Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.
They laughed at one I loved —
The triangular hill that hung
Under the Big Forth. They said
That I was bounded by the whitethorn hedges
Of the little farm and did not know the world.
But I knew that love’s doorway to life
Is the same doorway everywhere.
Ashamed of what I loved
I flung her from me and called her a ditch
Although she was smiling at me with violets.
But now I am back in her briary arms
The dew of an Indian Summer morning lies
On bleached potato-stalks—
What age am I?
I do not know what age I am,
I am no mortal age;
I know nothing of women,
Nothing of cities,
I cannot die
Unless I walk outside these whitethorn hedges.
If you ever hoof it to the village of Inniskeen in County Monaghan, Ireland, you’ll find Patrick Kavanagh’s grave among the pale wooden crosses in the village cemetery. According to pilgrims who’ve made the trek, some of the locals will still reminisce about the native son (Kavanagh died in Dublin in 1967). As one resident told a recent visitor: “I knew Paddy. His mother couldn’t read and his father was a cobbler. Paddy was not a good farmer… he paid no heed to his fields.”
Not surprisingly. His mind was on — or perhaps already in — the city. Like many poets of the day, from Yeats to Wilde to Goldsmith, Kavanagh migrated to Dublin, walking the fifty-mile journey for the first time in 1931, at the age of twenty-seven. He would be internationally known within the decade, largely due to his poems about common life “On Raglan Road” and “The Great Hunger”.
It’s clear he scorned the grubby, provincial life of his boyhood, with its emotional and material deprivation, its spiritual nullity. In his poem “Stony Grey Soil”, he levels a series of accusations against the stubborn soil of Monaghan: “the laugh from my love you thieved”, “you fed me on swinish food”, “you flung a ditch on my vision”. (There’s that “ditch” accusation he’s looking to rescind in “Innocence”.)
I’ll let Christian Wiman explain the rest of the poem and its relation to spiritual innocence, in his recent lecture “When You Consider the Radiance: Poetry for Preachers and Prophets”. It’s where I first heard of the poem, and I recommend watching the whole thing. Wiman’s reading of “Innocence” is set to start below.
To stand here in the wings of Europe
disheartened, I have come away
from the sick land where in the sun lay
the gentle sloe-eyed murderers
of themselves, exquisites under a curse;
here to exercise my depleted fury.
For the heart is a coal, growing colder
when jewelled cerulean seas change
into grey rocks, grey water-fringe,
sea and sky altering like a cloth
till colour and sheen are gone both:
cold is an opiate of the soldier.
And all my endeavours are unlucky explorers
come back, abandoning the expedition;
the specimens, the lilies of ambition
still spring in their climate, still unpicked:
but time, time is all I lacked
to find them, as the great collectors before me.
The next month, then, there is a window
and with a crash I’ll split the glass.
Behind it stands one I must kiss,
person of love or death
a person or a wraith,
I fear what I shall find.
Douglas, who strikes me as the Second World War’s echo of Isaac Rosenberg, wrote this, his last poem, two months before his death in the opening hours of the invasion of Normandy. He was twenty-four. Reread the final stanza — which Harold Bloom calls “Shakesperean” in its diction — with this information in mind.
The stanza and particularly its last line embody what Yeats considered the defining characteristic of Romantic poetry, namely, the principle of simplification through intensity.
“I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books… I have no Luddite prejudice against new technology; it’s just that books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information. My father’s school prizes are nowadays on my shelves, ninety years after he first won them. I’d rather read Goldsmith’s poems in this form than online.
The American writer and dilettante Logan Pearsall Smith once said: ‘Some people think that life is the thing; but I prefer reading.’ When I first came across this, I thought it witty; now I find it—as I do many aphorisms—a slick untruth. Life and reading are not separate activities. The distinction is false (as it is when Yeats imagines the writer’s choice between ‘perfection of the life, or of the work’). When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape—into different countries, mores, speech patterns—but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.”
__________
From the prefacing essay “A Life with Books” from Julian Barnes’s collectionThrough the Window.
“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books.” – Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot
Several months ago, The New York Times Magazine did a series of portraits, called “A Writer’s Room”, which chronicled authors at their desks. Barnes’s North London study is below, which was included with this description:
I have worked in this room for 30 years. It is on the first floor, overlooking the tops of two prunus trees… The room itself has always been painted the same color, a bright, almost Chinese, yellow, giving the effect of sunlight even on the darkest day… I use the computer for e-mail and shopping; the I.B.M. 196c — 30 years old itself — for writing (or rather, second drafting: nowadays I generally first draft by hand). It is getting increasingly difficult to find ribbons and lift-off tape, but I shall use the machine until it drops. It hums quietly, as if urging me on — whereas the computer is inert, silent, indifferent. The room is usually very untidy: like many writers, I aspire to be a clean-desk person, but admit the daily reality is very dirty. So I have to walk carefully as I enter my study; but am always happy to be here.
Read on:
Barnes on the question of whether life is a narrative
Interviewer: I’ve read that you’ve gone as far as to say that the “tyranny of beauty” in our culture has taken a tremendous psychological toll, and it has the tendency to bring out the worst in us. Expound on that.
Bret Easton Ellis: You know I grew up in a family of three women — my mother and my two sisters — all very smart, educated, beautiful, and yet still have problems that they don’t feel they measure up or add up to what the media’s ideal woman is: that they don’t have the hips of a Christy Turlington or a Kate Moss… that if they don’t look a certain way they won’t be accepted. And even though you know that’s wrong, and even though you know most people don’t look like that, those are really the images that flood our culture.
And the images are set up in such a way as to have a maximum impact on you when you look at them — and cause a feeling of desire in you, cause a feeling of wanting to have this stuff, and feeding an insecurity so you will go out and buy that product, buy that dress, buy that makeup.
And that is damaging.
And it’s not only women. I’ve seen in the last ten years men become effected by this too. I mean, the idea that you should have a full head of hair when you’re sixty, or this washboard abdomen when you’re a forty-five, fifty-year-old guy. Or, just that you have to look like a really great looking nineteen-year-old boy for the rest of your life — it’s really ridiculous.
And I don’t think, as humans, we would be thinking about things in this way — or that these would be the ideals which would be of the utmost concern to us — unless it wasn’t for this thing rising up in the culture to hit us in the face.
And it’s damaging.
__________
From Bret Easton Ellis’s interview with Allan Gregg, shown below.
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I admire Ellis as a writer, even though all but two of his novels have been — I can say without a shred of ego or exaggeration — pieces of garbage. Less Than Zero is a punchy and iconic chronicle of adolescent decadence (Ellis wrote it when he was nineteen); and American Psycho is a vivid and unsettling and very good book — or at least about 98% of it is. The subtexts of both of those two books, moreover, orbit around the issues Ellis is discussing here. They’re really all about the superficiality of our culture — superficiality which does not mask banality, but spiritual emptiness and evil.
I would though take issue with the term “tyranny of beauty,” because it is, however evocative, a misnomer. Yeats spoke about “terrible beauty” as a way to call attention to a type of aesthetic allure that was somehow transcendent. Donna Tartt, who in fact went to school with Ellis at Bennington College in Vermont, and dedicated her first novel to her friend and former classmate, observed that, “Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming… Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.” And this seems to be closer to the truth, even if it is a tad overwrought. There’s nothing uglier than a culture so frenetically obsessed with systematized cosmetic standards that are, even in principle, unobtainable. No, the tyranny under which we suffer isn’t that of beauty; rather, it’s a tyranny of vanity — which can be the ugliest trait of all.
