Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays

by Cynthia Ozick

  And lest we dismiss this as merely another of James’s ghost stories, or simply as a comical parable, we had better recall that celebrated Jamesian credo, a declaration of private panic mixed with prayerful intuition, which so many writers secretly keep tacked over their desks: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task.” The statement ends memorably, “The rest is the madness of art.”

  The madness of art? Maybe so. But more likely it is the logic of invisibility. James has it backwards. It’s not the social personality who is the ghost; it is the writer with shoulders bent over paper, the hazy simulacrum whom we will never personally know, the wraith who hides out in the dark while her palpable effigy walks abroad, talking and circulating and sometimes even flirting. Sightings of these ghost writers are rare and few and unreliable, but there is extant a small accumulation of paranormal glimpses that can guide us, at least a little, to a proper taxonomy. For instance: this blustering, arrogant, self-assured, muscularly disdainful writer who belittles and brushes you aside, what is he really? When illicitly spotted facing the lonely glow of his computer screen, he is no more than a frightened milquetoast paralyzed by the prospect of having to begin a new sentence. And that apologetically obsequious, self-effacing, breathlessly diffident and deprecatory creature turns out, when in the trance-like grip of nocturnal ardor, to be a fiery furnace of unopposable authority and galloping certainty. Writers are what they genuinely are only when they are at work in the silent and instinctual cell of ghostly solitude, and never when they are out industriously chatting on the terrace.

  What is the true meaning of “the madness of art”? Imposture, impersonation, fakery, make-believe—but not the imposture, impersonation, fakery, or transporting make-believe of inventive storytelling. No: rather, art turns mad in pursuit of the false face of wishful distraction. The fraudulent writer is the visible one, the crowd-seeker, the crowd-speaker, the one who will go out to dinner with you with a motive in mind, or will stand and talk at you, or will discuss mutual writing habits with you, or will gossip with you about other novelists and their enviable good luck or their gratifying bad luck. The fraudulent writer is like Bellow’s Henderson: I want, I want, I want.

  If all this is so—and it is so—then how might a young would-be writer aspire to join the company of the passionately ghostly invisibles? Or, to put it another way, though all writers are now and again unavoidably compelled to become visible, how to maintain a coveted clandestine authentic invisibility? Don’t all young writers look to the precincts of visibility, where heated phalanxes of worn old writers march back and forth, fanning their brows with their favorable reviews? Isn’t that how it’s done, via models and mentors and the wise counsel of seasoned editors? “I beg you,” says Rilke, addressing one such young writer,

  I beg you to give all that up. You are looking outwards, and of all things that is what you must now not do. Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you to write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places in your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of the night: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be in the affirmative, if you may meet this solemn question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity.

  Thus the poet Rilke, imploring the untried young to surrender all worldly reward, including the spur, and sometimes the romantic delusion, of Fame, in order to succumb to a career in ectoplasm. Note that he speaks of “the quietest hour of the night,” which is also the darkest, where we do what we can and give what we have. The madness of art—and again I willingly contradict Henry James—is not in the art, but in the madding and maddening crowd, where all manner of visibilities elbow one another, while the ghosts at their writing tables sit alone and write, and write, and write, as if the necessary transparency of their souls depended upon it.

  Out from Xanadu

  In my late teens and early twenties I was a mystic. It was Blake and Shelley who induced those grand intoxications, and also Keats and Wordsworth and Coleridge. At New York University, where Thomas Wolfe had once taught freshman composition, his shade—O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again—sometimes still flickered. Dylan Thomas, not yet in his cups and not yet renowned, came to a handful of students in an ordinary classroom and chanted, as if to a hall of hundreds, The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, syllables instinct with divine afflatus. Meanwhile I was writing an undergraduate thesis on the Romantic poets, and though I knew neither the word nor the concept, I was at that time seriously antinomian. Nothing was distinct, or of its own indivisible nature, nothing was fixed, nothing was demanded: all was wavering spirit and intuition. Rapture and ecstasy, ecstasy and rapture!—these were imagination’s transports, abetted by the piercing sweetness of melancholy. The sage was withered from the lake, and no birds sang; or else they chorused thrillingly, like celestial choirs.

  Besides being a mystic and an antinomian, I was also a believing monist: all things were one thing, watercolor worlds leaching and blending and fading into porous malleable realms. Yearning and beauty were the heart’s engines, shocking the waiting soul (mine, anyhow) into a pulsing blur of wonderment. In Xanadu, where Alph, the sacred river, ran, you might actually see the blessed damozel leaning out from the golden bar of Heaven! As for where the Spirit of God dwelled . . . well, where else but in you and me? (Primarily, of course, in me.) The Ten Commandments? In Xanadu nobody had ever heard of them.

  At twenty-four I blundered, I no longer recall where or how, into “Romantic Religion,” a trenchant meditation—or manifesto, or scholarly credo—by Leo Baeck. His name, his stature, his personal history, his transcendent learning, were all unfamiliar. That he was of that remarkable German-Jewish generation which included, among many other humanist eminences, the historian Gershom Scholem and the philosophers Martin Buber and Walter Benjamin, I had yet to discover. Nor did I know that Baeck was a rabbi consumed, beyond the vastnesses of his own multifaceted tradition, by Greek and Christian thought; or that he was of that minute fraction of Jewish humanity to have come out of Theresienstadt alive. When I stumbled into the majesties of “Romantic Religion,” I was as one (so it seemed to me afterward) who had conversed with Socrates while ignorant of Socrates’ origins and identity.

  Not that Baeck was Socratic in his tone or approach. His essay was a formidable looking glass. In a dissenting voice more analytic than scornful (though scorn seethed behind it), he told me off. For the romantic, he wrote, “everything dissolves into feeling; everything becomes mere mood; everything becomes subjective. . . . Fervently, the romantic enjoys the highest delight and the deepest pain day after day; he enjoys the most enchanting and the most sublime; he enjoys his wounds and the streaming blood of his heart. . . . Experiences with their many echoes and billows stand higher in his estimation than life with its tasks; for tasks always establish a bond with harsh reality. And from this he is in flight. He does not want to wrestle for his blessing, but to experience it, abandoning himself, devoid of will, to what spells salvation and bliss.” And again: “Everything, thinking and poetry, knowledge and illusion, all here and all above, flows together in a foaming poem, into a sacred music, into a great transfiguration, an apotheosis. In the end, the floods close over the soul, while all and nothing become one.”

  In the hundred energetic pages of Walter Kaufmann’s translation from the German (Kaufmann was himself a Princeton philosopher), under headings such as “Ethics,” “Humanity,” and “The Sentimental,” Rabbi Baeck had me dead to rights. I had been surrendering my youth to Weltschmerz, to Schwärmerei, to Welttrunkenheit, all those unleashed Wagnerian emotions which, Baeck pointed out, Hegel had once dismissed as the displacement of “content and substance” by “a formless weavin
g of the spirit within itself.” The opposite of all that besottedness was “the classical, ethical idea of history” as manifested in “the Kantian personality who confronts us as the bearer of the moral law”—the law of act and deed that is itself “an essential part of that honesty which man owes to himself: the test of criticism.” Who could criticize a dream? And what was that dream but immersion in fantasy and illusion? “Ethics evaporates into exaltation,” Baeck declaimed. “Justice is to be reduced to a mere feeling and experience; the good deed is effected not by human will but by divine grace; man himself is a mere object and not a personality. The will becomes supernatural, and only concupiscence remains to man. . . . Something more diametrically opposed to ethics than romanticism would be hard to find.”

  And reading on and on in a fever of introspection, I was beginning to undergo a curious transformation: not the spirit’s visionary turning, but one willed and chosen. I had become the Ancient Mariner—only in reverse. Gazing down at the water snakes writhing below, Coleridge’s mystical sailor is all at once seized by a burst of joyous sanctification: to his transfigured senses the repulsive creatures of the sea are now revealed as blessèd things of beauty. But I, pursuing passage after passage of Baeck’s reprise of the incantatory romantic—its transports and exultations, its voluptuously nurtured sorrows, its illusory beauty anchored in nothing but vapor—I came to see it all as loathsome, no different from those mindlessly coiling water snakes. What did it lead to? The self. What did it mean? Self-pride. What did it achieve? Self-delusion and delirium. That way lay Dionysus. I chose Rabbi Baeck.

  More decades than I wish to admit to have fled away since I first looked into “Romantic Religion.” And just recently, when I revisited my old copy—battered from many coerced lendings (it was I who did the coercing), and almost always returned unread—I was still impressed by its bold intellectual and moral cogency. But its power seemed somehow diminished, or, if not exactly that, then a tiny bit stale. I had, after all, assimilated those ideas from multiple sources over the years (not counting the Bible), and by now they were locked, as we have learned to say, into my DNA. “Romantic Religion,” with its emphasis on humane conduct over the perils of the loosened imagination, remains an essay to live by. It is not an essay to write stories by; stories crave the wilderness of untethered feeling. But once—even though I wanted then more than anything on earth to write stories—it left me dazzled and undone.

  The Rhapsodist

  This rounded, wet, weedy, windy earth, with its opposing poles, was born into contraries: Apollo and Dionysus, Talmudist and Kabbalist, sober exegete and rapt ecstatic. Harold Bloom, who bestrides our literary world like a willfully idiosyncratic Colossus, belongs to the party of rapture. He is himself no Whitman or Melville, no Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost or Wallace Stevens; no Hart Crane or Emerson. And yet he seems at times almost as large as any of these, so vital and particularized is his presence. If, as Emerson claims, the true ship is the shipbuilder, then is the true poem the critic who maps and parses and inhabits it? Can poet and critic be equal seers?

  Read Bloom, and you may be led to suppose it so. “Walt Whitman,” he writes, “overwhelms me, possesses me, as only a few others—Dante, Shakespeare, Milton—consistently flood my entire being. . . . Without vision, criticism perishes.” And: “I rejoice at all strong transports of sublimity.” And again: “True criticism recognizes itself as a form of memoir.” And finally, emphatically: “I believe there is no critical method except yourself.” It is through intoxicating impulses such as these that Bloom has come to his formulation of the American Sublime, and from this to his revelation of the daemon: the very Higgs boson of the sublime. Bloom’s beguiling daemon can be construed as the god-within; he is sire to the exaltations of apotheosis, shamanism, Gnosticism, Orphism, Hermeticism, and, closer to home, Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” He is made manifest through the voices of poets and in the chants of those weavers of tales, like Melville and Faulkner, who are kin to poets.

  The Daemon Knows, the enigmatic title of Bloom’s newest work of oracular criticism, is strangely intransitive. What is it that the daemon knows? We are meant to understand that the daemon is an incarnation of an intuition beyond ordinary apperception, and that this knowing lies in the halo of feeling that glows out of the language of poetry. “To ask the question of the daemon is to seek an origin of inspiration,” Bloom instructs, and his teacherly aim is to pose the question in close readings of twelve daemon-possessed writers whom he interrogates in pairs: Whitman with Melville, Emerson with Dickinson, Hawthorne with Henry James, Mark Twain with Frost, Stevens with T. S. Eliot, Faulkner with Hart Crane. He might well have chosen twelve others, he tells us, reciting still another blizzard of American luminaries, but dismisses the possibility “because these [chosen] writers represent our incessant effort to transcend the human without forsaking humanism.” (A question Bloom does not put—we will approach it shortly—is whether shamanism, Orphism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and all the other mystical isms, including the idea of the daemon, do in fact cling to humanism.)

  For Bloom, the origin of inspiration is dual: the daemon that ignites it from within, and the genealogical force that pursues it from without. The bloodline infusion of literary precursors has long been a leitmotif for Bloom, from the academic implosion of The Anxiety of Influence more than forty years ago to the more recent The Anatomy of Influence. Here he invokes the primacy of Emerson as germinating ancestor:

  For me, Emerson is the fountain of the American will to know the self and its drive for sublimity. The American poets who (to me) matter the most are all Emersonians of one kind or another: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, John Ashbery, A. R. Ammons, Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, Henri Cole. Our greatest creators of prose fiction were not Emersonians, yet the protagonists of Hawthorne, Melville, and Henry James frequently are beyond our understanding if we do not see Hester Prynne, Captain Ahab, and Isabel Archer as self-reliant questers.

  Though Bloom’s persuasive family trees are many-branched, the power of influential predecessors nevertheless stands apart from daemonic possession. According to Bloom, the daemon—“pure energy, free of morality”—is far more intrinsic than thematic affinity. However aggressively their passions invade, it is not Whitman alone who gives birth to Melville, or Emerson to Dickinson, or Hawthorne to James, or Mark Twain to Frost; and certainly it is not the lurid Faulkner, all on his own, who rivals the clay that will become Hart Crane. Literary heritage is half; the rest is the daemon. “Moby-Dick,” Bloom sums up, “is at the center of this American heretical scripture, our worship of the god-within, which pragmatically means of the daemon who knows how it is done.” But there is yet another pragmatic demonstration to be urged and elaborated. “Hart Crane’s daemon,” he adds, “knows how it is done and creates an epic of Pindaric odes, lyrics, meditations, and supernal longings without precedent.”

  Without precedent: surely this is the earliest key, in Bloom’s scheme, to the daemon’s magickings. Theme and tone and voice may have authorial ancestors; what we call inspiration has none. Turning to one of his two commanding touchstones (the other is Whitman), Bloom cites Emerson: “This is that which the strong genius works upon: the region of destiny, of aspiration, of the unknown. . . . For the best part, I repeat, of any life is not that which he knows, but that which hovers in gleams, suggestions, tantalizing unpossessed before him.” So when Bloom tells us that there can be no critical method other than the critic himself—meaning Bloom—we should not take it as blowhard hyperbole. With Emerson, he intends to pry open the unpossessed and to possess it, and to lead the reader to possess it too: a critical principle rooted in ampleness and generosity.

  In this way, the illustrative excerpts Bloom selects from the work of his hallowed dozen are more than concentrated wine tastings; they are libraries in little. In considering Hawthorne, he discusses—in full—“Wakefield” and “Feathertop,” two lesser-know
n stories, as well as The Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun, and the canonical The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. In his discant on James, Bloom supplies entire scenes from The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, and The Wings of the Dove, in addition to long passages of “The Jolly Corner.” And in crisscrossing from Hawthorne to James and back again, he leaves nothing and no one unconnected. “Where indeed in American fiction,” he asks, “could there be a woman loftier, purer, as beautiful and as wise as Hester Prynne? Isabel Archer is the only likely candidate,” though he goes on to lament her choice of the “odious Osmond.” For Bloom, Moby-Dick consorts with Huck Finn, and Emily Dickinson with Shakespeare, while Whitman underlies, or agitates, Stevens, Hart Crane, and, surprisingly, T. S. Eliot.

  Of all Bloom’s couplings, Stevens and Eliot are the oddest and the crankiest. Despite the unexpected common link with Whitman, the juxtaposition is puzzling. Bloom’s veneration of Stevens, sometimes “moved almost to tears,” is unfailing. “From start to end, his work is a solar litany. . . . He has helped me to live my life,” he confesses. Yet nearly in the same breath Bloom is overt, even irascible, in his distaste for Eliot, partly in repudiation of “his virulent anti-Semitism, in the age of Hitler’s death camps,” but also because of his clericalism: “Is it my personal prejudice only that finds no aesthetic value whatever in the devotional verse of T. S. Eliot? . . . He brings out the worst in me. His dogmatism, dislike of women, debasement of ordinary human existence make me furious.” In the same dismissive vein, he disposes of Ezra Pound: “I at last weary of his sprawl and squalor.” Nowhere else in this celebratory volume can such a tone—of anger and disgust—be found. Not even in Bloom’s dispute with what he zealously dubs “the School of Resentment” (the politicization of literary studies) is he so vehement as here.