The Gift (45 page)

For now, however, the point is less about the particulars of this case than about the search for practical responses to the general problem posed by
The Gift.
Some responses will necessarily be fitted to their historical period; the Music Performance Fund belongs to a time of powerful trade unions, and the heyday of public support for art and science seems to belong to the cold war.

But surely there could also be responses that transcend their time. The royal patronage that Sir Isaac Newton received may have fallen out of favor, but other innovations from his day have survived. The idea that colleges might have endowed professorships has not been lost. Newton was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics; that position was created in 1663 by one Henry Lucas, and it endures to this day (the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking is its current occupant). The forums
for scientific discourse that Newton knew have likewise endured. In 1672, Newton sent a long letter to Henry Oldenburg of the Royal Society in London, an outline of his theory of light and color. Oldenburg immediately printed the letter in the
Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society. It was Newton’s first scientific publication.
Philosophical Transactions
is the oldest scientific journal in the English-speaking world, having now published for over 340 years. Oldenburg was its founding editor. When he started it, it wasn’t part of a scientific community, it
created
a scientific community, and that community has endured.

Lucas and Oldenburg: these are good ancestors for the community of science; their institutions survive and their names are remembered. And for the community of artists? Those who can be clear about supporting the arts not as means to some other end but as ends in themselves, those who can shape that support in response to the gift-economy that lies at the heart of the practice, those who have the wit and power and vision to build beyond their own day: for artists, those will be the good ancestors of the generations of practitioners that will follow when we are gone.

Lewis Hyde

Cambridge, Massachusetts

April 2007

*
An amusing echo of this debacle was heard many years later: in 1948 one of the tour’s “surplus” paintings, Stuart Davis’s
Still Life with Flowers
, was bought for a high school in Chicago by one of its art teachers. The price was $62.50. In 2006 the school sold the painting at auction for $3.1 million.

*
Actually, wit may not be the key ingredient; power helps. It was the American Federation of Musicians that got the Music Performance Fund started as part of their collective bargaining with the recording industry. The loss of union power is another chapter of the recent saga of market triumphalism.

Part I

Bailey, F. G., ed.
Gifts and Poison: The Politics of Reputation.
New York: Schocken, 1971.

Barnett, H. G. “The Nature of the Potlatch.”
American Anthropologist
40, no. 3 (July–September 1938): 349–58.

Benveniste, Emile.
Indo-European Language and Society.
Translated by Elizabeth Palmer. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1973.

Blau, Peter.
Exchange and Power in Social Life.
New York: Wiley, 1964.

Boas, Franz. “The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians.”
U.S. National Museum, Annual Report
,
1894–1895.
Washington, 1897, pp. 311–738.

Drucker, Philip.
Cultures of the North Pacific.
Scranton, Pa.: Chandler Publishing Co., 1965.

Fox, Renée C, and Swazey, Judith P.
The Courage to Fail: A Social View of Organ Transplants and Dialysis.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

Goody, Jack, and Tambiah, S. J.
Bridewealth and Dowry.
London: Cambridge University Press, 1973.

Goody, Jack, ed.
The Character of Kinship.
London: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
Grimms’ German Folk Tales, The.
Translated by Francis P. Magoun, Jr., and Alexander H. Krappe. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960.

Hagstrom, Warren O.
The Scientific Community.
New York: Basic Books, 1965.

Hardin, Garrett.
The Limits of Altruism: An Ecologist’s View of Survival.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977.

__________“The Tragedy of the Commons.”
Science
162 (1968): 1243–48.

James, Wendy R. “Sister-Exchange Marriage.”
Scientific American
, December 1975, pp. 84–94.

_________“Why the Uduk Won’t Pay Bridewealth.”
Sudan Notes and Records
51 (1970): 75–84.

Joll, James.
The Anarchists.
Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1964.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude.
The Elementary Structures of Kinship.
Translated by James Bell et al. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

Malinowski, Bronislaw.
Argonauts of the Western Pacific.
London: George Routledge & Sons, 1922.

Marshall, Lorna. “Sharing, Talking, and Giving: Relief of Social Tensions Among !Kung Bushmen.”
Africa
(journal of the International African Institute) 31, no. 3 (July 1961): 231–49.

Marx, Karl.
Capital.
Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1930. Mauss, Marcel.

“Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l′échange dans les sociétés archaïques,”
L’Année Sociologique
1 (1923–24), pp. 30–186. Available in English as
The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies.
Translated by Ian Cunnison. New York: Norton, 1967.

Meister Eckhart by Franz Pfeiffer.
Translated by C. de B. Evans. London: John M. Watkins, 1924.

Nelson, Benjamin.
The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood.
2nd rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.

Nestrick, William. “George Herbert—the Giver and the Gift.”
Ploughshares 2
, no. 4 (Fall 1975), pp. 187–205.

Onians, Richard Broxton.
The Origins of European Thought.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951.

Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ′Political Economy′ of Sex.” In
Toward an Anthropology of Women.
Edited by Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975, pp. 157–210.

Sahlins, Marshall.
Stone Age Economics.
Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1972.

Schumaker, Millard.
Accepting the Gift of God.
Kingston, Ontario: Queen’s Theological College, 1980.

________“Duty.”
Journal of Medical Ethics
5 (1979): 83–85.

_______“Loving as Freely Giving.” In
Philosophy and the Human Condition
, edited by Thomas Beauchamp, William Blackston, and Joel Feinberg. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980.

________
Moral Poise: Toward a Christian Ethic Without Resentment.
Edmonton, Alberta: St. Stephen’s College, 1977.

Schürmann, Reiner.
Meister Eckhart, Mystic and Philosopher.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.

Scott, Russel.
The Body as Property.
New York: Viking, 1981.

Shell, Marc.
The Economy of Literature.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Simmel, Georg. “Faithfulness and Gratitude.” In
The Sociology of Georg Simmel
, edited by Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950, pp. 379-95.

Simmons, Roberta G.; Klein, Susan D.; and Simmons, Richard L.
The Gift of Life: The Social and Psychological Impact of Organ Transplantation.
New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1977.

Smelser, Neil. “A Comparative View of Exchange Systems.”
Economic Development and Cultural Change
7 (1959), pp. 173–82.

Stack, Carol B.
All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community.
New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

Titmuss, Richard.
The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy.
New York: Pantheon, 1971.

Tournier, Paul.
The Meaning of Gifts.
Translated by John S. Gilmour. Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press, 1963.

Usury Laws: Their Nature, Expediency and Influence.
Economic Tract Number IV. New York: The Society for Political Education, 1881.

Van Baal, J.
Reciprocity and the Position of Women.
Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, Assen, 1975. Van Gennep, Arnold.
The Rites of Passage.
Translated by M. B. Vizedom and G. L. Caffee.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. Weiner, Annette B.
Women of Value, Men of Renown: New Perspectives in Trobiand Exchange.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976.

Yaron, Reuven.
Gifts in Contemplation of Death in Jewish and Roman Law.
London: Oxford University Press, 1960.

Part II

Asselineau, Roger.
The Evolution of Walt Whitman.
2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962.

Budge, E. A. Wallis.
The Gods of the Egyptians, or Studies in Egyptian Mythology.
Vol. 2. London: Methuen & Co., 1904.

_________
Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection.
Vol. 1. New York: G. P.

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Chauncy, Charles.
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Boston: J. Draper, 1742.

Doob, Leonard W., ed.
“Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979.

Emery, Clark.
Ideas Into Action: A Study of Pound’s Cantos.
Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1958.

Ginsberg, Allen. “Encounters with Ezra Pound,”
City Lights Anthology.
San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1974.

Hall, Donald.
Remembering Poets.
New York: Harper & Row, 1978.

Heymann, C. David.
Ezra Pound: The Last Rower.
New York: Viking, 1976.

Kaplan, Justin.
Walt Whitman: A Life.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980.

Kenner, Hugh.
The Pound Era.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971.

Lawrence, D. H.
Studies in Classic American Literature.
New York: Viking, 1964.

Lopez-Pedraza, Rafael.
Hermes and His Children.
Zurich: Spring Publications, 1977.

Neruda, Pablo.
Memoirs.
Translated by Hardie St. Martin. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977.

_______
Twenty Poems.
Translated by James Wright and Robert Bly.

Madison, Minn.: Sixties Press, 1967.

Norman, Charles.
Ezra Pound.
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1960.

O’Connor, Flannery.
Mystery and Manners.
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.

Pound, Ezra.
ABC of Reading.
New York: New Directions, 1960.

________
America, Roosevelt and the Causes of the Present War.
Translated by John Drummond. London: Peter Russell, 1951. (First published in Venice in 1944.)

_______
The Cantos.
New York: New Directions, 1972.

________
Guide to Kulchur.
New York: New Directions, 1970.

_______
Jefferson and/or Mussolini
. London: Stanley Nott, 1935.

The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941.

Edited by D. D. Paige.

New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1950.

Literary Essays of Ezra Pound.
Edited by T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1964.

_____________
Make It New.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935.

_________
Pavannes and Divagations
. New York: New Directions, 1958.

________
Personae.
New York: New Directions, 1971.

_________
Selected Prose 1909–1965.

Edited by William Cookson. New York: New Directions, 1973.

________
Social Credit: An Impact.
London: Peter Russell, 1951.

(First published in 1935.) Rosellini, Ippolito.
I Monumenti Dell′ Egitto e Della Nubia.
Vol. 3,
Monumenti del Culto.
Pisa: 1844.

Shell, Marc.
The Economy of Literature.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Shephard, Esther. “Possible Sources of Some of Whitman’s Ideas and Symbols in ‘Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus’ and Other Works.”
Modern Language Quarterly
14, no. 1 (March 1953): 60–81.

Snyder, Gary.
The Real Work: Interviews and Talks 1964–1979.
New York: New Directions, 1980.

Whitman, Walt.
The Correspondence. 6
vols. Edited by Edwin Haviland Miller. New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977.

___________
Daybooks and Notebooks.
3 vols. (paginated consecutively). Edited by William White. New York: New York University Press, 1978.

________
Leaves of Grass.
Brooklyn, N.Y.: 1855.

__________
Leaves of Grass.
“Comprehensive Reader’s Edition.” Edited by Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York University Press, 1965.

Prose Works 1892.
2 vols. (paginated consecutively). Edited by Floyd Stovall. New York: New York University Press, 1963.

__________
The Uncollected Poetry and Prose.
2 vols. Edited by Emory Holloway. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1921.

It is now time to try to free some of the spirits who labored with me in the creation of
The Gift.

The idea for this book took shape during a month spent at the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico. I am grateful to Ivan Illich both for the example of his work and for the fertile atmosphere I found at CIDOC.

A creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts gave me the freedom to begin my project, and a fellowship for independent study and research from the National Endowment for the Humanities supported a year’s work in the library. The Millay Colony for the Arts provided a month of meals, shelter, and butterfly hunting without which my chapter on Whitman might never have taken shape.

The endowments and colonies such as Millay are truly gift institutions. I am grateful.

Both friends and strangers have given their support throughout the years, sending me newspaper clippings, talking all morning over coffee, convincing me of my errors, and offering typing, solace, diversion, and hope. I particularly wish to thank Robert Bly, Abby Freedman, Donald Hall, Patricia Hampl, Robert Hass, Dan Hobbing, Richard Hobby, Miriam Levine, Julia Markus, Jim Moore, Sherman Paul, Kris Rosenthal, Wendy Salinger, Marshall Sahlins, Millard Schumaker, Ron Sharp, Marc Shell, Daveda Tenenbaum, and Larry Wolken.

Bill Clark helped me gain access to valuable research materials. Charlotte Sheedy gave advice when it came time to
enter the marketplace. Jonathan Galassi edited the book with intelligence and care; his confidence in the unpredictable rhythms of creative labor often exceeded my own.

Linda Bamber responded to the book in manuscript, chapter by chapter. An ideal reader, she managed to combine a stranger’s cold eye with a sister’s unconditional support. If there are moments of clarity in
The Gift
, many of them are hers, not mine.

To Patsy Vigderman I owe a debt that I hope to repay, slowly, for years to come.