We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays

Last September in Italy, two events were simultaneously honored: at Naples, the two thousandth anniversary of the death of Virgil; and, at Milan, the death, at the age of eighty-four, of Eugenio Montale. The Virgilian ceremonies at Naples were an intensification of bimillennial commemorations, which included public readings of the Aeneid, dozens of scholarly articles in daily newspapers (which also carried special weekend color supplements on the poet), and innumerable other observances engaging the entire Neapolitan populace and noted throughout the Italian nation—as, by scholars, throughout the world. In the cathedral of Milan, the funeral of Montale was attended by the president and premier of Italy; while outside the Duomo an immense crowd stood in hot sun, breaking—as a newspaper reported—into “oceanic applause” as the poet’s coffin emerged. Banner headlines announcing Montale’s death were followed over many days by special newspaper pages of appreciation and reminiscence and, of course, examples of the poet’s work. A private memorial, only relatively less public than that held at Milan, subsequently took place at Florence.

It may thus be said that the press of Italy was to a great extent occupied, throughout the month of September 1981, in paying tribute to two poets who died just two thousand years apart, neither of whom had courted popular attention.

At his death in his fifty-first year, Virgil left the twelve books of his Aeneid, written in the latter part of his life and apparently completed in 19 BC, the epic that through subsequent centuries has stood in the civilized Western consciousness as a chief literary representation of man’s high heroic struggle to transcend his mortality and fulfill, by historic lofty actions, his greater destiny; its theme simply and grandly stated in its celebrated opening words: “Arms and the man I sing.”

Montale, in a brief poem written in his later life—a poem about a lost cat on a city street—tells us that on that street in past years—that is, during the fascist era—there had occurred events “fit for history, unfit for memory” (Fatti degni di storia, indegni di memoria).¹

So we have two poets, each a master of language and literary form, each accorded in life the highest formal recognition: the one favored by Augustus, the other a Nobel laureate; born in the same peninsula: one near Mantua, the other at Genoa; both profoundly affected by the public events of their troubled times; both of plain, respectable parentage. The public destiny proclaimed by the one as indivisible from the private; by the other, our contemporary, scorned as a contamination with which no decent person can associate himself. In the one, human existence ideally ennobled by superhuman striving. By the other, existence justified only on its most intimate terms.

In considering this mighty reversal during my talk this evening, I make no attempt to unravel the multiplicity of sociological, historical, political, anthropological, and demographic factors contributing to it. Still less do I wish to develop any literary theory, or to seem to pit one poet against another. Art is not a competition. Rather, I should like to offer, as a writer, some comments and conjectures through literature itself. That is, to trace this change through the work of poets and writers themselves, in whom consciousness of it has been acute and continuous. Indeed, the testimony is so vast that it allows tonight only of a few selected indications.

The scene last September in the piazza at Milan may be the last such observance that will occur—the last public tribute to the poet as a recognized requirement of society. (I might add that a young relative of Montale’s expressed the view to me at the time that the occasion was exploited by the attending politicians. However that may be, we can’t have it every way: at least they acknowledged by their presence that there was something there to exploit.)

In a pronouncement central to his thought and work—and also to his times, which are our own fateful era—Montale has told us that every human illusion has found its matching disillusionment: “Ogni illusione è in perfetta corrispondenza con la sua delusione.”³

It is the fourth of Auden’s lost categories that most touches my theme this evening: the disappearance of the public realm as the sphere of revelatory personal deeds. In consequence, Auden says, literature has lost its traditional principal human subject, the man of action, the doer of public deeds. To the ancient world, the private sphere was ruled by mere necessity of sustaining life; whereas the public realm was the field in which a man might disclose and fulfill himself. Today, the public has become the necessary impersonal sphere; while the private leaves us our only hope of manifesting—not even perhaps virtue but merely an individual presence, a singular experience, some affinity with our fellow beings.

The setting for public action is similarly degraded. In Auden’s poem, “The Shield of Achilles,” Thetis, the mother of Achilles, looks over the shoulder of the armorer Hephaestos to discover—in an invocation of the Iliad—what contemporary embellishments he has set on the shield her son will bear to the modern struggle. You’ll remember the poem opens:

Scepticism about arms and armory is common in the work of poets, including Virgil. To poets, swords have always been double-edged. Rochester says, in his Satyr against Mankind: “Whilst wretched man is still in arms for fear. / For fear he arms, and is of arms afraid, / By fear to fear successively betrayed.”⁶ In the Second World War, Henry Reed literally and figuratively took a gun apart in his delightful “The Naming of Parts.”⁷

The overall title of these lectures, “The Lonely Word” is taken from Tennyson’s memorial poem on Virgil, where the English laureate finds in the Roman—to quote—“All the charm of the Muses / Often flowering in a lonely word.”⁸ Tennyson’s poem was written just a century ago, at the request of the city of Mantua, for the nineteen hundredth anniversary of Virgil’s death; in an era when, as later, in the 1940s, in my own Australian schooldays, every British schoolchild was obliged to study Virgil. In the poem, Tennyson claims to have loved Virgil from his earliest youth—this was also the claim of Berlioz, on rather stronger evidence. I was a child when I first read Tennyson’s poem for the first time. Such is the inevitability with which poetry sets its seal on occasions that it did not occur to me then—and scarcely later—that there would be another such anniversary, and that I might be present for it. Still less could I imagine celebrating it, as I did, among the still highly recognizable settings of Book 6 of the Aeneid. For me, Tennyson had commemorated Virgil once and for all—Tennyson, whose commemorative powers were demonstrated as early as his fifteenth year when, in 1824, he carved on a rock BYRON IS DEAD.

As I shall revert to this poem of Tennyson’s in a later lecture, I shall say a word about it now. The poem touches briefly on the equivocal nature of poetic material—whether mighty or intimate, or the two converging; whether speaking of its time, or for all time, or the two simultaneously; whether it should develop a legend or express a man. Tennyson’s famous conclusion is a tribute to this encompassing power of language itself:

But these divisions of human literary impulse took place, with however many fluctuations and unrealities, within a recognizable context of attitudes to external forces, a mentalité acknowledging external forces, a collective necessity greater than the self. Whether achieved or not, some equilibrium was immemorially held necessary to balance human existence in relation to natural and supernatural power: the Greek Dike, which saw individualism literally as “idiotic.” (In English, by the way, the word “idiot” retained something of that ancient meaning into the seventeenth century.)

In two brief poems called “History,” Montale describes the remorseless impersonality of public events, speaking of history’s detestation for details, for the “idiotic.” He depicts history as a great net with an occasional small tear through which some fish may once in a while slip out: the escaped fish does not even realize he is outside; while those looking on from the net tell themselves they are freer than he.¹¹

An accepted starting point for this diminution of high heroic passion is the advent of the Christian era. Literature, however, shows us that human equivocation about single-mindedness was already a common topic. And for expressing these heresies, literature paid an inevitable price and the poet lost ground in his sacred function. In his Paideia, Werner Jaeger says that

Even so, St. Jerome expiated his love of pagan texts in the desert, and the Christian convert Paulinus wrote to Ausonius that “Hearts vowed to Christ have no welcome for the goddesses of song; they are barred to Apollo.”¹³

The Christian ideal retained the concept of mission. The Golden Bough had been supplanted by the Holy Grail, but with the profound difference that whereas the epic hero became godlike—larger than life—God had assumed Man’s daily likeness. Christ is an anti-hero. Man’s higher calling was now—at least, ideally—to godliness, meekness, obscurity, simplicity; to pacific and childlike ways; however much ferocity might still take place in the name of salvation. The literary hero remains to some extent familiar—he is necessarily beset on his life’s journey by doubt, despair, danger, terror, grief, responsibility, and above all by a temptation to self-indulgence supremely personified as Woman. In letting his choice fall on Aphrodite, Paris had chosen the gratification of private pleasure and disturbed the balance of a larger good. In consequence, his birthplace was destroyed and its survivors turned loose to wander the earth. For succumbing to the inducements of Eve, Adam was banished from Paradise. As Yeats remarked, “What theme had Homer but original sin?”¹⁴ The worst cross the Christian hero has to bear is frequently Woman—Eve, Guinevere, Isolde, Tasso’s Armida, Lady Macbeth. Literary Woman is henceforth a debilitating, or, as with Beatrice and Laura, is a redeeming influence on men and so she long remained.

Conversely, by abandoning Dido, and nobly pursuing his higher calling, Aeneas is enabled to found the Italian nation. For this he was commended by St. Augustine, in the City of God, as a pattern for Christian virtue—St. Augustine remarking with approval that Virgil allowed Dido’s tears to fall in vain.¹⁵

The pattern persisting through the morality plays and the medieval romance, and restated in The Pilgrim’s Progress, is strongly present in the nineteenth-century novel, and still discernible in modern fiction. It represents perhaps on the part of society an innate yearning toward exemplarity and also toward a caste system that survives in the figure of the knight (who belongs to what is significantly called the nobility). The knight gradually merges in literature with the man of honor, and subsequently with the merely estimable man, while humility contented itself with successive versions of Everyman.

As we see from St. Augustine’s comment, the phenomenon of Duty had supplanted the sacrifices required by pagan gods. Yet it was a “Duty” persistently supernatural enough for Wordsworth to address it, fifteen centuries later, as “Stern daughter of the voice of God.”¹⁶

Running parallel or counter to this literary stream, and often mingling with it, was the irrepressible questioning of men by man, a sifting of human conduct refreshed by the Renaissance that showed early traces of the anti-hero. The survival of the pagan gods, to borrow the phrase of Jean Seznec, was not a theological survival; paganism was recalled by man to serve the cause of humanism, or as Edgar Wind has written, to reconcile pleasure with virtue.¹⁷ From the Renaissance onward, the struggle of the central literary figure is often predominantly a sense of offending against his rational better sense. Under the aegis of Virgil, Dante is the central character of his own work, as Proust was later to be his own Narrator. And the range of mortal experience is the material for both. In a great poem of Petrarch, the poet and Love argue their case before the court of Reason. To Machiavelli a leader is a fallible and not notably virtuous mortal dealing in expedients—a view he derived, as he confirms, from his immersion in classical literature. (Alexander Pope was to write indignantly that “the politic Florentine Nicholas Machiavel affirms that a man needs but to believe himself a hero to be one of the best.”¹⁸) Hamlet, a virtuous prince, a leader born, is an unsurpassed anti-hero, who fatalistically tells us, in the very moment of professing his swordsmanship: “But you would not think how ill all’s here about my heart.”¹⁹

All these mutations, nevertheless, existed within a still recognizable frame. And “this huge stage presenteth nought but shows whereon the stars in secret influence comment.”²⁰ Auden’s four categories of loss were not yet in receivership, however their meaning might be questioned or resisted by individual writers, or however their persistence might depend, under Puritanism, on hypocrisy. A reference to external events, a deference to the natural and supernatural, a presumption, however altered or ironical, of a larger order, endured in literature if only as belief in the future ages, the future of the earth itself until the nineteenth century, and faltered on into the twentieth. The very names of cultural epochs speak for their links to classical concepts: Renaissance, Augustan, neoclassical. Memory was gaining on history as literary capital; but public action and intimate sentiment were still literarily compatible. Only 150 years ago Walter Scott was able to pay tribute to Jane Austen’s mastery of “the exquisite touch on commonplace things,” while reserving for himself what he called the Big Wow-Wow.²¹

When Scott offered that tribute, the Big Wow-Wow was increasingly mal vu, in literary quarters. Other ideas, or illusions, as Montale might call them, were in literary circulation as to what was fit for history and what for memory. Pope had proposed Ridicule as the only corrective for entrenched pomposity; Burns had declared of the Establishment that the man of independent mind, he looks and laughs at all that.²² Byron had declared, of attacks on the profanity of his work, “So much the better. I may stand alone, But would not change my free thoughts for a throne.”²³

No poet is more eloquent than Byron on the change in the poet’s views on history and memory, changes that intensified as the nineteenth century drew to its close. Of his own work Byron remarked, “If you must have an epic, there’s Don Juan for you. I call that an epic: it is an epic as much in the spirit of our day as the Iliad was in Homer’s. Love, religion, and politics form the argument, and are as much the cause of quarrels now as they were then.”²⁴ The transformations of emphasis in these components are a recurring topic in Byron’s work. Out of innumerable examples, a single reference—in this case to Marc Antony—will suffice here.

I have already referred to the contrast between Aeneas’s abandonment of Dido and Paris’s seduction of Helen; Aeneas chose history, the public over the private. His alliance with Lavinia is a mere political expedient—although indeed Turnus feelingly remarks of it that one would think Trojans, with their experience, might have steered clear of women forever.

During Virgil’s lifetime, Marc Antony suffered, in 31 B.C., with the Battle of Actium, the fate reserved for the man inadequate to his heroic destiny: dying like a figure of antique—or Japanese—tragedy. Of this downfall, Woman was the explicit cause. Plutarch in fact describes Cleopatra as being decked out as an image of Venus at her celebrated meeting with Antony. Virgil, in a single phrase, refers to Antony’s disgrace, condemning him as a man, victorious in every great challenge, who destroyed himself with illicit lust. By Shakespeare’s time, Antony’s story was recast as a humanly appealing struggle, in which a strong man forfeits for love his right to the hero’s immortality.

By 1823, Byron had this to say about Marc Antony’s place in history and in memory:

In Shakespeare, of course, other elected heroes divest themselves of their lustrous burden and throw themselves on the mercy of the court of rampant humanism: Richard II tells his courtiers, “I live with bread, like you; feel want, taste grief, / Need friends. Subjected thus, / How can you say to me, I am a king?”²⁶ Sensibility was a theme for Renaissance writers as for classical authors, as a power of mutual recognition in human kind. But sensibility as an isolating property had gained, by the Romantic period, such ascendancy that Leopardi in the 1830s was cautioning the Romantic poets on the elevation of subjective feelings over the greater mysteries of existence, in contrast with the ancient writers who preserved a humility before the universe. Leopardi says, “And they, the Romantics, do not realize that it is precisely this great ideal of our time, an intimate knowledge of our own heart, and the analyzing, foretelling, and distinguishing of every minute emotion, in short the art of psychology, that destroys the very illusion without which poetry will be no more.”²⁷

Leopardi, in early youth a translator of Virgil, who grieved over the inhumanity, as he called it, of the Aeneid’s closing scene; Leopardi, whose monument stands beside the supposed tomb of Virgil at the entrance of Naples; Leopardi was the author of “A se stesso,” as of the “Infinito.” Perhaps it is Leopardi among poets who first fully realizes that hubris, egotism, will drive man to destroy, along with Nature and his own relation to the world, his very relation to mystery and his source of poetry. This is a theme close to Montale, who again invoking the Aeneid, makes an ironic comment on fashionable modern disbelief:

Disbelief in a greater order produces disbelief in one’s own obligations, which is a form of disbelief in oneself. The literature of the nineteenth century is often preoccupied with a redefinition of Duty—that is, with an attempt to set the hero up on his own terms. There is a continuous examination of duty—duty to god, to the greater good, to the object of one’s affections; or of the conflict between these and a duty to the new hero, oneself: to one’s perception of justice and reason and to a human dignity independent of or opposed to established order. Equilibrium was now re-sited in the self. Under new management. One had become a hero merely by bearing with existence, which was no longer gratefully viewed as a gift of gods. Literally regarded, the daily life of man had become a heroic enterprise in itself.

Virtue, even idealism, might still be present in literature; but modern man in his new isolation must bear his destiny in himself—as Lydgate in Middlemarch, an innovative scientist and public benefactor, inspired by a noble humanitarian cause, foundering yet again, let us note, on the triviality of a woman. The pure redeeming female of the novel is in fact explicitly likened to the Virgin Mary. Loss of faith is a prevailing theme: “We are most hopeless who had once most hope,” Clough tells us, “We are most wretched that had most believed,”³⁰ while the contingent forces of godless inchoate darkness were confronted in the novels of Hardy. In literature, disillusion relieved itself in unmasking; and this unmasking, under the name of Realism, was a trail swiftly leading to the self. No deed or sentiment, however lofty, was now exempt from reassessment. While Tolstoy poured scorn on the historic phenomenon of “glory,” Baudelaire compared memory to a chest of drawers or a communal grave.³¹ Psychiatry was on the scene, a valet for whom there are few heroes. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams bears an epigraph from Virgil: “If the gods will not stir for me, I’ll rouse all hell.”

Literary discreditation of vigor was answered with the more languid genius of introspection: Proust told us what was fit for memory, and the Homeric Ulysses was ironically invoked in the obscure Dubliner. The Idiot had become the Hero.

Of this hero, the poet and writer was himself assuming certain attributes. The poet would address himself to power, to authority, to established ideas as to a phenomenon incapable of virtue. The poet would stand apart and accuse order; he would bear solitary witness. In the nineteenth century, exile, prosecution, and imprisonment—always a feature of the writing life—became common among literary figures: Shelley, Hugo, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Zola, Dostoyevsky. The Idiot was becoming an Outcast; but a heroic outcast, at least to himself. As Victor Brombert says in his Romantic Prison, “repressed freedom and poetic inventiveness are intimately related.”³²

With the coming of our own century, the institutions of authority seemed bent on justifying the writer’s condemnation—bent on identifying “heroism” with destruction and self-destruction. Nature had been, as the saying goes, “subdued.” With the onset of the First World War, the state, and society itself, appeared to embrace disorder, to have gone berserk. The betrayal of the helpless man at arms was excruciatingly reported by the poets of the trenches, and Eliot was to ask, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”³³ From now on, if equilibrium was to reside anywhere it was in a private, almost conspiratorial exchange of sensibility. The literary duel to the death is no longer between two warriors—Hector and Achilles, Aeneas and Turnus—but is exemplified in Edwin Muir’s beautiful poem “The Combat,” in which a monstrous heraldic beast endlessly does battle with an unprepossessing little creature who represents the tenacious surviving shred of our humanity.³⁴

Everyman was now the anti-hero—a Pooter, a Prufrock—who was to shamble onstage in the plays of Beckett and later of Pinter, and to perish in a seedy limbo in Death of a Salesman; the protagonist of such novels as Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, where the vacuum cleaners of the salesman Wormold are mistaken by the authorities for a global missile crisis.

On the death of the hero he warned us:

Poets were beginning to take the measure of loss, and to wonder if the joke might be on them. In 1936, in his “Letter to Lord Byron,” Auden reviewed the disintegration of literary order as a party which began brilliantly—as he says, “How we all roared when Baudelaire went fey.” As the party progressed, he says:

Not the proletariat but Everyman was soon—if briefly—to fill the hero’s role; and Day Lewis would write of the dead lying in a blitzed London street “They have made us eat our knowing words, who rose and paid the bill for the whole party.”³⁹

Along with the rest of us, the poet entered the Orwellian postwar world—the era of mass cult, of a technological supremacy whose ultimate achievement is potential annihilation. The poet’s aversion to events is representative but immaterial, it lacks the force even to register in what Montale calls the “civiltà dell’uomo robot.”⁴⁰ Montale, like Eliot, is a poet of the end of the line. Unlike Eliot, he brings no religious belief to the void; and his “divine indifference,” as he calls it, is a state very far from the nil admirari of Horace, that condition of composed maturity. The scraps of life that make ironic appearance in Montale’s verse—slivers of soap, squeezed toothpaste, crumpled wrapping paper—are introduced as fit accessories for the meagre modern soul. Mistrusting most passion and all enthusiasm he tells us to take life in small spoonfuls, in homeopathic doses: “Non aumentate le dose.”⁴¹ His tone is that of a sage whose knowledge can spare us much useless expenditure of emotion. And when he announces—with no little egotism—that he has “Lived at five per cent of capacity,” one feels that anyone attempting a larger percentage would be making a brutta figura.⁴² Far from Virgil’s “ocean roll of rhythm,” as Tennyson called it, Montale’s is a voice lowered so as to cause the auditor to cup his ear.⁴³ Although sound is measured and essential in every syllable of his verse, Montale—who was a highly trained and knowledgeable musician—is rarely a musical poet. He is aphoristic, but laconic. His poetry is a level gaze at life.

Montale has decreed public events as fit only for history. What then is fit for memory? One of his briefest and most beautiful poems is called “Memory.”⁴⁴ Memory, he says, was a literary genre before writing was invented and already had a stench of death. Living memory, he says, is immemorial, evanescent, and its content is a secret candor. Not every writer would agree that lofty ideals have entirely passed away from human possibility, or that one may not hope to encounter in literature qualities greater than our own, as we sometimes do in life. In our era, live heroes are often writers themselves—dissidents, prisoners of conscience. The very phrase “our hero” speaks for whatever in the human spirit anciently hungers after revelations and for exemplars (even if exemplars are sanitized nowadays in gibberish as “role-models.”) The Aristotelian ideal, that human life “take possession of the beautiful” and live nobly if briefly rather than prolong a commonplace existence is identified by Werner Jaeger as “the sense of heroism through which we feel the classical world most closely akin to ourselves.”⁴⁵ Mystery remains; and no one can really explain why a multitude outside the Duomo of Milan should break into “oceanic applause” at the sight of a poet’s coffin.

Montale has said that every illusion is matched by its disillusion. Yet illusion is the very nature of art. Proust speaks of the historic figures who owe their stature to the illusory magic of literature. Yeats says that civilization itself is “manifold illusion” and that man,

Virgil’s Aeneid has been called a prolonged literary allusion to Homer. It was Virgil whom Dante chose as his spiritual and literary companion. Crowned with the laurel on the capital of Rome, Petrarch chose the theme of his address from Virgil. In accepting, from detention, his Nobel award, Solzhenitsyn—who had inhabited and described the circles of hell—took his text from Dostoyevsky: “Beauty will save the world.”⁴⁷ Eugenio Montale’s Nobel address was called, “Is Poetry Still Possible?”—poetry, which he has called a pebble, a grain of sand. His address ended with characteristically inconclusive words—which will serve as my own conclusion this evening:

Not only poetry, but the entire world of artistic expression as it calls itself has entered a crisis indivisible from the human condition, from our life as humane beings, and our conviction or at least illusion of privileged existence as the only creatures who hold themselves masters of their fate and bearers of a destiny no organism can boast. It is therefore useless to ask ourselves what will be the fate of the arts. It would be as if asking whether the man of the future—a future so remote from our conception—will resolve the tragic contradictions in which we have increasingly struggled since the dawn of creation; and whether, by such an epoch, some unimaginable man would still be capable of talking to himself.⁴⁸

If all philosophy is an argument with Plato, as is sometimes claimed, all poetry might be seen as an effort to regain the immediacy of Homer. Literature, like philosophy, is concerned with truth. But the nature of poetry—of literature—extends beyond intellectual enquiry. It engages all human perception, intuitive, rational, mystical, spontaneous, or reflective. It proposes no outcome. It not merely enhances understanding, but is in itself a synthesis. Poets have been at pains to explain this to critics throughout the ages, but their words are unnecessary to lovers of poetry and have been disregarded by critics: The judgment of great poetry, said Whitman, “is as the sun falling around a helpless thing.”⁴⁹

In the previous lecture I quoted Montale’s observation that memory existed as a literary genre before writing was invented [Ed.: See note 44]. Articulation is an aspect of human survival, not only in its commemorative and descriptive function, but in relieving the human soul of incoherence. In so far as expression can be matched to sensation and event, human nature seems to retain consciousness.

In a sense Realism itself is a means of spiritualizing experience. And a civilized society, forced back to the wall of essentials, called upon the coherence and redemption that a great articulation might provide. That appeal, for poets, is unimaginable in any crisis we might now face.

By introducing this talk with a reference to the indirection that has pervaded Western literature since the time of Homer, I don’t intend a tour of familiar theoretical ground. As in my previous talk, I should like to illustrate, through literature itself, the consciousness of writers towards the revelatory or dissembling powers of language. Their commentary is for the most part embedded in their work; it is not theory but practical illustration. Recognition and exposure are present in it, but the artistic purpose is always to return, through language, to essentials, to reclaim truth. In the greatest poets, truth can be found, in Tennyson’s phrase, “often flowering often in a lonely word.”⁵⁰ So that, as Heidegger says of Homeric Greek, “We are directly in the presence of the thing itself, not first in the presence of a mere word-sign.”⁵¹ As Coleridge said of Shakespeare’s language, it becomes the instrument that makes the changeful god felt in the river, the lion and the flame.⁵²

I believe that Heidegger endorsed the tracing of the word logos to the harvest, to a gathering of crops. Similarly the Accademia della Crusca—the authority that has reigned over Italian language—takes its name from the sorting of grain from chaff, the sifting of good language from bad; it has a sieve as its emblem. (Unfortunately, the Crusca has in its turn become a symbol for stuffiness.) In the case of logos, the word is held, by some philosophers, to refer to the gathering not only of crops but of fruit. A Greek friend of mine proposes a still more direct connection of logos to the collecting of olives. And there is something compelling in the idea of the word as a small firm pungent fruit, with a hard pit at its center.

Auden’s celebrated assertion that Poetry makes nothing happen first appeared, in February 1939, in his memorial poem for Yeats who had died in the previous month.⁵³ Thirty-odd years before that, Yeats himself had stated that he did not write to affect opinion, but—in his words—to give “emotions expression for my own pleasure. [Otherwise] all would be oratorical and insincere. If we understand our own minds, and the things that are striving to utter themselves through our minds, we move others, not because we have understood or thought about those others, but because all life has the same root.”⁵⁴

In its preoccupation with the root of life, language has special responsibilities. The visual arts and music are an aesthetic appeal to senses of immediate perception, whatever subsequent impressions they make elicit. But language is the medium through which we all deal continually in daily life. Language, whether as daily speech or transcribed, must be formulated and decoded. Its deviations from true meaning are peculiarly exposed, and some of them fall into familiar categories under ancient names. Yet there are always new variations on impostures, adapted to the receptivity of the times. The multiple possibilities for valid approaches to truth through language are themselves increasingly circuitous, and increasingly insistent in their successive claims to be “definitive.” In repudiating such pretensions from the realists, Flaubert said, “There is no ‘true.’ There are merely different ways of perceiving.”⁵⁵ In considering tonight some of these different avenues toward truth I want to comment on special difficulties that have overtaken “the lonely word” in recent generations, one of the most drastic of those difficulties being reflected in the word’s no longer being lonely but found in agglomerations.

To take, as Leopardi does, the familiar Homeric point of departure, is to accept that literary indirection set in early. We have whole schools of explication on this theme. Last lecture I quoted Werner Jaeger’s view that the advent of Christianity reinforced rather than introduced the separation of aesthetic literary values from functional ones [Ed.: See note 12]. Norman Douglas, irreverent pagan, says of the Greek Anthology that:

In the older epigrams, there is present that eye for detail, that touch of earth—bitter or sweet. Slowly it fades away. Even before the commencement of the Christian era concrete imagery tends to be replaced by abstractions. The process was never arrested. The Christians could not allow these things of earth, dear to pagans, to be of much account. They looked inwards, guiding their conduct no longer in relation to tangible objects but to an intangible postulate; and so attained ghostly values. A kind of spiritual dimness had begun to creep over the world.⁵⁶

Douglas felt that even in the translation of classical texts there is some “Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic ferment that produces a saccharine deposit. The mischief has its roots in our gothic distrust of clean thinking.” To Douglas, Walter Pater himself was “a noble exponent of the diabetic school. By some alchemy, everything he wrote became charged with a sugary infiltration.”⁵⁷

Consciousness is the paradox of human error. Intelligence makes it possible, at least, for Man to establish in retrospect the instant at which they went off the rails; and many institutions and careers have been raised on minute study of our derailments. What is not possible is to resume the collective journey. It is left for a few indigent artists to resume the route on foot. Through art we can feel, as well as know, what we have lost; in art, as in dreams, we can occasionally retrieve and re-experience it. Through art, we can respond ideally to truth, as we cannot in life. It is possible, from time to time, through inspired language, to strike the note of immemorial immediacy.

Immediacy of language is not always or necessarily simplicity. Valéry says that of two words, one must choose the lesser.⁵⁸ But we do not always have a lesser word that will meet our need. Heidegger describes the properties of ancient language as distinct and distinguished. Spontaneous directness of oral expression, and simplicity as an instrument of considered language, are different things: a man or woman articulating urgent emotion is not acting under the same impetus as a writer who, from a pondered vocabulary, chooses for best effect and excludes excess. However, urgency does generate a compulsion to truth—just as discursiveness can be an index of falsehood—and veracity tends to express itself with an eminent simplicity—to rise, as it were, to occasion.

In the spring of 1940, when France was falling, Churchill’s address to the British nation opened with the words, “The news from France is very bad.”⁵⁹ A brief sentence of measured sounds, almost entirely composed of words of one syllable. A few years earlier, Churchill had drafted the king’s speech of abdication, which (somewhat paradoxically in the circumstances) began with the following sentence: “At last I am able to say a few words of my own.”⁶⁰ Again, a brief, balanced sentence of single syllables, almost entirely composed of words of Anglo-Saxon or at least non-Latin derivation. In both these instances, a masterful simplicity, a noble difference, gives force and inevitability to seemingly commonplace words. The space has been cleared for them. Dignity and candor are indivisible, and there is a sense of humility before the event; of the self subdued. The occasion and its articulation are at one.

Without diminishing the merits and advantages of brevity, however, literature cannot be looked on as a competition to employ as few words as possible. Rather it is a matter of seeking accurate words to convey a state of mind and imagination. And of deploying words so that tone, context, and sound are ideally combined, without any show of contrivance. That is the proper and agonizing business of literature, in which much of the writer’s sufferings originate: “the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings,” as Eliot called it.⁶¹ Every writer who is serious about his craft experiences this sense of professing pure meaning with unworthy words. Flaubert told George Sand:

When I come upon a bad assonance or a repetition in one of my sentences, I’m sure I’m floundering in the false. By dint of searching I find the proper expression, which was always the only one, and which is, at the same time, harmonious. The word is never lacking when one possesses the idea. Is there not in this precise fitting of parts, something eternal, like a principle? If not, why should there be a relation between the right word and the musical word? Or why should the greatest compression of thought always result in a line of poetry?”⁶²

Great practitioners of language have supplied new words and new usages when, in the literal sense, words failed them. In most cases we echo their innovations unthinkingly, because they satisfy, they meet the case. At other times they bear the maker’s seal so distinctly that they can’t be uttered without a mental nod in the author’s direction. And then there are inventions that cannot be appropriated. When Shakespeare speaks of the “painful warrior, famous’d for fight,” or of “fleeting Clarence,” or of “the hearts that spaniel’d me at heels,” we take his meaning perfectly, but the invention lapses with a single use.⁶³ In any case these great innovators cannot provide a pattern for lesser talents. Magnitude, as Jacques Barzun says, creates its own space.⁶⁴

More usually, the writer works with words in common use, developing as great a range as possible. Some will bring the whole weight of language to bear. Dr. Johnson said that he could have compiled his dictionary from Bacon’s works alone.⁶⁵ For the imaginative writer, words are the measure of talent—to an extent not necessarily true for writers dealing in information and ideas. The intentions of a novelist or poet are of course important, but he must be judged on talents of expression that may not be commensurate with them. The intentions of a historian or a critic, on the other hand, necessarily form the basis of our ultimate judgment of his writings, whatever his abilities or deficiencies of communication. The ear of the imaginative writer is ideally tuned to the highest sensitivity, and his method of transcription is perhaps somewhat misleadingly called style. Asked to justify the employment of “fine allusions, bright images, and elegant phrases,” Dr. Johnson responded with what might be considered a definition of style: “Why sir, all these ornaments are useful, because they obtain an easier reception for the truth.”⁶⁶ It is a recurring error of criticism, I think, to treat “style” as an insubstantial literary contrivance distinct from the author’s so-called “material.”

I have called this talk “The Defense of Candor” because the writer’s vigilance over language and his consciousness of its erosion and abuse is a theme running through literature, an indirect commentary, often benign but taking the form of exposure of pretension. I don’t refer to satire exclusively, although the English language has been notably congenial to satire—Satire, according to Byron, is the only weapon that doesn’t rust in the British climate.⁶⁷ In Pope’s view, ridicule was the sole corrective for the inveterate offender: “O sacred weapon, left for truth’s defence, / Sole dread of folly, vice, and insolence.”⁶⁸ However, the aspect I would most like to draw attention to here is rather that satire is much less the literary desire to hold offenders up to salutary public scorn than to depict character and eternal human characteristics. In literature this portrayal turns on a use of words, and often of a single word; in the novel it is most frequently rendered through qualities of speech, as in this very modern observation from George Eliot’s Middlemarch:

Mr. Vincy felt sure it would not be long before he heard of Mr. Featherstone’s demise. The felicitous word “demise,” which had seasonably occurred to him, had raised his spirits even above their usual evening pitch. The right word is always a power. Considered as a demise, old Featherstone’s death assumed a merely legal aspect, so that Mr. Vincy could tap his snuff box over it and be jovial, without even an intermittent affectation of solemnity.⁶⁹

The novelist’s defense of candor could be well illustrated through this book alone. I know of no work of fiction other than Proust in which character is so consistently illustrated through language. I confess I was tempted to give this talk exclusively on Middlemarch. Concern with words and sounds runs through the book as a conscious theme—there is even a scene of a grammar lesson given by a mother to her child. There is Mrs. Bulstrode, who felt that “in using the superior word ‘militate’ she had thrown a noble drapery over a mass of particulars.”⁷⁰ There is Mr. Casaubon who, even in saying “Yes,” manages with a “peculiar pitch of voice [to make] the word half a negative”⁷¹—and a drop of whose blood is said to show, under a magnifying glass, nothing but “semicolons and parentheses.”⁷² There is Mr. Trumbull, “an amateur of superior phrases”⁷³ with a way of saying, “‘It commences well.’ (Things never began with Mr. Borthrop Trumbull: they always commenced…).”⁷⁴ George Eliot, referring in this book to a new self-consciousness in language, speaks of what she calls “the lusty ease” of Fielding’s “fine [eighteenth-century] English,” which seems, she says, as if delivered from an armchair on a proscenium, while her own contemporaries and she herself produce what she calls “thin and eager chat, as if delivered from a campstool in a parrot-house.”⁷⁵

Writers have immemorially delighted in puncturing pretensions of speech. One need but recall the poem of Catullus, “Arrius,” or Hamlet with Polonius.⁷⁶ It seems strange to find George Eliot lamenting the decline of English at a time when fluency and genius of expression appear unsurpassed in our literature. However, the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century was bringing about what might be called an industrial revolution in thought and language, and an accelerated change in the long evolution of formal speech. The treatment of individual speech in literature first appears in English in the medieval rendering of types—especially of rustics—through the medium of vernaculars. There was also a special tone of language for genres of literature—as the tone of the epic is different from that of romance. It is with the development of the drama, and departure from the rules of rhetoric, that men and women begin to speak with their own personalities.

This was a humanistic assumption of individual responsibility, as we have continued, in theory at least, to consider it. Each person’s words, in literature as in life, are accepted as a revelation of their nature, and an index of the measure of responsibility they were prepared to assume for it. As Gabriel observes to Satan: “Evasion is rooted in fear as responsibility arises from conviction.”⁷⁷ The sense of individual responsibility through words has proved very hard to maintain—it seems that the medieval forms of class responsibility provided a shelter that has been sought ever since through linguistic embellishment and evasion. William Empson wrote of the seventeenth century that what was said of the Emperor Augustus in relation to Rome might be said of Dryden and the English language: that he found it brick and left it marble.⁷⁸ This, of course, was not necessarily an improvement. Another great change sets in with the nineteenth century. Along with the transforming powers of technology there came a stronger tendency to renounce personal in favor of generalized or expert opinion, and to evade self-knowledge through use of abstractions; a wish to believe in some process more generalized or efficient than human feeling. By the 1870s Trollope was able to introduce the following dialogue as conversation at a fashionable party. Speaking of a friend, Phineas Finn says to a young woman:

There was also the associated new phenomenon of mass communications and mass advertising—that is, of new words not spontaneously but speciously brought into being as a means of profitably controlling human impulse. We have a young man of Middlemarch, for instance, renouncing use of the word “superior” because, as he says, “There are too many superior teas and sugars these days. Superior is getting to be shopkeepers’ slang.”⁸⁰ That scene is set in 1831, although of course Middlemarch was written several decades later. In 1834, in Le Père Goriot, the residents of the pension Vauquer take up the suffix “-rama,” which has been recently publicized in connection with the invention of diorama; “-rama” is facetiously appended to every other word while the fad lasts. Observations of the kind abound in Dickens, along with an extraordinary prescience for the dehumanizing properties of all jargon, particularly of bureaucratic jargon—for instance, he sets his Circumlocution Office in Bleeding Heart Yard, and prophesies it will lead to Britannia’s downfall.

I have spoken of a renunciation of independent and eccentric views that accompanied the growth of mass culture. In aesthetic matters this has also been encouraged by an assumption of critical authority that, in the words of one modern critic, will “deal expertly” with literature and other arts, relieving readers of time-consuming burdens of private choice. While commentary and scholarly attention have always existed toward literature, and always will, a new body of attitudes has developed that seems to seek to neutralize the very directness to life which is nurtured by art. This phenomenon is notably one of explication rather than comprehension—the concept of art as a discipline to be contained within consistent laws, the seductive promise of a technology to be mastered by those who will then be equipped to dictate taste. There is the wish to dictate a view rather than accept the submission required by art—a submission akin to generosity or love, which evokes the individual response rather than the authorized one. Art is not technology, it is an endless access to revelatory states of mind, a vast extension of living experience, and a way of communing with the dead. An intimacy with truth, through which, however much instruction is provided and absorbed, each of us must pass alone.

Much of this encroachment of abstract language derives from a modern inability for wholeness; a modern incapacity for synthesis. While it poses as a higher seriousness, abstraction is perhaps another stage in the long attempt to neutralize the mysteries that are inimical to human vanity. Inimical, that is, to self-knowledge. Seneca, writing to a friend about the beauty of literature, remarks that when a literary critic goes through the same book, he emerges mainly with the news that Ennius filched the idea from Homer and that Virgil filched it from Ennius, and so on. He says, “To my mind, no one lets humanity down so much as these people who study knowledge as if it were some sort of technical skill.”⁸¹ One could cite a thousand such observations from every period of literature—Shakespeare is full of them, as when Horatio remarks that Hamlet will need marginal notes to follow the speech of Osric, or when Richard II speaks of thoughts that are so “intermix’d with scruples that they set the word itself against the word.”⁸² Chesterton tells us that “the north is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes; / and gone is all the innocence of anger and surprise.”⁸³

I think the defense of candor intensified to meet new incursions when they showed their new modern power. The rumble of abstractions runs through much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature as a threat to individual being. We believe in the crushing weight of Mr. Gradgrind’s dreadful facts, as, alas, we do not believe in Dickens’s redemption of this linguistic sinner. In a section of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, during a love scene between two principals who are sitting by a fireside, we are told that in the same room, “A Mr. Jegg and a Mrs. Haviland were sitting together in the window-seat. From time to time, Mr. Jegg used the word, ‘inhibition.’” The love scene proceeds by the fire, and then we’re told: “Behind their backs the fire rustled. Across the room, Mrs. Jegg said, ‘The failure to coordinate.’”⁸⁴

This is as much a modern background as the proclamations about cows and pigs that arise from the country fair in Madame Bovary while a love scene takes place in a room above; or the incongruously frivolous offstage music heard in the Tales of Hoffman as a murder takes place. However, one might now feel that the chorus of dehumanized expression has prevailed, while the word expressive of the root of life can be heard only in an occasional aside, or through the din.

The premise of artistic posterity is generally that the work that retains posthumous meaning has worth. As soon as one begins to examine it, however, posterity emerges as one of the larger mysteries of the largely mysterious phenomenon of art. The greatest mystery being why art should exist at all and why a few beings should be capable of creating it, and still fewer of doing so—always given the lottery of survival—with enduring power. Selective, elusive, and unpredictable in the extreme, literary posterity has, as such, been explicitly celebrated, wooed, or disdained by centuries of writers in innumerable works. One finds early examples of poets superstitiously exorcising the vengeance of time—for example, Homer forthrightly claims that future ages shall know of the sufferings of his heroes; whereas Virgil, appropriating that very line from Homer, inserts the word “perhaps.” The title of this lecture might well have been “Perhaps.” Over and over one finds writers referring in their work to their chances with posterity—whether to stake their claim with future ages, to repudiate any such ambition, or to acknowledge—like Milton—an unworthy preoccupation with Fame. Posterity is a kind of Tenth Muse, hovering ironically over the other Nine.

Byron himself made, in a variety of moods, a wide variety of comments on posterity. Don Juan is full of sardonic comments on the theme. Of himself he says fatalistically that “What I write I cast upon the stream / To swim or sink. I have had at least my dream.”⁸⁷ With hindsight we may think more appropriate his lines in Childe Harold, written only slightly earlier:

The Romantics were often at special pains to forestall oblivion by assuring the future that they expected nothing from it—as if Posterity were some rich old uncle with a fortune to dispose of. Keats was one of many who proposed their own epitaph: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Stendhal wished to be remembered as one who loved Shakespeare, Mozart, and Cimarosa.⁸⁹ Remembrance was in the air. In a letter about his imminent death Keats said, “If I should die, I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have loved the principle of Beauty in all things, and if I had time, I would have made myself remembered.”⁹⁰ Leopardi, shortly before his death, wrote that, “despite the fine title ‘Collected Works’ given by the bookseller to my volume, I have never accomplished anything real. I have only made attempts, believing them preludes. But my career has done no further.”⁹¹

When Leopardi wrote that, he was living at Naples and producing possibly the greatest of all his poems, “La Ginestra,” a poem about posterity inspired by the yellow flowers of the broom growing on the bleak lava of the Vesuvius—a symbol at once of the transience of man, the replenishment and renewal of nature, and the infinity of the universe. The poem refers to the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum whose posterity, artistic and otherwise, ranks among the weirdest of all survivals. In a passage of the poem that might deal directly with our own era, the poet apostrophizes his own nineteenth century with its proclamations of “progress”:

He goes on to say that even the intelligentsia feel obliged to pay tribute to their era simply because they themselves inhabit it—while sometimes expressing doubts behind their hands. Leopardi says, “I shall not go underground with that disgrace upon me; but shall proclaim my scorn of this century with my last breath. Although I know that Oblivion presses heaviest on those who will not celebrate their times.”⁹³

In fact, no literary name is more celebrated in Italy today than that of Leopardi. And it seems there is scarcely any common factor, even that of genius, in literary fame. Why indeed do we feel a need for literary posterity? Horace said that the strong men who lived before Agamemnon passed into oblivion because they lacked a sacred poet (although as Montale remarked, memory was a literary genre before writing was invented.)⁹⁴ There are now all too many other ways of recording the deeds of strong men; but the need is still felt of—so to speak—the sacred poet, to transmit sensations and sentiments. Why this is so might be the theme of many lectures. It has been exquisitely dwelt upon by Proust in the concluding section of his work where he treats the distinctions of supposed “reality,” the sharp image, with the successive states of being and impression that constitute—even if summarized in few words—the immortality of human memory.

The human wish that something of our existence should linger to inform later generations is at its best one of our larger desires—the reciprocity between the living and the dead. What we frankly call the pleasure of ruins must derive from the simultaneous reassurance and confirmation of shared mortality evoked by evidence of past existence, and of the helplessness and power of human knowledge, the urge of our forebears to strike the heart of some unknown future soul. All this is perhaps most of all manifest in the lonely word: in Shakespeare’s imperative desire to commemorate his love—as the sonnet says, “that in black ink my love may still shine bright.”⁹⁵ Or Byron pronouncing that

Posterity has been used by writers as a present threat: Chateaubriand confronting Napoleon, at the risk of his life, with the reminder that Nero railed in vain, because Tacitus was born within the Empire; in our time, Miłosz warning the oppressor, “You who harmed a simple man, do not feel secure; For a poet remembers.”⁹⁷

There is also the wish to share pleasure. A contemporary of David Garrick’s composed a piece of music for the cello—that being the instrument, with lower range as well as middle register, most closely approximating the human voice—to render the inflections of Garrick’s delivery of Hamlet’s soliloquy. (I’ve heard this performed, and uncanny it is.)

Posterity devolves on those who have not sought it. Twenty years ago or more, there appeared in the New Yorker a tiny poem by James Kirkup, an English poet living in Japan, addressed to a Japanese poet of the turn of this century, Ochi-Ai Naobumi:

In 1341 Petrarch was crowned with the poet’s laurel on the Capitol of Rome; he chose for his address of acceptance a text from Virgil, a text which, with echoes of Lucretius, exalts the private realm, the originality of talent and its contingent loneliness. (Sed me Parnassi deserta per ardua dulcis raptat amor.⁹⁹) Of his crown Petrarch subsequently said, “This laurel gained for me no knowledge, but rather much envy”¹⁰⁰—an observation echoed by Saul Bellow in a recent comment on his own Nobel award: “The prize was a pain in the neck.”¹⁰¹

The laurel continues to haunt the modern Italians. Guido Gozzano, whose short life ended in 1916, is, as it were, a modern Italian poet marking a transition, a rupture with formality. His beautiful long poem, “Signorina Felicità,” describes the idyll of a young man of intellect with a country girl—a girl whose total ignorance is highly approved by the poet. (It is a poem to drive any feminist up the wall.) One day the girl shows the young man her family’s attic, crammed with outmoded furniture, discarded mattresses, pots and pans, mildewed engravings. Among the engravings, there is a series of “distinguished persons,” including a portrait of Tasso. And the girl, knowing nothing either of the laurel or of Tasso, asks why those absurd old codgers are wearing cherry leaves on their heads. The young man laughs, but laughing thinks, “So this is glory—a dim corridor, some outworn furniture, a bad likeness in a cheap frame, inscribed with the mildewed name of Torquato Tasso.”¹⁰²

Of the laurel, Montale, no less than other Italian poets, has much to say. One of Montale’s first published poems, written about the time Mussolini came to power, is called “The Lemons,” and contrasts the lemon tree favorably with the stately varieties of plant—acanthus, myrtle, box-wood—with which the laureled poets concern themselves.¹⁰³ Elsewhere he tells us that a dried laurel isn’t even good in the Sunday roast.

For Virgil, it is Apollo himself who plucks the poet by the ear. Montale describes his muse as a ragged scarecrow flapping in an obscure vineyard.¹⁰⁴ This proclaimed diffidence is in its way a bravado about glory and posterity.

While it’s tempting to reverse the issue of posterity, to see it as defining what we collectively require from art, the theme will not resolve itself in such coherent terms. It is filled with contradictions not only because different times and societies seek differing forms of recognition, solace, or stimulus, and different fashions or political movements play their role, but because the accidental is a capital force, in posterity as in life. A considerable literature, for instance, has come down to us from the court of tenth-century Japan, the Heian court, the world of Lady Murasaki. That this is almost exclusively written by women stems from the fact that Chinese was the elevated language of the Heian court—an outmoded and mutilated form of Chinese, incomprehensible in China itself. The business and formalities of the Japanese court were carried on in this artificial language by male courtiers and officials, while the court ladies were held unworthy of the distinction. Educated women were thus the repositories of the Japanese language, and their ample leisure allowed certain of them to develop their country’s literature.

At times longevity and a large body of work appears to impress a writer on human memory. At others, the public imagination is captured by the tragedy of early or violent death. The writer may outlive his early fame as Swinburne did; like Shelley, he may enter into it with his death. (“Now he knows whether there is a God or no.”¹⁰⁵) He may be honored for his public role—like Solzhenitsyn—or because he was a recluse. Death itself can be a releasing force in enabling the world to realize a loss (as with the case of John Hall Wheelock)—critics who have been fearful of honoring a living writer seem to pluck up courage when they sense he may be entering on his literary afterlife. Writers may be resurrected, so to speak, because they seem to speak for a particular social change—as we now see happening with women writers who give expression or add lustre to the newly liberated consciousness of women. Or a writer may appear to epitomize a national mood by his person, life, and work, or by the nature of his death—as Rupert Brooke for the British public of 1915, when he embodied ideals or illusions of which he has since become the ironically ingenuous symbol.

Rupert Brooke described his own posterity in his poem, “The Soldier” (“If I should die, etc”). At his death of septicemia, during the campaign in the Dardanelles in 1915, Rupert Brooke was buried by night in a foreign field—an olive grove to be precise—in a remote part of the island of Skyros, where his simple grave has been tended and visited by occasional British travelers. In 1979, the Times of London reported that a road for trucks had been pushed through that still otherwise inaccessible region, the traffic passing within a foot or so of the poet’s grave. As a result of representations from the British government, the road has now been slightly diverted, and the tract of it that passed through Brooke’s corner of the foreign field has been allowed to grow over, at least for the present.

It is hard for us to believe now that Wallace Stevens, in his poem “Mozart 1935,” could write “We may come back to Mozart.”¹⁰⁶ In the impenetrable mystery of posterity there is something of a mirror image of life—of existence itself, with its enigmas and accidental qualities, its moods and recurring fads, its contradictions and inconsistencies that we seek to compress into the rational and discussable forms of our inability to accept our mortality, while incapable of living in a wider context. The ambiguities of our own age toward posterity are not the least bizarre of the mysteries. On the one hand, the industry of oral history, of time capsules, of the hoarding and buying at huge sums of the papers and libraries of writers, the commemorating even of authors’ most casual remarks, the assembling of their correspondence, the assiduity for getting writers down on tape or down on paper, or for just getting them down. On the other hand, the neglect and ignorance of past knowledge, the dying out of the study of ancient languages, the contempt or even terror of what is stigmatized “conventional” or “traditional,” the obsession with novelty and the up-to-date, possibly at the expense of genuinely fresh talent; the large claims made for artistic anarchy because it is supposedly expressive of our times. The conservation of books, on the one hand; and their accelerating disintegration on the other. One might say the preservation of antique fragments, and the destruction of the Acropolis; the extended lifespan of man, and the threat of nuclear obliteration.

I have spoken previously about art and in particular the articulating of man’s fate as a maintaining of the human consciousness. It is in this sense of contributing to human wisdom, liberty, and pleasure that the so-called posterity of an artist—of a writer—rises above mere vanity or an elevated ambition for power. Auden, who wrote that “time…worships language”¹⁰⁷ says that “The whole aim of a poet, or any other kind of artist, is to produce something which is complete and will endure without change.”¹⁰⁸ Randall Jarrell, in “The Obscurity of the Poet” says that “the poet writes his poem for its own sake, for the sake of that order of things in which the poem takes the place that has awaited it,” and he goes on to quote one of the most beautiful passages of Proust—that we enter this life as though carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former, higher existence, the obligations created by other beings who have contributed to our knowledge and self-knowledge.¹⁰⁹

Auden writes of “something which is complete.” I believe this touches on the question of wholeness to which I referred in “The Defense of Candor” in connection with a modern incapacity for synthesis—a fear of wholeness that reveals itself in a mania for explication, classification, and dissection. However that may be, I think it is generally accepted that an artist hopes at least that his works will outlive him, that they are self-sufficient enough to pass into futurity; an assumption logical enough, since artistic work is presumably intended to give pleasure and interest to as wide an audience as possible.

However, there are and always have been those who repudiated this view. “There is first reconciliation to oblivion”—John Marston.¹¹⁰ I don’t refer to the conjecture or acceptance of oblivion. More strikingly, there are artists for whom, in the words of the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, “disorder holds its charm.” (In a poem called “I take back everything I’ve said,” he asks the reader to burn the book. Why then royalties to quote therefrom?) (Me retracto de todo lo dicho.¹¹¹) These are the words of the painter Dubuffet on the theme: “I believe in the utility of oblivion. I should like to see a mammoth statue of Oblivion in the main square of every town, instead of the libraries and museums we see there today. / Let’s make a clean sweep of the art of the past! I do my best to make art as if no one had ever made it before…. I am an antihumanist.”¹¹²

In calling for the—somewhat paradoxical—monument to Oblivion, Dubuffet is already twenty-eight-hundred years out of date. According to legend, such a monument existed, in the statue to Sardanapulus at Nineveh whose inscription celebrated oblivion. Some might hold that such monuments existed in Dubuffet’s own work. These words of Dubuffet, along with much more of the same—all of them with dates of the 1950s and 1960s—appeared in print last year here in connection with a, let’s say, monumental exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, titled Retrospective.¹¹³

I don’t mean to mock Dubuffet—though I think his assertions might bear a little ironic treatment. His desire that forms of art in conflict with his own should be destroyed is perhaps more significant than he perhaps allows. What he feels—or felt—is an aspect of human impulse like any other and not an unfamiliar one. However, he utters these shockers secure—as it were—that what he advocates will not readily come to pass unless in the complete annihilation of our world. There is something of a French tradition here. Proust, taking up analogous views of Baudelaire, says he is shocked enough to find Baudelaire expressing such sentiments, but nothing like as shocked as when he discovers them in Dostoyevsky. Because, Proust says, “at least I know that Baudelaire is not sincere.”¹¹⁴

Proust is not, of course, accusing Baudelaire of expressing false sentiments but acknowledging a gulf between sentiment and an utter commitment such as nihilism—though even nihilism has its tradition—a distance between an environment in deadly earnest, and one in which artists and poets have traditionally explored sensation in the knowledge that no such exercise need be conclusive. Not for nothing was Dubuffet in youth a Voltairean and a friend, even a disciple, of Raymond Queneau. At a relatively early stage Dubuffet published two volumes of his writings—as John Russell remarks, he took care that posterity should be well informed of his desire for Oblivion. (A preferable form of posterity would perhaps be that of Machiavelli as manifested at the conference of scholars held in 1969 at Florence, on commemoration of the five-hundredth anniversary of Machiavelli’s death.)

Our own age—the last decades of the twentieth century—has its own peculiar and new paradoxes; the justified assumption of longer life, and greater leisure together with the sense of time cosmically running out. Our disbelief—our lack of complete confidence, at any rate—in posterity, and certainly our incapacity to imagine its forms and attitudes, infect the human mood of the present and the nature of art and work produced. Public acclaim, celebration of the achiever, however fleeting his renown, takes its notorious toll of the artistic spirit and its ability to create. Writers have historically cautioned against this, but they have never had to make themselves heard over such an uproar and such commercial interests, nor to feel that their warnings might count for nothing against so precarious a future. Samuel Johnson who in early youth composed a revelatory poem on this theme called “The Young Author,” wrote in age, “When a man has made celebrity necessary to his happiness, he has put it in the power of the weakest and most timorous malignity.”¹¹⁵ Byron—who was a celebrity indeed—has his say about the “eighty greatest living poets”;¹¹⁶ Leopardi wrote that “Fame, in literature, is sweet when a man nourishes it in silence and solitude as a foundation for new enterprises. But when it is enjoyed in the world and society, it is nothing.”¹¹⁷

Of the modern loss of this necessity for spiritual silence, perhaps the greatest of all modern deprivations for the life of the mind and imagination—for the soul, as it used to be called—Montale has said: “Only a man who lives in solitude can speak of the fatal isolation we suffer under this inhuman, mass-produced communication. Being in fashion and famous seems now the only accepted role for the contemporary artists…and I ask myself where this absurdity will lead us. Personal responsibility demands patience and solitude, and both these factors are dismissed by the modern world.”¹¹⁸

Some years ago in the time when the executive branch of government still sought sporadically to distinguish this country’s poets, I was invited one evening to the apartment of a prominent politician to hear a poet read. The poet had submitted the names of twenty or so friends—mostly other poets—whom he wished to be present. When we arrived we learned that the official who had invited us would not be present, having been detained, as his wife said, “at an important political meeting.” This lady then conducted the affair, and our friend the poet read several poems. When he had finished reading, there was a short silence, and the hostess said, “Well, let’s get the ball rolling.” By which we understood we were supposed to discuss what we had just heard. As no one spoke, she said, “I’ll start off. W. H. Auden said that the history of Europe would be exactly the same, wars and persecutions, and so on, if no poem had ever been written and art had never existed.”