For instance, in an essay on Czeslaw Milosz published in the NYRB, 1981, and reprinted in The Power of Delight, his collected essays, he points to what seems unique in Milosz: “the reality of the thing, the return of the thing … Things, in the sense in which the nineteenth-century novel both assumed and created them have not been central to the American literary consciousness. In their place have been legends and ideas and consciousness itself.” He goes on to note that American artists seek relief from freedom, but that in Milosz, who survived youth in Lithuania/Poland during World War II and was later a professor at UC Berkeley for almost 40 years, ideology had died a natural death. “Life itself, and the reverence for it, becomes then the precious thing to be explored and celebrated,” writes Bayley.
Bayley returns again and again to the significance of Pasternak. In 1967, he sees him as the natural heir of Tolstoy. He writes in Tolstoy and the Novel “Pasternak shares with Tolstoy the power of transforming and humanizing the actual and the terrible, not by shutting himself away from it but by remaining unexcited by it. Neither has an ambiguous relation to violence, or gives way to the novelist’s temptation to dispense it as an earnest of truth. … The main thing about Zhivago is not that he is a doctor or even a poet, but that like Pierre and Levin, he is a good man – a good man buried alive in an age in which men have ‘come to themselves half-conscious and with half their memory gone’. It is his task to show how they can be made whole again.”
I could go on quoting Bayley! His insights are expressed so clearly and are so appropriate to the discussion of literature in contemporary America. [We have a Brazilian student staying with us, and Don reminds me that American may mean much more than a citizen of the United States. Camila says, however, that Brazilians also use “American” to mean “coming from the United States.”] Garth Hallberg brings up the question “Why Write Novels at All?” in an essay in the New York Times [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/magazine/why-write-novels-at-all.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=garth%20hallberg&st=cse] which points to the writers currently holding sway here, and their ambiguity about what they are doing. He finds it rare to find characters that acknowledge the existence of others, that “require me to imagine a consciousness independent of my own, and equally real.”
Bayley brings all sides of the question into his capacious critique. During the time he has been writing, the totalitarian governments of Russia and the Slovakian countries have been a foil for Western literature, and these are what he knows best. In 1990, Bayley reflected on the paradox of Pasternak’s art, which “is at once totally popular and totally narcissistic.” He thus discriminates, considering Pasternak’s poetry better than the novel Doctor Zhivago. But he also says, “the novel, as D.H. Lawrence saw, is ‘incapable of the absolute,’ and gains in its own ways from its lapses and imperfections.”
We are struggling out of a cultural trough, I believe, looking for the wave that will next crest. The search for the self which Western literature developed in art, now indeed seems like a prison. Bayley notes that Milosz “is not after himself, but after that old European goal of cultivation and understanding, enlightenment and humanitas.”
See what I mean? Bayley points us in the right direction.
