Rebecca West: This Time, Let's Listen

by

Larry Wolff

In a hotel in Belgrade in 1937, Rebecca West watched businessmen at the bar lifting their glasses and slapping each other on the back. "That I might have seen in London or Paris or New York. But in none of those great cities have I seen hotel doors slowly swing open to admit, unhurried and at ease, a peasant holding a black lamb in his arms." There he stood, waiting, "still as a Byzantine king in a fresco, while the black lamb twisted and writhed in the firm cradle of his arms." Rebecca West recorded the image with reverence.

In that same hotel there was a Slovene chambermaid, "the gentlest and sweetest of women," who believed herself terribly sensitive to the scent of foreigners. She "staggered from room to room on her round of duties, almost in need of a gas-mask when she came to making the beds." The German guests smelled bad in 1937, and the French smelled "wicked and puzzling," but she fully refreshed her suffering olfactory sense in the exquisite fragrance "which hung about the rooms occupied by Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes." This susceptible servant, who might make beds in the magical fictional worlds of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Salman Rushdie or Patrick Suskind, was, in fact, in the historical Yugoslavia of Rebecca West. She cherished the chambermaid, because she wanted to believe that Eastern Europe was different from Western Europe, even perhaps magically different. For she had come to Yugoslavia, in a decade of deepening political nightmare, believing that civilization was at stake in Europe (and it was), seeking to enlarge her understanding of that civilization. When "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" was published in 1941, Hitler had made himself the master of Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia had been bombed and abolished, and Rebecca West found that she had been a visitor to a now lost world. At that moment in history, Rebecca West's book challenged Britain and America to cherish an image of Europe in its full moral and political dimensions, to recognize unequivocally that Eastern Europe was a necessary part of Europe.

"I know you did not really want to come to Yugoslavia at all," she said to her husband, the banker Henry Andrews, in their sleeper on the train, as related on the first page of the book. "But when you get there you will see why it was so important that we should make this journey." This injunction was directed at the reader as well, about to embark upon a work of more than a thousand pages, bafflingly resistant to classification by genre: travel memoir, historical meditation, philosophical encyclopedia, political prophecy. Yet it was recognized immediately in 1941 as a weird masterpiece and it has since become the supreme literary monument of one of the most brilliant writers of the 20th century.

If Rebecca West's journey was important 50 years ago, it is no less so today, when all of Eastern Europe has undergone a revolution and waits on the threshold of an uncertain future, while its cultural relation to Europe as a whole remains a matter of evasion and uncertainty. The Iron Curtain of the cold war so emphatically defined Eastern Europe on all of our mental maps that it was almost impossible to see that curtains of less solid stuff had been drawn across the continent for two centuries. The idea of Eastern Europe as the continent's backward half was invented in Western Europe, to illuminate by contrast the greater glory of "Western" civilization. Rebecca West was a journalist on the trail of that dishonest, self-serving appropriation of Eastern Europe, seeking to invert a tradition of condescension and to redefine the mapping of civilization in Europe.

After first visiting Mozart's birthplace in Salzburg, she boarded a train to Zagreb, in Croatia, that was coming from Hitler's Berlin. She found the German passengers "hideous." Zagreb, however, was not escape enough, for in Croatia she felt the shadow of past Austrian rule and German influence, somehow ruining even the patterns of regional embroidery. In the intensely bitter rivalry between Serbs and Croats that was tearing apart Yugoslavia in 1937, as it is today, Rebecca West was a partisan of the civilization of Serbia and the unity of Yugoslavia.

The Yugoslavia created after World War I was a union of lands with dramatically different cultural and political histories: of the Ottoman, Hapsburg or Venetian empires, of the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic or Muslim religions. Royal authority in Belgrade met resistance to centralized administration throughout the interwar period, and after World War II Communist Yugoslavia assumed its contemporary form as a union of federated republics: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Rebecca West in 1937 was politically committed to one unified Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but the literary structure of her travel narrative recognized the historically diverse lands as she journeyed from Croatia and Dalmatia to Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia and Macedonia.

In Bosnia, at Sarajevo, she meditated upon the assassination of the Austrian Archduke in 1914, her sympathies with the Serb assassin. She watched peasant women at the Sarajevo market, guessed that they were illiterate, but found that their behavior reminded her of a natural aristocracy: one woman demonstrating an unpolished elegance of manners, another exhibiting a sharp and ready wit. In Macedonia, at Skoplje, Rebecca West celebrated Easter in a moonlight procession and marveled at the magic of the Orthodox ritual, the beauty of Byzantium, "the sweetness spilled from the overturned cup of Constantinople" that consoled Eastern Europe during its terrible historical convulsions.

In the 1930's Rebecca West was already celebrated in Britain and America for her fiction and criticism; she was "the incomparable Rebecca" to Alexander Woollcott, who also commented on her extraordinary beauty. Born Cicely Isabel Fairfield, she assumed the pen name Rebecca West in 1912, writing as a feminist and suffragette; she sometimes employed the complementary pseudonym of Rachel East. As Rebecca West she published her first novel, "The Return of the Soldier," in 1918, and in 1928 a controversial book of literary criticism, "The Strange Necessity," which began by making fun of the poetry of James Joyce. She was an increasingly important British voice in American journalism, writing reviews and articles for The New York Herald Tribune, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. When Clifton Fadiman reviewed "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" in The New Yorker in 1941, praising its brilliance, he invoked precisely the perspective that she sought to efface: "Why should this highly cultivated Englishwoman make pilgrimage after pilgrimage to these dark lands and these violent and often primitive peoples?" Her husband asked too, for she had been there once before without him. "Was it so wonderful there?" She replied: "Well there is everything there. Except what we have. But that seems very little." The appetite for life, the still vital traditions, the unswerving religious faith Rebecca West found in her travels seemed to her to present a profound contrast with the insecurity and exhaustion that characterized Western Europe in the 1930's.

The figure of the cultivated traveler to the dark lands of Eastern Europe was as old as the idea of Eastern Europe itself. The Italian Renaissance confidently preserved the classical perspective on Europe, the civilization of the South disdaining the barbarism of the North; this was Europe viewed from Rome, Florence or Venice. In the 17th century, however, new centers of culture and commerce -- Paris, London, Amsterdam -- began to suggest a different perspective on the map of Europe, and in the 18th century the Enlightenment accomplished a conceptual reorientation: a civilized Western Europe in contrast to a backward Eastern Europe.

In Russia, in 1765, Casanova purchased a 13-year-old girl as a sexual slave for 100 rubles and set about improving his property by teaching her to speak Italian and to wear French clothes. The Italian Abbe de Fortis, in 1770, felt that he was leaving "the polite parts of Europe" in crossing the Adriatic to Dalmatia. Yet the Count de Segur, traveling east in 1784, declared that "when one enters Poland, one believes one has left Europe entirely." By the beginning of the 19th century such observations were becoming fixed and formulaic. Mme. de Stael defined Russia as a "melange of European civilization and Asiatic character." Balzac applied the same formula more broadly: "The inhabitants of the Ukraine, Russia, the plains of the Danube, in short, the Slav peoples, are a link between Europe and Asia, between civilization and barbarism."

Rebecca West was conscious of these condescending categories of analysis and wrestled with them as she traveled. She might relish intimations of the Orient, but she refused to cast Yugoslavia as a missing link between civilization and barbarism. Among the Muslim Slavs of Sarajevo, she saw a veiled woman in lilac silk, then caught a glimpse behind the veil of a face "completely un-Oriental, as luminously fair as any Scandinavian." Indeed, the lesson Rebecca West learned from Yugoslavia, and preached to Britain and America in "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon," was that Eastern Europe, in defiance of the formulas, emphatically belonged to Europe, that Europe was incomplete without it, that Western Europe alone was poor and sick without the complement of Eastern Europe's health and wealth. "We are Europeans," she might have cried on behalf of the Slavs in 1937, but in fact that affirmation was made by Mikhail Gorbachev 50 years later, denouncing the still pervasive equation of Europe with Western Europe. In a peculiarly seamless historical fit, the cliches of the cold war have followed and reinforced the formulas of the Enlightenment, dramatizing the distinction between Western Europe and Eastern Europe. Rebecca West saw the error in that equation 50 years ago.

When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu visited Belgrade in 1717, that highly cultivated Englishwoman found it an Ottoman fortress, entirely of the Orient. She described in her "Turkish Embassy Letters" how her host in Belgrade, Achmet-Beg, introduced her to Arabic love poetry, and she appeared oblivious to Serbia as a Slavic land: "I really believe I should learn to read Arabic if I was to stay here a few months." For Rebecca West in 1937, Serbia was a land triumphantly reclaimed from Ottoman oppression, if not yet enthusiastically embraced by Western Europe. Her host in Belgrade was a Serbian poet and Yugoslav official of Polish Jewish descent, called Constantine in the book; he was in love with Rebecca West, as the reader may guess. Her hostess was Constantine's German wife, called Gerda, whom Rebecca West hated from the moment they met at the Belgrade station, Gerda's "grey eyes so light and clear that they looked almost blind." She is the mesmerizing villain of "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon," a German villain for the 1930's, despising Yugoslavia and the Slavs, enraging Rebecca West. The narrative acquires the quality of a nightmarish novel when the English couple find themselves accompanied not only by Constantine but also by Gerda as they entrain for Macedonia. The train trip through the Balkans was a literary device of the 1930's in England, used in Graham Greene's "Stamboul Train" of 1932 and in Agatha Christie's "Murder on the Orient Express" of 1934. In 1937 Rebecca West offered her enemy the window seat, perhaps politely, perhaps provocatively. "That would be interesting, no doubt," said Gerda, "if one had the slightest intention of looking out of the window."

In refusing to look at Yugoslavia, Gerda spat upon Rebecca West's pilgrimage of visions and revelations. "When I see these people I feel I am not in Europe," said Gerda in Macedonia. There was, she maintained, "no order here, no culture, but only a mish-mash of different peoples who are all quite primitive and low." In 1937 this was also the language of scholarship about Eastern Europe in Nazi Germany: a geographer at Gottingen was writing in that year about Lithuania and its "primitive settlements without inner order." Gerda was there at the war memorial to the German soldiers who died fighting against Serbia in World War I, and watching her Rebecca West was certain that they "intend to come back and do it all over again as soon as they are given a chance." Gerda was also there at the French war memorial, to comment by the graves, "Think of all these people dying for a lot of Slavs."

Rebecca West cherished the Slavs, and described them as remarkably handsome: "This man was a Slav. The fair hair, the high cheekbones, the sea-blue eyes showed it." Her recurring attention to physiognomy was in strange and defiant counterpoint to contemporary anthropology in Nazi Germany, where the prominence of cheekbones, among other measurements of the skull, was studied as racial science, and construed to establish the inferiority of Jews and Slavs in Eastern Europe. Rebecca West laughed at the ideal of the Aryan German, comparing it to the reality of the "pear-shaped" German tourists in Yugoslavia. She and her husband took Nazism seriously though, and recognized Gerda as its voice. Europe would have to brace itself for "Gerda's assault on those who are not Gerda," and perhaps endure the establishment of "Gerda's empire."

The black lamb in the hotel bar in Belgrade was only an intimation. The black lamb of the title awaited the travelers in Macedonia, where it was sacrificed upon a huge rock, amid cocks' heads and candles, in a bloody fertility rite. Rebecca West was revolted, but she did not see the sacrifice as evidence of barbarism in Eastern Europe. On the contrary: "I knew this rock well. I had lived under the shadow of it all my life. All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing." To express her own rejection of that pretense she invoked the spirit of Mozart while standing at the rock in Macedonia, Mozart whose music conceded nothing to the sordid indulgence of pain and sacrifice.

Rebecca West was solemn in her passion for Yugoslavia, never more so than at the battlefield of Kosovo. It was there in 1389 that Serbia fell to the Ottoman empire. Contemplating Kosovo, she imagined imperial rule as "the night of evil," five centuries long, compelling subject peoples to a life of "sheer nonsense, the malignant nonsense of cancerous growth." She hated the idea of empire, the Ottoman empire that shadowed Serbia, the Hapsburg empire that shadowed Croatia; she hated and dreaded Gerda's empire that was yet to come.

At the same time the author herself was implicated: "I was born a citizen of one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen." Rebecca West even had a weakness for beautiful empresses, and in the opening pages of the book, meditating upon the assassination of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898, she imagined Elizabeth saying to her subject peoples: "Look, I am the Empress, but I am not evil." The plea was perhaps appropriate to Rebecca West herself, traveling from Western Europe to Eastern Europe, sensitive to the inevitability of being reviewed as "this highly cultivated Englishwoman" in "dark lands" among "primitive peoples," reviewed in the fraught language of past travelers, which was now too the language of Gerda.

It was at Kosovo that Rebecca West heard the poem of the gray falcon, recited by Dragutin, the handsome chauffeur. A gray falcon came to the Serbian czar on the eve of the battle and offered him the choice between an earthly kingdom in victory or a heavenly kingdom in defeat. So he chose defeat. Rebecca West hated his choice. "I do not believe that any man can procure his own salvation by refusing to save millions of people from miserable slavery." For it was evident to her in 1937 that "the whole world is a vast Kossovo," that the black lamb and gray falcon worked together to betray the virtuous, offered in sacrifice "to Gerda's knife." Rebecca West did not spare herself: "I had sinned in the same way, I and my kind, the liberals of Western Europe," who could not "cast off this infatuation with sacrifice." In 1938 the black lamb was Czechoslovakia. Neville Chamberlain was high priest in the cult of the black lamb and the gray falcon, and when he went to Munich Rebecca West thought, "I have been here before" and remembered Kosovo.

When she was finally finishing her enormous manuscript, the Battle of Britain had begun. "Now we in England stood alone. Now we, who had been unchallenged masters of the world, were poor and beset like the South Slavs." She took pride and inspiration from Yugoslavia's defiant resistance to Hitler. She thought of the bombing of Belgrade as German bombs still fell on London, and prayed for courage: "Let me behave like a Serb." Or else she would put a record on the gramophone, the chambermaid Susanna's aria from the last act of "The Marriage of Figaro," "Deh, vieni, non tardar" ("O come, do not delay"). An explosion overwhelmed the aria, but then the song continued, testifying to art, to civilization. It was in the mountains of Montenegro in 1937, where both the landscapes and the features of the inhabitants appeared utterly alien and unnaturally beautiful, that Rebecca West said to herself, "My civilization must not die." Her pilgrimage to Yugoslavia taught her to believe in her civilization, and just in time.

One day in Yugoslavia, Rebecca West met "a good-looking young man who was stripped to the waist." There are so many good-looking young men in "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" that the reader may at first be no more aware than the author that this one was special. "You may wonder why I approached you when my torso is nude," he said, "but I did so in full confidence for I am sure that you are people who have swept all unwholesome prejudices out of your minds, and are open-minded and receptive to such healthful ideas as sun-bathing." He said he was a Communist. The bemused report of his conversation suggests that Rebecca West did not appreciate the significance of this encounter with the future of Yugoslavia. In fact, she was later outraged when Churchill supported Tito's partisans against the Nazis, instead of the royalist resistance to Hitler led by Draza Mihailovic. She remained loyal to the young King Peter of Yugoslavia, envisioning him in 1941 as another Byzantine king in a fresco, like the kings of medieval Serbia, "rigid in his kingliness, as the earlier dynasty in their jewelled tunics and colossal diadems."

Rebecca West was never reconciled to the postwar Yugoslav Government; Communism appeared less benign when fully clothed. Though she took pride in Yugoslavia's resistance to Hitler in 1941, she was unable to appreciate Tito's achievement when Yugoslavia became the first country in Eastern Europe to achieve independence from the Soviet bloc, in 1948. Rebecca West's passion for Yugoslavia conditioned her postwar anti-Communism, which, sadly, then alienated her from the Yugoslavia she loved; she never went back. She died in 1983, three years after Tito. The two of them, with their very different visions of Yugoslavia, were exact contemporaries, both born in 1892.

Our problem today is that for 50 years the single issue of Communism has completely colored all our conceptions of Eastern Europe, especially in defining its distinction from Western Europe. Our challenge will be to discover Eastern Europe anew, and recognize it without the ideological marks that have served for simple identification; our challenge will be to accept it as part of Europe, and not the lesser part. "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon," almost 50 years after its initial publication, astonishes us by the weight and depth of what Rebecca West knew about Yugoslavia, but above all it overwhelms us with the passionate urgency of her need to know, our need to know.

Credits:  This article was first published in The New York Times in 1991.

Write Up of Brasilian Novelist Moacry Sciliar by William Grimes

Moacyr Scliar, one of Brazil’s most celebrated novelists and short-story writers, whose existential allegories explored the complexities of Jewish identity in the Diaspora, died on Feb. 27, 2011 in Porto Alegre. He was 73.

The Brazilian Academy of Letters stated on its Web site (academia.org.br), that the cause was complications of a stroke.

Moacyr Scliar (pronounced Mwa-SEAR SKLEER) lived all his life in the city of Porto Alegre, the capital of Brazil’s southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, to which many Eastern Europeans, like his parents, immigrated in the early 20th century.

The city and its Jewish quarter, Bom Fim, provided him with inexhaustible source material, as did his own preoccupation with the predicament of Jews in Brazil. The protagonist of his best-known novel, “The Centaur in the Garden” (1980), is a Jewish centaur born to Russian immigrant parents.

At home, you speak Yiddish, eat gefilte fish and celebrate Shabbat,” he told the Yiddish Book Center in 2003. “But in the streets, you have soccer, samba and Portuguese. After a while you feel like a centaur.”

“Max and the Cats,” about a Jewish youth who flees Nazi Germany on a ship carrying wild animals to a Brazilian zoo and, after a shipwreck, ends up sharing a lifeboat with a jaguar, achieved fame twice over. Critically praised on its publication in 1981, it touched off a literary storm in 2002 when the Canadian writer Yann Martel won the Man Booker Prize for “Life of Pi,” about an Indian youth trapped on a boat with a tiger.

Mr. Martel’s admission that he borrowed the idea led to an impassioned debate among writers and critics on the nature of literary invention and the ownership of words and images.

“In a certain way I feel flattered that another writer considered my idea to be so good, but on the other hand, he used that idea without consulting me or even informing me,” Mr. Scliar told The New York Times. “An idea is intellectual property.”

Moacyr Jaime Scliar was born in March 23, 1937, in Porto Alegre. His parents, who emigrated from Bessarabia in 1919, gave him a Brazilian Indian name in a nod to their new cultural surroundings. After attending both Yiddish and Roman Catholic schools, he obtained a medical degree in 1962 and practiced in the public health service until retiring in 1987.

He is survived by his wife, Judith, and a son, Roberto.

He came to public attention with his second collection of short stories, “The Carnival of the Animals,” whose intertwining of allegory, fable, fantasy and folklore and Borges-like excursions into metafiction, marked him as a distinctive new fictional voice.

“The Collected Stories of Moacyr Scliar,” rendered into English by his longtime translator Eloah F. Giacomelli, was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 1999.

In many of his novels, Mr. Scliar places a Jewish Brazilian protagonist in a dangerous, bewildering world whose external complexities reverberate in the hero’s interior journey of self-discovery. “The War in Bom Fim” (1972), for example, describes the coming of age of a young Jew in Porto Alegre during World War II and the pull of Zionism.

The central character of “The Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes” (1983) discovers that he is Jewish after finding his late father’s mysterious notebooks, which trace the family’s history back to Jonah.

“I owe to my Jewish origins the permanent feeling of wonderment that is inherent to the immigrant and the cruel, bitter and sad humor that through the centuries has served to protect Jews against despair,” Mr. Scliar told the reference work World Authors in 1991. “It is at the level of language, however, that these impulses are able to produce their effects. It is in language that I have faith, as a vehicle for aesthetic expression and also — and above all else — as an instrument for changing the world in which we live.”

Credits:  This article first appeared in 2011 in The New York Times.  It has been edited slightly for clarity.

Subterranean Homesick Blues

by

Kathryn A. Kopple

Marisa Merz

Until you perceive the extreme loneliness of flannel,

And rub your hands on the paint smacked brick walls,

Until you ponder the sad, square eyes of motels,
And the vinegar streaked sunsets,

When you are at the mercy of soups and kitchens,
And see yourself in the rucksack grandmothers,

When you consider under a microscope the ubiquity of cash registers,
But fail to monitor how one hand washes the other,

And you keep company with the marooned apartment cats,
And share the Purina One and the litter box,

When you understand you will perform a miracle every day,
When you finally get the artistry of lighting a match in strong winds,

When you live the purgatory of a five-story walkup,
When you suffer the pensive handshake of a stuck doorknob,

And survive years and years of emotional defenestration,
And never lose faith in the shamanistic properties of library cards,

And your body treats you like an unwanted tenant,
And you do the best that you can,

Until the stars come home,
Until God knows when.

Letter to Denise

by

Hayden Carruth

Wharton Escherik

Remember when you put on that wig

From the grab bag and then looked at yourself

In the mirror and laughed, and we laughed together?

It was a transformation, glamorous flowing tresses.

Who knows if you might not have liked to wear

That wig permanently, but of course you

Wouldn't. Remember when you told me how

You meditated, looking at a stone until

You knew the soul of the stone? Inwardly I

Scoffed, being the backwoods pragmatic Yankee

That I was, yet I knew what you meant. I

Called it love. No magic was needed. And we

Loved each other too, not in the way of

Romance but in the way of two poets loving

A stone, and the world that the stone signified.

Remember when we had that argument over

Pee and piss in your poem about the bear?

"Bears don't pee, they piss," I said. But you were

Adamant. "My bears pee." And that was that.

Then you moved away, across the continent,

And sometimes for a year I didn't see you.

We phoned and wrote, we kept in touch. And then

You moved again, much farther away, I don't

Know where. No word from you now at all. But

I am faithful, my dear Denise. And I still

Love the stone, and, yes, I know its soul.

Figurative North Topeka

by Eric McHenry

for Ben Lerner

Derivative graffiti crawls
up the overpass like ivy—
abstract names on concrete stanchions.
To the south, symbolic walls:
NO OUTLET signs along the levee,
idle river, idle tracks,
bypass, bluffside and the backs
of Potwin’s late Victorian mansions,
flush like book spines on a shelf.
Drunk on your late-Victorian porch
you promised me that if elected
you’d have the river redirected
down Fourth Street, to make Potwin search
North Topeka for itself.

I told you to retire Ad Astra
Per Aspera and put For God’s
Sake Take Cover on the state
seal and flag—the license plate
at least, since we collect disaster
and loss like they were classic rods:
’51 Flood; ‘66 Tornado.
Even the foot-lit Statehouse mural
has a sword-bearing Coronado,
a Beecher’s Bible-bearing Brown
and a tornado bearing down
on its defenseless mock-pastoral,
The Past. The present was still wet
when the embarrassed legislature
resolved that it would never let
John Steuart Curry paint the future.
He never did, although Topekans
would learn to let bygones be icons.

On Thursday, July 12, the rain
relented and the water rose,
darkened and stank more. The stain
is just shy of the second story
in what used to be Fernstrom Shoes.
That entire inventory
spent five nights underwater, gaping
like mussels on the riverbed.
Fernstrom spent the summer scraping
gobs of septic-smelling mud
out of eleven thousand toes.

On Friday the 13th, the Kaw
crested at thirty-seven feet.
They thought it might have cut a new
channel down Kansas Avenue.
One Capital reporter saw
a kid reach up from his canoe
and slap the stoplight at Gordon Street.

Porubsky’s never did reclaim
its lunchtime customers; the torrents
sent the Sardou Bridge to Lawrence
and there was no more Oakland traffic.
Business hasn’t been the same
for fifty years now. Fifty-two.
Ad astra per aspera: through
the general to the specific.
You do what you want to do
but I’m not using North Topeka
in conversation anymore,
because there is no north to speak of;
there’s only mud and metaphor.

Credits:  "Figurative North Topeka" was originally published in 2004 in Slate.  

McHenry is the author of Potscrubber Lullabies, Mommy, Daddy, Evan Sage, Odd Evening.  He was poet laureate of Kansas from 2015-2017.  He has won several distinguished awards. 

The Short, Sad Story of Stanwix Melville by Christopher Benfey

“Melville’s second son, Stanwix, was born a few weeks after the publication of Moby-Dick. He is a puzzle…”
—Elizabeth Hardwick, Herman Melville

Martin Bloch

“I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of the man.”

—Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener"

I was teaching “Bartleby, the Scrivener” to a dozen undergraduates on a cold November morning, all of us a little haggard after an unexpected Halloween snowstorm. Distractedly, I glanced across the page to the editor’s headnote, and settled on these words: “Their second son, Stanwix… was found dead in a San Francisco hotel in 1886.” I found myself thinking what a strange name Stanwix was, more like a commercial brand than a given name. Stanwix: When Kleenex Isn’t Enough. And what, I wondered, was Stanwix found dead of? Did he blow his brains out, or was that another of Melville’s star-crossed sons? During the days that followed, I began to assemble a few stray notes on Stanwix. I was following a thread, as I imagined it. And yet, the thread didn’t seem to lead out of a maze, like Ariadne’s, but farther into it.

I assumed that Stanwix—one of those “lesser lives” that, as Diane Johnson has pointed out, don’t feel any less to those living them—had been accorded a very small place in Herman Melville’s biography, which turned out to be true. But I wanted to stave off this kind of limitation in my own thinking. For this reason, the book I most consulted, or rather wandered around inside, was Jay Leyda’s The Melville Log (1951). During the 1930s, Leyda had traveled to Moscow to work with the great filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. On his return, he wrote the standard history of Russian and Soviet cinema. Leyda tried to get a foothold in film production, but he was blacklisted in Hollywood. Unemployed, he took up a project initially conceived as a birthday gift for Eisenstein, a Melville enthusiast: a collage, or montage, of the known documents of Melville’s life. Leyda wanted to give each reader the chance “to be his own biographer of Herman Melville.” Later, Leyda did something similar in The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (1960).

It was during the centenary of Dickinson’s death, in 1986, that I first came to know Leyda, a shy and formal man, when he was an emeritus professor of film at NYU. The floor of his apartment was covered at the time with documents, assembled for an expanded version of The Melville Log, undertaken with the Melville scholar Hershel Parker. I told Leyda how much I admired an article that he had published, in 1953, about one of the Irish servants in the Dickinson household, Margaret Maher.

It occurs to me now that my pursuit of Stanwix, another obscure life lived on the margins of fame, resembles Leyda’s work on “Miss Emily’s Maggie.” I imagine myself crawling around on Leyda’s apartment floor, searching among the piles of documents for stray mentions of Stanwix.

“Small and thin,” Stanwix Melville was born on October 22, 1851, between the British publication of Melville’s sixth novel, under the title The Whale, on October 18, and its American publication, about three weeks later, as Moby-Dick. The novel itself is notably careful about naming: Ahab, Ishmael, Queequeg, Starbuck. Call me Stanwix.

Stanwix was burdened with a name linked to an illustrious ancestor. In 1777, at a pivotal moment in the American Revolution, forces under the command of Peter Gansevoort held off a siege by British troops at Fort Stanwix, a star-shaped fort built around 1758, in upstate New York, under the direction of the British General John Stanwix. Gansevoort was Herman Melville’s grandfather. And yet, at the time that Gansevoort defended it, Fort Stanwix had already been renamed Fort Schuyler, for an American general. Melville’s choice for his son’s name seems perversely self-defeating. Why wasn’t Stanwix named Schuyler, a good Dutch name like Gansevoort, for the victors?

A hundred years later, Herman Melville stopped by the luxurious Gansevoort House in Greenwich Village, and casually asked about the origins of the name. “A wealthy landholder in the area,” came the response. The hero of Fort Stanwix, forgotten! “The dense ignorance,” Herman fulminated in a letter to his mother, “of this solemn gentleman,—his knowing nothing of the hero of Fort Stanwix, aroused such an indignation in my breast, that, disdaining to enlighten his benighted soul, I left the place without further colloquy.”

On Stanwix’s birth certificate, in the spaces reserved for the newborn child’s parents, Herman Melville signed his name, as required, and then, unaccountably, the name of his own mother. While Stanwix was nursing, his mother, Elizabeth Shaw Melville, developed a painful inflammation in her breast. Hershel Parker speculates that sexual deprivation likely ensued for Herman Melville. The more obvious deprivation was Stanwix’s, whose early weaning entailed both a loss of intimacy with his mother and, presumably, a diminished resistance to disease later in life.

A childhood photograph from around 1860 shows a pale, thin, unsmiling boy, with an oversized, almost clownish, bowtie. “Papa took me to the cattle show grounds to see the soldiers drill,” Stanwix wrote his aunt on June 20, 1861, “but we did not see them, because one of the factories was on fire, it was too bad. But papa took me [on] a ride all through the Cemetary.” Soon, the whole country was taking a ride through the cemetery.

In 1863, the Melville family left its “square, old-fashioned” (Stanwix’s adjectives) home in Pittsfield, Western Massachusetts, and moved to New York City, where Herman took a modest position in the Custom House. His novels, especially Moby-Dick, had been ridiculed by reviewers and ignored by readers. Henceforth, he would be a poet, as he embarked on his long, gloomy epic poem, Clarel.

In 1867, with the Civil War a recent memory, Stanwix’s older brother, Malcolm, joined a volunteer regiment. He was so smitten with his pistol that, according to a newspaper report (citing Stanwix), he slept with it under his pillow. Malcolm returned from a party at three o’clock one morning. He slept late. Let him sleep, said his father, and be punished at work for his tardiness. In the evening, when Herman came home, they broke down the bedroom door. The boy was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head. “Mackie never gave me a disrespectful word in his life,” his father declared, “nor in any way ever failed in filialness.”

In 1869, Stanwix announced that—like his father before him—he wanted “to go to sea, & see something of the great world.” Augusta Melville, Herman’s sister, added: “Herman & Lizzie have given their consent, thinking that one voyage to China will cure him of the fancy.” (One voyage did not cure Herman Melville of his fancy.) On April 4, the Yokohama, with seventeen-year-old Stanwix aboard, sailed for Canton. He wrote from Shanghai a few months later. Life at sea agreed with him, he said. A few weeks later, news reached his family that he had jumped ship in England. “What have you heard of Stanwix Melville [and] from what point did he run away?” asked one of Herman’s cousins. Suddenly, unannounced, Stanwix showed up in Boston, “much taller & stouter.”

In 1871, Stanwix was off again, to a small town in Kansas. Searching for work, he drifted down through Indian lands, followed the Arkansas River to the Mississippi, and arrived in New Orleans. “I found that a lively city, but no work,” Stanwix wrote, “so I thought I should like a trip to Central America, I went on a steamer to Havana, Cuba & from there to half a dozen or more ports on the Central America coast till I came to Limon Bay in Costa Rica.” Buoyed by rumors that a canal was soon to be cut through Nicaragua, he set out on foot from Limon Bay, “I walked from there on the beach with two other young fellows to Greytown in Nicaragua, one of the boys died on the beach, & we dug a grave in the sand by the sea, & buried him, & travelled on again, each of us not knowing who would have to bury the other before we got there, as we were both sick with the fever & ague.”

Having avoided a grave by the sea, Stanwix almost found a grave in the sea. He joined a surveying expedition on a schooner charting potential sites for the canal. “I got wrecked there in that heavy gale of wind,” he wrote. “and I lost all my clothes, & every thing I had, & was taken sick again with the fever, I went into the hospital there, & then came home on the Steamer Henry Chauncey, where I find the cold weather agrees with me much better, than the fun of the tropics.” Stanwix concluded: “Now I say New York forever.” But he discovered, like Bartleby, that failing eyesight was a “serious obsticle” to office work. And besides, he wrote, “I don’t like to be a clerk in an office.” (Bartleby: “No, I would not like a clerkship; but I am not particular.”) He sailed for California.

“He seems to be possessed with a demon of restlessness,” Stanwix’s mother remarked. But his real demon was motionlessness. After eighteen months in California, Stanwix reports: “I am still stationary.” After Bartleby’s employer suggests that he might consider “going as a companion to Europe, to entertain some young gentleman with your conversation,” Bartleby replies, “I like to be stationary.” To which his exasperated employer responds: “Stationary you shall be then.” Published two years after Stanwix’s birth, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” could not be based on Stanwix. But could Stanwix be based on Bartleby? Could Herman Melville, the distant, depressed father, have helped create the conditions for a Bartleby?

In 1876, Stanwix begged his half-uncle Lem for money. “There is a party of five or six of us that are going to start for the Black Hills country about the middle or last of January two of them who were there before & were doing well until driven away by the Indians, & I am going with them if I can get this money.” Then he added, presumably afraid of his father’s reaction, “Do not let anyone know of my intentions to go to the Black Hills.”

In the San Francisco directory, for April 1879, there is a listing for “Melville Stanislaus, canvasser.” Stanwix-Stanislaus was rounding up votes, for pay. Bartleby is evicted from his law-office lodgings on Election Day, and is consigned, fatally, to the Tombs.

Stanwix Melville died on February 22, 1886, age thirty-four, presumably of tuberculosis. So much was taken away during his short life: his mother, his namesake, his brother, his eyesight, his employment (many times), his health, his life. On March 16, his aunt Helen Griggs wrote to her cousin Catherine Lansing:


It is sad indeed to have had Stannie die away from home. But it seems he had a friend, who did all he could to make him comfortable, and there was money enough to procure all that was necessary for his comfort. It is sad enough; but it might have been worse, since there is so much consolation for his poor mother.

Ah me. The sorrows that lie round our paths as we grow older!

Ah Stanwix. Ah humanity.

Credits:  This article was originally published in 2010 in The New York Review of Books.  

As if haunted by a raging dark angel

by

Herbert Leibowitz

Theodore Roethke had a singular, almost fanatical fidelity to poetry. Like Dylan Thomas, he “drank his own blood, ate of his own marrow to get at some of the material of his poems.” The unfolding of his lyric genius was slow, harried, stumbling, but irreversible. In the greenhouse of childhood memories — a jungle and a paradise he called it — he discovered his lifelong subject matter: the mysterious shooting out of green life from the rich and rank fetor of dying.

From “The Lost Son” to “The Far Field” he wrote poems of an imperious and unnerving need, as though haunted by some raging “dark angel” in his mind and pulled by Invisible undertows to the edge of nonbeing. He was uncannily alive to, and attracted by, a dark kingdom of slugs, molds, worms and stones where the will was nearly extinguished. Yet he was as attentive as Thoreau at Walden Pond to the swelling bud. He would slide downward to “primeval sources” in order to leap upward into the “realm of pure song” where in mystical jubilation “all finite things reveal infinitude.” His spirit waited for the premonitory tremors that announced a resumption of motion, a waking to light and force.

Marguerite Blasingame

At his death in 1963 Roethke left 277 notebooks in which he had jotted down, for 20 years, fragments of verse, aphorisms, elliptical injunctions to himself, remarks about teaching poetry, reveries and random observations (surprisingly few and mild) about other poets. The notebooks evidently served Roethke as a verbal compost heap. He would on occasion raid it for lines and images and graft them onto his current work.

David Wagoner, the poet who selected and grouped the extracts that compose “Straw for the Fire,” suggests that Roethke didn't use the material because “he was sometimes dealing with material too painful to complete” and “he loved incompleteness, perhaps because it represented a promise that he would never exhaust himself.” In some of the passages of verse, there is a sense of the cadences and urgent themes, “the steady storm of correspondences,” that held him to the end of his career:

All things rolling away from me,

All shapes, all stones,

My face falling from itself,

Sunken like cratered snow,

My voice, lost, a lark

Grating like a jay.

As for you assassin of air,

Noise in the topmost tree,

Articulated despair,

The inhuman ecstasy:

My lament to the last; unloved...

More likely, though, the material did not meet Roethke's high artistic standards. For the melancholy fact is that there is very little here that is not more eloquently said in the “Collected Poems” and in “On the Poet and His Craft.” Wagoner imposes order on Roethke's anarchic entries, but the effect, even to an admirer of the poems, is exasperatingly tedious. Roethke's sense of humor, theatricality and burly charm vanish for long stretches.


What in the poems and essays is intense and deep, if somewhat narrow — his “love for the bottoms, the fell last roots of things” — is in the “Notebooks” flat‐footed: “I must learn that we must die.” “Intuition is one of our classic and great methods of learning.” “At least I have a sense of evil: that's more than most possess.” What is the purpose of exhuming such dull sayings?

The reader who turns to the “Notebooks” for help in unriddling Roethke the man who struggled for deliverance from himself will find only a scattering of clues. He is shy and oblique in talking about his childhood or disclosing his inner concerns. Nor do we learn how Roethke's poems grew out of such unpromising mulch, how such damp straw could ignite any fire. Perhaps it did. But to read these ramblings is to examine a torn papyrus and guess at its meanings. We need a study of Roethke's drafts and revisions that will trace and explain the leaps and advances of his imagination.

There is an intricate simplicity and directness to Roethke's finest lyrics and sequences—“I would with the fish, the blackening salmon, and the mad lemmings,” “I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,” (“Elegy for Jane”) In one entry in the “Notebooks” he declares “I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.” This is the truth he lived for. Poetry, his chaste goddess, could temporarily quell the insecurities of self, the fears and suffering, the anguished separateness and longing for oneness. 

Credits:  This article was originally published in 1972 in The New York Times; it has been edited slightly for clarity.