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Monday
Yesterday I presented a talk entitled “‘Being Alive Is the Magic’: The Spiritual Vision That Shapes Francis Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden” to our church’s Sunday Forum. One of the ideas I explored was the power of imagining to change the future.
In Friday’s post, I quoted from my friend John Gatta’s book Green Gospel, where he warns about the danger of environmental pessimism. Hopelessness, he says, can become “a self-fulfilling stance, even amounting to another form of climate denialism if it ends in passive resignation or despair.” To counter such hopelessness, he advises imagining visions of a sustainable future. In doing so, we “enlarge our capacity for hope.”
We see the power of such imagining in a moving scene in Secret Garden. Ten-year-old Colin Cravens has been convinced, by others and by himself, that he is a permanent invalid who is going to die. When Mary Lennox tells him about the secret garden, however, he begins seeing the world, and his own prospects in it, in a new way. At this stage in their relationship, however, Mary isn’t sure that she can trust him with her greatest secret, which is that she has found a way into the garden.
What she does, therefore, is engage him in a process of imagining what the garden must be like. I share the following passage because I think it can provide a model for what Gatta has in mind. If we imagine green energy policy might accomplish—and do so in a way that is not empty wish fulfillment but acknowledges the challenges involved—then perhaps we can help bring about a version of the transformations that we witness in the book: which is a dying garden brought back to life, a disagreeable girl whose heart is opened, and a young invalid who learns, not only to walk, but to run.
So here’s Mary pulling Colin into the imagining process:
“Oh, Mary!” he said. “Oh, Mary! If I could get into it I think I should live to grow up! Do you suppose that instead of singing the Ayah song—you could just tell me softly as you did that first day what you imagine it looks like inside? I am sure it will make me go to sleep.”
“Yes,” answered Mary. “Shut your eyes.”
He closed his eyes and lay quite still and she held his hand and began to speak very slowly and in a very low voice.
“I think it has been left alone so long—that it has grown all into a lovely tangle. I think the roses have climbed and climbed and climbed until they hang from the branches and walls and creep over the ground—almost like a strange gray mist. Some of them have died but many—are alive and when the summer comes there will be curtains and fountains of roses. I think the ground is full of daffodils and snowdrops and lilies and iris working their way out of the dark. Now the spring has begun—perhaps—perhaps—”
The soft drone of her voice was making him stiller and stiller and she saw it and went on.
“Perhaps they are coming up through the grass—perhaps there are clusters of purple crocuses and gold ones—even now. Perhaps the leaves are beginning to break out and uncurl—and perhaps—the gray is changing and a green gauze veil is creeping—and creeping over—everything. And the birds are coming to look at it—because it is—so safe and still. And perhaps—perhaps—perhaps—” very softly and slowly indeed, “the robin has found a mate—and is building a nest.”
And Colin was asleep.
Because they have this hopeful vision, Colin and Mary are willing to put in the work, both to save the garden and to get well. It all begins with imagining.
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Sunday
Ramadan, the month of fasting and prayer, begins tomorrow or Tuesday (depending on the sighting of the new moon). George Washington University’s Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the Iranian philosopher and theologian, explains what Muslims achieve by prayerfully fasting from dawn to dusk for a month:
A person who fasts with complete faith becomes aware very rapidly that he is a pilgrim in this world and that he is a creature destined for a goal beyond this material existence. The world about him loses some of its materiality and gains an aspect of “vacuity” and transparence which in the case of the contemplative Muslim leads directly to a contemplation of God in His creation.
The ethereal and “empty” nature of things is, moreover, compensated by the appearance of those very things as Divine gifts. Food and drink which are taken for granted throughout the year reveal themselves during the period of fasting more than ever as gifts of heaven (ni’mah) and gain a spiritual significance of a sacramental nature.
Rumi, poet and Sufi mystic, has many poems about the power of emptying oneself out. Here’s one of them:
There’s hidden sweetness in the stomach’s emptiness. We are lutes, no more, no less. When the sound box is filled, no music comes forth. When the brain and the belly burn from fasting, every moment a new song rises out of the fire. The mists clear, and a new vitality makes you spring up the steps before you. Be empty and cry as a reed instrument.
Be empty and write secrets with a reed pen. When satiated by food and drink, an unsightly metal statue is seated where your spirit should be. When you fast, good habits gather like friends who want to help. Fasting is Solomon’s ring.
Don’t give in to illusion and lose your power. But even when will and control have been lost, they will return when you fast, like soldiers appearing out of the ground, or pennants flying in the breeze.
A table descends to your tents, Jesus’ table. Expect to see it, when you fast, this table spread with other food, better than the broth of cabbages.
Frontispiece from School of Women, by Nicolas Chorier
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Friday
The blog Lit Hub has alerted me to a recent book, Annabelle Hirsch’s A History of Women in 101 Objects, that features an object celebrated by one of British history’s most notorious libertines. The poem is Earl of Rochester John Wilmot’s “Signior Dildo,” and Hirsch obligingly includes a woodcut featuring that item. We see three women and and a man checking out a shop apparently specializing in dildos, with Hirsch reporting,
During the brief wave of libertinism, some high-society ladies did have lovers. But those who found the risk of compromising their reputation and livelihood too great (while men have always been able to cheat to great acclaim, women have not) survived attacks of acute boredom by reaching for objects like this one. The sex-toy business seems to have experienced a small boom in the seventeenth century: dildos were produced in greater numbers and various materials; some could be filled with liquid to simulate ejaculation.
Hirsch reveals that
Venice was in those days what you might call the capital of refined sex. Accordingly, the glass-blowing island of Murano was known not just for its famous chandeliers, candlesticks, glasses, and other pretty objects—but also as a dildo factory. In a well-to-do household, masturbation (if indulged in) was to be aided by the very finest glassware, if you please, despite the fact that onanism was second only to coitus interruptus—which, incidentally, is linked in the Bible to the story of Onan—as the Church’s worst nightmare.
Wilmot was very much in favor of sexually liberated women. In one of my favorite of his poems—“To a Lady in a Letter”—he encourages his mistress to go out sleep with other men while he is boozing it up with his male companions. “For did you love your pleasure less,/ You were no match for me,” he tells her before concluding,
Whilst I my pleasure to pursue, Whole nights am taking in The lusty juice of grapes, take you The juice of lusty men.
Author Aphra Behn, among other women, was inspired by Wilmot, putting him in her play The Rover as Willmore. Protagonist Helena proves more than a match for cavalier.
But here’s the poem that came to my mind as I was reading Hirsch’s excerpt. I think it refers to actual ladies, which means that the upper class circles would have found it particularly titillating, something Charles’s court expected from Wilmot, who served as almost the official jester. The poem itself is repetitive so you may not want to read it in its entirety, but you can have fun imagining the stir it would have caused:
Signior Dildo By John Wilmot
You ladies of merry England Who have been to kiss the Duchess’s hand, Pray, did you not lately observe in the show A noble Italian called Signior Dildo?
This signior was one of the Duchess’s train And helped to conduct her over the main; But now she cries out, ‘To the Duke I will go, I have no more need for Signior Dildo.’
At the Sign of the Cross in St James’s Street, When next you go thither to make yourselves sweet By buying of powder, gloves, essence, or so, You may chance to get a sight of Signior Dildo.
You would take him at first for no person of note, Because he appears in a plain leather coat, But when you his virtuous abilities know, You’ll fall down and worship Signior Dildo.
My Lady Southesk, heaven prosper her for’t, First clothed him in satin, then brought him to court; But his head in the circle he scarcely durst show, So modest a youth was Signior Dildo.
The good Lady Suffolk, thinking no harm, Had got this poor stranger hid under her arm. Lady Betty by chance came the secret to know And from her own mother stole Signior Dildo.
The Countess of Falmouth, of whom people tell Her footmen wear shirts of a guinea an ell, Might save that expense, if she did but know How lusty a swinger is Signior Dildo.
By the help of this gallant the Countess of Rafe Against the fierce Harris preserved herself safe; She stifled him almost beneath her pillow, So closely she embraced Signior Dildo.
The pattern of virtue, Her Grace of Cleveland, Has swallowed more pricks than the ocean has sand; But by rubbing and scrubbing so wide does it grow, It is fit for just nothing but Signior Dildo.
Our dainty fine duchesses have got a trick To dote on a fool for the sake of his prick, The fops were undone did their graces but know The discretion and vigor of Signior Dildo.
The Duchess of Modena, though she looks so high, With such a gallant is content to lie, And for fear that the English her secrets should know, For her gentleman usher took Signior Dildo.
The Countess o’ th’ Cockpit (who knows not her name? She’s famous in story for a killing dame), When all her old lovers forsake her, I trow, She’ll then be contented with Signior Dildo.
Red Howard, Red Sheldon, and Temple so tall Complain of his absence so long from Whitehall. Signior Barnard has promised a journey to go And bring back his countryman, Signior Dildo.
Doll Howard no longer with His Highness must range, And therefore is proferred this civil exchange: Her teeth being rotten, she smells best below, And needs must be fitted for Signior Dildo.
St Albans with wrinkles and smiles in his face, Whose kindness to strangers becomes his high place, In his coach and six horses is gone to Bergo To take the fresh air with Signior Dildo.
Were this signior but known to the citizen fops, He’d keep their fine wives from the foremen o’their shops; But the rascals deserve their horns should still grow For burning the Pope and his nephew, Dildo.
Tom Killigrew’s wife, that Holland fine flower, At the sight of this signior did fart and belch sour, And her Dutch breeding the further to show, Says, ‘Welcome to England, Mynheer Van Dildo.’
He civilly came to the Cockpit one night, And proferred his service to fair Madam Knight. Quoth she, ‘I intrigue with Captain Cazzo; Your nose in mine arse, good Signior Dildo.’
This signior is sound, safe, ready, and dumb As ever was candle, carrot, or thumb; Then away with these nasty devices, and show How you rate the just merit of Signior Dildo.
Count Cazzo, who carries his nose very high, In passion he swore his rival should die; Then shut himself up to let the world know Flesh and blood could not bear it from Signior Dildo.
A rabble of pricks who were welcome before, Now finding the porter denied them the door, Maliciously waited his coming below And inhumanly fell on Signior Dildo.
Nigh wearied out, the poor stranger did fly, And along the Pall Mall they followed full cry; The women concerned from every window Cried, ‘For heaven’s sake, save Signior Dildo.’
The good Lady Sandys burst into a laughter To see how the ballocks came wobbling after, And had not their weight retarded the foe, Indeed’t had gone hard with Signior Dildo.
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Thursday
Our Lenten study group continues to discuss John Gatta’s book Green Gospel, which appears particularly timely given that (following yesterday’s primaries) the GOP has all but chosen a man who promises to “drill, drill, drill” if he becomes “dictator on day one.” Even if Trump loses in November, Gatta reminds us that “we are unlikely in this century to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Centigrade and will be hard pressed, even with serious mitigation measures, to limit it to 2 degrees Centigrade.” Indeed, it appears
already be too late to reverse the overall slide toward atmospheric degradation, too late to restore the wondrous old earth of preindustrial recollection, still largely in view just a few decades ago. The radically accelerated pace of greenhouse gas absorption into the atmosphere during the last thirty years means that this momentous transformation took place during an interval when the world had already been alerted to the peril that excessive emissions posed to life as we know it. Never has the human proclivity toward denial been so disheartening and so dangerous. Without some currently unforeseen breakthrough in technology, apparently the best outcome we might expect now is an appreciative mitigation of those otherwise grave debasements of planetary life that now seem likely.
That being acknowledged, Gatta still counsels hope, and it is this aspect of his argument that I focus on today. In his chapter “Toward a Gospel of Hope, on and for Earth as It Is in Heaven,” he cites John Muir and Emily Dickinson to advocate for what he calls “earth-hearted hope.”
Gatta asks how we are to survive what Mary Evelyn Tucker calls “a tsunami of sadness,” which “engulfs everyone cognizant of the immense losses already suffered or projected to arrive in the wake of climate change.” Hopelessness, he warns, can become “a self-fulfilling stance, even amounting to another form of climate denialism if it ends in passive resignation or despair.”
For a more positive response, Gatta has suggestions. As a Christian, he looks towards religious faith. Theologian Jürgen Moltmann, he notes, articulated a “theology of hope” that “strains after the future” and that, while it seeks inspiration beyond the world as we know it, “does not suppress or skip the unpleasant realities.” One figure buoyed by such faith-based hope, he says, was William Wilberforce, who agitated tirelessly against slavery for much of his life and finally saw it abolished shortly before he died. His faith sustained him throughout “decades of rejection and discouragement.”
But one can also look to nature, and it is here where Muir and Dickinson come in:
Creatures from the animal realm, too, can teach us something about single-minded persistence. John Muir was much taken, for example, by the irrepressible vigor and endurance of the water ouzel, a diminutive bird of the Sierra who impressed Muir by flying fearlessly into mountain torrents, and by continuing to sing sweetly regardless of storm or seasons. In a similar vein, poet Emily Dickinson chose a bird’s tenacious bearing as her figure of active resolve when she wrote of how “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words /And never stops at all.”
The full poem, as you probably know, goes as follows:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words – And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard – And sore must be the storm – That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm
I’ve heard it in the chillest land – And on the strangest Sea – Yet – never – in Extremity, It asked a crumb – of me.
By imagining visions of a sustainable future, Gatta says, “we might look together not only to express but also to enlarge our capacity for hope.” Such sustainability includes new forms of renewable energy and efforts “to develop regenerative modes of agriculture, a rewilding of ecosystems and ruined landscapes, and the restorative designation of oceanic ‘no fish zones.’”
Gatta also suggests three personal ways to develop earth-hearted hope. First, one can intensify one’s commitment to pursuing “early-friendly patterns of daily living for oneself,” focusing on “our relation to energy and land use, housing and transportation, toxic consequences of our domestic habits, and our inevitable involvement in food acquisition and consumption.”
Second, one can engage in activism geared toward environmental remediation, at the very least through voting deliberately and offering financial support. Finally, there is “earth-engaged personal meditation, Rule of Life, and sacramental worship.” All of these strengthen our hope muscles.
It so happens that yesterday I was reading a blog post by Rev. Daniel Schultz on how feelings of doom—or DOOM—can function like a virus. As Schultz notes,
DOOM spreads easily: Our brains are tuned to the negative, hyperalert to threat, focused on the evil that may befall us. Expressions of despair and maximal cynicism are quickly picked up and transmitted. The disease vectors of social media make sure of that.
But (and here’s where he agrees with Gatta), he says that hope too is a virus, one which spreads through giving and receiving support. Writing about a 4th century Christian monk who grappled with “acedia” or “a state of restless futility,” Schultz notes that Evagrius Ponticus offered the simple and practical advice “to divide ourselves in two,” with one part to encourage and the other part to be encouraged. “Thus,” Evagrius said, “we are to sow seeds of a firm hope in ourselves.”
“Figuring out how to keep ourselves in the game,” Schultz adds, “helps us to understand what it will take to win other battles.”
As literature professor Gatta knows well, sometimes poetry aids us in that endeavor.
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Wednesday
My cousin Phoebe Conant sent me the following Beowulf quiz from the University of Chicago alumni magazine. Since we give pride of place to the Anglo-Saxon epic in this blog—even though it functions as a metonym for literature in general—I thought I’d pass it along. Although I’ve read the poem dozens of times, I did not achieve a perfect score:
The fun part of the quiz is that some of the Ikea products do indeed sound like Beowulf characters. The quiz offers extra points for identifying the particular Ikea products, and I’m proud to say that I failed that part utterly. I’m less proud of having missed three Beowulf characters although (in my defense) Beanstan, Elan, and Merewing don’t show up in either the Seamus Heaney or the Burton Raffel translations of Beowulf. Beanstan is the father of Breca, whom Beowulf bests in a swimming contest; according to Wikipedia Elan is (thanks to a corrupted document) an incomplete name for Yrsa, Hrothgar’s sister; and Merewing is a different spelling of Merovingian, another name for the Franks. Wiglaf predicts that the Merovingians will be invading Geatland now that Beowulf is dead.
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Tuesday
I recently stumbled across this Laura Gilpin poem and felt compelled to share it today. In many cultures, honoring one’s departed forebears is a bigger deal than it is in the United States. This poem helps us understand the deep wisdom underlying ancestor worship.
Life After Death By Laura Gilpin
These things I know: How the living go on living and how the dead go on living with them so that in a forest even a dead tree casts a shadow and the leaves fall one by one and the branches break in the wind and the bark peels off slowly and the trunk cracks and the rain seeps in through the cracks and the trunk falls to the ground and the moss covers it and in the spring the rabbits find it and build their nest inside the dead tree so that nothing is wasted in nature or in love.
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Monday
An Alabama judge ruling that frozen IVF embryos are children is causing acute distress amongst certain Republicans. Those politicians who contend that a fertilized egg should have the same rights as people must now explain to angry constituents why it’s okay to destroy extra embryos. Or for that matter, to engage in a process that will invariably result in the “deaths” of many of these children.
I thought of the Alabama case recently when I was sitting on a dissertation proposal committee. A Bosnian student at the University of Ljubljana wishes to write a dissertation about biopunk fiction and (since we approved her proposal) will be writing on works that grapple with some of the issues raised by the Alabama case. In her proposal Majda noted that, since biotechnology has had such a profound impact upon our lives, biopunk has arisen to mirror and explore the new developments.
Majda says that Biopunk, which emerged during the 1990s,
deals with biotechnology, depicting a futuristic society that misuses biotechnology to gain power and exert control. Biopunk’s futuristic setting discusses genetic engineering and enhancement and shows the consequences of unchecked powers of biotechnology.The definition of what constitutes biopunk is taken further by [German literature professor Lars] Schmeink, who terms it as, “a creative exploration not only of the technoscientific possibilities of further progress in genetics, but also of the environmental and social consequences.”
The biopunk novels that Majda will focus on are Greg Bear’s Blood Music, Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam), and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.
To be sure, biopunk has been around (although not with that label) since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and even earlier. Indeed the golem figure of Jewish folklore, a creature created from inanimate clay or mud that would rise up and protect the Jewish people, goes back to the Middle Ages. But the acceleration of biotechnology in our own time has increased anxieties about what is human and what is not. Horror fiction often has this anxiety at its core.
To be sure, people often pick and choose which instances of biotechnology they wish to attack and which to let slide. Since many wealthy Republicans have given birth thanks to IVF, Republican politicians are rushing to defend that. Whereas when medical technology determines that a fetus threatens the life of a woman, multiple states are determining that she should just let nature take its course.
Certain people think nature should also take its course with regard to Covid—or they think it should until they actually contract the disease. Anti-vaxxers rail against vaccines although one wonders whether they would be quite so vociferous if their children started contracting measles, polio, smallpox, etc. As it is, they function as free riders on the herd immunity that arises when everyone around them is vaccinated.
But set all that aside for a moment. The best biopunk doesn’t offer facile plots but explores how definitions of “the human” keep changing. Our biological selves are now so bound up with scientific and technological advances that at times it is impossible to separate the two. Majda’s project will extend our understanding of what perceptive authors make of this situation.
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Sunday
I report again today on John Gatta’s Green Gospel: Foundations of Ecotheology, which is the subject of our Lenten study this year. As I’ve been noting, Gatta believes that Christian faith applies to all creation, not only humans. If this is true, then nature experiences some version of sin and salvation. At one point in his second chapter, Gatta writes,
St. Paul affirms that the rest of creation, too, shares in humanity’s wounded condition. Suffering from a certain incompleteness and “bondage to decay,” the whole creation in his view has been “groaning in labor pains,” waiting “in eager longing” for a redemptive liberation to be achieved in and through Christ (Romans 8:19, 21–22).
John acknowledges that it’s difficult to envision such fallenness, as well as what redemption might look like. “We realize, of course, that nonhumans suffer many ills—including, on the part of sensate animals, physical pain, loss, dislocation, terror, and death—even if they are not capable of sin,” he writes, adding,
We may even dream of a transformed biological order, free of predatory violence, that resembles the “Peaceable Kingdom” prophesied by Isaiah (11:1–9) and often represented pictorially by Quaker artist Edward Hicks.
I note in passing that John Milton, in Paradise Lost, sees creation suffering a fall along with Adam and Eve. Whereas the weather in Eden has been temperate and all the animals vegetarians, Milton says the humans tasting the forbidden fruit changes all that. Suddenly we have seasons:
The sun Had first [God’s] precept so to move, so shine, As might affect the earth with cold and heatScarce tolerable; and from the north to call Decrepit winter; from the south to bring Solstitial summer’s heat.
Beast now with beast ‘gan war, and fowl with fowl, And fish with fish; to graze the herb all leaving, Devoured each other; nor stood much in awe Of Man, but fled him; or, with countenance grim, Glared on him passing.
Of course, Milton believes that nature’s fall from perfection is all due to humanity. And while it is true that humans have had a disproportionate impact on the world, Gatta’s vision of creation goes beyond humans. Because it does, he must acknowledge the limits of his vision:
What God’s redemption of all creation might ultimately look like, …I cannot pretend to know. I know only that a Christian faith worthy of the name must presume that God somehow wills to bring to fulfillment not human beings alone but everything God had ever created, sustained, and esteemed as “very good.”
Gatta then points to the “larger life mystery of symbiotic processes reflected in nature”:
We know that through the course of earth’s biological cycles death, dissolution, and decay are perforce conjoined with the emergence of new life. Poet Walt Whitman helps us remember that dead bodies make for “good manure.” Vedic teaching likewise recognizes the interwoven texture of death and life, affirming that Lord Brahma, as creator, must be seen as more nearly partner than adversary of Lord Shiva, the destroyer.
Along these lines, Gatta cites one of Wendell Berry’s sabbath poems, noting that it is informed by St. Paul’s reflections on creation and that it “beautifully captures this cyclic dynamic rooted in a transformational falling and rising”:
What stood will stand, though all be fallen, The good return that time has stolen. Though creatures groan in misery, Their flesh prefigures liberty To end travail and bring to birth Their new perfection in new earth. . . . What stood, whole in every piecemeal Thing that stood, will stand though all Fall—field and woods and all in them Rejoin the primal Sabbath’s hymn.
God is what stands “whole in every piecemeal thing that stood,” the underlying creative force. “Fall” invokes the original fall, which is countered by all of nature rejoining “the primal Sabbath’s hymn.”
While Gatta doesn’t want to privilege humankind over the rest of creation, he also doesn’t want to downplay the significance of humankind in nature’s journey. There are environmentalists who essentially see humans as creation’s original sin, messing up an otherwise perfect nature. I pick up some of this sentiment in Sarah Teasdale’s post-World War I poem “Then Will Come Soft Rain,” which dreams of a world in which humans have eradicated themselves:
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Teasdale seems to regard humans as an unfortunate desecration of nature’s innocence. But humans have also produced beautiful poems like Teasdale’s. Through the human mind, nature comes to know itself, and while that can have bad effects, it can also have good ones. In other words, by evolving to include humans, nature is changing in remarkable ways, and who knows what the future holds? Why long for a blissful pre-human past when the future could be (emphasis on “could” as there are no guarantees) even more exciting? As Gatta puts it,
For Christians, the doctrine of a “fortunate fall,” or felix culpa, derives from recognition that through the saving deed of Christ’s death and resurrection, humankind’s moral standing or nature has been marvelously elevated to a level even above that presumed in its pre-lapsarian state.
In the final stanzas of Paradise Lost, the archangel Michael promises Adam,
for then the Earth Shall all be Paradise, far happier place Than this of Eden, and far happier days.
To which Adam responds,
O Goodness infinite, Goodness immense! That all this good of evil shall produce, And evil turn to good; more wonderful Than that which by creation first brought forth Light out of darkness!
A new creation surpassing the original creation, in other words.
Marcantonio Raimondi, Alexander the Great commanding that the work of Homer be placed in the tomb of Achilles (ca 1500-34)
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Friday
The recent New Yorker has a wide-ranging (sometimes too wide-ranging) article on “the fate—and the power—of books in wartime.” Claudia Roth Pierpont shares fascinating anecdotes about literature attempting to come to our aid when things are at their grimmest. It also has given me insight into my father, who was a soldier in World War II.
Pierpont recounts how “Armed Services Editions” were printed and sent to soldiers during the war. In 1942 President Roosevelt declared, “In this war, we know books are weapons.” Meanwhile, the U.S. Office of War Information “issued a poster that framed a photograph of a book burning with the words “THE NAZIS BURNED THESE BOOKS…but free Americans CAN STILL READ THEM.” THEN IT SENT MILLIONS OF BOOKS.” Then, in 1943, millions of books were sent overseas:
These editions were small in format and printed on lightweight paper, designed so that they could fit in a serviceman’s pocket and withstand some half a dozen readings, as soldiers passed them on. (There is an entire book about this series, Molly Guptill Manning’s When Books Went to War.) Thirty titles were sent out to start, fifty thousand copies of each. Hundreds of works were eventually added, and the number of copies tripled: fiction, classics, biographies, humor, history, mystery, science, plays, poetry. Bundles of books were flown to the Anzio beachhead, in Italy, dropped by parachute on remote Pacific islands, and stockpiled in warehouses in the spring of 1944, so that they could be shipped to the staging grounds for D Day.
It may have been one of these books—For Whom the Bell Tolls –that made it to my father. It was June of 1944 and he was on night duty in, I believe, Coventry. To pass the time, he was reading Ernest Hemingway’s novel, which Pierpont says became a British bestseller as the war progressed. At first, all was quiet—a night like any other—only suddenly my father heard a loud noise and, looking up, saw that the entire sky will filled with planes. It was the day before D-Day and they were off to bomb German positions in France in preparation for the Normandy landing.
My father would be in France less than a month later, posted as translator for an American unit in charge of the city of Avranches in Normandy. He would then spend time on to the outskirts of Paris before finally ending up in Munich. During that trek across Europe, he carried with him Untermeyer’s famous anthology, Modern American and British Poetry.
I can imagine him reading the World War I poets (whom he would one day introduce to me) like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg. He was also drawn to the poetry of Robert Graves, who like these others spent time in the World War I trenches but who wrote a very different kind of poetry. As I wrote in a past post,
I went back and looked at the Grave poems my father read and can see what he would have found in them. Unlike, say, Owen, who unleashes his fury at the absurdity of war, Graves looks for ways to protect his inner imagination. For instance, in “A Pinch of Salt” he advises his reader to “mask your hunger,” which sounds as though he’s recommending the outward fatalism that my father adopted throughout the war to protect his inner sensitivity. If one doesn’t mask, one risks emotional devastation.
Back to Pierpont’s article. Apparently the Nazis, in their plans to invade England, had a “Special Wanted List” of British subject and foreign residents they planned to arrest. On this list were a number of authors, including writers E. M. Forster, Rebecca West, Noël Coward, and Virginia Woolf. For their part, the Americans sent over (among other works) a novel by Woolf (The Years), Oliver Twist, Grapes of Wrath, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (one of the most popular), Zane Grey westerns, and Ogden Nash poetry.
Pierpont doesn’t limit herself to World War II. Looking back at the Civil War, she mentions Uncle Tom’s Cabin, although she underestimates the role that it played. While she’s probably correct that it didn’t turn everyone into abolitionists—more people fought to preserve the union than to end slavery—historiaan David S. Reynolds makes a compelling case that the novel made civil war more likely and that it influenced the war’s subsequent progress.
In Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, Reynolds says that the novel rejuvenated and united the abolitionist movement, which until its publication had been scattered and on the defense. He also believes it enhanced the chances of an anti-slavery candidate winning the presidency, even while at the same time it hardened southern attitudes. Both developments were key factors in the outbreak of hostilities. Furthermore, he believes Uncle Tom’s Cabin undermined British sympathy for the southern cause so that, despite Britain’s reliance on southern cotton, it did not intervene on the South’s behalf. The power of the work was such, Reynolds adds, that it probably strengthened Lincoln’s resolve when it came to signing the Emancipation Proclamation, which earlier he had avoided so as not to offend slave states that remained within the union (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri).
Tracking back to earlier wars, Pierpont talks about the importance of The Iliad in ancient times. Apparently people would choose to be buried with passages from Homer’s poem, “as though it were a sacred text.” Warriors would have responded to Homer’s lesson that even those favored by the gods will not be saved and that “man is born to die, long destined for it”:
The story runs thick with the blood of heroes, with the pain and defilement of their wounded bodies, which is presumably why the Iliad, unlike the Odyssey, was not among the books sent to American servicemen. Still, the Iliad has inspired soldiers from antiquity onward. Alexander the Great is said to have always kept it near him, and to have seen himself as a new Achilles, as he conquered lands from Egypt to India.
I note in passing that, whereas Alexander could have made a compelling case for himself as a new Achilles, Mussolini was less convincing when he declared himself to be a new Aeneas, destined to conquer Ethiopia and Slovenia.
Pierpont offers another couple of interesting anecdotes, even at the risk of making her article disjointed. Apparently the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in one of Stalin’s corrective labor camps, used to tell his wife Nadezhda not to complain about their tribulations under the dictator: “Poetry is respected only in this country—people are killed for it.”
Pierpont notes that Nadezhda too had a great faith (perhaps too great faith) in the power of literature:
Immediately after Osip’s death, she tells us, she spent several weeks with a friend who had just been released from a camp, and the friend’s mother, whose husband had been shot. Reading Shakespeare together, the three women paused over young Arthur in King John, whose death is ordered by his scheming uncle but whose innocence softens the heart of his executioner, who can’t bear to carry out the crime. What Nadezhda cannot understand, she tells her friend, is how the English, who must have read about young Arthur, had not stopped killing their fellow-men forever. The friend replies, with clear intent to comfort, that for a long time Shakespeare had not been read or staged, and that people kept slaughtering one another because they had not seen the play. The notion of literature’s power is left intact. The explanation allows for the possibility, at least, that the play will have an effect someday. But Nadezhda is not comforted. “At nights I wept at the thought that executioners never read what might soften their hearts,” she writes. “It still makes me weep.”
Nadezhda’s belief that literature can soften the hearts of evildoers is similar to an idea put forth in Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesie. Because tragedy “openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue,” Sidney reasoned it would deter kings from becoming tyrants. This is one of the more dubious of Sidney’s contentions, unfortunately. Piermont notes that Stalin, “in his youth, published romantic poems in a Georgian journal and never stopped caring about poetry.” He also was quite the reader and owned some 25,000 books. Hitler, Pierpont adds, owned about 16,000 books, including a hand-tooled leather set of Shakespeare, translated into German.
Although literature can do much good, we can’t expect it to accomplish miracles. Sidney himself said that poetry, in the hands of a bad man, can be corrupted, just as physic can be used both to cure and to poison and swords to aid to heroes and traitors. But acknowledging literature’s limitations, however, should not blind us to its positive effects.
