Novels That Predicted a Trump

By Robin Bates | Published: August 30, 2020

Monday

A few months before Donald Trump was elected president, Carlos Lozada of the Washington Post compared Trump’s rise to two novels about a fascist takeover of America, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004). I’m very impressed with how much the novels helped Lozada see clearly what a Trump presidency would look like.

If the novels are prescient, it’s because Lewis and Roth understand at a deep level the dark strain that has always been present in the American experiment. Although not everything the novels describe has come to pass, we also haven’t yet seen a second Trump term. We have not yet seen concentration camps (other than immigrant families in cages), a state takeover of the media (other than Fox News, where the relationship is more reciprocal), or executions (other than a few killings and attempted killings by rightwing terrorists and racist cops). I’m not confident, however, that we will avoid such a future in a second Trump term.

It Can’t Happen Here, Lozada notes,  

features a populist Democratic senator named Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip who wins the White House in the late 1930s on a redistributionist platform — with a generous side order of racism — and quickly fashions a totalitarian regime purporting to speak for the nation’s Forgotten Men.

Just as Trump has Art of the Deal, so Windrip

has a best-selling book, Zero Hour — “part biography, part economic program, and part plain exhibitionistic boasting” — that is required reading among the faithful. The leader also delivers awful yet captivating speeches. Doremus Jessup, the aging, small-town newspaper editor and hero of Lewis’s novel, marvels at Windrip’s “bewitching” power over large audiences. “The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic.” But he captivates supporters, addressing them as if “he was telling them the truths, the imperious and dangerous facts, that had been hidden from them.”

Plot against America, meanwhile,

offers a similarly harsh vision of that era, imagining the slow implosion of a working-class Jewish family when the Republican Party nominates aviator Charles Lindbergh for the presidency in 1940. The victorious Lindy strikes a pact with Hitler, launches federal programs that break apart and resettle Jewish communities, and promotes anti-Semitic thuggery.

Lozada observes,

Much as Trump claims that only he is tough enough to restore national glory, in The Plot Against America Lindbergh is hailed as a “man’s man who gets the impossible done by relying solely on himself.” Republican Party leaders despair over Lindy’s refusal to take any of their wise advice on how to run his campaign. Defenders believe that Lindbergh’s strength of personality will enable him to strike deals — great ones, the best ones — with the world’s bad guys. “Lindbergh can deal with Hitler, they said, Hitler respects him because he’s Lindbergh.”

From reading Lewis in July, 2016, Lozada could foresee Trump’s relentless attack on the press, which was already well underway during the 2016 campaign:

Like Trump, Windrip works hard to discredit the journalists covering him. “I know the Press only too well,” he declares. “Almost all editors hide away . . . plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill their greedy pocketbooks by calumniating Statesmen who have given their all for the common good.” As the novel progresses, Windrip detains them and takes over their publications, producing puff stories exalting the governing “Corpos,” members of the newly created American Corporate State and Patriotic Party.

Lewis also foresees how the GOP and others would underestimate Trump, thinking they could control him. In other words, they ignored Masha Gessen’s major maxim, “Believe the autocrat. He means what he says”:

That hope [that a president Trump would become presidential] recurs in the literature of totalitarianism. In It Can’t Happen Here, Jessup hears all the time that he needn’t worry. “You don’t understand Senator Windrip,” Jessup’s son Philip, a lawyer, lectures him. “Oh, he’s something of a demagogue — he shoots off his mouth a lot about how he’ll jack up the income tax and grab the banks, but he won’t — that’s just molasses for the cockroaches.” And the father believes it for a while, in denial even after Windrip imposes martial law. “The hysteria can’t last; be patient, and wait and see, he counseled his readers. It was not that he was afraid of the authorities. He simply did not believe that this comic tyranny could endure.”

Just as we have seen members of historically oppressed groups collaborating with this president (most notably the Jewish Stephen Miller and African Americans like Hermann Cain, Ben Carson, and those who vouched for Trump at the Republican National Convention), so we encounter collaborators in the two novels:

The editor’s in It Can’t Happen Here and the genial rabbi in The Plot against America make their choices, finding accommodation with their new leaders mainly out of self-interest. As Jessup grows radicalized in his opposition to Windrip, his son feigns concern, warning Jessup that he’s going to get into trouble if he keeps opposing local Dorpos. But soon Philip’s motive emerges: The government is offering him an assistant judgeship, he admits, and the appointment could suffer over his father’s intransigence. Rabbi Bengelsdorf, meanwhile, reaches the highest ranks of the Lindbergh administration, the token Jewish adviser, counseling the first lady and running the Office of American Absorption.

We also see an asymmetry in how people respond, with liberals far less likely to wield guns than the right—and even when they arm themselves, finding themselves pitted against the police in a way that rightwingers are not:

In The Plot Against America, a New Jersey Jewish community begins an armed self-defense patrol — the Provisional Jewish Police — which ends up clashing, fatally, not with anti-Semitic Lindbergh supporters but with local police. Herman, hiding with his family in a neighbor’s home as fighting stalks their block, declines to wield a gun. “I believe in this country,” he says simply.

The left also believes much more deeply that they will be saved by America’s institutions:

Trump feels like an American hallucination: wealth, sex, reality television, social media — he is every national fixation in excess. Yet, more than electoral college math or the Democratic nominee, what stands against his brand of politics is America itself, its self-perception and self-knowledge. That is what the fictional Roth family concludes in a visit to Washington, where they encounter anti-Semitic Lindbergh supporters but soak in the historic buildings and recite hallowed inscriptions on national monuments. “It was American history, delineated in its most inspirational form, that we were counting on to protect us against Lindbergh,” Herman’s youngest son decides.

So far, that faith is not entirely misplaced, with journalism, the judiciary, and the intelligence services holding firm. How much more pressure they can withstand is an open question, however.

Neither Lewis nor Roth include a major crisis like Covid-19. For that, one must turn to Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, in which Christian extremists seize power following some kind of nuclear catastrophe. Our own version of this is the Trump administration using the pandemic to undermine the election, education, the post office, and social security (by attempting to end the payroll tax).

It Can’t Happen Here and The Plot to Save America are all the more disturbing, however, because they show one doesn’t need extraordinary circumstances to get a Trump. Unless having had a black president was an extraordinary circumstance.

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Without Nature, No Language for Soul

By Robin Bates | Published: August 29, 2020
Redwoods in Big Basin State Park

Spiritual Sunday

We are facing so many simultaneous disasters—Covid19, economic collapse, resurgent white supremacy, climate change (currently manifesting itself in unprecedented wildfires, hurricanes, and heatwaves) that apocalyptic warnings can sound tired and stale. I think this is Richard Wilbur’s point in “Advice to a Prophet.”

Perhaps imagining a Jehovah, the poet sees a prophet’s arrival as inevitable:

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious.
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity.

If we are to truly care for ourselves, however, we can’t simply be told we face annihilation, whether by means of long-range rockets or something else. Such an appeal will not touch our hearts or imaginations:

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?—
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone’s face?

Focus instead, the poet tells us, on those small losses—especially in nature (“the world’s own change”)—that sear our souls. Think of losing “the dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return.” The images he offers up are not earth-shattering but as a result are all the more powerful: the white-tailed deer slipping away, a lark avoiding “the reaches of our eye,” a jack-pine losing “its knuckled grip/on the cold ledge” and tumbling into the gorge. We ourselves could be that pine, hanging on for dear life:

Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return…

I myself have used the image of the burning Xanthus River to capture the horrors of climate change. Fire from the blacksmith god Hephaistos blasts the vegetation and scalds the fish to beat back a river:

Then against the river
Hephaistos turned his bright flame, and the elms
and tamarisks and willows burned away,
with all the clover, galingale, and rushes
plentiful along the winding streams.
Then eels and fish, in backwaters, in currents,
wriggled here and there at the scalding breath
of torrid blasts from the great smith, Hephaistos…

Because we see our spiritual selves in nature’s mirror, we lose the “rose of our love,” the “horse of our courage,” the “singing locust of the soul unshelled” when the glass is “obscured or broken.” Nature calls “our natures forth,” giving us a “live tongue” that helps us say “all we mean or wish to mean”:

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

The poem ends with a dark question: even Dante’s divine rose, found in paradise (“worldless rose) will not sustain our hearts if it is not grounded in an actual worldly rose. Our vision of the “lofty and long standing” require actual oaks in our lives—or, should I say, redwoods, many of which are burning in California’s devastating fires. The “bronze annals” of manufactured human history only appear majestic when we have things like trees to compare them to:

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

In other words, if the prophet wants to get our attention, he or she will emphasize how all the we value, the soulful parts of ourselves, are inextricably entwined with the natural world.

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Obama: From Patience to Fury

By Robin Bates | Published: August 27, 2020
Barack Obama speaking at the Democratic National Convention

Friday

I was reminded of a John Dryden quotation that I had once applied to Barack Obama when a district judge recently wrote me about the post. I share it here, partly because it’s a gratifying response and in part because it’s relevant again given Obama’s speech last week targeting Donald Trump:

Dear Professor Bates,

Today I was angry with someone and, carefully nursing my sense of righteousness, again looked up one of my favorite quotations: “Beware the fury of a patient man.”  I’m glad I looked it up for two reasons.  First, it put some distance between me and the thing that angered me, and, once again, putting the brakes on before taking action saved me from some precipitous faux pas that I would have had to apologize for later.   (But putting the brakes on (and being patient) does not mean having no memory; I’ll put this event in the mental file called “Fool me once . . . .”)

The second reason that I’m glad I looked it us is that it brought me to the essays in your blog, “Better Living Through Beowulf.”  There I read your piece about the reaction of Obama to Boehner’s refusal to negotiate in the budget conflict.  Your article discusses the Dryden quotation in the context of the debate.  I enjoyed it very much…

The judge also mentioned his belief that, in an age when the law is under ceaseless attack, reading stories is one of the best ways to develop a sense of justice. Literature, he noted, specializes in showing us how humans work and how to solve human problems. Needless to say, I fully agree.

Regarding Obama, as is customary he has largely been silent about his successor. This has not been reciprocal, however, with Trump falsely accusing him of spying and claiming he was guilty of treason. In his convention speech, he had had it. The patient man was furious.

Obama started with a look back at the Constitution:

I’m in Philadelphia, where our Constitution was drafted and signed. It wasn’t a perfect document. It allowed for the inhumanity of slavery and failed to guarantee women — and even men who didn’t own property — the right to participate in the political process. But embedded in this document was a North Star that would guide future generations; a system of representative government — a democracy — through which we could better realize our highest ideals. Through civil war and bitter struggles, we improved this Constitution to include the voices of those who’d once been left out. And gradually, we made this country more just, more equal, and more free.

Then he set forth his charges:

[Joe Biden and Kamala Harris] understand that in this democracy, the Commander-in-Chief doesn’t use the men and women of our military, who are willing to risk everything to protect our nation, as political props to deploy against peaceful protesters on our own soil. They understand that political opponents aren’t “un-American” just because they disagree with you; that a free press isn’t the “enemy” but the way we hold officials accountable; that our ability to work together to solve big problems like a pandemic depends on a fidelity to facts and science and logic and not just making stuff up.

He followed it up with a challenge to the cynics amongst us:

Do not let them take away your power. Don’t let them take away your democracy. Make a plan right now for how you’re going to get involved and vote. Do it as early as you can and tell your family and friends how they can vote too. Do what Americans have done for over two centuries when faced with even tougher times than this — all those quiet heroes who found the courage to keep marching, keep pushing in the face of hardship and injustice.

Some commentators described the speech as a jeremiad, all the more startling because the conciliatory Obama does not normally speak this way. Many saw it as his angriest speech, some as his greatest. If it has any of its intended effect, Trump will have reason to beware.

In Dryden’s poem, the Obama figure is King David, an allegory for Charles II. You can read the detailed political history of the time in my post, but suffice it to say that, although he appeared to be an easy-going monarch, Charles could stand firm when the going got tough. That, at any rate, is how Dryden depicts him in the poem:

Thus long have I, by native mercy swayed,
My wrongs dissembled, my revenge delayed;
So willing to forgive the offending age;
So much the father did the king assuage.
But now so far my clemency they slight,
The offenders question my forgiving right.
That one was made for many, they contend;
But ’tis to rule, for that’s a monarch’s end.
They call my tenderness of blood my fear,
Though manly tempers can the longest bear.

Yet since they will divert my native course,
‘Tis time to show I am not good by force.

The poem’s best know line occurs further on:

Must I at length the sword of justice draw?
Oh curst effects of necessary law!
How ill my fear they by my mercy scan!
Beware the fury of a patient man.
Law they require, let Law then show her face;
They could not be content to look on Grace . . .

Obama no longer has the power he once had. Nor, as president, would he have been able to wield Charles’s sword of justice, which is the job of the (supposedly separate) Justice Department. His speech, however, may help bring about a better America.

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The USPS and Conspiracy Theories

By Robin Bates | Published: August 26, 2020

Thursday

Given post office slowdowns, whether through the Postmaster General’s malevolence or incompetence, there are real questions about whether we’ll have free and fair elections in November. I’ve written in the past about Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, maybe the greatest work revolving around mail delivery. The novel reads differently in light of the various Q-Anon conspiracy theories that are gripping sections of America, however.

In Pynchon’s novel, there is an underground mail organization called “the Tristero” that has been rebelling against state-run mail monopolies for hundreds of years. Call it a rebellion against the postal deep state. Tristero has drop boxes and stamps that, while they appear to have errors, are familiar to those who know the code. If the symbol of the mail service in many countries is the post horn, Tristero responds with with its own muted horn (see picture above), which is chalked up as graffiti in various locations.

Protagonist Oedipa Maas has come into possession of a set of stamps that may have been issued by the Tristero. She sets out to discover whether the underground organization actually exists, and at the novel’s end she is attending a stamp auction, awaiting to see who will be bidding on “Lot 49.” We never learn.

Maybe the Tristero exists or maybe it’s just a paranoid wish fulfillment, the desire for an alternate postal service and alternate reality. Life is becoming so complex in Pynchon’s America that one can see the yearning for something outside the bureaucratic state. In other words, the novel may identify that the yearning that draws many to conspiracy theorie.

Regardless of such yearning, one can’t imagine the Tristero getting mail to the inhabitants of China Grove, Mississippi, which is where Eudora Welty sets her comic short story “Why I Live at the P.O.” We watch as an aggrieved and passive aggressive postmistress walks out on her family following a feud. At one point, they try to use postcards as leverage:

So then Uncle Rondo says, “I’ll thank you from now on to stop reading all the orders I get on postcards and telling everybody in China Grove what you think is the matter with them,” but I says, “I draw my own conclusions and will continue in the future to draw them.” I says, “If people want to write their inmost secrets on penny postcards, there’s nothing in the wide world you can do about it, Uncle Rondo.”

 “And if you think we’ll ever write  another postcard you’re sadly mistaken,” says Mama.
 “Cutting off your nose to spite your face then,” I says. “But if you’re all determined to have no more to do with the U.S. mail, think of this: What will Stella-Rondo do now, if she wants to tell Mr. Whitaker to come after her?”

 “Wah!” says Stella-Rondo. I knew she’d cry. She had a conniption fit right there in the kitchen.
 “It will be interesting to see how long she holds out,” I says. “And now, I am leaving.”

By the end of the story, we learn that their threatened boycott could have a tangible effect, making the post office even less cost efficient than it already is:

Of course, there’s not much mail. My family are naturally the main people in China Grove, and if they prefer to vanish from the face of the earth, for all the mail they get or the mail they write, why, I’m not going to open my mouth. Some of the folks here in town are taking up for me and some turned against me. I know which is which. There are always people who will quit buying stamps just to get on the right side of Papa-Daddy.

The U.S. Postal Service, whose existence is mandated by the Constitution, serves as one of America’s unifying institutions. If it were to be privatized, it’s hard to see communities like China Grove being served at all. While people grumble about it the way that college students grumble about the dining hall, it has a fairly high approval rating. After all, it serves everyone.

Which is how Jane Fairfax sees it in Jane Austen’s Emma. In her case, as an impoverished dependent she has to fend off intrusive but influential busybodies  so that she can pick up her own mail. It’s important because she’s receiving missives from her secret fiancé:

The post-office is a wonderful establishment!” said she.—“The regularity and dispatch of it! If one thinks of all that it has to do, and all that it does so well, it is really astonishing!”

“It is certainly very well regulated.”

“So seldom that any negligence or blunder appears! So seldom that a letter, among the thousands that are constantly passing about the kingdom, is even carried wrong—and not one in a million, I suppose, actually lost! And when one considers the variety of hands, and of bad hands too, that are to be deciphered, it increases the wonder.”

“The clerks grow expert from habit.—They must begin with some quickness of sight and hand, and exercise improves them. If you want any farther explanation,” continued he, smiling, “they are paid for it. That is the key to a great deal of capacity. The public pays and must be served well.”

Jane is referring to the British rather than the American postal service but the praise is still warranted–or will be as long as it is not hamstrung by the Trump administration and those who want to privatize it.

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Does Lit Lead to Illicit Sex?

By Robin Bates | Published: August 25, 2020

Wednesday

Dr. John Reishman in my Dante study group recently pointed out that the poet is profoundly disturbed by the negative impact romances can have on readers. We learn from Francesca and Paolo, the two lovers who are killed by a jealous husband and end up in the second circle of hell, that the story of Lancelot and Guinevere contributed to their infraction. I’m pretty sure that Chrétien de Troyes’s The Knight of the Cart is the offending text.

Many people over the centuries have pointed out the danger of illicit love stories. Francesca blames this one of being a pander, which is to say, a procurer or intermediary in sexual affairs:

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

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

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 the tremor of his kiss.
That book, and he who wrote it, was a pander.
That day we read no further.

Like a film made in Hollywood’s Hayes Code days, the passage strategically fades to black when things get interesting.

Here’s the passage I’m pretty sure Francesca refers to. Lancelot has just pulled out a set of iron bars to get to the Queen’s chambers:

First he finds Kay asleep in his bed, then he comes to the bed of the Queen, whom he adores and before whom he kneels, holding her more dear than the relic of any saint. And the Queen extends her arms to him and, embracing him, presses him tightly against her bosom, drawing him into the bed beside her and showing him every possible satisfaction; her love and her heart go out to him. It is love that prompts her to treat him so; and if she feels great love for him, he feels a hundred thousand times as much for her. For there is no love at all in other hearts compared with what there is in his; in his heart love was so completely embodied that it was niggardly toward all other hearts. Now Lancelot possesses all he wants, when the Queen voluntarily seeks his company and love, and when he holds her in his arms, and she holds him in hers. Their sport is so agreeable and sweet, as they kiss and fondle each other, that in truth such a marvelous joy comes over them as was never heard or known. But their joy will not be revealed by me, for in a story, it has no place.

Francesca and Paolo are in the second circle of hell (their murderer is destined for the ninth, joining others who treacherously kill relatives). Slaves to a desire than can never be fulfilled, they lament ceaselessly as they are blown about by strong winds:

Now the choir of anguish, like a wound,
strikes through the tortured air. Now I have come
to Hell’s full lamentation, sound beyond sound.

I came to a place stripped bare of every light
and roaring on the naked dark like seas
wracked by a war of winds. Their hellish flight

of storm and counterstorm through time foregone,
sweeps the souls of the damned before its charge.
Whirling and battering it drives them on,

and when they pass the ruined gap of Hell
through which we had come, their shrieks begin anew.
There they blaspheme the power of God eternal.

And this, I learned, was the never-ending flight
of those who sinned in the flesh, the carnal and lusty
who betrayed reason to their appetite.

Francesca vividly describes what such love feels like:

Love, which in gentles hearts will soonest bloom,
seized my lover with passion for that sweet body
from which I was torn unshriven to my doom.

Love, which permits no loved one not to love,
took me so strongly with delight in him
that we are one in Hell, as we were above.

John pointed out that Dante uses the image of starlings blown by the wind to capture their psychological state:

As the wings of wintering starlings bear them on
in their great wheeling flights, just so the blast
wherries these evil souls through time foregone.

Here, there, up, down, they whirl and, whirling, strain
with never a hope of hope to comfort them,
not of release, but even of less pain.

Our group then discussed other literary characters who are caught up in endless whirling. Dante mentions Dido (who is bewitched by Cupid), Cleopatra, Helen, Paris, Achilles, and Tristan. We identified Catherine and Heathcliff, Anna Karenina, and Emma Bovary, the latter being particularly apt as she, like Francesca and Paolo, is swayed by her reading. Why settle for a dull, colorless marriage when adultery promises such magic?

Unfortunately for Emma, she learns, in one of literature’s bleakest lines, that unfaithfulness isn’t an improvement: “She found again in adultery,” Flaubert writes, “all the platitudes of marriage.” Creating his own infernal circle for his protagonist, Flaubert has her illicit liaison take place in a room overlooking the fairgrounds, where her love talk is intercut with bureaucrats exhorting farmers to apply themselves “to the amelioration of the soil, to good manures, to the development of the equine, bovine, ovine, and porcine races.” Romance is reduced to slabs of meat.

That relationships must have a spiritual as well as carnal component is made clear by Christopher Marlowe in Doctor Faustus. After selling his soul, Faustus asks Mephistopheles for a wife, only to be presented with “a hot whore.” Faustus cannot have a soulmate once he has rejected soul, which is what Francesca and Paolo have done.

To differentiate the lovers mentioned above with, say, Romeo and Juliet, the latter are anchored by wedded love. “If that thy bent of love be honorable,/
Thy purpose marriage,” Juliet conditions, while Romeo says to Friar Lawrence,

Then plainly know my heart's dear love is set
On the fair daughter of rich Capulet:
As mine on hers, so hers is set on mine;
And all combined, save what thou must combine
By holy marriage: when and where and how
We met, we woo'd and made exchange of vow,
I'll tell thee as we pass; but this I pray,
That thou consent to marry us to-day.

Similarly, Jane Eyre, while sorely tempted, ultimately rejects Rochester’s offer to become his mistress because there are more important things than gratifying one’s feelings. Here’s the key moment in her interior dialogue:

[Feeling] clamoured wildly.  “Oh, comply!” it said.  “Think of his misery; think of his danger—look at his state when left alone; remember his headlong nature; consider the recklessness following on despair—soothe him; save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his.  Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?”

Still indomitable was the reply—“I care for myself.  The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.  I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man.  I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad—as I am now.  Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be.  If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?  They have a worth—so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane—quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs.  Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot.”

Mentioning Jane Eyre reminds me of a superb essay by a student who compared and contrasted the novel with the Twilight series, which had enthralled her as a high school student and which she now found dangerous. (Read my account of her story here.) She spoke from experience, having been in an abusive relationship before pulling herself out of it. Author Stephenie Meyer regards as a happy ending Bella’s decision in the third book to allow herself be bitten so that she can spend eternity with her vampire lover. Tessa, essentially making Dante’s point, points out the dangerous lure of total absorption

Dante acknowledges the lure  by showing his own fascination with the Francesca-Paolo story. As he sees it, they shouldn’t be in hell and he must hear their story:

And when I had heard those world-offended lovers
I bowed my head. At last the Poet [Virgil] spoke:
“What painful thoughts are these your lowered brow covers?”

When  at length I answered, I began: “Alas!
What sweetest thoughts, what green and young desire
led these two lovers to this sorry pass.”

Then turning to those spirits once again,
I said: “Francesca, what you suffer here
melts me to tears of pity and of pain.

But tell me: in the time of your sweet sighs
by what appearances found love the way
to lure you to this perilous paradise?”
After hearing Francesca’s account, Dante is so overcome with emotion—just as these lovers were—that he faints:

           I felt my senses reel
and faint away with anguish. I was swept

by such a swoon as death is, and I fell,
as a corpse might fall, to the dead floor of Hell.

People have been swooning over love stories for hundreds of years. It’s why Samuel Johnson wanted novels kept away from young people and why German parents railed against Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, fearing their sons and daughters would follow the protagonist into suicide.

They are not entirely wrong, as Tessa’s story makes clear. The greatest love literature, however, like Dante’s handling of Francesca and Paolo, warns against losing self and soul in a grand passion. We’ve seen how Jane Eyre resists, and Tolstoy counterposes Anna’s affair with Levin and Kitty’s wonderful marriage, which is far more compelling and life-affirming. Goethe too warns against the narcissistic self-absorption that leads Werther to take his life.

Literature captures love’s passions but the best works also provide us critical distance. In this way they guide us towards better living.

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A Poem Brought to You by the Letter C

By Robin Bates | Published: August 24, 2020

Tuesday

Seven years ago on this day my father died, and although we can’t complain because, at 90, he had lived a full and rich life, I’m sorry that he’s not around to share his love of poetry with my eight-year-old grandson. They have similar sensibilities and would have enjoyed each other very much.

I’ll be sharing this poem of his with Alban, which plays with the shape of the letter “C.” The word “garçon”—pronounced ɡär-sän– is how male waiters are addressed in French. My father often wrote poems about freewheeling rebellion against stodgy authority, which Alban would appreciate. The poem appears in The ABC of Radical Ecology:

C Was a G Who Grew Up To Be a c

C was G in G A R Ç O N
until he threw away his tray
                     and his napkin
shaved off his mustache and goatee
and told his boss a handsome Q
he was quitting the Café

he wanted to become
a free C
and stop sycophantically serving
the C-lect

he wasn’t proud he said
he didn’t want to be C-lebrity or anything like that
he just wanted to cease his servility
and see the world

All right said the Q
who had a fine handlebar mustache himself
     albeit a bit askew
if you want to lose all your C-curity
and go to seed
that’s your cup of C
but don’t come crawling back to me
for your C-rations see

but C didn’t care
he was carefree as a Clam
as he danced like an S at the beginning of Spring
as he lay on his back and kicked up his heels like a U
climbed a pole like a P
slid down it like a B
turned cartwheels like a C R O C
took a boat ride like a J
and generally receded gracefully into all four of his seasons

until finally
when he had totally succeeded in seceding from Café Society
he had become so small
so very small
that he could crawl through an o hole
into a cave
as deep as a c-shell
as silent as an ear

listen

you can hear

the c

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Children’s Natural Affinity for Poetry

By Robin Bates | Published: August 23, 2020
Oscar Gustaf Bjorck, Children Reading

Monday

In Friday’s post I promised to talk about teaching poetry to my 8-year-old grandson Alban, which I’ve been doing since May. After dutifully following his teachers’ lesson plans for a month, I jumped at the permission they granted to us teachers-at-home to switch to other topics if they desired. Alban liked the poetry so much that, at his request, we continued our lessons through the summer and they may last until Christmas as an afternoon extracurricular offering. (His Hearst Elementary zoom classes occur only in the morning.)

Alban maintains a running list of poetic terms and is proud to have filled up a page and a half so far. As a good violinist, he has a musical ear and loves poetry’s aural side, prompting me to put more emphasis on meter and metrical feet than I do with my college students. Doing so came in handy when we were discussing T. S. Eliot’s cat poems.

Alban fell in love with these poems, reading them all and then ranking them. His favorite is “Skimbleshanks, The Railway Cat,” which makes great use of anapestic tetrameter (four feet of unstressed, unstressed, stressed), punctuated periodically with effective spondees (multiple hard stresses in a row):

There’s a whisper down the line at 11:39
When the Night Mail’s ready to depart,
Saying ‘Skimble where is Skimble has he gone to hunt the thimble?
We must find him or the train can’t start.’

Alban picked up that we hear, in the rhythm, the sound of train wheels beginning to take off—only to be stopped by the spondee (“train can’t start”). Fortunately Skimbleshanks shows up to set all in motion:

You may say that by and large it is Skimble who’s in charge
Of the Sleeping Car Express.
From the driver and the guards to the bagmen playing cards
He will supervise them all, more or less.
Down the corridor he paces and examines all the faces
Of the travelers in the First and in the Third;
He establishes control by a regular patrol
And he’d know at once if anything occurred.
He will watch you without winking and he sees what you are thinking
And it’s certain that he doesn’t approve
Of hilarity and riot, so the folk are very quiet
When Skimble is about and on them move.
You can play no pranks with Skimbleshanks!
He’s a Cat that cannot be ignored;
So nothing goes wrong on the Northern Mail
When Skimbleshanks is aboard.

Alban also became attuned to the internal rhymes and  to the difference between masculine and feminine and half and full rhymes.

I first noticed that Alban was alert to poetic rhythm when he observed that Eliot’s Gumbie Cat (#4 on his list) has a different rhythm at night than during the day. The daytime stanzas, like the daytime cat, move slowly with long and slow iambic octameter, but the poem picks up pace at night with half the feet (tetrameter) and mainly anapestic rather than iambic rhythm. Alban didn’t yet have names for what was occurring but noticed the difference on his own:

I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;
Her coat is of the tabby kind, with tiger stripes and leopard spots.
All day she sits upon the stair or on the steps or on the mat;
She sits and sits and sits and sits – and that’s what makes a Gumbie Cat!

But when the day’s hustle and bustle is done,
Then the Gumbie Cat’s work is but hardly begun.
And when all the family’s in bed and asleep,
She tucks up her skirts to the basement to creep.

Alban’s sense of humor draws him to limericks and to the poetry of Shel Silverstein and Roald Dahl, especially the latter’s rewriting of fairy tales. But he also likes the golden oldies in Louis Untermeyer’s Golden Treasury of Poetry, including poems by Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, A. A. Milne, and Eugene Fields. Robert Louis Stevenson, and others. He particularly loves poems that work as puzzles and conundrums.

He does not go for some of my own childhood favorites, perhaps because romance is not on his eight-year-old agenda. In any event, he shrugs his shoulders at “The Highwayman,” “Lochinvar,” and “Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight.” Nor does he go for mysterious poems like “The Listeners” and “The Raven.” On the other hand, he did enjoy Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in part because of its mesmerizing beat. Oh, and he liked the zombie crew.

Alban loves large, complicated words so I got him excited about onomatopoeia, such as that found in the following poem:

Onomatopoeia 
by Eve Merriam                             

The rusty spigot
sputters,
utters
a splutter,
spatters a smattering of drops,
gashes wider;
slash
splatters
scatters
spurts
finally stops sputtering
and plash!
gushes rushes splashes
clear water dashes.

We now engage in regular onomatopoeia sightings.

And so and so forth. I don’t give Alban exams—I figure that regularly circulating back to the terms in his notebook will get the concepts to sink in—but I’m open to feedback from teachers on this.

I also haven’t asked Alban to write any poetry of his own although this is a route I’m contemplating.

After we’ve spent 15 or 20 minutes or so on poetry, we round out the half hour lesson with Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series, which I also read to Alban’s father. This is producing its own series of words for the notebook—protagonist, antagonist, character, plot, suspense—and has led to many rich conversations about human behavior. Alban is very good figuring out some of the story arcs, especially when a character with a name like “Magg” enters the picture.

It all feels like a game for both of us. I remember my best elementary school teachers making my education feel this way, and I feel privileged to continue that tradition.

Further thought: We found useful the following lyric, supposedly written by Coleridge for his son:

Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot! yet ill able
Ever to come up with dactyl trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long;—
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng.
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A Weary Pilgrim, Now at Rest

By Robin Bates | Published: August 22, 2020
Anne Bradstreet

Spiritual Sunday

I recently wrote about the death of close friend William Boyd, who lived with us when he was a student at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and helped bring up our three sons, who regarded him as a brother. We recently watched his funeral service in a Baltimore church, and the combination of sadness and hope reminded me of an Anne Bradstreet poem.

Interestingly, Bradstreet references the same Shakespeare line that I did when I first wrote about William’s death.  The passage in Cymbeline reads, “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,” while Bradstreet writes, “The burning sun no more shall heat.”

Bradstreet had more than her share of sorrows and may have written the following poem when she was dying of tuberculosis. Her hoped-for meeting with Christ-the-bridegroom was a sentiment expressed by several of the speakers at William’s funeral.

As weary pilgrim, now at rest,
Hugs with delight his silent nest,
His wasted limbs now lie full soft
That mirey steps have trodden oft,
Blesses himself to think upon
His dangers past, and travails done.
The burnIng sun no more shall heat,
Nor stormy rains on him shall beat.
The briars and thorns no more shall scratch,
Nor hungry wolves at him shall catch.
He erring paths no more shall tread,
Nor wild fruits eat instead of bread.
For waters cold he doth not long
For thirst no more shall parch his tongue.
No rugged stones his feet shall gall,
Nor stumps nor rocks cause him to fall.
All cares and fears he bids farewell
And means in safety now to dwell.
A pilgrim I, on earth perplexed
With Sins, with cares and sorrows vext,
By age and pains brought to decay,
And my clay house mold'ring away.
Oh, how I long to be at rest
And soar on high among the blest.
This body shall in silence sleep,
Mine eyes no more shall ever weep,
No fainting fits shall me assail,
Nor grinding pains my body frail,
With cares and fears ne'er cumb'red be
Nor losses know, nor sorrows see.
What though my flesh shall there consume,
It is the bed Christ did perfume,
And when a few years shall be gone,
This mortal shall be clothed upon.
A corrupt carcass down it lies,
A glorious body it shall rise.
In weakness and dishonor sown,
In power 'tis raised by Christ alone.
Then soul and body shall unite
And of their Maker have the sight.
Such lasting joys shall there behold
As ear ne'er heard nor tongue e'er told.
Lord make me ready for that day,
Then come, dear Bridegroom, come away.
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Pratchett’s Ideal Teacher

By Robin Bates | Published: August 20, 2020
Liu Ye, A View of My Teacher’s Back

Friday

I cite today a Terry Pratchett passage from Thief of Time to honor our nation’s teachers, who are undergoing unimaginable stress at the moment. My grandson Alban, who attends Hearst Elementary School in Washington, D.C., has just learned that he will be taught remotely for the foreseeable future. My two oldest granddaughters, meanwhile, are being held back from Ivy Creek Elementary in Buford, Georgia since the virus is still raging in Gwinnett County, with 22,000 recorded cases and 300 deaths. Teachers are expected to smile and cope.

Pratchett sounds like he was inspired by Mary Poppins (from the novel, not the film) in his depiction of Susan. She refuses to be intimidated by administrators and sets the agenda in the classroom rather than letting others set it for her.

It was always very hard to disapprove of Miss Susan in her presence, because if you did, she gave you a Look. It was not in any way a threatening look. It was cool and calm. You just didn’t want to see it again.

The Look worked in the classroom, too. Take homework, another Archaic Practice the headmistress was ineffectively Against. No dog ever ate the homework of one of Miss Susan’s students, because there was something about Miss Susan that went home with them; the dog brought them a pen and watched imploringly while they finished it, instead. Miss Susan seemed to have an unerring instinct for spotting laziness, and effort, too. Contrary to the headmistress’s instructions, Miss Susan did not let the children do what they liked. She let them do what she liked. It had turned out to be a lot more interesting for everyone.

In other words, she has respect for herself, for the children, and for the subject matter.

I’m no teacher of small children but I appreciate how, last spring, Alban’s teachers allowed those of us who took on the teaching responsibilities to depart from the lesson plans and do what we liked. With his parents’ permission, I decided to teach eight-year-old Alban poetry.

I’ll describe all we’ve done in a blog post next week, just mentioning here that he has filled up two pages with poetic terms, can recognize dactylic tetrameter when he encounters it, never fails to point out half rhymes, and is currently enthralled with onomatopoeia (both the word and the concept). He picks up poetic vocabulary the way I (and he too) used to pick up dinosaur names.

As he sees it, it’s all a game, and last June, when the school year ended, he asked that we continue through the summer. Now there’s a chance we’ll keep going until at least Christmas. Stay tuned.

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