Celebrants at Stonehenge on winter solstice morning
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Sunday – Winter Solstice
The connection between Christmas and paganism’s winter solstice, while a source of distress to some fundamentalists, enhances the season in my eyes. An Episcopalian rector once observed to me that there are many roads to the top of the mountain because, when it comes to articulating our sense of the divine, no single symbol system or set of rituals is adequate in and of itself. We cobble together various traditions in ways that we find meaningful and go from there. For me, Christmas’s origins in fertility religions is an essential part of the celebration.
Susan Cooper, who specializes in Celtic fantasy, taps into the holiday’s pagan origins in “Winter Solstice.” Enjoy!
Winter Solstice By Susan Cooper
And so the Shortest Day came and the year died And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world Came people singing, dancing, To drive the dark away. They lighted candles in the winter trees; They hung their homes with evergreen; They burned beseeching fires all night long To keep the year alive. And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake They shouted, reveling. Through all the frosty ages you can hear them Echoing behind us—listen! All the long echoes, sing the same delight, This Shortest Day, As promise wakens in the sleeping land: They carol, feast, give thanks, And dearly love their friends, And hope for peace. And now so do we, here, now, This year and every year. Welcome, Yule!
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Friday
This is the latest post in my on-going series on “My Life in Literature,” which appears every Friday. Because an informal autobiography written by my great grandmother Eliza Scott means so much to me—she discusses the novels that were important to her as she grew up in Victorian England—I figured I should do something similar for family members who come after me. Of course, the subject is also consistent with the mission of this blog, which is to explore the many ways that literature enhances and sometimes changes our lives.
Believe it or not, literature made it into the delivery room as Julia was giving birth to our first child. Her water broke when we were returning home from our childbirth class, and a few hours later we were in the Douglasville GA birthing center, at the time the only one that had midwives and that allowed husbands to be present at the delivery. When things got serious, Julia wanted to hear my voice so I started reciting, for what felt like hours, poems that came to mind.
I mostly remember reciting Victorian nonsense poetry, such as Louis Carroll’s “Jaberwocky” and Edward Lear’s “The Jumblies,” “The Owl and the Pussycat,” and, above all, “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.” I incanted more than recited this last as it took on a hypnotic quality. Here’s how it opens:
On the Coast of Coromandel Where the early pumpkins blow, In the middle of the woods Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo. Two old chairs, and half a candle, One old jug without a handle– These were all his worldly goods, In the middle of the woods, These were all his worldly goods, Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, Of the Yonghy-Bonghy Bo.
Remembering back, Julia says that “Yonghy-Bonghy Bo” worked as a kind of lullaby, taking her into another space as the labor pains hit. Children’s nonsense poetry seemed somehow appropriate—a way of ushering our child into the world—and my incantation also assured her that I was fully present: we were working as a team. As I’ve noted in a past post, we first met over poetry and now, in the most meaningful moment so far in our young married lives, poetry was bringing us together in another way.
I am far from the only partner who left the birth experience awestruck by the power and resolve that women tap into while giving birth. I, who spend much of my life in my head, saw the world in an entirely new light. In addition, there was the rush that came from holding Justin in my arms. At that moment I realized my life had a new purpose. A passage from a Jean Paul Sartre play came to mind.
No doubt you’ll find it strange given that it involves death rather than birth. (“I had seen birth and death, but had thought they were different,” I hear T.S. Eliot saying.) It also seems inappropriate in that it involves a man lecturing a woman. Set that aside, however, because what I recall most from The Flies is a man determined to engage with life at a new level of seriousness.
The Flies is a retelling of the Orestes-Electra story. The two have avenged their murdered father by murdering their mother and her lover. After this, they are beset by the furies (or their lacerating guilt, if you want to get psychological). But where Electra freaks out and blames Orestes for having pulled her into the act, Orestes embraces the consequences:
Yes, my beloved, it’s true, I have taken all from you, and I have nothing to offer in return; nothing but my crime. But think how vast a gift that is! Believe me, it weighs on my heart like lead. We were too light, Electra; now our feet sink into the soil, like chariot-wheels in turf. So come with me; we will tread heavily on our way, bowed beneath our precious load. You shall give me your hand, and we will go– Electra: Where? Orestes: I don’t know. Towards ourselves. Beyond the rivers and mountains are an Orestes and an Electra waiting for us, and we must make our patient way towards them.
The lines that I stood out in those early days were “We were too light…; now our feet sink into the soil” and “bowed beneath our precious load.” Also, I thought of Julia and me walking, hand in hand, towards our true selves, which we were discovering on the fly.
Justin was born March 12, which meant that there was a gap between Julia’s maternity leave and summer vacation. I too was teaching so I would take Justin with me to Emory, with fellow student Eliza Davis looking after him during class time. (Student conferences were often held with Justin in my lap.) I have two stories that stand out from those days.
In one, while descending the elevator with Justin asleep in my arms, I overheard a distraught student pouring out his heart to a fellow student. I think he had just failed an organic chemisty test, which meant that his dreams of becoming a doctor had been dashed. His interlocutor then exited, leaving just the three of us in the elevator—at which point he looked over at Justin and said, in the most plaintive and heartfelt voice I have ever heard, “I wish I was there again.”
The other story traumatized me for months. My advisor was leaving to become dean of the faculty at the University of Rochester and we were interviewing replacements. I brought Justin to one presentation, sitting in the very back of the room, where I thought we wouldn’t be noticed. While Justin didn’t cry, however, he was noticed. Following the talk the department chair rose and said, “Before we have questions, I’d like to ask Mr. Bates to remove his child from the room! It has been most irritating!”
I turned bright red, snatched up Justin, and ran out the door. Then, because I had left his diaper bag behind, I had to skulk outside the room until the session was over—like a child sent from class—to retrieve it. I returned home, asked my neighbor to look after Justin for a few moments, and then curled up in the fetal position on the couch. Because of how power dynamics work in graduate programs, I felt like I had ruined my life chances forever.
Looking back, I understand the chair’s reaction. A southern gentleman in the old style—one who referred to his wife as “the casserole queen”—he saw a rigid demarcation between work and home. Someone bringing a child to an occasion like this must have seemed like desecrating holy ground. It was as though I had pissed in the holy of holies.
So why did I think I could do it? Having attended Carleton at the height of the counterculture, I had watched various boundaries being dismantled and perhaps figured that this was one more that could come down. Perhaps there was even an unconscious element of protest: graduate programs can be arid–Wordsworth’s “we murder to dissect” comes to mind—so introducing into this world the human being who was putting me in touch with my full humanity seemed like a healthy thing to do. Academic culture could be changed!
Only it couldn’t, at least not yet. The Age of Aquarius apparently was not yet dawning.
While I’m talking about culture shocks, here’s another. When I was teaching Death of a Salesman in an Intro to Drama class, I automatically assumed that the class would see the play as I did, which was as a stinging indictment of capitalism: business uses up its workers and then spits them out. I didn’t anticipate that the students would blame Willie Loman, not the system, for losing his job. It was his fault that he was not up to the task.
Once again I realized that the ideal world I dreamed of creating was far from realization.
But back to Justin, who I began reading to as soon as he showed an interest. One joy of parenting is revisiting the books you loved as a child. True, this is less the case when they are very young and insist on hearing the same story over and over. I had entire books memorized.
To keep myself interested, I started putting my graduate training to use and engaged in elaborate interpretations. Al Perkins’s Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb, I decided, is about masturbation, as is (more obviously) Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen.” I subjected the Berenstain Bears series to ideological analysis and mentally mapped the narrative structure of Dr. Seuss’s Go, Dog, Go.
Of course, none of this I shared with Justin. He just loved the zest I put into the readings: “Millions of fingers, millions of thumbs, millions of monkeys drumming on drums!”
Although I found some time to read for my dissertation when Justin napped, generally I would have to wait for Julia to return from school. At around 3:30 I would hand him off to her and head for the graduate school library, where I worked until it closed at midnight.
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Thursday
Back when Barack Obama was president and we were first encountering QAnon, Birtherism, Pizzagate, and other unhinged conspiracy theories, there were two literary works I turned to: Jorge Luis Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. (I’ve provided links to those posts below.) In the Borges short story, a Memphis millionaire makes up a fantasy world that is so compelling that it supplants the actual world, while in Pynchon’s novella heroine Oedipa Maas uncovers a conspiracy so vast and complicated that she wonders whether she’s going crazy. With his open ending, Pynchon never lets us know for sure.
Ace blogger Greg Olear enthused about Pynchon and Lot 49 this past Sunday. Despite its intricate plot, however, Olear says that the novella looks like a children’s book when compared with Trump’s career arc.
Olear lists some of the elements of Pynchon’s plot, but don’t worry if you can’t figure out how they fit together. It’s a challenge even if you’ve read the book. The connecting thread is Oedipa thinking she has uncovered a secret and illegal postal service that is centuries old:
Lot 49 is a paranoid adventure, a sort of Dark Night of the Soul that goes on for weeks and weeks. It involves a dead multi-millionaire, a conspiracy involving rival postal services, a nerdish counterculture, a child actor all grown up, a thought experiment debunking the second law of thermodynamics, rare stamps trollishly defaced, swastika armband manufacturers, Jacobean revenge plays, obscure used books, Nazi psychotherapists, disc jockeys and knockoff Beatles bands with a yen for “beautiful women…many of them on the younger side,” gay bars, a symbol of a muted postal horn, physics, engineering—and those are just the highlights.
Got that? Okay, now hang on for Olear’s description of what we have been seeing with our own eyes:
If I tried to describe the full plot [of Lot 49], in all of its kooky details, you would say, “That makes no sense! Why would anyone write a book about that?” But then we recall another plot, this one of a terrible show now in its ninth season: a New York real estate mogul, a creature of organized crime, after running afoul of the Russians, is co-opted by the Kremlin; sold to the American people as a successful businessman because of a reality show that portrays him as such; is installed in the White House by dint of an insidious social media campaign that demonizes his opponent; meets his Russian overlord in Helsinki, where he cowers before him despite being much taller; denies being a puppet; maintains the support of the American people because of “fake news;” botches the response to the first bona fide plague we’re had in 100 years; is voted out; leads an attack on the Capitol to remain in place, fails, and reluctantly leaves; is indicted four times in four jurisdictions only to have three of the cases get tossed, because the state prosecutor hired her sidepiece, and the special counsel brought the cases in Florida, where they are kiboshed by a corrupt judge no one bothers to investigate; is found guilty in the fourth, but serves no prison time; loses several cases in civil court so owes hundreds of millions of dollars, doesn’t pay; pretends to be injured in an assassination attempt; sells merch based on the images from the assassination attempt; wins election soon after, because his original opponent had a senior moment on national TV and America is racist and sexist; immediately forms a secret state police to deport residents and eventually dissidents (we all assume); sabotages our relationship with our allies and resets our foreign policy to align with Moscow’s; plunders from the U.S. taxpayer, issues fake money, accepts lavish gifts from foreign entities including a jumbo jet; invites conspiracy theorists to advise him and maybe even perform fellatio upon him; gins up a fight with Venezuela for some reason; says bat-shit stuff on TV on the regular; shits his pants; uses the full power of the presidency and the DOJ and the FBI to conceal his intimacy with one of the two most notorious child sex traffickers of all time, wishes the other one well and contemplates pardoning her; pardons drug dealers and swindlers and thugs who give him money; fails to properly flip a coin at a football game—and that’s just off the top of my head. Worst of all, we don’t know how this ends. No outcome is off the table. Like, none. Consider: a leaked sex trafficker email suggested that one president had sucked off another—and we didn’t immediately dismiss that as crazy.
Each one of these plot twists features rabbit holes into which one can disappear. Take the notorious child sex traffickers. Olear says that Lot 49 presages the Epstein situation in that the two contain a number of common elements. These include
a conspiracy that keeps getting bigger and bigger, and more and more perplexing, the more I dig into it. Lot 49 may well describe the murky confusion of the offshore finance system (“assets numerous and tangled”). Or the Epstein sex trafficking network itself—there are, in the book, a few references to pedophilia, and many parallels to the here and now: Nazis, perverts, secret societies, mad real estate developers, science, tech, big money, obscure law firms, conspiracy—even proto-memes…in the form of the defaced stamps.
Olear acknowledges to feeling like Pynchon’s protagonist as he tries to sort it all out:
I am Oedipa, my brain is full, I doubt my own sanity at times, I have a cocktail or two on Friday nights to calm my jangled nerves, I crank out piece after piece after piece about the Epstein madness, about the evil men at the heart of our darkness, and for all my relentless detective work, I am no closer to the truth.
One can sympathize. After all, this is what he is seeing:
The emails, the photographs, the survivor accounts, the civil suits, the foreign intelligence services, the shell companies, the banks, the lawyers, the models, the scientists, the trafficked girls, the massage tables, the creepy masks on the wall, the bad artwork, the money, the power, the influence: the enduring mystery. Names we know, IRL characters we’ve met—we look at them differently once they know that we know. But do we know, really? What do we know? What is there to know? And: do we even want to know? After all, the whole point of Oedipus Rex, to which titular king the name of Lot 49’s protagonist clearly alludes, is that there are some secrets we’re better off not discovering.
Another parallel Olear draws between Pynchon and the Trump administration had me laughing out loud. One of the joys of Pynchon is his character and place names, including (in Lot 49) “Genghis Cohen, Mike Fallopian, Emory Bortz, Randolph Driblette, Dr. Hilarius; a law firm called Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus; a town called St. Narcisso; a gay bar in San Francisco called The Greek Way.” Olear could have added Oedipa’s disc jockey husband Mucho Maas and Gravity’s Rainbow protagonistTyrone Slothrop.
But even Pynchon can’t compete with the reality of the two Trump administrations. “How many names in the MAGA-verse,” Olear asks,
would feel right at home in the universe of Lot 49? Elon Musk, Rex Tillerson, Steve Mnuchin, Lee Zeldin, Peter Thiel, Laura Loomer, even good guy Reality Winner. And none of Pynchon’s nine novels contain a single moniker more Pynchonesque than Reince Priebus.
In one past post on “Tlön, Uqbar” and Lot 49,I turned to Yale Professor Peter Brooks’s Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, who warns about the dangers of unbridled fiction. Brooks even opens his book witha cynical line from Game of Thrones: “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.” The observation is delivered by the dwarf Tyrion as he elevates Bran the Broken to the throne. As I noted then, we Americans, to our sorrow, have seen how far an unscrupulous man can go by relying upon nothing more than the fictions he tells.
While I admire Brooks’s book, I expressed skepticism about his solution, which is that students should be taught how fiction works. In other words, English teachers should focus on narratology. While I can’t entirely argue since I myself offer such instruction daily on this blog, a more powerful response is exciting students about good books. As I’ve written in the past,
Once students, through great literature, develop an expansive vision of human possibility, they will not be satisfied with shallow and manipulative fictions. Deep people don’t settle for trashy stories, whether from authors or politicians. Their very contact with sublime art enables them to see through bullshit.
Fiction is not the enemy. The enemy is bad fiction and the scoundrels who wield it.
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Wednesday
As yesterday was the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, I am reposting one of my past Austen essays, this one explaining why I find Emma to be the author’s most interesting character study. It was difficult to choose only one essay as I have written about Austen over 100 times while mention her in almost 150 other essays–more than any author other than Shakespeare. I am, to borrow Rudyard Kipling’s label for Austen fanatics, an unapologetic Janeite.
First published Oct. 30, 2014, slightly revised
My Jane Austen seminar has been thoroughly enjoying Emma. Yesterday, as we talked about how Mrs. Elton functions as Emma’s dark double, I came to understand why the novel has become my favorite Austen.
Before we launched into the multiple ways that the rector’s wife functions as Emma’s shadow side, I asked the class whether they could identify doubles in previous Austen novels. For a character to function as a double, I said that he or she must represent a dark direction that the character could go. We identified doubles for all the heroines.
Catherine Morland – Isabella Thorpe Elinor Dashwood – Lucy Steele Marianne Dashwood – Eliza (Col. Brandon’s ward) Elizabeth Bennet – Caroline Bingley Fanny Price – Mary Crawford Emma Woodhouse –Mrs. Elton
Isabella Thorpe is, as my students call her, the BFF (Best Friend Forever) who threatens to lead Catherine astray. Luckily a combination of sound moral principles and mature guidance (from Henry Tilney) saves Catherine from Isabella’s devious ways. The same principles save Marianne but only barely as her sensibility almost leads her to Eliza’s fate.
With Catherine, Elinor and Elizabeth, the question is how to win the hero without trying to. “Trying” is the operative word: it is considered bad form for a woman to set her cap at a man (to use Sir John’s expression, which offends Marianne) since this transforms a lady into a scheming seductress. To be sure, a major point of dressing up, playing the piano, singing, and talking prettily is to land a man. (Bingley notes delightedly that all the young ladies are accomplished, not realizing that men like himself are the target of these accomplishments.) By creating doubles who are nakedly ambitious, Austen absolves her heroines from the charge of seduction.
Elinor, for instance, could not be the heroine if she were as calculating as Lucy Steele. Whereas the latter deliberately angles for Edward, Elinor is unconscious of how she attracts him (even though Fanny Dashwood accuses her of “draw[ing] him in”). Likewise, whereas Caroline Bingley practically throws herself at Darcy, Elizabeth gains his attention despite herself. It is only at Caroline’s suggestion that she parades about the room to be admired by Darcy and only by accident that she ends up at Pemberley while he is there, an encounter that is critical to their reconciliation. Elizabeth escapes the charge of gold-digging by (1) rejecting his initial marriage offer and (2) being dramatically different from Caroline. When she tells Jane that her opinion of Darcy changed after she saw Pemberley, it’s not because of his wealth but because of his responsible stewardship.
Austen complicates the issue, however, by having one heroine put too little effort in landing a husband. I’m thinking of Jane here, whom the calculating Charlotte Lucas accurately predicts will lose her man if she doesn’t make more open displays of affection. It’s a thin line, then, that heroines must walk: they must somehow attract men without trying too hard to attract them. Fanny Price is the ultimate example, winning Edmund in the end simply by being principled and not contemptuous of the clergy.
I asked my women students whether they still feel a stigma attached to initiating relationships. Their answers were mixed but more said yes than no. Some traditions die hard.
The doubling in Emma involves class (as does Sense and Sensibility) but is more interesting because Emma is not as virtuous as Elinor and Elizabeth. “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,” Austen wrote. Mrs. Elton may be a social climber but, more importantly, she is the double who most resembles the heroine. If Emma finds Mrs. Elton so distasteful, it is because she sees so much of herself in her. Emma is a social snob who reacts badly to Mrs. Elton’s snobbery, and while she is appalled at the way that Mrs. Elton wants to control Jane Fairfax, it is unlike how she herself directs Harriet’s life. Her insult of Miss Bates at the picnic, meanwhile, is not qualitatively different from the way Mrs. Elton sneers at Harriet.
The drama of the book is whether Emma can resist her dark side. In no other Austen novel do we see quite such an internal conflict, making Emma the most interesting character study of all the novels. In the end, fortunately, Emma shows she has more substance than Mrs. Elton by making a heroic sacrifice that the latter would not make: she surrenders Knightley to Harriet (or so she thinks), accepting this as a consequence of her meddling in the lives of others. Her reward is to discover that Knightley loves only her. But Emma has had to dig more deeply into herself than any other Austen heroine to avoid becoming her double.
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Tuesday
Some deaths of public figures hurt more than others, and the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife has hit me especially hard. It so happens that on Saturday, while attending the memorial service of a good friend, someone mentioned that The Princess Bride was his favorite film. There are many for whom this is true. In homage to the legendary director, I share how I used to use Princess Bride to teach Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones in “Couples Comedy in the Restoration and 18th Century.”
Let’s start with how Fielding pioneered the romantic comedy genre that would one day gives us Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally. When you think about it, “romantic comedy” is an oxymoron since romance draws us close to the subject while comedy opens up a distance.In his book Masterworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, scholar Angus Fletcher says that Fielding blended romance with wit to invent a “valentine armor.”
The armor was necessary in the Age of Sentiment, as the latter half of the 18th century has been called. While women readers thrilled to such romance novels as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, the works also made them vulnerable. If a hypocrite came along using the language of sentiment—I think especially of the villain Sir Joseph Surface in Richard Sheridan’s 1777 comedy School for Scandal—then young women seeking love might
discover to their miserable shock that the world was not, in fact, filled with would-be spouses. It was populated instead with carnal con artists, polite uninterest and mismatched affections. Over and over, [these women] rushed into kissing too fast. And over and over, they got dumped at the altar, their dreams ending in tears.
Simultaneously embracing and mocking true love served as a form of protection. As Fletcher puts it, readers alternated between “the Almighty Heart” and “lightly satiric narration.” Fletcher includes Jane Austen along with Fielding as a pioneer of the genre, and one thinks of the difference between Elizabeth and Lydia in Pride and Prejudice. Whereas Lydia rushes headlong into passion, avoiding tears only because Darcy bails her out, Elizabeth balances satiric distance with genuine feeling. Fielding and Austen, as Fletcher puts it, “elevated our heart while also restraining it.”
Which of course is what Reiner does in Princess Bride. Young Fred Savage is understandably skeptical of deep emotion. After all, consumer society and cynical politicians are expert at manipulating our feelings. In his grandfather’s story, however, he gets to indulge in true love even as he expresses skepticism. The two emotions are held in balance.
Savage’s cynicism in the 1980s was shared by postmodernism, which privileged irony while making fun of the romanticism found in such novelists as Barbara Cartland. I mention Cartland because she is the example cited by Italian novelist and theorist Umberto Eco when he described postmodernism. His observation concerned the difficulty of avowing love:
I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her “I love you madly,” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say, “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly,” At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.
So how is love expressed in The Princess Bride? I’m sure you remember the ending, when Savage allows his grandfather to read the final kissing scene:
Since the invention of the kiss, there have been five kisses that were rated the most passionate, the most pure, this one left them all behind. The end.
Like Princess Bride, Tom Jones has a framing narrative, where the author comments on the action he is recording. Without it, Tom and Sophia’s love story would seem too sappy, too Barbara Cartland-like. Note the over-the-top way he describes his heroine and then think of how Reiner introduces Buttercup to us:
So charming may she now appear! and you the feathered choristers of nature, whose sweetest notes not even Handel can excel, tune your melodious throats to celebrate her appearance. From love proceeds your music, and to love it returns. Awaken therefore that gentle passion in every swain: for lo! adorned with all the charms in which nature can array her; bedecked with beauty, youth, sprightliness, innocence, modesty, and tenderness, breathing sweetness from her rosy lips, and darting brightness from her sparkling eyes, the lovely Sophia comes!
Regarding parallels between Tom Jones and Princess Bride, I note one other that my student Erin Hendrix pointed out to me when I was teaching Fielding’s novel.Undoubtedly you remember how the villain Wally Shawn says “inconceivable” every time one of his two henchmen notes that the “dread Pirate Roberts” is still on their trail. When they cut a rope that he is climbing, only to discover him still in pursuit, the following exchange occurs:
Vizzini: HE DIDN’T FALL? INCONCEIVABLE! Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The word in Tom Jones is “impossible”—as in Tom’s guide telling him that it is “impossible” that they are lost. It is a word, Fielding observes,
which, in common conversation, is often used to signify not only improbable, but often what is really very likely, and, sometimes, what hath certainly happened; an hyperbolical violence like that which is so frequently offered to the words infinite and eternal; by the former of which it is usual to express a distance of half a yard, and by the latter, a duration of five minutes.
In this case, however, we reach for superlatives because anything thing else fails to do the event justice. Of his many talents, one could say that Reiner had a very 18th century sense of humor, balancing sentiment and wit in a way that did justice to both heart and head. It is inconceivable that he is dead.
Image from Siegfried, the Hero of the North, and Beowulf, the Hero of the Anglo-Saxons (1900)
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Monday
Time after time, when there has been a mass shooting such as we just witnessed in Sydney, Australia and Providence, Rhode Island, I have turned to Beowulf. The Anglo-Saxon epic is one of the world’s great literary works about violence, composed by a poet who lived at a time of violent tribal rivalries and knew his subject well. The trolls, who embody resentful rage (Grendel) and grieving rage (his mother), help us understand what drives mass killers.
I want to focus today on the dragon, however, because, as I see it, the monster embodies the grief and depression we experience when faced with death. Or put another way, when we are feeling beaten down and world weary, we can become dragons.
Think about it. Dragons withdraw from the world, hunkering down in caves. Although they are encased in scaly hard exteriors, however, deep within they nurse angry fire, and poison runs in their veins. Although they can remain in this state for extended periods of time, if anyone intrudes on their solitude they may erupt in fury and burn down everything and everyone around them. Often their fellow human beings give them a wide berth.
Before Beowulf, the first poem that came to mind following the Sydney shooting was the 13th psalm since the shooters were targeting people celebrating Hanukkah. Legend has it that King David composed the psalm following the death of his son Absalom:
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
Repeatedly in Beowulf one encounters kings who are essentially calling out, “How long, O Lord?” First there’s Hrothgar, who spirals into depression after his best friend Aeschere is killed by Grendel’s mother:
Rest, what is rest, sorrow has returned.
Then there is the last veteran, who retreats into a funeral barrow after all his friends have died:
He mourned as he moved about the world, deserted and alone, lamenting his unhappiness day and night, until death’s flood brimmed up in his heart.
It is in this barrow that the dragon finds a home. Or as I read the incident, the last veteran becomes a human dragon.
Then there is Beowulf at the end of his life. Although he has been an exemplary king, all he can see as he looks back is one damn death after another. There’s no mention at this point in the poem of his victories. He thinks first of his beloved grandfather and mentor, King Hrethel, who falls into depression after his second son accidentally kills his first. Hrethel takes to his bed and never gets up again:
He gazes sorrowfully at his son’s dwelling, the banquet hall bereft of all delight, the windswept hearthstone; the horsemen are sleeping, the warriors under ground; what was is no more. No tunes from the harp, no cheer raised in the yard. Alone with his longing, he lies down on his bed and sings a lament; everything seems too large, the steadings and the fields.
Then Beowulf remembers his uncle Hygelac, king at the time of the Grendel slayings:
One of his cruellest hand-to-hand encounters had happened when Hygelac, king of the Geats, was killed…
Then he recalls how Hygelac’s son and successor, Heardred, was killed by the Swedes:
That marked the end for Hygelac’s son: his hospitality was mortally rewarded with wounds from a sword.
It is in recalling this history that Beowulf encounters dragon depression:
And so the son of Ecgtheow had survived every extreme, excelling himself in daring and in danger, until the day arrived when he had to come face to face with the dragon…
The poem is a gift because it articulates the funk into which we can sink. Fortunately, it also offers us a counter response. Since Beowulf’s desire to fight the dragon alone is itself a dragon trait, at moments of sorrow it is important to reach out to friends and loved ones. Beowulf would be swallowed up were it not for his nephew Wiglaf, who braves dragon fire and comes to his aid. Working together, the two of them defeat the monster, allowing Beowulf to go out a hero, not a dragon.
Too often our landscape can resemble the world that the aging Beowulf sees, with one damn death following another. When a mass shooting occurs, we pay special attention. Family, friendship groups, and community are vital at such moments.
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Sunday
A year and a half ago, when I was teaching at the University of Ljubljana, I learned that I had missed a Sewanee visit from Malcolm Guite, my favorite living religious poet. My friend John Gatta recently alerted me that a video is available on line, and I can report that it’s magnificent. In it Guite, who is an Anglican priest and a musician as well as a poet, looks at how the 17th century metaphysical poets John Donne and George Herbert use images of music in their poetry.
At one point in his talk, Guite enthuses about the opening stanza of Donne’s “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness.” He loves (1) how Donne sees himself tuning up for his encounter with God, much like an orchestra tuning its instruments prior to a concert; and (2) how Donne imagines himself not simply hearing but becoming God’s music:
Since I am coming to that holy room, Where, with thy choir of saints for evermore, I shall be made thy music; as I come I tune the instrument here at the door, And what I must do then, think here before.
Herbert refers to Donne’s poem in “Church Music,” today’s featured poem. Guite notes that when the speaker in Herbert’s poem is feeling melancholic, church music provides him with a refuge, reassigning him to “a dainty lodging” or “house of pleasure.”
Herbert finds a sublimated eroticism in what is essentially an out of body experience: “Now I in you without a body move, /Rising and falling with your wings.” Guite detects a possible allusion in line seven to Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (“Come live with me and be my love,/ And we will all the pleasures prove”) and in the eighth line I pick up an allusion to Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29” (“For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings/ That then I scorn to change my state with kings”). Check it out to see if you agree:
Church Music By George Herbert
Sweetest of sweets, I thank you: when displeasure Did through my body wound my mind, You took me thence, and in your house of pleasure A dainty lodging me assigned.
Now I in you without a body move, Rising and falling with your wings: We both together sweetly live and love, Yet say sometimes, God help poor Kings.
Comfort, I’ll die; for if you post from me, Sure I shall do so, and much more: But if I travel in your company, You know the way to heaven’s door.
Guite contends that the final two lines are among the most beautiful in English poetry. Herbert takes the image of heaven’s door from the Donne poem and then, centuries later, Bob Dylan takes it from Herbert. (Guite observes that Dylan is well acquainted with English poetry and points out that he borrowed the line “forever young” from John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.) Although, without church music, the speaker will not be able to continue on, if he “travel[s] in your company”—he could be addressing either music or Donne—he will find his way to God.
As I was listening to the Guite talk, I thought of another Herbert poem that dwells on similar themes. In “Denial,” a poem about spiritual crisis, Herbert laments that he is like an out-of-tune or unstrung instrument. After voicing his despair, however, he imagines God stepping in to “mend my rhyme.” The poem ends with a graceful rhyming couplet:
Therefore my soul lay out of sight, Untuned, unstrung: My feeble spirit, unable to look right, Like a nipped blossom, hung Discontented.
O cheer and tune my heartless breast, Defer no time; That so thy favors granting my request, They and my mind may chime, And mend my rhyme.
Imagine your soul in tune with creation. “Sweetest of sweets” is one way of describing it.
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Friday
This is the latest post in my on-going series on “My Life in Literature,” which appears every Friday. Because an informal autobiography written by my great grandmother Eliza Scott means so much to me—she discusses the novels that were important to her as she grew up in Victorian England—I figured I should do something similar for family members who come after me. Of course, the subject is also consistent with the mission of this blog, which is to explore the many ways that literature enhances and sometimes changes our lives.
Having focused last Friday on my graduate school experience, I look today at the rest of our life during that time. Julia had difficulty finding a public-school post when we moved to Atlanta so had to settle first for a small private school and then, when that went under, a school dedicated to individual tutorials. Not until the fourth year did she land the kind of position she wanted, which was teaching English at Decatur’s Renfroe Middle School.
Atlanta during the late 1970s was an exciting place for a young married couple. Although we didn’t have a lot of money, there was a superb movie theater ten minutes away—the Ansley Mall Film Forum—which every week would show one of the exciting new foreign films. Because we trusted the theater, we didn’t even both to check what was on offer and so saw films without knowing what to expect, which is the best way to see a movie. Thus we were introduced to new films from Italy, Japan, France, Hungary, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and especially Germany (Herzog, Wenders, Fassbinder).
For a special treat, once a month we would dress up (Julia in a short dress and knee-high boots, I in a suit and tie) and go out for dinner. On Sunday mornings we played softball at Chandler Park.
We also started a supper club with our best friends, Norman Finkelstein and Kathy Wexelman, where we would gather every Sunday and talk about literature, movies, art, the state of the world, and other such topics. Later others would join us, including my law student cousin Larry Bates, childhood friend Cathy Degen Andreen, and a colleague and his wife from Julia’s school.
Life wasn’t always smooth sailing. In some ways, Julia wanted me to be her father and I wanted her to be my mother, and we were frustrated that neither of us could fulfill those roles: I couldn’t fix things like a farmer and she wasn’t prepared to be a Sewanee society hostess. My excessive rationality, including my apparent failure to take her religious beliefs seriously, irked her, and she also felt out of place at graduate school parties. To prove she belonged, she once decided to read the entire opus of 19th century novelist Booth Tarkenton (his works include Penrod and The Magnificent Ambersons). Once, when I failed to include her in a grad student social event, I returned home to find angry poems plastered all over the apartment. (They were numbered so that I would read them in the right order, Julia herself having gone to bed by that time.)
For my part, I would sometimes bridle at how forceful she could be, even though that was one of the qualities that had drawn me to her. In short, we experienced the kinds of tensions that are typical of two virtual strangers learning how to share an apartment, a bed, a bank account, and everything else that comes with a marriage.
These tensions, however, were more than offset by the new world that was opening up. Julia’s exuberance and her enjoyment of hugs and massages were an exciting change from my emotionally buttoned-down upbringing. For her part, she relished entering a world where reading and intellectual discussion were prized above almost anything else. On her farm, reading had meant that you weren’t working.
We had gotten married at the height of the feminist movement, which both of us embraced. Indeed, Julia’s Moravian minister–who had given us questionnaires to fill out prior to the wedding—told us he’d never met a couple with a more egalitarian view of marriage. Although, as a man, I sometimes felt guilty for my sense of entitlement, I also felt freed by a number of feminism’s central tenants, especially its critique of hypermasculinity. Julia, meanwhile, appreciated that I was fully committed to her career aspirations. So although Julia occasionally regarded me as a wimpy and waffling and although I occasionally saw her as stubborn and abrasive, we were committed to changing traditional marriage. We shared household chores equally and made mutual respect our highest priority.
In Care of the Soul, psychotherapist Thomas Moore says that we fall in love with attributes in the other person that we wish to develop in ourselves. I wanted more of Julia’s enthusiasm and physicality and she wanted more of my intellectual passion. We developed accordingly.
Once one is in a committed relationship, however, Moore says we face the discomfort of growing into this new self and may find ourselves retreating back to what is familiar. After all, true growth is difficult, which is why some marriages fall apart. Indeed, there were times when I would retreat into my mind and when Julia would lash out at the academic life.
In a good marriage, however, each partner accepts the challenges and a new entity emerges. I think this is why Julia and I are still married, and still growing, after 52 years.
To illustrate Moore’s insights with a literary example, the awkward and arrogant Fitzwilliam Darcy falls in love with the witty and effervescent Elizabeth Bennett. Meanwhile she, who like her father sometimes uses her satiric view of the world as a protective shield, is impressed by Darcy’s serious commitment to community, exemplified by his mature stewardship of his estate. For them to grow into the potential their marriage represents, he will have to learn how “to laugh at himself” while she will need to become more serious (“mistress of Pemberley”). When tensions arise, he will be tempted to retreat into his pride and she into her prejudice, which are their default settings. The hard work of marriage requires resisting these impulses.
Despite Tolstoy’s famous dictum in Anna Karenina that all happy families are alike while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, my experience from my happy relationship with Julia is that each marriage contains such a wide variety of growth opportunities that all marriages are unique. For that matter, I find the happy marriage between Levin and Kitty more interesting than Anna’s unhappy marriage and her failed love affair. A critical moment in Levin’s marriage is when, not knowing how to respond to his dying brother, he discovers that Kitty is up to the occasion, possessing a strength and sensitivity he never imagined. Marriage to Julia has led to similar discoveries. Whereas I, like Levin, spend a lot of time in my head, Julia has periodically astounded me with unanticipated depth.
In some ways, in my marriage I have felt like Eza Pound’s river merchant’s wife. Although we were confused by our relationship at 22 when we said our vows, I have seen us grow into something permanent and solid. As the speaker in Pound’s poem puts it,
At fifteen I stopped scowling, I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever, and forever. Why should I climb the look out?
The “look out” here can be seen as a way out, a search for other possibilities, or perhaps a longing look back to childhood. Even when our marriage hit a rough spot, which it did when we reached our forties, I never seriously climbed that look out. Our marriage, I figured, was forever and forever and forever.
I will mention one final literary experience that Julia and I shared during these years. In 1978, after I passed my Ph.D. orals, we celebrated by taking a trip to Paris, London, and Scotland. While in London we saw two plays, and though Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour didn’t do much for me, a National Theater production of William Wycherley’s Country Wife is one of my most memorable theater experiences.
As someone specializing in Restoration and 18th Century British literature, this bawdy Restoration comedy was right up my alley. Better yet, it starred Albert Finney of Tom Jones fame. Finney played the role of Horner, a rake who gets around the defenses of jealous husbands by pretending that venereal disease has rendered him impotent. It’s a crazy premise but Wycherley’s wit is dazzling, albeit cynical in the extreme.
Because the theater wasn’t full, Julia and I were able to upgrade our student tickets for the front row, which led to something special. To appreciate what happened, it helps to know that maids in Restoration comedy are assumed to be sexually loose. So when Lucy the maid, who is orchestrating the action, said, “By my honor,” Julia guffawed.
The actress heard her and, without missing a beat, strode over to where we were sitting. Looking straight down as Julia, she repeated slowly and distinctly, as if affronted, “BY MY HONOR!” The audience erupted.
The night was memorable for another reason. On our way to the theatre, Julia was feeling a little off and we had to stop to get her some water. Later we realized that she was pregnant. We had disposed of her diaphragm in a Paris hotel, figuring it was the time to start trying, and now we had the result: our eldest child was conceived in the City of Light. More on Justin’s emergence into the world next week.
Additional note: Being socially clumsy at 20 when it came to women, my first interaction with Julia was as gauche as Darcy’s first interaction with Elizabeth. I was sick in the top bunk and listening to my roommate try to persuade Julia to join a group in a co-ed nude sauna. As she resisted, I leaned over and said, “You’re not as dumb as some people think you are.” For some reason, I thought I was being funny.
Darcy first response to Elizabeth, of course, is “She is tolerable: but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humor at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men.”
Since Pride and Prejudice, it has become common in romance novels for the hero to insult the heroine early in their relationship. Perhaps deep down, like Darcy, I sensed that this woman would turn my life upside down and I was trying to push her away. Julia was bemused by my comment, but a few months later we were going steady.
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Thursday
In the classic crime story, the prevailing social order is first disrupted and then reaffirmed as truth and the law defeat the forces of evil. Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest could be describing the genre when she says of her own novel, “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”
Even though good people in some stories end not so happily, the one non-negotiable aspect of the genre is accountability. The murderer cannot be allowed to escape some form of justice. If he or she were to do so, the world would become (to borrow from Heart of Darkness) “too dark altogether.”
Which is sometimes how our own world feels as our felon-in-chief appears able to break laws with impunity. Perhaps we need Elizabeth Brundage’s splendid crime novel All Things Cease to Appear to capture our reality. (Caution: major spoilers ahead.)While it was published in 2016, meaning that the author probably had other things than Donald Trump on her mind, this beautifully written work reveals how much a charming sociopath can get away with. When people assume that the world operates according to certain civilized rules, they are vulnerable to sick minds.
We learn from the early pages that Catherine Clare has been murdered with an axe. Although (as we are told) in nine out of ten such cases the culprit is the husband, as first we don’t suspect George Clare. That is because the book takes us into his point of view. We later get an explanation for what may seem at first a shabby authorial trick, however. As a seasoned defense attorney points out,
A sociopath has the ability to convince himself that he’s innocent. So everything that comes out of his mouth rings true to him, and usually to everyone else. They separate themselves from the event. Like they’d never been there. Like it never even happened.
The suspense in Cease to Appear is like the suspense that has been gripping America for the past decade: will the guilty party ever be brought to justice? The answer appears to be no. In addition to Catherine’s murder, George gets away with a fraudulent PhD (he has forged a letter from his PhD advisor); with killing his department chair; and with running a colleague off the road after she sees the double game that he’s playing. One reason he kills his wife is because she has just figured out he drowned his boss.
While there are a couple of people who could expose the crime—a woman with whom he is having sex, the teenage boy who comes by the house to babysit their daughter while Catherine is lying dead upstairs—for various reasons they don’t reveal what they know. In today’s essay I focus on the reasons that George escapes accountability because they provide insight into how Trump does the same. Different individuals enable his crimes in the following ways:
—Submitting to and closing one’s eyes to the sociopath lurking just beneath the surface
This is the path taken by Catherine, who gives up her art career and attempts to be a model wife in the 1950s mold, even though the year is 1978. This requires living in denial:
She chose to deny his true nature, just as his own mother did, contriving logical excuses for illogical acts, or reasonable grounds for unreasonable behavior, sometimes even blaming themselves for his failures. Poor George! He was overtired, overworked, overpressured – he just needs rest, to be left alone! and George never failed to exploit their misunderstanding.
MAGA rationalizations for Trump’s behavior have an abused spouse quality to them.
—Underestimating the lengths to which a sociopath will go
George’s department chair can’t imagine that an applicant for a position would forge a letter from his dissertation advisor and falsely claim to have received special awards. Then, when he learns the truth, he thinks allowing George to accompany him on a boat ride will be a chance to console him for the fact that he is about fire him. His humanity dooms him.
Similarly, when George’s colleague Justine, who is his wife’s best friend, reveals to him that she has learned of his adultery, she thinks she is safe in doing so. She has no idea that he will chase her down in his car and run her off the road. When she finally sees his psychotic streak, it’s too late.
Many people who voted for Trump had no idea the lengths to which he would go if given unbridled power, starting with the rightwing justices on the Supreme Court but including many more. Even Jeffrey Epstein, monstrous though he himself was, never suspected that Trump would backstab him, exposing him to the law in order to shaft him on a real estate deal.
—Thinking that, by running away, the problem will go away
This is the case of Willis, the masochistic woman with whom George is having an adulterous affair. As their sex becomes increasingly perverse, she realizes that he is fully capable of having killed his wife and flees to the other coast. She learns, however, that she can’t escape so easily. George hires her defense attorney father, famous for successfully defending the worst of the worst, and then blackmails her by sending her pictures of the two of them having sex. Reveal what she knows, he lets her know, and daddy learns all.
Anyone who has had dealings with Trump and then attempted to break off the relationship learns that there is no easy escape. Many in the GOP think there’s no way free.
—Pretending that nothing is amiss
The one piece of evidence that would definitively implicate George is in the hands of Cole, the babysitter: George’s kitchen table note informing Cole not to bother his wife, who he says is upstairs sick, would prove that George is attempting to cover up the murder. But Cole figures that denying that he was in the house that day will make any unpleasantness disappear.
A significant percentage of the country is hiding out in similar willful ignorance.
I suppose there is accountability of a sort for George: he spends the rest of his life terrified that he will be found out, and his restless moving from one place to another is a sign that he is never at peace. While he claims to love his daughter, she too comes to understand that there is something deeply wrong in the way he has never talked to her about her mother. She tells him that she will never forgive him or talk to him again, and he learns of her wedding (to Cole) only through a newspaper article. In the end, he is a cranky old man living in retirement center isolation. When, on the verge of growing blind (because of diabetes), he learns that the case has been reopened and that he is a suspect, he commits suicide.
I can’t imagine that Trump will ever find peace, even with bootlickers constantly around him who tell him whatever he wants to hear. To truly get in his head, I must leave Brundage’s novel and turn to Shakespeare. If the aging King Lear needs declarations of love from his daughters, it is because he realizes, in his final years, that a life without love is a living hell. His mistake is thinking that he can engineer such love—just as George thinks he can manipulate his daughter into loving only him by erasing the memory of her mother—and he goes crazy when his scheming doesn’t get him what he wants.
Will all those who have suffered under Trump consider justice to have been done when he descends into his miserable final years? And there’s no doubt about it, they will be as miserable as Lear’s, even if they are not spent wandering on the heath. We may not get the crime novel ending we desire: Trump, no more than George, will end up behind bars. But despite the adulation of fans and the millions the president has gained from monetizing the presidency, no sane person would want to change places with him.
