My title, “The Bright Reversion,” is drawn from a verse in Byron’s dedicatory preface to Don Juan:
He that reserves his laurels for posterity
(Who does not often claim the bright reversion)
Has generally no great crop to spare it, he
Being only injured by his own assertion.
And although here and there some glorious rarity
Arise like Titan from the sea’s immersion,
The major part of such appellants go
To—God knows where—for no one else can know.85
The phrase “the bright reversion” was taken, in turn, by Byron from one of his idols, Alexander Pope, who asks, “Is there no bright reversion in the sky / For those who greatly think, or bravely die?”86
The premise of artistic posterity is generally that the work that retains posthumous meaning has worth. As soon as one begins to examine it, however, posterity emerges as one of the larger mysteries of the largely mysterious phenomenon of art. The greatest mystery being why art should exist at all and why a few beings should be capable of creating it, and still fewer of doing so—always given the lottery of survival—with enduring power. Selective, elusive, and unpredictable in the extreme, literary posterity has, as such, been explicitly celebrated, wooed, or disdained by centuries of writers in innumerable works. One finds early examples of poets superstitiously exorcising the vengeance of time—for example, Homer forthrightly claims that future ages shall know of the sufferings of his heroes; whereas Virgil, appropriating that very line from Homer, inserts the word “perhaps.” The title of this lecture might well have been “Perhaps.” Over and over one finds writers referring in their work to their chances with posterity—whether to stake their claim with future ages, to repudiate any such ambition, or to acknowledge—like Milton—an unworthy preoccupation with Fame. Posterity is a kind of Tenth Muse, hovering ironically over the other Nine.
Byron himself made, in a variety of moods, a wide variety of comments on posterity. Don Juan is full of sardonic comments on the theme. Of himself he says fatalistically that “What I write I cast upon the stream / To swim or sink. I have had at least my dream.”87 With hindsight we may think more appropriate his lines in Childe Harold, written only slightly earlier:
But there is that within me shall tire
Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire;
Something unearthly, which they deem not of,
Like the remember’d tone of a mute lyre.88
The Romantics were often at special pains to forestall oblivion by assuring the future that they expected nothing from it—as if Posterity were some rich old uncle with a fortune to dispose of. Keats was one of many who proposed their own epitaph: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Stendhal wished to be remembered as one who loved Shakespeare, Mozart, and Cimarosa.89 Remembrance was in the air. In a letter about his imminent death Keats said, “If I should die, I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have loved the principle of Beauty in all things, and if I had time, I would have made myself remembered.”90 Leopardi, shortly before his death, wrote that, “despite the fine title ‘Collected Works’ given by the bookseller to my volume, I have never accomplished anything real. I have only made attempts, believing them preludes. But my career has done no further.”91
When Leopardi wrote that, he was living at Naples and producing possibly the greatest of all his poems, “La Ginestra,” a poem about posterity inspired by the yellow flowers of the broom growing on the bleak lava of the Vesuvius—a symbol at once of the transience of man, the replenishment and renewal of nature, and the infinity of the universe. The poem refers to the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum whose posterity, artistic and otherwise, ranks among the weirdest of all survivals. In a passage of the poem that might deal directly with our own era, the poet apostrophizes his own nineteenth century with its proclamations of “progress”:
Here look and see yourself, you preposterous century,
That going backwards calls this progress,
Ignoring all the arduous knowledge of past ages.92
He goes on to say that even the intelligentsia feel obliged to pay tribute to their era simply because they themselves inhabit it—while sometimes expressing doubts behind their hands. Leopardi says, “I shall not go underground with that disgrace upon me; but shall proclaim my scorn of this century with my last breath. Although I know that Oblivion presses heaviest on those who will not celebrate their times.”93
In fact, no literary name is more celebrated in Italy today than that of Leopardi. And it seems there is scarcely any common factor, even that of genius, in literary fame. Why indeed do we feel a need for literary posterity? Horace said that the strong men who lived before Agamemnon passed into oblivion because they lacked a sacred poet (although as Montale remarked, memory was a literary genre before writing was invented.)94 There are now all too many other ways of recording the deeds of strong men; but the need is still felt of—so to speak—the sacred poet, to transmit sensations and sentiments. Why this is so might be the theme of many lectures. It has been exquisitely dwelt upon by Proust in the concluding section of his work where he treats the distinctions of supposed “reality,” the sharp image, with the successive states of being and impression that constitute—even if summarized in few words—the immortality of human memory.
The human wish that something of our existence should linger to inform later generations is at its best one of our larger desires—the reciprocity between the living and the dead. What we frankly call the pleasure of ruins must derive from the simultaneous reassurance and confirmation of shared mortality evoked by evidence of past existence, and of the helplessness and power of human knowledge, the urge of our forebears to strike the heart of some unknown future soul. All this is perhaps most of all manifest in the lonely word: in Shakespeare’s imperative desire to commemorate his love—as the sonnet says, “that in black ink my love may still shine bright.”95 Or Byron pronouncing that
Words are things; and a small drop of ink
Falling like dew upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
’Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link of ages.96
Posterity has been used by writers as a present threat: Chateaubriand confronting Napoleon, at the risk of his life, with the reminder that Nero railed in vain, because Tacitus was born within the Empire; in our time, Miłosz warning the oppressor, “You who harmed a simple man, do not feel secure; For a poet remembers.”97
There is also the wish to share pleasure. A contemporary of David Garrick’s composed a piece of music for the cello—that being the instrument, with lower range as well as middle register, most closely approximating the human voice—to render the inflections of Garrick’s delivery of Hamlet’s soliloquy. (I’ve heard this performed, and uncanny it is.)
Posterity devolves on those who have not sought it. Twenty years ago or more, there appeared in the New Yorker a tiny poem by James Kirkup, an English poet living in Japan, addressed to a Japanese poet of the turn of this century, Ochi-Ai Naobumi:
You said if you could find one person
Who had let himself be touched by your poems
You would die happy.
I have come too late to tell you
How your brief poem moved me
With its modesty and longing.98
This is the only afterlife of which we have evidence—the transmission of human experience and thought. The wish to distinguish poets and writers who have power is an immemorial attempt to touch future ages. Byron speaks of conferring laurels. The laureled poet was formally recognized as the vessel through which man’s voice might be transmitted to the future. Crowned in ancient Greece at the Pythian Festival, honored in Rome with the sacred leaves, as Virgil calls them—the wreath that on the poet’s brow, according to Horace, admitted h
im to the company of gods; even while those very leaves commemorated the inability of Apollo to consummate his desire. The laurel set the poet not so much apart from others as above others—acknowledging him greater than usual beings and—to borrow Montale’s phrase—fit for memory. Not entirely an illusion, perhaps. The little branch of laurel served so long as a symbol of immortality that its leaves still rustle through our conversation. In Italy the laurel has maintained a spell second only to the halo as a persistent symbolic presence in literature and in the poet’s consciousness.
In 1341 Petrarch was crowned with the poet’s laurel on the Capitol of Rome; he chose for his address of acceptance a text from Virgil, a text which, with echoes of Lucretius, exalts the private realm, the originality of talent and its contingent loneliness. (Sed me Parnassi deserta per ardua dulcis raptat amor.99) Of his crown Petrarch subsequently said, “This laurel gained for me no knowledge, but rather much envy”100—an observation echoed by Saul Bellow in a recent comment on his own Nobel award: “The prize was a pain in the neck.”101
The laurel continues to haunt the modern Italians. Guido Gozzano, whose short life ended in 1916, is, as it were, a modern Italian poet marking a transition, a rupture with formality. His beautiful long poem, “Signorina Felicità,” describes the idyll of a young man of intellect with a country girl—a girl whose total ignorance is highly approved by the poet. (It is a poem to drive any feminist up the wall.) One day the girl shows the young man her family’s attic, crammed with outmoded furniture, discarded mattresses, pots and pans, mildewed engravings. Among the engravings, there is a series of “distinguished persons,” including a portrait of Tasso. And the girl, knowing nothing either of the laurel or of Tasso, asks why those absurd old codgers are wearing cherry leaves on their heads. The young man laughs, but laughing thinks, “So this is glory—a dim corridor, some outworn furniture, a bad likeness in a cheap frame, inscribed with the mildewed name of Torquato Tasso.”102
Of the laurel, Montale, no less than other Italian poets, has much to say. One of Montale’s first published poems, written about the time Mussolini came to power, is called “The Lemons,” and contrasts the lemon tree favorably with the stately varieties of plant—acanthus, myrtle, box-wood—with which the laureled poets concern themselves.103 Elsewhere he tells us that a dried laurel isn’t even good in the Sunday roast.
For Virgil, it is Apollo himself who plucks the poet by the ear. Montale describes his muse as a ragged scarecrow flapping in an obscure vineyard.104 This proclaimed diffidence is in its way a bravado about glory and posterity.
While it’s tempting to reverse the issue of posterity, to see it as defining what we collectively require from art, the theme will not resolve itself in such coherent terms. It is filled with contradictions not only because different times and societies seek differing forms of recognition, solace, or stimulus, and different fashions or political movements play their role, but because the accidental is a capital force, in posterity as in life. A considerable literature, for instance, has come down to us from the court of tenth-century Japan, the Heian court, the world of Lady Murasaki. That this is almost exclusively written by women stems from the fact that Chinese was the elevated language of the Heian court—an outmoded and mutilated form of Chinese, incomprehensible in China itself. The business and formalities of the Japanese court were carried on in this artificial language by male courtiers and officials, while the court ladies were held unworthy of the distinction. Educated women were thus the repositories of the Japanese language, and their ample leisure allowed certain of them to develop their country’s literature.
At times longevity and a large body of work appears to impress a writer on human memory. At others, the public imagination is captured by the tragedy of early or violent death. The writer may outlive his early fame as Swinburne did; like Shelley, he may enter into it with his death. (“Now he knows whether there is a God or no.”105) He may be honored for his public role—like Solzhenitsyn—or because he was a recluse. Death itself can be a releasing force in enabling the world to realize a loss (as with the case of John Hall Wheelock)—critics who have been fearful of honoring a living writer seem to pluck up courage when they sense he may be entering on his literary afterlife. Writers may be resurrected, so to speak, because they seem to speak for a particular social change—as we now see happening with women writers who give expression or add lustre to the newly liberated consciousness of women. Or a writer may appear to epitomize a national mood by his person, life, and work, or by the nature of his death—as Rupert Brooke for the British public of 1915, when he embodied ideals or illusions of which he has since become the ironically ingenuous symbol.
Rupert Brooke described his own posterity in his poem, “The Soldier” (“If I should die, etc”). At his death of septicemia, during the campaign in the Dardanelles in 1915, Rupert Brooke was buried by night in a foreign field—an olive grove to be precise—in a remote part of the island of Skyros, where his simple grave has been tended and visited by occasional British travelers. In 1979, the Times of London reported that a road for trucks had been pushed through that still otherwise inaccessible region, the traffic passing within a foot or so of the poet’s grave. As a result of representations from the British government, the road has now been slightly diverted, and the tract of it that passed through Brooke’s corner of the foreign field has been allowed to grow over, at least for the present.
It is hard for us to believe now that Wallace Stevens, in his poem “Mozart 1935,” could write “We may come back to Mozart.”106 In the impenetrable mystery of posterity there is something of a mirror image of life—of existence itself, with its enigmas and accidental qualities, its moods and recurring fads, its contradictions and inconsistencies that we seek to compress into the rational and discussable forms of our inability to accept our mortality, while incapable of living in a wider context. The ambiguities of our own age toward posterity are not the least bizarre of the mysteries. On the one hand, the industry of oral history, of time capsules, of the hoarding and buying at huge sums of the papers and libraries of writers, the commemorating even of authors’ most casual remarks, the assembling of their correspondence, the assiduity for getting writers down on tape or down on paper, or for just getting them down. On the other hand, the neglect and ignorance of past knowledge, the dying out of the study of ancient languages, the contempt or even terror of what is stigmatized “conventional” or “traditional,” the obsession with novelty and the up-to-date, possibly at the expense of genuinely fresh talent; the large claims made for artistic anarchy because it is supposedly expressive of our times. The conservation of books, on the one hand; and their accelerating disintegration on the other. One might say the preservation of antique fragments, and the destruction of the Acropolis; the extended lifespan of man, and the threat of nuclear obliteration.
I have spoken previously about art and in particular the articulating of man’s fate as a maintaining of the human consciousness. It is in this sense of contributing to human wisdom, liberty, and pleasure that the so-called posterity of an artist—of a writer—rises above mere vanity or an elevated ambition for power. Auden, who wrote that “time…worships language”107 says that “The whole aim of a poet, or any other kind of artist, is to produce something which is complete and will endure without change.”108 Randall Jarrell, in “The Obscurity of the Poet” says that “the poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it,” and he goes on to quote one of the most beautiful passages of Proust—that we enter this life as though carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former, higher existence, the obligations created by other beings who have contributed to our knowledge and self-knowledge.109
Auden writes of “something which is complete.” I believe this touches on the question of wholeness to which I referred in “The Defense of Candor” in connection with a modern incapacity for synthesis—a fear of wholeness that reveals
itself in a mania for explication, classification, and dissection. However that may be, I think it is generally accepted that an artist hopes at least that his works will outlive him, that they are self-sufficient enough to pass into futurity; an assumption logical enough, since artistic work is presumably intended to give pleasure and interest to as wide an audience as possible.
However, there are and always have been those who repudiated this view. “There is first reconciliation to oblivion”—John Marston.110 I don’t refer to the conjecture or acceptance of oblivion. More strikingly, there are artists for whom, in the words of the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, “disorder holds its charm.” (In a poem called “I take back everything I’ve said,” he asks the reader to burn the book. Why then royalties to quote therefrom?) (Me retracto de todo lo dicho.111) These are the words of the painter Dubuffet on the theme: “I believe in the utility of oblivion. I should like to see a mammoth statue of Oblivion in the main square of every town, instead of the libraries and museums we see there today. / Let’s make a clean sweep of the art of the past! I do my best to make art as if no one had ever made it before…. I am an antihumanist.”112
In calling for the—somewhat paradoxical—monument to Oblivion, Dubuffet is already twenty-eight-hundred years out of date. According to legend, such a monument existed, in the statue to Sardanapulus at Nineveh whose inscription celebrated oblivion. Some might hold that such monuments existed in Dubuffet’s own work. These words of Dubuffet, along with much more of the same—all of them with dates of the 1950s and 1960s—appeared in print last year here in connection with a, let’s say, monumental exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, titled Retrospective.113
I don’t mean to mock Dubuffet—though I think his assertions might bear a little ironic treatment. His desire that forms of art in conflict with his own should be destroyed is perhaps more significant than he perhaps allows. What he feels—or felt—is an aspect of human impulse like any other and not an unfamiliar one. However, he utters these shockers secure—as it were—that what he advocates will not readily come to pass unless in the complete annihilation of our world. There is something of a French tradition here. Proust, taking up analogous views of Baudelaire, says he is shocked enough to find Baudelaire expressing such sentiments, but nothing like as shocked as when he discovers them in Dostoyevsky. Because, Proust says, “at least I know that Baudelaire is not sincere.”114
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