Home: Leila Rosen—English Teacher and
Aesthetic Realism Associate
“Some Sentences in a Passage in American Literature”
Report of Eli Siegel’s Lecture of January 9, 1976
by
containing discussions of works by Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, Santayana
and more
The lecture I am reporting on was originally given by Eli
Siegel January 9, 1976, and he titled it, “Sentences in a Passage in American
Literature.” He began this rich talk by
saying he would discuss “the matter of what beauty is, and how it is, and why
it is the oneness of opposites.” With scholarly
ease, and often with humor, Mr. Siegel looked at many instances of American
poetry and prose and showed their beauty or goodness arose from the way
opposites are one in them. I was moved
hearing this lecture, and I'm proud to be giving this report. Studying in the professional classes taught
by Ellen Reiss, I am receiving the widest, most cultural education—and having
the time of my life!
Mr. Siegel looked first at Whitman’s long poem, “Starting from
Paumanok” (an early name for
O for all that, I am yet of you, unseen, this hour, with
irrepressible love,
Walking
Splashing my bare feet in the edge of the summer ripples, on
Paumanok’s sands,
Crossing the prairies—dwelling again in
Observing shows, births, improvements, structures, arts,
Listening to the orators and the oratresses in public halls,
Of and through The States, as during life—each man and woman my
neighbor,
The Louisianian, the Georgian, as near to me, and I as near to
him and her,
The Mississippian and Arkansian yet with me—and I yet with any
of them;
Yet upon the plains west of the spinal river—yet in my house of
adobie,
Yet returning eastward—yet in the
Yet Kanadian, cheerily braving the winter—the snow and ice
welcome to me,
Yet a true son either of
Yet sailing to other shores to annex the same—yet welcoming
every new brother;
Hereby applying these leaves to the new ones, from the hour they
unite with the old ones;
Coming among the new ones myself, to be their companion and
equal—coming personally to you now;
Enjoining you to acts, characters, spectacles, with me.
Said Mr. Siegel:
[It is] not the greatest of Whitman. It can be called a whirl… [However,] if
you’ve listened, you’ve been to many places and done many things… This is one of the places where manyness is
oneness… And the question is, When that
occurs, does something like beauty occur?
There is something like beauty in these lines… The enthusiasm is impetuous, madly
circular....This is all one sentence and you are tossed around...but I think
it's all to the good.
We were
seeing—technically—what this particular sentence says about beauty as
such. Continuing, Mr. Siegel looked at
more sentences in Whitman's poetry, one by the 19th century writer
Lafcadio Hearn, and two about Emily Dickinson.
He showed how opposites—including rest and motion, space and matter,
sameness and difference, contraction and expansion—were beautifully one in
them. And throughout, he related the
beauty of these sentences to that of other arts, including painting,
photography, and the cinema. For
example, there is this sentence by Robert Shafer, editor of the book American
Literature, which was the text for this class, about Emily Dickinson, whom
Mr. Siegel called “the Amherst recluse and angel,” who was “so much like
Whitman and so much unlike [him]:”
“Henceforth she lived more and more secluded, and
after her father’s death in 1874 she never even left the house save, in the
evening, to water her plants, set just outside the porch in summer.”
This is “like Nelson going on
the deck of the Victory and then [returning to his cabin,]” said Mr.
Siegel. “There is motion here in
tidiness. We have size in beauty,
smallness in largeness.” These
opposites, he said, are important in American art, as there are big wall paintings
and miniatures. And he added “the miniatures seem to be winning.”
Central in this lecture was a discussion of a story of 1898 by Edith Wharton, titled “The
Pelican," a bird, Mr. Siegel noted "who is thought to have given her
blood to save her children.” And he
said, “This is one of the important stories about a mother, [and] should be
known… The humor is quite good.” Miss Wharton “uses expansive
metaphors quite carefully,” he continued.
Often she compares “two things… which you don’t expect to have
compared.” For example, there is this
keen and satirical sentence at the beginning of the story, about the mother,
Mrs. Amyot:
“For the dear lady was providentially deficient in humor: the
least hint of the real thing clouded her lovely eye like the hovering shadow of
an algebraic problem.”
Mrs. Amyot is a
widow whose husband died soon after the birth of their child. To support her son, she gives drawing room
lectures, which Mr. Siegel said, were quite popular in the 1890s. And he read this sentence about one
particular lecture:
“The subject of the discourse (I think it proved to be on
Ruskin) was clearly of minor importance, not only to my friend, but to the
throng of well-dressed and absent-minded ladies who rustled in late, dropped
their muffs and pocket-books, and undisguisedly lost themselves in the study of
each other's apparel.”
Mr. Siegel commented:
In American literature, the severest critics of women are [of]
the same sex. It has always been that
way….[Miss Wharton] shows that women can write with satire and neatness.
And about the beauty of her sentences he said:
One thing in [prose]… is to relate two adjectives that are
unrelated [like] “well-dressed” and “absent-minded”….[It’s like saying] he was
touchy and rich, [or] he was elegant, yet archaic.
And he added, "What are you going to do with that?"
Looking at many
sentences in the story, he showed that Edith Wharton’s metaphors and similes
put together the opposites of sameness and difference in a way that makes
"us feel the world in a new and vivid way."
Like others in
the class, I was gripped as Mr. Siegel read almost the entire conclusion of the
story. The boy, Lancelot, is now a grown
man, successful, with children of his own.
After many years, he has finally come to hear his mother lecture. Before her talk, he happens to meet the
narrator, who has known his mother for years.
And as they are waiting, they overhear several women saying they buy
tickets for Mrs. Amyot’s lectures out of pity, because she needs the money to
support her son. Hearing this, Lancelot
is furious, and after the lecture he brings the narrator to see his mother, and
confronts her. He is humiliated, afraid
she has been, as he says, “making us both the laughing-stock of every place you
go!” He tells her:
This gentleman says he knows all about you and I mean him to
know all about me too. I don’t mean that
he or anybody else under this roof shall go on thinking for another twenty-four
hours that a cent of their money has ever gone into my pockets since I was old
enough to shift for myself. And he
shan’t leave this room till you’ve made that clear to him.
“This is one of the important son and mother confrontations in
literature,” said Mr. Siegel said. The
way he discussed this story had me see how important Edith Wharton's style and
perception is. As a man who once had the unfortunate and
very representative belief that men were simply superior to women, including my
own mother who happens to be a college professor, I'm grateful for the new,
large respect for women Aesthetic Realism has encouraged in me, and this
includes very much the woman to whom I'm happily married, Leila Rosen, who is a
high school teacher of English.
Turning to
writing so different from that of Edith Wharton, Mr. Siegel discussed passages
in the Shafer book by the important philosopher George Santayana, who lived
from 1863 to 1952. Santayana writes
disparagingly about his own poetry:
Of impassioned tenderness or Dionysiac frenzy I have nothing,
nor even that magic and pregnancy of phrase—really the creation of a fresh
idiom—which marks the high lights of poetry.
“All beauty,” Mr. Siegel commented,
can be said definitely to be a oneness of calm and impetuosity,
rest and motion, serenity and gusto, lucidity and disorder… So, in a most urbane way, Mr. Santayana says
he doesn’t have the ingredients of poetry.
He says it so decoratively, you forget what he’s saying.
Then, in a way
that moved me very much, Mr. Siegel explained what has to be in order for
poetry to be. And as he did, the
opposites were there. “There are a few
things that poetry needs,” he said:
One, that there be some feeling there. You can’t be indifferent…and write a poem…
.The next thing…is music….The exact expression of the feeling would make for a
kind of music…The next thing is…it would have to be personal, …and in order for
it to be poetry, there has to be the impersonal, too….There is something
universal and something idiomatic in poetry.
It is the universe peering at you through definite eyes.
I feel these sentences are beautiful, in both their style and
meaning.
“The
fight between the tiger and the maker of syllogisms, the maker of long
sentences,” Mr. Siegel continued, “is all throughout Santayana’s work.” I loved hearing this! The tiger and the maker of syllogisms have to
do with passion and control, emotion and logic, opposites that have fought in
me, and I thought they could never go together.
I learned from Aesthetic Realism, beginning in classes by Edward Green
at the Manhattan School of Music, that this fight is resolved in music,
including the music I love and play: jazz.
In another lecture Mr. Siegel said the motto of jazz is “Professor Tiger.”
Santayana’s
philosophy, Mr. Siegel continued, is: the world is senseless, but man can give
it sense through his perception. This,
he said:
is the problem that philosophy has to face: although the world
[can seem] senseless, it can create creatures who come to calculus [and]
grammatical sentences…[and] can study the proportion of a vase…. [The question
is,] does man, in being fond of order,… get this desire just from himself,…or
is he encouraged a bit by this chaos which produced him?
And to show
that the sentences which have lived in American literature are always a oneness
of passion and logic, intensity and control, something sensible and something
which can seem almost senseless, Mr. Siegel read a brief passage from Herman
Melville’s novel Moby Dick, in which Captain Ahab tells the men on the
ship of his determination to get the White Whale:
Aye, aye! And I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the
Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I
give him up. And this is what ye have shipped
for, men! To chase that white whale on
both sides of land, and over all sides of earth….
The oneness of
passion and control Mr. Siegel was showing are in great American sentences, he
himself had in this talk.
It is the honor of my life to hear him lecture, hear him talk
about poetry and all the arts, about people, history, ethics, and more, with
his unsurpassed knowledge and feeling.