Part 17 (1/2)
Angell sent Don a telegram care of American Express in Copenhagen: ”Indian Uprising victorious. Palefaces routed. Shawn scalped. In short, yes. Congratulations. Do you wish a fast advance? Will write you shortly.” Two days later, he sent five hundred dollars to Lynn Nesbit. By the end of the month, Angell had sent Nesbit the ”balance of the payment-I think it came to a further $761.” She took her small cut and sent the money to Don.
Sentence by sentence, ”The Indian Uprising” remains one of the most challenging and beautiful stories written by an American. Angell knew it was something special. ”We want to run this story because it is a rare and brilliant one,” he wrote Don. ”We know that it will confuse and distress a good many readers and we know that it will infuriate others, but we are ignoring these considerations because they are far less important than what you are doing here. Because you are serious about your writing, we have agreed to drop almost all of our own preferences in style, punctuation, and construction; we have done so in spite of the fact that we...don't really agree with you about the effectiveness and usefulness of some of your stylistic devices. [What] Shawn does not not want is to have readers (and other writers) think that we have simply stopped caring or to think that we have, in the course of printing a 'different' kind of fiction, stopped proofing for grammar, consistency, and clarity.” want is to have readers (and other writers) think that we have simply stopped caring or to think that we have, in the course of printing a 'different' kind of fiction, stopped proofing for grammar, consistency, and clarity.”
As ever, the struggle started with commas. Don wanted very few in the story because he wished the ”tone in certain places to be a drone, to get the feeling of the language pus.h.i.+ng ahead but uninflected.” Angell countered that Shawn's ”preference for the comma” was a ”stoutly-held belief of his, and not a compulsion.” Nevertheless, Don insisted that ”we should try it without horrible commas clotting up everything and demolis.h.i.+ng the rhythm of ugly, scrawled sentences....Yes it is true that I am a miserable, shabby, bewildered, compulsive, witless and pathetic little fellow but please Roger keep them commas out of the story!!!!!!!”
In certain paragraphs, Don skipped verbs and conjunctions to get the ”pus.h.i.+ng ahead” feeling he wanted. Angell and Shawn objected to these omissions-Shawn feared they would give the magazine ”black eyes.” Defending a particular sentence, Don said it ”must not have an 'and,' I think. This construction [a long list lacking conjunctions] has parallels all through the thing and zee additional conjunction would be like most regrettable, sad & und undfortunate.”
He explained his position: ”When the sentences suddenly explode or go to h.e.l.l...it contributes materially I think to the air of fear etc etc hanging over the story.” Of another grammatical lapse, Don said, ”I think it is beautiful, if you'll forgive me. I mean like it also exists for its own sweet sake....The whole d.a.m.ned [story] is a tissue of whispers, hints and echoes and for that reason most annoying but I can't help that.”
Over weeks of arguments about grammar and what Angell called ”unnecessary misdirections” in the story, the men rea.s.sured each other of their mutual respect. Angell knew his letters were bullying, and he regretted it: ”[P]lease don't get me wrong: I'm for this story most enthusiastically, and all [my criticisms are] meant to be helpful, not merely annoying.”
For his part, Don wavered between fear that his story was being stomped by Shawn's stodginess and absolute faith in Angell. The latest galley ”proof covered with little marks scared the h.e.l.l out of me,” he confessed at one point. ”But I trust that you will protect this beautiful story with your last dying breath there on West 43rd Street.”
Writer and editor cemented their bond and defined their relations.h.i.+p-Don pus.h.i.+ng, Angell resisting, both giving ground-over ”The Indian Uprising.” By the end of the process, Don had agreed to more conventional forms of paragraphing, particularly when it came to dialogue, and to the addition of most of the commas Angell asked for. Angell began trolling for commas to delete delete, just to please Don. He tempered Shawn's worries that certain imagery in the story was ”too wild.”
For all the stylistic compromises, enough disagreements remained by the end of January that Angell nearly took the story ”off the schedule.” Remarkably, the editors were still quibbling with Don over commas. ”[T]he difficult thing is that if even just one or two sneak back in the effect here, which must be that of a rush, confusion, hectic excitement, falling down stairs, etc, is vitiated. So I depend upon you, Roger, to not let this happen,” Don wrote.
Seeking a ”hushed” and ”stuttering” quality in other sections of the story, Don did did ask for a comma or two. Shawn would not ”give way” on this point. Angell explained that readers would think the addition of the commas was ”sheer carelessness on your part and on our part,” and he said, ”It looks like sloppiness and it makes both you and the magazine look bad.” He apologized for sounding ”pompous” and reiterated, ”I think there is enough respect and admiration all around for an eventual solution, and I don't want to go on pus.h.i.+ng you or annoying you....” ask for a comma or two. Shawn would not ”give way” on this point. Angell explained that readers would think the addition of the commas was ”sheer carelessness on your part and on our part,” and he said, ”It looks like sloppiness and it makes both you and the magazine look bad.” He apologized for sounding ”pompous” and reiterated, ”I think there is enough respect and admiration all around for an eventual solution, and I don't want to go on pus.h.i.+ng you or annoying you....”
Don replied, ”Pardon me for taking my self so seriously.” Shortly thereafter, he wrote, ”I understand, dear friend, that you and Mr. Shawn and the magazine are treating my little nightmare most kindly (in fact, I'm amazed that your patience didn't depart about two letters back).” He ended another note by saying, ”The main thing is to preserve the tone, and what is essential is **562%% choke! gasp! can't go on...commas...quirk...water....”
Finally, in mid-February, Angell was able to write Lynn Nesbit that the ”long struggles with THE INDIAN UPRISING have now been resolved, and the story is scheduled for the issue of March 6th.” To Don, he wrote, ”Thanks a million for your final compromise (or abject surrender).” He also addressed financial matters: Another issue for you to resolve-a much more pleasant one. You now have the sum of $1048.35 coming to you, due to something we call ”cola readjustment.” Don't worry about what it means-I think it's simply a further slicing of last year's melon-but we would like to know what part of this sum, if any, you would like to have applied against your debt here. You are entirely at liberty to take the entire sum and to leave the balance outstanding of $1000 on the books. Or we can knock off as little or as much of the debt as would suit your convenience.
Don took all but two hundred dollars. He noted ruefully that his agent's commission was ”guarded by the alert Miss Nesbit who is privy to my every move (or almost).” ”Miss Nesbit” still didn't know about Birgit, though she suspected that Don was having an affair.
Don told Angell that ”Copenhagen is beginning to pall; has palled, in fact.” Nevertheless, unexpected events would keep him from returning to the States for another several months.
”The Indian Uprising” was an ”emotionally important” story to Don. ”It was in part...a response to the Vietnam war,” he said in an interview and a ”political comment on the fact that we allow the heroin traffic in our country to exist.” It was also a ”response to certain things that were going on in my personal life at the time, and a whole lot of other things came together in that story.” He said he couldn't sort it out for readers any ”more clearly than that.”
His letters to Angell offer further glimpses into the story's core. He said he wanted to limn the ”secret places” of the ”body” and the ”spirit.” He also wanted to ”get” readers ”to the problems of art and the resistance of the [artistic] medium. (Sculptors hacking away at blocks of granite etc relating back to all the hacking up of people in the story.)”
His ”illegitimate” grammatical ”maneuver[s]” were meant to produce a ”very sharp effect of alienation” on the reader: Any tidying up of the story's style ”would be disastrous for my liver,” he said. The piece had to maintain its ”discord” and ”unpleasantness.”
”The Indian Uprising” begins, ”We defended the city as best we could”-a city that doesn't know what it has done to ”deserve baldness, errors, infidelity.” Fighting engulfs the streets, barricades are mounted, savages threaten the calm, ordered life of ordinary citizens whose luxuries include ”apples, books, long-playing records.” Drugs flood urban ghettos. Apparently , in the midst of all this action, a movie is being shot-or perhaps the violence is part of the film, scenes of comic mayhem reminiscent of Jean-Luc G.o.dard (he is mentioned, in pa.s.sing, in the story). At the end, ”helicopters and rockets” kill children and destroy places ”where there are children preparing to live.”
The writing is dense, swift, packed with referents, and unspecific as to character and setting-a heady, frightening storm, like much of urban America in the 1960s.
Filled with parodic Parisian street names (as in Edgar Allan Poe's ”The Murders in the Rue Morgue”), the piece is an eerie prophecy of May 1968 in France.
Various critics have seen the story as a satire on American film Westerns, ”civilization” fighting ”savages” to secure the country for its values. The story does does tie America's Indian wars to U.S. violence in Vietnam, but it's far too easy to say that murdering Indians was wrong, and Don was never content to say the obvious. tie America's Indian wars to U.S. violence in Vietnam, but it's far too easy to say that murdering Indians was wrong, and Don was never content to say the obvious.
Other critics read the story as a Freudian allegory of s.e.xual unease. The narrator repeats, ”I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.” The Indians' ”short ugly lances with fur at the throat” suggest phallic fear.
As to his later comment about the story's being a ”response” to his private life: We know of Don's separation from Helen at the time, his fraught relations.h.i.+p with Lynn Nesbit, his whirlwind affair with Birgit. The ”hordes of Indians and Frenchmen and Italians” he had seen in London had struck him as a thwarting of ”human possibility.” This impression, coupled with his domestic turmoil, touched the story and added to its hectic ”unpleasantness.”
Other readers have noted the range of modernist references in the piece-to T. S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Frank Wedekind-and suggest that Don is mocking Western literary tradition.
But none of these readings quite add up. They fail to explain why these specific materials are mixed here, or to fully convey the story's brilliance, mystery, and complexity.
So let's return to the street names. The narrator tells us that barricades are going up on ”Rue Chester Nimitz” and ”George C. Marshall Allee.” Other avenues are named after American military commanders, but with a French twist-we are in an unreal urban landscape, neither New York nor Paris, but with echoes of both (Manhattan, we recall, was purchased from Indians). ”Zouaves and cabdrivers” form battalions in the streets. Zouaves was a name for those fighting in the French Foreign Legion, whose fighting reputation was made in the Crimean War. They enjoyed enormous popularity in America just before our own Civil War.
Prior to 1968, barricades appeared in Paris during the revolutions of 1830, 1848, and in the days of the Commune in 1871. Manet painted them. So did Delacroix, Courbet, and Millet (when he wasn't drawing American Indians, figures inspired by the novels of James Fenimore Cooper). Daumier's lithograph The Uprising The Uprising, like Don's story, blurs background and foreground in portraying anarchy.
In each of the French revolutions, social cla.s.ses clashed, vying for power and justice; order and disorder fought for dominance, as they did in the United States during the 1960s, perhaps the closest our country has come to a second civil war, with rioting and political a.s.sa.s.sinations.
What Don has accomplished here is an overlay of French history on American experience, one time period on another, the way Robert Rauschenberg's silk screens show one image bleeding through to another. Once, in discussing Rauschenberg's methods, Don noted that ”orphaned objects” come together-like stacks of detritus made to build a barricade.
Where does all this take us?
If we compare the various French revolutions, we see they all occurred at moments when leaders tried to tighten economic and political control, when economic systems s.h.i.+fted and narrowed, destroying old patterns of work and communal life. The barricades went up as people tried to retain their domestic and working lives, their living quarters, and their sense of justice. And of course, in the nineteenth century, the Paris of the barricades was the Paris of modernist art. They-city, barricades, and art-are cobbled together from the same sources.
In the 1850s, Napoleon III ordered Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann, his prefect of the Seine, to redesign Paris. Haussmann proclaimed that redoing Paris ”meant...disembowelling” the old city, the ”quartier of uprisings and barricades”-and, not incidentally, the bohemian neighborhoods where Courbet, Manet, Baudelaire, Daumier, and later Rimbaud gathered. There, these artists lived in the gaps between the bourgeoisie and the laborers, and in the side streets populated by artisans' guilds, where Daumier's father once worked. There, they celebrated the ”primitive” sensuality of life, as embodied in the archetypal n.o.ble savage. ”The Savages of Cooper [are] right in Paris!” Paul Feval wrote in 1863. ”Are not the great squares as mysterious as forests in the New World?” Baudelaire called Indians the New World equivalents of devil-may-care dandies, and Dumas wrote of uprisings and barricades”-and, not incidentally, the bohemian neighborhoods where Courbet, Manet, Baudelaire, Daumier, and later Rimbaud gathered. There, these artists lived in the gaps between the bourgeoisie and the laborers, and in the side streets populated by artisans' guilds, where Daumier's father once worked. There, they celebrated the ”primitive” sensuality of life, as embodied in the archetypal n.o.ble savage. ”The Savages of Cooper [are] right in Paris!” Paul Feval wrote in 1863. ”Are not the great squares as mysterious as forests in the New World?” Baudelaire called Indians the New World equivalents of devil-may-care dandies, and Dumas wrote The Mohicans of Paris The Mohicans of Paris, his novel about urban ”natives.”
Haussmann's redesign displaced them all. He uprooted over 350,000 people in the inner city-roughly one-third of Paris's population at the time, most of it working-cla.s.s-and widened and straightened the boulevards so they'd be harder to blockade. This made them, as one journalist observed, paths ”without turnings, without chance perspectives”-the imaginative perspectives Manet and others fought for in their art. The barricades and modernist aesthetics were weapons in a war against the rigid ordering of daily life, the absolute control by economic forces of every aspect of experience.
One hundred years after Haussmannization, the United States was the best expression of the vision that had sparked fighting in the streets of Paris, and that touched off violence, now, in American cities. As Rimbaud, Marx, and others pointed out, Haussmann's project depended on cheap labor, on colonizing others, spreading the ”poisonous breath of civilization” to poorer, darker-skinned peoples.
In Southeast Asia, a century later, America extended and modernized this tradition (a.s.suming France's role in Vietnam). Indian uprisings indeed.
Street names like ”Rue Chester Nimitz” and ”George C. Marshall Allee” don't just combine one history and another; they suggest, like a silk-screen overlay, the culmination of a process: the surface as the latest incarnation of what lies beneath it-in this case, America as a perfected manifestation of Haussmann's ”disembowelling.”
As Don's narrator tries to sort out where he stands, he studies a map marked with blue and green, a hopeless attempt to locate opposing sides. Street gutters run with ”yellowish” muck, like the fog in the streets of ”Prufrock.” These hues also recall the color schemes in Rimbaud's poems about the Paris Commune, most notably in ”Chant de Guerre Parisien,” ”Les Incendiaires,” and ”Mauvais Sang.” In Rimbaud's visions of the uprising, yellow dawns shade b.l.o.o.d.y streets, green-lipped corpses sprawl across paving stones, and cheap wine makes blue stains on the tablecloths of the poor (vin bleu was popular in a communard fight song). was popular in a communard fight song).
”The white men are landing!” Rimbaud wrote. They intend to corrupt the barbarians. The battle is on.
Like Courbet, Daumier, and others, Rimbaud celebrated the 1871 revolt as a poets' rebellion. As he saw it, it was an attempt by artists and workers to shake off Haussmann's order, to take back their living quarters, and to refuse the exorbitant prices pinching their daily lives. It was an a.s.sertion of s.e.xual and creative freedom-a carnival in the streets (”Oh that clown band. Oh its sweet strains”) as much as a brief economic liberation: a political and libidinal Bill of Rights-again, as in the United States in the 1960s.
Along with Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett, Rimbaud was at the top of Don's reading list for young writers (a list he composed, years later, when he became a teacher). What did he learn from the Frenchman?