In the history of Western literature since the Middle Ages, one of the most noticeable trends has been the extent to which poets have felt the need to become critics, and not only critics in a general sense, but authors of works defending their vocation as servants of the Muse. However self-conscious Dante was about his poetic style and the nobility and suitability of the Italian language as a medium for great poetry, and however chaotic were the internecine political struggles of his day, he certainly did not need to defend the value of poetry to his intended audience. Chaucer may have been a customs officer, but he assuredly did not suffer bouts of angst over his passion for literature and its place in civilized life. But with the Renaissance and Reformation we find Sir Philip Sidney, the humanist and courtier, writing A Defence of Poetry against charges of immorality and frivolity. Later, Shelley will pen a book with the same title, defending not only the “morality” of poetry, but its prophetic role in an industrial society. Shelley himself drew heavily on the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge, who were at such pains to promote their theories of the imagination.
In the modern era, we take all this for granted. Indeed, we have come to expect the programmatic rhetoric of the manifesto, rather than the genteel defense of poesy. It is evident that in the modern era the artist has become increasingly estranged from his audience and so oppressed by the conditions of modern consciousness that he must in essence clear a space for his imaginative vision through his critical writings. Even if the artist himself is not racked by alienation or class hatred, he will feel the need to somehow explain and justify his work to his society, or perhaps only to himself.
In coming to a proper appreciation of Marion Montgomery’s achievement in his trilogy, The Prophetic Poet and the Spirit of the Age—consisting of Why Flannery O’Connor Stayed Home, Why Poe Drank Liquor, and Why Hawthorne Was Melancholy—it is important that we remind ourselves that the author is, first and foremost, a poet. Before his first critical work was published, Montgomery had written three volumes of poetry, as well as two novels and a novella. Except for a novel published in 1974, his books since 1970 have consisted of critical evaluations of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, English poetry, and, now, the trilogy. This shift from creative writing to criticism cannot be ascribed simply to a loss of imaginative drive, given the quality of his long poem, “At Al Johnson’s Lake,” which appeared in 1982. Like so many modern artists, Montgomery has found it necessary to come to grips with the crisis of our time, to embark on what he calls a “reflective journey toward order.”
American Literature and the Crisis of Modernity
The trilogy, then, despite its philosophical dimension, is a poet’s book, proceeding “more suggestively than exhaustively,” as Montgomery states in his preface. The author humbly acknowledges his debt to the work of philosophers, theologians, and historians; to a great extent, the trilogy is a work of synthesis, a bringing together of insights on modern ideology and the first principles of art and philosophy. As Professor Niemeyer has claimed in an essay, much of the value of the trilogy lies in its relation of the crisis of modernity to the realm of literature, and, more specifically, to American literature.1
Though the literary aspect of the trilogy is its obvious point of departure, it often appears submerged by the seemingly more urgent problems of philosophy and political theory. In addition, the very diffuse, meditative style of the trilogy tends to make it difficult to see as a whole Montgomery’s insights into the nature of literary form and creative intentionality. It is my conviction, however, that the most vital and original achievement in the trilogy is Montgomery’s understanding of metaphor and the imagination. For if Montgomery uses philosophy to develop a critique of modern ideology, he turns from this negative work not to a philosophical answer, but to an imaginative response that offers us a pattern of order. Unlike most contemporary critics, Montgomery persistently clings to the belief that art relates to life, that the highest art is a form of therapy for the soul. Art, he says, along with his mentor Flannery O’Connor, doesn’t prove anything; but it does enact an imaginative vision that can move us in the direction of order.
Any attempt to extract a single theme or subject from Montgomery’s suggestive prose risks turning subtle moments of understanding into flat, rigid propositions. But with that risk in mind I propose to sketch out Montgomery’s key concepts concerning imagination and metaphor, and to place those concepts in the context of the trilogy’s third volume, where they are given their most extensive treatment.
Montgomery has let it be known that he considers his earlier book, The Reflective Journey Toward Order, to be a “prelude” to the trilogy, though of course it stands perfectly well on its own.2 Like the trilogy, The Reflective Journey Toward Order consists of a series of essays or meditations grouped around common themes. The book’s thesis, in its simplest form, is that the Romantic age, far from being confined to the first decades of the nineteenth century, actually extends from Dante’s time to our own. With Dante, for the first time in Western art, the problem of the artist’s relation to tradition, nature, and to his own creative productions becomes acute. Discussing primarily Dante, Wordsworth, and Eliot, Montgomery examines the poetry of spiritual quest, in which the artist seeks to move from his painfully self-conscious fall from innocence to a higher innocence, a point of rest. Dante reached this state because of his confidence in nature as a window onto the transcendent, and because his Comedy encompasses his own stumbling efforts to comprehend his relation to the mystery of being. Wordsworth, on the other hand, inherits the Renaissance dichotomy between mind and nature; he struggles awkwardly, scanning his native Lake District, unsure whether nature actually speaks to him or is merely illusion. Finally, Eliot, more Wordsworthian than he himself understands at first, undertakes a long and arduous pilgrimage, from the solipsism of a Prufrock to the final surrender of the poet before the divine source of being, a surrender “costing not less than everything.”
The guiding spirits in The Reflective Journey Toward Order are principally Coleridge and Eliot. Montgomery’s crucial conclusion is that Eliot’s early attempt to divorce the personality of the artist from his art, though a well-intentioned effort at escaping the Romantic poet’s self-preoccupation, was a false start. Instead, he contends that the modern poet can only participate in transcendent being through what the philosopher Michael Polanyi calls “personal knowledge.” Art is not a hermetically sealed, self-sufficient kingdom, but must open out to spiritual experience. The question is not whether the poet is present in his work, but in what manner he addresses the mystery of the world beyond his self.
The Reflective Journey Toward Order deals almost exclusively with lyric poetry, and its guides are more literary than philosophical. The change between this book and the trilogy reflects Montgomery’s intensive study of such authors as Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, Mircea Eliade, Josef Pieper, Jacques Maritain, and Etienne Gilson. More importantly, it reveals how much he learned from his friend and fellow Georgian, Flannery O’Connor, and her philosopher of choice, St. Thomas Aquinas.
If The Reflective Journey dealt with lyric poetry and the more private world of the poet, the trilogy turns to fiction, the overarching political and intellectual matters concerning Western society, and particularly the American experience. Why Flannery O’Connor Stayed Home sets out to describe both the nature of modernity and how O’Connor brilliantly responded to modern consciousness. In a sense, Montgomery begins in the “present,” only to go back in American history in the next two volumes. Poe serves as a locus for an understanding of nihilism, presaging the philosophy of Heidegger. It is in the third volume that Montgomery stretches the broadest canvas, taking in the intellectual and literary influences on American culture from Puritanism and Transcendentalism to the modern masters of the grotesque, Flannery O’Connor and Nathanael West. Montgomery discusses the problem of the imagination more theoretically in the first two volumes, and applies that theory concretely in the third.
From Knowing to Thinking
The fundamental temptation for both the reason and the imagination is the belief that the mind is its own place. “The wonder of mind’s participation in time … may easily distract it from the question of abiding cause, and the mind’s attention be thus secretly transformed into cause, even before thought itself becomes so bold as to argue itself the cause.”3 The temptation is as old as, and perhaps equivalent to, the original fall from grace in Eden itself. But with the rise of nominalism in the late medieval era, the very nature of modern consciousness and thought is conditioned by the mind’s isolation from transcendent being. Here Montgomery benefits from the distinctions bequeathed to us most especially in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. Several times in the trilogy, he quotes Etienne Gilson’s basic rendering of the “problem of problems” for the philosopher.
In Thomas’s technical language, actual existence, which he calls esse, is that by virtue of which a thing, which he calls res, is a being, an ens. It is the being-hood or being-ness of being. It is be in being. It is to be that makes a certain thing to be a being. Esse is defined by its essence, namely that which the thing is.4
The pitfall for the mind is the conviction that it can create or be the self-sufficient ground of esse. This is to deny that man is a contingent being, an ens, who is not responsible for the act of being, or esse, which maintains him in existence. Both the philosopher and the poet go about their true business when they contemplate the mystery of being.
Thomas holds that man is a union of soul and body, that his knowledge of reality comes through the senses. It is the power of reason which enables man to abstract from sense experience and contemplate reality. Both the Nominalists, and Descartes after them, discarded this unity of perception by positing a radical break between man’s mind and his knowledge of reality. Montgomery is also fond of quoting Anton Pegis’s comment that “what we call the decline of medieval philosophy was really a transition from man as knower to man as thinker—from man knowing the world of sensible things to man thinking abstract thoughts in separation from existence. What is thinking but dis-existentialized knowing?”
When man separates himself from a knowledge of being, he no longer participates in it, but rather seeks to manipulate it to his own private ends. From this initial separation, this aboriginal schism, numerous sects arise, for man is now free to reject existence (nihilism), or see nature as a blind, determining force (naturalism), or proclaim that the mind may create its own reality (idealism or solipsism).
Montgomery’s originality and importance lies primarily in the way he applies these philosophical concepts to the history of the imagination in Western literature since Dante. As he writes in the introduction to Why Hawthorne Was Melancholy: “For the poet, the mystery of esse lies in his perception of ens and the challenge to his art is to embody his vision of being.”5 The poet in the modern world has largely followed the philosophers in believing that he can be the source of esse. He becomes the creator of what Robert Musil has called “Second Realities,” not “real possibilities” but self-contained kingdoms of art which are their own way of salvation. The true poet attends to the concrete world of beings, and in his encounter with the sensible world he may come to an apprehension of their Cause. To embody one’s vision of being is to create an “incarnational art.” But this creation is “secondary,” an imitation of God’s primary creation. That imitation is accomplished through the use of the intellect, that which in man is most akin to God’s being. Flannery O’Connor puts it this way:
St. Thomas called art “reason in making.” This is a very cold and very beautiful definition, and if it is unpopular today, this is because reason has lost ground among us. As grace and nature have been separated, so imagination and reason have been separated, and this always means an end to art. The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees. For him, to be reasonable is to find, in the object, in the situation, in the sequence, the spirit which makes it itself. This is not an easy or simple thing to do. It is to intrude upon the timeless, and that is only done by the violence of a single-minded respect for the truth.
With the help of O’Connor and Thomas, Montgomery is thus able to improve upon Eliot’s famous notion of the “dissociation of sensibility.” More than a separation of “thought and feeling,” as Eliot would have it, the prior division between grace and nature leaves the artist with a natural world no longer continuous with its cause. Inevitably, a distancing and estrangement between poet and world grows into alienation. John Donne still had access to scholastic philosophy in elaborating his metaphysical analogies, but after his time nature increasingly becomes emptied of meaning and is used to suit the fancy’s whim.
From Window to Mirror
Montgomery focuses on the change which metaphor and symbol undergo as the logic of modernity progresses. The Dantean symbol is a window on the world, a sensible thing representing through itself something beyond itself; in short, it possesses meaning. But in the modern era, metaphor is seen as a mirror, a cipher skillfully manipulated to evoke emotion or thought. Taken to its logical conclusion, the symbol as mirror may be seen in the Symbolist school of poetry (a school, incidentally, to which Eliot, Pound, and Yeats were all initially attracted, only to reject in favor of an older understanding of metaphor). Montgomery describes the nature of the Symbolist’s symbol:
The symbol in this sense must function as a projected satellite for intra-self communication; against the symbol the closed self bounces its emotional unrest and receives it back as sensual response, maintaining thereby its closed world as inviolate against threats of revelation. The “poem” becomes a moment’s solace to the alienated man, performed through images dissociated from any response other than a subjective reaction to the existence of the self.6
The irrationality and arbitrary playfulness spawned by this approach to metaphor led from Symbolism to Dada and Surrealism, and underlies much of our contemporary fascination with art as a closed system of signs, as in the French nouveau roman of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nobel Prize–winner Claude Simon.
The hardening of metaphor into the plaything of the fancy is precisely what occurred in the eighteenth century and was what the Romantic movement sought to counter. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge struggled to restore the imagination to a more epistemologically accessible reality. We have alluded to Wordsworth’s difficulties in finding that anchor for the imagination. Coleridge, whose Christian vision was more firmly grounded, is largely responsible for our distinction between fancy and imagination. The fancy deals with “fixities and definites,” that is, it rearranges dead things, whereas the primary imagination is the “repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”7 But if Coleridge hoped to reestablish the imagination on a metaphysical base, most of the other Romantics glorified the imagination as creator of a self-contained universe, the new god of liberation from human limitation. Thus Montgomery notes that in the Romantic imagination, Satan, the archetypal rebel against transcendent order, is transformed into Prometheus, the rebel against the gods who brings fire, and hence civilization, to mankind. Shelley unbinds Prometheus from his rock, and Blake comments that Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it.
By championing the Promethean imagination, the more radical Romantics intensified a problem that had been affecting the poet since the time of the Renaissance: that of casting the poet in the role of high priest of art. Thus the poem becomes a religious ritual and the aesthetic high points or “epiphanies” (as they would come to be known in the context of Joyce’s fiction) are the equivalent of receiving the Eucharist. In Why Hawthorne Was Melancholy, Montgomery distinguishes two types of art based on two different modernist approaches to being. The “naturalist,” who believes that “the stark immediate moment of the senses [is] the ultimate reality,” sees the world as ruled by mechanism and cultivates despair or a Nietzschean “tragic joy.” On the other hand, the “transcendentalist” or “idealist,” whom Montgomery calls “the ultimate solipsist, the creator of a supreme fiction of the self,” will inhabit a bizarre fantasyland, either nihilistic (as in Poe), utopian (as in Emerson), or merely absurd (as in the surrealists).8 What the naturalist and idealist have in common, Montgomery asserts, is an assumption of power, a positing of mind over being.9 The poet might be better seen as alchemist rather than priest: half magician, half scientist, he sets out not to encounter and understand a mystery, but to impose his private reality on the world.
Puritans and Transcendentalists
Such, in a brief and abstract form, is an overview of Montgomery’s understanding of the imagination and its temptations as they have developed in modern literature. In turning now to Why Hawthorne Was Melancholy, it will be possible to see these phenomena in the perspective of American literature, and to better perceive how two major artists, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nathanael West, swam against the current of modernity.
Why Hawthorne Was Melancholy is in some ways the most ambitious volume of the trilogy. Montgomery attempts nothing less than an interpretation of the Puritan, transcendentalist, and Lockean influences in our culture, tracing these strains of thought in Emerson, Jonathan Edwards, Hawthorne, Henry James, and Nathanael West, with side glances at the Stoic tradition in the South, the Puritan poet Edward Taylor, and that Emersonian gone native, Walt Whitman. But it is important to remember that Montgomery’s method is “suggestive,” not “exhaustive.” Nor should we assume that the final volume of the trilogy is part of a linear progression that will culminate in a grand synthesis. In fact, two thirds of the way through this volume, Montgomery shifts his attention to the growth of the grotesque in modern literature. By ending with a section on West, however, he can claim in some sense to be arriving at the place from which he started and knowing it for the first time. That is because West, master of the grotesque and incisive critic of our contemporary decadence, acts as something of a secular alter ego to Flannery O’Connor, who is the focus of the first volume and a constant presence throughout Montgomery’s reflective journey in the trilogy. In West, Montgomery can see more clearly O’Connor’s breakthrough, her lifting of West’s despairing vision into the divine comedy of redemption.
A hundred years before West, Hawthorne confronted the rise of the American popular spirit, that strange mixture of vaguely optimistic progressivism and a restless desire to conquer and appropriate nature. Hawthorne’s immediate concern was with two strands of thought, each oddly entwined with the other: the Puritan inheritance, especially as it is influenced by Locke, and the liberalism of the transcendentalists epitomized by Emerson.
Montgomery is adept not only at criticizing the ideological deformations of these traditions but also in relating them to the deformations of language and vision they produce. Thus he notes that in denying the natural world the goodness that enables it to become sacramentally representative of grace, the Puritans reduced ritual to mere ceremony, excluding the numinous from the public realm and exalting functionality. Here he cites O’Connor’s comment that when Emerson broke with the Unitarian Church because he refused to participate in the Communion service so long as bread and wine were used, he contributed to the “vaporization of American religion.”10 Montgomery notes that the Puritans’ Manichean alienation from nature leads them to elevate Industry as the highest virtue, paving the way for the pragmatic spirit to come. And with a unique insight, he claims that for the Puritans, allegory was seen as useful for instruction, and is therefore “spiritually pragmatic art.”11
Hawthorne treats Emerson with deference and lightly veiled irony in his public allusions to the former tenant of the Old Manse, but in his notebooks and fiction, Emerson is a significant antagonist. Emerson shared with the Puritans something Montgomery calls “inverted Platonism”: the belief that the world is the shadow of the mind. But Emerson “transfers Calvinistic election from the province of God to that of Nature.”12 Dispensing with evil, the past, and human institutions, the Emersonian “great man” divinizes himself. But to maintain his divinity, the “great man” must abandon passive faith and engage in a constant round of activity and domination.13
Though Emerson ostensibly considers every person capable of this self-divinization, he assumes that some are more equal than others. Indeed, as Montgomery points out, Emerson’s creed is extremely compatible with the laissez-faire ethic of ruthless individual competition. As with most ideologies, Emerson’s thought is infected with progressivist urgency, a frenetic becoming that pushes away from an isolated present.14 Here again, one can see that in the course of American history the transcendentalists and the Puritans become “folded in a single party.”
Hawthorne’s Response
Needless to say, Hawthorne set himself against these forces, even as he feared his own attraction to them. Unfortunately, it must be said that Montgomery’s exploration of Hawthorne’s oeuvre is weak and often misdirected. He spends an inordinate amount of time examining Hawthorne’s personal state of mind as revealed in his notebooks. To be sure, by doing this, Montgomery is able to show how experiences that troubled Hawthorne privately are downplayed when transferred into public prose, as in the sketches about his experiences in England published as Our Old Home. But Montgomery seems to forget that for some artists, the truest response to doubts and fears is worked out, not in journals or diaries, but in the art itself. Far from wanting to downplay Hawthorne’s own artistic weaknesses and spiritual uncertainty, I nonetheless feel that Montgomery misses opportunities to see in that dark romancer the many flashes of imaginative vision which raise him to the status of prophetic poet.
Montgomery stresses the clumsiness of Hawthorne’s allegory, that “spiritually pragmatic art” he inherits from his Puritan forebears. He contrasts it to what Flannery O’Connor called the “anagogical imagination,” which involves the ability to see multiple levels of meaning within a single realistic or possible image or event. And yet we have the example of Dante to show us that highly elaborate allegory is not incompatible with anagogical density. Without having to put Hawthorne on a level with Dante, we can see where he is able to achieve a symbolic density beyond rigid one-to-one correspondences. O’Connor also once said that Protestantism lends itself to dramatic treatment because it is open-ended: on the one side it is open to Catholicism, and on the other it is open to atheism. In this sense, Hawthorne at his best is able to dramatize the Puritan world and subtly transform it into something beyond itself. Of course, this is most ably done in The Scarlet Letter. That novel is given a taut structure through the use of three scenes which take place on the public scaffold, that place of punishment and reproof and suffering. At the outset, Hester Prynne stands on it in the full light of day, vividly aware of the presence of her lover, Dimmesdale, and her husband and enemy, Chillingworth, one at the heart of society and one at its periphery, whose identities are unknown to all but her. Later, Dimmesdale goes to the scaffold in the dead of night in an agony of remorse, and there meets Hester, Pearl, and Chillingworth; in this scene the characters meet but do not truly repent. Finally, the novel’s climax involves Dimmesdale’s public confession and death on the same scaffold: the instrument that is used to enforce society’s hypocritical standards becomes the locus of a freely chosen act of penitence and potential redemption. Hawthorne, in transforming the scaffold, takes it from its one-dimensional, literal function and raises it to a mysterious sign of grace, reminiscent of Golgotha and the cross of Christ.
Even in this most schematic of novels, Hawthorne is able to find realistic touches that lend psychological and moral depth to his vision. For instance, as demonic and cold as Chillingworth may be, at the moment he discovers the scarlet letter on the chest of the sleeping Dimmesdale, the narrator says that “what distinguished the physician’s ecstasy from Satan’s was the trait of wonder in it.”15 It is that human trait of wonder that enables Hawthorne to hint at Chillingworth’s possible redemption. Montgomery sees this as an unwillingness on Hawthorne’s part to judge his character. But I would prefer to see it in much the same light cast by O’Connor on her character the Misfit, who appears in her story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” She wrote: “I don’t want to equate the Misfit with the devil. I prefer to think that, however unlikely this may seem, the old lady’s gesture, like the mustard-seed, will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the Misfit’s heart, and will be enough of a pain to him there to turn him into the prophet he was meant to become.” This vision is shared by Hawthorne, however close he may come to sentimentality.
Montgomery again and again notes that Hawthorne is unable to make a complete surrender of the self in the certitude of faith, and yet nearly all his protagonists must make a surrender which admits human limitation. As R. W. B. Lewis writes in The American Adam, the constant rhythm of Hawthorne’s novels is one of attempted escape and the absolute necessity of return.16 Hester and Dimmesdale, in the heart of the forest, think they can throw off their past and escape the reality of their transgression. In a pathetic and comic variation, Clifford and Hepzibah in The House of the Seven Gables flee on the train, only to return after traveling a couple stops to confess a crime they did not actually commit. Emerging from his mountain retreat, Donatello in The Marble Faun returns to Rome to admit his act of murder. But beyond the return, there is a pattern of penance and sacrifice. Miriam, whose life is linked to that of Donatello, begins a pilgrimage at the end of the novel which will last as long as Donatello’s imprisonment. After Dimmesdale’s death, Hester lives a life of sacrifice, ministering to the sick. Montgomery sees Hester’s fate as evidence of Hawthorne’s stoicism; but why could it not equally be penance? Hazel Motes embarks on a penitential journey at the end of Wise Blood, and if it gains dramatic force by its symbolic richness and brief time span, it is not a difference of kind when compared to The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne’s artistry is undoubtedly more labored, but his mythopoetic and psychological powers at least shine through a faulty narrative. His rhythm of escape and return is predicated on the need to accept the limitations of time and to live within those limitations, working out one’s salvation in fear and trembling. In its emphasis on the lifelong pilgrimage of suffering, Hawthorne’s vision is closer to that of Eliot of Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets than to that of O’Connor.
Montgomery is most effective in demonstrating the way in which Hawthorne struggled with the problem of the place of the artist in relation to the community, particularly in his reading of the “Custom House,” that essential preface to The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne’s many scruples about becoming a “cold observer” indicate his own fear of becoming a manipulator of being who violates the sanctity of the human heart. By setting Hawthorne against Henry James, Montgomery is able to show that the weaker artist refused to take art as the path of salvation the way the great master of fiction did. For Hawthorne, as for Montgomery, art must continually open the reader and the poet himself onto a larger world, and if there is perhaps more of a conflict within James than Montgomery admits, the thrust of his critical analysis remains sound.
Nathanael West and Flannery O’Connor
Hawthorne’s choice of romance as his fictional vehicle testifies, as O’Connor says, to his intuition that the novel needed to steer clear of false types of realism based on reductionist worldviews. Montgomery concludes his trilogy with a study of another fictional compensation for ideological narrowness: the grotesque. In one sense, art is always striving to hold up a mirror to society, but that mirror may be distorted in such a way as to disturb the individual, making him see an image he prefers not to confront. Art may function as doppelganger, enabling one to see oneself as if for the first time, without any pleasing illusions. (Hawthorne uses mirrors constantly, such as the incident in which a suit of armor makes Hester’s scarlet letter seem grotesquely large.) Montgomery traces the rise of the grotesque in European literature, rightly pointing out that it parallels the rise of rationalism. He writes: “When reason’s measure of nature becomes so severe as to make it an intellectual sin to believe in any country save nature’s … nature itself becomes a most unsettling fairyland.… The nineteenth century grotesque which trenches upon the void appears … as an older imaginative vision now blinded and made desperate in its entrapment by modern gnostic thought. Its cry of emptiness is a cry for rescue; its destructive resistance is that of the spirit cornered.”17 When the rationalist mind eliminates the realm of myth, in which the imagination forms “deep images” bespeaking man’s position as inhabitant of Middle Earth, nature returns in nightmare form.
It is in the twentieth century that the grotesque is taken up by major artists and loses its Gothic, haunted-house flavor. But Montgomery’s interest is not in the images of horror concocted by believers in the absurd; his concern is for the artists who use the grotesque as part of a clear-headed critique of modern consciousness. He finds two such artists in Nathanael West and Flannery O’Connor. Despite his bleak outlook, West, like O’Connor, is principally a comic writer. West’s America is a land which continues to spout Emersonian optimism on the surface, but which suffers from inner spiritual chaos. Violence is so endemic to society that it can only draw people’s attention if it possesses some form of ghastly aesthetic grotesquerie about it. A headline like “FATHER CUTS SON’S THROAT IN BASEBALL ARGUMENT” is not imaginative enough as a crime to merit front page treatment; it would have to be a father killing three sons with a baseball bat, not a knife, according to West. In such a culture, the satirist despairs of his craft. So, at the end of West’s lacerating satire of Hollywood, The Day of the Locust, the painter Tod Hackett, who is injured in a mad-mob scene at a film premiere, is reduced to mimicking the ambulance siren as he is carried off to the hospital. He cannot find a vantage point from which to satirize the chaos he witnesses and is reduced to neurotic participation in disorder.
Both West and O’Connor find that language is in decay, and that cliché acts as a kind of mental salve to deaden the pain of existence. The immense challenge they faced as artists was to take violence and cliché and transform it into vision. (The extent to which this effort of transformation can be pushed is evident in West’s comment that he originally considered making his novel Miss Lonelyhearts into a comic strip, and that this medium still underlies the narrative method of the book.) For West, the decay of mind and word is exemplified primarily in the mass media, in his age dominated by the newspaper and (as in ours) by Hollywood. Miss Lonelyhearts, along with Tod Hackett, is an image of the artist’s reduced role in a mad world: Hackett is a set designer and Miss Lonelyhearts (the only name this character is given) writes the agony column for a metropolitan newspaper: both are implicated in society’s decay, while struggling to break free from it.
Miss Lonelyhearts writes in a completely abstract medium; he is largely cut off from any true community and can only receive messages of despair and send out messages of bland comfort. A job that started off as a joke turns into a sanity-threatening labor. Montgomery writes: “Miss Lonelyhearts’ territory is enlarged as the inner life becomes public property in a new socialism of the spirit.”18 But like most other modern artists, Miss Lonelyhearts conceives of his role in salvific terms; as he says, “I’ve got a Christ complex.” His one attempt to get involved with his readers leads to his death. He is described, significantly, as having the look of a “New England puritan,” and later, his nihilist colleague, Shrike, calls him “a swollen Mussolini of the soul.” These descriptions, though far removed from the Emersonian “great man,” are still a faint echo of the totalitarian direction of the self-divinizing individual. The novel ends with Miss Lonelyhearts going partially insane and attempting to become a savior. He dies in a mock Passion when trying to embrace the man he cuckolded, a wimp who would probably have been too weak to fire his gun in any case. Montgomery sees West as arranging his ending so as to eliminate any possible “meaning” in it, since the death is accidental.19 But accident or no accident, West at least shows the folly of the artist’s mad quest for godhead.
Intimacy with Creation
W. H. Auden used the phrase “West’s Disease” to describe the inability of West’s characters to turn wishes into desires. They cannot move beyond velleities; they ask, with Prufrock, “Do I dare to eat a peach? … Do I dare disturb the universe?” Auden’s comment immediately brings Rayber, of O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away, to mind. Tarwater’s accusation against the paralyzed intellectual, caught up in his deterministic worldview, is that he can’t act. So, too, a comment by West that Miss Lonelyhearts is engaged in “self-torture by conscious sinning” conjures up the figure of Hazel Motes, that Nietzschean so earnestly bent on denying existence to his conscience. But these comparisons with O’Connor in themselves indicate the distance that separates her from West: for the debilities and rebellions of West’s characters are seen in her fiction against a broader and more inclusive backdrop. If Rayber cannot act, Tarwater can, and finds that his murder of the idiot boy Bishop contains within it a grace he cannot deny. Hazel finally discovers, to use a cliché O’Connor might approve of, that you can run but you can’t hide.
O’Connor’s wholeness of vision stems from her conviction that she is not the creator or the redeemer of her world; those actions she knows to have been accomplished for her. As Montgomery puts it, “the distortions of the world in her fiction reflect distortions of the world by her characters; their grotesqueness is presented by an imaginative art as an effect whose cause, within the imaginative vision, is in the character’s own act of will.”20 In the same vein he writes: “Her prophets, she says, come to see what they do not wish to see, and in that ultimate vision have their eyes burned clean. For in seeing an Ultimate Grotesque, there occurs a loss of that life we have believed our own.… If nature became, in the sweep of naturalistic thought … impersonal and indifferent to man … we might say that Miss O’Connor rather makes nature terrifying because it becomes too personal.”21
West could not reach that state of “intimacy with creation,” but O’Connor admired the integrity and passion with which he approached his art. To end Why Hawthorne Was Melancholy with West is for Montgomery the best way to understand O’Connor’s breakthrough. But Montgomery is honest enough to admit that O’Connor’s way is not the only way; he even says that her very confidence makes for a lessening of dramatic tension in her work.
It is clear that for the trilogy Montgomery has taken O’Connor for his Virgil, or perhaps his Beatrice. I have no quarrel with this. But in coming to a just estimate of Montgomery’s critical contribution to our current crisis, we should remember his equally important studies of Eliot. One of my few criticisms of the trilogy is that O’Connor is omnipresent but Eliot is not fully integrated into the work; that is why the earlier book, The Reflective Journey Toward Order is not so much a prelude to the trilogy as a complement to it. O’Connor had the grace of a confident vision and the artistic advantages that vision afforded. But for someone like Eliot, for whom the “awful daring of a moment’s surrender” was long and painful in coming, the personal dimension in art becomes another crucial breakthrough for the imagination. Given the penetrating and hopeful insights Marion Montgomery has been able to give us into these authors and their world, we can only hope that he will return to his own art with a sense that he has arrived at the place from which he began, seeing it as if for the first time.