Letters from Kenneth Burke to William H. Rueckert, 1959-1987

Kenneth Burke

Description

These letters show the development of Burke’s thought in the last thirty or so years of his life, when he remained remarkably productive not only as a correspondent but as a critic and traveling scholar. Rueckert became for Burke both student and “co-conspirator,” with Burke himself playing the roles of teacher, mentor, father, and peer. While Burke corresponded for many years with Malcolm Cowley, William Carlos Williams, Hugh Duncan, and others, with Rueckert, we see him writing to someone who may have understood and appreciated his work more than anyone.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie moderne
• Philosophie moderne
• History
• Philosophy
• Philosophie et théologie
• Modern
• Surveys

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 28 octobre 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602358218
• Langue: English

Extrait

Letters from Kenneth Burke to William H. Rueckert, 1959-1987
Edited, with an Introduction by William H. Rueckert
Transcribed from the originals by Barbara L. Rueckert
Foreword by Angelo Bonadonna
Parlor Press
West Lafayette, Indiana
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906
© 2003 by William H. Rueckert
© 2003 by The Kenneth Burke Literary Trust
© 2003 by Parlor Press, LLC

Permission to publish the letters of Kenneth Burke courtesy of the Kenneth Burke Literary Trust.
Cover illustration courtesy of William H. Rueckert, 1972.
All rights reserved.
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Letters from Kenneth Burke to William H. Rueckert, 1959-1987 /
edited by William H. Rueckert
Includes index.
1. Burke, Kenneth, 1897-1993 — Correspondence. 2. Rueckert, William H., 1926 — Correspondence. 3. Authors, American—20th century—Correspondence. 4. Criticism—Literary. 5. Rhetoric. 6. Bonadonna, Angelo.
ISBN 0-9724772-2-5
Parlor Press LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is also available in paperback and cloth, as well as in Night Kitchen (TK3 Reader) formats, from Parlor Press on the WWW at http://www.parlorpress.com. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 816 Robinson St., West Lafayette, Indiana, 47906, or e-mail [e-mail].


For Barbara, who faithfully transcribed all of these letters from the originals.


Contents
Foreword
Angelo Bonadonna
Introduction
William H. Rueckert
Letters from 1959 to 1969
Letters from 1970 to 1979
Letters from 1980 to 1987
Index to the Print Edition


Foreword

Angelo Bonadonna
“. . . to have such friends as thee art”
Dear Bill Rueckert,
Never, never before in all my life have I been in such a godam tangle . . .
Thus Kenneth Burke opens his letter of June 18, 1962. He continues:
Every single paper I try to dispose of involves my finding some other pages that got misplaced. I still have to send in expense accounts for various items, mark a set of final exams, acknowledge various kicks, compliments, inquiries, etc. And the mere attempt to set my room in order, so that it doesn’t look like the portrait of acute mental unbalance will in itself take several days.
So what do I do? Your letter arrives, I pour myself a drink of bourbon, push aside some piles of trash to make room for the near-collapsing typewriter—and smack out some lines.
Of all the moments in the hundreds of letters of Kenneth Burke to William Rueckert—and those moments are varied, even for the Protean Burke—this is my personal favorite. What an honor it must have been for Bill Rueckert to be placed in Burke’s “bourbon cluster,” to be his hookey from what he later calls the “Disorder Among My Papers,” to be his untanglement, to be, in a word, his friend.
And of all the reasons to read the correspondence, this is the most compelling—to catch a glimpse of Burke the Word-man as Burke the Word-man/friend. Burke the friend is available elsewhere, of course, the most notable place being the Cowley correspondence, which chronicles a great intellectual friendship, and more closely and over a longer period than most such correspondences. But Burke and Cowley were peers and colleagues; Burke and Rueckert, besides their rather distinct professional roles, were separated by a generation. While the dynamics of a peer relationship involve intimacies, conflicts, and mutualities of a very revealing intensity, the ambiguous relationship of a colleague/mentor to his colleague/protege, a kind of relationship so common in intellectual circles, allows for a wholly different kind of connection and mode of expression. Burke, for instance, acted as Rueckert’s sponsor from time to time, submitting his name for awards, contacting publishers, and offering advice on how to negotiate “the Slave Market in December” (9/22/1963), (the MLA Convention). Indeed, the shrewdness of Burke’s coaching on issues of professional style and tone and his skill at “networking” so evident in the letters might well give question to the received view of Burke as an outsider to the academy.
More so than for mentoring, though, Burke uses the letters as a kind of writer’s journal, outlining the many talks and essays of his very productive late period. Contentwise the letters are full of Burkology, and there are several projects to be done here, for instance, juxtaposing the way Burke represents his projects in the letters with his other representations available elsewhere. In tone, the letters are poignant, often suddenly so, but their dominant mood is playfulness. Burke plays his typical epistolary games with return addresses, salutations (one sequence of three letters opens “Dear Bill”—“Dear Billiards”—“Dear Pool”), date­lines, and closings. Most are written in Burkese, a hodgepodge of English, East Coast dialect, Yiddish, Shakespeare, ablaut forms, joycing, and various other kinds of uncategorizable play.
The proportion of these three elements—work, play, and poignant emotion—is just such as defines an intimate friendship. In this regard, the letters, for all their diversity individually, are rather redundant as a whole. Collectively the letters stand as but a single utterance, a thirty-year enactment of an attitude, the attitude of affectionate gratitude for friendship. As we eavesdrop year in and year out, we hear Burke repeating, if only implicitly, “Thank you, Bill, for understanding and appreciatively so. Thank you for reading, writing, and speaking—for verbalizing, or co-verbalizing—in a mode not merely competent, but resonant, deeply so, with my own life’s project of humane, linguistic quizzicality.” To put it in Burke’s explicit words, from the letter in which he reacts to the “stupendous job” of Rueckert’s Cr itical Responses to Kenneth Burke : “You have been devoted to this job. Vexing though it necessarily was, you did it. In brief, you allowed my particular morality-of-production to tie in with yours” (5/5/1969).
Perhaps the best illustration of Burke’s gratitude comes in the letter in which he announces that his “darling snooze has a vexing symptom” (3/10/1967). Burke seems aware that his “sweetest Other,” his wife Libbie, is suffering the disease that would ultimately take her from him, and the hint of despair here is reinforced in many letters to follow that chronicle his adjustments to what he calls the “one dirty deal in [his] life” (11/25/1973), Libbie’s “clearing out” before him.
Burke’s tone is at once melancholy, cautiously hopeful, and angry. The letter is actually full of rage, perhaps a natural deflection of the anger at Libbie’s condition. The targets of the anger are the Johnson administration, a recurring whipping post in the letters of the late 1960s, God, and a particular “damfool,” with whom Burke had argued but to no avail:
If he decides that your position is such-and-such, and you go and show by a specific passage in the text that it’s not your position, the guy blunts off like a clam (except that a clam knows its business—and I greatly respect a clam, and some day, I hope, I’ll be allowed to clam up for good, and not hang on for ever being tortured by a Gawd that loves not only me but great saviors like the current administration than which nothing ever more persuasively stank to high heaven). (3/10/1967)
In the swirl of rage, despair, exasperation, hope, and irony that Burke sets into motion in this letter, he concludes, “Jeez, I realize all the more what luck I had in being allowed to have such friends as thee art. Please always count me in” (3/10/1967).
“Holla!”
Lest we overemphasize the goodwill and friendliness of the letters, we need but linger a bit more on their sharper moments. Burke’s letters, both published and unpublished, contain some of the finest vituperation in the language, and this correspondence does not disappoint in this regard. In general, Burke never wanted for something to lash out against. He was an individual who not only had enemies (or “enemas,” as he picturesquely put it on May 5, 1967), but one who cherished them—even to the extent, when times got tough and there was a shortage of opponents, he treated his friends as enemies. Rueckert certainly is a target from time to time. For instance, in the letter that immediately precedes the friendship letter I cited above, he chides Rueckert for his pedagogical irresponsibility in using for class “that fuzzy book of Frye’s as a text. I saluted it originally as a kind of conceptual fun. But I never for one moment thought that anybody as astute as you could put kids to work on it. Jeez, learn me, boy, learn me! And I pray, give me some examples of how you use it, in your work” (2/26/1967).
Rueckert insists on using Frye and Burke offers to get him psychoanalyzed, the first of several such offers. When Rueckert is late writing a promised review, for instance, Burke offers to raise the money for the psychoanalysis to get at the root of Rueckert’s “Phartisan Review complex” (1/13/1968). And later, in response to Rueckert’s advocacy of a critical theory that would too unproblematically treat “written history” as an “ultimate grounding,” Burke writes, “Once again I beg you to go get psychoanalyzed, and to ask your doctor that he help you find out why you refuse even to recognize what Poor Ole Honorary Rejected Father (Kink Leer) Burke has been talkink about [. . .] Wadda woild!” (2/11/1968).
But the target of targets in these letters, as elsewhere, is Sidney Hook, the enemy par excellence, Burke’s sole purpose, it often seem for striving on and on. April 27, 1970: “I don’t know what to say. Apparently I’m gwanna die with my boots on. Wouldn’t it be wonderfu