How Weigh the Cost of the War Dead?

By Robin Bates | Published: May 29, 2022
Matthew Brady, The Dead of Antietam

Monday – Memorial Day

In observance of Memorial Day, I’m going with a John Greenleaf Whittier poem, written in the first full year of the Civil War (1862). The poem represents the interior struggle of someone who opposes war in general and yet sees the necessity of this one in particular. It is how I feel about Ukraine’s struggle against the Russian invasion—and for that matter, how I feel about the Civil War. Like Whittier, I believe that nothing short of war could have an ended a practice as evil and as deeply entrenched as slavery.

The names of the dead that Whittier mentions in the poem, I suspect, are young men that he either knew or who were from his community. In other words, war is not an abstraction to him. As an ardent abolitionist—one who was attacked by mobs and had his offices burned down for speaking against slavery in the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s—he saw the necessity of the conflict, but that doesn’t mean he overlooked the attendant horrors. When he mentions standing on a “stricken field,” it isn’t only the field that is stricken.

As he stands there he imagines being visited by two heavenly but discouraged watchers, the angels Peace and Freedom. Peace, who is losing hope, looks to Freedom for optimism, only to hear an exasperated Freedom complain about infighting and incompetence in the Union army, which he describes as “a senseless brawl.” Perhaps those more conversant with the Civil War than I am can tell me who he means by the one “who guards through love his ghastly throne” (cares more about his position than winning?); who is fearful of and overly reverential to the Confederates; and whose timidity is failing to speedily supply needed aid.

The war was going poorly for the Union in 1862—the tide would not turn until 1863 with Gettysburg—and Freedom tells the poet that this fight for freedom stands in marked contrast with heroic stands taken in the past, including: the reform-minded Husites against the forces of the established church (Ziska); the Haitian rebellion against the French (Toussaint); resistance to the French reign of terror (Sidney—Sydney Carton (?)—is guillotined in Tale of Two Cities); the forces of Parliament against the Royalists on the moor of Marston; George Washington in the Battle of Trenton after crossing the Delaware; and Piedmont freedom fighters against the Austro-Hungarian empire at the Battle of Magenta.

Peace, to reassure Freedom, counsels patience, to which Freedom gloomily replies, “Too late.” But then holy hope makes an entrance:

A rustling as of wings in flight,
An upward gleam of lessening white,
So passed the vision, sound and sight.

Asserting that “all is possible with God,” this vision alludes to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”: the image of the winepress that “must be trod” is (I think) an allusion to “He has trampled out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored”— which itself is an allusion to the Book of Revelation, which reads (14:19-20), ”So the angel swung his sickle to the earth and gathered the clusters from the vine of the earth, and threw them into the great wine press of the wrath of God.”

However necessary the war, however, the deaths themselves are terrible, and it is those who died that we memorialize today. As Peace puts it,

What price was Ellsworth’s, young and brave?
How weigh the gift that Lyon gave,
Or count the cost of Winthrop’s grave?

The Watchers
By John Greenleaf Whittier

Beside a stricken field I stood;
On the torn turf, on grass and wood,
Hung heavily the dew of blood.

Still in their fresh mounds lay the slain,
But all the air was quick with pain
And gusty sighs and tearful rain.

Two angels, each with drooping head
And folded wings and noiseless tread,
Watched by that valley of the dead.

The one, with forehead saintly bland
And lips of blessing, not command,
Leaned, weeping, on her olive wand.

The other’s brows were scarred and knit,
His restless eyes were watch-fires lit,
His hands for battle-gauntlets fit.

“How long!”—I knew the voice of Peace,
“Is there no respite? no release?
When shall the hopeless quarrel cease?

“O Lord, how long! One human soul
Is more than any parchment scroll,
Or any flag thy winds unroll.

“What price was Ellsworth’s, young and brave?
How weigh the gift that Lyon gave,
Or count the cost of Winthrop’s grave?

“O brother! if thine eye can see,
Tell how and when the end shall be,
What hope remains for thee and me.”

Then Freedom sternly said: “I shun
No strife nor pang beneath the sun,
When human rights are staked and won.

“I knelt with Ziska’s hunted flock,
I watched in Toussaint’s cell of rock,
I walked with Sidney to the block.

“The moor of Marston felt my tread,
Through Jersey snows the march I led,
My voice Magenta’s charges sped.

“But now, through weary day and night,
I watch a vague and aimless fight
For leave to strike one blow aright.

“On either side my foe they own:
One guards through love his ghastly throne,
And one through fear to reverence grown.

“Why wait we longer, mocked, betrayed,
By open foes, or those afraid
To speed thy coming through my aid?

“Why watch to see who win or fall?
I shake the dust against them all,
I leave them to their senseless brawl.”

“Nay,” Peace implored: “yet longer wait;
The doom is near, the stake is great:
God knoweth if it be too late.

“Still wait and watch; the way prepare
Where I with folded wings of prayer
May follow, weaponless and bare.”

“Too late!” the stern, sad voice replied,
“Too late!” its mournful echo sighed,
In low lament the answer died.

A rustling as of wings in flight,
An upward gleam of lessening white,
So passed the vision, sound and sight.

But round me, like a silver bell
Rung down the listening sky to tell
Of holy help, a sweet voice fell.

“Still hope and trust,” it sang; “the rod
Must fall, the wine-press must be trod,
But all is possible with God!”

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

Thy Will Be Done on Earth

By Robin Bates | Published: May 28, 2022
Wenzel Peter, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden

Spiritual Sunday

Among the many things that confuse me about rightwing Christian fundamentalists is their love of guns. “God, guns, and gays” was the way their voting obsessions were characterized for a while, and if “gay” is expanded to LBGTQ and if one adds abortion and Critical Race Theory to the list, it still pretty much captures many of them. As this weekend’s Christian-inflected NRA Convention reminded us, gun love continues as strong as ever, despite the recent mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde. How God and weapons of war can come together in a religion that supposedly has love at its core is unfathomable to me.

It starts to make more sense, however, if one sees gun-loving Christians driven by an Armageddon-level of fear. Sarah Posner, who studies the fundamentalist right, notes that many believe in the Great Replacement Theory, which white supremacists, rightwing authoritarians, pundits on Fox News (especially Tucker Carlson), and various mass killers (including the one in Buffalo) also ascribe to. As Posner explains,

Replacement theory is not so much a “theory” as a racist ideology used to stoke rage that white Christian culture is under threat by an invasion, engineered by Jews, of non-white foreigners who will both pollute and dilute a nation’s heritage and culture.

Connected with this rage is the conviction that the End Times are near. In a parody of Jesus’s message that love is more powerful than death, these believers think that they need not worry about either death or this world because God will lift them up as everyone else burns in a fiery conflagration. Among my many problems with this belief is how God gets used as a life insurance policy. We need not grapple with the problems of living because death will give us everything we need or want. Or to shift analogies, dismissal of this world’s importance seems to give one the freedom to abuse the world like a rental car: you think you can walk away from it, consequence free, when you’re done with it.

In my view, this is a misreading of Jesus’s mission, which was to establish the kingdom of heaven in life, not in death. Lucille Clifton ascribes to this mission in her final collection of poetry, entitled Book of Days (2006), in which she reflects on spiritual matters.

The book begins with a poem I considered sharing next week for Pentecost given its vision of a born-again relationship with the world. Like many of the lyrics in Book of Days, it is grounded in Garden of Eden imagery.

birth-day

today we are possible.

the morning, green and laundry-sweet,
opens itself and we enter
blind and mewling.

everything waits for us:

the snow kingdom
sparkling and silent
in its glacial cap,

the cane fields
shining and sweet
in the sun-drenched south.

as the day arrives
with all its clumsy blessings

what we will become
waits in us like an ache

Yet instead of cherishing this garden and its, we desecrate it. Or as Clifton puts it in “godspeak: out of paradise,”

what more could you ask than this
good earth, good sky?
you are like mad children
set in a good safe bed
who by morning
will have torn the crib apart
and be howling on a cold floor
among the ruins.

Along the same lines, in a very Dante-esque message, Clifton’s God points out that we don’t need Her to castigate us for our sins. We’re all having too much fun punishing each other, thank you very much:

godspeak

little ones
small and treacherous,
why would you believe that I punish you
who punish each other relentlessly
and with such enthusiasm

A passage from Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy comes to me when I read this poem:

There were more violent quarrels in our deeply religious home than in the home of a gangster, a burglar, or a prostitute, a fact which I used to hint gently to Granny and which did my cause no good. Granny bore the standard for God, but she was always fighting. The peace that passesunderstanding never dwelt with us. I, too, fought; but I fought because I felt I had to keep from being crushed, to fend off continuous attack. But Granny and Aunt Addie quarreled and fought not only with me, but with each other over minor points of religious doctrine, or over someimagined infraction of what they chose to call their moral code. Wherever I found religion in my life I found strife, the attempt of one individual or group to rule another in the name of God. The naked will to power seemed always to walk in the wake of a hymn.

Back to Clifton, who observes that we don’t need God to condemn us to hell. We’re already finding our way there on our own:

man-kind: digging a trench to hell

did i go deep enough?

i’ve exhausted the earth,
the plentiful garden,
the woman,
myself.

i’ve exhausted even the darkness now.

are you not done with me yet?

The last poem in Book of Days calls out—once again as though with the voice of God—those who indulge in righteous fury, even as they squander the precious gifts they have been given:

godspeak: kingdom come

you, with your point-blank fury,
what if i told you
this is all there ever was:
this earth, this garden, this woman,
this one precious, perishable kingdom.

Or to continue with the Jesus allusion, “thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (emphasis mine).

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

On Men and Novel Reading

By Robin Bates | Published: May 26, 2022
Albert Ranney Chewett, A Young Man Reading

Friday

I recently came across an article in GQ (Gentleman’s Quarterly, for those of you not in the know) contending that “men need to read more novels.” Needless to say, you’ll get no disagreement from me, although I do have some questions about the article.

Comparing reading lists with her boyfriend, Ash Sarkar was struck by the absence of “literary fiction”:

I flick through the tomes on his e-reader; it’s science fiction, politics, or politics in space. He’s halfway through Kim Stanley Robinson, following hot on the heels of China Mieville, Vincent Bevins, and Ursula K. Le Guin. He peers over at the pages of my Jane Austen, and wrinkles his nose. “It’s all chitter-chatter.” I ask him to explain what he means. “Well, there’s just a lot of talking.” He hunkers back down with the expanse of Red Mars and leaves me in the drawing rooms of Mansfield Park.

This surprises Sarkar because, as she notes, her boyfriend is not “a protein-powder-where-a-brain-should-be bro.” Indeed, she notes, “he bears all the hallmarks of a fully reconstructed man: NTS on the radio, bell hooks on the shelf, a yoga membership used at least thrice-weekly.” But, she adds,

literary fiction, as opposed to non-fiction, history, or sci-fi, just doesn’t interest him. Why prod the nooks and crannies of the human heart, when you can terraform planets, or dig into the CIA’s murky psy-ops in Indonesia

Now, it should be noted that, of the authors she sees on his e-reader, three of the four are novelists. Furthermore, one of those novelists—Ursula Le Guin—blazed new ground for science fiction by making it more about relationships than about Star Wars-style shootouts. The Left Hand of Darkness, to cite one of her novels, is a fascinating exploration of gender and gender roles. China Miéville’s Perdito State, meanwhile, is an amazing multicultural, steampunk  fantasy involving fallen angels, tech wizards, insect humanoids, and prickly cactus people. The fact that her boyfriend is reading Le Guin and Miéville is entirely consistent with his yoga-practicing ways. And probably a sign that he’s the right man for her.

Oh, and I wouldn’t use Mansfield Park as a marker. I love the novel but it’s literally the last Austen work I would recommend to get someone interested in the author.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more confused I am about what Sarkar means by “literary fiction.” It’s important to know since she makes a big deal of the fact that “men account for only 20% of the audience for literary fiction, despite making up half the population.” To support this stat, she observes that reading fiction itself is regarded as mostly a female occupation and has been seen as such for a long time. As she observes, in the past

men who spend too much time indoors, reading novels and living their lives vicariously through the trials and tribulations of others, were widely considered cucks. A man’s literary interest had to be justified by ambition, linked to his masculine capacity for action, or contextualised in real-world exploration.

I’ll agree that men are more likely than women to pooh-pooh fiction. We see this prejudice voiced in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, where the doltish John Thorpe expresses contempt for novel-reading. However, he makes an exception for Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1747) and Matthew Lewis’s gothic novel The Monk (1796), and then goes on to acknowledge that he also likes Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, the novel that has gripped protagonist Catherine:

“Have you ever read Udolpho, Mr. Thorpe?”

“Udolpho! Oh, Lord! Not I; I never read novels; I have something else to do.”

Catherine, humbled and ashamed, was going to apologize for her question, but he prevented her by saying, “Novels are all so full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except The Monk; I read that t’other day; but as for all the others, they are the stupidest things in creation.”

“I think you must like Udolpho, if you were to read it; it is so very interesting.”

“Not I, faith! No, if I read any, it shall be Mrs. Radcliffe’s; her novels are amusing enough; they are worth reading; some fun and nature in them.”

“Udolpho was written by Mrs. Radcliffe,” said Catherine, with some hesitation, from the fear of mortifying him.

It’s not that men don’t read novels. It’s just that real men are not afraid to admit they like reading. Henry Tilney proves to be the right man for Catherine by being an unapologetic Radcliffe fan. Catherine starts a conversation with Tilney expecting him to echo Thorpe’s contempt for novels:

“But you never read novels, I dare say?”

“Why not?”

“Because they are not clever enough for you—gentlemen read better books.”

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days—my hair standing on end the whole time.”

“Yes,” added Miss Tilney, “and I remember that you undertook to read it aloud to me, and that when I was called away for only five minutes to answer a note, instead of waiting for me, you took the volume into the Hermitage Walk, and I was obliged to stay till you had finished it.”

And later:

But I really thought before, young men despised novels amazingly.”

“It is amazingly; it may well suggest amazement if they do—for they read nearly as many as women. I myself have read hundreds and hundreds. Do not imagine that you can cope with me in a knowledge of Julias and Louisas. If we proceed to particulars, and engage in the never-ceasing inquiry of ‘Have you read this?’ and ‘Have you read that?’ I shall soon leave you [ ] far behind me…

But would Sarkar count gothics as literary fiction? Maybe the real difference she has in mind is not between novels and non-novels but novels filled with (in her boyfriend’s phrase) chitter chatter and novels that are more action oriented. Mysteries of Udolpho, in which the heroine is kidnapped and locked up in a castle, where she subsequently explores secret passageways and stumbles over dead bodies, is pretty action oriented. No wonder Thorpe and Tilney like it. Steven King’s gothics, which also have a large male following, also feature lots of action. If Sarkar were to contend that such novels don’t “prod the nooks and crannies of the human heart,” I would disagree. They just do it in a different way than chitter-chatter novels.

As proof, take the novel I’m currently listening to while driving, written by that most macho of writers, Ernest Hemingway. I can testify that For Whom the Bell Tolls is obsessed with issues of the human heart. True, its male characters don’t speak openly about their feelings—often, one has to read between the lines to figure out what they’re feeling—but we are given special insight thanks to their interior monologues. Here, for instance is protagonist Robert Jordan thinking of how he may not have much more time with his new-found love Maria, given that he’s supposed to blow up a bridge in two days and may well be killed, either in the attempt or trying to escape afterwards:

So if you love this girl as much as you say you do, you had better love her very hard and make up in intensity what the relation will lack in duration and in continuity. Do you hear that? In the old days people devoted a lifetime to it. And now when you have found it if you get two nights you wonder where all the luck came from. Two nights. Two nights to love, honor and cherish. For better and for worse. In sickness and in death. No that wasn’t it. In sickness and in health. Till death do us part. In two nights. Much more than likely. Much more than likely…

And further on:

If this was how it was then this was how it was. But there was no law that made him say he liked it. I did not know that I could ever feel what I have felt, he thought. Nor that this could happen to me. I would like to have it for my whole life. You will, the other part of him said. You will. You have it now and that is all your whole life is; now. There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.

Through such interior monologues, then, Hemingway shows there are lots of feelings. Sarkar doesn’t acknowledge this, however, claiming that men miss out when they don’t read “literary fiction”:

But the thing is, women don’t just read novels to understand ourselves: we read them to understand each other. Literary fiction is how we can study human frailty, making the world of feelings, friendship, love, personal dilemma, rivalry, money and psychology rich terrain for exploration. 

I guess all I’m saying is that Sarkar doesn’t realize how much of the above is going on in the kind of genres that guys are traditionally drawn to. Emotional insight can be gleaned from Hemingway no less than from Jane Austen, from sci-fi authors like Ursula Le Guin no less than from some of the authors Sarkar admires (Bernardine Evaristo, Anna Burns, Marian Keyes,Torrey Peters, Candice Carty-Williams). Sarkar appears to think that, if people aren’t talking openly and constantly about their feelings, the feelings aren’t there.

She’s far from the only one who thinks this way. Indeed, the fact that we now associate melodrama with female emotion and think that emotion is absent from the action-adventure genre shows how we underestimate the latter. Men’s action films are filled with feelings. They may be stereotypical guy feelings but they are feelings nonetheless.

Indeed, if one looks at the history of melodrama in Hollywood, one discovers that it is only in recent decades that the genre has become associated with women’s pictures (“women’s weepies,” as they used to be called). Steve Neale, an expert on Hollywood genres, notes that, from around 1910 to about 1970, when people in the film industry said “melodrama,” they meant

action thrillers with fast-paced narratives , episodic story-lines featuring violence, suspense and death-defying stunts. Dastardly villains, heroines in peril and daring adventurous heroes populated these films, their actions speaking louder than their words. Cowboy films, gangster films, crime thrillers and horror movies were typically labelled “melodramas” in the trade press. (Melodrama, Mercer and Shingler, p.6).

In fact, what we now call action-adventure movies were sometimes referred to as “mellers,” Neale says. It’s only since the 1970s that our associations with melodrama have done a complete 180.

I suspect that, contra Sarkar, men are still reading plenty of novels—certainly her boyfriend is—and are using them to process any number of significant issues in their lives. Of course, I’m in favor of them reading even more than they do, and I’d like them to read chitter-chatter novels as well as spy novels and westerns. In fact, I think that both men and women should branch out since, the more variety they encounter, the richer their lives will become.

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

Massacre Machinery & Slaughterhouse 5

By Robin Bates | Published: May 25, 2022
Ruins of Dresden in Slaughterhouse Five

Thursday

Chuck Augello, who publishes a website exploring the life and art of Kurt Vonnegut (The Daily Vonnegut), has a Literary Hub article on what the American satirist thought about guns. As a survivor of the firebombing of Dresden, where he was a German prisoner-of-war, Vonnegut had a front-row seat to murderous violence. There was no strategic reason for bombing Dresden, by the way. The British targeted the city, which at the time was filled with refugees as well as prisoners of war, in retaliation for the bombing of London.

Augello notes that, though Vonnegut was an avid collector of old guns before he went to war, that was no longer the case when he returned. His anti-gun sentiments show up in a number of works.

For instance, in his 1970 play Happy Birthday, Wanda June,

Vonnegut satirizes the Hemingway model of masculinity through the main character, Harold Ryan, a World War II vet, big-game hunter, and avid gun enthusiast. At the end of the Third Act, Ryan bellows, “Whoever has the gun … gets to tell everybody else exactly what to do. It’s the American way.” Ryan’s New York apartment is decorated with the pelts of African animals killed for sport. He goads his young son to load a rifle so he can protect his mother from Ryan himself, calling the rifle “an iron penis three feet long.” Throughout the play Ryan’s aggressive “manliness” is symptomatic of a hatred of women born of sexual inadequacy.

In his novel Deadeye Dick (1982), meanwhile, the head of an Ohio arms manufacturing plants boasts “how natural and beautiful it is for Americans to have love affairs with guns.”

In other words, Vonnegut clearly saw how the worship of guns is integrally tied to toxic masculinity.

And then there is this editorial that appears in Vonnegut’s novel Deadeye Dick (not one of his better ones), written by the husband of a pregnant woman who has been killed by someone’s careless use of a gun:

My wife has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance: that something die. There is evil for you. We cannot get rid of mankind’s fleetingly wicked wishes. We can get rid of the machines that make them come true. I give you a holy word: DISARM.

In one of his own editorials, Vonnetut criticized NRA spokesman Charlton Heston, who celebrated Americans’ accessibility to guns. Vonnegut wrote,

I feel exactly as though he were praising the germs of some loathsome disease, since guns in civilian hands, whether accidental or on purpose, kill so many of us day after day.

It is through Slaughterhouse Five, however, that Vonnegut delivers his most sustained and powerful attack on what he calls “massacre machinery.” Vonnegut used the novel to process his PTSD (see my report of a student’s senior project on the issue), having his protagonist shut down his emotions in the face of the horrors he witnesses. It could be argued that much of America now shuts down its emotions in the face of each new mass shooting.

The phrase “so it goes” captures how Pilgrim shuts down, resorting to the fatalism of a resigned shrug. The words essentially signal that we are helpless and nothing can be done. Slaughterhouse Five appeared early in 1969 and shows Pilgrim using his coping mechanism to process the horrors of 1968:

Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.

Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.

And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.

Like Pilgrim, we think we can no more end gun violence than Pilgrim can prevent the British from firebombing Dresden. Of course, this fatalism becomes an out for politicians in the pocket of the gun lobby, who would like us to think that nothing can in fact be done. In other words, they exploit our trauma to line their pockets.

For his part, to lessen the unending cycle of gun violence Pilgrim engages in a significant non-action:

My father died many years ago now—of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.

In his introductory chapter to Pilgrim’s story, Vonnegut informs us that he passed along something far more life affirming than firearms to his own sons:

I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.

I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.

Allow me to express my own contempt—and my horror—at all those who have made America a haven for gun violence. They may wear $1000 suits, but they have blood on their hands.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

A Poem for Uvalde’s Grieving Families

By Robin Bates | Published: May 24, 2022
Van Gogh, Sorrowing Old Man

Wednesday

As I think of those families mourning those children who died in the Uvalde Elementary School mass shooting, I find myself remembering, as though it were yesterday, when I lost my own son. Poetry could not stop the pain, but poetry gave me the only words that came anywhere close to addressing my agony. I therefore send out this Conrad Aiken poem to all who are experiencing wrenching heartbreak tonight.

God bless you all.

Bread and Music
By Conrad Aiken

Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread;
Now that I am without you, all is desolate;
All that was once so beautiful is dead.

Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, belovèd,
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.

For it was in my heart you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes;
And in my heart they will remember always,—
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Which Poets Should Ukraine Honor?

By Robin Bates | Published: May 23, 2022
Vasyl Stus, Ukrainian poet who died in a Soviet prison

Tuesday

Along with Ukraine’s horrific war with Russia, there’s a secondary battle unfolding in the country, one involving statues and street names honoring poets. Trivial though that may sound in light of Russia’s genocidal slaughter, as I’ve been noting it’s actually attempted genocide in a different key. Having seen literature used to erase their identity, the Ukrainians are now taking shots at monuments to that literature.

I’ve pointed out (here and here) that Russia has long exploited the fact that some world-class Ukrainian authors have chosen to write in Russian, thereby affirming (in Russian eyes) that Ukrainians are really Russians—and that therefore Russian interference in Ukraine is justified.

There have Ukrainian authors, on the other hand, who have chosen to write in Ukrainian, thereby legitimating both the language and the nation that speaks it. If Ukrainians honor the poet Shevchenko, including with a large statue that overlooks Karkhiv’s city center, it’s because they say that, through his Ukrainian language poetry, he dreamed the nation into existence.

So welcome to the battle of memorials.

A Washington Post article notes some of the Russian memorials, including one in a city now known world-wide as the site of horrific Russian war crimes against the civilian population:

Reminders of Russian and Soviet dominion can be found almost everywhere in Ukraine. A street in Bucha is named after Alexander Pushkin, a poet revered by Russians as their Shakespeare. The 19th-century novelist Nikolai Gogol — who was born in Ukraine but claimed by Russia as one of its greatest authors because he wrote in Russian — overlooks one of Dnipro’s main boulevards from a pedestal. 

As I noted in a recent post, Gogol’s decision to write in Russian was a big deal for Russian émigré Vladimir Nabokov, showing the nature of Russian literary chauvinism. Here’s from an article that appeared in Literary Hub:

“We must thank fate (and the author’s thirst for universal fame) for his not having turned to the Ukrainian dialect as a medium of expression, because then all would have been lost,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov in his 1959 study, Gogol. He continued: “When I want a good nightmare, I imagine Gogol penning in Little Russian dialect volume after volume….” What he calls the “Little Russian dialect” is none other than the Ukrainian language, which is about as close to Russian as Spanish is to Italian.

I’ve also written on a Josef Brodsky poem that, part satirically but maybe not entirely, contrasts the “bullshitter” Shevchenko with the immortal Pushkin.

And then there is Bulgakov, author of The Master and Margarita and The Heart of a Dog, who though born in Kyiv chose to write in Russian. Not only that, the Post reports, but “he maligned Ukraine’s national aspirations and had the gall to disparage its mother tongue.”

So now Ukrainians are looking at what to do with the various memorials. According to the Post article, there is a new social media tool called “What did Pushkin do to you?” One types in a name and gets mini-tutorials on why various Russian figures should stay or go:

Tap Puskhin’s name, and the Telegram bot spits out a verdict writing him off as a “Russian chauvinist” who glorified czarist imperialism. It says much the same about Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Apparently the tool grants passes to Tolstoy and Chekhov “because of their humane and empathetic approach to almost everything they wrote.”

According to Yaroslav Hrytsak, director of the Institute for Historical Studies of Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Russian and Soviet markers have functioned as “a kind of imperial wallpaper” in Ukraine:

“I accepted it as a dull Soviet landscape,” Hrytsak said. It was as if street by street and square by square, the Soviet Union had all but lobotomized historical memory in Ukraine and other former republics, he said.

“Ukrainians were denied any kind of memory that would make them different from Russians,” Hrytsak said. “The politics of the Soviet Union toward Ukraine was a total amnesia.”

So if Pushkin and Gogol come down, who will take their place. One possibility mentioned in the article is Vasyl Semenovych Stus, a poet who died in a Soviet gulag while on a hunger strike in 1985. I did some googling on Stus and found a fascinating piece on him in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Here’s some material about him:

Following his arrest for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” in 1972, Stus spent nine months in custody awaiting his trial. During this period he composed a major collection, Time of Creativity (later to become part of Palimpsests), the title of which communicates the choice he had made: to keep creating against all odds. In almost complete solitude, broken only by interrogations, Stus wrote more than 300 original poems and translated more than 100 poems by Goethe. The dates under Stus’s poems show that he sought to write at least one poem a day; some days he wrote as many as five.

And then there’s this:

The Jewish-Ukrainian dissident Semen Gluzman, then a young psychiatrist and now the head of Ukraine’s Association of Psychiatrists, spent 20 days with Stus in custody. On first entering the cell, he saw a 30-year-old man bent over a bedside table with a book of poetry and an open dictionary. In the “feast of conversations” that followed, Stus would speak at length about philosophy and literature, recite poetry from memory, and read out his translations of Rainer Maria Rilke. The cell Gluzman shared with Stus came to seem spacious and full of light, because the poet refused to allow it to suffocate their minds. “Over these prison walls, over this sorrow, / and over Sophia’s bell tower my spirit lifts me,” he wrote while imprisoned in the KGB building located jarringly close to the ancient Saint Sophia’s Cathedral in Kyiv. In another poem from this period he extends his spiritual flight, transcending the earthly realm altogether:

Earth is too small
for the spirit. Too cramped
for the dishevelled soul is this planet,
where dwelling is but hunching (the trenches
of self-elevations)

Where did Stus find the strength for this flight? The answer lies in one of his neologisms: samosoboiunapovnennia, “filling-oneself-with-oneself.” Stus uses the word in the very first poem he wrote in captivity, which starts with a star shining at dawn and ends with an epiphany: “for living means not overcoming limits / but adjusting and filling-oneself-with-oneself.”

I’m not saying that Stus is as great as Gogol—but Ukrainians undoubtedly are inspired by how he faces up to adversity, of which they are getting more than their share at the moment. And just because Shevchenko is not as great as Pushkin doesn’t mean that he can’t be more meaningful. After all, if Russians have used Pushkin as a cultural club, then they have already drained him of his poetry.

There may come a time, when Ukraine is free of the invaders and has reestablished itself as a multi-lingual republic, where Ukrainians will find their way back to Russian-language literature. But right now what they need are poets who speak to them in Ukrainian with a Ukrainian desire for freedom.

Further note: I see fro Stus’s Wikipedia page that there are, in fact, many Ukrainian streets named after him. No surprise there. And those street names, it appears, will be there to stay.

And to emphasize just how important such street naming is–and how Russians desecrate Pushkin and others when they use them to support imperial ambitions–here’s a report from Julia Davis, who monitors Russian television:

More genocidal talk on Russian state TV: falsely claiming that Ukrainians are just Russians who need to be reminded that the Ukrainian language, history and religion are “made up,” that Russian troops in Ukraine are fighting for “their land” and Russia is planning to never leave.

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

Austen on the Simple Country Life

By Robin Bates | Published: May 22, 2022
Thomas Gainsborough, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (1749)

Monday

We’re in full strawberry season at the moment, and the strawberry coffee cake that my wife made for yesterday’s church coffee hour—with strawberries she picked from the college farm—disappeared in an instant. Thoughts of literary strawberries took me to Jane Austen’s Emma, although when I first looked at the strawberry picking scene, I was confused. It shows up in a long paragraph that opens in one vein and ends in another. Something seems amiss.

I have learned to always trust Austen, however. If a sentence seems awkward, there is always—and I mean always—a reason for it. And so it has proved to be the case here.

Mrs. Elton, Emma’s social-climbing foil, has wheedled an invitation out of Mr. Knightley to invite people over to pick strawberries from his premier beds. Being a gentleman, Knightley can’t refuse, although he insists on doing it on his terms. Despite Mrs. Elton’s suggestion, there will be no outdoor picnic. They will pick strawberries and then go indoors for a luncheon.

Austen is taking a dig at idyllic views of nature here. Mrs. Elton has visions of a pastoral setting, with herself carrying around a basket with pink ribbons, riding in on a picturesque donkey, and, Marie-Antoinette like, playing the dairymaid—or in this case, the strawberry picker. Austen is always suspicious of such shallow Romanticism. .

In any event, Mrs. Elton at least gets a Donwell Abbey invitation and comes prepared to lord it over everyone.

And Emma? She’s looking forward to seeing Donwell again. Her sister has married Knightley’s brother, and her long friendship with Knightley makes her proud to have such an acquaintance. Upon arriving, she takes a tour of the grounds.

The paragraph that confused me begins with her reflections and ends with an account of the strawberry picking, conveyed entirely through snippets of Mrs. Elton’s non-stop comments. Here the paragraph, along with the lead in:

It was so long since Emma had been at the Abbey, that as soon as she was satisfied of her father’s comfort, she was glad to leave him, and look around her; eager to refresh and correct her memory with more particular observation, more exact understanding of a house and grounds which must ever be so interesting to her and all her family.

She felt all the honest pride and complacency which her alliance with the present and future proprietor could fairly warrant, as she viewed the respectable size and style of the building, its suitable, becoming, characteristic situation, low and sheltered—its ample gardens stretching down to meadows washed by a stream, of which the Abbey, with all the old neglect of prospect, had scarcely a sight—and its abundance of timber in rows and avenues, which neither fashion nor extravagance had rooted up.—The house was larger than Hartfield, and totally unlike it, covering a good deal of ground, rambling and irregular, with many comfortable, and one or two handsome rooms.—It was just what it ought to be, and it looked what it was—and Emma felt an increasing respect for it, as the residence of a family of such true gentility, untainted in blood and understanding.—Some faults of temper John Knightley had; but Isabella had connected herself unexceptionably. She had given them neither men, nor names, nor places, that could raise a blush. These were pleasant feelings, and she walked about and indulged them till it was necessary to do as the others did, and collect round the strawberry-beds.—The whole party were assembled, excepting Frank Churchill, who was expected every moment from Richmond; and Mrs. Elton, in all her apparatus of happiness, her large bonnet and her basket, was very ready to lead the way in gathering, accepting, or talking—strawberries, and only strawberries, could now be thought or spoken of.—“The best fruit in England—every body’s favorite—always wholesome.—These the finest beds and finest sorts.—Delightful to gather for one’s self—the only way of really enjoying them.—Morning decidedly the best time—never tired—every sort good—hautboy infinitely superior—no comparison—the others hardly eatable—hautboys very scarce—Chili preferred—white wood finest flavour of all—price of strawberries in London—abundance about Bristol—Maple Grove—cultivation—beds when to be renewed—gardeners thinking exactly different—no general rule—gardeners never to be put out of their way—delicious fruit—only too rich to be eaten much of—inferior to cherries—currants more refreshing—only objection to gathering strawberries the stooping—glaring sun—tired to death—could bear it no longer—must go and sit in the shade.”

I fully expect the paragraph to end at the point where Emma joins the party, but it continues on. I think it does so because Austen wants the two halves to clash with each other. In the first half, the sentences are ordered and sedate. The abbey and its grounds reflect the good taste of its owner.

Mrs. Elton is an entirely different matter. She begins with inane small talk but, because she can never talk about something without making demeaning comparisons, she very soon launches into talking about different kinds of strawberries and which are superior—hautboys, Chilean strawberries, or white wood strawberries. Somehow her monologue gets around, as it always does, to her hometown of Maple Grove. Then, next thing we know, she’s putting down strawberries in favor of cherries, which then give way to currants. Then she’s complaining about stooping and the heat—so much for idyllic nature—and by the end she is “tired to death—could bear it no longer—must go and sit in the shade.”

So what’s Austen up to? As a vulgar social climber in the presence of gentry (Knightley, Emma), Mrs. Elton is the worm in the apple, the toad in the garden. Austen doesn’t say so directly, but Mrs. Elton’s strawberry monologue is just more proof that she lacks the class of her social superiors.

My favorite example of the contrast, which is a constant theme in the novel, appears in the final paragraph when Mrs. Elton lets us know what she thinks of Emma’s wedding dress—which she knows about because her husband performs the ceremony:

The wedding was very much like other weddings, where the parties have no taste for finery or parade; and Mrs. Elton, from the particulars detailed by her husband, thought it all extremely shabby, and very inferior to her own.—“Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business!

We can imagine that her own wedding was gaudy and tasteless in the extreme.

Note how Austen carves up Mrs. Elton by showing, not telling. Years ago I remember reading an article discussing Austen’s indirect style. The author, whose name I can’t remember, noted that Gustave Flaubert is often given credit for indirect style in Madame Bovary, which appeared in 1856. Emma appeared in 1815, over 40 years earlier, and the article’s point was that she should be given more credit as a revolutionary stylist. After all, most authors of the time—including Austen in earlier novels and even occasionally in Emma—intervene in their novels. In any event, Austen is breaking new stylistic ground here.

I have to say that Austen’s distaste for social climbers, which shows up in most of her novels, is my least favorite thing about her. Think Isabella Thorpe, Lucy Steele, Caroline Bingley, Mrs. Elton, and Mrs. Clay. (Only Mansfield Park, with its focus on the young, rich, and restless, seems to lack a social climber.) Austen’s distaste, I think, comes from her anxiety about her own class status, which was perilously close to middle class. But putting that aside, she certainly knows how to wield her satiric pen when creating such figures.

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

I Am the Blossom Pressed in the Book

By Robin Bates | Published: May 21, 2022

Spiritual Sunday

For today’s poem I share Jane Kenyon’s “Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks.” In the poem, she alludes to Julian of Norwich’s revelations, which sent me back to the medieval mystic’s Revelations of Divine Love.

In 1373 Julian, who appeared to be on her deathbed (she had already received extreme unction) had a series of 15 revelations (or shewings) of Jesus and a 16th on the following night. She spent the rest of her life exploring those revelations. Here’s a sampling:

And in the same Shewing suddenly the Trinity fulfilled my heart most of joy. And so I understood it shall be in heaven without end to all that shall come there. For the Trinity is God: God is the Trinity; the Trinity is our Maker and Keeper, the Trinity is our everlasting love and everlasting joy and bliss, by our Lord Jesus Christ. And this was shewed in the First [Shewing] and in all: for where Jesus appeareth, the blessed Trinity is understood, as to my sight.

In her poem, Kenyon appears to capture moments, brief but intense, that speak to her of spirit. Each has its own resonance and each will hit you differently. The love, however, is always there. 

It will overwhelm you when you think to call its name.

Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks
By Jane Kenyon

I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years. . . .

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper….

When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me. . . .
I am food on the prisoner’s plate. . . .

I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills. . . .

I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden. . . .

I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge. . . .

I am the heart contracted by joy. . . .
the longest hair, white
before the rest. . . .

I am there in the basket of fruit
presented to the widow. . . .

I am the musk rose opening
unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. . . .

I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name. . . .

Further thought: I can’t believe that I didn’t mention Julian’s hazelnut, which is the real inspiration for this poem. All the items that Kenyon mentions in her poem are her versions of that hazelnut. Here’s the passage:

And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.

In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Literary Tweeting

By Robin Bates | Published: May 19, 2022
Franz Snyders, Concert of Birds (1601)

Friday

From time to time, I share literary tweets composed by my son Tobias Wilson-Bates (@PhDhurtBrain), who is in the Georgia Gwinnett College English Department. I sometimes joke that I rebelled against my father by specializing in British rather than French literature while Toby rebelled against me by specializing in 19th century British literature whereas I specialized in 18th century British literature. In any event, Toby has far surpassed his father in his mastery of the twitter format, composing hundreds of insightful and often very funny tweets. My favorites, of course, are those that deal with literature, and I share some of my recent favorites today. (You can read previous posts on Toby’s tweets here and here.)

Samuel Johnson, an inveterate procrastinator, once said that procrastination can take the form of intense busyness. Here’s Toby’s tweet on the subject:

Sherlock Holmes (*entering my house): a very clean home
Me: thanks!
Holmes: avoiding work deadlines I presume?
Me: YOU BASTARD!

On creative writing, in two tweets:

Dickens skewers Chancery Court in Bleak House, but if you think about it, as a young court reporter Dickens probably drew an enormous amount of insight into plot and character watching hundreds of hours of depositions.

What I’m saying is that MFA programs should offer a class that’s just sitting in on local court cases for a semester.

Dickens gets a lot of play in Toby’s tweets. Here are some more instances:

Every single other Dickens title makes more sense than Our Mutual Friend.

From now on just assigning the first two serial fragments of novels and then telling students they need to register for my classes next semester to get the rest.

Dickens writing from female perspective: she’s so mysterious! her manners are a carefully orchestrated symphony of etiquette.
Bronte writing from a male perspective: this asshole is so insufferably full of shit you would not believe it.

Here he summarizes T.S. Eliot:

The Work of TS Eliot: or, how to be unhappy but in a useless way

Toby started a twitter thread on literary figures and characters who complain a lot:

the popularity of complaining about how other people are complaining makes me think we’re still in the fin de siècle somehow

Matthew Arnold was the all-time king of “my complaining is better than your complaining”

Pater was just telling everyone to complain harder

Picture of Dorian Gray is 90% just people complaining and then some quick murders to finish up

to be fair, Hamlet is also mostly just one guy complaining about things

I was touched that Toby in one series of tweets mentioned my inspiration for his name. It’s about Tristram Shandy’s gentle Uncle Toby refusing to hurt even a fly:

Tristram Shandy has arguably the best line in English literature: “Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape;—go poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?—This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.”

Really every scene with Uncle Toby is solid gold.

And, yes, I was named after this specific character, so what?

Uncle Toby, having sustained a wound to his groin in the Battle of Namur, becomes obsessed with recreating the fortifications where it happened. I like Toby’s comparison:

building a full scale model of the singular moment of your trauma is basically what writing an academic monograph is

And then there’s the widow who has her eyes on innocent Uncle Toby but who first wants to find out—without asking directly, of course—whether his war wound has incapacitated him:

I will never stop laughing at the “I can show you just the spot where I was wounded!” widow scene. The most perfect punchline in literature.

Toby gets some good laughs out of the anti-technology Luddites (who hated what factories were doing to working men and women) and Lord Byron, who from his elite position claimed to be a rebel:

Luddites: we need a few clear political mandates to convince parliament our cause is just!
Byron: good! and then we’ll seduce their wives and beautiful half sisters!!
Luddites: ok, ok, who let Byron into the meeting???

The following two tweets were composed in the final week of the semester when Toby was madly grading student essays:

Testing out a new hypothesis that the work will eventually give up and complete itself. More later.

*David Attenborough voice: the Work continues to rest lazily in its natural habitat, but don’t let its relaxed demeanor lull you, it is capable of doubling or tripling at a moment’s notice.

Since Toby handles twitter so beautifully, he of course has been interested in Elon Musk’s on-again, off-again attempt to acquire the company:

For all you Bleak House lovers, if the Twitter sale goes sideways the whole thing is ending up in Chancery, well known for handling complicated cases quickly 😉😉😉

 Toby’s dissertation was on how notions of time changed over the course of the 19th century, influencing literature in the process. As a result, meditations on time often show up in his tweets, as here:

Rime of the Ancient Mariner is actually a poem about what it feels like to go to one of those Time Share pitches.

Also, aren’t we all already Sharing Time??? Deeply troubling to consider the alternative 🤔

 And here:

My proudest teaching moment is probably still teaching Alice in Wonderland in a class on temporality, where I sent the whole class off on a journey across campus and when they came back we sat there for a second and then a student said, “that was a waste of Time, wasn’t it?”

I almost fell out of my seat cheering. Credit hours are already a nonsense structure.

On James Joyce:

Editor: (*laughing) no, but for real, if we publish this the way it is right now, you’re gonna sound like a real pervert

James Joyce: *looks directly into the camera

 On Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe is like 4 entirely different books in one, but the surrealist horror of a single human footprint is the best one.

 For those Thomas Gray fans:

WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME THAT THOMAS GRAY WAS BURIED IN A HUMBLE COUNTRY CHURCHYARD?!

Thomas Gray: I AM the mute inglorious Milton I want to see in the world.

For John Steinbeck fans:

Grapes of Wrath was the original Squid Games.

Steinbeck and [George] Eliot both feel like they do this thing where the plotting, in almost the gentlest way, leads you to the cruelest outcome

A note to his almost 4500 twitter followers:

Greetings, new Followers! Just know that by Following me, you implicitly endorse Middlemarch as better than Moby Dick and that the 19th century extends from 1780-1914. I don’t make the rules (except for this rule that I just made up)

A response to a tweet by one Jack Corbett:

Jack Corbett: Enough content creators, now time for content destroyers.

Toby: Alexander Pope’s entire career in a tweet

On William Morris:

Last time I taught News from Nowhere, I feel like I didn’t do it justice, but this time the students are so into it that the artisanal revolution might happen after class gets out.

On selling one’s soul:

Mephistopheles: I will offer you anythi-
Me: a sabbatical.
Mephistopheles: I mean, you could have infinit-
*sound of door slamming, tires squeal into the distance

On teaching literature:

just reiterating that it’s a crime against me that I can’t assign 16 novels for one semester in an undergraduate English class. incredibly difficult choosing only a couple to teach!

Response to a game invented by (I think) one Dustin Friedman:

Ok. I’ll play.
Victorian authors edition
Favorite of all time: George Eliot
Dislike: Carlyle. The answer is Carlyle.
Grew on me: Wilkie Collins (brought sexy back)
Most overrated: this feels like a trick
Most underrated: Richard Marsh
The G.O.A.T.: Wilde & Eliot tie

And finally, a twitter thread about combining 19th century novels:

all film adaptations should retroactively produce extended universe structures. fairly clear that Lucy Snow [from Villette] tracks down Wickham in order to resolve that situation for Elizabeth Bennet, and then tells Darcy not to say a word.

Jane Eyre’s rich uncle mysteriously dying at a convenient time is the work of Van Helsing.

Thornton [in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South] goes bankrupt because the wildly profitable speculation in America is investing in Magwitch’s sheep fortune.

Basil leaves Miss Havisham at the altar, so it’s kind of not too bad when Dorian kills him.

Heathcliff turns out to be the love child of the Monster and Elizabeth Lavenza [Dr. Frankenstein’s wife]

this also makes the scene where he tries to dig up Catherine’s grave make a new kind of sense

After Frankenstein dies, Walton goes on to become the Ancient Mariner.

All I’m saying is that comic nerds have had their decade in the sun. RELEASE THE LITERATURE NERDS!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments closed