Why garden? Why poeticize?
Robert Frost and his much younger contemporary, Mary Oliver, both distinguished themselves as poets of nature, and also as poets whose audiences have far exceeded college classrooms and highbrow bookstores. This 1993 essay compares two of their best-known poems, Frost’s “Mending Wall” and Oliver’s “Writing Poems.”

 

Gardening, human beings govern nature with art. Human art mediates between the gardener and nature. Poetry mediates among the poet, nature, and readers.

Robert Frost knows this. His neighbor tells him, “Good fences make good neighbors.” It is Frost’s neighbor’s father’s saying, a specimen of traditional or folk wisdom. “He will not go behind his father’s saying,” Frost says of him, who repeats himself, and his father. Were Frost’s neighbor a scientist, he would study cloning, an art of exact replication. Frost’s neighbor’s soul finds its deepest satisfaction in remembering. Memory can have the drawback of mischaracterization. Frost’s neighbor calls a wall a fence, and pronounces it good.

Frost’s deepest satisfaction lies elsewhere. Frost wants the exact word, the one that fits the nature of the thing. Frost wants to go behind the sayings of the father. Frost knows of something older than fathers, and the conventions or traditions of fathers. Nature is older than the oldest human father, even older than the oldest remembered human father.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Nature is what doesn’t love a wall. Nature in its entropy acts beyond human seeing and hearing, undoing the work of even the most vigilant and industrious men. Nature is somewhat mysterious, and behind it might be some greater mystery.

Nature’s entropy does not so threaten human works as to force men into a grim struggle for survival. Mending walls is “just another kind of outdoor game.” Together, men and nature play the outdoor version of Penelope’s indoor game of weaving and unweaving. But in Frost’s outdoor game there are no threatening suitors, no need for a rescuing hero.

Frost wants to know, Why play? He wants to know the reason for the game—what he’s walling in or out, and whether someone will take offense at his handiwork. His neighbor, “like an old-stone savage armed,” divides the world into his own and yours, us and them. He respects ancient divisions of politics and property. Frost is not so respectful, seeing the nature shared by all.

A poem, as much an artifact as a wall, another sort of line built on another form of sand, traditionally marking out the wisdom of fathers, limning the spiritedness of political men. In the Iliad the Muse sings of the high-hearted rage of Achilles, indignant at an instance of unjust, conventional rule in a war sparked by erotic disappointment, that is, by both the frustration of erotic nature and an affront to convention. Is there also something that doesn’t love a poem?

As a poet, Frost must wonder at the playful entropy of nature. Will it undo his artifacts? He approaches nature lightly, shrewdly, circumlocutiously, even as he questions human artifice and convention. He takes care not to question too blatantly. He lets his neighbor have the last word, lest a good neighbor become a savage and not merely resemble one, on occasion. The poet-gamesman plays the game in order to moderate the latent savagery of the convention—therefore ordinary, therefore natural—man.

Mary Oliver takes a less prudent tone. She does not question convention. She dismisses it in two sentences, each a kind of negative command. “You do not have to be good” and “You do not have to walk on your knees” are thou-shalt-nots disputing efforts founded on another set of thou-shalt-nots. Eros replaces spiritedness or thumos, and does so directly, without conventional guides. Let “the soft animal of your body love what it loves”; “the world offers itself to your imagination” as a complaisant lover does. You are part of “the family of things,” a nature unmediated by the wisdom of fathers. This unusual family has no parents, only siblings. It is as pliable to desires as one’s imaginings are. Olivier assumes imaginings to be benign. She does not see that if all things constitute a family, all corporeal eroticism is incest. Or if she does, she regards that as just another taboo to be negated.

Oliver’s optimism comes from her replacement of Frost’s natural law, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the law of dissociation, with the law of love, the law of association. Bees go to rhododendron flowers in Eros’ “invisible line”; “otherwise death is everywhere.” It’s as if she’s taken Neoplatonism and made it corporeal, in the way Marx took Hegel’s dialectic and made it material. Her problem is even more acute than Marx’s, and idealism of corporeality being even less plausible than a materialist dialectic.

The bees are like poets, Oliver supposes; they appear in a poem titled “Writing Poems.” Oliver wants poetry to be natural or erotic, not a wall against death but a beeline or a lifeline through it.

Of these two poets, Frost is older, tougher, probably wiser. He knows that poems are artifacts, no matter how natural the impulse urging poets on. If nature is the deepest human satisfaction, and human beings can apprehend nature directly, what need is there for poems? Oliver’s left hand does not know what her writing hand is doing.

Oliver wants to say, nature associates as well as it dissociates, lives as a precondition of dying. Poems are on the side of spontaneous life, the eros that always says yes. But she says this in a poem, not in a spontaneous outpouring. Idealism of the body leads to a didacticism of the erotic.

The canny gamesman Frost smiles at Oliver, the earnest erotic. Eroticism is no substitute for moralism, he tells her; trying to make it that will only confuse the poet. Poetry must never go in a beeline. A one-liner isn’t a poem, and one-line poems teach aphoristically, with an indirectness resembling the dialogues composed by Plato, the wisest erotic. A poet who tries to make a poem go in a beeline will remove the reasons for poetry’s existence.

This is also why gardeners exclude most animals from gardens. This goes for animal bodies soft and hard. Who rules? If not human beings, then it’s no longer a garden. (A garden governed by God would be another matter, and is another story.)

The question, then, is: On what terms will human beings, whether poets or gardeners, govern nature?

 

Maurice Lever: Sade. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1993.

Originally published in the Washington Times, September 26, 1993.

 

Democratic nations can’t get the hang of aristocracy. Ask an American to name an aristocratic family and your likely to hear ‘the Kennedys’ (who, being not only American but Irish, are doubly disqualified) or perhaps ‘the English royals,’ whose Windsor line has served as one of this century’s most prodigious sources of rich, white trash. Better still, consider the phrase, ‘Hollywood royalty,’ when referring to famous movie actors—an oxymoron comparable to ‘Coney Island champagne,’ or ‘Duluth chic.’

By contrast, the French are a nation for whom democracy, aristocracy, and despotism remain live wellsprings of conflicting currents. One of the most powerful whirlpools among French intellectuals results from the collision of the aristocratic passions and pretensions with those of democracy. Aristocrats, impelled by what the ancient Greeks called thumos—the part of the soul that gets angry, waxes righteously indignant, quarrels at a straw when honor’s at the stake—detest modern democrats—peaceable bourgeois who pride themselves on being down-to-earth. But perceiving that there is no honor in being undemocratic in a democracy, aristocrats (nowadays more likely to be disaffected bourgeois) quickly learn to pose as plus démocratique que la démocratie—thundering against the modest inequalities of bourgeois democracies while deploring the vulgarity, the complacency, the selfishness, in a word the populism of the populace.

The modern aristocrat wants to be above the law and protected by it; he wants to despise the vulgar while exacting their adulation, or at least their obedience. The Marquis de Sade represented these contradictory inclinations at their pathological extremes. Maurice Lever’s biography exhibits a pedestrian French intellectual’s confusion with respect to this mélange of arrogance and servility, too like his own prejudices to condemn, yet too obviously absurd and nasty to praise.

Something of a literary courtier himself, Lever begins by flattering the Sade family, who cooperated with his research efforts. “The house of Sade distinguished itself over the years through important service to church and state… [producing] men who helped to make the France of the Ancien Regime what it was and whose feudal pride our hero would cherish throughout his life,” and producing as well many nuns, whom our hero did not much cherish. It quickly became clear that the Marquis’s immediate family did not provide young Donatien (as Lever chummily calls him) with a home fit for heroes. His father, a bisexual courtier-littérateur, his uncle, “the very type of the libertine priest,” his mother, absent, his grandmother and aunts, who “welcomed the child as a veritable Jesus—and immediately created a kind of cult around him,” and even his best friend’s guardian, a count whose “favorite amusement was to fire a musket at workmen repairing nearby roofs” (“When he hit one, he jumped for joy”), bent the young twig in decidedly roué directions, unfitting him for life in any of the several political regimes France saw in Sade’s lifetime. “At the age of four his despotic nature was already formed.” By the age of ten he had been moved from Provence to Paris, where a Jesuit grammar school developed his taste for theatrics, whippings, and sodomy. “Let the show begin!” Lever loopily exclaims.

And a wretched show it was. Given to arranging orgies at which he would perform obscene acts with crucifixes while bellowing such challenges as “If thou art God, avenge thyself!” Sade soon came to the attention of civil and religious authorities, who, acting in the name of God, did indeed revenge Him. Lever tries to explain Sade’s antics as the result of bad upbringing and mental imbalance, while allowing that “To whip a defenseless woman is an ignoble act, whatever the torturer’s inner drives.” On the one hand, under the Ancien Regime such acts, when committed by the unnatural aristocrats, were mere misdemeanors; on the other hand, Lever intones, “noble birth was an unfair advantage.” And then again, Sade was made a scapegoat for a public outraged at the ‘aristoi’s’ excesses. But remember, “the torture [Sade inflicted] was more cerebral than actual,” as he preferred to terrify than to cut prostitutes (though he did a bit of both) and, by the way, didn’t the religion of the time exalt flagellation?

The description of Sade’s usual living quarters—ranging from a prison-like château designed for “the sole purpose of protecting pleasure from outside attack” to the real jails and lunatic asylums—affords Lever the irresistible chance to prattle in Foucaultian terms about “carceral space” and to indulge in French lit-crit chitchat about how “existed in language only,” replacing “the hazards of life” with “signs” (portentous emphasis in the original). For the ‘aristocrats,’ the prisons of the Ancien Regime allowed one to surround oneself with excellent books at the price of enduring bad food, tedious or insane fellow-inmates, and intrusive authorities who pestered him with silly rules and red-penciled his prose. That is, an old-fashioned prison resembled nothing so much as a small, mediocre American liberal arts college of today. It being easy to earn a reputation for derangement living in such circumstances, Sade did, acting out the familiar pattern of the undergraduate: spending his considerable idle time writing home with requests for food (he put on weight), alternatively raging at and cajoling the administration, seeking relief in sexual fantasizing and autoeroticism. To top off the parallels, upon his release he found himself “with no idea where to go, where to stay, where to eat, or where to find money.” An American lad would, of course, head home to mom and dad, but Sade, aged 50, had outlived his parents and alienated his pitiably bovine wife of 27 years. He sank to the dregs. He became a writer.

This sets Lever off on some more nonsense about how “Sade may have written masterpieces without knowing it”—his novel Justine being “one of the most powerful and striking creations of French literature.” To Lever, as to Sade in solitary confinement, no device is too squalid: he quotes Barthes, calls Sade’s prose subversive, and shamelessly compares the old hack to Laclos.

The sovereign isolato, who nonetheless gassed up at the slightest affront, careened on, from porno potboiler to potboiler, from jail to mental hospital, ending up, under the Napoleonic regime, as the director of theatricals starring his fellow-inmates at Charenton, the Paris asylum where the saner ‘aristocrats’ were allowed in to gawk and giggle at woebegone thespians, whose performances were deemed therapeutic by the ‘progressive’ director. “Long before Nietzsche, Sade showed that dramatic art was not the fruit of Apollonian clarity alone but also the progeny of Dionysus,” Lever scribbles, having seen that the Marquis is best employed as the intellectual’s equivalent of an inflatable plastic woman, malleable for any sodden pleasure of mind or heart. This is the Marquis’s fitting legacy.

 

 

Claude Tannery: Malraux, the Absolute Agnostic: or, Metamorphosis as Universal Law. Teresa Lavender Fagan translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Originally published in Philosophy and Literature, Volume 16, Number 2, October 1992.

 

In the United States, where recent calls for ‘diversity’ amount to little more than a multicolored cloak for a thin ideological monism, any good study of André Malraux’s work deserves more than welcome—it deserves thoughtful attention. From first to last Malraux sought to understand the plurality of civilizations and to make that understanding address the spiritual crisis of the West. If ideologues reject Malraux because he was on the ‘wrong’ side in May ’68—on the side of de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic against the New Left—perhaps they need a stronger dose of their own diversity. Politically and culturally,, Malraux was there first, with far superior mind and heart.

Claude Tannery is a novelist, encountering Malraux not to classify and analyze but to sympathize and build. The merit of this book derives from Tannery’s commitment to read Malraux as Malraux wanted to be read—as a man challenging readers to change their lives, not as a literary aroma to be inhaled and ‘appreciated,’ exhaled and ‘deconstructed.’ Tannery treats an homme sérieux seriously.

Tannery considers central Malrauvian themes, metamorphosis and agnosticism. He shows more emphatically than previous commentators have done (if not always more clearly) the extent to which Malraux integrates the Eastern delight in plurality, its charmingly relaxed attitude toward contradiction, with the Western insistence on unity, on logical rigor. Malraux does this by transforming Nietzsche’s concept of creativity. Like Nietzsche, Malraux finds in the will-to-create a cross-civilizational universal, a feature of ‘the human condition’ everywhere and always. Unlike Nietzsche, Malraux finds fraternity in this will, not self-isolating dominance. Nietzsche’s thought remains firmly within the modern Western framework, the attempted conquest of fortune and of nature. Malraux’s fraternal (but not egalitarian) creative will can open itself to the plurality of cultures, relax its individuality, without lapsing into some indiscriminate moral and political anarchism. Whereas Nietzsche finally must either rule or ruin, tyrannize or go mad, Malraux can govern—rule and be ruled, in Aristotle’s phrase. Hence the association with de Gaulle. Tannery formulates this well, calling Malrauvian fraternity “a fellowship of differences” (232).

This shows why the New Left could never accept Malraux, any more than the Old Left had done. The old, Communist-Party French ‘Left’ had denounced Malraux for his refusal to accept the supposedly iron law of economic determinism; indeed, Malraux opposed fatalism in all its forms. The New Left had to reject Malraux just as vehemently, but on different grounds: on the way they used not Marx but Nietzsche. The New Left took the Nietzschean will-to-power and made it not so much fraternal as egalitarian, a non-royal road toward communalism without so much Marxian dialectical signage. The New Left incoherently sought to maximize egalitarianism and freedom. But the New Left retained the core of Nietzsche’s will-to-power, seeking dominance over all other political contenders, seeking rule simply rather than ruling and being ruled. This has remained the case as the New Left has marched diligently through the institutions of academia, government, and the media in the half-century since the évènements of 1968.

If members of one civilization can admire other civilizations by fraternal recognition of the will-to-creation in all, then the question of human creativity arises. Agnosticism comes in because we cannot know much about the source of the artist’s creative metamorphoses. There exists a “metalanguage of art,” a “language of forms that transcends civilizations,” a set of form-generating archetypes inaccessible to reason. Responding to this unknowable realism as the artist does constitutes neither submission to destiny nor transcendence of it, but “the highest form of fellowship with destiny”—a reconciliation, a participation with forces ascribed to gods and to nature. Tannery does not mention the resemblance of this account of Malraux’s thought to Nietzsche’s amor fati, but it is noteworthy. It is also a mistaken resemblance, as Malraux insists on the self-consciousness of the artist’s metamorphoses of previous traditions. Picasso knew what he was doing, and so did his predecessor, and so will his successors.

Tannery’s generous ardor brings with it some weaknesses as well as strength. At times he exclaims and defends too much, persisting, for example, in treating the butcher Mao Zedong and his vicious ‘Cultural Revolution’ with undeserved respect. (In some respects this parallels Malraux’s own mythologized Mao, presented as a Chinese Charles de Gaulle.) It is too much to say that Malraux regards “every revolution” as a lyrical illusion (91); Malraux is both less ‘disillusioned’ and less utopian than Tannery, more genuinely political. Tannery does share one weakness with Malraux: the failure to distinguish sufficiently the classical from the modern form of reason. In Plato reason yields transcendence, a possibility Malraux, following Nietzsche, too hastily rejects. For them, creativity replaces reasoning, although in both the concept of ‘consciousness’ supplements creativity lends some rational content to creativity.

Tannery insists too much on the development, the metamorphosis, of Malraux’s thought, underestimating its continuity. He discusses The Walnut Trees of Altenburg without fully considering Malraux’s integration of that novel, its chapters largely unchanged, into his vast ‘anti-memoir’ memoir-novel, The Days of Limbo, published some three decades later. This happens because Tannery sometimes does not attend closely to the texts as Malraux presents them, making it difficult to see exactly where Malraux’s thoughts end and Tannery’s begin. This is especially and most regrettably true of Tannery’s penultimate chapter, treating his principal theme, metamorphosis as universal law. Here he brings in a plethora of writers from Goethe (quite informatively) to Stephen Jay Gould. There’s just not enough Malraux.

We who admire Malraux and find nourishment in his writings would betray what he has given us were we to use such occasions as this for multiplying un-fraternal complaints. Tannery has written a book to learn from, and to build with.