'A Fury of Self-Deception, Malice, and Conceit'

There’s no getting away from the din. Who knew the human voice, individually and in the collective, could carry on this way? An innocent question or observation prompts a sonic explosion. I’m unable to get that angry and loud so quickly. Perhaps if my family were threatened. There was a time when people who behaved like that were put away or at least shunned. Now they host podcasts, clutter the neighborhood with campaign signs and chant at rallies. Edgar Bowers may have written his sonnet “In the Last Circle” (The Astronomers, 1965) during the Johnson-Goldwater campaign of 1964: 

“You spoke all evening hatred and contempt,

The ethical distorted to a fury

Of self-deception, malice, and conceit,

Yourself the judge, the lawyer, and the jury.

I listened, but, instead of proof, I heard,

As if the truth were merely what you knew,

Wrath cry aloud its wish and its despair

That all would be and must be false to you.

 

“You are the irresponsible and damned,

Alone in final cold athwart your prey.

Your passion eats his brain. Compulsively,

The crime which is your reason eats away

Compassion, as they both have eaten you,

Till what you are is merely what you do.”

 

It’s clear Bowers could be writing not about a candidate but a voter – anyone emotionally irresponsible. Hugh Kenner had published an article, “A View of the Goldwater Administration from the Academy,” in the July 14, 1964 issue of the National Review. Guy Davenport wrote to Kenner on October 12, three weeks before the election:

 

“As for the campaign, I’ve decided that we’ve at last proved the obsolescence of the Presidency. An impartial observer, weighing carefully all the charges of each side, even allowing for lies and hyperbole, is forced to conclude that we would be better off without a leader at all.”

 

Johnson won the presidency on November 3.

The "Last Circle" in Bowers' title -- might it be Dante's Ninth, where the treacherous are condemned and Satan dwells? As C.H. Sisson puts it in his translation of Canto XXXII in the "Inferno" (The Divine Comedy, 1980):

"O you who are the lowest dregs of all,

Put in this place which it is hard to speak of,

Better if you had been sheep or goats!"

 

[The Davenport passage can be found on Page 624 in Vol. 1 of Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner (Counterpoint, 2018).]