Anagrammatically

Take any text that introduces Shakespeare to the beginner, and ever so shamefully little mention will be made of meter. Instead, time will be spent speaking about themes, about characterisations, about motives. Rather than bringing into relief one of the fundamental tools of Shakespeare’s trade and training the ear to hear, what can be idly “discussed” to and fro for arguable gain are emphasised. Sadly, such a sorry situation is made worse by actors often taking liberties with the meter in performance.

Puck’s epilogue in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is yet another moment of Shakespearean brilliance and a fine example of how Shakespeare employs meter to reinforce meaning (stressed syllables are underlined):

If we shadows have offended
Think but this, and all is mended:
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend.
If you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearn-ed luck
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call.
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

Puck, the merry prankster, is here speaking not in pentameter, but in the more playful and fun-loving tetrameter. So instead of every line containing five stressed syllables or beats, as Shakespeare usually writes his verse, Puck speaks predominately in four-beat lines of rollicking merry glee.

Shakespeare also sets up a call and response by making Puck’s first two lines end on weak beats that are emphatically answered with the lines that follow, each of which come in ending on the strong beat and feature one less syllable to accentuate the last word of each line.

Those lines are unevenly syllabled for another reason too. Each line of verse is ordinarily even-numbered in length, so the lines’ seven syllables go hand in hand with the sense that something does indeed need amending, as Puck confesses.

And the pièce de résistance, the thing that makes Shakespeare the king of verse, is the final two lines of the epilogue that turn from seven-syllable lines of trochees (DA-dums) to eight-syllable lines of iambs (da-DUMs). Iambic is the predominant rhythm of English prosody, the natural flow of an Anglophone’s speech, and just as Puck promises to restore amends, he himself reinforces what he says by turning from uneven trochees to well-balanced iambs and speaking in English’s natural rhythm.

In Puck’s epilogue, Shakespeare deftly works the meter to support the text’s meaning, all of which go over the head of the beginning student whose introductory books speak only of grander subjects and ignore the humbler merits of musical meter. Shakespeare is perhaps more for the ear than he is for the insights into human behaviour, and ignoring the ear’s joys is as silly as swallowing whole a blueberry cheesecake without it even brushing past the tongue.

I found myself reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast only last week and remembered again why I find what he writes about so juvenile. I say what he writes about rather than his writing because, while I concede that appreciating someone’s writing style can be largely subjective after a certain point, what someone writes about — the topics, the themes — can be discussed profitably and even perhaps be sprinkled with nuggets of that much dreamed-of gold of El Dorado, objectivity, if done carefully.

Now, Hemingway and juvenilia are inextricably linked in my imaginings because of the author’s clear-eyed view of stunning vistas of truth, a quasi-mystical vision that pervades his literature and excites the blessed pure of heart. In one’s youth, these stunning vista are revealed almost daily and knowledge and truth do seem declarative — carbon has six protons, chien is French for dog; the truth is mine, ye evil deniers of wisdom! Soon, the unchecked fire of the gonads engulfs the brain and moral indignation runs wild: here be change, a new world order, the overthrow of the wicked and the righting of countless wrongs via the embracing of what’s certain, what’s true: carbon has six protons and chien is French for dog, ye blackguards of untruth, and the light of the good guides us in our reshaping of the world!

There is indeed something noble in such an attitude. The austere clarity of the unspoiled truth is alluring and inspiring, the kind of thing that gets people on soapboxes spouting glib wisdom. Of course, a bout with quantum mechanics — did you know protons are spin-½ fermions composed of three quarks? — and the discovery that languages have histories, fuzzy bounds and uncharted byways — chien might mean dog in certain respects, but a dog of a day and un chien d’un jour shows that’s certainly not in all respects — puts paid to the old notions of what’s true.  The messiness of reality rears its sullying head, and those who can bear to look turn from youthful, simplifying idealism towards a mature, do-as-best-as-one-can pragmatism. Others, however, remain oblivious to reality and cling to the adolescent’s truths.

Bono professes to write songs containing no more than “three chords and the truth”, and it’s that naivete that makes Bono so downright embarrassing as he struts about attempting to right the world’s ills, no matter how noble his intentions might be. In Hemingway and his offspring, those ever so earnest Beats, we find that same attitude, that same superficial certainty masquerading as mystical profundity that excites simplicity’s yearners and sticks in the side of complexity’s acolytes. And in Moveable Feast we find Hemingway’s awkwardly juvenile paean to his muse, Austere Truth, who sheds her glib grace on her patient, obeisant faithful:

But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was a good and severe discipline.

Nabokov reproduced his “interview” (Nabokov generally replied in writing to interview questions — he claimed that he couldn’t speak well off the cuff) for the Paris Review in October, 1967, in his Strong Opinions. In the interview, he explained poshlost, the art of the charlatan and the mountebank, in that humorously withering way of his:

What is most characteristic of poshlust in contemporary writing? Are there temptations for you in the sin of poshlust? Have you ever fallen?

“Poshlust,” or in a better transliteration poshlost, has many nuances and evidently I have not described them clearly enough in my little book on Gogol, if you think one can ask anybody if he is tempted by poshlost. Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishnest pseudo-literature — these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. Poshlost speaks in such concepts as “America is no better than Russia” or “We all share in Germany’s guilt.” The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as “the moment of truth,” “charisma,” existential” (used seriously), “dialogue” (as applied to political talks between nations), and “vocabulary” (as applied to a dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam is seditious poshlost. Belonging to a very select club (which sports one Jewish name—that of the reasurer) is genteel poshlost. Hack reviews are frequently poshlost, but it also lurks in certain highbrow essays. Poshlost calls Mr. Blank a great poet, and Mr. Bluff a great novelist. One of poshlost’s favorite breeding places has always been the Art Exhibition; there it is produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools of wreckers, building crankshaft cretins of stainless steel, zen stereos, polystyrene stinkbirds, objects trouvés in latrines, cannon balls, canned balls. There we admire the gabinetti wallpatterns of so-called abstract artists, Freudian surrealism, roric smudges, and Rorschach blots — all of it as corny in its own right as the academic “September Moms” and “Florentine Flowergirls” of half a century ago. The list is long, and, of course, everybody has his bête noire, his black pet, in the series. Mine is that airline ad: the snack served by an obsequious wench to a young couple — she eyeing ecstatically the cucumber canapé, he admiring wistfully the hostess, And, of course, Death in Venice. You see the range.