History never repeats itself; at best it sometimes rhymes.
Mark Twain
The thing that drove this album wasn't a sense of nostalgia and to memorize the past and recite it – that to me is something that's been done more successfully by other people.
Van Dyke Parks (1995)
"A poem containing history." 1 The words are Ezra Pound's, written in the year 1934; his life encompassed, perhaps, more history than he might have wished. It is, in fact, Pound's definition of an epic. Let's agree to read "work" for "poem.” (Pound would have approved.)
"It was an 'American Gothic' trip that Brian and I were working on." 2 Those words are Van Dyke Parks's, spoken in the Bicentennial year of 1976. The cancellation of that "trip" – the shelving of the SMiLE album – lay, from that vantage point, a mere nine years in the past; its completion, unimaginable in those days, lay twenty-eight years in the future. Epic in conception, SMiLE was to have been a "symphony to God," 3 intensely concerned with (among other things) American history. Completed in the early morning of a new millennium, its own history stretches across five turbulent decades. In that sense, at least, it is clearly a work "containing history."
But Pound had something else – something more – in mind. Like many other simple-sounding phrases, his definition reveals, beneath the opacity of its surface, unsuspected complexities. Focus attention on them, and even the discrete words begin to lose their stability.
Take "history": we all know what that word means. It is a table of bygone dates and deeds, a roster of monarchs, a list of battles. It is a meticulous accounting of causes and effects, in which minute actions and decisions, like the whirs and clunks of an immense Rube Goldberg contraption, cumulate to produce some enormous result. It is a matter for textbooks and classrooms, an ordered narrative presentation of past events. This is what Edmund Burke meant when he called history "a great volume…unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind." 4
That is, for most purposes, a useful way to think about history. The origins of the word itself, however, suggest deeper meanings; it is descended from a root meaning "learning" or "knowing" (etymologists detect a kinship with the word "wit"). The ordered narrative comes in only by way of association of ideas: knowing, hence the acquisition of knowledge, hence a formal statement of such knowledge. The order of the narrative is imposed by the human mind, which will stubbornly invent structure where it cannot intuit it; and by what we take to be the nature of time itself: the linear unfolding of sequenced events.
Or take the word "containing." An odd word, surely, in this context. A work of art may depict something, or describe something, or evoke something; but how, we may ask, would a work of art go about "containing" something? The answer may depend, oddly, on a handful of "historical" facts: a year, a cultural context, a poetic method. Because what "containing history" meant for Ezra Pound, in 1934 (very nearly the midpoint between two world wars), is not what "containing history" would have meant for Tennyson seventy years earlier:
So Hector spake; the Trojans roared applause;
Then loosed their sweating horses from the yoke,
And each beside his chariot bound his own;
And oxen from the city, and goodly sheep
In haste they drove, and honey-hearted wine
And bread from out the houses brought, and heap'd
Their firewood, and the winds from off the plain
Roll'd the rich vapor far into the heaven.
And these all night upon the bridge of war
Sat glorying; many a fire before them blazed…. 5
In 1864, this was how a skilled poet imbued a translation of Homer with a sense of history. Tennyson distributes lofty archaisms throughout his verse: "So Hector spake"; "and goodly sheep in haste they drove." Henry James referred to that kind of affectation as "the tone of time” 6: a stylistic trick, a way to apply "age" to one's writing as one might apply brown varnish to a canvas in order to simulate the work of an old master painter. (The closest SMiLE comes to such a technique: the AM-radio/vinyl-disc effects that identify some of its musical quotations.) Tennyson’s translation conveys a feeling of age, certainly, although the overall result is perhaps more Biblical than classical. The intended effect is an elevated remoteness from modern-day speech. The more antique the language, the more "historical" the work.
Until an amateur archaeologist's spade struck a buried wall, a mere six years after Tennyson's translation, authors who wrote about the Iliad, or translated the Iliad, or sought inspiration in the Iliad, all thought they were dealing with a piece of fiction. But when Schliemann discovered ancient Troy in 1870, the structured conventions of history began to dissolve away. Understanding Homer's Greece was no longer an exercise in pure imagination; to behold an irrefutably real golden mask (Agamemnon's?) was to become, in a sense, a contemporary of Hector and Achilles.
Elsewhere, even older artifacts were causing trouble. The startling "modernity" of the ancient European cave-paintings – whose authenticity was established around the turn of the 20th century – further eroded Victorian notions about history and time. A prehistoric bull was no less "modern" than a Picasso bull; our sensibilities struggled to absorb this visual pun, some 30,000 years in the telling.
Those not busy discovering such artifacts were busy inventing new ones. Modern sound recordings and photographs hinted at the possibility of a history preserved in unmanipulated images and voices. By the middle of the 19th century, photographers were beginning to abandon the painterly pictorial style of the earliest photographic images in favor of a scrupulously accurate recording of detail. Matthew Brady brought that rectitude to Manassas and Antietam; one wonders what his wet-plate camera would have made of the "valley of Death" into which Tennyson's Light Brigade romantically rode. Soon after, photojournalists began taking pictures of the tenements of New York City; today, these images connect us, as no reformer's essay can, to the realities of slum life. In 1878, an inventor named Frank Lambert recorded his own voice, reading off the hours of the day for a projected "talking clock." His lead cylinder – the earliest playable sound recording – survives to this day. 7 You may listen to it, if you like, on your smartphone: the lineal descendant of the difference engine Charles Babbage first conceived in 1822. These are the real words of a real man, their sounds made out of the living air of 1878: audible now, without supervening commentary. So, the physicists theorize, would a wormhole operate: directly connecting remote places, times, universes.
Without supervening commentary: when "Heroes and Villains" incorporates a passage, verbatim, from Poor Richard's Almanack 8, there is no overt editorializing. The words become part of the lyric, following naturally from the lines that precede them:
My children were raised, you know they suddenly rise.
They started slow long ago, head to toe; healthy, wealthy and wise.
Part of the lyric, and yet these words also invoke the shade of Benjamin Franklin, urging the youth of the eighteenth century to a life of industry, thrift and sound personal habits. If we recall these words later, when we come upon another specimen of advice to the young, it is up to us to figure out the relationship of the two passages, and to draw meaning from their juxtaposition:
Sleep a lot, eat a lot, brush ‘em like crazy
Run a lot, do a lot, never be lazy.
Sleep a lot, eat a lot, brush ‘em like crazy
Run a lot, do a lot, never be lazy.
When we listen to "Cabin Essence" –
Have you seen the Grand Coulee workin’ on the railroad?
we are being invited, again, to educe meaning from discrete elements. To understand this point, consider the line as two separate units:
Have you seen the Grand Coulee
This sounds, for all the world, like a question about sightseeing in Washington state, home of the Grand Coulee and its namesake dam.
The second unit, viewed in isolation, is nothing more or less than a direct quotation from traditional American song:
Workin' on the railroad
When these lines are brought together, however, new meanings emerge. The second line, with its “railroad” reference, casts a shadow on the first, and so "Coulee" becomes "coolie" as well; and the adjective "grand," as applied to an anonymous Chinese laborer, takes on a newly ironic twist. The knowledge that that laborer worked brutally long hours, in appalling conditions, neutralizes the sing-song jolliness of the second line: we are reminded that "workin' on the railroad" was a dangerous (and often deadly) proposition. The pleasant “Workin’ on the Railroad” fantasy of "strummin' on the old banjo" is forgotten; although "Cabin Essence," allying musical wit to verbal wit, employs a banjo to memorable effect.
Clearly, this is a new kind of history: the very opposite, in fact, of Tennyson's archaizing remoteness. This is a history directly accessible as sensory experience:
In transparent overlay, two times have become as one, and we are meant to be equally aware of both… The words lie flat like the forms on a Cubist surface. The archaizing sensibility…has simply dissolved…. Time folded over; now lay flat, transparent, upon not-now. 9
T.S. Eliot made his pilgrimage to the prehistoric painted caves in 1919. By that time modern sensibilities had undergone an even more catastrophic convulsion: the First World War shattered those sensibilities as surely as it shattered cities and limbs. The "botched civilization" 10 of the pre-war years was gone. It would be necessary to remake art – to remake culture itself – from the surviving fragments.
Fragments: the entire world, it seemed, was made of fragments. A scrawl on a cave wall, the curve of a guitar, a Trojan helmet, a scrap of old verse, a folk chant, a broken archway. Painters created their own fragments, exploding the still life or the portrait into a seeming anarchy of images lying flat upon a plane. Architects gave up the notion of reproducing chateaus and palaces; a past style was of relevance only to the extent that the architect might "quote" an ironic detail or boldly expose its hidden construction in an "expressed structure." The poets built their poems like little mounds of pottery shards and bones, heaped together in the hope that some sort of meaning might emerge. Stravinsky wrote music for an imaginary pagan ritual, neither ancient nor modern, yet somehow both; Charles Ives incorporated old ballads and hymns into music so "modern" that it was commonly thought to be unplayable.
In 1966 and 1967, Brian Wilson, like the photographers and lead-cylinder recording technicians before him, was busy inventing artifacts of his own. In the modern recording studio, as in a laboratory, he worked obsessively to create dozens – hundreds! – of painstakingly arranged, meticulously recorded bits of music. Multiple sessions yielded scant seconds of usable sound. Horn players held "conversations," talking through their instruments, presumably in the hope that a few inches of interesting tape would result. There was talk of recording staged arguments, dinner parties, rushing water. The snippets accumulated; like "forms on a Cubist surface," they were ordered, reordered, sequenced and resequenced. Giving a rational name to a chaotic process, we have come to call Brian's approach "modular" recording. Where was the master plan, the organizing principle that would gather the modules into a coherent whole? If that unifying vision resided anywhere, it resided in Brian's own mind.
Unifying vision: that is a terribly important phrase. Because Brian appropriated the modernist method without accepting its defeatism. He created, collected and arranged fragments, resolute in his belief that those fragments could be integrated into a meaningful whole. Incredibly, his first experiments in "modular" composition fully justified that belief. "Good Vibrations," the single, was the product of some six months' worth of sessions at multiple studios. It was assembled from countless bits and pieces. The result? A number-one hit record that is still widely regarded as the most sophisticated expression of the pop-single art form. Against all odds, the master plan, the organizing principle, the unifying vision…worked.
Confronted with the task of creating an entire album – a sweeping, ambitious, avant-garde album at that – the "modular" method broke down. Other pressures, better chronicled elsewhere, took their own toll: family pressures, psychological pressures, professional pressures. The delicate miniaturist miracle that was "Good Vibrations" could not, it seemed, be "scaled up" to album size. The resolute belief in the unifying vision wavered; and when it did, the original SMiLE project simply fell apart. Afterwards – it's always this way – it was difficult even to imagine that it could have ended otherwise.
Here is Eliot, some three years after his cave-journey. No person is "speaking" these lines; no one person could speak them:
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon – O swallow swallow
Le prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih 11
Eliot goes so far as to provide his own footnotes to The Waste Land (or are they lines of verse imitating footnotes?). That is a strange thing for a poet to do. Poets write poetry; it is left to the scholars to add the footnotes. By usurping those responsibilities, Eliot reminds us that there is little difference between the modernist poet and the historian. ("History is the new poetry," said Carlyle 12, although it is doubtful he foresaw this sort of thing.)
There are passages of SMiLE that resemble Eliot’s dazzling collocation of fragments:
Columnated ruins domino!
Canvas the town and brush the back-drop.
Are you sleeping? Brother John?
Dove nested towers –
the hour was strike the street, quicksilver moon.
Carriage across the fog – two-step to
lamplight cellar tune.
The laughs come hard
in Auld Lang Syne
The writer is there, of course: there is a creative mind selecting and organizing the quotations, allusions and images. As with Eliot, however, there is no single speaker. The tone is not "personal"; it is as if the literary tradition itself has autonomously generated these verses. "Columnated ruins domino" looks, for all the world, like a Latinate construction (ablative absolute?). Nursery rhymes: "London Bridge" and "Frère Jacques." Kyd, Burns, Dante, the anonymous author of the Upanishads: these are the authors we see and hear. The poet is out of the lamp light: behind the backdrop.
In a 1999 interview, Van Dyke Parks had this to say about an album inspired by the Br'er Rabbit tales:
[S]ome 20 years ago, I aimed to make this musical character faithful to the original that jumps off the pages at the Archives of American Folk Culture, Library of Congress. It was more preservationist than creative. 13
This notion would have been comprehensible to Eliot: the poet not as some filter through which past experience is strained, but the poet as curator, faithfully preserving artifacts "shored against ruins.”
But – once again – there is a fundamental difference between Wilson and Parks, on the one hand, and Eliot, on the other, The ending of The Waste Land, quoted above, ends in an awful, despairing silence that finally imposes a sort of uneasy peace on the chaos of borrowed voices. “Surf’s Up” ends with the promise of a redeeming “tidal wave” of new life, a “young and often spring.” It ends, not in silence, but in a children’s song.
To come back, at last, to our definition: "an epic is a poem containing history." For Pound, as for us (we have inherited, for good or ill, the sensibilities of his generation), "history" is no longer a static narrative; time is no longer a linear progression. History is a collection of artifacts that “recover time.” Past and present have been flattened out, coexisting like sketches of bulls made three hundred centuries apart. Ironically, the word "history" has returned to its ancient roots; for we are able to "know" this kind of history in a more intimate, more immediate way. "You must always know the past," said Faulkner, "for there is no real Was, there is only Is." 14
As for a work of art “containing” history: that is no longer a matter of euphonious archaisms, of period costumes and antique flourishes. We include history as Eliot and Ives did: by incorporating the words, images, musical phrases – the artifacts – that comprise this new and experiential history. A line of Shakespeare rubs elbows with a line of Virgil, which jostles a line of Verlaine; and the "falling towers" of Vienna collapse alongside those of Jerusalem and Alexandria. "Marching Through Georgia" and "Turkey in the Straw" share the stage with Beethoven and Brahms. In one remarkable instance, both poet and composer seized upon the same artifact: “London Bridge” is quoted in the final stanza of The Waste Land; and it is also, fleetingly, quoted in Ives’s “Country Band March.”
Appropriation of method, but not acceptance of defeatism. As The Waste Land meticulously gathers fragments, it meticulously documents the poet's inability to assemble them into a meaningful whole. And late in his life, Pound looked back on his own "poem containing history" – The Cantos – and admitted, in what amounts to a whisper, that it was beyond his powers to unite its fragments into the great work he had envisioned:
[M]y errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere….
i.e. it coheres all right
Even if my notes do not cohere. 15
Pound insists that the coherence is real, even as he acknowledges that he cannot make it real upon the page. That insistence is poignant, but it is not, finally, convincing.
SMiLE, on the other hand, convinces in the only way a work of art can: with the logic of its imagination and the force of its emotional power. The miracle (second only to the central miracle of its existence, after thirty-seven years of suspended animation) is that SMiLE aspires to the creation, out of its disparate elements, of unity and meaning…and that it realizes that aspiration. It dares greatly, and it succeeds greatly. It contains history in many ways and on many levels; it manages a formidable array of allusions, of quotations, of – yes – fragments; but those elements are united into a work of surpassing beauty. Ironically, we now understand, in retrospect, that the decades of arranging and rearranging of SMiLE puzzle-pieces by earnest fans – that fascinating, frustrating, futile pastime – may have been the most sustained exercise of Eliot's method…and its grandest failure. For those efforts ended in defeat after defeat; while the complete, real SMiLE is a crowning, redemptive triumph. The titles tell much of the story: Eliot arranged fragments, mirroring shattered sensibilities, and he called his poem The Waste Land. Wilson transmuted elements, conjuring positive "vibrations," and he called his album SMiLE.
Transmuted elements: the breadth and diversity of SMiLE is breathtaking. It finds room for "Peace in the Valley" next-door to "El Paso," with "C C Rider" and "You Are My Sunshine" just around the corner. It encompasses a sentimental ballad, c.1830; the Cherokee Strip Land Run; a song written by the last Queen of Hawaii and a song written by the Governor of Louisiana; innocent pagan goddesses and cantina dancers; two different official American state songs; the Transcontinental Railroad; the very first rock-n-roll record; a cook chopping lumber for a woodstove; a nursery rhyme with its roots in a medieval circle dance; a tip of the cap to Cole Porter, Woody Guthrie and Benjamin Franklin; some pirates, not necessarily of the Caribbean; the bicycle craze of the 1890s (with a passing wave to the Wright brothers); talking crows; Wordsworth and Coleridge (both); and the landing of the Puritans on Plymouth Rock.
It coheres, all right.
Footnotes
1 Quotation cited here: https://modernamericanpoetry.org/ezra-pound
2 Van Dyke Parks, in The Beach Boys: An American Band video, 1976
3 https://magazine.atavist.com/goodbye-surfing-hello-god/
4 https://oll.libertyfund.org/quotes/edmund-burke-past-errors
5 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad in Blank Verse”
6 Henry James, “The Tone of Time”
7 http://www.tinfoil.com/cm-0101.htm
8 https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/ead/pdf/century0765.pdf
9 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era
10Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”
11T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
12Quotation cited here: https://www.azquotes.com/quote/524808
13Van Dyke Parks, 1999 interview; source unavailable
14Quotation cited here: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/392594-there-is-no-such-thing-as-was-only-is-if-was
15Ezra Pound, “Canto CXVI”
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