Nietzsche’s followers will readily recall the myth of Anteus, who renews his strength only when he touches the earth. In his poetry Milosz has revised this myth, giving us an Anteus who recovers his strength by contact with both the earth and the sky.
The happily double-edged nature of Milosz’s poetic (and essayistic) talent, his scrupulous attention to the truth of collective life and a higher, ecstatic truth, has enabled him to create a body of work before which both Naphta and Settembrini must stop short—not only with profound respect but with great interest. Perhaps, then, true ardor doesn’t divide; it unifies. And it leads neither to fanaticism nor to fundamentalism. Perhaps one day ardor will return to our bookstores, our intellects.
2 The Shabby and the Sublime
Il n’est pas de poésie sans hauteur …
—Philippe Jaccottet
Whenever we speak of anything more general than, say, the view from our own window (a cherry branch, and behind it the late afternoon’s cloudy sky), we risk being charged with arbitrariness. You might say it that way, but then again—the critic scoffs—it could be put quite differently. Pandemonium prevails in the realm of general propositions, something like the chaos of a barracks abandoned an hour earlier by a regiment out for spring training.
I’m touchy about this particular accusation: poets are especially sensitive to the charge of arbitrariness. Poetry, after all, involves precision and concreteness; words are verified not, as Rudolf Carnap would have it, through empirical, quantifiable observations. They are verified through existential preparedness, through experience, through our own lives, through reflection and moments of illumination. But they are verified. They don’t appear randomly. Only provincial physics teachers who down a few beers every night could conceive of poetry as the realm of absolute license.
But when someone who works alone in the concrete domain of poetry ventures into the realm of general propositions—like a carpenter who’s been asked to talk on the problems of European forest administration—he must shield his brow, take a deep breath, and with quick, unflinching steps traverse this treacherous terrain. And so to me, writing and thinking in recent years have come to seem meager, gray, anemic. More specifically, the output of recent years—I’ll take poetry as my example, since that’s what I follow most closely—is marked by a disproportion between the high style and the low, between powerful expressions of the inner life and the ceaseless chatter of self-satisfied craftsmen. I have the sense that we’re up against a kind of fainthearted appeasement, a policy of evasions and concessions as concerns the literary vocation. And I see one of the chief symptoms of this weakness in the decline of high style and the overwhelming predominance of a low style, tepid, ironic, conversational.
Let me state from the start that I don’t speak as a conservative. I don’t recommend a return to medieval Christianity, the Renaissance, or even something as close at hand as European Romanticism. And I won’t bemoan the dearth of talent, since I don’t see any dearth of gifted writers. I want only to describe the situation as I see it, running the risk at every moment of committing some faux pas, of alienating socialists or sportsmen, stamp collectors or supporters of education and hygienic housing. I won’t propose a diagnosis; you diagnose when you’re young and ambitious, but the time comes later for meditation and, at most, the distress sometimes accompanied by something like a chuckle.
How did this all get started? Do we know?
At times we may unexpectedly catch sight of how things used to be before the mutation of European literature. In Robert Graves’s remarkable memoir Goodbye to All That, we find the following description of a meeting with Siegfried Sassoon:
Siegfried Sassoon had, at the time, published only a few privately-printed pastoral pieces of eighteen-ninetyish flavor … We went to the cake shop and ate cream buns. At this time I was getting my first book of poems, Over the Brazier, ready for the press; I had one or two drafts in my pocket-book and showed them to Siegfried. He frowned and said that war should not be written about in such a realistic way. In return, he showed me some of his own poems. One of them began:
Return to greet me, colours that were my joy,
Not in the woeful crimson of men slain …
Siegfried had not yet been in the trenches. I told him, in my old soldier manner, that he would soon change his style.
The trenches of the First World War led to what was probably an inevitable change of style. They thrust writers in the direction of an outraged realism. Did they also lead to a gradual evolution of human nature? Graves’s generation had a quarrel with the silver-tongued orators of the Victorian era, with impassioned elocutionists, abusers of high-flown speech such as d’Annunzio in Italy. The splendid Eugenio Montale constructed his poetics precisely against the grandiloquence of poets like d’Annunzio. Above all the poets of Graves’s generation despised the hysterical style of journalists and generals. After his return to England from the front, Graves recalls, it was months before he could bear the publicists’ patriotic syntax. Disgustedly he quotes a letter written by a “little mother” intended to persuade other British mothers that they should rejoice in their sons’ valiant deaths! Having experienced the horror of war, the rats in the trenches, the campaigns to “no man’s land” where unburied German and English corpses lay rotting, Graves was now confronted, and revolted, by the pronouncements of British chauvinism. During a war, generals—and their wives—employ the high style. It enters naturally into the service of propaganda.
In the trenches of the First World War, and more unimaginably, the camps of the Second World War, people saw things no one should see, things that, in calmer times, would be experienced only by a few unfortunates standing eye to eye with their own murderers. It is probably impossible to create an art that could answer to the terror of those extreme experiences in a trustworthy and consistent way, that would “scale the heights” of the lowest depths in modern history. These radical experiences inevitably lead in the end to a rejection of Mozart’s sonatas and Keats’s odes. Someone will always turn up to insist that literature is just literature and music is only music; and that person, as harrowed as Job (or perhaps just a precocious student at a prestigious university), will be right. It is just literature, it is only music. That’s the best we have.
The young Tadeusz Rozewicz, a poet who came not from the camps but from the forests that generously hid the partisans of World War II, effected something like an about-face in Polish poetry. He stripped it of its complex syntax, its velvety similes, and baroque accumulation of tropes, and replaced them with a radical starkness of expression.
To be sure, this simplification of style, which was often strikingly successful and opened new vistas in art, was brought about by a multitude of factors. The pressure of modernity made itself felt in all forms of art, not just in poetry. The onslaught of social criticism, descended from the Enlightenment and coupled with what Ortega y Gasset called “the revolt of the masses,” joined forces with the disillusionment of the Romantic poet who had failed to persuade the masses to his vision (the French literary historian Paul Benichou dissects this phenomenon beautifully) and imbued poetry with its sardonic humor. Louis MacNeice once remarked that Auden managed to “put the soul across in telegrams.” Auden and a few others were able to pull this off, but there was no shortage of poets who were almost fatally paralyzed by these stark means of expression; their souls became telegraph forms.
The trouble is that great simplicity—and everyone who seeks both beauty and truth has dreamt of it—achieves its bracing effect only by contrast with complex, baroque forms, and the result is never lasting. The moment of transformation, the instant of contrast, passes quickly. It’s like a surgical procedure which is not supposed to last long—unless you forget about the patient. Tadeusz Rozewicz remains an outstanding poet, but today he achieves more rarely the almost supernatural simplicity of his early poetry.
Paradoxically, the purging of aesthetics under the influence of horror, the simplificat
ion of art by shock, leads in the long run to an aesthetics that can express neither horror nor shock. (It’s worth noting that neither Milosz, who survived the Nazi terror, nor Mandelstam, who didn’t survive the Stalinist nightmare, ever fell prey to the lure of a false simplicity.)
I’ll give another example. My friend Tzvetan Todorov, with whom I often agree and occasionally argue, published an essay several years ago called “Eloge du quotidien,” or “In Praise of the Quotidian,” a discussion of several paintings from the golden age of Dutch painting. Todorov rightly admires the Dutch masters, about whom we may say (following Neruda, as cited by Seamus Heaney) that thanks to them “the world’s reality will not go unremarked.” Here is the world’s reality, in this poetry of dim interiors, in these still lifes, natures mortes, disclosing the delicate being of things, paintings in which onions and leeks achieve the dignity of royal silk, portraits of men and women who were neither kings nor princes, but who merited nonetheless a depiction full of tenderness. How can we comprehend the sensitivity of these painters, we who regularly fear that reality will melt beneath our fingers, for whom even the movies, unlike the vibrating electrons of television, seem somehow pleasantly old-fashioned, since they can at least occasionally convey people and objects in their absolute, opaque presence.
But the aims of Todorov’s elegant essay extend beyond the philosophical treatment of art history. The essay serves a normative, programmatic purpose. It attempts to establish a sphere of life—and a corresponding sphere of art—from which certain elements are excluded. “In Praise of the Quotidian” presents a program for life and art, an antimetaphysical program. It confers special ontological status upon the quotidian. We must adore the quotidian, value it, so as not to seek refuge in nostalgia, utopias, or fantasies. It summons us to live in the present moment, to root ourselves in reality. But at what cost? Here is Todorov:
The genre painter is not satisfied only to renounce history; he makes a choice, and a highly restrictive choice, among all the actions that make up the tissue of human life. He renounces the representation of everything that exceeds the ordinary, and remains inaccessible to the majority of mortals. There is no place here for heroes and saints. When Karel Capek visited Holland, he remarked that the Dutch painters must have done their painting sitting down …
I resist precisely this pruning, this reduction of reality, this contraction of human life—and art!—to a narrow zone that holds no place for heroes and saints. It’s not that I want to propagate heroics or compose hagiographies; I have something else in mind. On the level of aesthetics, contact with the sublime gives us the equivalent of “heroes” and “saints.” This contact is never unadulterated—we have such thick skin these days that we probably couldn’t stand an epic poem that functioned only as a conduit to the sublime, that didn’t amuse and puzzle us at the same time. Still it remains indispensable for art. How little divides us finally from Longinus and his classic work on the sublime, written in the early years of our era. The literary encyclopedia reminds us that the sublime is not a formal feature of a work and can’t be defined by way of rhetorical categories. It is instead “a spark that leaps from the soul of the writer to the soul of his reader.” Has so much really changed? Don’t we still wait greedily for that spark?
Surely we don’t go to poetry for sarcasm or irony, for critical distance, learned dialectics or clever jokes. These worthy qualities and forms perform splendidly in their proper place—in an essay, a scholarly tract, a broadside in an opposition newspaper. In poetry, though, we seek the vision, the fire, the flame that accompanies spiritual revelation. In short, from poetry we expect poetry.
Todorov’s gesture is dangerous—it rends the rich fabric of reality, the cloth that we received whole from previous generations and that we are obliged to pass on undamaged to generations yet to come. It is a web of human experience holding room for heroism and saints, for madness, tragedy, and reason—as well as for laughter, of course, and the quotidian, since the quotidian, too, is beautiful. But it is beautiful not least because we sense in it the quiet quivering of potential events, enigmatic, heroic, exceptional events. The quotidian is like the surface of a peaceful, low-lying river, where delicate currents and eddies are etched, auguring rushes and floods that may or may not come to pass. The mute lightning bolts in the sky don’t trouble us for now, they are omens of distant storms. But those storms will reach us one day. A notion of the quotidian that omits all possibility of heroism and saintliness—the shiver of a tragedy still distant—is flat and monotonous. Moreover, it is not true to life, and hence cannot form the ontological basis for a persuasive aesthetics. I am not in thrall, I hope, to what the Polish critic Karol Irzykowski called “the highbrow mania for tragedy”; but I insist that a complete sundering of the sublime must finally lead to a world of chess-playing computers, not living, mortal, humans.
Todorov concludes one section of his essay with a description of a painting by Pieter de Hooch called Mother and Children, which hangs in Berlin. In the picture’s background we see a girl gazing at the world. “The girl is not looking at anything,” Todorov writes, “she turns her eyes toward the emptiness outside, smitten by a spell that has stolen her away from the real world. The whole of life, the infinity of the universe, drives her on. She regards the light.”
In this passage, one of my favorites, we glimpse a way to revise Todorov’s narrow program, although it remains unrealized. Precisely because the world that opens before the chubby little girl is boundless and mysterious—the painting just hints at “the world” as the northern daylight invades the cozy bourgeois interior through a half-open door—it must encompass both the known and the unknown. Neither heroism nor saintliness can be axiomatically excluded, any more than one can remove the ultraviolet rays from daylight or expel the dead from the earth. But Todorov wants precisely this; he wants to purify the earth, to diminish it.
“In Praise of the Quotidian” is a brilliant work; on first reading, it completely won me over. It is marked, though, by a kind of trahison des clercs, a breach of faith. It betrays a strong—too strong?—affinity with the mood of our unheroic era. But it is surely a clerk’s duty to open himself to the world beyond clerkdom. He must think and judge without yielding to the temper of the times. “Philosophy is the epoch’s judge, but things go ill when it becomes the epoch’s mouthpiece,” Rudolf Pannwitz observes, as Hofmannsthal reports in his astonishing Book of Friends.
The sublime must be understood differently these days, of course. The concept must be stripped of its neoclassical pomp, its alpine stage set, its theatrical overkill. The sublime today is chiefly a perception of the world’s mysteries, a metaphysical shudder, an astonishment, an illumination, a sense of proximity to what cannot be put into words. (It goes without saying that these shudders must take a persuasive artistic form.)
I mentioned madness among the elements that make up that great reality of which we are the trustees, thanks to the very significant accident of our birth. The marvelous little-known Italian essayist Nicola Chiaromonte—a political émigré, antifascist, and friend of André Malraux and Albert Camus, he died in Rome in January 1972—wrote in an essay on Shakespeare:
But in the world today madness has been eliminated for reasons of dogma: in our world only the most rigorous rationalism is given voice, and thus absurdity erupts on every front, and the claims of human madness, which insists on its due share, turn into bitter rebellion and a passion for destruction.
Our great reality obviously contains many other elements as well. Can we count them all? Should we?
They include not only darkness, tragedy, and madness but also joy. Not long ago I was rereading the essays of Jerzy Stempowski, a major Polish essayist who spent the second half of his life as a humble émigré in Switzerland, in Berne, where he died in 1969. And I came upon a surprising quotation from Maupassant—surprising, since you don’t expect metaphysical gifts from naturalists! I must have come across it earlier, but its force struck me this time
.
From time to time I experience strange, intense, short-lived visions of beauty, an unfamiliar, elusive, barely perceptible beauty that surfaces in certain words or landscapes, certain colorations of the world, certain moments … I’m not able to describe or communicate it, I can’t express it or portray it. I save these moments for myself … I have no other reason for continuing, no other cause for keeping on …
“Strange, intense, short-lived visions of beauty”—how could we live without them! “I can’t describe it,” Maupassant says. And we discover in his account something very familiar that is also very difficult to convey. In such moments one experiences something incomprehensible and piercing, both extravagant and absolutely fundamental.
Origen thought that those who have been fully initiated into a religion’s substance come to live in a spirit of eternal joy, an unending holiday. Only novices, he said, require the labored cheerleading of official church holidays! It is very clear that we who live today are not among the initiates; our holidays last only moments.
And these ephemeral revelations of beauty are coupled in some strange way with moments of great sorrow, of overwhelming grief. Yet neither one nor the other is simply a personal whim, a mere mood swing; both the joy and the sorrow correspond to something in reality itself. We don’t exactly know what causes beauty; suffering’s causes are easier to guess.
This mixture of impermanence and permanence, the blending of what vanishes and what remains, is yet another ingredient of our reality—that is, if we choose not to be reductionists. A workman’s shovel may suddenly uncover a pocket mirror of gold flashing among the ordinary, rough, unpolished lodes. Mortal and immortal moments likewise mingle in the abundance of our everyday existence. I suppose there are far more of the former than the latter, but who knows? Has anyone counted?
A Defense of Ardor Page 3