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Monday
As I read Stormy Daniels’s account of her sexual encounter with Donald Trump—how she just stared at the ceiling as he did his business—I couldn’t help but think of T.S. Eliot’s description of the secretary and the “small house agent’s clerk” in The Waste Land. Both are equally empty and desolate. Here’s the story Eliot tells:
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting, I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins. Out of the window perilously spread Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays, On the divan are piled (at night her bed) Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays. I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest— I too awaited the expected guest. He, the young man carbuncular, arrives, A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare, One of the low on whom assurance sits As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. The time is now propitious, as he guesses, The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, Endeavors to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired. Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference. (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on this same divan or bed; I who have sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead.) Bestows one final patronizing kiss, And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . . She turns and looks a moment in the glass, Hardly aware of her departed lover; Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: ‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’ When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smooths her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone.
Eliot has taken on the persona of Tiresias, the world-weary seer from Greek mythology who has seen it all. In this instance, he witnesses a loveless tryst, which is different from the Daniels-Trump episode mainly in that Daniels thought she had been invited to Trump’s penthouse apartment for dinner. As Daniels tells it, once she saw Trump undressed and blocking the door, she gave in and allowed him to have his way with her. After it was over, she left as quickly as she could.
In Eliot’s poem, by contrast, the affair occurs in the woman’s apartment. Also, she at least gets supper. It’s unclear how consensual the sex is because we don’t know if there has been pressure at the office (assuming she works for the man). Given that his caresses are “unreproved, if undesired,” it sounds like she too surrenders to the power dynamic. It’s certainly the case that the reactions of both women are the same: “Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”
The “young man carbuncular” (pimply?) is a dead ringer for Trump in his narcissism. He doesn’t notice much about the woman because he’s so caught up in himself. “Flushed and decided, he assaults at once,” we are told and, “his vanity requires no response,/ And makes a welcome of indifference.” While Trump, unlike the clerk, actually is as rich as “a Bradford millionaire,” Eliot’s scathing put-down of the clerk’s sense of entitlement fits the former president to a tee.
The sordidness of the scene matches what we are learning from the New York trial. Recall that what set Trump’s hush money payments in motion was the need to save his campaign following the remarks caught on the Access Hollywood tape (“”I don’t even wait [to kiss a woman]. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything”). Witnesses are informing us that many were convinced that, if Stormy Daniels’s account had gone public, the GOP would have replaced Trump on the ballot. Though we have become numbed to his outrageous behavior since the 2016 campaign, at the time his future hung in the balance. Therefore he paid for the story to be hushed up (along with his affair with Karen McDougall) and then falsified business records to hide the payments—which is to say, to hide his election interference.
In the poem, Eliot laments the decline of high heroic ideals, with Teiresias–who once witnessed the Oedipus tragedy and spoke to Odysseus in the underworld—now reduced to reporting on an illicit sex scene. In our own unheroic times, the Founders must be turning in their graves to see the kind of man their republic elected to the presidency once, with the possibility of doing it again.
It’s not only the young man carbuncular who is groping around in the dark trying to find an exit.
Stained glass in St. James the Greater Catholic Church (Concord NC)
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Ascension Sunday
In celebrating the moment when Jesus ascended into heaven, we come to the next stage of that momentous journey that began with Christmas and Epiphany. If Epiphany represents the moment when people came to realize that divinity can be found within the world—incarnate in a human being—then Ascension shows Christ modeling what it means to step fully into that divinity. As Malcolm Guite puts it in “A Sonnet for Ascension Day,” “We saw him go and yet we were not parted/ He took us with him to the heart of things.”
There may be an echo here of lines from Wordworth’s Tintern Abbey, where the poet talks about the moment when, “with an eye made quiet by the power/ Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, /We see into the life of things.” For contrast purposes, poets writing about the Ascension always dwell upon what it is they are stepping beyond. For John Donne, who is always wrestling with his recalcitrant heart (“Batter my heart, three-personed God”), Ascension washes or burns away our “drossy clay.”
Salute the last, and everlasting day, Joy at the uprising of this Sun, and Son, Ye whose true tears, or tribulation Have purely wash’d, or burnt your drossy clay.
In this, the final lyric in Donne’s seven-sonnet sequence known as “The Crown,” Donne sees Christ paving the way to heaven. “Bright Torch, which shinest, that I the way may see!” he writes.
In his own Ascension poem Henry Vaughan too talks about earthly clay ascending “more quick than light.” He also uses a clothing analogy. “Who will ascend, must be undrest,” he asserts before noting how we have soiled the clothes we were given:
But since he That brightness soiled, His garments be All dark and spoiled, And here are left as nothing worth, Till the Refiner’s fire breaks forth.
“He,” in this instance, is Adam, who in his naked innocence was “intimate with Heav’n”:
Man of old Within the line Of Eden could Like the Sun shine All naked, innocent and bright, And intimate with Heav’n, as light
With Christ’s arrival and then with the Ascension, the Fall doesn’t get the last word as “stained man” is made “more white than snow”:
Then comes he! Whose mighty light Made his clothes be Like Heav’n, all bright; The Fuller, whose pure blood did flow To make stained man more white than snow.
For his part, Malcolm Guite talks about how “the heart that broke for all the broken-hearted” is now “whole and Heaven-centered.” This Jesus heart “sings in the strength that rises out of weakness,/ Sings through the clouds that veil him from our sight.”
The result is that we, as witnesses, can “sing the waning darkness into light.” Jesus’s light is in us, just as our light is in him, with the barriers between heaven and earth coming down. As Guite explains,
The mystery of this feast is the paradox whereby in one sense Christ “leaves” us and is taken away into Heaven, but in another sense he is given to us and to the world in a new and more universal way. He is no longer located only in one physical space to the exclusion of all others. He is in the Heaven which is at the heart of all things now and is universally accessible to all who call upon Him.
And further:
His humanity is taken into heaven so our humanity belongs there too, and is in a sense already there with him.” For you have died”, says St. Paul, “and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
Here’s Guite’s sonnet:
A Sonnet for Ascension Day
We saw his light break through the cloud of glory Whilst we were rooted still in time and place As earth became a part of Heaven’s story And heaven opened to his human face. We saw him go and yet we were not parted He took us with him to the heart of things The heart that broke for all the broken-hearted Is whole and Heaven-centered now, and sings, Sings in the strength that rises out of weakness, Sings through the clouds that veil him from our sight, Whilst we our selves become his clouds of witness And sing the waning darkness into light, His light in us, and ours in him concealed, Which all creation waits to see revealed.
As I’ve been noting recently, John Gatta in Green Gospel: Foundations of Ecotheology observes that “all creation” involves far more than humans. When we open ourselves to God’s bigness, we develop in ways that are beyond human imagining.
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Friday
With Mother’s Day coming up, here’s a May Sarton homage to her own mother. It’s fairly direct reminder that, when we look back, it’s important to dwell upon the good times.
For My Mother By May Sarton
Once more I summon you Out of the past With poignant love, You who nourished the poet And the lover. I see your gray eyes Looking out to sea In those Rockport summers, Keeping a distance Within the closeness Which was never intrusive Opening out Into the world. And what I remember Is how we laughed Till we cried Swept into merriment Especially when times were hard. And what I remember Is how you never stopped creating And how people sent me Dresses you had designed With rich embroidery In brilliant colors Because they could not bear To give them away Or cast them aside. I summon you now Not to think of The ceaseless battle With pain and ill health, The frailty and the anguish. No, today I remember The creator, The lion-hearted.
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Thursday
This being Teacher Appreciation Week, I share the classroom experiences of one of literature’s great teacher characters. In Jane Eyre we see a true professional at work.
Commenting on the Lilliputian system of education, Jonathan Swift observes “that parents are the last of all others to be trusted with the education of their own children.” Why certain parents think they can do a better job than skilled professionals says more about them than about our education system. These parents remind me of Blanche Ingram and her sisters who, right in front of Jane, show how badly they treated the governesses who taught them. We are fortunate that, even when suffering similar disrespect, our underpaid and overworked teachers demonstrate the same commitment to their students that Jane does.
I’ll admit that bad teachers exist, and in Bronte’s novel we get an instance of one in Lowood School’s Miss Scatcherd, who publicly humiliates the angelic Helen Burns and condemns her “to a dinner of bread and water on the morrow because she had blotted an exercise in copying it out.” Scatcherd, by failing to appreciate Helen’s beautiful mind, prompts Jane to reflect, “Such is the imperfect nature of man! such spots are there on the disc of the clearest planet; and eyes like Miss Scatcherd’s can only see those minute defects, and are blind to the full brightness of the orb.”
So yes, there are those who focus on defects rather than seeing the full student.
But there are more Jane Eyres and Miss Temples than Scatcherds in our school systems. Temple, the principle of Lowood, knows how to be teacher that both Jane and Helen need in their hours of extremity. Fair, kind, empathetic and just, Temple becomes a model for Jane. We go on to see Jane in three teaching situations: at Lowood when she grows up, at Thornfield Hall as governess to Adele, and in a country school as sole teacher.
While Jane has some nationalist prejudices when it comes to Adele (she regards her as a French coquette), she nevertheless takes her teaching duties seriously and the results are good. We know this from an interchange with Rochester regarding Adele’s progress. He has brought his ward a gift (“un cadeau”) and wonders if Jane expects one as well:
“I have examined Adèle, and find you have taken great pains with her: she is not bright, she has no talents; yet in a short time she has made much improvement.”
“Sir, you have now given me my ‘cadeau;’ I am obliged to you: it is the mead teachers most covet—praise of their pupils’ progress.”
When Jane is put in charge of a country schoolroom, she shines yet brighter, even though her task is a daunting one. She describes her situation:
This morning, the village school opened. I had twenty scholars. But three of the number can read: none write or cipher. Several knit, and a few sew a little. They speak with the broadest accent of the district. At present, they and I have a difficulty in understanding each other’s language. Some of them are unmannered, rough, intractable, as well as ignorant…
She adds that others, however, “are docile, have a wish to learn, and evince a disposition that pleases me.” And she reminds herself of a truth that every good teacher knows:
I must not forget that these coarsely clad little peasants are of flesh and blood as good as the scions of gentlest genealogy; and that the germs of native excellence, refinement, intelligence, kind feeling, are as likely to exist in their hearts as in those of the best-born. My duty will be to develop these germs: surely I shall find some happiness in discharging that office.
Jane doesn’t pretend that this is her first choice of occupation. “Much enjoyment I do not expect in the life opening before me,” she admits. After all, she was on the verge of marrying the master of Thornfield Hall. But she resolves to soldier on, reassuring herself that “if I regulate my mind, and exert my powers as I ought, [this will] yield me enough to live on from day to day.”
The teaching episodes, often skipped over in film and television adaptations of Jane Eyre, are critical to her developing a full sense of self. After all, when she was first on the verge of becoming Mrs. Rochester, she all but gave away her power, allowing Rochester to shape her. As she puts it at one point,
My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol.
She leaves because “I care for myself,” and this care involves escaping his influence. Her teaching stint helps her step into her powers, all the more so because challenges her to the max. Sounding like many first-year teachers, the task ahead of her at first seems hopeless:
I continued the labors of the village-school as actively and faithfully as I could. It was truly hard work at first. Some time elapsed before, with all my efforts, I could comprehend my scholars and their nature. Wholly untaught, with faculties quite torpid, they seemed to me hopelessly dull; and, at first sight, all dull alike…
Once education begins to work its wonders, however, she discovers she has underestimated her students. There’s more in them than she first realized:
There was a difference amongst them as amongst the educated; and when I got to know them, and they me, this difference rapidly developed itself. Their amazement at me, my language, my rules, and ways, once subsided, I found some of these heavy-looking, gaping rustics wake up into sharp-witted girls enough. Many showed themselves obliging, and amiable too; and I discovered amongst them not a few examples of natural politeness, and innate self-respect, as well as of excellent capacity, that won both my goodwill and my admiration.
The students respond to her appreciation:
These soon took a pleasure in doing their work well, in keeping their persons neat, in learning their tasks regularly, in acquiring quiet and orderly manners. The rapidity of their progress, in some instances, was even surprising; and an honest and happy pride I took in it: besides, I began personally to like some of the best girls; and they liked me. I had amongst my scholars several farmers’ daughters: young women grown, almost. These could already read, write, and sew; and to them I taught the elements of grammar, geography, history, and the finer kinds of needlework. I found estimable characters amongst them—characters desirous of information and disposed for improvement—with whom I passed many a pleasant evening hour in their own homes.
To be sure, Jane’s teaching career proves to be of short duration, and eventually she returns to Thornfield to nurse Rochester back to health and become his wife (“Reader, I married him”). Some find this ending dissatisfying.
For instance, in her study of the marriage plot, feminist Rachel Blau DuPlessis complains how, in the 19th century, women were not allowed their own growth novels: they either ended up married or dead. Even in Jane Eyre, she says, whatever growth occurs in the middle of the novel is held of no account by the end as the “hero” dwindles to a married heroine.
To her credit, Bronte changes this in her next novel (spoiler alert). In what looks, until the last pages, like a romance, Villette concludes with Paul Emanuel dying at sea and Lucy Snowe running her own school. Readers, including Bronte’s own father, complained vociferously, causing Bronte to alter the ending—but instead of giving them what they wanted, she shrouded the ending in ambiguity, telling them that it was up to them, not to her, to imagine a “Reader I married him.” Or as she puts it, ”Let them picture union and a happy succeeding life.”
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Wednesday
Ronald Reagan famously asked the question, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” and if the upcoming election were really to be determined by that answer, there would be no question about the winner. After all, four years ago thousands of people were dying and unemployment was soaring as Donald Trump mismanaged the pandemic in multiple ways. But instead of recalling those uncomfortable facts, many just recall that gas prices were low while Democratic governors were requiring that people wear masks and stay away from others.
The blaming continued the following year. Although, in 2021, the new Biden administration brought an end to the dying through the vigorous promotion of vaccines along with continued masking, Republicans have managed to convince many to focus on the measures taken to address the catastrophe rather than the catastrophe itself.
There’s a comparable situation in Gulliver’s Travels, which my faculty book group is currently discussing (at my suggestion). The palace of Lilliput has caught on fire and, having left his leather jerkin elsewhere (so that he can’t use it to smother the flames), Swift must find an alternative solution. First, the situation:
I was alarmed at midnight with the cries of many hundred people at my door; by which, being suddenly awaked, I was in some kind of terror. I heard the word Burglum repeated incessantly: several of the emperor’s court, making their way through the crowd, entreated me to come immediately to the palace, where her imperial majesty’s apartment was on fire. The case seemed wholly desperate and deplorable; and this magnificent palace would have infallibly been burnt down to the ground, if, by a presence of mind unusual to me, I had not suddenly thought of an expedient.
Now for the expedient:
I had, the evening before, drunk plentifully of a most delicious wine called glimigrim, (the Blefuscudians call it flunec, but ours is esteemed the better sort,) which is very diuretic. By the luckiest chance in the world, I had not discharged myself of any part of it. The heat I had contracted by coming very near the flames, and by laboring to quench them, made the wine begin to operate by urine; which I voided in such a quantity, and applied so well to the proper places, that in three minutes the fire was wholly extinguished, and the rest of that noble pile, which had cost so many ages in erecting, preserved from destruction.
Gulliver expects to be thanked for this service but quickly learns that no good deed goes unpunished. First, he is informed that it is a capital crime to urinate within the palace. While the emperor grants him a formal pardon, the empress is less forgiving. Feeling “the greatest abhorrence” for what Gulliver has done, she “removed to the most distant side of the court, firmly resolved that those buildings should never be repaired for her use: and, in the presence of her chief confidants could not forbear vowing revenge.”
Eventually, Gulliver learns from one of the court ministers, she tries to have him put to death, “having borne perpetual malice against you, on account of that infamous and illegal method you took to extinguish the fire in her apartment.”
Biden’s competent management of the pandemic, which contrasts so markedly with Trump’s, should have helped pave the way for an easy reelection. Unfortunately, the polls remain close as far too many Americans are proving to be small-minded and vindictive Lilliputians
Further thought: The lack of appreciation for Biden’s efforts puts me in mind of how Lilliput deals with ingratitude—or at least how it did so in its golden past before it became a degenerate nation. For the ancient Lilliputians, ingratitude was a capital crime:
[T]hey reason thus; that whoever makes ill returns to his benefactor, must needs be a common enemy to the rest of mankind, from whom he has received no obligation, and therefore such a man is not fit to live.
I’m obviously not advocating this for the GOP. Nor would Swift, for that matter, who has just found a dramatic way to emphasize the ugliness of ingratitude. He provides another instance of Lilliputian ingratitude later after Gulliver brings peace between Lilliput and its rival Blefescu (France) by stealing Blefescu’s fleet. Rather than thank him, the emperor declares him a traitor for not going futher, using his size to wipe Blefescu off the map. For his disobedience, Gulliver is to have his eyes shot out, which would result in him becoming an unresisting tool of the emperor’s imperial agenda.
And yet more thoughts: Since Gulliver’s Travels is a satiric allegory as well as an adventure story, both the palace and fleet incidents have real life antecedents. Apparently Queen Anne was so put off by Swift’s early satire Tale of a Tub (1704), a buoyant, profane and controversial exploration of religious excess, that she quashed all promotion hopes. Swiftian acerbic satire, one might say, is like pissing on a fire to put it out: critics only smell the stench while failing to acknowledge the necessity.
Something comparable happened in the early years while Swift was in the Tory administration. Through secret talks, the Tories paved the way for the Peace of Utrecht, which ended the bloody War of Spanish Succession. Those talks were illegal and therefore problematic, leading to Whig accusations of treason and selling out to the French, but much bloodshed was averted as a result. A comparable situation in our own time could be Biden messily pulling the United States out of Afghanistan, the longest standing war in our history–while arguably necessary, the action was roundly criticized.
Finney and Cilento as Tom and Molly in Tom Jones (1963)
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Tuesday
A recent column by the Washington Post’s Brian Broome about comedian Jerry Seinfeld has me revisiting one of my all-time favorite works, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. I should add that this column has more to say about the 18th century novel and the nature of comedy than about Seinfeld’s complaints about woke audiences but I promise you that it’s all connected.
Apparently Seinfeld has been complaining that our “woke” culture doesn’t have a sense of humor because they aren’t laughing at him anymore. Broome begins his column by informing us that he was never laughing:
I have never found Jerry Seinfeld funny. Even in the ’90s when his show was all the rage, I didn’t get why people thought it was hilarious. It always seemed to me to be about immigrants being odd or unhygienic or making fun of women’s faces or body parts. The show always seemed mean-spirited to me, and that’s just not my kind of humor.
Rather than taking shots at Seinfeld, however, Broome’s major point is that comedy has to change with the times. He provides two examples, the second of which puts me in mind of Tom Jones:
Blackface, for example, was considered funny at one time, and I’m positive that, when it fell out of fashion, there was some old White guy complaining about how nothing is funny anymore and people have lost their sense of humor and it’s a shame he can’t say the n-word like he used to. “Punch and Judy,” a violent puppet show for children in which one of the puppets (Punch) would lay into his wife (Judy) and others with a stick, sometimes beating the daylights out of them. Punch was popular in its time. When it was called out for being problematic, I’m sure there were people who complained about that, too.
Now, I suspect that Seinfeld might make the same critique of Broome that Tom Jones makes of a puppet-master who decides to censor his own Punch and Judy Show. The entertainer does so in order to please the moral censors of his day, and at first he is applauded. Instead of Punch and Judy, he offers his public a morally correct comedy about a “provoked husband” chastising his philandering wife:
The puppet-show was performed with great regularity and decency. It was called the fine and serious part of the Provoked Husband; and it was indeed a very grave and solemn entertainment, without any low wit or humor, or jests; or, to do it no more than justice, without anything which could provoke a laugh. The audience were all highly pleased. A grave matron told the master she would bring her two daughters the next night, as he did not show any stuff; and an attorney’s clerk and an exciseman both declared, that the characters of Lord and Lady Townley were well preserved, and highly in nature.
The applause leads the puppet-master to discourse on how the age has progressed:
The master was so highly elated with these encomiums, that he could not refrain from adding some more of his own. He said, “The present age was not improved in anything so much as in their puppet-shows; which, by throwing out Punch and his wife Joan, and such idle trumpery, were at last brought to be a rational entertainment. I remember,” said he, “when I first took to the business, there was a great deal of low stuff that did very well to make folks laugh; but was never calculated to improve the morals of young people, which certainly ought to be principally aimed at in every puppet-show…
Tom, sounding like Seinfeld, is unimpressed, “I would by no means degrade the ingenuity of your profession,” he replies, “but I should have been glad to have seen my old acquaintance master Punch, for all that; and so far from improving, I think, by leaving out him and his merry wife Joan, you have spoiled your puppet-show.”
Tom’s complaint elicits the puppet-master’s contempt:
[W]ith much disdain in his countenance, he replied, “Very probably, sir, that may be your opinion; but I have the satisfaction to know the best judges differ from you, and it is impossible to please every taste. I confess, indeed, some of the quality at Bath, two or three years ago, wanted mightily to bring Punch again upon the stage. I believe I lost some money for not agreeing to it; but let others do as they will; a little matter shall never bribe me to degrade my own profession, nor will I ever willingly consent to the spoiling the decency and regularity of my stage, by introducing any such low stuff upon it.”
As is his wont, however, Fielding immediately upsets these high moral declarations by introducing some low comedy of his own:
A violent uproar now arose in the entry, where my landlady was well cuffing her maid both with her fist and tongue. She had indeed missed the wench from her employment, and, after a little search, had found her on the puppet-show stage in company with the Merry Andrew, and in a situation not very proper to be described.
The “wench” proceeds to blame the puppet-master’s seemingly moral production for her behavior:
Though Grace (for that was her name) had forfeited all title to modesty; yet had she not impudence enough to deny a fact in which she was actually surprized; she, therefore, took another turn, and attempted to mitigate the offence. “Why do you beat me in this manner, mistress?” cries the wench. “If you don’t like my doings, you may turn me away. If I am a w—e” (for the other had liberally bestowed that appellation on her), “my betters are so as well as I. What was the fine lady in the puppet-show just now? I suppose she did not lie all night out from her husband for nothing.”
This prompts the landlady, who had before been praising The Provoked Husband for its high sentiment, to turn her fire on it, calling the puppeteers “lousy vermin” who have turned her inn into a bawdy-house. Modern-day puppet shows, she says, “teach our servants idleness and nonsense,” and she longs for puppet-shows from the past:
I remember when puppet-shows were made of good scripture stories, as Jephthah’s Rash Vow, and such good things, and when wicked people were carried away by the devil. There was some sense in those matters; but as the parson told us last Sunday, nobody believes in the devil now-a-days; and here you bring about a parcel of puppets drest up like lords and ladies, only to turn the heads of poor country wenches; and when their heads are once turned topsy-turvy, no wonder everything else is so.
Fielding revels in recounting how the self-censoring puppet-master has been hoisted with his own petard, as the saying goes. The point to be made here is that there is no placating self-righteous guardians of morality, as anyone encountering purists will quickly discover, whether they come from the left or the right. Give them an inch and they’ll take it a mile. Therefore, it’s satisfying to see the man effectively silenced:
Nothing indeed could have happened so very inopportune as this accident; the most wanton malice of fortune could not have contrived such another stratagem to confound the poor fellow, while he was so triumphantly descanting on the good morals inculcated by his exhibitions. His mouth was now as effectually stopt, as that of quack must be, if, in the midst of a declamation on the great virtues of his pills and powders, the corpse of one of his martyrs should be brought forth, and deposited before the stage, as a testimony of his skill.
It should be noted that, in arguing for Punch and Judy, Fielding has his own art in mind. His comic novel elevates an indecorous hero of unknown parentage and sends him boozing and womanizing through the countryside and on into London (although we love him for his good heart and strong sense of honor). In fact, barbs similar to those directed by the puppet-master against Punch were directed against Tom Jones by multiple critics. Among these were Samuel Johnson, who feared that the novel would corrupt young people. As the great moralist argued,
These books are written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of conduct, and introductions into life. They are the entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impressions; not fixed by principles, and therefore easily following the current of fancy; not informed by experience, and consequently open to every false suggestion and partial account.
So should we use Fielding to defend Seinfield against so-called woke culture? Possibly. But much as I admire Fielding’s comedy—Tom Jones is the reason I focused on 18th century British literature in grad school—he is not exempt from Broome’s criticism. There are parts of Fielding’s comedy that haven’t aged well, starting with his incessant old maid jokes. Sometimes I find myself wincing in ways I didn’t in 1973, when I first read the novel.
I don’t think it’s because I’m a humorless moralist. It’s just that certain jokes now seem somewhat cheap, flaws in what is otherwise a brilliant comic diamond. Which brings me back to the conclusion of Broome’s article:
So, yes, if you make ham-fisted jokes about women, or the LGBTQ+ community or people living with disabilities or the French, someone will come for you. And I don’t think it’s because they “don’t have a sense of humor.” I think it might just be because you’ve been living in a bubble and they are tired of playing Judy to your Punch.
There’s plenty to laugh at in our world without hitting down. Seinfeld just sounds like a curmudgeon whose act has worn thin and who can’t keep up with the times.
Further thought: The same thing happened to Henry Fielding. In Tom Jones, he pulls off an amazing comic balance between the traditions of the landed gentry and a rapidly changing England that is characterized by a new acquisitive spirit and urban chaos. In the end, the old values prevail as Tom returns to the country to become gentry himself, uniting two country estates through his marriage to Sophia. But Fielding needs a certain ironic detachment to pull this off, which he achieves through a framing narrative where he comments on the novelistic devices required to pull off a happy ending. In other words, even as he gives us the romantic fantasy we desire, he does so with a sly wink, comparable to what occurs in the novel and movie The Princess Bride. In his later Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, by contrast, Fielding sounds increasingly petulant and out of control. The world is changing in ways that challenge his brand of comedy and he doesn’t like it.
Ferris, Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776
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Monday
A superb Washington Post article by Robert Kagan (gifted here) has put Donald Trump within the broader context of American history in a way I find very illuminating. When I sent it to my brothers, Jonathan said it put him in mind of Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, which in turn got me thinking about the Grand Inquisitor episode is Dostoevsky’s Brother’s Karamazov. Hang on while I explain.
According to Kagan’s article, which is adapted from his recent book Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again (Penguin Random House), America’s Founders based the new republic “on a radical set of principles and assertions about government.” These principles and assertions were
that all human beings were created equal in their possession of certain “natural rights” that government was bound to respect and to safeguard. These rights did not derive from religious belief but were “self-evident.” They were not granted by the Christian God, by the crown or even by the Constitution. They were inherent in what it meant to be human.
Because they recognized how radical their ideas were, they also knew that “a new way of thinking and acting” was required. This new way set up inevitable conflicts from the very beginning since most people of the time thought and behaved differently. The Founders, Kagan says, were well aware of this, knowing
that their own practices and those of 18th-century American society did not conform to their new revolutionary doctrines. They knew that slavery was contrary to the Declaration’s principles, though they permitted slavery to continue, hoping it would die a natural death. They knew that established churches were contrary to those principles because they impinged on that most important of rights, “freedom of conscience,” which was vital to the preservation of liberty, yet a number of states in the 18th and 19th centuries retained all kinds of religious tests for office.
Because the Declaration of Independence was so radical, a significant number of Americans kicked back against it and have been doing so ever since. Believing that America should be governed by White Protestants, they felt and have continued to feel “under siege” by the Founders’ liberalism, which Abraham Lincoln later endorsed and backed up by force.
In Lincoln’s vision, the Declaration of Independence was the nation’s “standard maxim,” with a goal of “constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of colors everywhere”—and it is this vision that some rightwing political scientists today call “liberal totalitarianism.” They claim they are being deprived of their “freedom” to “live a life according to Christian teachings” and that the government favors various minority groups (especially Black people) at their expense. Kagan observes,
Anti-liberals these days complain about wokeness, … but it is the liberal system of government bequeathed by the Founders, and the accompanying egalitarian spirit, that they are really objecting to, just as anti-liberals have since the founding of the nation. Many of Trump’s core supporters insist they are patriots, but whether they realize it or not, their allegiance is not to the Founders’ America but to an ethnoreligious definition of the nation that the Founders explicitly rejected.
Kagan turns to various rightwing intellectuals to flesh out this counter vision, including Claremont Institute’s Glenn Ellmers, Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen, and Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule. He reports,
The smartest and most honest of [rightwing intellectuals] know that if people truly want a “Christian America,” it can only come through “regime change,” by which they mean the “regime” created by the Founders. The Founders’ legacy is a “dead end,” writes Glenn Ellmers, a scholar at the Claremont Institute. The Constitution is a “Potemkin village.” According to Deneen and Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule, the system established by the Founders to protect individual rights needs to be replaced with an alternative form of government.
What they have in mind, Katan says, is a Christian commonwealth—which is to say (here he quotes Vermeule),
a “culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious belief and institutions,” with legislation to “promote public morality, and forbid its intentional corruption,” a “forthright acknowledgment and renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization,” “public opportunities for prayers,” and a “revitalization of our public spaces to reflect a deeper belief that we are called to erect imitations of the beauty that awaits us in another Kingdom.”
Since most Americans are not White Protestants—or even White Christians—these rightwing intellectuals believe that democracy must be overthrown. Kagan elaborates on their view:
The Christian commonwealth would not and could not be a democracy because the majority of people can’t be trusted to choose correctly. According to the Claremont Institute’s Ellmers, “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” They are a “zombie” or “human rodent” who lives “a shadow-life of timid conformity.” Only “the 75 million people who voted in the last election” for Trump are true Americans. Instead of trying to compete with Democrats in elections that don’t reflect the will of the people, Ellmers writes, “Why not just cut to the chase and skip the empty, meaningless process?” The “only road forward” is “overturning the existing post-American order.”
In this view, Trump has been an essential albeit imperfect vehicle for counterrevolution. Kagan turns to Deneen to elaborate:
If Trump failed to accomplish the desired overthrow in his first term, Deneen argues, it was because he lacked “a capable leadership class.” Things will be different in his next term. What is needed, according to Deneen, is a “self-conscious aristoi,” a class of thinkers who understand “both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure,” who know how to turn populist “resentments into sustained policy.” Members of Deneen’s would-be new elite will, like Vladimir Lenin, place themselves at the vanguard of a populist revolution, acting “on behalf of the broad working class” while raising the consciousness of the “untutored” masses. Indeed, according to Harvard’s Vermeule, it will be necessary to impose the common good even against the people’s “own perceptions of what is best for them.”
Kagan adds that this is “a most Leninist concept indeed.”
Now to The Brothers Karamazov although, interestingly enough, the Grand Inquisitor’s diatribe is directed against Christianity, not democracy. But there is a democratic strain within Christianity, and it is this to which he is objecting. In other words, parallels between the Grand Inquisitor and today’s Christian authoritarians hold up.
In Dostoevsky’s novel, the rational brother (Ivan) is debating with the spiritual brother (Alyosha) about the latter’s vision of God as loving and benevolent. Setting up a thought experiment where Jesus is arrested by the Inquisition when he returns to the world, Ivan argues that he makes inhuman demands on people. When Jesus rejects Satan’s temptations in the desert—bread, safety, and earthly power—and when he tells his followers that they must rely on faith rather than miracles—he is putting impossible and therefore cruel demands upon them. Only saints are capable of rising to the occasion, the Inquisitor contends:
Thou hast burdened man’s soul with anxieties hitherto unknown to him. Thirsting for human love freely given, seeking to enable man, seduced and charmed by Thee, to follow Thy path of his own free-will, instead of the old and wise law which held him in subjection, Thou hast given him the right henceforth to choose and freely decide what is good and bad for him, guided but by Thine image in his heart. But hast Thou never dreamt of the probability, nay, of the certainty, of that same man one day rejected finally, and controverting even Thine image and Thy truth, once he would find himself laden with such a terrible burden as freedom of choice? That a time would surely come when men would exclaim that Truth and Light cannot be in Thee, for no one could have left them in a greater perplexity and mental suffering than Thou has done, lading them with so many cares and insoluble problems.
In Escape from Freedom (1941), the book mentioned by my brother, Erich Fromm uses a similar idea to explain why certain Germans embraced fascism over democracy. Individual freedom, he argued, causes fear, anxiety, and alienation whereas authoritarianism provides them with a kind of relief. The Grand Inquisitor makes the same argument against Christ’s challenge, asserting, “Thou has suffered for mankind and its freedom, the present fate of men may be summed up in three words: Unrest, Confusion, Misery!”
By contrast, the Inquisitor contends, the authoritarian church offers happiness:
We will prove to them their own weakness and make them humble again, whilst with Thee they have learnt but pride, for Thou hast made more of them than they ever were worth. We will give them that quiet, humble happiness, which alone benefits such weak, foolish creatures as they are, and having once had proved to them their weakness, they will become timid and obedient, and gather around us as chickens around their hen. They will wonder at and feel a superstitious admiration for us, and feel proud to be led by men so powerful and wise that a handful of them can subject a flock a thousand millions strong. Gradually men will begin to fear us. They will nervously dread our slightest anger, their intellects will weaken, their eyes become as easily accessible to tears as those of children and women; but we will teach them an easy transition from grief and tears to laughter, childish joy and mirthful song.
The Grand Inquisitor goes on for a while longer but you get the point. Christ’s vision that every individual is beloved by God—it doesn’t matter whether you are high or low, slave or free, man or woman—was as radical in Roman times as the Declaration of Independence was in the 18th century. In fact, Christ’s radical ideas helped make the democratic revolutions possible. So it is not only Founder liberalism that America’s contemporary rightwing intellectuals are objecting to but people finding their own individual ways to God.
These intellectuals, in their arguments for a new elite, don’t mention the potential for abuse and corruption, which we witness in every authoritarian regime. They appear to see themselves exempt from the truism that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Similarly, the Grand Inquisitor speaks as though the authoritarian church actually cares about the common people rather than, first and foremost, about its own concerns. One need only do a quick glance at the history of humankind to realize that “benevolent dictator” is an oxymoron.
Americans are beginning to get glimpses of what a Christian Commonwealth would look like as librarians, teachers, and doctors are threatened with prison, women are forced to bring non-viable fetuses to term, asylum seekers are shot, and threats of violence against political opponents are regarded as an acceptable means of maintaining order. If we are to judge by the questions asked at Trump’s immunity hearing last week, some rightwing members of the Supreme Court see presidents as above the law (at least Republican presidents). In their questions, they didn’t laugh Trump’s lawyers out of court when they argued that a president should be free to assassinate opponents or stage a coup.
I imagine Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh reading the Grand Inquisitor’s words and applauding.
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Sunday
As we are still in the Easter season, here’s Christina Rossetti’s lovely “Easter Carol.” Feel the pure joy as the poet makes full use of springtime imagery.
Easter Carol By Christina Rossetti
Spring bursts today, For Christ is risen and all the earth’s at play.
Flash forth, thou Sun, The rain is over and gone, its work is done.
Winter is past, Sweet Spring is come at last, is come at last.
Bud, Fig and Vine, Bud, Olive, fat with fruit and oil and wine.
Break forth this morn In roses, thou but yesterday a Thorn.
Uplift thy head, O pure white Lily through the Winter dead.
Beside your dams Leap and rejoice, you merry-making Lambs.
All Herds and Flocks Rejoice, all Beasts of thickets and of rocks.
Sing, Creatures, sing, Angels and Men and Birds and everything.
All notes of Doves Fill all our world: this is the time of loves.
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Friday
The presence of anti-Semitic campus leftists who lionize Hamas terrorism while arguing for the elimination of the state of Israel is taking me back to my college days, when both the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement had their share of extremists. I remember hearing Martin Luther King (this in Charleston in 1967) when he responded to Black militants with, “It’s not burn, baby, burn but build, baby, build.” Meanwhile, peaceful Vietnam War protesters were derided by the Underground Weathermen, who said they/we weren’t going far enough.
While leftwing militancy today doesn’t pose the same dangers as rightwing militancy—occupying college campuses isn’t the same existential threat to the country as seizing the Capitol, and we haven’t seen leftists implicated in mass shootings—it still must be called out. Gaza supporters directing hate speech against Jews are no less disturbing than Islamophobes and Palestinian haters. Few poets have better credentials for such calling out than William Blake, who does so in his poem “The Grey Monk.” More on this in a moment.
First, a little on my own activist background. Speaking as one who was arrested during a peaceful protest following the Kent State shootings—we blocked the Hennepin County draft induction center in Minneapolis for two hours before police came and, with no resistance from us, took us to Hennepin County jail—I remember thinking of Trotskyist, Maoist, anarchist, and Black militants as mostly bullshitters. But they also revealed a disturbing authoritarian streak that mirrored the very forces that they were opposing.
In fact, that authoritarian streak would reveal itself in time. Just as a number of 1950s Troskyists would become hardened reactionaries in the 1960s, so it was not surprising to see figures like the New Left’s David Horowitz and Black Power’s Eldridge Cleaver embrace the intolerant right.
Unlike them, Blake maintained a balanced perspective.
Blake’s activist credentials are beyond question. Here’s a summation:
In 1780, Blake was among the crowd that stormed Newgate Prison and freed its inmates. (The assault was the culmination of the Gordon Riots, a set of events that started as an anti-Catholic protest and turned into a fundamental challenge to inequality, the king, and an unrepresentative parliament.) In 1791, he wrote a long poem about the French Revolution. It was too admiring for even his left-wing publisher, John Johnson, to present to the public. Two years later, he wrote and illustrated a book, America a Prophecy, celebrated the American Revolution and endorsed abolitionism. In another book he published that year, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, he examined, through metaphor and personification, what is today called “rape culture” and argued for women’s sexual and creative emancipation. In 1804, Blake was charged with sedition for punching a soldier and allegedly saying, “Damn the king.”(It’s unclear if he actually uttered the phrase, though he wrote, in private literary notations, “Every Body hates a King.”
Blake’s activism put him at far greater risk than American activists in the 1960s and early 1970s. For his so-called sedition, which occurred when fears of a French invasion were high, he could have been executed. Only a good lawyer was able to get him off.
“Grey Monk” begins with a cry of suffering, one which those Palestinian and Israeli parents of dead children can relate to:
I die I die the Mother said My Children die for lack of Bread What more has the merciless Tyrant said The Monk sat down on the Stony Bed
The Grey Monk, an avatar for Blake himself, is a Christ-like witness to the suffering:
The blood red ran from the Grey Monks side His hands & feet were wounded wide His Body bent his arms & knees Like to the roots of ancient trees
His eye was dry no tear could flow A hollow groan first spoke his woe He trembled & shudderd upon the Bed At length with a feeble cry he said
While God, Blake writes, has commanded him to write to protest injustice, he acknowledges that his writing could elicit an opposite response than that which he desires. That’s the reason for his feeble, almost defeated, cry. He embraces love but is seeing his protest lead to hatred and violence, which are “the Bane of all that on Earth I lovd”:
When God commanded this hand to write In the studious hours of deep midnight He told me the writing I wrote should prove The Bane of all that on Earth I lovd
Before explaining how, he returns to his theme of suffering and of his own willingness to endure torture to say truth to power:
My Brother starvd between two Walls His Childrens Cry my Soul appalls I mockd at the wrack & griding chain My bent body mocks their torturing pain
Then, however, comes the response he fears. He probably is thinking foremost of the Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution:
Thy Father drew his sword in the North With his thousands strong he marched forth Thy Brother has armd himself in Steel To avenge the wrongs thy Children feel
And now the caution. Only love, not force, can “free the World from fear.” His declaration that “a tear in an Intellectual Thing”—an apparently contradictory statement since tears are of the heart rather than of the head—is (I think) a response to how people regarded the French Revolution as an outgrowth of the Age of Reason. While a revolutionary himself, Blake believes that the heart rather than the head must take the lead:
But vain the Sword & vain the Bow They never can work Wars overthrow The Hermits Prayer & the Widows tear Alone can free the World from fear
For a Tear is an Intellectual Thing And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King And the bitter groan of the Martyrs woe Is an Arrow from the Almighties Bow
And then Blake’s grand finale, which is a warning that every activist should memorize and hold close:
The hand of Vengeance found the Bed To which the Purple Tyrant fled The iron hand crushd the Tyrants head And became a Tyrant in his stead”
From long history we know this truth only too well. Since the founding of Israel, the Middle East has been witnessing non-stop tit-for-tat vengeance. In practically every instance, tyranny has proved the victor.
Yes, we must speak out against suffering, Blake’s Grey Monk tells us. But we must do so with humility and care, knowing that even well-intentioned protesters can have their own inner tyrant.
