The Joy of Reading

chapter twelve

Turn of the Century

The title of this chapter is an act of quiet desperation. Many really good books were written by men and women who were born in the last half of the nineteenth century but who lived through the First World War and did their best-known work after it, or at least after the turn of the century. More importantly, most of them were deeply affected by that terrible “War to End Wars,” which, of course, turned out to be nothing of the kind, instead being—as we see now—only the first part of a world conflict that dominated the entire century just past. The twentieth century—we have finally arrived at it, and it is hard to view it with anything but tears. As some of these authors make abundantly clear.

Some of them were world-historical figures: Freud, Yeats, Mann, Shaw, to name only four. The latest of these to depart was Thomas Mann, who died in 1955. That is a long time ago, now—more than half a century. In half a century many people and events can be forgotten, more or less, but these four survive, in some of our memories, at least, and also, perhaps, more concretely in film and other modern recensions of their stories and lives. At the same time the world we live in now is so very different from the one they knew that it is not surprising if many readers of this book will know little more about these figures than about Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare. That is precisely the reason I have written it—to keep alive and warm the memory of some very great people. And ideas. And books.

SIGMUND FREUD

1856–1939

The Interpretation of Dreams

An Outline of Psychoanalysis

Civilization and Its Discontents

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Freiburg, Czechoslovakia, and moved to Vienna when he was four. He was educated in Vienna and only decided to become a physician at the end of his gymnasium course, when he read Goethe’s “beautiful essay ‘On Nature.’” He received his medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1881, became an intern at the General Hospital, and began to study nervous diseases in children. He went to Paris, where he studied under the neurologist Jean Charcot, and returned to Vienna to do further work with Josef Breuer, who was just beginning to treat hysteria, or conversion neurosis, with hypnosis. Freud published with Breuer the first of his many books, Studies in Hysteria (1895). Soon, however, he parted from Breuer, deciding that treating hysteria with the method of “free association” was more effective. At the same time he began to study intensively his patients’ dreams, and out of this grew his first truly distinctive book, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

The year 1900 was a symbolic one in which to publish this revolutionary work; Freud had been educated in the nineteenth century and in some respects remained a nineteenth-century man throughout his life, but his doctrines, as first set forth in The Interpretation of Dreams, would help to shape the utterly different world of the new century. Few paid attention to this at the time. The book was largely ignored; Freud had worked in isolation for years, having as yet no following, and the main response to his ideas was mockery. Within hardly more than a decade, however, The Interpretation of Dreams and its author were world famous.

The book is fascinating. The interpreted dreams are in themselves of great interest, the interpretations even more so; and we can see, as we read, Freud developing his theory of dreams and coming himself to understand it. The book is not Freud’s final statement on dreams, nor on psychoanalysis, but he never wrote anything more fresh, youthful, and enthusiastic; he was in his forties and still had hopes for the world, hopes that he later lost.

You do not have to read all of The Interpretation of Dreams. It is one of those books that you can safely read in, unless of course you are studying to become an analyst. At the same time the book is hard to put down. Holding it in your hand, you are aware that it is the beginning of something important, that it is about a set of ideas that are fundamental to our modern view of the world. Trying to imagine the world without Freud is like trying to imagine it without electricity, petroleum, or nuclear weapons.

Most of the technical terms that Freud uses in his later, more formal presentations of his theory of psychoanalysis appear in The Interpretation of Dreams, together with the insights into human behavior that mark all of his later work. A basic assumption of the book is that there is an unconscious, and that unconscious mental activity is even more important than conscious. In the 1880s it would have been hard to find anyone willing to accept the notion of the unconscious; in the 1980s it was hard to find anyone to deny it. Today, I am not so sure. Nevertheless, it is one measure of the influence of the author of The Interpretation of Dreams.

By 1910 Freud was not only famous but also controversial. He recognized the need to make himself understood by ordinary people, and several times he attempted to sum up his doctrines for a lay audience. The first attempt was in 1909, when he was invited to Clark University, in Massachusetts, to give a series of lectures that became The Origin and Development of Psycho-Analysis. At the University of Vienna between 1915 and 1917 he again explained his theories in a series of lectures to a lay audience, and these became A General Introduction of Psycho-Analysis. He was, however, dissatisfied with all of these attempts, and in 1938, shortly before his death, he wrote a short book, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, in which he attempted to convey his ideas in the most succinct fashion. Nothing Freud wrote is clearer, I think, than this work; although it is too small to be definitive, there is nonetheless no better way to begin trying to understand Freud.

The work is in three parts. The first, “The Mind and Its Workings,” sets forth the basic assumptions about the mental apparatus that constitute Freudian theory. Part Two, “The Practical Task,” deals with the techniques of psychoanalysis. Part Three, “The Theoretical Yield,” is unfinished, but it must have been very nearly complete when Freud abandoned the book only a few months before he died. It touches on the relations between the psychical apparatus and the external world, and attempts to describe the character and workings of the internal world—that of the mind itself.

The book is dense, compact. Each sentence is crucial to the argument; the book cannot be read quickly (even though it is less than 125 pages long). But it is enormously rewarding. Here is the final statement of the man who invented psychoanalysis and who may almost be said to have discovered the mind. Certainly no one before him ever understood it!

Freud early recognized that his theories involved not just a new treatment for hysteria and neuroses and, perhaps, psychoses, but also a new explanation for the structure of human institutions and the conditions of human life. He tried in a number of works to present the insights gained from his studies, as applied not to individual patients but to society at large. One of the first such documents was a paper, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” which appeared early in 1915 in the journal Imago. It is a somber piece, revealing clearly the shock and disappointment felt by Freud—and many other intellectuals on both sides—in the face of the brutal realities of human conduct exhibited during the first few months of World War I. In portentous words Freud sums up his realization: “Our unconscious is just as inaccessible to the idea of our own death, as murderously minded towards the stranger, as divided or ambivalent towards the loved, as was man in earliest antiquity.”

War, he went on to say, strips us of the later accretions of civilization and lays bare the primal man in each of us. It would seem that something like this, many times repeated, has been the major human event of the twentieth century—and now the twenty-first.

Others regained their buoyant optimism after the end of World War I, but Freud continued to ponder the meaning and consequences of the conclusions he had set forth in the paper of 1915. The great question, he decided, was why modern civilized man, with all of his wealth and technical prowess, is at heart so unhappy. The most eloquent statement of these views of Sigmund Freud’s was the small book Civilization and Its Discontents (1929). Hardly any book I know of is so packed with interesting things; there are only a hundred pages or so, but what pages they are!

The main thesis of the book is that civilization, although necessary to the survival of the species, is an intolerable intrusion upon the liberty of the individual. Consciously, man accepts civilization, even embraces it as his savior and his greatest achievement; but underneath he hates it because of what he has given up for it. For primal man—and woman—is very different from the ideal erected by civilization, to which we must all adhere.

The bit of truth behind all this—one so eagerly denied—is that men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but that a powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment. The result is that their neighbor is to them not only a possible helper or sexual object, but also a temptation to them to gratify their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without recompense, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and kill him. Homo homini lupus [man is a wolf to man]: Who has the courage to dispute it in the face of all the evidence in his own life and in history?

Everyone denies this, of course; we could hardly live together if we did not. But denying it does not make it untrue. Down in our unconscious, man is indeed a wolf to man; and we may trace our mental miseries to the continuing struggle, which we do not always win, to repress that terrible reality.

For Freud, all of his nightmares came true before he died. He had suffered from the effects of anti-Semitism for many years, but at least he had been allowed to go on working. When the Nazis invaded Austria in 1938, his books were burned, his institute was destroyed, and his passport was confiscated. Following frantic negotiations, he was permitted to leave Austria after paying a large ransom. Sick at heart and suffering from a painful cancer of the mouth, he found his way to London. He died in London in September 1939.

World War II had already begun. Its horrors would not have surprised the author of Civilization and Its Discontents.

C.P. CAVAFY

1863–1933

Poems

Constantine P. Cavafy (Kavafis) was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1863, the ninth and last son of his mother and father, who, with his parents, were businessmen in Greece and Egypt. They were not very good businessmen, however, and Constantine lived for many years, off and on, in “genteel poverty.” There were periods of semi-exile in England, where the boy learned English well enough so that he was said to speak Greek with an accent for the rest of his life. For the last thirty years of his life, until his death in Alexandria in 1933, he held a civil service position in the Egyptian government. But the real “business” of his life was writing extraordinary poems.

Cavafy was a homosexual, and many of his poems are about homosexual relationships with younger men. He lived most of his life either with members of his family or alone, but he was a welcoming host to anyone who managed to seek him out in Alexandria, especially if they spoke English. A few visitors report that he had the “fascinating capacity to gossip about historical figures from the distant past so as to make them seem a part of some scandalous intrigue taking place in the Alexandria of his day.” He never made any effort to publish his poems, choosing instead to provide copies to friends as he wrote them. It is almost a miracle, but of course a happy one, that we know anything about him and have his wonderful poems.

It is his ability to write poems about the Hellenistic past in forms and meters that go back more than two thousand years that has fascinated me ever since I first read him many years ago. There is a Collected Edition edited by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard that I strongly recommend. The frank homoeroticism of many of the poems is not to my taste, but there are dozens of poems that have none of that, and I urge you to cull this book for the “historical” entries. See especially “The Horses of Achilles,” “The Funeral of Sarpedon,” “Thermopylae,” “Unfaithfulness” (this, the complaint of Thetis upon the death of her son, is particularly moving), “Ithaka” (this one is famous), and “Waiting for the Barbarians” (this one very famous for its last lines: “And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbar-ians?/ They were, those people, a kind of solution”), and finally “One of Their Gods,” which will wrench you.

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

1861–1947

Introduction to Mathematics

Alfred North Whitehead was born at Ramsgate, England, in 1861, the son of an Anglican clergyman. He was a serious and devoted student as a youth, preferring mathematics to all other subjects. He went to Cambridge in 1880 and attended only the mathematical lectures. After doing well on the mathematical tripos he was elected a fellow of Trinity College and made an instructor in mathematics.

Among his other duties was the task of examining mathematically inclined students desiring to enter Trinity. A certain B. Russell struck him by his brilliance in 1889, and Whitehead recommended that Russell be accepted. Within a few years Bertrand Russell was known throughout the university for the mathematical brilliance that Whitehead had been the first to recognize. Together they struggled with the crisis in the logical foundations of mathematics that infested the subject at the end of the nineteenth century. Their famous and extraordinarily difficult book, Principia Mathematica, was published in 1910.

In that same year Whitehead made a radical change in his life. He had been given a ten-year appointment by Trinity College in 1903, and in 1910 this still had three years to run. But Whitehead was impatient and frustrated with his work at Cambridge. If he resigned his teaching position, he would still have a small income as a fellow of the college. He proposed to Mrs. Whitehead that they move to London and take their chances. She agreed.

She was right. In the modern phrase, Whitehead’s career took off after the move. He was appointed to the staff of the University of London in 1911 and in 1914 he became professor of mathematics at the Imperial College. He published important books, notably The Concept of Nature (1920), and by the early 1920s he had become the most distinguished philosopher of science writing in English. He was invited to Harvard to teach philosophy in 1924 and again he decided to move. His years in the United States were his most productive. He taught at Harvard until 1937 and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1947.

During his first year in London, Whitehead had time on his hands and accepted an invitation from a publisher of popular scientific books to produce a small volume on mathematics. This appeared the next year (1911) under the title Introduction to Mathematics. It is one of the best such books.

Whitehead was a great mathematician, but his and Russell’s Principia Mathematica had been a very difficult book to read and understand. Whitehead’s later books were also sometimes so difficult as to be almost unintelligible. But during that one year of 1910, at least, he possessed the genius of simplicity. Introduction to Mathematics is so clear, simple, and direct, with so many good examples and so few mathematical symbols, that almost anyone who will devote the slightest effort can read it. The astonishing thing is that the book is also rigorous and authoritative. It is good mathematics as well as being easy to read and understand.

Whitehead explains why at the very beginning of the book. “The study of mathematics,” he concedes, “is apt to commence in disappointment.” Great expectations are built up in students, but these are not satisfied.

The reason for this failure of the science to live up to its reputation is that its fundamental ideas are not explained to the student disentangled from the technical procedure that has been invented to facilitate their exact presentation in particular instances. Accordingly, the unfortunate learner finds himself struggling to acquire a knowledge of a mass of details that are not illuminated by any general conception.

Perhaps all beginning students of mathematics, at least mathematics beyond the level of arithmetic or simple geometry and algebra, have become aware of that failing—unless they had an excellent teacher. Alfred North Whitehead was an excellent teacher. He makes the ideas clear.

Introduction to Mathematics is not, he insists, designed to teach mathematics. Perhaps not, but much mathematics can be learned from it. And all mathematics becomes easier to do as well as to understand when one grasps the basic ideas and concepts underlying the operations. Thus the book helps anyone to be a better mathematician than he or she otherwise would.

Is that important? It seems to me that it certainly is. For mathematics is not only extremely useful, it is also extremely beautiful. But its beauty is not grasped if one cannot “do the math,” at least a little.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

1865–1939

Selected Poems

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865. He studied art as a young man but decided on a literary career when he was twenty-one. Although a Protestant and a member of the Anglo-Irish ruling class, Yeats was deeply interested in the old Ireland. He helped to found an Irish Literary Society in London and another in Dublin. He also worked to create an Irish national theater, joining with others to acquire the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which has been the home of the Irish Players for nearly a hundred years. Several of his own plays were produced during those early years, and Yeats throughout his life wished to be known as a playwright.

He was a much better poet than playwright, however, and it is as probably the greatest English poet of the last century that he is known today.

He deserves that honor because, almost alone among poets of the twentieth century, he never ceased to grow, to become better and more interesting, as long as he lived. Most poets run out of steam or reach a plateau beyond which they cannot go—often early in their careers. This never happened to Yeats. He never stopped reaching out, experimenting with new ways of saying new things. Thus his last poems are among his best. Last Poems, which appeared in 1940, the year after his death, contains some of his finest, strangest work.

Yeats loved the misty mysteriousness of the Irish past, and as a young man he wrote the kind of ditties we think of as “Irish.” Politics, the convoluted, tormented politics of Irish independence, obsessed him during his middle years. This was a greater theme than the misty past of Ireland, and Yeats rose to it. Some of the poems he wrote about it are very famous, like “Easter 1916,” about the execution of some Irish nationalists on that day, with its mournful, lamenting cry: “A terrible beauty was born!”

This was the beauty of the martyr, a terrible beauty indeed, and perhaps we can understand that Yeats himself came to know the real meaning of freedom when he saw these men, his friends, hanged for seeking it.

Yeats the politician sat in the Senate of the newly founded Irish Free State during the 1920s, but poetry was by now his main business and he continued to write, getting better and better, more and more profound, more and more disturbing in what he had to say.

Finally, what he had to say was mostly about growing old and not wanting to. He was sixty in 1925, and in that year he wrote “Among School Children,” not his most famous single poem but perhaps his greatest. He mingles among the girls in a school, “A sixty-year-old smiling public man,” and, looking into their eyes, is overcome by wonder at what has occurred. All these years have come and gone, but where did they go? What have they produced? Were they “A compensation for the pang of his birth/Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?”

As he became older he worked all the harder, inventing a character named Crazy Jane who rebels against the formality and politeness of the world. Crazy Jane and the Bishop fight it out over the great questions of life. These poems, “Words for Music Perhaps” as Yeats called them, are not quite songs but have the earthiness, the directness, and the catch in the rhythms that good songs have. Nothing better was written in the twentieth century.

Finally even the heart of Yeats grew old and tired:

O who could have foretold

That the heart grows old?

But this occurred only when Yeats was near death. He died of a broken heart, broken over the human condition, which is summed up in the one terrible word: Mortality. He never gave in; he never accepted it. We remember “Sailing to Byzantium”: Byzantium, where the poet dreams of golden birds that sing forever because they are not alive. Are they the spirit of poetry itself or are they the spirit of this poet who refused to concede that he was merely human?

At the very end he drafted his own epitaph. In the poem “Under Ben Bulben” he describes the place where he shall be buried, and the words that shall be read over his grave:

Under bare Ben Bulben’s head

In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.

An ancestor was rector there

Long years ago, a church stands near,

By the road an ancient cross.

No marble, no conventional phrase;

On limestone quarried near the spot

By his command these words are cut:

Cast a cold eye

On life, on death.

Horseman, pass by.

So it was, and so it is. You may go and see for yourself if you wish. It is one of the few literary pilgrimages worth the bother.

W.B. Yeats was a voluminous poet and the Collected Poems is a big, heavy book. Buy it nevertheless and treasure it, for it is one of the foundations of any good personal library. Only practiced and sophisticated readers of poetry should sit down with such a book and read it from beginning to end. A book of poems is not a novel. Start with these twenty poems, more or less: “The Ballad of Father Gilligan,” “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing,” “The Cat and the Moon,” “The Second Coming,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Leda and the Swan,” “For Anne Gregory,” “The Cold Heaven,” “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “Among School Children,” “The Tower,” “Down by the Salley Gardens,” “When You Are Old,” “September 1913,” “Easter 1916,” “A Prayer for My Daughter,” “Words for Music Perhaps” (the Crazy Jane Poems), and “Under Ben Bulben.”

Then put down the book and think about it. Come back to Yeats again and again, as you grow older. And wiser.

J.M. SYNGE

1871–1909

The Playboy of the Western World

John Millington Synge was born near Dublin in 1871, attended Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied languages, and decided after graduating to be a musician. His life remained confused and his career uncertain until he was twenty-eight, in 1899, when he met William Butler Yeats in Paris. Yeats was interested in his young countryman, but not in a plan Synge proposed to write literary criticism. Something much more important than mere literature was happening in Ireland, Yeats said. We now call it the Irish Renaissance. Synge, inspired by Yeats’s words, returned to Ireland, to the western country and the Aran Islands, where he found his métier.

In his preface to The Playboy of the Western World, his masterpiece, Synge explained both his method and his source of literary inspiration. “Anyone who has lived in real intimacy with the Irish peasantry,” he wrote, “will know that the wildest sayings and ideas in this play are tame indeed, compared with the fancies one may hear in any little hillside cabin in Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay. All art is a collaboration,” he went on; “and there is little doubt that in the happy ages of literature, striking and beautiful phrases were as ready to the storyteller’s or the playwright’s hand, as the rich cloaks and dresses of his time. It is probable that when the Elizabethan dramatist took his ink-horn and sat down to his work, he used many phrases that he had just heard, as he sat at dinner, from his mother or his children. In Ireland, those of us who know the people have the same privilege.”

Synge told of how, some years before, when he had been writing “The Shadow of the Glen,” he had crouched over a chink in the floor of his room in the inn at Wicklow and listened to the servant girls talking to one another in the kitchen. “This matter, I think, is of importance,” he wrote, “for in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words and at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form.”

On the stage, Synge insisted, one must have both reality and joy. The intellectual modern drama, he said, has failed; Ibsen and Zola were dealing “with the reality of life in joyless and pallid words; people have grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy that has been given them in place of the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality. In a good play,” Synge went on, “every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple, and such speeches cannot be written by anyone who works among people who have shut their lips on poetry.” Such was not the case in Ireland, Synge felt; at least for a time, until the modern world should descend upon it and shut up its springs of fancy. “In Ireland,” he concluded, “for a few years more, we have a popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent, and tender.”

It is indeed that fiery and tender imagination that infuses Playboy. The play tells the story of a country lad who appears out of the night with a confession that he has murdered his father. He is welcomed as a hero and then, strangely, he becomes one in fact. But his father turns up, unmurdered, and Christy Mahon loses all his reputation, although not his new, more successful self. As such, the story was scandalous to Irish eyes and ears, and the audience rioted at its opening at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1907. The first American production, in New York in 1911, was met with equal distaste.

Later audiences have come to understand that the story is a great metaphor, and not just an attack—which was certainly far from Synge’s intention—on the Irishman’s love of boasting and his tendency to glamorize ruffians. Joyce’s Ulysses is also an account of a young man’s quest for an accommodation with his father, and The Playboy of the Western World is now read as comparable to such major work.

Metaphor or not, the most wonderful thing about Playboy is its language. Synge’s time spent on the floor listening to the kitchen girls in the inn at Wicklow was not wasted. The words of the text dance and sing as you read them out loud, as you should do. Brush up your Irish accent and go to it. Many lines will bring the tears to your eyes, and others will make your heart leap.

Best of all are the words with which young Christy woos Pegeen Mike, the “wild-looking but fine girl,” as Synge describes her, who is the daughter of the keeper of a country public house where the action takes place. Pegeen is smitten by Christy from the moment she sets eyes on him, and he soon falls madly in love with her. He begins to pour out his soul to her in a kind of poetry he has never spoken before and that she has never before heard. He tells her that they will walk the mountains together “in the dews of night, the times sweet smells be rising, and you’d see a little shiny new moon, maybe, sinking on the hills”:

PEGEEN—looking at him playfully.—And it’s that kind of a poacher’s love you’d make, Christy Mahon, on the sides of Neifin, when the night is down?

CHRISTY. It’s little you’ll think if my love’s a poacher, or an earl’s itself, when you’ll feel my two hands stretched around you, and I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips, till I’d feel a kind of pity for the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome in his golden chair.

PEGEEN. That’ll be right fun, Christy Mahon, and any girl would walk her heart out before she’d meet a young man was your like for eloquence, or talk, at all.

Did lovers ever really talk like that, in Ireland or anywhere? Synge said they did, and I hope he was right. He also said they would not be talking like that much longer, and I am afraid he was right about that, too.

Synge died in 1909, at the age of thirty-eight. I have placed him here, out of chronological order, because of his relationship to Yeats, who died in 1939 at the age of seventy-four.

BEATRIX POTTER

1866–1943

The Tale of Peter Rabbit

Beatrix Potter (one of the nicest things about her was the way she spelled her name) was born in South Kensington, now a part of London, in 1866. She received an ordinary education in an ordinary school, and she lived quite an ordinary life. But she liked to tell stories and to draw, and in 1899 she began to send a series of illustrated animal stories, in letters and on postcards, to a sick child who was her friend. As the year wore on the stories grew longer and longer. The first of her books appeared in 1900. It was called The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and it is one of the most famous books in the world.

There is nothing sentimental about Peter Rabbit or about the dozens of other books with which Beatrix Potter followed it. That is another good thing about her: she saw the world, especially the animal world, very clearly, knew it was full of accidents and cruelties, and did not disguise these from her child readers. Some of the books are even a bit macabre. But the stories usually end up well, which is what children like best: hard times and travails, with a happy ending. In fact, who doesn’t like that kind of story best?

By the time Beatrix Potter died, in 1943, millions of copies of her little square books had been sold, with their wry stories and colorful illustrations. By now the count may be approaching a billion. Thank you, Beatrix Potter, wherever you are; you deserve all your fame and all your royalties. You gave us Peter Rabbit and the Tailor of Gloucester and Benjamin Bunny and Jemima Puddle-Duck and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle—how can we ever repay the debt?

ROBERT FROST

1874–1963

Selected Poems

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874 and moved when he was eleven years old to New England, where his family had lived for generations. He went to Dartmouth College when he was eighteen but dropped out to live at home, working at various jobs and writing poetry. In 1897 he entered Harvard but withdrew because of ill health. He farmed in New Hampshire for a while and taught school, but his life and career were not successful until he went to England in 1912 and found a willing publisher for his now considerable body of work. A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914) appeared in England and made him well known.

Frost returned to New England in 1915 and for the next forty years held various academic posts, some of them honorary, and wrote poems. The winner of four Pulitzer Prizes for his verse, he was eminently a professional poet whose later works were often on bestseller lists. He made a memorable appearance at the inauguration in 1961 of President John F. Kennedy, reciting his poem “The Gift Outright” in the strong wind and sunlight of that day. The next year, at the age of eighty-two, he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Frost died in Boston in 1963.

His death was a shock; it was hard to get used to his not being here. He had published his first volumes before World War I, and it seemed that he had always been what he later became, the most important American poet of the twentieth century. And then he was gone.

The personality of a poet has much to do with his fame. Frost was a crafty self-promoter. He knew how to remain in the public eye, how to be always at the top of everyone’s lists. His later books were the kind of commercial success on which publishers live. But was he really good? As good as everyone thought, as good as he seemed?

There is not the almost-unanimous consensus about this that existed a few years ago. As with Picasso, another who bestrode his age, it has become apparent that some of Frost’s productions were not first rate. Even Homer nodded, and Frost nodded often and disastrously. His easy verse could run on and on. His subjects could be so tiny that they seemed to disappear when you got down to examining them. Then, a handful of his poems were so famous that they seemed to wear out in the reading.

Take “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” That last stanza:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

It is hard to think of four lines by an American poet that are better known. Or these astonishing lines that leap out of the pages of “The Death of the Hired Man”: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there/They have to take you in.” “I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Or the famous boast (for boast it is) in “The Road Not Taken”:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Or (finally) this marvelous last stanza from “Two Tramps in Mud Time”:

But yield who will to their separation,

My object in living is to unite

My avocation and my vocation

As my two eyes make one in sight.

Only where love and need are one,

And the work is play for mortal stakes,

Is the deed ever really done

For Heaven and the future’s sake.

Do these famous lines, and a hundred or five hundred others, deserve their great fame? I think they do. Are they as good as they seem to be? I think they are. Are the sentiments, so clear, so intelligible (unlike so much modern poetry)—are the sentiments superficial, and is that why we understand them so easily? I do not think it is bad for a poem to be intelligible.

That easy verse I mentioned is truly a marvel. Usually in couplets, often either in a four-footed or a five-footed meter, it is as close to prose as verse can be and still be unmistakably verse. Take the next-to-last line of “Two Tramps in Mud Time.” Read the line aloud and see how the fact that it is verse, and that the verse has four beats in each line, forces you to put the emphasis where it belongs: “Is the deed (pause) ever (pause) really (strong emphasis) done.” The verse, apparently so easy and forgiving, in reality has you by the throat and will not let you go, will not let you read the poem in any other way. Frost was unequaled in the writing of verse in our time. The stories he told in verse, in pentameter couplets that can be compared, if they can be compared to any other English poet’s, only to Chaucer’s wonderful, easy couplets in The Canterbury Tales, are all the better stories because of the form he gives them. “The Witch of Coos,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Home Burial,” “The Black Cottage,” “In the Home Stretch”—these are all extraordinary narrative poems, and narrative poems endure.

Best of all, probably, are the little poems that merely observe, often on the basis of a natural event or phenomenon, how life conducts itself in this world. “Fire and Ice” is a famous example, as are “Once by the Pacific,” “Birches,” and “Mending Wall.” The point is not made too obviously or too strongly, but you do not forget that both anger and hatred are sufficient to end the world, that the fury of the sea is the symbol of the fury of Nature itself, that “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches,” that “Good fences make good neighbors.” Homely truths, all of these, but true for all that! And it is the poet’s business to tell the truth.

The last edition of Robert Frost’s Collected Poems is a very large book and there are quite a few bad poems in it. But there are also many, many good ones. Start with those I have already mentioned. Go on to read “Revelation,” “The Oven Bird,” “The Runaway,” and “To Earthward.” Make sure to read “The Silken Tent,” noticing that the entire poem is just one sentence. Start with these, and when you have done with them, go on to make your own list.

WALLACE STEVENS

1879–1955

Selected Poems

Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1879. After attending Harvard for three years he worked briefly as a journalist, then acquired a law degree and practiced law in New York. He had been writing poems for years, but his first published work appeared in Poetry in 1914. Two years later he joined an insurance firm in Hartford, Connecticut, rising in 1934 to vice president, a position he retained until his death in Hartford in 1955.

His first book, Harmonium, was published in 1923 and sold fewer than one hundred copies. Nevertheless, it included some of his best poems; for example, “Sunday Morning,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” and his own favorites, “Domination in Black” and “The Emperor of Ice Cream.”

The theme of the conflict between and the relation of reality and imagination imbues many of his poems, both in Harmonium and thereafter. In “Esthetique du Mal” (“Aesthetic of Evil”) he argued, brilliantly as was always true of his verse, that beauty is inextricably linked with evil. But in “Sunday Morning,” my own favorite, which was written twenty years before, he had declared that “death is the mother of beauty.” I believe both of those contentions are correct, in the sense in which he uses the terms.

In his recent book, The Best Poems in the English Language, Harold Bloom (who is given to such exclamations) declares that “Stevens is the principal American poet since Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.” Certainly he is one of the three or four—or five. But he isn’t easy to read. You have to work. Begin with the poems mentioned here, then go on to “The Idea of Order at Key West,” perhaps his best-known poem, and “The Poems of Our Climate.” Much effort will be required, but it will be rewarded.

THOMAS MANN

1875–1955

The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann was born in Lubeck in 1875, the son of prosperous middle-class parents who were sufficiently liberal-minded not to object to the fact that their son never really wanted to be anything but a writer. He prepared himself thoroughly and well, reading voraciously, studying history, literature, and law, and writing assiduously from the time he was in his early teens. He also thought about writing and what it meant to be a writer. By “writer” he meant, of course, a maker of fictions, a creator of worlds, and he was well aware from a young age of how dubious and questionable is the career of a writer, and how little he ought to be trusted by more solid persons. This self-awareness was in itself partly make-believe, but partly serious, too, as is evident in many of Mann’s novels and stories, which are as frequently about fakes and charlatans as they are about artists as such.

Mann’s father died in 1891, whereupon the family moved to Munich, where Thomas Mann lived for more than forty years, marrying, fathering a family, and writing the books that made him world famous. Buddenbrooks was the first of them; published in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, it was an instant success that, everyone knew, promised more and better things in the future. Death in Venice was published in 1912; Der Zauberberg in 1924 (the English translation, The Magic Mountain, appeared in 1927 and helped to ensure Mann’s Nobel Prize); and the series of biblical novels, Joseph and His Brothers, from 1933 to 1943. By this time, however, Mann was living in America.

He had been a political conservative during World War I, but he soon saw through Hitler in his Munich days and was outspoken in his writings about him. When Hitler came to power at the beginning of 1933, the Manns were vacationing in Switzerland. A telephone call from their son and daughter warned them not to return to Germany. Thomas Mann never lived in Germany again, although he visited it for short periods after World War II.

Mann became a U.S. citizen in 1944. In 1952 he moved to Zurich, Switzerland, which was close to Germany but not in it and where everyone spoke German—this was a comfort. He was, however, writing a very uncomfortable book at the time, a joke on all of his devoted and adoring followers, and a return to his old theme of the charlatan/artist. In fact, The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, published a year before Mann died in 1955, is very funny, and I recommend it highly. But life is not infinitely long, and do not read it until you have read The Magic Mountain first.

This strange and beautiful book is a novel of ideas, one of the few such books to become a worldwide bestseller. Hans Castorp leaves his solid, middle-class city and takes the winding cog railway up the mountain to the sanitarium where his cousin is being treated for tuberculosis. Hans meets the director at the door and is surprised to discover that this slightly diabolical doctor would like to take his temperature. The young man refuses. There is nothing whatever wrong with him, he insists; it is his cousin who is ill, and in any case Hans is merely on a short vacation from his solid job and must return at the end of two weeks, or perhaps three. But there is something wrong with him after all; he has tuberculosis, and he finds that he must inform his family that he will not return when he planned and to ask them to forward his clothes and his books to the sanitarium, to which he has been confined for an indefinite stay.

Life in the sanitarium at the top of the magic mountain is easy and carefree, although fraught with peril, for from time to time a patient worsens and dies, and is taken out at night so that the other patients cannot see it happen. There is all the time in the world to talk, and everyone does so, but the talk is not haphazard. A consuming conflict develops among representatives of various recognizable lines of thought in early-twentieth-century Europe and America. But nobody wins, nobody is proved “right,” the talk merely goes on and on while the patients, for the most part, become sicker and sicker (although one or two are cured and leave the scene). There is also time for love; and Castorp falls in love with a beautiful and enigmatic Russian woman who denies herself for months and then, on the eve of her departure—it seems that she is one of those who is cured—gives herself to Castorp in a storm of passion that is no less violently erotic for not being explicitly described.

The high point of The Magic Mountain takes place after this. Castorp, depressed and alone for the first time in his life and forced as a result to face his own existence, dons a pair of skis and goes out on the mountain, into the pure white snow that has surrounded the sanitarium all along but that he has never paid any real attention to before. He is not a bad skier, but these are real mountains and he soon becomes lost. The sun is a blazing light in the sky, and the snow all around reflects its cruel clarity and brilliance. Castorp becomes confused and begins to see visions. They are extraordinary. The twenty or so pages that describe Castorp’s snowbound epiphany are a high point, not just of The Magic Mountain, but of Western literature in our time.

The book does not end there. Hans Castorp survives his ordeal and returns to the sanitarium. Surprisingly, he seems to be better; the director soon notices this and informs him that he will be allowed to go home soon. In the meantime World War I has broken out, and Castorp must leave anyway, whether well or ill, for he thinks it necessary to fight for his country. When he descends into the darkling plain he never looks back at the magic mountain, shining in the sun.

EDITH WHARTON

1862–1937

The House of Mirth

The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton was born in New York of a distinguished and wealthy New York family. She was educated privately at home and in Europe, and she was married in 1885. The marriage was not happy, and she and her husband were divorced in 1913. But she had long since begun to write both novels and stories, together with travelogues describing her life in France and Italy, which were luxurious and interesting.

I don’t know when she first met Henry James, but they became fast friends. His novels influenced her greatly and perhaps she also influenced his last novels or at least appreciated them better than most. She wrote several “Jamesian” novels that in some ways are better than his, partly because they are more accessible. They deal with similar themes but somehow reach deeper into the souls of her main characters. This is especially true of The House of Mirth, her first novel, published in 1905.

The story is striking, memorable, and painful in the extreme. I have read it only once because I can never forget it, scene by scene, conversation by conversation. Lily Bart suffers from her social ambitions, which would be solved if she had any money, but she doesn’t. She comes close, very close, but her desires are always thwarted, her hopes always dashed. She is loved by an ineffectual man who is never quite able to tell her he wants her for his wife, although in fact he does; only when he discovers that he can ask her to marry him does he learn that it’s too late. I realize I am being very guarded in describing the plot of this fine book, but that’s because I don’t want to spoil it for you. Read it, please, despite my statement that it’s painful. It’s a good pain, and you won’t forget it either.

The Age of Innocence is another story of thwarted love and desire. In this case it is the man who suffers. Newland Archer, a successful New York lawyer, falls in love with a Polish countess who is separated from her husband. Archer is married too, but his wife is determined to keep him for herself and never gives up her campaign to come between her husband and the woman she knows he loves instead of her. No one can win in such a complex game—except fate steps in and arranges things so they can. Archer’s wife dies, and the countess’ husband dies too. Archer learns she is living in Paris, his son visits her there and realizes that his father’s love is returned. Archer then goes to Paris ostensibly to join her, but … Once again I am concealing the ending of a fine book. Once again, please forgive me and read it.

Edith Wharton wrote another well-known novel, a short, bitter, New England story called Ethan Frome. It was successful but somehow—in my view—not as interesting as the two novels described above. You may want to read it anyway; in fact, you may have already read it in school because, being short, it is often included in high school literature classes.

WILLA CATHER

1873–1947

The Song of the Lark

My Ántonia

Willa Cather was born in Virginia in 1876 but moved to Nebraska when she was eight and spent the rest of her life there and in New Mexico. Her discovery of the fascination of Santa Fe imbues one of her best-known books, the historical novel Death Comes for the Archbishop. It’s a good book but not, I think, her best. She wrote many other novels, but I particularly like and remember The Song of the Lark and My Ántonia, both of them written early in her career.

The Song of the Lark is the story of Thea Kornberg, a Colorado girl who likes to sing and realizes, thanks to a neighbor, that she has a fine voice. He tries to teach her, but, knowing he can’t take her beyond his limited expertise, he arranges for her to go Chicago for professional lessons. The account of her train journey across the prairie, of her first sight of the first city she has ever seen and only dreamed about, and her introduction to her first teacher—all these experiences are described with great skill and in just the right kind of language for the girl she still is. The beginning of the novel is the best part, but her great success as a diva, though perhaps not entirely credible, is nevertheless very satisfying. She becomes an international celebrity and of course becomes involved with the wrong kind of people, especially men. But this isn’t important. The novel is really fine and I don’t know of anyone who has read it who has ever forgotten it, especially that train ride.

The Song of the Lark was published in 1915, My Ántonia three years later. It is the story of an immigrant girl from Bohemia who lives on the family farm in Nebraska. Her family loses its farm, and she has to go to work as a “hired girl” in the city, which she hates. A young man named Jim Burland falls in love with her, but neither his family nor hers approves of the match. Jim is the narrator, and he describes his sadness when she returns to the farm and shortly afterward marries another immigrant and has many children. Ántonia is a strong and determined woman who supports her husband—who is physically strong but not as determined. She teaches her children English—their father speaks only Czech—and sees to it that they have more education than she did. Ántonia holds her family together through thick and thin and, in short, lives the kind of life we may all think our forebears did in this country that was new in those old days. I hope it still is but I’m no longer sure. In any case I recommend this novel with my heart and expect you will fall in love with Ántonia, just as I did.

Willa Cather wrote many other novels, one of which, Death Comes for the Archbishop, published at the end of her career, is noteworthy. It is the story of two devoted French priests who bring civilization and religion to New Mexico in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is moving but also sad, as all of her books are. They were all touched by memories of her childhood and youth in the pioneer country of Nebraska, memories that were fading the longer she lived (she died in 1947). The epigraph of My Ántonia, is a quote from Virgil’s Aeneid—Optima deis … prima fugit: “The (memories of the) best days are the first to go.”

ÉTIENNE GILSON

1884–1978

The Arts of the Beautiful

Étienne Gilson was one of the most renowned scholars of the twentieth century. He was born in Paris in 1884 and lived to be ninety-four, dying in France in 1978. He was educated at the Lycée Henry IV, the premier preparatory school of France, and at the Sorbonne; by the time he was thirty-four he was the leading scholar of medieval history in France. By the time he was fifty he was the leading scholar of his subject in the world. He taught both in Paris and Toronto, where he established a school of medieval studies, his teaching consisting usually of a course of lectures; from these he wrote his books. There were many of those, all of them marked by his astonishing clarity of thought; indeed there is no thinker that I know of whom it is easier, and more fruitful, to follow—whether you always agree with his conclusions or not. A large, gruff man, Gilson possessed an instrument, in his pen, of the most consummate delicacy; he has been compared to that Zen master, also a chef, who cut meat for his dishes without effort because, as he said, “I cut at the joints.”

I would not hesitate to recommend any book of Étienne Gilson’s to a reader curious to experience the best Roman Catholic philosophical thought of our time. I have chosen The Arts of the Beautiful because it is not only an example of Gilson’s own art at its best, but also because of the novel things that it says.

Gilson was eighty-one when the book was published; he had delivered the series of lectures on which it is based a year or two before. The book is clearly the work of an old man. It is spare, there is no wasted effort in it, no unnecessary words. This wise old man is intent on telling us something that we ought to have known and consequently that he ought not to have had to go to the trouble to tell us; but he must, because we do not know it, and it is true. For him, no other reason is needed.

That something he wishes to tell us, or to remind us of, is that art is making. Gilson does not beat around the bush; the first paragraph of the introduction begins thus:

In the Encyclopédie française we find this quotation by the historian Lucien Febvre: ‘Assuredly, art is a kind of knowledge.’ The present book rests upon the firm and considered conviction that art is not a kind of knowledge or, in other words, that it is not a manner of knowing. On the contrary, art belongs in an order other than that of knowledge, namely, in the order of making … From beginning to end, art is bent upon making.

Now most people do not agree with Gilson, although he is right. It is true enough that what the artist makes is, or can be, an object of knowledge; we can know a great deal about a painting or a poem, to say nothing of knowing about the painter’s or the poet’s life. But knowing about a self-portrait of Rembrandt is very far from being able to paint it, which is to say to make it. Nor is it sufficient to know how Rembrandt painted: how he arranged his subjects, how he mixed his pigments, how he applied them to the canvas, which he had also prepared in his special way. Knowing all that will not permit you to paint like Rembrandt, to make what he made.

To paint like Rembrandt, you must have made the things that he made—paintings, etchings, and other works of art. Rembrandt, like all great artists, knew this perfectly well, whether or not he ever said it; we know that, because we know that he never stopped making things as long as he lived. The idea, in fact, of an artist who knows how to make but does not make is a contradiction in terms.

I do not mean to belittle criticism. Knowing about art is an important kind of knowledge. But making a work of art is more important. It is also essentially mysterious. Why are the great artists great? I don’t think we can ever say why. The Greeks made a myth out of the notion of inspiration, and a myth is something, according to an old definition, that is so true that it could never happen. At any rate, no one has ever actually seen anyone being inspired. But some human beings make better—more beautiful—things than others, and a very few men and women are truly great makers. The things that they make have a meaning and importance that endures for a very long time, even forever, and those things have a kind of life that in one sense, although not in another, is higher than that of human beings.

Those are a few of the things that Gilson says in The Arts of the Beautiful. He says many other things as well that are worth digging out. His was a remarkable mind; he was a great maker of books, even though his books are not works of art per se, that is, they are themselves in the realm of truth, not that of beauty.

JAMES JOYCE

1882–1941

Dubliners

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Ulysses

James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, the son of a couple who were at first prosperous. But Joyce’s father was an angry, blustering man who drank too much (as Joyce described in many of his stories). So the family’s fortunes soon foundered. By the time he was ten Joyce had become the son of a poor man, and he himself remained a poor man all of his life.

Besides poverty, Joyce also had other ills to contend with. He suffered from several kinds of eye diseases; between 1917 and 1930 he endured a series of twenty-five operations for iritis, glaucoma, and cataracts; and he was for short stretches during this period totally blind. He and Nora Barnacle, the woman with whom he lived throughout most of his life and whom he finally married, had a daughter who was mentally ill, and this illness disturbed Joyce greatly. In addition, his works, although admired by the literati, were not popular successes during his lifetime; indeed, most of them were banned for long periods, and he had great difficulty getting them published. Despite these problems and troubles, Joyce was essentially a happy man who kept up his spirits and never stopped working. Some of his most hilarious passages were written during the worst times of his life.

He wrote the stories that were collected under the title Dubliners (1914) during the first years of the last century. All of these stories show an acute, observing eye, but one of them, “The Dead,” is among the finest stories ever written. The story was written in Trieste, where Joyce and Nora were living, around the year 1910. Joyce had recently been told—although it was a false report—that Nora had been loved by another man, and he felt betrayed. In addition, he was sentimentally overwhelmed, while living so far from home, by his memories of Irish hospitality. He combined these two feelings in “The Dead,” which described a party at Christmastime in Dublin some years before. Many characters are introduced but the focus is on the protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, and his wife Gretta. There is singing and dancing. Gabriel makes an awkward speech about hospitality, but his eyes never leave Gretta, whom he finds that he loves and desires more than ever. At the end of the story he learns something about her he has never known. Her heart was broken years before, he now realizes, by a boy who died for her, or so she thought, and his own heart is broken as he lies beside her in the night, watching her as she sleeps and thinking of all the living and the dead. This last scene of “The Dead” is one of the purest of all literary experiences; for concentrated feeling it is hard to name anything that is its equal.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is, like almost everything Joyce wrote, autobiographical—that is, largely based on the events and experiences of his early life in Ireland. Joyce loved Ireland, but he hated its narrowness and its restrictions on feeling and expression. His country, he thought, was paralyzed and could not break out of the web of illusions and self-deceits that entrapped it. The Portrait starts with a very young boy and carries him onward to the moment when he is finally able to tear himself away and to become the free and feeling artist he has always wanted to be. A wonderful, moving journey is described in this book; perhaps no artist ever revealed himself more fully and completely, unless it was Rembrandt in his last self-portraits or Rousseau in his Confessions or Beethoven in his last quartets. But those men were all old; Joyce did it when he was still in his twenties.

The beginning of the Portrait is lovely and very famous: “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo … ” The end is just as famous. It takes the form of a diary; the month is April, but the year does not matter. It is spring, a new beginning. Stephen (the name Joyce used for the hero of this autobiographical novel) writes in his diary:

26 April: Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

27 April: Old father, old

artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

Perhaps nothing Joyce wrote has been quoted and pondered over so many times. Almost every young writer, man or woman, has thrilled to those lines.

Joyce wrote most of Ulysses during World War I. He had been living in Trieste, but when war broke out the Italian authorities allowed him and his family to go to Zurich, where he spent the next five years. He was beset by poverty, which was relieved only from time to time by small grants of money from two American friends and supporters, Edith Rockefeller McCormick and Harriet Shaw Weaver. In fact, Miss Weaver’s contributions cannot be called small; by 1930 they had amounted to more than £23,000, a large sum for those days.

Chapters from Ulysses began to appear in the American Little Review starting in March 1918 and continuing until 1920, when the book was banned in the United States. It was an era when bluestocking sentiment was rampant, and the banning of Ulysses ran parallel to the banning of alcohol. Ulysses regained its legitimacy sooner than alcohol; furthermore, it was published in Paris in 1922, by Sylvia Beach, proprietor of a bookstore called Shakespeare & Co., and soon everyone who was anyone had a copy. There is nothing like banning a good book to make people think it is great, and the ban had that effect on Ulysses. The ban combined with the mysterious difficulties of the novel had the effect of making it an irresistible object of passionate scholarly concern on both sides of the Atlantic.

Is Ulysses not a great book, then? Of course it is. However, it seems to me to be disorganized and overwrought in many places, and harder to read than it ought to be. At the same time it is full of wonders. They are more important than the faults, if that’s what they are.

The book’s beginning and its end are both extraordinary. Stephen Daedalus—Joyce’s alter ego—conducts a long discussion of Hamlet, in which he shows that even in 1922 there were new things to be thought and felt about that play. This conversation, which winds throughout the book, is fascinating. And the last chapter, consisting of eight immensely long paragraphs that reveal Molly Bloom’s thoughts as she lies in bed after a day made especially interesting by an act of adultery, is deservedly famous. Molly is earthy, cunning, goodhearted, and loving, all at the same time. And although she has betrayed her husband, Poldy, her affection for him has not really been betrayed, and one is certain that their future together will be no worse, if it will not be better, for her escapade.

Leopold (Poldy) Bloom is an enigmatic character. The book is the story of a single day in his life—Bloomsday, Joyce called it (it was in fact the anniversary of the day, June 16, when he had first fallen in love with Nora Barnacle, his wife). Bloom visits various symbolically important places in Dublin; these correspond to parts of the body; and these in turn represent the various arts and sciences; while all are hung upon a structure based on The Odyssey of Homer. Thus, for example, Chapter 3 of Part 2, “Hades,” occurs at 11 A.M., in the graveyard, where the heart is the symbol and all of this represents religion.

I rebel, and you may, too. Ulysses may be a more enjoyable book if you do not work too hard at reading it. At any rate, Molly is worth the trouble of finding her out.

HENRIK IBSEN

1828–1906

A Doll’s House

About certain authors one has an impression that may have little basis in reality, but that is hard to eradicate and that stands in the way of true comprehension and appreciation. About Ibsen I have an impression of murky darkness, of a kind of sad foreignness and strangeness. This is quite wrong: Ibsen, although a serious man and artist, was not the somber, unpleasant person of my imagination. As a result of my impression, however, whenever I see a play of Ibsen’s on the stage or read it in a book, I am surprised at how good it is, how interesting and absorbing, and how much fun.

I know where my impression comes from. Bernard Shaw was envious of Ibsen, whom he thought of as his only living competitor (Shakespeare, after all, was dead); at the same time Shaw could not help but admire Ibsen. When English audiences, and critics, would hoot a new play of Ibsen’s off the stage, Shaw would “defend” him with praise that was a little below enthusiastic and with enigmatic analyses. Shaw’s book The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) helped to create my impression, and that of many others, of Ibsen as a dark, tortured spirit who had in the final analysis perverted drama by turning it into a vehicle for social criticism. The fact that Shaw admitted that Ibsen was a great dramatist and an able social critic, and the fact that Shaw did all the things he accused Ibsen of doing, was lost in the rhetorical fireworks of this “defense.”

Henrik Ibsen was born in a desolate lumbering town in northern Norway in 1828. His childhood and youth were not happy; his father went bankrupt, the family had to move to another town, Henrik did badly in school, and his first plays were either disasters or just unsuccessful. A shy, introverted man, he nevertheless obtained a job as a producer of plays. During this time he was miserable but at least learned everything that could be known about the theater. Still, he’d enjoyed no success of any kind by the time he was thirty-five and decided that life in Norway was impossible for him. He therefore went to Rome, and, as with many northern artists who exchanged their dark, cold surroundings for the warmth and gaiety of the south, Ibsen’s life and career suddenly bloomed.

A series of plays of a new kind poured from his pen. The first was Brand (1866), the second that astonishing work, Peer Gynt (1867). This was followed by a collection of poems, the ten-act drama Emperor and Galilean (1873), and Pillars of Society (1877). He was approaching his major mode, but he had not yet quite reached it. Two years later, with A Doll’s House, he exploded into dramatic greatness.

Nora, the heroine of A Doll’s House, is the twittery, charming but incompetent wife of Torvald Helmer, who adores her. But he is unable to treat her as anything but a child. The play is about Nora’s awakening. A series of confrontations and events leads to her final recognition that she is not only—she is much more than—what her husband sees in her. In the last, great scene she leaves him, leaving all of her life behind, thus breaking not only his heart but her own as well. But even with a broken heart she will take on the world, endure her suffering, and make a life for herself that is hers alone.

The play created a scandal when it first appeared. In a sense it is still scandalous; even today, the majority of any audience viewing a good production believes that, after all, Nora does not really have to leave Torvald—has she not made her point, does he not now fully understand it, will he not treat her better from now on? Nora alone, perhaps, knows that it is impossible for Torvald to treat her any other way, for she is a woman and he is a man. A Doll’s House is a tragedy of sex—or of the failure of communication between the sexes.

The part of Nora is a superb one for any fine actress, and dozens have played her in their different ways. Ibsen, after all, was not just a social critic, he was also a wonderful playwright, a fact that became clear to all with the staging and subsequent publication of plays like An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), Hedda Gabler (1890), and The Master Builder (1892). All of these read well and act even better, and no one should miss a good production of any of Ibsen’s later plays if one can be seen.

But no Ibsen play touches me so deeply as that first great success, A Doll’s House. My final impression of Ibsen is of Nora going out the door, with Torvald standing astounded and broken on an empty stage. There are few moments to equal it in the drama of the last 125 years.

BERNARD SHAW

1856–1950

Pygmalion

Saint Joan

George Bernard Shaw (he disliked the name “George” and in his will directed that his plays be produced in the future under the name Bernard Shaw) was born in Dublin in 1856, the son of an impractical and impecunious man whom Shaw disliked and whom his mother left, with her children, in 1875. Mother and son wound up in London, where for years Shaw was dependent on her meager earnings as a music teacher; he later remarked that he did not throw himself into the battle of life, he threw his mother.

His formal education having ended before he was sixteen, Shaw undertook to educate himself, reading in the British Museum, attending free lectures, and making speeches for political and other causes—he thus honed the edge of his polemical prose style. He began to write but was unable to publish before the later 1880s, when he was well into his thirties; but he emerged in 1888-90 as one of the best music critics ever to write in English and, later, as a superb drama critic as well. (In the first capacity he championed Wagner and Mozart; in the second, Ibsen and Shakespeare.)

Shaw’s first plays were not produced; they were thought to be too “unpleasant” for the stage. He published them, together with some later works, as Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). But he soon was writing successfully for the stage, first abroad and then in London, and from 1901, with the production of Caesar and Cleopatra, he was hardly ever off the boards and sometimes had two or three hits running simultaneously.

Pygmalion was first produced in 1913 and published in 1916; it did not become My Fair Lady until 1956. It is probably Shaw’s best-known play, and his purest comedy. Shaw was always fascinated by language, particularly the English language, and by the social consequences that ensue from the way one spoke it. The heroine of Pygmalion is a flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, who parades her frightful Cockney accent; the hero is Professor Higgins, a brilliant but eccentric phonetician who determines to teach Eliza to speak like a lady, on the theory that if she speaks like a lady she will be taken for one.

The play is wonderfully funny, acute, and effective on at least three levels. First, the story of Eliza’s efforts to learn to speak like a Duchess at a garden party—she succeeds—is brilliantly effective theater, combining as it does not only the myth of Pygmalion—the sculptor who brought his finest sculpture, Galatea, to life—but also the great and powerful myth of Cinderella. Second, the play is an acute social commentary. As a poor Cockney flower girl earning half a crown a day by selling bouquets of violets, Eliza has an established, although not necessarily delightful, place in the world. But once she learns to speak like a lady, what, as she cries at the end of the play, is to become of her? She still has no money, but she can never go back to the gutter, where she was at least happy, if not comfortable. Finally, the play includes a deliciously complicated love affair. Eliza and her teacher fall in love, but Higgins is not perceptive enough to recognize that he loves Eliza, and Eliza is intelligent enough to know that he never will—and that she therefore should marry someone else. And so she does.

The play ends with the question of what will happen, and what Eliza will do, quite unsettled. The resolution of the uncertainties of the play—which, despite them, was and is a brilliant stage piece—was left for Shaw’s Epilogue, which he included in the published version. The Epilogue is as funny, acute, and effective as the play itself. Do not miss it when reading the play.

See a stage version of the play too if you can manage it—preferably one staged in England, where the accents will be true to life. My Fair Lady, the musical version, is just as good as the play, though different in some respects—for example, in it Eliza and Higgins do get together at the end.

Joan of Arc was finally canonized in 1920, five centuries after her death, and the profound fascination of this most human of saints affected Shaw as it did millions of others. Saint Joan, which many think is his greatest play, was produced in 1923, published in 1924, and in 1925 earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The story of Joan of Arc is well known. A village girl from the town of Domrémy in Lorraine, she was directed by her “voices”— those of Saint Catherine, Saint Margaret, and Saint Michael, whom she heard speak to her “in the church bells”—to go to Orleans in soldier’s attire, raise the English siege of the city, and crown the Dauphin in the cathedral of Rheims. It is one of the most extraordinary facts in history that she did all these things. She was eighteen when she crowned the Dauphin as the king of France, but she was captured soon afterward by the English at Compiègne, tried by a French court of the Inquisition, convicted of being a heretic and a witch, and burned alive at the stake on May 30, 1431, when she was still only nineteen.

Her spirit lived on and helped the French to drive the English from France, which they did in a few years. In 1456, her trial was declared invalid and her memory officially purged of any taint or stain. It was not until the nineteenth century, however, that serious ecclesiastical attention was paid to the question whether she was a saint. The long process of canonization came to an end on May 16, 1920, when she was declared Sainte Jeanne d’Arc, her saint’s day being May 30. For centuries before this she had been revered by the common people of France as their patron saint and savior.

Shaw was well aware that the danger in writing a play about Joan was to sentimentalize her story, as Mark Twain, for example, had done only a few years before. The facts, Shaw knew, would speak for themselves if fairly presented. And a fair presentation demanded that Joan receive a fair trial; anything else would be a dramatic travesty (as well as a travesty of historical fact). The high point of the play is of course the trial, when Joan, who never really understands the charges against her, condemns herself over and over in her insistence on the truth of her voices as against the truth of the Church. She is crushed, as Shaw says, “between those mighty forces, the Church and the Law,” and suffers death because, for her, there is no alternative. She emerges, at the end, as a Shavian hero of reason and clear sightedness. And Shaw concludes, in a stage Epilogue, that mankind will continue to kill its best men and women as long as the qualities that differentiate them, and for which they are therefore killed, are not shared by all.

The play is luminous and beautiful, and the part of Joan is one of the most magnificent for an actress in world drama. It is a long play—three and a half hours—but few playgoers have ever complained. It is also didactic, about which audiences have not complained, either. Shaw was well aware of this, too; I am reminded of something he said in the preface to Pygmalion, which is also didactic. “I wish to boast,” he wrote, “that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home.”

It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.

Whether or not that is true, Shaw was always didactic, always trying to teach us something. What he was trying to teach us was usually valuable; more important, he was a great playwright. One learns and enjoys at the same time.