The Dandy and the Herald

Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 Earnest." Alexander's irreverence for Wilde's masterpiece was productive , and fortunately much of the criticism in Bloom's volume also speaks with its own voice—for instance, Joseph Lowenstein's witty essay comparing Wilde and Sophocles, Camille Paglia's asserting the play's authoritarian structures of language, and Regenia Gagnier's relating Earnest to the marketplace. I judge from his introduction that Harold Bloom simply loves the play too much to pronounce any criticism of it in this sense, although the theorist of influence is particularly, perhaps uniquely, well-equipped to do so. Kerry Powell Miami University THE DANDY AND THE HERALD Richard Pine. The Dandy and the Herald: Manners, Mind and Morals from Brummell to Durrell. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. $29.95 BY 1937 LN PARIS, the New Yorker Henry Miller had completed Black Spring, the Parisian Anais Nin had begun Winter of Artifice, and the Anglo-Irish expatriate Lawrence Durrell living in Corfu had written "Asylum in the Snow" and Panic Spring, each work heralding the death/winter of real or literary fathers and the spring of new aesthetic forms that Richard Pine calls "selfist" or "autistic." In rejecting the cold self-sufficiency of the dandy fathers ultimately to reconnect with a barbarous modern world, Nin begins with her own dreams, Miller begins with the passion of the nearest meal or the nearest fuck (in Pine's terms), and Durrell, as Pine says, "incapable of such savagery as Miller's," begins with a "handful of dust, souvenirs of the wasteland" in order to revive a "dead England." Analyzing what amounts to a crisis of aesthetic legitimation in the interwar period, Pine's goal is to increase the number of key players in modernism beyond Eliot, Woolf, Pound, and Joyce to include Nin, Durrell, and Miller. The second half of his book properly falls outside the scope of ELT, yet the first two chapters, on dandyism and what Pine calls "the English Renaissance 1840-95," are intended to provide a necessary connection between late Victorianism and modernism. Pine acknowledges that distinctions between dandies and heralds are difficult to maintain and often conflates them in the persons of "heraldic dandies." Crudely, he claims that the dandy is concerned with style, "the accomplishment of manners, the aristocracy of taste" and the herald with "identity ... an accomplishment of mind 341 Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 and morals, with renewal of self-knowledge rather than the mere proclamation of an ego": Where the dandy affirms, the herald needs to attest, where dandyism is born out of ennui, heraldry is the child of despair or outrage, a child often savage in defence of the identity it has just proclaimed. Dandy into herald equals artist into autist. The difference is due to the social purpose the herald knows because he is dandy not only of manners but also of mind and of morals. Where the dandy tells society about himself, the herald tells society about itself. The dandy acts out the comedy of manners; he conceals and refines; today's heralds have lived through the theatres of cruelty, despair and the absurd; they proclaim in crudity. (12-13) Building upon these admittedly shaky distinctions, Pine is able to make in the early chapters some fairly plausible observations— Brummell, Disraeli, and Beerbohm were in most respects, though not all, dandies but not heralds; Luther, Darwin and Marx were in most respects, but not all, heralds but not dandies. Often, however, he resorts to byzantine schemes (in part after Martin Green's Children of the Sun), including aesthete-rebels, rogue-criminals, naif-fantasists, and naif-chivalries, whose ultimate utility may be questioned. Succeeding chapters provide an intellectual history of artistic rebellion from artists (of the fin de siècle), to autists (of high modernism), to autistic saints (Miller, Nin, and—Pine's favorite—Durrell). The intellectual history Pine offers is largely impressionistic, typically a tropology of literary figures with little logical exposition or historical reference outside the texts. We are told that Victorian chivalric fraternal association "led to" homoeroticism without reference to the rise of sexology; that Marx and Engels's proclamation that "man will cease...