a note on christopher middleton

What is it exactly that Christopher Middleton doesn't like when he says: "An eager-beaver rising literary man with "Eng. Lit." behind and abreast of every novelty I certainly was not." [CHICAGO REVIEW, 51:1/2 (Spring 2005), 13.] Eager-beavers have a penchant, often, for self-display, of their eagerness as much as whatever its content is. The kind of thing one finds at sports venues and, so I'm told, corporate boardrooms. "Rising," of course, signifies a distracting attentiveness to one's career. "Literary" is not a good word to someone who feels that the last thing literature should be is literary, i.e., self-reflexive. For Middleton's and other surrounding generations, that meant resisting the influence of the world's most grateful colonial author, T.S. Eliot. After THE WASTE LAND, that is. "Eng. Lit.," speaking of colonialism, is the American rendering of the term and speaks to/about the eagerness with which the middle generations of American poets embraced (re-embraced?) the traditions and forms of the mother tongue and, by implication, little outside it. "Eng. Lit." was a closed shop, into which you could put American or any other experience if you did it the right way. It was not very open to influences from elsewhere--David Jones, Stevie Smith, and maybe Robert Graves to the contrary--despite or perhaps because so much of the other world, outside Eng. Lit., was beginning to bear down on it. Such attitude, be it underscored, came from an Englishman (Middleton) who made his way to Texas and, of course, the German language, two zones resisted in the deep provincial recesses of Englishness, there and abroad. Though one can't help but point out the love of jazz (the other?) in the writings of Philip Larkin, John Wain and Kingsley Amis. "Novelty" probably explains itself. The spuriously new, the trendy, whatever prevents focus on what matters. I don't know whether America made all this happen for Middleton or whether indeed it was England that drove him from England, but the need for The New was as strong in him as it was in the man who left Crawfordsville, Indiana for Venice in 1908. And who never came back except to spend twelve years in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C.