The Super Bowl edged out yesterday’s Valentine’s Day post so here it is a day late. I’ve always liked Lucille Clifton’s “salt” because it gives us insight into her marriage to Fred Clifton, who tragically died of lung cancer before his time (he didn’t smoke).
Lucille joined us at St. Mary’s College of Maryland not long after Fred had died but, because she was a private person, I never learned too much about him. As I read the poem, she all but says that Fred was an acquired taste—but that it was her taste (“precious and valuable only to her tribe”). In the history of the word, salt has been used as currency in certain cultures and Clifton plays on that fact here.
And then there’s how she comes across to Fred. While she acknowledges that she can rub Fred raw in quarrels that end in tears (or at any rate, that leave “a tearful taste”), she is also what he needs. Maybe he is drawn to her because she rubs him raw. From what I can tell, he was no less a forceful personality than she was.
Clifton doesn’t use the Valentine’s Day cliché that their love is as deep as the ocean. Instead, she says that her husband will strain the entire ocean for a taste of her. Which is romantic in a visceral type of way.
Here’s the poem:
he is salt to her, a strange sweet a peculiar money precious and valuable only to her tribe, and she is salt to him, something that rubs raw that leaves a tearful taste but what he will strain the ocean for and what he needs
Charles Cowden-Clarke, Chaucer’s Miller winning “the ram”
Monday
Congratulations to the Rams for winning their first Super Bowl for Los Angeles (they won one when they moved to St. Louis before returning to Los Angeles). When, in the third quarter, I thought the Bengals would win, I started concocting a blog post featuring William Blake’s “The Tyger.” In the poem, Blake contrasts this fearsome predator with a member of the sheep family. Not a ram, to be sure—but then, at that point in the game, the Bengals had reduced the Ram to lambs, especially when it came to the run game.
Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies. Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears And water’d heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Cincinnati was proving very much to be a hammer, and the Los Angeles backs were experiencing their “dread grasp” on virtually every running play. In the poem, Blake is amazed that a supposedly benign god—the god who creates sweet little lambs—could also hammer out such a creature on a celestial anvil. I imagine him watching an American football game and wondering what kind of a divinity would create 250-pound linebackers that run like deer and hit with the force of sledgehammers.
But then Los Angeles rose to the occasion, finally behaving more like their moniker as they charged into the Cincinnati offensive line. They got to the Bengals’ talented quarterback multiple times, including on the play that effectively ended the game. As distraught as the Bengals are, maybe they’ll take consolation from the fact that I compare their opponent to one of Chaucer’s most disagreeable characters.
The miller is noted for his wrestling skills, for which he will often win—wait for it—“the ram.” (I’m not sure why a ram would have been the prize for which they were fighting.) But that’s not his only association with the animal. The miller is also famous for running into doors with his head, thereupon either breaking them or heaving them off their hinges. His physical build, as described by Chaucer, would make him an ideal football player:
The MILLERE was a stout carl for the nones; Ful byg he was of brawn, and eek of bones.
He’s also a drunkard and a loud-mouthed braggart who tells dirty stories. He plays the bagpipes (in other words, he’s full of hot air) and insists on always taking the lead. I haven’t followed the Rams team close enough to know whether there are any members who fit that description.
In any event, here are the relevant lines from Chaucer’s Prologue, with every other line the modern translation.
The MILLERE was a stout carl for the nones; The MILLER was a stout fellow indeed; Ful byg he was of brawn, and eek of bones. He was very strong of muscle, and also of bones. That proved wel, for over al ther he cam, That was well proven, for wherever he came, At wrastlynge he wolde have alwey the ram. At wrestling he would always take the the prize. He was short-sholdred, brood, a thikke knarre; He was stoutly built, broad, a large-framed fellow; Ther was no dore that he nolde heve of harre, There was no door that he would not heave off its hinges, Or breke it at a rennyng with his heed. Or break it by running at it with his head.
And, oh yes, the miller is often a cheat, stealing from the farmers who bring him their grain. But for ramming things, he’s your man.
Sewell as Will Ladislaw and Aubrey as Dorothea in Middlemarch (1993)
Spiritual Sunday
My good friend and editor extraordinaire Rebecca Adams just alerted me to a fine blog post on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. In the view of Lindsey Brigham Knott of the Circe Institution, Eliot’s magnificent novel grapples with the question, “What happens when a person of fervent ideals is born into a place and age that cannot support them?”
Knott points out that Middlemarch compares protagonist Dorothea Brooke with Teresa of Avila. As Eliot states in her preface, certain people, “with dim lights and tangled circumstance [try] to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement.” Unfortunately, to all the rest of the world,” their struggles seem
mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Teresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul.”
Knott observes that the challenge arises in figuring out what path to choose. Since that path must be “greater and beyond” self, the ardently willing soul “longs to be directed, subsumed into an end other, greater, and more self-evidently transcendent than its own whims and fancies.” For St. Teresa, this transcendence involves working to reform the Carmelite Orders within the context of a divine mission. For Dorothea, lacking this religious context, it takes the form of marrying a stodgy professor who seems to be working on a great work, a key to all mythologies. Dorothea will (as she sees it) become his amanuensis, supporting him as Milton’s daughters supported their father to produce Paradise Lost. Unfortunately for Dorothea, Casaubon is no Milton. Knott points out,
She creates plans for cottages that would improve the lives of neighboring estates’ tenant farmers; she embarks on regimens of personal discipline and denial; in what should be her culminating glory, she marries a man in order to aid him in finishing his life’s work of scholarship before his looming death. But these attempts, though they promised great reservoirs to fill, prove too shallow for the flood of her zeal. Her plans for reform are dismissed as frivolous and expensive; her efforts at denial earn her only a reputation of oddness; and, rather than a great work, her husband’s scholarship turns out to be little more than the crabbed scrawls of a weary mind. So she pours her passion out, only to watch it overspill and soak, heedlessly, into barren ground.
Dorothea is not the only character who experiences such frustration. Lydgate is a visionary doctor who wants to bring new medical and sanitation practices to the area and also build a much needed hospital. Unfortunately, his vision is stymied by local politics and he is essentially broken by his failure, leaving in disgrace and spending the rest of life servicing wealthy invalids in a resort town. His shallow and materialistic wife is happy but he himself, having been denied a higher purpose, dies an existential death, which in turn is followed by his actual death.
Thus, Dorothea and Lydgate are in the same boat. Knott writes,
For what Eliot critiques through her novel is not the protagonist, whose impetuous errors are described with gentle pity, but rather her setting—Middlemarch, as the title indicates, an English neighborhood that represents the social order of the whole nineteenth century, and that our own twenty-first century perpetuates. Dorothea’s ideals do not fail because of her poor choices, but because of the poor circumstances her world offers her.
At this point in her essay, Knott cites Middlemarch’s finale:
[A]midst the conditions of an imperfect social state . . . great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Teresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone.
Applying the message to our own times, Knott writes that,
in the world of the modern West’s secularized syncretism, the medium of ardent deeds is forever gone. Here, neither Teresa nor Antigone would have known how to act significantly, because there is no consensus on what constitutes significant action. The actions that were clearly transcendent in the medium of their own times could only be met with this response today: “Well . . . it was an extreme choice . . . but if it was personally meaningful . . . then it must have been fulfilling to them”—and no ardently willing soul would want to pour its fervor out for something merely personally meaningful.
The answer, as Knott sees it, is “a classical Christian education [that offers] not offer a worldview, but a world”:
This could, perhaps, form a fresh metaphor for understanding the task of classical Christian education. It is not only to train students in wisdom and virtue, but to summon them into a medium beyond their present circumstances in which wise and virtuous acts can take shape. It is to make the legends of Homer’s Troy, Dante’s Paradise, Milton’s Eden feel like students’ own history, and then to make their history feel like a grand legend, and their present but a small chapter in that tale. It is to reveal their religion, not as a school’s statement of faith or Sunday church attendance, but as the interpretive key to all time and space. It is to cultivate, within the walls of the classical school and classical home, a communion of people who share this sense of the drama in which they are supporting cast.
I’m not entirely sure of the relationship between “classical” and “Christian” in Knott’s articulation. Homer, after all, is not a Christian author and Dante and Milton have different Christian visions. But I fully subscribe to Knott’s view that many people, those in their teens and twenties especially, long for a meaningful quest and sometimes thrash around trying to find it—and that literature is a powerful guide to help them find their way. The quest, in other words, has a spiritual dimension, even though I would disagree with Knott that it can find articulation only through a religious education.
And in that light, I believe that the political path that Dorothea is planning with her second husband at the end of the book addresses some of the meaning that Knott finds missing. The social reform to which the couple dedicate their lives is as worthy–as spiritual–as convent reform.
It has been revealing to teach a college literature class again after a gap of two years, during which time I worked full throttle on a book where I emphasize that literature is meant to be applied more than it is meant to be interpreted.
Not that interpretation is unimportant. In fact, it helps us apply works to our lives. But if one starts with the premise that literature above all is meant to open eyes and change lives (oh, and to delight us), then the focus shifts. Don’t worry about coming up with original readings, I have been telling my students. Discuss how the works give you a way of talking about things you care about.
Once one does that, then layered symbolism becomes, not a set of hoops to leap through, but a helpful attempt to fully articulate the situation.
Having just completed the poetry section of “Introduction to Composition and Literature,” I’ve seen my students find invaluable life advice in poems by Mary Oliver, Lucille Clifton, and Adrienne Rich. I share some of the stories below, speaking sometimes in vague terms to protect the students’ privacy.
A couple of students recognized, from reflecting on Oliver’s “The Journey,” how enabling the neediness of others can stunt one’s own growth. They also took heart from Oliver assuring them that it’s possible to break free of dependent relationships. As the poet puts it,
But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do– determined to save the only life you could save.
–One student learned, from reading Clifton’s poem about her autistic grandson, that assisting people with disabilities can be a two-way street. One thinks one is helping others, only to learn that one is being helped in return.
–Another discovered, from Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck,” that there’s a way to articulate and process the dark feelings that arise from life having dealt one a bad hand. The student particularly liked the passage,
I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail.
–A male student appreciated how Rich understands, in a poem like “The Knight,” the pressures upon men to be knights in shining armor—which is to say (when it comes to college men) stellar students who, upon graduation from college, land high paying jobs that make their parents proud of them. The student liked Rich’s description of the knight being pressured by “the walls of iron, the emblems crushing his chest with their weight.”
–A foreign student saw the drama of his deciding to leave his small village in a poor country and come to be educated in the United States in Rich’s “Prospective Immigrants: Please Note.” While the student is not an immigrant, he saw himself in the immigrant’s choice:
If you go through [the door] there is always the risk of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly and you must look back and let them happen.
–A female student gained new courage with regard to body and beauty issues after reading Clifton’s “what the mirror said.” She found inspiring the self-confidence of a woman who, although large, black and poor, can say to her image in a mirror,
listen, you a wonder. you a city of a woman. you got a geography of your own.
–Finally, there was the student who gained new insight into the confidence that people see her exuding—even though she herself doesn’t feel confident—from Clifton’s poem “questions and answers.” Clifton doesn’t provide a definitive answer but, for the student, it was enough that the poet described the situation:
what must it be like to stand so firm, so sure?
in the desert even the saguaro hold on as long as they can
twisting their arms in protest or celebration.
In our revision conference, we did a dive into the cactus symbol. I suggested that she stand with her eyes shut (not in my presence) and imagine herself as a saguaro (see picture above), which can grow to 20 feet in the desert and yet has a root system that goes only inches deep in the unpromising soil. I suggested she throw up one arm in defiance of all that life has thrown at her and one arm in celebration that she has triumphed in spite of it all. She reported that Clifton captures the experience perfectly.
In other words, while my student did what we ask our students to do—unpack suggestive metaphors—she was doing so in the context of a pressing question. In fact, all the students did so. It was interpretation performed in the service of an urgent purpose.
Reginald Birch, illus. from Little Lord Fauntleroy
Thursday
The Guardian newspaper recently had an article on “the top single mothers in fiction,” which is my kind of article. Sadly, only the top three are from classic fiction (which partly explains why they’re the only ones I recognized), so I set myself the challenge to see if I could come up with another seven. Here’s my list. Please send in your favorites.
I love the Guardian’s top three, with the choice of Euripides’s Medeaparticularly inspired. Here’s what author Beth Morrey has to say about her:
Medea
“It might seem odd to start with a drama about a barbarian witch who kills her own children when her husband leaves her for a princess. But shoutout to Euripides for featuring a female protagonist who dominates the action, a chorus of Corinthian women, and a scot-free exit. Medea murders her sons in cold blood to annoy her ex, Jason. But Jason is maddening – a shameless social climber who rubs salt in the wound by suggesting Medea stay on as a mere mistress. Medea has the last laugh, escaping with the bodies of their sons in Helios’ chariot, hinting the Gods are on her side. This is a woman scorned taking back control and getting away with it. The Athenian audience didn’t react favorably to the notion, awarding the play third place (out of three) at the Dionysia festival of 431 BCE. I’m sure Euripides would be heartened to know Medea’s No 1 in my top 10.” [Beth Morrey]
Mrs. Dashwood
I heartily approve of Morrey’s selection of Elinor and Marianne’s mother in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Mrs. Dashwood all but reverts to her teen years after her husband dies, relegating head of the family duties to eldest daughter Elinor. As a result, she doesn’t exercise motherly caution when Marianne falls in love with Willoughby, which almost ends in disaster. A great moment is when, late in the book, she realizes that heartbroken Elinor needs her to be a mother.
Marmee
Morrey includes Margaret (Marmee) March in her list because her husband is absent, elevating her to head of the household. Morrey describes Little Woman’s matriarch as “the archetypal single mother saint” and describes her as “infuriatingly perfect.” She adds, however, that
Alcott hints at dark depths when Marmee confesses she was once as hot-headed as her daughter Jo, but learned to control her temper. I would love to have seen a tiny flare of it, the glimmer of original sin.
Hester Prynne
I don’t know how Morrey could have left the protagonist of The Scarlet Letter off her list, but so she has. The mother of Pearl eventually arises to sainthood herself but at one point thinks that she can just throw away her scarlet letter and live free of the taint. (Pearl lets her know otherwise.)
Helen Graham
Another character who must be included on every such list is the inhabitant of Anne Bronte’s Wildfell Hall, who flees there with her son to save him from his abusive and alcoholic father. She is accused by villagers who don’t know her story of overprotecting her son, but she knows what’s at stake and risks social shunning to keep him safe. Tenant of Wildfell Hall ranks right up there with Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.
The Countess of Roussillon
This is the mother-in-law every woman should dream of. The mother of the irresponsible Bertram in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the countess takes Helena’s side when Bertram proves a brute. I saw Judi Densch play her in a Stratford-upon-Avon production and will never forget the scene where she lets Bertram have it for abusing his wife. Dench did no more that make a tiny dismissal gesture with her right hand, but I was thrown back in my seat by the move. That’s the moment when I realized Dench’s greatness.
Clara Copperfield and then adoptive mother Betsey Trotwood
Widowed Clara may be angelic—one of Dickens’s child women—but she’s an incompetent mother, with her worst action being marrying the abusive Murdstone when David is seven. After being sent away to an awful school and then an awful job, David is fortunate (after running away) to be taken in by Betsey Trotwood, recently named by my English professor son as Dickens’s greatest creation. Toby Wilson-Bates quotes David Copperfield’s opening lines before declaring Trotwood the winner of his contest:
“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” The pages show you lost, son. From donkeys to dandies, Betsey takes and vanquishes all comers.
Taylor Greer
Barbara Kingsolver exploded on the literary scene with her sassy, foul-mouthed protagonist in The Bean Trees. Greer is given and unofficially adopts an Indian baby, after which Kingsolver had to write a sequel (Pigs in Heaven) to clean up some of the mess she had gotten into with her story. (A white woman can’t just take and raise an Indian baby, even if it is given to her, without the author addressing the various ethical and cultural issues that arise—which Kingsolver then does in Pigs in Heaven.)
Lulu Nanapush Lamartine
One of Louise Erdrich’s great creations, Lulu is rescued from a reservation school by village elder Nanapush (in Tracks), who raises her as his own and tells her stories about her extraordinary mother Fleur. Lulu goes on to have her own colorful life, birthing nine children (eight of them sons) to five different fathers—and while members of the tribe try to shame her, she always walks with her head high. As she explains at one point in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Love Medicine,
When they tell you that I was heartless, a shameless man-chaser, don’t ever forget this: I loved what I saw. And yes, it is true that I’ve done all the things they say. That’s not what gets them. What aggravates them is I’ve never shed one solitary tear. I’m not sorry. That’s unnatural. As we all know, a woman is supposed to cry.
Mrs. Cedric Errol
This last character few will recognize outside myself, but the mother of Little Lord Fauntleroy was an important part of my childhood. In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1886 novel, Fauntleroy’s father, the son of an earl, has married this American woman, been disinherited as a result, and then died, leaving her alone with her angelic son. When the death of the earl’s older sons leaves Fauntleroy as the next heir, mother and child return to England, but the harsh and unforgiving earl refuses to see her, even though he is won over by Fauntleroy. In the end, of course, he learns to appreciate the woman his son risked everything to marry.
My girl side was in love with Fauntleroy when I was young, especially his long locks, his velvet suits and his lace collars. I was later to learn that there was a Fauntleroy craze for a while, with mothers dressing their sons up in this fashion. While many boys hated it, my father loved his mother outfitting him this way. (This would have been forty years after the book appeared but Granny, born the year the book appeared, was very Victorian.) Rereading Burnett’s novel now is like eating one of those sugary treats we loved as children but find inedible as adults. For an example, here’s a passage highlighting one of the consolations of single motherhood:
So when he knew his papa would come back no more, and saw how very sad his mamma was, there gradually came into his kind little heart the thought that he must do what he could to make her happy. He was not much more than a baby, but that thought was in his mind whenever he climbed upon her knee and kissed her and put his curly head on her neck, and when he brought his toys and picture-books to show her, and when he curled up quietly by her side as she used to lie on the sofa. He was not old enough to know of anything else to do, so he did what he could, and was more of a comfort to her than he could have understood….
As he grew older, he had a great many quaint little ways which amused and interested people greatly. He was so much of a companion for his mother that she scarcely cared for any other. They used to walk together and talk together and play together. When he was quite a little fellow, he learned to read; and after that he used to lie on the hearth-rug, in the evening, and read aloud—sometimes stories, and sometimes big books such as older people read, and sometimes even the newspaper; and often at such times Mary, in the kitchen, would hear Mrs. Errol laughing with delight at the quaint things he said.
So that’s my list. Some of the mothers are angelic, some supremely confident, some murderous killers. Expect a post on single fathers in the near future.
Further thought: A slighting reference to Fauntleroy shows up in the Eugene Field poem “Just afore Christmas”:
Father calls me William, sister calls me Will, Mother calls me Willie, but the fellers call me Bill! Mighty glad I ain’t a girl – ruther be a boy, Without them sashes, curls, an’ things that’s worn by Fauntleroy! Love to chawnk green apples an’ go swimmin’ in the lake – Hate to take the castor-ile they give for belly-ache! ‘Most all the time, the whole year round, there ain’t no flies on me, But jest ‘fore Christmas I’m as good as I kin be!
I’m not usually one to bash a fellow Shakespeare enthusiast but an article by one Casey Chalk in the American Conservative has me riled up. (Thanks to Rebecca Adams for the alert.) According to Chalk, Shakespeare is currently under assault by the forces of diversity and inclusion. Or as the article’s title contends, “The push by Shakespeare companies to abandon Shakespeare in the name of diversity seems driven by resentment of his greatness and our smallness.”
My instant reaction was, “Huh? Who’s pushing to abandon Shakespeare?” I combed through Chalk’s article and didn’t see much evidence of a Shakespeare decline, much less of “resentment of his greatness” being the reason. Chalk’s major examples are:
—a Washington Post article that, while it reports on Shakespeare theatre companies scrambling in the wake of the pandemic, gives only one example of Shakespeare getting booted for something else—that being D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company staging Once Upon a One More Time, a feminist fairy tale set to the music of Britney Spears; — an assistant professor of performance studies at State University of New York at New Paltz who says that Shakespeare is edging out black playwrights; and –a “teacher at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento [who] told the Post several years ago that she does not like Shakespeare because she ‘cannot always easily navigate’ him. She adds: ‘there is a WORLD of really exciting literature out there that better speaks to the needs of my very ethnically-diverse and wonderfully curious modern-day students.’”
These three meager examples lead Chalk to this overblown conclusion:
Put more bluntly, Shakespeare the dead white male is too distant to relate to non-white, 21st-century students. This same thinking has much to do with the abandonment of Shakespeare on stage.
This is patronizing and demeaning. What about 20th-century urban “ethnic” youth whose first language was Italian or Polish? Are Latino kids incapable of being inspired, challenged, or taught by someone simply because his language and culture are different from theirs? If Shakespeare represents an excellence not only of the English language, but of storytelling and human psychology, wouldn’t we want all people, regardless of race or ethnicity, to know him?
To sum up Chalk’s contention: because one Shakespeare theatre put on one non-Shakespeare play; because an assistant professor of performance studies said that too many Shakespeare productions were depriving Black playwrights their time in the sun; and because a California high school teacher several years ago complained about the difficulty of teaching Shakespeare to high school students, we’re supposed to accuse the left of being patronizing, demeaning, and resentful of greatness.
To be sure, Chalk also quotes (from the Post article) Tai Verley, artistic director of Philadelphia-based Revolution Shakespeare, saying, “This pedestal we have put him [Shakespeare] on should be smacked down to the floor!” Chalk misunderstands the quote, however. Verley is not attacking the Bard but bardolatry–which is to say, the blind worship of Shakespeare.
In my experience, there’s no better way to ruin Shakespeare for students than to tell them to genuflect before his greatness. By contrast, Shakespeare shines for them once you show how deeply and imaginatively he grasps key issues that they care about. The Post article reports on recent productions that creatively find new ways to do this:
New varieties of that elasticity [in presenting Shakespeare] are evident in shows by writers of color who are using the dramatist as inspiration. The 2022 season of Cal Shakes near Oakland, Calif., for instance, consists entirely of Shakespeare adaptations by Latina and Black playwrights: a bilingual Romeo y Juliet by Karen Zacarias and a modern-verse Lear by Marcus Gardley. In Manhattan last summer, the single attraction of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park was Jocelyn Bioh’s critical and popular hit, Merry Wives, based on The Merry Wives of Windsor and set among the West African immigrant community in Harlem.
These efforts should excite Chalk. After all, he tells us he’s a fan of Japanese director Akiri Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran, which are renditions of Macbeth and King Lear respectively.
Another way to ruin Shakespeare for audiences is for Brits to inform the rest of the world that they’re superior because Shakespeare was British. This is a problem voiced in the Post article by Nicolette Bethel, an anthropology professor and head of the Bahamas-based Shakespeare in Paradise. Bethel observes that Shakespeare “was the weapon that was used to tell us we were not good enough.” Something similar occurred when the British colonized India, causing Indian nationalists for a while to push back against Shakespeare—not because of his works but because of how the colonialists used him to denigrate works like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Once Shakespeare was judged on his own merits, he became as popular in India as he is in the rest of the world.
Chalk misreads the Shakespeare conference described in the Post article as a program to topple Shakespeare rather than as an attempt to put him to the test to see what new perspectives emerge. As it turns out, Shakespeare is strong enough to withstand a great deal of testing, and the Post author notes that everywhere he witnessed “an abiding respect” for the Bard. Indeed, for all of Chalk’s complaining, there is no evidence of a widespread abandonment of Shakespeare on stage, and I guarantee that Shakespeare is universally taught in American colleges and universities—with any declines due more to reductions in humanities and arts requirements than in the actions of politically correct literature professors. I can report that, in my Sewanee English 101: Composition and Literature class, tomorrow I’ll start teaching Twelfth Night and follow that up with Othello. (I’ll conclude the course with Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.)
Chalk, who has written a book entitled The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands, apparently wants to write a sequel, Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Shakespeare Lovers Living Their Faith in Multicultural America. He complains about leftwing resentment but appears intent on using the straw man of diversity fanaticism to inflame rightwing resentment.
Which, come to think of it, pretty much sums up the rightwing culture wars these days. First Critical Race Theory, which isn’t actually taught, and now Shakespeare Skepticism, which also isn’t happening.
As I’m currently in an essay-grading frenzy, I’m rerunning a post from last November that, given Mike Pence’s speech last week, is more timely than ever. After a year of waffling, Pence finally came out and stated that “President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election.” Important though the speech was, however, Pence’s most significant action occurred 13 months ago.
Since I wrote the column, we’ve learned even more about the pressure on Pence not to certify the election. We also now know about the self-appointed Republican electors in states that Biden won and about the requests made by Trump associates to various agencies that they seize voting machines. Fortunately none of the agencies complied with the requests while the fake electors are now being investigated.
Reprinted from November 18, 2021
We’re slowly but surely getting a clearer picture of Donald Trump’s coup attempt, and it appears to have come much closer to succeeding than we realized. In the end, we were saved by the most unlikely person imaginable: Donald Trump’s sycophant-in-chief, Vice President Mike Pence.
Literature is filled with stories of unlikely heroes. The hobbit who saved Middle Earth is the first who comes to mind, but Mike Pence is no Frodo. I think of him more as one of A.E. Housman’s hirelings in his delicious little poem, “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries.”
Before applying it, here is my simplified understanding of the coup attempt:
–Trump wanted to create enough doubt about the election that Mike Pence would refuse to certify the election but instead send it back to the states, where anything could happen; –to create doubt, Trump pressured Attorney General Barr and various governors, secretaries of state, and election boards in critical states to claim voter fraud; –those in the White House who resisted him after the election were fired and replaced by flunkies ready to carry out his will; –during all this time, Pence was put under intense pressure, not only by Trump but by lawyer John Eastman and others, who redefined his duties by reinterpreting the Constitution; –to further pressure Pence and Republican members of Congress, Trump inspired a mob to descend upon the Capitol. The mob was financed by, among others, various rightwing billionaires; –while Trump may or may not have anticipated that the mob would storm the Capitol, once they did so, he refused to call them off for four hours; –if Pence had refused to certify the election, Trump’s circle anticipated there would be massive protests from Biden supporters. Various fascist and white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys would then get involved, seeking to stir up trouble, at which point Trump could declare martial law and, voila, stay on as president. It was because the Armed Forces feared such a scenario that they stayed away from the Capitol when it was being attacked.
As a result, for only the second time in American history (the first being 1860) we did not have a peaceful transition of power. Democracy was in danger of “falling” as America’s “foundations fled.”
And who stood true to the Constitution? Who, despite immense pressure, performed the duties he was constitutionally required to do? The man who had groveled before the Trump for four and a half years.
In Housman’s poem, the unlikely heroes are mercenaries who, against all odds, insist on fulfilling their contractual obligations:
Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
These, in the days when heaven was falling, The hour when earth’s foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling And took their wages and are dead.
Their shoulders held the sky suspended; They stood, and the earth’s foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay.
Pence, when he convened Congress and called for the certification vote following mob violence, did indeed hold the sky suspended. And while he did not, like the mercenaries, die in the process, he is politically dead, loathed by both sides. No one, outside of Housman, gives either mercenaries or sycophants credit when they do something noble. Why should either hirelings or Mike Pence be applauded for just doing their job?
But given all the incentives for them to have acted otherwise, we should hold them up and honor them.
Since I’ve been writing a lot recently about rightwing book bans, it’s only fair that I should look at liberals doing something similar. I have in mind a school system in Washington State booting Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird from the required curriculum. The comparisons are revealing but so are the contrasts.
The Mukilteo School District recently approved removing the text as a required assignment for ninth graders. Under the change, the district retains the book as an option for teachers who still want to assign it. Three teachers at Kamiak High School made the request in the fall to remove Lee’s iconic novel from the required ninth grade curriculum, said Monica Chandler, the district’s director of curriculum and professional development, told Crosscut in an interview before the school board approved the proposal. The book will not be not banned, however, and teachers may still choose to assign the book in their classrooms.
The attacks on Lee’s classic are not unlike rightwing attacks on their favorite targets. Critics highlight certain aspects of a work as potentially damaging to young people and those stand in for the whole work. Here’s what the Mukilteo critics had to say:
The teachers’ objections to the book included criticism that Black characters are not fully realized and that the book romanticizes the idea of a “white savior.”
The teachers also cited concerns that characters in the book frequently use the N-word while no character explains that the slur is derogatory, and that the word and the portrayal of Black characters cause harm to students of color.
In other words, these teachers are worried about literature that makes students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.” I’m quoting from the new Florida guidelines that are being promoted by Donald Trump wannabe Gov. Ron DeSantis. A friend wrote last week that
that kind of statement is straight from the playbook of the left, with their trigger warnings and wokeness. You can’t decry the old canon for all those reasons and then cry “no fair” when they shoot the same (silly) language back at you.
I agree and think that the Mukilteo teachers went about their criticism the wrong way. Rather than seeking out ways that the book has certain white blindnesses—which it does, as I’ve pointed out myself—they should just have said that there are better books out there. Curriculums have to pick and choose which books they teach and a novel like, say, Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye is far superior. Flannery O’Connor delivered the most devastating critique of Mockingbird when it appeared, observing, “It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book.” In other words, she regards it as a fairy tale.
It’s not a bad fairy tale, with wondrous characters like Scout and Jem and a gripping plot. That it has engaged so many readers over the decades (Oprah Winfrey is a huge fan) should not be dismissed. But as a fairy tale, it sugarcoats the depth of southern racism and, for that matter, classism (note its handling of poor whites). Harper Lee is no Toni Morrison or, for that matter, Flannery O’Connor.
But if teachers want to take advantage of how Mockingbird engages readers, they can supplement it with its sequel, Go Set a Watchman. Mockingbird is set in the Great Depression, and by the time the Civil Rights Movement rolls around, the white upper class can no longer maintain its fairy tale illusions. Calpurnia, no longer content with the good mammy role, has quit the Finch household. Atticus, meanwhile, is freaked out that African Americans are no longer treating him with the deference they once did and has joined the White Citizens’ Council. (In Mockingbird, he has contempt for the KKK, which attracts poor whites; the WCC is an upper class version of the Klan.) Scout, as a white liberal born to privilege but awakened to Black anger, must renegotiate her relationship to the south and to her (no longer) saintly father. It’s a perfect drama for teens as they step out of their family cocoons and start to think for themselves.
In a New York Times column, Vietnamese-American author Nguyen complained that parents underestimate their kids’ resilience when it comes to the books they read (read my post on the essay here). Liberal parents can be just as guilty of this as conservative parents. It’s as though both sides regard children as delicate flowers that must be raised in a hothouse environment or they will be irrevocably damaged. The fact, however, is that we’re constantly reading material that is insensitive in one way or another. The answer is not to forbid it but to address the controversy.
And that’s where right and left differ. The left is not pulling books off of school library shelves or encouraging parents to snitch on teachers or passing laws banning certain content. It is not forbidding teachers from teaching Maus (as a Tennessee school district 90 minutes to east of me did) or throwing Harry Potter and Twilight into bonfires (as a Tennessee church 90 minutes to the north did). In the Mukilteo School District, teachers still have the option of teaching Mockingbird.
Which is to say that the school system appears to regard them as professionals who are in the best position to figure out what their students need. Leftwing wokeness and liberal cancelation pale in comparison to the authoritarian right’s book attacks.
Today I share a poem by my favorite poet when I was growing up. As a romantic teen, I was enthralled by three Alfred Noyes poems in particular: “The Highwayman”(which I had memorized), “Song of Sherwood,” and “The Barrel-Organ.” (Less romantically, I also got a kick out of “When Daddy Fell into the Pond.”)
Noyes’s “Fisher of Men” alludes to today’s Gospel reading (Luke 5:1-11):
Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.
“The blind welter of war” in “Fishers of Men” refers to World War I, which must have been underway when the poem was written. According to his Wikipedia biography, Noyes was a pacifist who opposed the Boer War and also wrote a long anti-war poem in 1913, hoping to stave off the meaningless slaughter that was to come. (Poetry can do only so much.) He supported the allies in the two world wars, however, believing that, “when threatened by an aggressive and unreasoning enemy, a nation could not but fight.” His “fight for right and not for might” can be read in that context.
Fishers of Men
Long, long ago He said, He who could wake the dead, And walk upon the sea– “Come, follow Me.
“Leave your brown nets and bring Only your hearts to sing, Only your souls to pray, Rise, come away.
“Shake out your spirit-sails, And brave those wilder gales, And I will make you then Fishers of men.”
Was this, then, what He meant? Was this His high intent, After two thousand years Of blood and tears?
God help us, if we fight For right, and not for might. God help us if we seek To shield the weak.
Then, though His heaven be far From this blind welter of war, He’ll bless us, on the sea From Calvary.
Added Note – To give you a sense of what Noyes means by “blood and tears”—he foresaw only too clearly the horrors of World War I—here’s an excerpt from his 1913 anti-war poem The Wine Press:
Slaughter! Slaughter! Slaughter! The cold machines whirred on. And strange things crawled amongst the wheat With entrails dragging round their feet, And over the foul red shambles A fearful sunlight shone….
The maxims cracked like cattle-whips Above the struggling hordes. They rolled and plunged and writhed like snakes In the trampled wheat and the blackthorn brakes, And the lightnings leapt among them Like clashing crimson swords.
The rifles flogged their wallowing herds, Flogged them down to die. Down the the slain the slayers lay, And the shrapnel thrashed them into clay, And tossed their limbs like tattered birds Thro’ a red volcanic sky.
