one sees them without remembering having looked at them" (P, 41), the way an infant sees. In this way one actively "feel[s] with [one's] eyes," as Stein suggested she did in her writing, and as Picasso did in painting and James in introspecting, rather than passively "tracing round the frame" through which "the physiognomy of the thing" is registered as a physiognomy--as Wittgenstein continued to do in conceiving of "[m]eaning [as] a physiognomy."
Steven Meyer teaches modern poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. Author of Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science, forthcoming from Stanford University Press, as well as of introductions to The Making of Americans and A Novel of Thank You, he is currently preparing an edition of Stein's complete lectures, due out from Stanford in 1999.
1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (1953; New York: Macmillan, 1968), 174e; hereafter abbreviated PI.
2. Gertrude Stein, "Poetry and Grammar," in Lectures in America (1935; Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 226; hereafter abbreviated "PG." They may also be found in her "Sentences and Paragraphs," in How to Write (Paris: Plain Edition, 1931), 25-29.
3. See Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 91.
4. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933; New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 247-48; hereafter abbreviated AA.
5. Gertrude Stein to Sherwood Anderson, February 1929, in Sherwood Anderson/Gertrude Stein, ed. Ray Lewis White (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 68.
6. Gertrude Stein to Virgil Thomson, 23 February 1929, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
7. Gertrude Stein to Carl Van Vechten, 15 April 1929, in The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913-1946, vol. 1, ed. Edward Burns (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 193; Stein to Thomson, 23 February 1929, Yale Collection of American Literature.
8. Gertrude Stein, "Saving the Sentence," in How to Write, 13, 20.
9. Stein, "Sentences and Paragraphs," 29, 33.
10. Gertrude Stein, "More Grammar for a Sentence," in As Fine As Melanctha (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 367; hereafter abbreviated "MG."
11. Gertrude Stein, Narration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935) 22-23; hereafter abbreviated N.
12. Gertrude Stein, "Plays," in Lectures in America, 93.
13. Ludwig Wittgenstein to Bertrand Russell, 22 June 1912, in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Cambridge Letters: Correspondence with Russell, Keynes, Moore, Ramsey and Sraffe, ed. Brian McGuinness and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 14.
14. Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein, A Life: Young Ludwig, 1889-1921 (London: Duckworth, 1988), 156-57.
15. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Martin E. Marty (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 149.
16. Bertrand Russell to Ottoline Morrell, 20 December 1919, in Cambridge Letters, ed. McGuinness and von Wright, 140.
17. Bertrand Russell, "Logical Positivism," in Logic and Knowledge: Essays, 1901-1950, ed. Robert Charles Marsh (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1956), 370; Maurice O'C. Drury, "Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Symposium: Assessments of the Man and the Philosopher, II," in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Man and his Philosophy, ed. K. T. Fann (New York: Dell, 1967), 68. Elsewhere Drury observed that Wittgenstein "was early influenced by William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. This book he told me had helped him greatly. And if I am not mistaken the category of Varieties continued to play an important part in his thinking" (Maurice O'C. Drury, "Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein," in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees [Totowa, N. J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981], 108).
18. Wittgenstein introduces the notion of "family resemblance" in remark 67 of Philosophical Investigations.
19. K. T. Fann, Wittgenstein's Conception of Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 47. The emphasis is mine.
20. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 82e.
21. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 32e.
22. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 2, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); hereafter abbreviated R1 and R2, respectively. Also see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, vol. 1, Preliminary Studies for Part 2 of Philosophical Investigations (1982; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); and vol. 2, The Inner and the Outer, 1949-1951 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
23. See Christopher Coope, Peter Geach, Timothy Potts, and Roger White, A Wittgenstein Workbook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 48.
24. "Mr. A. C. Jackson," quoted in John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (New York: Basic Books, 1967), 434.
25. Wolfe Mays, "Recollections of Wittgenstein," in Ludwig Wittgenstein, ed. Fann, 83.
26. Ludwig Wittgenstein, "The Brown Book," in The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the "Philosophical Investigations" (1958; New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 103.
27. William James, "What Is an Emotion?" in Collected Essays and Reviews (1920; New York: Russell and Russell, 1969), 247; also in The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 1065, with "theory" substituted for "thesis." James reprinted most of the earlier article, substantially reorganized, in the chapter "The Emotions" in The Principles of Psychology.
28. Ibid.
29. William James, "The Physical Basis of Emotion," in Collected Essays and Reviews, 346.
30. Ibid., 359.
31. In another set of remarks composed in the late 1940s regarding James's suggestion that "the emotion consists in the bodily feeling," Wittgenstein concludes with the instruction to "[c]ompare fear and anxiety with care," adding: "And what sort of description is this: 'Ewiges Dustere steigt herunter . . .'?/ One might describe a pain like that; even paint it" (R1, 132e-133e). In the most thorough account of Wittgenstein's readings of James to date, Joachim Schulte has observed that "[t]he original German word translated as care is 'Sorge.' And Wittgenstein continues by asking himself what sort of description is given by words like 'Ewiges Dustre steigt herunter,' translated as 'Perpetual cloud descends.' These words are spoken by the re of Sorge in the last act of Goethe's Faust" (Joachim Schulte, Experience and Expression: Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Psychology [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993], 128). Schulte is quite right in proposing that Wittgenstein invokes Sorge here because it is an emotion typically "without a clear cause or object," in contrast to fear and anxiety. Yet it does not follow that the emotion is "[un]accompan[ied]" by "strong . . . physical feelings," as Schulte asserts; rather the feelings are less likely to be felt as impacts and hence due to external influences. None of this is inconsistent with James's theory of emotion, of course. Moreover, through the reference to Sorge Wittgenstein joins his early interest in The Varieties of Religious Experience and his subsequent engagement with The Principles of Psychology, particularly with the James-Lange theory. For additional discussions of Wittgenstein and James centered on the James-Lange theory, see Sybe Terwee, "James' Theory of Emotion--A Wittgensteinian View," in Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Proceedings of the Seventh International Wittgenstein Symposium, ed. Paul Weingartner and Johannes Czermak (Vienna: Holder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1983), 538-42; and Malcolm Budd, Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Psychology (London: Routledge, 1989), 151-65.
32. Ludwig Wittgenstein, quoted in Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversation Recorded by Frederich Waismann, ed. Brian McGuinness (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1979), 74.
33. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: The Free Press, 1990), 285.
34. David G. Stern, Wittgenstein on Mind and Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 120ff.
35. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wiener Ausgabe/Vienna Edition, Einfuhrung/Introduction, ed. Michael Nedo (Vienna: Springer-Verlag, 1993), 53; hereafter abbreviated WA.
36. Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, abridged by Gary Van Den Heuvel (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 321.
37. Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Philosophy," in Philosophical Occasions: 1912-1951, ed. James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), 165; hereafter abbreviated "P."
38. Gertrude Stein, Picasso: The Complete Writings, ed. Edward Burns (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 40; hereafter abbreviated P. "Most people," Stein writes, "are more predetermined as to what is the human form and the human face than they are as to what are flowers, landscapes, still lifes"--most people, but "[n]ot everybody."(P, 40) Interestingly, she uses the same phrase in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in describing Francis Picabia's "way of achieving the disembodied," his "struggl[e] with the problem that a line should have the vibration of a musical sound and that this vibration should be the result of conceiving the human form and the human face in so tenuous a fashion that it would induce such vibration in the line forming it." "[I]t was this idea," Stein adds, giving agency to the idea rather than to the artist, "that conceived mathematically influenced Marcel Duchamp and produced his The Nude Descending the Staircase" (AA, 120).
.
When many millions of people all over the world demand security and a state that must guarantee it, that's one thing. But when bowlers or batsmen, responsible for an activity essentially artistic and individual, are dominated by the same principles, then the result is what we have.
--C. L. R. James, "The Welfare State of Mind"
In his State of the Union address of 1935, Franklin Roosevelt reaffirmed his commitment before Congress and the American people to make it his "first and continuing task" to provide for the "security of the men, women and children of the nation." 1 Later that year, as he signed the Social Security Act into law, he explained that the legislation was a necessary response to the facts of the modern industrial world. A national insurance plan like Social Security, designed to provide some minimal form of protection from adverse contingencies that individuals could neither anticipate nor control, was needed because "the civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure." 2 Acknowledging that it was impossible to "insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life," he nonetheless expressed the hope that Social Security would give "some measure of protection to the average citizen." 3
Two years later, in his essay "Insurance and Social Change," Wallace Stevens defended the Social Security Administration to his coworkers at the Hartford Fire and Indemnity Company, rebutting the claim that the welfare-state incursion into insurance practice would fragment an already diminished market. Stressing the fact that the private industry looked to offer "insurance for everything," as opposed to the government's "insurance for all," Stevens argued that federal insurance, far from competing with private insurance, provided the precondition for the latter's efforts to "perfect" insurance coverage. "To be certain of a regular income, as in the case of social security," reasoned Stevens, "is not the same thing as to be able to repair any damage, or to meet any emergency." 4 Indeed it is only when Americans were certain of a regular income that they could afford the "insurance for everything" offered by the private industry.
Social Security was seen in this way to offer one solution to the depression specter of "underconsumption," the notion that the nation's economic troubles were traceable less to excessive industrial production than to the failure of Americans to consume what was produced. "Insurance and Social Change," however, also suggests a more literary solution to the problem of underconsumption. According to Stevens, nothing stimulated demand more than representing a product in its perfected form. Stevens reasons, for example, that "it helps us to see [the value of] insurance in the midst of social change to imagine a world in which insurance has been made perfect" ("ISC," 234). He goes on to observe that H. G. Wells revitalized the field of mechanical science in this manner, coyly noting that "If Mr. Wells has preferred the machine to insurance as his field, he has only left insurance to others" ("ISC," 234). Thus Wallace Stevens, poet, makes his bid to be the H. G. Wells of insurance. But Stevens goes farther still. In "Adagia" (1934-37), he claims not simply that poetry might usefully represent the workings of perfect insurance, but that it can actually perform them. "Poetry," he writes, "is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death." 5 This statement doubles the assertion in "Insurance and Social Change" that perfect insurance brings about "a world in which nothing unpleasant can happen" and where "all our wishes . . . come true" ("ISC," 234). Indeed given these criteria, one might reasonably argue that perfect insurance could be found only in poetry: where else but in a poem could a wish eliminate evil and death?
The suggestion that poetry might somehow "eliminate" evil and death, however, was more likely to consign it to social irrelevance than establish it as an active force in the mitigation of insecurity. Nothing was more common throughout the 1930s, and more potentially damning, than the claim that poetry provided a safe haven from the withering realities of the depression, a place as insulated from want and suffering as the shimmering worlds projected in the nation's movie theaters. Speaking from a proto-Popular Front Left in the 1935 New Masses, Stanley Burnshaw makes the scathing observation that "contemporary poets . . . have all tramped off to some escapist limbo where they are joyously gathering moonshine." 6 At the other end of the political spectrum, the southern Agrarian John Crowe Ransom in 1938 derides the poet who invents "a private world where . . . injustice cannot be and enjoy it as men enjoy their dream." 7 Bread lines called for more than fantastical worlds, and Burnshaw and Ransom were just two of many who felt that the depression made unavoidable the differences between security of an imaginative and a substantive financial kind.
Yet condemnations of inexcusably "private" retreats into the poetic imagination do not so much undermine the analogy between Stevens's poetry and insurance as explain why that relationship is constructed through a defense of Social Security. It is in this respect crucial that Stevens defends Social Security in "Insurance and Social Change" by insisting that "perfect insurance" needed to take an unmistakably public form. Stevens asks, for example, that we "Compare the man who, as an individual, insures his dwelling against fire with that personality of the first plane who, at a stroke, insures all dwellings against fire; and who, without stopping to think about it, insures not only the lives of all those that live in the dwellings, but insures all people against all happenings" ("ISC," 234). The identity of this personality is left suggestively nebulous; he seems at once Roosevelt, God, and a messianic poet turned insurance provider. But whoever or whatever it is, Stevens's personality does not retreat from the world into a private imagination. In fact, the office this personality performs seems public precisely because it is opposed to thought of any kind. Stevens's poetic corpus of the 1930s and early 1940s opposes "stopping to think" to public action in just this manner. Stevens's poetry persistently stages the substitution of thought with the "impersonal" representation of social relationships; hence his aphorism "People take the place of thoughts" ("A," 198). For Stevens, then, insurance and poetry both supervene at the limits of intentional agency; in his conception of both insurance and poetry, the objectification of social relationships compensates for the fact that no premeditated plan can ever make the future sufficiently secure.
"Insurance and Social Change" therefore marks the moment at which Stevens comes to understand poetry as being importantly related to the necessarily public activities of America's first welfare state, in particular to the federal "insurance for all," Social Security, that has emerged as the New Deal's most sacrosanct legacy. "We feel threatened," Stevens notes at his first public lecture in 1936; "[w]e look from an uncertain present toward a more uncertain future. One feels the desire to collect oneself against all this in poetry as well as in politics." 8 Roosevelt would of course "collect" against the future in a strictly economic sense: "We must begin now to make provisions for the future," he declared during a Fireside Chat on 28 April 1935. 9 Nonetheless, poetry and politics alike would after 1935 address themselves at a much deeper level to structures of agency defined in relation to necessarily imaginative invocations of the future.
"Relatively to a given human being," reasons Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Common Law, "anything is accident which he could not fairly have been expected to contemplate as possible . . . ." 10 Accidents have meaning, Holmes makes clear, only to the extent that they mark a transgression of our imaginative capacities, our ability to envision future states. It is in this context hardly surprising that a poet as concerned with the imagination as Stevens would work in close orbit to a government committed to providing for the future. The suggestion that accidents are defined only in relation to what cannot be anticipated might lead to the conclusion that shoring up individual agency meant expanding the individual's imaginative capacities such that he could be able to anticipate all future contingency. Yet this suggestion just as plausibly leads to the opposite conclusion, namely, that individuals could protect themselves only by renouncing the value of the imagination per se. Stevens, I have already suggested, reached the latter conclusion. Thus his project of affixing the poetic to the rising star of an increasingly interventionist government did not call for the integration of life and art, nor did it make claims for the literal outcomes poetry might effect. Far from a self-confident activism, the insistence on the provision of security instead marked the outer limits of federal as well as poetic agency; after 1935, welfare government and poetry both would work to compensate, after the fact, for all they could not imagine, for all they could not prevent.
Michael Denning notes in The Cultural Front that "the public cultural apparatus was virtually invented by the New Deal." 11 He explains, "The state sponsorship of writers, artists, theaters, and musicians that began in the spring of 1935 under the Works Progress Administration as relief from the present crisis became an attempt to redefine American culture and to create a 'culture of democracy' by establishing a bureaucracy that would provide 'culture' for the people" (CF, 44). This culture of democracy is not Denning's primary concern. Far from it; his book is instead devoted to demonstrating the existence of a broadly conceived "cultural front" that was "not simply New Deal liberalism" (CF, xvii). The Left during the New Deal, he claims with equal anxiousness, was not simply "the product of the new cultural apparatuses of the state and industry" (CF, 96). Thus The Cultural Front sets out to recover a substrata of working-class radicalism, a "laboring of American culture" that remained distinct from, and ultimately survived, New Deal liberalism. But beyond the fact that he uses it as a foil for cultural-front radicalism, it remains entirely unclear throughout what exactly Denning means by New Deal liberalism. Denning's refusal to reveal the criteria that might distinguish New Deal liberalism from a capaciously defined cultural front turns out seriously to compromise his ability to understand the public cultural apparatus the New Deal did in fact invent.
In what follows, I will insist that insofar as there was a coherent New Deal liberalism, it was organized around not a nebulously conceived culture of democracy, but what Roosevelt termed his "security legislation" (FDR, 86). The Social Security Administration and the Works Progress Administration in particular formed what he called a "new order of things," of which "every major legislative enactment of . . . Congress should be a component part" (FDR, 82, 83). The Federal Writers' Project--part of this new order--supported more than seven thousand writers at its peak in 1937. More importantly, by 1937, the project's commitment to security had produced an entirely new set of answers to what John Dos Passos, writing on the nature of literary professionalism, called "the whole question of what writing is." 12
The official New Deal answer to Dos Passos was implicit in the wage structure that the Writers' Project offered: according to Harry Alsberg, director of the project, writing could be secured from economic contingency only when it was more a public activity subject to regulation than a privately owned product. The weekly salary paid writers for producing material they would never own and never have to sell (usually between $20 and $30) made this unmistakably clear. Thus when Richard Wright notes in "How Bigger Was Born" that "just as a man rises in the morning to dig ditches for his bread, so I'd work daily [writing Native Son]," his invocation of labor carries a literal force that a phrase like "the laboring of American culture" does not: Wright was working for a Writers' Project wage when he started writing Native Son, a novel that would "strive to heighten the consciousness of the [petty bourgeoisie] to all those progressive forces making for security in American life." 13 Wright in fact was on the federal payroll even as he was writing it, for he was a member of the elite Creative Writers' Project, a unit of the Writers' Project that paid writers to work on their own material (in this case material that would comprise Native Son). 14
Moreover, the rise of New Deal patronage led a broad contingent of writers--including those who had not themselves been made "clients" of the New Deal by working on the projects and those who were at best ambivalently associated with the Left--to theorize the relation between the specific modes of support used to enable writing and the aesthetic criteria used to justify that support. Robert Frost's pre-New Deal claim in "Build Soil, A Political Pastoral" that "Thought product and food product are to me / nothing compared to the producing of them" left Burnshaw unsure of the poet's political affiliations. 15 The political commitment to writing as labor and the concomitant generality of the antimarket sentiment that the lines convey could not then be specified with any kind of accuracy. 16 By 1935, however, Ernest Hemingway's antithetical and quintessentially modernist claim that his writing was something "round and whole and solid" could be understood as inseparable from his often scathing criticism of the WPA and the salary it provided its workers. 17 Hemingway's relation to the New Deal can be most successfully elaborated through his aesthetic convictions; Hemingway would repeatedly make clear that his writing was above all else an artifact, and in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and To Have and Have Not this artifact is shown not only to be impervious to the woundings that plague the characters, but finally to be more resilient to unexpected change than any person putatively secured by the New Deal. 18
But even Frost's "Build Soil," first delivered during the primaries for the 1932 presidential election, provides a compelling example of how "security legislation" ideas inflected, avant la lettre, modernist efforts at poetic self-definition. Modeled on Virgil's "First Eclogue," the poem takes as its subject the social obligations incurred with different forms of literary patronage: should the poet Tityrus, the poem asks, somehow address in his poetry the impoverishment of his peer Meliboeus, who is struggling at self-employment? Unlike Meliboeus, both Virgil's and Frost's Tityrus draw their respective wages from public institutions meant to secure them from the market: Virgil's from the Roman state, and Frost's from a university poets-in-residence program (presumably like the one at which Frost himself was then employed). 19
In both Virgil's and Frost's pastorals, Tityrus is asked for help by the farmer Meliboeus; in both he refuses the plea for assistance. In "Build Soil," Tityrus tells the suffering farmer that the only revolution available is a "one man revolution":
. . . inside in is where we've got to get.
My friends all know I'm interpersonal.
But long before I'm interpersonal,
Away way down inside I'm personal.
["BS," 320]
Thus even though Frost seems to champion something like Social Security when he writes elsewhere that it is "Better to go down dignified / With boughten friendship at your side / Than none at all," Tityrus claims that poetry is most valuable in its ability to counterbalance the forms of interpersonal association that programs like Social Security demanded. 20 "We're too unseparate out among each other" insists Tityrus, and we are meant to believe that poetry, imagined as a private form of nonmarketed labor, compensates for this fact ("BS," 324).
It is of course not clear how this advice helps Meliboeus, particularly because Tityrus's refusal to take his thought product to market is not private in any clear sense--on the contrary, it is underwritten by a salary unavailable to Meliboeus. Meliboeus therefore concludes the poem by ironically paraphrasing Tityrus's incoherence, stating that "going home / From company means coming to our senses" ("BS," 325). If a reassuring poetic retreat from a threatening reality is a familiar theme in pastoral, then so is the pronominal oscillation that here confuses the isolate with the collective. 21 What does it mean, for instance, that "we" come to "our" senses only when "we" are most alone? In what respect does the often conflicted movement to collective pronouns that marks pastoral generally and Frost's poem specifically alter Tityrus's claim that poetry is the last bastion against the eroding of private and autonomous experience? These questions point to what recent critics have seen as the defining problematic in New Deal writing. One critic argues that James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (the preeminent New Deal pastoral) "is a product of the Great Depression, which," he insists, "still occupies a mythic place as the moment when irrepressible private suffering publicly marked a faltering of capitalism." This critic then goes on to note how the work "replicate[s] the antinomies of private and public as a tension between artistic independence and corporate patronage." 22 In this account independence seems to mean privacy, and we are meant to understand that the history of art since the New Deal has been the history of art's betrayal at the hands of government and corporate modes of patronage antithetical to that privacy.
This kind of nostalgia for "artistic independence" misses entirely the significance of those formal and stylistic developments brought about by the rise of both state and corporate patronage--misses, in other words, the transformations undergone by American modernism as it impacted with the New Deal. Stevens's poetry in particular does not dramatize the antagonism between private independence and public support so much as it demonstrates how the rise of corporate patronage facilitated and was perfectly consistent with a relocation of poetic interest, already in progress, from the private "I" to the public "we." Stevens will show what is implicit in Frost's poem, namely that valuing literary labor at the expense of the literary artifact is significant not because it enables a private retreat from the market but because it relocates the poetic domain from private experience to public paradigms that authenticate experience in the process of making it reproducible. Alsberg would proudly declare that his project provided writers with a form of collective and impersonal artistic labor unavailable since the late Middle Ages, suggesting in this way a necessary relation between the project's employment structure (writers would punch a clock on group projects that rarely bore their names) and the value of the work it produced. Modernist impersonality would loom large in Stevens's work as well; he declares in "Adagia" that "Poetry is not a personal matter" ("A," 189), and would use his own source of income--the insurance company--to understand the ways in which the regulation of objectified social relationships enabled rather than threatened the sanctity and security of the individual, both in poetry and business.
All insurance practice, private or public, poetic or political, aggregates social relationships. Before any insurance practice becomes concerned with the ways it will sell its product to individual persons, it works to understand those persons in terms of population groups. The category of risk in particular identifies the frequency with which a given outcome will occur in a generalized target group. Actuarial science in this manner calculates the probability of specific outcomes occurring in specific populations. But in fact, risk is not predictive for the individual at all, for while it might make sense to say, based upon past calculations, that thirty percent of all adult males in a given test group will be in at least one automobile accident before they are forty years old, it does not make sense to say that there is a thirty-percent risk that a given adult male within that group will have an automobile accident before that age. "Risk is collective," explains François Ewald. "Whereas an accident, as damage, misfortune and suffering, is always individual, striking at one and not another, a risk of accident affects a population. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an individual risk." 23
The point here is that an insurance practice is able to order and systematize what seem to be random events by studying those events as they occur in population groups. In "The Vice of Gambling and the Virtue of Insurance" , George Bernard Shaw asks, "how is it possible to budget for solvency in dealing with matters of chance? The answer is that when dealt with in sufficient numbers, matters of chance become matters of certainty." 24 As Shaw goes on to explain, insurance is used to account for events in their most public and generalizable form, and as such is relatively uninterested in the irreducibly private dimensions of personal experience. This is why, for example, insurance is of such interest to a thinker like Michel Foucault. Foucault sees insurance as insistently, almost coercively, collective and consequently identifies it as one of the principle mechanisms through which the modern state manages population groups. 25 It is crucial to insurance practice that it "secure" the population group more than any one individual within it. Insurance cannot guarantee that individuals do not experience accidents, and the indemnification it offers is never an exact substitute for the loss incurred in any given experience. Instead, insurance guarantees that one person's experiences will not be transferred to others as a loss (when, for example, an insured individual is able to continue to meet his financial obligations after a work-stopping injury). Insurance underwrites, as Stevens puts it, "a world in which nothing unpleasant can happen," not by somehow insulating private experience from public reality, but by relocating the social significance of experience from the private and the subjective to the public and the transferable.
Frost's phrase "boughten friendship" is useful here, for it exemplifies how insurance transforms relations once thought to be the product of a private proclivity into generalizable economic relations newly dependent upon the "interpersonal" nexus Frost's Tityrus so despises. Stevens's third-person lyric achieves this same interpersonality, for it shifts poetic identification from inner experience to objectifications of the social never reducible to any one person's experience. Indeed Stevens brings to the fore the actuarial nature of his poetry in a poem explicitly about the transition from a first-person voice committed to the "private" imagination to a more scientific means of representing public relationships.
Reviewing Stevens's Ideas of Order, Burnshaw claims in 1935 that in "The Idea of Order at Key West," "contradictory notions" produce a poem in which "uncertainties are unavoidable." 26 When later asked the perceived source of that uncertainty, Burnshaw answered that the middle-class and politically unaffiliated Stevens was "unable to make alliance with what we considered to be the forces that would make things better." 27 But Stevens does very specifically refer to a compensatory mechanism designed to "make things better" (insurance) when he insists to his editor just after this review that "in 'The Idea of Order at Key West' life has ceased to be a matter of chance." 28 Stevens explains his comment by noting, "it may be that every man introduces his own order into the life about him and that the idea of order is simply what Bishop Berkeley might have called a fortuitous concourse of personal orders. But still there is order" (L, 293).
It is not immediately clear what it means for chance to be replaced by a "fortuitous concourse of personal orders." If the elimination of chance is "fortuitous"--and not the result of the personal agency gestured to in the phrase "every man introduces"--then in what respect has chance been eliminated? Stevens's comment, however, makes perfect sense in the context of the actuarial science just discussed: to recall Shaw, "when dealt with in sufficient numbers, matters of chance become matters of certainty." What appears fortuitous to one person is, from a more totalized perspective, part of a predictable pattern; as one economist explains insurance, whereas "individuals may face uncertainty . . . society can face approximate certainty." 29 As I will show below, "The Idea of Order" depends upon this move from the isolated individual to the population group, which is why Stevens can explain the elimination of chance in that poem with the simple but authoritative assertion, "But still there is order": chance becomes probability--becomes calculable--the moment that a set of what at first seem to be discrete accidental events takes on a recognizable pattern if viewed at the level of an entire population. Paradoxically, life becomes a matter of risk when it "ceases to be a matter of chance." Stevens's desire to collect oneself against uncertainty consequently emerges here with a literal force: uncertainty is eliminated when individuals are "collected" into population groups impersonal enough to turn chance into probability, impersonal enough to warrant Stevens's third-person lyric. That Frost, committed as he was to the inviolate privacy of the poetic experience, should write to Burnshaw at this time that "it was chance when the right subject matter and the right words came together" is in this context not surprising: 30 looking "inside in," a poetic devoted to the private will invariably experience as accidental those events that, seen from a totalizing perspective, constitute the most perfect of orders.
If Frost had reason to associate his job at a university writing program with more overt modes of government employment, Stevens, who had been made vice president of Hartford Fire and Indemnity in 1934, had even more reason to believe he was working for a corporation that was in many respects indistinguishable from the New Deal. This was viable in part because by 1935 Roosevelt had made the New Deal stand or fall on its ability to provide security. More importantly, the modes of social organization intrinsic to insurance provided the pattern for many of the New Deal's economic and social programs. Long before the New Deal, the insurance company had offered the preeminent model for what would come to be called the welfare state: Oliver Wendell Holmes remarks in 1881, for instance, that "[t]he state might conceivably make itself a mutual insurance company against accidents, and distribute the burden of its citizens' mishaps among all its members. There might be a pension for paralytics, and state aid for those who suffered in person or estate from tempest or wild beasts." 31 However fanciful this proposal might have seemed to Holmes, it usefully demonstrates how easily private insurance practice did in fact become public. Indeed by 1939, a novelist like Josephine Herbst refused to distinguish between private and public forms of insurance: she writes that the New Deal had entered into a "conspiracy" with the insurance company; "as long as this government exists," a character exclaims in her Rope of Gold, insurance is the one basic reliable investment." 32
For Herbst, to be committed to insurance was in some sense already to be committed to the New Deal. Just as the private insurance industry promised security in its ability to extend to its clients an artificial and financially defined family, Roosevelt's security legislation promised a form of "boughten friendship" as a function of American citizenship itself. To the extent that modern life left the individual unable to plan or effect his future, Roosevelt offered him security by facilitating and regulating his access to those resources at the disposal of an officially sanctioned national-population group. "A million persons organized as a state can do things that cannot be dared by private individuals," notes Shaw, things that "no private company can do." 33
In the years leading up to the establishment of the Social Security Administration and the WPA, however, it seemed that an interventionist state might do more than simply provide for individual security. At first, the acknowledgment that the individual is unable to cause or even foresee the conditions of his economic existence led to the hope that government might secure for itself the agency unavailable to individual persons. During the early years of the New Deal (1933-35), public opinion overwhelmingly supported the pooling of more than financial resources; it supported, that is, a form of national planning that would locate in government the capacity for intentional agency that the uncertainty of modern life was seen to threaten. The desire for economic centralization, which gave the state the power not to ameliorate the effects of economic downturns but to direct the course of the economy such that there would be no downturns, resulted in what Frank Warren has called "an apotheosis of the idea of planning, in which planning became almost synonymous with liberalism." 34
Thus whereas Soviet and German economies--both committed to national planning--turned to an increasingly authoritarian centrism, the New Deal's "associational" economy, orchestrated by the National Recovery Administration (NRA), was sold as the culmination of democratic representation. 35 "There is nothing complicated about it," Roosevelt declared of the NRA during a Fireside Chat. "It goes back to the basic idea of society and of the nation itself that people acting in a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about" (FDR, 65). But the NRA was seen to articulate and organize more than collective accomplishments, more even than collective hopes. "The social will," noted Rexford Tugwell while presenting his case for what would shortly thereafter become the NRA, "is a vague and elusive thing, difficult to apprehend, more difficult to pin down to specific issues." 36 "Governments," however, "presumably, are expressions of [the] social will. That is their excuse for being." 37 Thus the plans formulated by the NRA were sold as the product of a national collectivity: Roosevelt would describe the NRA as a brain trust of macro-economic proportions. During the years leading up to the dismantling of the NRA in 1935, Roosevelt described the New Deal as "the public's government" because it articulated nothing less than the public will (FDR, 128).
According to Walter Lippmann, any endeavor like the NRA was doomed from the start, not because Roosevelt's economic council would ignore the public's will, but because the public did not have a will. In The Phantom Public , Lippmann, responding in large part to Herbert Hoover's repeated corporate-liberal invocations of the public interest, insisted that a public was not a person, and that there was no meaningful sense in which a public could be said to have interests, let alone intentional agency. Intentional agency dissolved during the move from the individual to the public; there was, he claimed, only a virtual and impersonal public, one that by definition could not formulate designs. "A mere phantom," "an abstraction," the public was not "a fixed body of individuals," and therefore could never "direct . . . the course of events." 38
Lippmann's claim that a collective entity like the public could only mistakenly be conceived of as an agent would become recast as a central criticism of the welfare state in the hands of a laissez-faire conservative like Ayn Rand. In Atlas Shrugged , her libertarian Übermensch John Galt hijacks a radio broadcast from a band of aging New Dealers and speaks to a captive audience: "The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society--a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself." 39 But as Rand would insist again and again, "Mankind is not an entity, an organism, or a coral bush." 40 There was no sense in which one could attribute intention of any kind to a collective. Howard Roark, the modernist hero of The Fountainhead , Rand's most explicitly anti-New Deal polemic, puts this most simply during the trial at the close of the novel. Roark stands accused of blowing up a government housing project that he designed, but that has been altered by others. "The mind is an attribute of the individual," Roark explains:
There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. The primary act--the process of reason--must be performed alone. . . . No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred. 41
For Roark, as well as for Rand, the welfare state rested on the faulty premise that public, collective groups could perform those functions reserved for private, necessarily singular persons. In this instance, Rand's caricature was not without its basis. In Liberalism and Social Action , a defense of an "organized social control of economic forces," John Dewey claimed that the state "has to assume the responsibility for making it clear that intelligence is a social asset, and is clothed with a function as public as its origin." 42
On the other hand, John Maynard Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money , perhaps the most important influence on the future of the American welfare state, made clear in economic terms that intelligence was not a social asset, particularly in the case of nationally planned economies. National planning, Keynes reasoned, had embraced the faulty proposition that the state's involvement in the economy needed to proceed by refining technologies of representation, by deciding how successfully to personify and so represent collective agency, by deciding how a board, a president, or even an entire government might think and plan for the larger totalities they represented. Keynes, however, argued that there had been "a fundamental misunderstanding of how . . . the economy in which we live actually works," and maintained that personifying groups did not address the fact that there was no way for groups, or the persons they were made to resemble, to intend the economies they comprised. 43
Moreover, Keynes maintained that like individual persons and collectivities, government had no significant intentional agency in matters of economy. 44 The organic complexity of economies meant that no government plan, however comprehensive, could anticipate or account for economic contingencies as they developed. Keynes would argue, for example, that a traditional actuarial calculus could never accurately measure probability in questions of macro-economics--the government, for example, could never foresee exactly how many unemployed would need each month to claim unemployment benefits from the Social Security Administration. 45 Thus he argued that continual regulation of fiscal and monetary policy was necessary because the international nature of the modern economy guaranteed that government could never anticipate or stabilize the contexts in which it would execute its plans. In fact, Keynes saw the controlled circulation of money as the consummate means of addressing the inherently uncertain nature of modern economies, writing with emphasis that "the importance of money essentially flows from its being a link between the present and the future" (GT, 293). Thus while governments did not know what was done with the money they regulated, money remained one of the only traceable lineaments connecting governmental actions and their outcomes.
The legislators of the world, acknowledged and unacknowledged both, were retrenching, for the 1930s and 1940s would find Stevens fascinated with these same issues, such that he could claim, for example, to be interested in what he called "up to date capitalism" (L, 292), a claim that might begin to explain his famously cryptic proclamation that "Money is a kind of poetry" ("A," 191). 46 This assertion seems to find Keynesian explanation in "The Pleasures of Merely Circulating," as well as in Owl's Clover, where the injunction "To live incessantly in change" is enabled by the command "turn / Your backs upon the vivid statue." 47 Stevens would in fact take this opposition into the concluding cantos of "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" , where he contrasts the civic aggressions of an architect and sculptor who "builds capitols" and "establishes statues of reasonable men" to the intrinsically poetic song of a robin. 48 Whereas the sculptor attempts to impose an artifactual order of his own making on a public world, the robin produces art in the simple process of singing. In this way the public circulation of money that funds the sculptor is transformed into a poetic commitment to circulation as such, for the robin's songs
. . . at least comprise
An occupation, an exercise, a work,
A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:
One of the vast repetitions final in
Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round
And round and round, the merely going round,
Until merely going round is a final good . . .
["NT," 405].
Here, then, is one context in which to understand the poem's edict "It Must Change" ("NT," 389). Poetry--like an act of establishing, but unlike the statue that is finally established--is thus conceived of as "[a]n occupation, an exercise, a work."
The idea that circulation could itself become an aesthetic value was far from the mind of a writer like Anzia Yezierska when she declared of her experience on the Federal Writers' Project that "every day it became harder to blind ourselves to the cold fact that we, like the privy-builders and road-makers of other public projects, were being paid, not for what we did, but to put money into circulation." 49 Yezierska, the author of successful novels that had become still more lucrative when they were made into films, refused to imagine herself a wage laborer. Stevens, however, would cannily suggest that the commitment to producing a literary artifact (as opposed to simply circulating) opened one up to precisely the uncertainty both he and the Writers' Project were committed to protecting against. Owl's Clover, for example, does more than simply relocate poetic value from the artifact to a process of making--it associates the fixity of the statue with the inevitable uncertainty of how others respond to it. Richard Wright, veteran of the Writers' Project, claims that he doesn't care if either critics or consumers decide whether "Native Son is a good book or a bad book" because "the mere writing of it will be more fun and a deeper satisfaction than any praise or blame from anybody" (N, 540). Hence Wright, dubbing writing "a significant kind of living" (N, 535), absolves writing from the unpredictability of consumption in much the same way that Keynesian theory, committed to the ongoing regulation of monetary and fiscal policy, absolves governments from having to anticipate future economic contingencies. Indeed neither author nor government could anticipate the whims of the consumer. Thus whereas the second stanza of Owl's Clover begins, "So much the sculptor had foreseen," the third stanza represents a consumer of the statue that the sculptor "had not foreseen," in this way explaining why poetry might want to hypostatize the regulated circulation of money and commit to the trope of continuous labor. 50
But Keynesian economics provides more than an homology for Stevens's substitution of a "going round // And round and round" for artifactual art, for Keynes would argue as early as 1936 that government spending on the arts was an ideal way to put federal money into public circulation. Keynes was in fact the first head of Britain's Council for the Encouragement of Music and Arts, established in 1941, and later founded and ran the British Arts Council. Like the New Deal's Arts Projects, both organizations would work to implement his claim, made in 1936, that the performative arts in particular were ideal recipients of government spending. In "Art and the State," Keynes reasons that
Even more important than the permanent monuments of dignity and beauty in which each generation should express its spirit to stand for it in the procession of time are the ephemeral ceremonies, shows and entertainments in which the common man can take delight . . . and which can make him feel, as nothing else can, that he is one with, and part of, a community, finer, more gifted, more splendid, more care-free, than he can be by himself. 51
It was of course the aim of Keynesian economics to demonstrate that this hypothetical common man could not meaningfully imagine himself part of a community able to affect the economy. But if collective agency was dead, the common man might receive art in its stead. The artist, Keynes reasons, in need of "economic security and enough income" ("AS," 372), would thus become the "servant of the public" ("AS," 372), an expressive vehicle for what by his own account cited above was a mostly fictive "spirit" ("AS," 374), when his art was at its most "ephemeral" ("AS," 374). Artists, as well as "architects and engineers," might in this way "embody the various imagination . . . of peaceful and satisfied spirits" ("AS," 374). The reflexive and placating moment of performance, he declared, was "an immortal function of the state, an art of government regarded at most times as essential" ("AS," 373). 52
"Whose spirit is this?" asks the speaker of "The Idea of Order at Key West" as he and a companion observe a singing woman walking by the side of a raging sea, and become interested in the relation between her song and the sea's motions. 53 Does the singer orchestrate the sea with her voice, or is she a more passive poetic device, an objective correlative meant to "embody the various imagination . . . of peaceful and satisfied spirits"? Or is the raging sea an entirely natural force, beyond the control of any imagination?
However these questions are answered, it is clear that the poem, in its relentless quest to locate the origins of order and in its opposition, fundamental to modern political theory, between the natural and the social, speaks in potentially expansive registers. "Order has to be created," Keynes insisted, "It is not natural." 54 There was, he maintained, no systemic genius; laissez-faire could in the end lead only to what "The Idea of Order at Key West"--seeming to compare waves to stockmarkets--will call "meaningless plungings" ("IO," 129). Stevens raises the possibility of such analogies when he notes on the jacket cover of Ideas of Order that "We think of changes occurring today as economic changes, involving political and social changes. Such changes raise questions of political and social order." "[I]t is inevitable" he continues, "that a poet should be concerned with such questions." 55
If Ideas of Order reveals this concern, then the poem "The Idea of Order at Key West" does so even more pointedly. The year Stevens wrote the poem, 1934, saw the high-water mark in a federal and state publicity campaign that held Key West up as the perfect encapsulation of the early New Deal. The Roosevelt Administration lauded Key West as "an illustration" and "model" of the goals of its work-relief programs; the town was declared "New Deal Town" as newspapers across the country followed Roosevelt's lead in associating the isolated island with the possibilities of a federally orchestrated economic recovery. 56 Liberal intellectuals were just as sanguine. "In that isolated microcosm you could study the whole issue of disinterested collective planning versus interested private enterprise," writes Elmer Davis of Key West in 1935. This leads him to conclude with grandeur that Key West had become nothing less than "the New Deal in miniature." 57
This was the case, Davis reasoned, because "City and county had surrendered their powers, via the Governor, to experts from Washington backed by Federal funds" in their efforts to rebuild Key West after it was devastated by a hurricane in 1934 ("NW," 641). By July 1934, Julius Stone, the ranking Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) officer in Florida, had assumed control of the town and began disbursing the $935,000 the FERA would spend on the now-stranded island in its first year alone.
But for Davis, Federal Relief had done more than save Key West; it had transformed it into something of an intellectual hot-house: "It was Greenwich Village, Montparnasse, Provincetown--on a little tropical island" ("NW," 648). The hot topics, however, were not those that had characterized other centers of modernist bohemia; Davis claims that "groups of men and women" would sit up "till two A. M. discussing problems of administrative technique, and having as good a time as they would have had at the nightclubs" ("NW," 649). "The dominant interest," Davis explains of these discussions, was "the application--however hampered and unsuccessful--of the trained and disinterested intelligence to the problems of collective welfare" ("NW," 649). This celebration of "administrative technique" and those "disinterested intelligences" who would perfect it is cause for suspicion as well as for marvel, for Davis laments that if the New Deal "had got started earlier, the rehabilitation of Key West would have been a really collective enterprise; now it cannot help looking to many people like something imposed by outside authority" ("NW," 650). Thus we are left, Davis concludes, with "a picture of a group of intelligent men and women applying their intelligence (under whatever handicaps, with however limited success) to the problems of a community which could not save itself" ("NW," 652).
The imposition of order "by outside authority" on a "community which could not save itself" speaks directly to "The Idea of Order at Key West"'s organizing question--"Whose spirit is this?" But it is the opposition Davis sets up between the civic planning of administrative experts and a planning that might "have been a really collective enterprise" that speaks most directly to the poem, which is meant precisely to moot the opposition between these two alternatives, both of which presume that human agents impose order on the world through constructive imaginative acts. Key West was the New Deal in miniature for Stevens as well as for Davis, but the insurance executive saw what the future head of the Office of War Information did not, namely that welfare government would be felt most powerfully not in the worlds it built, but in the provisions it made for its inevitable failure to secure those worlds from the hazards of the unforeseen.
"The Idea of Order" is most explicitly about the difficulty of discerning, let alone controlling, the causes of events. The lines of influence between woman and sea are next to impossible to discern, as when the speaker notes that "The song and water were not medleyed sound / Even if what she sang was what she heard, / Since what she sang was uttered word by word" ("IO," 128). Amid the qualification, the words seem to utter themselves, lending force to the ambiguous phrase at the beginning of the stanza, "No more was she" ("IO," 128).
But if this phrase suggests the irrelevance of the individual agent in the face of sublime, natural forces, the speaker's desire to know "Whose spirit is this?" continually searches for an intentional agent as the source of what he sees. The relentless personification in the poem is perhaps the most telling sign of the speaker's efforts to locate this agency. The sea is produced as a personification ("the ever-hooded, tragic gestured sea" ["IO," 129] has a "genius" ["IO," 128], a "body" ["IO," 128], "sleeves" ["IO," 128], and a "dark voice"["IO," 129]) precisely so the speaker can treat it as a potentially intentional agent equal to the singer. Genius and body, however, are not interchangeable aspects of personhood; rather, the former designates the capacity to control and direct the latter. Thus the sea is least like an intentional agent when the speaker notes that "the water never formed to mind or voice, / Like a body wholly body" ("IO," 128).