by Alex Preston
You are flown into Čáslav Airport in a Breguet 941. Your assistant, Bruno, has radioed ahead with instructions to the site team. You are forty-six, single, wealthy. In the years since you began working at the firm, Société Peñarroya has been taken over by Damrec and then reverse-merged into the Imerys conglomerate, but your arm of the business – Mine Safety Solutions, S.A. – has continued its uninterrupted ascent. Now, as Germany slips by beneath, you sift through reams of file notes and technical data until you understand the situation in the collapsed mine down to the most minute detail, and this pleases you. You picture yourself as a surgeon operating on the heart of the earth: instead of scalpels, you have auger bits, instead of stents you have pipe-jacking. You are about to extend the metaphor further in your mind when the plane hits an eddy of turbulence, a delicious lurch where you feel the sudden precariousness of being airborne. Then the plane wheels down, down, like a gull, like a tern, and with three sharp bumps and a squeal of rubber on tarmac, you have arrived.
A car is waiting to hurry you along the dálnice. A ribboned functionary of the CSSR sits beside you, asks you, in English, to sign documents ensuring complete – he jabs the word with his finger – confidentiality. You have worked with the Russians, you tell him. You know the drill. You smile; he doesn’t. You lean back and look out of the window: a brief glimpse of the Elbe, then endless forests of melancholy white birches, drab towns rising like dreams from the flat landscape. A thick mantle of fog lies over the land around the Sokolov Mine. You pass between two watchtowers poking up out of the murk. Intimations of the blasted landscape around. Then, as the car – a well-upholstered Dacia – slows, you make out through the fog the usual gaggle of press and politicians, the miners’ families who stand in silent, watchful clusters. As you step out into the damp air, they look at you with fretful, fearful hope.
We lost another three men to the river. Two of them, brothers, Serbs I think (they muttered and grunted to each other, barely spoke to us), chanced themselves to the water. They stood on the cusp of the ravine like angels on the rim of a cloud, clasped each other by the hand and jumped. We shone our torches down upon them, but their grip must have slipped, because only one brother was visible, grabbing onto a slab of rock and drinking greedily, his face in the river like a pig in its trough. Then a surge of water and he let go, looking up at us, and we saw him disappear into the mouth of the tunnel. I imagined the two boys, like tongues in the river’s throat, sliding onwards, onwards, praying for a break in the rock, then the release of breath, the white choke of the water, and still, even though life had left them, sliding on, deeper, in utter darkness. The third man – Karel – wouldn’t pray with us. Now there were thirteen men left, and me. I held my knife in one hand. In the other I waved a cigarette lighter, tracing patterns in the afterdamp as we prayed: green and crimson and sulphurous yellow flames that shifted and glowed. As I wrapped the colours around me, I pictured myself as a bird of some deep paradise, decked in plumage of iridescent light. The men looked to me as their father, reaching up to touch my beard as, one by one, I judged them, and found them wanting.
The collapse of the shaft proves more difficult than you’d imagined, the rock more porous and granular, the angles of incidence more acute. You install double telescopic jacks, relay bars, a reverse-mounted ram that begins to pump away at the knitted earth, throwing up great joyful clouds of rock and soil. You make a tour of the families, examining the wives in their damp eyes, letting your gloved hand rest on the heads of the children. After three hours, a breach is made in the rock and you oversee the insertion of steel castings. The shaft becomes wider, wide enough for the lift mechanism. You remove the yellow safety helmet and wipe a sleeve across your brow.
You insisted on being the first to descend; this was your indulgence, your katabasis: a trip to the land of the dead. The lift machinery clanked and thunked as you passed out of sight of those above ground. Rocks crumbled and shifted, but you were sure of the shaft’s integrity, certain of your own calculations. You practised the face you would show to us, the saved – benevolent and wise. There were bottles of water at your feet, flashlights, medical packs. The lift reached the dusty floor of the cave with a rumble. A moment’s pause. You could hear the rushing of the water, could see the river that was already slopping over the edge of the cliff-face; then you turned towards me.
It takes your habitual face a careful moment before it adjusts to the scene. I stand there, have been standing waiting ever since the first distant thuds came to us, five hours earlier. I have been writing your story. The air around me is plumed through with colour, great swirls of light that illuminate my eyes, my beard. A shimmering green cloud seems to hover above me, brooding over the scene. I am alone, the prophet of these dark reaches. All the others, all my scared and sinful children, are deep in the belly of the earth.
I don’t know if the tale I have invented for you is the right one, or if maybe the man now standing on the lift platform before me is instead a Silesian mine-owner, a German medic, an English aid-worker. But I am pleased with the shape and scope of the story I have given you, and so, when you try to speak, to cry out and reveal your language, I spring forward and press my palm across your mouth, my knife to your throat. Yours is the last body I heave into the water. I watch you go, my child, your body bobbing for a while before the current really takes it, and you are sucked down into the earth’s black maw.
I send the lift back up, empty. Then I stand in the heart of the technicolour clouds, running the point of my knife across my palm, and I begin another story, my mind spooling out and up into the world of endless possibilities, the world above ground.
You are born in the military hospital in Prague – your father is an officer, your mother a ballerina at the conservatory, only just seventeen. Within hours of your birth, you are spirited through the snowy night to the Carmelites at the Cloister of the Infant Jesus of Prague. They name you Marek, no, Kazimir, no, Roman. Even as a child, you are drawn to wounded, fragile things. Now you step onto the platform that has appeared in the mouth of the shaft. You stand on the small metal lift and you begin to descend – clunk, clunk, clunk – and as I wait for you, my beard dripping, the waters slopping, my palms held out, I tell your story.
REALMS OF GOLD
Sarah Churchwell
1924
IN December 1924, Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda were living in the Hotel des Princes, a small, unfashionable but comfortable – and affordable – hotel in Rome, on the west side of the Spanish Steps. Across the steps, on the east, stood the Casina Rossa, the house in which John Keats had died a century before. The Fitzgeralds had chosen the Piazza di Spagna for its proximity to the ghost of Keats. This was no mere touristic gesture: Fitzgerald’s feeling for Keats went beyond appreciation, or even love, into a kind of literary fealty. Keats, it has been said, was the greatest poet of pleasure in our tradition. Pleasure was not something he merely felt, but something he understood: exaltation as a moral response to the joy of existence, a natural state of intoxication.
The Fitzgeralds had come to Rome from the French Riviera in November after Fitzgerald submitted the manuscript of his third novel, so he could complete revisions for publication in the spring. This novel used Keats throughout, threading allusions and updatings, turning romantic poetry into roaring jazz. As of the beginning of December, Fitzgerald was still vacillating over his novel’s title, writing to his editor that maybe it should simply be called Trimalchio – or perhaps just Gatsby. He couldn’t decide. But one thing he believed: ‘I think my novel is about the best American novel ever written,’ he confessed to his editor.
Two weeks later, Fitzgerald wrote another letter from the Hotel des Princes, this one a simple note of thanks to a translator who had sent him a new edition of a volume of Sappho’s poems. ‘The Sappho followed me around Europe and reached me here,’ he said. ‘It’s gorgeous – I’d always wanted to read Sappho but I never realised it would be such a pleasure as you’ve made it.’
He closed by thanking the translator, John Myers O’Hara, for his courtesy in sending the copy.
Some years later, it seems, Fitzgerald sent O’Hara a reciprocal volume: in this case, an inscribed copy of his own first novel, This Side of Paradise. (‘It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being,’ he writes of its protagonist.) What prompted the gift is unclear, but Fitzgerald inscribed it in ‘Washington D.C.’, which means it was likely sent sometime between 1930 and 1935, by which point the Fitzgeralds were living in Baltimore.
The inscription read: ‘For John Myers O’Hara, who first introduced me to Sappho in his translations, with a thousand thanks. “Much have I travelled in the realms of gold . . .” His most cordially, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Washington D.C.’
You’d think that a translator of ancient Greek would have appreciated the compliment, but you’d be wrong. In 1935, the book was auctioned. It wouldn’t have got much.
But it begins a story riddled with quotations, quotations that form riddles. Riddle, derived from the Old German for read.
1816
IN the autumn of 1816, John Keats spent the evening with a school friend who had been lent a sumptuously illustrated folio book published 200 years earlier. Its title page, styled ‘The Whole Works of Homer: Prince of Poetts In his Iliads, and Odysses, Translated according to the Greek by Geo. Chapman’, was embellished with drawings of heroes and gods, along with several Latin mottos, working as early blurbs. The largest one, ‘qui nil molitur inepte’, is how Horace described Homer: ‘one whose efforts are always successful’.
Keats was acutely aware of the question of literary success. His impecunious family had pushed him to become a doctor, in the hope that it would help them achieve financial security, but he desperately wanted to write poetry. All that autumn night, aspirant, glimmering, he sat poring over the 1616 folio with his friend Charles Cowden Clarke, ‘shouting with delight as some passage of especial energy struck his imagination’, Clarke later remembered. Here, at last, was what he had been seeking, a catalyst to spark his own genius into life. Here, at last, he found inspiration.
For someone who had only encountered Homer through the pale Augustan precision of Alexander Pope, Chapman’s Homer was nothing less than an epiphany. Keats was left ‘exclaiming’, Clarke recalled, startled into ‘one of his delighted stares’, by lines such as this description of shipwrecked Odysseus: ‘the sea had soak’d his heart through’. They had Pope’s translation open nearby for comparison; it rendered the same phrase ‘his swoln heart heav’d’.
To be fair to Pope, the words swollen and heaved certainly suggest waves and tempests as well as heavy hearts. But how much more propulsive and memorable is that figurative, alliterative doubling of the sea soaking everything, including the hero’s heart. Here was poetry with its pulses pounding, its fingers trembling.
At ‘day-spring’, after a night spent reading aloud, his heart soaked with words, his mind filled with ‘teeming wonderment’, Keats strode home, a poem forming in his mind. The draft survives, and shows that he wrote it almost without correction, the poem pouring from him like the imaginary waves that had inspired it.
‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’ is widely considered Keats’s first great poem, the initial step from promise into genius. And what makes it so marvellous (literally, to be marvelled at) is that it is a poem about marvel, and revelation. It’s about suddenly discovering – not what you’ve been looking for but rather, what so surpasses your meagre imagination that it leaves you breathless, staring, silent.
Except it left John Keats anything but silent. A few hours later, Clarke said, he came downstairs to find a sonnet awaiting him with his breakfast.
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Here is the sudden exhilaration of sensing worlds to conquer; but here also is not understanding until you understand; there’s a reason ‘comprehend’ means both understand and encompass. Indeed, the line ‘never did I breathe its pure serene’ originally read: ‘Yet could I never tell what men might mean’. Often Keats had heard of Homer’s greatness, but never had he felt it, never had he breathed its essence, until Chapman spoke out ‘loud and bold’ into the stillness.
Speaking in the first person, Keats merges the voice of the poet with that of the voyager into new lands, the discoverer of ‘realms of gold’, the golden dawn of a new age of poetry. His wonder at encountering new lands, new oceans, was his wonder at discovering new possibilities for poetry. This poem announced not merely Keats’s arrival as a poet, but his ability to ascend artistic peaks.
It is about odysseys of discovery, of a world suddenly enlarged, expanded. This is why it’s so apt that Keats’s master metaphor comes from Homer, and that he keeps his metaphors so strictly within the realms of exploration. Here was no mere attempt, no feeble velleity. Here was the grandeur of endeavour – like the famous voyage of the Endeavour, in which Captain Cook set sail to a different new world in 1768. ‘On First Reading Chapman’s Homer’ left its first readers similarly struck dumb, standing before an enormous vista of poetic possibility.
Two years later, Keats’s brother George voyaged to the United States. Whatever his faith in the inspirational power of imaginary Americas, Keats was considerably less sanguine about the real thing. Although some believed ‘that America will be the country to take up the human intellect where England leaves off’, he begged to differ:
A country like the United States whose greatest Men are Franklins and Washingtons will never do that. They are great Men doubtless but how are they to be compared to those our countrymen Milton and the two Sidneys . . . Those Americans are great but they are not sublime Man – the humanity of the United States can never reach the sublime
But maybe an Englishman with poetry in his heart could beget a great American poet. That was the ‘prophecy’ John Keats wrote for his brother George in 1819 upon learning that George and his wife were expecting their first child: perhaps their infant would grow up to be ‘the first American poet’, a writer who ‘dares what no one dares’:
It lifts its little hand into the flame
Unharm’d, and on the strings
Paddles a little tune, and sings
With dumb endeavour sweetly!
Bard art thou completely,
Little child
O’ the western wild,
Bard art thou completely!
Sweetly with dumb endeavour,
A poet now or never . . .
Here is a poetic endeavour indeed: the western world would need to produce its own bard.
But many continued to doubt whether America could ever prove capable of such a feat, not least because (the argument went) they lacked the cultural and historical mettle to forge an as-yet-uncreated national literature. Throughout the nineteenth century, American writers were themselves often the first to concur.
Seven years after Keats died, in his 1828 travelogue ‘Notions of the Americans’, James Fenimore Cooper declared that aspiring American writers were crippled by a ‘poverty of materials’:
There are no annals for the Historian; no follies (beyond the most vulgar and commonplace) for the satirist; no manners for the dramatist; no obscure fictions for the writer of romance; no gross and hourly offenses against decorum for the moralist; nor any of th
e rich artificial auxiliaries of Poetry.
Four decades later, the argument was still being made. John William DeForest introduced a new phrase into literary history when he mused in an 1868 essay about when it might be possible to produce ‘the Great American Novel – the picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence’.
Although a novel might prove possible, DeForest was certain ‘that the Great American Poem will not be written, no matter what genius attempts it, until democracy, the idea of our day and nation and race, has agonized and conquered through centuries, and made its work secure’. This may have come as disappointing news to a poet named Walt Whitman, born in 1819, the same year that Keats presaged the birth of the first great American poet. Whitman had published Leaves of Grass a full thirteen years before DeForest’s essay, but he doesn’t even earn an honourable mention. Great American poetry was an endeavour for another day – but maybe Americans could scrape together sufficient art to produce something more prosaic in the meantime?
Afraid not, DeForest answered. Irving had been ‘too cautious to make the trial’, Cooper ‘shirked the experiment’, Hawthorne had written ‘three delightful romances’ but showed only ‘a vague consciousness of this [American] life’. Uncle Tom’s Cabin had come closest, but to anyone asking if the time had yet come for the Great American Novel, he answered: ‘Wait.’