Justin carrying the cross at the National Cathedral in Washington
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Spiritual Sunday
Last Sunday Julia and I attended church service in the new Coventry Cathedral, which stands next to the one that was bombed by the Germans in 1940 and that now stands open to the sky. I think of that as I write today’s essay about Justin, my eldest son who drowned on this day, April 30, 23 years ago. We lost him on the first Sunday after Easter.
Like Coventry Cathedral, we still bear the marks of the blast we received that day. And like the people of Coventry, we rebuilt our lives, which stand adjacent to the ruins. Extending this analogy, in the new cathedral one can look through a glass wall, known as “the screen of saints and angels,” and see the old cathedral. Angels have been etched into that glass by artist John Hutton (it was a ten-year project) so that, as one looks out at the old church, one is aware of ghostly presences. While we no longer think of Justin daily, at unexpected moments he enters our thoughts, just as Hutton’s transparent angels insinuate themselves into one’s field of vision.
Justin would have loved the George Herbert poem/hymn we sang as the recessional. Justin, who was 21, had embarked on an intense spiritual search at the time of his death and visited four churches in the 24 hours before he died, including the Episcopal/Anglican church he grew up in. Although sometimes tormented by religious struggles, he was also joyful and didn’t hold back from expressing his joy at being filled with the holy spirit. Here’s Herbert doing the same in his call-and-response poem that places special emphasis on the heart:
Antiphon 1
Chorus Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing, My God and King.
Verse The heav’ns are not too high, His praise may thither fly: The earth is not too low, His praises there may grow.
Chorus Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing, My God and King.
Verse The church with psalms must shout, No door can keep them out: But above all, the heart Must bear the longest part.
Chorus Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing, My God and King.
In the moments before his death, Justin rushed up to the large wooden cross on Church Point (at St. Mary’s City, Maryland), kissed it, and joyously flung himself into the St. Mary’s River, a kind of baptismal immersion to match his overflowing joy. He was singing from every corner of his being.
And lest you think he was being reckless, we had taken our kids to swim in this spot when they were small, and at any other time the river would have posed no danger. In fact, Justin had jumped into that water fully clothed before. What he didn’t know was that the rainiest spring in decades had created dangerous currents, one of which caught him and dragged him out.
A student who saw him go under reported that he cried out, “Jesus God!” before disappearing forever. I’m sure there was fear and desperation in those words but maybe also a sense that he was not alone. There’s no way I can know.
What I do know is that Herbert’s hymn would not have done much for me at the time. I didn’t much feel like lifting up my voice to sing, and God indeed seemed “too high,” an impersonal force that didn’t bother itself with our tiny lives.
Now, however, my heart opens to hear the psalms, including today’s psalm, which is the 23rd. In church together we will read, “Yea though I walk through the valley of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me” and “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. And I shall live in the house of the Lord forever.”
Justin, as he leapt into the water, was singing from the heart. Our children have much to teach us.
Old Coventry Cathedral seen through the western window of the new cathedral
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Friday
On our plane ride back from the United Kingdom, I watched Sam Mendes’s Oscar-nominated Empire of Light, which looks back to a time when cinema screens seemed to stretch forever and when films like Chariots of Fire were public events. I write about the film here because it is filled with poetry, which infuses the film with a special magic.
An article in Awards Daily by one Sasha Stone picks up some of the poetic references I missed. For instance, the film is set in the beach resort sound of Margate Sands, where T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land, and a crossword puzzle that one of the characters is filling out asks, “What is the cruelest month.” (I know I don’t have to answer that one for you.) After that, we encounter poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson, W. H. Auden, and Philip Larkin.
The story reminds me somewhat of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film Ali:Fears Eats the Soul in the way a middle-aged woman, beaten down by life, is rejuvenated by her relationship with a young immigrant of color. In this case, he is from the West Indies and he works alongside her in a movie theatre. The year is 1981, which is when Thatcherism and skinhead riots were creating havoc in the U.K., and at one point rioters smash through the cinema’s windows and beat up young Stephen. Hilary, meanwhile, doesn’t have the self-belief to stand up to her boss, who uses her sexually. They are indeed living in a desolate wasteland.
Their relationship brings poetry into their lives, sometimes literally as Hilary shares various poems with Stephen. The first poem I recall is Tennyson’s “Ring Out, Wild Bells,” the first stanza of which Hilary recites for Stephen as they greet the new year. At the time, they are standing on the roof of the theatre awaiting the fireworks:
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Moved by the poem and the moment, Stephen kisses Hilary, at which point, frightened by her growing attraction for him, she runs away. Eliot’s Waste Land explains why. April is the cruelest month when we have shut down our feelings (“Winter kept us warm, covering/ Earth in forgetful snow”), which Hilary has, and now here are, like
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain…
As the relationship blooms, we learn that Hilary has been raped in the past and also been hospitalized for mental problems. As the two face pressure from both sides, Stephen wonders whether they should break off the relationship, which sends Hilary into a tailspin. Yet she gathers her strength and, during the announcements of a grand showing of Chariots of Fire that all the local luminaries are attending, crashes the podium. In her remarks she pleads for interracial harmony and then reads to the bewildered crowd the final stanza of Auden’s “Death’s Echo”:
Dance, dance, for the figure is easy, The tune is catching and will not stop; Dance till the stars come down from the rafters; Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
“Death’s Echo” is a dark poem, as indicated by such lines as
The greater the love, the more false to its object, Not to be born is the best for man; After the kiss comes the impulse to throttle, Break the embraces, dance while you can.
If we can dance—or if we can love—the Waste Land won’t have the last word. Hilary proclaims this vision to herself, to Stephen, and to the world.
Her relationship with Stephen cannot last, however. If he is is to step into his powers, he must leave his job at the theatre and go to college. He must also find someone his own age. Hilary realizes this and, in the end, though heartbroken, she uses a Larkin poem to let him know it’s okay to leave her. Opening the book of Larkin poems that she has presented him upon his boarding the bus, he find the following one marked:
The Trees
The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too, Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
“Dance, dance, dance,” Auden has written and now Larkin follows it up with his own thrice repeated command. “Trees” also reads as a response to Eliot’s vision of a world
where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water.
The Larkin poem applies more to Hilary than to Stephen and could be her way of reassuring him that all will be well with her. While separations and deaths inevitably occur in our lives, greenness returns. “Last year is dead,” Larkin writes, just as Tennyson writes, “The year is dying in the night.” And while Tennyson follows this up with, “Ring out, wild bells, and let him die,” Larkin writes, “Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.” At movie’s end, we see Hilary indeed beginning afresh as she returns to her friends in the theatre and to the world of the movies.
One last note: I believe the movie ends with Hilary seeing, for the first time, one of the films her theatre is showing. In watching Peter Sellers, as Chauncey Gardener, walk across a pond in the finale of Being There, we are seeing the power of cinema, that empire of light, to create transcendent moments. Hilary herself has achieved a new level of being—she has begun afresh—and the movie confirms what she has achieved.
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Thursday
We returned to the States to discover that Fox’s Tucker Carlson, who had remade himself into a racist nativist, has been fired by Rupert Murdoch. Of the many commentaries I’ve read about the bow-tied pundit, one surprised me by invoking a forgotten novel that I haven’t read since high school.
Mother Jones’s David Corn has alluded to Bud Schulburg’s What Makes Sammy Run in an attempt to figure out Carlson’s strange trajectory from seemingly reasonable rightwing intellectual to white supremacist. In Corn’s eyes, he is a “Sammy Glick of the Right”:
What happened to Carlson? Perhaps nothing. Maybe from the start he was nothing but an opportunistic guy on the make. A Sammy Glick of the right. As a young reporter, he seized the opportunity to brand himself as a conservative journalist different from other right-wing scribes in the combative Age of Clinton. Years later, as that glow wore off (and his television career started slipping), he reinvented himself as an angry populist cheerleader of the Trumpish right. That’s where the audience and the big bucks were—and the influence. It’s possible that along the way he even convinced himself of some of what he was saying. But the likely explanation is that truth never mattered: It was all about status and money.
Comparing Glick and Carlson is somewhat strange in that Glick is a working class kid fanatically driven to rise in the world—a kind of Jewish Gatsby—whereas Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson grew up in privileged surroundings, attending first a private boarding school and then one of the small ivies, Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. But like Sammy, Carlson appears to be willing to do and say anything to succeed. As Sammy says at one point in his rapid rise to Hollywood mogul, “Going through life with a conscience is like driving your car with the brakes on.”
Unlike Carlson, Sammy is a product of New York’s “dog eat dog” Lower East Side. The narrator meets him when, at 16, he is a copyboy for a newspaper. By the end, through stealing scripts, shamelessly using and discarding acquaintances, stabbing his principled boss in the back, and leaving his girlfriend to strategically marry the daughter of the Wall Street banker representing the film company’s financiers, Sammy rises to the top, becoming a producer.
Then, having reached the pinnacle, he experiences the emptiness of a life where everything has been transactional. When he catches his wife Laurette Harrington making love to an actor he has just hired, she informs him that their marriage is no more than a business affair. His response is to order Shiek, his personal servant, to find him a prostitute.
Before this occurs, however, he tells the narrator that he has achieved everything he ever wanted. I wonder whether Tucker Carlson, when he ruled the world of cable television, ever thought similarly. The scene occurs when Glick is looking out his window at Hollywood in action:
“Now it’s mine,” Sammy said. “Everything’s mine. I’ve got everything. Everybody’s always saying you can’t get everything and I’m the guy who swung it. I’ve got the studio and I’ve got the Harrington connections and I’ve got the perfect woman to run my home and have my children.”
I sat there as if I were watching The Phantom of the Opera or any other horror picture. I sat there silently in the shadows, for it was growing dark and the lights hadn’t been switched on yet and I think he had forgotten he was talking to me. It was just his voice reassuring him in the dark.
“Sammy,” I said quietly, “how does it feel? How does it feel to have everything?”
He began to smile. It became a smirk, a leer.
“It makes me feel kinda..” And then it came blurting out of nowhere—“patriotic.”
If you see the American Dream as achieving personal success, then I suppose you could interpret your ascension to the heights as patriotic. But success paid for with one’s soul is ultimately empty, as the narrator reflects after having seen Glick turn to paid sex after discovering his wife’s affair:
I drove back slowly, heavy with the exhaustion I always felt after being with Sammy too long. I thought of him wandering alone through all his brightly lit rooms. Not only tonight, but all the nights of his life. No matter where he would ever be at banquets, at gala house parties, in crowded night clubs, in big poker games, at intimate dinners, he would still be wandering alone through all his brightly lit rooms. He would still have to send out frantic S.O.S.’s to Sheik, the virile eunuch. Help! Help! I’m lonely. I’m nervous. I’m friendless. I’m desperate. Bring girls, bring Scotch, bring laughs. Bring a pause in the day’s occupation, the quick sponge for the sweaty marathoner, the recreational pause that is brief and vulgar and titillating and quickly forgotten, like a dirty joke.
Tucker Carlson is far from the only Sammy Glick in the rightwing media. Tom Nichols, Atlantic writer and former Republican, identifies the type. In the 1990s, he says, the new generation of young conservatives
realized that the way to dump their day jobs for better gigs in radio and television was to become more and more extreme—and to sell their act to an audience that was nothing like them or the people at D.C. dinner parties. They would have their due, even if they had to poison the brains of ordinary Americans to get it.
Carlson, as Nichols sees it, is
emblematic of the entire conservative movement now, and especially the media millionaires who serve as its chief propagandists. The conservative world has become a kind of needle skyscraper with a tiny number of wealthy, superbly educated right-wing media and political elites in the penthouses, looking down at an expanse of angry Americans whose rage they themselves helped create.
If your only criteria for success is how much wealth and/or power you can amass—I’m thinking of such unprincipled politicians as Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Lindsey Graham here as well as Carlson—then you are doomed to a perpetual restlessness. Or as Schulberg’s narrator puts it, “always thinking satisfaction is just around the bend.” You run incessantly without ever finding peace.
And sooner or later, as Schulberg narrator notes, there will be other Sammy Glicks overtaking you—or in Carlson’s case, other Fox commentators—at which point you may come face to face with the emptiness inside you.
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Wednesday
Visiting my cousin John Beech in Coventry, England after two weeks of ancestor-searching with Julia, I learned about a Phil Larkin plaque in a local railway station. On it is the opening stanza of “I Remember, I Remember”:
Coming up England by a different line For once, early in the cold new year, We stopped, and, watching men with number plates Sprint down the platform to familiar gates, “Why, Coventry!” I exclaimed. “I was born here.”
For all that it celebrates Larkin, however, the plaque gives a false impression of the poet’s actual feelings about Coventry. Rather than experiencing nostalgia, the poet is cranky and sarcastic and essentially goes on to say, “I was born here? Big frickin’ deal!”
Indeed, at one point in the poem, Larkin’s interlocutor says, “You look as though you wished the place in Hell, judging from your face.”
His friend is prepared to hear a sentimental account of a childhood spent in Coventry, only to get the exact opposite. In other words, the excerpted stanza implies sentiments that the poet attacks. Not all people are sentimental about their family roots, we learn—which, for all we know, was also true of Julia’s ancestors, those Joneses and Pickens who emigrated to the United States.
Larkin’s starting point is a poem by the Victorian poet Thomas Hood entitled “I Remember, I Remember,” which Larkin appropriates but only so that he can attack the poem’s vision. When he recalls his childhood in Coventry, he arrives at a list of things that did not happen. For instance,
–he was not a child prodigy that invented “blinding theologies of flowers and fruits”; –there was not some “splendid family” that he ran to when he got depressed, a family that had muscular boys, full chested girls, a car he could drive, and a farm where he could grow into himself; –he never had a romantic encounter with a girl in the bracken; –his poetry was not printed in the local newspaper, nor did he receive early recognition.
In short, nothing memorable happened in his Coventry childhood, leading him to say, “Oh well, I suppose it’s not the place’s fault.”
And then:
Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.
So Coventry might just as well be anywhere else. Here’s the poem:
I Remember, I Remember By Philip Larkin
Coming up England by a different line For once, early in the cold new year, We stopped, and, watching men with number plates Sprint down the platform to familiar gates, “Why, Coventry!” I exclaimed. “I was born here.”
I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign That this was still the town that had been ‘mine’ So long, but found I wasn’t even clear Which side was which. From where those cycle-crates Were standing, had we annually departed
For all those family hols? . . . A whistle went: Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots. ‘Was that,’ my friend smiled, ‘where you “have your roots”?’ No, only where my childhood was unspent, I wanted to retort, just where I started:
By now I’ve got the whole place clearly charted. Our garden, first: where I did not invent Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits, And wasn’t spoken to by an old hat. And here we have that splendid family
I never ran to when I got depressed, The boys all biceps and the girls all chest, Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be ‘Really myself’. I’ll show you, come to that, The bracken where I never trembling sat,
Determined to go through with it; where she Lay back, and ‘all became a burning mist’. And, in those offices, my doggerel Was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read By a distinguished cousin of the mayor,
Who didn’t call and tell my father There Before us, had we the gift to see ahead – ‘You look as though you wished the place in Hell,’ My friend said, ‘judging from your face.’ ‘Oh well, I suppose it’s not the place’s fault,’ I said.
‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.’
If we go by what his friend sees in his face, the speaker’s “oh well” masks a deep resentment. He’s mad at Coventry because it did not give him the cliched childhood of someone who would become famous. In fact, the more he thinks about it, the madder he becomes for not having had such a childhood. It’s not Coventry he’s mad at but “anywhere.” Had he been born somewhere else, he would be just as angry.
So I guess that lets Coventry off the hook. And perhaps Larkin would appreciate the city finally getting around to saying, “There before us, had we the gift to see ahead, was a genius, and we didn’t even know it.” Would the plaque and other publicity material assuage his hurt feelings?
Even if they did, with Larkin being Larkin I can’t imagine him admitting it.
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Tuesday
Today Julia and I fly back to the States after having ancestor hunted in Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland, and England. Although we have been here to track Julia’s ancestors, I’ve actually filled in some gaps of my own, thanks to my third-cousin John Beech, who lives in Coventry with his wife Sue. It involves a Lord Bunbury, although the actual one, not Algernon’s fictional friend in The Importance of Being Earnest.
I promise you some more literary allusions in this post but indulge me for a moment as I share some speculation about this family history.
John and I share a great-great grandfather, one Thomas Scott, who was Lord Bunbury’s “factor” (estate manager) in Great Barton and Mildenhall. Family lore, which even allowing for exaggeration sometimes has truth in it, is that we are descended from Charles Montagu-Scott, 4th Duke of Buccleuch, although from the wrong side of the bed. Buccleuch, John says, fought alongside Lord Bunbury in the Peninsular War against Napoleon, and John’s theory is that William Scott was Buccleuch’s illegitimate son and “batman” or personal servant—and that through the Buccleuch-Bunbury friendship, William Scott and then his son Thomas found employment with Bunbury. One of Thomas’s daughters was Eliza Scott, my great grandmother, who married Edwin Fulcher, who took her first to South Africa and then to Evanston, Illinois. Her daughter Eleanor married Alfred Bates, and their son Scott is my father.
[Side note: John’s story helps me make sense of another piece of family lore, which was that we are related to Charles II. The first Duke of Buccleuch was Monmouth, illegitimate son of Charles, who was immortalized by John Dryden in Absolom and Architophel. Monmouth was not the only illegitimate child Charles produced, Dryden reminds us (casting the monarch as the Bible’s King David in his allegory):
Then, Israel’s monarch, after Heaven’s own heart, His vigorous warmth did variously impart To wives and slaves: and, wide as his command, Scatter’d his Maker’s image through the land.
My grandmother stopped boasting of our connection with Monmouth once she discovered he was a bastard, and it would have taken two illegitimate births, Monmouth’s and William Scott’s, for us to be linked to the king. So I don’t think we will be invited to the coronation of King Charles III.]
Anyway, back to my Coventry cousin John Beech. Wherever we have gone in Ireland and the United Kingdom, I have looked for literary connections and Coventry has at least three. In terms of most impressive to least, there is (1) George Eliot, who spent her twenties there taking care of her father; (2) E.M. Forster, who lived his final days there in a menage-a-trois he didn’t want publicized as it involved a man and his wife; and (3) Philip Larkin, who announces in “I Remember, I Remember” that “I was born there.”
Learning about this poem, I of course had to read it and, upon my first encounter, was very confused. The cranky and even cynical Larkin abhors sentimentality while the poem I was reading was sentimental in the extreme. Was this an elaborate parody, I wondered.
Only it turns out that the poem I was reading, while it has the same title, was written by the Victorian poet Thomas Hood. You can read the full version here but the final stanza reads,
I remember, I remember, The fir trees dark and high; I used to think their slender tops Were close against the sky: It was a childish ignorance, But now ’tis little joy To know I’m farther off from heav’n Than when I was a boy.
I’m running out of computer power as I sit in Heathrow Airport so I’ll have to postpone discussion of Larkin’s “I Remember, I Remember,” which doesn’t employ the word “remember” once. Instead, it is a satire of those who idealize their pasts, which I suppose is a useful corrective for those who sentimentalize their ancestors. Anyway, more tomorrow.
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Monday
As yesterday was both Shakespeare’s birthday (we think) and his death day, my post today is about a perspective I have acquired on one of his greatest villains. Yesterday, my Coventry cousins took us to the Richard III Center in Leicester, and I saw the extent to which the Bard had unfairly slimed the last of the Plantagenet kings.
Richard’s bones were famously discovered under a Leicester parking lot ten years ago, and a small museum has now been erected at the spot. From the wall displays, I learned that Richard was a reformer who did not (contra Shakespeare) murder Henry VI, his own brother Clarence, or his own wife Anne and who may not even have murdered his nephews, the two princes in the tower (although the jury is still out on this one). Nor was he an ugly hunchback who would have voiced the sentiments that Shakespeare puts in his mouth, such as
And thus I clothe my naked villany With old odd ends stolen out of holy writ; And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.
Or:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover, To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Shakespeare drew for his information on works designed to support the Tudors—starting with Henry Tudor (Henry VII), who had defeated and killed Richard. These included Holinshed’s Chronicles and Thomas More’s History of Richard III, and Shakespeare further distorted the record through freely embellishing.
It took everything I had to keep an open mind about Richard as I went through the exhibit, given the Shakespearean version of him I have always carried around in my head. When propaganda is able enlist a great artist in its cause, truth can take a beating.
But even if Shakespeare has problems with accuracy, his understanding of evil is unmatched. If you ever want insight into how political leaders will sacrifice everything we hold sacred for the sake of power, Richard III is the play for you.
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Spiritual Sunday
Today’s Gospel reading—which Julia and I hope to hear read in Coventry Cathedral—involves two of the disciples unknowingly encountering the risen Jesus as they walk the road to Emmaus. Among other things, he asks, “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” Enthralled with his talk, they invite him to join them for supper, at which point he makes himself known:
So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.
The physicality of the risen Jesus, emphasized by his breaking and sharing the bread, is critical to Denise Levertov. In this she seems to agree with Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who (as I noted in last Sunday’s post), disagrees with Jesus for his declaration, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor tells Jesus he is setting impossibly high standards and not accounting for human weakness.
Thou didst hope that man, following Thee, would cling to God and not ask for a miracle. But Thou didst not know that when man rejects miracle he rejects God too; for man seeks not so much God as the miraculous.
Levertov does not altogether say that she needs to witness miracle, but she’s unwilling to see Jesus’s resurrection as merely a metaphor for soul awakening. In her eyes, metaphors, which ground an abstract idea in a concrete reality, are not in themselves enough. As she puts it, she can’t open herself “to symbol’s power” unless she is
convinced of its ground, its roots in bone and blood. We must feel the pulse in the wound to believe that “with God all things are possible”…
In this she differs from those “intricate minds” that can be nourished entirely on concept, just as epiphytes (think Spanish moss) derive their moisture from moisture and nutrients in the air rather than from the plants they are attached to. Resurrection for them, she suggests, is an “internal power,” not “a matter of flesh.”
I must acknowledge to being somewhat agnostic here. Sometimes I believe that Jesus came back to life after being dead in some non-ghostly form, sometimes that the story is just a symbolic way of illustrating the power of love. I don’t see myself so much as one of Levertov’s intricate minds as someone who waffles on the subject.
Levertov seems to say that this is not enough for her. As one of the “literalists of the imagination,” she needs to believe that people actually tasted
bread at Emmaus that warm hands broke and blessed.
Here’s the poem:
On Belief in the Physical Resurrection of Jesus By Denise Levertov
It is for all ‘literalists of the imagination,’ poets or not, that miracle is possible and essential. Are some intricate minds nourished on concept, as epiphytes flourish high in the canopy? Can they subsist on the light, on the half of metaphor that’s not grounded in dust, grit, heavy carnal clay? Do signs contain and utter, for them all the reality that they need? Resurrection, for them, an internal power, but not a matter of flesh? For the others, of whom I am one, miracles (ultimate need, bread of life,) are miracles just because people so tuned to the humdrum laws: gravity, mortality- can’t open to symbol’s power unless convinced of its ground, its roots in bone and blood. We must feel the pulse in the wound to believe that ‘with God all things are possible,’ taste bread at Emmaus that warm hands broke and blessed.
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Friday
As a result of our visits to Ireland and North Ireland, I have fallen in love with the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, who was raised on a farm with minimal education but found his way to poetry in spite of that. I share here a wonderful poem he wrote about labor leader Jim Larkin, who I found honored in both Dublin and Belfast.
In Dublin there is a large monument of Larkin gesticulating in his characteristic fashion, and there is a large poster of him in the North Ireland history exhibit in Belfast’s City Hall. Dublin appears to honor him for his commitment to Irish independence, Belfast for his contributions to the labor movement. His most notable achievement regarding the latter is his leadership of the 1913 Dublin lock-out, which historians sees as the Irish trade union movement coming of age. At stake were wages, working conditions, and the workers’ right to organize.
Larkin was famous for his energy and his eloquence, leading George Bernard Shaw to describe him as “the greatest Irishman since Parnell” (Parnell also has an impressive statue in Dublin). In his poem about Larkin, Kavanagh praises the way that labor leader could inspire workers to see beyond their working conditions to what life could be. When the poet writes that Larkin urged workers to look beyond “the serf’s grey docks” and see “the flowers are growing for you, and wonderful trees,” I am reminded of Karl Marx in his Preface to Hegel: “Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.”
Along the same lines, Kavanagh says Larkin persuaded dock workers to see ships, not as “dark galleys”—which is to say, working conditions that treated men essentially as prisoners—but as potentially “pine forests under the winter’s starry plough.” Similarly, the “brown gantries” that the dock workers operate to load the ships could become, if workers were treated with dignity, “the lifted hand/ Of man the dreamer whom the gods endow.’
Kavanagh may echo Jesus when he imagines Larkin saying to the workers that “the ghost of bread/ Must not haunt all your weary wanderings home.” In other words, people do not live by bread alone. Important though life’s necessities are, they are not all there is to life.
As Kavanagh sees it, the Irish workers before Larkin were seduced away from confronting their real conditions by the sensationalist press and by sports. (He sounds here like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, members of the Marxist Frankfurt School, who saw pop culture as the opiate of the masses.) When Larkin “cried the call of Freedom and the call of Pride,” Kavanagh says, Irish workers were “cheered from out the utter degradation of their miseries” and, with the 1913 lock-out, changed labor history.
On the Death of Jim Larkin By Patrick Kavanagh
Not with public words now can his greatness Be told to the children, for he was more Than a labor-agitating orator — The flashing flaming sword merely bore witness To the coming of the dawn. ‘Awake and look! The flowers are growing for you, and wonderful trees, And beyond are not the serf’s grey docks, but seas — Excitement out of the creator’s poetry book.
When the Full Moon’s in the River the ghost of bread Must not haunt all your weary wanderings home. The ships that were dark galleys can become Pine forests under the winter’s starry plough And the brown gantries will be the lifted hand Of man the dreamer whom the gods endow.’
And thus I hear Jim Larkin shout above The crowd who wanted him to turn aside From Reality coming to free them. Terrified They hid in the clouds of dope and would not move. They ate the opium of the murderer’s story In the Sunday newspapers; they stood to stare Not at a blackbird, but at a millionaire Whose horses ran for serfdom’s greater glory.
And Tyranny trampled them in Dublin’s gutter, Until Larkin came along and cried The call of Freedom and the call of Pride, And Slavery crept to its hands and knees, And Nineteen Thirteen cheered from out the utter Degradation of their miseries.
The shell of Dublin’s post office after 1916 fighting
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Thursday
I continue yesterday’s post about visiting, at Dublin’s General Post Office (GPO), an exhibit about the 1916 Easter Rising and Yeats’s reflection about the event. I was struck when I learned that some of those who died were revolutionized by Yeats and Lady Gregory’s play Cathleen Ni Houlihan.
According to Wikipedia, play is
startlingly nationalistic, in its last pages encouraging young men to sacrifice their lives for the heroine Cathleen ni Houlihan, who represents an independent and separate Irish state. The title character first appears as an old woman at the door of a family celebrating their son’s wedding. She describes her four “beautiful green fields,” representing the four provinces, that have been unjustly taken from her. With little subtlety, she requests a blood sacrifice, declaring that “many a child will be born and there will be no father at the christening.” When the youth agrees and leaves the safety of his home to fight for her, she appears as an image of youth with “the walk of a queen,” professing of those who fight for her: “They shall be remembered forever, They shall be alive forever, They shall be speaking forever, The people shall hear them forever.”
Although the play was written in 1902, it was revived many times, often to packed audiences. There was a performance just weeks before the uprising.
Given Yeats’s suspicion of violent nationalism, the play comes as a surprise. In his scholarly study Making the Void Fruitful: Yeats as Spiritual Seeker and Petrarchan Lover, Patrick J. Keanehas an explanation: it was all the fault of the more radical Lady Gregory and of Maud Gonne, Yeats’s unrequited love and one of literary history’s great muses (up there with Dante’s Beatrice and Keats’s Fanny Braun).
According to Keane, Gonne had introduced Yeats to the leader of the nationalist Sinn Fein party in the hope that he would take the Irish literary movement and the Abbey Theatre in a more politically nationalist direction. Gonne, furthermore, had played the role of Cathleen in the play, inspiring young Irish men to the cause. Keane notes that the play was considered a “sacrament” by various nationalists, and it did in fact “send out men that were shot in the Easter Rising; in fact, the first to die was an actor cast in a revival of the play.”
While pleased by the play’s popular success, Yeats years later worried that he had blood on his hands for its effects. As he noted in “Man and the Echo,”
All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right. Did that play of mine send out Certain men the English shot?
As Keane puts it, along with Yeats’s pride at the play’s popular success, he felt guilt “in having produced a patriotic but propagandistic play that was, at heart, a love-offering to his own terrible beauty, Maud Gonne, and a betrayal of his own better judgment.”
In the Museum of Irish Literature I came across a humorous corrective. Thinking that Yeats was being overly dramatic, poet Paul Muldoon humorously wrote,
If Yeats had saved his pencil-lead would certain men have stayed in bed?
Offering his own corrective, W. H. Auden wrote in his elegy on Yeats,
Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen…
But while poetry can’t usually be shown to have the same concrete impact as certain non-literary forms of writing—if it could, people would pay a lot more attention to it than they do—the General Post Office exhibit did point out that Irish culture and Irish nationalism fed off each other. Frantz Fanon, the father of post-colonialist theory, would describe a play like Cathleen Ni Houlihan as “literature of combat” and see it as essential to the political project. Literature may make “nothing happen” in a vacuum, but when the times are ripe, Fanon says, it changes hearts and minds.
In “Easter 1916” Yeats has a more nuanced handling of the uprising. The poem begins with him acknowledging his personal connection with the rebel leaders. Nothing he saw in them prepared him for how (he accurately predicts) they will become legendary Irish figures. When they met, they would exchange “polite meaningless words” or perhaps a gibe—did Yeats lightly mock them for their nationalist aspirations?—but nothing prepared the poet for what happened. Instead he regarded both them and himself as nothing more than ordinary fools (we “lived where motley is worn”). All that “changed, changed utterly” with the rebellion, followed by their executions. Out of that, a “terrible beauty is born”:
I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses. I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words, Or have lingered awhile and said Polite meaningless words, And thought before I had done Of a mocking tale or a gibe To please a companion Around the fire at the club, Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn: All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.
The next stanza is given over to some of the leaders, specifically to Countess Constance Markiewicz, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and James MacBride. Markiewicz’s sweet voice is the one that grows shrill through political arguments, MacDonagh was a literature teacher and poet, and Pearse was a writer and an important figure in the Gaelic League. As a sign of just how miraculous a transformation has occurred, Yeats even includes MacBride on the list. MacBride was the “drunken, vainglorious lout” whom Gonne, to Yeats’s dismay, had explicably married and who would go on to abuse both her and her daughter, so if even he can become a legend, then the uprising was indeed wondrous:
That woman’s days were spent In ignorant good-will Her nights in argument Until her voice grew shrill. What voice more sweet than hers When, young and beautiful, She rode to harriers? This man had kept a school And rode our wingèd horse; This other his helper and friend Was coming into his force; He might have won fame in the end, So sensitive his nature seemed, So daring and sweet his thought. This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vainglorious lout. He had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart, Yet I number him in the song; He, too, has resigned his part In the casual comedy; He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.
Having described the figures in his drama, Yeats goes on to describe the fixity of purpose that characterizes many revolutionaries: they have hearts seemingly “enchanted to a stone” because they are driven by “one purpose alone.” While life for most of us flows by, a “living stream” that is altered by “the horse that comes from the road” and by the reflections in the water of the rider and of “the birds that range/ From cloud to tumbling cloud,” the stone doesn’t change:
Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream. The horse that comes from the road, The rider, the birds that range From cloud to tumbling cloud, Minute by minute they change; A shadow of cloud on the stream Changes minute by minute; A horse-hoof slides on the brim, And a horse plashes within it; The long-legged moor-hens dive, And hens to moor-cocks call; Minute by minute they live: The stone’s in the midst of all.
That this fixity of purpose is not altogether admirable is clear when we think of terrorists—and indeed (as I learned from the GPO exhibit) many Irish at the time saw the GPO rebels in this light. After all, they caused the death of innocent civilians and policemen and in fact killed some themselves. “Too long a sacrifice/ Can make a stone of the heart,” Yeats writes, and there’s a noteworthy contrast between the stone and the life connected with the stream (“The long-legged moor-hens dive,/ And hens to moor-cocks call”). When Yeats asks, “O when may it suffice?” he may be asking, “How long will Irish conditions continue to turn hearts into stone?” Perhaps he is echoing Psalm 13, “How long, O Lord?”
However Heaven may judge stone-hearted rebels, Yeats says that our human role is to murmur their names “as a mother names her child.” And to know they dreamed and died in obedience to that dream. It doesn’t even matter that the dream may have been needless as “England may keep faith”—which is to say, England may have granted Ireland home rule without the rebellion.
Indeed, the Easter uprising so polarized matters that it may have set progress back. Some even think that, without it, Ireland and Northern Ireland would not have been partitioned, although some of the historians in the videos argued that partition probably was inevitable in any event, given how vigorously unionists opposed even home rule, not to mention an independent republic.
In any event, what emerged from the uprising was a “terrible beauty”—beautiful in that it took on mythic status, terrible because of the violence. It may be that there are terrorists who regard 9-11 and other suicide missions as beautiful—or for that matter, people who see as beautiful the Confederacy’s Lost Cause or ancient Israel’s Massada rebels. The difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist is often a matter of perspective. In short, Yeats shows himself to be ambivalent about the uprising as his poem comes to its end:
Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice? That is Heaven’s part, our part To murmur name upon name, As a mother names her child When sleep at last has come On limbs that had run wild. What is it but nightfall? No, no, not night but death; Was it needless death after all? For England may keep faith For all that is done and said. We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead; And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died? I write it out in a verse— MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.
I appreciate Yeats for his willingness to explore the meaning of the uprising. He is not so sure of the rightness of the cause as he appears to be in Cathleen Ni Houlihan. Contra Auden, he is making something happen, but that something is expanding our understanding of dramatic political events.
I have one other thought which may undermine the poem: there are certainly those who don’t find the Easter uprising to have been beautiful. Could Yeats be guilty of being overly impressed with the event’s drama. If so, he would not be alone. Many poets and writers between the wars were drawn to fascism, in part because it seemed more beautiful—or at least more full of life—than bureaucratic welfare democracy. (I’m thinking here of T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and Ezra Pound among others.) And such love affairs continue today with (to cite one example) playwright David Mamet, who admires Donald Trump because of his willingness to (as Mamet sees it) cut through bullshit and speak to raw emotions. That these raw emotions include racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia doesn’t faze Mamet in the slightest. (I note in passing that Mamet’s great play Glengarry Glen Ross shows itself to be wiser than its author by exposing the void at the core of sexism.) “Easter 1916” loses some of its power if one doesn’t find beauty, terrible or otherwise, in what MacDonagh and MacBride and Connolly and Pearse did.
But it certainly has gripped the Irish imagination, with the hundredth anniversary having been celebrated in style seven years ago. Maybe this is the beauty that Yeats foresaw.
