Gleanings

What I've been reading

(Acknowledgements to The Inscapist for the title of today’s post!)

I’ve had very little time to write, and not that much more to read: this school year feels busier than last year, somehow, despite my being better-versed in the arcane workings of small Catholic schools.

But I have been reading, and I have the gleanings to prove it. I have neither the time nor the energy to string together an original thought this weekend, so I thought I’d string together some unoriginal thoughts from my evening reading sessions.

John Keats

I went looking for Keats’ comments about Shakespeare’s “negative capability”, his power of lingering with ambiguities without needing to resolve them into a positive insight. I found them, of all places, in a letter to his brothers from late in December 1827. As it happens, his comments are spare, especially given the influence his words have had on the subsequent tradition, although they’re no less thoughtful for being gnomic. But they weren’t the most arresting part of the letter, at least for me: his comments on humor vs. wit were even more striking, for being so immediately and relatably true. I kept his style and capitalization/non-capitalization, as the case may be.

I spent Friday evening with Wells & went the next morning to see Death on the Pale horse. It is a wonderful picture, when West’s? age is considered; But there is nothing to be intense upon; no women one feels mad to kiss; no face swelling into reality. the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth — Examine King Lear & you will find this examplified throughout; but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness — The picture is larger than Christ rejected —I dined with Haydon the sunday after you left, & had a very pleasant day, I dined too (for I have been out too much lately) with Horace Smith & met his two Brothers with Hill & Kingston & one Du Bois, they only served to convince me, how superior humour is to wit in respect to enjoyment — These men say things which make one without making one feel, they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have a mannerism in their very eating & drinking, in their mere handling a Decanter — They talked of Kean & his low company— Would I were with that company instead of yours said I to myself! I know such like acquaintance will never do for me & yet I am going to Reynolds, on wednesday - Brown & Dilke walked with me & back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously —I mean Negative Capability, that is when man Is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. (Selected Poems and Letters, pp. 260-261)

Arthur Miller

Autumn seems to be a good time to wrestle with Arthur Miller. I picked up his Collected Essays for another autumn gander, and wasn’t disappointed. I was especially struck by some of his comments in his 1989 reappraisal of two of his earliest plays, The Man Who Had All The Luck and The Golden Years, then being reissued after half a decade of obscurity. You hear so much about “fascism” from people who didn’t live through it, either as victims or as observers from afar, it’s refreshing — if depressing — to hear about it from someone who did, especially when they encountered it at the cusp of adulthood, when we are prone to idealism.

I must say that, at the time, life at best seemed headed for a bloody showdown with Fascism, or at worst a hapless surrender to it, but while there is plenty of worry in these plays, there is no real despair or defeat of the spirit. This will strike some as perhaps a reflection of a callow Leftism, but in truth it was the way most Americans felt even after a very long decade of Depression. By the late thirties and early forties we had, of course, known much social violence and all kinds of vileness, but not yet a Holocaust, not yet the bursting of the banks of evil. I can still recall my incredulity at the daylight bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. As bombings go, it wasn’t a very big one. The big ones were still on the way. But I simply could not believe that a European flying low in an airplane on a sunny day over an undefended town, could, whatever his politics, drop live bombs on women out shopping with their baby carriages, on old men sitting before their doorways, on young lovers strolling across the ancient square! It was hard to sleep for weeks afterwards. It was still possible to be shocked. At least within one’s mind the lines of some sort of order of permissible human behavior still held. (Collected Essays, pp. 184-185)

There was a metaphorical poetry in this in the late thirties when perfectly intelligent, respectable, even heroic folk like the great flier Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne could return from a visit to Nazi Germany and call it “The Wave of the Future.” I recall feeling myself surrounded in those times by a kind of drifting into cultural suicide and a self-blinded acceptance of murder in high places, and this play was written in alarm. A few years later I did believe that had the Japanese not been deluded enough to attack Pearl Harbor there might well have been sufficient isolationist sentiment in the American people to simply let Hitler have his way with a defeated England and Europe. In a word, our passivity seemed in reality a drift toward an unacknowledged arrangement with Fascism. So-perhaps despite appearances-these are two anti-Fascist plays that were written quite close to the abyss. But perhaps more importantly, they were one very young writer’s wrestling with enormous themes. (ibid, pp. 187-188)

Lionel Trilling

I finished The Liberal Imagination earlier this week, a fact attended by the usual bittersweetness with which you close a book that will live with you forever, but which you’ll never be able to read again with the “wild surmise” of discovering another Mencian friend in its pages.

Trilling is a magnificent writer, which no one ever seems to mention when they discuss his importance as a critic. Certainly, he stands head and shoulders above Jacques Barzun, his friend and colleague at Columbia University, whose essays I have also been reading during my evening literary sojourns to “the ancient courts of ancient men” à la Machiavelli, and who strikes me as far the shallower thinker and more workmanlike stylist of the two. (Though maybe one of these days I’ll read From Dawn to Decadence and revise that assessment.)

For all that, though, it was Barzun who furnished the clearest understanding of Trilling’s preoccupations as a thinker and critic.

In the 1930s a young American who would be a critic faced, in life and art, the choice between a reactionist aestheticism upholding the autonomy of the work of art and the Marxist interpretation (and employment) of art as a weapon in the class struggle. Like many others, Lionel was drawn to Marxism by his idealism and generous humanity; but not for long. He soon found unacceptable the apparatus imposed on thought by Marxian teachings and even more repellent the deeds of the practitioners. He began to develop his own Third Position, a position on the Left as a critic of the Left. Out of it came all the premises and conclusions in politics, art, morals, and psychology that made him from the outset unclassifiable. (A Jacques Barzun Reader, p. 134)

I read those words between essays in The Liberal Imagination, and they illuminated much. He is very much a man of the left (both politically and aesthetically — the latter leads him to fascinating and, I think, correct critiques of the more or less conservative New Critics in “The Sense of the Past”), but he is never uncritically so. Indeed, the whole thrust of The Liberal Imagination is that the relationship between the eponymous ideas was, at least in 1950, too tenuous to sustain liberal democracy as a living sociopolitical tradition.

Liberalism is all thought and no imagination, whereas conservatism — which, in 1950, still lacked intellectual champions in America — is all feeling and no thought. Neither condition is desirable, but for different reasons. Of the conservative impulse in 1950, Trilling wisely notes that

when we say that a movement is “bankrupt of ideas” we are likely to suppose that it is at the end of its powers. But this is not so, and it is dangerous for us to suppose that it is so, as the experience of Europe in the last quarter-century suggests, for in the modern situation it is just when a movement despairs of having ideas that it turns to force, which it masks in ideology. What is more, it is not conducive to the real strength of liberalism that it should occupy the intellectual field alone. In the course of one of the essays of this book I refer to a remark of John Stuart Mill’s in his famous article on Coleridge-Mill, at odds with Coleridge all down the intellectual and political line, nevertheless urged all liberals to become acquainted with this powerful conservative mind. He said that the prayer of every true partisan of liberalism should be, “ ‘Lord, enlighten thou our enemies . ..’; sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom: their weakness is what fills us with apprehen-sion, not their strength.” What Mill meant, of course, was that the intellectual pressure which an opponent like Coleridge could exert would force liberals to examine their position for its weaknesses and complacencies.

It is toward remedying liberalism’s weaknesses, especially its lack of lasting expression in and through images, that he dedicates the book. He offers many striking critiques of the postwar liberal consensus, but one struck me above all, the peroration of its final essay, “The Meaning of A Literary Idea”, which I found simultaneously illuminating and irritating, and which I reproduce here in full for your own irritation and illumination.

I know that I will not be wrong if I assume that most of us here are in our social and political beliefs consciously liberal and democratic. And I know that I will not be wrong if I say that most of us, and in the degree of our commitment to literature and our familiarity with it, find that the contemporary authors we most wish to read and most wish to admire for their literary qualities demand of us a great agility and ingenuity in coping with their antagonism to our social and political ideals. For it is in general true that the modern European literature to which we can have an active, reciprocal relation-ship, which is the right relationship to have, has been written by men who are indifferent to, or even hostile to, the tradition of democratic liberalism as we know it. Yeats and Eliot, Proust and Joyce, Lawrence and Gide — these men do not seem to confirm us in the social and political ideals which we hold.

If we now turn and consider the contemporary literature of America, we see that wherever we can describe it as patently liberal and democratic, we must say that it is not of lasting interest. I do not say that the work which is written to conform to the liberal democratic tradition is of no value but only that we do not incline to return to it, we do not establish it in our minds and affections: Very likely we learn from it as citizens; and as citizen-scholars and citizen-critics we understand and explain it. But we do not live in an active reciprocal relation with it. The sense of largeness, of cogency, of the transcendence which largeness and cogency can give, the sense of being reached in our secret and primitive minds — this we virtually never get from the writers of the liberal democratic tradition at the present time.

And since liberal democracy inevitably generates a body of ideas, it must necessarily occur to us to ask why it is that these particular ideas have not infused with force and cogency the literature that embodies them. This question is the most important, the most fully challenging question in culture that at this moment we can ask.

The answer to it cannot of course even be begun here, and I shall be more than content if now it is merely accepted as a legitimate question. But there are one or two things that may be said about the answer, about the direction we must take to reach it in its proper form. We will not find it if we come to facile conclusions about the absence from our culture of the impressive ideas of traditional religion. I have myself referred to the historical fact that religion has been an effective means of transmitting or of generating ideas of a sort which I feel are necessary for the literary qualities we want, and to some this will no doubt mean that I believe religion to be a necessary condition of great literature. I do not believe that; and what is more, I consider it from many points of view an impropriety to try to guarantee literature by religious belief.

Nor will we find our answer if we look for it in the weakness of the liberal democratic ideas in themselves. It is by no means true that the inadequacy of the literature that connects itself with a body of ideas is the sign of the inadequacy of those ideas, although it is no doubt true that some ideas have less affinity with literature than others.

Our answer, I believe, will rather be found in a cultural; fact-in the kind of relationship which we, or the writers who represent us, maintain toward the ideas we claim as ours, and in our habit of conceiving the nature of ideas in general. If we find that it is true of ourselves that we conceive ideas to be pellets of intellection or crystallizations of thought, precise and completed, and defined by their coherence and their procedural recommendations, then we shall have accounted for the kind of prose literature we have. And if we find that we do indeed have this habit, and if we continue in it, we can predict that our literature will continue much as it is. But if we are drawn to revise our habit of conceiving ideas in this way and learn instead to think of ideas as living things, inescapably connected with our wills and desires, as susceptible of growth and development by their very nature, as showing their life by their tendency to change, as being liable, by this very tendency, to deteriorate and become corrupt and to work harm, then we shall stand in a relation to ideas which makes an active literature possible. (The Liberal Imagination, pp. 301-303)

Heimito von Doderer

This has been a year for big German-language novels: Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which I started sometime last October (how time flies!) and finished, at last, in February; and now Heimito von Doderer’s The Strudlhof Steps, which I started in July and which I hope to finish this week.

I don’t want to go much into Doderer’s background at the moment — I’m sure I’ll write an essay about the book when I finish it. All I’ll say is that the following quotations give you a taste of what this almost 900-page monster of a book is like; there’s a reason I’m taking my time with it.

And I say that with all the affection in the world. I have a high tolerance for artistic self-indulgence, as long as it’s enjoyable. I believe that that distinction is possible, and important. Inception is Christopher Nolan’s most self-indulgent film, but it’s still cool; The Gormenghast Trilogy is almost a thousand pages of self-indulgent dreamscaping, and I don’t care. Some people stop enjoying music or literature as soon as they realize that the artist is producing more for himself than for his audience — and that’s a fine response, I suppose, though I can’t help but feel that such people miss a lot by demanding the author’s full attention and condescension. That’s how self-absorbed children behave, a habit we expect them to break.

Doderer was a strange and flawed man, but he was an artist unlike anyone else I’ve ever read — he writes with a passion for the bizarre that rivals Mervyn Peake, but with a moral intensity like Tolstoy’s and a tone of self-reproach more palpable than Turgenev’s. If you can’t get through these lines because of your contempt for self-indulgence, remember that that’s its own kind of self-indulgence, friend.

The kind of conviviality that sets in quite on its own as a varied and interesting meal progresses and at the same time rises by imperceptible degrees out of the wine now started expanding around the table and warming everyone. Even Melzer. He was seeing through a veil, and that is what enabled him to see in the first place. It is not in confronting the object itself, which fades in stark daylight, that the eye displays its wondrous abilities;, the opulence of light does not unfold until there is refraction. It appeared to him as if the rooms here had unexpectedly grown deeper and that the people in them had accordingly moved off to a distance, in a way somehow akin to what had just happened with the fur-like forest down below on the mountains as they pointed outward and away to a plain which could not be seen. He released himself from his immediate surroundings, as a string being tuned will stretch and raise itself off the fingerboard of the instrument-once i’s no longer touching, it can resonate. A kind of dignity was what now crept over Melzer, along with the remote possibility of his composing himself into some other form so as to face what was coming, whatever that might be. (p. 220)

The steps were standing there for anyone who happened by, for all the self-satisfied run-of-the-mill types and even for the great unwashed, but their design was such as to provide a path spread out to the strides of destiny, which don’t always have to shake the ground with a foot shod in armor but will often come walking, nearly noiseless, on the thinnest of soles, and in Atlas shoes, of with the short, skipping little footsteps of some poor heart exposed, running at a steady, ticking pace on its own two feet, tiny little heart-feet all bare and sore and needing so much care—to such a heart as well will the steps, cascading down in their splendor, offer companionship and escort; and they are always there; and they never grow weary of telling us that each path has a worth and value of its own and is always, in every case, more than just the goal. The masterful architect who designed these stairs isolated one small segment of all the paths we millions follow in so large a city, and in doing so he showed us how much every meter of it is imbued with dignity and design. And when the ramps go sweeping outward, level and banked, and curve as they run along the hillside, negating all utilitarian efficiency of movement and rejecting all our chicken ladders; when one of the flights of steps becomes in itself a device of style, a means of achieving expression on these stages ranked here one above the other, so that a man with his self-worth all forfeited now seems virtually compelled, regardless of how far he may have come down in the world, to come down the steps with that much more refinement of execution, then the architect’s deepest wish for those living in his own time and those coming after him has been fulfilled-to lay out in its component parts and then reunite in some concrete form the treasure beyond price that is in all their pathways all their days, to persevere in this long, tediously detailed palaver, giving cadence to its rhythms, so that it may carry through, a constraining force for skipping little hearts and stomping boots alike, reaching as far down as the platform, where the solitude of summer gathers in so densely around the babbling and the prattling of the fountain, or even all the way down to the urn and to the mask that looks out onto the warm and silent street and is just as inscrutable as a living face, made of stone though it may be. (pp. 308-309)

Taking cognizance of another human being is an act of creation and completion. Out of a sectional councillor or civil service official or other fairly high-ranking bureaucrat earning a decent competence this creative cognizance will fashion the rock-solid fortress of a private lite in splendid order, a person tree of all pressure, as it were, in his own affairs, a firmly established vacuum, an ideal resting place for such backpacks as may from time to time grow too heavy. What’s more, every man also appears more purely to exist than he does. To our own selves, we are always occurring, emerging, forever faltering. But others we see in their static mode, so to speak, ascribing to them far more possession of their selves than they have, more, indeed, than we ourselves have. And yet that’s exactly what we claim from them-that they should at all times function as a solid base on which to lay aside backpacks, if occasion should arise-presuming upon them in a way that is both unthinking and thoughtless, and of course very selfish, too. (314)

Good order is nothing more than the water of life rising up through the arteries, the veins, and the capillaries; when it fills them to the brim they form the most beautiful network of branchings. And when it recedes, then you can bundle them together or smooth them out any way you like but they’ll still be all tangled and snarled, in great disorder. That person is best engaging with life whose apparent command of good order is handled with discretion and can barely be discerned for what it is. (348)

The whole novel reads pretty much like that. And it’s magnificent.