Today’s post will be short as I’m busy preparing for the community celebration of my mother’s life, which occurs Saturday. The high point for me will be when my daughter-in-law Betsy, who has a gorgeous voice, will sing the same French song that that she sang at my father’s memorial service nine years ago.
The song is Jacques Prévert’s “Two Snails on Their Way to a Funeral,” put to music by Jacques Kosma. My mother selected it for my father’s ceremony and loved Betsy’s performance—and because she, like him, was fluent in French and a fan of Prévert’s poetry, it seems right to sing it at her own ceremony.
The idea of having a drink and visiting Paris rather than spending time mourning is perfectly in keeping with how she lived her life (although she would choose white wine over the beer recommended in the poem). I imagine the moon in the poem watching over her as it watches over the two snails.
Song of Two Snails on Their Way to a Funeral By Jacques Prévert
Two snails were going to the funeral of a dead leaf. Their shells were shrouded in black, and they had wrapped crepe around their horns. They set out in the evening, one glorious autumn evening. Alas, when they arrived it was already spring. The leaves who once were dead had all sprung to life again. The two snails were very disappointed.
But then the sun, the sun said to them, “Take the time to sit awhile. Take a glass of beer if your heart tells you to. Take, if you like, the bus to Paris. It leaves this evening. You’ll see the sights. But don’t use up your time with mourning. I tell you, it darkens the white of your eye and makes you ugly. Stories of coffins aren’t very pretty. Take back your colors, the colors of life.” Then all the animals, the trees and the plants began to sing at the tops of their lungs. It was the true and living song, the song of summer. And they all began to drink and to clink their glasses. It was a glorious evening, a glorious summer evening, and the two snails went back home. They were moved, and very happy. They had had a lot to drink and they staggered a little bit, but the moon in the sky watched over them.
As relatives show up for my mother’s Saturday memorial service, we are sifting through masses of correspondence, financial records, income tax filings, old newspaper clippings, useless remote controls, outmoded technology (such as slide projectors, light tables, and manual typewriters), and tons of flotsam and jetsam. As we sort through it, keeping some and jettisoning some, I think of Krook’s Rag and Bones Shop in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. Here’s a description:
In one part of the window was a picture of a red paper mill at which a cart was unloading a quantity of sacks of old rags. In another was the inscription BONES BOUGHT. In another, KITCHEN-STUFF BOUGHT. In another, OLD IRON BOUGHT. In another, WASTE-PAPER BOUGHT. In another, LADIES’ AND GENTLEMEN’S WARDROBES BOUGHT. Everything seemed to be bought and nothing to be sold there. In all parts of the window were quantities of dirty bottles—blacking bottles, medicine bottles, ginger-beer and soda-water bottles, pickle bottles, wine bottles, ink bottles; I am reminded by mentioning the latter that the shop had in several little particulars the air of being in a legal neighbourhood and of being, as it were, a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation of the law. There were a great many ink bottles. There was a little tottering bench of shabby old volumes outside the door, labelled “Law Books, all at 9d.” Some of the inscriptions I have enumerated were written in law-hand, like the papers I had seen in Kenge and Carboy’s office and the letters I had so long received from the firm. Among them was one, in the same writing, having nothing to do with the business of the shop, but announcing that a respectable man aged forty-five wanted engrossing or copying to execute with neatness and dispatch: Address to Nemo, care of Mr. Krook, within. There were several second-hand bags, blue and red, hanging up. A little way within the shop-door lay heaps of old crackled parchment scrolls and discoloured and dog’s-eared law-papers. I could have fancied that all the rusty keys, of which there must have been hundreds huddled together as old iron, had once belonged to doors of rooms or strong chests in lawyers’ offices. The litter of rags tumbled partly into and partly out of a one-legged wooden scale, hanging without any counterpoise from a beam, might have been counsellors’ bands and gowns torn up. One had only to fancy, as Richard whispered to Ada and me while we all stood looking in, that yonder bones in a corner, piled together and picked very clean, were the bones of clients, to make the picture complete.
Apparently rag and bone men once literally collected bones, which were boiled down for glue, but the expression came to mean unwanted household items. While my mother differed from Krook in that she was a tidy lady—her checkbooks dating back to the early 1980s are all neatly filed—she was reluctant to throw anything away. Now her children are faced with doing so.
Chaotic though Krook’s Rag and Bone Shop may be, it has a copy of the most recent will in the Jarndyce v Jarndyce case. In other words, the nightmarish lawsuit that has ruined the lives of countless individuals could have been solved instantly had this actual will not been buried under mounds of stuff.
In our own searching, we have unearthed correspondence that my father had with Bill Moyer, Pete Seeger, Robert Penn Warren, poet Elizabeth Alexander, and others. We too have struck gold amidst all the junk.
It’s nothing that will have an impact on anything. But then, neither does the long-lost Jarndyce will. That’s because, by the time it’s brought to court to clear everything up, the case has just ended, legal legal expenses having exhausted all the money tied up in the lawsuit.
I’m not sure what the moral is here other than that the living should focus on living rather than be ruled by the dead hand of the past. My mother’s hand wasn’t heavy but we’re committed to throwing away anything that is of no use to anyone. Krook, by having dwelt so long in the junk of the past, spontaneously combusts—Dickens controversially insisted this was scientifically possible—and we’re determined not to let that happen to us.
Last week I commented on Katie Kontent’s love of Charles Dickens in the Amor Towles novel Rules of Civility. Today I enjoy how Towles has his protagonist turn to Agatha Christie to cope with the betrayal (or so she thinks) by the man whom she loves and who loves her.
The problem (spoiler alert!) is that he has deceived her about a wealthy benefactor, who has been making him wealthy in exchange for sex. When Katie learns that he is not her godson but actually her gigolo, she is shattered and turns to Christie’s crime novels for comfort. In a Christie novel, as in her own life, someone observant should be able to see through the deception. Katie has been so smitten, however, that she has missed clues that should have been obvious.
Kontent believes she find Christie’s novels satisfying because the plots are reassuring. Readers may think they are treading new ground, only to learn that the ground is thoroughly recognizable. As we read, we encounter our own predictable lives step by step:
You can make what claims you will about the psychological nuance of Proust or the narrative scope of Tolstoy, but you can’t argue that Mrs. Christie fails to please. Her books are tremendously satisfying.
Yes, they’re formulaic. But that’s one of the reasons they are so satisfying. With every character, every room, every murder weapon feeling at once newly crafted and familiar as rote (the role of the postimperialist uncle from India here being played by the spinster from South Wales, and the mismatched bookends standing in for the jar of fox poison on the upper shelf of the gardener’s shed), Mrs. Christie doles out her little surprises at the carefully calibrated pace of a nanny dispensing sweets to the children in her care.
The criticism that Christie’s plots are formulaic will be made by critic Edmund Wilson six years (in 1944) after Towles’s novel is set (1938):
Her writing is of a mawkishness and banality that seem to me literally impossible to read. You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out; and you cannot become interested in the characters, because they never can be allowed an existence of their own even in a flat two dimensions but have always to be contrived so that they can seem either reliable or sinister, depending on which quarter, at the moment, is to be baited for the reader’s suspicion … Mrs Christie, in proportion as she is more expert and concentrates more narrowly on the puzzle, has to eliminate human interest completely, or, rather, fill in the picture with what seems to me a distasteful parody of it. In this new novel, she has to provide herself with puppets who will be good for three stages of suspense: you must first wonder who is going to be murdered, you must then wonder who is committing the murders, and you must finally be unable to foresee which of two men the heroine will marry. It is all like a sleight-of-hand trick, in which the magician diverts your attention from the awkward or irrelevant movements that conceal the manipulation of the cards, and it may mildly entertain and astonish you, as such a sleight-of-hand performance may.
These are harsh words but they match my own assessment. I want more depth in my characters and more exploratory plots. It’s as though, in a Christie novel, a murder is not an earth-shattering event but a social faux pas. Or to put it another way, lapses in social etiquette are treated as earth-shattering events. Someone has upset society with an indecorous murder, and it takes a shrewd detective to restore order and return things to what they were.
In other words, Christie is not writing mind-bending literature.
But if you’re someone who has just had her heart broken, maybe you need reassurance that the world is, despite appearances, fair and just. At this juncture, Samuel Beckett’s theatre of the absurd (to choose someone who was writing at the time the novel is set) will not assure us that justice and fairness will prevail. As Kontent puts it,
But I think there is another reason [the novels] please—a reason that is at least as important, if not more so—and that is that in Agatha Christie’s universe everyone eventually gets what they deserve.
Inheritance or penury, love or loss, a blow to the head or the hangman’s noose, in the pages of Agatha Christie’s books men and women, whatever their ages, whatever their caste, are ultimately brought face-to-face with a destiny that suits them. Poirot and Marple are not really central characters in the traditional sense. They are simply the agencies of an intricate moral equilibrium that was established by the Primary mover at the dawn of time.
For the most part, in the course of our daily lives we abide the abundant evidence that no such universal justice exists. Like a cart horse heads down and our blinders in place, waiting patiently for the next cube of sugar. But there are certain times when chance suddenly provides the justice that Agatha Christies promise. We look around at the characters cast in our own lives—our heiresses and gardeners, our vicars and nannies, our late-arriving guests who are not exactly what they seem—and discover that before the end of the weekend all assembled will get their just deserts.
If Kontent turns to Agatha Christie when her feelings are in turmoil, one can’t altogether blame her. As it turns out, however, her own life (and Towles’s novel) are far less predictable than an Agatha Christie novel. Indeed, resolutions we expect do not come to pass. Tinker Gray, the man who breaks her heart, proves to have unexpected depth, and Kontent grows as she discovers this. Each must break out of conventional settings in order to step into their best selves.
Nuanced authors such as Proust and big-hearted novelists such as Tolstoy prepare Kontent much better for this soul-expanding growth than do Christie’s murder mysteries.
Yesterday Donald Trump’s niece applied L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz those Republican politicians who have been bashing the FBI while defending Donald Trump for having carried off state secrets. “Remember how aggressively the flying monkeys protected the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz? Then when she melted the fever broke?” she asked, before adding, “It’s gonna be like that.”
In other words, GOP politicians are going to defend the former president to the hilt until, suddenly, they’ll stop.
One shouldn’t be too confident in her prediction given how Trump, time and time again, has retained the loyalty of his followers when all appeared lost for him. Still, I turned to Baum’s book to see what fevers look like when they break.
It’s worth noting just how vicious the monkeys originally are. Think of them as those Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol and who continue to threaten violence. Upon the command of the Wicked Witch of the West, some of them
seized the Tin Woodman and carried him through the air until they were over a country thickly covered with sharp rocks. Here they dropped the poor Woodman, who fell a great distance to the rocks, where he lay so battered and dented that he could neither move nor groan.
Others of the Monkeys caught the Scarecrow, and with their long fingers pulled all of the straw out of his clothes and head. They made his hat and boots and clothes into a small bundle and threw it into the top branches of a tall tree.
The remaining Monkeys threw pieces of stout rope around the Lion and wound many coils about his body and head and legs, until he was unable to bite or scratch or struggle in any way. Then they lifted him up and flew away with him to the Witch’s castle, where he was placed in a small yard with a high iron fence around it, so that he could not escape.
They are fully prepared to destroy Dorothy as well but discover that she is supported by the kiss of the Good Witch of the North. They therefore capture her instead, carrying her off to the Wicked Witch.
After Dorothy destroys the witch, she learns that, by employing her golden cap, she too can command the monkeys. When they are carrying her and her companions back to the Emerald City, she learns their history from their leader. His description of their pre-captivity days may sound—to some members of the GOP—like the good old days before Trump:
“Once,” began the leader, “we were a free people, living happily in the great forest, flying from tree to tree, eating nuts and fruit, and doing just as we pleased without calling anybody master. Perhaps some of us were rather too full of mischief at times, flying down to pull the tails of the animals that had no wings, chasing birds, and throwing nuts at the people who walked in the forest. But we were careless and happy and full of fun, and enjoyed every minute of the day.
Then they play a trick on the fiancé of a sorceress and become members of the Trump cult captives of the golden cap.
Another group victimized by the Witch are the Winkies, who—like the rest of us—have had to suffer under a tyrannical reign. Here’s what happens after Dorothy frees them:
There was great rejoicing among the yellow Winkies, for they had been made to work hard during many years for the Wicked Witch, who had always treated them with great cruelty. They kept this day as a holiday, then and ever after, and spent the time in feasting and dancing.
Many of us thought we could start feasting and dancing when Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election. It appears our battle with the former president is not yet over.
After Indian novelist Salman Rushdie was stabbed Friday, many have reported on something he said in a speech before the PEN Club three months ago. As the New India Express summed it up, Rushdie stated that
a poem cannot stop a bullet, a novel cannot defuse a bomb, but we are not helpless, we can sing the truth and name the liars. We must tell better stories than the tyrants!
I’m one of Rushdie’s many fans, especially of Midnight’s Children. Today, however, I repost an essay I wrote on Rushdie’s debate with Islamic fundamentalism in his fantasy novel Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. There we see two medieval Islamic theologians squaring off, Ibn Rushd (a.k.a. Averroes) and al-Ghazali. Rushdie traces much of the religious infighting we are witnessing back to this famous debate, and the issues addressed apply not only to Muslims. It fact, they arise in all debates between Reason and Faith.
According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ibn Rushd was a 12th century philosopher who believed that God gave us Reason to understand creation. The 11th century philosopher Ghazali, on the other hand (this according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) saw God rather than natural law as the basis of reality. In other words, the debate was set within Islam between Reason and what Rushdie regards as blind faith.
Like Rushdie, I’m in the Ibn Rushd camp. In the Episcopal Church we sometimes say that, when we enter church, we don’t check our brains at the door. God gave us this great gift to use it. Or as the Internet Encyclopedia puts it,
Ibn Rushd strived to demonstrate that without engaging religion critically and philosophically, deeper meanings of the tradition can be lost, ultimately leading to deviant and incorrect understandings of the divine.
Of course, we must guard against the sin of pride, as John Wilmot warns us in Satyr against Reason and Mankind. We can become too full of ourselves if we don’t let God guide us. (See Frankenstein.)
In Rushdie’s fantasy, jinn awaken the corpses of Ibn Rushd and Ghazli, who debate from their crypts. The rational Ibn Rushd opens the debate:
“Let us think of the human race as if it were a single human being,” Ibn Rushd proposed. “A child understands nothing, and clings to faith because it lacks knowledge. The battle between reason and superstition may be seen as mankind’s long adolescence, and the triumph of reason will be its coming of age. It is not that God does not exist but that like any proud parent he awaits the day when his child can stand on its own two feet, make its own way in the world, and be free of its dependence upon him.”
The faith-based Ghazali pushes back:
“As long as you argue from God,” Ghazali replied, “as long as you feebly try to reconcile the rational and the scred, you will never defeat me. Why don’t you just admit you’re an unbeliever and we can take if from there. Observe who your descendants are, the godless scum of the West and East. Your words resonate only in the minds of kafirs [African blacks]. The followers of truth have forgotten you. The followers of truth know that it is reason and science that are the true juvenilia of the human mind. Faith is our gift from God and reason is our adolescent rebellion against it. When we are a;dult we will turn wholly to faith as we were born to do.”
Rushd counters that time is on his side:
“You will see, as time goes by,” said Ibn Rushd, “that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God’s worst advocates. It may take a thousand one years but in the end religion will shrivel away and only then will we begin to live in God’s truth.”
Once Rushd starts talking about the future, however, Ghazali feels on familiar ground:
“There,” said Ghazali,. “Good. Now, father of many bastards, you begin to speak like the blasphemer you are.” Then he turned to matters of eschatology, which, he said, was now his preferred topic, and he spoke for a long time about the end of days, with a kind of relish that puzzled and distressed Ibn Rushd.
And further on:
For what the living call life is a worthless triviality when compared to the life to come.
There are fundamentalist Christians who also believe this, making Ibn Rushd’s puzzlement relevant to more than just Muslims. As Ibn Rushd complains to the good jinn Dunia, Ghazali
believes that God has set out to destroy his creation, slowly, enigmatically, without explanation; to confuse Man into destroying himself. Ghazali faces that prospect with equanimity, and not only because he himself is already dead. For him, life on earth is just an anteroom, or a doorway. Eternity is the real world.
It so happens that Ghazali has released a dark jinn from a bottle and told him to instill fear in humans. Doing so, he believes, will bring them to God:
“Teach them,” Ghazali said, “Teach them the tongue of the divine Just-Is. The instruction should be intensive, severe, even, one could say, fearsome. Remember what I told you about fear. Fear is man’s fate. Man is born afraid, of the dark, of the unknown, of strangers of failure, and of women. Fear leads him towards faith, not as a cure for fear, but as an acceptance that the fear of God is the natural and proper condition of man’s lot. Teach them to fear the improper use of words. There is no crime the Almighty finds more unforgivable.”
“I can do that,” said Zummurud the Great. “They’ll be speaking my way soon enough.”
“Not yours,” Ghazali corrected him, but only mildly. When one was dealing with a Grand Ifrit one had to make certain allowances for his vast egotism.
Ghazali, however, has underestimated how much damage a fear-inducing jinn can do. In the book, he has literally let the genii out of the battle. Like many fundamentalists, Zummurud will indeed set himself up in place of God. In fact, he horrifies Ghazali when he manifests in the terrorism of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist groups:
As Ghazali would soon discover, however, sending the most potent of the dark jinn down the path of extreme violence could have results that alarmed the sender. The student soon surpassed the master.
Ibn Rushd is given one last chance for a counterargument, and it is a version of Rushdie’s comments at the PEN Club:
The enemy is stupid. That is ground for hope. There is no originality in tyrants, and they learn nothing from the demise of their precursors. They will be brutal and stifling and engender hatred and destroy what men love and that will defeat them. All important battles are, in the end, conflicts between hatred and love, and we must hold to the idea that love is stronger than hate.
It can be hard to hold on to that idea in the face of terrorism, including Friday night’s stabbing. That Rushdie continues to make public appearances, even with a fatwa hanging over his head, shows that he is willing take chances in order to get the word out. Since he appears to have survived the attack, I suspect we’ll hear a lot more from him, even with evil jinn goading on people who wish him dead.
I know it’s rather late in life, but I’m finally dipping my toes in the poetry of St. John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic famous for “the dark night of the soul.” It is in our darkest moments, spiritual guides tell us, that we find ourselves able to shed distractions find our way to God. Old identities are annihilated to make way for new.
John may have composed “On a Dark Night” when he was being imprisoned and tortured for his efforts to reform the Carmelite order. Although there’s no reference to literal imprisonment in the poem, John describes finding a secret ladder, down which he climbs disguised. His only light is “the light that burned in my heart.”
But because it leads him to reunite with Christ the beloved—the imagery appears to be taken from The Song of Solomon—the night becomes “more welcome than dawn”:
On a dark night By St. John of the Cross Trans. By Ken Krabbenhoft
On a dark night, afflicted and aflame with love, O joyful chance!, I went out unnoticed, my house lying silent at last.
In darkness and secure, down the secret ladder, disguised, O joyful chance!, in darkness, and shielded, my house lying silent at last,
one joyful night, in secret: no one was watching and I saw no other thing, my only light and guide the light that burned in my heart.
That same light led me more surely than the noonday sun to where one was waiting, the one I knew would come, where surely no one would find us.
O you my guide, the night, O night more welcome than dawn, night that drew together the loved one and the lover, each transformed into the other!
On my blossoming breast, kept untouched for him alone, there he fell asleep, and I caressed him while boughs of cedar stirred the air.
On the ramparts while I sat ruffling his hair, the air struck my neck with its gentle hand, leaving my senses suspended.
I stayed; I surrendered, resting my face on my Beloved. Nothing mattered. I left my cares forgotten among the lilies.
I love the tenderness of the imagery and am also struck by the unexpected reversal: the speaker is comforting Christ, not (as is customary) the other way around. Ultimately, however, there is no difference between the loved one and the lover. It is as though, in rendering himself vulnerable, Jesus is providing the speaker with the comfort that comes in comforting.
Malcolm prepares Birnam Wood attack against Macbeth
Friday
There’s been a Macbeth sighting in the public news recently. Reporting on the FBI descending upon Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence to seize illegally pilfered documents—a story that gets more interesting by the hour—former special agent for the FBI and now Yale lecturer Asha Ramgappa said that Attorney General Merrick Garland was employing a Birnam Wood approach. My instant response: “That’s really cool!”
It’s a perfectly applied allusion. Macbeth believes he will never have to account for his crimes because a supernatural apparition, conjured up by the witches, has informed him of the following:
Meanwhile Malcolm, like the FBI, is plotting his stealth attack—although the FBI at least let Trump’s Secret Service detail that it was coming (not to mention sending an earlier subpoena). Nevertheless, stealth from better than a full frontal assault, and stealth has been Garland’s M.O. He aims to catch Trump off guard:
When Birnam Wood begins to move, Macbeth goes into the same kind of denial we are seeing from Trump and his faithful followers. They just want to hear good news, not the truth. Although to their credit, they probably won’t hang truthtellers from trees until they starve to death:
I’ve compared Trump to Macbeth multiple times (for instance, here), but I haven’t focused on who or what would take him down. The unassuming Garland, who resembles the unassuming Malcolm, works for me.
Edward Henry Potthast, Children Playing at the Seashore
Thursday
My four Georgia grandchildren began school this week, which for much of the world sounds outlandish. Who outside of the United States starts school in the heart of the summer?
William Blake would certainly disapprove. Check out his “School Boy”:
I love to rise in a summer morn, When the birds sing on every tree; The distant huntsman winds his horn, And the skylark sings with me. O! what sweet company.
But to go to school in a summer morn O: it drives all joy away; Under a cruel eye outworn. The little ones spend the day. In sighing and dismay.
Ah! then at times I drooping sit. And spend many an anxious hour. Nor in my book can I take delight, Nor sit in learnings bower. Worn thro’ with the dreary shower.
How can the bird that is born for joy, Sit in a cage and sing. How can a child, when fears annoy, But droop his tender wing. And forget his youthful spring.
O! father & mother if buds are nipped, And blossoms blown away. And if the tender plants are stripped Of their joy in the springing day, By sorrow and cares dismay.
How shall the summer arise in joy Or the summer fruits appear, Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy Or bless the mellowing year. When the blasts of winter appear.
This isn’t Blake’s only poem involking the tragedy of birds in cages. In “Auguries of Innocence,” which is a set of Blakean proverbs, he writes,
A Robin Redbreast in a Cage Puts all Heaven in a Rage. A dove house fill’d with doves and pigeons Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.
Blighted minds, Blake fears, will grow up to become blasted adults. Best to have children sing with the summer skylark.
Periodically I share comic tweets from my youngest son’s twitter feed because I find them to be hilarious. The above image is Toby repurposing an image (or meme) that has been bouncing around the twitterverse. If you don’t pick up on the literary allusions, I explain them below.
In posting it, I’ve given you the punchline without the set-up. Since the joke in such twitter humor lies in how successfully one hijacks the original image for one’s own purposes, here’s the original image so that you can compare:
The original drew a lot of twitter criticism because it trades in stale gender stereotypes of women caring for others and men caring only for themselves. Furthermore, the cartoonist’s sense of women’s moral superiority rubbed a number of readers, not only men, the wrong way. The two figures have essentially been reduced to caricatures.
Toby’s repurposing not only makes the cartoon funnier—at least for literature nerds—but more complex. The woman’s new response (as I’m sure many of you know) references Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, the man’s T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Rossetti’s poem is a wild phantasmagoria involving forbidden fruit, which is a stand-in for (I simplify here) casting off all sexual restraint. Its fairy tale mysteriousness makes it one of my all-time favorite poems. Here’s are “the goblin men” tempting Laura and her sister:
Morning and evening Maids heard the goblins cry: “Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy: Apples and quinces, Lemons and oranges, Plump unpecked cherries Melons and raspberries, Bloom-down-cheeked peaches, Swart-headed mulberries, Wild free-born cranberries, Crab-apples, dewberries, Pine-apples, blackberries, Apricots, strawberries– All ripe together In summer weather—
Laura gives in to temptation, buys, indulges, and then loses all joy in life. Fortunately, her sister—who heroically resists goblin temptation—sacrifices herself, thereby saving Laura. The poem is a rich exploration of sexual repression and sublimation.
In Eliot’s poem, meanwhile, the socially insecure and uptight Prufrock, attempting always to be perfectly proper, occasionally imagines (but does no more than imagine) taking a daring action. One of these actions involves eating a peach:
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
Apparently parting his hair behind in the bohemian style and walking casually and freely upon the beach (in flannel trousers, no less!) are fairly daring for Prufrock, who normally dresses in the height of fashion. (Example: “My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, /My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin.”) Eating a peach, especially given Rossetti’s poem, hints at sensuality. Might he too shake off all restraint and, like Laura, indulge his repressed desires?
But no sooner has Prufrock mentioned stepping outside his comfort zone than, like earlier in the poem, he retreats back into it. Victorian sexual repression appears to be alive and well in Eliot’s 1915 poem. No sensual encounters with mermaids for him.
So look how Toby’s repurposing has made the original cartoon more interesting. Rather than a woman boasting her moral superiority over her selfish husband, we have a couple each wrestling with marital frustrations in very human ways. Both appear to worry that aging is robbing them of their youthful vitality and imagine doing something wild and forbidden. Perhaps each is contemplating an affair.
Perhaps they’ll never act upon their fantasies but instead, in Thoreau’s phrase, continue to live lives of quiet desperation. In any case, a peach is operating very much as it does in both Rossetti’s and Eliot’s poem, triggering thoughts that otherwise lie hidden beneath the surface. The woman may not be as different from her husband as she thinks.
Suddenly we have the kind of drama that D. H. Lawrence famously takes on, say in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Li-Young Lee’s seasonally appropriate “From Blossoms,” which owes a lot to Rossetti (and to Mary Oliver as well) also comes to mind:
From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches we bought from the boy at the bend in the road where we turned toward signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands, from sweet fellowship in the bins, comes nectar at the roadside, succulent peaches we devour, dusty skin and all, comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside, to carry within us an orchard, to eat not only the skin, but the shade, not only the sugar, but the days, to hold the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
There are few taste sensations more delectable than a fresh peach from Georgia, Toby’s home state. If you come across one, dare to eat it.
