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Gods in the Gutter & God's Skallywags

11/29/2014

Human Failings in Literature

Paul Claudel is not much remembered today, at least in the English-speaking world. That he is at all is largely due to three famously excised stanzas from a poem by W.H. Auden, his obituary for William Butler Yeats:

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

Two days ago I quoted a letter of Yeats in which a literary figure of the day was shown in a state of inebriation (or rather, hangover), and referred to it as "delightful," not because I support drunkenness, but because it seemed humanizing. I felt sympathy.

An online discussion of friends recently touched upon the same topic. Famous poets were quoted. Baudelaire: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish." And Byron: "Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication." Stories abound, say, of the infamous drunkenness of Dylan Thomas on his reading circuit in America, even of his death after having imbibed "18 straight whiskies." Recent investigation has shown the cause of death more probably to have been medical malpractice than drinking too much—not to suggest that drinking has not resulted in many a needless death.

The myth persists—both about Thomas's death, and that alcohol somehow serves as a spur to creativity. In all likelihood it does not.

Today, various "sins" which at one time were described as originating in "moral failings"—alcoholism, homosexuality—are now seen to be biologically or genetically determined. (The Old Testament, of course, propounds an anti-scientific view: was not Noah's son punished for having seen his nakedness when he was drunk?) In either case, a predisposition may be inherited.

Bound not by the Old but the New Testament—or not even that—Christians are enjoined to be tolerant and forgiving. In practice, this becomes not always so easy to enforce; as Chesterton noted, a great argument against Christianity is the behavior (and words) of Christians themselves. Yet tolerance does not imply permissiveness: DUI recidivism demands penalty for the protection of society.

What time pardons, or fails to pardon, lies beyond human comprehension; yet it is fairly certain where human sympathies lie. Two poems by the poet Robert Service would suggest that "sinfulness is next to godliness". The religious context would be: one cannot be saved without having sinned; that lamb is beheld most dear which previously was lost. Robert Service, immensely popular in his day, has been a perennial favorite among that part of the population which does not count itself among the literati; which suggests that his empathy reflects the norm, not an irregularity. (I have noted his influence on my verse here.)

These are his poems:

Gods in the Gutter

I dreamed I saw three demi-gods who in a cafe sat,
And one was small and crapulous, and one was large and fat;
And one was eaten up with vice and verminous at that.

The first he spoke of secret sins, and gems and perfumes rare;
And velvet cats and courtesans voluptuously fair:
"Who is the Sybarite?" I asked. They answered: "Baudelaire."

The second talked in tapestries, by fantasy beguiled;
As frail as bubbles, hard as gems, his pageantries he piled;
"This Lord of Language, who is he?" They whispered "Oscar Wilde."

The third was staring at his glass from out abysmal pain;
With tears his eyes were bitten in beneath his bulbous brain.
"Who is the sodden wretch?" I said. They told me: "Paul Verlaine."

Oh, Wilde, Verlaine and Baudelaire, their lips were wet with wine;
Oh poseur, pimp and libertine! Oh cynic, sot and swine!
Oh votaries of velvet vice! . . . Oh gods of light divine!

Oh Baudelaire, Verlaine and Wilde, they knew the sinks of shame;
Their sun-aspiring wings they scorched at passion's altar flame;
Yet lo! enthroned, enskied they stand, Immortal Sons of Fame.

I dreamed I saw three demi-gods who walked with feet of clay,
With cruel crosses on their backs, along a miry way;
Who climbed and climbed the bitter steep to which men turn and pray.

God's Skallywags

The God of Scribes looked down and saw
The bitter band of seven,
Who had outraged his holy law
And lost their hope of Heaven:
Came Villon, petty thief and pimp,
And obscene Baudelaire,
And Byron with his letcher limp,
And Poe with starry stare.

And Wilde who lived his hell on earth,
And Burns, the baudy bard,
And Francis Thompson, from his birth
Malevolently starred. . . .
As like a line of livid ghosts
They stared to Paradise,
The galaxy of Heaven's hosts
Looked down in soft surmise.

Said God: "You bastards of my love,
You are my chosen sons;
Come, I will set you high above
These merely holy ones.
Your sins you've paid in gall and grief,
So to these radiant skies,
Seducer, drunkard, dopester, thief,
Immortally arise.

I am your Father, fond and just,
And all your folly see;
Your beastiality and lust
I also know in me.
You did the task I gave to you . . .
Arise and sit beside
My Son, the best belovèd, who
Was also crucified.

Cicero at Athens and Brundisium

11/28/2014

As All Roads Lead to Rome

I felt the letters were beginning to get tedious. After yesterday's post, I began to get drawn off into the P.D. James book which I had only then stumbled across.

She gave the various early detective writers a thorough dissection, if superficial in contrast to Edmund WIlson's (but then she is sympathetic, he not). Ngaio Marsh seemed interesting. She went into great lengths about the syringe-filled-with-air that I remembered from my youthful reading of Dorothy Sayers as having been the murder weapon. Seems it is impossible. Oh, well.

Then I began to find the discussion even more tedious than ever Cicero got—well, as with Wilson, I am not sympathetic (anymore) with the genre. So better judgement overcame me and I set down the James, and picked back up Cicero.

He is writing to his friend and—well, everything: advisor, proxy (in his absence) and so forth. Now he is returning from his governorship, everything having wrapped up swimmingly; he posts this from Brundisium:

I am glad your little daughter gives you pleasure and that you agree that affection for children is part of nature. Indeed if this is not the case there can be no natural tie between one human being and another, and once you abolish that, you abolish all society. “And good luck!”, says Carneades—an abominable thing to say, but not too naive as the position of our friend Lucius and Patro; when they make self-interest their only yardstick while refusing to believe in any altruistic act and maintain that we should be good only to avoid getting into trouble and not because goodness is naturally right, they fail to see that they are talking about an artful dodger, not a good man. [Brundisium, 25 November (?) 50]

Reminds one not a little of our own time. The letter previous to that, from Athens, discusses his dilemma, and what he is returning to. Caesar has not yet crossed the Rubicon; but, with hindsight, we know it is only a short while before he will. It dawned on me: Tedious? Not on your life! Here is an extract, as with the previous translated by Shackleton Bailey:

For mercy’s sake, put all your affection, lavished on me as it is, and all your wisdom, remarkable in every field as I do assure you I regard it, into one single concern, the consideration of my position in toto. I fancy I see the greatest struggle—unless the same Providence that delivered me from the Parthian war better than I could have dared to hope takes pity on our country—, the greatest that history has ever known. Well, that is a calamity which I shall have to bear along with the rest of the world. I don’t ask you to think about that. But do pray take up this personal problem of my own. You see, don’t you, that at your instigation I have made friends with both the contestants. And I only wish I had listened to your affectionate admonitions from the first. “The heart within my breast thou ne’er couldst sway.” However in the end you persuaded me to make friends with one of them because of all he had done for me and with the other because of his power. So I did, and by conciliating them in every possible way I managed to win as high a place in their several good graces as any other man’s. We calculated that on the one hand joined with Pompey I should never be obliged to go politically astray, while on the other hand as Pompey’s ally I ought not to be at loggerheads with Caesar—they were so closely linked. Now, as you represent and as I see myself, there looms ahead a tremendous contest between them. Each counts me as his man, unless it be that one of them is only pretending—for Pompey has no doubts, judging correctly that I strongly approve of his present politics. Moreover I received letters from both at the same time as yours, conveying the impression that neither has a friend in the world he values more than myself.

But what am I to do? I don’t mean in the proceedings that will be set on foot when I get back to prevent his candidature in absentia and to make him give up his army. “Speak, M. Tullius!” What shall I say? “Be so kind as to wait until I see Atticus”? There’s no room for fence-sitting. Against Caesar then? “Where are those close-clasped hands?” For I helped to get him this privilege, as requested by himself at Ravenna in connexion with Caelius who was Tribune—and not only by him but by our Gnaeus too in that immortal third Consulship of his. Or shall I take a different line? “I fear” not Pompey only but “the Trojan men and dames”. “Polydamas will foremost cry me shame.” Being who? You yourself of course, the encomiast of my doings and writings.

I escaped this dilemma during the two earlier Marcelline Consulships when the Senate discussed Caesar’s command; now I am coming in just at the crisis. [Athens, 16 October 50]

Lord, lead me not astray into detective novels.

Chesterton: a Different Approach?

11/27/2014

The Intemperance of Father Brown

Good men, whatever their background or cultural basis, are stars in the firmament.

Had I approached him from another angle, I might have seen Chesterton in another light. Granted, my bias is explicitly against religious texts that strive too hard—to make an argument. Witness my recent incomprehension at St. Anselm who “proved” the existence of God. The paragraph of his that I quoted in an earlier post struck me as off-the-wall to say the least—not in a very different fashion from Chesterton’s.

Chesterton’s nebulous thought was one thing; but that he went out of his way to denigrate Marcus Aurelius—that was “pushing the envelope” with me as they say.

I approached Orthodoxy at a friend’s behest—a friend whose judgement I respect, whose rationality I admire. So I find the weird congeries of the the text—sort of a witch’s brew of disparate and exceedingly grotesque ideational content—incongruent and shocking.

Almost at random—as though reaching into a hat—one may pull out the absurdest of ideas. Such as: “The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand.”

This perhaps is an example of what Wilson labeled his “mechanical” paradoxes. That the statement is dull and insipid is not my point; it is incontrovertibly wrong. Chesterton may have felt that he arrived at some pinnacle—but the plain and simple fact is that man cannot understand everything. Or, as Sahl Abdullah remarked after experiencing “a state of violent agitation, with physical manifestations, during a religious meeting.” “Power,” he said, “is when something like this enters, and the mind and body manifest nothing at all.” (Idries Shah, The Way of the Sufi)

Chesterton may not have “set reason up for judge/ of our most holy mystery,” but he certainly cramped it and flattened mystery into a planisphere. However, had I approached Chesterton differently...

P.D. James, whose death has just been reported by the media, lauds Chesterton’s seminal detective Father Brown:

[His] output was prodigious, and it would be unreasonable to expect all the short stories to be equally successful, but the quality of writing never disappoints. Chesterton never wrote an inelegant or clumsy sentence. The Father Brown stories are written in a style richly complex, imaginative, vigorous, poetic and spiced with paradoxes.
. . .
I have never suffered from literary indigestion when reading the stories, partly because of Chesterton’s imaginative power and his all-embracing humanity. (P.D. James, Talking About Detective Fiction)

These are high praises from a professional at her craft; although she acknowledges that “[m]uch of [Chesterton’s] output, particularly on social, political and religious subjects, has proved ephemeral”.

In my youth, I read Dorothy Sayers, something of an admirer of Chesterton. “As my whimsey takes me,” the slogan of her fictional Lord Peter, is something I have spouted many times. I bought an omnibus containing all the Lord Peter novels—but I don’t believe I ever got much past the first one or two. (I remember someone being murdered by a syringe filled with air.) The Father Brown stories were readily available, and looked intriguing, but possibly I grew out of the youthful detective fiction phase of a boy’s exploratory reading before ever having a chance to try one.

Because she was so celebrated, I did manage to read one by Dame Agatha Christie—though God knows which it might have been. Edmund Wilson classifies her style as the “puzzle mystery”, “brought to a high pitch of ingenuity” (such was the reputation) under her handling, yet my experience roughly parallels his:

I confess that I have been had by Mrs. Christie. I did not guess who the murderer was, I was incited to keep on and find out, and when I did finally find out, I was surprised. Yet I did not care for Agatha Christie and I hope never to read another of her books.

Presumably the Father Brown stories are not so austere as Wilson describes Dame Agatha’s:

Mrs. Christie, in proportion as she is more expert and concentrates more narrowly on the puzzle, has to eliminate human interest completely, or, rather, fill in the picture with what seems to me a distasteful parody of it. In this new novel, she has to provide herself with puppets who will be good for three stages of suspense: you must first wonder who is going to be murdered, you must then wonder who is committing the murders, and you must finally be unable to foresee which of the two men the heroine will marry. It is all like a sleight-of-hand trick, in which the magician diverts your attention from the awkward or irrelevant movements that conceal the manipulation of the cards, and it may mildly entertain and astonish you, as such a sleight-of-hand performance may. But in [such] a performance... the patter is a constant bore and the properties lack the elegance of playing cards.

I suppose Father Brown is drawn with less focus on the puzzle and more on the milieu, so that the “human interest” (or parody thereof) is more expansive. It may have been a window into Chesterton’s “all-embracing humanity” which is so absent from Orthodoxy. Yet even St. Anselm, who is much more logically coherent than Chesterton, is, in his work, all about the argument, and not about “humanity.”

Hoping to find something out about William Butler Yeats’ interest or compulsion with detective fiction—a genre much in vogue “between the two wars” —and whether or not he read or admired Chesterton, I looked into the only text I have readily available, his letters to Dorothy Wellesley. There was nothing, save for a delightful anecdote by way of hearsay:

My sister the embroidress has a pleasant memory of Chesterton. She was staying there. He got very drunk one night. Next morning he did not appear at breakfast. Presently a servant came in to say “Mr. Chesterton asks for a Bible and a tumbler of milk”. Mrs. Chesterton in unbroken gloom told the servant where the Bible could be found.

If you go to the Chesterton Society website (or page), you find there people bickering over whether or not Chesterton’s boozing and (gasp) smoking should be a bar to his canonization. (There also you find acolytes contemplating topics such as the “difference” between Catholic and Protestant drinking.) Fortunately, manmade canonization is not my field; the literary exclusively is. Whether Chesterton may have been a drunkard is of no matter to me. (His far greater contemporary, Oscar Wilde, outshines Chesterton as writer, philosopher, and moral paragon—yet his fall from grace is well-documented.) Some of the greatest of saints may well have led dissolute lives—certainly writers have—but what counts in the end, and where my interest lies, is with the work.

THANKSGIVING (1956)

11/26/2014

A Poem by E.E. Cummings

The primary influence of my poetic youth—that is, writing I did at the time I first realized I was a poet—was E.E. Cummings. Paul Carroll spotted this right off, and suggested I try to change from that; I was resistant. He was right, of course, but it was too early for that and the time was not ripe.

On the last day of class, he asked everybody to read something aloud. That was the first time I ever heard (or heard of) "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas. (The poem would later be the starting point for my own assays in the villanelle: see my poetry page under the titles The Condemnation, The Arraignment, and The Recusal.)

I recited "THANKSGIVING" BY Cummings—one of the few of his poems to bear a title, originally in all caps (I believe) so I have maintained that. It remains one of the few poems that I have memorized. "You didn't even look at the page" a classmate commented to me.

He took a lot of flak for insisting on reading this poem wherever he went. As a young lad, not knowing anything about the historic circumstances he was responding to, I could not help but feel admiration for his courage. The poem remains forceful today.

THANKSGIVING (1956)

by e.e. cummings

a monstering horror swallows
this unworld me by you
as the god of our fathers' fathers bows
to a which that walks like a who

but the voice-with-a-smile of democracy
announces night & day
"all poor little peoples that want to be free
just trust in the u s a"

suddenly uprose hungary
and she gave a terrible cry
"no slave's unlife shall murder me
for i will freely die"

she cried so high thermopylae
heard her and marathon
and all prehuman history
and finally The UN

"be quiet little hungary
and do as you are bid
a good kind bear is angary
we fear for the quo pro quid"

uncle sam shrugs his pretty
pink shoulders you know how
and he twitches a liberal titty
and lisps "i'm busy right now"

so rah-rah-rah democracy
let's all be as thankful as hell
and bury the statue of liberty
(because it begins to smell)

“To Know Cicero Is to Love Him”

11/25/2014

or, Familiarity Breeds Contempt

Did I really say, “To know Cicero is to love him”? Yes, that was me. What I meant to say...

After a hiatus, I am back to the letters of Cicero to Atticus. Really, if I finish this volume alone, it will be an accomplishment (following concurrently with the Shackleton Bailey biography). Letters to His Friends will have to wait for another time, if ever.

What I mean is, Cicero’s copiousness is his downfall. F.R. Cowell mentioned that we know no other ancient personality so well as we do Cicero’s, and that is true. Previously, as I said, I had read merely a part of what might be considered Cicero’s “Greatest Hits,” and certainly, under those conditions, “To know him is to love him.” Actually, I believe, as one grows to know him more deeply (or rather, in detail, as Cicero does not tend to burrow), it will still be possible to love him, “warts and all” as the saying goes. But I begin to see why any introduction to Cicero lists all of his character defects. He has them, they are manifold, and they are on display.

Part of it, simply, is a tad of revulsion at common humanity: as he begins his governorship of Cilicia, details of conquest emerge—the selling off of captives, the burgeoning panther trade—and it is only too easy to see human faults and foibles in undisguised form. The other part is force of his personality— “too much, too much!” I feel like crying, as he revels in his celebrity stature with some bombastic claim.

Yet he is worth knowing. To know Cicero is to know the Republic. The concluding paragraph of Tor Andrae’s biography of Muhammad floats before my mind.

In spite of everything that can be said in defense of Mohammed’s religious integrity and his loyalty to his call, his endurance, his liberality, and his generosity, we are not doing the Prophet of Islam an injustice when we conclude that this moral personality does not stand upon the same level with his other endowments; and indeed, not even upon the same level with his religious endowments. But if we would be fair to him we must not forget that, consciously or unconsciously, we Christians are inclined to compare Mohammed with the unsurpassed and exalted figure whom we meet in the Gospels, and that we cannot avoid seeing his historical personality against the background of the perfect moral ideal to which the faith of his followers tried to exalt him. And when it is measured by such a standard, what personality is not found wanting?

Any plethora of historical detail tends to work counter to hagiography. Today a found papyrus fragment which has Jesus saying “my wife...” causes an uproar. Unfortunately, the early churchmen severely culled what material remains we might have had of Christianity’s central figure. The nearest thing in time, as Garry Wills points out, remains Paul—who knew his Savior through a vision and not in the flesh. Jesus stands outside of history. Cicero most certainly does not (nor Muhammad for that matter), which remains a large part of his enduring attraction.

Hindsight is not an excuse for any (religious) apologist, even a well-intentioned one, to denigrate the past. That was not part of the Nazarene’s program.

Gilbert Ate a Filbert

11/24/2014

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Then Chesterton Was Done

Last thoughts on the topic upon waking up:
Hopefully these dregs will empty the cup.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley invented a poetic form known as the clerihew. He was a schoolfriend of G.K. Chesterton, with whom, apparently, he shared a taste for nonsense verse. The form is irregular—AABB in rhyme scheme—and, as much of this type of thing, intended to be a bit irreverent (if not irrelevant). The first line consists of the name of a famous person, so for example Marcus Bales (if not famous at least notorious enough now and again in online forums).

Marcus Bales
Has his fails,
But very few
When he attempts the clerihew.

Now, "has his fails" is the kind of line I would rather avoid, not comfortable with the current rage of substituting verbs for nouns ("fail" instead of "failure")—but it has always seemed to me that in this type of format "anything goes." (When you give the issue a good visitation, I suppose this transformation has some kind of history in English, but who is to say in any given case how long it will last?)

So, (something in line with what Edmund WIlson would have said as per my last post,)

Chesterton
Won
Praise
For a few days.

Of course available nonsense forms rank in complexity from the very simple, as above, to the more demanding. Limericks or "double dactyls" are harder to turn.

Orthodox for the phlox
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Went to the rest-au-ran'
Often enough:

Thomas Aquinian
Postprandiality
Turned his composure the
Sternest of stuff.

This "DD" is not quite a perfect one: the first line is supposed to be a pure nonsense phrase—but after you've seen enough of them you find they repeat. The second stanza must contain a single (appropriately measured) word for one line: in this case a made-up word is not strictly appropriate, though, as it came out of a waking dream, who am I to question it?

As a boy I did one which later on embarassed me to the extent where I disposed of every known copy of it—but such is the nature of the beast that things like this stick in your craw and I remembered it even after all these years.

Higglety-pigglety
Emily Dickinson
Getting from Higginson
Wondrous advice:

"Words with a definite
Anthropomorphism
Structured in rhythm"—now
Isn't that nice!

I destroyed it because it wasn't fair to the great man Emily Dickinson's preceptor. As it seems to demand a life of its own, I may hope that his spirit forgives me.

Urbis-et-orbisy
Marcus Aurelius
Never expected thus
To be remembered--

Kindled fame's bonfire not
Vaingloriosity:
Critics' pomposity
Kept his pyre embered...

This is perhaps a little too tortuous and abstruse, but at least it fits the occasion.

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Edmund Wilson and G.K. Chesterton

11/23/2014

Literary Chronicles Toward Posterity

In light of the post I put up two days ago, touching on the book Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton, it occurred to me to look up what Edmund Wilson, the most astute literary critic of his day had to say. Alas, not much. He wrote to Malcolm Crowley (September, 1936), "I'm not interested in doing anything about Chesterton—though somebody ought to." A man of principle, in a later letter to Harold Ross he explained his reluctance:

I have no intention of persecuting any religion; but I am myself a complete unbeliever, and I know from experience that both the Catholics and the Christian Scientists invariably make a squawk if anything critical is said about them.... Now I know that the Catholic Church is a formidable power at the present time; but I think it is important to stand up to it. For example, I have just read the Catholic biography of G.K. Chesterton, published by Sheed and Ward. If I had been reviewing books, I should certainly have had to review it; and if I had reviewed it, I should certainly have had to say that it suffered from the intellectual squalor of the Catholic Church in America. This would have brought you indignant letters and probably some people would have stopped their subscriptions. (October, 1943)

He rated comparison with Macaulay, whom Wilson described as "one of the most open, straightforward, and comprehensible literary men I have ever read about, and one of the most honest and admirable." Chesterton, however, got the worse end of juxtaposition: "He [Macaulay] had one of those able, dogmatic, and stubborn minds of which Johnson was the great typical example in the eighteenth century and Chesterton a perhaps somewhat enfeebled one in our own." No Chesterton scholar, yet I have seen enough to confirm Wilson's choice of traits.

Wilson, himself an insightful and able essayist on Charles Dickens, proposed George Gissing the "one admirable critic of Dickens."

For the rest, you have mainly G.K. Chesterton, who turned out in his books on Dickens some of the best work of which he was capable and who said some excellent things, but whose writing here as elsewhere is always melting away into that peculiar psuedo-poetic booziness which verbalizes with large conceptions and ignores the most obtrusive actualities.
. . .
Chesterton asserted that time would show that Dickens was not merely one of the Victorians, but incomparably the greatest English writer of his time; and Shaw coupled his name with that of Shakespeare. It is the conviction of the present writer that both these judgments were justified.

Once again, "here and elsewhere" hits the nail on the head: those passages I quoted two days ago highlight the melt and display little solidity—though there was little solidity to speak of in Orthodoxy.

Taking my lead from Wilson, I thought I should skulk around the internet for some other, less religiously-oriented and more literary-centric writing by Chesterton. He would not be the first critic whose literary conceptions arrive with clarity, but whose religious speculations (or social engineering proposals) inspire merely stupefaction: as much has been asserted of T.S. Eliot by his harshest critics. Not troubling to search too exhaustively, I very quickly stumbled upon a serviceable piece entitled "The Romance of Rhyme." Very little melting occurs; his pen stays true to its line: the result is a piece which admirably conveys a sense of what sort of literary issues were deemed important in its day, useful for the literary historian perhaps if not to be taken as a prescriptive for today's tyro.

Wilson felt posterity would hold Chesterton in a class with John Galsworthy, 1932 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature: "I can't imagine that anybody in the future will take Galsworthy very seriously—or Chesterton." If Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga gains him a slightly higher rank than Father Brown (or even The Man Who Was Thursday) among the serious literary community, Wilson could not have conceived the fervid intensity with which Chesterton's writing would continue to be held in esteem by its hermetic group of devotees.

Wilson "did not much care" for the few detective stories by Chesterton which he read. (I would be curious to know if Yeats—one of the many writers of the day addicted to the genre—was a fan, or W. Somerset Maugham for that matter.) "[T]he mechanical paradoxes of Chesterton" did not impress Wilson; more than once he took occasion to deride them: "The paradoxical epigrams of Chesterton, which became so mechanical and monotonous, are mostly unreadable today" he signaled in 1963. Yet I imagine Chesterton's more serious efforts in literary criticism may be of use to critics today: "Rhythm deals with similarity, rhyme with identity" is about as clear a statement of theory as one could want: would that today's critics offered as much.

The Cryptogram, Romulus, Iphigenia at Aulis

11/23/2014

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Some Recent Play Sightings

Shortly after I started writing plays, I made a decision to stop reading them. Heavy text-based attention was necessary to learning how drama functioned, and for that I turned to comedies. In the course of events leading up to that moment, of course, I had, here and there, read a play or two. I may well have done all of Sophocles after Oedipus Rex was assigned in a class; and other class assignments exposed me to a few other plays, but not many.

My first experience reading plays was those of Harold Pinter. Of that generation I hold his to be the best, although I have not revisited them in years: thematically my interests lie in a different direction. Of course in Chicago of those days, you could not avoid Mamet, and so I was acquainted with several of his earlier plays (on the page).

Even after I began writing plays, I did not entirely close out reading. A brilliant 1997 Defiant Theatre production of The Skriker turned me onto a course of intensive reading of Caryl Churchill. Although I have not read anything beyond two collections of her work (here and here), I retain fond memories of them and she remains my favorite living playwright. (I dearly wanted to see her play Seven Jewish Children when it was performed in Chicago but was unable to attend.) For sheer imagination and inventiveness nobody tops her—but I must temper that assertion with the caveat that, because of my decision, exposure to plays has been sporadic and haphazard.

Lately I have seen more—much more—than ever: in the last couple of weeks I attended Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides, Romulus by Gore Vidal (an adaption from Dürrenmatt), and The Cryptogram by David Mamet. Vidal and Durrenmatt are both on order from the library; Iphigenia I had hoped I possessed, but do not, so the Philip Vellacott translation will be coming. For the Mamet there is no need.

Lest that be construed wrongly, Mamet is probably the finest and surest hand presently active on the American stage—yet he seems to attempt so little, that, when you understand his mastery of technique, there is no reason to pursue further, especially when, as in my case, you find his politics antithetical: The Cryptogram is twenty years old now, and while it was a joy to see, it is hard not to suppose that his "hard turn to the Right" has crimped his style. (My second play, Mamlet, follows the foibles of a somewhat David Mamet-esque protagonist.)

Euripides is alien to me— "desperately foreign" to use the title of an essay by M.I. Finley—and while I have read The Bacchae with enjoyment if little comprehension, until seeing Iphigenia in Aulis at the Court Theatre I had little sense of the playwright. The staging was awkward, as much because Athenian stage conventions are unknown to us, as owing to what I take to be the befuddlement of the director; but on the whole well presented. What liberties may have been taken, or even what the state of the original text (Euripides' last play) in transmission I cannot guess—but hope Vellacott will have some insight for me.

The Dürrenmatt--or rather Vidal—is of a style or genre I am mostly unfamiliar with. Possibly "theater of the absurd"? Not schooled, or frankly, well-studied in drama (save as an autodidact with specific comedic targets), I am at a loss to characterize it. (I saw The Visit years ago, but have forgotten the whole of it; it will be included in the compendium I have ordered.) Thematically the sweep was broader than something by Mamet, but the execution possibly detracted. The scenario hinges upon the last Roman emperor (in the West), Romulus Augustus (or "Augustulus"), but it was not a history play. It was more camp than comedy—but, judged from standards of verisimilitude, not greatly more aberrant than the Euripides. (Imagine, if you will, Stan Freberg does "The Roman Empire.") Mamet, who strives to remain plausible, is not necessarily strengthened by that achievement.

Seeing plays performed has been an eye-opener: I have an appreciation for Tom Stoppard and Bernard Shaw, to give two examples, that their work on the page did not elicit. Possibly when the texts arrive and I have taken a look at them, I will have more to say.

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G.K. Chesterton and Straw Men

11/21/2014

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When Heresy Becomes Orthodoxy

A.E.M. Baumann has written:

“[T]he nature of a great amount of religious and conservative thought and propaganda, especially within fundamentalist circles” is to “establish a straw man out of the enemy so repulsive that the willing audience will on its own reject everything about the enemy, finding themselves then willing to accept anything that is said in counterpoint afterward.”

He is responding to some posturing done by acolytes of G.K. Chesterton, author most famously known for the Father Brown detective series. Dorothy Sayers—author of her own dick, Lord Peter Whimsey, and also a respected Dante scholar and translator—wrote of him: “To the young people of my generation, G.K.C. was a kind of Christian liberator. Like a beneficent bomb, he blew out of the Church a quantity of stained glass of a very poor period, and let in gusts of fresh air in which the dead leaves of doctrine danced with all the energy and indecorum of Our Lady’s Tumbler.”

Perhaps the book she was thinking of was Orthodoxy, a fanciful reinterpretation of Christian doctrine which has found many adherents. To wit: “Orthodoxy is a stunningly brilliant book written by one of the literary giants of the early twentieth century,” writes Lyle Dorsett, editor of G.K’s Weekly: A Sampler in a blurb quoted on the back cover. In the foreword to the 1994 Harold Shaw Publishers edition, Philip Yancy writes, “Chesterton readily admitted that the Church had badly failed the Gospel. In fact, he said, there is only one unanswerable argument against Christianity: Christians.”

These words only seem too applicable to the mouthpiece that is Chesterton. Scanning his book—but not attempting to read it—I find the author comes off as a sometimes charming (but often not) windbag. “I add one purely pedantic note which comes, as a note naturally should, at the beginning of the book,” he writes, in the last paragraph of Chapter One: it is the kind of indulgence that does not wear well with time. Indeed, much of the first chapter reads as though one were overhearing someone intoxicated with the sound of his own voice. Chapter Two begins with a “straw man” argument about some insignificant mortal who has made a foolish statement about self-confidence, and the easy refutation of it. Only in the second paragraph does Chesterton appear to begin to get down to business: “[T]his book may well start where our argument started—in the neighborhood of the mad-house.”

For me, it is too much to wade through a chapter plus one paragraph to get to the beginning; ergo I skim. (Let me not detain myself to examine the subsequent incorrect presumptions regarding sanity and madness, as they are not germane to my theme.)

Skimming ahead to Chapter Five, “The Flag of the World,” I find Marcus Aurelius—whom I have lately been reading—stunningly misrepresented to the point where he is unrecognizable. A bit of a lead in (pardon the flaccidity of the text: it is unavoidable with Chesterton):

Only the other day I saw in an excellent weekly paper of Puritan tone this remark, that Christianity when stripped of its armour of dogma (as who should speak of a man stripped of his armour of bones), turned out to be nothing but the Quaker doctrine of Inner Light. Now, if I were to say that Christianity came into the world specially to destroy the doctrine of Inner Light, that would be an exaggeration. But it would be very much nearer to the truth. The last Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, were exactly the people who did believe in the Inner Light. Their dignity, their weariness, their sad external care for others, their incurable internal care for themselves, were all due to the Inner Light, and existed only by that dismal illumination. Notice that Marcus Aurelius insists, as such introspective moralists always do, upon small things done or undone; it is because he has not hate or love enough to make a moral revolution. He gets up early in the morning, just as our own aristocrats living the Simple Life get up early in the morning; because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games of the amphitheatre or giving the English people back their land. Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types. He is an unselfish egoist. An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without the excuse of passion. Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within.

It is hard to know what to make of all this, or what prompts Chesterton’s animus against Quakers, but it requires an exceptionally broad brush to paint Marcus Aurelius into the Society of Friends. (The throwaway line about “stopping the games” or “giving... back [the] land” seems especially incongruent given Quaker successes in the political sphere—stopping the slave trade, for one—whereas mainstream Catholicism’s sins are all too easily and often trotted out (usually with some reference to Hitler thrown in). However, with reference to the Biblical Christ (“I come to bring a sword”) the Christianity espoused is a violent sort:

Marcus Aurelius and his friends [sic] had really given up the idea of any god in the universe and looked only to the god within. They had no hope of any virtue in nature, and hardly any hope of any virtue in society. They had not enough interest in the outer world really to wreck or revolutionize it. They did not love the city enough to set fire to it.

Slanders fabricated from hearsay obviously. Chesterton appears to know more about Aurelius than the historical record shows. This “moralist” of course is mainly known to us by virtue of some impromptu jottings never intended for publication that miraculously survived to posterity. (There are letters of the young man to his teacher—only a relatively recent literary discovery—and three speeches of doubtful authenticity, some various anecdotes recorded in other sources, and possibly what can be gleaned from broader-scale imperial actions, but that’s about it.) Gross mischaracterization noted by Baumann above traces its origins to the prototype. From a non-sympathetic perspective, what I have quoted comes across as the rantings and ravings of a lunatic; but a friend has promised an essay which may persuade me otherwise, and I look forward to it. For now, I would choose the Stoicism of Aurelius before the Christianity of Chesterton hands down. Possibly that “[t]hey did not love the city enough to set fire to it” is some attempt to contrast the Principate of Marcus Aurelius with that of Nero, to suggest that the former is somehow inferior to the latter—but it is the early part of Nero’s reign, given huge impetus by the Stoicism of Seneca, that history views favorably, and not the later. (Serious historians do not accept that the conflagration of Rome was set by Nero.)

“Code words” are sometimes employed by sects as a kind of shibboleth, to set themselves apart from the common run by employing language in other than the natural fashion. Something of that appears to be operational in Chesterton when he describes “nature worship”. It is hard to know what this phrase conjures up in his mind—or how that pertains to Aurelius—but in between the two extracts I have quoted comes another passage which I record merely as a note to myself, so I may think on it after Orthodoxy goes back to the library:

Nature worship is natural enough while the society is young, or, in other words, Pantheism is all right as long as it is the worship of Pan. But Nature has another side which experience and sin are not slow in finding out, and it is no flippancy to say of the god Pan that he soon showed the cloven hoof. The only objection to Natural Religion is that somehow it always becomes unnatural. A man loves Nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics, yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot bull’s blood, as did Julian the Apostate. The mere pursuit of health always leads to something unhealthy. Physical nature must not be made the direct object of obedience; it must be enjoyed, not worshipped. Stars and mountains are not to be taken seriously. If they are, we end where the pagan nature worship ended. Because earth is kind, we can imitate all her cruelties. Because sexuality is sane, we can all go mad about sexuality.

This reads as s kind of perverted Freudian self-analysis: what the gist is, I cannot (yet) fathom. But certainly Marcus Aurelius would not have said: “Stars and mountains are not to be taken seriously.” It is hard to give credulity to this kind of thought; yet today, as temperatures (and seas) appear to be rising, due to manmade causes, there are many who do. You wonder what William (“All Religions Are One”) Blake would make of this.

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Shackleton Bailey's Biography of Cicero

11/20/2014

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Gods in the Gutter & God's Skallywags

Human Failings in Literature

Cicero at Athens and Brundisium

As All Roads Lead to Rome

Chesterton: a Different Approach?

The Intemperance of Father Brown

THANKSGIVING (1956)

A Poem by E.E. Cummings

“To Know Cicero Is to Love Him”

or, Familiarity Breeds Contempt

Gilbert Ate a Filbert

Then Chesterton Was Done

Edmund Wilson and G.K. Chesterton

Literary Chronicles Toward Posterity

The Cryptogram, Romulus, Iphigenia at Aulis

Some Recent Play Sightings

G.K. Chesterton and Straw Men

When Heresy Becomes Orthodoxy

Shackleton Bailey's Biography of Cicero

Further Readings in Ancient Rome

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