On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 9:21 AM, R S Gwynn
<Rsgwynn1@cs.com> wrote:
In a message dated 1/27/2010 7:23:31 AM Central Standard Time,
jerryfriedman1@GMAIL.COM writes:
One place I disagree with Dupee is that he calls Shade "rustic", and others here have agreed. Yes, Shade grew up and still lives in a country house, but I don't see what's so rustic about the poem. Certainly not the language. I admit, though, that I haven't known many country people, and the rather rural area where I live now (northern New Mexico) has important differences from Appalachia. If the idea is that his interest in nature is rustic, I find it suburban, like mine. Country people I've known have been interested in nature from the angles of hunting, fishing, gathering, logging, and protecting their farms against pests, as well as in its more spectacular manifestations, but not in scientific names or in dingy butterflies. My idea of a rustic American poet is James Dickey, not Robert Frost. Maybe those who know the real Appalachia better than I do can comment.
Indeed, Kinbote calls the Goldsworth house "suburban".
However, I think we know of only one close neighbor, CK, who's fifty yards away. The five families across the road are close enough to hear their horseshoes and be visited by the dog belonging to one of them, and to know the others' opinion of the dog, but too far to know which ones play horseshoes. (The combination of knowledge and lack of knowledge seems a bit surprising. Has Kinbote overheard shouts of "That damn dog!", maybe?) I can find no mention of any other neighbors, including when Shade is shot. Kinbote doesn't worry that anyone will see him when he spies on the Shades.
Up some hill there's a "wood path" that leads to a farm with fields and a barn (or shed), close enough that Kinbote and Shade can walk there and back in an evening, skirting Dulwich Forest. That sounds just like the country. Up some other hill, two houses are mentioned: Dr. Sutton's (three times) and Prof. C.'s.
One hint that there might be closer neighbors is Shade's phrase, "Some neighbor's gardener, I guess". It seems there must be neighbors around. But why would anyone's gardener be trundling a wheelbarrow up the lane between Shade's and Kinbote's houses? Usually you use a wheelbarrow on your own property.
So I think the Goldsworth house is at least very exurban, and I don't think I was too far wrong in calling it a country house, especially considering that the area might have been more rural when Shade was born.
Whittier may have been one of our few truly "rustic" poets and Frost merely "rural,"
I was using "rustic" in the neutral sense, as Jim Twiggs put it--the same as "rural"--since I took Dupee to be using it that way.
but Dickey was as suburban as they come, born and raised in the toney Buckhead part of Atlanta, educated at Vanderbilt, and spending his adult life as an advertising executive
and, both earlier and later, an academic. Deliverance may portray some nasty rustics, but they're seen from the perspective of a group of faux good ol' boys out for a weekend's adventure, nicely outfitted by Abercrombie and Fitch (as it then was).
Thanks for the information about Dickey, which I didn't know. (I haven't even read /Deliverance/ or seen most of the movie.) I was thinking more of his poetic persona. I can imagine the few country people I've known reading "Cherrylog Road" or even "The Bee" (those who could get past the style) and thinking that the author was someone like them. Ditto the hero of /Alnilam/, not that that's poetry. Maybe not some other poems of his, though.
And if anyone is the ur-model of the contemporary "academic" poet (and most of the poets I know these days, myself included, are academics--if you need verification of this claim, just attend the annual AWP convention) it's Frost, who was steadily employed by colleges and universities from the 1920s onward--Amherst, Michigan, Dartmouth, Harvard, et al. I don't think recent times have seen a true American rustic poet, with the possible exceptions of Wendell Berry, who writes from his small farm in Kentucky, or the early John Haines, writing from the Alaskan outback.
Shade isn't rustic, not even rural, just born and bred suburban and academic.
I'm glad we agree about Shade, who's really the point, and Frost.
A college town in "Appalachia" doesn't differ much from one in upstate New York or one in Georgia or one, I suspect, in northern New Mexico.
I'm smiling as I compare the town I live in (Espaņola) to other college towns I've lived in, but the college here (Northern New Mexico College) is so small you couldn't call this a college town.
[snip interesting comments about campus novels]
Both Pnin and Kinbote are figures of fun in their respective academic communities, though CK seems to be seen as dangerous as well (with good reason, given his ping pong table and student guests). Was VN also imitated, for his accent and his manners, behind his back by colleagues and students? As a former student and longtime professor, I can firmly say, "Yes."
Yes, I occasionally remember what I said about my teachers, and wonder what my students say about me.
To return to Shade, who still seems to me as conventionally "upright" as any character invented by VN, I recall that someone recently referred to his "drinking problem." Huh? Sybil probably doesn't like him to drink (he does have health problems, after all), so he surreptitiously buys a secret pint of brandy and is lured with the promise of a bottle of Tokay. This means he's a drunk?
Sybil says Shade "is forbidden to touch alcohol", which strongly suggests that his doctor has warned that it endangers his health, presumably because of his attacks. I agree with those who say that someone who drinks despite such a warning has a drinking problem. But I suppose Sybil could be aggrandizing her dislike of his drinking--that hadn't occurred to me.