Tsvetaeva, "Германии"

A work ("To Germany") by this poet written in Moscow about a decade and a half into the last century, including a reference to a beautiful city in which I once studied.  You can read the original here.

From all the world thou hidest as prey,
Thine enemies are legions long.
How can I then thy love betray?
How can I then chant treason's song?

What wisdom would I drink  in wine:
"An eye for an eye, blood for blood"?
O Germany, o madness mine!
O Germany, my only love!

Нow can I then so turn my back
On my surrounded Vaterland,
Where still through Königsberg fall tracks
Of narrow-faced and quiet Kant?

And cherishing a Faustian psalm,
On long-forgotten village routes,
Geheimrat Goethe, with cane in palm
Makes rugged use of gilded boots.

How can I then forsake thee now,
Germanic star, my sky of rhyme?
How then to halve my love's bold prow,
I have not learned – and at the time,

In ecstasy from thy sweet voice,
The captain's spurs I do not hear,
When good Saint George made me his choice
And Freiburg's Schwabentor appear?

Am I engulfed by utter rage
When Kaiser whiskers steal the sun?
When I have pledged at every age
My love to thee, my only one?

No wiser or more magical
A  fragrant land is there than thine,
As Lorelei her flaxen curls
Reflects in the eternal Rhine.

Se7en

Steady pouring rain has a certain effect on the human psyche: it reminds us of our mortality.  If we shudder at the thought of life's end, at a vacuum of empty and hollow nothingness, then we will be necessarily depressed by the deluge (this might explain why the least religious countries complain most readily about bad weather); if, however, we entertain other possibilities, there is no greater inspiration for our thoughts and actions.  We gaze upon the moods of the gray skies and their tears and we come to understandings about small constellations of detail that might not have occurred to us previously.  We see beauty as we never saw it before; we see the ones we have loved and, occasionally, the ones we will love; and we come, as the Romantics did, to grandiose conclusions about the contours of our souls and where they are destined to migrate.  Admittedly, these ideas are not for everyone.  Looking at those gray skies may cause the happy among us to drift into happier realms, but if we are already saddened by our stay on earth, our grief might be exacerbated.  Evil visions, past and future, might conspire and attempt to gain our attention and fears.   And as most palpable among these sweeps and swerves of thought we find our conscience and the numerous crimes that we allow it to amass.  Regardless of how good a life we have lived, how many correct and righteous decisions we have made, however faithful we have been to the people we care about, a few agenbites of inwit will obtain.  Perhaps our lies helped us to get ahead in life, while obliterating any chances of turning back (one of the watchwords in this film); perhaps we have been hypocrites and chided others for our own secret vices; perhaps we have not been faithful to anyone or anything save our own hedonistic urges, although you cannot be truly faithful to something that does not want the best for you.  Some of us who believe in divine retribution also see opportunities in the endless rain that wets the pages of our beloved tomes.  Which brings us to this famous film. 

The setup derives its pulse from contrasts that we have seen countless times before, and yet rarely as effectively.  There a young, white cop of gruff temperament (a maturing Brad Pitt), and an older policeman of African descent (Morgan Freeman) who has a distinctively mild take on life despite the myriad horrors he has witnessed in his line of work.  The younger cop bears the simple name of David Mills; the older the first two names of this well-known writer and moralist.  Maugham is a fitting choice because of  his instinctive feel for the weaknesses of others – insight that he exploited ruthlessly in his work, but that's a story for another day.  Weaknesses seem to abound in the unnamed and perpetually gloomy city in which the events take place, with it always (until the crucial last scene which is as bright and sunny as any postcard cornfield) being rainy, overcast, and late afternoon or early evening.  The two officers should have little to do with one another since Mills is on his way in and Somerset, in one of cinema's greatest clichés, a venerated policeman on the verge of retirement.  If you know modern film you also know what generally befalls retiring policemen, and if you don't I'll leave that matter to your own discovery. 

What links the two men is a nasty bit of business: a series of sadistic crimes with a strange pattern that would lead the faithful to suspect one of their own.  Our first victim is an obese character who is found face down in his pasta bowl.  The coroner (in a very busy role) inspects the corpse and surmises that the man, who was bound to the chair in which he sat dying, was forced to eat at gunpoint until his stomach or intestine or some component of the digestive apparatus could no longer endure and burst.  Thus, we may conclude, this poor beast was obliged to eat himself to death – an ironic twist on his obvious sin, gluttony.  Gluttony, as someone said, is the sin that lasts the longest in our lives, but it is the first here and would have little bearing on the religious beliefs of all involved were it not for the subsequent discovery of a lawyer who bled to death in his office.  Our coroner determines that this fellow, who happens to be Jewish like the villain in this renowned play, had the now-proverbial pound of flesh extracted from him in exchange for a temporary reprieve from death's shroud.  Since the evidence suggests there was no way he would have survived, even with near-immediate medical attention, his murder was as deliberate as that of our first sinner although the lawyer's crime, greed, was far worse.  To help our two detectives with their search, the sins in question are scrolled in blood across prominent display areas at the crime scenes.  We know and they know there will be five sins left, and the plot has all the kinetic energy it needs to reach its dénouement at full speed.

A few words of advice before you proceed to unravel the order in which all seven deadly sins – envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, sloth and wrath – are portrayed.  This film, which I happened to see upon its initial release in the autumn of 1995, is not for, forgive the pun, the weak of stomach.  You may only be exposed to the remnants of violence but they are disturbing enough to keep you awake well past the closing credits.  Most people are duly aware of what well-known actor emerges as the killer John Doe although the actor's name was not officially associated with the film to heighten its mystery; in any case, the age, appeal and acting ability of the person selected is superb, dovetailing nicely with the intricacies of the crimes without frothing over into hamhanded wickedness.  The world in which all these atrocities are committed is fallen and, sad to say, still falling – the hallmark of the noir genre in which morality has long since been replaced by a half-rued resignation to man's inherent flaws.  No one can be trusted; no one is above suspicion or guiltless; and, worst of all, no chance for any kind of redemption seems to be available.  There is also the matter of Mills's wife Tracey (Gwyneth Paltrow), who tries to palliate her irascible spouse with the same mildness that makes her get along so well with Somerset.  The three form a tenuous bond, mostly out of need on the Millses' part, but also because Freeman always comes off as nothing if not sincere, and in one great scene they sit around at dinner as a train rumbles beneath them, brutally jostling the apartment and its residents.  Apparently trains run every ten or fifteen minutes even during the night, which might explain the good deal they got on rent.  "The real estate agent took us here in-between trains," say the newlyweds, and Somerset nods.  Here even rental agencies are not immune to those gray skies.

Sonnets from the Portuguese

Many years ago in a class on Russian literature, I caught myself puzzling over an aside by one of my professors (professors, after all, are famous for their asides).  She claimed that the word poetess was a burden simply because of that triliteral suffix that let us know that George Sand and George Eliot were nothing more than socially acceptable pseudonyms.  Female authors are of course far less of an oddity than they were in the days of this Gothic writer; but how men and women are supposed to differ in writing is similar to how they allegedly differ in other forms of existence.  There are numerous bestselling works on this subject and they are all wrong.  Not that, mind you, women and men shouldn't celebrate their differences, but that they should be chary of obscuring their commonalities.  It is, in all likelihood, much harder to be a woman; they are judged on their appearance much more readily and viciously; they are expected to be weak and vulnerable, because otherwise they might not be deemed womanly; they learn history by learning mostly about the accomplishments and struggles of men; and because of these circumstances they receive different treatment.  When they are emotional, we are not surprised; but when a man is emotional, he steps down the long road to becoming a great poet.  When a woman cries, we shrug our shoulders; when a man cries, he has searched the bottom of his soul for words commensurate with his feelings and surfaced gasping for air.  When a woman loves, it is because she must love in order to be a woman; when a man loves, it is because he has found a woman he can do nothing to but love.  And when a woman finds her faith, it is seen as a fallback position to not making it in the world, whereas for a man it is the beginning of the greatest journey he will ever take.  Which brings us to this collection of poems about both love and faith by one of the finest – male or female – English-language poets.

Of the forty-four sonnets, you will surely know something of the forty-third.  Despite its fame, it is inferior to at least half of its companions, and not only for its simple cadence and almost saccharine pleas to love.  Barrett Browning has a special talent for talking in circles, no less evident in the seventeenth poem:

I never gave a lock of hair away
To a man, Dearest, except this to thee,
Which now upon my fingers thoughtfully
I ring out to the full brown length and say
"Take it."  My day of youth went yesterday; 
My hair no longer bounds to my foot's glee 
Nor plant I it from rose- or myrtle-tree,
As girls do, any more. –
(XVII)

If you like this style of poetry, you will be very happy with Sonnets from the Portuguese, and, I may add, with Barrett Browning's work as a whole.  It is precisely these types of meanderings through girlhood and womanhood, through things that men can only listen to but not experience, that beget the moniker of "female writing," or less graciously, "writing like a woman."  And whatever you may think of them, they have established themselves as veritable methods of investigation in the academic community.  There are many criteria for determining male and female writers, and the criteria, like so many of our loose cultural conventions, have wriggled through a number of distinct phases in the last century and ours (for example, according to one scholar's measuring sticks, the most female of authors is actually this famous Irishman).  Indeed, Barrett Browning is aware of her femininity (a word of which I am hardly fond) insofar as she speaks to her husband, the great poet Robert Browning ("the liberal and princely giver, who hast brought the gold and the purple of thine heart" [VIII]), as his wife.  Half of her sonnets are about being his possession, in every sense of the word, and her understanding that this fatidic relationship has been approved by God.  In the thirty-third poem, she wishes unreluctantly for her husband to return her to her childhood (a wish contradicted by a superb, later poem):

Yes, call me by my pet name! let me hear
The name I used to run at, when a child,
From innocent play, and leave the cowslips piled,
To glance up in some face that proved me dear
With the look of its eyes.  I miss the clear
Fond voices which, being drawn and reconciled 
Into the music of Heaven's undefiled.
Call me no longer. –
(XXXIII)

I can find no fault in these lines; there is no error or misstep; but in comparison to other poems, the expression appears shallow, wasted on frivolous tidbits.  We all miss the "clear, fond voices" of our past, yet nostalgia for these lost people and places – and the younger years of the people we know are all lost – remains one of our most fundamental means for coping with life's downturn, with the misery that besets those who have nothing but brief time ahead.  Barrett Browning is young, but her youth, her maidenhood, is over.  She is now a woman and a wife, and will be so perhaps even "better after death."

Unless your English teacher is of a particular bent,  you will not hear much past the endless love of the Brownings and their unique place in the English literary canon.  Yet Barrett Browning is at her best when her husband, beloved as he may be (the word appears at least a dozen times) becomes an element rather than the target of her verse.  Take, for example, the exquisite thirty-sixth:

When we first met and loved, I did not build
Upon the event with marble.  Could it mean
To last, a love set pendulous between
Sorrow and sorrow?  Nay, I rather thrilled
Distrusting every light that seemed to gild
The onward path, and feared to overlean
A finger even.  And, though I have grown serene
And strong since then, I think that God has willed
A still renewable fear ... O love, O troth ...
Lest these enclasped hands should never hold, 
This mutual kiss drop down between us both
As an unowned thing, once the lips being cold,
And Love be false!  if he, to keep one oath,
Must lose one joy, by his life's star foretold.
(XXXVI)

Were I more prone to hyperbole, I would deem this poem perfect; as it were, it is unblemished.  The sonorous stack of "feared," "overlean," "finger" and "even" cannot possibly be duplicated, and the sense is so precise that no other image quite renders the idea appropriately.  More important for our purposes, however, is the separation of poet and deity: the pairing might indeed have been the work of a higher power, but the poet himself is as human as his wife, who also happens to be a poet.  She cannot "build upon the event with marble" (a stark contrast to this poet's glorious advice "forget thyself to marble") because we are dealing both with mortals and mortals are plagued constantly by one thing, uncertainty.  At times, they know nothing greater than themselves; at others, nothing lowlier.  For that reason, perhaps, we get the following lines:

I lived with visions of my company, 
Instead of men and women, years ago,
And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know
A sweeter music than they played to me
(XXVI)

Few finer stanzas will you find in Barrett Browning's work.  What she captures is the essence of every poet's dilemma: to live among the rest, or imagine a world in which to live.  Every poet has preconceived notions of happiness, love, sorrow, anger; every poet wants to know every last emotion and justify it with the very event, good or bad, that might summon it from within him.  What he cannot imagine is that he will not experience everything, love everyone he is destined to love, or write everything that he is destined to write.  Yet he loves the future.  He loves the future because of the anticipation of being an even more accomplished poet.  Not in the sense of commercial success, which is all too often the barometer of mediocrity, but of writing with greater precision and scope.  Is that why Barrett Browning quotes herself in XLII ("my future will not copy fair my past")?  Should we care that she was hesitant to publish these works, with the pet name her husband bestowed upon owing to her appearance?  But Barrett Browning does care, if a bit too much at times, although read as a whole, her poetry is consistently optimistic, faithful, loving, and grateful to life for everything it has given her.  That embrace of life's wonder was rare then and is even rarer now.        

Sachliche Romanze

I have very fond memories of this poem ("Objective romance") by Erich Kästner (known mainly as the author of Emil and the Detectives), learned while studying in beautiful Freiburg im Breisgau.  You can read the original here. 

Eight years they'd known each other well  
(And one can say quite well at that),
When suddenly their love's light fell
Like others lose a cane or hat.

And sadness rose, then merry lies, 
And kisses flew to cloud their fate. 
Without a plan they wed their eyes;
At last she wept, beside her mate.  

The ships were close enough to wave,
When he declared it four-fifteen.
A coffee might this day still save,
Next door a piano's scales were lean.

A small café, the smallest lair
They chose and stirred each with one hand.
When evening came, they sat still there;
They sat alone, no words to share,
And simply couldn't understand.

Bartleby, the Scrivener

Each year, as life hems its sleeve more tightly around our wrist, we are greeted with tidings of differing sensation.  There are good tidings, pleasant reminders of our privileges; small disappointments that can be mocked to raconteurish ends; and occasionally even wonderful swoons of information, turning points.  If you are a family man, the best news you will ever receive will concern your children and their welfare; alone, or in a quiet couple, hints of love or respect, or even career success might be the most satisfying seconds of life.   But behind each glorious memory lurks the possibility of disappointment which makes that glory all the more fantastic and delightful.  The old aphorism about pessimists' never being disappointed is codswallop: they are always disappointed.  They are saddened by every detail and swerve of our existence and never content with partial success, and for that reason complete success is to them an alien concept.  Whenever someone quips that he does not like to be disappointed, I know immediately that I am dealing with a child.  I know as well that this person will never be happy with anyone or anything because, in his heart of hearts, there is something that he hates about himself. 

The best people on this earth – I am lucky enough to know a few – are happy at all times, fundamentally happy to be alive and healthy, happy that the sun still shines, that we have seasons, that we have fewer wars now than ever before, that the smallness of the world allows us to experience the lives of others in startling new ways.  Disappointments knock on their doors (they have a very distinctive knock), but they don't answer.  After a while, they proceed to a curtained window and watch the monsters skulk away, to knock at other doors.  Sometimes those monsters are ones we love that do not love us back – unrequited love, however selfish, remains the greatest of our disappointments – other times we lose people close to us for a variety of causes, mostly not of our own doing.  As we get older, the monsters tend to stop by more frequently; peering out the same trusted window, we see that they are more varied; sometimes they even come in pairs or threes, plying their trade like any cobbler or haberdasher.  But when we are young and life stretches out before us like that one woman you would give anything to possess, soul and body – and we all have one such person – we cannot allow our coils to be blackened and tarred.  We cannot evince signs of the grave, signs of refusal or indifference to life, because that would mean we were already dead.  This is the premise of arguably the finest short story in the English language.

Our narrator, as opposed to the titular character, is an older man, who "from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best."  He is an attorney at law in what we still call Manhattan, as well as the supervisor of a triptych of oddball characters rightly appropriated from Dickensian annals:  Turkey and Nippers, two Englishmen of sixty and twenty-five, respectively, and of varying tempers, and a young gopher called Ginger Nut.  Their names owe their eccentricity to the narrator's wish for life to be easy and happy; frivolous monikers are part and parcel of jesting with mortality.  Our story thus begins with a sort of caricature of the curious shifts in mood on the part of the narrator's staff: Turkey is well-mannered and diligent before lunch, but a wretched beast once fed; whilst Nippers only manifests the bare bones of courtesy in the afternoon.  The description of Nippers's testiness (which the narrator, in another effort to play down its moral consequences, labels "indigestion") is particularly superb:

[Nippers evinced] especially a continual discontent with the height of the table where he worked.  Though of a very ingenious mechanical turn, Nippers could never get this table to suit him.  He put chips under it, blocks of various sorts, bits of pasteboard, and at last went so far as to attempt an exquisite adjustment, by final pieces of blotting-paper.  But no invention would answer.  If, for the sake of easing his back, he brought the table-lid at a sharp angle well up towards his chin, and wrote there like a man using the steep roof of a Dutch house for his desk, then he declared that it stopped the circulation in his arms.  If now he lowered the table to his waistbands, and stooped over it in writing, then there was a sore aching in his back.  In short, the truth of the matter was, Nippers knew not what he wanted.  Or, if he wanted anything, it was to be rid of a scrivener's desk altogether.

This last observation, after a series of comic asides, is quite obviously the truth, but our narrator still makes little noise of it.  When relating the insufferable behavior of Turkey, the narrator similarly obliges himself to lessen our expectations by likening his employee to an animal: "in fact, precisely as a rash, restive horse is said to feel his oats, so Turkey felt his coat.  It made him insolent.  He was a man whom prosperity harmed."  A more astute observer would have depicted Turkey's unwillingness to wear his employer's hand-me-down overcoat as a shallow form of pride based on the entitlement of age (especially since, we are told, he and the narrator are practically coevals); but it is the narrator's interest to preserve this sideshow atmosphere for what is to come.  Or, I should say, who.

Demand, that great overlord, progresses to the point that the office needs additional help ("There was now great work for scriveners"), so an ad is placed and quickly answered.  It is here that we first meet the subject of our tale:

In answer to my advertisement, a motionless young man one morning stood upon my office threshold, the door being open, for it was summer.  I can see that figure now – pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!  It was Bartleby.

From these first lines it is clear that Bartleby is already no longer among the living.  So when the narrator avers that the "mettlesome poet, Byron" could not have sat down with Bartleby to "examine a law document of, say five hundred pages, closely written in a crimpy hand," he might as well have made Byron the register of all hedonism and sensation that life offers and Bartleby his spiritless counterpart.  By virtue of his name, however, one might be led to believe that Bartleby belongs in an office with a Turkey, a Nippers and a Golden Nut, but this is also completely deceiving.  The newest hire wishes for nothing but the opportunity to carry out his scrivener work unimpeded by the whims of his patron, who "in [his] haste and natural expectancy of instant compliance" elects to give Bartleby some additional, menial business.  And Bartleby responds with one of the most famous retorts in literary history – 'I would prefer not to,' begetting the following reaction:

I looked at him steadfastly.  His face was leanly composed; his gray eye dimly calm.  Not a wrinkle of agitation rippled him.  Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there been anything ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises.  But as it was, I should have as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of-Paris bust of Cicero out of doors.

The precedent is now set and maintained throughout.  Bartleby cannot possibly accept anything more than the core task of his profession, the copying of documents, as if he himself were a shadow or imitation of life.   His only response to the narrator's requests never changes, and the latter expresses his frustration in a statement that rings truer today than one hundred fifty years ago: "nothing aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance."  After numerous roadblocks, the narrator alights upon a curious conclusion:

He is useful to me.  I can get along with him.  If I turn him away, the chances are he will fall in with some less indulgent employer, and then he will be rudely treated, and perhaps driven forth miserably to starve.  Yes.  Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval.  To befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange wilfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience.

The narrator, like the reader, is aware of the duality of his condition.  He should pity Bartleby, and rightly intuits that most others won't; and yet being a martyr has little benefit to himself or others.  Why should it be he that assumes the burden of this dead emotional weight and "mulish vagary"?  Why he and no one else?  For the sweetening of his own regrets and misdeeds?  Perhaps that is not symptom enough to take on this unmindful young man; perhaps the discovery of Bartleby's afterhours whereabouts will sway the narrator in another direction.

If you do not regularly read this author, the greatest artist America has ever produced, I would recommend rearranging your schedule.  More than Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Updike, and Salinger, Melville has no peers, no equals, no one who can touch him when he is at his best.  His greatest work, produced at the staggering age of thirty-two, might have four or five novels worth its value; his poetry is largely unread although equally magnificent; but his greatest contribution might be his short fiction, insofar as Typee, Omoo, White Jacket, and Redburn have an anecdotal quality to them that suggests an exotic necklace of bright beads rather than a wholesome, perfectly contained pearl.  But Bartleby is a pearl, the rarest of gems that has much in common with a Russian short story, also one of the best ever written.  And also one that might spring from the adage: Ah, happiness courts the light, so that we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none.