Rabbi Moshe Reiss
HAROLD
BLOOM
Since not many of you are likely to have read the essay by a man
considered a master teacher, Harold Bloom – a true American genius (the
MacArthur Genius Award) – and a Master of both Kafka and Scholem I
thought to share this with you.
Moshe
“www.moshereiss.org”
Reflections in the Evening Land
Saturday December 17, 2005
The Guardian
Huey Long, known as "the Kingfish," dominated the state of Louisiana
from 1928 until his assassination in 1935, at the age of 42.
Simultaneously governor and a United States senator, the canny Kingfish
uttered a prophecy that haunts me in this late summer of 2005, 70 years
after his violent end: "Of course we will have fascism in America but
we will call it democracy!"
I reflected on Huey Long (always mediated for me by his portrait as
Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren's novel, All the King's Men)
recently, when I listened to President George W Bush addressing the
Veterans of Foreign Wars in Salt Lake City, Utah. I was thus benefited
by Rupert Murdoch's Fox TV channel, which is the voice of Bushian
crusading democracy, very much of the Kingfish's variety. Even as Bush
extolled his Iraq adventure, his regime daily fuses more tightly
together elements of oligarchy, plutocracy, and theocracy.
At the age of 75, I wonder if the Democratic party ever again will hold
the presidency or control the Congress in my lifetime. I am not
sanguine, because our rulers have demonstrated their prowess in Florida
(twice) and in Ohio at shaping voting procedures, and they control the
Supreme Court. The economist-journalist Paul Krugman recently observed
that the Republicans dare not allow themselves to lose either Congress
or the White House, because subsequent investigations could disclose
dark matters indeed. Krugman did not specify, but among the profiteers
of our Iraq crusade are big oil (House of Bush/House of Saud),
Halliburton (the vice-president), Bechtel (a nest of mighty
Republicans) and so forth.
All of this is extraordinarily blatant, yet the American people seem
benumbed, unable to read, think, or remember, and thus fit subjects for
a president who shares their limitations. A grumpy old Democrat, I
observe to my friends that our emperor is himself the best argument for
intelligent design, the current theocratic substitute for what used to
be called creationism. Sigmund Freud might be chagrined to discover
that he is forgotten, while the satan of America is now Charles Darwin.
President Bush, who says that Jesus is his "favourite philosopher",
recently decreed in regard to intelligent design and evolution: "Both
sides ought to be properly taught."
I am a teacher by profession, about to begin my 51st year at Yale,
where frequently my subject is American writers. Without any particular
competence in politics, I assert no special insight in regard to the
American malaise. But I am a student of what I have learned to call the
American Religion, which has little in common with European
Christianity. There is now a parody of the American Jesus, a kind of
Republican CEO who disapproves of taxes, and who has widened the
needle's eye so that camels and the wealthy pass readily into the
Kingdom of Heaven. We have also an American holy spirit, the comforter
of our burgeoning poor, who don't bother to vote. The American trinity
pragmatically is completed by an imperial warrior God, trampling with
shock and awe.
These days I reread the writers who best define America: Emerson,
Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, Mark Twain, Faulkner, among others.
Searching them, I seek to find what could suffice to explain what seems
our national self-destructiveness. DH Lawrence, in his Studies in
Classic American Literature (1923), wrote what seems to me still the
most illuminating criticism of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Of the
two, Melville provoked no ambivalence in Lawrence. But Whitman
transformed Lawrence's poetry, and Lawrence himself, from at least 1917
on. Replacing Thomas Hardy as prime precursor, Whitman spoke directly
to Lawrence's vitalism, immediacy, and barely evaded homoeroticism. On
a much smaller scale, Whitman earlier had a similar impact on Gerard
Manley Hopkins. Lawrence, frequently furious at Whitman, as one might
be with an overwhelming father, a King Lear of poetry, accurately
insisted that the Americans were not worthy of their Whitman. More than
ever, they are not, since the Jacksonian democracy that both Whitman
and Melville celebrated is dying in our Evening Land.
What defines America? "Democracy" is a ruined word, because of its
misuse in the American political rhetoric of our moment. If Hamlet and
Don Quixote, between them, define the European self, then Captain Ahab
and "Walt Whitman" (the persona, not the man) suggest a very different
self from the European. Ahab is Shakespearean, Miltonic, even
Byronic-Shelleyan, but his monomaniacal quest is his own, and reacts
against the Emersonian self, just as Melville's beloved Hawthorne
recoiled also. Whitman, a more positive Emersonian, affirms what the
Sage of Concord called self-reliance, the authentic American religion
rather than its Bushian parodies. Though he possesses a Yale BA and
honorary doctorate, our president is semi-literate at best. He once
boasted of never having read a book through, even at Yale. Henry James
was affronted when he met President Theodore Roosevelt; what could he
have made of George W Bush?
Having just reread James's The American Scene (1907), I amuse myself,
rather grimly, by imagining the master of the American novel touring
the United States in 2005, exactly a century after his return visit to
his homeland. Like TS Eliot in the next generation, James was far more
at home in London than in America, yet both retained an idiom scarcely
English. They each eventually became British subjects, graced by the
Order of Merit, but Whitman went on haunting them, more covertly in
Eliot's case. The Waste Land initially was an elegy for Jean Verdenal,
who had been to Eliot what Rupert Brooke was to Henry James. Whitman's
"Lilacs" elegy for Lincoln became James's favourite poem, and it deeply
contaminates The Waste Land.
I am not suggesting that the American aesthetic self is necessarily
homoerotic: Emerson, Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Faulkner, Robert Frost
after all are as representative as are Melville, Whitman and Henry
James. Nor does any American fictive self challenge Hamlet as an
ultimate abyss of inwardness. Yet Emerson bet the American house (as it
were) on self-reliance, which is a doctrine of solitude. Whitman, as
person and as poetic mask, like his lilacs, bloomed into a singularity
that cared intensely both about the self and others, but Emersonian
consciousness all too frequently can flower, Hamlet-like, into an
individuality indifferent both to the self and to others. The United
States since Emerson has been divided between what he called the "party
of hope" and the "party of memory". Our intellectuals of the left and
of the right both claim Emerson as ancestor.
In 2005, what is self-reliance? I can recognise three prime stigmata of
the American religion: spiritual freedom is solitude, while the soul's
encounter with the divine (Jesus, the Paraclete, the Father) is direct
and personal, and, most crucially, what is best and oldest in the
American religionist goes back to a time-before-time, and so is part or
particle of God. Every second year, the Gallup pollsters survey
religion in the United States, and report that 93% of us believe in
God, while 89% are certain that God loves him or her on a personal
basis. And 45% of us insist that Earth was created precisely as
described in Genesis and is only about 9,000 or fewer years old. The
actual figure is 4.5 billion years, and some dinosaur fossils are dated
as 190 million years back. Perhaps the intelligent designers, led by
George W Bush, will yet give us a dinosaur Gospel, though I doubt it,
as they, and he, dwell within a bubble that education cannot invade.
Contemporary America is too dangerous to be laughed away, and I turn to
its most powerful writers in order to see if we remain coherent enough
for imaginative comprehension. Lawrence was right; Whitman at his very
best can sustain momentary comparison with Dante and Shakespeare. Most
of what follows will be founded on Whitman, the most American of
writers, but first I turn again to Moby-Dick, the national epic of
self-destructiveness that almost rivals Leaves of Grass, which is too
large and subtle to be judged in terms of self-preservation or
apocalyptic destructiveness.
Some of my friends and students suggest that Iraq is President Bush's
white whale, but our leader is absurdly far from Captain Ahab's
aesthetic dignity. The valid analogue is the Pequod; as Lawrence says:
"America! Then such a crew. Renegades, castaways, cannibals, Ishmael,
Quakers," and South Sea Islanders, Native Americans, Africans, Parsees,
Manxmen, what you will. One thinks of our tens of thousands of
mercenaries in Iraq, called "security employees" or "contractors". They
mix former American Special Forces, Gurkhas, Boers, Croatians, whoever
is qualified and available. What they lack is Captain Ahab, who could
give them a metaphysical dimension.
Ahab carries himself and all his crew (except Ishmael) to triumphant
catastrophe, while Moby-Dick swims away, being as indestructible as the
Book of Job's Leviathan. The obsessed captain's motive ostensibly is
revenge, since earlier he was maimed by the white whale, but his truer
desire is to strike through the universe's mask, in order to prove that
while the visible world might seem to have been formed in love, the
invisible spheres were made in fright. God's rhetorical question to
Job: "Can'st thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?" is answered by
Ahab's: "I'd strike the sun if it insulted me!" The driving force of
the Bushian-Blairians is greed, but the undersong of their Iraq
adventure is something closer to Iago's pyromania. Our leader, and
yours, are firebugs.
One rightly expects Whitman to explain our Evening Land to us, because
his imagination is America's. A Free-Soiler, he opposed the Mexican
war, as Emerson did. Do not our two Iraq invasions increasingly
resemble the Mexican and Spanish-American conflicts? Donald Rumsfeld
speaks of permanent American bases in Iraq, presumably to protect oil
wells. President Bush's approval rating was recently down to 38%, but I
fear that this popular reaction has more to do with the high price of
petrol than with any outrage at our Iraq crusade.
What has happened to the American imagination if we have become a
parody of the Roman empire? I recall going to bed early on election
night in November 2004, though friends kept phoning with the hopeful
news that there appeared to be some three million additional voters.
Turning the phone off, I gloomily prophesied that these were three
million Evangelicals, which indeed was the case.
Our politics began to be contaminated by theocratic zealots with the
Reagan revelation, when southern Baptists, Mormons, Pentecostals, and
Adventists surged into the Republican party. The alliance between Wall
Street and the Christian right is an old one, but has become explicit
only in the past quarter century. What was called the counter-culture
of the late 1960s and 70s provoked the reaction of the 80s, which is
ongoing. This is all obvious enough, but becomes subtler in the context
of the religiosity of the country, which truly divides us into two
nations. Sometimes I find myself wondering if the south belatedly has
won the civil war, more than a century after its supposed defeat. The
leaders of the Republican party are southern; even the Bushes, despite
their Yale and Connecticut tradition, were careful to become Texans and
Floridians. Politics, in the United States, perhaps never again can be
separated from religion. When so many vote against their own palpable
economic interests, and choose "values" instead, then an American
malaise has replaced the American dream.
Whitman, still undervalued as a poet, in relation to his astonishing
aesthetic power, remains the permanent prophet of our party of hope.
That seems ironic in many ways, since the crucial event of Whitman's
life was our civil war, in which a total of 625,000 men were slain,
counting both sides. In Britain, the "great war" is the first world
war, because nearly an entire generation of young men died. The United
States remains haunted by the civil war, the central event in the life
of the nation since the Declaration of Independence. David S Reynolds,
the most informed of Whitman's biographers, usefully demonstrates that
Whitman's poetry, from 1855-60, was designed to help hold the Union
together. After the sunset glory of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloom'd", the 1865 elegy overtly for Abraham Lincoln, and inwardly for
Whitman's poetic self-identity, something burned out in the bard of
Leaves of Grass. Day after day, for several years, he had exhausted
himself, in the military hospitals of Washington DC, dressing wounds,
reading to, and writing letters for, the ill and maimed, comforting the
dying. The extraordinary vitalism and immediacy departed from his
poetry. It is as though he had sacrificed his own imagination on the
altar of those martyred, like Lincoln, in the fused cause of union and
emancipation.
Whitman died in 1892, a time of American politics as corrupt as this,
if a touch less blatant than the era of Bushian theocracy. But there
was a curious split in the poet of Leaves of Grass, between what he
called the soul, and his "real me" or "me myself", an entity distinct
from his persona, "Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, an American":
"I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase
itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other."
The rough Walt is the "I" here, and has been created to mediate between
his character or soul, and his real me or personality. I fear that this
is permanently American, the abyss between character and personality.
Doubtless, this can be a universal phenomenon: one thinks of Nietzsche
and of WB Yeats. And yet mutual abasement between soul and self
destroys any individual's coherence. My fellow citizens who vote for
"values", against their own needs, manifest something of the same
dilemma.
As the persona "Walt Whitman" melted away in the furnace of national
affliction in the civil war, it was replaced by a less capable persona,
"the Good Grey Poet". No moral rebirth kindled postwar America; instead
Whitman witnessed the extraordinary corruption of President US Grant's
administration, which is the paradigm emulated by so many Republican
presidencies, including what we suffer at this moment.
Whitman himself became less than coherent in his long decline, from
1866 to 1892. He did not ice over, like the later Wordsworth, but his
prophetic stance ebbed away. Lost, he ceased to be an Emersonian, and
rather weirdly attempted to become a Hegelian! In "The Evening Land",
an extraordinary poem of early 1922, DH Lawrence anticipated his
long-delayed sojourn in America, which began only in September of that
year, when he reached Taos, New Mexico. He had hoped to visit the
United States in February 1917, but England denied him a passport.
Lawrence's poem is a kind of Whitmanian love-hymn to America, but is
even more ambivalent than the chapter on Whitman in Studies in Classic
American Literature.
"Are you the grave of our day?" Lawrence asks, and begs America to
cajole his soul, even as he admits how much he fears the Evening Land:
"Your more-than-European idealism,
Like a be-aureoled bleached skeleton hovering
Its cage-ribs in the social heaven, beneficent."
This rather ghastly vision is not inappropriate to our moment, nor is
Lawrence's bitter conclusion:
"'These States!' as Whitman said,
Whatever he meant."
What Whitman meant (as Lawrence knew) was that the United States itself
was to be the greatest of poems. But with that grand assertion, I find
myself so overwhelmed by an uncomfortable sense of irony, that I cease
these reflections. Shelley wore a ring, on which was inscribed the
motto: "The good time will come." In September, the US secretary of
state Condoleezza Rice was quoted as saying at Zion Church in Whistler,
Alabama: "The Lord Jesus Christ is going to come on time if we just
wait."
© Harold Bloom 2005