The Spirit of Parody [by David Lehman]

Who doesn't love the parodies Lewis Carroll inserted in the Alice books? What student of the late Henry James wouldn't laugh at (and with) Max Beerbohm's "Mote in the Middle Distance"? A chapter of Ulysses recapitulates the evolution of English prose styles via parody. There are delightful self-parodies, conscious (Oscar Wilde) or unconscious (Dwight D. Eisenhower). Jane Austen made her debut with a novel that parodied the Gothic novel then fashionable. In one sonnet J. K. Stephen captures both the majesty of Wordsworth at his best and the sinking feeling you get when he is at his worst. Henry Reed's parody of T. S. Eliot,  pitch perfect as it is, is true to the spirit of the author of Four Quartets: "As we get older, we do not get any younger."

The last great anthology of Parodies was compiled by Dwight Macdonald and published by Random House in New York and by Faber in London in 1960.  Veronica Geng's blurb graced a paperback edition: “If Parodies were a man I'd marry it.” In 1981 and `82 I was assisting Dwight toward a new edition of the book. He died not long after and I have little left of the project but notes. Dwight's papers are in the Beinecke Library at Yale and there's bound to be a file.

Back in 1981 I made a list of possible additions that included

Anthony Hecht's "The Dover Beach" (re Matthew Arnold);
the Ern Malley poetry hoax in Australia;
Kenneth Koch's "Variations on a Theme by WC Williams";
Nabokov's parody of Agatha Christie in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight;
The parody of Hemingway in Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely;
Wendy Cope's rendition of The Waste Land  in the form of five limericks;
Prudence Crowther, "Insanity Fair" -- parody of Tina Brown (TNR, 11/4/91)
Woody Allen "The Kugelmass Episode" (The New Yorker, May 2, 1977)
Woody Allen's parodies of Martin Buber and Flaubert
John Ashbery's "To a Waterfowl," the cento as implicitly a parody of the canon
Veronica Geng’s parody of Pauline Kael (NY Rev of Books, 1975)
Tom Disch, parody of A. R. Ammons, Poetry magazine, 1978
May Swenson parody of Dorothy Parker

I'm writing without notes relying just on memory. In 1981 I had been writing parodies of writers from Christopher Smart to Thomas Hardy. Dwight liked them, and he approved also of the historian John Clive's parodies of Gibbon, Carlyle, and Macaulay, which I brought to his attention from an issue of the Times Literary Supplement.

I believe that the most successful parodies reflect more affection than contempt for the lampooned subject. There are a fair number of parodies in my book Poems in the Manner Of (2017).

The parody as a genre is a fertile one. The whole category is undervalued. It's as if, these days, the mind is too busy having a nervous breakdown to allow for a random laugh.  

Readers are invited to bring to our attention, in the comments section, parodies in verse well-worth reading. -- DL

Comments

[Vince]

The NFL is driven by a desire for parody.

[Glen]

Beerbohm's second parody of James, “The Guerdon”: That it hardly was, that it all bleakly and unbeguilingly wasn’t for “the likes” of him — poor decent Stamfordham — to rap out queries about the owner of the to him unknown and unsuggestive name that had, in these days, been thrust on him with such a wealth of commendatory gesture, was precisely what now, as he took, with his prepared list of New Year colifichets and whatever, his way to the great gaudy palace, fairly flicked his cheek with the sense of his having never before so let himself in, as he ruefully phrased it, without letting anything, by the same token, out.

[David Lehman]

Thanks, Glen. Beerbohm is a peerless parodist.