November 14, 2008
"Forgive my being silent: after Wilde, I only exist a little."
So wrote André Gide in a letter to Paul Valéry in 1891, after meeting Oscar Wilde in Paris.
The effect Wilde had on Gide, a young man of about 20 at the time, was tremendous and could, ultimately, have destroyed Gide. Wilde's effect was so unbalancing that it took away Gide's voice. He could not write, he could barely think anymore. He trusted nothing, all of the things he thought were true he now saw were not. He did not know which end was up. He had a nervous breakdown, I suppose, although he eventually recovered (obviously. He won the Nobel Prize in 1947) Gide remained a friend of Wilde - although a distant cautious one - until the end. Whatever his tendencies were already (Gide's), they were not 'set' and neither, of course, were Wilde's, who delighted in contradictions. To someone who is a bit more rigid, perhaps, or who is looking for the answer - (not to mention living in a society that requires, expressly, that you not be who you really are) to meet someone who "delights in contradictions" can be a ruinous event. It nearly was for Gide.
Oscar Wilde's epigrams are wonderful, cutting, funny - still surprising - and his plays are still sell-outs over a century after he first wrote them - but I think in many ways we all 'only exist a little" after Wilde, there is still something so brilliant about him that it is hard to get my mind around it. It's inconsistent, at times, and there's some balderdash (the opening paragraph of Dorian Gray for example) - but the body of the work is extraordinary, and the willingness to delve deep into the contradictions of his age (and, of course, of future ages, of our age) and let two things co-exist at the same time STILL strikes me as a bit dangerous. There is STILL something truly subversive about him. (To me, "subversive" is a compliment.) His goal is to upend convention. That's all fun and good when it means curling your hair when everyone else wears it straight ... but how far will one go? How far will society let you take it?
In his contradictions, in the way he closes his epigrams with exactly the OPPOSITE of what you would expect, lies the assumption that all of society's rules and morals are up for interpretation. You can believe in that crap as "true" if you want, but Wilde will stand there, shrugging his shoulders at you languidly, and go on doing what he wants to do, and that could cause outrage in conventional people - because it wasn't so much that he flouted convention, it was that he refused to believe in the reality of those conventions in the first place. Subversive stuff. An example of his epigrams and how they start out one way, and set you up - the reader - into thinking, "Oh yes, I know where we're going" - and then he pulls the rug out, but elegantly, smoothly. Not to mention the fact that the sentiment itself is slightly unbalancing, unsettling ...
To win back my youth ... there is nothing I wouldn't do - except take exercise, get up early, or be a useful member of the community.
If all of society behaved in the way he described here, we would all be lost. But that was part of his point. And that was part of why Gide felt so silenced after meeting him for the first time.
But - on the other hand - there is a kindness in Wilde which cannot be denied. I think people often characterize him as a shallow dandy who was "brought down" into the muck, but I don't find that to be accurate. Yes, he was the promoter of the aesthetic movement, and counseled people on what books to read and how to dress and interior decorate, but it was always for a deeper purpose. Also, anyone that funny could not be shallow. His kindness is not there so much in his early plays, and certainly not there in Salomé, but as a person - he was generous, patient, and unbelievably strong in the face of relentless viciousness. He handled the insults with good humor, skewering his opponents - until he finally came across someone (the damned 9th Marquess of Queensberry, a pox on his soul) who could not be stopped, who had a chip on his shoulder the size of the entire British Isles, and who was determined to "save" his fairy son from further corruption. (Meanwhile, and this I had not known - one of the Marquess' OTHER sons had also been caught in a compromising relationship with another male, and had killed himself - right around the time that Queensberry started harassing Oscar Wilde. So. Imagine. This short angry little man - who, I'm sorry, probably had some "tendencies" himself, his response is so vicious, so out of proportion - had two gay sons, both of whom were living in an openly gay manner, in 1895. TWO sons? Unthinkable! It had to have pushed all this guy's buttons. Not to mention the fact that also right around this time, his second wife had divorced him, claiming publicly that his penis was too small for effective intercourse, and also that he was impotent, that the marriage had remained unconsummated. So. Make of that what you will. His unresolved issues ruined another man's life - a man whose writing I happen to cherish, so I've got zero sympathy for the guy.)
And so Wilde found himself a pawn in a fiery family struggle between father (Marquess of Queensberry) and son (Lord Alfred Douglas). Lord Douglas was no shrinking violet in this, Lord Douglas was the main instigator, pushing Wilde further and further into it, forcing the confrontation, glorying in the fact that his famous lover was "sticking it to dear old Dad". Wilde, too, who had two pretty extraordinary people as parents (look them up. Amazing people.) just did not approve of how the Douglas family treated one another. Lord Douglas would send telegrams to his father, saying stuff like, "You are a silly stupid man" and Wilde would just shake his head and remark, "You shouldn't talk to a parent like that." Imagine the generosity of this. Here he is talking about a man who is threatening to ruin him, who leaves notes under his front door calling him a "sodomite" and every other nasty name in the book, who stages protests outside productions of plays Wilde has written - who is doing everything possible to make Wilde miserable - and here Wilde is, chiding the son for talking to his father in a disrespectful manner. He had class, that's why.
He, a man of exquisite manners and taste, who loved his parents and remained close to his mother all the days of his life (his father passed away much earlier) found himself embroiled in a brou-haha that would ruin him completely. Fate, doom, whatever you want to call it. Wilde was not an innocent bystander in any way... he had invited Lord Douglas into his life and, therefore, by proxy, invited the Marquess into his life who would ruin everything ... but Wilde (unlike Douglas) was not a vindictive person. Wilde knew Douglas could ruin him. Perhaps that was part of the thrill. The beautiful dangerous boy and all that. In reading about Wilde, in reading about all of the literary spats he got into, all of the verbal sparring with current authors of the day - I never feel that he is vindictive. Or cruel. He is clever, and intelligent - and yes, often merciless - but never needlessly cruel.
So to see the cruelty that was heaped upon him at the end ... it's just awful.
It's very rare that a biography can bring me to tears. Patricia Bosworth's biography of Montgomery Clift
I just finished Richard Ellmann's biography of Oscar Wilde 
Now, the last 5 years of Oscar Wilde's life are horrifying enough to make a person tremble and cross herself in fervent thanks that none of it happened to her, but it is Ellmann's deep compassion (not to mention intelligent piecing-together of events, through letters and diary entries) that brought it so vividly before my eyes that I found tears streaming down my face. I know the story of his downfall, I know the series of truly unfortunate events, but not to the detailed extent I do now. The court transcripts are included in the book, the letters written from prison ...
It's one of the most moving books I've ever read.
Ellmann is spectacular (as I already know - since I've read his biography of James Joyce
But more than anything right now, I'm left really sad. Sad for the suffering of a fellow human being in 1897, 1898. I cannot even imagine his torment, and I have tears in my eyes now as I type this out.
So forgive my being silent: after Wilde, I only exist a little.
"...you aren't so much trying to describe it as trying to locate it."
Wonderful interview of Seamus Heaney by Dennis O'Driscoll.
One of my favorite excerpts from the interview:
I had no particular gift for writing what were called "compositions", and no particular enjoyment of it. But I do remember a moment, early on at St Columb's, when the topic was "A Day at the Seaside" and I made a connection between the performative student in me and a more inward creature, the writer-in-waiting, if you like. In the middle of the list of usual, expected activities such as diving and swimming, neither of which I could do, I wrote about going into an amusement arcade to escape from a shower and being depressed by the wet footprints on the floor and the cold, wet atmosphere created by people in their rained-on summer clothes. This had actually happened to me, so the image and the recording of it had a different feel. Something in me knew that I was on the right, intimate track - but it took me years to follow up.
And I love his bit about trying to locate it.
A new book is coming out, a compilation of interviews with Seamus Heaney (and he's a wonderful interview, juicy, intelligent - always leaves you with something to chew on). I've seen him read a couple of times, once in a nearly empty classroom at NYU in the middle of the afternoon ... and he's wonderful "live". Just wonderful. Funny, mischievous, and sharp.
November 9, 2008
Happy birthday, Anne Sexton
Poems and quotes from and about her below - in honor of this amazing talent, who pretty much burst fully-formed onto the poetry scene. Kind of incredible. When you read the Complete Poems
I love you the way the oboe plays.
I love you the way skinny dipping makes my body feels.
I love you the way a ripe artichoke tastes.
Yet I fear you,
as one in the desert fears the sun.
True.
True.
This is terrible stuff, the voice of a sentimental undergraduate in a beginning poetry class, not a celebrated prize-winning American poet. It almost embarrasses me to type that out here. So I see there to be a regression in the gift - because her first poems are spectacular, and she wasn't like Sylvia Plath - a precocious academic poetess, getting published in Seventeen magazine when she was still a teenager, and winning prizes, and all that. Sexton was getting married, having kids, and struggling with her sickness.
She was a housewife, mother, and madwoman - who had spent time in mental institutions, and a psychiatrist suggested that maybe she "should write" as a way to get through the darker moments. Maxine Kumin tells the story:
Nevertheless, seven months after her second child, Joyce Ladd Sexton, was born in 1955, Anne suffered a second crisis and was hospitalized. The children were sent to live with her husband's parents; and while they were separated from her, she attempted suicide on her birthday, November 9, 1956. This was the first of several episodes, or at least the first that was openly acknowledged. Frequently, these attempts occurred around Anne's birthday, a time of year she came increasingly to dread. Dr. Martin Orne, Brunner-Orne's son, was the young psychiatrist at Glenside Hospital who attended Anne during this siege and treated her for the next seven years. After administering a series of diagnostic tests, he presented his patient with her scores, objective evidence that, despite the disapproving naysayers from her past, she was highly intelligent. Her associative gifts suggested that she ought to return to the writing of poetry, something she had shown a deft talent for during secondary school. It was at Orne's insistence that Anne enrolled in the Holmes workshop."You, Dr. Martin" came directly out of that experience, as did so many of the poems in her first collection, To Bedlam and Part Way Back.
The first poem Anne wrote, "You, Dr. Martin", reads:
You, Doctor Martin, walk
from breakfast to madness. Late August,
I speed through the antiseptic tunnel
where the moving dead still talk
of pushing their bones against the thrust
of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel
or the laughing bee on a stalkof death. We stand in broken
lines and wait while they unlock
the doors and count us at the frozen gates
of dinner. The shibboleth is spoken
and we move to gravy in our smock
of smiles. We chew in rows, our plates
scratch and whine like chalkin school. There are no knives
for cutting your throat. I make
moccasins all morning. At first my hands
kept empty, unraveled for the lives
they used to work. Now I learn to take
them back, each angry finger that demands
I mend what another will breaktomorrow. Of course, I love you;
you lean above the plastic sky,
god of our block, prince of all the foxes.
The breaking crowns are new
that Jack wore.
Your third eye
moves among us and lights the separate boxes
where we sleep or cry.What large children we are
here. All over I grow most tall
in the best ward. Your business is people,
you call at the madhouse, an oracular
eye in our nest. Out in the hall
the intercom pages you. You twist in the pull
of the foxy children who falllike floods of life in frost.
And we are magic talking to itself,
noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins
forgotten. Am I still lost?
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,
counting this row and that row of moccasins
waiting on the silent shelf.
Her first poem.
Whether or not you "like this sort of stuff" (and that is the main complaint you hear about Sexton and the other "confessional" poets) is not the point. The point is that the VOICE we meet in "You, Dr. Martin" is confident, strong, and unselfconscious. We know we are meeting the POET, not a persona, or a smokescreen of words and devices. It's not clever. Straight out of the gate, there was nothing between Anne Sexton and her expression of herself. Sylvia Plath's early poems suffer from precocity, they can come off as coy - arch - She was still working to find herself. Wonderful stuff, with some startling lines - but it wouldn't be until 1962, years into her career, when Plath would burst out with her original voice - that you would never ever mistake for anyone else's. Sexton STARTED at that point. Her voice didn't need to be developed, or honed. It came out fully-formed. There was much jealousy between the two, although they were also good friends.
Her life was not easy, she was a wild woman, and she made life hell for her husband, her kids, and anyone who really loved her. A mixture of drink, drugs, and a lifetime battle with mental illness took its toll on her relationships, certainly, but it also took its toll on her writing gift, which you can see in those later poems, which don't just read as hallucinatory or unclear - but as amateur.
Regardless: A remarkable journey. With some WONDERFUL poems.
My father saw her read her poetry in Cambridge, Massachusetts when he was in college. Her poetry readings were more like underground rock shows, with handmade posters, and an electric buzz of excitement running through the mostly-young crowd. They weren't poetry readings, they were events. Anne Sexton was gorgeous, and she would dress the part. When my dad saw her, she wore a bright red dress, slinked her legs around each other (so many of the photos of her have her twining those legs about), and chain-smoked. My dad said she was great, he remembers it well.
My favorite of hers is this one:
LIVE
Live or die, but don't poison everything...
Well, death's been here
for a long time --
it has a hell of a lot
to do with hell
and suspicion of the eye
and the religious objects
and how I mourned them
when they were made obscene
by my dwarf-heart's doodle.
The chief ingredient
is mutilation.
And mud, day after day,
mud like a ritual,
and the baby on the platter,
cooked but still human,
cooked also with little maggots,
sewn onto it maybe by somebody's mother,
the damn bitch!
Even so,
I kept right on going on,
a sort of human statement,
lugging myself as if
I were a sawed-off body
in the trunk, the steamer trunk.
This became perjury of the soul.
It became an outright lie
and even though I dressed the body
it was still naked, still killed.
It was caught
in the first place at birth,
like a fish.
But I play it, dressed it up,
dressed it up like somebody's doll.
Is life something you play?
And all the time wanting to get rid of it?
And further, everyone yelling at you
to shut up. And no wonder!
People don't like to be told
that you're sick
and then be forced
to watch
you
come
down with the hammer.
Today life opened inside me like an egg
and there inside
after considerable digging
I found the answer.
What a bargain!
There was the sun,
her yolk moving feverishly,
tumbling her prize --
and you realize she does this daily!
I'd known she was a purifier
but I hadn't thought
she was solid,
hadn't known she was an answer.
God! It's a dream,
lovers sprouting in the yard
like celery stalks
and better,
a husband straight as a redwood,
two daughters, two sea urchings,
picking roses off my hackles.
If I'm on fire they dance around it
and cook marshmallows.
And if I'm ice
they simply skate on me
in little ballet costumes.
Here,
all along,
thinking I was a killer,
anointing myself daily
with my little poisons.
But no.
I'm an empress.
I wear an apron.
My typewriter writes.
It didn't break the way it warned.
Even crazy, I'm as nice
as a chocolate bar.
Even with the witches' gymnastics
they trust my incalculable city,
my corruptible bed.
O dearest three,
I make a soft reply.
The witch comes on
and you paint her pink.
I come with kisses in my hood
and the sun, the smart one,
rolling in my arms.
So I say Live
and turn my shadow three times round
to feed our puppies as they come,
the eight Dalmatians we didn't drown,
despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy!
Despite the pails of water that waited,
to drown them, to pull them down like stones,
they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue
and fumbling for the tiny tits.
Just last week, eight Dalmatians,
3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood
each
like a
birch tree.
I promise to love more if they come,
because in spite of cruelty
and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens,
I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann.
The poison just didn't take.
So I won't hang around in my hospital shift,
repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun,
the dream, the excitable gift.
"All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.... I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out." -- Anne Sexton
"Untrammeled by a traditional education in Donne, Milton, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, Anne was able to strike out alone, like Conrad's secret sharer, for a new destiny. She was grim about her lost years, her lack of a college degree; she read omnivorously and quite innocently whatever came to hand and enticed her, forming her own independent, quirky, and incisive judgments. Searching for solutions to the depressive episodes that beset her with dismaying periodicty, Anne read widely in the popular psychiatric texts of the time: interpretations of Freud, Theodore Reik, Philip Reiff, Helena Deutsch, Erik Erikson, Bruno Bettelheim. During a summer-school course with Philip Rahv, she encountered the works of Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Thomas Mann. These were succeeded by the novels of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Kurt Vonnegut. But above all else, she was attracted to the fairy tales of Andersen and Grimm, which her beloved Nana had read to her when she was a child. They were for her, perhaps, what Bible stories and Greek myths had been for other writers. At the same time that she was being entertained and drawn into closer contact with a kind of collective unconscious, she was searching the fairy tales for psychological parallels." -- Maxine Kumin
"What Sexton suggested to Plath was the force of simple rhyme and simple rhythm, the magic of nursery rhyme darkened by time, of fairy tale where the happy ending somehow doesn't happen. Sexton showed Plath the way, and then Plath died first, stealing a march on her friend, which Sexton resented and envied. Four years Plath's senior, Anne Sexton survived her by twelve years, committing suicide in 1974. But Plath keeps hold of the laurels. There are wonderful things in the Complete Poems of Sexton, published in 1981, but many of them are things we associate, whatever their original source, with Plath, and Sexton's work seems but a footnote to hers." -_ Michael Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets"
"Criticism of 4 of my poems in Lowell's class: criticism of rhetoric. He sets me up with Ann Sexton, an honor, I suppose. Well, about time. She has very good things, and they get better, though there is a lot of loose stuff." -- Sylvia Plath, journal, March 20, 1959
"This then is a phenomenon ... to remind us, when we have forgotten in the weariness of literature, that poetry can happen." -- Louis Simpson on the publication of Anne Sexton's first book of poetry
"For a book or two, she grew more powerful. Then writing was too easy or too hard for her. She became meager and exaggerated. Many of her most embarrassing poems would have been fascinating if someone had put them in quotes, as the presentation of some character, not the author. -- Robert Lowell
"Have rejected the Electra poem from my book. Too forced and rhetorical. A leaf from Anne Sexton's book would do here. She has none of my clenches and an ease of phrase, and an honesty. I have my 40 unattackable poems." -- Sylvia Plath, journal, April 23, 1959
"I hold back nothing." -- Anne Sexton, 1969
"Retyped pages, a messy job, on the volume of poems I should be turning in to Houghton Mifflin this week. But AS [Anne Sexton] is there ahead of me, with her lover GS [George Starbuck] writing New Yorker odes to her and both of them together: felt our triple martini afternoons at the Ritz breaking up. That memorable afternoon at G's monastic and miserly room on Pinckney "You shouldn't have left us": where is responsibility to lie? I left, yet felt like a brown winged moth around a rather meagre candle flame, drawn. That is over." -- Sylvia Plath, journal, May 3, 1959
"Does Sexton imagine any way out of this impasse, any way to escape the debilitating terrors of a consciousness plagued by a conviction of its own evil? One possibility is to replace self-loathing with an open acceptance of evil—even admitting the likelihood that she is 'not a woman'. What is remarkable, however, is not this admission itself but the lively, almost gleeful tone in which it is uttered:
"I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming of evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
" 'A woman like that is misunderstood,' Sexton adds wryly, but the poem is a serious attempt to understand such a woman--her sense of estrangement, her impulse toward death--by internalizing evil and giving it a voice: a chortling, self-satisfied, altogether amiable voice which suggests that 'evil' is perhaps the wrong word after all. Sexton's witch, waving her 'nude arms at villages going by,' becomes something of value to the community, performing the function Kurt Vonnegut has called the 'domestication of terror.' Unlike Plath's madwoman in 'Lady Lazarus'--a woman at the service of a private, unyielding anger, a red-haired demon whose revenge is to 'eat men like air'--Sexton's witch is essentially harmless. Although she remains vulnerable--'A woman like that is not afraid to die'--she rejects anger in favor of humor, flamboyance, self-mockery. She is a kind of perverse entertainer, and if she seems cast in the role of a martyr, embracing madness in order to domesticate it for the rest of the community--making it seem less threatening, perhaps even enjoyable--it is nevertheless a martyrdom which this aspect of Sexton accepts with a peculiar zest." -- Greg Johnson on Anne Sexton's perhaps most-famous poem, "Her Kind"
Her Kind
by Anne Sexton
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
"Once, when I wrote to her about my terror of publishing a second book of poems, she answered: 'Don't dwell on the book's reception. The point is to get on with it--you have a life's work ahead of you--no point in dallying around waiting for approval. We all want it, I know, but the point is to reach out honestly--that's the whole point. I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any of us--or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem--a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer--it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem. You have the gift-- and with it comes responsibility--you mustn't neglect or be mean to that gift--you must let it do its work. It has more rights than the ego that wants approval.'" -- Erica Jong
"It would be hard to find a writer who dwells more insistently on the pathetic and disgusting aspects of bodily experience." -- James Dickey - the man who wrote "Deliverance", a book that had, if I recall, quite a few "disgusting aspects". I suppose when women write about their bodies it's just grosser to some people. Oh, boo-hoo. I love Dickey's poems, but I do not like this comment of his.
"[Sexton's poems] raise the never-solved problem of what literature really is, where you draw the line between art and documentary." -- Hayden Carruth
"My own struggle with Anne Sexton, for twenty years now, has not been about her subject matter (she is the one who taught me that you can write a poem about anything), but about the blatant deterioration of her talent. Sexton's Complete Poems appeared in 1981, edited by her daughter/literary executor Linda Gray Sexton. This volume includes the eight books Anne Sexton sent to press during her lifetime, as well as one hundred and thirty pages of posthumously published poems. Though fascinating as Sexton documents, the latter are shockingly sloppy and full of over-the-top, bad-trip imagery. This, coupled with the fact that the last three books she did publish (The Book of Folly, The Death Notebooks, and That Awful Rowing Toward God) saw an obvious decline in quality, has made it difficult to come to grips with her complete body of work. It also didn't help that, after her death, her former mentor Robert Lowell wrote that her writing had become "meager and exaggerated." I jokingly refer to Sexton's late period as "Bad Anne." How else to reconcile such slipshod lines as "I flee. I flee. / I block my ears and eat salami" with her amazing early metaphors ("leaves . . . born in their own green blood / like the hands of mermaids") and admissions ("Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself")? It's too painful to think of her simply as a brilliant poet who got bad. And too easy, somehow, to blame it on pills, alcohol, insanity, fame. Better, I recently decided, to think of her as a genius with demons, writing to beat the clock. " -- David Trinidad
"Her delineation of femaleness [is] so fanatical that it makes one wonder, even after many years of being one, what a woman is." -- Mona Van Duyn
"All I need now is to hear that GS [George Starbuck] or MK [Maxine Kumin] has won the Yale and get a rejection of my children's book. AS [Anne Sexton] has her book accepted at HM and this afternoon will be drinking champagne. Also an essay accepted by PJHH [Peter J. Henniker-Heaton], the copy-cat. But who's to criticize a more successful copy-cat. Not to mention a poetry reading at McLean. And GS at supper last night, smug as a cream-fed cat, very pleased indeed, for AS is, in a sense, his answer to me." -- Sylvia Plath, journal, May 20th, 1959
"Her vision of Him as the winner in a crooked poker game at the end of that book [The Awful Rowing Toward God] is a sporting admission of her defeat rather than a decisive renewal of the Christian myth." -- Estella Lauter
"One feels tempted to drop [Sexton's poems] furtively in the nearest ashcan, rather than to be caught with them in the presence of so much naked suffering." -- James Dickey
"NOW: the story about George, J-- and Ann, and the children. An insufferable woman (myself of course) gets involved in the separated family. She thinks G will be fondest of her, tells mad wife (she's sick, I mean, really sick) it is of course Ann, feels very clever. Then finds out, when A's book is accepted, it is really A, gets furious. Calls up society, or gets sociologist friend to call up society for prevention of cruelty for children, never really finds out if they get through. Day in park. Children can't speak, finds herself throwing peanuts to pigeons etc. Ducks, squirrels, children blank-staring and oblivious. Smell bad, girl urinates on bench. I wouldn't be surprised to read tomorrow in the paper how that little girl was killed falling from that roof. Of course she never does read any such thing. Her good will perverted, conditional on pity that would generate from self if G was her lover, when cheated of that, it becomes nasty busybodiness. THE OLYMPIANS. Poor, married poets in Ritz bar. -- Sylvia Plath, jotting down sketches for a story about Anne Sexton, journal, June 15, 1959
Sylvia's Death - by Anne Sexton
for Sylvia Plath
O Sylvia, Sylvia,
with a dead box of stones and spoons,
with two children, two meteors
wandering loose in a tiny playroom,
with your mouth into the sheet,
into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,
(Sylvia, Sylvia
where did you go
after you wrote me
from Devonshire
about rasing potatoes
and keeping bees?)
what did you stand by,
just how did you lie down into?
Thief --
how did you crawl into,
crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,
the death we said we both outgrew,
the one we wore on our skinny breasts,
the one we talked of so often each time
we downed three extra dry martinis in Boston,
the death that talked of analysts and cures,
the death that talked like brides with plots,
the death we drank to,
the motives and the quiet deed?
(In Boston
the dying
ride in cabs,
yes death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)
O Sylvia, I remember the sleepy drummer
who beat on our eyes with an old story,
how we wanted to let him come
like a sadist or a New York fairy
to do his job,
a necessity, a window in a wall or a crib,
and since that time he waited
under our heart, our cupboard,
and I see now that we store him up
year after year, old suicides
and I know at the news of your death
a terrible taste for it, like salt,
(And me,
me too.
And now, Sylvia,
you again
with death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)
And I say only
with my arms stretched out into that stone place,
what is your death
but an old belonging,
a mole that fell out
of one of your poems?
(O friend,
while the moon's bad,
and the king's gone,
and the queen's at her wit's end
the bar fly ought to sing!)
O tiny mother,
you too!
O funny duchess!
O blonde thing!
"I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life." -- Anne Sexton
November 7, 2008
Today in history: November 7, 1917
One of the most seismic events of the 20th century: The Russian Revolution.
Look at that gathering of rogues.
I love the grainy old photographs of all of them - they always look so twinkly and jolly, don't they? It's such a dichotomy because honestly a more humorless and nasty bunch has never existed. Stalin's face always seems to be twinkling, as though he is Santa Claus on his day off. And the "social realism" paintings of the guy are so idealized it makes me want to puke. Standing surrounded by children, glimmering and twinkling benevolently. But they ALL look like that to me. Like they are chortling from on high. I say "I love the grainy old photographs" not because it does my heart good to see Trotsky smiling - but because I find them VERY interesting. Especially, as I mentioned, the collective twinkle in the eye.
On this day in 1917, the Bolsheviks seized the government buildings and put out a proclamation declaring the new government. There had been a spontaneous uprising in February of the same year, and much upheaval led up to the October Revolution. The Czar had abdicated (unbelievable) - a Provisional Government had been set up (with a mix of the old guard and the new ... well, THAT didn't last long) ... the Bolsheviks, in their power-grab, put out a notice saying that the Provisional Government was no longer.
There was almost no resistance, although a civil war followed.
The Russian Revolution is, along with Cary Grant and the early career of Ralph Macchio, one of my enduring fascinations.
Many reasons why.
First of all: I love politics and history - and whatever the outcome, you would be hard pressed to find a more important moment of political upheaval in the entire 20th century than the Russian Revolution. It changed the world.
Second of all: because it was SUCH a bad idea.
This is the secret in the secret book in 1984
Thirdly: I am fascinated in the Russian Revolution because of the world-wide repercussions of it - and also because I vividly remember the entire edifice cracking apart in the late 80s. I couldn't believe it. I am in that generation that still grew up being afraid of Russia. Come on, I saw Red Dawn and it was real enough at the time for me to tremble at the thought of such a thing actually happening. We were the last generation to grow up with that fear. We have OTHER fears now - but not that one. I grew up during the dying gasps of the Cold War. So - to learn about the BEGINNINGS of such a political movement - something that would be entrenched for the better part of a century - has always been important to me.
And lastly,: cults fascinate me. How do you not only control what people DO but how they THINK? It all comes down to language.
In the early heady days (I know that's such a cliche - but it's a perfect way to put it) of the Bolshevik takeover - there was something in their twinkly assurance that they could re-make the world through LANGUAGE itself. Imposing a mindset, a correct way of thinking, on a country of millions.
Victor Klemperer, a German Jew who lived in Dresden Germany and witnessed the rise of Nazi power, eventually wrote a book (after WWII and the fall of the Nazis) called The Language of the Third Reich
John Reed's 10 days that Shook the World
(twinkle, twinkle, glimmer, glimmer, look at our serious comradely rural conversation about serious ideas, we are in accord, we are dear brothers of the spirit. Yeah, right.)
Back to the topic at hand - John Reed: I love first-person accounts of any historical event. I like to feel like I am THERE. What did you smell, see, touch? One of his contemporaries has said, about Reed's writing and journalism, "He couldn't be touched", and he really can't, not in terms of reportage, as well as giving you a sweeping sense that you are there.
Reed prints all of the Bolshevik pamphlets, fliers, announcements - word for word, in facsimile sometimes, so that you can see what it actually looked like - and all of it is in that LANGUAGE of Communism, that deadening blunted-edge language - with no poetry, no humanity in it. It is FROM a collective and TO a collective. I start to drone out into some gray foggy area as I read that stuff, losing my critical mind.
To control a population: you MUST control their language. You MUST show them the "correct" way to speak. There is only ONE meaning of the word "state". There can only be ONE meaning of the word "freedom". So the leaders of the Revolution set out immediately to co-opt the language. Watch any developing revolution anywhere in the world and watch how they start by controlling the language. Look at the group of peole today who want to control the words "marriage", "family", "values". Their desire is to co-opt MEANING, make no mistake about it. Their desire is EXclusive - to shut others out, they want to "own" a word. They are not to be trusted.
George Orwell knew this, of course, and that's where the whole Newspeak thing comes from, in 1984
I find it interesting, and ironic in a horrifying way, that Lenin would say: "While the State exists there can be no freedom; when there is freedom there will be no State."
Look at that language. The language of diametrically opposed clarity. This is not the language of humanity. It is an abstraction. I am not entirely convinced that any of these people truly believed in the Utopia, although it's not always easy to know someone's motivations or beliefs - as people are notoriously unreliable witnesses about themselves. Some of them did - and the gradations were much subtler back then, of socialism, communism, capitalism. Orwell is eloquent on all of this, as are many of the other "converts" - Arthur Koestler is another one. The belief in socialism is also a difficult thing to talk about with those who have entrenched prejudices, but again: I'm talking about history here on the ground-level - NOT the filtered-down present day version where the sides are clearly drawn. In the early days, there was much belief, there was also not a lot of information coming out of Russia, and there was a smokescreen thrown up - for decades - about what was actually happening. Many were duped. I think many were WILLINGLY duped. They went and witnessed the "show trials" of the 1930s and bought the piece of theatre as the truth. "Yes, it's awful, but these people all actually CONFESSED ... so of course they were guilty - otherwise why would they confess?" This is the pampered Western mind at work, and we should be grateful, actually, that we do have a level of incomprehension about that kind of pressure and insanity. But before that - in the teens and twenties - things were not at all as clear as they soon became.
So Lenin makes that statement about the state - but then of course what happened in Russia? The State became everything.
I refuse to just blame this on Stalin's evil - although I do think he was evil - and missing whatever piece it is that makes most of us human. I don't think he was the way he was because his Mummah didn't love him enough, or because he was short. I think there was something in him - a deadly mixture of patience and violence (rare rare rare - most dictators have the violent thing down, but what most of them lack is PATIENCE - Stalin knew how to wait ... sometimes for decades ... to get what he wanted). But I don't think Stalin took an essentially good idea and made it bad. I think it was a terrible idea to begin with.
Check out the picture below - of junkers lounging around in the Winter Palace in the fall of 1917:
From John Reed's 10 days that Shook the World
By this time, in the light that streamed out of all the Winter Palace windows, I could see that the first two or three hundred men were Red Guards, with only a few scattered soldiers. Over the barricade of firewood we clambered, and leaping down inside gave a triumphant shout as we stumbled on a heap of rifles thrown down by the yunkers who had stood there. On both sides of the main gateway the doors stood wide open, light streamed out, and from the huge pile came not the slightest sound.Carried along by the eager wave of men we were swept into the right hand entrance, opening into a great bare vaulted room, the cellar of the East wing, from which issued a maze of corridors and stair-cases. A number of huge packing cases stood about, and upon these the Red Guards and soldiers fell furiously, battering them open with the butts of their rifles, and pulling out carpets, curtains, linen, porcelain plates, glassware ... One man went strutting around with a bronze clock perched on his shoulder; another found a plume of ostrich feathers which he stuck in his hat. The looting was just beginning when somebody cried, "Comrades! Don't touch anything! Don't take anything! This is the property of the People!" Immediately twenty voices were crying, "Stop! Put everything back! Don't take anything! Property of the People!" Many hands dragged the spoilers down. Damask and tapestry were snatched from the arms of those who had them; two men took away the bronze clock. Roughly and hastily the things were crammed back in their cases, and self-appointed sentinels stood guard. It was all utterly spontaneous. Through corridors and up stair-cases the cry could be heard growing fainter and fainter in the distance, "Revolutionary discipline! Property of the People ...."
Here's all the crap I have written about Stalin over the years, if you're interested.
(portraits of the Romanovs ripped off the walls of the Palace and other official buildings)
Robert K. Massie's highwater-mark book Nicholas and Alexandra
In September, the Bolsheviks gained a majority within the Petrograd Soviet. From Finland, Lenin urged an immediate lunge for supreme power: "History will not forgive us if we do not take power now ... to delay is a crime." On October 23, Lenin, in disguise, slipped back into Petrograd to attend a meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee, which voted 10 to 1 that "insurrection is inevitable and the time fully ripe."On November 6, the Bolsheviks struck. That day, the cruiser Aurora, flying the red flag, anchored in the Neva opposite the Winter Palace. Armed Bolshevik squads occupied the railway stations, bridges, banks, telephone exchanges, post office and other public buildings. There was no bloodshed. The next morning, November 7, Kerensky left the Winter Palace in an open Pierce-Arrow touring car accompanied by another car flying the American flag. Passing unmolested through the streets filled with Bolshevik soldiers, he drove south to try to raise help from the army. The remaining ministers of the Provisional Government remained in the Malachite Hall of the Winter Palace, protected by a women's battalion and a troop of cadets. Sitting around a green baize table, filling the ashtrays with cigarette butts, the ministers covered their scratch pads with abstract doodles and drafts of pathetic last-minute proclamations: "The Provisional Government appeals to all classes to support the Provisional Government --" At nine p.m., the Aurora fired a blank shell, and at ten, the women's battalion surrendered. At eleven, another thirty or forty shells whistled across the river from the batteries in the Fortress of Peter and Paul. Only two shells hit the palace, slightly damaging the plaster. Nevertheless, at 2:10 a.m. on November 8, the ministers gave up.
This skirmish was the Bolshevik November Revolution, later magnified in Communist mythology into an epic of struggle and heroism. In fact, life in the capital was largely undisturbed. Restaurants, stores and cinemas on the Nevsky Prospect remained open. Streetcards moved as usual through most of the city, and the ballet performed at the Maryinsky Theatre. On the afternoon of the 7th, Sir George Buchanan walked in the vicinity of the Winter Palace and found "the aspect of the quay was more or less normal." Nevertheless, this flick of Lenin's finger was all that was necessary to finish Kerensky. Unsuccessful in raising help, Kerensky never returned to Petrograd. In May, after months in hiding, he appeared secretly in Moscow, where Bruce Lockhart issued him a false visa identifying him as a Siberian soldier being repatriated home. Three days later, Kerensky left Murmansk to begin fifty years of restless exile. Trotsky later, in exile himself, scornfully wrote Kerensky's political epitaph: "Kerensky was not a revolutionist; he merely hung around the revolution ... He had no theoretical preparation, no political schooling, no ability to think, no political will. The place of these qualities was occupied by a nimble susceptibility, an inflammable temperament, and that kind of eloquence which operates neither upon mind or will but upon the nerves." Nevertheless, when Kerensky left, he carried with him the vanishing dream of a humane, liberal, democratic Russia.
From distant Tobolsk, Nicholas followed these events with keen interest. He blamed Kerensky for the collapse of the army in the July offensive and for not accepting Kornilov's help in routing the Bolsheviks. At first, he could not believe that Lenin and Trotsky were as formidable as they seemed; to him, they appeared as outright German agents sent to Russia to corrupt the army and overthrow the government. When these two men whom he regarded as unsavory blackguards and traitors became the rulers of Russia, he was gravely shocked. "I then for the first time heard the Tsar regret his abdication," said Gilliard. "It now gave him pain to see that his renunciation had been in vain and that by his departure in the interests of his country, he had in reality done her an ill turn. This idea was to haunt him more and more."
At first, the Bolshevik Revolution had little practical effect on faroff Tobolsk. Officials appointed by the Provisional Government - including Pankratov, Nikolsky and Kobylinsky - remained in office; the banks and lawcourts remained open doing business as before. Inside the governor's house, the Imperial family had settled into a routine which, although restricted, was almost cozy.
Haunting. I know it's me projecting, but it's almost like I can see their terrible fate in their eyes, even in the expressions of the little ones.
From Edvard Radzinsky's book The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II
In his diary, Trotsky, back from the forest, described his conversation with Sverdlov:" 'The tsar is where?'
" 'Shot, of course.' [Imagine Sverdlov's cool triumph when he told Lev to his face that they had torn his favorite bone right out of his mouth; there would be no trial.]
" 'And the family is where?'
" 'The family as well.'
" 'All of them?'
" 'Yes. What about it?' [Again Sverdlov's invisible grin between the lines: "Does the fiery revolutionary Trotsky pity them?"]
" 'Who decided this?' [Fury: he wants to know who dared not consult with him, and so on.]
" 'We all did. Ilich [Lenin] felt we could not leave them a living banner, especially given our trying conditions.' "
Yet when his anger had passed, Trotsky, who during the terrible days of the revolution had said, "We will leave, but we will slam the door so hard the world will shudder," could not have helped but admire this superrevolutionary decision."In essence this decision was inevitable. The execution of the tsar and his family was necessary not simply to scare, horrify, and deprive the enemy of hope, but also to shake up our own ranks, show them that there was no going back. Ahead lay total victory or utter ruin ... The masses of workers and soldiers would not have understood or accepted any other decision. Lenin had a good sense of this," Trotsky wrote.
So, according to Trotsky, it was all decided in Moscow. That was what Goloshchekin negotiated in Moscow!
This is only Trotsky's testimony, however. History recognizes documents - and I foun done. First a clue, from a letter of O.N. Kolotov in Leningrad:
"I can tell you an interesting detail about the topic of interest to you: my grandfather often told me that Zinoviev took part in the decision to execute the tsar and that the tsar was executed on the basis of a telegram sent to Ekaterinburg from the center. My grandfather can be trusted; by virtue of his work he knew a great deal. He said that he himself took part in the shootings. He called the execution a 'kick in the ass', asserting that this was in the literal sense: they turned the condemned to the wall, then brought a pistol up to the back of their head, and when they pulled the trigger they simultaneously gave them a kick in the ass to keep the blood from spattering their uniforms."
There was a telegram! I found it! Even though they were supposed to destroy it. The blood cries out!
Here it is lying before me. One stifling July afternoon I was sitting in the Archives of the October Revolution and looking at this telegram, sent seventy-two years before. I had run across it in an archive file with the boring label "Telegrams About the Organization and Activities of the Judicial Organs and the Cheka," begun on January 21, 1918, and ended on October 31, of the same 1918. Behind this label and these dates lie the Red Terror. Among the terrifying telegrams - semiliterate texts on dirty paper - my attention was struck by a two-headed eagle. The tsarist seal!
This was it. On a blank left over from the tsarist telegraph service and decorated with the two-headed eagle was this telegram: a report on the impending execution of the tsar's family. The irony of history.
At the very top of this telegram, on a piece of telegraph ribbon, is the address "To Moscow Lenin."
Below, a note in pencil: "Received July 16, 1918, 21:22." From Petrograd. And the number of the telegram: 14228.
So, on July 16, at 21:22, that is, before the Romanov's execution, this telegram arrived in Moscow.
The telegram was a long time in getting there, having been sent from Ekaterinburg to "Sverdlov, copy to Lenin". But it was sent through Zinoviev, the master of the second capital, Petrograd - Lenin's closest comrade-in-arms at the time. Zinoviev had sent the telegram on from Petrograd to Lenin.
The individuals who sent this telegram from Ekaterinburg were Goloshechekin and Safrov, another leader of the Ural Soviet.
Here is its text:
"To Moscow, the Kremlin, Sverdlov, copy to Lenin. From Ekaterinburg transmit the following directly: inform Moscow that the trial agreed upon with Filipp due to military circumstances cannot bear delay, we cannot wait. If your opinion is contrary inform immediately. Goloshchekin, Safarov. On this subject contact Ekaterinburg yourself.
And the signature: Zinoviev.
Nov. 7, 1917 NY Times front page article:
Bolsheviki Seize State Buildings, Defying KerenskyPremier Posts Troops in Capital and Declares Workmen's Council Illegal
NORTHERN ARMY OFFERS AID
And Preliminary Parliament, Forced by Rebels to Leave Palace, Supports Him
WOMEN SOLDIERS ON GUARD
Petrograd Conditions Generally Normal Save for Outrages by So-Called Apaches
Bolsheviki Seize State BuildingsNov. 7, Petrograd - An armed naval detachment, under orders of the Maximalist Revolutionary Committee, has occupied the offices of the official Petrograd Telegraph Agency. The Maximalists also occupied the Central Telegraph office, the State Bank and Marin Palace, where the Preliminary Parliament had suspended its proceedings in view of the situation.
Numerous precautions have been taken by Premier Kerensky to thwart the threatened outbreak. The Workmen's and Soldiers' Committee has been decreed an illegal organization. The soldiers guarding the Government buildings have been replaced by men from the officers' training schools. Small guards have been placed at the Embassies. The women's battalion is drawn up in the square in front of the Winter Palace.
The commander of the northern front has informed the Premier that his troops are against any demonstration and are ready to come to Petrograd to quell a rebellion if necessary.
No disorders are yet reported, with the exception of some outrages by Apaches. The general life of the city remains normal and street traffic has not been interrupted.
Leon Trotzky, President of the Central Executive Committee of the Petrograd Council of Workmen's Soldiers' Delegates, has informed members of the Town Duma that he has given strict orders against outlawry and has threatened with death any persons attempting to carry out pogroms.
Trotzky added that it was not the intention of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates to seize power, but to represent to a Congress of Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates, to be called shortly, that the body take over control of the capital, for which all necessary arrangements had been perfected.
In the early hours of the morning a delegation of Cossacks appeared at the Winter Palace and told Premier Kerensky that they were disposed to carry out the Government's orders concerning the guarding of the capital, but they insisted that if hostilities began it would be necessary for their forces to be supplemented by infantry units. They further demanded that the Premier define the Government's attitude toward the Bolsheviki, citing the release from custody of some of those who had been arrested for participation in the July disturbances. The Cossacks virtually made a demand that the Government proclaim the Bolsheviki outlaws.
The Premier replied:
"I find it difficult to declare the Bolsheviki outlaws. The attitude of the Government toward the present Bolsheviki activities is known."
The Premier explained that those who had been released were on bail, and that any of them found participating in new offenses against peace would be severely dealt with.
The Revolutionary Military Committee of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates demanded the right to control all orders of the General Staff in the Petrograd district, which was refused. Thereupon the committee announced that it had appointed special commissioners to undertake the direction of the military, and invited the troops to observe only orders signed by the committee. Machine gun detachments moved to the Workmen's and Soldiers' headquarters.
In addressing the Preliminary Parliament yesterday Premier Kerensky charged the Military Committee of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates with having distributed arms and ammunition to workmen.
"That is why I consider part of the population of Petrograd in a state of revolt," he said, "and have ordered an immediate inquiry and such arrests as are necessary. The Government will perish rather than cease to defend the honor, security, and independence of the State."
The Preliminary Parliament, in response to the Premier's appeal for a vote of confidence, voted to "work in contact with the Government." The resolution, which originated with the Left, was carried by a vote of 123 to 102, with 26 members abstaining from voting. A resolution offered by the Centre calling for the suppression of the Bolshevikis and a full vote of confidence failed to reach a vote. The Cabinet, however, considers the resolution adopted as expressive of the Parliament's support.
The reported resignation of Admiral Verdervski, Minister of Marine, was denied after the Cabinet meeting. It was stated that all the ministers had agreed to retain their portfolios.
The Bolshevik Chairman of the Petrograd Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates, realizing that there are more ways than one of acquiring real authority, not only attempted its capture by armed force but also by a far more ingenuous plan, which was disclosed today. He formed a so-called Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, and informed the Headquarters Staff of the Petrograd military district that only orders sanctioned by the Military Revolutionary Committee would be executed.
On Sunday night the committee appeared at the staff offices and demanded the right of entry, control and veto. Receiving a natural and emphatic refusal, the military revolutionaries wired everywhere to the general effect that the Petrograd district headquarters were opposed to the wishes of the revolutionary garrison, and were becoming a counter revolutionary centre. This bid for the loyalty of the garrison has so far yielded no definite results, but obviously is extremely dangerous, especially in view of the fact that in the Petrograd garrison discipline is extremely lax.
It is said the Provisional Government intends to prosecute the Military Revolutionary Committee. It should be noted that the All-Russian Executive Committee of the Soviets is backing the Provisional Government. There is a general feeling of reaction against the Bolshevik-ridden Soviets, a feeling completely loyal to the revolution but impatient of disorders.
November 3, 2008
“It took me an hour or so to get back into my own metre”
Elizabeth Bishop wrote that to Robert Lowell, after reading one of his poems. An amazing symbiotic relationship - the two influencing one another, loving one another - while living separate lives. I am most interested in how the work affected each other. Lowell was much more famous in his own day than Elizabeth Bishop was - although now I am SO pleased to see that she is having a bit of a renaissance, she is one of my favorite poets.
Bishop and Lowell kept up a correspondence for the 30 years of their friendship, and while some have already been published (in a collection of Bishop's letters
They never married. Lowell had many lovers, and a wife, Bishop stayed with one woman for many many years (sadly, this woman committed suicide - yet another plot-point in the tragic story that was Bishop's outer life). But theirs was a soulmate kind of connection. Lowell did ask her to marry him, and her cooler head prevailed. It seems, though, that they were each other's "perfect reader". Every writer needs one. Not a critic, not a gushing fan ... but someone who is able to really hear not just the words, but the intent. Who can speak to the theme, the greater picture. I recently read one of my pieces out loud to Rachel and Mitchell - it was one I had been struggling with. As we settled in for my reading, Rachel said, "What do you want us to be listening for?" Now THAT is a good reader. It helped me to focus my own intentions and goals - and it helped me to think about the piece in a larger way, so that I could work on that LARGER element, not just the language or the progression of events.
Bishop and Lowell were two very different poets - it is hard to imagine their rapport. She was solitary, with a tiny literate following. She wrote about fish houses and the beach and small moments. He upended his psychology, pouring passion and unrequited feeling into his poems. They worked FOR one another, over decades.
It was a highly passionate relationship, and you ache reading some of their letters.
William Logan writes, in the NY Times piece:
Their admiration even made them light fingered — they borrowed ideas or images the way a neighbor might steal a cup of sugar. Lowell was especially tempted by this lure of the forbidden, using one of Bishop’s dreams in a heartbreaking poem about their might-have-been affair, or rewriting in verse one of her short stories. They were literary friends in all the usual ways, providing practical advice (the forever dithery and procrastinating Bishop proved surprisingly pragmatic), trading blurbs, logrolling as shamelessly as pork-bellied senators (Lowell was adept at dropping the quiet word on her behalf). There was a refined lack of jealousy between them — that particular vice never found purchase, though in letters to friends they could afford the occasional peevish remark about each other. The only time Bishop took exception to Lowell’s poems was when, in “The Dolphin” (1973), he incorporated angry letters from his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick — “Art just isn’t worth that much,” Bishop exclaimed. She flinched when poets revealed in their poems too much of themselves, once claiming that she wished she “could start writing poetry all over again on another planet.”These poets, in short, inspired each other. Lowell always seems to be stuffing her newest poem into his billfold, so he can take it out later like a hundred-dollar bill. Bishop saw immediately how strange and even shocking “Life Studies” (1959) was (its confessional style caused as violent an earthquake in American poetry as “The Waste Land”); but he noticed something more subtle, that she rarely repeated herself. Each time she wrote, it was as if she were reinventing what she did with words, while he tended to repeat his forms until he had driven them into the ground, or driven everyone crazy with them. Bishop was loyal enough to admire, or pretend to, even Lowell’s mediocre poems.
If Lowell and Bishop often seem to love no poems more than each other’s, as critics perhaps they were right. A hundred years from now, they may prove the 20th century’s Whitman and Dickinson, an odd couple whose poems look quizzically at each other, half in understanding, half in consternation, each poet the counter-psyche of the other. Their poems are as different as gravy from groundhogs, their letters so alike — so delightfully in concord — the reader at times can’t guess the author without glancing at the salutation.
Here's a post I wrote about Elizabeth Bishop - and I included in it what I consider to be her greatest poem - "The Moose".
I am very much looking forward to reading the entire correspondence of Lowell and Bishop.
October 31, 2008
Happy birthday to John Keats
Keats was born on this day in London, 1795. "Ode to Autumn" is perhaps my favorite of his - but today, for his birthday, I will post: "Ode on Melancholy". And below the poem are a bunch of compiled quotes - from Keats and about Keats. He brings up strong reactions in people. Many adore, many think something is lacking ... but all give him the props. I particularly love the quote I found from Robert Graves.
Ode on Melancholy
1.
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolfs-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
2.
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
3.
She dwells with Beauty - Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
"One song of Burns is of more worth to you than all I could think of for a whole year in his native country. His Misery is a dead weight on the nimbleness of one's quill ... he talked with Bitches, he drank with blackguards, he was miserable. We can see horribly clear in the works of such a Man his whole life, as if we were God's spies." -- John Keats on Robert Burns
"Shelley was a volatile creature of air and fire: he seems never to have noticed what he ate or drank, except sometimes as a matter of vegetarian principle. Keats was earthy, with a sweet tooth and a relish for spices, cream and snuff, and in a letter mentions peppering his own tongue to bring out the delicious coolness of claret. When Shelley in Prometheus Unbound mentions: "The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom", he does not conjure up, as Keats would have done, the taste of the last hot days of the dying English year, with over-ripe blackberries, ditches full of water, and the hedges grey with old man's beard. He is not aware of the veteran bees whirring their frayed wings or sucking rank honey from the dusty yellow blossoms of the ivy." -- Robert Graves
"On the whole, I do not like Keats. His poems are, in reality, too full of beauty. One feels stifled in roses ... There is little in Keats' poems except luscious beauty -- so much of it that the reader is surfeited." -- L.M. Montgomery
"These are the pure Magic. These are the clear vision. The rest is only poetry." -- Rudyard Kipling on John Keats and Samuel Coleridge
"He'd planned to become a surgeon, but he realized his real vocation was poetry, and in the spring of 1818, he published his first major long poem Endymion. And then he set out on a hike through the countryside with his friend Charles Brown. Wordsworth was one of Keats's favorite poets, and he knew that Wordsworth had been inspired by walking around England, so Keats decided to do the same that summer.
Keats was a London boy. He had never seen the mountains. He had never seen a waterfall. He wrote letters back to his brother about the wonderful things that he saw, but gradually on his hike he realized he was no Wordsworth, that he did not want to write about scenery. He hated descriptions. He was more interested in the people whom he saw along the way. He was fascinated by the peasants who walked barefoot on the roads, carrying their shoes and stockings so they would look nice when they got to town. He saw an old woman being carried along the road in a kind of a cage like a dog kennel, smoking a pipe.
He came back to London and learned that the reviews of his last book of poetry, Endymion, were coming in and critics had written ferocious attacks on him. He was crushed. And his brother had come down with a serious case of tuberculosis. His brother died in December, and by the end of that year, John Keats had contracted tuberculosis himself. He would die three years later, in 1821. It was in those last three years of his life that he wrote most of his greatest poems." -- Garrison Keillor
"He ramped through [Spenser's[ Fairie Queen ... like a young horse turned into a Spring meadow." -- Cowden Clarke, a friend of Keats
"The imagery he chose was predominantly sexual. Poetry for him was not a philosophical theory, as it was for Shelley, but a moment of physical delirium." -- Robert Graves
"... miserable self-polluter of the human mind."-- Shelley
"I look upon fine phrases as a lover." -- John Keats
"Keats as a poet is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous, but the question with some people will be, whether he is anything else." -- Matthew Arnold
"The three great narratives, rich in detail, idealized characterization, and gothic elements, inspired poets, painters and musicians later in the century. The Pre-Raphaelites in particular drew sustenance from them. 'The Eve of St. Agnes' radically reconfigures resources of tone and characterization that Keats adapted from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet was not far from his hand when he wrote the poem. And his phrasing owes Shakespeare a debt. Cymbeline suggests the way Madeline's bedchamber is made solid before our eyes. Keats does not imitate his masters: he has assimilated them. The odes - 'To a Nightingale,' 'On a Grecian Urn', 'To Autumn', and the lesser 'To Psyche' and 'On Melancholy' -- are incomparable. The charge that he 'lacked experience' is fatuous; nor are they 'merely sensuous'. They are the step beyond moral romance to the romance of feeling itself, feeling as subject, the 'true voice'." -- Michael Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets"
"I have loved the principle of beauty in all things." -- John Keats
" ... a sensuous mystic." -- Louis MacNeice
"Keats was short-sighted. He did not see landscapes as such, so he treated them as painted cabinets filled with interesting objects ... His habit was to allow his eye to be seduced from entire vision by particular objects ... He saw little but what moved: the curving, the wreathing, the slanting, the waving - and even then, it seems, not the whole object is in motion but only its edge, or highlight." -- Robert Graves
"Keats's yearning passion for the Beautiful is not a passion of the sensuous or sentimental poet. It is an intellectual and spiritual passion." -- Matthew Arnold
"Milton had an exquisite passion for what is properly, in the sense of ease and pleasure, poetical luxury, and with that, it appears to me, he would fair have been content, if he could, so doing, preserve his self-respect and feeling of duty performed." -- John Keats
This Grave
contains all that was Mortal
of a
Young English Poet
Who
on his Death Bed
in the Bitterness of his Heart
at the Malicious Power of his Enemies
Desired
these words to be engraved on his Tomb Stone
"Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water."
-- Keats' epitaph
"Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance." -- John Keats
More on John Keats' short life here
October 17, 2008
The Books: "Timebends: A Life" (Arthur Miller)
Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:
Timebends: A Life
This is truly bizarre. Today happens to be Arthur Miller's birthday. His is the next book on the shelf. So happy birthday, Arthur Miller.
When Timebends came out, in 1987, I remember there being mixed reviews. I think mainly folks were expecting salacious revelations about Marilyn Monroe - and the book decidedly does not deliver on that score. But why does it not deliver? Because Marilyn Monroe was not some unearthly sexual goddess to Arthur Miller. She was a real girl, sweet, troubled, innocent, lovely - and she was his wife. He does not take us into their bedroom, and he does not "explain" her. She can't be "explained" by one person alone, and it is not up to Miller to interpret her for us. The Marilyn sections of the book are very lovely - I loved the picture of her that emerged ... but it's certainly not the whole book, it is not even the context in which the entire book is placed. It is an event, like any other ... something that made up a good deal of his emotional life for some time, as well as his creative life (as he tried to write material that would show the world she was a "real actress"). (Once upon a time I put together a giant post called "The Making of The Misfits" - filled with photos and book excerpts about that troubled film-shoot. The whole thing really had began as Miller's desire to write something he felt Marilyn could do, something worthy of her.) But in general, the Marilyn in the book is revealed as a real person, maybe more beautiful than most, certainly more famous ... but a woman with anxieties, quirks, and a lovely sense of humor and intellect that he found captivating.
Additionally, there is a lot of politics in the book (which is also not surprising) - and in many ways it gives a grand sweeping look at the journey of the American Left from the 30s to the 50s ... well, and yes, into the 60s - but by then many of the definitions had changed. Miller was from New York, and had grown up going to see productions at the Group Theatre, that bastion of the American Left, and had been gobsmacked by Clifford Odets' fiery language, and the vision that theatre could be somehow relevant and revolutionary. His compassion for the downtrodden, the persecuted, the forgotten masses could be seen as radical (and it certainly was at the time) - yet at the same time he had great contempt for the Soviet system of oppression and censorship, and worked hard through his life to support the persecuted writers in the Soviet bloc. And while he had seen the downside to American capitalism in his own family misfortunes, he was also amazed during the groundbreaking production of Salesman in Beijing in 1983 - which took China by storm. I actually remember some of the news reports about that production trickling down to me in junior high. I had read Salesman by then, so I knew of it ... but that production can be seen, in certain lights, as a watershed moment in China's cultural history. People went NUTS for Salesman in China. They had gone NUTS for Salesman in America in the 1940s and there, 50 years later, in a Communist country, they went nuts again. Even more nuts. Miller was amazed by the response. The curtain would go down at the end of the production, and Chinese men in suits would be hugging one another in the aisles, weeping. Amazing. It had spoken to them, to their experience, their hopes and dreams - another culture, another political system - none of that mattered. The message of Salesman, of the inherent dignity of man, despite his financial success, had a deep deep resonance for the Chinese. Salesman traveled, in other words. John Updike shares an interesting anecdote about Miller, which, I think, might surprise some people who just brush Miller off as a radical:
I went to the Soviet Union [in 1964] for a month as part of a cultural exchange program ... I came way from that month ... with a hardened antipathy to communism ...There was something bullying egocentric about my admirable Soviet friends, a preoccupation with their own tortured situations that shut out all light from beyond. They were like residents of a planet so heavy that even their gazes were sucked back into its dark center. Arthur Miller, no reactionary, said it best when, a few years later, he and I and some other Americans riding the cultural-exchange bandwagon had entertained, in New York or Connecticut, several visiting Soviet colleagues. The encounter was handsomely catered, the dialogue loud and lively, the will toward friendship was earnest and in its way intoxicating, but upon our ebullient guests' departure Miller looked at me and said sighingly, "Jesus, don't they make you glad you're an American?"
Miller's family lost everything in the stock market crash, and so their situation was quite reduced. I believe they moved to Brooklyn, a huge downward step, off the island, so to speak, and Miller was a young child, but very much remembers the stress and fear of that time. Much of his memory would be put to use later on when writing Death of a Salesman - the tenement buildings, the change of Brooklyn from a more rural area to something crowded and fetid ... Not to mention the fact that he did have an uncle who was a salesman, a brash funny and vaguely pathetic man - an early prototype for Willy Loman.
I did not go into Timebends with any specific expectation like some people did. I didn't think, "He had BETTER talk about Marilyn Monroe for 300 pages straight!" Or "He had BETTER dish on how he felt about Kazan and the HUAC - if he doesn't? I will HATE the book" ... or etc. etc. I found some of it didactic and rather humorless, and much of his political sections were boring and preachy ... but you move through them and then get on to the business of theatre. To Miller, it all was one. You can tell that in his plays as well. His plays always have a "message", some social, political, or cultural message ... and it is that reason that they can sometimes seem didactic in a way that Tennessee Williams' plays never do. It's interesting: they were contemporaries, the two giant stars of the American stage, the two men (with O'Neill and Odets in the generations before paving the way) who brought an American voice and an American perspective where before there had been none. Much of the Broadway fare in the early years of the 20th century, up into the 1920s, was written by Americans, sure, but they took as their inspiration the works of Noel Coward, or Shaw, or other Europeans. It was not a truly American art-form. Vaudeville was, but not the mainstage of the Broadway theatres. That began to change with O'Neill - and Odets ... two wildly different playwrights with different perspectives ... but they cleared the space for what would happen in the 40s, and 50s - when out came playwrights like Miller, and Williams, and Inge, and Saroyan. These playwrights are American to the core. It is a voice I am talking about, a sensibility - it is its own thing, and these guys helped put American on the map, at least in a theatrical sense.
Miller's book details his own part of that historic moment in our cultural life.
It has since come to light that Miller and his last wife - Inge Morath, a photographer - had a child who had Down's Syndrome, and Miller was so horrified and embarrassed that he put the child in an institution and never saw him again. He never even acknowledged the child's existence. For decades. Inge Morath would go to visit her son, but it was a horrible situation. The child is now a man, and many of Miller's old friends have reached out to him - but Miller himself never did. And there's not a word of this in Timebends, which is truly chilling. The daughter he had with Morath - Rebecca - is now a director, actress, writer - and wife of Daniel Day-Lewis - and Miller showers her with praise and love in Timebends. The story about the Down's Syndrome child came out this past year - so reading Timebends in the 80s, you'd never ever know that this giant THING was missing. Miller had some major demons going on, obviously, and I do wonder what price he paid (psychologically, I mean) in keeping this huge thing a secret. His last play was Finishing the Picture (2004) and it was (obviously, if you know Miller's life) the story of the making of The Misfits, with its star actress going deeper and deeper into madness and incomprehensibility, as the hard-drinking macho cast and crew wait for her to appear, so that they can "finish the picture". Miller was 90 years old, and there he is ... going back in time to a moment when maybe he thought he could "save" someone ... going over it and over it (as he had done before, in his play After the Fall) ... maybe in doing so he thought he could change his own past. He died before the revelation came out about his abandoned son, so naturally there has been MUCH chatter on the airwaves about it. For my part, it makes me look at his work in a different way: the evocations of fathers and sons, so common in his work ... the passing on of the torch, so important in all matters of family and mortality ... what do we pass on? What have we, as men, as fathers, made of ourselves? What can I give to my son? What do I have to give? There is a whole new way to look at these existential questions now. It's awful, but I wonder if a lot of his torment and didacticism came from the fact that he had done this awful thing and he felt the need to hide it.
The excerpt I share below is giant, so sit back, and get ready. It is the story of the making of Death of a Salesman, and it is not only my favorite section in the book - but perhaps my favorite section of ANY book. He's an elegant writer, not too emotional, but his memories of that time in his life are intense and you really get the sense that he was pushing himself THROUGH something, he was dreaming himself into a space where he could find his voice and share it. Not an easy thing to do. He had already had one success - All My Sons ... but with Salesman he went deeper. It was profound for him. I will not re-cap his thoughts here - they are all below.
But the elements of this story resonate for me, and have for years, ever since I first read it:
-- his experience of seeing Streetcar Named Desire for the first time, and what it said to him, what it did to him ... It basically gave him permission. To go big, to go huge, to be relevant and important ... not to imitate Williams, that could not be done, they were different men ... but to stop being microscopic and go into the macro-level. (His giving-of-the-props to Williams here is incredibly generous. Because he could very easily have taken the credit himself for what happened to American theatre in the 1940s ... Salesman was as huge a phenomenon as Streetcar ... but he doesn't. He hands that to Williams.)
-- his feeling that he needed to build a shack with his own hands to write the play (he didn't know why he had to, but he knew he did ...) Here he is in front of the shack, many years later.
-- the fact that he would finish work on the play after a long day, and find that he had been crying all day ... without even realizing it
-- Kazan signing on to direct - a huge deal. (And Kazan's response to reading the play for the first time ... gulp ...)
-- finding their Willy Loman. The story of Lee J. Cobb - who was really too young for the part, he was the contemporary of Arthur Kennedy who played his own son ... but how Cobb basically insisted that the part was his and his alone.
-- then - the UNBELIEVABLE story of the moment in rehearsal when Lee J. Cobb "got it". I have goosebumps right now just thinking about it.
-- and then: opening night ... and what happened in that theatre that night.
It is a magnificent story, from beginning to end, and one I treasure. It feels, in a weird way, like it belongs to me. In the same way that I feel that the signing of the Declaration of Independence belongs to me, or that Walt Whitman belongs to me, or that the first walk on the moon belongs to me. These are stories that make up our culture, our history ... and they are part of me, mine.
At the end of Death of a Salesman, Willy's wife Linda says what are probably the most famous lines in the entire play:
Don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.
And so it has.
EXCERPT FROM Timebends: A Life
Already in the sixties I was surprised by the common tendency to think of the late forties and early fifties as some sort of renaissance in the New York theatre. If that was so, I was unaware of it. I thought the theatre a temple being rotted out with commercialized junk, where mostly by accident an occasional good piece of work appeared, usually under some disguise of popular cultural coloration such as a movie star in a leading role.
That said, it now needs correction; it was also a time when the audience was basically the same for musicals and light entertainment as for the ambitious stuff and had not yet been atomized, as it would be by the mid-fifties, into young and old, hip and square, or even political left and middle and right. So the playwright's challenge was to please not a small sensitized supporting clique but an audience representing, more or less, all of America. With ticket prices within reason, this meant that an author was writing for his peers, and if such was really not the case statistically, it was sufficiently so to support an illusion that had a basis in reality. After all, it was not thought particularly daring to present T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party on Broadway, or Laurence Olivier in a Greek tragedy, or Giraudoux's The Madwomen of Chaillot, or any number of other ambitious works. To be sure, such shows had much shorter lives than the trash, but that was to be expected, for most people would much rather laugh than cry, rather watch an actor being hit on the head by a pig bladder than by some painful truth.
The net of it all was that serious writers could reasonably assume they were addressing the whole American mix, and so their plays, whether successfully or not, stretched toward a wholeness of experience that would not require specialists or a coterie to be understood. As alienated a spirit as he was, O'Neill tried for the big audience, and Clifford Odets no less so, along with every other writer longing to prophesy to America, from Whitman and Melville to Dreiser and Hemingway and so on.
For Europe's playwrights the situation was profoundly different, with society already being split beyond healing between the working class and its allies, who were committed to a socialist destiny, and the bourgeois mentality that sought an art of reassurance and the pleasures of forgetting what was happening in the streets. (The first American plays I saw left me wondering where the characters came from. The people I knew were fanatics about surviving, but onstage everyone seemed to have mysteriously guaranteed incomes, and though every play had to have something about "love", there was nothing about sex, which was all there was in Brooklyn, at least that I ever noticed.) An American avant-garde, therefore, if only because the domination of society by the middle class was profoundly unchallenged, could not simply steal from Brecht or even Shaw and expect its voice to reach beyond the small alienated minority that had arrived in their seats already converted to its aims. That was not the way to change the world.
For a play to do that it had to reach precisely those who accepted everything as it was; great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theatre worth my time that did not want to change the world, any more than a creative scientist could wish to prove the validity of everything that is already known. I knew only one other writer with the same approach, even if he surrounded his work with a far different aura. This was Tennessee Williams.
If only because he came up at a time when homosexuality was absolutely unacknowledgeable in a public figure, Williams had to belong to a minority culture and understood in his bones what a brutal menace the majority could be if aroused against him. I lived with much the same sense of alienation, albeit for other reasons. Certainly I never regarded him as the sealed-off aesthete he was thought to be. There is a radical politics of the soul as well as of the ballot box and the picket line. If he was not an activist, it was not for lack of a desire for justice, nor did he consider a theatre profoundly involved in society and politics, the venerable tradition reaching back to the Greeks, somehow unaesthetic or beyond his interest.
The real theatre - as opposed to the sequestered academic one - is always straining at the inbuilt inertia of a society that always wants to deny change and the pain it necessarily involves. But it is in this effort that the musculature of important work is developed. In a different age, perhaps even only fifteen years later, in the sixties, Williams might have had a more comfortably alienated audience to deal with, one that would have relieved the pressure upon him to extend himself beyond a supportive cult environment, and I think this might well have narrowed the breadth of his work and its intensity. In short, there was no renaissance in the American forties, but there was a certain balance within the audience - a balance, one might call it, between the alienated and the conformists - that gave sufficient support to the naked cry of the heart and, simultaneously, enough resistance to force it into a rhetoric that at one stroke could be broadly understandable and yet faithful to the pain that had pressed the author to speak.
When Kazan invited me up to New Haven to see the new Williams play, A Streetcar Named Desire - it seemed to me a rather too garishly attention-getting title - I was already feeling a certain amount of envious curiosity since I was still unable to commit myself to the salesman play, around which I kept suspiciously circling and sniffing. But at the same time I hoped that Streetcar would be good; it was not that I was high-minded but simply that I shared the common assumption of the time that the greater the number of exciting plays there were on Broadway the better for each of us., At least in our minds there was still something approximating a theatre culture to which we more or less pridefully belonged, and the higher its achievement the greater the glory we all shared. The playwright was then king of the hill, not the star actor or director, and certainly not the producer or theatre owner, as would later by the case. (At a recently televised Tony Awards ceremony, recognizing achievement in the theatre, not a single playwright was presented to the public, while two lawyers who operated a chain of theatres were showered with the gratitude of all. It reminded me of Caligula making his horse a senator.)
Streetcar - especially when it was still so fresh and the actors almost as amazed as the audience at the vitality of this theatrical experience - opened one specific door for me. Not the story or the characters or the direction, but the words and their liberation, the joy of the writer in writing them, the radiant eloquence of its composition, moved me more than all its pathos. It formed a bridge to Europe for me, to Jouvet's performance in Ondine, to the whole tradition of unashamed word-joy that, with the exception of Odets, we had either turned our backs on or, as with Maxwell Anderson, only used archaically, as though eloquence could only be justified by cloaking it in sentimental romanticism.
Returning to New York, I felt speeded up, in motion now. With Streetcar, Tennessee had printed a license to speak at full throat, and it helped strengthen me as I turned to Willy Loman, a salesman always full of words, and better yet, a man who could never cease trying, like Adam, to name himself and the world's wonders. I had known all along that this play could not be encompassed by conventional realism, and for one integral reason: in Willy the past was as alive as what was happening at the moment, sometimes even crashing in to completely overwhelm his mind. I wanted precisely the same fluidity in the form, and now it was clear to me that this must be primarily verbal. The language would of course have to be recognizably his to begin with, but it seemed possible now to infiltrate it with a kind of superconsciousness. The play, after all, involved the attempts of his son and his wife and Willy himself to understand what was killing him. And to understand meant to lift the experience into emergency speech of an unashamedly open kind rather than to proceed by the crabbed dramatic hints and pretexts of the "natural". If the structure had to mirror the psychology as directly as could be done, it was still a psychology hammered into its strange shape by society, the business life Willy had lived and believed in. The play could reflect what I had always sensed as the unbroken tissue that was man and society, a single unit rather than two.
By April of 1948 I felt I could find such a form, but it would have to be done, I thought, in a single sitting, in a night or a day, I did not know why. I stopped making my notes in our Grace Court house in Brooklyn Heights and drove up alone one morning to the country house we had bought the previous year. We had spent one summer there in that old farmhouse, which had been modernized by its former owner, a greeting card manufacturer named Philip Jaffe, who as a sideline published a thin magazine for China specialists called Amerasia. Mary worked as one of his secretaries and so had the first news that he wanted to sell the place. In a year or two he would be on trial for publishing without authorization State Department reports from John Stewart Service, among a number of other China experts who recognized a Mao victory as inevitable and warned of the futility of America continuing to back her favorite, Chiang Kai-shek. Amerasia had been a vanity publication, in part born of Jaffe's desire for a place in history, but it nevertheless braved the mounting fury of the China lobby against any opinion questioning the virtues of the Chiang forces. At his trial, the government produced texts of conversations that Jaffe claimed could only have been picked up by long-range microphone as he and his friends walked the isolated backcountry roads near this house. Service was one of many who were purged from the State Department, leaving it blinded to Chinese reality but ideologically pure.
But all that was far from my mind this day; what I was looking for on my land was a spot for a little shack I wanted to build, where I could block out the world and bring into focus what was still stuck in the corners of my eyes. I found a knoll in the nearby woods and returned to the city, where instead of working on the play I drew plans for the framing, of which I really had very vague knowledge and no experience. A pair of carpenters could have put up this ten-by-twelve-foot cabin in two days at most, but for reasons I still do not understand it had to be my own hands that gave it form, on this ground, with a floor that I had made, upon which to sit to begin the risky expedition into myself. In reality, all I had was the first two lines and a death - "Will!" and "It's all right. I came back." Further than that I dared not, would not, venture until I could sit in the completed studio, four walls, two windows, a floor, a roof, and a door.
"It's all right. I came back" rolled over and over in my head as I tried to figure out how to join the roof rafters in air unaided, until I finally put them together on the ground and swung them into position all nailed together. When I closed in the roof it was a miracle, as though I had mastered the rain and cooled the sun. And all the while afraid I would never be able to penetrate past those first two lines. I started writing one morning - the tiny studio was still unpainted and smelled of raw wood and sawdust, and the bags of nails were still stashed in a corner with my tools. The sun of April had found my windows to pour through, and the apple buds were moving on the wild trees, showing their first pale blue petals. I wrote all day until dark, and then I had dinner and went back and wrote until some hour in the darkness between midnight and four. I had skipped a few areas that I knew would give me no trouble in the writing and gone for the parts that had to be muscled into position. By the next morning I had done the first half, the first act of two. When I lay down to sleep I realized I had been weeping - my eyes still burned and my throat was sore from talking it all out and shouting and laughing. I would be stiff when I woke, aching as if I had played four hours of football or tennis and now had to face the start of another game. It would take some six more weeks to complete Act II.
My laughter during the writing came mostly at Willy's contradicting himself so arrantly, and out of the laughter the title came one afternoon. Death Comes for the Archbishop, the Death and the Maiden quartet - always austere and elevated was death in titles. Now it would be claimed by a joker, a bleeding mass of contradictions, a clown, and there was something funny about that, something like a thumb in the eye, too. yes, and in some far corner of my mind possibly something political; there was the smell in the air of a new American Empire in the making, if only because, as I had witnessed, Europe was dying or dead, and I wanted to set before the new captains and the so smugly confident kings the corpse of a believer. On the play's opening night a woman who shall not be named was outraged, calling it "a time bomb under American capitalism"; I hoped it was, or at least under the bullshit of American capitalism, this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last.
But some thirty-five years later, the Chinese reaction to my Beijing production of Salesman would confirm what had become more and more