The Din in the Head

by Cynthia Ozick

  On the other hand, Alter's determination to replicate the original as closely as possible, while it will surely satisfy the sticklers, will do more than that for the poets. The poets will rejoice. Alter's language ascends to a rare purity through a plainness that equals the plainness of the Hebrew. To achieve this, he has had to come to a clear decision about the nature of English, with its two sources, or etymological strands: the florid Latinate and the spare Germanic; or call it Dr. Johnson versus Lincoln. The voice of Alter's Hebrew-in-English is Lincoln's voice, whose words and meter resonate in American ears with biblical gravity and biblical promise. It is in this plainspeaking, quickly accessible Anglo-Saxon prose, simple monosyllable following simple monosyllable, that Alter lets us hear God's imperatives, pleas, hopes, and ela-tions:

  ...for the Lord shall turn back to exult over you for good as He exulted over your fathers, when you heed the voice of the Lord your God to keep His commands and his statutes written in this book of teaching, when you turn back to the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your being. For this command which I charge you today is not too wondrous nor is it distant. It is not in the heavens, to say, "Who will go up for us to the heavens and take it for us and let us hear it, that we may do it?" And it is not beyond the sea, to say, "Who will cross over for us beyond the sea and take it for us and let us hear it, that we may do it?" But the word is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it. See, I have set before you today life and good and death and evil, that I charge you today to love the Lord your God, to go in His ways and to keep His commands and His statutes and laws.... Life and death I set before you, the blessing and the curse, and you shall choose life... (Deuteronomy 30:9–19)

  Alter's gloss looks past this passage to the kind of world that surrounded it:

  The Deuteronomist, having given God's teaching a local place and a habitation in a text available to all, proceeds to reject the older mythological notion of the secrets or wisdom of the gods. It is the daring hero of the pagan epic who, unlike ordinary men, makes bold to climb the sky or cross the great sea to bring back the hidden treasures of the divine realm—as Gilgamesh crosses the sea in an effort to bring back immortality. This mythological and heroic era, the Deuteronomist now proclaims, is at an end, for God's word, inscribed in a book, has become the intimate property of every person.

  To which we might add, a book that is "not wondrous" requires no sacred mysteries, no sacred mediators, no sacred hierarchies. All the same, God's commands, statutes, and laws are not easy; they are grounded in self-restraint. Seven of the Ten Commandments begin with "Do not." And insofar as the overarching vision of monotheism encompasses ritual, it is as "a battle against the inchoate," Alter argues. "Authorized ritual is in all respects the exact opposite of ecstatic orgy (another departure in principle from the pagan world)."

  Remarks like these—informational, historical, pedagogical—have a secularized socio-anthropological flavor so radically different in tone from the diction of the translation itself that we need to be reminded that Alter has crafted both. The text breathes out power and truth. The footnote is instructional. The one carries divine authority, the other carries ... what? The authority of a teachers' manual, perhaps, the kind with the answers at the back of the book. But if the Bible in all the purity of its expression is genuinely and wholly intended to be read as literature, its prerogatives will descend to the level merely of prestige: the prestige of literature, which, as Alter has already defined it, derives its authority solely from "the power of human imagination." Literary prestige, though, tends to have a weak hold on authority, as the immemorial shufflings of the canon show us; otherwise the work of Virgil would still be as revered today as it was when the Latin spelling, Vergil, was deposed in favor of its Marian echo. The necessity of Virgil diminished when he came to be seen as Vergil the poet, not Virgil the prophet.

  The necessity of the Bible, if it is to be seen solely as poetry and story, may flatten in the same way. All sacred books contain the wise or stirring pleasures of narrative: the Bhagavad-Gita tells stories, the Taoist scriptures of Chuang-Tsu tell stories, the Zoroastrian Zend-Avesta tells stories, the Koran tells stories, Confucius and Mencius tell stories, the Buddha tells stories; African and American Indian sacred tales abound. The earth is flooded with stories, hymns, and parables regarded as holy in their origins. The literary approach can deflate them all. The short story writer Flannery O'Connor, an intransigent believer, said of the Christian mysteries that if they were not true, "then the hell with them." A skilled teller of tales, she insisted on a distinction between imagination of the kind she herself could wield and what she took to be divine revelation. And it may be that if all the world's scriptures had long ago been flattened into literature, and packed side by side, despite their dissimilarities and divergences, into a single bookshelf—much as Madame Bovary, say, can stand in civil proximity to Crime and Punishment, and Joyce cheek by jowl with Proust—all our habitations and histories might have been far more pacific. Novels and stories do not war with one another; neither, pace Harold Bloom, do they always engage in supersessionism (at least not of the jihadist variety).

  But stories, though they influence and enlarge us, do not deliver Commandments. The Bible cannot be pumped up from literary prestige to divine prerogative through arguing from the power of human imagination, even when that power is "kindled" by positing measureless structures of transcendent dominion. What, then, are unbelieving readers of the Five Books left with? Unless they happen to be moral philosophers who will deduce law and right conduct from reason, it is stories they are left with, and—for nonphilosophers—isn't that enough? On their face, the Patriarchal Tales, like all literature that endures, touch on everything recognizable in ordinary human life: crises between parents and children, between siblings, between husbands and wives; hunger and migration, jealousy and reconciliation, sudden ascent and sudden subjugation, great love and great hatred. Universally felt, they are family annals in a family album. The Joseph narrative is doubtless the most moving story of all: here stands Joseph, Pharaoh's mighty viceroy, interrogating the humbly petitioning brothers who in the past flung him into a pit and sold him to traders on their way to Egypt. Catching sight of Benjamin, the tender younger son of Rachel, their mother, "Joseph hurried out, for his feelings for his brother overwhelmed him and he wanted to weep, and he went into the chamber and wept there. And he bathed his face and came out and held himself in check and said, 'Serve bread.'"

  In this enclosed fraternal scene, God is not needed, and seems not to be present. So far, the drama of Joseph appears to resemble the stories we call literature; and yet it does not, because Joseph will not permit God to be exiled out of his world. When, bowing before Pharaoh's deputy, the brothers plead for forgiveness, Joseph is again swept into weeping, and invokes not only God, but God's design: "And Joseph said, 'Fear not, for am I instead of God? While you meant evil for me, God meant it for good.'" And further: "Do not be pained and do not be incensed with yourselves that you sold me down here, because for sustenance God has sent me before you ... to make you a remnant on earth and to preserve life, for you to be a great surviving group. And so, it is not you who sent me here but God." A few verses on, Joseph dies, at one hundred and ten, and is embalmed according to Egyptian custom. And now, portentously, the Book of Genesis ends: "He was put in a coffin in Egypt."

  That coffin signifies more than a human story. It is God's story: Egypt will become a coffin for the Hebrews until God redeems them. God in the Hebrew Bible is Causality, and Causality, unlike Joseph or Benjamin, cannot be a character in a tale—an assertion that has been broadly contradicted, or at least qualified, in formulations by both Harold Bloom and Jack Miles. In his winning and ingenious God: A Biography, Miles is moved to ask, "How did all this feel to God?" and sets out to see Him as a "character who 'comes to life' in a work of literary art." Miles's God has an indelible, even a familiar, human personality, not unlike the mercurial protagonist of an epic
, or an opera, or a labyrinth of motives by Henry James. And while it may be possible to transmute aspects of Scripture into literature by means of the Active imagination—certainly Thomas Mann succeeded in turning the Joseph chronicle into a massive and masterly novel—finally Scripture itself rebels against it. Mann's fiction can claim no greater authority than writerly genius.

  Just here is the nub and the rub of it: if the God of the Bible is not "real," then—in creative-writing-course argot—the Bible's stories won't and don't work. For the faithless skeptic or rationalist confronting Scripture (a category of modernity that includes, I suppose, most of us), there is nothing more robust to lean on than suspension of disbelief, the selfsame device one brings to Jane Austen. Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightly, salvational creations both, are not real; we believe in them anyway. Causality deserves better. Causality escapes the mere "comes to life" of character.

  It is the directness and consummate clarity of Alter's rendering that forces this conclusion. The translator's richly developed notes and reflections are informed by scholarship, wit, and intuition; without the intrusions of didacticism, they educate. But the antique words, on their own power, and even in a latter-day language, draw us elsewhere, to that indeterminate place where God is not a literary premise but a persuasive certainty—whether or not we are willing to go there.

  * * *

  Afterword

  An (Unfortunate) Interview with Henry James

  THE INTERVIEW TOOK PLACE at Lamb House, Rye, Sussex—rather, its precise duplicate in the Other World. The house, red brick with numerous mullioned windows, fronts the street. One approaches it along the curve of a narrow flagstoned path. Four shallow steps lead up to a white door overhung by a cornice. The modest brass knocker is tapped, and a young man responds. He is Burgess Noakes, James's valet.

  JAMES (within): Noakes? Is it our appointed visitor?

  NOAKES : Yes, sir. It's the American lady from that magazine.

  JAMES (coming forward with a certain fussy anxiety): A lady? I was rather expecting a gentleman. Forgive me, dear madam, do come in.—Noakes, the tea things, if you please.—Ah, my most admirable typewriter is just departing. Quite a morning's toil, Miss Bosanquet, was it not? We are getting on, we are getting on!

  Miss Theodora Bosanquet, James's typist (writer's cramp has in recent years forced him to dictate), emerges from a room behind, pinning on her hat. She neatly rounds James's bicycle, precariously lodged against an umbrella stand in the central hall. She nods, smiles tiredly, and makes her way out with practiced efficiency.

  JAMES (seating himself before a finely tiled fireplace, and motioning for the visitor to join him there): I must again beg your pardon. I discover myself increasingly perplexed by the ever-accelerating extrusions of advanced women—

  INTERVIEWER (interrupting): You don't like us. You were opinionated enough about all that in The Bostonians.

  JAMES (taken aback by this feminist brashness, and glad to have Noakes deflect it with the arrival of a tray holding teacups and a variety of jellied pastries): Thank you, Noakes. The advent of cakes, the temptation to the sweet tooth, how it brings to the fore one's recent torments at the dentist's! One must perforce disclose one's most private crannies to this oral Torquemada—which I take to be the unhappy emblem of an age of interlocutory exposure. The ladies seem to swim in it! Especially the American ladies.

  INTERVIEWER: I suppose that's what you were getting at in your portrait of Henrietta Stackpole, the peppy American journalist in The Portrait of a Lady.

  JAMES: May I say, mutatis mutandis, that she might have been getting at me! In point of fact, dear madam, I have in mind rather my unfortunate engagement with your predecessor, an American lady journalist representing the New York Herald, with whom I sat, as it were, for an interview during my American journey in 1904, my maiden voyage, so to speak, into a venture of this kind. This lady's forwardness, her hagiographical incessancy, was, in fine, redoubtable. She hastened to remark upon how I had so far, and so long, escaped the ministrations of uncanny inquirers such as herself, and undertook to portray my shrinking from her certainties as a species of diffident bewilderment. She declaimed it her right, as a free citizen of my native land, to put to me all manner of intimacies. I warned her, as I now warn you, madam, that one's craft, one's art, is in one's expression, not one's person. After you have heard Adelina Patti sing, why should you care to hear the small private voice of the woman?

  INTERVIEWER: I gather that you intend to inhibit my line of questioning.

  JAMES : Madam, I do not inhibit. I merely decline to exhibit.

  INTERVIEWER: IS that why you've had the habit of burning things? When your ailing sister Alice died, her companion, Katharine Loring, had copies of Alice's diary printed up especially for you and your brother William. You burned your copy.

  JAMES: Ah, the mask and armour of her fortitude, poor invalid!—and with such ironic amusement and interest in the presentation of it all. It would not, could not, do. My fraternally intimated morsels of London gossip, for the simple change and relief and diversion of it, came ultimately, and distressingly, to animate her pen. The wit of those lucubrations loomed, may I say, as a vulgar peril. So many names, personalities, hearsays, through me! I hardly wished to be seen as privately depreciating those to whom I was publicly civil.

  INTERVIEWER: Yet in 1909 you might have been seen as doing exactly that. You made a bonfire in your garden of the thousands of letters sent you by your devoted correspondents, many of them your distinguished friends. And six years later, you threw still more papers into the fire: it took you a week to get the job done. Will you agree that you've been singularly merciless to your biographers?

  JAMES: Put it that the forewarned victim subverts the future's cunning. I have been easier in my mind ever since, and my little conflagrations scarcely appear to have impeded posterity's massive interventions.

  INTERVIEWER: Well, true, they haven't stopped us from speculating that you're gay and always have been.

  JAMES : Indeed, there has been a frequency of jolly corners ... delightful hours with Turgenev in Paris ... the soliloquizing intimacy of one's London hearth in winter, or the socially convenient pleasures of the ever so felicitous Reform Club ... going in to dinner with a gracious lady on one's arm in some grand country house ... all rewardingly gay at times, to be sure; but neither have I been spared sojourns upon the bench of desolation. Despair, I own, dogged me in particular in the year 1895, when at the opening of my play, Guy Domville—

  INTERVIEWER (breaking in hurriedly): I mean you've loved men.

  JAMES : And so I have. To choose but one, my fondness for the dear Jonathan Sturges, that crippled little demon, resonates unchecked for me even now. How I embraced the precious months he came to stay at Lamb House, with his mordant tongue and bright eyes, full of unprejudiced talk and intelligence. Body-blighted Brother Jonathan! Yet he made his way in London in wondrous fashion.

  INTERVIEWER: I'm afraid we're not entirely on the same page.

  JAMES : The same page? Would that be an Americanism? With all your foreign influx, we shall not know our English tongue for the sacred purity it once resplendently gave out. A young American cousin, on a visit here, persisted in pronouncing "jewel" as "jool," "vowel" as "vowl," and was driven at last to deem my corrections cruel. "'Cru-el,' Rosina, not crool,'" I necessarily admonished. The young ladies of Bryn Mawr College, in the vicinity of Philadelphia, when I lectured there in 1905, had similar American afflictions. They would articulate the reticent "r" in words such as motherrrr, fatherrrr, millerrrr—

  INTERVIEWER: I admit to that "r" myself. But to come back to your, um, fondness for men. One of your more reckless biographers believes that in the spring of 1865, in your own shuttered bedroom in Cambridge—that's Cambridge, Massachusetts—you had your earliest experience, your initiation premiere, as you yourself called it in your journal.

  JAMES: Ah, the epoch-making weeks of that memorable spring! The bliss of l'initiation premiere, th
e divine, the unique! It was in that very March that my first published story appeared in the Atlantic Monthly.

  INTERVIEWER: We're definitely not on the same page. He claims that this initiation premiere of yours was in the arms of the young Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior, the future chief justice of the United States Supreme Court. He says that you slept with Holmes. Carnally.

  JAMES (recoiling, and pressing his fingers to his temples, as if a familiar migraine is coming on): My dear lady—

  INTERVIEWER (digging into her tote bag and pulling out a thick biographical volume): And what about Hugh Walpole? No one burned your letters, after all. Here's what you wrote to your "dear, dear Hugh": "See therefore, how we're at one, and believe in the comfort I take in you. It goes very deep—deep, deep, deep: so infinitely do you touch and move me, dear Hugh." Such obvious ardor! What do you say to it?

  JAMES: I say I deeply, deeply, infinitely favour the universalization of epistolary arson. The twaddle of mere graciousness has perhaps too often Niagara'd from the extravagances of my inkpot.

  INTERVIEWER: And how about your "exquisite relation" with Jocelyn Persse? A good-looking Anglo-Irishman, the nephew of Lady Gregory, thirty when you met him, you were sixty. Now it was "my dear, dear Jocelyn." You went so far as to ask for his photo to moon over. And then there was Hendrik Andersen, that big handsome blond Norwegian sculptor—"I have missed you," you confided, "out of all proportion to the three meagre little days that we had together. I hold you close, I feel, my dear boy, my arms around you, I draw you close, I hold you long." So why shouldn't the homoerotic question come up?