Notes on Recent Reading 50 (Greene, de Sévigné, Cary)

 

The Potting Shed (Greene)

     Greene’s plays are little-known compared to his fiction which, in the case of The Potting Shed, is just as well.  He attempted to write a tendentious piece in support of old Jehovah using the plot structure of a mystery, but succeeded at inspiring neither faith nor suspense.  The plot, concerning a militant atheist and an alcoholic priest, requires not only the suspension of disbelief necessary for all fiction, but a rather idiosyncratic view of Christianity itself.  To accept the premise of the plot, one must accept the idea that God miraculously restored James’ life in trade for the priest William’s faith, leading the former to a fevered search for the resolution of his own dissatisfaction while the latter stews in even more miserable wretchedness.  Christian and non-Christian alike might wonder what sort of a God would participate in such a deal, but I suppose this is a sacred mystery.  As a play-goer (or reader), though, one expects a more solid foundation to a work’s themes.  The hero’s tragic anagnorisis is managed with appropriate drama as long as one does not think about it much.  The enormous lion that appears in the closing image must surely be a close relative of C. S. Lewis’s Aslan, though his appearance here seems an artificial graft.

 

 

Selected Letters (Mme. de Sévigné)

     Reading Mme. De Sévigné’s letters one is brought into the world of the seventeenth century French court, but not the court alone.  She was acquainted with the chief writers and intellectuals of the day and delivers opinions of plays by Molière, Racine, and Corneille when they were fresh.  She was a close friend of Rochefoucauld as well as of woman writers like Mme. de La Fayette and Madeleine de Scudéry.  Still, despite its vivid recreation of its time, I found this collection unsatisfying.  Though these are genuine letters, full of gossip and news and emotion, they are not very artful.  The author turns out a nice bit of wit now and then (often a catty sort of remark), but most of the writing is formless and very often pedestrian (the Penguin volume I read translated by Leonard Tancock contained perhaps one quarter of the extant correspondence and might have been cut further yet in my opinion.)  The lady never ventures an original opinion which makes her an excellent source for historians but sometimes dull for other readers.  Most of the letters are to her daughter, living far off in the South of France and her intense maternal concern for her child, for her health in particular, and her delicate management of her son-in-law M. de Grignan, a man with a weakness for gambling and little financial acumen are fascinating at first encounter, but very shortly a bore.  The glittering Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné who frequented the court of the Sun King, comes to seem like a guest who stayed too long, blathering about her offspring until one found one was no longer listening. 

 

 

Prisoner of Grace (Cary)

      Though the novel is explicitly engaged with politics, the real thematic center of Prisoner of Grace is psychological.  Chester Nimmo’s every position is presented as expedient, as his real passion, his most strongly felt “cause” is consistently his own career, from advocacy for the Boers through pacifism and then patriotic support for WWI.  Thus the actual validity of, for instance, his denunciation of “baby-starving landlords” is never an issue; the rhetoric is a means for him to the end of political success.  likewise, Jim Latter’s defense of the Luga tribespeople seems merely an aspect of the errant quirks of that rather shallow individual rather than as either vindication or condemnation of colonialism.  Likewise, the defenders of the status quo like Nina’s cousin Slapton seem to espouse the politics into which they were born with little regard for rightness or wrongness, while Chester’s class consciousness seems like simple resentment of a piece with his pettiness otherwise.

     Nina Woodville is not only the narrator; she is the center of the novel, though she reacts to others and allows herself to be swept along by the current of her life, taking no decisive action.  Though even her love-making, with both Jim and Chester, is altogether passive, she is a fascinating character, as little in control of her destiny at the end as at the start.

     Along the way the reader is exposed to a good deal of history (wars, change of government, social movements) as well as developments like the introduction of lipstick among respectable women, but these documentary elements are consistently secondary to the psychological portraits, principally of Nina, but also of Chester and Jim on down to lesser characters like Aunt Latter and Bootham.

The Christian Romanticism of Chateaubriand’s Atala and René

 

 

Portrait of Chateaubriand 

by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, 1809.

 

 

References in parentheses to Atala refer to the 1905 edition with an introduction, notes, and a vocabulary by Oscar Kuhns; those to René to Claude Martin’s edition of 1984.  Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.  Translated passages are my own hasty renderings; the original French is relegated to endnotes. 

 

 

     Chateaubriand is universally considered the founding figure of French Romanticism, and there can be no question about the label’s general accuracy.  His self-consciously emotional analyses of nature and of love made him an icon in his day, much as Byron was in England just a few decades later [1],  Many readers have found René to have something in common with Childe Harold as exemplars of the mal du siècle, and something of their kinship as celebrities might be inferred from the tousled portraits of the viscount by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson and of the baron by Thomas Phillips. 

      Chateaubriand not only created a character who wandered the world trying to free himself from alienation, he himself spent time in an America that was still largely possessed by its natives.  The question has been debated by historically-minded critics how much of America Chateaubriand actually saw.  He surely never visited the Mississippi River or Florida, and it is very unlikely that did he ever wrote while squatting on the floors of Indian hits, as he liked to claim.  Indeed, it is not direct observation but rather his tumultuous imagination that underlies his descriptions of America,

     Among the most rhetorically elaborate and mythic passages in Atala is the opening description of the Mississippi River, so extravagant as to be altogether unrealistic, so majestic it is worth quoting at length. 

 

When all these rivers are swollen with the torrents of winter, when the storms have uprooted great swaths of forest, the felled trees fill their sources.  Before long the mud has cemented them and creepers joins them together and the plants, sending out roots in every direction, consolidate the debris.  Carried off by the foaming waves, they descend in the Meschacebe which takes hold of them, carrying them to the Gulf of Mexico only to run grounds on banks of sand, multiplying thereby the river’s outlets.  Now and then the river raises its voice while passing these heaps and   its overflowing waters spread among the forests’ colonnades and the pyramidal Indian tombs.  It is the Nile of the desert.  But grace is always accompanied by grandeur in scenes of nature.  While the central current pulls the corpses of pines and oaks toward the sea, one sees currents on either side rising, along the shores, floating islands of water cabbage and water-lilies, the yellow blossoms of which mount up like little pavilions.  Green snakes, blue herons, pink flamingos, and young crocodiles embark as passengers on these flowery vessels, and the colony, unfurling its golden sails before the wind, lands asleep in some secluded cove of the river.                 (1-2) [2]

 

     This grand vision of great island-like agglomerations of timber cascading downstream, reshaping the topography moment by moment, in effect constantly reshaping the continent, is enacted between the columns of the trees and near to native peoples’ funerary pyramids, suggesting Greek and Roman antiquity and the even older Egyptian civilization.  Not only are the great floating islands of debris covered in flowers; they are also rich to an unlikely degree in fauna, birds and reptiles, which sail like the early explorers until they come to rest by chance and establish a terra nova. 

     The primary characteristics of Chateaubriand’s America are its magnificent richness in animals and plants and the wildness of its formation amid turbulent earth-shaping floods.  The new world is specifically associated with Eden, for instance in Genesis’ mention of four rivers but the reference is rendered ambiguous by the counterbalance of Milton’s four infernal streams [3].

     The fecundity of nature recurs elsewhere, for instance, during the escape of Atala and Chactas when the cedars and live oaks, covered with Spanish moss, teem with wildlife: “butterflies, bright flies, hummingbirds, green parakeets, and blue jays” (28) [4] in a veritable swarm of life.  Likewise, the scene at Niagara Falls is awe-inspiring not simply because of the cataract, but also because of the eagles who “ride on currents of air” and the altogether unreal picture if “wolverines” who “hang by their flexible tails at the end of a low branch, to seize from the abyss the broken corpses of elks and bears” (77)[5]. 

     Yet such fantasies were not the only indulgences Chateaubriand allowed his imagination.  Since his reconversion to Roman Catholicism in 1798, he had abandoned the philosophes to become a committed Christian, and both Atala and René were portions of his Génie du christianisme, a work which as a whole sought to justify religion on largely aesthetic rather than intellectual or spiritual grounds.  Thus, while nature may be a staggering marvel, human beings, infected by original sin, are unredeemed until accepting Jesus.  In order to advance, Atala must “have recourse to the Christian God” and pray to Mary (18).   The”savages” inflict dreadful tortures on their captives (19), and in fact cruelly kill the benevolent Father Aubry (79).  They are, at best, “child-like” (68), with “sorrows” that “arise from ignorance” which can be remedied only by “necessary instruction” (58) [7].  Chactas cannot be a lover of Atala unless he “learn the lessons of the Christian faith” (64).  Doubt is impossible as Chateaubriand describes a veritable theophany. 

 

The grotto seemed suddenly lit up; one could hear in the air the words of angels and the tremelos of heavenly harps; and when the recluse took the holy vessel from his tabernacle, it seemed I saw God himself emerging from the side of the mountain. (65) [8]

 

     A powerful figure for René’s “faiblesse” is his prospect from the top of Etna. 

 

     A youth full of passion, sitting at the mouth of a volcano, weeping for the mortals whose homes he sees below is doubtless, o old men, an object deserving of your pity, but, whatever you might think of René the scene provides an image of his nature, of his being.  Thus during my entire life I have had before my eyes the creation, at once huge and imperceptible, and an abyss open at my side. (67) [9]

 

His is an existential anxiety, not a Christian “dark night of the soul,” specifically because what he faces is not the prospect of judgement and eventual apocalypse, but rather a drear emptiness.  Though he placed the novella as part of his apologia for Christianity, the hero lacks Christian hope.  A distinctly modern variant on the medieval sin of acedia (sometimes spelled accidie) which Aquinas describes (in Summa Theologica II) not as a symptom of sensitivity or a contemplative stage but rather as a flight from the divine, amounting very nearly to unbelief.  The closing words of the epilogue’s narrator in Atala indicate a remoteness from Christian salvation: “man, you are nothing but a passing illusion, a melancholy dream.  You exist only for sadness; you are nothing but the dolor of your soul and the unending misery of your soul.” (81) [10]

     This is not the only contradiction which Chateaubriand ignored as a consequence of his clinging to Christianity’s consolations.  The glorification of nature itself evident in the opening passage (and throughout) is sweeping and unqualified, familiar from many other authors’ Romantic rhetoric, yet inconsistent with the Christian notion of the natural world as fallen.  The most fundamental statement of this proposition  is Genesis 3:17: “cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life,” but the idea recurs, for instance in Romans 8:22: “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.”

     America was an apposite scene for René’s ambivalence toward nature, natives, and, indeed, the entire creation.  Since Europeans arrived on these shores, the country was often described as an unspoiled paradise but equally often as hell.  Thus to many early settlers Indians must be remnants of the ten lost tribes of Israel whose conversion would lkead to the apocalypse.  Thomas Morton who founded the colony at Merrymount called New England Canaan in his 1637 book, and for John Winthrop the Massachusetts Bay Colony was “a city on a hill,”  [11] while William Bradford says the new world was a “hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men" [12].  For William Crashaw the devil "visibly and palpably reigns” in America and for John Smith “the chefe God they [the natives] worship is the Devel.” [13]

     Just as Chateaubriand’s lifelong royalist politics may seem to harmonize poorly with his liberal sentiments on m any issues, his allegiance to orthodox Christianity compromises his Romanticism.  His enthusiasm for nature is prototypically Romantic, but, to be consistent, this would be accompanied by a view of the indigenous people as Rousseauian “noble savages,” though for Chateaubriand their heathenism is a fatal deficiency.   Similarly, René’s despair is a godless one, though he is nominally Christian.  These contradictions would scarcely have bothered the author, whose conclusions were always more impressionistic than systematic.  Atala and René dramatic examples of the mythic use of the American colonies by an author who broke considerable new ground while insisting on traditional religious faith.

    

 

 

1.  In his Mémoires d’outre-tombe (vi) Chateaubriand clearly regards Byron as a rival, complaining of the British writer’s failing to name him as an influence and disappointedly calling himself “one of those fathers who are disowned when the son has come to power” in an trope invoking Oedipal anxiety of influence.

2.  Quand tous ces fleuves se sont gonflés, des déluges de l’hiver, quand les tempêtes ont abattu des pans entiers de forêts, les arbres déracinés s’assemblent sur les sources. Bientôt la vase les cimente, les lianes les enchainent, et des plantes, y prenant racine de toutes parts, achévent de consolider ces débris. Charriés par les vagues écumantes, ils descendent au Meschacebé: le fleuve s'en empare, les pousse au golfe Mexicain, les échoue sur des bancs de sable, et accroit ainsi le nombre de ses embouchures. Par intervalles, il éléve sa voix en passant sur les monts, et répand ses eaux débordées autour des colonnades des foréts et des pyramides des tombeaux indiens; c'est le Nil des déserts. Mais la gráce est toujours unie à la magnificence dans les scénes de la nature: tandis que le courant du milieu entraîne vers la mer les cadavres des pins et des chénes, on voit sur les deux courants latéraux remonter, le long des rivages, des iles flottantes de pistia et de nénufar, dont les roses jaunes s'élévent comme de petits pavillons. Des serpents verts, des hérons bleus, des flamants roses, de jeunes crocodiles, s'embarquent passagers sur ces vaisseaux de fleurs, et la colonie, déployant au vent ses voiles d’or, va aborder endormie dans quelque anse retirée du fleuve.

3.  See Genesis 2:10 and Paradise Lost II, 575.

4.  Papillons, de mouches brillantes, de colibris, de perruche vertes, de geais d’azur.

5.  Des aigles, entraînés par le courant d'air, descendent en tournoyant au fond du gouffre, et des carcajous se suspendent par leurs queues flexibles au bout d'une branche abaissée, pour saisir dans l'abîme les cadavres brisés des élans et des ours.

6.  La fille de Simaghan ut recours au Dieu des chrétiens.

7.  Tous vos malheurs viennent de votre «ignorance; c'est votre éducation sauvage et le manque «d'instruction nécessaire qui vous ont perdue;

8.  La grotte parut soudain illuminée; on entendit dans les airs les paroles des anges et les frémissements des harpes célestes; et lorsque le solitaire tira le vase sacré de son tabernacle, je crus voir Dieu lui-même sortir du flanc de la montagne.

9.  Un jeune homme plein de passions, assis sur la bouche d'un volcan, et pleurant sur les mortels dont il voyait à ses pieds les demeures, n'est, sans doute, ô vieillards, qu'un objet digne de votre pitié; mais, quoi que vous puissiez penser de René, ce tableau vous offre l'image de son caractère et de son existence: c'est ainsi que toute ma vie j'ai eu devant les yeux une création à la fois immense et imperceptible, et un abîme ouvert à mes côtés.

10.  Homme tu n'es qu'un songe rapide, un rêve douloureux ; tu n'existes que par le malheur ; tu n'es quelque chose que par la tristesse de ton âme et I'éternelle mélancolie de ta pensée.

11.  In his 1630 sermon "A Model of Christian Charity."

12.  Bradford,  Of Plymouth Plantation (1952) p. 62.

y.  Wm. Crashaw, "The Epistle Dedicatory" to Alexander Whitaker's Good News from Virginia (London, 1613), in Early Accounts of Life in Colonial Virginia, 1609-1613.  Ed. W. F. Craven (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimile & Reprints 1976, n. p.

13.  John Smith A Map of Virginia with a description of the country (1612), 29.

Thomas Browne’s Religion of Sensibility

 

Quotations are cited in parentheses by the section (often a paragraph) in which they appear, using the symbol §, as few readers will have a copy like my own, a 1912 Everyman reprint.  A single section reference may refer to several quotations, cited after the last.  One online text with numbered sections is available at https://penelope.uchicago.edu/relmed/relmed.html.

 

     Those with a taste for English prose relish the sonorous rhetoric of Sir Thomas Browne, yet he has a more modest reputation as a thinker.  Indeed, though a physician and something of a Baconian at times, Browne is fundamentally a poet, marveling equally at himself and the curious phenomenal world.   Yet to make his Religio Medici a testament of faith, a sensibility drawn to excavating buried urns and buried thoughts had to accommodate to orthodoxy.  The candid self-reflection which underlies so much of Browne’s musing yields finally to an assertively conventional faith, yet Browne’s aesthetics provide a more heart-felt faith: he marvels at the wonders of creation, in the details of which he spies divine sparks and creates then lovely structures of prose the beauty of which glows, just as the beauties of nature do, with a light not quite numinous, but nonetheless reassuring.

     The essay’s very title, “a physician’s religion,” specifies the dualism.  In the book’s opening line Browne observes that many might assume from his profession that he has no belief at all. (§ 1.1)  To Browne human beings are “amphibious,” caught “betweene a corporall and spirituall essence, that middle forme that linkes those two together,” though people are ultimately “the breath and similitude of God.” (§1.34)  Yet Browne is dissatisfied with simply describing the scientific and the spiritual as wholly separate realms; he finds in his observations of nature inductive proofs of conventional religious principles in plenty.  On the other hand, his evaluation of the evidence of his senses that forms the chief foundation (apart from authority) for his beliefs is highly subjective, impressionistic even, but for that very reason convincing to him.

     Browne does repeatedly acknowledge that he accepts Christianity as a given, revealed in scripture and accepted by the believer with a faith all the more admirable for lacking a rational basis.   Thus he declares his religion “an humble faith” which follows strictly “the great wheel of the Church,” “not reserving any proper Poles or motion from the Epicycles of my own brain.” (§1.6)  He maintains that to believe in something “which indeed my reason would perswade me to be false” is particularly meritorius.”  “And this I think is no vulgar part of faith to believe a thing not only above, but contrary to reason, and against the arguments of our proper senses.” (§1.10)  He argues that “it is an insolent part of reason to controvert the works of God, or question the justice of his proceedings; Could humility teach others, as it hath instructed me, to contemplate the infinite and incomprehensible distance betwixt the Creator and the creature, or did wee seriously perpend that one Simile of Saint Paul, Shall the vessell say to the Potter, Why hast thou made me thus?” (§1.52) 

     Browne may strike the skeptic as a bit self-interested, in his courtier-like efforts to curry divine favor.  In spite of his willingness to read heretical and even atheistic books and his temptation “during the time of his “greener studies” (§1.6) by several quaintly antique heresies, he assures us that what he calls his “discreet beliefe” (§1.21) was never shaken “as to encline me to any point of infidelity.” (§1.20)  His lengthy defense sounds as like an attorney pleading a case (as Browne doubtless was, though it may be only with himself).

 

“These opinions I never maintained with pertinacity, or endeavoured to enveagle any mans beliefe unto mine, nor so much as ever revealed or disputed them with my dearest friends; by which meanes I neither propagated them in others, nor confirmed them in my selfe, but suffering them to flame upon their own substance, without addition of new fuell, they went out insensibly of themselves; therefore these opinions, though condemned by lawfull Councels, were not Heresies in me, but bare Errors, and single Lapses of my understanding, without a joynt depravity of my will.” (§1.7)

 

With such care to remain orthodox, Browne declares himself confident of his own salvation, though, as “an humble soule,” to avoid presumption he is careful to add that he dares not take an oath on it.  (§1.57)  While claiming to be altogether unafraid of death, he is punctilious about asserting his bona fides as a pious and simple believer. 

     Browne insists that the discoveries of science, far from controverting the claims of religion, strengthen them.  He describes his as a “mysticall Philosophy, from whence no true Scholler becomes an Atheist, but from the visible effects of nature, growes up a reall Divine, and beholds not in a dreame, as Ezekiel, but in an ocular and visible object the types of his resurrection.”  (§1.46)  For him as for those reading the book of nature in the Middle Ages, every natural fact has a symbolic significance.  In his view “this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein as in a pourtract, things are not truely, but in equivocall shapes; and as they counterfeit some more reall substance in that invisible fabrick.”  He is confident that “in this masse of nature there is a set of things that carry in their front, though not in capitall letters, yet in stenography, and short Characters, something of Divinitie.” (§1.12)

     Thus Browne worships god by studying nature – he is religious because of his medical knowledge, not in spite of it.   Meditating on the spectacle of natural phenomena, Browne grandly asserts “Natura nihil agit frustra,” and declares that every circumstance reveals God’s glory.  The evidence of the human body with which as a physician he was intimately familiar, is compelling and readily available.  He studies “the Cosmography of my selfe.”  To his insatiable curiosity “there is all Africa, and her prodigies in us.”  The miracles of scripture are to him less wonderful than “that bold and adventurous piece of nature” which is the human body.  All creatures are to him equally beautiful as all share a divine origin. (§1.15)

     In the tightly wound dialectic of Browne’s thought, religion must rest upon faith rather than reason, though he would like to think that his own belief is based on scientific knowledge.  Yet the reader notices a further twist yet.  Though built on information from natural history, Browne’s reverence arises from a mystical response to those data.  His language clearly indicates the character of his insights.  He has a taste, he confesses for “the mysticall way of Pythagoras, and the secret Magicke of numbers.”  He is an adherent, he says, “of the Philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible.  Attracted always to “Ænigmaes, mysteries and riddles” (§2.6), he is fascinated by “those strange and mysticall transmigrations that I have observed in Silkewormes” and it is in fact the extent to which such facts “seeme to puzle reason” that they turn “Philosophy into Divinity.” (§1.38)  There is an esoteric element: Browne feels he sees “more . . . then the eye of a common spectator doth discover.”  (§1.38)

     Not only does Browne feel that meditation on the creation can vault his consciousness into sublime regions; he can be similarly inspired by works of art.  “I can looke a whole day with delight upon a handsome picture, though it be but of an Horse.” He finds in human works the same potential for  beauty, signaled by a “musicke” that arises “where-ever there is a harmony, order or proportion” reflecting  the “musick of the spheares” whose “well ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the eare, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony.”  He finds indeed that all music “even that vulgar and Taverne Musicke, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in mee a deepe fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first Composer, strikes in mee a deepe fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first Composer.”  (§2.9)      

It is an Hieroglyphicall and shadowed lesson of the whole world, and Creatures of God, such a melody to the eare, as the whole world well understood, would afford the understanding. In briefe, it is a sensible fit of that Harmony, which intellectually sounds in the eares of God. I will not say with Plato, the Soule is an Harmony, but harmonicall, and hath its neerest sympathy unto musicke: thus some, whose temper of body agrees, and humours the constitution of their soules, are borne Poets, though indeed all are naturally inclined unto Rhythme.”  (§2.9)      

 

     The intimations of the divine Browne finds in art are the result of self-reflection; his proof lies in his aesthetic capacity that suggests a divinely ordered cosmos, the universe as a work of art by analogy, more than the data of a given poem, picture, or piece of music.  “The world that I regard is my selfe, it is the Microcosme of mine owne frame, that I cast mine eye on; for the other, I use it but like my Globe, and turne it round sometimes for my recreation.” (§2.12)   

. . . that masse of flesh that circumscribes me, limits not my mind: that surface that tells the heavens it hath an end, cannot perswade me I have any; I take my circle to be above three hundred and sixty, though the number of the Arke do measure my body, it comprehendeth not my minde: whilst I study to finde how I am a Microcosme or little world, I finde my selfe something more than the great. (§2.12)   

     His religion of sensibility, founded on an exhilarated celebration of the creation rather than doctrinal enthusiasm, makes him exceedingly tolerant and liberal for his age.  He finds Catholic ritual affecting in spite of doctrinal differences and is willing even to recognize non-Christian piety (though he retains an uncharacteristically nasty animosity to Jews).  He finds uplift, the reader recalls, even in “Taverne Musicke.” (On the stoics see § 1.43; on pagan philosophers in general  §1.53, on acceptance of all Christians §1.54; on Jews §1.25 and §2.4; on general lack of ethnic prejudice §1.59 and 1.65.)

     Given his spirituality based on aesthetics, it is unsurprising that the good doctor finishes with a spectacular rhetorical flourish on love.  Splitting dualisms with paradox Browne tosses into the air the question of what  is real and what is “a story out of Pliny, an apparition, or neat delusion.” (§ 2.15)  He sounds almost as though he is proposing a koan when he says “a man may bee buried alive, and behold his grave in his owne issue.” (§2.14)  Indeed Browne’s argument embraces self-contradiction as he proceeds in a dialectical manner.  After saying that religion is a matter for faith alone, Browne scrambles to assure the reader that his belief has a rational base as well.  He then suggests that his religion is at base a subjective impression based on a sense of the beautifully organized cosmos, the aesthetic design of which implies a creator.  Just as he insists that each human is a microcosm reflecting the whole of the phenomenal world, his own prose style in this lovely essay reproduces that natural beauty, as for him humanity’s creativity is a god-like quality.  In the end, his protestations of faith seem almost adventitious.  He takes solace, as do his readers, in a variety of the “argument from desire” best-known from C. S. Lewis.  He reminds me as well of a twentieth century nonbeliever, Wallace Stevens, who sought with his notion of a “supreme fiction” to restore a sort of faith without accepting Christian dogma.  Readers unlikely to be swayed by Browne’s reasoning nonetheless may find his sensibility wholly convincing, and words can hardly aspire higher than to portray with accuracy a state of consciousness.  This Browne has done with precision and passion and taste.

Blind Willie Johnson Preaches

     Gospel is Old English for good news, and the predominant message of much gospel music is indeed joy at an unquestioned salvation. The worshipper delights in every breath, since the future ultimately holds a sure deliverance. This theme and the ecstatic mood it may produce are prominent in the recordings of Blind Willie Johnson. Johnson’s bottleneck slide guitar work and growly intense vocals owe much to the blues, but many of his songs are nonetheless celebratory and optimistic. His vision includes, however, the suffering Christ no less than the risen Lord, and he offers the inspiration of Jesus’ model to believers who may have much to endure in their own lives. Sometimes, Johnson’s songs, whether traditional or original, reach further yet, to suggest an ultimate reality beyond joy and suffering, no less certain for being bound in mystery.
     While the blues are largely concerned with pain, loneliness, and frustration, Johnson sings of his “joy and gladness in “Praise God I’m Satisfied.” Death is welcomed in the almost rollicking easy tones of “Bye And Bye I'm Goin' To See The King”: “And I don't mind dying, I'm a child of God.” A variety of ingenious figures of speech reinforce the point. In “It's Nobody's Fault But Mine” Christ appears as a benevolent bail bondsman, freeing the captive soul. “God don’t never change” offers the delightful image of the singer so consumed in divine worship that he can direct even a mountain to “skip around like a lamb.” The magical efficacy of Christ’s blood is affirmed in “I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole.” [1] Sin and damnation play very little role in Johnson’s ministry, though in “If It Had Not Been For Jesus” the singer notes that Christ ”washed my black heart white” without further details.
     Among the other songs with similar emphasis are “Let your light shine on me” with its claim that luminous “angels in heaven, done write my name,” “Trouble Will Soon Be Over,” “He’s my Bosom Friend,” “Sweeter as the Years Go By,” “Go With Me To That Land,” and “Church I'm Fully Saved Today.”
     Pain and suffering, however, receive their due. The very heart of the Christian myth with its deity mysteriously combining divine and human natures emphasizes Jesus’ passion on the cross, the strongest available image of anguished torture. The believer’s own difficulties are given meaning while at the same time appearing less than his Lord’s. One may safely assume that Johnson’s African-American listeners had sufficient troubles of their own to identify readily with Christ.
     Most profound of Johnson’s songs on this theme is doubtless “Dark was the night.” Johnson takes his opening line from a pre-existing hymn, then follows with a series of novel and powerful images. I am reminded of Crashaw by “his sweat like drops of blood ran down.” These drops are mysteriously present in the Garden to which the sinner is directed. Ultimately the song teaches the imitation of Christ: “Learn of him the cross to bear.” “Jesus Make Up my Dying Bed” is an imaginative tour de force in which Christ is the singer’s spouse and the suffering of worshipper and worshipped are conflated.
     Contemporary afflictions appear: the Titanic disaster in “God Moves On The Water” and WWI and Spanish flu in “Jesus Is Coming Soon.” Probably the most powerful metaphor for suffering, one appearing multiple times in both sacred and secular lyrics is the separation from God as loss of a loving parent in “Mother's Children Have A Hard Time” and “Lord I Just Can't Keep From Crying.”
     Thus Johnson’s lyrics, like the Psalms, chart the high and low of experience. There is a numinous glow, however, about Johnson’s religious vision, a sheen of mystery imponderable until the Apocalypse which has little to do with good and evil or pain and pleasure. I think, for instance, of the gloriously minimal miracle of “The Rain Don't Fall On Me,” the understated imagery of “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed And Burning,” and the open-mouthed wonder of “The Soul Of A Man.” The culmination of this nearly occult aspect of the poet’s religious experience is surely the haunting “John the Revelator” which invokes the most spectacularly mystifying book of the Bible repeatedly as though its very mention is a magic charm. The song is made of this hypnotic iteration along with a few enigmatic symbols (“Judea’s Lion”) and an account of a theophany to Moses. This song is anticipated by the mention in “I'm Gonna Run To The City Of Refuge” of the “dragon hurled down by the preacher” with its specific scriptural reference.
     Though a musical artist is hardly a theologian, gospel singers have always been inspired and motivated not only by their faith, but also by the approaches that have proven successful in appealing to an audience whose critical judgment is not suspended even in church. Willie Johnson’s oeuvre emphasizes the joy and confidence of salvation, with a darker shadow acknowledging suffering, then ornamented with a bit of mystery and magic. His message reached not only the streets and storefront churches, but into Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, and new versions of his songs by Reverend Gary Davis, folk revival figures like Buffy Sainte-Marie, Fairport Convention, and Peter, Paul and Mary, as well as rockers like Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin.


This site includes a good many other essays treating blues songs as poetry. To see the others open the Index under the current month in the archive and consult section 5D “songs.”

Notes on Recent Reading 21 [Fussell, Mahfouz, Watts]

The Norton Book of Travel [edited by Paul Fussell]

     Unfortunately Mr. Fussell has mistaken descriptive literary passages for travel writing. Little harm is done by including odd verses such as Blake’s “Ah, Sunflower,” Hardy’s “Midnight on the Great Western,” or Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” but passages from Dodsworth or Farewell to Arms do not belong in this anthology. Travel writing is a genre itself; fiction and lyric are likely to privilege other priorities.
     His claim that travel in the modern sense is a very recent amusement is of a piece with his citation of Freud “A great part of the pleasure of travel lies in the fulfillment of . . . early wishes to escape the father and especially the family.” Psychologists may now see how many of Freud’s insights, while profound, are bound by time and culture. Still, one is glad for his discussing the theory of travel at all and for ferreting out the quotation (and the next, from Levi-Strauss, and Aristotle and then Flaubert a few lines later). In the middle of this pleasant miscellany of opinion, one does encounter a few sound truisms, such as travel being broadening and sharpening the senses, and he concludes with a sound observation on the double narrative (observer and observed) implied by every travel story.
     In the end the variety of ideas set forth resembles the variety of texts. There is plenty to enjoy. He does include the marvelous Robert Byron, and I did encounter the Romantic German vagabond in England Karl Philip Moritz here for the first time.

 

The Thief and the Dogs [Mahfouz] 

     Naguib Mahfouz’ novel would make an excellent film noir screenplay. The main character’s consciousness is consistently desperate and anxious; the reader sympathizes with antihero Said, a petty thief driven by his sense of honor to violence. The action is swift and unrelenting as he drives toward his own wretched fate. He is stoic, only rarely allowing a glimmer of hope to intrude on his self-righteous victimhood. Though a criminal, he has the sense of the long-exploited that he is merely setting things straight in a small way when he takes the belongings of the rich. His affection for his daughter is real, but he was not cut out to be a father. His relations with women are defined by his wounded pride at Nabawiyya and the favors he accepts from Nur. The violence that results seems to arise more from profound anguish than from the political context – the collapse of the hope of intellectuals in Nasser-style socialism -- that is regarded by many as a significant theme. The Sufi Sheikh Ali al-Junaydi provides mystical commentary for those who prefer Sufism to Existentialism.


Myth and Ritual in Christianity [Watts]

     From adolescence I have been fascinated with mysticism. I devoured Evelyn Underhill’s books, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, and (pseudo-)Dionysius the Areopagite and tried to imagine myself in ineffable transport. I proved to be the worst of meditators in spite of the fact that in those days I could pull myself into a full lotus. My contemplative peak was the ability to undergo Friends meeting for worship with satisfaction if not divine “openings.” One impediment I experienced was difficulty in interpreting the mythic system with which I was most familiar, that of Christianity. Even when I went through confirmation as a Protestant, I had lost whatever faith I had had as a young child. Even after years in the realms of Daoist, Buddhist, and Hindu thought, I never felt I had a sympathetic grasp Christ’s story or of the Christian reading of the Hebrew scriptures until I read this book.
     Now, I am well aware that Watts had a good bit of the charlatan about him (as do many native shamans). He had undertaken Zen training before becoming a priest and then a media figure (though at first only on KPFA, the Pacifica station in Berkeley). He gained a considerable reputation as a bon vivant with an eye for the women and a relish for alcohol and other drugs. Christians will recoil from his heterodoxy just as his Buddhism was criticized by D. T. Suzuki himself. Still, he taught me important things that have opened up to me way of understanding a great many Christian texts. After fifty years I reread this book without disappointment.