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.
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:
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.
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.
I share today another chapter of my current book project, Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate. Since I am still in the revision process, I am particularly interested in feedback.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, while very interested in making our lives better, don’t have a lot to say about how literature can help. I include them in this book, however, because many left-leaning literary theorists think that literature can join with their class politics to advance human liberation.
Had things turned out differently, it’s possible that Marx would have had a lot to say about literature since, at 17, he was a brilliant student who wanted to study literature in college. (Instead, his father made him study law, which he finessed into law and philosophy.) He wrote some poetry and short fiction, along with a play, before shifting over to philosophy, focusing on the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. After leaving the university, he became a journalist increasingly interested in socialist causes.
Meeting Friedrich Engels was a major turning point in his life. Engels, the son of a Lancashire textiles factory owner, had researched the abysmal living conditions of mill hands, producing the landmark Condition of the Working Class in England (1844). Disenchanted with Hegel’s idealism, which believed that ideas shape history, Marx turned his attention to economics and worker activism. When revolutions broke out all over Europe in 1848, Marx and Engels co-authored The Communist Manifesto, designed to transform working class dissatisfaction into a mass movement.
As Marx and Engels see it, more inclusive forms of society invariably replace less inclusive forms, meaning that the proletariat will one day replace the bourgeoisie as the bourgeoisie replaced the landed classes. The desired end is a communal state where each individual, free of worrying about physical needs, can develop his or her particular potential to the fullest. Marx analyzed the workings of capitalism in Capital, his masterpiece. Engels, meanwhile, would go on to write, among other works, The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State.
According to Marx’s daughter Elaine, he was a fan of Shelly, whom he considered as “one of the advanced guard of Socialism.” It’s important to distinguish between the two, however. Defence of Poetry is closer to the Hegelian idealism that Marx rejected in that Shelley sees visions of human liberation, grasped by the great poets, inevitably seizing hold of human society and changing it. In other words, consciousness (including literature) shapes history, even though it can take a while.
If Marx is said to have stood Hegel “on his head,” it’s because he saw economic forces influencing consciousness, not the other way around. Shelley may have called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” but Marx became increasingly interested in actual legislating. What does it take for power to change hands?
Consciousness and literature still have a role to play, however. To understand how, we must look at the relationship between what Marx and Engels call “the ideological superstructure” and “the economic base.” The superstructure involves “ideas, concepts and consciousness”—the mental structures that influence how we see ourselves—while the base concerns “the material intercourse of man”:
The production of ideas, concepts and consciousness is first of all directly interwoven with the material intercourse of man, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the spiritual intercourse of men, appear here as the direct efflux of men’s material behavior…
The Marx-Engels passage has led to many debates about which is more important, material life or culture (life or literature for us). At first glance, it appears that Marx and Engels consider material life to be primary:
We do not proceed from what men say, imagine, conceive….[R]ather we proceed from the really active man…Consciousness does not determine life: life determines consciousness.
While this may seem to definitively relegate consciousness to the second tier, it’s actually more complicated than that. In pushing against Hegel’s contention that consciousness determines history, Marx and Engels may overstate the case, going to the other extreme. “Interwoven,” I think, gives us a better sense of the actual relationship. Literature can’t act independently from the material conditions on the ground, but it is through people’s ideological sense of themselves that the economic conditions manifest themselves. History may involve impersonal forces, but it takes place through actual people.
The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, a labor organizer who thought about these issues when locked up in Mussolini’s prisons in the 1930s, helps clarify the relationship. As he sees it, workers (economic base) and cultural activists (ideological superstructure) need each other. Without connection to actual working conditions, culture laborers (including poets) are prone to airy abstractions, while without the efforts of those who work with ideas, manual workers are vulnerable to what Engels calls “false consciousness” and Gramsci “bourgeois cultural hegemony.”
As Gramsci sees it, the middle class uses the institutions of culture (the media, universities, religious institutions) to “manufacture consent,” with the result that the middle class need not rely only on armies and the police to stay in power. The existing power relations will appear, to the working class, as just the way things are.” What passes as “common sense,” Gramsci writes, is actually a manipulated reality. William Blake, in his poem “London,” captures how people forge mental shackles for themselves. Although miserable, they do not cast off the internal restraints:
I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man, In every Infant’s cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
When the reigning power structure can convince people to forge mental manacles for themselves, we have what Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye calls “soft power.”
If culture helps enforce existing power relations, however, it also can challenge them. Gramsci himself is more interested in how political philosophy can break the hold of bourgeois “common sense” on worker minds, but we will be examining literature’s ability to do so. W.E.B. Du Bois, Bertolt Brecht, Frantz Fanon, and various feminists (Rachel Blau Du Plessis, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Tania Modleski) all examine ways that poetry, fiction and drama can break the hegemonic power of, respectively, racism, capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. If Sir Philip Sidney is right that literature is the best way to teach virtue, then maybe it is also the best way to break the hold of oppressors over our minds.
We will also see a contrary view expressed by Victorian poet and thinker Matthew Arnold, who openly calls for poetry to be used to ensure middle class hegemonic control, not challenge it. Literature, as Arnold sees it, should be taught in worker schools because it will “civilize” the masses, by which he means persuade them to be content with their lot in life.
Marx and Engels do not disagree with Arnold that great literature can play a reactionary role in class struggle. For instance, they both noten how members of the rising middle class used Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe for their own purposes. One can see how the story of a shipwrecked mariner creating a new society would appeal to entrepreneurs, casting someone like them as a heroic protagonist in a drama that breaks with the past and forges a new path into the future. Crusoe’s father wants him to stay at home and pursue a safe “middle way” whereas Crusoe wants something more, even though he can’t put his finger on exactly what that is. In any event, he continues to engage in risky ventures, with the final result that he creates a new world that far surpasses anything that his father could envision. The story so engaged readers that for 200 years Robinson Crusoe was the world’s most popular novel.
Marx would point out that Robinson Crusoe was popular because it reflected the historical shift from the land-owning gentry to the mercantile and industrial middle class. The economic base, in other words, was determining the ideological superstructure. But it did more than reflect. By giving entrepreneurs an identity, putting steel in their spines and confidence in their decision making, the novel helped propel historical forces forward. And not only Robinson Crusoe. In his seminal work The Rise of the Novel, scholar Ian Watt talks about how early novels in general reinforced new notions of individualism that were part of the new economic order. Each time readers immersed themselves in the story of Robinson Crusoe, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, Goethe’s Young Werther, Sarah Fielding’s David Simple, Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random, William Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, or a host of other novelistic protagonists, they were invited to prioritize the thoughts, feelings, and actions of individuals over age-old traditions. Watt points out how the break is particularly striking in Crusoe:
Crusoe’s island gives him the complete laissez-faire which economic man needs to realize his aims. At home market conditions, taxation and problems of the labor supply make it impossible for the individual to control every aspect of production, distribution and exchange. The conclusion is obvious. Follow the call of the wide open places, discover an island that is desert only because it is barren of owners or competitors, and there build your personal Empire with the help of a Man Friday who needs no wages and makes it much easier to support the white man’s burden.
What’s for a middle class businessman not to like?
Marx was not entirely opposed to the middle class embracing this vision. In his dialectical view of history, the heroes of one era are the villains of the next. Although the capitalists who replaced the gentry would become oppressors in their turn, they represented a new prosperity where, theoretically, the needs of all could be met—although for that to become a reality, the proletariat would need to force capitalists to (a) stop exploiting them and (b) share the wealth.
So what are authors to do if their work is used in the service of progress at one moment in history and oppression in another? Marx and Engels have a simple answer: don’t worry about it. The artist’s job is to tell the truth, not engage in politics. Authors are not to be activists but reality describers.
In this, Marx and Engels share with Aristotle, Samuel Johnson and Shelley the belief that looking closely at literature gives us access to certain larger human truths. Johnson, as we have seen, believes that “much instruction” is to be gleaned from Shakespeare’s deep understanding of human nature while Shelley finds evidence of humanity’s yearning for freedom in literature’s masterworks. For their part, Marx and Engels believe that novelists give us a deeper understanding of the workings of society than economists, sociologists, and political scientists. “Scientific socialism”—which is to say, socialism based on empirical reality, not on utopian dreaming—benefits from literature’s insights.
Even as Robinson Crusoe inspired capitalists, for instance, it also revealed the dark side of capitalism, especially its self-absorption and its readiness to use other people as instruments of profit. Crusoe thinks that God is using earthquakes to send him special messages, and he doesn’t hesitate to sell a Muslim friend into slavery when it suits his purposes. (His shipwreck, meanwhile, occurs when he is traveling to Africa to acquire slaves.) To reflect upon Robinson Crusoe, then, is to recognize both the energies of emergent bourgeois capitalism and the way it sacrifices human beings. Because these energies remain a powerful element of capitalism, socialist activists underestimate them at their peril. In other words, they can use literature to better understand the enemy.
To cite another literary example, Marx and Engels praise the French novelist Honoré de Balzac, even though he has royalist sympathies. Engels claimed to have learned more about French society and its history from the French novelist than from any historian or social scientist. Marx too admired Balzac and once planned to write a critical study of the author after his studies of economics were complete. Engels explains why Balzac’s grand project, his La Comédie Humaine, is so revealing:
Well, Balzac was politically a Legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the inevitable decay of good society, his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction. But for all that his satire is never keener, his irony never bitterer, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathizes most deeply – the nobles. And the only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloître Saint-Méry, the men, who at that time (1830-6) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses. That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favorite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found – that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac.
If literary masterpieces like Robinson Crusoe and the novels that make up Balzac’s Comédie Humain function as objective mirrors of social relations, allowing political and economic theorists to penetrate to their core, then works that sacrifice truth to politic expediency will not serve us, even if we agree with their politics. Engels makes this clear in his criticism of the draft of an 1885 novel about salt miners sent to him by a hopeful author. In his letter to the author, Engels begins by pointing out that she appears chiefly interested in proclaiming her socialist convictions:
You obviously felt a desire to take a public stand in your book, to testify to your convictions before the entire world. This has now been done; it is a stage you have passed through and need not repeat in this form.
He goes on to note that he is not against partisanship per se. Some of the great authors have been partisan, a qualification that Shelley too should have made:
I am by no means opposed to partisan poetry as such. Both Aeschylus, the father of tragedy, and Aristophanes, the father of comedy, were highly partisan poets, Dante and Cervantes were so no less, and the best thing that can be said about Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe is that it represents the first German political problem drama. The modern Russians and Norwegians, who produce excellent novels, all write with a purpose.
The danger comes when partisanship clouds one’s vision, however. At that point, one has surrendered literature’s greatest strength, which is the ability to provide “a faithful portrayal of real conditions.”
Engels would undoubtedly endorse novelist Iris Murdoch when she makes a similar point, distinguishing between the writer as citizen and the writer as artist:
A citizen has a duty to society, and a writer might sometimes feel he ought to write persuasive newspaper articles or pamphlets, but this would be a different activity. The artist’s duty is to art, to truth-telling in his own medium, the writer’s duty is to produce the best literary work of which he is capable, and he must find out how this can be done.
With a “faithful portrayal of the real conditions,” Engels says, the socialist problem novel will have done its job. Once one sees the truth about the world, the optimism of the bourgeoisie will have been shaken and its aura of invincibility shaken. Literary truth, in other words, will make us free, which means that novelists don’t need to offer direct solutions to the problems presented or even to take sides. They don’t have to write newspaper articles or pamphlets advocating for proletarian revolution—or if they do, they will be engaging in a different activity.
As we have seen, however, Engels himself is less interested in authors as activists than as truth tellers. Leave it to others, Engels might have said in his letter, to turn literary insight into active resistance. With his view that the arc of history bends towards equality for all, Engels shares with Shelley the belief that the greatest (and therefore most truthful) literature will, by definition, be consistent with history’s progressive march, expanding the vision of freedom for all.
One other issue is worth taking up given Engels’s preference for a truthful author over a politically correct author. Stalin’s Soviet Union chose political correctness over truth, with the result that authors whose works didn’t toe the party line could be imprisoned or even killed. Marxist literary scholars like Terry Eagleton and Frederic Jameson have labeled this “vulgar Marxism” and, citing Marx and Engels’s admiration for the monarchist Balzac, come to the defense of conservative writers. For instance, Eagleton praises reactionary author Joseph Conrad for accurately depicting the crisis of late 19th century capitalism in works like The Heart of Darkness.
Since we will be seeing figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Chinua Achebe, and Frantz Fanon attacking a work that depicts Africans as a howling mass, it’s worth looking deeper into Eagleton’s defense. As Eagleton sees it, Conrad’s pessimism reflects how capitalism has reached a dead-end. Because Conrad focuses on the individual when the world (so Eagleton believes) requires a collective solution, he finds himself in a dead end:
The pessimism of Conrad’s world view is rather a unique transformation into art of an ideological pessimism rife in his period— a sense of history as futile and cyclical, of individuals as impenetrable and solitary, of human values as relativistic and irrational, which marks a drastic crisis in the ideology of the Western bourgeois class to which Conrad allied himself. There were good reasons for that ideological crisis, in the history of imperialist capitalism throughout this period.
Consider, for instance, the contrast that Conrad draws between Kurtz and Marlow in Heart of Darkness. Kurtz represents Europe’s failure to reconcile enlightened Christianity with unregulated capitalism. He goes into the jungle to civilize the natives (also to make his fortune) but, in the process, descends into barbarism, displaying the heads of his enemies on spikes while coupling up with a native queen. Greed and lust expose civilization’s values. Narrator Marlow, however, is at a loss when it comes to alternatives. He finds himself admiring Kurtz because at least he at least strives for big things, unlike Marlow, who doesn’t believe in anything. Marlow downplays the fact that Kurtz has become absolutely corrupt..
Eagleton also has a Marxist explanation for why Conrad would see the bourgeois crisis so clearly:
[E]very writer is individually placed in society, responding to a general history from his own particular standpoint, making sense of it in his own concrete terms. But it is not difficult to see how Conrad’s personal standing, as an “aristocratic” Polish exile deeply committed to English conservatism, intensified for him the crisis of English bourgeois ideology…
Conrad wasn’t alone and Eagleton mentions other conservative writers of the time who provide similar critiques of capitalism. Marxist criticism, he believes, should use these insights in the service of building a better world rather than castigating the authors for their politics:
Whether those insights are in political terms “progressive” or “reactionary” (Conrad’s are certainly the latter) is not the point—any more than it is to the point that most of the agreed major writers of the twentieth century—Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence—are political conservatives who each had truck with fascism. Marxist criticism, rather than apologizing for the fact, explains it—sees that, in the absence of genuinely revolutionary art, only a radical conservatism, hostile like Marxism to the withered values of liberal bourgeois society, could produce the most significant literature.
Since we’ve seen, in his critique of the salt miners novel, Engels’s own preference for truthful literature over doctrinally correct literature, we can imagine him and Marx criticizing socialist realism, the party line art that arose in Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China. They would also have been appalled at the persecution of authors whose work didn’t conform to orthodox dogma. By executing writers or sending them to the Gulag, Stalin shut himself off from the truths that artists could have taught the Soviet Union about itself. Listen to literature or you will become stagnant, one could say.
In summation, literature provides revolutionaries with a powerful tool: if they reflect upon the master works, they will better understand the energies and tendencies of history. Just as (according to Johnson) “a system of social duty may be selected” from Shakespeare’s plays, so scientific socialism can build upon literature’s truth telling. Marx and Engels, of course, would then add that simply knowing the truth isn’t enough: literature can help expose the way oppression works, revealing the physical and mental chains that constrain humanity, but it is up to the working class to usher in a new world. As Marx lyrically asserts in his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.”
That being said, we will be looking at theorists who think that literature should not only reveal the chain but also assist in throwing it off. Just as Sidney sees poetry as a powerful way to inculcate virtue, so Bertolt Brecht will see drama as a way to inspire and direct revolutionary action.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, An Arab and His Horse in the Desert (1872)
Monday
Here’s an H.D. poem for those suffering through temperatures reaching up into the 120s (50 centigrade) in places like Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Las Vegas. Hang in there:
O wind, rend open the heat, cut apart the heat, rend it to tatters.
Fruit cannot drop through this thick air– fruit cannot fall into heat that presses up and blunts the points of pears and rounds the grapes.
Cut the heat– plough through it, turning it on either side of your path.
Today I get the privilege of reading the Old Testament lesson to our recently reopened and newly named church (we are now St. Mark and St. Paul on the Mountain). The lesson itself works as a tree poem and it puts me in mind of a gorgeous Robert Haas tree poem, with both poems signaling new hope.
First, here’s Ezekiel (17:22-24)
Thus says the Lord God:
I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of a cedar; I will set it out.
I will break off a tender one from the topmost of its young twigs;
I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain.
On the mountain height of Israel I will plant it,
in order that it may produce boughs and bear fruit, and become a noble cedar.
Under it every kind of bird will live; in the shade of its branches will nest winged creatures of every kind.
All the trees of the field shall know that I am the Lord.
I bring low the high tree, I make high the low tree;
I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish.
I the Lord have spoken; I will accomplish it.
The poem reminds me somewhat of Joyce Kilmer’s well-known poem “Trees,” which also sees trees sheltering winged creatures while lifting their arms up to the Lord:
A tree that looks at God all day, And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear A nest of robins in her hair…
In Haas’s “The Apple Trees at Olema,” meanwhile, a couple comes across two “old neglected apple trees”—like Ezekiel’s dry tree—and are transported upward. She is “shaken by the raw, white, backlit flaring/ of the apple blossoms” while he “is exultant, as if something he felt were verified.” She “takes the measure/ of the trees and lets them in” while he finds that his dismay, like a thin moon, “fades like a scar in the sky to the east of them.”
The concluding image is one where the speaker, knowing that he has a home he can always return to, confidently ventures forth to wander among strangers. The tree of faith gives one that confidence.
The Apple Trees at Olema By Robert Haas
They are walking in the woods along the coast and in a grassy meadow, wasting, they come upon two old neglected apple trees. Moss thickened every bough and the wood of the limbs looked rotten but the trees were wild with blossom and a green fire of small new leaves flickered even on the deadest branches. Blue-eyes, poppies, a scattering of lupine flecked the meadow, and an intricate, leopard-spotted leaf-green flower whose name they didn’t know. Trout lily, he said; she said, adder’s-tongue. She is shaken by the raw, white, backlit flaring of the apple blossoms. He is exultant, as if something he felt were verified, and looks to her to mirror his response. If it is afternoon, a thin moon of my own dismay fades like a scar in the sky to the east of them. He could be knocking wildly at a closed door in a dream. She thinks, meanwhile, that moss resembles seaweed drying lightly on a dock. Torn flesh, it was the repetitive torn flesh of appetite in the cold white blossoms that had startled her. Now they seem tender and where she was repelled she takes the measure of the trees and lets them in. But he no longer has the apple trees. This is as sad or happy as the tide, going out or coming in, at sunset. The light catching in the spray that spumes up on the reef is the color of the lesser finch they notice now flashing dull gold in the light above the field. They admire the bird together, it draws them closer, and they start to walk again. A small boy wanders corridors of a hotel that way. Behind one door, a maid. Behind another one, a man in striped pajamas shaving. He holds the number of his room close to the center of his mind gravely and delicately, as if it were the key, and then he wanders among strangers all he wants
The internet is a wondrous place when it can surface a poem that hits as close to home as this Lu Yu lyric. It captures the joys of being about to turn 70 at a time when I am on the eve of turning 70 (tomorrow).
Lu Yu was an 8th century Chinese poet who (this according to Wikipedia) authored The Classic of Tea, “the first definitive work on cultivating, making and drinking tea.” I love how the old man in the poem is carrying a battered book. No wonder he is whooping with delight.
Old man pushing seventy, In truth he acts like a little boy, Whooping with delight when he spies some mountain fruits, Laughing with joy, tagging after village mummers; With the others having fun stacking tiles to make a pagoda, Standing alone staring at his image in the jardinière pool. Tucked under his arm, a battered book to read, Just like the time he first set out to school.
Carl Jung, while he celebrates the archetype of the “wise old man,” also has positive things to say about the figure of the “old fool.” Dignified old age can get trapped by respectability whereas crazy old age opens up new perspectives on life. W. B. Yeats agrees in his “Crazy Jane” series, having a poor old woman confront a holier-than-thou bishop. “Love has pitched his mansion in/ The place of excrement,” she defiantly tells him. Lu Yu’s old man would have hit it off with Crazy Jane.
While not crazy, my old friend Maureen Holbert Hogaboom, an actress who died at 98, insisted on being called a crone rather than a wise old woman, although she was both. Thinking of herself as a crone gave her the freedom of not always being entirely respectable. She used to tell me that each decade was better than the one before (although she stopped saying this when she hit her nineties).
As I enter my seventies, my prayer is that, like Lu Yu’s old man, I will continue to whoop with delight, laugh with joy, have fun, and act like a little boy.
We’re currently traveling so I missed writing about Julia’s and my 48th wedding anniversary, which was Tuesday. I turn to Milton’s celebration of “wedded love” in Book IV because it captures well my own view of marriage.
The scene occurs in Book IV, before the fall. After Adam and Eve have offered up spontaneous prayers of thanksgiving to God (“adoration pure/Which God likes best”), they venture into their “blissful bower,” which is also described as a “shady lodge.” Because they are naked, they don’t have to worry about taking off their “troublesome disguises” but get immediately to business. Milton gets a little cagey at this point, essentially saying that they did not not make love (“nor Eve the rites/ Mysterious of connubial love refused”). Then, rather than provide us with any more detail, he attacks people who attack sex.
Apparently, Milton entered fraught territory by having Adam and Eve engage in sex before before the fall. For Milton, however, this made sense. After all, Adam and Eve, guided by the Puritan work ethic, need children to help them trim the garden.
Sex within marriage is sanctified by the sacred commitment between two people. Marriage is “founded in reason, loyal, just, and pure” and is befitting of “holiest place.” Designed to be a “perpetual fountain of domestic sweets,” marriage provides a bed that (according to saints and Biblical patriarchs) is “undefiled and chaste.” Shifting to a classical allusion (Cupid), Milton writes,
Here Love his golden shafts employs, here lights His constant lamp, and waves his purple wings, Reigns here and revels…
In contrast to wedded love is “adulterous lust,” such asis found “among the bestial herds to range.” Such sex can be found in brothels (“loveless, joyless, unendeared,/ Casual fruition”). One sees it in secret assignations, wild parties, and guys singing outside your window. Or as Milton puts it,
…in court amours, Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball, Or serenate, which the starved lover sings To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain.
Having distracted the reader long enough so that our prying eyes can’t see their lovemaking, Milton at this point returns to find them asleep in each other’s arms and covered with rose petals. “Sleep on, blest pair,” he says, “it doesn’t get better than this.” Or to quote Milton’s actual words, “O yet happiest if ye seek/ No happier state, and know to know no more.” Here’s the passage in its entirety:
This said unanimous, and other Rites Observing none, but adoration pure Which God likes best, into their inmost bower Handed they went; and eased the putting off These troublesome disguises which we wear, Straight side by side were laid, nor turned I ween Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites Mysterious of connubial love refused; Whatever hypocrites austerely talk Of purity and place and innocence, Defaming as impure what God declares Pure, and commands to some, leaves free to all. Our Maker bids increase; who bids abstain But our destroyer, foe to God and Man? Hail, wedded Love! mysterious law true source Of human offspring, sole propriety In Paradise of all things common else By thee adulterous lust was driven from men Among the bestial herds to range; by thee, Founded in reason, loyal, just, and pure, Relations dear, and all the charities Of father, son, and brother first were known. Far be it, that I should write thee sin or blame, Or think thee unbefitting holiest place, Perpetual fountain of domestic sweets! Whose bed is undefiled and chaste pronounced, Present or past, as saints and patriarchs used. Here Love his golden shafts employs, here lights His constant lamp, and waves his purple wings, Reigns here and revels; not in the bought smile Of harlots, loveless, joyless, unendeared, Casual fruition; nor in court amours, Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball, Or serenate, which the starved lover sings To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain. These lulled by nightingales embracing slept, And on their naked limbs the flowery roof Showered Roses, which the Morn repaired. Sleep on, Blest pair; and O yet happiest if ye seek No happier state, and know to know no more.
I don’t go so far as to condemn all sex that happens outside of marriage. I’m not a 17th century Puritan. But I agree something special happens when physical intimacy is linked with spiritual connection. I’m willing to add, as other instances of spiritual connection, committed partnership and even just two people evincing genuine respect for each other.
I think something precious is lost, however, if our sexual relations are no more than that experienced by “bestial herds.”
Love has been lighting his lamp and waving his purple wings over me and Julia for 48 years. Hail wedded love indeed.
Mrs. Musgrove (Cornwall) complains about her daughter-in-law to Anne Elliot (Root) in Persuasion (1995)
Wednesday
I am deeply grateful to be on good terms with my two daughters-in-law, whom I saw again recently for the first time since pre-Covid. Not everyone is so lucky. I was talking to a friend recently whose wonderful daughter is disliked by her mother-in-law. (That her mother-in-law is a rabid Trump supporter makes it even worse, but their friction predates Trump.) My friend advised her daughter that, if she ever feels the need to vent, to do so to her rather than to her husband. After all, a wife-mother battle puts him in a no-win situation. Fortunately, as he sees his mother with clear eyes, no wedge has been driven between him and his wife. Still, my friend’s advice is useful, and her daughter has followed it.
I think how valuable it is to have such third person interlocutors. Anne Elliot, my favorite Austen heroine, plays such a role in Jane Austen’s Persuasion.
In this case, it is the daughter rather than the mother-in-law who is at fault. Anne’s sister Mary is the spoiled wife of Charles Musgrove and complains constantly about her mother-in-law, who lives close by. When Anne visits, she hears from both parties. In this case, the children are a major cause of contention:
One of the least agreeable circumstances of [Anne’s] residence there was her being treated with too much confidence by all parties, and being too much in the secret of the complaints of each house. Known to have some influence with her sister, she was continually requested, or at least receiving hints to exert it, beyond what was practicable….
Mary’s declaration was, “I hate sending the children to the Great House, though their grandmamma is always wanting to see them, for she humors and indulges them to such a degree, and gives them so much trash and sweet things, that they are sure to come back sick and cross for the rest of the day.” And Mrs. Musgrove took the first opportunity of being alone with Anne, to say, “Oh! Miss Anne, I cannot help wishing Mrs. Charles had a little of your method with those children. They are quite different creatures with you! But to be sure, in general they are so spoilt! It is a pity you cannot put your sister in the way of managing them. They are as fine healthy children as ever were seen, poor little dears! without partiality; but Mrs. Charles knows no more how they should be treated–! Bless me! how troublesome they are sometimes. I assure you, Miss Anne, it prevents my wishing to see them at our house so often as I otherwise should. I believe Mrs. Charles is not quite pleased with my not inviting them oftener; but you know it is very bad to have children with one that one is obligated to be checking every moment; “don’t do this,” and “don’t do that;” or that one can only keep in tolerable order by more cake than is good for them.”
To give you a sense of Mary, being from the upper-class Elliot family she has the right to precede her mother-in-law into formal dinners. That she insists on this privilege marks her out as a snob. One of her sisters-in-law complains about it to Anne:
Again, it was Mary’s complaint, that Mrs. Musgrove was very apt not to give her the precedence that was her due, when they dined at the Great House with other families; and she did not see any reason why she was to be considered so much at home as to lose her place. And one day when Anne was walking with only the Musgroves, one of them after talking of rank, people of rank, and jealousy of rank, said, “I have no scruple of observing to you, how nonsensical some persons are about their place, because all the world knows how easy and indifferent you are about it; but I wish anybody could give Mary a hint that it would be a great deal better if she were not so very tenacious, especially if she would not be always putting herself forward to take place of mamma. Nobody doubts her right to have precedence of mamma, but it would be more becoming in her not to be always insisting on it. It is not that mamma cares about it the least in the world, but I know it is taken notice of by many persons.”
Infinitely patient Anne responds through gentle hints:
How was Anne to set all these matters to rights? She could do little more than listen patiently, soften every grievance, and excuse each to the other; give them all hints of the forbearance necessary between such near neighbors, and make those hints broadest which were meant for her sister’s benefit.
Of course, it’s best if one can communicate directly without the need for go-betweens. We generally have achieved this with our own daughters-in-law although even we, upon occasion, have received gentle hints from our sons on certain matters (usually concerning the grandchildren). And although my wife and my 95-year-old mother, with whom we now live, have become best friends, there have been times when I have been called upon to channel my inner Anne Elliot. Even in the best of situations, one stumbles upon an occasional mine.
But minefield or no, Anne acknowledges that Musgrove family life is much richer than the sterile isolation in which her pretentious father and elder sister live. When her navy husband is called to duty and she must seek out family, she is more likely to spend time with the Musgroves than with Sir Walter and Miss Elliot.
