From
May 5th through the 11th, I will be in the gorgeous lakeside town of
Bled, Slovenia, participating in a P.E.N. conference. P.E.N. champions the abolition of censorship and the freeing
of literary-political prisoners, of which there are twenty-eight in Cuba, say, and an
uncountable number in China. Most of the proceedings, then, involve political
strategizing.
There
is always, however, another dimension of this conference. This year marks the
100th anniversary of WWI, and our theme will be “The Great War and
Modern Literature.” As the American representative, I’m urged to speak of our
own nation’s response to that calamity.
I’ll
copy a version of my comments, but first the lucky back story of why I’m a
participant.
In
2001, I was teaching in Lugano, Switzerland. A diplomat friend our family had known
ten years before in Hungary. where I'd held a Fulbright fellowship invited us to stay at their
Budapest home over Easter break and I’d give a tenth anniversary reading. The
stay was delightful, and afterwards, our host said he’d spread the word to
fellow diplomats that I would happily lecture or read elsewhere. I did visit
several cities, including Ljubljana, the Slovene capital.
I
joke that Slovenia is where right-acting poets go after death. I was in
Slovenia’s national press, on its national TV, and most gratifying, on its
public radio’s daily poetry program.
After
the show, I had lunch with my interviewer, Marjan Strojan, when I learned he
was not only an eminent poet himself but also the foremost Slovene
translator of English poetry, having managed such modest projects as The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, and
Beowulf. But he claimed his greatest
challenge had been the work of Robert Frost: Marjan always seeks form-true
translation, but Slovenian is a language devoid of Frost’s signature iambic
foot. For all that, he had managed fifty poems in half as many years, and
they’d soon be published.
Marjan
and I stayed in touch, and I soon got a sad note from him. His publisher had
failed rightly to secure international rights to Frost’s canon, and Frost’s
American publisher, Henry Holt, would exact a prohibitive permissions fee for
any print run that exceeded 200. By pure chance, Frost’s literary executor is
Peter Gilbert, a friend and former student, now director of the Vermont
Humanities Council. So I forwarded Marjan’s email to him, along with my opinion
that every single living Slovenian could buy Marjan’s book of translations
without the least effect on Holt’s bottom line. Peter arranged the permission
for a song.
For
me this involved a quick email; for Marjan it redeemed a quarter-century’s
work. In gratitude, he began to invite me back to all manner of literary
events. Each time, he’d translate some of my poems, and in 2006 a selection of
them appeared in print over there. Best of all, over time the translator has
become one of my dearest friends. (Autumn Hill Press in Iowa, an excellent
house specializing in eastern European authors, will soon publish a selection
of his work here. Should you want to see a sample, go to http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/walking.)
Now
my remarks, abridged, for the P.E.N. conference.
The Great War and the Death
of Abstract Language
Ten
decades ago, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson argued to a doubtful American
populace that the country’s entry into war would “make the world safe for
democracy.” Such idealistic rhetoric soon measured itself against brute fact:
hundreds of thousands of war casualties and maimings.
The following,
written by e.e. cummings after his Great War experience as an ambulance driver,
makes much of such dissonance. It ironically echoes “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” ,
which nearly became our national anthem. The song begins, “My country, ‘tis of
Thee,/Sweet land of liberty,” and
goes on to salute the “Land where my fathers died,/Land of the pilgrims’ pride....”
“next to of course god
america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?”
He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water.
Artists have always been suspicious of conventional pieties, but the
Great War deeply enhanced that suspicion. Cummings’s own anti-war suspicions
were vocal enough to earn him a military incarceration and, eventually, to
prompt a compelling novel, The Enormous
Room. In the poem above, the clash of pietistic slogan with grim factuality
is patent, and its demagogic protagonist seems to know it: he races through his
address, reluctant to use his own jingoistic shibboleths. Unlike the hymn he
quotes in part, the speaker avoids mentioning pride, for instance, and even if he makes an obligatory reference
to God, as American politicians still
seem obliged to do, he’s disinclined to say that his “country ‘tis of Thee.” At the end, we read, “He spoke. And drank rapidly a
glass of water,”
as though to wash the formulaic blather out of his mouth.
Cummings
won’t ennoble rhetorical convention as a mark of patriotism, any more than he
will consider poetic convention like the sonnet, which he at once adopts and
mockingly subverts in this poem, as one of art. Even conventions of grammar and
punctuation seem to offend him. No bromide, no propriety whatever– right, left,
center, religious, atheistic– is simply to be accepted at face value.
There
are examples of such skepticism and resistance throughout the work of American
artists of the Great War. Given time constraints, I’ll refer only to Ernest
Hemingway, another ambulance driver. He raises themes akin to Cummings’s, most
famously in The Sun Also Rises, but
really throughout his earlier work. One of his stories, “The Gambler, the Nun,
and the Radio,” written in the lull between WWI and WWII, is exemplary.
The
plot unfolds in a Catholic hospital, and involves a Mexican gambler, Cayetano,
who has been shot in a small Montana town; a nun who aspires to be a saint; and
Mr. Frazer, a writer recovering from a horseback accident, who constantly
listens to his radio.
The
nun invites three Mexican musicians to perform for Cayetano. One of them
suggests that religion is the opium of the people, dulling them to their
ignorance. After Frazer hears that opinion, he reflects as follows:
Religion is the opium of the people. He
believed that, that dyspeptic little joint-keeper. Yes, and music is the opium
of the people. Old mount-to-the-head hadn’t thought of that. And now economics
is the opium of the people; along with patriotism the opium of the people in
Italy and Germany. What about sexual intercourse; was that an opium of the
people? Of some of the people. Of some of the best of the people. But drink was
a sovereign opium of the people, oh, an excellent opium. Although some prefer
the radio, another opium of the people, a cheap one he had just been using.
Along with these went gambling, an opium of the people if there ever was one,
one of the oldest. Ambition was another, an opium of the people, along with a
belief in any new form of government. What you wanted was the minimum of
government, always less government. Liberty, what we believed in, now the name
of a MacFadden publication (i.e. a tabloid).
Though Frazer makes no direct reference to the Great War, its effects
show themselves here: like Cummings, he stresses
the emptiness of abstractions like Liberty. And yet, half-addled by drugs and drink and pain, he
speaks as follows:
“Listen,” Mr. Frazer said to the nurse when
she came. “Get that little thin Mexican in here, will you, please?”
“How do you like it?” the Mexican said at
the door.
“Very much.”
“It is a historic tune,” the Mexican said.
“It is the tune of the real revolution.”
“Listen,” said Mr. Frazer. “Why should the
people be operated on without an anæsthetic?”
“I do not understand.”
“Why are not all the opiums of the people
good? What do you want to do with the people?”
“They should be rescued from ignorance.”
“Don’t talk nonsense. Education is an opium
of the people. You ought to know that. You’ve had a little.”
“You do not believe in education?”
“No,” said Mr. Frazer. “In knowledge, yes.
In distinguishing education from knowledge, I believe
Hemingway smells danger in thought removed from tangible, empirical reference. Such
thought is, so to speak, disembodied
speech; it’s abstract in the Latin sense, “a drawing away.” The wounded and
dying are unlikely to recite dulce et
decorum est pro patria mori. The anodynes we propose to soothe us in a
world as cruel as late history has proven– perhaps all are empty; but the broad
political ones, which have so deceived and wounded “the people,” are downright disastrous. We all may
deceive ourselves; but let us at least be modest in our self-deceptions.
The constitutional skepticism that I mentioned at the
outset, has by our time solidified itself among American artists; but,
tragically, it has not spread among the truly powerful. I can think of no U.S. poet, for instance, who endorsed George W.
Bush’s unconscionable 2003 misadventure, code-named– what else?– Iraqi Freedom. And yet that murderous and foolish campaign went forward.
Bush spoke of an “axis of evil.” He had not, one assumes, ever encountered the
counsel of Ezra Pound (before Pound himself went politically insane): Go in fear of abstractions.
Yes, I wince in my own time to hear billowy, abstract rhetoric in the
mouths of politicians. Iraqi Freedom
indeed. I can read the news and see what that freedom amounts to even now. I
wish, however, that the problem were a partisan one. Today, however, with a supposedly
liberal administration in office, one often hears from high places terms like human dignity– even as our drones wipe
out untold hundreds of invisible lives.
That last example is germane. Our abstractions, our disembodiments, can
so easily lead us to dehumanization,, especially, I believe, in a virtual
world. Assisted by technology, our power-brokers can all too easily divorce
themselves from Hemingway’s brand of “knowledge,” even to the point of
forgetting that the enemy dead, civilian and “terrorist” alike, were ever
living, breathing people.
Let me here make a leap to consider some ramifications of all this for
the writer. Since the advent of deconstruction in literary study, a parallel
danger emerges, at least in my opinion. That so-called literary theory should
have stressed the inevitable disjunction between what we always thought was signification and its intended object;
that it should have found language to be an unavoidable artifice: these were
perhaps important propositions, and surely ratified those suspicions that
artists have always held of official language. Theory may have helped discredit
propaganda. But
if we follow many of its premises to their furthest conclusions, every ideal
becomes at worst a lie and at best a distortion. If that be the case, then
there can be no solid reason for honorable thought or activity. “It is easy to
be brilliant if you do not believe in anything,” as Goethe said. If there is no
such thing as truth, how may we censure students who go on to join America’s
corporate elite?
Mark Edmundsen, a maverick professor at my own alma mater, Yale, puts
the matter thus:
If
the business of education as de-idealization had ended with the revelations
about de Man’s wartime anti-Semitism or
Derrida’s death, then all this would be semi-ancient history. But it’s not
over. Universities made a turn toward the
de-Bunkers, and they’ve not turned back. Scholars don’t take ideals too
seriously; academics remain pretty much
in the de-divinization business, which is the business of deflating or attacking
ideals. Few professors in my field,
literature, believe that they can distinguish rigorously between pop-culture
flotsam and the works of Milton. Few of
them know how to mount an argument that values Wyatt’s poetry over a video
game. Few believe that reading the
best that has been thought and said can give a young person something to live
for and teach him or her how to
live.
So where, as humanists, can
we stand? Have we no choice beside empty, even ruinous, Wilsonian idealism on
the one hand and a skepticism so deep on the other as to amount, essentially,
to mere cynicism? As so often, I think, it is the practitioners of our art
rather than its critics and scholars who may show us a way. Let me close with a
poem by Robert Hass, a former poet laureate of my country:
Meditation at Lagunitas
All the new thinking is about
loss.
In this it resembles all the
old thinking.
The idea, for example, that
each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general
idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the
dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by
his presence,
some tragic falling off from
a first world
of undivided light. Or the
other notion that,
because there is in this world
no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it
signifies.
We talked about it late last
night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a
thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a
while I understood that,
talking this way, everything
dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I
remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my
hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at
her presence
like a thirst for salt, for
my childhood river
with its island willows,
silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught
the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because
desire is full
of endless distances. I must
have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the
way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said
that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are
moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the
good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those
afternoons and evenings,
saying
blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
I believe that, as writers and thinkers and simple citizens, we must
hold the feet of our powerful to the fire. We must demand that their
abstractions be tethered to what Eliot called their objective correlatives,
that they be grounded in the flesh-and-blood realities not only of their own
constituencies but also of the world’s citizenry, that they be founded on a
Hemingwayesque “knowledge.”
As Hass’s poem implies, there may be no way for
language to get at ultimate truths. But let us speak of what we can know; let us speak of provisional
truths. The slipperiness of language, so ably demonstrated by the
deconstructionists and their successors, ought not lead us to nihilism. Hass’s
poem is instructive, urging us, rather, to humility– which, as I’m fond of
repeating, never hurt anyone.
