Selling Dead Souls in an American Prison

By Robin Bates | Published: May 16, 2023

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Wednesday

Sometimes, when one is reading two books at the same time, the works talk to each other. That’s been happening as I read Daniel Genis’s Sentence: Ten Years and a Thousand Books in Prison while listening to James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk on Libby. Genis’s grim account of prison life makes me realize what Fonny Hunt, locked up on a bogus rape charge by a corrupt cop, must be going through.

Today’s post, however, continues the series I’ve been writing on how Genis used literature to cope with prison life. As I noted yesterday, there’s one dramatic instance where two novels, Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, got Genis into more trouble.

Midway through Sentence, Genis casually mentions that he once was confined to solitary—or rather, solitary with one other, a schizophrenic—for selling “dead souls.” I wondered whether this was some kind of prison slang since I only associate the phrase with Gogol’s novel, where a conman buys dead serfs from landowners so that the latter won’t have to pay taxes on them. (Taxes are based on the census, conducted when these serfs would have been still alive.) In the novel, Chichikov plans to take out a large loan against these dead souls, which he will then pocket.

As it turns out, the Russian-American Genis is in fact drawing partly on Gogol, partly on Mann’s version of the Faustus story, which also involves a soul transfer. Genis’s soul-selling was partly a joke, partly a practical measure to keep his fellow prisoners from bleeding him dry.

Genis, who is NYU educated and solidly middle class, was in the enviable position of having parents who sent him $100 a month. The other prisoners knew this, however, and Genis became besieged by requests, some of them accompanied by threats. At that point he thought of Adrian Leverkühn, who in Mann’s novel gets “twenty-four years of genius in exchange for the gift of syphilitic creativity, after which he was punished with madness.” In other words, he sells his soul for brilliance.

Genis found himself relating to Leverkühn:

For my soul-sucking criminal compromises with my own morals, I got half the time Leverkühn did [and] probably none of the genius…In any case, as the disease that Leverkühn deliberately contracted ate away at his mind, the composer embraced the Mephistophelian figure with whom he began to interact, the metaphorical buyer of his souls. Mann wrote the character with aplomb. The devilish is always appealing to those of a bohemian bent, and even though I was but a half-assed Rimbaud locked away in a place of simple values and harsh rules, my sense of play never left me.

I wrote in yesterday’s post about how this sense of play was vital to Genis and how he turned to literature to bolster it. In this case, however, he got into trouble when he decided to exchange gifts for his fellow inmates’ souls. He typed up contracts very professionally on his typewriter, and the ploy worked since, once having sold their (one) soul for something, the prisoners couldn’t ask for more favors. The the prison administration stepped in:

My skill on the typewriter was part of my undoing: my contract for souls just looked too real in the eyes of the cops, who were horrified by what they had discovered. The document simply stated that in exchange for a desired item, which was a cup of coffee in three of the five cases, the seller would transfer ownership of his immortal soul to the buyer, me. It took me only ten minutes to type up these one-page contracts. I used the legal jargon that was inescapable in prison and added in little bits of sarcasm to amuse myself.

All probably would have been well had not the contracts caught the attention of a fire-and-brimstone evangelical cop, who made sure that Genis was put away. As Genis observes, “Josef K. would have had an easier time getting acquitted from that kangaroo court.” I note as an aside that, of the five books that Genis was initially allowed to take with him, one was the work I would take if I were in similar straits: Shakespeare’s collected plays:

I decided to use the time to read the lesser-loved plays of Shakespeare, as well as a thick volume of science fiction for when I had no attention span. I consumed fifteen plays in fifteen days, enjoying Coriolanus and All’s Well That Ends Well, works I probably would never have read without having absolutely nothing else to do. I also did push-ups. Clips of a hundred between every scene at first, then after every act when I found the pace was unsustainable.

Ninety days in solitary—or in solitude with “a bunky”—was bad enough, but Genis also almost lost three months of “good time,” which is to say time he had built up for good behavior. Fortunately, this time he didn’t run up against any hardcore fundamentalists:

Luckily, when the day came for me to explain myself to a Time Allowance Committee in another prison, it happened to be Halloween, and the group’s members found the story humorous enough to ignore the penalty. I did not try to blame Thomas Mann or Nikolai Gogol for my misconduct, and went home on time.

Another work that Genis read in those final 90 days was Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, read while his schizophrenic roommate “raged on the cot beneath me.” Tomorrow I’ll report on the profound impact Proust’s novel had on him.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

Reading in Solitary Confinement

By Robin Bates | Published: May 15, 2023
Prisoner reading book in prison cell (Berlin 1895)

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Tuesday

I’ve been reporting on a book that Oberlin librarian Valerie Hotchkiss sent me, an account by former dope addict and now writer Daniel Genis about how he read 1000 books (1046 to be exact) while serving a ten-year prison sentence. For the most part, literature proved a godsend although there were some notable exceptions. But first to some of the positives.

For instance, literature helped Genis handle solitary confinement, which he experienced four times while in prison:

Torture is not illegal in the United States; it is used with abandon every time a prisoner is put iin solitary. I had the escape route of a literary bent, which allowed me to spend my box bits in the castle turrets of [Mervyn Peake’s fantasy series] Gormenghast and the drawing rooms of [Thackeray’s] Vanity Fair and on the tennis courts of Infinite Jest. Most of the boxed population, however, was barely literate. To this day I can summon the shrieking and howling, punctuated by teenage madmen banging the walls with their foreheads, that was the accompaniment to my reading.

Not all literature proved to be equally useful, as he discovered when, as a prison job, he served meals and facilitated discussions amongst “a crew of honest-to-God monsters.” These were men with severe mental disabilities, some of whom had committed horrendous crimes but whom he came to love. Novels didn’t help him better understand them, however:

Many of the works I consulted dealt with neurotic malaises that poorly corresponded with the real-life examples with whom I was eating my meals. Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities meandered over the gradual erosion of a sense of self, while The Brothers Karamazov explored murderous rages and how one can come to them quite rationally. Crime and Punishment provided the best justification for murder ever penned, and anyone who is convinced by its conclusion, and Raskolnikov’s inability to live with the crime, is too easily cajoled. I read de Sade to try to understand if there was truly any aesthetic to evil, and followed that up with Michel Houellebecq’s Elementary Particles. The French author made an argument for the humanity and even nobility of perversion. Antonin Artaud tried to do the same for cruelty, and the foibles of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi made a mocking sense of madness and evil that was delightful to read about but utterly unnerving when it was housed in the cell next to yours. The truth is that these sophisticated interrogations of psychosis provided little illumination regarding the mentally ill men around me. These were men who cut off the ears of their kidnapped victims rather than their own.

Genis mentions one book that got closer to the truth:

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next was a more accurate look into the world in which I was living, with its simpleminded obsessions, petty cruelties of the orderlies, and horror for the person with moments of lucidity interspersed with his blessed madness.

Fortunately, literature reminded Genis of the importance of humor and helped him hold on to a sense of play. As he notes, during his ten years in prison he “laughed as much as possible, feeling that every chuckle was a moment stolen back from the Department of Corrections.” He said he picked up the idea from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago,

where the innocent prisoners laugh at political jokes that are treacherous because of the informants all around, but laugh nevertheless to remind themselves that they are more than just zeks. Central European, as well as German, literature is remarkably suited to jailhouse reading. They have a native sense of absurdity, a condition I walked around in for years. Having seen men attempt suicide in toilet bowls and murders committed a dozen feet from me, what could I do but put on the same sardonic smile that I imagine Bruno Schulz wore when his brilliant brains were blown out by a callous SS officer. I loved his Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass….Perhaps it was the blood that soaked the soil of these authors’ heimland, but I also adored Hermann Hesse, especially The Glass Bead Game, better titled in the original as Das Glasperlenspiel. German writing on man and his place in this ungainly life of ours appealed to me when I was so lost in this one. Kafka’s Castle, with its cruel absurdities and nightmare bureaucracies, felt like an apt metaphor for prison life. I went further down this rabbit hole and discovered other Czech literature to revel in. Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk taught me how to laugh off the world life has to offer. Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts suggested that any oppressed underclass has a certain power.

But this sense of humor, which literature helped keep alive, also got Genis into trouble. Tomorrow I’ll share how a harmless joke, inspired by Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus and Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, led to Genis being locked up in solitary confinement for 90 days.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Frustrated Longing in Queen Charlotte

By Robin Bates | Published: May 14, 2023
Andoh, Gemmell as Danbury, Bridgerton in Queen Charlotte

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Monday

Julia and I are currently caught up in Queen Charlotte, the Netflix series about King George III’s wife. The series includes Violet Bridgerton from Netflix’s Bridgeton series, whom we see developing a moving friendship with Lady Danbury. These two elderly widows buck convention by talking about their sexual yearnings—this in a society where women aren’t supposed to have such yearnings and certainly not to talk about them. As I watched, I thought that they would have benefitted from the poetry of a near contemporary, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. (The story is partially set in 1760 while Montagu died in 1762.)

A skilled satirist, Montagu was an early feminist. She skewered the carpe diem message of “gather ye rosebuds while yet may” in a brilliant lyric “The Lover.” If I turn you down, she tells her wooer, it’s not because I’m cold (“a virgin in lead”) or prudish (“Nor is Sunday’s sermon so strong in my head”). Repeating some of the carpe diem poets’ familiar arguments, she says, “I know but too well how time flies along, /That we live but few years, and yet fewer are young.” But, she adds, “I hate to be cheated, and never will buy/ Long years of repentance for moments of joy.”

The two elderly widows in Queen Charlotte need not worry about rakish suitors, however, so I have two other poems that would do them good. One of them, written in Montagu’s later years, captures her sadness over frustrated longing, asking, “What cure for those who wish in vain?” While Montagu says she could give up desire for fame, wealth, and beauty, this longing is a grief she cannot “bear or cure.” “Clarinda” is a self-reference:

Exil’d, grown old, in Poverty and Pain;
Philosophy could calm the Poet’s breast:
But oh! what cure for those who wish in Vain!
What Lesson is it must restore my Rest?

Let others court the mighty Idol Fame;
Let all the World forget Clarinda’s Name,
I could lose all that Avarice requires
Of all that Beauty that the World admires,
This only grief I cannot bear or cure,
The firmness of my Soul gives way,
Some pitying Power behold what I endure

The other poem is angrier, written as it was in defense of a woman who was sued successfully by her husband because of an affair, even though he himself was a notorious womanizer. (The courts granted him control of her money.) “Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to Her Husband” is written from the wife’s point of view and was too controversial to be published. The part that applies to Ladies Bridgerton and Danbury is Mrs. Yonge’s declaration that she too has emotional needs:

Are we not formed with passions like your own?
Nature with equal fire our souls endued,
Our minds as haughty, and as warm our blood;
O’er the wide world your pleasures you pursue,
The change is justified by something new;
But we must sigh in silence—and be true.

And then there’s the anger at her hypocritical husband not allowing her to fulfill her own desires quietly and discreetly:

But you pursue me to this last retreat.
Dragged into light, my tender crime is shown
And every circumstance of fondness known.
Beneath the shelter of the law you stand,
And urge my ruin with a cruel hand…

Lady Bridgerton and Lady Danbury are never unfaithful to their husbands so that part of the poem doesn’t fit their situation. But both know well that society would mock them if their sexual desiring were “dragged into light.”

Poems like these would bolster the two women considerably.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

T.S. Eliot’s Cats and Jesus’s Sheep

By Robin Bates | Published: May 13, 2023
The Good Shepherd (c. 280-290)

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Spiritual Sunday

With our regular rector Rob Lamborn on sabbatical, we are fortunate to have a former English major taking his place. Fortunate, that is, because Scott Lee draws heavily on literature in what has been a series of memorable sermons.  Two weeks ago Scott used a poem from one of T.S. Eliot’s cat poems to explain Jesus’s parable about the shepherd who knows his sheep.

Here’s the passage that Scott made the subject of his sermon (John 10:1-10)

Jesus said, “Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.” Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.

So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

T. S. Eliot, Scott said, knew something about this business of secret names before quoting from the opening poem of Ole Possum’s Book of Practical Cats:

The Naming of Cats

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there’s the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey—
All of them sensible everyday names.
. . .
But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover—
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

After noting that each of us has our own “deep and inscrutable singular name,” Scott cited instances of such names in the Bible. For instance, after Jacob wrestled with the angel, he was told, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel”(1 Genesis 32:28). God told the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jeremiah 1:5a), and Isaiah reported, “The LORD called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me” (Isaiah 49:1b).

What is true of the prophets,” Scott said, is true of each of us. Indeed,

to God all hearts are open and all secrets are known – including that name that says who we really, really are. In what Jesus says to us this morning we have, most supremely, the words that assure us that we are known by Jesus, who says he is the kind of shepherd who “calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.” When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.

Notice, Scott continued, that

these sheep follow one whose voice they have learned to recognize. They follow as he leads the way, who shows them, shows us, the way to go; not like a New Zealand sheep dog nipping at us, frightening and coercing us to go where he wills, but a loving shepherd who calls us by name. So, whatever your secret name is – that is whoever deep, deep down in your very soul you are–Jesus knows you. Deep, deep down in that place where you are really, really real, Jesus knows your name.

Our true name, Scott explained, is the person “who is really, really you – without any pretending or posturing or concealing.” And even though

many, maybe even most of us, don’t know that secret name very well, just like Ole Possum’s cats we can come to know it and can revel deep inside with the joy of knowing that we are already known. It is a name we can come to know as we are willing to slow down, to sit in silence, to listen for the voice of God.

Scott concluded his sermon by listing some of the deep, inner, ineffable names by which we are known to God, including

Image of God
Crowned with glory and majesty
Wonderfully made
Bought with a price
The sheep of God’s pasture, Lamb of his flock
Justified
Saved
Redeemed
The image and the glory of God
Ambassador of God
Beloved of the Lord
Little lower than the angels
The apple of God’s eye
The temple of the Holy Spirit
The crown of creation

and the loveliest name of all:

Child of God

“That,” Scott said, “is who we are. We have only to be still and listen for the one who knows us and calls us each by name.”

Further note:

In a previous post  I reported on a presentation that Scott gave to our adult Sunday school where he cited Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats to capture how Jesus uses parables to get people to imagine the kingdom of God come to earth. Parables, Scott notes, speak to the human imagination, which Coleridge described as “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception” and “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

The Perfect Sonnet for Mother’s Day

By Robin Bates | Published: May 11, 2023
James Whistler, Icon of Mother’s Love

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Friday

With Mother’s Day coming up Sunday, here’s one of the best poems I know to honor the occasion. Imagine being eighty years old and receiving this sonnet from your daughter.

Sonnets Are Full of Love
By Christina Rossetti

Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome
      Has many sonnets: so here now shall be
   One sonnet more, a love sonnet, from me
To her whose heart is my heart’s quiet home,
   To my first Love, my Mother, on whose knee
I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome
   Whose service is my special dignity,
And she my loadstar while I go and come.
And so because you love me, and because
   I love you, Mother, I have woven a wreath
      Of rhymes wherewith to crown your honoured name:
      In you not fourscore years can dim the flame
Of love, whose blessed glow transcends the laws
   Of time and change and mortal life and death.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Reading Lit to Cope with Prison

By Robin Bates | Published: May 10, 2023
Daniel Genis, author of Sentence: Ten Years and a Thousand Books in Prison

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Thursday

After a pause, I’m back to reading Daniel Genis’s Sentence: Ten Years and a Thousand Books in Prison, which I’ve blogged about in a previous post. I am drawn to the book in part because I’ve often wondered whether literature would help me cope with imprisonment were I ever to be in that unfortunate situation. Genis talks about the different ways that fiction came to his aid while he was serving time as one who had mugged people (albeit non-violently) to pay for his drug addiction.

At one point, he talks about reading the literature of other cultures to better understand his fellow inmates. As he notes, sometimes he “allowed chance meetings to direct my choices”:

A Czech friend, in for drunkenly assaulting the love of his life, sent me down a Bohemian path beyond the Franz Kafka I already knew, loved, and practically lived. His sense of humor was in congruence with what I found in Bohumil Hrabal and Jaroslav Hašek; I Served the King of England and The God Soldier Švejk were companions that kept me in good humor, as their protagonists took misery and injustice with such aplomb. When Švejk is sent to jail, he is quite happy with the boards he has to sleep on, since it could have been the cold stone floor.

The prison’s Latino contingent, meanwhile, sent Genis to Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel GarcÍa Márquez. These he added to the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, the existential author who, like Kafka, “seemed to be the author of some of the absurdities of my condition.” Unfortunately, he never met a hispanophone prisoner with whom he could talk about literature.

He did find such a companion—at least for a while–in a Korean-American prisoner, who alerted him to fantasy writers Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman and to Haruki Murakimi’s novel 1Q84. Genis doesn’t mention what about these novelists and this novel he loved, but I can speculate. Perhaps he identified with Shadow in Gaiman’s American Gods, who spends time in jail and then goes on a spiritual quest to find meaning in life. Or with Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen, where secret forces control life on earth. In 1Q84, meanwhile, the major characters must find a way to escape a tyrannical cult, which sounds a lot like coping with prison life.

At one point, Genis does acknowledge that reading literature is “ultimately secondary to reading men themselves,” which sounds reasonable. I wouldn’t say see it as either/or, however. Reading books assisted him in “reading” his fellow inmates so that the two feed off of each other.

Genis’s reading also gives him a way of imagining his relationship with his fellows, who he talks of as “books bound in varying shades of human leather.” Comparing them and himself to Valentine Michael Smith, the enlightened alien in Robert Heinlein’s science fiction classic Stranger in a Strange Land, he says that “they made the small scope of human experience wider.”

Along with using literature to learn about other cultures, Genis used it to learn about his own, which is immigrant Russian Jew. Unobservant before he was imprisoned, he learned that there were certain benefits to identifying Jewish (kosher cooking is a step up from normal prison food) and so read novels to learn what it means to be Jewish. He notes that Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Joseph Heller “explained much of myself to me”:

It was in Portnoy’s Complaint, Herzog, and Good as Gold that I found evidence proving I was a Jew after all. The intellectual egotism I knew well in my father and better in myself was common to us. We were oversexed, simultaneously needy, and a bit predatory. I was of a gabby culture no matter how much I wished I was the strong, silent type, and I loved an argument while fearing an actual fight, just like the Jews is the brilliant literature that came out of Judaic America. The characters I found there were funny, chubby, horny, and hirsute. Rother’s clever, insecure protagonsits were me. “Too Jewish,” Jackie Mason might have said, but it was right for me. Portnoy’s complaints were familiar, even if I am a Soviet Jew, from another culture and another continent.

Expect to hear more about Genis’s prison reading program in future posts.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Thrown by Proust into the Past

By Robin Bates | Published: May 9, 2023
Paul Nadar, photo of Jeanne Pouquet, Proust’s model for Gilberte Swann

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Wednesday

An unexpected gift of reading Swann’s Way, my Lenten project, has been to find myself plunged into memories of my own childhood. In other words, I have been inspired to go searching for my own lost time. When the narrator describes a childhood friendship he develops with Swann’s daughter Gilberte, I think of Chris Mayfield.

Chris was a friend in third, fourth, and fifth grades when her father, Judd, was attending Sewanee’s School of Theology. Despite the relatively short time period, Chris occupies an outsized place in my imagination, just as Gilberte does in that of Proust’s narrator.

First to Gilberte, whom the narrator initially encounters only at a distance. Her father regularly dines with his family in Combray, their country home away from Paris, and the narrator first sees her when he is walking past the Swann house:

Suddenly I stood still, unable to move, as happens when something appears that requires not only our eyes to take it in, but involves a deeper kind of perception and takes possession of the whole of our being. A little girl, with fair, reddish hair, who appeared to be returning from a walk, and held a trowel in her hand, was looking at us, raising towards us a face powdered with pinkish freckles. 

When he hears Gilberte’s mother call out her name, he feels he has encountered “a talisman which might, perhaps, enable me some day to rediscover her whom its syllables had just endowed with a definite personality, whereas, a moment earlier, she had been only something vaguely seen.”

And indeed, he will later and unexpectedly encounter Gilberte in Paris when he is taken for walks on the Champs Elysée. She invites him to join in a game she is playing with friends, and he falls hopelessly in love with her. Or at least puppy love.

The love is not, nor could it be, reciprocated since the narrator so idealizes Gilberte. As a result, for every happy moment, there are many more unhappy ones. First, here’s a memory he treasures:

We got ready to play and, since this day which had begun so sadly was destined to end in joy, as I went up, before the game started, to the friend with the sharp voice whom I had heard, that first day, calling Gilberte by name, she said to me: “No, no, I’m sure you’d much rather be in Gilberte’s camp; besides, look, she’s signalling to you.” She was in fact summoning me to cross the snowy lawn to her camp, to ‘take the field,’ which the sun, by casting over it a rosy gleam, the metallic lustre of old and worn brocades, had turned into a Field of the Cloth of Gold.

Even this happy occasion, however, only serves to accentuate the unhappy ones. As the narrator observes, “This day, which I had begun with so many misgivings, was, as it happened, one of the few on which I was not unduly wretched.”

He’s wretched in part because the relationship is almost entirely one-sided. He reports being a little boy obsessed with someone who is not obsessed in return:

For, although I no longer thought, now, of anything save not to let a single day pass without seeing Gilberte…yet those moments which I spent in her company, for which I had waited with so much impatience all night and morning, for which I had quivered with excitement, to which I would have sacrificed everything else in the world, were by no means happy moments; well did I know it, for they were the only moments in my life on which I concentrated a scrupulous, undistracted attention, and yet I could not discover in them one atom of pleasure. All the time that I was away from Gilberte, I wanted to see her, because, having incessantly sought to form a mental picture of her, I was unable, in the end, to do so, and did not know exactly to what my love corresponded. Besides, she had never yet told me that she loved me. Far from it, she had often boasted that she knew other little boys whom she preferred to myself, that I was a good companion, with whom she was always willing to play, although I was too absent-minded, not attentive enough to the game. 

My own relationship with Chris was nothing like this. First of all, as we lived in the same wooden apartment building—situated where Sewanee’s library now stands—and as we were in the same class in school, I saw her all the time. In other words, I didn’t have to conjure her up in my imagination.

Nor did I idealize her, at least not then. Still, she was my best friend and I did find her remarkable. Here are a few memories that I have carried around with me in the 60 or so years since we were playmates:

–I remember her arguing loudly for women’s rights with some boy in fourth grade. I believe the issue was whether the Girl Scouts or the Boy Scouts were founded first, and while I remember asking her why this mattered, I see now she was pushing against boys with an entitled sense of their superiority. I’m sure she became a feminist, like the woman I myself married.

–I also remember her telling me, with horror in her voice, about how sometime in the future as a girl, she would start bleeding every month. She found this to be terribly unfair whereas I was grossed out and didn’t want to hear any more about it.

–Chris introduced me to the Narnia books—this when we were in third grade—and I can still remember her showing me The Silver Chair. She wanted us to put out our hands out and pray to Aslan, like Jill and Eustace, so that we would be transported to Narnia. I thought this was weird but went along.

–I believe she also introduced me to Tolkien, whose books would become the great love of my childhood (followed closely by Narnia). When I wrote to Tolkien and he sent me (along with his letter) a signature “to paste in one of your books,” I gave the signature to Chris.

–In fourth grade, when my mother was teaching our class French, Chris wrote a French version of Snow White for a play that our class performed. For having done so, she was offered any role she wanted and chose the wicked stepmother. She recognized that the stepmother was far more interesting than Snow White.

–Once, when we were building a shelter with sticks we found in the yard, I thought it would be more efficient to use boards from our jungle gym. Without consulting her, I replaced the sticks with boards. She was so furious with me that she wouldn’t speak to me for the rest of the day, and I have carried that lesson with me ever since. (It’s the process, not the final product, that’s important.)

–For some reason, Chris was always late to school. I remember one morning, however, when she was proud to have gotten there before me—only to feel upstaged when I came with the announcement that my youngest brother had been born overnight.

–I also remember envying her that she had a bicycle and I didn’t. We would walk home from school together—she walking her bicycle—but she would take off down a steep hill when we reached it and then see how far she could pedal up the ascent on the other side. Wanting to experience the same thrill, I borrowed her younger brother’s bicycle (without asking) and set off for that same hill—and had a painful crash when I hit a pothole.

I regard it as primarily my fault that we lost touch after she left Sewanee, her father having become a rector in a Pensacola, Florida church. I’m pretty sure she would have written if I had, but I’m a lousy correspondent and never followed up my vague yearnings to find out how her life had gone. I have no idea how to get in touch with her now.

Proust writes that “the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment,” but I don’t know if it is regret so much as curiosity that has me thinking of Chris now. If a reunion were ever to occur, I would not be sad that she didn’t live up to certain images I have of her because I think she would be far more interesting now than she was then. After all, she’s had a whole life of experiences, as have I. I’ve heard that she has three daughters and that she edited a collection of essays—Growing Up Southern—which means that it would be fascinating to learn about how the girl I knew became the woman she became.

I’m not sure how to make it happen. But I’m open to it if it does.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

On Trump, Achilles, and Retribution

By Robin Bates | Published: May 8, 2023

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Tuesday

My faculty book group concluded Homer’s Iliad yesterday with an examination of Priam’s meeting with Achilles to recover the body of his son. While we were discussing how revenge hollows out Achilles, I thought of Donald Trump openly promising retribution upon all who have slighted him.

In a recent appearance at Waco, Texas, an event that attracted white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other shady types, Donald Trump declared,

I am your warrior, I am your justice. For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution.

Trump is no Achilles, who is not only a great warrior but a gifted leader, but the thirst for revenge operates similarly on both men. But while I hold out little hope for Trump, Achilles reconnects with his humanity by the end of the epic.

First, however, Homer shows retribution’s corrosive effects. Following the death of his BFF Patroclus, Achilles goes on a killing rampage that eventually has his chariot throwing up a bloody spray:

…before great-hearted Achilleus the single-foot horses
trampled alike dead men and shields, and the axle under
the chariot was all splashed with blood and the rails which encircled
the chariot, struck by flying drops from the feet of the horses,
from the running rims of the wheels. The son of Peleus was straining
to win glory, his invincible hands spattered with bloody filth.

Wilfred Owen, incidentally, alludes to this passage in his great anti-war poem “Strange Meeting,” where he writes “when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels” to capture the horrors of World War I.

The killing spree continues. When one Trojan begs Achilles for mercy, the Greek hero not only ignores his pleas but derides and dishonors him:

Achilleus caught him by the foot and slung him into the river
to drift, and spoke winged words of vaunting derision over him:
‘Lie there now among the fish, who will lick the blood away
from your wound, and care nothing for you, nor will your mother
lay you on the death-bed and mourn over you, but Skamandros
will carry you spinning down to the wide bend of the salt water.
And a fish will break a ripple shuddering dark on the water
as he rises to feed upon the shining fat of Lykaon.

Even nature is appalled at what it is witnessing so that the Skamandros River rises up and threatens to drown Achilles.

We see how brutish Achilles has become in his final confrontation with Hektor. Before they fight, Hektor asks Achilles to agree that the victor will honor the other’s body. The imagery Achilles uses, however, reveals him to be animal-like:

Then looking darkly at him swift-footed Achilleus answered:
‘Hektor, argue me no agreements. I cannot forgive you.
As there are no trustworthy oaths between men and lions,
nor wolves and lambs have spirit that can be brought to agreement
but forever these hold feelings of hate for each other,
so there can be no love between you and me, nor shall there be
oaths between us, but one or the other must fall before then
to glut with his blood Ares the god who fights under the shield’s guard.

After killing Hektor, Achilles then drags him around the walls of Troy three times. Yet even this does not bring him peace so that, by the last book, he is thinking of further ways to enact revenge for the friend he has lost:

Remembering all these things he let fall the swelling tears, lying
sometimes along his side, sometimes on his back, and now again
prone on his face; then he would stand upright, and pace turning
in distraction along the beach of the sea, nor did dawn rising
escape him as she brightened across the sea and the beaches.
Then, when he had yoked running horses under the chariot
he would fasten Hektor behind the chariot, so as to drag him,
and draw him three times around the tomb of Menoitios’ fallen
son, then rest again in his shelter, and throw down the dead man
and leave him to lie sprawled on his face in the dust.

To end this madness and bring order back to humankind, Zeus sends down divine intermediaries. Priam is prompted to go and beg the body of his from the man who has killed him while Achilles is ordered to be merciful. At this point, as our discussion leader John Reishman pointed out, the gods withdraw from the scene, leaving it up to the two men to work things out. Priam wins Achilles over by prostrating himself before him and then asking him to think of his own father:

‘Achilleus like the gods, remember your father, one who
is of years like mine, and on the door-sill of sorrowful old age.
And they who dwell nearby encompass him and afflict him,
nor is there any to defend him against the wrath, the destruction.
Yet surely he, when he hears of you and that you are still living,
is gladdened within his heart and all his days he is hopeful
that he will see his beloved son come home from the Troad.

The plea gets through:

So he spoke, and stirred in the other a passion of grieving
for his own father. He took the old man’s hand and pushed him
gently away, and the two remembered, as Priam sat huddled  
at the feet of Achilleus and wept close for manslaughtering Hektor
and Achilleus wept now for his own father, now again
for Patroklos. The sound of their mourning moved in the house.

At that point they engage is very human actions, eating together and then retiring to sleep. The sacred rules of hospitality, which Paris violated when he ran off with Helen, have been restored:

Automedon took the bread and set it out on the table
in fair baskets, while Achilleus served the meats. And thereon
they put their hands to the good things that lay ready before them.
But when they had put aside their desire for eating and drinking,
Priam, son of Dardanos, gazed upon Achilleus, wondering
at his size and beauty, for he seemed like an outright vision
of gods. Achilleus in turn gazed on Dardanian Priam
and wondered, as he saw his brave looks and listened to him talking.

So are other sacred rituals. For instance, before Priam returns to Troy with Hektor’s body, Achilles asks him how long the father will need to mourn his son’s death (eleven days) and promises that the Greeks will hold off fighting until then.

John and others in our group noted that, in a world of cruelty and death, such rituals are essential if we are to rise above our animal selves and find meaning to our existence. Without them, the life of humans is (to quote Thomas Hobbes) “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

This is what awaits the United States if it allows Trump’s vengeful desires to win out–which is to say, if people with power act out their angry urges upon those who disagree with them. If Achilles and Priam, enemies with every reason to hate each other, can break bread together, then Democrats and Republicans should be able to do the same.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

A Child’s Vision of British Monarchs

By Robin Bates | Published: May 7, 2023
E. H. Shepard, “The King’s Breakfast”

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Monday

Following the coronation of King Charles III on Saturday, I found myself thinking about how literature has shaped my vision of British monarchs. Major influences have been the poetry of A.A. Milne, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and (later in life) Shakespeare’s history plays, which allow me to sort out the Lancasters and the Yorks in the War of the Roses.

Milne, however, seems to have left the deepest mark, and I can still recite both “King John’s Christmas” and “The King’s Breakfast.” Given how many people seem to be dismissing Charles as irrelevant or worse, perhaps the first of the two poems captures the way he is being treated:

King John was not a good man —
He had his little ways.
And sometimes no one spoke to him
For days and days and days.
And men who came across him,
When walking in the town,
Gave him a supercilious stare,
Or passed with noses in the air —
And bad King John stood dumbly there,
Blushing beneath his crown.

Why King John is bad Milne never explains, although as one of the villains in the Robin Hood saga—he opposes the return of the true king, his brother and crusader King Richard the Lion-Hearted—he has certainly gotten bad press.

Charles III has sometimes been described (perhaps unfairly, I don’t know) as overly concerned with trivial matters, which is the case with the monarch in “The King’s Breakfast.” Children like the bounciness of the poem, and they also relate to how the king is being told what he should want rather than what he actually wants. After the cows says he should prefer marmalade to the butter he asks for, he goes to bed in a pout:

The King said,
“Bother!”
And then he said,
“Oh, deary me!”
The King sobbed, “Oh, deary me!”
And went back to bed.
“Nobody,”
He whimpered,
“Could call me
A fussy man;
I only want
A little bit
Of butter for
My bread!”

As a child, I loved the image of the king sliding down the bannisters when he finally gets his wish:

The Queen took
The butter
And brought it to
His Majesty;
The King said,
“Butter, eh?”
And bounced out of bed.
“Nobody,” he said,
As he kissed her
Tenderly,
“Nobody,” he said,
As he slid down the banisters,
“Nobody,
My darling,
Could call me
A fussy man –

BUT
I do like a little bit of butter to my bread!”

Speaking of English kings, there’s a great mnemonic for remembering Britain’s monarchs going back to William the Conqueror. Richard III gets called “Dick the Bad”—I complained about this in a recent post—but it’s handy for getting everyone straight:

Willie Willie Harry Stee
Harry Dick John Harry three;
One two three Neds, Richard two
Harrys four five six….then who?
Edwards four five, Dick the bad,
Harrys (twain), Ned six (the lad);
Mary, Bessie, James you ken,
Then Charlie, Charlie, James again…
Will and Mary, Anna Gloria,
Georges four, Will four Victoria;
Edward seven next, and then
Came George the fifth in nineteen ten;
Ned the eighth soon abdicated
Then George six was coronated;
After which Elizabeth
And that’s all folks until her death.

Now we just have to figure out to get Charles III in the poem.

Past post
King Charles poems (Charles I and II)

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed