Harriet Monroe and The Great American Novel

Harriet Monroe, 1860-1936

William Carlos Williams, out of Paterson Book III (1949):

—of this, make it of this, this
this, this, this, this             .

And, out of the end of The Great American Novel (1923):

      What difference is it whether I make the words or take the words. It makes no difference whatever.

Or:

      He took any kind of rags just as they were collected, filth or grease right on them the way they were and teased them up into a fluffy stuff which he put through a rolling process and made into sheets of wadding. These sheets were fed mechanically between two layers of silkolene and a girl simply sat there with an electric sewing device which she guided with her hand and drew in the designs you see on those quilts, you know.
      You’ve seen this fake oilcloth they are advertising now. Congoleum. Nothing but building paper with a coating of enamel.
      ¡O vida tan dulce!

—

After a rather cursory look around, I haphazardly conclude that it’s gone previously unnoted—how William Carlos Williams, in The Great American Novel (1923), included therein la plupart of a Harriet Monroe commentary titled “Flamboyance,” a piece found in the November 1922 issue of Poetry (Vol. XXI, No. 2). Here’s the Monroe:

      “America needs the flamboyant to save her soul”—so said Vachel Lindsay at one of those Glacier Park camp-fires where he and Stephen Graham talked of art and life to the indifferent mountains.
      He might have added that America tries to satisfy this need in strange and often uncatalogued ways. America, living an exemplary three-meals-a-day-and-bed-time life in a wall-papered home, goes now and then en masse to the circus to see men, women and animals perform exquisite and impossible feats of grace and daring. What could be more flamboyant than the trapeze-performer hurtling through the air, the tiger leaping through man-made hoops, or the elephant poising his mighty bulk on his two forelegs lifted to the top of bottles? What more flamboyant than the painted clown, timeless type of the race, laughing that he may not weep, grinning through a thousand tragic jests while little human beings perform their miraculous tricks around him?
      And America, sitting respectably at home with its newspaper; America, suppressing its feelings and censoring its artists; America, fearing emotion as the gateway to perdition—America finds the flamboyant in the courts, and listens to every passion-molded word uttered to judge and jury in Reno or New Brunswick or South Bend.
      Jazz, the Follies, the flapper in orange and green gown and war-paint of rouge, the skyscraper lighting its thousand windows, the airplane skimming the clouds, the freshman shouting his college yell—these are all extravagant, impossible frenzies of color in a world that refuses to be drab. Even the movies, devoid as they are of color in the physical sense, are gaudy in the imaginations of the people who watch them; gaudy with exaggerated romance, exaggerated comedy, exaggerated splendor or grotesqueness or passion. Human souls who are not living impassioned lives, not creating romance and splendor and grotesqueness—phases of beauty’s infinite variety—such people wistfully try to find these things outside themselves; a futile, often a destructive quest.
      The imagination will not down. If it is not a dance, a song, it becomes an outcry, a protest. If it is not flamboyance it becomes deformity; if it is not art, it becomes crime. Men and women can not be content, any more than children, with the mere facts of a humdrum life—the imagination must adorn and exaggerate life, must give it splendor and grotesqueness, beauty and infinite depth. And the mere acceptance of these things from without is not enough—it is not enough to agree and assert when the imagination demands for satisfaction creative energy. Flamboyance expresses faith in that energy—it is a shout of delight, a declaration of richness. It is at least the beginning of art.

Signed “H. M.” Williams’s use of the material (with a few minor cuts and fewer inserts) occurs in chapter XII:

      That cat is funny. I think she’d be a good one for the circus. When she’s hungry she bites your legs. Then she jumps at you as much as to say: Caramba, give me something.
      America needs the flamboyant to save her soul—said Vachel Lindsay to the indifferent mountains.
      He might have added that America tries to satisfy this need in strange and often uncatalogued ways. America, living an exemplary three-meals-a-day-and-bed-time life in a wall-papered home, goes now and then en masse, by Gosh, to the circus to see men, women and animals perform exquisite and impossible feats of daring. What could be more flamboyant than the trapeze-performer hurtling through the air, the tiger leaping through man-made hoops, or the elephant poising his mighty bulk on his two forelegs lifted to the top of bottles? What more flamboyant than the painted clown, timeless type of the race, laughing that he may not weep, grinning through a thousand tragic jests while little human beings perform their miraculous tricks around him?
      Jazz, the Follies, the flapper in orange and green gown and war-paint of rouge—impossible frenzies of color in a world that refuses to be drab. Even the movies, devoid as they are of color in the physical sense, are gaudy in the imaginations of the people who watch them; gaudy with exaggerated romance, exaggerated comedy, exaggerated splendor of grotesqueness or passion. Human souls who are not living impassioned lives, not creating romance and splendor and grotesqueness—phases of beauty’s infinite variety—such people wistfully try to find these things outside themselves; a futile, often a destructive quest.
      The imagination will not down. If it is not a dance, a song, it becomes an outcry, a protest. If it is not flamboyance it becomes deformity; if it is not art, it becomes crime. Men and women cannot be content, any more than children, with the mere facts of a humdrum life—the imagination must adorn and exaggerate life, must give it splendor and grotesqueness, beauty and infinite depth. And the mere acceptance of these things from without is not enough—it is not enough to agree and assert when the imagination demands for satisfaction creative energy. Flamboyance expresses faith in that energy—it is a shout of delight, a declaration of richness. It is at least the beginning of art.
      All right go ahead: A TEXAS PRIZE CONTEST—The Southern Methodist University at Dallas, Texas, recently emerged from a prize contest which had a strange dénouement—
      Look here young man, after this you examine those girls in the cold weather.
      Who is Warner Fabian? Flaming Youth is the story of the super-flapper, of her affairs at country clubs and cozy home-dances with all the accompaniments of prohibition stimulants. Warner Fabian believes that the youth of this country feeds on excitement and rushes to knowledge “heeled” by way of petting parties and he elemental stimulus of jazz. The barriers of convention are down . . .

And so forth, off into a brief investigation of the 1923 book by the pseudonymous (for Samuel Hopkins Adams) Warner Fabian. Oddly enough, Williams’s paragraph beginning “All right go ahead”—a kind of exhortatory parallel to the earlier pre-grab “Caramba, give me something”—uses both title and opening line of a (directly) subsequent “H. M.”-penned commentary in the same November 1922 issue of Poetry.

—

No news per se in the way Williams assembled borrowed material.* Hugh Kenner, in “A Note on The Great American Novel” (out of the 1958 Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature) refers to both its “blocks of verbal material” and how it is “the dream of a writer who hasn’t written a word, and it parodies certain naïve motives for undertaking authorship which—once more—are part of Williams’ subject.” Kenner:

. . . the “Novel,” bringing its lyric phases under progressively stricter control, acquires by cunning trial and error a reliable tone which in the final chapters can handle with a compositor’s sureness a surprising variety of materials and effects: from “Particles of falling stars, coming to nothing. The air pits them, eating out the softer parts” to “The Perfection of Pisek-designed Personality Modes: A distinctly forward move in the realm of fashion is suggested by the new personality modes, designed by Pisek . . .”

It is entirely likely that other borrowings of “verbal material”—“small (or large)”—are evident, or traceable.** What I find notable—and somewhat lamentable—is how Monroe’s fine final outburst (“The imagination will not down . . .”), routinely assigned to Williams (and seeming to fit perfectly), makes its incognito way in the world. So Charles Altieri (oddly glossing “The imagination will not down . . .” as “The imagination will not d[r]own . . .”) in a piece (rather ironically) titled “Rhetoric and Poetics: How to Use the Inevitable Return of the Repressed” writes of Monroe’s lines: “Here William Carlos Williams provides a striking example when he imagines how a poetry resistant to rhetoric might be central to democracy.” Or there’s Herbert Leibowitz, in “Something Urgent I Have to Say to You”: The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams quoting Monroe’s lines in order to evoke a pulpit-mounted and afflatus-scorched Williams, one who “exhorts us to find the grace that imagination’s holy powers alone bestow.” (Note: Williams cut Monroe’s “impossible feats of grace and daring” to “impossible feats of daring.”)

* Williams himself seemingly had little to say about The Great American Novel. In the Autobiography he (rather flippantly and with a modicum of accuracy) calls it “a satire on the novel form in which a little (female) Ford car fall more or less in love with a Mack truck.” In a 26 March 1924 letter to Kenneth Burke, Williams seems ambivalent (if not dismissive):

      Yes, my Gr. Am. Novel never found a beginning. It was that I must have wanted to say. And that’s how you get me, one of the ones with that that I am after. It’s got to be said to be read. I am trying to speak. To tell it in the only way possible, but I do want to say what there is. It is not for me merely to arrange things prettily. Oh purple anemones! (you get what I mean? I mean “Shit.” But I’m through with that now. No more “shits.” It is dead, that kind of slang.)

** In the June 1922 issue of a monthly magazine called The Mentor (Vol. 10, No. 5) one discovers a number of paragraphs Williams used in chapter XIII of The Great American Novel. Thus (out of a piece called “Mesa Verde Cliff Dwellers” by Ronne C. Shelsé)—

      Afterward came the cliff dwellers—a much advanced race—who formed a partnership with nature in the science of home building. They fashioned stones into perfect blocks and built the solid walls which have withstood the lashing storms of time forgotten. Masterpieces of architecture, the survivals of the cliff dwellings tell the story in the mute language of the ages . . .

—is transformed by Williams into—

      The Mesa Verde cliff dwellers—a much advanced race—formed a partnership with nature in the science of home building. Masterpieces of architecture, the survivals of the cliff dwellings tell the story of the ages . . .

A couple of paragraphs later, Williams uses nearly verbatim this lengthy caption to an illustration of a Navaho blanket (out of a piece called “Indian Blankets and Their Makers” by George Wharton James):

      The word bayeta is merely Spanish for baize. Great quantities of this were made in England for the Spanish and Mexican trade, the major part of which was of a brilliant red color. In this way English baize became Spanish bayeta to the Indians of the American Southwest. Familiar with the art of weaving, these Indians unraveled the bayeta, retwisted it into one, two, or three strands, and then rewove it into their blankets, which are now almost priceless. This old blanket was picked up by the author in a New Mexican corral, for the purpose of wiping his buggy axle. It was covered with filth and mud. A number of “washings” revealed this glorious specimen of the weaver’s art.

Williams’s next paragraph—it, too, verbatim—is out of an unsigned item in The Mentor titled “Why Did They Say No?”

      Accepted by a cultured and talented belle, Lincoln, according to his law partner, had already been refused by Sarah Rickard, an obscure miss of sixteen, of whom apparently nothing further is known.

And so forth. Art out of the assemblagist’s idle page-flippings and recklessly sure intuitings.