How great literature can change your life

Thursday

I recently finished listening to and thoroughly enjoying the Ian McEwan novel Saturday (2005). I share today an episode (major spoiler alert!) where Matthew Arnold’s famous poem “Dover Beach” (1867) prevents rape and possibly murder. Poetry breaks through where other forms of communication fail.

One Saturday morning on his way to a squash game, neurosurgeon Henry Perowne is sideswiped by a thug and two cronies, who then prepare to beat him up. The date is February 15, 2003, the place is London, and there is a large rally underway protesting U.S. and British plans to invade Iraq. Just as he’s about to be thrashed, however, Perowne diagnoses the man (whose name is Baxter) as being in the early stages of Huntington’s disease. He disarms him and saves himself from a beating by talking to him about the illness. In listening to Perowne, however, Baxter loses face in front of his friends and later intrudes on a family dinner party to get revenge. I pick up the action after Baxter and one of his accomplices have just forced Perowne’s daughter to strip and then, as she stands before them naked, to read a poem from her upcoming book, the proofs of which she has in her possession. Although she pretends to read from the manuscript, however, Daisy instead recites “Dover Beach” and gets an unexpected response.

So that you can get the full effect of what transpires, here’s Arnold’s magnificent poem:

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

I should add that, when she strips, Daisy reveals to both the thugs and her family that she’s two months pregnant. Here’s the scene:

Henry has been through her book a few times, but there are certain poems he’s read only once; this one he only half remembers. The lines surprise him—clearly, he hasn’t been reading closely enough. They are unusually meditative, mellifluous and willfully archaic. She’s thrown herself back into another century. Now, in his terrified state, he misses or misconstrues much, but as her voice picks up a little and finds the beginnings of a quiet rhythm, he feels himself slipping through the words into the things they describe. He sees Daisy on a terrace overlooking a beach in summer moonlight; the sea is still and at high tide, the air scented, there’s a final glow of sunset. She calls to her lover, surely the man who will one day father her child, to come and look, or, rather, listen to the scene. Perowne sees a smooth-skinned young man naked to the waist, standing at Daisy’s side. Together they listen to the surf roaring on the pebbles, and hear in the sound a deep sorrow which stretches right back to ancient times. She thinks there was another time, even further back, when the earth was new and the sea consoling, and nothing came between man and God. But this evening the lovers hear only sadness and loss in the sound of the waves breaking and retreating from the shore. She turns to him, and before they kiss she tells him that they must love each other and be faithful, especially now they’re having a child, and when there’s no peace or certainty, and when desert armies stand ready to fight.

The reason Perowne only half remembers the poem is because it isn’t, of course, actually in her book. Not familiar himself with the literary canon, Perowne believes that his daughter is being “wilfully archaic” and throwing herself back into another century. In this perception, he reminds me of the narrator in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” who commends Menard because, after having immersed himself deeply in the life of Cervantes, he is able to recreate, word for word, two and a half chapters from Don Quixote. In other words, a work that seems archaic if written in the past seems daringly new, flouting various 20^th century literary conventions, when written by a modern author. Through this comic story, Borges makes the point that the same work can appear very different to readers of different eras, especially if they don’t make an historical adjustment.

But set that aside because the most remarkable thing about the scene in McEwan’s novel is the effect the poem has on Baxter, who has been holding a knife to the neck of Perowne’s wife. Baxter is dangerous because, as a man who knows his medical future, he feels he has nothing to lose. Yet he orders Daisy to read the poem again, and his mood, already prone to wild alterations because of his condition, shifts again:

It’s hard to tell, for his face is never still, but Baxter appears suddenly elated. His right hand has moved away from Rosalind’s shoulder and the knife is already back in his pocket. His gaze remains on Daisy. Baxter has broken his silence and is saying excitedly, “You wrote that. You wrote that.” It’s a statement, not a question. Daisy stares at him, waiting. He says again, “You wrote that.” And then, hurriedly, “It’s beautiful. You know that, don’t you. It’s beautiful. And you wrote it.” She dares say nothing. “It makes me think about where I grew up.”

A moment later he is telling Daisy to get dressed:

For a moment she doesn’t move, and they wait for her.

“I can’t believe it” Nigel says. “We gone to all this trouble.”

She bends to retrieve her sweater and skirt and begins to pull them on.

Earlier, while they are all listening to the second reading, Perowne imagines the effect the poem must be having on Baxter:

[Daisy] turns back a page, and with more confidence, attempting the seductive, varied tone of a storyteller entrancing a child, begins again. “The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair upon the straits—on the French coast the light gleams and is gone…”

Henry missed first time the mention of the cliffs of England “glimmering and vast out in the tranquil bay.” Now it appears there’s no terrace, but an open window; there’s no young man, father of the child. Instead he sees Baxter standing alone, elbows propped against the sill, listening to the waves “bring the eternal note of sadness in.” It’s not all of antiquity, but only Sophocles who associated this sound with the “turbid ebb and flow of human misery.” Even in his state, Henry balks at the mention of a “sea of faith” and a glittering paradise of wholeness lost in the distant past. Then once again, it’s through Baxter’s ears that he hears the sea’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating, to the breath of the night wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world.” It rings like a musical curse. The pleas to be true to one another sounds hopeless in the absence of joy or love or light or peace or “help for pain.” Even in a world “where ignorant armies clash by night,” Henry discovers on second hearing no mention of a desert. The poem’s melodiousness, he decides, is at odds with its pessimism.

The poem doesn’t magically end Baxter’s lethal threat. McEwan is too much of a realist to believe that literature can perform that kind of a miracle, no more that poetry can stop the U.S. and Britain from invading Iraq. For that matter, Russian poet Yevgueni Yevtushenko’s “Do the Russians Want War?”, alluded to by Ukrainian president Zelensky shortly after Putin’s invasion, did not stop the advance of Russian forces. “Dover Beach,” however, does manage to interrupt Baxter’s violent trajectory, and in that pause the family finds a way to save itself.

And the poem continues to work his magic. After Perowne and his son throw Baxter down the stairs, cracking his head open, Perowne finds himself—as the on-call surgeon—operating on the man. Reflecting on what to do next after a successful operation, Perowne decides he will try to get the man psychological and medical help rather than press charges. “[H]ere is one area where Henry can exercise authority and shape events,” the novel tells us. “He knows how the system works—the difference between good and bad care is near infinite.” He does so in part because of Baxter’s response to the poem:

Daisy recited a poem that cast a spell on one man. Perhaps any poem would have done the trick, and thrown the switch on a sudden mood change. Still, Baxter fell for the magic, he was transfixed by it, and he was reminded how much he wanted to live. No one can forgive him the use of the knife. But Baxter heard what Henry never has, and probably never will, despite all Daisy’s attempts to educate him. Some nineteenth-century poet—Henry has yet to find out whether this Arnold is famous or obscure—touched off in Baxter a yearning he could barely begin to define. That hunger is his claim on life, on a mental existence, and because it won’t last much longer, because the door of his consciousness is beginning to close, he shouldn’t pursue his claim from a cell, waiting for the absurdity of his trial to begin.

And so the book ends, with Perowne, like the figure in Arnold’s poem, looking out his window in the middle of the night with his beloved wife sleeping behind him. Indeed, “Dover Beach” shapes McEwan’s novel itself, which has come full circle since action at this same window 22 hours earlier. Then Perowne, waking early, gazed out of at the early morning sky with similar meditations. And while the world is a dangerous and often bewildering place, we also see the love he has for his wife and his children, who are now—at least temporarily—safe again. But whether safe or not, there is love. Or as Arnold puts it, “Ah love, let us be true to one another.”

It is a reminder we desperately need since we know what has happened in the almost 20 years since when the book is set. We know that mayhem will break out, not only in Iraq, but in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Georgia, Chechnya, and now Ukraine. We are certainly on a darkling plain where armies are clashing.

I have one other thought about poetry’s role in current events. While I state above that Yevtushenko’s “Do the Russians Want War?” appears to have had no effect on Russia’s Ukraine invasion, that may not be entirely true. Granted, the poem’s assurance that any country that has endured 20 million killed in World War II cannot possibly want war seems contradicted my Putin’s warmongering.  But if Russians all over the country are, with unimaginable bravely, standing up to protest the war, it’s in part because Yevushenko and others have instilled in them a sense that war is justified only in self-defense, not as a naked power grab. They are so appalled at what is being done in their name that they are willing to give up their liberty and their futures to voice their opposition.

Just as poetry can sometimes reach through a thug’s diseased mind and stay his actions, so it can help a country get in touch with its soul and to turn its back on egotistical power trips.