Ruined Cottage Cheese

When I was in medical school, a GI surgeon opened a lecture with a statement I’m sure has never been uttered before or since. “I have a confession to make,” he said with a weird grin. “I love infected pancreatic necrosis.” This surgeon, who so enjoyed the debridement of dead pancreas, had an infamous temper and was rumored once to have thrown a chunk of human liver at somebody in the O.R. A visceral reaction, you might say. I don’t know why I’m telling you this except that I have a confession to make that’s equally unseemly and visceral, but not towards any viscera so literal as liver, or even pancreas. My confession is: I hate Wordsworth’s poems.

When you consider that Wordsworth’s contemporaries ranked him next to Milton and Shak-Daddy, and many critics still do, my dislike of his poetry looks almost as sick as love of infected pancreatic necrosis. Wordsworth was brilliant and totally sincere, and he had a hard life; he was an orphan. He’s written lines that other poets will forever envy, lines that sound as old as the Lake District hills. For example: “The Child is father of the Man.” The famed literary critic William Hazlitt regarded Wordsworth as “the most original poet now living.”

I can see why Hazlitt says so; WW is so passionate, so cerebral, so revolutionary for his time. He would never throw a liver at anyone. Not even if they deserved it. His poetry, written in the afterglow of the French Revolution, imported to English lit the progressive philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like Rousseau, WW champions individuality, a deist sense of God in Nature and of harmony between Nature and humanity, and a belief in universal human dignity that extends across ethnicities and class divisions. WW’s suspicion of civilization, of nationalism and primitive religion, his attempt to de-repress emotion, his validation of introspection, and his interest in the personal sphere carried modernity a long way downfield. First down, Wordsworth.

On the other hand, WW’s advocate William Hazlitt seems himself to acknowledge the difficult qualities of stillness and abstraction in WW’s poetry. To his praise of Wordsworth, Hazlitt adds this fairly unambiguous criticism: “He is totally deficient in all the machinery of poetry.” Hmmm. That is a problem. Then Hazlitt goes on to cite the example of The Excursion, the first Book of which, informally called “The Ruined Cottage,” is regarded as “one of Wordsworth’s greatest poems” by Encyclopedia Britannica. Here is the rest of the passage from Hazlitt:

His Excursion, taken as a whole, notwithstanding the noble materials thrown away in it, is a proof of this [i.e. that he is “totally deficient in all the machinery of poetry”]. The line labours, the sentiment moves slow, but the poem stands stock-still. The reader makes no way from the first line to the last. It is more than any thing in the world like Robinson Crusoe’s boat, which would have been an excellent good boat, and would have carried him to the other side of the globe, but that he could not get it out of the sand where it stuck fast. English Romantic Writers, David Perkins, ed., p. 639

I have tried many times to like WW’s pastoral poems, much as I’ve tried to like religion. Neither matzah nor “Tintern Abbey” go down easy. Yeast is matzah’s problem. Wordsworth’s may be his consistent disregard for two of Strunk and White’s cardinal principles: omit needless words, and write with specificity. Strunk says particulars power the work of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare because they call up pictures in the mind. By contrast, Hazlitt says of WW, “his descriptions of natural scenery are not brought home distinctly to the naked eye…. The image is lost in the sentiment….” (Perkins, p. 614).

Sometimes WW makes keen, specific observations—as when at twilight “hills / Grow larger in the darkness” (“The Ruined Cottage,” ll. 127-128)—but more often he favors archetype and abstraction—as when a herdsman leaves his wife with some “soldiers, going to a distant land” (l. 677). What soldiers? Which distant land? WW doesn’t care. Fables may successfully employ such abstractions, but fables are usually spare in language and rich in incident, and “The Ruined Cottage” is the opposite: long, wordy, philosophical, and almost without human motives or dramatic conflict.

Abstraction is a means of avoiding reality that shows up particularly in WW’s tendency to cloying idealizations of peasant men and women. Margaret, the last tenant of the eponymous ruined cottage, is “One whose stock / Of virtues bloomed beneath this lowly roof” (ll. 511-512). The Wanderer who narrates Margaret’s story “lived a long and innocent life” (l. 396). One of Margaret’s children seems to remain an “infant in her arms” (l. 843) and a “little babe” (l. 856) for as long as ten years.

“The Ruined Cottage” develops profound thoughts and a sophisticated, intricate extended meshadow and light, dream and waking, but its phony idealizations rebuff the reader. It does not take much account of the difficult realities that have stimulated twee reaction formations inside him, but rather just keeps selling the dream to himself.

Did Wordsworth beatify peasants in order to deny their vulnerability, much as he devoted so many lines to denying death? Did he idealize peasants in order to defend them from aristocratic bigotry of Hazlitt’s variety? Either way, his poems certify the aesthetic risks of taking too little account of reality and of mixing art and well-meaning politics.

Non Serviam

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On June 15, 1917, a U.S. marshal and 12 New York City policemen entered the Lower East Side offices of the radical magazine Mother Earth and placed its editor under arrest.  The U.S. was mobilizing to enter World War I, and the famous anarchist Emma Goldman had been charged with conspiracy to obstruct the draft in violation of the Selective Service Act passed earlier that year.  She brought with her to the jailhouse, according to Vivian Gornick, only two things: "a small toilet case" and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.


Joyce's novel was a rare object at that time (though, admittedly, not so rare as Emma Goldman's toilet case).  At the time Goldman was arrested, Portrait had been in print for little more than six months in an edition of less than a thousand.  Yet it’s fitting, even if surprising, that she had a copy and attached such importance to it, since Joyce wrote the quintessential book against "the spirit of unquestioning obedience" that Goldman deplored.


While Goldman rebelled publicly against governments, armies, corporations, and churches in order to even the scales of justice, Joyce ignored a political bagatelle such as World War I.  He wrote not of the struggle to liberate a people but of the individual’s struggle to liberate himself—if need be, from his people.  In his book on the adolescence of Stephen Dedalus—the best book ever written on male adolescence, I think—Stephen liberates himself above all from his own twisted conscience.  And that is hard enough.  To overthrow a government of the people is not so hard, perhaps, as to overthrow the government of the heart.


Plato confused conscience with reason, but Freud, the ultimate analyst of corrupt conscience (a.k.a. neurosis), did not.  He knew that for some it could be a catalogue of hysteric, childish dangers with sometimes pitiless, bullying, and sophistical methods for enforcing its prohibitions.


Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus rebels against such irrational conscience, conscience that rules not by reason but by incantations and scare tactics, a sovereign conscience that “force hath made supreme / Above his equals” as Satan says of God in Paradise Lost Book I, ll 248-249.  At times Stephen shares the apostate angel’s “unconquerable will” and “courage never to submit or yield,” as Milton puts it.  When the priest names the cardinal Satanic sin—“non serviam: I will not serve” (Portrait p 117)—and says you burn in Hell for it, Stephen cowers and chastens himself.  But reason, courage, and self-sympathy prevails; in the novel’s last pages Stephen twice echoes Satan’s famous line, “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven” (PL I, l 263); he tells his friend Cranly “I will not serve” on p 239 and “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church” on p 247.  Dedalus soars over Hell with self-made wings, over the Irish Sea to Europe, hoping “to fly by those nets” of church and homeland (p 203) which are the aliases by which demonic conscience makes itself known.


This inner conflict, which shapes Portrait, in turn takes its shape from the family conflict in which its template was cast.  Just like in Paradise Lost, where the many crises of conscience turn on relations between God the Father and his curious, jealous children, Portrait is all about fathers and sons.  Patrick Parrinder, author of a great essay on the novel called “A Portrait of the Artist,” says of Stephen Dedalus: “his father’s voice plays a crucial part in the novel.  Portrait begins (as we have seen) with his father’s words and ends with a cry addressed to an imaginary father.”  It’s battle and rapprochement between father and son, rebellion and submission, resentment and idolization, and a vacillation between these two positions, conducted wholly in the realm of language.  While writing my college thesis on Portrait I counted instances of the word ‘father’ and came up with 193 (including ‘governor’ three times and ‘Papa’ once) in 253 pages.  (Since this was before the internet and e-books, I counted by circling ‘father’ whenever I came across it and then I went back and tallied them up on notebook paper with hash marks in sets of five!)


There’s a beautiful triangle form inside of Portrait, with sin at one end of its base and piety at the other, and a conciliation between the two at its glorious flying vertex.  Only Joyce could inscribe this abstract form onto a novel of such incomparable specificity and naturalism.  He does it with three motivic lines on Stephen’s approach to reality.


First:


"It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin." p 103


Then:


"In vague sacrificial or sacramental acts alone his will seemed drawn to go forth to encounter reality." p 159


And then:


"I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." p 253


There at the windy vertex Stephen throws off the yoke of oppressive conscience by replacing it with a conscience he made himself en route to maturity.  That is self-governance, no?  That is autonomy, and it enables "detachment from parental authority, a process that alone makes possible the opposition, which is so important for the progress of civilization, between the new generation and the old," as Freud says in “The Transformations of Puberty,” the third of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.


I’ll soon be forty years old.  I’ve been done with puberty for months.  Now, if I could just move past this nasty, moody adolescence.  Well, here I go with my wax wings on, to set sail over the abyss, muttering to myself, “ ‘Indigestibly byronic’?  I find that incontestably mo-ronic, Mr. Kenner….”  Shit, it’s a long way down there.



View all my reviews

Out of Eden

The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism by Peter Gay
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

For more than a month now, I've been steeped in Peter Gay's sane and sage history of the sanest and sagest intellects from Roman antiquity to the 18th-century.  Gay's command of his subject is broad and deep.  He owns a subtle, temperate, and vivacious mind.   This book is a treasure chest of historical data, but it's also a philosophical meditation on the central question that nature has put to the human race: can you face the facts of life and of yourself, or will you bury your head in the sand like an ostrich?  (Do even ostriches actually do this?)  Will you bury your thinking mind in all manner of denial and magic and, one might add, will you in so doing destroy your planet, your kind, yourselves?  This question, which has been so well articulated by Carl Sagan, that great latter-day Justus Lipsius, intermittently haunted me while reading--but then anxiety haunts me even if I'm sitting on the beach, Corona in hand.  And more than anxiety, I felt a great comfort in my daily immersion in the humanism of antiquity, of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

Gay focuses on the writings and ideas themselves more than on the personal lives of the writers and thinkers.  It isn't light reading in that sense, but it's leavened by Gay's perspicuous and unpedantic writing style and his sense of the drama in the flux of ideas across empires and ages.  I learned all the great Roman writers I should have read by now, and discovered the Carl Sagans of their time, the popularizers, the encyclopedists and curators of the arts and letters of the modern and humane.  People with fantastic names like Aldus Manutius and Poggio Bracciolini (I think I ate something like that braised with garlic).  Poggio, "the most assiduous and successful discoverer of classical texts in the Renaissance" (p. 261), was a church figure who shrugged off clerical duties to rescue manuscripts from monasteries.  "From 1414 to 1418," Gay tells us, "Poggio Bracciolini found himself Apostolic Secretary at the Council of Constance, a council which, fortunately for scholarship, rarely met." (p. 262)  Gay's dry humor keeps the history entertaining throughout and, despite the precedence of ideas before personalities, Gay does in the end resurrect certain personalities through his amusing and affecting anecdotes.  I learned that Boccaccio, the great progenitor of Chaucer and Shakespeare and author of The Decameron, was also a Raider of the Lost Ark.  Gay writes:

When Boccaccio visited the great Benedictine library of Monte Cassino, he found it a room without a door, with grass growing on the window sills, and the manuscripts covered with dust, torn and mutilated.  Profoundly dejected, and in tears, he asked one of the monks how such desecrations could have been permitted, and was told that the monks would tear off strips of parchment, to be made into psalters for boys or amulets for women, just to make a little money. p. 262

No one figure looms over the book, and over the Enlightenment itself, as does Voltaire--the archangel of the Enlightenment, an effete Machiavellian marauder on behalf of all the right things: science, tolerance, the classics.  Gay describes Voltaire's exile from the court of Frederick the Great thus: "Depressed, irritable, aimless, he wandered from elegant refuge to elegant refuge" (p. 363) until he landed at the abbey of Senones in 1754.  While Calmet generously hosted Voltaire at the abbey, Voltaire privately scoffed at him, "Felix errore suo," (p. 363-364) and used the abbey library to research polemics meant to destroy all that Calmet held most dear--the Christian faith.  

David Hume is the other hero of the book and the age.  Gay paints a portrait of James Boswell's visit to Hume in the weeks before the latter's death: "Hume's good nature and graceful acceptance of his imminent dissolution withstood even the tasteless intrusion of James Boswell," Gay writes (p. 356).  Boswell, like his mentor Samuel Johnson, was terrified of the philosophes' demotion of the Christian Heaven to the status of a fairy tale, and they particularly feared Hume, one of the most original and formidable minds of all time.  Boswell tried to extract from Hume some shred of Christian belief (as if Hume's endorsement would make it all true!) but even on his deathbed, Hume calmly refused to abandon the conclusions to which careful reasoning had led him.  "The Christian was on the defensive," Gay writes, "and grave doubts assailed him.  Perhaps to dispel them--he does not tell us--Boswell then sought refuge in an argument that Hume would certainly have been too charitable to use."  Boswell said in effect, Don't you want to see your friends in Heaven?  To which Hume replied, yes, but his friends didn't believe in an absurd notion like Heaven either.  "Not long after," says Gay, "as [Edward] Gibbon notes with majestic approval, Hume died at Edinburgh, 'the death of a philosopher.' " (p. 357)

"Hume makes plain that since God is silent, man is his own master: he must live in a disenchanted world, submit everything to criticism, and make his own way," Gay writes in conclusion (p. 419), and I suspect he deliberately echoes the last lines of Paradise Lost on the departure of Adam and Eve from Eden:

"They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way."

Let us all be so courageously modern as Peter Gay, David Hume, Milton, Adam, and Eve.



View all my reviews

That Old Nerd Magic

The Lord of the Rings Box Set by J.R.R. Tolkien

As Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker in 2001, “The work of Tolkien is infamously, almost scandalously, bereft of sex.”  Lane says he read it at 11 and 12 years old, exactly when I did--an age when a pretty girl was scarier than an orc.  Lane says that Tolkien's epic particularly suits "those who stand on the crumbling brink of puberty and gaze both forward and back. Tolkien’s characters, like teen-agers, feel at once lonely and sociable ... prey to private fears, and the book itself, though dazzled by innocence, is also hungry to know the worst—to confront all varieties of darkness and dereliction."

I was interested to learn from Lane’s article, written in his characteristic style (plush, jaded, yet sensitive), that Tolkien lost his father when he was three years old.  This lends an added poignance, Lane observes, to Tolkien's idea of "The Return of the King" and I think to the books' whole darkly romantic rationale.

"[A]nd yet to give in to it," Lane writes, "to cave in to it, as most of us did on a first reading—betrays a certain nerdishness, a reluctance to face the finer shades of life, that verges on the cowardly.”  There's clearly partial truth in this, as some Tolkien fans attest with their near-pathological level of absorption with the pretend, with the sexless, latency world of Middle-earth.  On the other hand, Tolkien's power of conjuration derives from his own immersion in reality, if a bookish level of it.  Wizards are not born but made, by long study of their spell books.

Tolkien was a linguist and mythographer who in some cases borrowed names directly from existing traditions, such as the dwarves from the Icelandic Poetic Edda.  And if you compare Tolkien’s description of “Smeagol” in The Fellowship of the Ring to John Milton’s description of fallen angel Mammon in Paradise Lost, it’s obvious that Tolkien consciously fashioned Gollum after Milton’s gold-digging devil (which Milton had in turn borrowed from tradition in the first place).  That’s allusion and artistic theft of the most creative and delicious sort.  The result is that Tolkien, like Milton, like Mammon, taps a vein of ancient gold, treasure refined over many centuries in the alembic of human imaginations, and then of course Tolkien refines and orders it further in his own imagination.  What Lane rightly calls the “outlandish plenitude of Middle-earth” reflects the outlandish plenitude of the big and rangy reality of the human mind and the long human experience on earth.

On looking into The Lord of the Rings again, I find they hold up better than any of my sci-fi favorites from childhood and adolescence (with the possible exception of Douglas Adams).  The scene at the entrance to the Mines of Moria is a wonder.  The little band of travelers confronts a secret entrance to the Mines, and Gandalf says, “these doors are probably governed by words,” meaning that there is an Elvish password—but he might as well be speaking for the books themselves, since they are themselves words that open a secret entrance to a vast and unknown land.

Tolkien insinuates the menace and the vastness of the Mines with great sleight of hand.  He has Gandalf tell of paths ahead that a pony can’t walk because too narrow or too steep, wells and pools that you shouldn’t drink from, and shows us the steps leading up into total darkness and a passageway, but nothing beyond.  When Gandalf magically lights the way, he does so with a light that’s only bright enough to show the floor one step in front of him.  We hear the sounds of Bill the Pony being killed outside the closed doors to the Mines, but don’t get to see it.

The Peter Jackson movie versions, incidentally, employ very different, and to my mind inferior, techniques.  Tolkien hinted where Jackson tries to show everything by the light of noon.  By doing so Jackson restricts the territory available to the imagination, which does a better job than his computer animators ever could.  But Tolkien is thankfully a strong enough writer to purge from memory, after a little rereading, Ian McKellen and Elijah Wood’s painfully uncomplicated, unmagical, uninviting performances and that score that seems to parrot the trumpets of medieval heraldry more than to evoke them.

Moria—a byzantine underground complex of passages, chambers, mansions, bridges, mines, and fire pits resembling Dante’s Hell—was constructed underneath the Misty Mountains thousands of years ago, in “a happier time,” by dwarves that have long since abandoned it to who knows what—the things that live under mountains.  By sending the fellowship to revisit someone else’s creation, now abandoned, it seems to me that Tolkien has set before them his own task: to explore the mysterious, byzantine works created in bygone ages, to open the chasms of darkness within.  This sort of nostalgia mixed with curiosity is in so many ways what characterizes plain old English Romanticism.  Wouldn’t Samuel Taylor Coleridge get Middle-earth?

Unsinkable John Milton

Paradise Lost: An Authoritative Text Backgrounds and Sources Criticism by John Milton


Harold Bloom on Paradise Lost:

"What makes Paradise Lost unique is its startling blend of Shakespearean tragedy, Virgilian epic, and Biblical prophecy.  The terrible pathos of Macbeth joins itself to the Aeneid's sense of nightmare and to the Hebrew Bible's assertion of authority.  That combination should have sunk any literary work nine fathoms deep, but John Milton, blind and battered by political defeat, was unsinkable.  There may be no larger triumph of the visionary will in Western literature." (The Western Canon, p. 160)

I love Milton's ambition.  I love his opening note in which he declares his intention to be the first in English to restore the "ancient liberty" of the heroic poem, delivering it "from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming."  Then in ll. 12-16 of the poem itself he writes: "I thence / Invoke thy aid to my advent'rous song, / That with no middle flight intends to soar / Above th' Aonian mount, while it pursues / Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme."  And while you may not be able to tell from those somewhat abstract lines, Milton to my mind achieved all the greatness he sought after.  Paradise Lost has stuck in my mind more firmly over the last twenty years than anything I've read other than Hamlet and Ulysses.

Paradise Lost is peopled with specifically rendered, touching human characters as in Shakespeare, but it's more epic than anything in Shakespeare (even more than the Henry tetralogy, which is quite an epic in itself).  Paradise Lost is more epic in fact than anything since the ancients.  It's a poem and a story, but it's also a comprehensive worldview.  Accordingly, it has a more formal, Virgilic, stately syntax, than Shakespeare's plays do, but it looks as deeply into the human heart and, like Shakespeare's work, it overflows with fine metaphor and subtilitas naturae.

Milton appeared to be conscious of writing in the shadow of Shakespeare, to whom the younger poet dedicated his first published poem (called "On Shakespeare").  Milton's father, according to The Milton Reading Room (hosted by Prof. Thomas Luxon at Dartmouth), was a trustee of the Blackfriars Theater, where Shakespeare's King's Men performed in the last decade of Shak's life.  John Milton Sr.'s commendation was printed in the opening pages of the First Folio, and Milton Jr.'s "On Shakespeare" appears in the first pages of the Second Folio.  (That must be the most awesome blurb in history.)  Milton was 7 years old when Shakespeare died.  Prof. Luxon speculates that if Milton had ever met Shakespeare, he would probably have let us know about it himself, but given his father's ties to the King's Men, I like to imagine Milton in Shakespeare's presence and literally looking up at him.

Link to Prof. Luxon's Milton Reading Room: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading...
I liked the Scott Elledge annotations in the Norton Critical edition.    

View all my Goodreads book reviews