This Is Where We Came In
Page 11
Also notably un-glue-like is the limpid unfurling of words in “A Few Dilapidated Arias,” the last group of poems from his latest collection, Toward the Distant Islands, spanning work from 1959 to 2005. Here, with deceptive casualness, the poet unburdens his mind—as active as his physical abilities are curtailed—after a fallow spell. The poems have the nonchalance of cultivated skill associated with the “late style” of the great poets and composers, though not their frequently imputed serenity or resignation. They open with a dazzling image and move from strength to strength like a Brahms symphony, now thundering, now muted, now wistful:
And thus the morning has descended. Slowly like
a tremulous lady down the great stairs of the East.
What I notice is language pressing in my mind,
surprising me, as in those times when I made poems
like sweet tarts cooling on the windowsill of a
studio in the woods . . .
So let the sentences unfold again, like a measuring rule
jerked into angled shapes that nevertheless trace
the line onward toward resolution. Let them be
a little sonorous, but only a little.
Even earlier, he was bemoaning his own “slipping.” “Song: Luxury,” written in his mere sixties, declares:
Even to think
of installing an air-conditioner
in his car is
to the old man a
shame and hurt,
who throve on hardship.
“Who throve on hardship” becomes the pungent closing refrain of each of the four stanzas; it echoes the life of arduous labor described in Reluctantly, when he lived with his wife and son in rural Vermont and did physical work all day, for himself and his neighbors, then various sorts of editorial work for hire all night, for extra money, then wrote poems in what time remained. In that essay he urges hardship on young writers, especially graduate students poised to enter the relative ease of the academic world. “If your life is easy, your writing will be slack and purposeless . . . You need difficulty, you need necessity. And it isn’t a paradox that you can choose necessity, can actually create necessity, if you seek the right objectives; not the great metaphysical necessity, but your own personal necessity; and it will be no less inexorable because you have chosen it. Once you are in it, your writing will be in it too.” This in opposition to young writers’ customary view that the academic life will leave them “time to write.” Time, yes, but what intensity? Write out of what urgency, if not the press of practical necessity against passionate desire?
The most poignant and scrupulous poem about old age is “In the Long Hall,” from the 1996 collection Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey, an extended metaphor for writing poetry as well as watching one’s life ravel and unravel with the passage of time:
On his knees he was weaving a tapestry
which was unraveling behind him. At first
he didn’t mind it; the work was flawed,
loose ends, broken threads, a pattern
he could not control; but as his skill
improved he began to resent the way
his tapestry was undoing itself.
He resolved not to look back
but to keep going ahead, as he did
successfully for a long time. Still
later, however, he began to notice
that the part of the tapestry in front
of him was unraveling too; threads
he had just knotted became loose.
He tied them again. But before long
he could not keep up, his hands
were too slow, his fingers too weak.
The unraveling in front pushed
him toward the unraveling in back
until he found himself isolated
on a small part of the tapestry whose
pattern he could not see because
it was beneath his own body. He spun
this way and that. He worked as fast as
he could with trembling fingers
in futility, in frenzy, in despair.
But to offset the futility and despair the aged artist feels on contemplating his work, Hayden’s late poems introduce an unexpected theme: romantic love. Not new, for he has often written of love before, in The Sleeping Beauty and elsewhere, but now refreshed and revivified. Love has come once more, surprising him, eliciting a self that is new as well. He welcomes love with unabashed gratitude and wonderment, in a series of sonnets from the late 1980s, some colloquial and others highly formal, evoking Wyatt and Donne. “More and more I believe the age demands / incertitude,” and of course he means his own advanced age as well as the age in which we all uneasily reside.
I am no one. Yet your hands
touching, word-like, can make a person. Who
is this strange new myself? Woman, do we know
the I of love that you in love bestow?
Inevitably, poems written in old age will be about approaching death, but few treat death in the same breath as erotic love, as Hayden does in “Testament,” from Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey. In fluid language and easeful music, he offers the conventional image of the hourglass to represent life seeping away, then puts that image to entirely original and startling use:
Yet not only our lives drift down. The stuff
of ego with which we began, the mass
in the upper chamber, filters away
as love accumulates below. Now
I am almost entirely love.
What can he leave his wife, he wonders, as “the sands / in the upper glass grow few”?
All our embracings?
I know millions of these will be still
unspent when the last grain of sand
falls with its whisper, its inconsequence
on the mountain of my love below.
Words may be maddeningly inadequate, and yet the lover’s hands that “make a person” are “word-like.” Words can make a person; they have certainly made this poet. And he in turn has made the poems that are “a gift, a bestowal / . . . what instinct is for animals, a continuing and chiefly unthought corroboration of essence.” This is from “The Impossible Indispensability of the Ars Poetica,” another love poem, where he muses on what a poem is and is not. In the end, it is the elusive, not the articulated, aspect of poetry that enthralls him:
it has almost the quality of disappearance
In its cage of visibility. It disperses among the words. It is a
fluidity, a vapor, of love.
The negative, disappearing quality of poetry returns us to the ineffable, Hayden Carruth’s true habitation, the vast tracts of consciousness that words cannot begin to clarify. This fluidity, this vapor of love, he hovers over in the extraordinary “Words in a Certain Appropriate Mode,” a poem that in its strategy is as evanescent as trying to catch a wisp of smoke in the hand, and yet precise in its limning of the effort. It is about an indefinable locale in consciousness, the nothingness within that contains the fullness of the inexpressible world, perhaps like the blackness of the near-death moment from which he emerged so strangely happy:
In the everywhere that is nowhere
Neither the inside nor the outside
. . .
Where one is neither alone
Nor not alone, where cognition seeps
Jactatively away like the falling tide
If there were a tide, and what is left
Is nothing, or is the everything that keeps
Its undifferentiated unreality . . .
Where there is neither breath nor air
The place without locality, the locality
With neither extension nor intention
But there in the weightless fall
. . .
Without leaf or star or water or stone
Without light, without sound
anywhere, anywhere . . .
Heinrich Mann’s Man of Straw
American awareness of Heinrich Mann has not improved
much since the day he reached New York Harbor on a Greek ship in 1940, following a wartime cloak-and-dagger escape to Lisbon through the goat paths of the Pyrenees. He came with his wife and nephew, to join his younger brother, Thomas, in exile. Mann’s biographer, Nigel Hamilton, in The Brothers Mann, stresses the irony of the New York Times report of the event: “Golo Mann, celebrated German author (he had yet to write a book!) and son of the famous novelist Thomas Mann, had arrived on American soil, ‘accompanied by his uncle Heinrich.’” (The succeeding quotes from Mann’s letters are also from this excellent biography.)
Uncle Heinrich, at that point, had written some dozen novels as well as novellas, short stories, plays and political essays; he was a major German man of letters, well traveled, widely known and esteemed on the Continent not only as a writer but as a partisan of progressive social movements and an enemy of authoritarian government. Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, he did not fit any better in American society than he had in his native Germany, from which he was chased in February 1933 (one newspaper called him “national vermin”), three weeks after Hitler became chancellor. He may be known today to moviegoers as the author of the novel Professor Unrat (i.e., “excrement”), on which the movie The Blue Angel is based. “My head and Marlene Dietrich’s legs,” as he wryly remarked.
The title of Heinrich Mann’s masterpiece, Der Untertan, means, literally, “the underling, the one below”: it connotes a slave-like person, or someone who slavers over his masters. When I first read Man of Straw, as it is lamely titled in English, I didn’t know when it had been written. I found it searing and frightening, like acid burning through metal—yet it has a comic streak, too. I had never read anything quite like it. It made Swift look mild; you would have to go back to Juvenal for anything approaching so thorough an indictment of a society and the people who sustain it. And yet Mann seemed much saner and more authentic than Juvenal ever had. How satisfying, I thought, that someone besides Charlie Chaplin had finally “done” Hitler and the Third Reich, albeit in the guise of looking back at the previous century.
Then I learned that Man of Straw was begun in 1906. A few chapters had appeared in periodicals in 1914, but all publication plans were dropped at the outbreak of war. The German people, editors told Mann, could not tolerate less than reverence for the kaiser at such a critical moment. Nor, obviously, could the kaiser himself. In the autumn of 1918 the war was lost and the kaiser forced to abdicate. The Republic of Germany signed the Armistice on November 11; Man of Straw was published and had sold seventy-five thousand copies by December.
So the book I had admired as brilliant satire was prophecy. Man of Straw takes place in the 1890s, early in the reign of Wilhelm II, who was noted for militarism and authoritarian rule. To any post–World War II reader, though, the book re-creates the social and psychological conditions for the flourishing of Nazism. It is, with the regrettable benefit of history, a work that loops through eras, showing simultaneously what happened once and, like a shadow story, what happened even more disastrously again. How many more times? it inevitably asks.
Unlike his brother, Heinrich Mann was very much a political man. The two men spent years estranged over political differences, with Thomas the more conservative and patriotic, until the 1930s, when that position became untenable. Man of Straw’s political intrigue—shocking, dirty and ludicrous—is one of its most salient features: in a series of maneuvers of Byzantine complexity, far right and far left join forces to crush the middle. Nonetheless, Heinrich Mann knew what many other political men don’t: that tyrants, like the rest of us, are trained in the nursery. Diederich Hessling, the hollow yet highly dangerous underling, becomes a caricature—the man you love to hate—as this eerie balloon of a book soars to its finish, but the psychological portrait of him at the start is deadly realism.
Diederich is a sadomasochistic toddler, terrified of his father yet proud to be abused by him because as victim he partakes of power. When his father’s workmen mock him, he thinks, “I have got a beating, but from my papa. You would be glad to be beaten by him, but you are not good enough for that.” He both loves and hates the insipid sentimentality of his mother and will feel confused and ambivalent about women for the rest of his life. Apart from this, there is no confusion. Diederich takes pleasure in confessing his sins and cringing. In school, he is delighted to be part of an “inhumanly indifferent” organization. “He was proud of . . . this grim power, which he felt, if only through suffering. On the headmaster’s birthday flowers were placed on his desk and the blackboard. Diederich actually decorated the cane.”
The novel traces Diederich’s rise to power as a paper manufacturer and citizen activist in the small city of Netzig, a success won through political chicanery and slander, and inseparable from his adoration of the flamboyant emperor. The centers of narrative energy—and my own favorite passages—are the several encounters of emperor and subject, in which our loathsome hero feels a nonsensical transfer of power. With savage drollery, Mann demonstrates how this pseudo-mystical identification with power inspires allegiance to dictators. The first such meeting occurs in Berlin, where Diederich is a student and also a coward who has managed to evade military service by a bogus injury. But he belongs to the Neo-Teutons, a militaristic youth group that fosters virility and character by beer drinking. A somber demonstration by masses of the unemployed takes place along Unter der Linden:
They reached the Castle, were driven back, and reached it again, silent and irresistible, like a river overflowing its banks . . . this turbid, discolored sea of poverty, rolling up in clammy waves, emitting subdued noises and throwing up, like the masts of sunken ships, poles bearing banners: “Bread! Work!” Here and there a more distinct rumbling broke out of the depths: “Bread! Work!” Swelling above the crowd it rolled off like a thunder-cloud: “Bread! Work!”
And then the emperor appears on horseback, “a young man wearing a helmet.” The crowd breaks through the barriers and Diederich stumbles in front of the emperor’s horse. “The Emperor gave him a piercing glance which went through him.” In an effort to salute his leader, Diederich plops down in the mud. High above, the emperor laughs at him. “From the depths of his puddle Diederich stared after him, open-mouthed.”
Thus begins what is, in Diederich’s mind, a supernatural affinity between the two. It’s not long before Diederich shapes the ends of his mustache in the twin peaks of the emperor’s and learns to flash his eyes with menace at his own underlings: his mother and two sisters and the employees at the paper factory he takes over on his father’s death. After the shooting of an innocent citizen by a sentry, Diederich and a group of like-minded and drunk citizens applaud military violence and dispatch a telegram to the emperor affirming that he rules by divine right. A few drinks later, and Diederich’s affinity with Wilhelm has grown so potent that he forges a telegram from the emperor himself, praising the sentry and promoting him. Flashing his eyes, graced by his mustache, Diederich is so impressive that the pathetic Netzig newspaper editor says, “You look so very like—His . . .”
The next day he reads his own words in the newspaper. “Was it possible? Had he really anticipated what the Emperor would say? Was his intuition so acute? Did his brain work in unison with . . . ?” Indeed, the emperor does not deny the words. “Diederich spread out the newspaper, and gazed into its mirrored reflection of himself draped in imperial ermine.”
To culminate the extraordinary union of willing slave and oblivious master, Mann concocts a whirlwind tour of the Eternal City. Diederich interrupts his honeymoon in Zurich to rush south when he hears of the emperor’s diplomatic visit to Rome. In the course of trying to protect his leader and alter ego, he wards off an attack by a mad bomber: that the bomb smells of peppermint and leaves Diederich covered with tooth powder does not deflate his valor. An investigation reveals that the perpetrator, “significantly enough, was an artist.”
I mention the comic aspects of Man of Straw because they are so deliciously satisfying,
so garishly and pointedly hyperbolic. Equally hyperbolic are the caricatures of Diederich’s little circle, representatives of every walk of life: the hypocritical preacher whose wayward daughter becomes Netzig’s leading demimondaine, the power-hungry public prosecutor, the fanatical high-school teacher, the weak-minded newspaper editor, the stalwartly stupid old soldiers, proto-Nazis all.
But comedy is by no means the informing spirit of Man of Straw. Mann subtitled the novel A history of the public soul under Wilhelm II. In a letter to a friend, he described himself as “oppressed by this slave-like man without ideals” and wanted his book to illustrate “the slide towards ‘national inhumanity,’” as indeed it does. This goal could hardly be accomplished without a foil for the slave-like Diederich, a victim of national inhumanity. The foil is the Buck family, headed by Netzig’s leading citizen, old Herr Buck, a public-spirited hero of the democratic uprising of 1848, a man ready to give his life for his principles. At the novel’s opening, he walks the streets magisterially, esteemed by all, a representative of the highest social ideals.
Diederich begins his systematic destruction of Buck and what he stands for by dragging Buck’s son-in-law, Lauer, to court on a charge of libel. The nature of the libel is chilling, retroactively. Goaded by Diederich in a bar, Lauer suggests half-jokingly that the emperor may be tainted by Jewish blood. This is too blasphemous to be borne.
In a splendid courtroom scene, Lauer is defended by old Buck’s son, Wolfgang, who is Diederich’s former schoolmate and opposite number. It would be easy and neat to make Wolfgang an upstanding liberal like his father. Too easy. Instead, Mann does something exceptional with the character: Wolfgang Buck is a skeptic, a pleasure-loving freethinker, a practitioner of what today might be called situational ethics. The contrast, then, is not the familiar one of tyrant versus liberal, but the more encompassing and philosophical one of fanatic versus independent spirit.