November Books

a shining simulacrum

I continue my sabbatical from longform criticism as I write my novel, Major Arcana, which I am now serializing in both text and audio format for paid subscribers. For now, a catalogue of my last month’s reading cross-posted from johnpistelli.com. Please enjoy!

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The Books of Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi
And so the King James Old Testament comes to an end. (Catholic and Orthodox Bibles have more books. I’ll have to catch up with them next year in Herbert Marks’s Norton Critical Edition of the New Testament and Apocrypha. I’ve read the New Testament before, give or take some pseudo-Pauline epistles, but never in the King James; I don’t think I’ve read the Apocrypha at all, unless they assigned parts of it that I’ve forgotten back in Catholic school.) These final prophets leave me at a loss, just as the earlier ones did, so I will forego a commentary that would only repeat what I’ve said earlier of more illustrious figures like Isaiah and Ezekiel. I do admire these lines against idolatry from Habakkuk, with which I will take my leave of this book I’ve been reading for 11 months:

What profiteth the graven image that the maker thereof hath graven it; the molten image, and a teacher of lies, that the maker of his work trusteth therein, to make dumb idols?

Woe unto him that saith to the wood, Awake; to the dumb stone, Arise, it shall teach! Behold, it is laid over with gold and silver, and there is no breath at all in the midst of it.

But the LORD is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him.

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
This is one of those nonfiction classics, classics of “thought,” that you think you’ve read because its thesis is so familiar, so curtly encapsulated in its title—but in fact you haven’t read it. I won’t belabor an argument you’re probably already familiar with. Freud opens this 1930 book with a dismissal of the “oceanic feeling” of metaphysical interconnectedness that gives rise to religious faith. First, he says he’s never felt it. Then he says this feeling represents only a regression to the pre-ego state of infancy, when we were fused to our mothers, rather than an experience of the numinous. From this materialist presupposition, he sets out his view that society, which we organized for the benefit of our collective protection against the elements and against one another, will always conflict with the individual’s primal instincts, particularly those instincts of sex and death, the wish to possess those we desire and to destroy those who impede our will. The argument is mostly a conservative one directed against utopian and progressive dreams. Freud even pauses to express skepticism about the then-ongoing Soviet experiment, given the material, i.e., humanity, it was forced to work with: “nature,” he writes, “has introduced injustices against which there is no remedy.” He more liberally suggests, on the other hand, that civilization might alleviate some unnecessary psychological suffering if it loosened its sexual mores and ceased to insist “that there shall be a single kind of sexual life for everyone.” There is also an amusing excursus against the Christian injunction to universal love: “not all men are worthy of love,” Freud objects with charming literalism. As always with Freud, you can take or leave the argument. The readerly pleasure is in the physician’s gently ironic and proudly disabused tone, a tone of mingled arrogance and forbearance accounting for the continued literary esteem he still enjoys long after science’s abandonment of his system. Freud is a true essayist. Some people have also called him a true poet—I may have called him this myself—but you probably need to feel the oceanic feeling to be one of those. Then there are his always startling imaginative leaps. He does think, poet-wise, in associations. I will take the good doctor’s leave with this one, a likening of individual to collective psychic growth:

The analogy between the process of civilization and the path of individual development may be extended in an important respect. It can be asserted that the community, too, evolves, a super-ego, under whose influence cultural development proceeds. It would be a tempting task for anyone who has a knowledge of human civilizations to follow out this analogy in detail. I will confine myself to bringing forward a few striking points. The super-ego of an epoch of civilization has an origin similar to that of an individual. It is based on the impression left behind by the personalities of great leaders—men of overwhelming force of mind or men in whom one of the human impulsions has found its strongest and purest, and therefore often its most one-sided, expression. In many instances, the analogy goes still further, in that during their lifetime, these figures were—often enough, even if not always—mocked and maltreated by others, and even despatched in a cruel fashion. In the same way, indeed, the primal father did not attain divinity until long after he had met his death by violence.

Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks
Like Freud, Yeats had also decided in favor of the reality principle by 1930. He traveled a longer road than our alienist, however, to arrive at this modernism—at what he called “the desolation of reality.” Ellmann, in the first of his three great biographies of the modern Irish writers, determinedly charts just this path. Ellmann’s Yeats (1948), which I’ve just read for the first time, is less exhaustive than his magisterial James Joyce (1959) and more theoretical than his novelistic Oscar Wilde (1987), each of which I’ve read twice. Advertised on the cover of the old paperback edition as a “critical biography,” the book is more interested in the development of the poet’s thinking than in the events of his life, though his father and Maud Gonne and the Golden Dawn and Lady Gregory and the Abbey Theatre and Ezra Pound and the Easter Rising and the Irish Senate and Georgie Hyde-Lees and the Blueshirts do make their entrances and exits in the proper places. Writing in the dead middle of Freud’s century, Ellmann explains our poet oedipally: Yeats was always reacting against his father’s Victorian Romanticism and liberalism in quest of a more solid coherence of identity. He began as a preternaturally shy young man at the end of the 19th century by seeking his self in Irish myth, nationalist politics, occultist doctrine, and Aestheticist poetry, but never rested in his quest until he arrived at his own magical mythopoeia in the 1920s (inspired by messages dictated from the beyond through his mediumistic wife) and at his mature poems, no longer the Pre-Raphaelite verses of his early years but those tragic and severe lyrics of the 1920s and ’30s that define his modernism and his greatness. Ellmann seems to admire this never-resting mind. Aesthetically, no one can deny the majesty of the late work. But as befits our poet in his ravening old age, the whole story could also be read as a tragedy, no less baleful for its being inevitable: a sensitive boy becomes an armored man. Ellmann is good on the literary background and, more surprisingly, on the occult background, too. (The chapter “Esoteric Yeatsism” can be read for free online. Its cogent summation spares us, or at least I hope it does, from having to read A Vision. The duty one occasionally feels to read a book laying out a system is one of those discontents civilization imposes upon us, and, as I have no mind for systems, I almost always fail to obey this duty. Ellmann tells us that Yeats, who only learned to read at all at the age of nine, did not seriously read philosophy until almost his final decade, wanting to compare his own system with those of others, so there’s hope for me yet.) Ellmann is vaguer on politics and history. For our poet’s questionable public life, I break no ground in recommending Conor Cruise O’Brien’s classic, “Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W. B. Yeats,” not online, alas, but included in O’Brien’s 1988 collection also called Passion and Cunning. O’Brien explains in meticulous historical detail, with reference less to Yeats’s psychology than to his class and sectarian background, the poet’s bent toward the authoritarian. What I mostly recommend, however, is this hidden YouTube gem, a 40-minute documentary that aired on Irish television in 1982, where Ellmann and Seamus Heaney stroll through Dublin and environs talking about the lives and works of the biographer’s three great subjects.

A. S. Byatt, Angels & Insects: Two Novellas
After having loved her 1990 breakthrough, bestseller, and Booker-winner Possession in college, after having become enamored of her long story “The Thing in the Forest” when I discovered it recently in an anthology I was teaching from, I’d intended to go back to Byatt. She died this month, so I did. This enchantingly titled 1992 diptych was her follow-up to Possession: two novellas about Victorian life and literature, as her beloved novel also was. The first, “Morpho Eugenia,” deserves to be a classic. It concerns a lowborn naturalist, William Adamson, who’d spend a decade in the Amazon before entering a noble family in the 1850s and ’60s by marrying its beautiful eldest daughter, Eugenia Alabaster. Byatt began her scholarly life as a Spenserian, so note the allegorical names: the questions of faith and doubt implied in the century of Darwin by denominating a man “Adam’s son” and the political implication of a white eugenics. “Morpho Eugenia,” continuous with the literary criticism of its time, takes great pleasure in exposing the sexual and social underbelly of Victorian rectitude. I won’t spoil the plot except to say that it has to do with an anagram of the collection’s eponymous “insects.” It is about ants and butterflies, selective breeding and crises of faith, anthropology and entomology and fairy tales, sex and love and intellect. Its moral, pronounced on its final page by the one character shared, David Mitchell-style, between the collection’ two novellas, is this: “As long as you are alive, everything is surprising, rightly seen.” Byatt handles the whole affair, as it were, with such a lushness of prose and sensuous detail, such insight into mind and nature, such adept mimesis of so many different kinds of writing and speech, that the novella never seems shrill or didactic, the way the period’s aforementioned criticism, when making the same points, sometimes was. Above all, it’s a good story, if one that feels almost written to be the last thing assigned in Brit Lit II. (Byatt, we recall, was an academic.) That’s less of an insult than it sounds, however, since, if it were to be assigned in Brit Lit II, its prose would not have to blush in embarrassment next to such inevitable company as Austen or Dickens or Conrad or Woolf:

The vegetation belonged to no place on this planet, and in some sense to all. English primroses and bluebells, daffodils and crocus shone amongst evergreen luxuriant tropical creepers, their soft perfumes mingling with exotic stephanotis and sweet jasmine. She turned round and round, and the butterflies circled, and the captive water splashed in its little bowl. He thought he would always remember her like this, whatever happened to her, to him, to them, in this glittering palace, where his two worlds met. And so he did, from time to time, for the rest of his life: the girl in the blue dress with pale sunny head, amongst creepers and Spring flowers, and the cloud of butterflies.

The second novella, “The Conjugial Angel,” though no shorter, is slighter, and also academic: speaking of Brit Lit II, it might be described unkindly as In Memoriam fan fiction. Tennyson’s great long poem of 1850, we recall, is an elegy for his dead friend Arthur Henry Hallam that doubles as a compendium of Victorian anxieties about the collapse of faith in the modern age. Byatt introduces us to the poet’s sister in the year 1875. Long ago engaged to Hallam, she hires spirit mediums to help her contact his shade. Via this scenario, Byatt explores spiritualism vs. materialism, the nature of love and marriage, relations among men and women, the sources and purposes of poetry, the weight of grief, and the perennial appeal of the occult. (This novella has enough Swedenborg in it to rival Balzac’s Séraphîta). Byatt often wrote about the inevitability of biographical interest in major writers. Accordingly, this story about the way grief drives its sufferers to desperate metaphysics cannot fail to recall for us the death of Byatt’s son at age 11. Again attuned to the academic interests of her era, she pays due attention to Tennyson and Hallam’s homoeroticism. Again concerned with providing a good yarn, she ventures into outright horror; she suggests with Lovecraftian disquiet at the story’s climax that, as Tennyson’s contemporary Melville wrote, “the invisible spheres were formed in fright.” In a bravura passage, she boldly enters Tennyson’s own consciousness and imagines his poetic process. With this beautifully evoked aesthetic credo, I will say farewell to Byatt, and to you:

If the air was full of the ghostly voices of his ancestors, his poem let them sing out again, Dante and Theocritus, Milton and the lost Keats, whose language was their afterlife. He saw it as a spinning circular cage in which he was a trapped bird, a cage like a globe, rimmed with the bright lines of the horizons of dawn and dusk. He saw it as a kind of world, a heavy globe, spinning onwards in space, studded with everything there was, mountains and dust, tides and trees, fly and grubs and dragons in slime, swallows and larks and carrier-birds, raven-glossed darkness and summer air, men and cows and infants and violets, all held together with threads of living language like strong cables of silk, or light. The world was a terrible lump of which his poem was a shining simulacrum. The world burst and slid, and expanded into shapelessness, of which his poem was a formally delightful image.

Arthur Garth Jones, illustration to In Memoriam (1901)