Holmes and Lupin, a Comparison

By Robin Bates | Published: June 24, 2021
Omar Sy in Netflix’s Lupin

Friday

Like many Netflix viewers, our family has fallen in love with Lupin, an updated version of the famous “gentleman burglar.” France’s answer to Sherlock Holmes but working the other side of the law, Arsene Lupin only steals from those who deserve it or can spare the money. Often he breaks the law to make sure that justice is done.

Like the BBC series Sherlock, Lupin has entered the age of the internet. The central character is not actually Lupin himself but Assane Diop, the son of a Senegalese immigrant. The Diops are passionate fans of the Maurice Leblanc novels, and when the elder Diop is framed for a diamond theft by his wealthy employer Pellegrini (who needs the insurance money), he sends a Lupin-type code to his son. He is murdered in prison before Assane is old enough to decipher the code, but when young Diop comes of age, he devotes his life to exposing Pellegrini. Since the millionaire has powerful friends, however, burglary and other Lupin-type tactics are Assane’s only options.

The thrill of the series is watching Assane break the law and get away with it, all without harming anyone truly innocent. (For instance, some of the diamonds he steals at one point are blood diamonds from a lady who doesn’t care.) Those who help him or need his help sometimes find themselves the unexpected possessors of a diamond.

The Sherlock Holmes comparison actually comes up in the stories (although not in the Netflix series). Leblanc wrote a few stories where Lupin outwits Holmes, and when Doyle complained about copyright infringement, he changed the name to Herlock Sholmes (a lack of subtlety not at all worthy of Lupin). I wonder if this was a case of Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” where authors, desiring to be original, attack or otherwise disparage those who most influenced them.

We see Doyle himself doing this in the early pages of Study in Scarlet, where Watson first meets Holmes. Holmes has just, after a quick glance, informed Watson of his entire life history and then explained how he did it:

“It is simple enough as you explain it,” I said, smiling. “You remind me of Edgar Allen Poe’s Dupin. I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories.”

Sherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. “No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin,” he observed. “Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.”

“Have you read Gaboriau’s works?” I asked. “Does Lecoq come up to your idea of a detective?”

Sherlock Holmes sniffed sardonically. “Lecoq was a miserable bungler,” he said, in an angry voice; “he had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill. The question was how to identify an unknown prisoner. I could have done it in twenty-four hours. Lecoq took six months or so. It might be made a text-book for detectives to teach them what to avoid.”

I felt rather indignant at having two characters whom I had admired treated in this cavalier style. I walked over to the window, and stood looking out into the busy street. “This fellow may be very clever,” I said to myself, “but he is certainly very conceited.”

Harold Bloom would affirm that Holmes does in fact leave his predecessors in the dust since Dupin reads as a pale imitation of Doyle’s detective. Poe may have invented the detective story but Doyle perfected it. Leblanc’s attempt at surpassing his predecessor is less successful, I think. Lupin–perhaps a cross between Dupin and the French word for wolf (loup)–is no Sherlock.

Nevertheless, it’s fun to read—and now watch—a charismatic burglar at work. To give you a quick taste of Dupin at work, here’s the conclusion of “Madame Imbert’s Safe,” a story reminiscent of Doyle’s “Scandal in Beohemia” in that, like Holmes, Lupin finds himself unexpectedly bested by a woman. In his early days before becoming famous, he takes a job with a couple thinking he is the one about to do the robbing. We he discovers their wealth is all counterfeit and that, to boot, the woman has robbed of his meager student savings, he is at first furious and then genuinely amused. The narrator reports,

I could not refrain from laughter, his rage was so grotesque. He was making a mountain out of a molehill. In a moment, he laughed himself, and said:

“Yes, my boy, fifteen hundred francs. You must know that I had not received one sou of my promised salary, and, more than that, she had borrowed from me the sum of fifteen hundred francs. All my youthful savings! And do you know why? To devote the money to charity! I am giving you a straight story. She wanted it for some poor people she was assisting—unknown to her husband. And my hard-earned money was wormed out of me by that silly pretense! Isn’t it amusing, hein? Arsène Lupin done out of fifteen hundred francs by the fair lady from whom he stole four millions in counterfeit bonds! And what a vast amount of time and patience and cunning I expended to achieve that result! It was the first time in my life that I was played for a fool, and I frankly confess that I was fooled that time to the queen’s taste!”

Doyle himself once put Holmes on the wrong side of the law. In “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” he and Watson break into a blackmailer’s home to retrieve correspondence that would compromise a client. Watson has convinced Holmes to let him come, leading Holmes to reply,

Well, well, my dear fellow, be it so. We have shared this same room for some years, and it would be amusing if we ended by sharing the same cell. You know, Watson, I don’t mind confessing to you that I have always had an idea that I would have made a highly efficient criminal. This is the chance of my lifetime in that direction.

As with Lupin, we get a good chuckle when Holmes plays with the police, who have received a report of them:

“Criminals?” said Holmes. “Plural?”

“Yes, there were two of them. They were as nearly as possible captured red-handed. We have their footmarks, we have their description, it’s ten to one that we trace them. The first fellow was a bit too active, but the second was caught by the under-gardener, and only got away after a struggle. He was a middle-sized, strongly built man—square jaw, thick neck, moustache, a mask over his eyes.”

“That’s rather vague,” said Sherlock Holmes. “My, it might be a description of Watson!”

“It’s true,” said the inspector, with amusement. “It might be a description of Watson.”

Needless to say, Holmes refuses to help, and his rationale pretty much sums up Netflix’s Lupin:

I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge. No, it’s no use arguing. I have made up my mind. My sympathies are with the criminals rather than with the victim, and I will not handle this case.”

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Eternally Damned after Reading a Book

By Robin Bates | Published: June 23, 2021
Rossetti, Paulo and Francesca

Thursday

Yesterday, drawing from the chapter in my book where I examine Jane Austen’s critique of literature that can lead people astray, I focused on how Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price may have used Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa to retain her moral compass. I should have mentioned, by way of contrast, that those around her are using a racy play by Elizabeth Inchbald to engage in inappropriate behavior. Most notably, Henry Crawford uses the play to cuckold Maria Bertram’s fiancé, casting her in a role where he himself can have an intimate moment with her.

Today, drawing from the same chapter, I make a comparison between how Marianne and Willoughby use poetry in their courtship and how Paulo and Francesca do in Dante’s Inferno. Austen herself doesn’t have Dante in mind but the parallels are illuminating, as are the contrasts.

Dante shows the two famous lovers trapped in the second circle of Hell, reserved for the lustful. The couple is based on an actual incidents of lovers caught in an adulterous affair and killed by the husband. (Francesca notes that he is destined for one of Inferno’s lower circles.) The two are blown about perpetually by the winds of their desire, never finding a point of stability. As Dante puts it (in John Ciardi’s translation),

And now the sounds of grief begin to fill
My ear; I’m come where cries of anguish smite
My shrinking sense, and lamentation shrill –

A place made dumb of every glimmer of light,
Which bellows like tempestuous ocean birling
In the batter of a two-way wind’s buffet and fight.

The blast of hell that never rests from whirling
Harries the spirits along in the sweep of its swath,
And vexes them, forever beating and hurling.

When they are borne to the rim of the ruinous path
With cry and wail and shriek they are caught by the gust.
Railing and cursing the power of the Lord’s wrath.

Into this torment carnal sinners are thrust.
So I was told – the sinners who make their reason
Bond thrall under the yoke of their lust.

A major culprit for their transgression, Francesca tells Dante, was the Arthurian tale about Lancelot’s love for Guinevere. Until they encountered that story, all was well:

But if there is indeed a soul in Hell
to ask of the beginning of our love
out of his pity, I will weep ad tell:

On a day for dalliance we read the rhyme
of Lancelot, how love had masted him.
We were alone with innocence and dim time.

After that, as it were, all hell broke loose:

Pause after pause that high old story drew
our eyes together while we blushed and paled;
but it was one soft passage overthrew

Our caution and our hearts. For when we read
how her fond smile was kissed by such a lover,
he who is one with me alive and dead

breathed on my lips ahd tremor of his kiss.
That book, and he who wrote it, was a pander.
That day we read no further.

Reading is also a key part of Willoughby and Marianne’s relationship. It begins romantically—he rides up out of the mist when she has sprained an ankle and carries her home—and continues on in the same vein:

His society became gradually her most exquisite enjoyment. They read, they talked, they sang together; his musical talents were considerable; and he read with all the sensibility and spirit which Edward had unfortunately wanted.

We know what they’re reading because Marianne’s older sister Elinor and Elinor’s admirer Edward, both on the sense side of the sense-sensibility spectrum, good-naturedly tease her about her favorite poets:

“Well, Marianne,” said Elinor, as soon as he had left them, “for one morning I think you have done pretty well. You have already ascertained Mr. Willoughby’s opinion in almost every matter of importance. You know what he thinks of Cowper and Scott; you are certain of his estimating their beauties as he ought, and you have received every assurance of his admiring Pope no more than is proper. But how is your acquaintance to be long supported, under such extraordinary despatch of every subject for discourse? You will soon have exhausted each favourite topic. Another meeting will suffice to explain his sentiments on picturesque beauty, and second marriages, and then you can have nothing farther to ask.

Edward, meanwhile, weighs in during a conversation about how the family would spend a large fortune were they suddenly to inherit one:

What magnificent orders would travel from this family to London,” said Edward, “in such an event!…[A]s for Marianne, I know her greatness of soul, there would not be music enough in London to content her. And books!—Thomson, Cowper, Scott—she would buy them all over and over again: she would buy up every copy, I believe, to prevent their falling into unworthy hands; and she would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree. 

For a while, Marianne and Willoughby are as absorbed in each other as Paulo and Francesca, so much so that they rudely ignore everyone else.  There’s a real danger that Marianne, blown by the same winds, could lose her way. That’s because Willoughby is not one of Scott’s admirable heroes but a cad who has ruined one woman (Colonel Brandon’s Ward) and who will dump Marianne for an heiress. After he does, Marianne sinks into the melancholic self-absorption that Cowper helped romanticize and that alarmed many parents. To cite two instances, Cowper writes in Book III of The Task,

I was a stricken deer that left the herd
Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt
My panting side was charged when I withdrew
To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.

And in “The Castaway,” about a young man who falls overboard, Cowper concludes,

No voice divine the storm allay’d,
        No light propitious shone;
When, snatch’d from all effectual aid,
         We perish’d, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.

This is heady stuff for a moody, heartbroken 16-year-old. Thomson’s The Seasons, meanwhile, is the kind of poem that encouraged long walks in nature, and Marianne, venturing out despite a threat of rain, catches a chill and almost dies. In other words, one could say that Scott almost ruins her, Cowper almost drives her mad, and Thomson almost kills her.

If Marianne doesn’t lose herself entirely in a Paulo and Francesca passion, it’s because she is grounded. She has, for a guide, a wise older sister and, for additional reading material, the poetry of Alexander Pope, whose heroic couplets (say, in Essay on Man) urge a balance between reason and emotion.  Marianne may have only a grudging appreciation for Pope, but she has at least read him.

And so Marianne does not end up in an Inferno of endless desire but in a good, if not tempest-like, marriage. Those readers wishing she had ended up with Willoughby should consult Dante.

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Lit Steels Spines in Face of Pressure

By Robin Bates | Published: June 22, 2021
Francis Hayman, illus. of Lovelace preparing to abduct Clarissa

Wednesday

As I continue to revise my current book project (Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate), I am looking into how literature may have come to the aid of Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price at her darkest hour. Fanny is the most well-read of all Austen’s heroines, and while Austen doesn’t specifically mention that her reading assists her when the Bertram family pressures her to marry the problematic Henry Crawford, I’m now convinced that Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa helps steel her resolve.

Although Fanny has been denigrated by any number of readers for being mousy and “insipid” (this from Austen’s own mother), she rises to the occasion when confronted with more pressure than that encountered by any Austen heroine. Unsympathetic readers, who would prefer an Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse or Anne Elliot, underestimate her situation. A poor dependent, she is subject to the whims of the Bertram family at all times. She comes into the household as a child and is either ignored, bullied, or exploited by all but her older cousin Edmund.

As she grows older, they continue to thoughtlessly make use of her and to assume that her needs don’t matter. She is deprived of a fire in her room when it’s cold (by the malicious Aunt Norris) and made to run errands in the scorching heat (by the thoughtless Lady Bertram). Even Edmund, without thinking, takes away her horse when a woman he admires (Mary Crawford) wants to ride.  All of this Fanny endures without complaint, and it’s noteworthy that the one time she pushes back—when she refuses the Crawford marriage—she is sent back to her impoverished family. Her attempts to remain invisible at all times are a survival tactic.

That’s why her rebellion, when it comes, is so remarkable. Accustomed to downplay her own rights as a human being, she asserts them here. The Bertrams and Crawfords are astounded by her decision. In their eyes, Henry’s proposal is extraordinary considering his wealth and her poverty. It’s the prince proposing to Cinderella.

Only Crawford is no prince. Fanny has seen how, beneath his charming exterior, he is hollow, self-absorbed, manipulative, at times even cruel. He may be everything that society admires, but that’s because society itself has faulty values. If Fanny can see through him whereas others can’t, it’s partly because her position as a dependent makes it necessary to assess those who are above her. But it may also be because she’s acquainted with Richardson’s Robert Lovelace.

Lovelace is the charming rake in Clarissa who first courts her, then kidnaps her, and finally rapes her. Always promising to reform and never doing so, he deludes many. In fact, many 18th century readers wanted Richardson to end the novel with a marriage (even after the rape), just as many readers want Fanny to marry Crawford. I myself did at one point. But Richardson resisted reader pressure and Fanny resists Bertram family pressure, even though Fanny’s beloved Edmund pleads with her and Sir Thomas, hoping that a dose of poverty will bring her “to her senses,” sends her back to her family.

It would be easy for her to decide that her own needs don’t matter, as she has been doing all her life, and succumb. That way she would please everyone, and she’d get an upper class life as a reward. Yet she resists.

Clarissa provides the model for doing so. Clarissa’s family puts unrelenting pressure on her to marry the odious Mr. Soames, sometimes more brutally and with coarser language than that encountered by Fanny. Yet Clarissa remains true to herself and holds firm, just as Clarissa does with Lovelace’s non-stop sexual overtures (which is why he finally resorts to rape). After that, though much of the world condemns Clarissa—they see her as having run off with Lovelace—she knows the truth. In the end, she dies, at which point Richardson practically canonizes her. One can see how having such a literary model would strengthen Fanny.

To be sure, Austen doesn’t actually mention that Fanny has read Clarissa, but it would be strange if she hadn’t, given how much of a reader she is. Richardson was Austen’s favorite author, and Clarissa is arguably the greatest English novel of the 18th century. Women would disappear for days into their private chambers to read the million-word novel, neglecting household duties to do so.

In his article “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Reader,” my dissertation director J. Paul Hunter says that the novel form generally, and Clarissa in particular, ushered in a new kind of solitude, upsetting people who were used to more social interactions. It was like kids disappearing into video games. Husbands were particularly upset at losing their wives’ services, but perhaps they were even more upset at the way the novel promotes female selfhood.

In any event, the thought of Fanny reading Clarissa helps me better understand how she withstands the pressure put on her.

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Putin Quoting Tolstoy? Puleeze!

By Robin Bates | Published: June 21, 2021
Vladimir Putin

Tuesday

Last week when Joe Biden was meeting with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s autocrat claimed to be quoting Leo Tolstoy when he responded to a reporter’s question about whether there was a “growing trust and happiness” between him and America’s president. “There is no happiness in life, only a mirage of it on the horizon, so cherish that,” Putin said

Commentators were unable to find any instances of Tolstoy saying or writing this, nor does it sound like something that Tolstoy would say. In fact, his characters often find genuine moments of happiness. The closest MSNBC’s Laurence O’Donnell could come was a passage from War and Peace, but Prince Andrei has something very different in mind that Putin.

Having lost his wife as well and seeing his proposals for military reform dashed, Andrei is feeling particularly discouraged. He begins to experience new hope after meeting Natasha, however:

“Pierre was right when he said one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and now I do believe in it. Let the dead bury their dead, but while one has life one must live and be happy!” thought he.

To be sure, this happiness will not be long-lasting. After accepting his marriage proposal, Natasha will renege and then Andrei will almost die when fighting Napoleon and almost die. Although he will in fact die, before he does he will experience a vision of absolute love. (Now there’s a vision of happiness that eludes Putin.) Andrei also forgives Natasha, and he does not so much surrender to death as accept it as a new adventure.

His best friend Pierre, to whom he attributes the observation, is the novel’s existentialist, constantly pondering the meaning of life. Yet happiness awaits him as well as, after he and Natasha mourn Andrei, they fall in love (this after Pierre escapes execution). We see them enjoying a contented family life as the book comes to its conclusion.

While it’s not Tolstoy, what Putin said serves his purposes. If Russians believe that life is inevitably unhappy, then they won’t blame Putin’s kleptocracy for tanking the Russian economy. They will just continue to suck it up, as they have been doing for hundreds of years.

In Putin’s defense, the reporter’s question was strange. What does happiness have to do with the Biden-Putin relationship? Indeed, Russians and Americans may have very different visions of what constitutes happiness. For Americans, the word appears in the most important sentence of their founding document: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

These are the words of a people who think they can start fresh in a new world. It’s the vision of a young and optimistic people, a belief that one can erase the past. This vision has been embraced by each successive wave of immigrants and is integral to the American Dream, that which makes America America.

Russia, on the other hand, has experienced hardship after hardship. For them, there’s no easy way out. We see plenty of suffering in War and Peace when Napoleon invades, and the 20th century alone dumped on the Soviet Union more than almost any other nation. That Russians have been hardened in a way that optimistic Americans have not may contribute to Russia’s literary greatness. In any event, I can see why Putin would be taken aback by the question.

Incidentally, his response reminds me of Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” He too represents a response to facile American optimism. After he and gang have just murdered a Georgia family, one of his men complains that he’s not having much fun. In the line that ends the story, the Misfit replies, “Shut up, Bobby Lee. It’s no real pleasure in life.”

The Misfit and Putin are both clear-eyed realists with blood on their hands. The issue of soul gets raised with both as well. When meeting with Putin as vice-president in 2011, Biden reported the following:

“I said, ‘Mr. Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul,’” Biden told the New Yorker at the time. “He looked back at me, and he smiled, and he said, ‘We understand one another.'”

Biden’s remark was a follow-up to George W. Bush’s fatuous statement, made ten years before, about his meeting with Putin: “We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul. He’s a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country and I appreciate very much the frank dialogue and that’s the beginning of a very constructive relationship.”

Both Putin and the Misfit have buried their souls so deep that they cannot respond to the humanity of others. It is because the Misfit momentarily sees the soul at work in the otherwise shallow grandmother that he freaks out and shoots her. By reaching out to him with tenderness and love, even though he has just had her family killed, she shakes his cynical world view to its foundations. When Bush thought he could reach out similarly, however, Putin ran circles around him. Biden knows a lost cause when he sees one.

In any event, Putin represents everything that Tolstoy was against. The writer spoke from the beating heart of his country whereas the autocrat just twists words for his cynical ends.

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Sumer Is i-Cumin In

By Robin Bates | Published: June 20, 2021
Herbert Arnould Olivier, Summer Is Icumen In

Monday – First Day of Summer

This being the first full day of summer, the famous mid-13th century lyric “Sumer is i-cumin in” is a must. My father, who was both a bird watcher and a lover of nature, lamented that the French couldn’t match the English for nature imagery, and this poem pulsates with the sounds, sights, and smells (“verteth” means farts) of early summer. The Middle Ages may have been a particularly spiritual age but it was also very earthy. These two aspects make for wonderful creative tension in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer.

There’s no such tension in “Sumer is i-cumin in,” however. This lyric is all earth all the time. You should be able to make out most of the middle English, but here are words you may need translated:

Nu – now
Med – meadow
Wude – wood
Awe – ewe
Lhouth- cow
Lu – lows
Sterteth – starts up
Verteth – farts
Bucke – male goat or deer

The last line means “never stop now.”

Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu.
Sing, cuccu. Sing, cuccu, nu.

Sumer is i-cumin in—
Lhude sing, cuccu!
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springth the wude nu.
Sing, cuccu!

Awe bleteth after lomb,
Lhouth after calve cu,
Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth—
Murie sing, cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu,
Wel singes thu, cuccu.
Ne swik thu naver nu!

Bonus Poem:

While looking up the lyric on Wikipedia, I came across a very funny parody by A.Y. Campbell, a classic scholar who composed it in the 1920s or 1930s:

Plumber is icumen in;
Bludie big tu-du.
Bloweth lampe, and showeth dampe,
And dripth the wud thru.
Bludie hel, boo-hoo!

Thaweth drain, and runneth bath;
Saw saweth, and scrueth scru;
Bull-kuk squirteth, leake spurteth;
Wurry springeth up anew,
Boo-hoo, boo-hoo.

Tom Pugh, Tom Pugh, well plumbes thu, Tom Pugh;
Better job I naver nu.
Therefore will I cease boo-hoo,
Woorie not, but cry pooh-pooh,
Murie sing pooh-pooh, pooh-pooh,
Pooh-pooh!

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Father God, I Want to Sit on Your Knees

By Robin Bates | Published: June 19, 2021
Guercino Giovan Francesco Barbieri, God The Father

Spiritual Sunday – Father’s Day

When I attended church as a child, I came away with the impression that God was an old man who was angry all the time. It didn’t help that our rector, as I learned later, was a fire and brimstone Episcopalian (they’re fairly rare). I was also freaked out by the confessional of the time, especially the lines, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.” (The language was softened in the 1979 prayer book revision.) Christianity, as I experienced it, seemed to do little more than exacerbate my already strong sense of guilt. I would have agreed with William Blake’s depiction of such a God as “Nobodaddy,” a “silent & invisible Father of jealousy” who hides in “darkness and obscurity.”

The end result was that I stopped going to church when I hit high school and didn’t return until my late thirties.

It helped in my return that I started thinking of God as female rather than male. This gender shift opened up possibilities that had seemed closed off before. I also appreciated that Julian of Norwich, whom I taught in the British Literary survey, refers to Jesus as a mother.

Katherine Mansfield’s poem “God the Father,” however, provides a more positive view of a paternal God. She too appears to have had negative feelings until, after having been beaten about by life, she arrives at a new appreciation.

We can’t help but anthropomorphize the deities we worship, but literature helps us expand the range of our metaphors.

To God the Father

By Katherine Mansfield

To the little, pitiful God I make my prayer,
The God with the long grey beard
And flowing robe fastened with a hempen girdle
Who sits nodding and muttering on the all-too-big throne
of Heaven.
What a long, longtime, dear God, since you set the
stars in their places,
Girded the earth with the sea, and invented the day and night.
 And longer the time since you looked through the blue window of Heaven
To see your children at play, in a garden….
Now we are all stronger than you and wiser and more
arrogant,
In swift procession we pass you by.
“Who is that marionette nodding and muttering
On the all-too-big throne of Heaven?
Come down from your place, Grey Beard,
We have had enough of your play-acting!”

It is centuries since I believed in you,
But to-day my need of you has come back.
I want no rose-colored future,
No books of learning, no protestations and denials–
I am sick of this ugly scramble,
I am tired of being pulled about–
O God, I want to sit on your knees
On the all-too-big throne of Heaven,
And fall asleep with my hands tangled in your grey
beard.

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A Father’s Day Poem about Tenderness

By Robin Bates | Published: June 17, 2021
Georges de La Tour, Joseph the Carpenter

Friday

With Father’s Day coming up, I share one of the tenderest poems I know about fathers. I’ve heard Li-Young Lee read this poem upon visits to St. Mary’s College of Maryland, the college where I spent my career and where he came to visit Lucille Clifton. It prompts me to recall important moments with my own father, who died seven years ago at 90 but who is with me always.

The young boy in the poem is traumatized by a splinter, sure that he will die from it. Later, when he looks back, he indicates his hysteria by the ways he considered characterizing it:

I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!

The hands of the father have two realities for the child. They are comforting when they cradle his face, disciplinary when they rise up to strike him. In this case, they comfort:

The Gift
By Li-Young Lee

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.

I love how the father’s “gift” has been planted in the boy, showing up years later when he cares for his wife. The gift is more than the removal of a splinter. It is a tenderness that transcends generations.

The poem has me thinking about gifts from my own father. One came after I said something sarcastic to one of my younger brothers. I don’t remember the occasion—I must have been trying to deflate him, as tweenagers do—but I remember my father’s response. Gently but firmly he told me that one should never burst another person’s bubble.

His admonition alerted me to the preciousness of another’s joy. Since then, I strive to enter into and bolster the excitement of others, whether it’s in the classroom, on the tennis court, or elsewhere. To do so doubles life’s enjoyments.

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Was Jan. 6 Just Sound and Fury?

By Robin Bates | Published: June 16, 2021

Thursday

When I visited my son Darien and his family in Washington, D.C. last week, he cautioned me against attaching too much importance to the January 6 takeover of the Capitol. As he sees it, the insurrection was nothing more than cosplay, various blowhards acting out their barroom fantasies. Although we didn’t pursue it, I had the sense he would say the same about a lot of rightwing posturing, from Michigan yahoos brandishing automatic weapons to Cyber Ninjas in Arizona looking for bamboo in the presidential ballots. Nor does he worry about Trump, whom he regards as far too incompetent to pull off a coup. As Darien sees it, America’s fundamentals are solid enough to ride out such political bullshit, and liberals like myself should stop overreacting.

Macbeth’s best-known passage comes to mind as I think about what he had to say. Macbeth applies the analogy to life itself but try it out on rightwing braggarts:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

It’s certainly true that we’ve had a whole series of sound-and-fury idiots in recent times, from Pat Buchanan to Sarah Palin to Donald Trump to, currently, Marjorie Taylor Green and Ted Cruz. As one fades into obscurity, someone else invariably steps up to take his or her place. It could well signify nothing.

Of course, Duncan thought that Macbeth would stand by his oath of allegiance and look how that turned out. It’s not unlike Trump swearing to uphold the Constitution.

 I don’t know whether or not Darien is right, but I pray that he is.

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To Esmé, without the Squalor

By Robin Bates | Published: June 15, 2021
Hanging out with Esmé

Wednesday

Yesterday, when my eldest granddaughter turned nine, I looked back at the post I wrote when she was born. As I have done with each of my grandchildren, I looked into the literary antecedents to her name. The most famous Esmé in literature, I believe, is J.D. Salinger’s “To Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” Nine years later, I can report the prediction I made at that time has proved fairly prescient.

Reprinted from June 18, 2012

My son Toby and his wife have just managed to accomplish what neither my paternal grandparents, my parents, nor Julia and I could do: they have given birth to a baby girl. Esmé Eleanor Wilson-Bates arrived 2:58 Friday morning, turning me instantly into the cliché of the doting grandfather. I’m also pleased to report that her parents are keeping alive a Bates tradition of giving their children literary names. Esmé is the enchanting little girl in the J. D. Salinger short story “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” which bodes well for Esmé Eleanor’s future.

At least it does if you subscribe to the Walter Shandy theory of naming, which I’ve written about here. According to the father in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, names determine destiny. To Walter Shandy, it’s self-evident why Julius Caesar grew up to become a great general and leader of men. After all, he bore the name “Julius Caesar.” (Also according to Walter, the worst name that one can possibly have, a name that will doom one forever, is “Tristram”—and how his son ends up with that name is part of the comedy of the novel.)

So how have literary names shaped destiny in our family? I was named after Christopher Robin and there was indeed a way in which, as the oldest son, I saw myself as the chief game master in my family, with my brothers as so many Poohs, Piglets and Eyores. To this day I still like to run things. [Slight amendation: My mother points out that the actual source of my name was the family name of “Robins,” with my poet father dropping the “s” because “Robin Bates” scans better. While I accept this explanation, names are often overdetermined so Milne’s character is in there as well.]

Meanwhile Darien, who owes his name to the Keats sonnet “Upon First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” is a bold explorer like Cortes/Balboa, starting his own Manhattan marketing agency at the height of the recession with virtually no capital. Toby, meanwhile, is one of the kindest men I know, sharing similarities with his namesake Uncle Toby, who refuses to hurt a fly in Tristram Shandy.

By naming their daughter Esmé, then, Toby and Candice have given her a real gift. Salinger’s Esmé is an English girl in her early teens who befriends a U. S. soldier (the narrator) in a restaurant on the eve of his being sent over to France in the D Day invasion.  She has lost both parents, her father in the African campaign, and is reaching out to Americans. She is earnest, sensitive, and precocious—she likes to use big words—and the soldier is captivated. When she learns that the narrator is a writer, she asks him if he will write a story about her:

“I’d be extremely flattered if you’d write a story exclusively for me sometime. I’m an avid reader.”

I told her I certainly would, if I could. I said that I wasn’t terribly prolific.

“It doesn’t have to be terribly prolific! Just so that it isn’t childish and silly.” She reflected. “I prefer stories about squalor.”

“About what?” I said, leaning forward.

“Squalor. I’m extremely interested in squalor.”

And later:

 “Are you at all acquainted with squalor?”

I said not exactly but that I was getting better acquainted with it, in one form or another, all the time, and that I’d do my best to come up to her specifications. We shook hands.

Her final words are, “ I hope you return from the war with all your faculties intact.”

Esmé doesn’t appear to know what squalor means, but the narrator does indeed become better acquainted with it when he undergoes combat, as did Salinger. His faculties, furthermore, take a beating: we next see him stationed in a house in Germany after the war suffering from PTSD. He has the shakes and a facial twist, and he vomits when he gets too close to real emotion. At one point he recalls the Brothers Karamazov passage that hell is the inability to love, and he himself finds himself unable to answer, or even to read, the letters which his wife and relatives are sending him. He wraps himself in a protective shield of irony.

Esme’s letter pulls him out of the worst of his illness. Here’s her postscript:

P.S. I am taking the liberty of enclosing my wristwatch which you may keep in your possession for the duration of the conflict. I did not observe whether you were wearing one during our brief assocition, but this one is extremely water-proof and shock-proof as well as having many other virtues among which one can tell as what velocity one is walking if one wishes. I am quite certain that you will use it to greater advantage in these difficult days than I ever can and that you will accept it as a lucky talisman.

The narrator knows the meaning of the watch, which belonged to Esmé’s father. It helps him recover enough to return to his wife and begin his life anew.

I can imagine Esmé Eleanor 12 years from now as an alert, curious, and gregarious girl (“gregarious” is a word that fascinates the fictional Esmé). I see her, like Salinger’s heroine, wearing a Campbell tartan dress and being sensitive to people in distress (as her father was at a very early age). She will reach out to lonely souls.

I pray that she won’t be forced to grow up too fast, even though I’m aware that tragedy happens. Her father, after all, wrestled with the death of an older brother when he was just 16.

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