The Unstuffed Owl

PARODIES--AN ANTHOLOGY FROM CHAUCER TO BEERBOHM AND AFTER (574 pp.) --Dwight Macdonald--Random House ($7.50).

Police mamma Helen mother please take me out. Come on open the soap duckets. The chimney sweeps. Talk to the sword. Shut up you got a big mouth! Please help me get up. Henry Max come over here. French Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone . . .

This flawless (because meaningless) fragment of prose is offered as a parody of the once-famed gibberish of Gertrude Stein, and is the work of an unknown writer, Arthur Flegenheimer. It is one of the more recondite items in this anthology of Dwight Macdonald, critic, polemicist and New Yorker staff writer. To see just how recondite it is, the reader must not miss the footnote, in which it is disclosed that the obscure Flegenheimer is Mobster Dutch Schultz, and that the Stein "parody" is a police stenographer's transcript of his dying delirium. Such thimbleriggery is a fair sample of the tactics used by Macdonald to create, rather than compile, the best anthology of parody ever printed.

Like Method Acting. The editor--once described as looking like a Scots Unitarian impersonating Mephistopheles--is perfectly matched to his task, and Madcap Mac is balanced by Dour Donald. Parody, he makes clear, though a laughing matter, is serious. Writes Macdonald: "I enjoy it as an intuitive kind of literary criticism, shorthand for what 'serious' critics must write out at length. It is Method Acting, since a successful parodist must live himself, imaginatively, into his parody."

With a socio-philosophical turn of mind and a sometimes puckish, sometimes pawkish humor, Macdonald has also shown a scholar's doggedness in sifting a stupefying quantity of material, and in separating the living wit from the dead cats flung in literary battles long ago. The parody buff will find few representative favorites missing here (J. C. Squire is one). Macdonald was uplifted by his rediscovery of The Stuffed Owl (title taken from a wonderfully woeful Wordsworth poem of the same name), an Anthology of Bad Verse published in 1930. He was dispirited by the six-volume collection of parody published in the 1880s, which contained 86 versions of Gray's Elegy, 60 versions of Poe's The Raven, and 21 of The Charge of the Light Brigade. He has learned that the greatest are beyond parody: Shakespeare was himself a master parodist (of Nashe, Marlowe, Lyly), but no one ever capped that starry-pointing pyramid, though Shaw and Nigel Dennis have notably tried.

An Antiquarian Thrill. Many a parody ends as a work of art in its own right, its original forgotten; the brilliant parasite fly emerges from the husk of its host. As "an antiquarian thrill," Macdonald offers the reader the original pious rhymes upon which Lewis Carroll based his verses in Alice in Wonderland. Demonstrating some sparkling footnotework, Macdonald has ranged the whole wide field of self-declared parody. He starts with Chaucer (only students of Mid. Eng. Lit. will get much of this one) and winds up with the latest chic spoof of Truman Capote based on a New York Times Book Review section interview ("I am about as tall as a shotgun . . . I think my eyes are rather heated") or the Beowulf of the Beatniks, Allen Ginsburg, whose Howl turns into Squeal:

I saw the best minds of my generation Destroyed--Marvin Who spat out poems . . .

Macdonald insists there is more parody around than the work done by those who say they are doing it, and he has enriched his study by adding odd categories, such as unconscious self-parody, and by ranging outside the official field into politics and the crypto-language of psychiatry. Antiestablishmentarian Macdonald gleefully produces a mimeographed jeu d'esprit by American Heritageman Oliver Jensen. It is a Gettysburg Address in Eisenhower, beginning: "I haven't checked these figures, but 87 years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental setup in this country . . ." Ike, in a West Point Address, is quoted as doing almost as badly by himself, and thus joins an illustrious company of those capable of unconscious self-parody. Others: Henry James, Ernest Hemingway and Samuel Johnson himself, quoted in an impenetrably opaque passage on the subject of glass. Hemingway fails to get his unletter on this team; "for obvious reasons," Macdonald mourns, Across the River and Into the Trees could not be included. E. B. White, however, is a very good stand-in (see box).

Comic Ghoul. Max Beerbohm remains the master among the parodists, although men of greater genius (e.g., Proust, who makes an appearance in French spoofing Balzac, and William Faulkner, in a rare item, parodying himself) have worked in this deceptive motley. Why the passion for parody among writers? Macdonald finds parody inherent in a mature culture; it is a way of digesting the past. Parody obviously demands that the original parodied should be well known to the reader, and this calls for a firmly held common culture. It persists today among the British as a form of "upper-class folk art," but its great age was the late Victorian period (C. S. Calverley, Lear and J. K. Stephen), based on a common Oxbridge education. In this century Macdonald loyally finds U.S. parodists better than Britain's best (Belloc, Chesterton, Beerbohm, Connolly notwithstanding), and the best of these in The New Yorker school (E. B. White, Wolcott Gibbs, Peter De Vries). The reason: that magazine, with its "peculiar combination of sophistication and provinciality," provides the necessary "compact cultural group." "The old lady from Dubuque," it seems, now digs Jack Kerouac.

But Macdonald takes a dour view of the future of this comic ghoul among the arts. Life, he seems to think, is getting beyond a joke. "The real world has become so fantastic that satire, of which parody is a subdivision, is discouraged because reality outdistances it. What can a satirist add to the U2-Summit-Meeting fiasco? Or to the dealings between the United Nations and Premier Lumumba of the Congo Republic--the latter a character right out of Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief? Indeed, in the Congo tragicomedy, history seems to be parodying itself."

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