I’ve been mulling over Geoffrey Hill’s Speech! Speech! (Counterpoint. 2000), which I rescued from a discount book shop’s bargain bin on my last trip back to the U.S., and am left wondering if it has ever been examined closely by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers proper and post, because, with its grand disjunctions, its fragments and linguistic slippages, it could very well pass for writing in the experimental style of writers X, Y, and Z in the U.S.A., and Jeremy Prynne and some members of that tradition in the U.K. And no wonder! Hill would have to have transformed himself into the Hermit of the Major Arcana to have escaped this sort of thing, situated as he is at Boston University in the very heart of L=A=N=G=P=O territory.

Though the back of the book tells us that Speech! Speech! is a jeremiad aimed at these times of debased public speech, of “media hype, insipid sermons, hollow political rhetoric, and the ritual misuse of words”–I believe that the real target of Hill’s blast is the young–especially his American students. We can almost hear the constriction rise in the throat of Hill–the purveyor of the Humanist tradition–as he finds himself perhaps wishing–secretly–to throttle the barbarians who are not only at the gate, but have entered the halls, and even taken up residence in American universities! Unlike poor Henry of the Dream Songs who has the gentle Mr. Bones to remind him of the failures of the flesh and the long slide to oblivion, we have Hill’s “Rapmaster”–a straw man if there ever was one–whom the don bewails, lectures, trounces, denounces.

Either the thing moves, Rapmaster, or it
does not. I disclaim spontaneity,
the appearance of which is power. I will
match you fake pindaric for trite
violence, evil twin…. [92]

To my ears Speech! Speech! is the moan of yet another WHITE GUY tethered by tenure, far from being DEAD yet (thank God), and lashing out with the only weapons he has at hand–wit, irony, sarcasm in several languages,–allusive squibs that fail because the target no longer feels that it must spend time learning the Western Canon, and so doesn’t understand–or even care–that it is being roundly taken to task. Hill’s language, loaded with erudition, is becoming increasingly harder for the young to understand, and therefore easier to disregard. (I can’t help but be reminded here of Blake’s nightmarish engraving of the being in the cage having its wings cut by a smiling giant–what better symbol for the poet in the halls of the academy!)

Unlike King Log and much of Hill’s muscular, early work–which I continue to admire–Speech! Speech! is Hill at his most lax and most overtly cynical. While attempting to critique debased language, he himself presents texts that lack the intensity–the intellectual interest–of his earlier work.

Go back to your roots Geoffrey Hill and bring us that luminous vision again. We are–as you above others would understand–sorely in need of it.

Ghosts of Vesuvius
by Charles Pellegrino.
Harper. 490 pages.

I picked up this book after listening to the author on a talk radio show. He impressed me, holding forth on the universe in a distinct Long Island accent, so I thought why not? What I got was an incredibly ambitious work that takes the reader back, literally, to the non-time before the universe was born, then barrels forward faster than the speed of light to the non-time post-omega of the universe, and then drops the reader on the edge of the pit left behind after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center after lengthy disquisitions on Pompeii, Herculaneum–the incredible forces unleashed there–and how they were repeated at various intervals of volcanism through the eons. Not content with this, Pellegrino dove-tails these dynamics with the collapse of the Twin Towers and shows how various fire fighters and rescue workers met or survived their fates through the phenomenon of “shock cocoons”–the uncanny interventions that appear in the midst of disasters and which allowed paper documents to survive the searing heat in Herculaneum as well as one fire-fighter to glide on his back for hundreds of feet through the closest equivalent to hell on earth this side of the atomic bomb. A less capacious mind would be content to call it quits after these feats of mental gymnastics, but Pellegrino plows on, Diderot-fashion, to consider, simultaneously, rustcicles, the sinking of the Titanic, the Book of Thomas, Josephus and the early Christian church, the Stoics, the history of Rome, Roman technology and hundreds of other subjects. This man Pellegrino, if he ran a pizza parlor, would most probably offer the Pellegrino Special, which would be the very embodiment of abundanza!–all conceivable toppings, plus a sprinkling of star dust–and all for a reasonable $15.95, U.S.D.! (And, by the way, it appears that the folks of Herculaneum and Pompeii actually had a pizza-like dish, as well as their own hamburgers, hotdogs and a great-tasting fish topping–facts I learned from the author in question.) In addition Pellegrino succeeds in putting a human face on these tragedies–both natural and man-made. We are taken through the last nano-seconds of the life of a beautiful Asian-European slave girl of 14–16 years of age, who was lying on her side with her mistress’ baby in her arms trying to comfort it when the searing gasses from Vesuvius caused her brains to boil and explode. We stand on the deck of the Titanic watching an officer with a pistol in his hand holding off the surging crowds of desperate passengers as women and children find seats on the final life boats, the freezing water lapping around their ankles. We are taken into the private hell of a man buried with his dog under tons of volcanic dust, who managed to live for weeks after Pompeii’s extinction, yet still died far from the picks and shovels of potential rescuers.

With any such massive undertaking there will be of course some problems. Even War and Peace has arid passages that one would like to tear out and feed to the swine–especially when Tolstoy the philosopher begins to lecture us about history. With the Ghosts of Vesuvius the problems involve structure and editing. Towards the end of the book Pellegrino seems to be writing under the old rule of so many cents a page. We’ve seen the results in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi when what begins as an excellent book is buried, in part two, under so much filler. I believe that the author simply had a space requirement that was assigned to him by his agent and by hook or crook, he managed to fill it. In addition, Mr. Pellegrino sometimes needs a fact-checker. However, having said these things, I recommend both the author and his book. Obviously the man is brilliant in the best possible sense of the word, and the book is the near-barbaric yawp of an American original.

Wittgenstein’s Poker
David Edmonds and John Eidinow
Ecco/HarperCollins. Paperback. 340 pages

A reconstruction of the historical and philosophical contexts of the legendary encounter between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein on October 25th, 1946, at the Cambridge Moral Science Club, this book makes for some fascinating reading–especially for those intrigued–as I am–by the enigmatic Wittgenstein. Though he has always been a problematic figure for me, it must be said that Wittgenstein comes across in this telling in even darker shades than other biographers have painted him, especially in his attempts–at first successful–in buying off the Nazis so that the Jewish origins of his family would be overlooked. The sad truth emerges that Wittgenstein himself was anti-Semitic–although, as in all things pertaining to him–even this is complicated and perhaps not as it seems.

When I first heard of this enounter between the lion-like Wittgenstein and the retiring Karl Popper, I at first envisioned Popper as the sacrificial lamb, but as Edmonds and Eidinow make abundantly clear, the philosopher of the Open Society was himself a brilliant bully when it came to argument. So the stage is set, the event takes place, and yet another avenue opens up for exploration–that of the fallibility of human memory. The book, it seems, was suggested by a series of letters penned by those who were present as students when the poker event took place and which were originally published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1998. They illustrate how different even the basic contours of a story can be when viewed in hindsight and how human memory can be distorted by wish fulfillment. Certainly Karl Popper’s memory of the encounter as recounted in his memoires appears to have been liberally distorted in his favor when he awarded himself the “victory” in the debate. Or not. All we can be sure of is that that unique moment in time with Wittgenstein and Popper seething at each other while Bertrand Russell looks on has become yet another myth of the 20th century–a moment as numinous as J. Robert Oppenheimer’s meeting with that general whose name I can’t now remember, or John Cage sitting silently in front of a piano in a concert hall at about the same time that I learned to bounce a ball.