Tipping My Hand

Readers of this blog will have noticed common themes running through its posts. As I near the end of the first draft of my final book, So Are You to My Thoughts, I think often of the value system embodied in the characters. I haven’t tried to make it explicit, as it is indeed meant to be reflected in their actions and thoughts. Their human natures compel their actions, while their feelings and thoughts make meaning of them.

In our study of tai chi, the Taoist way and its principles, we were taught an exercise between two people in which we first “listened” with our bodies, “surrendered” to the other person, “transformed” their energy as it came toward us, and finally “pushed.” It is a practice of balance within oneself, and harmony between people, which also results in positive accomplishment.

In my work, I’ve tried to show that there are ways of taking the material you grow up with and find in yourself and transforming it. Thus the freedom everyone in my generation fought for (“like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir”) does not have to be freedom from anything. It can be freedom to make homes, families and lives of which we are proud and which honor those we love.

Likewise, the self definition which many of us were so desperate about can be understood in terms not of self expression, but of service. Beyond the idea that only a few are called to become artists, documenting every last impulse, we can recognize that all of us are able to display the cardinal virtues of discernment, courage, temperance and fairness. Cultivation of these virtues enables us to live beside each other in harmony and peace.

A third major preoccupation of my generation was lifestyle, making new ways to live beyond the traditional furniture-ridden, unquestioned round of those who had gone before. Transforming this impulse to trash the past, we can educate ourselves to live with grace and taste, seeing these as elements of everything we do.

Goodness, truth, and beauty have long been the ideals of humanity. Keats saw in the Grecian urn that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” None of this triad exists without the other. I associate freedom with truth, as all paths must be open in order to find it. Beauty has within it the necessity for authenticity, as in nature, where nothing is anything but itself. Goodness too is hollow without the backbone of character. Victimhood has been the subject of art, and of people’s prurient interest, way too long. And people hardly believe they have a right to beauty, that they know what it is. We can turn our gaze back to these ideals.

In his book, The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit [1995], Frederick Turner says: “The greatest arts are, I believe, not those which cause a stir on museum walls or extend some ‘shocking’ modern or post-modern critical theory into yet another posture or attitude, but those arts which intensify ordinary human existence and fill it with meaning, that make a home into a place that recalls all our beautiful and tragic past, and points to futures that are as human as they are strange and adventurous.”

John Bayley pointed out, regarding Czeslaw Milosz, that he was beyond ideology, having lived through so much change and violence during the 20^th century. Milosz was “not after himself, but after that old European goal of cultivation and understanding, enlightenment and humanitas.” The U.S. too is growing up, forging a new culture not seen before from its indigenous peoples, its immigrants and its unique place on the globe. Humans evolve slowly, but culture is quick. We can do better than we have in recent years. Postmodernism, with its identity and power politics, is a dead end. We are over it. Time to look back and pick up the pieces.

Where is John Bayley When We Need Him?

Most people know John Bayley, if at all, as the husband of Iris Murdoch, portrayed in the movie Iris based on his memoir of her. Because of my early involvement with Pasternak and other Russian writers, I knew him long before that from his criticism, with a special affinity for the Russians, published in the New York Review of Books. A professor at Oxford University, he has spoken for over 50 years with great authority on the vast subject of world literature. He comes to it with a perspective which I find both instructive and validating.

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.