Longer Views: Extended Essays

by Samuel R. Delany

  To become properly acquainted with a truth we must first have disbelieved it, and disputed against it . . .

  Philosophy is properly Home-sickness; the wish to be everywhere at home . . .

  The division of Philosopher and Poet is only apparent, and to the disadvantage of both. It is a sign of disease, and of a sickly constitution . . .

  There is but one Temple in the World; and that is the Body of Man. Nothing is holier than this high form. Bending before men is a reverence done to this Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven, when we lay our hand on a human body . . .

  We are near awakening when we dream that we dream . . .

  —and the disturbingly prescient observation quoted by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, “Writings are the thoughts of the State; archives are its memory.”

  As well, Novalis wrote a series of poems, Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night), that forms one of the most influential series of poems from the exciting ferment of Early German Romanticism.

  Trained as an engineer, the twenty-three-year-old von Hardenberg was working as an assayer in the salt mines where his father had worked before him. In the small Saxon mining town, he met and fell in love with a thirteen-year-old girl, Sophie von Kühn. He sued her family for her hand, and was finally accepted—though the marriage was not to take place until she was older. Hardenberg was devoted to his young fiancée. Two and a half years later, on March 17th of 1797, Sophie turned fifteen. But two days later, on the 19th, after two operations on her liver, she died. Not a full month later, on April 14th, Hardenberg’s younger brother Erasmus passed away. Now Hardenberg wrote a friend in a letter:

  It has grown Evening around me, while I was looking into the red of Morning. My grief is boundless as my love. For three years she has been my hourly thought. She alone bound me to life, to the country, to my occupation. With her I am parted from all; for now I scarcely have myself any more. But it has grown Evening . . .

  And in another letter, from May 3rd:

  Yesterday I was twenty-five years old. I was in Grünigen and stood beside her grave. It is a friendly spot; enclosed with simple white railing; lies apart, and high. There is still room in it. The village, with its blooming gardens, leans up around the hill; and it is at this point that the eye loses itself in blue distances. I know you would have liked to stand by me, and stick the flowers, my birthday gifts, one by one into her hillock. This time two years, she made me a gay present, with a flag and national cockade on it. To-day her parents gave me the little things which she, still joyfully, had received on her last birthday. Friend,—it continues Evening, and will soon be Night.

  Soon after that, Hardenberg composed both his fragments and his Hymns.

  An early manuscript shows us that Novalis first wrote all six of his hymns as verse. But later he reworked and condensed the first four (and much of the fifth) into a hard, glittering, quintessentially modern German prose-poetry. It was only the final hymn, the sixth, “Sensucht nach dem Tode” (“Yearning for Death”) that Novalis let stand as traditional poetry. The prose-poetry version was the one published by the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel in their magazine Athenaeum 3, n. 2, in 1800.

  By inverting a traditional metaphor, the Hymnen (a series quite as notable in its ways as The City of Dreadful Night, The Waste Land, and The Bridge, though it lacks the two modern series’ urban specificity) introduce an astonishing trope into the galaxy of European—and finally Western—rhetoric: To those of a certain sensibility (often those in deep grief, or those with a secret sorrow not to be named before the public), the day, sunlight, and the images of air and light that usually sign pleasure are actually hateful and abhorrent. Night alone is the time such souls can breathe freely, be their true selves, and come into their own. For them, night is the beautiful, wondrous, and magical time—not the day.

  In the second half of that extraordinary fifth Hymn, in which both prose and verse finally combine, Hardenberg even goes so far as to Christianize his “Nachtbegeisterung” (“Enthusiasm for the night”): Night, not day, is where the gods dwell as constellations. It was through the night the three kings traveled under their star seeking Jesus, and it was in the night they found Him. Similarly it was during the night that the stone was rolled away from the tomb and, thus, it was the night that the Resurrection occurred.

  Writers who were to take up this trope of the inversion of the traditional values of night and day—in both cases, directly from Novalis—and make it their own include both Poe and Baudelaire. And the great Second Act of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde has been called simply “Novalis set to music.” Certainly Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night is the poetic moment through which it erupted into the forefront of English poetic awareness. The Christianizing moment makes the trope Novalis’s own, but writers were to seize that basic night/day inversion—Byron for Childe Harold and Manfred, Poe for C. August Dupin—till we can almost think of it as the romantic emblem.

  By comparison to Novalis (or Thomson), Crane’s Bridge is overwhelmingly a poem of the day—yet it has its crepuscular moments, where one is about to enter into night:

  From Crane’s opening “Proem,” addressing the Bridge:

  And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

  Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;

  Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.

  The City’s fiery parcels all undone,

  Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

  Though Crane is the author, this is Novalis (does Crane’s capital “C” in “City” consciously link it to Thomson’s?)—and Novalis by way of Thomson, at that!

  As well, in The Bridge, there is the pair of aubades, “The Harbor Dawn” and “Cutty Sark,” when night is being left behind.

  But let us linger on the Thomson/Novalis connection a little longer. Eventually it will lead us back to Crane, and by an interesting circumlocution:

  Thomson not only took Novalis’s pen name and Novalis’s famous poetic night/day inversion for his own. Working with another friend, he taught himself German and translated Novalis’s Hymns: though his translation has never been published in its entirety, the sections reprinted by various biographers are quite lovely; the manuscript has been at the Bodley Head since 1953. Thomson also appropriated, however, a bit of Novalis’s biography.

  When he was eighteen and an assistant army schoolmaster in Ballincollig near Cork, Thomson met the not quite fourteen-year-old daughter of his friend Charles Bradlaugh’s armourer-sergeant, Mathilda Weller, with whom he was quite taken. They danced together at a young people’s party; presumably they had a handful of deep and intense conversations. Two years later, before she reached her sixteenth year, Mathilda died.

  In later years, Thomson claimed that her death wholly blighted the remainder of his life. (Mathilda just happened to be the name Novalis had given to the character inspired by Sophie in his novel of the mystical quest for the blue amaranthus in Heinrich von Ofterdingen.) On his own death from dipsomania, at age forty-seven in 1882, Thomson was buried with a lock of Mathilda’s hair in the coffin with him. But it’s quite possible Thomson used this suspiciously Novalis-like fable to excuse the fact that he did not marry, also to excuse his increasing drunkenness, and quite possibly as a cover for promiscuous homosexuality in the alleys and back streets of London, where he eventually finished his life. While Friedrich von Hardenberg survived Sophie von Kühn by only four years—tuberculosis killed him shortly before he turned twenty-nine (as it would kill the twenty-three-year-old Greenberg)—James Thomson survived Mathilda Weller by nearly thirty.

  An incident in Thomson’s young life that may have come far closer to blighting the remainder of it than Mathilda’s death occurred in 1862, however, when Thomson was twenty-seven—and still teaching in the army. Thomson and some other schoolmasters were at a pond. Though it was a private lake and no bathing was allowed, someone dared one among them to swim out to a boat in the middle. Thomson was recognized but, when quest
ioned about the incident later, refused to give the names of his companions. For this, he was demoted to schoolmaster 4th Class, then dismissed from the army.

  Whether any of the other schoolmasters involved were dismissed has not been recorded.

  Thomson’s earliest biographer, Henry Salt, makes little of the incident and claims Thomson was not guilty of any personal misconduct but was simply unlucky enough to be part of “the incriminated party.”

  But Thomson’s 1965 biographer, William David Schaefer, feels the explanation is wildly improbable, detecting about it some sort of Victorian cover up—possibly involving alcoholism: Thomson’s drinking had already established itself as a problem as far back as 1855. Perhaps the young men at the pond were both rowdy and soused. I would go Schaefer one further, however, and suggest there was some sort of sexual misconduct involved as well, for which the swimming incident was, indeed, used as the official excuse to expel the group of possibly embarrassing fellows. But we do not know for sure.

  What we do know is that Thomson now went to London and began a career of writing scathingly radical articles for the various political journals of the times—often living off his friends, and drinking more and more. And it was only now that (some of) his poems began to refer to a secret sorrow—presumably Mathilda Weller’s death. In London Thomson lived with his friend Charles Bradlaugh (and Bradlaugh’s wife and two daughters) on and off for more than twelve years as a kind of tolerated, even fondly approved of, if occasionally drunken, uncle—until a year or so after The City of Dreadful Night was published in the March and May issues of Bradlaugh’s magazine, The National Reformer. (Bradlaugh skipped the April issue because of objections from readers; but still other readers, among them Bertram Dobell, wrote to ask when the poem would continue; and publication resumed.) But with Thomson’s newfound fame, the poet-journalist’s drinking escalated violently—and the two men finally broke over it.

  The City of Dreadful Night begins with two Italian epigraphs, one by Dante, one by Leopardi. The Dante says, “Per me si va nella citta dolente” (“Through me you enter into the sorrowful city.”) But this is not the all too familiar motto over the Gate of Hell. Rather, from Thomson’s poem, we realize this is Thomson’s motto for the gate of birth and that the city of life itself is, for Thomson, the sorrowful city, the city without hope or love or faith. And Leopardi is, after all, the poet who wrote to his sister Paolina about the grandeur that was Rome: “These huge buildings and interminable streets are just so many spaces thrown between men, instead of being spaces that contain men.” The City of Dreadful Night is a blunt and powerful, if not the most artful, presentation of the condition of humanity bereft of all the consolations of Christianity as well as the community of small rural settlements—next to which The Waste Land, with its incursions of medieval myth, occultism, and Eastern religions to provide a possible code of meaning and conduct, looks positively optimistic!

  Back in his twenty-second year, however, in 1857, while still stationed at Ballincollig, Thomson wrote what, today, we must read as a “dry run” for the more famous series (that he would go on to write between ’71 and ’73, with trips to both the U.S.A. and Spain coming to interrupt its composition). Called The Doom of a City, its four parts (“The Voyage,” “The City,” “The Judgment,” and “The Return”) run to some 43 pages in my edition—fifteen pages longer than the 28-page City of Dreadful Night. Although Plato’s mythic island is never mentioned by name, clearly this is the young Thomson’s attempt to tell his own version of the story of Atlantis. (Again, the basic idea may have come from his idol: on a shipboard journey in Chapter III of Novalis’s Ofterdingen, merchants regale Heinrich and his mother with a tale of Atlantis, in which Atlantis’s king is enamored of poetry and his daughter, who rides off and meets a young scholar in the woods, loses a ruby from her necklace which the young man finds, returns for it the next day, stays to fall in love, retreats to a cave with the young man in a storm, and lives with him and his father for a year before returning to court with her child and the lute-playing young man, for a glorious reunion with the king—a fairy tale whose overwhelming affect is its reliance on time’s ability to absorb all intergenerational, or generally Oedipal, tensions, so that the reference to its destruction in the closing line, “Nur in Sagen heisst es, dass Atlantis von machtigen Fluten den Augen entzogen worden sie,” [“Only in legends are we told that mighty floods took Atlantis from the sight of man”], falls like a veil between us and a vision of paradise.) In Part I, “The Voyage,” of Doom of a City, the despairing poet rises in the middle of the night and takes a skiff that, leaving his own city, brings him over the lightless water—after a brief, but harmless, confrontation with a sea monster—to dawn and the shore of a great and mysterious City. The day, however, grows stormy.

  After waiting out the day on shore, here is the City the poet finally finds at sunset:

  . . . Dead or dumb,

  That mighty City through the breathless air

  Thrilled forth no pulse of sound, no faintest hum

  Of congregated life in street and square:

  Becalmed beyond all calm those galleons lay,

  As still and lifeless as their shadows there,

  Fixed in the magic mirror of the bay

  As in a rose-flushed crystal weirdly fair.

  A strange, sad dream: and like a fiery ball,

  Blazoned with death, that sky hung over all.

  Night descends; and the poet enters the darkened City’s gates:

  The moon hung golden, large and round,

  Soothing its beauty up the quiet sky

  In swanlike slow pulsations, while I wound

  Through dewy meads and gardens of rich flowers,

  Whose fragrance like a subtle harmony

  Was fascination to the languid hours.

  In the moonlight, he finds a garden of cypress, a funeral come to a halt, and a market. But all the inhabitants are frozen stone instead of living people. He moves on into the City:

  My limbs were shuddering while my veins ran fire,

  And hounded on by dread

  No less than by desire,

  I plunged into the City of the Dead,

  And pierced its mausolean loneliness

  Between the self-sufficing palaces,

  Broad fronts of azure, fire and gold, which shone

  Spectrally valid in the moonlight wan,

  Adown great streets; through spacious sylvan squares,

  Whose fountains plashing lone

  Fretted the silence with perpetual moan;

  Past range on range of marts which spread their wares

  Weirdly unlighted to the eye of heaven,

  Jewels and silks and golden ornaments,

  Rich perfumes, soul-in-soul of all rare scents.

  Viols and timbrels: O wild mockery!

  Where are the living shrines for these adornings?

  The poet explores on, but instead of a populace in the City—

  What found I? Dead stone sentries stony-eyed,

  Erect, steel-sworded, brass-defended all,

  Guarding the sombrous gateway deep and wide

  Hewn like a cavern through the mighty wall;

  Stone statues all throughout the streets and squares.

  Grouped as in social converse or alone;

  Dim stony merchants holding forth rich wares

  To catch the choice of purchasers in stone;

  Fair statues leaning over balconies,

  Whose bosoms made the bronze and marble chill;

  Statues about the lawns, beneath the trees

  Firm sculptured horsemen on stone horses still;

  Statues fixed gazing on the flowing river

  Over the bridge’s sculpted parapet;

  Statues in boats, amidst its sway and quiver

  Immovable as if in ice-waves set:—

  The whole vast sea of life about me lay,

  The passionate, the heaving, restless, sounding life,

  With all its
side and billows, foam and spray,

  Attested in full tumult of its strife

  Frozen into a nightmare’s ghastly death,

  Struck silent by its laughter and its moan.

  The vigorous heart and brain and blood and breath

  Stark, strangled, confined in eternal stone.

  The poet continues to regard the urban landscape around him with its stony populace—

  Look away there to the right—How the bay lies broad and bright,

  All athrob with murmurous rapture in the glory of the moon!

  See in front the palace stand, halls and columns nobly planned;

  Marble home for marble dwellers is it not full fair and boon?

  See the myriads gathered there on that green and wooded square,

  In mysterious congregation,—they are statues every one:

  All are clothed in rich array; it is some high festal day;

  The solemnity is perfect with the pallid moon for sun.

  As he finally sees the stony autarch of the city (beside whom crouches the skeleton of Death), the whole, frozen vision, with all its populace turned to stone, lit with a full moon, a series of towering gods appear (Part III, “The Judgment”), and a booming Voice proceeds to judge wanting one aspect of the City after another; and, on each judgment, that section of the City falls into the sea, or is toppled by an earthquake, to be swallowed up.

  The judgment on the City begins with—

  A multitudinous roaring of the ocean!

  Voices of sudden and earth-quaking thunder

  From the invisible mountains!

  The heavens are broken up and rent asunder

  By curbless lightning fountains,

  Swarming and darting through that black commotion,

  In which the moon and stars are swallowed with the sky.

  Finally, only the young poet is spared by the Voice, as one who has sought after truth. The day dawns; what remains of the city is only the good and the pure—which, indeed, isn’t very much. The poet regains his boat and returns from whence he came over the blue waters and under the brilliant sun.