1st Edition

Another Music Polemics and Pleasures

By John McCormick Copyright 2008

    As the essays in this book attest, in a time of specialization John McCormick chose diversification, a choice determined by a life spent in many occupations and many countries. After his five years in the U. S. Navy in the Second World War, the academy beckoned by way of the G. I. Bill, graduate training, and a career in teaching. Prosperity in the American university at the time meant setting up as a "Wordsworth man," a "Keats man," or a "Dr. Johnson man": all chilling to the author. He chose self-exile in which he disguised himself as an "Americanist" saleable in Europe, and lectured happily in comparative studies: literature, history, and philosophy. Thus the broad range of this volume, both in subject matter and in the span of time it covers.

    The essays are divided into three sections. First are general and personal essays on a variety of topics, followed by work on individual writers, and third, writings on criticism and theory. A section on Santayana reflects his eight years of research for Santayana's biography. The writings on Spain and toreo (bullfighting) result from another long-held interest, together with the author's attempt to alter some of the romantic nonsense about the running of the bulls in Pamplona, too often the entire substance of what the general public knows about Spain. McCormick has long been convinced that without knowledge of bullfighting, the foreigner cannot comprehend arcane and wonderful aspects of the Spanish character.

    The coda, "Another Music," is an old man's attempt to solve the mysterious algebra of how the world turns now, and how the young appear to the aged. While the volume is diverse in its range of writers--from Whitman in America to Santayana in Europe, taken as a collectivity, these essays provide a sense of the grandeur as well as the decadent in twentieth century politics and aesthetics alike. Written with the literary taste and political non-conformity that still characterizes McCormick, the volume is a treat for the specialist (perhaps) and for the generalist (certainly).

    Introduction

    Part 1: General and Personal
    The Berlin Uprising: Cold War Turning Point?
    The United Snopes Information Service
    Federal Censorship
    Gott Mit Whom?
    A Most Mysterious Disaster
    On Taste
    Down Low and Hard Up
    Snobbery and the American Scene

    Part 2: Individual Writers
    The Rational Shelley
    Walt Whitman: Orientalist or Nationalist?
    The Urban and the Urbane: Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow
    An English Bohemian in Spain: Gerald Brenan
    Lorca in Our Time
    Philip Larkin: An American View
    James Joyce and Hermann Broch: From Infl uence to Originality

    Part 3: Literary Criticism and Theory
    Problems of "Poetic Prose" in English and French
    Down with Translation
    Toward a Comparative American Literary History
    Problems and Occasions for the American Scholar
    A Novel of Ideas
    Santayana's Idea of the Tragic
    The Last Puritan Once More
    Santayana's Reading of Freud
    Santayana and Ezra Pound
    Santayana's The Sense of Beauty:
    Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory
    Mnemosyne
    Benedetto Croce's aesthetic: An Introduction
    Franco, Spain, and the Third Reich
    Antonio Ordonez and Others
    The Bullfight Gentrified

    Coda
    Another Music

    Name Index
    Title Index

    Biography

    John McCormick