The Trouble With Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein and Zukofsky Bob Perelman University of California 263 pp. $16.00 Review by Alec Marsh Featured in BBR May 1995 The trouble with modernist geniuses, Bob Perelman argues, is that they seem compelled to announce the fact to an uncomprehending world. "I have met three geniuses in my life," Gertrude Stein wrote in the commandeered voice of her loyal partner Alice B. Toklas, "Picasso, Alfred North Whitehead and Gertrude Stein." To be confronted by such a boast is to be asked to sit up and take notice-but if we do, Stein's charming Autobiography is likely to be snatched away and a copy of Tender Buttons, or Finnegan's Wake, or the brick-sized, multi-lingual Cantos, or Zukofsky's thorny 800-page A, thrust upon us. Too often, it seems that to read a genius one has to be a genius-so most often we just don't. The major modernists were such geniuses they never could seem to understand how off-putting they were. This paradox, the genius's "struggle for authority," energizes Perelman's book. He is troubled that the heroic modernists have required an industry of handbook writers, explicators and tour guides. His own clearly written book is designed not so much to explicate as to de-mystify the sacred texts of modernism. In his wry, unbuttoned style, he is as willing to cite Wile E. Coyote as Walter Benjamin. He believes that we must confront Stein, Pound and Co. in "the original"-without critical Baedeckers-and in that confrontation come to our own conclusions about how their texts make sense: This is not to say that the handbooks should be ignored, but rather that at a certain point it is necessary to forget the soothing coherence they add to the words of The Cantos or Ulysses. Rather than explicating, evaluating, selecting out thematic coherence, or using the works of these four writers to articulate an argument as to the nature of language, I want to keep strange the strangeness of their verbal surfaces and extreme rhetorical strategies, and at the same time see how this intensely specialized language is continually at the service of the most ambitious attempts at totalization and social authority. The result is a book which is likely to be popular with ambitious students looking for a sane way to approach these difficult works. It may also irritate specialists, for Perelman's debunking common-sense approach cannot, by its very nature, enter into subtleties of explication, nor take much account of the enormous critical labor which has gone into revealing (he might say imposing) coherence upon these recalcitrant bodies of words. In a sense, the less you know about a genius the better, for Perelman's readings enlighten most when not qualified with too much learning. When he claims that "as elsewhere in Joyce's work, in Ulysses there is a strong connection between being a cuckold and being a potent writer," I'm all ears, the idea is new to me. When he claims that "Pound began The Cantos when his career was in decline," I want to complain that Pound's career had in fact scarcely begun. In the essays concerning Pound and Zukofsky, whose writing I know well, I often found myself grumbling and kvetching. The essays on Joyce and Stein, however, in whom I am less invested, often made me nod in agreement. If, like all of the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets, Perelman overrates Zukofsky at the expense of Pound (the literary equivalent of saying that Mickey Rivers was better than Mickey Mantle) the tone in which he does so suggests that, well, okay-let's talk about it. Perelman's prose charms-he's rarely tendentious. The Trouble With Genius is loaded with the kind of incautious but provoking judgments which will instigate lively discussion. Consider his take on Stein. Perelman's position is an attractive one: "The expertise needed to read Joyce, Pound and Zukofsky is readily subsumed under the category 'higher learning.' One does not need such expertise to read Stein." This claim will come as a relief to many readers even if Perelman does not try very hard to sustain it. In fact, the most interesting things he says about Stein are his learned comparisons between her plain modernist style and Wordsworth's plainspoken "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads. He also suggests that, far from being new, Stein's theory of genius is close to Kant's: "In the Critique of Judgement Kant, like Wordsworth, aligns genius with nature and originality. "Nature," Kant writes, "gives the rule to art....beautiful art is only possible as a product of genius: 'originality must be its first property.' Genius cannot be taught or imitated." Yet, Stein's How To Write is full of sentences which teach genius writing: A sentence never needs to be like what there is when there is some of it the same.... What is a sentence. They will not need to know where she has been. Perelman notes that "these sentences seem to accord with Kant's demand that 'beautiful art' not be 'derived from any rule which has a concept as its determining ground.' These sentences are examples only of themselves, and they illustrate the impossible exemplariness demanded of the genius. If school were taught by a genius instead of a teacher, the lesson might look like How To Write." Geniuses can only be followed by other geniuses-in Stein's case, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, and through them countless contemporary writers from Bruce Chatwin to Tim O'Brien. Perhaps genius is not impossible to follow after all. How many poets-including Zukofsky and Perelman himself-have benefited from the poetic example of Pound? The paradox of modernist genius, it seems to me, is not so much that they have been found unintelligible, but rather, despite the self-consciously recondite form and display of "genius" in their work, they manifestly have found not only readers, but imitators. Geniuses trouble. Bob Perelman's book keeps that trouble brewing, but because his own work is so readable, even as he insists that unreadableness is the trouble with modernist geniuses, Pound, Joyce, Stein and Zukofsky are likely to win more readers. I mean it as a compliment to claim that Perelman plays Baedecker in spite of himself. Alec Marsh lives in Allentown, PA. &copy1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.

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