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Alan Jacobs
Walking with Iain Sinclair.
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1. In the Year of Our Lord 2001, Iain Sinclair walked around the city of London in an attempt to undo a great curse laid upon the city. He walked alongside the M25, the vast London Orbital: sometimes just inside its circumference, sometimes just outside it, very rarely walking on the road itself. The road itself was the curse he sought to remove, along with the politics and philosophy that produce such roads.
Invoking magicians and celebrants of the paranormal, Sinclair imagines London not as an inorganic "place" but as a living body, a body endangered by its mechanistic physicians, above all Margaret Thatcher: "My superstition, sympathetic to Fludd and Paracelsus, persists: the walk around London's orbital motorway is personal. From Harefield to Purfleet, the rushes, surges of excitement, are connected to an imagined—solar powered?—circulation of blood." Having noted that many great country houses were built a day's horseback ride from central London, and that the M25 itself is set just at that distance, he becomes obsessed with concentric circles of spiritual and intellectual force. He sees the poets and sages of London moving to its periphery either to escape or understand: "Blake at Lambeth, [the Elizabethan magician John] Dee at Mortlake, Pope at Twickenham, [the novelist J. G.] Ballard at Shepperton: the great British tradition of expulsion, indifference. The creation of alternative universes that wrap like Russian dolls around a clapped-out core." The body of London is dying from its heart and being strangled by the great garrotte of the Orbital; Sinclair hopes by walking the ancient lines to make an effectual counterspell, to loosen the malign constriction.
Some sixty years earlier, C. S. Lewis had asked a church congregation, "Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spells that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years." Lewis and Sinclair don't have a great deal in common: the evil enchanters with whom the older man contended (Victorian skeptics, literary modernists, Freudians) bear little resemblance to Sinclair's enemies (city planners and Tory politicians), and where Lewis wished to restore orthodox Christianity Sinclair advocates an older and darker magic. But both rail against what Max Weber called Entzauberung, the disenchantment or de-magicking of the world. Sinclair's walk was a way to rage against the dying of an ancient light, a light given off for millennia by a disturbingly magical city on the banks of the Thames.
What was unusual about that journey, for Sinclair, was its reach and range. For while Sinclair is a titan among walkers, he ambulates primarily near his home in Hackney, in London's East End. As Robert Macfarlane has commented, "Walking is his chief method and the city his chief subject." So it was fitting that after London Orbital, which came out in 2002, he would offer, seven years later, a detailed and passionate account of the nearby: Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report. The title will strike many as ironic, because Hackney is a scrubby place, populated by people of varying colors and nationalities who have little in common save their scraping-to-get-by social status. (Hackney suffered badly in the August riots.) In Hackney there's nothing that a visitor is likely to call charm or even interest. "Rose-red empire" indeed.
But Sinclair treats Hackney unironically, even though the title of his book is a borrowing of the name of an enormous old music hall: "The rose-red endstop of the Town Hall precinct. With its vast lettering: HACKNEY EMPIRE." It's Sinclair's empire, for he knows it inside and out, and possesses that authority conferred by long intimacy. Near the beginning of the book he says that he had been gathering information to write it for forty years. But changes to the landscape meant that what he learned was always going out of date, as new information arrived and demanded attention. Add to that the problems of memory's failures: as he writes near the end, "My rose-red Empire was built around absence, holes in the narrative, faked resolution. Characters had to wear large labels so that I would recognize them when they reappeared."
"How best to describe Sinclair?" asks Robert Macfarlane in a recent portrait in the Guardian:
East London's recording angel? Hackney's Pepys? A literary mud-larker and tip-picker? A Travelodge tramp (his phrase)? A middle-class dropout with a gift for bullshit (also his phrase)? A toxicologist of the 21st-century landscape? A historian of countercultures and occulted pasts? An intemperate Wall-E, compulsively collecting and compacting the city's textual waste? A psycho-geographer (from which term Sinclair has been rowing away ever since he helped launch it into the mainstream)? He's all of these, and more.
Yes, but the first description is the most fitting. It is recording that Sinclair does best and most—maniacally, sometimes to the fascination and sometimes to the utter perplexity and sheer boredom of his readers. All of his books have their longueurs, but often the moments of greatest fascination emerge from them. His recording can seem like that of an angel through its indifference to the usual human concerns—or perhaps it would be better to say, to the concerns we typically bring to books and other narratives. Sinclair has written of his "final renunciation of the burden of narrative." Like William Blake, his great predecessor as an occult and obsessive Londoner, and one also linked with the angelic, Sinclair's motto might well be, "Enough! Or, Too much." He gathers, consumes, and regurgitates in a seemingly endless cycle. But he also says of his four decades of gathering knowledge about Hackney, the "guiding principle" was stated by Blake: "Tho' obscured, this is the form of the Angelic land."
2. Even as Sinclair was writing his tribute to, or denunciation of, or account of—it all depends on which page you're reading—Hackney, something big was happening there, something far beyond the gradual changes endemic to any place. The apparatus of the Olympic Games came to East London.
He had already noted its arrival in the Hackney book: he says there that the building sites—venues for sports, athlete housing—are "an effective cultural defoliant, an Agent Orange of edge-land jungles, marking out the flight path to dinosaur rock acts in O2, the rebranded Millennium Dome." Sinclair is offended and angered by this as by little else. That book begins with Sinclair describing, in a strangely elliptical way, a gang attack he suffered while walking through Hackney. This he shrugs off: "This is nothing, a toll on the privilege of living here; … It's my own fault, for being visible in my difference, and too ancient to be moving through this place at this hour." The book ends with a strange juxtaposition: an interview with Astrid Proll, an early member of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang, is intercut with visits to a blue fence that surrounds construction of Olympic venues. "An exclusion zone has been declared."
Random assaults on pedestrians, the harboring of violent criminals—these are the ordinary things of the Hackney Sinclair loves. There's a place in Hackney where people dispose of guns, the same place where criminals have ditched their instruments for generations: Sinclair was shown the disposal site by an associate of the Kray twins, psychotic and murderous leaders of the London underworld decades ago. (Tradition!) But the blue fence—that's something different, and infinitely worse. The fence generated another book, Sinclair's newest, Ghost Milk. Sinclair tells people that's the name of the book he's working on, and, asked what it means, he thinks, "cgi smears on the blue fence. Real juice from a virtual host. Embalming fluid. A soup of photographic negatives. Soul food for the dead. The universal element in which we sink and swim."
Well, what does that mean? It's hard to specify.[1] George MacDonald used to say that the purpose of fantasy was not to convey a meaning but awake a meaning, and that seems to be Sinclair's approach from the grittier end of the literary spectrum—except that what he seems to want to awaken is a sense of foreboding, dread. The "ghost milk" that oozes from the blue fence offers simulated nourishment: the Olympic organizers promise urban renewal, new possibilities for Hackney and the rest of East London, but such promises are empty, Sinclair insists. They're taking the soul of a place and leaving a few temporarily pristine buildings behind: "The pressure of regeneration, forcefed by the Olympics, is such that zones once tolerant of impoverished artists have to turn every waste lot, every previously unnoticed ruin, to profit. To provide more theoretical housing, it is necessary to unhouse those who have already fended for themselves." Similarly, in the Hackney book he had written, "We are the rubbish. Outmoded and unrequired. Dumped on wet pavings and left there for weeks, in the expectation of becoming art objects …. It is my own choice to identify with detritus in a place that has declared war on recyclers while erecting expensive memorials to the absence of memory."
As Robert MacFarlane notes, Sinclair is often seen as the founder of the discipline of "psychogeography" (his follower in the practice, Will Self, has been largely responsible for this designation), and however much Sinclair dislikes the term it remains useful—as long as we remember that psyche in this case does not mean "mind" but rather "soul." It is perhaps Sinclair's deepest conviction that places have souls, that they are lastingly, though perhaps not everlastingly, connected to the universe in distinctive ways. It is hard to erase the spirit of a place, but relatively easy to damage or obscure it. And over the years Sinclair has amassed a detailed inventory of the things that damage a place. In Sinclair's analysis, cheap transport caffs (truck stops) that serve dreadful coffee and greasy English breakfasts do no harm; elegant new coffee shops staffed by expert baristas, though, produce destructive reverberations in the spirit world. An old pub with new owners, offering an upscale dining menu, is a blight on the inner landscape of a street. Indeed, anything that smacks of "planning," "improvement," or "renewal" is sure to distress the presiding spirits, to disrupt the spiritual balance of the neighborhood. So a project the size of the Olympic construction is the psychogeographical equivalent of the Hiroshima bomb.
3. When put this way, Sinclair's career-long project might sound ridiculous. It is a tribute to the singular power of his style that one rarely feels this way when reading his books, though the uniformity of the tone does weary the mind's ear. His prose hypnotizes more often than it infuriates; but sometimes it does infuriate. Though his anger is often justified, surely his readers can be forgiven for sometimes wanting something else.
That "something else" might be a substantive vision of the good, or just a good: Sinclair prefers the old to the new, the shabby to the polished, the disorderly to the orderly, the dirty to the clean, even (it often seems) the poor to the well-off. He expresses his preferences relentlessly, mainly through scorning what has come to be rather than celebrating what was—but he never really accounts for them. It is hard to find anywhere in Sinclair's work a clear explanation of why he prefers what he does: what values, what commitments, what view of what makes life worth living, underlies all this outrage.
Sinclair really doesn't write at all like Hunter S. Thompson, the American apostle of "gonzo journalism" to whom he has been compared, but the linkage is understandable. Both of them are writers who like finding an edge and then crossing over it; both (above all) possess a style fueled primarily by deep disquiet sliding into rage. These are writers whose styles are so distinctive, so relentlessly urgent, that they cannot really be parodied: any parody would merely replicate something that's in the writers themselves at some point.
But whereas Thompson got his energy from traveling, from being on the road in big cars, Sinclair thrives as he walks his own neighborhood. He's the Antaeus of writers. The farther he gets from London, indeed from Hackney itself, the more diffuse and pointless his anger seems. Even in Manchester he feels powerless: "It was too late, the story was too rich, I would not live long enough to fix my bearings." Yet farther and farther from home he travels here, to Liverpool, to Hull, to Berlin—and in the book's final pages to Texas and California. A story that begins with Sinclair's recollections of being marginally employed in East London in 1971 ends with his eating an elegant Italian meal at a waterfront restaurant in Sausalito and thinking of traveling to Mexico. He seems to be deliberately disorienting himself, as though determined to replace anger with confusion.
But he keeps circling back. The most distant places serve to remind him of what he has left behind. No matter where he travels, two topics recur: the "grand project" of the Olympics, the book's ostensible theme, but also the life and death (in 2009) of J. G. Ballard. And if anything Ballard is the stronger presence.
Ballard, a dozen years older than Sinclair, was a friend and mentor to him but also a kind of Doppelgänger, like and unlike. If Sinclair's primary task has been to document the layered mundanities and secrets of East London, Ballard's was to imagine future dystopian worlds (most famously in his novel Crash). Ballard lived the last fifty years of his life in solidly suburban Shepperton, northwest of London, a very different place than Sinclair's grungy and sketchy Hackney—but he never wrote about Shepperton. Or perhaps it would be better to say that he never wrote directly and obviously about it. Imagined places were his territory, except in his powerful autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, based on his childhood experience in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai. Sinclair is ever fascinated by what the present is doing to the past; Ballard's thoughts turned always toward the futures the present could someday yield.
In that sense, one might say that he wrote about what Shepperton was (invisibly to others) on the way to becoming. In his dystopian speculations Ballard is as much of a psychogeographer as Sinclair; and Sinclair clearly believes that Ballard drew strength as a writer from that half-century of close observation of a small piece of Earth:
I wondered why, after his great success with Empire of the Sun, he didn't relocate to one of those balconied, sharp-edged properties that were so attractive to the convalescing and blocked advertising men who populate his books. Foolish thought. Ballard was a working writer, first and last: the where of it was not to be disturbed. Fixed routines served him well; so many hours, so many words. Breakfast. Times crossword. Desk overlooking a natural garden. Stroll to the shops to observe the erotic rhythms of consumerism. Lunch standing up with World at One on the radio. Back to the study. Forty-minute constitutional down to the river. TV chill-out meditation: The Rockford Files rather than Kenneth Clark.
Ballard had no need for ostentatious slumming or for cultural striving under the guidance of the learned and urbane Clark, host of the famous BBC series Civilisation. (And anyway, who needs to learn about civilization when civilization is what's dying?) According to Sinclair, Ballard's loss of his driver's license in the 1970s merely helped him to focus on all that he could learn within walking distance of his house, which, as it turned out, was more than enough. Sinclair seems to see Ballard as someone who could be evisceratingly critical of modern life without being personally fretted by any of it—in contrast, it would seem, to Sinclair himself. Sinclair concludes one of his meditations on Ballard with the following signal compliment: "Ballard was nothing if not precise. He said what he meant and he meant what he said."
4. In the last chapter of Ghost Milk Sinclair voyages to America, which he perceives always through the scrim of the movies he's seen: Texas via Red River, San Francisco via Vertigo. This doesn't bother him, because he holds to the view that America "remains a tabula rasa, bereft of ghosts …. Writing in London is about archaeology: trawling, classifying, presenting. Here it is the blank page of an elephant folio." These are tiresome old clichés, lacking even the truthfulness residing in most clichés; which makes one wonder why Sinclair would bother to come to America in the first place.
The answer brings us back to Ballard, by a circuitous route. Sinclair comes to Texas to visit his own literary archive, which he sold some years ago to the Harry Ransom Humanities Center at the University of Texas. He is self-scornful about this: we recall the subtitle of Ghost Milk ("Calling Time on the Grand Project") when he writes, "I became my own grand project and sold the memory-vault for the dollars to keep me afloat for another season." And then he tells us that when Ballard had been approached to sell his literary remains, he told everyone that they didn't exist, that he had discarded or burned everything he had made and whatever had come his way.
Only after his death did Ballard's children discover that he had in fact kept it all, from documentation of his time in the Lunghua internment camp to his school records to complete and meticulously edited manuscripts of his novels. His family ended up selling the hoard to the British Library, just a few miles from Shepperton, still within the metropolis that he and Sinclair loved. Meanwhile, Sinclair's stuff lies in Austin: an old hard drive awaits repair and recovery, but "everything else, my false starts, abandoned projects, drafts, proofs, corrected typescripts, had been sorted, listed, entombed."
Entombed. And then Sinclair flies to California, pays an inconclusive and disappointing visit to San Quentin—another failed "grand project"—then returns to the mainland to enjoy his dinner in Sausalito. In those final pages he is a convincing chronicler of his own inauthenticity, his fixed belief that Ballard was the one who somehow got it right.
Meanwhile, back home, he has at least the comforts of being a prophet without honor in his own country. Hackney's city council was so enraged by his opposition to the Olympic developments that they prohibited Sinclair from doing a reading at a local library. "So sorry," the librarian told him apologetically. "The launch is off. You dissed the Olympics." The last words of Ghost Milk are: "This book is dedicated to Mayor Jules Pipe, a constant inspiration, as he remakes the borough of Hackney as a model surrealist wonderland." But for a writer so long stimulated by mendacity and thoughtlessness, here the inspiration seems weak, slack. Though the book is dotted with occasional brilliancies, Sinclair has gotten tired, I think, of his own method. He describes himself as a "madman talking to himself in public." He's living off the fading adrenalin of wrath, which is itself a kind of ghost milk. Maybe the worst kind.
Alan Jacobs is professor of English at Wheaton College. His edition of Auden's The Age of Anxiety was published earlier this year (Princeton Univ. Press). He is the author most recently of The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, just out from Oxford University Press.
1. In an interview with Daniele Rugo, Sinclair expanded on his choice of title: "One of the reasons for the title is precisely to provoke the question, why this title? You can't have too descriptive a title or too bland a title. A title should be mysterious enough to interest me for a few days; otherwise it means it is not the right one. There isn't a specific meaning to this title; in the book I keep going back to it to try and justify this initial paradox. I think it has to do with creating a strange membrane between memory and the world, that impervious zone—material and immaterial—that is like the milk of a ghost, if such a thing could exist. The two elements push one another. Sometimes the title refers to the pollution coming off a site and creating those strange clouds that make up the sunsets in Los Angeles or Beijing, some other times it indicates voices of ghosts that become dominant. "I took a walk towards the river, to Wapping, once I had finished the book and in King Edward's Park I found an obelisk—a war memorial of some sort. The commemorative plaque had been dug out, so that the monument looked like the memory of nothing. Just before stepping away I noticed that below the missing message someone had graffitied 'Milk' and someone else had added 'Ghost.' Somehow this was the confirmation that the title was already inscribed into the landscape."
Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Laurance Wieder
The omnivorous curiosity of Evliya Celebi.
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Evliya Çelebi’s Book of Travels is too long to translate, and too big to write about.
An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Celebi
Robert Dankoff (Author), Sooyong Kim (Translator), Celebi Evliya (Translator)
Eland Publishing
520 pages
$24.77
Travelogue, ethnography, architectural and musical guide, dream diary and action drama, intimate portrait of the Ottoman Porte, foreign phrasebook and economic catalogue, diplomatic history, it features battles and shipwrecks, deceit, escapes, wonder tales of dervishes and magicians, sexual customs and sample menus, landscape and weather, surgical practices, science, superstition and beliefs, employing an enormous 17th-century Turkish vocabulary. The Seyahatname‘s ten volumes run to over 4,300 pages in the authoritative Turkish edition.
The Travels made its own long journey into print. Evliya Çelebi settled in Cairo the mid-1670s for the last decade or so of his life, and finished his memoirs by 1683. The manuscript was first read in 1742, when it was transported to Istanbul and copied. It took over a century and a half for a complete, printed Seyahatname to appear, and that edition was as long in the press (1896-1938) as Çelebi was on the road. Most Turkish readers know the Travels in that version, or in condensed translation in modern Turkish. The authoritative, unbowdlerized, and corrected Book of Travels in the language of its composition was published between 1999 and 2007.
Çelebi’s path into English also has that hint of romance. Around 1804, a German-English aristocrat, Joseph von Hammer, ran across a manuscript of volumes 1 through 4. Thinking he had the whole work in hand, Hammer issued excerpts in German translation starting in 1814. Between 1834 and 1850, he released his abbreviated English version of volumes 1 and 2: Narrative of Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in The Seventeenth Century, by Evliya Efendi, translated from the Turkish by the Ritter Joseph Von Hammer. That, plus a mid-20th-century version of Hammer’s translation titled In the Days of the Janissaries: Old Turkish Life as Depicted in the “Travel Book” of Evliyá Chelebí, and a scholarly monograph, Turkish Instruments of Music in the Seventeenth Century, as described in the Siyāhat nāma of Ewliya Chelebi (extracted from the catalogue of Istanbul guilds in Volume 1) was all the English common reader had of The Book of Travels.
No more.
About twenty years ago, Robert Dankoff collaged a biography, The Intimate Life of an Ottoman Statesman: Melek Ahmed Pasha (1588-1662), as Portrayed in Evliya Çelebi’s “Book of Travels” using von Hammer’s English and the 1896-1938 Turkish. Last year, Dankoff (an editor of the 21st-century Turkish edition) and his co-translator Sooyong Kim issued the anthology An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels by Evliya Çelebi. Unlike the topical Evliya Chelebi: Travels in Iran and the Caucasus, 1647 & 1654, published that same year but aimed at Persian specialists, An Ottoman Traveller draws from all ten volumes, and gives some metonymous measure of the whole work’s greatness.
The Book of Travels resembles Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy in its exhaustive accumulation of detail; it’s also akin to Herodotus’ Histories, but picaresque. As a collection of pointed tales and reported wonders, the Travels owes a lot to The 1001 Nights, as well as to the Mathnawí of Jalálu’ddín Rúmí. As for posterity, Orhan Pamuk set his world-art-historical murder mystery, My Name Is Red, in the Istanbul of Çelebi’s first volume.
Born in 1611, Evliya Çelebi was the son of the chief goldsmith to all the Ottoman sultans from Süleyman to Ibrahim; his maternal uncle, Melek Ahmed Pasha, served as grand wazir and as governor of Rumelia (now Bulgaria), Baghdad, Damascus, Van (in the Crimea), and Bosnia. Çelebi studied theology and jurisprudence until the age of twelve. He then apprenticed to the personal imam of Sultan Murad IV. By his early twenties, Çelebi was a recognized hafiz, reciting the entire Koran from memory in public performances at Aya Sofia, just up the hill from the Topkapi Palace. In 1636, Murad himself took note of Evliya’s gifts as muezzin, singer, and ready wit, and named him a royal entertainer and boon companion.
But Çelebi avoided a career at court. Instead, he pursued his lifelong dream of travel, often as an attaché in this or that pasha’s entourage. “Dream” is more than figurative here: the Seyahatname opens with an account of “a dream of comfort” that came to the young hafiz in a “sleep of wish fulfillment” in 1631, on his twentieth birthday. That night, Çelebi kissed the hand of the Prophet himself, who called him to travel the world, and commanded the youth to record what he would see.
Çelebi’s practical curiosity is as universal as ibn Khaldun’s; his forty-year travels are sprightlier than ibn Batuta’s. Beginning at the Bosporus, the Seyahatname touches upon every corner of the Ottoman Empire at the height of its power (excepting the Maghrib), and ends in Cairo, on the River Nile.
As an observer, he makes no pretense of neutrality. Çelebi was an orthodox Sunni Muslim, and his contempt for almost everyone else—Christians, Jews, Shi’ites, Zoroastrians’, Hindus, Kurds, Franks, Arabs—accounts for much of his narrative’s charm, even guarantees its integrity.
Passing through Safed in Canaan, he describes the language of the Jews, “an ancient and accursed people.” Çelebi explains that the two books revealed to this religious community are the Book of Psalms, which God revealed to the prophet David, and the Torah, revealed to Moses. Psalms is entirely prayers, while the Torah, the traveler writes, “is entirely promise and threat, command and prohibition, narrative, permitted and forbidden, paradise and hell and purgatory, resurrection and judgement …. Aside from the Jews, among the Christians as well—the infidels of Sweden, Holland, Dunkerque, Denmark, Germany, etc.—they all read the Torah and the Psalms and they speak Jewish.” (By “Jewish,” Çelebi meant Ladino.)
His description of the Armenians includes a brief cultural survey: Amalek created the Armenian language; the Armenians are all Christians who follow the Gospel, and are divided into seven sects. “Only their false doctrines,” says Çelebi, “are not like those of the Greeks. The Armenians eat oily foods on the eve of the Christian Festival of the Egg (Easter), while the Greeks eat oily foods on the following morning, according to their false fast.”
Evliya allows that every world traveler should have a smattering of Armenian to satisfy his needs and to keep on good terms with the natives. His handy vocabulary transliterates numbers from one to twelve, and lists the words for bread, water, raisins, apple, come, and go. The traveler’s phrasebook deals with such question-and-answer situations as demanding and failing to be served barley. And there are scripts for other interactions as well: “Come let’s go to the garden and drink wine”; “My hero, I love you very much”; “Give me a kiss O my dear boy”; “My hero, what ever happens will happen tonight, come let’s go to bed.”
When Çelebi accompanied Melek Ahmed Pasha to Split, in Croatia, he encountered the Frankish tongue. According to him, all the Franks speak their own dialect of Italian, and require translators to communicate with each other. He concedes that the Venetian language is most eloquent, then invokes the old saying, “Arabic is eloquence, Persian is elegance, Turkish is an offence, and all other languages are filth.”
Vienna posed the Muslim traveler real difficulty. A bronze white elephant clock that struck the hours, a gilded copper peacock that flapped and shrieked, and a pair of cast rams used to execute criminals left him torn between graven imagery and admiration. The elephant’s behavior was like that of the black elephant, Çelebi explained, “but it is white magic, a masterpiece of art, that astonishes the viewer.”
To qualify the wonder, this orthodox Sunni placed his extended description of Vienna’s Stephansdom under the heading, “Dispraise of the cathedral of priests and monks,” which he further characterized as a “house of mis-worship the un-good work of a non-upright king.”
Yet Çelebi couldn’t contain himself. “The paintings and gildings are strange and wondrous works of magic in the Frankish style …. This great cathedral glitters like the gold mine of Mt Akra in Kurdistan and dazzles the eyes like a mountain of light.” And several pages later, “When one sees the depiction of Paradise in this Stephan Church … , one wishes to die and go to heaven …. When it comes to painting, the Franks prevail over the Indians and Persians.” And then there were paintings of Hell and Purgatory. “Seeing these figures,” he wrote, “one’s body trembles like an autumn leaf.”
There is seeing, and there is hearing.
The Stephansdom’s “organ of David” requires twenty priests just to operate the bellows. “When the infidels wish to play this organ,” Çelebi writes, it takes seventy magicians, “each one a master at the level of Pythagoras,” to turn and work its parts. Castrati climb ladders to descend upon the bellows. As they rise and fall, the boys sing along with the organ in voices that will never crack, intoning verses from the Psalter. “According to the Germans’ false doctrine,” the traveler explains, “while David recited psalms … , he also played the organ …. So when the German priests and monks play the organ …—and the castrati mounted on the two bellows in groups of ten recite the Psalter …—one’s lungs fill with blood and one’s eyes with tears …. Truly, this organ has an awesome, liver-piercing sound, like the voice of the Antichrist, that makes a man’s hair stand on end …. It is only white magic,” the Muslim musician concludes, “a concatenation of musical instruments that scatters the wits of the listener.”
While the first volume of the Seyahatname begins with a dream, the last starts with what Çelebi calls “Adam’s prayer for Egypt in ‘Hebrew.’ ” He prefaces his transcription with this account of Adam’s wanderings: After the expulsion from Eden, Adam made his first home in Sri Lanka; he next dwelt at Mt. Ararat, then in unfarmed Mecca. Finally, Adam and his descendants (40,000 sons, by the Coptic chronicles’ count) went down to Egypt and settled by the Nile.
“And this,” Evliya Çelebi reports, “is the prayer he recited. It is written in the Hebrew language, because when Adam fell from paradise, in his rebellion he forgot the language of paradise, which is Arabic, and instructed by Gabriel he began to speak Hebrew instead”:
Hidam
tit jedilem
huji Çiji riba
felaj riba felaj riba
sujüm jaken
tarj dilem serij tena
sija riyeji zehriba
jedilem jiraj jiraj
Hidam kidam
hirj bijiti jar binti
jari mjni jari mjni
My God
My faith
Preserve from the devil
Save me, save me
All your angels
May they serve me
Give wheat I’ll make bread
In the end death occurs, death
My God
For my sons this my city
Make prosper, make prosper
Bibliography
I first learned of Evliya Çelebi in John Freely’s Istanbul: The Imperial City (Penguin, 1996).
Evliya Chelebi: Travels in Iran and the Caucasus, 1647 & 1654, translated by Hasan Javadi and Willem Floor (Mage, Washington, D.C., 2010).
The Intimate Life of an Ottoman Statesman: Melek Ahmed Pasha (1588-1662), as Portrayed in Evliya Çelebi’s “Book of Travels,” translation and commentary by Robert Dankoff (SUNY Press, 1991).
In the Days of the Janissaries: Old Turkish Life as Depicted in the “Travel Book” of Evliyá Chelebí, by Alexander Pallis (London: Hutchinson, 1951).
Turkish Instruments of Music in the Seventeenth Century, as described in the Siyahat nama of Ewliya Chelebi, translation edited with notes by Henry George Farmer (Long-wood Press, 1937).
Narrative Of Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in The Seventeenth Century, by Evliya Efendi, translated from the Turkish by the Ritter Joseph Von Hammer (London: 1834).
Laurance Wieder is a poet living in Charlottesville, Virginia. His books include The Last Century: Selected Poems (Picador Australia) and Words to God’s Music: A New Book of Psalms (Eerdmans). He can be found regularly at PoemSite (free subscription available from poemsite@gmail.com).
Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Daniel Taylor
Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, Wyndham Lewis, Rebecca West.
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The essence of travel is putting yourself in a different place—and coming back changed. If you go somewhere and don’t come back, you haven’t traveled, you have simply moved. If you go and come back but are not changed, you haven’t traveled, you have simply been a tourist. There is an element of pilgrimage (physical travel for a spiritual purpose) in all genuine travel, and the urge in human beings to do so is timeless.
Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad
David G. Farley (Author)
University of Missouri
248 pages
$43.00
On the other hand, we have been reminded, by people as diverse as the medieval Cistercians (who discouraged pilgrimage) and Henry Thoreau (who said explore your inner spaces before exploring outer ones), that spiritual and intellectual quests are also a form of travel. The greatest discoveries, they argue, are not over the horizon, but within the soul and mind.
But why not both? Why not put both body and mind in motion and allow them to feed each other? This, David Farley claims, is exactly what some modernist writers did in the middle of the 20th century. In Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad, Farley explores the travel and the writing of four modernists: Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, Wyndham Lewis, and Rebecca West. He claims that the latter three especially traveled to distant places in order to gather material for thinking about the crises facing the Western world in the years between two great wars. They were trying, says Farley, to bring something back—from Russia, Northern Africa, and the Balkans—that would be helpful in the more politically engaged forms of modernism that informed the 1930s.
Farley begins with Pound, a writer whose life illustrates as well as anyone’s the intimate link between modernism and travel. Literary and artistic modernism came about, in no small part, because writers and visual artists and musicians and dancers and impresarios from all over the world traveled to and shared lives together (sometimes briefly, sometimes for decades) in a handful of European cultural capitals (Vienna, London, Paris and others). Pound, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Stein, and Hemingway came from America; Yeats and Joyce from Ireland; Picasso and Miro from Spain; Stravinsky, Nijinsky and Diaghilev from Russia, and on and on. They came to these cosmopolitan cities, met in the bars and salons, ingested each other’s work, changed their styles more often than they changed their clothes, and remade large chunks of modern culture. Without travel—in both the superficial and profound senses—this wouldn’t have happened.
Farley limits his treatment of Pound largely to a discussion of the contrast between a 1912 walking tour Pound took of southern France and his later more difficult travels around a post-World War I Europe that had become a thicket of bureaucratic obstacles to free travel and free thinking: border crossing stations, passport requirements, petty officials, and paperwork. Pound, ever on the lookout for a “luminous detail” (any small fact that casts light on larger realities), saw in these obstacles to free travel a cultural decline that inhibited the exchange of ideas and therefore threatened the “new Renaissance” for which he was working.
Farley uses an interesting discussion of the rise of passport requirements as a lead-in to offering a fresh explanation of a brief allusion in Canto 7 of Pound’s masterwork The Cantos. The couple of lines begin with the words “Damn the partitions,” often exegeted as a reference to Pound’s feeling cut off from great literary eras of the ancient past. Instead, Farley links the passage to a maddening encounter Pound had in 1919 with a Parisian bureaucrat that briefly prevented him from returning to England. It is a believable explanation because Pound, as was characteristic of modernism, liberally sprinkled his work with esoteric references to his own life.
Unfortunately, the offering of this small insight is about all that Farley does with The Cantos, illustrating a weakness—or, more charitably, a missed opportunity—in the book as a whole. He says that Pound gave up travel writing early—as something for writers of prose—and while Farley more than once generalizes about how travel is important throughout Pound’s career and to The Cantos, he accepts too readily a hard distinction between travel writing and other genres.
How much more interesting, and significant, it would have been to explore The Cantos as travel writing rather than as simply passingly influenced by travel. Other critics have suggested that one approach to this notoriously difficult epic is to see Pound traveling, like the Odysseus he invokes in the poem’s beginning, through time on a voyage to various islands and continents of knowledge and artistic achievement—18th-century America (Jefferson, Adams), Renaissance Italy (Malatesta), China (early dynasties and Confucius)—in search for something to bring home for his new Renaissance in the early 20th century. If Farley could have linked that intellectual and spiritual travel more closely to Pound’s physical travel—and outlined the same for other great modernist works—he would have written an important book.
Turning to Cummings, Lewis, and West, Farley suggests that while all three writers produced modernist travel books, only Cummings’ Eimi is unambiguously modernist in form. The book chronicles a 1931 trip Cummings made to Russia, a path well worn by enthusiastic Western observers of the great Communist experiment going on far, far away.
Cummings was not impressed. Eimi, written in a cryptic and elliptical style worthy of a true modernist, records the uncomfortable travels (in many senses) of a maximal individualist (the book title is Greek for “I am”) in an authoritarian and conformist society. A hotel clerk presses Cummings to identify in what capacity (and with what attitude toward the Revolution) he has come, suggesting “you wish to go to Russia as a writer and a painter? Is that it?” To which Cummings, refusing the categorizing instinct, replies, “I wish to go as myself.”
Farley argues that the distancing, experimental style in Eimi highlights a tension within the work between high modernist aestheticism and late modernist political engagement, a tension many writers felt. Cummings both reveals and conceals his responses to post-revolutionary Russia in the indeterminacies of his poetic prose. Two passages, however, clearly reveal his core rejection of the collectivist mentality that smothers the individual and spiritual impulses of art. The first is a description of the famed Saint Basil’s Cathedral on the Kremlin grounds, which Cummings simply calls “Something Fabulous” (the following approximates his self-consciously idiosyncratic punctuation and spacing):
a frenzy of writhing hues—clusteringly not possible whirls together grinding into one savage squirtlike ecstasy : a crazed Thinglike dream solemnly shouting out of timespace,a gesture fatal,acrobatic (goring tomorrow’s lunge with bright beyondness of yesterday)—utterly a Self,catastrophic; distinct,unearthly and without fear.
In contrast to this onion-domed testimony to traditional Russian spirituality and imagination, Lenin’s tomb is for Cummings a testimony to Marxist materialism:
a rigid pyramidal composition of blocks;an impurely mathematical game of edges : not quite cruelly a cubic celebration—equally glamourless and emphatic , withal childish … perhaps the architectural equivalent for “boo—I scared you that time!”
Has there ever been a more unexpected, and yet marvelously apt, architectural description of the emotional impact of a building? Cummings went to Russia to find out what was going on and he came home not greatly changed, but with firsthand information about the most important purely political event of the 20th century.
In the same year that Cummings went to Russia, Wyndham Lewis headed in the opposite direction, to North Africa. But the impulse that prompted him, according to Farley, was similar. Both in an earlier book on Hitler and in Filibusters in Barbary, Farley writes, “Lewis is attempting to find some political or social structure that would prevent a recurrence of the events that led to the First World War.”
This seems a little grand (inflated claims being a recurring problem in this book) for a work that Lewis created, as he so often did in prose and in painting, to keep the pot boiling. Farley never cites Lewis himself making this claim for the book, nor does he show clearly what, in fact, Lewis may have found in his travels that would serve this enormous purpose. Nor, for that matter, does he show convincingly why Filibusters in Barbary should be considered a modernist work.
Though the chapter on Lewis doesn’t live up to its stated goals, it does offer insights into Lewis as a writer and extracts some provocative points he makes about the enterprise of travel and culture-crossing in the modern world. Farley encapsulates a great deal of Lewis’ entire career as both a writer and visual artist when he says the satire in Filibusters “ranges between personal slander and a kind of cultural critique.” Lewis had previously applied both in books like Time and Western Man (1927) and The Apes of God (1930). In the latter he savaged what he took to be the artistic phonies and snarky cultural gate-keepers of Bloomsbury—”parlor-room nihilists” and “revolutionary simpletons,” in his words. In Filibusters he was widening his attack to Western colonialism and, by implication, the broader stupidities of the modern world.
Farley depicts Lewis as both a critic of Western imperialism (the “filibusters” of the title refers to pirates or pillagers, in this case the French) and, of course, as complicit in it. Lewis admires the Berbers for their impassive resistance to being westernized (while predicting that, sadly, in a hundred years they will “be just like us”), but Farley claims that he also victimizes them by not seeing them in their long historical context. (Where can one find any critic in our time who does not assert or imply his or her moral superiority to the benighted thinkers of the past?)
One of the targets of Lewis’ satire is the modern traveler. In both an earlier work, The Art of Being Ruled (1926), and here, Lewis argues against doing exactly what he is doing—traveling to experience other cultures. He says people wouldn’t do it if advertising didn’t seduce them, and because the great majority are not prepared to do it critically, the result is a messy “homogenizing” (Farley’s word) of cultures. (When you arrive in a new country, Lewis says, “your head is stuffed with preconceived anticipatory pictures” that make it difficult even to experience virginally what you are experiencing.) Travel has become just another object of consumerist desire. You can buy cross-cultural “experiences” just as you buy a new pair of shoes.
Cummings went northeast to Russia, Lewis southeast to Morocco, and Rebecca West went in between to the Balkans (three times during the 1930s). I found the chapter on her book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, the most engaging in Modernist Travel Writing, perhaps because Rebecca West is the writer among the four I know the least. Hers is the most explicitly political and passionate of the works considered. She very consciously (and beautifully) writes as an almost resigned Cassandra against the impending return of the bloodlust in Europe, feeling “a revulsion from the horror of history, and a dread that it might really be witless enough to repeat itself.” (Not least because in their pacifistic response to Stalin’s and Hitler’s threats, British intellectuals were “fleeing towards death.”)
Farley argues that what makes West’s book modernist is its self-consciousness about the slipperiness of truth claims in any historical account of human experience, and her awareness of how history is turned into myth—often with violent and tragic results. Nowhere, for West, are these things seen more clearly than in the Balkans (“there is no end to political disputation in Croatia. None”), and she greatly fears that the hatreds and prejudices and nationalistic complexities of the Balkans prefigure what is in store for Europe as a whole. (One cannot help but think when reading her words of the current Middle East, among other places.)
A key part of the mythologizing process is the role of symbols. One such symbol is the iconostasis, the large wooden screen in Orthodox churches that separates the congregation from the altar. West probes throughout her book the ties between the political and the religious and sees the symbols of each tied up in the other. “For West,” Farley observes, “the iconostasis serves not just as a metaphor for history where the real is always both masked and enlivened by a screen of words and perspectives but as a site where the very process of history continues as people are drawn to it in prayer and out of ritual.”
West sees religion—in the Balkans and elsewhere—as complicit in bloodletting because it has long linked salvation and sacrifice (an intriguing, if contestable, claim). She witnesses a black lamb (as in her book title) having its throat cut on a rock as part of a fertility rite and sees it as a symbol of an irrational human equation of spilled blood and blessing, demonstrating our inability (and even lack of desire) to avoid violence. In that inability lies our tragedy, a tragedy that will unfold one more time in a second world war: “A part of us is enamored of the rock and tells us that we should not reject it, that it is solemn and mystical and only the shallow deny the value of sacrifice.”
One thing that links these four writers in addition to their travel and their modernism is a fundamental dissatisfaction both with modern, consumerist culture and with their fellow intellectuals. West identifies the emotion that most often stimulates her to travel as “rage,” and brilliantly skewers the spiritual and intellectual emptiness that each of these writers felt around them: “Our enemy is commerce: The frenetic distribution and exchange of ugly things made by unhappy people confuses the earth.” (See Pound’s Canto 45 for his poetic expression of the same sentiment.)
Farley claims, a bit too vigorously at times, that travel writing is an important part of modernism and that the books he deals with are themselves of great importance. Perhaps they should be, but they aren’t, and herein lies a complaint about Modernist Travel Writing. He barely touches on The Cantos. I am one of a handful of people in the world who can walk to his bookshelf and pull down a copy of Filibusters in Barbary (a first edition, no less!), an accident of my own graduate education. Eimi is largely unread and West’s book, though better known than the other two and championed by some discerning readers as a classic, is mostly read by historians and diplomats. I would very much like to see Farley apply his theses and his skills to some of the major works of literary modernism, which I believe could be significantly illuminated by his approach.
The Waste Land, for instance, does not simply employ “the vocabulary of travel indirectly through the citation of foreign literary works and traditions” as Farley claims (as though Eliot was stuck in a library). During the poem’s gestation and execution, Eliot was traveling—both physically, to Germany, England, Margate, Lausanne, and Paris, and intellectually, to Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Carthage. Similarly, why settle for identifying a single allusion in Canto 7 when one can explore the travels of Pound that resulted in the famous USURA of Canto 45, or the Pisan Cantos, which Pound composed in part in a dog cage after his arrest in Italy? Why not explore how Joyce’s travels in Europe affected his vision of distant Dublin in Ulysses, or how Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises—with its contrasting settings in Paris, Burgette, and Pamplona—is a travel book at the same time that it is a novel.
Having said that, Modernist Travel Writing breaks some new ground in highlighting a genre, travel writing, that is only recently getting its deserved attention and linking it to modernism, a large-scale movement in Western culture that we are still trying to make sense of. It is a book that prompts intellectual travel.
Daniel Taylor is the author most recently of Creating a Spiritual Legacy: How to Pass on Your Stories, Values, and Wisdom, just published by Brazos Press.
Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Naomi Schaefer Riley
“The conflict of modern motherhood.”
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It’s Sunday morning. I’ve just returned from a week at my parents’ house with my two toddlers. A great week, but work was shoved to the side since my husband was at home. Now, I have two book manuscripts and five articles I should be working on. I have blog posts to write, emails to return, editing to wade through, but instead I’m making lasagna for a friend. Why, my husband wonders, am I now running a meals-on-wheels program? Because the friend had a third child recently, and the other nursery school mommies decided that since she didn’t really need any more clothes or toys, we should all just agree to make her dinner one day for the three weeks after the baby comes. It’s a lovely thought, really, and I was glad they asked me. Making mommy friends is harder when you’re a working mother, but it’s also even more important if you want to know what’s going on at nursery school. As I’m sprinkling on the mozzarella cheese, though, I can’t help but think about Alison Pearson’s novel I Don’t Know How She Does It, in which the heroine tries to mangle her storebought mince-pies to make them look homemade for her daughter’s school Christmas party. Who am I kidding? I don’t have time for this. And, of course, my friend, who is also a working mother, orders her groceries online and is perfectly capable of eating takeout with her family for three weeks.
Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career & the Conflict of Modern Motherhood
Samantha Parent Walravens (Editor)
Coffeetown Press
269 pages
$29.00
All of which brings us to the most important question in life (at least to judge by the number of words spilled on answering it): How much can one woman accomplish in one day? While blogs like Motherlode (at The New York Times) and The Juggle (at The Wall Street Journal) or even Mama PhD (at InsideHigherEd) purport to offer advice about how to manage the “work-life balance,” they are first and perhaps foremost an exercise in exhibitionism (see above). Reading stories of mothers (occasionally a father’s voice is added for a little color) who have full-time jobs while acting as their families’ cooks, chauffeurs, tutors, laundresses, cleaners, confidants, etc., reminds one of The Cat in the Hat. “Look at me, look at me, look at me now!” the cat says as he holds up a teacup, some milk, a cake, three books, the Fish, a rake, a toy boat, a fan, and his umbrella, all while balancing himself on a ball. If only these moms were having as much fun as the Cat.
Instead, by their own accounts, they are tired and stressed and overworked and underappreciated and unfulfilled. And yet, they couldn’t imagine doing things any other way. This message is driven home in a new collection of essays, Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career, and the Conflict of Modern Motherhood. Here, for instance, are the words of Susan Morse, a law professor trying to raise three daughters: “There are many evenings when I wish I were not racing to cook dinner with my work clothes pinching at my waist, hurriedly helping my children with their homework so I can climb into bed and spend a few minutes alone with my husband before we fall asleep.” But, she continues, “when I think about quitting, it’s like contemplating the amputation of my legs. For me, work is dignity. It is breathing. It is a safety net for the future if something should happen to my husband or my marriage. It’s an example for my daughters, who will most likely experience the same juggling act in their lives.”
The schedule Morse keeps is hardly uncommon. And she is one of the lucky ones—home in time for dinner. As she points out, if she had stayed at a law firm, that would not have happened very often. But her feeling that quitting to stay home with her children would be like cutting off her limbs is startling to say the least.
We’ll get back to the work-as-dignity question in a moment. First, there is the issue of “balance.” As one of the other authors, Carrie Lukas, a policy analyst and mother of three, recalls, when she first had a child, balance seemed possible. “My first few months back on the job went smoothly. I worked at night and during naps. I participated in conference calls and interviews over the phone.” Children fool you like this. You think you understand how much attention they need and what kind of attention they need and then they change. When they are born you say, Okay, you need to be diapered and fed and bathed and in return you will sleep for many, many hours (even if they are not all in a row). And you say to yourself, I can handle this.
But then, as Lukas found out, these babies start moving around. Lukas put her 9-month-old daughter in front of Dora the Explorer for 15 minutes while she did a radio interview. But Molly got bored. Lukas ran into the bathroom to find a zone of quiet. Alas, her daughter “sobbed on the other side of the door for the remainder of the interview” while Lukas “cowered in the bathtub trying to shield the phone from the noise.” Lukas realized her mistake: “The hope that I could be both a full-time mom and a full-time worker without sacrificing something was a farce.”
Like many mothers in the book, Lukas seems to be in a position to take on more or fewer work responsibilities as her time with family allows. While the mothers sometimes make mistakes about how much they can handle, the mistakes are not permanent. A number of the authors in this book are, not surprisingly, writers of one sort or another. They can dip into and out of regular jobs and freelance assignments as the years go on. But others cannot. Jessica Scott is the mother of two and a commissioned officer serving (at the time of this writing) in Iraq. Her husband is also in the military. When she recalls how her three-year-old tells her over Skype that she wants her mommy to come home, the reader’s heart breaks.
Scott does not discuss her reasons for going into the military (or for staying in it while her children are young), but other mothers with long hours at their jobs make similar choices. They say that raising young children does not provide enough intellectual stimulation, that they have no control over the hours, that they do not get a moment to themselves, that no one tells you you’re doing a great job or gives you a raise.
These are all reasonable (to me, anyway) responses to the demands of being with young children. What I find stranger are the mothers who decide to take on demanding jobs because they are concerned with what other people will think. One essayist worries that her parents will think they wasted their money paying for her college degree. Others worry that they must show their daughters or even society at large that women can work, that the feminist movement was not for nothing. Maybe we can achieve work-life balance if we try, but when we add the pressures of entire social revolutions, it’s going to be darn near impossible.
When I finished these essays, my mind wandered back to a conversation I had many years ago with some young women at Thomas Aquinas College, a conservative Catholic “Great Books” school in Southern California. If you ask the women there about their aspirations, most will tell you they plan to join a religious order or to marry and have a significant number of children. The latter seem confident that their expensive education will be put to good use—since they plan to homeschool their children. Passing on to their children the knowledge of the great minds of Western civilization may provide their lives with enough “dignity” that they needn’t worry about feeling “torn.”
But for them, this is not simply an individual choice. The decision to raise large families and homeschool one’s children is made in the context of a community—a community that values marriage and family above just about everything else. And most American women don’t live there. There are women in this book who work in part because of the security it provides them, just in case they find themselves alone. One mother who opted out of work when her kids were young describes how now, divorced and raising two children on her own, she is struggling to get by financially. She tells women thinking about quitting that they should not, that they will regret it down the road.
Torn is a report from the richest, most free society in history, but the lives described here seem so joyless. The sadly overriding message of this book is: “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” For the beneficiaries of modern feminism, this is indeed the paradox of choice.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a former Wall Street Journal editor and writer whose work focuses on higher education, religion, philanthropy, and culture. With Christine Rosen, she edited Acculturated: 23 Savvy Writers Find Hidden Virtue in Reality TV, Chick Lit, Video Games, and Other Pillars of Pop Culture (Templeton Press).
Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Kristen Scharold
The life of Alice James.
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We take it for granted that biographies are composed because of a certain fame someone has achieved. Alice James, however, is the worthwhile exception. The sister of psychologist William James and novelist Henry James, Alice is notable precisely for who she did not become.
Alice James: A Biography (New York Review Books Classics)
Jean Strouse (Author), Colm Toibin (Preface)
New York Review Books
392 pages
$15.56
It takes an exceptional biographer to tell such a person’s story. In Alice’s case, she is fortunate to have been found by the shrewd, sensitive Jean Strouse. In Alice James: A Biography, first published in 1980 (it won the Bancroft Prize) and now reissued by New York Review Books, Strouse uncovers a woman of immense fascination, untapped genius, and heartbreaking fragility. By deciphering the traces of Alice’s life in the writings of her brothers, Strouse not only opens up a fresh perspective on this famous family but also delves deep into the psyche of a challenging woman. As Colm Toibin’s new introduction observes, “Strouse is not a biographer who begins with a theory and sets about proving it; her version of this complex life is judicious and detailed.” But perhaps even more significantly, Strouse has shown that one’s legacy can’t be measured only by what one “accomplishes.”
Alice James was born in 1848, the youngest child and only girl of the five James children: William, Henry, Garth Wilkinson (“Wilkie”), Alexander Robertson (“Bob”), and then Alice. Being born into “a perfectly self-sufficient erotic-intellectual commune,” as Jacques Barzun has described the James family, was as much a burden as it was a blessing. Alice was a woman in a family of men during an era of Victorian repression; on top of that, she was smart. While defending herself from her brothers’ taunts and even William’s “overtly sexual” flirtations, Alice had to endure her father’s confusing partiality. Though he loved his daughter dearly, Henry James, Sr., remained convinced that women should be excluded from intellectual spheres. Thus, he focused solely on educating his sons, leaving Alice to gather the scraps of her brothers’ studies. “To be a James and a girl then was a contradiction in terms,” Strouse observes, and “it is Alice’s struggle to resolve that essential contradiction, her attempt to find something whole and authentic in her own experience, that gives her life its real stature and interest.”
Alice’s struggle proved to be severe. By conventional measures, she was a failure. She “did not produce any significant body of work. She never married. She did not have children. She was not socially useful, particularly virtuous, or even happy,” Strouse writes, with the blunt realism that anchors the biography. Alice suffered from constant invalidism, caused in part by an unknown nervous disorder. Confounding every physician who saw her, she had to accept the ubiquitous diagnosis of “hysteria,” receiving a grotesque range of primitive treatments throughout her life.
Her constant health battles were something she both writhed against and reveled in. Her breakdowns “gave her a mode of self-assertion” as Paul Fischer puts it in House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family. Not only did Alice enjoy the attention her examinations promised, but her illness “provided her with an escape route—a way out of having to choose between a safe boring life of devotion to others and a dangerous assertion of intellectual competence.” In other words, “it justified her failure to achieve while allowing her to preserve a sense of potent capacity.”
Alice was all too aware of her shortcomings and limitations. She felt she had no stake in the James’ genius, even signing one of her letters to William as “Your loving idiotoid sister,” but at the same time knew her intellectual capacity was unusual. As she got older and marriage receded as a possibility, she tried to cope with her lot by variously joining a sewing bee, teaching correspondence history classes to women through The Society to Encourage Studies at Home, and, when she moved to London, hosting well-attended salons in her home. But she abandoned each new endeavor, thus shutting the doors that could have let her out of her sick room. Instead, she chose to make her illness her career. “It grew out of her particular, troubled existence, just as Henry’s novels and William’s psychology grew out of their moral concerns and personal conflicts,” Strouse writes. “An expert at suffering, she could convert the waste of her life into something more lasting than private unhappiness.”
Alice’s fortitude in the face of suffering was admirable, but Strouse is careful to point out that “To make her into a heroine (or victim-as-heroine) now would be seriously to misconstrue her sufferings and aims.” Even to equate her resilience with religious patience is inaccurate, since Alice “clung too fiercely to the unique quality of her own experience, and had too much contempt for organized religion, to find solace in conventional faith.” Nonetheless, Strouse suggests, she accomplished what many women of her time were unable to do: cobble together some sort of individual identity.
As much damage as Henry Sr. might have done through his eccentric Swedenborgian preoccupations and well-meaning sexism, he did impart one strange measure of success to his children. In his opinion, “an interesting failure seemed more worthy of appreciation than any ‘too obvious success,’ ” Strouse writes. “To ‘succeed’ as a person, then, in the broadest Jamesian interpretation, meant to achieve a complex identity forged out of all these ideas about morality, consciousness, perception, and communication—and a sense of self that had to do with a quality of being and the ability to see life steadily (as Matthew Arnold put it) and see it whole.” Measured by conventional standards, Alice’s life was an abject failure, but near the very end, she found a bit of Jamesian success.
At the age of 41, she began to keep a diary. She hadn’t dared take on such a project any sooner, Strouse explains, because “to a woman whose father had placed negative value on female intelligence and whose family suspected one person’s success was purchased by another’s failure, addressing posterity even in this covert way seemed a dangerous undertaking.” But the journal provided the outlet she had needed: “Finding a way to think and speak for herself was, for Alice, her life’s highest aim. In beginning to keep a private journal, she had begun finally to distinguish herself, in both senses of the word—from her famous brothers, and as a person on her own.”
This aspiration to be a person in her own might sound like a cliché to modern ears, but for a woman whose own intelligence had been suppressed not only by social restrictions but also by her own father, locating a sense of self was no small matter. Perhaps what is most remarkable is how simple her desire was. Alice didn’t need to be somebody, she just needed to be herself.
“How dreary to be somebody / How public, like a frog / To tell your name the livelong day / To an admiring bog!” Emily Dickinson wrote in her poem “I’m Nobody! Who are You?” Alice copied these lines into her notebook, and no doubt clung to them. Alice had no interest in fame or credit. She even refused to write for publication. Perhaps doing so would have cured her of some of her feelings of futility—after all, many women in her time did find careers as writers—but Alice was too overwhelmed with one goal: “to keep in mind as much as possible the invaluable thought that one has only to live one day at a time and that all the vague terrors of the future vanish as the future at every moment becomes the present.”
When Alice was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 42, she was thrilled not only to finally have a “palpable disease” but also to be allowed to die. She had been preoccupied with death since she was a young woman, at one point asking her father if suicide was a sin, which he answered negatively, so long as she “did it in a perfectly gentle way in order to not distress her friends.” So when her doctor finally told her that death was imminent, Alice rejoiced. “Death was the consummation of struggle and pain, the apotheosis and the cessation of suffering,” Strouse writes. “Alice went out to meet it like a lover keeping a long-awaited assignation, yearning to surrender to its large, dark, overwhelming force.”
As she lay dying, she told William: “When I’m gone, pray don’t think of me simply as a creature who might have been something else, had neurotic science been born.” Alice knew better than anyone the ways in which she had been thwarted and yet refused to blame anyone or anything. “Surely there is nothing so true as that we are simply at the mercy of what we bring to life and not what life brings to us,” she had written to William a few years before.
Alice’s diary was a secret to everyone but Katharine Loring, her closest friend and caretaker, who transcribed Alice’s entries when she eventually became too weak to write. William and Henry were both stunned and conflicted when Loring shared it with them after Alice’s death. (Henry viewed “personal publicity as a catastrophe.”) A selection from her diary was published in 1934. When Leon Edel, Henry James’ most assiduous biographer, republished the diary in a fuller edition in 1964, The Saturday Review hailed it as “one of the neglected masterpieces of American literature.”
But Alice didn’t write for posthumous recognition. As she told Bob’s wife after he broke down and was sent to an asylum: “The weary journey does not last forever and we do not take our success with us only the manner in which we have met our failures, that never crumbles in the dust.” And indeed, in the end she was recognized for precisely that.
For many readers, Alice’s published diary confirmed what her doctor said about her: “If she had had any health, what a brilliant woman she would have been.” But it was her brothers who understood her best. After her death, Bob wrote to Alice’s friend Fanny: “Dear Alice’s life didn’t seem beautiful, but I doubt not it was interiorly beautiful. There is nothing beautiful in a life that has nothing to overcome. And she overcame more than any of us can ever know.”
Perhaps not in spite of but because of her failed life, Alice deserves the honor of a closer look and an amplified voice, which is precisely what Jean Strouse has given her.
Kristen Scharold is a writer living in Brooklyn.
Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Timothy Larsen
Dick Van Dyke, in his own words.
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If getting paid to entertain people is your idea of the good life, then Dick Van Dyke is a lucky man. His very first job—at the age of sixteen—was to present his own radio show, and though he is now in his mid-eighties it is not clear that his career is over yet. Even when he joined the Air Force during World War II, he served his country by putting on musical revues under the indulgent command of a fading Broadway actress.
There was nothing to make this vocational path predictable. His father was a traveling salesman for Sunshine Cookie Company. Van Dyke poignantly records in My Lucky Life, a show biz memoir with a walk-on part for God, that when he saw Death of a Salesman it so captured his father’s life that it sent him into a month-long depression. Dick Van Dyke (it is not a stage name!) grew up in the midwestern solidity of Danville, Illinois. He could stride out from his house “in any direction and hit a relative before I got tired.” (Perhaps if you could make it there you could make it anywhere. His classmates included Donald O’Connor and Bobby Short—and Gene Hackman was the pesky kid brother of a friend.) Small-town radio led to local television in Atlanta and New Orleans. In 1955, he was put under contract by CBS, mostly to appear on other people’s shows. In 1960 came Bye Bye Birdie, his Broadway breakthrough.
By that time, Carl Reiner was looking for someone to star in a television show that he was developing about a writer and his co-workers and home life. Johnny Carson was a possibility, but Reiner decided on the “likeable comedian who has India-rubber joints” (according to The New York Times‘s review of Bye Bye Birdie). This turned out to be brilliant casting, and it was a sensible choice even for what was known at the time. Bolder was the decision to title it The Dick Van Dyke Show despite the fact that its star was an unknown. Still, that formulation was ubiquitous in those days. Most people will best recall The Andy Griffith Show, but the now largely forgotten ones were legion. Indeed, The Dick Van Dyke Show was almost cancelled after its first season because it was being beaten in the ratings by The Perry Como Show. Van Dyke had already done The Fran and Dick Show back in Atlanta, and after The Dick Van Dyke Show would come—believe it or not—The New Dick Van Dyke Show, Van Dyke & Company, and The Van Dyke Show.
Van Dyke is convincing and generous in his analysis of what made The Dick Van Dyke Show TV gold. He never tires of praising Reiner’s writing. Reiner insisted that the humor should grow organically out of the relationships. He was careful to avoid playing off of passing cultural moments, but rather focused on perennial human situations. The other actors were fabulous. What could be better than having Mary Tyler Moore exclaiming, “Oh, Rob!” while prancing about in Capri pants? Van Dyke is so wonderfully secure in his craft that he does not even bother to mention that his own genius for physical comedy might have helped out a bit as well. When decades later the show became a re-run hit, the Los Angeles Times approached him for his theory on its appeal for new generations. I find his analysis lucid: “The show was funny.”
Let’s get the bad news out there. After passing the half-century mark, Van Dyke left Margie, the wife of his youth and the mother of his four children, for Michelle Triola, a woman best known for a lawsuit against her former lover, the actor Lee Marvin, which introduced the word “palimony” into the American vocabulary. (Yes, we have just bravely marched into the 1970s.) He was also a smoker with a drink problem. Still, his relationship with his wife was a faithful one for all the decades up to this “adult-onset confusion.” And he then stayed devotedly with Triola until her death at the age of 76. He eventually beat both booze and “cancer sticks,” and he seems to have been a good father.
Van Dyke’s clean-cut, caring reputation is exemplified by his being named in 2010 an official Year of the Tiger Ambassador of the World Wildlife Fund. He made a decision early in his career that he wanted to be involved only in projects that were suitable for the whole family to watch. This was truly a principled stand; he was warned that it could be detrimental to his career. It is one of the things that he boasts about repeatedly in this autobiography—and rightly so. Van Dyke has actively supported Democratic candidates. Nevertheless, without irony or concerns about politicized overtones a chapter is entitled “Family Values.” In the conclusion he affirms again by way of summation, “I am proud that I kept it clean, that I stood for something, and upheld values.”
As it happened, Walt Disney read that Van Dyke had made this commitment and decided he wanted him for Mary Poppins (1964). It was a great relief to read that Van Dyke agrees with me that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is not a very good movie. There were numerous other films, many of them forgotten or forgettable, but as a septuagenarian Van Dyke was starring in another hit TV show, Diagnosis: Murder. Its eighth and final season concluded in 2001, making it a longer running series than The Dick Van Dyke Show.
As a child, Van Dyke attended Immanuel Presbyterian Church regularly. He also went to vacation Bible school, and at the age of eleven read the entire Bible. As a sophomore in high school he carried his Bible around with him and told people he wanted to be a minister. His plans changed after he joined drama club. Van Dyke does not exactly reason that when he does a pratfall he feels God’s pleasure, but he does write that he had found his “true calling.”
Although throughout the book he only refers to his oldest son as “Chris,” they had actually christened him “Christian.” While appearing on Broadway, Van Dyke was not only worshipping faithfully in a Dutch Reformed church but even teaching Sunday school. (Have you ever noticed how lucky Calvinists are?) When they moved to California, they joined Brentwood Presbyterian Church and Van Dyke became an elder. He also seems to have done some preaching (“I spoke to the congregation on occasion”) and witnessing (“I shared my opinions when the appropriate opportunity arose”).
Van Dyke speaks movingly about the quality of the Christian faith of Brentwood’s youth minister, who was also a Young Life worker. Van Dyke leaned on him spiritually, even turning to him for guidance when President Kennedy was assassinated. Van Dyke also volunteered for service activities sponsored by Brentwood Presbyterian, including community development in Watts after the riots. His revered youth pastor took a call elsewhere, and this weakened Van Dyke’s commitment. In his telling of it, at any rate, when a fellow elder expressed his dislike of the idea of African Americans coming to their church, Van Dyke decided that organized Christianity was overrun by hypocrites and it was best to give up on ensemble work and become a one-man show. His relationship with God, however, was still “solid.”
Moreover, he continued to read serious theological literature. One expects a show biz memoir to be marked by name-dropping—”Of all the presidents I have met (Johnson, Nixon, Clinton), Obama has been my favorite “—but it was surprising to come upon Buber, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, and Tournier. These are not selling points for his publisher—none of these named favorite theologians makes it into the index, and the copyeditor was sufficiently unengaged that Tillich is misspelled.
Van Dyke also evokes John A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God (1963). Robinson proceeded from the assumption that Bultmann’s dictum that one cannot both use electricity and believe in miracles was a profound insight rather than a self-flattering non sequitur. Following Tillich, Robinson also revealed breathlessly that God is not actually “up there” but rather “the ground of our being” (theologians having hitherto lacked spatial reasoning). Van Dyke was so enthralled he wrote the Anglican bishop a fan letter. While he was filming Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in England, Van Dyke and Robinson co-hosted a radio show in which they explored faith in the light of contemporary thought.
Van Dyke quotes approvingly from the bishop’s bestseller—”Assertions about God are in the last analysis assertions about Love”—and throughout My Lucky Life he commends all-you-need-is-love as his own rubber-jointed theology. When this theme comes to the fore again in the conclusion, Van Dyke offers a barrage of sources where it can be found, from the New Testament to Walt Disney. One cannot help but feel wistful when one traces the road from Danville to the lives of his grandchildren today if he has really convinced himself that the church services and Bible reading of his own spiritual formation can be adequately replaced by the box-set of Love Bug movies.
Earlier in the book, Van Dyke explains that he had come to the conviction that to live by the credo of love was all that the Lord his God required of him: “I decided if I could manage that I wouldn’t have any serious problems were there to actually be a Judgment Day.” It’s the Master. Step in time.
Timothy Larsen, McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, is the author most recently of A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians, published in March by Oxford University Press.
Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Makoto Fujimura
The Art of Toshiko Takaezu
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Going through the pages of the lovely The Art of Toshiko Takaezu: In the Language of Silence, a newly released, posthumous survey of Takaezu’s works, edited by Peter Held, I immediately began to sense a kinship. Her process-driven creativity produced a remarkable array of objects, ceramics, pottery, paintings, tapestries, and other works that seem, even on the flattened reproduced photograph, alive and resonant. I have journeyed with traditional Nihonga art (Japanese-style painting tradition) and attempted to blend the ancestral method with new, even avant-garde, forms of expression; similarly, Takaezu created a unique hybrid of Japanese ceramics and contemporary expression. Through the book, I was introduced to her world, as I had not seen her works firsthand and the photographs were my entry point; even so, I began to see profound overlaps between what I have intuited as an artist and Takaezu’s language of art. I read that many of her vessels are famous for being “closed,” meaning that she only left a pinhole on top to allow heated gas to escape during firing and the object is rather useless. Her works refuse to be categorized, causing many museums to be confounded as to where to place them; likewise, my works hover between contemporary and traditional, modern and medieval. Perhaps I had never heard about her precisely because she is so hard to categorize; there is simply no easy mechanism to gain an audience for works such as this. I know that battle all too well.
The Art of Toshiko Takaezu: In the Language of Silence
Peter Held (Editor)
The University of North Carolina Press
160 pages
$115.83
Takaezu’s large ceramic “pots” are englobed unto themselves, an impossibility of a pot, completely mute to the world. In such “uselessness,” her works instinctively explore the origin of what art can and could be. They stare into our propositional, utilitarian culture. If you are lucky enough to hold one of her works, you’ll find that they turn into bells: sound echoes out of them as you shake them. There is a small picture on the opening page of this book which shows Takaezu standing with, and almost embracing, a large ceramic piece as if the object was a friend. I imagine her gently tapping the surface of the piece. The gentle reverberation spreads out into the world and disappears, and somewhere in the woods behind her studio in Quakertown, New Jersey, the vibrations are still echoing.
Those faint echoes persuaded me to make a trip to Princeton myself one hot summer day, where Cary Liu, the curator of Asian Art at the Princeton Museum, took me for a tour. Takaezu taught at Princeton for some time, receiving an honorary doctorate in 1996; thus, the Princeton Art Museum became the logical place to hold her last retrospective while she was still alive.
Cary Liu wrote an essay for her retrospective catalogue (an excellent essay which, unfortunately, is not included in this book). “In Zen Buddhist and Daoist thought,” Liu reminds us, “it is in emptiness that usefulness is found. A ceramic bowl in and of itself is useless; only its empty center, where substances can be collected and shaped, provides function.”
Takaezu’s works are like Zen’s koan: they pose questions more than give answers. Encountering her ceramic pieces forces us to reconsider the notion of what a work of pottery or ceramics really “ought to be.” Her works are metaphysical questions, imposing but delicate, stubborn yet welcoming, allusive and weighty.
What are these objects, if not utilitarian ceramic pieces?
Are they wombs, or bombs?
In the cooled storage unit of the Princeton Art Museum, I stood in front of these loaded questions, now neatly placed on shelves. Cary told me that Takaezu is known to have written words inside of the each pot, but to her last days, she never revealed what she wrote. Her message is inside out, outside in. William Blake wrote in Jerusalem: “There is a Void, outside of Existence, which if enterd into Englobes itself and becomes a Womb.”
Takaezu’s pieces are wombs of silence.
In the Language of Silence is a beautiful book.
For artists like Takaezu, deeply attuned to the embodiment of the created object, and with particular emotion invested in the imperfections of surface and materiality, the challenge lies in the printed and digital documentation and reproduction of such work. An inherent frustration resides in the translation of the painting, sculpture, or installation into a photographic, flattened representation of the work. I consider it an artistic success as a painter when the photographer who takes photos of my paintings utters, “this is impossible to photograph!” I’ve decided that such a frustration is part of my goal: to create a surface that is impossible to flatten. Though a good reproduction, paradoxically, recognizes the inherent frustrations and limitations of the editing process, translating the work to a page or digital image is comparable to the way that a good translator navigates from one language to another.
A true work of art is created not to be reproduced but to be experienced. Van Gogh’s Starry Night, now reproduced a billion times over, still needs to be seen with the naked eye because the mystery imbedded there escapes reproduction. Andy Warhol recognized, embraced, and commoditized this gap in translation: his Last Supper is not even a direct photograph of the da Vinci masterpiece; rather, it is a photograph of a kitschy, ten-cent reproduction of the masterpiece (thus a photograph of a photograph), which could have been bought at Woolworth’s. By magnifying and multiplying the famed image of an image hundreds of times over, Warhol intentionally addressed the problems and the limitations of representation. Today, every artist has to deal with this cheapened realm of image reproduction.
Takaezu, however, did not join in this postmodern dance. She even seemed oblivious of the contemporary obsession with reproduction. This anachronism is perhaps why this book shines so brightly and speaks so eloquently. Impossible to reproduce in a two-dimensional format, Takaezu’s works remind us of their untranslatability even as they enjoy a surprising reprieve—a forced excellence in another dimension. This book, full of two-dimensional images, is now what one would hold instead of her pots, as a descriptive pause, an antidote to the culture that demands easy answers and quick reads. Takaezu’s pieces are beautifully photographed mute objects, somehow speaking in thousands of tongues at the same time. This book, too, somehow multiplies the depth and weight of her works into a shared experience. To Takaezu, her creativity was a gift alive with possibilities, and In the Language of Silence is a perfect tribute.
Takaezu was born in 1922 to Japanese immigrant parents in Pepeekeo, Hawaii. After studying at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, she continued her studies at Cranbrook Academy of Art, studying under Maija Grotell, who has been called the “mother of American ceramics.” Takaezu ended up teaching at Cranbrook later in her life, as well as at Princeton University.
Taking a pottery class at Princeton must be, one might muse, relaxation fit for élite students needing a breather between hard classes. But Takaezu developed a reputation over the years as “the most difficult grader on campus.” She was known to take a hammer and destroy any pieces that were not satisfactory to her.
Making an object of art, teaching—whatever she was doing at the moment, Takaezu regarded it as part of an integrated process of creativity, requiring patience, commitment, and dedication. “In my life,” she said, “I see no difference between making pots, cooking, and growing vegetables. They are all so related. However there is a need for me to work in clay. It is so gratifying and I get so much joy from it, and it gives me many answers in my life.” Her students were invited not just to a classroom to be instructed, they were invited to share her life. She was tough on herself, and seeking the highest level of excellence was simply a way of life. Perfectionism was not the goal; what mattered was the process of seeking the greatest joy. To seek joy was to collaborate with the imperfection, whether it be in clay or in her students, and simply to claim the journey as a gift.
“A work of art is a gift, not a commodity.” Are these words from Lewis Hyde merely a utopian fantasy, or do they get to the heart of the matter? Whether it be the commissioned art of the Renaissance, or kitsch art in the malls of today, Hyde’s point is that what endures transcends the marketplace of its time. Let’s assume that he is right, that enduring works of art desire to reside in the precinct of the gift, rather than the marketplace; then such enduring objects of contemplation will gravitate toward, and even redefine, what a gift ought to be. Takaezu put it this way:
I never thought my work as beautiful. I thought it was okay, that’s all … [but] I realized that the beauty was coming from something outside of me; a power that was passing through me; an intangible source that I can’t pinpoint. So I felt that in a way, I couldn’t take the credit. But since it wasn’t only me that was involved in making them, it felt alright to say that they were beautiful.
She saw herself as a vehicle for this “beauty” to pass through, first receiving the gift herself and then offering it in turn to the world.
What resonates in these passages is a missing link in today’s art-world conversations. If we speak of a contemporary work of art in the same way Takaezu speaks of her works, we will be asked to define what we mean by “beauty.” Her intuitive language includes assumptions that the contemporary art market, filled with cynicism and ironic distance, rejected long ago. And yet, rather stubbornly, Takaezu paved a path not taken by others. Janet Koplos, in a descriptive, insightful essay in the book, writes:
Narrative art attracts critics who want to talk about sociopolitical matters in specific terms, but Takaezu’s works elicit poetic and emotional responses because of their openness and refusal to commit declarative statements. The consequence is that the work is sometimes described as spiritual.
Critic Irving Sandler, the last remaining critic from the heyday of abstract expressionism, came to one of my recent exhibits and told me, “I don’t know what it means by ‘spiritual,’ but your work is certainly very spiritual.” Such words can be dimissed as evasive and dreamlike in the contemporary art world, even nonsensical, and therefore to be avoided. But Takaezu’s pieces force us to reckon with “poetic and emotional” responses, circumnavigating the labyrinth of the contemporary “sociopolitical” language of art.
Just as her unflinching hand would destroy her students’ work, her own hands generated work suggesting metaphors of destruction. Her larger works are literally shaped like bombs, a threatening presence of imposing size and color, reminding one of the shape of the atomic bomb dropped from the Enola Gay. I have decided, after seeing many of her pieces both in Princeton and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that Takaezu’s works are both bombs and wombs. They do not just circumnavigate the contemporary malaise, they are meant to be dropped right into the darkest arena of the arts. They are dropped as a gift into a world that has lost the habit of contemplation, and they implode silently within our anxious hearts, but as an intruding force of life. We are to be englobed by them, and are meant to wonder if art can reverse the curse.
After being asked by Princeton University to provide something for the 9/11 memorial there, Takaezu chose a bronze bell that she had created. She could have chosen any of her works. They are all her laments for an ideological age, filled with trinkets and propaganda called art. They are both wombs and bombs.
Makoto Fujimura, an artist based in New York, is the founder of the International Arts Movement. His illuminated edition of The Four Holy Gospels was published by Crossway in January.
Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Richard J. Mouw
A new edition of Robert Orsi’s classic study.
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Not long after my paternal grandmother—born in the Netherlands, but who lived most of her life in Paterson, New Jersey—died, a family member was telling some of us about kindnesses performed by a neighbor couple for my grandmother in her final months. “Are they Christian people?” another relative asked. The response: “No, they’re Italians.”
The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950
Robert A. Orsi (Author)
Yale University Press
287 pages
$24.00
To be sure, the label “Christian” in that conversation was for our family pretty much a synonym for “Dutch Reformed.” If pushed, we could expand the definition a bit. But Catholics were certainly off our spiritual map. And when the Catholics were also Italians, the situation was hopeless.
I got over all of that long ago. For example, I consider Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli—otherwise known as Pope John XXIII—as one of the great church leaders of the past century. And while I have never been tempted to pray directly to Saint Francis of Assisi, I do find him inspiring as a model for discipleship. Still, re-reading Robert Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street, now appearing in a third edition, reminded me of the kind of thing that worried the New Jersey Dutch Calvinists of my youth about grass roots Italian Catholicism.
What I know now, of course, is that many of my Catholic friends share those worries. A priest-theologian friend, a Polish American, had worked several years in Rome, heading up a Vatican office. I mentioned to him once that a cousin of mine had lived with his family in Rome, serving as dean of the Greater European Mission’s Italian Bible Institute. “What kind of school is that?” my friend asked. “They train people to evangelize Italian Catholics,” I answered. His immediate response was: “Thank God somebody is doing that! We certainly have not had any success! That school will be in my prayers.”
I did not ask my friend about the specifics of his critique of popular Italian Catholicism. But I’m fairly sure he would have described a pattern of religious devotion that shared some common elements with the beliefs and practices of the community of immigrants chronicled by Robert Orsi, in his study of the grass-roots Catholicism that emerged in Italian Harlem in the last decades of the 19th century.
The focus of Orsi’s book is the elaborate annual festa of devotion to the Madonna of Mount Carmel, held for many decades every July on 115th Street in East Harlem. The main religious event of the festa was a solemn mass followed by a jubilant procession through the streets on July 16, but the larger drama occurred over many days, before and after the parade. Friends and relatives would visit from others cities, with much eating, drinking, dancing, noise-making, and the buying and selling of religious articles. There was a heavy trade in candles and waxworks, locally produced: models of arms and legs to be offered to the Virgin in support of prayers for healings, and images of infants carried by women who were praying for fertility. This was a time for special acts of penitence and intercession; many miracles, originating during the festa, were attributed to the Madonna’s beneficence. In one case, the family of 69-year-old Giuseppe Caparo helped him carry a heavy wax model of himself in the annual procession. The Madonna, they were convinced, had preserved his life when Giuseppe had fallen without serious injury from the fifth floor of a building.
For the mass and procession themselves, families would dress up in their finest—although many walked barefoot on the scalding summer pavement. The crowds came streaming from all directions to the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Many would crawl up the stone steps to the church’s doors, some even licking the stone surfaces as they moved.
After the mass, the crowds would gather outside, and the large statue of the Madonna would be carried out and placed upon a float. Then the march would begin, with bands, Italian chanting, rows of dignitaries and parish groups, banners, incense, fireworks—and hundreds of penitents along the route, some of them forcing the procession to pause as they threw themselves in front of the float bearing the statue, begging for the Virgin’s favors.
Italian immigrants started moving into Harlem in the 1870s, with the flow increasing over the next several decades. As the neighborhood expanded, other groups—Jews, Germans, and Irish, mainly—were forced to move away. At the same time, blacks and Puerto Ricans also began moving into Harlem. Neither the exodus nor the influx of neighbors was altogether peaceful. But inter-ethnic tensions were only a part of the hardship faced by the Italians. Their physical living conditions were often squalid, and they were plagued by unemployment, rampant disease, organized crime, and intra-ethnic gang warfare.
The Madonna of Mount Carmel had accompanied the immigrants on their journey from their homeland, and she played an important role in their new life in America. With her statue serving as “a visible link between Italy and East Harlem,” the Madonna was a guarantor of continuities for the immigrants; in her name they preserved the family rituals and burial customs of the Old World. She also provided the hope—and even some miraculous interventions—that eased the way into the strange and difficult living conditions of the New World.
The Mount Carmel yearly celebration continues these days, but its scale has been drastically reduced. More important, it clearly no longer serves the purposes that were once so important to the folks living on and near 115th Street. The September-October 1954 issue of Italian Harlem’s Mount Carmel Parish Bulletin featured a cover photo of the Archdiocese of New York’s Cardinal Francis Joseph Spellman. This expression of honoring the grandson of Boston-area Irish immigrants was of a piece with the Bulletin‘s increasing attention to local parish and archdiocesan activities in the years immediately following World War II.
All of that might seem unremarkable for a Catholic parish newsletter. But as Robert Orsi tells us, it was not always so. Early on, the larger Catholic community in the New York area regarded the East Harlem Italians with disdain. Orsi cites the example of an Irish American priest who in 1888 blasted “the peculiar kind of spiritual condition” of the immigrant Italians as devoid of any grasp of “the great truths of religion.”
But by the middle years of the 20th century, the Mount Carmel folks had finally become “an Italian American Catholic parish eager to conform to the styles and values of American Catholicism.” What had for many decades been “a festa housed in a church,” Orsi observes, had now become “a church with an annual festa.”
The shift in the sense of identity among the Italian Americans in East Harlem brought about a parallel shift in the Madonna’s role in their community. She had—in an important sense—joined the church.
Many Protestants have been warming up in recent years to Marian devotion. For example, a recent book presenting us with a “Mary for Evangelicals” featured enthusiastic endorsements by well-known evangelical theologians.[1] To be sure, evangelicals and their mainline Protestant counterparts do not mean to espouse the official Marian dogmas of Catholicism, such as Mary’s Immaculate Conception and her bodily ascension to Heaven. But there is a new insistence, as one Protestant writer put it recently, that Mary be seen by all of us as “the Mother of Believers.”[2]
Seldom in all of these recent Protestant calls for a new spiritual affection for Mary, however, has any serious attention been paid to the ways she has often functioned, especially in the past two centuries, as a subverter of ecclesiastical authority. This inattention even characterizes recent historical studies that have sorted out the various “re-imaginings” of Mary throughout history. Miri Rubin, for one, offers a detailed historical account of the Virgin’s shifting roles over the centuries—for example, after serving as the maternal nurturer in medieval Christianity, Mary subsequently came to the aid of “poets and revolutionaries, apocalyptic visionaries and, later, feminists.”[3] But Rubin shows no real interest in the ways in which folks like the recent Italian immigrants in Harlem used Marian devotion as a challenge to the authority of church officials.
While the Italians of Harlem sustained their challenge mainly by configuring their Marian devotion in a way that constituted an alternative to much officially sanctioned Catholic life and thought, their largely passive challenge was of a piece with more aggressive ones that have arisen in recent years. In the complex scenario spelled out by Michael Cuneo in his excellent study of various conservative and traditionalist dissenting movements in contemporary Catholicism, the key Marian apparitions of the past century, the ones at Fatima in Portugal and Medjugorye in Bosnia-Herzegovina, have loomed large in what has often been an overt grass-roots hostility toward the Catholic hierarchy. Such hostile movements—which Cuneo describes as comprised of “complex shadowlands of steamy prophecy, exotic conspiracy, and sectarian intrigue”[4]—generally pit the specific Marian revelations of recent history against official church pronouncements, often depicting the Vatican, including several recent popes, as at best hiding some “revealed” secrets, and at worst as perpetrating a deceptive heretical conspiracy.
Of special importance in this regard is the message delivered by the Virgin to three shepherd children who lived near Fatima in 1917. Her revelations, which came on six separate occasions during that year, featured three messages. One depicted the horrors of hell; in the second, she promised a world peace to be facilitated by an official church commitment to the conversion of Russia as an expression of devotion to her “Immaculate Heart.” The third, which was kept secret until June of 2000, included what was understood by the faithful to be a prophecy of the 1981 attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. But much controversy continues to surround this third “secret” among many Fatima devotees—including the conviction shared by many of them that to this day the Vatican is refusing to reveal the whole truth about the third Fatima revelation.[5]
Apart from those details, however, there is the reality of a grass roots devotion to a Mother who reveals her secrets directly to her peasant children. This devotion has led to what is, in effect, the emergence of an alternative “magisterium” in some Catholic circles: i.e., the teaching “office” of the heavenly Virgin who chooses on occasion to bypass the channels of official Catholicism to communicate directly to the “foolish” of this world. That same Virgin was clearly the primary spiritual authority for the immigrant people of the East Harlem parish.
Robert Orsi’s book first appeared in 1985. What makes this third edition especially interesting for those of us who first read the book in its original edition is the inclusion in this present volume of a new introduction, along with the two earlier introductory essays. Together these three pieces, totaling 67 pages, provide a fascinating ongoing commentary on the project. For one thing, Orsi reports on his continuing contacts with some present day offspring of the 115th Street community. Many of them still practice the community’s devotion to the Madonna, and their perspectives give us a rare picture of how practitioners of a folk religion respond to their actual reading of an academic book about their views and practices.
The three introductions chronicle an increasing methodological self-awareness on Orsi’s part. Twenty-five years ago he was—without fully realizing what he was doing—departing from what he now clearly sees as a defective pattern of scholarship, one that approaches a movement of this sort with the attempt “to translate the experiences of people we write about into the comfortable categories of modern scholarship,” instead of learning from the people studied about how “they disrupt our theories and methods.”
The result is a book that is rich in “thick description” of an immigrant community’s life, touching on politics, neighborhood activities, food, gender patterns, family dynamics, entertainment, the drama of living and dying—and insofar as it can be distinguished from all the rest, religious devotion. Through it all, one senses not merely a laudable effort on Orsi’s part to cultivate an empathy for his subject matter but even a genuine affection for the community whose complex life he narrates in such careful detail.
All of us who care about “lived religion” can learn from Orsi’s important efforts to understand—to use the title of his final chapter—”The Theology of the Streets.” There are many streets that still need to be studied in similar detail, and with the same kind of empathy, even affection. Indeed, as some of us struggle to find our own way of giving the Lord’s mother her spiritual and theological due, we can learn at least a few lessons from the residents of the East Harlem neighborhood themselves.
Orsi puts one of those lessons well in his concluding paragraph. On the streets in their neighborhood, he writes, those Italian-Americans created a communal occasion on which they carried their pains and hopes to a divine Mother—one who often “merged in their memories with their own mothers”—begging for another year of her nurturing mercies. And they did this with the knowledge “that the path to the divine was the same dense and trying and joyous and painful path that they trod every day.” That should preach well in neighborhoods far removed from 19th-century East Harlem!
1. Tim Perry, Mary for Evangelicals: Toward an Understanding of the Mother of Our Lord (InterVarsity, 2006).
2. Beverly Roberts Gaventa, ” ‘Nothing Will Be Impossible with God,’ Mary as the Mother of Believers,” in Mary: Mother of God, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Eerdmans, 2004), p. 19.
3. Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (Yale Univ. Press, 2009), p. 416.
4. Michael W. Cuneo, The Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism (Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), p. 87.
5. An Italian journalist, who claims to have been—apparently until publishing this book—a friend of the present pope and other senior church officials, has now developed an elaborate case for the existence of yet another, and highly significant, “fourth secret of Fatima,” the content of which, he claims, is being withheld by the Vatican; cf. Antonio Socci, The Fourth Secret of Fatima (Loreto Publications, 2009).
Richard J. Mouw is president of Fuller Theological Seminary. He is the author most recently of Abraham Kuyper: A Short and Personal Introduction (Eerdmans).
Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Lauren F. Winner
A family history writ large.
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Carla Peterson’s historian friends told her that her research trip to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture was a fool’s errand. Armed with only with the knowledge that her great-grandfather was named Philip Augustus White, and that he was a New Yorker, Peterson, a literature scholar who has specialized in the work of 19th-century African American women, wanted to learn more about her family’s history.
Black Gotham: A Family History of African-Americans in Nineteenth Century New York City
Carla L. Peterson (Author)
446 pages
$27.60
Her pessimistic friends were wrong. Peterson is a patient and tireless (and lucky) researcher. On that first trip to the archives, Peterson found her great-grandfather’s obituary, and an obituary of his father-in-law, Peterson’s great-great-grandfather. Those obituaries led Peterson to church records, tax records, and a pharmaceutical archive in Madison. (White, a pharmacist, was the first African American to earn a degree from the College of Pharmacy of the City of New York. Naysaying historians, take note: scholars of American pharmacy told Peterson the school’s records had “probably long since disappeared,” but she found them at the Wisconsin Historical Society.) Peterson wove that research into an impressive and fascinating account of her ancestors’ public, political lives, and—to use a phrase of Toni Morrison that Peterson quotes—their “unwritten interior lives.” It is a remarkable accomplishment.
Philip White is Peterson’s compelling central character. Peterson learns that he was not, as family lore had it, a Haitian native who fled Saint-Domingue at the time of the revolution. Rather, he was born in 1823 to a Jamaican mother and a white, English father. He grew up in Hoboken and Manhattan. As a young man, White apprenticed himself to a pharmacist; by 1847, he owned his own drug store. Throughout his life, he was a devoted churchman and a leader in civic and cultural affairs. In 1883, the mayor appointed him to the Brooklyn Board of Education; at the time of his death, he was a member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Obituary writers lauded White as “a self-made man[:] studious, temperate, methodical, and always pursuing the ends of a noble manhood, in business, church, and social affairs, with punctilious regard to truth and fairness.”
Peterson’s account of her great-grandfather’s political life is nuanced—discomfitingly so, at times. Throughout his life, White was devoted to two causes: Episcopal religion, and education. He was not especially interested in slavery. To wit, his involvement in an 1852 episode in which an escaped slave named Preston was captured in New York and returned to his slaveowner. When black New Yorkers organized in protest, the (white) priest of White’s church insisted it was “our duty” to obey the controversial Fugitive Slave Act (which mandated the return of captured runaway slaves to their masters). The church’s vestry, of which White was a member, passed a resolution thanking the minister for his leadership. Pondering the available evidence, Peterson realized that “Philip was indifferent to the plight of the slave. My initial reaction was one of utter dismay. I wanted my great-grandfather to be a dedicated race man, a hero of the antislavery cause.” But Peterson ultimately concluded that “Philip did not identify with those degraded by slavery, and their concerns were not his.”
In later decades, White’s politics evolved. In 1886, an article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that White “is beginning to take greater interest in his race and his friends are stimulated by his progressive spirit.” Three years before, as a member of the Brooklyn Board of Education, he pushed through a resolution that “the Principals and Heads of Departments of the schools under control of the Board of Education are hereby directed to receive all colored children that may apply for admission on the same terms that they do white children.” In 1889, he cofounded the Afro-American League, which lobbied for anti-discrimination legislation. By the end of his life, Peterson concludes, White had become more of “a race man publicly committed to fighting for racial justice.”
Why did the members of St. Philip’s want to be part of a denomination that judged them coarse and debased?
White’s biography is central to Peterson’s chronicle, but Black Gotham is far more than a history of Peterson’s relatives. Peterson takes the lives of her great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather as a window onto the élite African American community of 19th-century Manhattan and Brooklyn. A major theme in Black Gotham is institution building. Peterson explores the voluntary associations black New Yorkers founded: literary societies, as well as branches of the Odd Fellows and Freemasons, not to mention the New York and Newport Ugly Fishing Club, founded in 1865 “for the object of cultivating a love of piscatorial pleasure.” And Peterson investigates the more overtly political institutions that black New Yorkers built, such as the New York Association for the Political Elevation and Improvement of the People of Color, founded in 1837 to work for black suffrage.
The institution that looms largest in Peterson’s account is the church, specifically St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, where White worshipped for decades. St. Philip’s was founded by black members of the predominantly white Trinity Episcopal Church. Trinity’s white parishioners tolerated black co-religionists, but did not want to receive religious instruction with, or be buried alongside, black Episcopalians. African American members began pressing Trinity for land for a black parish in the 1790s; it was 1818 before Trinity finally appropriated money for that purpose. St. Philip’s quickly became the spiritual home of Peterson’s ancestors and their friends.
If the members of St. Philip’s no longer had to put up with the condescension of Trinity parishioners each Sunday morning, the new parish still encountered the racism of white New Yorkers: the church building was destroyed in the race riot of 1834. The racism of the Episcopal Church was also unavoidable. Peterson describes St. Philip’s unsuccessful efforts to develop a black clergy. The church’s first priest was black, but after he retired, there were no black priests to be had. Three African American men who sensed a call to ordination were thwarted by the bishop, Benjamin Onderdonk, who refused their applications to General Seminary. The three men went on to achieve distinction: one became a prominent educator; one was eventually ordained to the deaconate, and moved to Jamaica to do mission work; the third, Alexander Crummell, an outspoken abolitionist and early black nationalist, was ordained to the priesthood in the Diocese of Massachusetts. His ministry took him for many years to Liberia, though eventually Crummell returned to the U. S. where, inter alia, he led St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. Today the Episcopal Church recognizes Crummell as one of the most important churchmen of the 19th century, celebrating his feast day on September 10.
Peterson also details St. Philip’s efforts to be included in the Diocese of New York’s yearly Diocesan Convention. Philip White was among the vestrymen who lobbied the diocese, year after year, to recognize St. Philip’s as a legitimate parish of the diocese, with a right to participate in the annual Convention. And year after year, the Conference rebuffed the church: “When society is unfortunately divided into classes,” declared the Convention in the mid-1840s,
when some are intelligent, refined, and elevated, in tone and character, and others are ignorant, coarse and debased, however unjustly, and when such prejudices exist between them, as to prevent social intercourse on equal terms, it would seem inexpedient to encounter such prejudices, unnecessarily, and to endeavor to compel the one class to associate on equal terms in the consultation on the affairs of the Diocese, with those whom they would not admit to their tables, or into their family circles.
Finally, in 1853, the diocese relented and admitted St. Philip’s to the Annual Convention. But why did the members of St. Philip’s want to be part of a denomination that judged them coarse and debased? Why was Peterson’s great-grandfather so devoted to St. Philip’s, and why was he so determined to see St. Philip’s accepted by the Episcopal hierarchy? The obvious explanation might be that as the black élite developed, it gravitated toward the denomination of the white élite. But Peterson offers a more intriguing hypothesis. Black Episcopalians, Peterson argues, found both spiritual and aesthetic sustenance in the High Church forms of the Episcopal Church. They were nourished by the beauty of the church rituals; the order of the liturgy helped them “forget the disordered world of Gotham … and reach closer to their God.” White and his co-religionists were devoted to St. Philip’s “not despite, but because, it was part of the Episcopal denomination.” The patterns of Anglican worship, and even the norms of Anglican polity, “placed New York’s black Episcopalians within an ancient, cosmopolitan history and offered them a set of memories to place alongside there more recent history of enslavement, degradation, and Americanization.”
So too, in Black Gotham, Carla Peterson has given us a set of memories—memories of the growth of a black middle-class, memories of the development of institutions like St. Philip’s, and memories of the familial and private lives of people we thought were lost to history—to place alongside the more familiar story of 19th-century African American history. It is a gift for which students of American history owe her a great debt of thanks.
Lauren Winner is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School. She is the author most recently of A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Yale Univ. Press).
Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Mischa Willett
William Blake’s illustrations on biblical themes.
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Christopher Rowland’s Blake and the Bible is misleadingly named, since it says next to nothing about Blake and the Bible; instead, this is a set of extended captions to Blake’s visual work, such as one might find on a placard affixed to a museum wall, but Descriptions of Blake’s Drawings on Biblical Themes and the Prophetic Tradition in 18th Century London lacks the felicitousness of the former. Gather those placards for his etchings and illustrated books (but not for the paintings), flip though them, and you have this book, more or less.
William Blake was not only a painter and a poet, but considered himself a prophet of God, and thought every Christian should be one too. His work has attracted critical attention from its earliest days, and his body of poetic work is among the most-considered we have in English. Entering a critical arena so staffed with strength is then, itself, a bold—almost an aggressive—act, but Rowland is a bit timorous as a scholar. Often, rather than make a claim, he’ll merely hint at a possible interpretation. His main method for this interpretation by implication is the questioning parenthetical, as in “There are also four cherubs at God’s side (the four Zoas?), and above, two smaller angels,” as though the statement, taken directly, would be too direct.
Sometimes, the evasion is harmless: “in the margins [sic] we have angels with trumpets possibly proclaiming a solemn moment.” Others are rather more glaring: “Job’s head is turned … looking heavenwards before a stone altar, seemingly offering a sacrifice” [italics mine]. When people see a stone altar and a flame on top of it, the smoke rising up to a celestial presence whose rays beam back as though receiving it, and penitents kneeling before it, that’s definitely a sacrifice scene; there isn’t any ambiguity present.
Sometimes, the waffling is downright silly. Having described one engraving in which “the open palm of the Almighty, which faces the viewer … has a mark at its centre,” Rowland mouses forward this reading of what should seem an obvious symbol: “is it too far-fetched to suggest that this may be a reference to ‘the print of the nails’ on the palm of the crucified and resurrected Jesus?” No, Prof. Rowland, when one sees nail-scarred palms on the hands of a deity who has raised them in the classical posture of benediction, it is not too much to “suggest” that the artist may be invoking the Christ.
Perhaps Rowland’s better off taking these baby-steps to claim-making, though. When he does come out swinging, I tend to disagree with his pronouncements. Of the Job series Engraving 17, which depicts a righteous Job kneeling with his wife, their hands folded in their laps and eyes raised in supplication while an embodied Jehovah lays his hands over their heads in blessing, Rowland writes “there is no subscription here to the notion of humanity having to grovel before a transcendent deity. This is insight, not submission.” I don’t think he could be more wrong. Not only do all the visual cues tell us the exact opposite (see aforementioned kneeling, supplication, etc.), but isn’t the very message of the book that insight happens through submission? They aren’t opposing principles for Christians. Realizing who God is allows us to realize who we are, which is, perhaps, the ultimate insight.
I don’t want to belabor the point that Rowland is wrong about this reading (and many others besides in this book[1]), but it is an interesting way to be wrong. What I mean is, Blake is sort of a humanist. It’s not at all impossible to imagine his holding a position like the one Rowland foists on him here; it’s just that he’s very much not doing it in this instance. Blake’s caption beneath this image reads “I have heard thee with the hearing of the ear, but now my eye seeth thee.”
This, as it turns out, is a common problem. When an artist reaches a certain level of abstraction, weaker readers tend to take every gesture (textual or otherwise) as artistically significant. Two examples: Blake, working long hours on painterly minutiae around toxic chemicals, misspells the word “receive.” A quick search reveals that “receive” is the 10th most-commonly misspelled word in the English language; I had to doublecheck it just for the purpose of this illustration. Rather than look over the error, which seems to me the gentlemanly thing, or inserting that adorable and passive “[sic],” Rowland suggests that the misspelling may be pregnant with meaning, noting a scholar who argued that Blake’s rendering the “a” in “adultery” backwards (remember that the process of engraving involves making all the figures backwards) implies a resistance “to endorse a prohibition against adultery.” This is a readerly technique in vogue since the grand dame Isobel Armstrong’s Victorian Poetics, which argues that every 2nd-rate poet who can’t be bothered to make a clear image is automatically trying “to problematize” the scene.
The second example of this every-move-is-meaningful approach has further-reaching repercussions because it impedes the actual experience of reading this book. Rowland opts to keep Blake’s original punctuation and capitalization throughout, which borders, to put it mildly, on the eccentric. And so we read, “I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more that I would question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro’ it & not with it.”
There’s no reason to do this. Blake was not, like e. e. cummings or Apollinaire after him, a graphic poet, wherein the capitalizations and/or misspellings of words are part and parcel in the process of making meaning. He was a graphic artist, and a poet, and a publisher of sorts, but not a very careful editor. When Blake fails to place a comma in a sentence where one is, by modern grammatical standards, required, he’s not making a point, or bucking the system; he’s just not being careful, and it doesn’t help modern readers to leave his whimsical punctuation in place as though it’s authoritative. It is authorial, but that’s not the same thing.
Blake made some sketches for The Book of Enoch, left incomplete at his death in 1827, illustrating the rape of the daughters of men by the Sons of God, a curious aside in 1 Enoch 19:2. As he often does, Blake draws the figures nude, or mostly nude. In one drawing, two men are standing next to a supine woman. Here’s how Rowland describes the sketch: “The two figures have halos and beams of light coming from the centre of their bodies. In the very middle of this halo of light, with massive beams projecting forth, there appears to be a worm and a drop of liquid coming out of it.”
Right. Naked muscular men are depicted with “beams” coming from the “centre of their figures,” and one has a “worm” leaking “a drop of liquid.” The woman looks “uncomfortable,” Rowland notes. Remember: these aren’t Sunday school variety angels; they’re the ones who “lay with the daughters of men,” impregnating them, in which practice, it must be said, those “towers” and “dripping worms” would have been useful. I’m not trying to be crass, I just don’t know what we get by avoiding the obvious description: Blake draws two nude figures with engorged genitalia. It’s just another instance of Rowland’s tip-toeing around the issue.
Of the Enoch series as a whole, he writes “these remarkable drawings lose nothing for being sketches.” But they do. They’re barely there. Blake was a considerate, if not a terribly disciplined painter. His genius is evident in his most considered work: paintings as colorful and intricate and artfully designed as his poetry. To claim that his notes-to-self about possible future paintings to make are every bit as good as the paintings they might have become is to cheapen the artist’s actual work, and to be disingenuous in the process. These sketches lose everything for being merely sketches: not only the obvious things like form, color, a sense of weight, and clarity (the problem of what exactly is being rendered in the rape scene would presumably fade away were the subjects themselves more filled in) but also less tangible things like intentionality. For Blake to have sketched some sexually disturbing images in the margins of a private notebook is a rather different gesture than had he rendered them in his usual painstaking method, had his wife hand-color them, had them printed and offered for sale to the general public.
This is a problem endemic to modern academia, and perhaps to modern cultural institutions generally. When a (usually American) museum can’t afford to mount a show of Picassos, they’ll often hang some sketches, a transcription of a letter, and a notebook draft of a well-known work and have ten-foot banners printed claiming “PICASSO IS COMING.” Still, I understand Rowland’s instinct here. Romantic criticism is a rather well-trod path, having attracted nearly every major scholarly figure of the last century (Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Northrop Frye, and W. K. Wimsatt all started as Romanticists). The burden of scholarly material extant on a popular author like Blake tends to push writers to the margins of his corpus in the hope of finding something “new” to say.
In a letter to his friend Thomas Butts in 1803, Blake explains something about his compositional process, that he had written “an immense number of verses … from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes thirty at a time, without premeditation and even against my will.” In this practice of writing by otherworldly possession, Blake stands in a long tradition among not only prophets but poets as well. W. B. Yeats, though a Shelleyan in style, is a Blakean in substance, and would write by putting his wife into a trance, channeling spirits through her, and writing down what they said. More recently, James Merrill wrote his magnum opus The Changing Light at Sandover completely through spirited dictation received through the medium of a Ouija board.
It’s hard to know what to make of these back-stories. On the one hand, they are compositional fictions that lend a kind of street cred to imaginative literature: “the lady of the lake raised up a sword and called to me” has more purchase than “I got this from Milt the blacksmith, but I’d be a really good king.” Coleridge used it to such great effect that “the man from Porlock,” who allegedly interrupted his opium-inspired composition of Kubla Khan, is now as much a part of the poem as its actual words.
Nor have the authors themselves always maintained faith in these supernatural methods. Yeats writes,
Some will ask if I believe in the actual existence of my circuits of sun and moon. Those that include, now all recorded time in one circuit, now what Blake called ‘the pulsation of an artery’, are plainly symbolical, but what of those that fixed, like a butterfly upon a pin, to our central date, the first day of our Era, divide actual history into periods of equal length? To such a question I can but answer that if sometimes … I have taken such periods literally, my reason has soon recovered.
If such stories of “possession,” automatic writing, Ouija boards, and their ilk make you queasy, you’re in good company. C. S. Lewis visited Yeats at his house in 1921, and wrote to a friend the next day that it terrified him, going on to explain about mediumship: “First, the record of proved fraud in such matters is usually very big and black. Second, it very often has extremely bad effects on those who dabble in it,” and “the whole tradition of Christendom is dead against it.”[2] Frederick Buechner, who was very close with James Merrill, wrote of his inspired methods, “I have always found something dim and slightly unwholesome about it.”[3] I have too.
Rowland’s book does provide a useful guide to the content of Blake’s illustrations of books on biblical themes. He also builds a very convincing historical context for Blake’s understanding of the role of prophecy in the late 18th century. But there are many important things to be said about William Blake and his relationship with the Bible. Is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell a satire, none of whose propositions Blake holds and which we should read like The Screwtape Letters? Was Blake’s faith, if founded on a latter-day prophet model, destroyed by the failure of any of his prophecies to come true? What view of scriptural authority must one hold if indeed “every man” is to be his own prophet, re-writing Scripture through imaginative engagement? Alas, none of them are said here.
Mischa Willett is scholar-in-residence at the University of Tübingen for the academic year 2011-2012. His poems have appeared in regional and national publications.
1. Another example: Rowland claims that “one of Blake’s depictions of the death of Jesus, ‘The Soldiers casting Lots for Christ’s garments,’ does not show the crucified Christ at all, but foregrounds the … soldiers.” Oddly, this claim is made about a painting that Rowland includes among the color plates, and so the reader can flip to plate 11 and see, as clear as anything, Christ crucified. He’s right there, shown. It’s the “at all” that jars, since, while the painting’s focus is not on the Christ’s body, he is still present: there are his arms, and the light coming from his face, and the cross bigger than anything.
2. To MHD, December 14, 1958.
3. Frederick Buechner, The Eyes of the Heart: A Memoir of the Lost and Found (HarperOne, 1999), p. 171.
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