The Gift

At the corner drugstore, Hyde begins, you can buy romance novels written to a formula devised by market research, the heroine's age and the hero's marital status chosen by a poll, each book exactly 192 pages long. Why do we suspect these will never be enduring works of art? Because a work of art, even one bought and sold, is something other than a pure commodity. It is the assumption of this book, Hyde writes, "that a work of art is a gift, not a commodity." More precisely, works of art live simultaneously in two economies, a market economy and a gift economy, but "only one of these is essential: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no art."

What is a gift? Common to all its senses is one thing. A gift is "a thing we do not get by our own efforts. We cannot buy it; we cannot acquire it through an act of will. It is bestowed upon us." This is why we call talent a gift, for no effort can cause its first appearance, and why we call inspiration a gift, since some portion of the work arrives unbidden. "Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me," said D. H. Lawrence. And the finished work is received the same way. Even after we have paid at the museum door, when a work of art truly moves us "something comes to us which has nothing to do with the price." The gift the artist labored to bring forth wakes an answering gift in us.

The problem the book exists to solve follows at once. If the labor of art is the labor of a gift, then "there is nothing in the labor of art itself that will automatically make it pay." Every modern artist who works with a gift must sooner or later wonder how to survive "in a society dominated by market exchange," in an age "whose values are market values." A market society reverses the older image of a person of substance. In many cultures one became a "big man" or "big woman" through the dispersal of gifts, "that one through whom the most gifts flowed." But the hero of a market society is "self-made" and "self-possessed," and getting, not giving, is the mark of worth. Under those assumptions, the gifts of the gifted are "powerless to make him substantial."

One distinction threads the whole book. Hyde calls gift exchange an erotic commerce, using eros in its widest sense as "the principle of attraction, union, involvement which binds together," and setting it against logos, "reason and logic in general, the principle of differentiation in particular." A market economy is an emanation of logos. The gift is an emanation of eros. Neither is evil and neither can be wished away, but they pull in opposite directions, and the tension between them is the drama in which every artist, and every gift, must live.

When the Puritans landed in Massachusetts they were baffled by a custom they had to invent a name for, the "Indian gift," a present for which a return was expected. To the settler, a gift once given was a possession to keep. To his hosts, the carved stone pipe he took home to his mantelpiece was meant to keep moving from lodge to lodge. He called them uncivilized. But the Indian giver, Hyde writes, understood "a cardinal property of the gift: whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept." You may keep your Christmas present, but "it ceases to be a gift in the true sense unless you have given something else away." A gift is not a possession that stands still and marks a boundary. "The gift keeps going."

Tribal peoples distinguish sharply between gifts and capital, and often live by a single stern law, "one man's gift must not be another man's capital." Among the Uduk of northeast Africa, wealth given from one clan to another must be consumed as a gift, not invested for growth. If a pair of gift goats is kept to breed, the neighbors complain that the family is "getting rich at someone else's expense," and everyone expects that "they will soon suffer storm damage." In folk tales the person who tries to hold on to a gift usually dies. The gift is "property that perishes," and Hyde's word for what happens to it is that it is used up, consumed, eaten. Food is its commonest image because food is so obviously consumed. When the Trobrianders pass their ceremonial shells they say, "Here, some food we could not eat." The North Pacific potlatch was originally a "big feed," and the Haida called their feasting "killing wealth."

A Scottish tale, "The Girl and the Dead Man," makes the whole law visible. A mother offers each departing daughter a choice: a large piece of bread with her curse, or a small piece with her blessing. The two elder daughters take the large piece, refuse to share their bread with the birds along the road, and come to grief. The youngest takes the small piece and her mother's blessing, shares her bread with the birds, and by keeping the gift in motion she gains their friendship, survives her ordeal, and receives at the end a vial of the "water of life" with which she revives her dead sisters. She "is no dummy," Hyde notes. She keeps every gift moving. "By keeping the gift they get no more," but "what is given away feeds again and again, while what is kept feeds only once and leaves us hungry."

This is why a gift is different from a consumer good. A commodity is "used up" the moment it is sold, because "nothing about the exchange assures its return." A market exchange seeks equilibrium, a balance struck so that the transaction "doesn't consume anything or involve one person with another." Buyer and seller might as well be sealed in plastic bags. But a gift has momentum, "and the weight shifts from body to body." And it moves in one particular direction, always. "The gift moves toward the empty place." As it turns in its circle it goes to whoever "has been empty-handed the longest," and if a greater need appears elsewhere, it changes course toward that. This is the deep sense of the begging bowl of the monk, who "takes it as his task to carry what is empty from door to door" and makes the moving spirit of the gift visible to us all.

The gift does not simply move; it moves in a circle, and the circle needs at least three people, because "two points establish a line, but a circle lies in a plane and needs at least three points." Reciprocal giving back and forth between two people is the simplest form of gift exchange and also the weakest, forever tempted to collapse into barter, into what D. H. Lawrence called the "égoisme à deux" of couples who open up for no one else. The larger circle is where the gift comes into its power, "for when the gift moves in a circle no one ever receives it from the same person he gives it to." You give blindly and receive elsewhere. "When the gift moves in a circle its motion is beyond the control of the personal ego, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith."

The classic example is the Kula ring that Bronislaw Malinowski found among the island peoples off New Guinea. Two kinds of ceremonial gift circulate in opposite directions around a wide ring of islands, red shell necklaces traveling clockwise and white armshells counterclockwise, carried by canoe across hundreds of miles. Each man has gift partners to his left and right, forever receiving armshells from one side and passing them to the other. The gifts "never stop." No one keeps a Kula valuable for long without gaining a reputation for being "slow" and "hard." Two ethics keep the exchange from becoming barter. There is a prohibition on discussion, so that the gift is given "in silence" and its return never bargained over, and there is the rule that "the equivalence of the counter-gift is left to the giver" and cannot be coerced. "You put your self in his hands."

As the circle widens it draws in more than people. The Maori speak of the hau, the spirit of the gift and of the forest that gives food. When hunters bring back birds, they give a portion to the priests, who cook them at a sacred fire and return a talisman, the mauri, to the forest, where it "causes the birds to be abundant." Three gifts, and at the end the gift returns from the third party to the first. The ceremony is called "nourishing hau," feeding the spirit, and it names an ecological truth. "The circle of gifts enters the cycles of nature," and "what nature gives to us is influenced by what we give to nature." When we treat the forest's wealth as a gift rather than as loot, we "come to feel ourselves as one part of a large self-regulating system," a return gift that Hyde notes "is literally feedback, as they say in cybernetics."

Here lies the paradox that makes gift exchange so strange to a market mind. When a gift is used, it is not used up. "The gift that is not used will be lost, while the one that is passed along remains abundant." The Kula shells are not diminished by their travels; only a foreigner who buys one for a collection "uses it up." The hunted birds remain plentiful when they are treated as gifts. As Dr. Aziz says in A Passage to India, arguing gift against commodity with the Englishman Fielding, "in the world of the spirit" you not only can have your cake and eat it too, "you can't have your cake unless you eat it."

Everywhere in these stories, gifts grow. The beggar's gift brings the barren queen a child; the Kula shells feel richer as they travel; even inert gifts "take on life" as they move from hand to hand. Hyde offers three ways to understand this increase. It can be a plain natural fact, when the gifts are living things that grow. It can be a "natural-spiritual fact," when a gift is the vehicle of a spirit that survives the consumption of its particular body. And it can be a social fact, when a circulation of gifts "creates community out of individual expressions of goodwill." The salmon return each year to the tribes of the North Pacific coast because the tribes treat them as guests, welcome the first fish with song, and return its bones to the sea to be reborn. Where "true, organic increase is at issue, gift exchange preserves that increase; the gift grows because living things grow."

The strangest increase belongs to gifts that are not alive at all. Those same tribes circulated engraved copper plaques at their potlatches, and a copper grew in worth in two opposite ways. When it was passed from tribe to tribe, each new host heaped on more blankets, so the increase was concrete, "each man really adds to the copper's worth as it comes toward him," and yet the added blankets were themselves gifts, witnesses to a swelling of "generosity, liberality, goodwill." But a copper also increased when it was broken. At a mortuary potlatch the pieces of a shattered copper were called "the bones of the dead," and the reassembled or dismembered copper was declared to be worth more than before. Here the increase came not from investment but simply "through consumption. People feel the gift is worth more just because it has been used up."

Why should a broken copper be worth more? Hyde reaches for the old vegetation gods, and for Dionysos in particular. The Romanian scholar Carl Kerényi saw in the grapevine "the image of indestructible life," and drew a distinction between two Greek words for life. Bios is "limited life, characterized life, life that dies." Zoë is "the life that endures," the thread that runs through every mortal life and is not broken when the individual perishes. Dionysos is a god of zoë, the god of honey and wine that ferment, of what rots and yet bubbles back to life, of the god who is dismembered and returns "as strong as or stronger than before." The broken copper declares the same thing about a human community. "The spirit of the gift increases because the body of the gift is consumed." This, Hyde says, is one sense in which a work of art is a gift, "a reservoir of available life" that revives the soul, carrying the zoë-life that outlasts each of us.

The point is not that we must never produce material wealth. A commerce of gifts builds houses and weaves blankets and lays up food for winter. The point is that in a gift economy "no material good becomes an item of commerce without simultaneously nourishing the spirit." Reverse the direction of the increase and you may not lose the material portion, "it may even augment it," but "the social and spiritual portions drop away. Negative reciprocity does not feed the hau." As Black Elk was told of the sacred pipe, so long as its history is passed on and the gift is used, "the people will live; but as soon as it has been forgotten, the people will be without a center and they will perish."

A whole class of gifts marks the great passages of a life, and Hyde calls them threshold gifts, or, borrowing Arnold Van Gennep's terms, "gifts of passage." They attend us at every station, from the baby shower to the graduation present to the flowers laid upon a coffin. He takes death gifts as the type of the whole class, because he wants "to speak of all transformations as involving death." Spiritually, the old life must leave before the new can enter. Initiation rites stage a symbolic death for exactly this reason, and the gifts that mark such moments make visible "the giving up we do invisibly." A gift at the threshold is not mere compensation for what is lost. It is "the promise of what lies ahead," and it guards the traveler through a change that not everyone survives.

Some gifts do more than mark a passage; they cause one. Hyde calls these transformative gifts, and his prime example is a teaching. He once counseled alcoholics and came to admire the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, in which "nothing is bought or sold" and the teachings are "a literal gift." The newcomer receives the program, and then something odd happens. "An insight may come quickly, but the gut transformation is slow." The teaching is "in passage" in the body of its recipient, sometimes for years, until it has sunk in deeply enough to be passed along. The twelfth and final step is an act of gratitude, helping the next alcoholic, "a step in which the gift is passed along." AA warns against "two-steppers" who leap from admitting the problem straight to helping others, skipping the labor in between. "They try to pass along something they themselves have not yet received."

The Grimms' tale "The Shoemaker and the Elves" is Hyde's parable of the gifted person. A poor cobbler cuts out his last leather and sleeps, and in the night two naked elves sew it into perfect shoes. Night after night they work, and the shoemaker prospers, until his wife proposes that they show their gratitude by sewing the elves some clothes. When the elves find the little garments they sing, dance, and go free, never to return, and the shoemaker prospers ever after "at whatever he takes in hand." The elves are the man's talent, arriving mysteriously while the will is slack. But "the elves have need of us, as well." Their freedom depends on "the shoemaker's recognition and gratitude." The clothes make the gift real, and the first shoes he sews himself, to dress the elves, complete his transformation. "Now the man is a real shoemaker." A gift, Hyde writes, "isn't fully realized until it is given away."

The oldest name for this labor of setting free one's gifts is the cultivation of one's genius. The Romans called a person's tutelar spirit his genius, the Greeks a daemon. It "comes to us at birth" carrying "the fullness of our undeveloped powers," and it offers them to us as we grow, so that "we choose whether or not to labor in its service." A Roman sacrificed to his genius on his birthday, feeding the spirit that fed him, and by such devotion the genius made him "genial," sexually potent, artistically creative, spiritually fertile. The opposite of this gratitude "is properly called narcissism." The narcissist "feels his gifts come from himself" and works "to display himself, not to suffer change." And so Hyde delivers a sentence that indicts a whole culture. "An age in which no one sacrifices to his genius or daemon is an age of narcissism."

This, Hyde says, is "the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange." He walks into a hardware store, pays for a hacksaw blade, and walks out, and he may never see the clerk again. "The disconnectedness is, in fact, a virtue of the commodity mode. We don't want to be bothered." But a gift makes a connection. In cheap restaurants in the south of France, Claude Lévi-Strauss noticed, each diner finds a small bottle of wine at his place, and before the meal a man will pour his wine not into his own glass but into his neighbor's, who returns the gesture. In economic terms nothing has happened; no one has more wine than before. "But society has appeared where there was none before." A trivial exchange of gifts dissolves "the mutual uncertainty" between strangers, and a whole series of social ties unfolds from it.

Every synthetic gift works this way, from the candy offered to a stranger on a plane to the massive exchanges of a wedding, which make "one body out of several." Gifts of peace end wars; gifts in marriage join clans. And in the highest cases, the incarnate gods give their own bodies as the gift that binds humanity to a higher state. Christ's body becomes "the gift, the vehicle of atonement," and Hyde pauses on that word, "to atone" is "to reunite, to make at one," to heal a falling-away. Among the tales of the Buddha's former lives, the Wise Hare, finding a hungry beggar, throws "his whole body into the jaws of his generosity" and leaps onto the fire to feed him. The great materialists, Hyde writes, are those who "extended the commodity form of value into the human body," while the great spiritual figures "have used their own bodies to extend the worth of gifts just as far."

Behind this lies a distinction between two kinds of value. A commodity, Hyde says, has value, and a gift has worth. Value comes only from comparison; a thing "has no market value in itself except when it is in the marketplace." Worth belongs to "those things we prize and yet say you can't put a price on it." To price something you must be able to stand apart from it and imagine parting with it. "I may be fond of my wristwatch but I can put a value on it because I can imagine parting with it. But my heart has no market value, for to detach it is inconceivable." This is why we recoil from the old lifeboat dilemma, being forced to rank a spouse against a child against a grandmother; we are being made to price things "to which we are emotionally connected," and the pricing is itself the violence.

Because gifts bind and commodities free, gifts have become "associated with community and with being obliged to others," while commodities are "associated with alienation and freedom." There is truth in the phrase "the free world," Hyde grants, if we hear it rightly, for a commodity binds the buyer to no one, "not to his family, to his community, or to the state." The excitement teenagers in Prague or Peking once felt for genuine Levi's is "the excitement of possibility, of floating away from the particular to taste the range of available life." The American cowboy and private eye act out for us "the drama of survival in a land where man has no attachments," free as a bird and lonesome. It is an "old lovers' quarrel between liberty and community." Westerners "are those who defend freedom and long for attachment."

Add to the bond between two people a circulation wider than a simple give-and-take, and you have the beginnings of society itself. When Lorna Marshall left a band of Bushmen she had lived with, she gave each woman a small string of cowrie shells. Returning a year later, she found hardly a shell left in the band; they had spread outward "in ones and twos in people's ornaments to the edges of the region," like water dispersing in a pool. "While gifts are marked by motion and momentum at the level of the individual, gift exchange at the level of the group offers equilibrium and coherence, a kind of anarchist stability." And the converse is the warning that runs through the whole book. "The conversion of gifts to commodities will have the effect of fragmenting the group, or even destroying it."

Carol Stack's study of an urban kin network, the Flats, shows the mechanism at work. When Magnolia and Calvin Waters inherit fifteen hundred dollars, the news spreads through the network of kin, "those you count on," and within six weeks the money is gone, dispersed in rent and train fare and winter coats and a burial. "The only way this couple could have capitalized on their good fortune would have been to cut themselves off from the group." Magnolia's sister Lydia did exactly that once, cutting off her kin for ten years to buy a house and furniture, until her marriage began to fail and she quietly gave a couch to her brother, a television to a niece, and "reincorporated herself into the network." There is no simple moral, Hyde says, because there is no simple way to resolve "the conflict between community and individual advancement." But the pattern holds. A group forms and endures when property circulates as gift, and fragments when the gift is stopped.

Hyde's subtlest example is the community of science. Papers in scientific journals are literally called "contributions," and they are gifts; the authors are usually not paid, and work written for money, textbooks and popularizations, is held in lower esteem. A scientist earns status not by acquiring but by giving away, exactly as a Kwakiutl name is "raised" by giving property and "flattened" by receiving it. The task of assembling scattered facts into coherent theory "clearly lies beyond the powers of a single mind," so science needs a "group mind" into which each thinker's ideas are contributed, accepted or rejected, and integrated. Convert those ideas to commodities, lock them behind patents and trade secrets and technology-transfer offices, and the group mind cannot form. "In a free market the people are free, the ideas are locked up." When a lab starts patenting what its neighbors treated as common property, the researchers say, "Now we are locking our doors."

Which leaves the modern world its hardest unsolved problem. "It remains an unsolved dilemma of the modern world, one to which anarchists have repeatedly addressed themselves, as to how we are to preserve true community in a mass society, one whose dominant value is exchange value and whose morality has been codified into law." The question is not answered here so much as opened, and it will haunt the second half of the book, where the artist must live and work inside exactly this dilemma.

One item on the old lists of gifts jars the modern ear. "At the great festival they gave away canoes, whale oil, stone ax blades, women, blankets, and food." Of all the cases in which people are treated as gifts, the primary one is the woman given in marriage, a custom we still preserve when the minister asks, "Who giveth this woman?" and the father answers, "I do." Hyde is careful. She is a kind of property, but "the property rights involved are not those to which the phrase usually refers. She is not a chattel, she is not a commodity; her father may be able to give her away, but he may not sell her." To understand this we need a definition. Property is "a right of action," an expression of the human will in things and in people, and among the actions one may have "in" a thing is the right to sell and, distinctly, the right to give.

Modern organ transplants forced the law to sharpen exactly this distinction. A dead body was long held to be no one's property, so that it could not be sold to pay debts. But once a kidney could be transplanted, every state adopted a Uniform Anatomical Gift Act recognizing "the right of an adult to bequeath all or part of his body," and extending to parents the right to donate a dead child's organs. "The law justly restrained the right to sell, but what of the right to bestow?" Because gift property "retains or even increases its liveliness," most cultures classify human life as a gift, which is why a child's life may be given in adoption but not sold, and why the newborn is felt to be "a gift that has been bestowed upon its parents," who are its custodians until it matures.

Whether women are given in marriage turns out to track the power a culture grants them. Among the matrilineal Uduk there are essentially no marriage gifts, women "readily quit an unsatisfying union," and when the Ethiopian government tried to introduce bridewealth to make marriages more stable, the Uduk revolted at the idea, refusing to pay and crying, "Are we to sell our girl as if she were a goat or something?" Hyde draws a general rule. "The amount of self-will recognized for women is inversely proportional to the size of the return gift." Where women may inherit, bequeath, and carry a dowry of their own, any wealth exchanged for a bride tends to be felt "as an immoral purchase, not as a gift." The India of the Code of Manu says the same as the Uduk. "No father may take even the smallest gratuity for his daughter; for a man who takes a gratuity is a seller of his offspring." What is truly onerous, then, is not that a person can be a gift but that in a patriarchy "the right of bestowal passes to the son when he comes of age, but not to the daughter."

Hyde is careful about the conclusion. We can and should reward gift labors where we value them, "pay social workers as we pay doctors, pay poets as we do bankers," but if we do, "we shall have to recognize that the pay they receive has not been made the way fortunes are made in the market, that it is a gift bestowed by the group." The costs of "female" tasks "cannot be expressed through a market system." So the feminist demand for "equal pay for equal work" must be distinguished from "the equally important need to keep some parts of our social, cultural, and spiritual life out of the marketplace." The way past the old gender system is not to convert all gift labor into cash work but "to recognize that they are not female but human tasks," and to widen "our sense of possible masculinity" to include the giving of gifts.

The oldest meaning of usury, Hyde argues, is nothing more than the increase that comes to a gift as it is used, the "use-ance," reckoned and charged. When a man borrows a bushel of seed grain and returns it with the extra it yielded, that extra is the usura, and among gift-friends it is simply "the expression of gratitude," never named or charged. Usury as a distinct idea "appears when spiritual, moral, and economic life begin to be separated from one another, probably at the time when foreign trade, exchange with strangers, begins." Where wealth moves as a gift, its increase is at once material, social, and spiritual. When trade no longer connects one person to another, that unity splits, and "a commercial language appears." Then "increase does not appear between gift partners, usury appears between debtors and creditors." The Koran keeps the two apart, blessing the increase that comes of almsgiving and condemning the increase of usury, riba. Aristotle called the breeding of money from money "the most unnatural" of all ways to get wealth.

The heart of the whole debate is a single double law in Deuteronomy. "Unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury," but "unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury." Hyde reads it as the wisdom of "a brotherhood wandering among strangers." Inside the group, wealth must circulate as gift, so no one is more or less in touch with the necessities of life, and a needy person's neediness "is felt throughout the group, and its wealth flows toward the need and fills it without reflection." Put another way, "there shall be no business in the tribe." But at the edge, where a stranger with a different god may never return, the gift is rationalized into a loan with interest and collateral. "The God who permits usury is one who allows gift exchange to have a boundary," and the boundary protects the interior "so that the fluid property within will not be lost or spread too thin."

Then Jesus dissolved the wall. If all men are brothers, "compassion, not blood, makes one a brother," and the boundary that once ran around the tribe now had no place to stand. For fifteen centuries the Church tried to hold that impossible universal, resolving the double law "on the side of charity," insisting that "usury and brotherhood were wholly antithetical." But a shadow fell behind the unbounded compassion. "As soon as all men ought to be brothers, all aliens become enemies," and much of the darkness of the Middle Ages, from anti-Semitism to the Crusades, grew in that shadow, with the Jew cast as the one permitted to practice a hated usury on behalf of a Christendom that needed the trade.

What the modern world is left with is a vast middle ground. Between the pure gift and outright theft lies "balanced reciprocity," the exchange of "cordial strangers" who are "neither real friends nor real aliens." They loan at "the equity rate," the honest approximation of increase that assures a market relationship "and no more." Above it sit the rates for speculators and the modern usury of loan sharks; below it fall the "friendship rates" that shade down to the interest-free loan and pure gift. A market society leans on that middle, because it lets "the true citizens of a mass society, members of no community of common faith, maintain an ongoing commerce with one another." The ethic that once appeared "at the edge of the group now appears at the edge of the self." Behind the whole history lies a change in faith itself, for gift exchange and faith are alike disinterested. "Gift increases inside the circle; capital bears interest at the boundary. These are all one and the same: faithlessness, usury, and the alienation of both property and persons."

Now Hyde reads all the fairy tales and ethnography of Part I as "Just So stories of the creative spirit." He begins where the work begins, with its source. "An essential portion of any artist's labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received." We court it, he says, by "creating within ourselves that begging bowl to which the gift is drawn." Poet after poet testifies. Milosz felt "that everything I might accomplish in life would not be won by my own efforts but given as a gift." Pinter says his play "germinated and bred itself." Roethke describes a poem that "started, and finished itself in a very short time." The craft, the revision, the judgment all come after, and they "cannot begin until the body of the work is on the page." As with the Kula prohibition on naming the gift's value, "premature evaluation cuts off the flow. The imagination does not barter its engendering images."

Having received the gift, the artist must give it away, for the same law governs the inner world as the outer. The gift must stay in motion. "Publish or perish is an internal demand of the creative spirit," May Sarton wrote, for "the gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up." And the gift is not used up in use. "It is the talent which is not in use that is lost or atrophies, and to bestow one of our creations is the surest way to invoke the next." When Hermes invents the lyre and gives it to Apollo, he is at once inspired to invent the pipes. "Bestowal creates that empty place into which new energy may flow."

The artist also returns the work toward its source, a first-fruits ritual of the imagination. "Just as treating nature's bounty as a gift ensures the fertility of nature, so to treat the products of the imagination as gifts ensures the fertility of the imagination." The injunction is simple: "Do not exploit the essence." Whitman dedicated his gift back to his soul, Pound to "tradition," Neruda to "the people." Gary Snyder describes learning it directly. Once he "just dropped poetry," and afterward "started writing poems that were better," each one "like a surprise. You get a good poem and you don't know where it came from. Did I say that? And so all you feel is: you feel humility and you feel gratitude." The mark of the gifted state, Hyde says, is that the artist is "self-squandering, self-abnegating, self-forgetful." As Flannery O'Connor put it, "in art the self becomes self-forgetful."

Against this Hyde sets the modern reality, "The Paper Chase" bumped around the television schedule to chase a Nielsen point worth $2.8 million, and Salvador Dali signing forty thousand blank sheets of paper to be filled in later and sold. "The more we allow such commodity art to define and control our gifts, the less gifted we will become, as individuals and as a society." The true commerce of art is a gift exchange, and only where it can proceed on its own terms will we inherit its fruits, "a creative spirit whose fertility is not exhausted in use," works "that can serve as agents of transformation," and "a sense of an inhabitable world." No amount of gold flake, he says, "will free the genius of our race."

Hyde reads Walt Whitman as the exemplary poet of the gift. A creation myth opens the story. In an early notebook the young Whitman describes his hunger fighting with his soul over a meal, "will you stuff your greed and starve me?" But in "Song of Myself" he answers the soul's hunger; he shares his bread. "Loafe with me on the grass," he invites it, and the soul comes as a lover, settles its head athwart his hips, and "plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart." Bread given, tongue received. It is exactly the commerce of the Roman and his genius, "an interior give-and-take between a man and his tutelary spirit," and through it Whitman "enters a way of being, a state, in which an ongoing commerce of gifts is constantly available to him." The tension of "mine and his" falls away, and the poet is born.

The gifted state, Hyde shows, is an erotic state of unity. Whitman "puts hierarchy to sleep." His famous catalogs induce his own equanimity in the reader, focusing "unqualified attention" on so wide a range of creation that "our sense of discrimination soon withdraws for lack of use." All things "carry equivalent worth simply by virtue of their existence, be they presidents or beetles rolling balls of dung." He would be useless in the lifeboat dilemma. He refuses commerce with "the brain that divides," with any spirit that would "cipher and show me to a cent, exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two." "Master," he wrote to Emerson, "I am a man who has perfect faith," and faith "does not question." Whitman is an enthusiast in the old sense, one whose spiritual knowing runs through the body, and Hyde places him precisely. "Cash exchange is to gift exchange what reason is to enthusiasm." Whitman was "Emerson's enthusiast, Emerson with a body."

Whitman's central image, the grass, "almost always appears over a grave." It grew from a single note in his earliest journal, "I know that my body will decay," and from the wish to find "a way of being which could include the fact of death." The grass sprouts from the buried and then it speaks, "so many uttering tongues" from "the faint red roofs" of the mouths of the dead. Like Osiris, the dismembered god who "comes back green," the self that accepts decay finds its voice at the threshold "where identity forms and perishes." Whitman becomes "the mouthpiece of the dumb," lending his tongue to "the interminable generations of slaves," to the diseased and despairing, to "fog in the air and beetles rolling balls of dung," giving speech to all "the buried speech" that would otherwise perish, "for we shall lose that life which remains unarticulated."

The finished poem, for Whitman, is the third gift in a chain. There is the initial gift bestowed on the self, the gift of talent by which the artist can labor, and "the finished work, the one offered to the world," a gift directed back "specifically to the clan and homeland of an earlier gift." Whitman offers it forward, into the future, to "O reader of the future," to wake the gifted self "in any who would receive his poem." A live tradition works this way, "bestowed from the dead to the living and from the living to the unborn," the images speaking for themselves so that "we fall in love with the spirits of the dead" and are drawn "into a life higher than that to which they have been born." Whitman, the mother's son, "courted the future"; his heirs, from Hart Crane to Neruda to William Carlos Williams, are the enthusiasts of Whitman as Whitman was of Emerson. "Sprouts take and accumulate."

Ezra Pound believed in "the undivided light," the fecundity of nature and of the mind, and he wanted his poetry to preserve it. But those who face his work, Hyde says, "will find no such light to guide them there. Something has scattered it in all directions." The scattering is the subject of the chapter. Pound's temperament held two opposed forces. On one side was Eleusinian fecundity, the pagan mystery of coitus and the grain and the "liquid light" of the imagination, which "can be destroyed by any dividing or splitting." This is the root of his Imagism, "Go in fear of abstractions," his insistence on concrete speech, his delight that a Chinese character could define "red" by drawing ROSE, CHERRY, IRON RUST, and FLAMINGO together rather than climbing "progressively remoter abstractions." On the other side was Confucian order, and here Pound trusted the will. "The greater the artist," he wrote, "the more permanent his creation, and this is a matter of WILL."

And there lies the flaw. There are two phases to making art, one in which the will is suspended so that "something other will come forward," and one in which the will is active, carrying the material back to be reworked. Whitman lolled on the grass; Kerouac wrote "submissive to everything." But Pound distrusted the idle, unwilled, "stupid" and "lazy" fecundity that is the wellspring of creation, and drove his will harder in exact proportion to his frustration with the powerlessness of the erotic. "Willpower has a tendency to usurp the functions of imagination." As Yeats said, "rhetoric is the will doing the work of the imagination." The will "knows about survival and endurance," but "we cannot remember a tune or a dream on willpower. Will may direct virtù but it cannot bring it into the world. The will by itself cannot heal the soul. And it cannot create." When the will dominates, "there is no gap through which grace may enter."

Pound's generosity to other artists was extraordinary, and it flowed straight from his sense that "true worth inheres in the creative spirit." He midwifed Eliot's "Prufrock" into print, took his red pencil to "The Waste Land," and launched a subscription scheme to free Eliot from his bank job. He got Joyce's Ulysses supported, mailed him money and a parcel of used clothes and old brown shoes, and, as Hemingway wrote, spent his own days getting fellow artists "into magazines and out of jail," loaning them money, sitting up all night with them, dissuading them "from suicide." "Wealth that came to Pound left him in the service of art." His economics began, sincerely, as an attempt to find "a money system that might replicate the form of value that emanates from creative life." Why, he asked in effect, have no proper shoes been distributed to James Joyce?

And here the tragedy closes. Rather than "revalue the gift through affirmation," Pound "undertook the hopeless task of changing the nature of money itself," and, unable to change it, resolved to police it by the will of the state. He called his politics "a volitionist economics," and the will drew him to Fascism, to Mussolini, and to the paranoid projection of all evil onto a single figure, "a Hermes/Jew whom he chose to fight man to man." He broadcast for the Axis, was charged with treason, and was locked in a wire cage near Pisa until he broke. In old age he fell silent for eleven years. Asked where he was living, he answered, "In hell." When Allen Ginsberg visited him, Pound at last whispered his confession, "my worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of antisemitism, all along, that spoiled everything." Ginsberg, "the Buddhist Jew," offered him a blessing instead of a judgment, and "a light suddenly fell from a window no one had noticed." One of Pound's last written lines was a correction of his whole crusade. "Re USURY. I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. The cause is AVARICE."

In his conclusion, Hyde does something rare for an author. He reports that his own position changed as he wrote. He began believing in "an irreconcilable conflict between gift exchange and the market," and that the true artist must "defend himself against all temptations to commercialize his calling." He still holds that "the primary commerce of art is a gift exchange" and that "a gift can be destroyed by the marketplace." "But I no longer feel the poles of this dichotomy to be so strongly opposed." Working through the history of usury taught him that "gift exchange and the market need not be wholly separate spheres." Pound's life proves the alternative is a dead end. "The market is an emanation of logos, and logos is as much a part of the human spirit as eros is; we can no more do away with it than Pound could keep Hermes out of his head."

The resolution lies in the very boundary the Deuteronomy laws drew. It can be permeable. "Gift-increase may be converted into market-increase. And vice versa: the interest that a stranger pays on a loan may be brought into the center and converted into gifts." Within limits, "gift wealth may be rationalized and market wealth may be eroticized." The question is no longer "Can gift and commodity coexist?" but "To what degree may one draw from the other without destroying it?" There is a degree of commercialization that destroys a community, and a refusal of all trade that starves it. "Between these two extremes lies a middle ground in which, sometimes, eros and logos may coexist."

No matter the route, Hyde warns, the artist "is likely to be poor." Neither Whitman nor Pound ever made a living from art. And here he distinguishes the actual penury from "the poverty of the gift," an interior, spiritual poverty that belongs to the gifted state, in which "those things that are not gifts are judged to have no worth, and those things that are gifts are understood to be but temporary possessions." We are, as Leviticus says of the land, "strangers and sojourners" with our gifts, "not their owners." "Spiritually, you can't be much poorer than gifted." An artist whose gifts are strong and flowing can, like Sahlins's hunters and gatherers, "have affluent economies, their absolute poverty notwithstanding." Yet where a culture has no institutions "for the conversion of market wealth to gift wealth," where it "cannot settle the debt it owes to those who have dedicated their lives to a gift," the interior poverty of the artist tends to become poverty in fact.

Hyde closes the argument with a mystery, because a gift, he says, is finally a thing we can only point to through stories. The root of "mystery" is a Greek verb meaning to close the mouth; what the initiate learns "cannot be explained. It can be shown." So he offers a last tale. As a small boy in frontier Chile, Pablo Neruda pushed a treasured pine cone through a hole in his backyard fence, and an unseen hand pushed back a worn white toy sheep. He never saw the other child again, and lost the sheep in a fire, but "this exchange of gifts, mysterious, settled deep inside me." From it he traces his poetry, and "the great lesson I learned in my childhood." To feel affection "from those unknown to us," he said, "widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things. It won't surprise you then that I have attempted to give something resiny, earthlike, and fragrant in exchange for human brotherhood."

What remains, then, is the vision the whole book was written to protect. A work of art is a gift, and a gift is a thing whose life depends on its motion. It must move; it moves in a circle; it increases as it is given away; it binds us to one another and to whatever we take to be the source of our gifts. The market, an emanation of logos, is real and cannot be wished away, but it must not be allowed to rule where eros belongs, lest we wake, as Hyde warns, in "that universal market in which all our actions earn a wage and all our goods and services bear a price." The artist's task, and ours, is to keep a protected place for the gift, to labor in gratitude, and to give what we have been given away again, so that "the accumulated wealth of our spirit" may keep growing among us. Where there is no gift, there is no art.