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Friday
This past April the New Yorker’s Jill Lepore reported on how she turned to a hundred classics to survive the first one hundred days of the Trump administration. Her resounding conclusion—”There is no emergency, nor any day, that does not require poetry”—could well be the motto for my own blog.
By poetry Lepore means fine writing, and the works she turned to for solace and strength were Penguin’s Little Black Classics, a collection of slim paperbacks that she noted can be held in the hand like a phone. Her article traces the history of cheap versions of the classics, going back to 1906 when a London bookseller began publishing the Everyman Library. The company drew its name from Knowledge’s advice to Everyman in the medieval play of that name: “Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, / In thy most need to go by thy side.” In dire times, Lepore asserts, we need wisdom.
A more direct ancestor of the Little Black Classics is the “Little Leather Library,” which was founded in America in 1915 and which produced “handy little classics” by such figures as Shakespeare, Longfellow, Tennyson, and Poe. When America entered the war in 1917, Lepore writes, the company
began to sell them by mail order to the families of soldiers to send to the boys at the front, because men in trenches, and men who’d once been in trenches, battered by shelling and up to their waists in mud and blood, “read, eagerly, cravingly, everything they can lay their hands on,” as a Little Leather Library ad explained in October, 1917. “They have gone through such frightful experiences that they require something to put them in touch again with a sane world.”
Thinking of that war, Lepore quotes from Wilfred Owen’s poem “1914,” which she encountered in Penguin Little Black Classics #50, focusing especially on the passage,
. . . Rent or furled
Are all Art’s ensigns. Verse wails. Now begin
Famines of thought and feeling. Love’s wine’s thin.
The grain of human Autumn rots, down-hurled.
While not a soldier on the battlefield, Lepore says that “now begin famines of thought and feeling” struck home.
In some ways, Lepore’s project could be best summed up by the 14th century Japanese Buddhist poet Yoshido Kenkō (#11): “It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.”
I won’t mention all of the works that Lepore turned to, just cite some of the highlights. As is customary with this blog, I’ll confine myself to poetry, fiction, and drama.
–For the Silicon Valley billionaires licking Trump’s boots, there’s this line from the Greek poet Sappho (#74): “Wealth without real worthiness / Is no good for the neighborhood.”
–For Trump’s assaults on the National Parks and the environment generally, Lepore recorded two lines from a Tang dynasty poet (#9): “Can I bear to leave these blue hills? / And the green stream—what of that?”
–For the stop-work order for the H.I.V./AIDS treatment-and-prevention program, which is expected to lead to the deaths of half a million children in sub-Saharan Africa by 2030 and the orphaning of another 2.8 million, there was Mark Twain’s “The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Didn’t Come to Grief” (#88). Lepore explains that it’s
the tale of a very nasty little boy who, unlike those in all the storybooks, never pays the cost for all the terrible things he does: “And he grew up, and married, and raised a large family, and brained them all with an axe one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and rascality, and now he is the infernalest wickedest scoundrel in his native village, and is universally respected, and belongs to the Legislature.”
–For the Democrats’ ineffective protest at Trump’s State of the Union speech, Lepore was put in mind of the damned awaiting progress across the River Styx in canto 3 of Dante’s Inferno (#25):
They raged, blaspheming God and their own kin,
the human race, the place and time, the seed
from which they’d sprung, the day that they’d been born.
–After seeing a Turkish graduate student at Tufts being handcuffed by immigration officers, Lepore reread “The Nightingales Are Drunk” by the great 14th century Persian poet Hafez (#27):
And when did kindness end? What brought
The sweetness of our town to naught?
–When Jeff Bezos, Amazon and Washington Post owner, declared that the newspaper would no longer print columns questioning the free market, Lepore turned to Gogol’s short story “The Nose” (#46), a satire involving a nose that escapes from a man’s face. Lepore focused on the following passage, in which he wants to advertise to get it back:
The clerk’s tightly pressed lips showed he was deep in thought. “I can’t print an advertisement like that in our paper,” he said after a long silence.
“What? Why not?”
“I’ll tell you. A paper can get a bad name. If everyone started announcing his nose had run away, I don’t know how it would all end.”
–Aesop’s fable about “The Frogs Who Demanded a King” (#61) was an obvious choice although to compare Joe Biden to the log in the story does an injustice to his presidency. Still, many who voted for Trump are discovering they elected a water serpent:
The frogs, annoyed with the anarchy in which they lived, sent a deputation to Zeus to ask him to give them a king. Zeus, seeing that they were but very simple creatures, threw a piece of wood into their marsh. The frogs were so alarmed by the sudden noise that they plunged into the depths of the bog. But when the piece of wood did not move, they clambered out again. They developed such a contempt for this new king that they jumped on his back and crouched there.
The frogs were deeply ashamed at having such a king, so they sent a second deputation to Zeus asking him to change their monarch. For the first was too passive and did nothing.
Zeus now became impatient with them and sent down a water-serpent which seized them and ate them all up.
–When Columbia University “decided to allow Trump to dictate what college students will learn about the Middle East,” which was followed up by the White House announcing an end to legal aid for migrant children, Lepore turned to the world’s most famous essay about victimizing children. In Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” (#8) we read, “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my Acquaintance in London; that a young healthy Child, well nursed, is, at a Year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food.”
–When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and various other Cabinet members were discovered using insecure communications channels, Lepore thought of the Brothers Grimm story “The Six Servants” (#68):
After a while they found another man lying on the ground with one ear pressed against the grass. ‘What are you doing there?’ asked the prince. ‘I’m listening,’ answered the man. ‘What are you listening for so attentively?’ ‘I’m listening to what’s going on in the world at this moment, for nothing escapes my ears, I can even hear the grass growing.’
Lepore observes, “It sounds like Pete Hegseth, tapping at his phone, “Just CONFIRMED w/CENTCOM we are a GO for mission launch.”
–A line from Virgil’s “Eclogue II” (#76), in which the speaker laments how good men have sowed the fields for godless soldiers and barbarians to harvest, came to mind when Lepore saw the banner “SAVE OUR DEMOCRACY, UPHOLD OUR CONSTITUTION” draped over an overpass. As she reports, she had to pull over on the soft shoulder (“not soft enough”) and weep as she thought of the passage,
Look where strife
has led
Rome’s wretched citizens.
–Trump’s non-stop threats brought to mind a passage in Coleridge’s poem “Fears in Solitude” (#35), in which the poet is worrying about the threat represented by Napoleon:
. . . may the vaunts
And menace of the vengeful enemy
Pass like the gust.
–When Trump promised new tariffs on “Liberation Day,” causing both the stock market and the bond market to plummet, Lepore turned to the great 17th century haiku poet Matsuo Bashō (#62):
Spring’s exodus—
birds shriek,
fish eyes blink tears.
–Lepore turned to literature to process some of her frustrations at the Democrats’ response to Trump. For Cory Booker’s impressively long but ultimately ineffective filibuster, Henry James’s “The Figure in the Carpet” (#49) came to mind:
I had thought him placid, and he was placid enough; such a surface was the hard polished glass that encased the bauble of his vanity.
–More hopeful was an April 1 Democratic victory in Wisconsin assuring the state of a more balanced Supreme Court. A line from Edith Wharton’s “The Reckoning” jumped out: “Did not a magnolia open its hard white flowers against the watery blue of April.”
–The continued failure of Democratic messaging, however, sent Lepore to Sophocles’s Antigone (#55). The “blows of fate” are a reference to Creon losing his son Haemon, who has committed suicide in response to Antigone’s suicide:
Chorus: The mighty words of the proud are paid in full
with mighty blows of fate, and at long last
those blows will teach us wisdom.
–For Trump’s attacks on Harvard, Lepore imagines the university as Odysseus threatened by the cyclops, “a giant lawless brute,” who has him trapped in his cave: “When young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more / the monster relit his fire.”
Lepore says she saved Walt Whitman for the hundredth day because, like her, he relied on the classics to carry him through:
Whitman wanted to be the Homer of America, the Herodotus of democracy. He, too, toted around little copies of the classics. “Every now and then,” he once wrote, “I carried a book in my pocket—or perhaps tore out from some broken or cheap edition a bunch of loose leaves.” He loved the Iliad. He pored over Virgil and Sophocles, Shakespeare and Dante. And yet he insisted, “I stand in my place with my own day here.”
Lepore chose a passage from Whitman’s “With Antecedents.” Written in 1860 when America was on the verge of civil war, it provides an important perspective for living in troubled times:
I assert that all past days were what they must have been,
And what they could no-how have been better than they were,
And that to-day is what it must be, and that America is,
And that to-day and America could no-how be better than they are.
Whitman doesn’t necessarily want us to stop trying to make America better, but he wants us to stop fretting when it falls short of what we would like. His magisterial view suggests that we should factor in shortcomings—we are who we are—rather than fall into despair. In pointing out that we are the culmination of soaring human history, he appears to be counseling a kind of acceptance.
That being said, I’m a little surprised that Lepore stopped at his observations about the past and the present. After all, the poem concludes with Whitman looking towards the future:
I know that the past was great, and the future will be great,
And I know that both curiously conjoint in the present time,
(For the sake of him I typify—for the common average man’s sake—
your sake, if you are he
And that where I am, or you are, this present day, there is the
center of all days, all races,
And there is the meaning, to us, of all that has ever come of races
and days, or ever will come.
As we are assaulted daily by Trump’s attempts at a fascist coup—just as Whitman would have been assaulted by secessionist talk—it’s good sometimes to step back and see ourselves in the larger sweep of history. Lepore takes some comfort from seeing the present moment from this vantage point.
