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Nations of Nothing But Poetry
Modernist Literature & Culture
Kevin J. H. Dettmar & Mark Wollaeger, Series Editors

Consuming Traditions
Elizabeth Outka

Machine-Age Comedy
Michael North

The Art of Scandal

Sean Latham

The Hypothetical Mandarin

Eric Hayot

Nations of Nothing But Poetry

Matthew Hart

Accented America
Joshua Miller
Nations
of Nothing
But Poetry
Modernism, Transnationalism, and
Synthetic Vernacular Writing

Matthew Hart

1
2010
3
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without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hart, Matthew.
Nations of nothing but poetry : modernism, transnationalism, and synthetic vernacular writing / Matthew
Hart.
p. cm. — (Modernist literature & culture)
ISBN 978-0-19-539033-9
1. English poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. American poetry—20th
century—History and criticism. 3. Poetry, Modern—20th century—History and
criticism. 4. Modernism (Literature)—English-speaking countries. 5. Postcolonialism in
literature. 6. Transnationalism in literature. I. Title.
PR605.M63H37 2010
821'.9109114—dc22 2009025887

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
The history of literary criticism is largely the history of a vain struggle to find a terminology
which will define something.

—Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance

This page intentionally left blank
 Acknowledgments

Nations of Nothing But Poetry began in Philadelphia, where the endless permuta-
tions of English vernacular discourse can be heard in every apartment, bar, cab,
and seminar room. The first draft was conducted under the mentorship of Bob
Perelman, Jim English, and Jean-Michel Rabaté at the University of Pennsylvania.
Their counsel and encouragement continues to help and inspire me. I’m also
extraordinarily grateful to Rita Barnard, who has long supported my work with
generosity and passion. Finally, how does one say thanks for years of friendship?
Tina Bejian, Kate Beschen, Dillon Brown, Tim Green, Matt Merlino, Laura
Heffernan, Andy Liddell, Karim Olaechea, Brian Parkhill, Simon Tickner: you’ve
done me the great favor of never being boring.
This book was rewritten at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
where my ideas grew thanks to conversations with my colleagues Jed Esty, Lauren
Goodlad, Jim Hansen, Zach Lesser, Michael Rothberg, Andrea Stevens, and Joe
Valente. While at Illinois, I also benefited from the financial support of the Campus
Research Board, which awarded me a semester of leave through the Humanities
Released Time Program, having earlier funded a research trip to London and
Edinburgh. Cornell University generously granted me a fellowship year at the
Society for the Humanities, directed in 2006–07 by Brett de Bary and Tim Murray.
I benefited greatly from debate with all the Society Fellows, but especially with
Sarah Evans, Jenny Mann, Micol Seigel, and Erin Williams-Hyman. Above all,
I came to depend on the wicked humor and open door of Andy Hoberek. Additional
research support came from the Ruth Ratcliffe Fund at the National Library of
Scotland and a Library and Archives Visiting Fellowship at King’s College, London.
My thanks to the trustees and directors of the Library of Congress, the National
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Library of Scotland, and the University of Edinburgh Library for permission to

quote from material held in their archives. Portions of chapter 2 first appeared in
the Journal of Modern Literature 31/1 (2008); parts of chapter 4 were published in
The International Reception of T. S. Eliot, ed. Elisabeth Daumer and Shyamal
Bagchee (New York and London: Continuum Books, 2007). My thanks to the edi-
tors of these publications for permission to reprint. An early version of the epilogue
benefited greatly from the editorial eye of Marshall Brown at Modern Language
Quarterly, before being withdrawn from consideration in order to form part of
this book. Last but most definitely not least, I am incredibly grateful to Mark
Wollaeger and Kevin Dettmar for their vote of confidence in my work and to the
anonymous readers of my initial manuscript: the effects of their wise counsel can
be found in every chapter.
I dedicate this book to my family, a more caring and thoughtful community
than I deserve. Summer and Connery are the center of my world. They motivate
me to go to my desk and give me a reason to always come back. Jan, Joanna,
Lindsay, and Carla long ago taught me the importance of kindness, persistence,
and laughter. I’m sorry to be always so far away. My late grandmother, Kathleen
Hart, is sorely missed. Her proud and often underestimated love will always inspire
me, as will the courage and compassion of my late grandfather, Philip Kemp.
Above all, this book is a tribute to my father, Christopher Keith Hart. No one
valued knowledge and disputation more than that lovable, incorrigible man.
Thanks, Dad. I couldn’t have done any of this without you.
 Contents

Series Editors’ Foreword xi

Introduction 3

1. Vernacular Discourse from Major to Minor 26

2. The Impossibility of Synthetic Scots; Or, Hugh MacDiarmid’s
Nationalist Internationalism 51
3. A Dialect Written in the Spelling of the Capital:
Basil Bunting Goes Home 79
4. Tradition and the Postcolonial Talent: T. S. Eliot versus
E. K. Brathwaite 106
5. Transnational Anthems and the Ship of State: Harryette Mullen,
Melvin B. Tolson, and the Politics of Afro-Modernism 142

Epilogue: Denationalizing Mina Loy 177

Notes 191
Index 233
This page intentionally left blank
 Series Editors’ Foreword

Matthew Hart’s Nations of Nothing But Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and

Synthetic Vernacular Writing is the first volume in the Modernist Literature &
Culture series to focus primarily on poetry, and the first to engage with issues of
transnationalism. The modernist canon has been steadily expanding for some
time now, not only by including a wider range of cultural objects but also, in
response to postcolonial and global studies, by embracing figures and locales for-
merly thought to exist beyond modernism’s pale. Nations of Nothing But Poetry
makes an important contribution to conversations about the transnationalizing or
globalization of modernist studies by demonstrating the considerable yield of its
key term: synthetic vernacular writing.
Hart derives his concept of the synthetic vernacular from what Hugh
MacDiarmid in the mid-1920s called “Synthetic Scots,” an invented literary
dialect that combined rare and obsolete instances of Scottish regional expres-
sions with contemporary idioms. Drawing on dictionaries and chance encoun-
ters with unusual language in old texts, MacDiarmid created—or synthesized—a
Scottish vernacular idiom whose palpable Scottishness nevertheless had a trans-
national political edge. Depending for its effect on the spectral absence of stan-
dard English, and inspired by the macaronic experiments of Joyce and Eliot,
MacDiarmid’s synthetic vernacular was aimed at English linguistic and political
hegemony in Britain. For Hart the political dimension of MacDiarmid’s poetic
practice is representative of a set of issues in modern Anglophone poetry more
generally: “the vernacular is not just a linguistic problem,” Hart writes; “it is a
discourse of power.”

xi
xii SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD

For this reason, Hart goes on to say, Nations of Nothing But Poetry is “not
only structured around a westward movement from Scotland to the US, and
a chronological journey from high modernism to contemporary poetry, but by a
back-and-forth oscillation between linguistic and formal analyses and problems
of vernacular belonging that are more properly social and political.” After an intro-
ductory chapter that situates his argument in relation to recent conversations
about the politics of language, definitions of late modernism, the national versus
the cosmopolitan, and in relation to longer standing debates about popular versus
high art and the longevity of modernist forms, Hart investigates how the synthetic
vernacular operates in the poetry of MacDiarmid, Basil Bunting, Kamu Brathwaite,
Harryette Mullen and Melvin B. Tolson, and Mina Loy. These are not the usual
suspects of modernist poetry, but they trace, Hart argues, what amounts to a
quasi-tradition within Anglophone poetry of synthetic vernacular writing, one
that opens new ways of thinking about poets such as Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot,
W. H. Auden, and Ezra Pound, all of whom Hart also discusses.
Important touchstones for Hart are Robert Crawford’s revisionary work on the
paradoxically provincial character of metropolitan or cosmopolitan modernism
in Devolving English (1992) and Michael North’s study of modernism’s racialized
deployment of vernaculars in The Dialect of Modernism (1994). His work also finds
a sympathetic context in discussions of “minor writing” (initiated by Deleuze and
Guattari in their book on Kafka) and in more recent accounts of the cultural
politics of so-called “broken” or “rotten” English. Hart at once broadens and
sharpens the focus of such work by grounding his discussion in the concept of the
synthetic vernacular. On one hand, he devotes attention to the political function
of invented dialects, arguing that “conversations about vernacular language are
inseparable from questions of sovereignty and social inequality.” On the other
hand, with his readings taking into account not only syntax but the velar fricative,
Hart combines close attention to the particularities of poetic form and language
usage with a richly historical approach to transnational modernism.
Finally, Hart writes about complex matters in a lively, engaging style. Thus
we learn of synthetic vernacular poems: “Like a constitutional monarchy, their
doubleness is the condition of their existence: half obsessed with folk identity,
half drunk on the refined spirits of global modernity, they are to be found
(to transliterate from MacDiarmid’s Scots) where extremes meet, cursing the
damnable condition of being right.” And in a crisp summary of his main line
of argument, Hart writes that Nations of Nothing But Poetry explores that
“how twentieth-century literary history gets torn between bondage and
abandon, how the poem enacts a freedom the poet and its subjects do not
 SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD xiii

always get to share, and how all of this is legible in the socially and aesthetically
contradictory discourses of the vernacular.” Always sensitive to the mutual
implication of literature and politics, Hart clearly takes great pleasure in poetry;
and in making the particular pleasures of synthetic vernacular poetry available
to his readers, he shows why such writing matters to a world too often deaf to
the kinds of appeal poetry makes.

Mark Wollaeger and Kevin J. H. Dettmar

This page intentionally left blank
Nations of Nothing But Poetry
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction
The way of writing is straight and crooked.

—Heraclitus

Vulgar, Not Simple

How shall we describe the following stretch of dialogue, from “Melanctha: Each
One as She May,” the middle tale of Gertrude Stein’s 1909 volume, Three Lives?

All you are always wanting Dr. Campbell, is just to talk about being good,
and to play with people just to have a good time, and yet always to certainly
keep yourself out of trouble. It don’t seem to me Dr. Campbell that I admire
that way to do things very much. It certainly ain’t really to me being very
good. It certainly ain’t any more to me Dr. Campbell but that you certainly
are awfully scared about really feeling things way down in you, and that’s
certainly the only way Dr. Campbell I can see that you can mean, by what it
is you are always saying to me.1

It is certainly unusual. Stein’s reiterations of the same few phrases appear to push
naturalistic fiction in the direction of the prose poetry for which she became
famous, as in the line that “caressed completely caressed and addressed” that over-
tired noun of romantic memory: “a rose is a rose is a rose.”2 So what’s going on?
Melanctha Herbert is arguing with her man, Jeff Campbell, about the balance bet-
ween propriety and deep feeling. She is worried that affection comes too easily to
Jeff, who doesn’t know the meaning of “strong, hot love” and will let her down

3
4 INTRODUCTION

when desire turns to trouble (TL 86). The reader also knows, because she has been
told many times before now, that these characters are African-American. Melanctha
is a version of the tragic mulatta, a “graceful, pale yellow, intelligent, attractive
negress [. . .] half made with real white blood,” while Jeff is a light-skinned member
of W. E. B. DuBois’s “talented tenth,” a socially ambitious medical man with “the
free abandoned laughter that gives the warm broad glow to negro sunshine” (TL
60, 77).3 Can we say, then, that Melanctha’s speech patterns are modeled on
African-American vernacular speech? Richard Wright certainly thought so.
Writing in 1945, he celebrated “Melanctha” for the way it opened his ears to “the
magic of the spoken word,” evoking “the speech of my grandmother, who spoke a
deep, pure Negro dialect.”4
The author of Native Son (1940) surely knew something about the difficulties
of representing black subaltern character and speech. Yet there are reasons to
query his judgment. “Melanctha” is hardly rich in black linguistic or literary
forms. Unlike a contemporary text I discuss in a later chapter—Harryette
Mullen’s Muse & Drudge (1995)—it contains no punning play with urban slang
or country sayings. It doesn’t innovate in the Afro-American forms that
Gwendolyn Brooks made her own in poems such as “of De Witt Williams on his
way to Lincoln Cemetery” (1945), with its blues stanza, spiritual refrain, and
cutting social irony: “Swing low swing low sweet sweet chariot. / Nothing but a
plain black boy.”5 Nor does it sing the “songs / Beat back into the blood— / Beat
out of the blood with words sad-sung,” which embody the memory of lost
home in Langston Hughes’s “Afro-American Fragment” (1930).6 Stein’s dialog
employs some clearly nonstandard language, such as the contraction “ain’t,” the
subject-object disagreement in “don’t seem,” and overuse of the present
participle (“always saying”); but these are used in many demotic Englishes and
are not by themselves sufficient evidence for a “black” voice. Similarly,
Melanctha’s repetitious idioms have equivalents in the speech of white ethnic
characters from the other parts of Three Lives. (The “good german cook” in
“The Gentle Lena,” for example, is capable of orgies of negation: “don’t,” “don’t,”
“never,” “ain’t,” “don’t,” “ain’t,” “can’t” [TL 195]). “Melanctha” even refuses to
indulge the kind of literary blackface that turns up in the letters and fugitive
poems of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound—and even briefly infects Stein’s
correspondence, as when she wrote to a friend about Three Lives: “I don’t know
how to sell on a margin or do anything with shorts and longs, so I have to
content myself with niggers and servant girls and the foreign population gener-
ally. . . . Dey is very simple and very vulgar and I don’t think they will interest the
great American public. I am very sad Mamie.”7
 NATIONS OF NOTHING BUT POETRY 5

Small wonder, then, that Michael North concludes that the vernacular mean-
ings of modernist texts such as “Melanctha” inhere less in their mimesis of black
language than in how they provide evidence for the way the Anglo-American
avant-garde conducted its formal experiments “over a third figure, a black one.”8
The reiterative sentence structures of Three Lives disrupt common notions of plot
and character development, but this formal disjunction is not matched by a simi-
larly apparent disruption of racial stereotypes. Melanctha’s speech therefore seems
to reflect, at the level of the sentence, Stein’s prejudicial assumption that “very
simple and very vulgar” ethnic types are the most suitable characters for the rep-
resentation of elementary psychological states.9 From our twenty-first-century
perspective, such examples point to the vulgarity, not of Melanctha’s desire or
Jeff ’s inconstancy, but of Stein’s engagement with blackness. In this way, they
appear to confirm the reasonableness of Houston Baker’s distinction between
African-American writing and the Euro-American “Joycean or Eliotic projects”
that provide a basic point of contrast for his “vernacular theory” of black literary
modernity.10
The racial politics of “Melanctha” are undeniably troubling, but we can’t just
end our analysis there. Nations of Nothing But Poetry adds to the body of mod-
ernist scholarship that troubles conclusions such as Baker’s by exploring how the
undoubtedly agonistic relationship between “high” and “low” literary forms is not
merely oppositional.11 The following chapters question this literary-historical
opposition in several contexts, from 1920s Scotland to late modernist and postco-
lonial situations in countries as diverse as England, Liberia, Barbados, and the
United States. My readings are motivated by how, to stick with the current example
a little longer, a hard opposition between modernism and ethnonational language
means that Wright’s celebration of “Melanctha” is explicable only as a blatant mis-
reading. This book aims, by contrast, to contribute to a modernist literary history
that is flexible at the vertical (social) and horizontal (geographical) levels.12 It
respects the interplay of different cultures in modernist texts, especially as this
quality traduces familiar social and political boundaries. It pursues this cross-cul-
tural goal by showing how vernacular poets saw avant-garde forms, not as
something toxic to ethnicity or nationality, but as the gateway to a negative
dialectical politics of autonomy and interrelatedness that was alone adequate to
the unevenly transnational character of the modern world. Nations of Nothing But
Poetry shows how enduring poetry (and innovative political practices) emerge
from the contradictions among beloved local identities, the redoubtable
nation-state form of government, and the increasingly globalized nature of twen-
tieth-century culture.13
6 INTRODUCTION

Wright does not simply insist on the vernacular qualities of Melanctha’s speech.
He says he was bothered by leftist accusations that Stein’s “tortured verbalisms
were throttling the revolution” and so decided to read her story out loud to some
“semi-literate Negro stockyard workers.” The result? They “understood every
word” (“GSS” 15). However unlikely this story might sound, it’s not totally anom-
alous: some critics continue to read Three Lives as an experiment in vernacular
verisimilitude.14 More interesting, Wright also hints at the influence upon him of
another Stein—the writer who blurred the lines between verse and prose, inhabited
a word-world of the perpetual present, and showed how identity, like language, is
a social and phenomenological event, not an ontological fact. For the poet of The
Making of Americans (1925), neither selves nor languages exist apart from us, like
empty shells waiting to be inhabited. They are rather always in process; so that
the job of poetry is to show how even apparently rooted ethnonational languages
are performed in the gaps between each imperfect repetition and reiteration. This
other Stein, who will later inspire Harryette Mullen, lurks on the edges of Wright’s
review. He claims that Three Lives “made the speech of the people around me
vivid,” but he attributes that power to the “struggling” nature of Stein’s words, not
just to the “shock of recognition” he experienced on hearing Melanctha speak
(“GSS” 15). The ethnolinguistic significance of “Melanctha” therefore goes beyond
the mimesis of what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o calls “language in its particularity”—that
carrier of culture that links voice to labor and a whole way of life.15 Its deeper
meaning lies in the way Stein’s troubling, struggling language enabled Wright to
“tap into the vast pool of words that swirled all around [him],” finally hearing lan-
guage as a fluid system in which there is no a priori distinction between common
speech and literary discourse (“GSS” 15).
This Stein remains, as I have said, on the edges of Wright’s review, which (one
cannot deny) rescues her from leftist opprobrium through a strategic exaggeration
of her commitment to linguistic naturalism.16 Stein is less interested in represent-
ing African-American English than in experimenting with stylistic effects of what
readers are willing to hear as “black,” employing abstracted versions of vernacular
English as the building blocks of a style that is “determined by an aesthetic not a
social order.”17 This doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t explain “Melanctha” in
the social terms it otherwise resists. In Irene Ramalho Santos’s reading, for in-
stance, the paradoxes of Stein’s engagement with vernacular discourse stem from
its overdetermination by her ethnicity, expatriatism, and Americanness: “Stein,
writing doubly from the outside, as an American Jew in exile, still is the intelli-
gence of America’s soil.”18 Charles Bernstein, likewise, includes Stein in his list of
modernists whose linguistic experiments can be historicized as the result of their
 NATIONS OF NOTHING BUT POETRY 7

descent from non-Anglophone immigrants to America, an experience that led

them to see English as a dialect among dialects, neither a settled cultural inheri-
tance nor a transparent window to the world.19 Finally, North explains how, “by
making her dialect both direct and indirect, distinct and very slippery, [Stein’s
style] undermines the associated differences of race and gender” that her cant
about “niggers and servant girls” would otherwise enforce.20 For all that “Melanctha”
trades in stereotypes and abstractions, then, it remains always engaged with the
sociolinguistics of ethnonational experience.
This book builds on critical work, pioneered by the likes of North and Robert
Crawford, which draws attention to modernism’s investments in vernacular
discourse.21 In “The Poetics of the Americas” and his essay on “Second-Wave
Modernism,” Bernstein joins North and Crawford in attending to modernism’s
experimental synthesis of dialectal codes.22 Julianna Spahr, by herself and in
concert with David Buuck, focuses on the intersection between non-standard lan-
guage and avant-garde aesthetics in the context of identity politics, globalization,
and postcoloniality.23 And Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch’ien’s Weird English (2004) shows
the continuity between late modernists such as Vladimir Nabokov and the
linguistic explorations of ethnic semiautonomy by contemporary writers such as
Maxine Hong Kingston.24 Most recently, Dohra Ahmad has suggested that far from
involving a flight from the vernacular into rhetoric, “the highly self-conscious
literary project of Modernism placed the vernacular in a [ . . . ] central position.”25
Like all these critics, I offer an account of modernism as a transnational formation
that confounds the boundaries between high and low language. The key formal
concept in my analysis will be the idea of synthetic vernacular discourse, which I’ll
at once stop putting in estranging italics. Synthetic vernaculars operate in the gray
area between familiarly ethnonational languages and the macaronic linguistic
constructions of cosmopolitan modernism. Though formally transgressive, they
are not always politically left or progressive; nor do they float in a deracinated
space beyond sociocultural determination. Rather, to appropriate a famous line
from William Carlos Williams, synthetic vernacular poems exemplify how the
“pure products” of modern cultures inevitably “go crazy”—and they go crazy,
Williams knows, in many different directions at once.26 As James Clifford explains
in an essay that takes Williams as its totem, in the unequal but interconnected
world of capitalist modernity, “one is always, to varying degrees ‘inauthentic’:
caught between cultures, implicated in others.”27 Synthetic vernacular poetries
register exactly that contradiction. They trouble the border between vernacular
self-ownership and the willful appropriation of languages that will be forever
foreign. They are the authentic text of an inauthentic world.
8 INTRODUCTION

What Is a Synthetic Vernacular?

In Language (1921), Edward Sapir offers a brief but illuminating definition of literar-
iness. Reflecting on the relationship between vernacular expression and “great” liter-
ature, Sapir muses about how “the Shakespeares and the Heines [ . . . ] have known
subconsciously to fit or trim the deeper intuition to the provincial accents of their
daily speech.”28 In Sapir’s approximation, great literature emerges when the writer
achieves a “synthesis of the absolute art of intuition and the innate, specialized art of
the linguistic medium,” such that one falls under “the illusion that the universe
speaks German. The material ‘disappears’ ” (225). He thus sketches a vision of total
aesthetic synthesis between a generalized artistic intuition and the necessarily “pro-
vincial” medium of language, and he contrasts this with minor artists, who vainly
strive for a “generalized art language” and thereby fracture the harmony between
language and feeling. The expression of such artists is “frequently strained, it sounds
at times like a translation from an unknown original” (224). For Sapir, “provincial”
language is a fundamental element of literary art. In great literature, however, the
provinciality of language disappears as a result of a higher-order synthesis with
absolute art.
In synthetic vernacular poetry, the materiality of language refuses to disappear
in a moment of overcoming. In Sapir’s hymn to Shakespeare and Heine, the syn-
thesis of the universal and the particular is fully successful: the provincial medium
of language “disappears” and one forgets that, after all, the universe speaks neither
English nor German but, rather, mathematics. By contrast, synthetic vernacular
poetry is double-voiced writing. In it, the dialectic between the linguistic medium
and aesthetic “intuition” is stalled, leaving a remainder in the form of some indi-
gestible verbal object or aporia. This remainder might be the symptom of an his-
torical contradiction, such as the way that Melvin B. Tolson’s Libretto for the
Republic of Liberia (1953) struggles to reconcile the tension between its multiple
ideological commitments to Liberia, America, and a future world beyond nations
and empires. Or it might stem from a poet’s deliberate creative choices, as when
the unevenly multilingual texture of Kamau Brathwaite’s “nation language”
mirrors his historical theories about the incomplete project of Afro-Caribbean
creolization. Finally, the remainder might be a formal lacuna, as when Basil
Bunting describes his autobiographical poem Briggflatts (1966) as being written in
a “Northumbrian tongue travel has not taken from me” but provides no
orthographic cues for voicing his Northern song.29 In every case, synthetic vernac-
ular poetry demonstrates what T. W. Adorno called “the untruth of identity, the
fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived.” The “concept,” here, is
 NATIONS OF NOTHING BUT POETRY 9

the idea of a language that articulates some collective sense of nationality or

heredity; the “thing” is the actual verbal structure that will not “go into its concept
without leaving a remainder.”30
The term “synthetic” signals a poet’s attempt to sublate the tension between
local languages and the “desperate attempt at a new inclusiveness” that Edward
Said described as marking modernism’s late imperial engagement with the non-
Occidental world.31 “Synthetic” also implies, however, that the urge to bridge the
gap between difference and universality inevitably fails—after all, the term con-
notes both Hegelian Aufhebung and processes of artificial manufacture, adultera-
tion, or plasticization. The poets discussed in this book embrace the formal and
ideological complications between the universal and the particular, seeing them as
contradictory but not necessarily antinomian.32 Indeed, I argue that this produc-
tive tension is one of the hallmarks of modernist poetry. This is a quality that
synthetic vernacular poetries register with particular clarity; but although they
form their own quasitradition within the mainstream of modernist poetry, they
are hardly anomalous. The editors of a recent volume on cosmopolitanism capture
their constitutive doubleness when they describe an oxymoronic “vernacular cos-
mopolitan” subjectivity that is one of the hallmarks of our incompletely globalized
modernity. Like Homi K. Bhabha’s rooted-but-cosmopolitan subjects, synthetic
vernacular poems live in the interstices among the “modernist (and nationalist)
insistence on territorialized imaginations of identity,” the “minoritarian moder-
nity” experience of those who are exiled from or within metropolitan nations, and
the increasingly transnational nature of human culture and political economy.33
The poems forged in those gaps therefore strive to be “both-cosmopolitan-and-
vernacular” (588). They refuse to choose between local circumstance and the
reality of a world in which locality is never the only game in town. Indeed, the
modernist engagement with the vernacular might be said to negotiate what Bhabha
elsewhere describes as the “unsatisfied” (and unsatisfiable) line between “a morally
arbitrary sense of the nation [. . .] and a necessary postcolonial state.”34 Cosmopolitan
modernity is not, therefore, incommensurable with vernacular discourse, even
though the vernacular remains in necessary tension with the universal tendencies
of liberal cosmopolitanism. For as Bhabha puts it: “To vernacularize is to ‘dialectize’
as a process; it is not simply to be in a dialogic relation with the native or domestic,
but it is to be on the border, in between, introducing the global-cosmopolitan
‘action at a distance’ into the very grounds—now displaced—of the domestic.”35
Synthetic vernacular poetries do not reify or consolidate identities that are some-
how already “there,” merely awaiting discursive representation. They displace the
vernacular even as they affirm it, revealing it as an uncanny site that includes,
10 INTRODUCTION

without becoming identical to, the cosmopolitan challenge of unifying the

universal and the particular.36
One can illustrate these ideas via Hugh MacDiarmid’s early poetry. The pri-
mary formal innovation in his early collections, Sangschaw (1925) and Penny
Wheep (1926), comes in their development of what MacDiarmid called “Synthetic
Scots.” This literary language recreates the Scots poetic tradition via the contin-
gencies of the dictionary, mixing contemporary idioms with obsolete and rare
specimens from various regions of Scotland. As previous critics have shown,
MacDiarmid’s Synthetic Scots lyrics were often inspired by the accidental conti-
guity of unusual words on the pages of antiquarian and dialect dictionaries.37
MacDiarmid’s combinatorial attitude to language therefore enabled the creation
of a vernacular poetics that, for all its unabashed Scottishness, remains contingent
and heterogeneous at the levels of geography and chronology, juxtaposing found
phrases from Lowlands to Highlands, medieval to modern.
We can see how such a practice works by looking at “The Sauchs in the Reuch
Heuch Hauch” (1925), which begins with a phrase stolen verbatim from George
Watson’s 1923 Roxburghshire Word Book:

There’s teuch sauchs growin’ i’ the Reuch Heuch Hauch.

Like the sauls o’ the damned are they,
And ilk ane yoked in a whirligig [each one]
Is birlin’ the lee lang day. [whirling round]
O we come doon frae oor stormiest moods,
And licht like a bird i’ the haun’.
But the teuch sauchs there i’ the Reuch Heuch Hauch
As the deil’s ain hert are thrawn.38 [contrary, stubborn]

In its dictionary Scots, as in its concern with the occult half-life of the natural world,
this poem is characteristic of MacDiarmid’s early work. “Reuch Heuch Hauch” is a
proper noun—the name of a field near Hawick in the Scottish Borders—and the line
is completed by the onomatopoeia and assonance of the “tough willows” (“teuch
sauchs”) that are compared to “the [souls] o’ the damned,” whirling around for eter-
nity. These are uncanny trees that, we learn in the third stanza, have roots that “rin
richt doon thro’ the boddom o’ Hell.” Nevertheless, we shouldn’t be too quick to char-
acterize this poem as a traditional rural lyric, at home in the houses of life and not-
life. It is such a poem; but it is also an experiment in transnational metalinguistic
commentary. Buthlay, for instance, contends that “The Sauchs in the Reuch Heuch
Hauch” is a consonantal tongue twister composed largely in order to “illustrate the
use of a particular variety of the velar fricative which is a distinct feature of Scots but
 NATIONS OF NOTHING BUT POETRY 11

not English speech.”39 As a sentence, “There’s teuch sauchs growin’ in the Reuch
Heuch Hauch,” is highly local, leading up to a prepositional phrase that puts us in a
particular place. The poem is really interested, however, in a different kind of speci-
ficity, one that displaces the local onto the cross-cultural politics of the British state. It
says,“Listen, here are these Scottish sounds in this Scottish place. (Hear the Englishman
murder them!)” Its undeniable Scottishness has to be read, then, against the spectral
body of English: the language that remains unseen, that the phonemic riches of Scots
exceeds, and yet—like the Derridean supplement—that it cannot help referring to
and, referring to, affirm.40
These synthetic effects do not negate MacDiarmid’s nationalism; they rather
allow him to theorize a “national” platform for his broader cultural and political
goals. Inspired by the example of Joyce, he described the “synthetic use of a lan-
guage” as “something completely opposed to all our language habits and freely
utilizing not only all the vast vocabulary these automatically exclude, but illimit-
able powers of word formation in keeping with the free genius of any language.”41
For all that, however, he identified the synthetic revival of Scots as a crucial step in
his thoroughgoing attack on English hegemony in Britain. Like Frantz Fanon,
MacDiarmid combines a belief in the necessity of national sovereignty with the
opinion that “it is at the heart of national consciousness that international con-
sciousness lives and grows. [ . . . ] [This] two fold emerging is ultimately the source
of all culture.”42 In this way, MacDiarmid’s Scots offers a paradigmatic example of
the formal properties and ideological potentials of a synthetic vernacular poetry.
But since the following chapters focus on how synthetic vernacularism works in
poetic texts, let me now turn to a brief prose illustration.
The obvious example is Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), which MacDiarmid cel-
ebrated as leading to the “world language” that was the ultimate conclusion of the
synthetic approach to vernacular composition.43 However, a late modernist text
such as Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) more completely maintains
the tension between dialectal language and modernist form.44 Kenneth Ramchand
describes Lonely Londoners—a novel depicting the lives and ambitions of black
immigrants to London in the 1950s—as a linguistic fabrication that, in its desire to
reflect diverse migrant sensibilities, utilizes “the whole linguistic spectrum avail-
able to the literate West Indian, ranging from English Standard English to West
Indian Standard English to differing degrees of dialect.”45 This much is true. But
the really important fact about language in Lonely Londoners is that the seemingly
harmonious relation between its disparate vernacular elements exists in continual
tension with its depiction of the intra-racial tensions between groups such as
Jamaicans and Trinidadians. These island identities, which only became fully
12 INTRODUCTION

national with the coming of postcolonial independence, are shown to be different

from one another in the very first pages of the novel: “ ‘Ah, I wish I was like allyou
Jamaican,’ Moses say, ‘Allyou could live on one-two-three pound a week, and save
up money in a suitcase under the bed, then when you have enough you sending for
the family. I can’t save a cent out of my pay.’ ”46 In this way, Selvon creates a contra-
puntal relation between the language of his novel and his central social theme,
which is that while his characters’ exile eventually helps forge a society of Caribbean
friends, it also forces them to confront their reification at the hands of white society
into the racial abstraction of “blackness.” These themes of atomization and con-
solidation, alienation and solidarity, are key to reading Selvon’s language, which
depends for its effect on the productive tension between the way its vernacular
discourse simultaneously confirms and deconstructs the sovereignty of ethnona-
tional identity.

Objects of Study

As these examples suggest, conversations about vernacular language are inseparable

from questions of political sovereignty and social inequality. Nations of Nothing But
Poetry depends on the idea that the vernacular is not just a linguistic problem; it is a
discourse of power. For this reason, this book is structured not only around a west-
ward movement from Scotland to the United States, and a chronological journey
from high modernism to contemporary poetry, but also by a back-and-forth oscilla-
tion between linguistic and formal analyses and problems of vernacular belonging
that are more properly social and political. This movement occurs within each chapter
but gradually tips, over the course of the book, toward the politics of culture. Following
Fahamisha Patricia Brown’s use of the term in her study of African-American poetry,
I apply “vernacular” to a wide range of textual forms, from recorded speech to poems
and essays. What unifies these texts is their shared status as an “invention, or reinven-
tion [that is] forged out of historical, sociopolitical, and cultural necessities.”47 The
concept of synthetic vernacular poetry is, in this sense, deliberately expansive—a
decision that I have made in full sympathy with Grant Farred’s point that the vernac-
ular, “though it emerges from below is considerably more than a language of subalter-
neity. It is not only a language in itself, but a form [of] public discourse.”48 This is the
point that James Baldwin makes in opening his essay,“If Black English Isn’t a Language,
Then Tell Me, What Is?” (1979), with the claim that arguments about African-American
English have “nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language.”49
Describing black vernaculars as the product of a history formed by slavery and
 NATIONS OF NOTHING BUT POETRY 13

diasporic migration, Baldwin calls language “the most vivid and crucial key to iden-
tity” and “a political instrument, means, and proof of power” (454). In this context,
for all that politicians and educators may speak about problems of illiteracy or inar-
ticulacy, Baldwin insists that “it is not the black child’s language that is in question, it
is not his language that is despised: It is his experience” (456). The vernacular, here,
has a politically representative function in that it stands in for the otherwise unspeak-
able reality of social exclusion and anomie.
In embedding my formal and literary-historical analyses in a broad consideration
of vernacular discourse, I hope to address several current lines of enquiry in mod-
ernist studies. First, I build on the long tradition of scholarly work on the politics
of language in the context of racism, empire, and class society. Benedict Anderson,
to give a famous example, writes about how the standardization of print vernacu-
lars in capitalist modernity led to the stigmatization of newly “non-standard” dia-
lects, which became ineligible as “languages-of-power.”50 Raymond Williams,
meanwhile, argued that the relationship between so-called major and minor lan-
guages is more precisely one of domination than of kind.51 The politics of non-
standard language have, moreover, been a consistent topic of interest in work on
twentieth-century poetry. I have already quoted from North’s Dialect of Modernism,
which makes crucial connections among the expatriate modernisms of London
and Paris, the social history of language reform, and the popular culture of racial
masquerade. Crawford’s Devolving English Literature (1992) is likewise important
for the way it explains modernism as a form of cross-cultural provincialism, while
more recently Rob Jackaman has described how, in the context of imperial break-
up and increased social mobility, insular accounts of Anglophone poetry are nei-
ther possible nor desirable.52 Jackaman argues that the metropolitan monopoly on
English literary discourse has been triumphantly broken and explains how the
pejorative label “broken English” has become a term of revolutionary art, so that
poetries that were once disparaged as inauthentic derivations from the master
tongue are now revalued as “vital new pidgins and kriols asserting equal rights
(writes) from the cultural margin, partly dismantling received monopolistic
English in favor of a multiplicity of different but equally valid voices” (12).
But language is not all. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz have recently
explained that nothing characterizes the modernist field like the expansion of its
objects of study.53 Period boundaries once bracketed by events like the publication
of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and the death of Joyce
(1941) are being pushed back into the nineteenth century or forward into the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century. Influenced by work in postcolonial studies,
scholars are meanwhile questioning the “politics, historical validity, and aesthetic
14 INTRODUCTION

value of exclusive focus on the literatures of Europe and North America.” The
result is the expansion of the canon into “hitherto little-recognized enclaves” of
global culture.54 Finally, the field has seen an explosion of research criticizing any
hard division between popular culture and the autonomous art object of mod-
ernist legend. Such scholarship not only questions whether aesthetic modernism
can escape the reified consumer landscape of capitalist modernity; it rather com-
bines with the temporal and spatial expansion of the field to foreground “works by
members of marginalized social groups” whose demotic identifications once
placed them beyond the modernist pale (738).
This book engages all these trends. By focusing on modernist poets’ invest-
ments in the vernacular, it adds to research that, coming in the wake of Andreas
Huyssen’s After the Great Divide (1986), challenges the idea that the vaunted
unpopularity of literary modernism means that its opposition to popular culture
should be taken for granted. Huyssen famously writes of how modernism consti-
tuted itself through a “strategy of exclusion” in which “an increasingly consuming
and engulfing mass culture” was figured as the contaminating other of aesthetic
expression.55 Although powerful and long lasting in its effects, this strategy of
exclusion can’t account for the richness of modernist culture, in which the border
between high and low is constantly menaced by liminal examples.56 Far from occu-
pying a zone of pure antagonism, then, modernism and mass culture are deeply
imbricated in each other. David Chinitz has shown, for instance, how T. S. Eliot’s
public demeanor as the priest of European high culture was the condition, not the
antithesis, of his immense popularity in postwar America.57 Synthetic vernacular
poems are likewise energized by this unresolved tension. Like a constitutional
monarchy, their doubleness is the condition of their existence: half obsessed with
folk identity, half drunk on the refined spirits of global modernity, they are to be
found (to transliterate from MacDiarmid’s Scots) where extremes meet, cursing
the condition of being right.58
This book does not, therefore, contend that the followers of W. B. Yeats and
Pound somehow fulfilled (without us noticing) the interrupted tradition of a
Robert Burns. While the vernacular is an inherently attractive medium for subal-
tern nationalists, synthetic vernacular modernism takes shape in elite genres such
as the long poem, lyric sequence, verse-drama, and prose poem. This social
tension at the level of genre is also apparent at the level of linguistic medium and
ideological value. Synthetic vernacular poems never reconcile popular culture
with l’art pour l’art. Such reconciliation would not only be difficult; it would suck
the very energy out of a poetry that thrives on the tension between values like oral
vs. written, idiolect vs. sociolect, and province vs. metropolis. Synthetic vernacular
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of A pound of
prevention
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: A pound of prevention

Author: G. C. Edmondson

Illustrator: Richard Kluga

Release date: October 13, 2023 [eBook #71870]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Royal Publications, Inc, 1958

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A POUND OF

PREVENTION ***
A POUND OF PREVENTION

By G. C. EDMONDSON

Illustrated by RICHARD KLUGA

They knew the Mars-shot might fail, as

the previous ones had. All the more
reason, then, for having one good meal!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Infinity April 1958.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Without his hat General Carnhouser was just a tired old man. Three
men sat at the other side of the table. "No use trying to gloss it over,"
he said.
The young men nodded. If this shot failed it might be a hundred
years before Congress could be conned into another appropriation.
The three young men had an even better reason not to fail. They
were going to be in the rocket.
Hagstrom spoke. "There were no technical difficulties in the previous
shots."
"Right," the general said. "Take-offs proceeded according to
schedule. Orbital corrections were made; then everybody settled
down for a four-month wait. When deceleration time came the shot
was still in the groove."
"We know," van den Burg said tiredly. He worked a microscopic
speck of dirt from under a fingernail. There was a loud snap as he
snipped the nail off. He stared at the general, a lean forefinger to one
side of his ascetic nose.
"I'm no expert," the general said wearily. "When you reach my age
they turn you into an office boy."
Hagstrom lit a cigarette. "It's tomorrow, isn't it?"
The general nodded. "They're loading now."
The third man's slight build and bushy black hair belied his mestizo
origins. "I still don't think much of those rations," he said.
Hagstrom laughed suddenly. "You aren't going to con me into eating
pickled fire bombs for four months."
"If I lived on prune soup and codfish balls I'd make no cracks about
Mexican food," Aréchaga grunted. "You squareheads don't
appreciate good cooking."
"You won't get any good cooking in zero gravity," the general said.
They got up and filed out the door, putting on their caps and military
manners.

Outside, trucks clustered at the base of a giant gantry. Aréchaga

shuddered as a fork lift dropped a pallet of bagged meat on the
gantry platform. The meat was irradiated and sealed in transparent
plastic, but the habits of a lifetime in the tropics do not disappear in
spite of engineering degrees. All that meat and not a fly in sight, he
thought. It doesn't look right.
Multiple-stage rockets had gone the way of square sail and piston
engines when a crash program poured twenty-two mega-bucks into
a non-mechanical shield. Piles now diverted four per cent of their
output into a field which reflected neutrons back onto the pile instead
of absorbing them. Raise the reaction rate and the field tightened.
Those sudden statewide evacuations in the early years of the
century were now remembered only by TV writers.
A liquid metal heat exchanger transferred energy to the reaction
mass which a turbine pump was drawing from a fire hydrant. Since
the hydrant was fed from a sea water still there was no need for
purification.
The last load of provisions went up and an asepsis party rode the
gantry, burdened with their giant vacuum cleaners and germicidal
apparatus.
"They'll seal everything but the control room," the general said.
"When you go aboard there'll only be one compartment to sterilize."
"I still think it's a lot of hog-wash," Aréchaga said.
"They can't have us carrying any bugs with us," van den Burg said
tiredly.
"The Martians might put us in quarantine," Hagstrom added sourly.
"If there are any Martians—and if we get there," Aréchaga groused.
"Now boys," the general began.
"Oh, save it, Pop," Hagstrom said. "Let's be ourselves as long as the
public relations pests aren't around."
"Anybody going to town?" van den Burg asked.
"I am," Aréchaga said. "May be quite a while before I get another
plate of fried beans."
"Checkup at 0400," the general reminded.
Hagstrom went to B.O.Q. Van den Burg and Aréchaga caught the
bus into town and lost each other until midnight when they caught
the same bus back to the base.
"What's in the sack?" Hagstrom asked.
"Snack," Aréchaga said. "I can't stand that insipid slop in the B.O.Q.
mess."
"Looks like a lot of snack to eat between now and daybreak."
"Don't worry, I've got quite an appetite."

At 0345 an orderly knocked on three doors in Bachelor Officers'

Quarters and three young men made remarks which history will
delete. They showered, shaved, and spat toothpaste. At 0400 they
walked into the Medical Officer's door. A red-eyed corpsman reached
for a manometer and the three men began taking their clothes off.
Fifteen minutes later the doctor, a corpulent, middle-aged man in
disgustingly good humor for 0400, walked in with a cheery good
morning. He poked and tapped while the corpsman drew blood
samples.
"Turn your face and cough," he said.
"You think I'm going to develop hernia from riding a nightmare?"
Hagstrom growled. "You did all this yesterday."
"An ounce of prevention," the doctor said cheerfully.
"A pound of bull," van den Burg grunted.
"Now boys, what if that got in the papers?" asked a voice from the
doorway.
"Damn the papers!" they greeted the general.
"Do we get breakfast?" Aréchaga asked.
"You'll take acceleration better without it."
"Tell my stomach that."
"Bend over the table," the doctor said.
"Oh, my aching back," Hagstrom moaned.
"That's not the exact target, but you're close. And awaaaay we go,"
the doctor chanted as he drove the needle home.
Each man received an injection of antibiotics and drank a paper
cupful of anise-flavored liquid.
"Don't we get wrapped in cellophane?" Aréchaga asked.
"You'll be pure enough when that purgative goes through you."
They dressed and rode in the general's staff car to the base of the
gantry. As the car stopped, the general said, "Well boys, I hope you
don't expect a speech."
"We love you too, Pop," van den Burg said. They shook hands and
stepped aboard the gantry platform. Hagstrom muttered and they
faced a telescopic TV pickup with mechanical grins until the rising
platform shielded them.
Each had his own control board and each was prepared to take over
another's duties if necessary. They took off the baggy coveralls and
tossed them into lockers. Aréchaga's made an odd clunk. He hitched
up his shorts and turned quickly. They checked each other's
instruments and settings, then went to their couches. A clock with an
extra hand ticked the seconds off backward.
"We're ready," van den Burg muttered into a throat mike.
"So're we," a speaker answered tinnily.
The second hand began its final revolution in reverse. With blastoff it
would begin turning in its proper direction. There was a clang as the
water hose dropped its magnetic nipple. The rumbling became
louder and the G meter climbed to 3.5. After several minutes the
needle dropped suddenly to 2. Aréchaga tried to lift his head but
decided it wasn't worth the effort. The rumbling stopped and he knew
the sudden panic of free fall.
He made the adjustment which controlled arc flights and free fall
parachute jumps had taught him and unstrapped. The speaker's
tinny voice read off numbers which they transmuted into turns of two
wheels with axes at right angles. Since the weight of the remaining
reaction mass could not be calculated with exactitude they spun by
trial and error the last few turns until a telescope parallel to the thrust
axis zeroed on a third magnitude pinpoint whose spectroscope
matched the tinny voice's demands.
"Why such a razzy speaker?" Hagstrom groused as he spun a
wheel.
"A paper cone gets mush-mouthed in 3 G's," van den Burg grunted.
Aréchaga set the pump for 1.6 seconds at four liters. He nodded.
Hagstrom pulled the rods. Weight returned briefly; then they floated
again. Van den Burg belched. The tinny voice approved, and
Hagstrom dropped the cadmium rods again. "Anybody for canasta?"
Aréchaga asked.

The first day nobody ate. Overtrained, blasé—still, it was the first
time and the stomach had yet to make peace with the intellect. The
second day Aréchaga broke the pantry door seals and studied the
invoices. He gave a groan of disgust and went back to sleep. With
something solid strapped in on top it was almost easy.
On the third day van den Burg put bags of steak and string beans
into the hi-fi oven and strapped himself into a chair. He used
chopsticks to snare the globules of soup and coffee which escaped
from hooded cups despite all precautions.
"How is it?" Hagstrom asked.
"It'd taste better if you'd come down and sit on the same side of the
ship."
Human Factors had recommended that table and chairs be situated
in one plane and resemble the real thing. The sight of one's fellow
man at ease in an impossible position was not considered conducive
to good digestion.
Hagstrom dived across the room and in a moment Aréchaga joined
him. Aréchaga sampled the steak and vegetables and turned up his
nose. He broke seals and resurrected pork, beef, onions, garlic, and
sixteen separate spices. There was far too much sancoche for one
meal when he was through.
"What'll you do with the rest of it?" Hagstrom asked.
"Eat it tomorrow."
"It'll spoil."
"In this embalmed atmosphere?" Aréchaga asked. He sampled the
stew. "Irradiated food—pfui!" He went to his locker and extracted a
jar.
"What's that?" van den Burg asked.
"Salsa picante."
"Literal translation: shredding sauce," Hagstrom volunteered.
"Guaranteed to do just that to your taste buds."
"Where'd you get it?" van den Burg asked.
"Out of my locker."
"Not sterile, I presume."
"You're darn tootin' it ain't. I'm not going to have the only tasty item
on the menu run through that irradiator."
"Out with it!" van den Burg roared.
"Oh, come now," Aréchaga said. He poured salsa over the stew and
took a gigantic bite.
"I hate to pull my rank but you know what the pill rollers have to say
about unsterilized food."
"Oh, all right," Aréchaga said morosely. He emptied the jar into the
disposal and activated the locks. The air loss gave the garbage a
gradually diverging orbit.
He began cranking the aligning wheels. When the stars stopped
spinning, he threw a switch and began reading rapidly into a mike.
Finished, he handed the mike to Hagstrom. Hagstrom gave his
report and passed it to van den Burg.
Aréchaga rewound the tape and threaded the spool into another
machine. He strapped himself before a telescope and began
twiddling knobs. Outside, a microwave dish waggled. He pressed a
trigger on one of the knobs. Tape screamed through the transmitter
pickup.
"Make it?" Hagstrom asked.
"It began to wander off toward the end," Aréchaga said. He switched
the transmitter off. The temperature had risen in the four minutes
necessary to squirt and the sunward side was getting uncomfortable
even through the insulation. Hagstrom began spinning the wheel.
Aréchaga fed tape into the receiver and played it back slowly. There
was background noise for a minute then, "ETV One. Read you loud
and clear." There was a pause; then a familiar voice came in, "Glad
to hear from you, boys. Thule and Kergeulen stations tracked you for
several hours. Best shot so far. Less than two seconds of corrective
firing," the general said proudly.

Hagstrom and van den Burg returned to their books. Aréchaga

snapped off the player and went into the pantry. The light dimmed
and brightened as the spin exposed and occulted its accumulator.
He filed the information subconsciously for his revision list and
glared at the provisions.
Shelves were filled—meats, vegetables, fruits, all held in place by
elastic netting. The skin-tight plastic was invisible in the dim light.
Aréchaga began to feel prickly as the lack of ventilation wrapped him
in a layer of steam. All that food right out in the open and no flies. It
just isn't right, he thought. He shrugged and picked out three apples.
"Keep the doctor away?" he asked as he swam back into the control
room. Hagstrom nodded and caught one.
"Thanks, I'm not hungry," van den Burg said. He put his book under
the net and began taking his own pulse.
"Something wrong?" Aréchaga asked.
"Must have been something I ate," he grunted.
Hagstrom eyed his half-eaten apple with distaste. "I must have eaten
some too." He threw the apple into the disposal and belched.
Aréchaga looked at him worriedly.
Two days passed. Hagstrom and van den Burg sampled food
fretfully. Aréchaga evacuated the disposal twice in six hours and
watched them worriedly. "Are you guys thinking the same thing I
am?" he asked.
Van den Burg stared for a moment. "Looks that way, doesn't it?"
Hagstrom started to say something, then dived for a bag and
vomited. In a moment he wiped his mouth and turned a pale face
toward Aréchaga. "This is how it started with the others, isn't it?" he
said.
Aréchaga began talking into the recorder. He killed spin long enough
to squirt. In a few minutes the razzy speaker again made them part
of Earth. "—and hope for the best," the general was saying. "Maybe
you'll adjust after a few days." The voice faded into background
noise and Aréchaga turned off the player.
"Any ideas?" he asked. "You know as much medicine as I do."
Van den Burg and Hagstrom shook their heads listlessly.
"There's got to be a reason," Aréchaga insisted. "How do you feel?"
"Hungry. Like I hadn't eaten for two weeks."
"The same," Hagstrom said. "Every time I eat it lays like a ton of
lead. I guess we just aren't made for zero grav."
"Doesn't seem to be hitting me as quickly as it did you two,"
Aréchaga mused. "Can I get you anything?" They shook their heads.
He went into the library and began skimming through the medical
spools.
When he returned the others slept fitfully. He ate a banana and
wondered guiltily if his salsa had anything to do with it. He decided it
didn't. The other crews had died the same way without any non-
sterile food aboard. He floated back into the pantry and stared at the
mounds of provisions until the mugginess drove him out.

Three more days passed. Hagstrom and van den Burg grew steadily
weaker. Aréchaga waited expectantly but his own appetite didn't fail.
He advanced dozens of weird hypotheses—racial immunity,
mutations. Even to his non-medical mind the theories were fantastic.
Why should a mestizo take zero grav better than a European? He
munched on a celery stalk and wished he were back on Earth,
preferably in Mexico where food was worth eating.
Then it hit him.
He looked at the others. They'll die anyway. He went to work. Three
hours later he prodded Hagstrom and van den Burg into wakefulness
and forced a murky liquid into them. They gagged weakly, but he
persisted until each had taken a swallow. Thirty minutes later he
forced a cup of soup into each. They dozed but he noted with
satisfaction that their pulses were stronger.
Four hours later Hagstrom awoke. "I'm hungry," he complained.
Aréchaga fed him. The Netherlander came to a little later, and
Aréchaga was run ragged feeding them for the next two days. On
the third day they were preparing their own meals.
"How come it didn't hit you?" van dan Burg asked.
"I don't know," Aréchaga said. "Just lucky, I guess."
"What was that stuff you gave us?" Hagstrom asked.
"What stuff?" Aréchaga said innocently. "By the way, I raised hell
with the inventory getting you guys back in condition. Would you
mind going into the far pantry and straightening things up a little?"
They went, pulling their way down the passage to the rearmost food
locker. "There's something very funny going on," Hagstrom said.
Van den Burg inspected the stocks and the inventory list
suspiciously. "Looks all right to me. I wonder why he wanted us to
check it." They looked at each other.
"You thinking what I'm thinking?" Hagstrom asked.
Van den Burg nodded. They pulled themselves silently along the
passageway back to the control room. Aréchaga was speaking softly
into the recorder, his back to the entrance. Hagstrom cleared his
throat and the black-haired little man spun guiltily. Van den Burg
reached for the playback switch.
"It's just a routine report," Aréchaga protested.
"We're curious," Hagstrom said.
The recorder began playing. "—I should have figured it right from the
start. If food is so lousy the flies won't touch it, then humans have no
business eating it."
"What's the food got to do with it?" Hagstrom asked.
"Quiet!" van den Burg hissed.
"—got by all right on Earth where there was plenty of reinfection, but
when you sealed us in this can without a bug in a million miles—"
Aréchaga's voice continued.
"If food can't rot it can't digest either. Irradiate it—burn the last bit of
life out of it—and then give us a whopping dose of antibiotics until
there isn't one bug in our alimentary tracts from one end to the other.
It's no wonder we were starving in the midst of plenty."
"Wait a minute. How come you didn't get sick?" Hagstrom asked.
Aréchaga flipped a switch and the recorder ground to a stop. "I
reinfected myself with a swallow of salsa picante—good, old-
fashioned, unsanitary chili sauce."
A horrible suspicion was growing in van den Burg's mind. "What did
you give us?" he asked.
"You left me little choice when you threw out my salsa," Aréchaga
said. "Why do you have to be so curious?"
"What was it?" van den Burg demanded.
"I scraped a little salsa scum from the inside of the disposal. It made
a fine culture. What did you think I gave you?"
"I'd rather not answer that," van den Burg said weakly.
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A POUND OF
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