Turning Over a New Leaf; or, What Is Literature? By Sheldon Kranz

4. People and Novels   

I had the greatest personal and aesthetic experience when I began to study Aesthetic Realism with Eli Siegel. My life was given a form, a shape, a coherence which made me respect myself and life more. That personal and aesthetic criticism is continuing now.

In his lecture on the novel, Mr. Siegel says:

If we could find some arrangement in the happenings of our lives, we should that much be prouder of ourselves and we'd be happier, stronger, and so on. It is that arrangement of events, with all that goes with events, that novel criticism is trying to understand; and it is that arrangement, likewise, that we must try to understand if our lives are to make sense. Very few lives have made sense. Novel criticism is the same, in the deepest meaning, as criticism of events in any person's life.

It is the aesthetic criticism of self, which Eli Siegel has formulated and put into action, that makes him unique in the history of thought.  It is the showing of how we have to have our lives be like a poem or a novel, and what that implies, that changed my life and has changed the lives of others so magnificently.  It is this way of seeing people that I now teach to others in Aesthetic Realism consultations. A question I've asked is: "How do you think a novelist would see your mother? How is that different from how you see her?"

The way life and the novel met in my lessons was wonderful. How I saw people as such in relation to how I saw characters in a novel I was working on was one of the chief subjects. To a large degreee I saw people, remotely, two-dimensionally, and also as interferences. Clearly, this was not much help in writing a novel. And it was criticism like the following that had me reconsider what kind of world I was in and who people were, and were the means of my seeing them with new warmth, accuracy, and depth. This made it possible for me to become an Aesthetic Realism consultant and talk to people about the questions of their lives, with the perception of a good novelist--with dimension, perspective, and a good deal of emotion--people of different backgrounds and experiences, men, women, husbands, wives.

For example, Mr. Siegel asked me:

Then referring to the main character in my novel, Martin, and his mother, Elsa, Mr. Siegel asked me: "If Elsa were very hurt by Martin, could you describe that in all its terror?"

Then Mr. Siegel asked me a surprising question:

I never heard anything remotely like this in my writing courses at the University of Iowa with Robert Penn Warren and others. What Eli Siegel saw about the relation of literature and the self is new and so needed: that a person, like a character, wants to be seen as a mobile relation of opposites--of self and universe, of unity and diversity, strength and weakness, good and evil, and more. To see oneself as having an aesthetic structure like a character of Hawthorne's or Thackeray's has, is to see oneself as one truly is.  To see other people with the depth, mystery, and intricacy they have is to see as a good novelist does.

It is this seeing that Aesthetic Realism consultations carry on. And when the world, including the literary world, understands the magnitude of the work Mr. Siegel has done in this field of self and aesthetics, he will be placed among the great critics of all time.

I didn't see how revolutionary what I was hearing was.  But it was true criticism, and it gave me new life and new perception.  Eventually, it made for the writing of poetry I am proud of.

Every Aesthetic Realism consultation is a novel or poem in process; and where the question of love comes up, as it so frequently does, consultants have seen how two people unknowingly go against the principle represented by the Francis Thompson poem, and use love to go away from the world, and cause each other pain.

For instance, take Richard Lehman, a married man in his early 30s, who had consultations with an Each and All trio.  He was a successful businessman who lived on Long Island, and seemed to charm everyone but his wife.  Though they had two children, they were considering divorce. We asked Mr. Lehman:


What we were trying to show Mr. Lehman is that a good marriage, like a good poem, has the presence of the world in it.  When Francis Thompson talks of the "red pavilion of my heart," he makes his heart like the outside world; and the poem, with all its seeming desire to possess a person utterly, has a great sense of the large, impersonal beauty of reality.

And we asked Mrs. McLean:


Mrs. McLean was learning how to see her husband as a relation of personal and impersonal, near and far, intimate and wide. In the "Song of Songs," from the Old Testament there is an intense personal feeling that takes in the whole world.  The images are of reality as such; and yet how intimate they sound.  The music of the lines is wide and generous, and simultaneously, there is economy and compression.  Richard Lehman and Harriet McLean need to see that love, like a poem, is a making one of these opposites; and consultations go after making them a reality, as they are in these lines from "The Song of Songs."

If love is the most written of subject in literature, death, surprisingly, is the next most popular.  It is the subject that, in ordinary life, has been the most frightening, the most depressing.  So why should one deliberately go out of one's way to write about it or read about it? It shows that people have a courage and a desire to tackle the most difficult of subjects, to take existence where it is least understood, toughest, and make sense out of it--at least, to so shape it through words that beauty occurs.  If beauty can be made out of the subject of deem, including grief at some person's death, it says something in favor of reality.

Robert Browning can write with his customary rough energy:


Edna St. Vincent Millay eloquently expresses people's anger at death.  She speaks musically for the centuries when she writes:

Walt Whitman sees death very differently. He can write this way, and one feels it is sincere:


And death has been written about in a simple, plain style; it has also been written about in a style that is rich and complex.  Both ways can be beautiful.  But as Aesthetic Realism points out, simplicity and complexity are made one in every fine piece of writing, including every fine piece of writing about death, though one opposite may be more apparent at first glance.

A prose writer who has stood for the bare, the simple, the unadorned sentence is Ernest Hemingway.  The prose style of his stories and early novels of the 1920s affected writers for decades afterward. Many tried to imitate that tight-lipped, economical, monosyllabic style. Most of the imitations were hollow.  For at Hemingway*s best, the simple style was not only that.  It gave rise to large emotion.  There was a feeling of what had been left unsaid; and the unsaid was rich and complex. "The purpose of a clipped style," said Eli Siegel in talking of Hemingway, "is to show you have composure, and to say: Reality, I can take you."

As moving an instance of this as any, is the closing scene in Hemingway's 1929 novel, A Farewell to Arms. The subject is death.  It is World War I.  Frederick Henry, who narrates the story, is an ambulance driver in Italy. He falls in love with an English nurse, Catherine Barkley.  Catherine becomes pregnant, and at the end of the novel she dies in childbirth. We have love, pain, and death expressed with the utmost economy and simplicity.  Simultaneously, we feel a world of emotion, of heartbreak just below the taut surface. The effect is powerful. As Mr. Siegel observed, "This was said with such simplicity, people felt at last English was dealt with justly." This is the conclusion of A Farewell to Arms:

Style, like the world itself, can be a spare New England landscape. Hemingway represents that. Style can also be like a tropical jungle, rich and complex.

A writer of the 18th century, not a novelist, but an essayist, who represents this aspect of style and who wrote one of the most eloquent passages on death, is Joseph Addison. We are a long way from Hemingway in these sentences of Addison from his essay on Westminster Abbey. His prose has a swelling cadence, a rising and falling, that brings us close to poetry.

Both the New England landscape and the jungle are in us, and both can be cared for. And we should be able to care for Hemingway and Joseph Addison as representing these opposites of contraction and expansion, or the simple and the complex in ourselves. One of the things I am most appreciative of is the fact that, through my study of Aesthetic Realism, I have come to care for such diverse writers, such different ways of seeing.

Addison, in his essay, says he uses looking at the tombs in Westminster Abbey to rid himself of envy, greed, and human vanity.  Death, for him, is the great joiner, that which makes every person akin. And he expresses this with grandeur and a rich, organ-like music. Yet, there is simplicity, too, in his long sentences.  It is in their careful symmetry, in the way segments are balanced one against the other; it is in the essentially simple idea of death as the great leveler to which all men must come.  Here is the conclusion of "Westminster Abbey" by Joseph Addison, which appeared in Number 26 of the periodical, The Spectator, in 1711.

Both are musical; both show reality truly. Death, from one point of view, is a simple, monosyllabic fact. From another point of view, who understands it, it is so mysterious and fathomless. So it has the same opposites life has in another arrangement. And when these opposites of simplicity and complexity are reconciled, art occurs.  Death then can be a lively subject of life; it can be a subject of beauty; and, as such, it can be used to like the world as much as any other subject or fact. This is the message of Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Addison.