What's for Dinner? by James Schuyler (to read list .txt) 📕

bottle, enters local psychiatric facility. Husband in her absence offhandedly takes up with neurotic, grasping, newly widowed neighbor. However, wife’s recovery underway, he returns to normal, decisively terminates affair, which wife knew about from jump. No hard feelings, except on part of neurotic, grasping, newly widowed neighbor.

James Schuyler is an oblique artist, whose apparent simplicity proves deceptive to agenda readers, and yet he never wanted either to be or to be thought of as obscure. He wanted more than anything else to be understood by the Common Reader (as designated by Virginia Woolf, a writer he greatly admired). If he had a program in respect of writing, it was to encourage silence and reward repose. Natures such as his (and Samuel Beckett’s and Virginia Woolf’s) will always, on evidence, be at a loss to know quite how to behave in the world, beyond attempting to salvage their personal dignity in situations that confound them.

Samuel Beckett, as confounded by experience as any great writer in the twentieth century, declared that the proper role of objects is to restore silence. The book as both object of contemplation and contemplative provocation seeks to restore silence for a distinct purpose: the reader reading becomes adept at deflecting all exhortation posing as information hurled against the slender bulwark of the private act, while attending to the business at hand, silent congress with an imagined world, one distinctly, but never wholly, of the writer’s invention.

A work of literature may be said to have two elements in play, a design and a thrust, almost always conceived sequentially: the first as draftsmanship, “working up“ the material, devising a coherent plot; the second as substantiation, “doing“ the characters and milieu, coloring, shading, and toning the situations. (The very creation of the world is unforgettably imagined and chronicled in just this way in Genesis, the first three days given over to the work of foundation, the second three to the work of decoration.) But a literary work is sometimes produced by making, as it were, the work of the second three days subsume the work of the first three. What’s for Dinner?, like Schuyler’s poetry (and like the painting of his great friend Fairfield Porter), seems neither drawn up nor drawn out, but insistently in and of the moment of its creation.

For the “ordinary“ semblance of What’s for Dinner? is cognate with the overall plan of American painterly realism as seen in the work of Fairfield Porter and his many successors (wet-on-wet, quick-drying, as-is, implicitly evanescent) with one radically important difference. Both in his painting and in his overall philosophy, delineated in Art on Its Own Terms, Porter was a (William) Jamesian, subscribing to James’s famous dictum all there is is what there is. Schuyler knew otherwise from unnerving experience, had become equally familiar with the apparent and the hidden, the logically deduced and the induced, the in-dwelling, the schizoid, the uncanny. The novel is very carefully composed in a language that inevitably strikes the alert contemporary reader as old-fashioned, even archaic: an apple pie/apple cider, home-baked bread, elderberry wine, Middle-Atlantic American English, couched in the proverbial and replete with behavioral directives. Its aura of Kiwanis clubs and church picnics and its employment of wise old saws of the type that used to be embroidered on linen, framed, and hung on front parlor walls, entirely characteristic of refined public and private discourse in America in the years prior to World War II, and long since gone the way of diagramming sentences and consulting the thesaurus, was essential to Schuyler’s method.

In addition, the plot is episodic, rather than what theorists today call event-driven. Not that much happens in What’s for Dinner?, but extraordinary things come down, out of the blue.

The evening sun came through the sheer glass curtains and sparkled on the silver, the dishes and the glassware. “Why look“ Biddy said, “there’s a rainbow in the water pitcher,” which was made of Norsk crystal, “isn’t that the loveliest thing!”

Here, couched in a supple eloquence that conjures beauty from kitsch, is the evidence of an art that carries its all-but-untellable meaning straight to the nerve centers of the reader’s sensibility. Schuyler didn’t care for metaphor (“One thing’s never much like another,” he wrote) but he surely understood the force of the underlying emblematic trope, especially when occurring in a seemingly unremarkable situation.

Schuyler’s reluctance to explicate his poetry, in which he seems to tantalize the reader with allusions to recipes (sometimes even including one as some kind of emblem of tested process in the real world) resulted in his presenting himself always as mute witness, and counterfoil, to the fact that the operations of his genius (and he understood the term as applied in the classical sense of another force, in effect another being, overtaking him) could not in fact be detailed in speech, spoken or written, other than the diction of the poem. The poem is the story of the poem, and its gloss.

Such a dilemma greatly resembles the unspoken narrative which at length presents itself, accompanied by apocalyptic emotion, in a successful psychoanalysis. In Schuyler’s life such operations were periodic inevitabilities, usually occurring as it were by spontaneous combustion. He was obliged to submit to a kind of unknowing in respect to his most intimate activity, but simultaneously feared and even resented the sometimes trance-like access of inspiration, as much because it had become associated in the nineteenth century with High Romanticism, which he eschewed, as for the fact of his unwitting and unwilling loss of the reassuring protocols of rational discourse.

It should be noted, however, that, again as regularly happens in the riptide circumstances of the analytical hour, outbursts of rage triggered by setbacks in free association are followed by periods of silence and repose ashore, akin to what Wordsworth had in mind when ascribing great value to the recollection of strong emotions in tranquillity: moments in which exemption from sorrow, and by extension from mortality, seems vouchsafed.

In What’s for Dinner?, in the sections depicting group therapy (for some