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Pragmatism with Purpose: Selected Writings by Peter Hare (review)

deployed throughout her career. Her working method—using an exceptionally fluid capacity for association to gather a broad range of works, events, and people together and then effectively standing back to see what happens—remains fairly constant across that span, as do her concerns, which orbit around three poles: avant-garde verbal and visual work, American history and letters, especially those centered in New England, and family and personal history. She often laces two or more of these within and around each other in a single essay—Walt Whitman and her late husband David von Schlegell’s experiences in World War Two emerge within an essay predominantly focused on Chris Marker and documentary film (“Sorting Facts”), and Jonathan Edwards, Nietzsche, Heraclitus, Ovid, and Poussin all make appearances in an essay whose principal theme is another husband’s death, that of Peter Hare in 2008 (“The Disappearance Approach”). In short, what changes dramatically across the forty years chronicled here is style, which is so profoundly worked that it becomes an issue of form. Another way to phrase this is to say that, by 2015, she has so radically reworked the stylistic possibilities of written English that it constitutes formal invention. The collection “begins” with the perceptive and crisply logical argument that rules the 1974 essay “The End of Art,” which is presented in clear sentences with normative syntax and a particularly vivid vocabulary, and ends forty years later with a syntax that is still accessible, but much more variable, much more slippery, and, above all, has much more momentum. “That silent chorus prescient deep inside us so we remember the night-hymn is there in that parallel perspective both shield and cry. ‘How easily the blown banners change to wings . . .’ Rome—an essence incarnate in its name” (13). So much is swept up into the energy of a passage such as this; the elided commas and colliding clauses grab quotations and whip them along in a constantly building vertigo that nonetheless remains solidly grounded. What this collection reveals is the remarkable flowering of a mind determined to “vocalize wilderness” (55) and, in turn, a wilderness of the mind, which once accepted as such, is much more evocative and stimulating than the domesticated mind encased in normative syntax and syllogistic logic. The pleasure of the surface of her texts, with their flowing ease and charged phrasing, is nicely juxtaposed to her unprecedented ways of viewing some of our national literature’s most signal writers. This collection confirms that she should be classed among them.