Social media has been passing around this poem by Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky. It is not, as first appears, a criticism of the west for refraining from direct involvement in Ukraine’s war. In fact, the poem appears to be set in America, not Ukraine.
Nevertheless, the question of whether Americans could do more to stop oppression is always a good one. We are, at least, imposing sanctions on Russia that have some bite to them—and since those sanctions could have some impact our own lives, the very least Americans could do is stop complaining about rising gas prices. We could also stop making apocalyptic statements about minor matters. A vaccination mandate is not Holocaust-level oppression. The Russians invading your country is real oppression.
We Lived Happily During the War By Ilya Kaminsky
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was in my bed, around my bed America
was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.
I took a chair outside and watched the sun.
In the sixth month of a disastrous reign in the house of money
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, our great country of money, we (forgive us)
As it is the last Sunday before Lent, today we hear the account of the transfiguration. Poet Mark Jarman has a poem about the moment when the veil between the material and spiritual worlds is, for a moment, removed so that Jesus and the disciples come face to face with divinity. I like the poem because it imagines Jesus as human enough to resist what the prophets of old are telling him. After all, if they are informing him of the resurrection, they would also be informing him of the crucifixion.
Jarman imagines Jesus resisting and then being transfigured by the resistance. The great spiritual breakthroughs do not come without a struggle.
First, here’s Luke’s version of the incident:
Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah”–not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.
Here are the first and final sections of Jarman’s lengthy poem:
Transfiguration By Mark Jarman
And there appeared to them Elijah and Moses and they were talking to Jesus. (Mark 9-2)
They were talking to him about resurrection, about law, about the suffering ahead. They were talking as if to remind him who he was and who they were. He was not Like his three friends watching a little way off, not like the crowd At the foot of the hill. A gray-green thunderhead massed from the sea And God spoke from it and said he was his. They were talking About how the body, broken or burned, could live again, remade. Only the fiery text of the thunderhead could explain it. And they were talking About pain and the need for judgement and how he would make himself A law of pain, both its spirit and its letter in his own flesh, and then break it, That is, transcend it. His clothes flared like magnesium, as they talked.
1
7
I want to believe that he talked back to them, his radiant companions. And I want to believe he said too much was being asked and too much promised. I want to believe that that was why he shone in the eyes of his friends. The witnesses looking on, because he spoke for them, because he loved them And was embarrassed to learn how he and they were going to suffer. I want to believe he resisted at that moment, when he appear glorified. Because he could not reconcile the contradictions and suspected That love had a finite span and was merely the comfort of the lost. I know he must have acceded to his duty, but I want to believe He was transfigured by resistance, as he listened, and they talked.
Further thoughts: Because my youngest son and two youngest grandchildren were with us all day yesterday, I didn’t have time to say all I wanted about Jarman’s wonderful poem. In sections 2-6, he elaborates on what he believes is involved in the process of transfiguration, which according to Webster’s means a “change in appearance or metamorphosis” and “an exalting, glorifying, or spiritual change.” In section 2, the transfiguration is medical: Jarman talks how about his mother, suffering from severe medical and mental problems, is restored through a medical procedure. The family has brought their mother to a doctor, but Jarman frames it as though they are bringing her to Jesus. And indeed, modern medicine can seem miraculous:
When we brought our mother to him, we said, “Lord, she falls down the stairs. She cannot hold her water. In the afternoon she forgets the morning.” And he said, “All things are possible to those who believe. Shave her head, Insert a silicone tube inside her skull, and run it under her scalp, Down her neck, and over her collarbone, and lead it into her stomach.” And we did and saw that she no longer stumbled or wet herself. She could remember the morning until the evening came. And we went our way, Rejoicing as much as we could, for we had worried many years.
In section 3, imagining that conversation that Jesus is having with Moses and Elisha that has transfigured him, Jarman speculates that they are talking about the miracle of life itself. These include “the complexities of blood and lymph,” matted hair and lice, and above all the brain/mind:
And they were talking about the lamp burning in the skull’s niche. They eyes drinking light from within and light from without. And how simple it is to see the future, if you look at it like the past. And how the present belonged to the flesh and its density and darkness And was hard to talk about. Before and after were easier. They talked about light.
In section four, the poet talks about another miracle, although not a medical one this time. Someone who has been blind since his wedding day is restored to a certain kind of sight–we’re not sure if it’s literal or not–when some miracle worker tells the man to begin remembering his parents. The man remembers so much that “suddenly his sight came back and blinded him, like a flashbulb.”
In section five, Moses and Elisha are talking to Jesus about law and how lawgiving should be
Like rainfall, a light rain falling all morning and mixing with dew– A rain that passes through the spiderweb and penetrates the dirt clod Without melting it…
Eventually, however, the law can become cumbersome. It is at that point, the poet imagines, that Moses and Elisha tell Jesus that
you hurled judgement into the crowd and watched them Spook like cattle, reached in and stirred the turmoil faster, scarier. And they were saying that; to save the best, many must be punished, Including the best. And no one was exempt, as they explained it, Not themselves, not him, or anyone he loved, anyone who loved him.
By section 6, Moses and Elisha are getting down to brass tacks. They have confirmed Jesus’s foundational spiritual change but now are telling him that suffering is the inevitable consequence. If anyone else were in such a situation–told that the transformative feelings were real and that the voices would be with there to prepare him or her for the end–then that person too would “seem transfigured”:
Take anyone and plant a change inside them that they feel And send them to an authority to assess that feeling. When they are told That for them alone there waits a suffering in accordance with the laws Of their condition, from which they may recover or may not, Then they know the vortex on the mountaintop, the inside of the unspeakable, The speechlessness before the voices began talking to them, Talking to prepare them, arm them and disarm them, until the end. And if anybody’s look, they will seem transfigured.
So returning to the concluding section (7), we now understand the whirl of emotions and thoughts going through Jesus’s head. We can imagine him replying to Moses and Elisha that “too much was being asked and too much promised”–not only of him but of his followers. The poet even imagines him struggling with the contradictions–about whether love was eternal or merely momentary, “the comfort of the lost”–so that while Jesus in the end “accede[s] to his duty,” it’s not only the promise but the struggle that changes the appearance of his face so that his clothes appear to be dazzling white.
Jarman, in other words, tries to relate to Jesus’s encounter with the numinous by putting it in terms he can relate to. Doing so, after all, is one of poetry’s basic jobs.
On Wednesday, in his address to the people of Ukraine, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy made an allusion to a well-known Russian poem that should have shamed Vladimir Putin and those endorsing the Russian invasion of the country. Of course, we know that Putin is impervious to shame, but Zelenskyy’s allusion is still worth noting.
The poem was Yevgueni Yevtushenko’s “Do the Russians Want War?” Here’s how it showed up in Zelenskyy’s speech:
I know that they [the Russian state] won’t show my address on Russian TV, but Russian people have to see it. They need to know the truth, and the truth is that it is time to stop now, before it is too late. And if the Russian leaders don’t want to sit with us behind the table for the sake of peace, maybe they will sit behind the table with you. Do Russians want the war? I would like to know the answer. But the answer depends only on you, citizens of the Russian Federation
Yevtushenko wrote “Do the Russians Want War” in 1961 when the Cold War was at its height. The poem was meant to reassure the world that, while Russia would defend itself bravely if attacked, it had suffered so much from World War II (a staggering 16,825,000 Soviets died, which is to say 15% of the population) that it had no interest in attacking others. The poem became a popular song by Mark Bernes.
The reference to Elbe is when Soviet troops advancing from the east and American troops advancing from the west met at the Elbe River on April 25, 1945, thereby essentially cutting Germany in half. Many embraced. Elbe Day commemorates that encounter.
I share the song version, which may well have been the version Zelenskyy had in mind:
Do the Russians Want War? Yevgueni Yevtushenko Trans. by Leonard Lehrman
O, do the Russians long for war? ask of the stillness evermore, ask of the field, or ask the breeze, and ask the birch and poplar trees.
Ask of the soldiers who now lie beneath the birch trees and the sky, and let their sons tell you once more whether the Russians long, whether the Russians long, whether the Russians long for war.
Not only at their country’s call did Russian soldiers fight and fall; they died that men from ev’ry shore might live without the fear of war.
Ask those who fought, and those erased, ask those who at the Elbe you embraced. These monuments are only for to show if Russians long, to show if Russians long, to show if Russians long for war.
Yes, we can fight when fight we must; but we don’t wish to breathe the dust of soldiers brave from ev’ry clime who give up life before their time.
Ask of the women in our life, ask of our mothers –ask my wife–, and you will never wonder more whether the Russians long, whether the Russians long, whether the Russians long for war.
Their answer rises loud and clear for all men, ev’rywhere, to hear. The message now is as before: the Russians do not long, the Russians do not long, the Russians do not long for war.
Because he doesn’t want to be seen as longing for war, Putin has been trying to raise the specter of World War II to justify his Ukraine invasion, pledging to oversee a “demilitarization and de-Nazification” of the country. His rationale, of course is absurd, as Zelenskyy has pointed out. (“You are told we are Nazis. But could a people who lost more than 8 million lives in the battle against Nazism support Nazism?”) Furthermore, Zelenskyy is Jewish and lost relatives in the Holocaust. The real threat Putin sees in Ukraine is not a military threat but a functioning democracy on his border, which threatens his own kleptocratic dictatorship.
There are reports of protests in Russia, which are occurring despite dire threats of reprisals. Which means that some Russians take Yevtushenko’s words seriously, even if Putin doesn’t.
I recently finished reading Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club, which has given me some new insights into the significance of Dante for 19th century American audiences. That’s because it’s set in 1867 Boston (right after the Civil War) at the time that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was finishing up his famous translation of Divine Comedy. Dante Club is also a murder mystery and part of the plot involves the Harvard Board of Governors attempting to sabotage the translation, which they regard as dangerous.
The Dante Club in the novel includes Longfellow, fellow poets James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and legendary publisher James Taylor Fields, all of whom are assisting Longfellow in his translation. Lowell is also teaching a Dante class at Harvard, much to the consternation of the Board of Governors. In other words, the book reads like a literary Who’s Who of the age, with Ralph Waldo Emerson also making an appearance.
For today’s post, I share some of the passages from the book that cast light on the significance of Dante at the time. For instance, we hear about the objection of August Manning, treasurer of the Harvard Corporation:
Manning now thought about how to address the Dante problem. A staunch loyalist to classical studies and languages, Manning, it was said, spent an entire year conducting all his personal and business affairs in Latin…The living languages, as they were called by the Harvard fellows, were little more than cheap imitations, low distortions. Italian, like Spanish and German, particularly represented the loose political passions, bodily appetites, and absent morals of decadent Europe. Dr. Manning had no intention of allowing foreign poisons to be spread under the disguise of literature.
At one point, under orders from the Harvard Corporation, Harvard president Thomas Hill pressures Lowell to cancel his Dante class. Lowell, of course, will have none of it:
Lowell said he would not suffer the fellows of the Corporation to sit in judgment of a literature of which they knew nothing. And Hill did not even try to argue this point. It was a matter of principle for the Harvard fellows that they knew nothing of the living languages.
The next time Lowell saw Hill, the president was armed with a slip of blue paper on which was a handwritten quotation from a recently deceased British poet of some standing on the subject of Dante’s poem. “What hatred against the whole human race! What exultation and merriment at eternal and immitigable sufferings! We hold our nostrils as we read: we cover up our ears. Did one ever before see brought together such striking odors, filth, excrement, blood, mutilated bodies, agonizing shrieks, mythical monsters of punishment? Seeing this, I cannot but consider it the most immoral and impious book that ever was written.”…
Lowell laughed. “Shall we have England lord over our bookshelves….Till America has learned to love literature not as an amusement, not as mere doggerel to memorize in a college room, but for its humanizing and ennobling energy, my dear reverend president, she will not have succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a nation out of a people. That which raises it from a dead name to a living power.”
The Dante Club begins meeting in 1861, shortly after the commencement of the Civil War—which is to say, they have an inkling of a real life inferno to come. Longfellow at this point feels driven to translate the work. Lowell and Holmes discuss the project:
Lowell detailed for Holmes how remarkably Longfellow was capturing Dante, from the cantos Longfellow had shown him. “He was born for the task, I would rather think, Wendell.” Longfellow was starting with Paradiso and then would turn to Purgatorio and finally Inferno.
“Moving backwards?” Holmes asked, intrigued.
Lowell nodded and grinned. “I daresay dear Longfellow wants to make sure of Heaven before committing himself to Hell.”
“I can never go all the way through to Lucifer,” Homes said, commenting on Inferno. “Purgatory and Paradise are all music and hope, and you feel you are floating toward God. But the hideousness, the savagery, of that medieval nightmare! Alexander the Great ought to have slept with it under the pillow [instead of The Iliad].”
“Dante’s Hell is part of our world as much as part of the underworld, and shouldn’t be avoided,” Lowell said, “but rather confronted. We sound the depths of Hell very often in this life.”
The force of Dante’s poetry resonated most in those who did not confess the Catholic faith, for believers inevitably would have quibbles with Dante’s theology. But for those most distant theologically, Dante’s faith was so perfect, so unyielding, that a reader found himself compelled by the poetry to take it all to heart. This is why Holmes feared the Dante Club: He feared that it would usher in a new Hell, one empowered by the poets’ sheer literary genius. And, worse yet, he feared that he himself, after a life spent running away from the devil preached by his father, would be partially to blame.
I love how Pearl describes the workings of the Dante Club. For instance, here they are discussing the wood of the suicides:
“In the seventh circle,” Longfellow said, “Dante tells us how he and Virgil come upon a black forest.” In each region of Hell, Dante followed his adored guide, the Roman poet Virgil. Along the way, he learned the fate of each group of sinners, singling out one or two to address the living world.
“The lost forest that has occupied the private nightmares of all of Dante’s readers at one time or another,” Lowell said. “Dante writes like Rembrandt, with a brush dipped in darkness and a gleam of hellfire as his light.”
Lowell, as usual, would have every inch of Dante at his tongue’s end; he lived Dante’s poetry, body and mind….
Longfellow read from his translation His reading voice rang deep and true without any harshness, like the sound of water running under a fresh cover of snow….
In the canto at hand, Dante found himself in the Wood of Suicides, where the “shades” of sinners have been turned into trees, dripping blood where sap belonged. Then further punishment arrived: Bestial harpies, faces and necks of women and bodies of birds, feet clawed and bellies bulging, crashed through the brush, feeding and tearing at every tree in their way. But along with great pain, the rips and tears in the trees provided the only outlet for the shades to utter their pain, to tell their stories to Dante.
“The blood and words must come out together.” So said Longfellow.
After two cantos of punishments witnessed by Dante, books were marked and stored, papers shuffled, and admiration exchanged. Longfellow said, “School is done, gentlemen. It is only half-past nine and we deserve some refreshment for our labors.”
And here’s one final passage, this one describing Lowell’s Dante class. Edward Sheldon is his most enthusiastic student. The passage begins by Lowell recalling a passage from Isaiah 38:10 in the Bible:
“Shall I translate [from the Latin]?” Lowell asked. “‘I say: In the midst of my days I shall go to the gates of hell.’ Is there anything our old Scripture writers didn’t think of? Sometime in the middle of our lives, we all, each one of us, journey to face a Hell of our own. What is the very first line of Dante’s poem?”
“‘Midway through the journey of our life,’” Edward Sheldon volunteered hapilly, having read that opening salvo of Inferno again and again in his room at Stoughton Hall, never having been so ambushed by any verse of poetry, so emboldened by another’s cry. “‘I found myself in a dark wood, for the correct path had been lost.’”
“‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. Midway through the journey of our life,’” Lowell repeated with such a wide glare in the direction of his fireplace that Sheldon glanced over his shoulder…. “‘Our life.’ From the very first line of Dante’s poem, we are involved in the journey, we are taking the pilgrimage as much as he is, and we must face our Hell as squarely as Dante faces his. You see that the poem’s great and lasting value is as the autobiography of a human soul. Yours and mine, it may be, just as much as Dante’s.”
Lowell thought to himself as he heard Sheldon read the next fifteen lines of Italian how good it felt to teach something real.
That’s great literature for you. It’s something real.
As I watch Vladimir Putin seek to reboot the Soviet empire while suppressing internal dissent, I’ve been struggling to find a literary equivalent. I thought for a while of Macbeth, but Macbeth has a conscience, even though he does everything in his power to override it. While I see signs of Macbeth’s paranoia in Putin, I don’t see the latter having any qualms about what he’s doing.
Since it appears that Putin’s model is Josef Stalin, I have instead chosen a character who was modeled on the Soviet dictator. Which is to say, I have chosen Napoleon from George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945).
I owe the Putin-Stalin connection to columns in Foreign Policy and the Washington Post. In the first, journalist Kristaps Andrejsons notes the Stalin references in Putin’s speech on Monday. Characterizing the talk as “a messy, incoherent, angry rant” that “put forward a dark vision of renewed national glory,” Andrejsons writes that Putin contrasted Stalin’s vision of Ukraine with Lenin’s. Whereas Lenin (in Putin’s version of events) surrendered to Ukrainian nationalists and allowed them the right to self-determination within the Soviet Union, Stalin wanted to grant Ukraine only “limited autonomy within a national framework” (emphasis on “limited”). In his speech, Putin didn’t mention how Stalin bent Ukraine to his will, both through a manufactured famine that killed millions and by deporting 200,000 Crimeans, whom he replaced with Russians. This large Russian population became Putin’s rationale for seizing Crimea in 2014.
In his Washington Post column, David Von Drehle observes that “the only thing more dangerous than a nut with nukes is a nut with nukes who idolizes Joseph Stalin.” He points to how Putin, in addition to plunging Europe into war, has
also been busy purging Russia of honest historians. In December, a puppet court in northern Russia extended the prison sentence of Yuri Dmitriev to 15 long years on trumped-up charges. His real offense? Documenting a few of Stalin’s countless crimes against humanity. Putin’s government then outlawed the academic movement called Memorial, which supported Dmitriev’s work and that of other scholars
Stalin’s countless crimes against humanity are on full display in Animal Farm, albeit in allegorical form. He shows up in the figure of Napoleon, whom we are informed is “a large, rather fierce-looking Berkshire boar, the only Berkshire on the farm, not much of a talker, but with a reputation for getting his own way.” In the course of the novel, we see Napoleon shedding his socialist beliefs and becoming increasingly tyrannical—which, it so happens, is a trajectory Putin has traveled as well. A key moment occurs when Napoleon unleashes specially bred dogs—once used by the tyrannical farmer—against his rival Snowball (modeled on Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s major opponent):
At this there was a terrible baying sound outside, and nine enormous dogs wearing brass-studded collars came bounding into the barn. They dashed straight for Snowball, who only sprang from his place just in time to escape their snapping jaws. In a moment he was out of the door and they were after him.
We learn that the dogs
were the puppies whom Napoleon had taken away from their mothers and reared privately. Though not yet full-grown, they were huge dogs, and as fierce-looking as wolves. They kept close to Napoleon. It was noticed that they wagged their tails to him in the same way as the other dogs had been used to do to Mr. Jones.
Napoleon—like Stalin and Putin—then proceeds to make a mockery of democratic rule:
Napoleon, with the dogs following him, now mounted on to the raised portion of the floor where Major [a Marx/Lenin composite] had previously stood to deliver his speech. He announced that from now on the Sunday-morning Meetings would come to an end. They were unnecessary, he said, and wasted time. In future all questions relating to the working of the farm would be settled by a special committee of pigs, presided over by himself. These would meet in private and afterwards communicate their decisions to the others. The animals would still assemble on Sunday mornings to salute the flag, sing “Beasts of England,” and receive their orders for the week; but there would be no more debates.
“Deep, menacing growls” issue from the dogs the moment anyone objects.
Like Stalin and Putin, Napoleon is constantly rewriting history, including history that the animals have witnessed with their own eyes. He also has a way of rewriting what is happening to them in real time. These include a famine–probably an allusion to the Ukrainian famine—that is brought about by Napoleon’s own mismanagement. Whatever goes wrong invariably gets blamed on Snowball, who supposedly is always lurking in the shadows.
By the end of the novel, Napoleon, like Stalin and Putin, has created a cult of personality, which has also benefited him financially. He hobnobs with, and has become indistinguishable from, the capitalist millionaires he once fought against.
In other words, Putin is Napoleon II—which brings to mind what Victor Hugo and Karl Marx said about another Napoleon. Not the Napoleon but his nephew, Napoleon III, who staged a successful coup in 1851 after his tenure as president ran out. Hugo called him “Napoleon the Small” (as contrasted with Napoleon the Great), and Marx famously said of him that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.”
Compared to Stalin, Putin too is a farce with his imperial ambitions. Unfortunately, even as a farce he’s still dangerous.
Nicholas Nickleby punishing the brutal Wackford Squeers
Tuesday
While I don’t think, for a moment, that today’s leftwing purists are as bad as rightwing fascists when it comes to censorship, they can inflict their own kind of harm. My friend Rebecca Adams, who has been editing my book, alerted me to a dispiriting account by Kate Clanchy, a Scots woman and author of the Orwell Prize-winning memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, about such sensitivity police. Since I read the piece right after having encountered the stories about teachers in a Washington state school attacking To Kill a Mockingbird (see my blog post on that here), and after having read a historic piece about Black activists calling poet Robert Hayden an “Uncle Tom” in the 1960s, I wondered whether liberal and leftwing cancel culture wasn’t a bigger deal than I had previously thought. Today’s post is my attempt to sort some of these issues out.
I don’t want to be guilty of a false equivalence here. Liberals are not taking books out of libraries or throwing them into bonfires or even (to cite the Washington state school system policies) forbidding teachers from teaching To Kill a Mockingbird. My quarrel with the Washington state teachers is that they reduced the book to a narrow political point rather than (as they should have done) made the case that there are authors of color who have written far better works dealing with racism than Harper Lee. If, as a teacher, you must pick and choose, why choose Mockingbird instead of Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye or Song of Solomon, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, or (to choose a more recent work) Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-prize winning The Nickel Boys?
With regard to Mockingbird, it certainly has problems, including its vision of a white savior (who, for the record, doesn’t actually save). It’s noteworthy, however, that the white savior has joined a racist organization in Harper Lee’s sequel, and it’s not that there aren’t danger signs even in the earlier book. Furthermore, the story of Atticus Finch is not the entire book. When I read Mockingbird as a child, my focus was entirely on Scout and her horror at injustice. By seeing literature as propaganda making a single point, leftwing purists, like their rightwing counterparts, overlook everything else going on in the work.
This is what Scottish author Clanchy discovered from the reader reports of her memoir. Here’s a sampling of the feedback she received:
I am enjoined not to quote from My Ántonia by Willa Cather, as it is “an old novel”; nor to state that homosexuality has historically been taboo in Nepal, as homophobia comes from colonialism; nor to mention that the Taliban were terrorists. Extending the principle of sunny improvement into the present, Wordsearch List [one of her readers] breaks out of their list to make the helpful suggestion that I should remove references to terrorism from across the book, as it “over-sensationalizes such a heavy topic, especially with minors involved.”
Nor should I say that more middle-class than working-class children go to university; nor that Foetal Alcohol Syndrome leaves children unable to progress; nor that a long tight dress restricts movement. All of these things are, for my Readers, “hurtful” notions of mine, not unfortunate facts. Writing, they imply, should represent the world as it ought to be, not as it is.
Clanchy ignored the responses and published the work, which sounds wise. As I read her words, I think of W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes, both of whom complained about virtue police in the Black community. Here’s Hughes defending Jean Toomer’s masterpiece Cane:
The Negro artist works against an undertow of sharp criticism and misunderstanding from his own group and unintentional bribes from the whites. “Oh, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,” say the Negroes. “Be stereotyped, don’t go too far, don’t shatter our illusions about you, don’t amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,” say the whites. Both would have told Jean Toomer not to write Cane. The colored people did not praise it. The white people did not buy it. Most of the colored people who did read Cane hate it. They are afraid of it. Although the critics gave it good reviews the public remained indifferent. Yet (excepting the work of Du Bois) Cane contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America. And like the singing of Robeson, it is truly racial.
And here’s W.E.B. Du Bois discussing how Black authors are pressured by the Black community to avoid certain inconvenient truths. While the observation comes in an article (“Art Is Propaganda”) that excoriates White authors for engaging in certain racist tropes, Du Bois is so interested in truth that he complains about Black audiences pressuring Black authors. He therefore urges Black authors to stay true to their art:
We [Black readers] are bound by all sorts of customs that have come down as second-hand soul clothes of white patrons. We are ashamed of sex and we lower our eyes when people will talk of it. Our religion holds us in superstition. Our worst side has been so shamelessly emphasized that we are denying we have or ever had a worst side. In all sorts of ways we are hemmed in and our new young artists have got to fight their way to freedom.
A different kind of pressure was applied to Black artists in the late 1960s, including to Robert Hayden, whose “Those Sunday Mornings” I wrote about recently (here). In an article for The Dispatch, Timothy Sandefur notes that Hayden refused to embrace the Negritude movement, which “supposedly meant emphasizing African traditions, but which in practice meant subordinating artistic concerns to the demands of Marxist revolution.” Sandefur observes that Hayden “had worked too hard perfecting his skill to elevate protest over craftsmanship.”
It’s central to this blog that literature can have a tremendous impact upon readers. Literature, however, operates differently than prose meant to exhort people to action. The latter is necessarily reductive since it must choose one plan amongst multiple possibilities and advocate for it. Literature, on the other hand, is multifaceted. Those politicos who don’t understand this will, upon reading a work, link a theme to something they don’t like, at which point they dismiss the work altogether. Literature that is politically correct propaganda, however, is not literature.
I remember, even as a child, sensing when a work was operating out of an agenda. Such stories often appeared in our school textbooks. In fact, I recall arriving at the conclusion—this as a third grader—that there were two kinds of reading: real reading and the reading one did in school. The latter bored me silly.
Later, when married to Julia, I also remember getting a book from her evangelical brother entitled A Christian Mother Goose, which rewrote the Mother Goose rhymes as Christian parables. I felt ill in the face of what felt like a profanation or a bad joke. Never have I understood Lewis Carroll’s parodies of didactic poetry as well as I did when reading this book. If children at Christian school are being force fed such “literature,” then they risk becoming similarly one-dimensional and will be ill-prepared to negotiate our complex world.
But back to leftwing purists. I imagine, when some of them condemn a novel, they pat themselves on the back for being able to read between the lines and pick up themes. But instead of surveying a forest, all they are seeing is one of the trees. “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” Alexander Pope famously wrote, and a little knowledge too often shapes their response.
Christmas has come early to the Bates household: we have just purchased a wood splitter, which feels like getting a giant new toy. As I watch the blade cut effortlessly through giant logs, literary references to woodcutting come to mind.
First of all, some background. My mother owns 18 heavily wooded acres surrounding her house by Lake Eva in the Southern Cumberlands. We are surrounded by tall oaks but, because of the shallow soil, the red and black oaks sooner or later hit rock, at which point they begin rotting from within. (The root systems of white oaks are able to work around the rock so they don’t have the same problem.) Then, come winter, the water that has entered the rot freezes, expanding and cracking the foundation. After that, it just takes a strong wind to topple the tree. As a result, just within 50 feet, three red oaks, one hickory and one maple that have all gone down. In addition, a tree service had to take down two trees that threatened to fall on the house.
With all this free wood around, the question has been how to take advantage of it. Finally, I found someone who would cut the trees into chunks, and he in turn persuaded us to buy a log splitter (rather than rent one at $250 a shot). I rev up the machine whenever I want a break from writing.
A Robert Frost poem confirmed me in my decision not to add a chainsaw to the log splitter. You may know “Out, Out,” maybe his most horrifying poem. In it, a boy is sawing logs when the unimaginable happens:
His sister stood beside him in her apron To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw, As if to prove saws knew what supper meant, Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap— He must have given the hand. However it was Neither refused the meeting. But the hand! The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh, As he swung toward them holding up the hand Half in appeal, but half as if to keep The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all— Since he was old enough to know, big boy Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart— He saw all spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off— The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’ So. But the hand was gone already.
Better to pay a skilled professional, I figured, than take that risk.
Another Frost poem has me wondering, however, if the wood I split and stack—being so plentiful—will end up like the abandoned woodpile, in the poet’s poem by that name. Frost comes across it quite by accident and figures it is at least three years old.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split And piled—and measured, four by four by eight. And not another like it could I see No runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it. And it was older sure than this year’s cutting, Or even last year’s or the year’s before. The wood was gray and the bark warping off it And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle. What held it though on one side was a tree Still growing, and on one a stake and prop, These latter about to fall. I thought that only Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks Could so forget his handiwork on which He spent himself, the labor of his ax And leave it there far from a useful fireplace To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay.
So if I turn four fallen oaks into firewood with this wondrous log splitter, that could be enough wood to fuel our woodstove for ten years. But would it stay good for that long? Please write me if you know.
One other literary image comes to mind as I add logs to our fire. I gave Julia a bellows for her birthday and suddenly we feel as though, without it, we’ve been making fires with one hand tied behind our backs. It also makes me think of Flute, who reluctantly plays the female lead in Pyramus and Thisbe in Midsummer Night’s Dream and who is a bellows mender. I’ve never thought of bellows needing mending—much less that there was a special profession dedicated to doing so—but now that we own one, I realize that they can wear out.
Anyway, here’s a fun poem about bellows, by one John Steele, which appeared in The Amethyst Review:
The Bellows
The bellows breath ignites a fire. Flames purge your nostrils, gut, and brain, rouse the serpent from its slumber, coiled up in your sacral cave.
Cross-legged, your head bowed to face your heart, breathe in to lift your chest up toward your chin. Exhale, inhale through your nose,
pump your gut to blast air out— in-out, in-out, in-out… Then with a sharp in-breath, suck your belly in and hold…
Work the bellows till the embers glow. Breath by breath, surrender to the flow.
For my wife’s birthday this past week, my mother gave her a copy of Mary Oliver’s Devotions, a collection of poems compiled by the author that capture her vision of the world as sacred space. Oliver often sees owls as symbols of death, and in “White Owl Flies into and Out of the Field” death is seen as “scalding, aortal light.”
When death strikes, the poet tells us, we should greet it with amazement and “let ourselves be carried,/ as through the translucence of mica,/ to the river.” Drawing on imagery of being cleansed in the River Jordan, Oliver says that, with death, we are “washed and washed/ out of our bones.”
What crossing that river means, Oliver says in another poem (“In Blackwater Woods”), “none of us will ever know.” But as in “Blackwater Woods,” in “White Owl” she hints at salvation.
White Owl Flies into and Out of the Field By Mary Oliver
Coming down out of the freezing sky with its depths of light, like an angel, or a buddha with wings, it was beautiful, and accurate, striking the snow and whatever was there with a force that left the imprint of the tips of its wings — five feet apart —and the grabbing thrust of its feet, and the indentation of what had been running through the white valleys of the snow —
and then it rose, gracefully, and flew back to the frozen marshes, to lurk there, like a little lighthouse, in the blue shadows — so I thought: maybe death isn’t darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us —
as soft as feathers — that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes, not without amazement, and let ourselves be carried, as through the translucence of mica, to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow— that is nothing but light — scalding, aortal light — in which we are washed and washed out of our bones.
John Tenniel, illus. from Alice through the Looking Glass
Friday
I’m here to report a literature sighting! A judge has just cited Alice through the Looking Glass and 1984 in his ruling that the Trump family must sit for depositions in a case involving its real estate practices.
Former President Donald Trump, as well as his children Ivanka and Donald Jr., must sit for depositions in the New York attorney general’s civil investigation of their business practices, a New York judge ruled Thursday.
New York Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron also rejected an attempt to freeze the work of Attorney General Letitia James, who is investigating whether Trump misled lenders, insurers or others in his family business’ financial statements. On several occasions throughout a two-hour hearing Thursday morning and in his ruling, the judge expressed skepticism toward the Trumps’ arguments that sitting for testimony in the civil investigation would undermine their constitutional rights.
The judge was particularly of skeptical of the looking-glass logic used by the Trump lawyers when it came to the Trumps’ accounting firm. Earlier this week, MazarsUSA declared that the information it has been receiving from the Trump Organization over the past ten years is so unreliable that it can no longer vouch for them. Most people have taken this to mean that the Trumps have been lying to the accounting firm about the value of their real estate assets. The Trump lawyer, however, argued that the Mazars declaration instead exonerates the Trump Organization and means that people should not go rooting around into the Organization’s past practices.
If that makes absolutely no sense to you, then you’ll understand why the judge declared the argument to be “as audacious as it is preposterous.” And why he turned to literature to express his shock and amazement:
“The idea that an accounting firm’s announcement that no one should rely on a decade’s worth of financial statements it issued based on the numbers submitted by an entity somehow exonerates that entity and renders an investigation into its past practices as moot is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll (‘When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said … it means just what I chose it to mean — neither more nor less’); George Orwell (‘War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength’): and ‘alternative facts,'” Engoron wrote.
“Alternative facts” was the phrase used by Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway to defend Trump’s (false) assertion that his presidential inauguration attracted more people than Obama’s. I probably don’t need to gloss the passage from 1984, but here’s the passage from Looking Glass. Humpty Dumpty has just used the word “glory” in a way that confuses Alice:
“There’s glory for you!”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”
“Would you tell me, please,” said Alice “what that means?”
“Now you talk like a reasonable child,” said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. “I meant by ‘impenetrability’ that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.”
“That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.”
“Oh!” said Alice. She was too much puzzled to make any other remark.
“Ah, you should see “em come round me of a Saturday night,” Humpty Dumpty went on, wagging his head gravely from side to side: “for to get their wages, you know.”
(Alice didn’t venture to ask what he paid them with; and so you see I can’t tell you.)
Trump has not been held legally accountable for his use of words in the past, which I suppose has given him Humpty-Dumpty type mastery over them. One hopes that Trump’s words aren’t waiting for him to pay them, however. After all, he’s notorious for stiffing those who work for him.
