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John William Corrington on the Academic Revolution

In America, American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, Conservatism, Creative Writing, History, Humanities, John William Corrington, liberal arts, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Philosophy, Scholarship, Southern History, Southern Literature, Western Philosophy, Writing on October 31, 2018 at 6:45 am

John William Corrington delivered “The Academic Revolution,” which is part memoir, as a lecture at Centenary College in 1969. In this talk, Corrington seeks to develop what he calls his “ontologies,” which he adopted in part while he was a student at Centenary.

Corrington suggests here that our lives are short and meaningless without an ontology and that our purposive acts ought to be guided by essential patterns of history.

Corrington’s conservatism and his belief in canonical greatness are apparent in his recommendation to “enter that vast communion of past, present, and future, of living, dead, and yet to be born that was recognized by the early church and called the communion of saints.” One’s sense of place and continuity, Corrington submits, is requisite to the production of great works of art.

Corrington suggests that academic revolution is paradoxically tied to tradition in that the new necessarily springs from the old. Corrington claims that the current academic revolution is rooted in the rejection of authority and the repudiation of materialism. He is concerned with the transitional ethic of the 1960s and the concomitant widespread questioning of the legitimacy of authority and institutions. He refers to this questioning as the New Politics.

Corrington praises the academic revolution and encourages universities to serve as a matrix for that revolution. He believes that universities study the old disciplines to reveal new ways of forming constructive communities. Championing the drift of the university toward more student-centered objectives, toward more bottom-up rather than top-down power structures on campus, Corrington embraces and celebrates the reforming spirit of his students. He believes this spirit is in fact conservative in that custom and tradition and the complex, organic nature of social development teach that reform is necessary to ensure future growth.

Corrington suggests that colleges and other institutions, to remain faithful to the past, must reform themselves; to be faithful to the past, in other words, colleges and other such institutions must rework and re-energize the past for present purposes.

“The Academic Revolution” has been printed in my recent edition of Corrington’s work, which is available for purchase by clicking on the image below:

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John William Corrington on “The Message” as “Art”

In American Literature, Arts & Letters, John William Corrington, liberal arts, Writing on October 24, 2018 at 6:45 am

“The Message as Art,” a short essay, is likely the written version of a lecture that John William Corrington delivered to the South-Central Modern Language Association in 1971. The title of that talk was “The Poetry of Rock & Roll.”

The “message” in art to which Corrington refers involves politics, or the role of “social consciousness” in works of poetry and fiction. Corrington suggests that, rather than generalize about the importation of politics to literature, one should examine each work on a case-by-case basis to determine whether it is art with a social theme or merely “a harangue disguised as art.”

Corrington is concerned with the distinction between art and propaganda; the latter, he suggests, is marked by cliché and the sort of troping that entails no clear political referent (i.e., no nameable, observable social examples) in the actual world. For this reason Corrington criticizes art that employs such general types as “Big Business, the German Army, the Atomic Bomb, Big Labor, Hollywood, Mom, jingoistic patriotism, etc.”

“The Message as Art” has been printed in my recent edition of Corrington’s work, which is available for purchase by clicking on the image below:

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John William Corrington on Intuition and Intellect

In America, American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, Essays, History, Humanities, John William Corrington, liberal arts, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Modernism, Philosophy, Poetry, Religion, Scholarship, Southern History, Southern Literature, The South, Western Philosophy, Writing on October 17, 2018 at 6:45 am

In my edition of John William Corrington’s essays, I assembled Corrington’s unpublished notes and sections of his unpublished lectures from the early 1970s that he maintained in one document.  Because of the subject matter, I titled this section “Intuition-Intellect.”

This material demonstrates the shift in Corrington’s interests in poetry as a craft to more philosophical concerns that were influenced by poetry, or mythopoetics. His discussion of myth and his references to Eric Voegelin in these notes suggests that he had just begun to read Voegelin and to explore Gnosticism and myth criticism.

Corrington questions here the relationship between science and philosophy and hypothesizes about how the truths generated by science become mythologized to satisfy certain human desires. He proposes that science itself has a “mythic” character and claims that “the aftermath of every significant act of science is its mythologization.” Corrington speculates whether myth is inevitable because it fulfills something basic or instinctive in human nature.

Science amasses data for their predictive value, but asking what these data mean is the beginning of myth, which, properly understood, is another form of understanding and articulating truths about the world. However, myth can also, Corrington claims, have destructive implications at odds with truth. He warns about mismanaging myth, giving such examples as Nazism, Marxism, and free enterprise: ideological constructs that rely on abstract myth narratives to stamp out opposition.

Corrington critiques the scientism that has developed since the Enlightenment because he considers its emphasis on empiricism and rationalism to mask its role in formulating mythic patterns or archetypes for governing the phenomenal world, including the human social order. These patterns or archetypes, despite their mythic nature, are taken as authoritative and valid because they are conflated with or understood as scientific truth; in this manner they are assumed to be separate and apart from myth when in fact they constitute myth.  They are dangerous because they are presumed to be scientific truth subject to certain and definite application when in fact they represent mythopoetic urges to satisfy innate and instinctual human impulses.

Corrington transitions from this discussion of myth and science into a discussion of twentieth-century poetry and its “overintellectualization,” as evidenced by the implementation of supposedly scientific approaches to the study of poetry. Corrington considers the New Criticism to represent such a scientific approach to poetry.

The turn to reason and science, Corrington suggests, has destroyed the aesthetics of poetry just as it has destroyed human civilizations in the sociopolitical context. In both contexts there has been, he believes, a failure to realize the distinction between science and the mythologization of science, a failure that has led certain groups to mistake what is unreasonable and irrational for absolute reason and rationality, to believe, that is, that what is merely a pattern or archetype—a human construct—is something given and definite even apart from human knowledge of it. Those who fail to understand the distinction between science and the mythologization of science embrace a potentially destructive psychic system that mistakes science for its opposite. This essay shows that, as Corrington begins to transition away from the writing of poetry, he is also trying to integrate his interest in poetry with his growing interest in philosophy.

The exact date of this Corrington material is unknown; however, certain references suggest that Corrington wrote these notes in or around 1971. For example, he mentions a “new” album by the Rolling Stones, Sticky Fingers, which came out in 1971. It is possible that part of this material comes from a lecture that Corrington gave to the South-Central Modern Language Association in 1968. That lecture was titled “Cassirer’s Curse, Keats’s Urn, and the Poem Before the Poem.” Some of the material may have come from the National Science Foundation Lecture that Corrington titled “Science and the Humanities” and delivered at Louisiana State University in 1966. Corrington began the essay with four discursive notes under the heading “Statements and Questions.” Because the ideas in these notes are more fully developed in the text proper, I have moved them to the end of the essay.

“Intuition-Intellect” has been printed in my recent edition of Corrington’s work, which is available for purchase by clicking on the image below:

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Who Was John William Corrington?

In America, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, Conservatism, Essays, History, Humanities, liberal arts, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Novels, Poetry, Scholarship, Southern History, Southern Literature, The South, Writing on October 10, 2018 at 6:45 am

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Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 28, 1932, John William Corrington—or Bill, as his friends and family called him—claimed on his academic CV that he was born in Memphis, Tennessee.  Raised Catholic, he attended a Jesuit high school in Louisiana but was expelled for “having the wrong attitude.” The Jesuit influence would remain with him as he explored in his scholarly pursuits certain forms of Catholic mysticism as well as the teachings of the ancient Gnostics.

Bill loved the South and Southern literature and during his career authored or edited, or in some cases co-edited, twenty books of varying genres.  He earned a B.A. from Centenary College and M.A. in Renaissance literature from Rice University, where he met his wife, Joyce, whom he married on February 6, 1960. In September of that year, he and Joyce moved to Baton Rouge, where he became an instructor in the Department of English at Louisiana State University (LSU). At that time, LSU’s English department was known above all for The Southern Review (TSR), the brainchild of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, but also for such literary luminaries as Robert Heilman, who would become Bill’s friend.

In the early 1960s, Bill pushed for TSR to feature fiction and poetry and not just literary criticism. He butted heads with then-editors Donald E. Stanford and Lewis P. Simpson. A year after joining the LSU faculty, he published his first book of poetry, Where We Are. With only 18 poems and 225 first edition printings, the book hardly established his reputation as a Southern man of letters. But it gave his name instant recognition and inspired his confidence to complete his first novel, And Wait for the Night (1964).

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Bill and Joyce spent the 1963-64 academic year in Sussex, England, where Bill took his D.Phil. from the University of Sussex in 1965, writing his dissertation on James Joyce. In the summer of 1966, at a conference at Northwestern State College, Mel Bradford, a Southern conservative English professor, pulled Bill aside and told him that And Wait for the Night (1964) shared some of the themes and approaches of William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished.  Bill agreed, happily.

Of Bill and Miller Williams, Bill’s colleague at LSU, Jo LeCoeur, poet and literature professor, once stated, “Both men had run into a Northern bias against what was perceived as the culturally backward South.  While at LSU they fought back against this snub, editing two anthologies of Southern writing and lecturing on ‘The Dominance of Southern Writers.’  Controversial as a refutation of the anti-intellectual Southern stereotype, their joint lecture was so popular [that] the two took it on the road to area colleges.”

In 1966, Bill and Joyce moved to New Orleans, where the English Department at Loyola University, housed in a grand Victorian mansion on St. Charles Avenue, offered him a chairmanship. Joyce earned her M.S. in chemistry from LSU that same year. By this time, Bill had written four additional books of poetry, the last of which, Lines to the South and Other Poems (1965), benefited from Charles Bukowski’s friendship and influence. Bill’s poetry earned a few favorable reviews but not as much attention as his novels—And Wait for the Night (1964), The Upper Hand (1967), and The Bombardier (1970). Writing in The Massachusetts Review, Beat poet and critic Josephine Miles approvingly noted two of Bill’s poems from Lines, “Lucifer Means Light” and “Algerien Reveur,” alongside poetry by James Dickey. Dickey himself admired Bill’s writing, saying, “A more forthright, bold, adventurous writer than John William Corrington would be very hard to find.”

Joyce earned her PhD in chemistry from Tulane in 1968.  Her thesis, which she wrote under the direction of L. C. Cusachs, was titled, “Effects of Neighboring Atoms in Molecular Orbital Theory.” She began teaching chemistry at Xavier University; her knowledge of the hard sciences brought about engaging conservations, between her and Bill, about the New Physics. “Even though Bill only passed high school algebra,” Joyce would later say, “his grounding in Platonic idealism made him more capable of understanding the implications of quantum theory than many with more adequate educations.”

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Bill became increasingly disenchanted with what he perceived to be radical campus politics, so he entered law school at Tulane University, graduating in 1975 and, with Joyce, coauthoring the screenplay for Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) while he was still a law student. By the time he graduated from law school, he had penned three novels, a short story collection, two editions (anthologies), and four books of poetry. But his writings earned him little money despite their sales figures.

Bill joined the law firm of Plotkin & Bradley, a small personal injury practice in New Orleans, and continued to publish in such journals as The Sewanee Review and The Southern Review, and in such conservative periodicals as The Intercollegiate Review and Modern Age.  His stories took on a legal bent, peopled as they were with judges and attorneys. But neither law nor legal fiction brought him the fame or fortune he desired.

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So he turned to screenplays—and, at last, earned the profits he sought. Viewers of the recent film I am Legend (2007), starring Will Smith, might be surprised to learn that Bill and Joyce wrote the screenplay for the earlier version, Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston.  And viewers of the recent Battle for the Planet of the Apes films, the latest of which is currently in theaters, might be surprised to learn that Bill co-wrote the film’s original screenplay. All told, Bill and Joyce wrote five screenplays and one television movie together. Bill collaborated with Joyce on various television soap operas as well, among them Search for Tomorrow, Another World, Texas, Capitol, One Life to Live, Superior Court, and General Hospital.  These ventures gained the favor of Hollywood stars, and Bill and Joyce eventually moved to Malibu.

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By the mid-70s, Bill, who preferred deep learning and philosophy to the popular writing that was earning him a comfortable living, had become fascinated by Eric Voegelin. A German historian, philosopher, and émigré who had fled the Third Reich, Voegelin taught in LSU’s history department and lectured for the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he was a Salvatori Fellow. Voegelin’s philosophy inspired Bill and gave Bill a research focus and writing subject for the hours when he was not writing for film or television. In fact, Voegelin made such a lasting impression that, at the time of Bill’s death, Bill was working on an edition of Voegelin’s The Nature of the Law and Related Legal Writings. (After Bill’s death, two men—Robert Anthony Pascal and James Lee Babin—finished what Bill had begun. The completed edition appeared in 1991.)

Bill constantly molded and remolded his image, embracing Southern signifiers while altering their various expressions.  His early photos suggest a pensive, put-together gentleman wearing ties and sport coats and smoking pipes.  Later photos depict a rugged man clad in western wear. Still later photos conjure up the likes of Roy Orbison, what with Bill’s greased hair, cigarettes, and dark sunglasses.

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Whatever his looks, Bill was a stark, provocative, and profoundly sensitive writer. His impressive oeuvre has yet to receive the critical attention it deserves. There are no doubt many aspects of Bill’s life and literature left to be discovered.  As Bill’s friend William Mills put it, “I believe there is a critique of modernity throughout [Bill’s] writing that will continue to deserve serious attentiveness and response.”

On Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 1988, Bill suffered a heart attack and died. He was 56. His last words were, “it’s all right.” An introduction to his life’s work is both timely and necessary; this proposed manuscript will fill a gap in scholarship in addition to surveying the works of a man who was so important to the literary scene of the 1960s and 1970s. In other words, this manuscript will make a scholarly contribution even as it serves as a basic introduction to Corrington’s writing and career.

This manuscript, moreover, will have the added benefit of being the first book-length exposition of Corrington’s oeuvre and will place his fiction and poetry into historical context. The manuscript will consist of approximately 58,000 to 60,000 words, including bibliography and front matter. It will include both primary and secondary bibliographies. More detailed information about the specific plan of the book may be found below. Here, in conclusion, is a list of Corrington’s most notable works:

 

Where We Are (Poetry), The Charioteer Press, Washington,

  1. C., 1962. Hardback and paperback.

 

The Anatomy of Love and Other Poems (Poetry), Roman Books,

Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 1964.  Hardback and paperback.

 

Mr. Clean and Other Poems (Poetry), Amber House Press, San

Francisco, California, 1964.

 

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And Wait for the Night (Novel),

  1. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, N. Y., 1964;

Anthony Blond, Ltd., London, 1964;

Pocket Books, Inc., New York, N. Y., 1965;

Panther Books, Ltd., London, 1967.

 

Lines to the South and Other Poems (Poetry), Louisiana State

University Press, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1965.

 

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Southern Writing in the Sixties: Fiction (Anthology), ed.

with Miller Williams, Louisiana State University Press,

Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1966. Hardback and paperback.

 

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Southern Writing in the Sixties: Poetry (Anthology), ed.

with Miller Williams, Louisiana State University Press,

Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1967. Hardback and paperback.

 

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The Upper Hand (Novel),

  1. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, N. Y., 1967;

Anthony Blond, Ltd., London, 1968;

Berkeley Books, New York, N. Y., 1968;

Panther Books, London, 1969.

 

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The Lonesome Traveler and Other Stories (Short Fiction),

  1. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, N. Y., 1968.

 

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The Bombardier (Novel),

  1. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, N. Y., 1970;

Lancer Books, New York, N. Y., 1972.

 

The Actes and Monuments (Short Fiction), University of

Illinois Press, Urbana, Illinois, 1978. Hardback and paperback.

 

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The Southern Reporter Stories (Short Fiction),

Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge,

Louisiana, 1981.

 

 

Shad Sentell (Novel),

Congdon & Weed, Inc., New York, N. Y., 1984;

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(Shad) Macmillan, London, 1984;

(Shad) Grafton Books, London, 1986.

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So Small a Carnival, (Novel, with Joyce H. Corrington),

Viking/Penguin, New York, 1986;

Ballantine Books, New York, 1987;

(Karneval med doden) Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck

A/S, Kobenhavn, Denmark, 1988;

Hayakawa Publishing, Inc, Japan, 1988;

(New Orleans Carneval) Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munchen,

Germany, 1988;

(Carnaval de Sangue) Editora Best Seller, Sao Paulo,

Brazil, 1988;

Mysterious Press, London, UK, 1989;

(Carnaval de Sangue) Editora Nova Cultural Ltda., Sao

Paulo, Brazil, 1990.

 

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A Project Named Desire, (Novel, with Joyce H. Corrington),

Viking/Penguin, New York, 1987;

(Das Desire-Projekt) Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munchen,

Germany, 1987;

 

Ballantine Books, New York, 1988;

(Dannys sidste sang) Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck,

Kobenhavn, Denmark, 1988;

Hayakawa Publishing, Inc., Japan, 1988;

(Una Canzone Per Morire) Arnoldo Mondadori Editore

S.p.A., Milano, Italy;

(Um Projecto Chamado Desejo) Editora Nova Cultural

Ltda., Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1990;

(Um Projecto Chamado Desejo) Circulo do Livro, Sao

Paulo, Brazil, 1990;

(Um Projecto Chamado Desejo) Editora Best Seller, Sao

Paulo, Brazil, 1990.

 

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A Civil Death, (Novel, with Joyce H. Corrington),

Viking/Penguin, New York, 1987;

(Begrabnis Erster Klasse) Wilhelm Heyne Verlag,

Munchen, Germany, 1988;

Ballantine Books, New York, 1989;

Hayakawa Publishing, Inc., Japan, 1989;

(Finche Odio Ci Separi) Arnoldo Mondadori Editore

S.p.A., Milano, Italy, 1989.

 

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All My Trials, (2 Short Novels, “Decoration Day” and “The

Risi’s Wife”), University of Arkansas Press,

Fayetteville, Arkansas, 1987. Hardback and paperback.

 

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The White Zone, (Novel with Joyce Corrington),

Viking/Penguin, New York, 1990.

 

 

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The Collected Stories of John William Corrington, ed. by

Joyce Corrington, University of Missouri Press,

Columbia, Missouri, 1990.

 

The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 27, The Nature

    of the Law, and Related Legal Writings, ed. with Robert

Anthony Pascal, James Lee Babin, Louisiana State

University Press, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1991.

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John William Corrington’s Credo for Poets

In American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, Essays, History, Humanities, John William Corrington, liberal arts, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Scholarship, Southern History, Southern Literature, The South, Writing on October 3, 2018 at 6:45 am

John William Corrington’s essay “A Poet’s Credo” appeared in the journal Midwest in 1961. In it, Corrington writes that over the course of the twentieth century, poetry gradually became less “intellectual,” a view he purports to share with Norman Mailer. Corrington decries as “love drivel” much of the poetry from the sixteenth to the twentieth century but considers the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century to have been a renaissance for poetry that is now in decline, with the notable exception of the poetry of Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Corrington writes against the mass proliferation of quarterly journals that, he says, has resulted in the publication of more and more bad poetry. Corrington expresses appreciation for poets like Auden, Eliot, and Pound, but wishes there were more room in anthologies for writers like Bukowski, Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti, who, he says, represent “the new vision, the new lightning that is shaking on the west coast and in New Orleans, in New York and along the tidewater.”

Corrington is not against modernist poets like W. H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound; rather, he is against those who continue to imitate or copy these figures. What Corrington prizes in poetry is originality, which he considers to be lacking in the industry of literary periodicals in no small part because the editors of such periodicals publish only poems that copy the poetry of an earlier age rather than staking out new territory.

Corrington calls this essay a “credo,” perhaps because of the incantatory rhythms of the essay in addition to the statement of his belief that lasting poetry is, paradoxically, that which seems new.

This essay is remarkable for revealing Corrington’s early affiliation with Beat writers. Early in his career Corrington was known as a poet and interested mostly in poetry. Later in life he began to retreat from poetry as he grew more interested in philosophy, specifically in the thinking of Eric Voegelin and Gnosticism.

“A Poet’s Credo” has been printed in my recent edition of Corrington’s work, which is available for purchase by clicking on the image below: