David Matthews

This has not exactly gone well. Twenty-two modest essays posted in just over seven months, one in the past six weeks, more or less, and it is a reach to call some of them essays. I go at it, with pen and paper at my desk, with my journal in coffee shops, at the computer, but not much happens. A pack of half-baked, vague notions float around, tentative beginnings with tentative titles such as “The Fetishization of the Center,” “Running and Psychobabble,” “The Intellectual and Income,” yet to attain coherence and too often failing to rise above the level of pedestrian drivel.

Vain enough to hope for better from myself, I continue to hack away. There was a time when I could take an opening like the one here and just run with it. Where I ended up might be no great shakes, and maybe that is part of what is going on now. I am less willing to settle for what is no great shakes. Mon dieu, I have standards, perhaps even ambition, and the consequence is a kind of paralysis, a profound sense of inadequacy, when those standards can never be lived up to and the ambition is beyond reach.

As often, I think of Dylan, this time “tryin’ to get to heaven / before they close the door.” I am trying to paint my masterpiece before the time runs out, before the rivers run dry, a canvas spread against night sky dusted with stars, beyond reach, beyond grasp, far from me as as time or love. I am realistic enough to acknowledge that age likely has something to do with this state of affairs. The capacity to go at the vision with focus and intensity for extended periods is diminished, to say the least, from whatever physiological and mind-bent causes.

The barrenness of the last several winters is the source of much distress. My work cycles are based on the school year. Summer has never been a productive season. I look to late September and early October for renewal of the spark, as the light softens and days grow a little shorter, the evenings cooler, and here in Portland on into October as the rainy season sets in. Last winter’s Brontë project was fruitful and rewarding, but even that was dug out in fits and starts and stands in bleak isolation. In the aftermath summer’s lethargy is more than little annoying.

I must grant that this summer much focus and energy is devoted to training to take a crack at the San Antonio Marathon with Big T in November. However much I relish running at a level that I have not known in years, it comes at the expense of the scholarly and creative work. The trade-off bugs me to the extent that it prolongs an already extended period of discontent with an aspect of life that is at the heart of what is best in me. Is it good or bad that running myself to near exhaustion is my primary means of satisfaction these days?

Some may think it kind of nutty for a fellow approaching advanced middle age to be taking a crack at his first marathon, and maybe it is. On the other hand, it is fairly amazing what those of us fortunate to be in reasonably good health at an age older than dirt can do. Arthur Webb at 67 (maybe 68 by now) has run 12 consecutive (maybe 13 by now) Badwater Ultramarathons. The Badwater is a 135 mile race through Death Valley for which Webb prepares by, among other things, running 15 miles in too-small shoes to loosen the nails on his big toes so he can yank them out with pliers because they tend to crack and bleed as the toes swell during the race. (Chris Ballard, Defying Death Valley, Sports Illustrated, 31 August 2009). Okay, so we are not necessarily talking about good sense here. Take the case of legendary grappler Abdullah the Butcher, who at 73, or maybe 69, still hoists his considerable girth, some 400 pounds, into the squared circle to wreak mayhem and stab opponents with his signature dinner fork, which after the match he offers to sell for ten dollars. (Mike Tierney, Still the Butcher After All These Years, New York Times, 26 July 2010). I do not know that it speaks all that well of me, but I find something kind of cool in this.

At one end of a spectrum there is William Wordsworth, who wrote his best poetry by his mid-thirties. He continued to write poems for the remainder of his life, and much of what he wrote on the back end of quite a long life was not very good. At the other stands Picasso. “In the main, Picasso only got better. That’s the take-away from the staggering exhibition of Picasso’s late paintings and prints at the Gagosian Gallery.” (Roberta Smith, Going All Out, Right to the End, New York Times, 16 April 2009, a review of a show featuring paintings from the last decade of Picasso’s life). Smith’s take is that the Gagosian Gallery show proves that “Picasso didn’t skitter irretrievably into an abyss of kitsch, incoherence or irrelevance after this or that high-water mark.” Rather, he “painted, as usual, for his life.”

When I come to the end of an essay such as this one, I must ask if this is anything more than narcissistic whining? Is it, maybe, honest self-appraisal, legitimate criticism from which something of value might be derived? Perhaps in the end you never know, no more than you know if a poem you have written is really good or not. In the end I come down on the side of the latter, that there is something of worth here, fully aware that this may just be a lot of wishful thinking.

The marathon course in San Antonio is billed as flat and fast, a good one to try for a PR or to qualify for Boston. Big T will be looking for a fast time. I will be looking to find the finish line. From where I stand now, I can conceive doing it. The image that torches my heart, the one that reaches into my spirit, is of Picasso painting for his life right up to the end. I can conceive that too, putting brush to canvas stroke after stroke, putting one foot in front of the other, putting one word down on the page after the other, mile after mile, page after page, and finding delight there.

David :: Jul.27.2010 :: Literary :: No Comments »

Robert B. Parker (1932–2010) in his 1971 doctoral dissertation “The Violent Hero, Wilderness Hero, and the Urban Reality: A Study of the Private Eye in the Novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald” placed the hard-boiled private detective in a romantic tradition dating back to James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, a tradition Parker  himself was soon to revitalize with the appearance of Spenser in The Godwulf Manuscript (1973).

Hammett’s Sam Spade, Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and Macdonald’s Lew Archer were cool, flippant, and irreverent, governed by an idiosyncratic code of honor and the determination to live life as much on their own terms as one is able. They were outsiders and loners whose moral compass not infrequently put them at odds with conventional morality, mores, and the letter of the law in a world where the cops were apt to be crooked, the politicians seedy and corrupt, and society’s upper crust decadent and depraved. They were more likely to show their toughness by taking a beating than by handing one out, and they solved cases less by clever deduction than by poking around the hornet’s nest until they stirred up a denouement.

After Spenser came a new golden era of such finely drawn figures as James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux, Walter Moseley’s Easy Rawlins, Sara Paretsky’s V I Warshawksi, Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone, and Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole, to name but a few. Burke, Paretsky, et al., may not rank with the very best novelists of their generation, but they may not be so far behind either. As Parker noted (Charles L.P. Silet, Robert B. Parker Author Interview on Writing Mysteries: “Five Pages a Day”), the quality of the writing is what matters, and this is limited only by the author’s talent and ability, not by genre. I would quibble with Parker only by way of extrapolating that the best writers transcend genre, as for instance, Dostoevsky with Crime and Punishment, Robert Stone with DogSoldiers, and Cormac McCarthy with No Country for Old Men.

Some of the real action these days is in Europe, especially Scandinavia, where the protagonist is likely to be a cop but remains an individualistic outsider, bound by a stringent code, whatever his quirks, flaws, and all too human foibles. To my mind the best of them writing today, American or European, are Ian Rankin, whose John Rebus prowls the streets and pubs of Edinburgh while listening to music played in the dorms when I was in college 1970–1973, and Henning Mankell from Sweden, who I think of not as a writer of mysteries or thrillers but simply a novelist, and quite a good one.

On the cusp of the 21st century, Carol O’Connell debuted Kathy Mallory in the 1994 novel Mallory’s Oracle. Some ten years later Mallory was joined by her Swedish spiritual cousin Lisbeth Salander, one of the two protagonists of Steig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy now all the rage, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest.

Mallory was abandoned on the streets of New York at the age of six, cared for to the extent she was cared for at all by prostitutes, a child sociopath living by her wits and thievery until taken in by a cop and his wife who became her foster parents. She followed in the footsteps of her foster father and became a police detective, but she plays by her rules. Mallory’s maxim is, “If you didn’t catch me, I didn’t do it.” She instinctively bucks authority, and authority puts up with her only because she gets results. She has no scruples about breaking the rules if that is what it takes to get them.

Salander’s childhood was every bit as harrowing than Mallory’s. A victim of rape and abuse, with a history of violence, she is determined by the authorities to be mentally incompetent and placed under a guardianship. Her first guardian is a kindly man who is sympathetic to this strange, clearly troubled and just as clearly very bright girl with multiple piercings and tattoos, but when he suffers a stroke, he is replaced by a middle-aged weasel who does not have her best interests at heart, for which Salander will see that he receives his just desserts. She supplements the Taser and mace packed in her knapsack with a hammer on the principle that you can take care of a lot of problems with a good hammer.

Mallory and Salander are women others cross only at their peril. They are loners who keep a small circle of friends at arm’s length while remaining in their way fiercely devoted and protective. They are not inclined to explain themselves, much apologize for anything. To be open is to be vulnerable, and vulnerability must be guarded against at all costs.

Both women are freakishly intelligent, among other things world-class computer hackers. Mallory is drop-dead beautiful, Salander less conventionally attractive but no less desirable. If all this seems to require a bit much suspension of disbelief, well that rather goes with the territory. Spade, Marlowe, and Archer routinely shrug off the effects of being sapped and pistol whipped with no more than a passing headache, while Korean War vet Spenser beats the crap out of hooligans half his age and enjoys terrific sex with the love of his life, lovely übershrink Susan Silverman, in some pretty contemporary settings.

What Parker traced to Natty Bumppo is itself part of a broader tradition of the Romantic outsider who sometimes flaunts and is sometimes merely indifferent to the conventions and approval of society. The Byronic hero, bohemian artist, and hard-boiled detective are not so distant kin. They may be jaded and made cynical by the ways of man and the world. The hard edge they adopt to protect themselves from being hurt may condemn them to turn away from those for whom they care most (Spenser being a notable exception to this last trait). Yet they are after their fashion idealists too who take their stand against hypocrisy and philistinism and evildoers who are rich, respected, powerful, and seemingly immune to justice. They never give up on the quest for authenticity, whatever its cost and whether it is to be had in the end or not. They are heroes for a dark time.

postscript 1 June 2010

A better title, or perhaps a subtitle, for this one would be “notes toward a future essay.” Or perhaps multiple essays, considering themes of kinship between the hard-boiled detective and the bohemian and of Mallory and Salander as distinctive variations on the type, just as Spenser represented a substantive variation on his predeccesors. To do that I would have to go back and reread some Hammett, Chandler, McDonald, and O’Connell, at the minimum. That would be fun but would require time at the expense of other projects. Maybe some day.

David :: May.31.2010 :: Literary :: No Comments »

“Only Crime and Punishment was read during 1866, only it was spoken about by lovers of literature, who often complained about the stifling power of the novel and the painful impression it left, which caused people with strong nerves almost to become ill and forced those with weak ones to give up reading it altogether.” — Nikolay Strakhov, Russian philosopher of Dostoevsky’s era (quoted in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky:  A Writer in His Time, Princeton University Press, 2010. pp. 462, 463)

Can we imagine a novel having such an impact in our time? Can we imagine someone even saying such a thing about a contemporary novel, justified or not?

David :: May.24.2010 :: Literary :: 1 Comment »

How might I respond if a poet I respected, to whom I sent a sample of my work and solicited critical advice, opined that literature cannot be the business of my life and it ought not to be? Might I be prickly? Defensive? Crushed? Granted that hypotheticals can only be answered provisionally, it is a safe bet that I would not be thrilled. No matter the de rigueur request for an honest critique, we tend to hope the judgment will be that we are gifted and should pursue the art as if called to it by divine dispensation.

Many years ago the editor of a magazine to which I submitted a small selection of poems replied with a handwritten rejection note that went on for several pages whose gist was that some people are well advised to stick to reading poetry and not try writing it. The poems must have made some impression to prompt the handwritten note instead of the standard rejection slip; perhaps he thought them not just bad, but real bad, bad beyond redemption. I have no record of the poems that comprised the submission, only the recollection that they were dark in theme and, in fairness to the editor, in all likelihood pretty poor. My knee-jerk reaction was something along the lines of “screw him.” Soon enough I concluded that the poems should never have seen the light of day, in that my critic was correct, and the decision to submit to that particular publication was a poor one. My spirit was not scarred. I kept writing.

Robert Southey (1774–1843) was an English poet of the Romantic school who in his youth palled around with the likes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, with Coleridge was involved in Sir Humphrey Davy’s early experiments with nitrous oxide, and was  appointed Poet Laureate in 1813, though only after Sir Walter Scott refused the post (bio notes lazily lifted from Wikipedia). In December 1836 twenty-year-old Charlotte Brontë wrote to Southey asking his opinion of some verses she sent him. This would be akin, I suppose, to my writing in 1972 to someone of the stature of, say, Robert Lowell, had I been presumptuous enough to do so. I can scarcely imagine it; nor can I imagine that I had at that time any writings that might have elicited even a lukewarm reception.

No mention of Southey should pass without noting Byron’s dedication to “Don Juan”:

I
Bob Southey! You’re a poet — Poet-laureate,
And representative of all the race,
Although ’tis true that you turned out a Tory at
Last, — yours has lately been a common case, —
And now, my Epic Renegade! what are ye at?
With all the Lakers, in and out of place?
A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye
Like ‘four and twenty Blackbirds in a pye;

III
You, Bob! are rather insolent, you know,
At being disappointed in your wish
To supersede all warblers here below,
And be the only Blackbird in the dish;
And then you overstrain yourself, or so
And tumble downward like the flying fish
Gasping on deck, because you soar too high, Bob,
And fall, for lack of mositure quite a-dry, Bob!

Ah, but I digress. Southey wrote for the most part encouragingly to Charlotte:

You evidently possess & in no inconsiderable degree what Wordsworth calls ‘the faculty of Verse’…[but] Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: & it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it…But do not suppose that I disparage the gift wh[ich] you possess…Write poetry for its own sake, not in a spirit of emulation, & not with a view to celebrity: the less you aim at that, the more likely you will be to deserve, & finally to obtain it.”

Notwithstanding the statement that literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life and ought not to be, however unexceptionable that view may have been at the time it was expressed, Southey’s words offer more than faint praise and the  sound advice to write poetry for its own sake, not in the spirit of emulation and not with a view to celebrity, and trust that recognition will come in due course.

Charlotte in her reply notes that on first reading Southey’s letter she

felt only shame, and a regret that I had ever ventured to trouble you with my crude rhapsody…but after I had thought a little and read it again and again ― the prospect seemed to clear. You do not forbid me to write; you do not say that what I write is utterly destitute of merit; you only warn me against the folly of neglecting real duties, for the sake of imaginative pleasures — of writing for the love of fame & for the selfish excitement of emulation: you kindly allow me to write poetry for its own sake provided I leave undone nothing which I ought to do in order to pursue that single, absorbing exquisite gratification: I am afraid Sir you think me very foolish — I know the first letter I wrote to you was all senseless trash from beginning to end. But I am not altogether the idle, dreaming being it would seem to denote. (letter to  Southey, 16 March 1837)

She closes by thanking Southey for him for answering her first letter and assuring him that his advice will not be wasted. She is gracious and deferential without being obsequious, reflective, and cognizant of her shortcomings, yet secure in her own intelligence and talent.

Jane Eyre was published in October 1847 under the pseudonym Currer Bell, followed by Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Ellis and Acton Bell, respectively, in December of that year. From the beginning there was much speculation about the identity of the Bells, the authors’ sex, their relationship, whether there were three authors or only one. Jane Eyre achieved immediate commercial  success accompanied by some favorable and some dubious reviews. Charlotte’s sisters did not fare so well. Wuthering Heights “was regarded as the product of a dogged, brutal and morose mind,” while Tenant was deemed “insipid, and both were received with indifference.” (Phyllis Bentley, The Brontës)

Digging up contemporary reviews of the Brontës and offering my own take on them would be interesting and the more intellectually responsible course; however, there are limits to the time and resources at the disposal of your oft humbled scribe. With that somewhat lame excuse in hand, I rely on Margaret Smith, editor of Selected Letters of Charlotte Brontë, to give an idea of the critical reception received by Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:

The Scottish advocate James Lorrimer (1818–90) reviewed the three novels in the North British Review for Aug. 1849. He praised Fanny Hervey; or The Mother’s Choice (1849) by Mrs Stirling, gave moderate praise to Anne Marsh’s Emilia Wyndham (1848), considered that she wrote “as an English gentlewoman whould write,” and admitted that, unlike Marsh, Currer Bell [Charlotte] was never tedious. He praised and found fault with JE by turns, finding in it elements of the revolting and improbable, but acquitting the author of the Quarterly‘s charge of vulgarity.

The Economist for 27 Nov. 1847 praised JE enthusiastically. Though the reviewer found some coarseness, and some too-obvious art in construction, he wrote nothing resembling CB’s sentiment here [Charlotte wrote: “I am reminded of 'The Economist.' The literary critic of that paper praised the book if written by a man ― and pronounced it 'odious' if the work of a woman.”].

Lorimer found the faults of JE “magnified a thousand-fold” in WH and Tenant, despite the vivid realism of their sketches of nature “in her rougher moods.” He did not finish reading WH, repelled by a “perfect pandemonium of low and brutal creatures” and disgusting language. Tenant had a better beginning and “poetical justice” at the end, but it brought the reader into “the closest possible proximity with naked vice,” with coarseness never really found in gentlefolk, and a style marked by vulgar slang and provincialisms. (editor’s notes for Charlotte’s letter to William Smith Williams, 16 August 1849; Williams read Jane Eyre for Smith, Elder & Co. and recommended it to George Smith)

To critics who speculated whether the author of Jane Eyre was man or woman and whose evaluation of the novel’s merits and defects was conditioned on the author’s sex, Charlotte was uncompromising:

To such critics I would say ― “to you I am neither Man nor Woman ― I come before you as an Author only ― it is the sole standard by which you have to right to judge me ― the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.”

Anyone whose soul is not a clod, to borrow from Keats, will take seriously criticism and advice offered in good faith. However, it is not a given that it is the critic who gets it right. The onus is on us to weigh that criticism and its source and decide whether and how to act on it. To accept criticism blindly is no better than to reject it blindly. Criticism can present an opportunity to reflect on what we are doing and try to articulate the principles that guide our efforts, and we may thus profit even from criticism that we reject when push comes to shove.

Charlotte’s letters give every indication that this is exactly what she did. As in the exchange with Southey, she is never cowed or intimidated. She acknowledges other points of view, but she stands her ground and holds to her principles. She is, in the words of my old history teacher, a real tough baby.

To the pedestrian advice to write about what she knows, “not to stray too far from the ground of experience,” she answers thoughtfully:

…is not the real experience of each individual very limited? and if a writer dwells upon that solely or principally is he not in danger of repeating himself and also of becoming an egotist?

Then too, Imagination is a strong, restless faculty which claims to be heard and exercised, are we to be quite deaf to her cry and insensate to her struggles? When she shews us bright pictures are we never to look at them and try to reproduce them? ― And when she is eloquent and speaks rapidly and urgently in our ear are we not to write to her dictation? (letter to G. H. Lewes, journalist, novelist, dramatist, and writer on philosophy and physiology, 6 November 1847)

Likewise, she minces no words when sharing strongly held views on her literary contemporaries. To Ellen Nussey she recommends Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, Goldsmith, Pope (though noting that she does not admire him), Scott, Byron, Campbell, Wordsworth, and Southey; “[f]or fiction — read Scott alone all novels after his are worthless. For Biography, read Johnson’s lives of the Poets, Boswell’s life of Johnson.”

She did not care for Jane Austen and compares her unfavorably to George Sand:

Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point.

What induced you to say that you would rather have written “Pride & Prejudice” or “Tom Jones” than any of the Waverly Novels?

I had not seen “Pride & Prejudice” till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book and studied it. And what did I find? An accurate daguerrotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers ― but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy ― no open country ― no fresh air ― no blue hill ― no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses. These observations will probably irritate you, but I shall run the risk.

Now I can understand admiration of George Sand ― for though I never saw any of her works which I admired throughout (even “Consuelo” which is the best, or the best I have read, appears to me to couple strange extravagance with wondrous excellence) yet she has a grasp of mind which I cannot fully comprehend. I can very deeply respect; she is sagacious and profound; Miss Austen is only shrewd and observant. (letter to Lewes, 12 January 1848)

She goes further in another letter to Lewes six days later:

You say I must familiarize my mind with the fact that “Miss Austen is not a poetess, has no ‘sentiment’ (you scornfully enclose the word in inverted commas) no eloquence, none of the ravishing enthusiasm of poetry” — and then you add, I must “learn to acknowledge her as one of the greatest artists, of the greatest painters of human character, and one of the writers with the nicest sense of means to an end that ever lived.”

The last point only will I ever acknowledge. Can there be a great Artist without poetry? What I call — what I will bend to as a great Artist, there cannot be destitute of the divine gift. But by poetry I am sure you understand something different to what I do — as you do by “sentiment.” It is poetry, as I comprehend the word, which elevates that masculine George Sand, and makes out of something coarse, something godlike. It is “sentiment,” in my sense of the term, sentiment jealously hidden, but genuine, which extracts the venom from that formidable Thackeray, and converts what might be only corrosive poison into purifying elixir. If Thackeray did not cherish in his large heart deep feeling for his kind, he would delight to exterminate; as it is, I believe he wishes only to reform.

Miss Austen, being as you say without “sentiment,” without poetry, may be — is sensible (more real than true) but she cannot be great. (to Lewes, 18 January 1848)

Charlotte speaks here of poetry in the sense the Romantics before her and the Surrealists after used the term to suggest some heightened element in a work of art that speaks to us, touches us, moves us, what is also called the sublime or the marvelous. I see in this not a shying away from the world of everyday experience but rather a reawakening of the mystery inherent in it but often forgotten and lost in our daily busyness. Charlotte Brontë stands for an art that is more than just another commodity in the marketplace of amusements and diversions available for our pursuit. She represents an integrity of spirit and art whose example we might cherish in a time where notions of spirit and art are too often trivialized, reduced to the narcissitic commonplaces of a therapeutic culture or to brain chemistry or to goods to be bought and sold the same as automobiles and houses, video games and sexy lingerie.

David :: Apr.25.2010 :: Literary :: No Comments »

I do not know what I am up to, other than, perhaps, my neck in foolish moves, dubious decisions, squandered promise. A cursory examination of the files reveals the dismaying but indisputable fact that my accomplishment as a poet has been at best modest dating back at least to 2003. Each year since has yielded only a handful of keepers and not many more drafts that may yet be whipped into something of substance.

The blog Memo from the Fringes was launched Memorial Day weekend 2005. From there through the end of 2009, I posted 392* entries, not including the fictions Next Time We Talk and the unfinished Sketches from the Days and Nights of Charlotte Reine. Alas, quantity by no means implies quality. Too much was filler, gibberish, rant, invective, and drivel. Even so, it kept me busy and consumed a fair portion of my resources of time and talent, and I am vain enough to believe some of it justifies the expenditure.

A reasonable person might endeavor to polish and market the best of those essays in hope of generating income that might purchase a measure of freedom from the wage-work that would translate into more time to devote to this kind of work. I confess I am just not up to that task, which would in all likelihood be Sisyphean in nature anyway. The situation is as Dostoevsky found it when he wrote for money while trying to reestablish himself on the literary scene after his return from exile:

I don’t like it [the novella Uncle's Dream, for which he had received an advance], and it saddens me that I am forced to appear in public again so miserably…. You can’t write what you want to write, and you write something that you wouldn’t even want to think about if you didn’t need money…. Being a needy writer is a filthy trade. (quoted in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, Princeton University Press 2010, pp. 256, 257)

Were I a young man, I might make an effort to ply that filthy trade, albeit with no assurance that things would turn out more satisfactorily than they did with the course that led to where I now stand. While I am not so very old ― I like to think I can still lace up my ASICS and run whiskey-swilling, cigarette-puffing poet friends half my age into the ground (smiling as I type) ― it has been a while since I was young. My inclination from where I stand today is to devote what resources of time and talent lie at my disposal to the writing, undertaken in Camus’s terms as one of the few pure things in my life. I can hope that readers who find their way to this space will find something here of interest, as I hope that those who happen on my little writings when on occasion they appear in other publications will enjoy them.

The prickly issue is not whether to try to write for money but the extent to which the time, focus, and effort demanded by  essays and forays into fiction comes at the expense of the same kind of time, focus, and effort demanded by poetry. I believe that my greater talent as a writer is as poet, not essayist, and certainly not novelist. But as Emerson put it, nothing is got for nothing. Have I made a trade-off these past five years? Is that trade-off one I want to continue to make? What I want, of course, is everything, to recultivate the poetry and see it bloom anew while penning essays, reviews, and maybe even fiction that I hope hits on something in some sense informative, entertaining, amusing, if nothing else by way of turning people on to some good books to read and good films to see. “You must go on. I can’t on. I’ll go on.” (Samuel Beckett). What else I’m gon’ do?

memo from the editorial desk

The next essay in the Brontë series remains in progress. I had thought that piece, focused on Charlotte and Jane Eyre, would close out the series until Ceylon Anderson, editor of Venetian Blind Drunk (which can be found at Powell’s Books), advised  that I  must read Anne, in particular The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, stating flat out that she is the best novelist among the three sisters. Thus, the Brontë project goes on.

*Oops. The figure given when this was first posted earlier today was 492. That seemed a lot for just over four-and-a-half years, and a recalculation proved it to be in error.

David :: Apr.12.2010 :: Literary :: 1 Comment »

Wuthering Heights is one sublimely strange novel. Harold Bloom goes so far as to claim it “as unique and idiosyncratic a narrative as Moby-Dick, and like Melville’s masterwork breaks all the confines of genre.” (“Introduction,” The Brontës, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, p. 7)

 I came to the book with a vague notion that it has to do with doomed romantic love but was in no way prepared for the twisted tale of tormented passion and ruthless vengeance found there. Wuthering Heights is demanding and not always a source of immediate pleasure, but our engagement does not end, we do not close the book on it, when we come to the last page. In that respect Emily’s novel is comparable to works of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Pynchon. The pleasure we take in it comes as much from pondering it afterward as from the reading itself.

We can understand why Heathcliff is as he is, implacable, uncompromising, misanthropic — brought home by Mr. Earnshaw, master of Thrushcross Grange, father of Hindley and Catherine, “a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough to both walk and talk — found starving, and houseless, and as good as dumb in the streets of Liverpool” (p. 31). He is abused by the older Hindley, who becomes master of the house on the death of his father, and alternately befriended, tormented, and perhaps after some fashion loved by the willful and capricious Catherine. At the same time we sense that Emily does not see Heathcliff as a being reduced to nothing more than the product of his miserable environment. Under other circumstances he might not have been as implacable, uncompromising, and misanthropic, though this is a matter of degree, not kind.

Although Heathcliff’s tenant Lockwood is technically the narrator, most of the story he passes on to the reader comes to him through second- and third-hand accounts. He describes his landlord, Heathcliff, after their first meeting as “the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with,” an observation that proves prescient. Then he notes, setting the stage for the claustrophobic tale that follows:

This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s Heaven — and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. (p. 1)

…

The apartment and furniture would have been nothing extraordinary as belonging to a homely, northern farmer, with a stubborn countenance, and stalwart limbs set out to advantage in knee-breeches and gaiters. Such an individual, seated in his armchair, his mug of ale frothing on the round table before him, is to be seen in any circuit of five or six miles among these hills, if you go at the right time, after dinner. But Mr. Heathcliff forms a singular contrast to his abode and style of living. He is a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman — that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire: rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect and handsome figure — and rather morose — possibly some people might suspect him of a degree of under-bred pride — I have a sympathetic chord within that tells me it is nothing of the sort; I know, by instinct, his reserve springs from an aversion to showy displays of feeling — to manifestations of mutual kindliness. He’ll love and hate, equally under cover, and esteem it a species of impertinence to be loved or hated again — No, I’m running on too fast — I bestow my own attributes over-liberally on him. (p. 3)

Lockwood’s backtracking at the end notwithstanding, the description is apt.

Characters and reader alike are trapped within narrow physical and psychological bounds in a tale set almost entirely in two houses, Thrushcross Grange where Lockwood resides as tenant, and the more isolated and rougher dwelling at Wuthering Heights, and the land between the two. Heathcliff is a demonic force, relentless in his machinations to avenge himself on Edgar Linton and his family for having taken Catherine from him. Only Edgar’s sister Isabella, after Heathcliff seduces and marries her with bad intent, escapes the confines of the Wuthering Heights-Thrushcross Grange orbit, however briefly before her death.

My junior year in college we read The Brothers Karamazov in a class that took up European intellectual history from 1789 to 1914. This was the first of several rereadings of Dostoevsky’s novel over the course of decades, after I discovered it on the recommendation of Dr. Mulvaney, who taught an introductory philosophy course I took spring semester of my freshman year. Dr. Mulvaney, a wonderful teacher who embodied what is best in the ideal of liberal scholarship and education, provided a lengthy reading list from which students could choose several books to read for the class. Among them was The Plague by Albert Camus. I did not read The Plague that spring but picked it up the following fall and found it captivating. There was no particular reason to pick it up when I did; the book just happened to catch my eye on the shelf when I was looking for something to read. One day Dr. Mulvaney and I happened to cross paths on campus, and I mentioned that I read The Plague and enjoyed it. He suggested that if I liked The Plague I should read The Brothers Karamazov. This turned out to be not only a pleasure in itself but also a gateway to Dostoevsky’s other novels, and Dostoevsky and Camus together a gateway to existentialism, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre. Once again I am struck by the role chance occurrence and happenstance of this kind play in our lives and how we come to be who we are.

During class discussion about The Brothers Karamazov, Mr. Mandell another wonderful teacher I was fortunate to know, blurted out, “How realistic is this? These people scream at each other.” Indeed, they do. As do Emily’s people. They are not on the whole people with whom we would wish to spend time. Yet they intrigue us.

“Emily Brontë’s religion is essentially erotic, and her vision of triumphant sexuality is so mingled with death that we can imagine no consummation for the love of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw except death.” (Bloom, pp. 8, 9). I am not sure what Bloom means with the assertion that Emily’s religion is essentially erotic or by triumphant sexuality. Like Bloom I can imagine no consummation for the relationship of Heathcliff and Catherine except death, but I am less ready than he to characterize that relationship as love, or if it be love, it is, in the words of Charlotte, “a sentiment fierce and inhuman.” There may be something of love between them, but that is only an aspect of it. Again Charlotte’s critique strikes me as perceptive:

Heathcliff betrays one solitary human feeling, and that is not his love for Catherine; which is a sentiment fierce and inhuman: a passion such as might boil and glow in the bad essence of some evil genius; a fire that might form the tormented centre — the ever-suffering soul of a magnate of the infernal world: and by its quenchless and ceaseless ravage effect the execution of the decree which dooms him to carry Hell with him wherever he wanders. No; the single link that connects Heathcliff with humanity is his rudely confessed regard for Hareton Earnshaw — the young man whom he has ruined; and then his half-implied esteem for Nelly Dean [the housekeeper who relates the back story to Lockwood]. These solitary traits omitted, we should say he was child neither of Lascar nor gipsy, but a man’s shape animated by demon life — a Ghoul — an Afreet. (writing as Currer Bell in an editor’s preface to Wuthering Heights)

As for Catherine, the two-sidedness and ambivalence of her feelings for both Heathcliff and Edgar Linton brings to mind Dostoevsky’s great female heroes Nastasya Filippovna in The Idiot and Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov. The story could be seen as effectively ending with Catherine’s death, followed by a lengthy epilogue where Heathcliff’s single-minded passion for revenge plays out with the unanticipated consequence that it brings together Cathy Linton and Hareton Earnshaw, a beauty and the beast motif that in lesser hands might be hackneyed, but I think Emily pulls it off as under Cathy’s influence the abrupt, uncouth, wholly unsophisticated, and unlettered Hareton’s better qualities are brought out and flourish.

I anticipate that a second reading of Wuthering Heights will reward with glimmers of understanding missed the first go around. That will come another day. For now, it is on to the finish of Jane Eyre and the conclusion of this series of essays. I regret that I have given the third sister, Anne, short shrift here, and fully intend to sample one of her novels down the road.

Those who wish to read more about the remarkable Brontës might find BrontëBlog of interest.

As for your oft humbled scribe, I am off on a new adventure even as I set about wrapping up the Brontë project: the one-volume condensation, weighing in at just under a thousand pages, of Joseph Frank’s monumental five-volume biography of Dostoevsky. Frank’s premise is that

a conventional biographical point of view could not do justice of the complexities of his [Dostoevsky's] creations. To be sure, while Dostoevsky’s characters struggle with the psychological and sentimental problems that provide the substance of all his novels, more important, his books are also inspired by the ideological doctrines of the time…. The personal entanglements of the figures in the novels, though depicted with often melodramatic intensity, cannot really be understood unless we grasp how their actions are intertwined with ideological motivations.

Thus, Frank’s treatment is as much history of ideas, intellectual history, as biography. It promises to be fascinating.

David :: Mar.29.2010 :: Literary :: 1 Comment »

Conversations with Joseph Brodsky
Solomon Volkov
The Free Press, 1998, 306 pp.

I am presently enjoying a collection of conversations between the poet Joseph Brodsky and Solomon Volkov, a Russian musician, cultural critic, and author who emigrated to the U.S. in 1976, four years after Brodsky came here in exile. Brodsky as he is portrayed in the film Room and a Half is a considerably more appealing character than the Brodsky of these tape-recorded interviews that took place between 1978 and 1993. Plenty of interesting people can be pompous, arrogant, and full of themselves. Some I find simpatico. Brodsky, not so much.

Even so these wide-ranging interviews with the Nobel Prize-winning poet who lived almost half of his life in involuntary exile are a joy to read, unconvinced though I am by many of his assertions and ideas. My experience here bears out my conviction that we can respect and appreciate people with whom we differ on substantive matters and find ourselves to some degree unsympathetic.

Brodsky was not inclined to false modesty, I give him that, and the rather silly observations he was prone to spout are at times amusing, as with these remarks about Stalin and Western intellectuals:

…[D]o you know who Stalin made a very strong impression on? Homosexuals! This is terribly interesting. There was something southern, something Mediterranean in that mustache. A real-live mustachioed daddy! I think that a significant percentage of the support for Stalin among the intelligentsia in the West had to do with their latent homosexuality. I would guess that many people in the West turned to the Communist faith precisely for this reason. That is, they simply worshiped Stalin! (pp. 30-31)

Anti-intellectualism is a hallowed American tradition, as is homophobia for that matter. Perhaps Brodsky the emigré is just trying to fit in as he exhibits a variant strain not uncommon in intellectuals of the self-educated variety, which manifests itself in a tendency to hurl slurs at intellectuals, the intelligentsia, in general. This is altogether distinct from the legitimate leveling of concrete criticism against individual intellectuals, debatable points that will stand or fall on their merits.

There is an interesting exchange about European and American attitudes about money in an interview from the second half of the 1980s.

Brodsky: By the way, not just in Russia, but in Europe, too, talking about money is just not done. There are so many political parties, platforms, philosophies, and everything else there, all of which can be discussed with impunity, but no one would ever breathe a word about money. Whereas here, in the States, everyone talks about it. Well, maybe not everyone, but in general, people talk about money quite a lot. The majority of Americans, in comparison with Europeans, are extremely well off. Nonetheless, a rich American can start making faces because a sandwich seems too expensive to him. Or make a terrible scene about it in a restaurant.

Volkov: I’ve run into that more than once. Americans are nonchalant about going to a restaurant only when their company is footing the bill. (pp. 163-164)

A little further on Volkov inquires if Brodsky cooks for himself or goes out to eat.

Brodsky: There’s this illusion that it’s cheaper to cook for yourself, which is true to a certain extent, but in the final analysis, it’s not. There are so many psychological costs involved. First, there’s all that chaos. Then endless dilemmas arise: wash the dishes or not? And if so, then now or later? And so on. Therefore, as a rule, I go out in the evening. (p. 164)

The psychological costs involved in cooking for oneself! Now there’s an intellectual observation! These considerations have been on my mind of late even before I came to this passage. I enjoy dinner out, wine, conversation when with a companion. Dining out is something of an occasion, more than just getting something to eat. For that reason and so that I do not have to concern myself too much about expense when I do eat out, I cook at home most nights. I am no great shakes as a cook, but I do well enough for myself. Brodsky nails it with the psychological cost. That’s the kicker, the time it takes for preparation before and cleaning up after, with the disruption and chaos that entails. When you factor this in with time wasted at the wage-work, granted a necessary evil but nonetheless an evil, a substantial chunk is taken out of the day that would be better spent on other pursuits. There is no solution to this dilemma. We must live with it. Or as I advised my niece, an art major, when she asked if I have any advice about how to survive as an artist: Marry a doctor. It may be too late for me, but she still has a shot.

David :: Mar.13.2010 :: Literary :: 1 Comment »

I seem to recall an interview with Gregory Corso where he remarked that if he found the poet’s life interesting he would the find the poetry interesting. I believe he was speaking of Shelley, but I could be mistaken, as I cannot lay my hands on the interview to confirm that recollection, and the gears of memory grind erratically these days.

Be that as it may, I located the Unmuzzled Ox interview where Corso responded to Michael Andre’s mention of a Richard Howard essay about his  poetry:

…I met him maybe two or three times, so he gets his shot from what I write. Anybody is going to take me for what I write, then I have the trump card. After all, I know what I am putting down there and why I am putting it down. The poet and his poetry are inseparable [italics mine]. (Writings from Unmuzzled Ox Magazine, 1973, 1975, 1981, p. 140)

Yes, well, maybe. Does the writer really hold a trump card that overrides all else? Must we know what a writer thinks she or he is putting down and why to make a legitimate critical assessment, much less understand it, in whatever sense we may think of understanding these things? Must we read the biography, journals, letters, and so on before taking up the body of a writer’s work?

We bring whatever we may know of an author’s life, background, influences, interests, and passions to bear on what we read, and we hope we mange this with discrimination and acumen, wary of reading into the writing what is not there, but this knowledge is not sine qua non. We appreciate writers about whom we know next to nothing of their lives and thinking, however curious we may be and frustrated when we cannot satisfy that curiosity. Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, J.D. Salinger, and Thomas Pynchon come readily to mind, our appreciation scarcely diminished by how little we know about them. Do we read Nietzsche differently knowing that he composed books during long walks of several hours morning and afternoon? Does this help us understand what he was up to? Or thought he was up to? Does knowing so little about Shakespeare diminish our reading of Hamlet, King Lear, and the rest?

This brings us back to the Brontë project, which I am thoroughly enjoying. Those girls are fascinating, three sisters, daughters of a provincial clergyman, who grew to be young women of formidable intellect and significant literary accomplishment in their all too brief lives. Whether the context provided by a glimpse into those lives aids interpretation of the writing may be almost beside the point. Perhaps what we learn about them by way of biographical and personal details offers a different pleasure, distinct though not altogether separate from the pleasure their novels and poems give us.

More is known of Charlotte than her sisters thanks to her prolific, lifelong correspondence, notably to her childhood school friend Ellen Nussey, her publishers, and more occasionally literary contemporaries such as Robert Southey, Hartley Coleridge (son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge), Thomas de Quincey, and Elizabeth Gaskell. The letters make clear that while Charlotte and her sisters lived almost their entire lives in provincial isolation, they were anything but ignorant of the wider world, especially the world of arts and letters.

Charlotte (1816–1854) and Emily (1818–1848) were the third and fifth of six children born in a span of seven years, from 1813 to 1820, to Patrick and Maria Brontë in Haworth, Yorkshire. Maria died in 1821, leaving Patrick to rear the brood with the aid of his sister-in-law, who moved in with the family in 1823. More tragedy followed in 1825 when Marie and Elizabeth, the oldest of the siblings, died of tuberculosis contracted at Cowan Bridge School, a clergymen’s daughters boarding school that was by general account a gruesome place. Charlotte and Emily attended the school briefly in 1824 before being brought home by their father after their sisters’ deaths. The school register offers these notes:

[Emily] Reads very prettily & Works a little

[Charlotte] Reads tolerably — Writes indifferently — Ciphers a little and works neatly — Knows nothing of Grammar, Geography, History or Accomplishments — Altogether clever of her age but knows nothing systematically.

Six years later Charlotte attended Roe’s Head School, where she later taught. Emily followed her sister to Roe’s Head in 1835, but formal schooling did not agree with her. She lasted three months and grew miserable, pale, and thin before returning home. The girls were otherwise schooled at home by their father, with Charlotte also teaching her younger sisters.

Literary endeavor was nothing out of the ordinary in the Brontë household. Patrick published two volumes of poems, two prose tales, two pamphlets, and three sermons, beside which several articles and poems appeared in local newspapers. By general account none of it was of any distinction. Maria penned an essay entitled “On the Advantages of Poverty in Religious Concerns,” described as “[p]ious and sincere, entirely correct in the style of the time…[but containing] nothing original or striking and did not achieve, perhaps did not seriously attempt, publication” (Phyllis Bentley, The Brontës, Thames and Hudson, 1969, p. 12). For the sisters “the highest stimulus, as well as the liveliest pleasure [they] had known from childhood upwards, lay in attempts at literary composition.” (Charlotte, quoted in Bentley, p. 13)

One day in 1826 Patrick brought home a box of wooden soldiers for Branwell and other gifts, including a model village, for the girls. The children immediately gave names to the soldiers and made up stories about them, which grew into extensive written accounts of the fanciful kingdoms of Angria (the creation of Charlotte and Branwell) and the darker Gondal (from the imaginations of Emily and Anne).

The family’s high hopes for Branwell, “his Father’s and his sisters’ pride and hope in boyhood” (Charlotte, letter to W.S. Williams, 2 October 1848), did not pan out. Sent to London to study art, he fell in with a bad crowd and returned home after only a week. Thereafter he found gainful employment only sporadically.

[He] drank, got into debt, took opium, wrote wild letters, illustrated by wild sketches…dozed about the Parsonage in a drunken stupor by day, raged and ranted by night, and in general behaved with such feverish irresponsibility as to bring continual disquiet and distress to the Parsonage. (Bentley, p. 84)

At her brother’s death Charlotte wrote,

I do not weep from a sense of bereavement — there is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away no dear companion lost — but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and a shining light. My brother was a year my junior; I had aspirations and ambitions for him once — long ago — they have perished mournfully — nothing remains of him but a memory of errors and sufferings — There is such a bitterness of pity for his life and death — such a yearning for the emptiness of his whole existence as I cannot describe — I trust time will allay these feelings. (Letter to Williams, 2 October 1848).

There would have been no such expectations for the sisters, career opportunities being not exactly abundant for women in a provincial village in the first half of the nineteenth-century. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne determined that their best shot lay in teaching or being governesses, to which they were not particularly well suited, despite their considerable intelligence and learning. Charlotte put it frankly in a letter to Ellen Nussey:

…no one but myself can tell how hard a Governesse’s work is to me — for no one but myself is aware how utterly averse my whole mind and nature are from the employment —  Do not think that I fail to blame myself for this or that I leave any means unemployed to conquer this feeling. Some of my greatest difficulties lie in things that would appear to you comparatively trivial. I find it so hard to repel the rude familiarity of the children —  I find it so difficult to ask either servants or mistress for anything I want, however much I want it. It is less pain to me to endure the greatest inconvenience than to go into the kitchen to request its removal. I am a fool — Heaven knows I cannot help it. (3 March 1841)

How could I not feel kinship with this woman? As for Emily, Charlotte says she “is not very fond of teaching but she would nevertheless take care of the housekeeping, and though she is rather withdrawn she has too kind a heart not to do her utmost for the well-being of the children — she is also a very generous soul…” (letter to Constantin Heger, 24 July 1844, where Charlotte tells of a plan to open a small boarding school at the parsonage).

Their aunt derived some financial resources from her father, who was a prosperous merchant. In 1842 Charlotte and Emily convinced her to send them to school in Brussels where they might improve their French and German and even gain a little Italian and thereby improve their prospects for employment as teachers. At the Pensionnat Heger they studied French, German, music, singing, writing, arithmetic, and drawing. Charlotte wrote of Emily that she “works like a horse” (letter to EN May 1842) and “is making rapid progress in French, German, Music and Drawing —  Monsieur & Madame Heger [who ran the school] begin to recognize the valuable points of her character under her singularities.” (letter to EN July 1842).

The death of their aunt later that year brought the sisters home, where Emily remained when Charlotte returned to the school as a teacher in January 1843. Charlotte did not care for the Belgian girls she taught or the other teachers, and she fell for Monsieur Heger, an unfortunate situation made worse when Madame Heger picked up on it.  A miserable year ended with Charlotte’s departure from Brussels for good in December. Her letters to M. Heger over the next two years convey both her feelings for him and the one-sided aspect of the affair.

The sisters also engaged in some modest investments, which Emily managed “in a most handsome and able manner” (letter to Margaret Wooler, 30 January 1846) for Charlotte while she was in Brussels, evidently with some persnicketiness, to judge by Charlotte’s letter, where she writes of the Railway Panic and their investment in the York and North Midland line. Charlotte assured Wooler, whom the sisters had previously solicited for investment advice, that their capital was as yet undiminished, but she would have preferred moving it to a more secure investment. She was not, however, able to persuade her sisters and would rather run the risk of loss than hurt Emily’s feelings, saying,

…therefore I will let her manage still and take the consequences. Disinterested and energetic she certainly is and if she be not quite so tractable or open to conviction as I could wish I must remember perfection is not the lot of humanity and as long as we can regard those we love and to whom we are closely allied, with profound and never-shaken esteem, it is a small thing that they should vex us occasionally by, what appear to us, unreasonable and headstrong notions. (ibid.)

As I write this, I have read Wuthering Heights, about half of Jane Eyre, biographical and critical writings about the sisters from several sources, and a fair number of Charlotte’s letters. Charlotte is interesting on many levels, intelligent, perceptive, witty. To Anne I have given only passing attention thus far. It is Emily, mysterious, reclusive, fiercely intelligent, fiercely independent, who grips my imagination with each reference to her singularities and unreasonable and headstrong notions.

A good deal of what we know about Emily comes from Charlotte; much of the rest is surmise and speculation that draws on Wuthering Heights, the astounding poems, and characters in her sisters’ novels that might be modeled at least in part on her. I quote here at length from Charlotte’s prefatory note to “Selections from Poems by Ellis Bell [Emily Brontë]” for its glimpse into Emily’s persona and for the vivid description of the place the sisters called home.

At that period [when Emily was sixteen] she was sent to school. Her previous life, with the exception of a single half-year, had been passed in the absolute retirement of a village parsonage, amongst the hills bordering Yorkshire and Lancashire. The scenery of these hills is not grand — it is not romantic; it is scarcely striking. Long low moors, dark with heath, shut in little valleys, where a stream waters, here and there, a fringe of stunted copse. Mills and scattered cottages chase romance from these valleys; it is only higher up, deep in amongst the ridges of the moors, that Imagination can find rest for the sole of her foot: and even if she finds it there, she must be a solitude-loving raven — no gentle dove. If she demand beauty to inspire her, she must bring it inborn: these moors are too stern to yield any product so delicate. The eye of the gazer must itself brim with a ‘purple light,’ intense enough to perpetuate the brief flower-flush of August on the heather, or the rare sunset-smile of June; out of his heart must well the freshness, that in latter spring and early summer brightens the bracken, nurtures the moss, and cherishes the starry flowers that spangle for a few weeks the pasture of the moor-sheep. Unless that light and freshness are innate and self-sustained, the drear prospect of a Yorkshire moor will be found as barren of poetic as of agricultural interest: where the love of wild nature is strong, the locality will perhaps be clung to with the more passionate constancy, because from the hill-lover’s self comes half its charm.

My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hill-side her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best loved was — liberty.

Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils; without it, she perished. The change from her own home to a school, and from her very noiseless, very secluded, but unrestricted and inartificial mode of life, to one of disciplined routine (though under the kindliest auspices), was what she failed in enduring. Her nature proved here too strong for her fortitude. Every morning when she woke, the vision of home and the moors rushed on her, and darkened and saddened the day that lay before her. Nobody knew what ailed her but me — I knew only too well. In this struggle her health was quickly broken: her white face, attenuated form, and failing strength threatened rapid decline. I felt in my heart she would die if she did not go home, and with this conviction obtained her recall. She had only been three months at school; and it was some years before the experiment of sending her from home was again ventured on. After the age of twenty, having meantime studied alone with diligence and perseverance, she went with me to an establishment on the Continent: the same suffering and conflict ensued, heightened by the strong recoil of her upright, heretic and English spirit from the gentle Jesuitry of the foreign and Romish system. Once more she seemed sinking, but this time she rallied through the mere force of resolution: with inward remorse and shame she looked back on her former failure, and resolved to conquer in this second ordeal. She did conquer: but the victory cost her dear. She was never happy till she carried her hard-won knowledge back to the remote English village, the old parsonage-house, and desolate Yorkshire hills. —

In 1845 Charlotte accidentally happened on a notebook in which Emily had copied her poems and found them “wild, melancholy and elevating.” Emily was at first furious at this invasion of her privacy. Eventually Charlotte convinced her that the poems merited publication. A volume containing poems by all three sisters was brought out at their expense in 1846 as Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, published pseudonymously to avoid the bias of the critics against women writers and to keep the publication secret to their father, brother, and neighbors. The publication was conspicuous for its lack of success, as Charlotte documented in a note to de Quincey signed by Currer Bell:

My Relatives, Ellis and Acton Bell and myself, heedless of the repeated warnings of various respectable publishers, have committed the rash act of printing a volume of poems.

The consequences predicted have, of course, overtaken us; our book is found to be a drug; no man needs it or heeds it; in the space of a year our publisher has disposed but of two copies, and by what painful efforts he succeeded in getting rid of those two, himself only knows.

Before transferring the edition to the trunk-makers, we have decided on distributing as presents a few copies of what we cannot sell — we beg to offer you one in acknowledgment of the pleasure and profit we have often and long derived from your works — (16 June 1847)

A bit more than a year later, in September 1848, after publication of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Charlotte told Williams that she had no pride in her poems from that first book at the same time she attested to Emily’s strength and originality.

…much of it was written in early youth — I feel it now to be crude and rhapsodical. Ellis Bell’s [Emily's] is of a different stamp — of its sterling excellence I am deeply convinced, and have been from the first moment the M.S. fell by chance into my hands. The pieces are short, but they are very genuine: they stirred my heart like the sound of a trumpet when I read them alone and in secret. The deep excitement I felt forced from me the confession of the discovery I had made — I was sternly rated at first for having taken an unwarrantable liberty — this I expected — for Ellis Bell is of no flexible or ordinary materials — but by dint of entreaty and reason — I at last wrung out a reluctant consent to have the “rhymes” (as they were contemptuously termed) published — The author never alludes to them — or when she does — it is with scorn — but I know — no woman that ever lived — ever wrote such poetry before — condensed energy, clearness, finish — strange, strong pathos are their characteristics — utterly different from the weak diffusiveness — the laboured yet feeble wordiness which dilute the writings of even popular poetesses.

That the mysterious Emily should so captivate me is no mystery. The iconic Romantic figure of the solitary poet, the solitude-loving raven, walking where her own nature would be leading, vexed to choose another guide, shunning convention, strong-natured and stubborn in Imagination’s embrace of a bleak beauty, is at the heart of what has drawn me to poetry from its first stirrings in me. This is enough to make Emily intriguing even if the writing did not hold up. Because the writing does hold up, her persona adds to the texture and richness of our reading. Because the writing holds up, Emily is not just intriguing, she is important.

David :: Mar.07.2010 :: Literary :: No Comments »

The matter of career came up during conversation with a friend I met for a drink on the last Monday of 2009, just before we attended a fine 3 Friends poetry reading that featured Andrew MacArthur, Neil Anderson, and Patrick Bocarde. My friend — call her J. — is casting about for an acceptable career while she finds her way as a poet. At some point in the conversation she inquired about my career. I explained that I never thought of myself as having one of those. There is no career, just whatever ways to generate income that I have fallen into: bookstore clerk and quasi-manager, editor in the employ of a state legislature, fund-raising functionary, a stint pretending to be a freelance writer-editor-proofreader. I put it this way, pretending, because while I do good work, I am less than adept at promoting myself and there is not an entrepreneurial bone in my body, so it comes as no surprise the endeavor never generated much income.

career : n 1 a : speed in a course <ran at full ~> 1 b : course, passage 2 : encounter, charge 3 : a field for or pursuit of consecutive progressive achievement esp. in public, professional, or business life <Washington’s ~ as a soldier> 4 : a profession for which one trains and which is undertaken as a permanent calling <a ~ in medicine> <a ~ diplomat>
career vi as a verb: to go at top speed esp. in a headlong manner <a car ~ed off the road>

Meanings 3 and 4 of the noun version are along the lines of what J. had in mind when she spoke of career, implicit in it that this is the manner in which one earns a living. As I have noted elsewhere, if I had it to do over again, I might have sought to make a place for myself in academia. That is where my career would have been if I had one. Youthful romanticism led me away from the university, and I never made my way back. I say this without illusion or idealization, for as a friend recently pointed out, the unfortunate reality is that universities are intensely political places and if you don’t play the politics, you get chewed up and spit out. It is not a given that I would have thrived there. Weighed against that recognition is my experience with  wage-work in a variety of honorable employments among many good and some exceptional people, where I have toiled always diligently and conscientiously and on occasion well but at a cost to what is best in me. The work I found demanded my lesser talents at the expense of those valued more highly and held more dear. Perhaps this is my failing. Had I been more clever, more wise, I might have found a way to make my way.

vocation : n 1 a : a summons or strong inclination to a particular state or course of action; esp : a divine call to the religious life 1 b : an entry into the priesthood or a religious order 2 a : the work in which a person is regularly employed : occupation 2 b : the persons engaged in a particular occupation 3 : the special function of an individual or group

My sense of myself as a poet is central to the poetry I make, and this sense is grounded in a notion of vocation or calling. Yes, all very romantic, quite impractical, the kind of thing many people experience in their teens and early twenties and mature out of to make their way in the world of practical affairs. For ill or not, I never did that.

Poets who matter most to us seem to speak directly to our deepest concerns. Not that they offer the final word on age-old questions of existence and meaning. Rather, they keep the cauldron bubbling by stirring our questioning anew.

…Who alive can say,
‘Thou art no Poet — mayst not tell thy dreams’?
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.

I like to think my soul is not a clod, as John Keats put it in these introductory lines from “The Fall of Hyperion,” and there are moments my spirit soars with vision when the wind is with me and wisps of cloud streak the blue of the sky.

The main body of the poem begins at line 19, opening in an Edenic setting where the narrator finds “a feast of summer fruits, / which, nearer seen, seemed refuse of a meal / By angel tasted, or our Mother Eve.” He “ate deliciously, / And after not long, thirsted, for thereby / Stood a vessel of transparent juice / Sipped by the wandered bee…”

Naturally he drinks and, quelle surprise, the transparent juice turns out to be a powerful drug that renders him unconscious. Upon awakening he finds himself transported to some strange ruin, an old sanctuary with a roof “Builded so high, it seemed that filmed clouds / Might spread beneath, as ‘er the stars of heaven.” (lines 63–64)

To west he sees “far off / An Image; huge of feature as a cloud, / At level of whose feet an altar slept, / To be approached on either side by steps, / And marble balustrade, and patient travail / To count with toil the innumerable degrees” (lines 88–92)

A voice that turns out to be Moneta, the admonisher, warns him:

…’If thou canst not ascend
These steps, die on that marble where thou art.
Thy flesh, near cousin to the common dust,
Will parch for lack of nutriment — thy bones
Will wither in few years, and vanish so
That not the quickest eye could find a grain
Of what thou now art on that pavement cold.
The sands of thy short life are spent this hour,
And no hand in the universe can turn
Thy hourglass, if these gummed leaves be burnt
Ere thou canst mount up these immortal steps.’ (lines 107–117)

To gain the lowest step takes all the narrator’s strength, and in the effort he comes near death, as

…a palsied chill
Struck from the pavèd level up my limbs,
And was ascending quick to put cold grasp
Upon those streams that pulse beside the throat.
…
Slow, heavy, deadly was my pace: the cold
Grew stifling, suffocating, at the heart;
And when I clasped my hands I felt them not. (lines 122–131)

But “One minute before death, my iced foot touched / The lowest stair; and as it touched, life seemed / To pour in at the toes…”

Who is he to feel what it is to die and live again before his fated hour? The goddess explains.

‘None can usurp this height…
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.
All else who find a haven in the world,
Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days,
If by a chance into this fane they come,
Rot on the pavement where thou rott’st half.’ (lines 147–153)
…
Every sole man hath days of joy and pain,
Whether his labours be sublime or low —
The pain alone; the joy alone; distinct:
Only the dreamer venoms all his days,
Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve. (lines 172–177)
…
…’Art thou not of the dreamer tribe?
The dreamer and the poet are distinct,
Diverse sheer opposites, antipodes.
The one pours out a balm upon the world,
The other vexes it.’ (lines 198–202)

Ah, I am at a loss to express my delight in these incredibly rich passages. I love this stuff. Two thoughts occur straight off. First, how do these lines play with those from the beginning of the poem: “Who alive can say / Thou art no Poet…”? The earlier passage implies that poetry lies within the province of pretty much everyone, while the goddess suggests that poetry is the fate of “those to whom the miseries of the world / Are misery, and will not let them rest.” Or is it dreamers, not poets at all, to whom the goddess refers? Second, and far from least for one such as I, the question must be asked: Am I poet or dreamer? Which is it? We know which I would like to think myself, but who am I to say?

The narrator shouts back at the goddess:

‘Apollo! Faded, far-flown Apollo!
Where is thy misty pestilence to creep
Into the dwellings, through the door crannies,
Of all mock lyrists, large self-worshippers
And careless hectorers in proud bad verse.
Though I breathe death with them it will be life
To see them sprawl before me into graves.
Majestic shadow, tell me where I am,
Whose altar is this; for whom this incense curls;
What image this, whose face I cannot see,
For the broad marble knees; and who thou art,
Of accent feminine so courteous?’

This place is the temple of Saturn, leader of the deposed Titans, who are “…swallowed up / And buried from all godlike exercise / Of influence benign on planets pale,” Saturn himself a God changed into a shaking palsy with no strength left, and the one who speaks is Moneta the muse, sole priestess of Saturn’s desolation.

‘Mortal, that thou mayst understand aright,
I humanize my sayings to thine ear,
Making comparisons of earthly things;
Or thou mightst better listen to the wind,
Whose language is to thee a barren noise,
Though it blows legend-laden through the trees —

Moneta goes on to tell that though the Titans have fallen,

…one of our whole eagle-brood still keeps
His sovereignty, and rule, and majesty;
Blazing Hyperion on his orbèd fire
Still sits, still snuffs the incense teeming up
From man to the sun’s God — yet unsecure.

As the story concludes, Hyperion “leaving twilight in the rear,” the poem drawn thus to an end, the narrator finds himself standing in clear light.

Anon rushed by the bright Hyperion;
His flaming robes streamed out beyond his heels,
And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire,
That scared away the meek ethereal Hours,
And made their dove-wings tremble. On he flared…

So which is it? Poet or dreamer? Keats, if we take the narrator to speak for him, does not take lightly the charge that he is a dreaming thing, a fever of himself. He is at once generous — “every man whose soul is not a clod / Hath visions, and would speak…” — and not above taking a shot at “mock lyrists, large self-worshippers / And careless hectorers in proud bad verse. / Though I breathe death with them it will be life / To see them sprawl before me into graves.”

Poets who matter most to us seem to speak directly to our deepest concerns. Not that they offer the final word on age-old questions of existence and meaning. Rather, they keep the cauldron bubbling by stirring our questioning anew.

You know my ideas about Religion—I do not think myself more in the right than other people and that nothing in this world is proveable. I wish I could enter into all your feelings on the subject merely for one short 10 Minutes and give you a Page or two to your liking. I am sometimes so very skeptical as to think Poetry itself a mere Jack a lanthern to amuse whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance—As Trademen say every thing is worth what it will fetch, so probably every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer—being in itself a nothing—Ethereal thing[s] may at least be thus real, divided under three heads—Things real—things semireal—and no things—Things real—such as existences of Sun Moon & Stars and passages of Shakspeare—Things semireal such as Love, the Clouds &c which require a greeting of the Spirit to make them wholly exist—and Nothings which are made Great and dignified by an ardent pursuit—Which by the by stamps the burgundy mark on the bottles of our Minds, insomuch as they are able to “consec[r]ate whate’er they look upon“… (Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, 13 March 1818)

We look to poets such as Keats to spur us to think of fresh ways to think about ourselves and the paths we have bumbled onto, which may be in part an act of rationalization, but is in better part an assertion of value, a nothing made great and dignified by an ardent pursuit, stamping the burgundy mark on the bottles of our minds insomuch as they bring value to the world. Yes, I know, ignoble ends may be pursued every bit as ardently as noble ones. Our leaps of faith may carry us into the abyss, but as my old French teacher Marie-Laure used to say, “So whacha gon’ do?” We leap. We stand as best we can for what is best in us and in the world.

Three previous essays on John Keats appeared on Memo from the Fringes:

Poets Who Matter: John Keats (1795–1821)
Poets Who Matter: More Keats
Poets Who Matter: Thinking of Keats

David :: Jan.31.2010 :: Literary :: No Comments »

For ten years or so I reread one of Dostoevsky’s four major novels each winter, what I came to think of as the winter project. Each novel gave fresh pleasure with each reading, and the project brought a semblance of order to my generally scattershot approach to things. Other winter projects followed, among them Dostoevsky’s A Writer’s Diary, Samuel Beckett, Shelley, Keats.

The Brontës showed up on the radar a few years ago when I came on Emily Brontë’s poem Stanzas in The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost, edited by Harold Bloom, and was at once struck, even stunned, by it. I am not generally inclined to think in terms of a single favorite book, poem, author, or film. It is enough to note that “Stanzas” is a poem committed to memory, alongside Emily Dickinson’s “A Certain Slant of Light,” Walt Whitman’s “A Clear Midnight,” and just a few others.

“Stanzas” led to other poems by Emily. (I hope referring to Emily and her sisters Charlotte and Anne informally will avoid awkwardness and confusion; I do not mean to indicate that I take them any less seriously than male authors, say, Beckett, Shelley, or Keats, whom I tend to refer by last name.) The poems are sufficiently good to make it all but inevitable that sooner or later I would take up Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, which are among too many novels prominent in the tradition that I somehow managed to escape reading during my formative years, when my interests ran more to the likes of The Foundation Trilogy (Isaac Asimov), Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein), Childhood’s End (Arthur C. Clarke), Slan (A.E. Van Vogt), and The Stars My Destination (Alfred Bester).

High school English teachers were so happy to have eager readers among their students that they sometimes allowed  me to read science fiction for book report assignments when more substantive works would have been in order, however largely wasted on me at the time. I recall slogging through Silas Marner and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and getting little if anything out of either of them. A Tale of Two Cities, junior or senior year in high school, marked the only time in my academic career I resorted to CliffsNotes, borrowed from a pal when I found myself unable to make it beyond the first few pages. Some years later, probably well into my thirties, I picked up A Tale of Two Cities and thoroughly enjoyed it, leaving me to wonder what was the matter with me as a young fellow that I just did not get it.

After returning again to Emily’s poems in the fall of last year, I decided this winter’s project would be the Brontës generally, the major novels Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre in particular.  “Stanzas” remains to my mind the most striking of Emily’s poems, with its romantic impracticality — “leaving busy chase of wealth and learning / For idle dreams of things which cannot be” — rejection of convention and authority — “I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces / And not in paths of high morality” — and fierce independence — “I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading — / It vexes me to choose another guide.” Where does that nature lead?

Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding,
Where the wild wind blows on the mountainside.

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

What exactly does Brontë mean with the final lines?  Even Harold Bloom is flummoxed. “Whatever that centering is, it is purely individual, and as beyond gender as it is beyond creed or ‘high morality.’” (“Introduction,” The Brontës, ed. Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, p. 11)

Firmly rooted in this world that is the world of each of us, she “will seek not the shadowy region,” whose “unsustaining vastness waxes drear.” It is to this world, rendered uncanny, eerie, sublime, that her nature would be leading, this finite existence bounded by death, where waked to feeling we find or make what glory and what grief we may know.

Do I read too much of myself into the poem? Perhaps, tightroping a fine line, for we always bring ourselves to encounters with writers, reading ourselves and our stories into them and theirs, no matter how we try to be open to what may be there independent of our reading.

I do not know if these remarks shed any illumination on why I respond to this poem as I do. Perhaps it can only be said that I simply love it, as we sometimes love those things that we come to call art. It wakes my heart to feeling and carries me away.

David :: Jan.25.2010 :: Literary :: 2 Comments »