'The Situation Cries for Bathos, and Gets It'

I come to The Sugar-Cane: A Poem in Four Books (1764) by way of Msgr. Ronald Knox’s “A Neglected Poet (James Grainger),” collected in Literary Distractions (1958). No, I haven’t read the whole thing. I’m not convinced anyone could.

Grainger (1721-1766) was a Scottish physician who published a treatise in Latin on venereal disease, Accedunt Monita Syphilitica, in 1757. Two years later he settled on St. Kitts in the West Indies where he remained for the rest of his life. There he observed the cultivation, harvesting and processing of sugar cane. To dedicate a book-length poem to such a subject requires rare and probably pathological dedication. I’m reminded of the five-part series of articles E.J. Kahn devoted to corn, potatoes, wheat, rice and soybeans in The New Yorker. Interminable, unreadable, a virtual parody of the magazine’s self-indulgent manner by the nineteen-eighties. Grainger achieves an earnest, kitschy grandeur in dutifully Miltonic blank verse:

“Mosquitoes, sand-flies seek the sheltered roof,

And with fell rage the stranger-guest assail

Nor spare the sportive child; from their retreats

Cockroaches crawl displeasingly abroad.”

  

Knox mock-praises Grainger’s bathetic achievement: “[Bathos] demands a perfect craftsmanship in verse, no false rhymes, no missing caesuras, that bad taste, bad sentiment, bad imagination may find its just and inevitable expression. Bad verse you may find anywhere; bad poetry is of its essence a faux ménage (marriage of incompatibles)—verbal felicity married to mental imbecility.”

Bathos is tricky. It can be used for comic or raffish effect. Mark Twain deploys it winningly, as do Ring Lardner and A.J. Liebling. Here is the OED definition: “ludicrous descent from the elevated to the commonplace in writing or speech.” If Grainger possessed a sense of humor, I’m unable to detect even trace elements. He is serious and methodical, like many lousy writers. That he took Virgil’s Georgics as his model merely sweetens the epical idiocy of The Sugar-Cane. Knox writes:

“[That] the subject of his choice is a process incurably pedestrian, the result of which can only be sugar or (at the best) rum: that while the Mantuan [Virgil] reaps corn Grainger hoes yams, while the Mantuan treads grapes Grainger must peel bananas; that local colour demands the superceding of the ash and the pine by the coconut; that machinery, which Grainger is far too conscientious to leave undescribed, does the greater part of the manufacture; that the human cries for labour involved is not that of jolly Apulian swains but that of negroes looted from the Gold Coast, whose presence has begun to need some explanation, even to the easy conscience of the eighteenth century. The situation cries for bathos, and gets it.”

Knox is among the wittiest of writers, a superb prose stylist. As his friend and biographer Evelyn Waugh once wrote to him: “Every word you have written and spoken has been pure light to me.”