Hamlet and Identity

Hamlet is one or more of the following:

A university-trained scholar.

A scientific rationalist.

A follower of stoic philosophy.

Montaignean skeptic.

Clinically depressed son/son-in-law/nephew.

A paltry lover.

Actor/dramaturge.

A Christian prince.

A pagan warrior.

Machiavellian killer.

A tricky fool, more fit to be son of the late king's jester than son of the late king himself.

"To thine own self be true": to which of these selves ought he be true? All of them, apparently, at one point or another.

Hamlet tries out the different roles until he finds the one that is most dramatically expedient. The play is like a maze, a game that Hamlet plays until he finds his way out--which is to say that he finds his fate, which is death.

The identity Hamlet creates for himself in Act 5 is a result of his experiences in Act 4, Scene 4, and in Act 5, Scene 1: the only two scenes in the play that take place outside of Elsinore. Hamlet has to get outside, get a bit of fresh air, observe Fortinbras, and dig about in the dirt a little to figure out his motivation. The graveyard scene is perhaps most apt: Hamlet fears death; he muses on the fate of the body, and then he viacariously encounters that fate in the most direct of fashions. He even ends up inside of a grave for a while, wrestling with Laertes. Finally, death is no longer a thought but a reality. Hamlet learns something from the gravedigger as well: that death is something one can grow accustomed to in such a way that the jokes can lose their sting. What is death to the gravedigger? A business opportunity, and that is all.

It is the intersection of all of the above identities that Hamlet stands upon in Act 5, Scene 2. Hamlet's allusion to scripture, his belief in the "special providence in the fall of a sparrow," is less a full-fledged Christian precept than it is a representation of the intersection of Christianity and stoicism, where the two modes of living arc together on the Venn diagram. Hamlet summarizes his acceptance of fate in two words: "Let be." He knows the role he is supposed to play, and he plays it. And in doing so, he robs death of its glory, which is and always has been merely the fear of it.

Hamlet and Montaigne

Montaigne establishes one of his essays upon a quotation from Cicero: "To Philosophie is no other thing, than for a man to prepare himself for death."

Shakespeare knew Cicero. Shakespeare also certainly read Montaigne, or at least some Montaigne, later in his career; we have passages from The Tempest that mimic Montaigne's "Of the Caniballes" as proof. Shakespeare was reportedly a friend of John Florio, Montaigne's first English translator, and may have read early translations before they were published in 1603.

Hamlet was written some two or three years before the publication of Montaigne's essays in English, but it is thrilling to think that there may be some link between the two. Certainly, there is a likeness in sensibility. Hamlet seems an enactment of a principle asserted by Montaigne:

So have I learned this custome or lesson, to have alwaies death, not only in my imagination but continually in my mouth. And there is nothing I desire more to be informed of, than of the death of men; that is to say, what words, what countenance, and what face they shew at their death. (Book I, XIX)

Montaigne writes: "You have seene many who have found good in death, ending thereby many many miseries" (Book I, XIX). This is the very lesson Hamlet seems to have learned by Act V.

Hamlet represents a revolution in drama, a new mode not only for Shakespeare but for all literature. The intense inwardness of the title character was previously unknown to the stage, to poetry, even. The soliloquys are unprecedented in their depth of expression, in their complexity. Rank biographical speculation bears little fruit, I believe, but here is a plum: what if Shakespeare's reading of Montaigne prompted this revolution?--prompted Hamlet?

We can never know the extent to which Montaigne influenced Shakespeare. Regardless, the two operate so much in parallel that they are rightly acknowledged as co-founders of the modern sensibility, giving us, among other things, the vision of the fragmented self and a modern attitude toward death that, despite the real or supposed Christianity of both authors, is founded ultimately upon a secular humanist attitude, one borne of much reflective thought.

Wherefore Hamlet?

One of the challenges of reading Hamlet is to figure out what the fuss is all about.

To wit, Hamlet's most famous soliloquy, "To be or not to be ..." Some of the most famous lines in the English language.

Why? Most of us do not walk around in a suicidal depression on a day to day basis.

But we do possess an awareness of our own mortality, and Hamlet dealt with that awareness on a level more profound than anyone before and perhaps since. And we do, each of us, have to find a way to live in this world, which is to endure the suffering that it presents to us. And in the modern world, with a multiplicity of viewpoints beyond the received truth of the medieval church, this challenge takes on further complications.

Hamlet wanted to know the meaning of death. He questioned it bluntly and boldly and with a degree of thoughtfulness previously impossible. A by-product of the Reformation, Hamlet inhabits a world that is not fully Catholic or Protestant; he is in a sense the first post-Christian figure in literature because conventional religious sensibility is insufficient to him in answering questions about death. This does not necessarily make Hamlet an atheist, but it does make him agnostic or at least a doubter. No one could have gotten away with a public expression of doubt in those old Church of England days except for a character on stage; the law wouldn't have allowed it. But certainly people were thinking it: with Catholics and Protestant splitting each other to bits all across Europe, it might lead a sensible person to doubt the validity of the enterprise altogether. But one couldn't say so except on a stage.

Then there's the matter of two value systems in conflict: the Christian one that forbids suicide as a mortal sin and the classical-stoical one that condones it under certain circumstances. Hamlet grapples with stoical precepts throughout the play, but he cannot free himself from his passions, from his own depth of feeling. If stoicism is about the denial of feeling in order to endure the "slings and arrows" that come automatically with living in this world, then Hamlet is not a stoic, because Hamlet is nothing if not two things: thoughtful and full of feeling. It is above all his capacity for emotional depth and not his critical thinking skills that make him admirable. And it is depth of feeling that an audience expects to see when they see Hamlet.

Hamlet and Meaning

I.
Either meaning is transcendentally signified, or it is not. In Hamlet, it is not. Thus Hamlet's predicament: there are no set principles upon which to act, so he must define them himself. No mean task, that.

A. D. Nuttall uses the word "vertiginous" to describe Hamlet's famous line "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." Indeed, the entire play could be described as vertiginous. Hamlet's vertigo, then, is the consequence of understanding that things are only what you define them to be, that you are only what your mind defines yourself to be. Here is the power of mind, which is both a creative force and a destructive force at once. Out of it, Hamlet must invent a self. He has less than four acts left to do it. How?

II.
Polonius offers us the stoic commonplace, so often quoted out of context, "to thine own self be true." To determine the utility of this advice, we must not only look at the character who speaks these words (at best, a doddering fool; at worst, right-hand to a fratricidal murderer) but also consider how they might apply to Hamlet himself were the advice given to him: to what self ought he to be true? Hamlet begins the play a mopey undergrad and ends as something entirely different, not quite a warrior, but someone who can play the role of the warrior to good effect. In between (that is, for the vast bulk of the play), he is nebulously defined. Vertigo is his only identity.

Hamlet is merely an amalgam of words, always shifting, disappearing. He wishes the body to "resolve itself into a dew," but it is only identity that proves itself vaporous, not the body for which Hamlet has so much disdain. Either he possesses no self to which to be true or the self to which he ought be true is no self that's going to get him anywhere he wants to be. Hamlet is a modern character because he faces the same predicament we face in the modern world: he must invent the idea of that self that he hopes to become, and he must then struggle to become it. Easier said than done, even for a character whose only existence is words on a page (or drifting to the heavens from the stage).

III.
Thus Hamlet's preoccupation with drama, which is also Prospero's preoccupation with drama, which also must certainly be Shakespeare's obsession with drama. It is through drama that Hamlet hopes to discover truth. One philosophy of Polonius that is actionable: "by indirections find directions out." Reality--that is, certainty--can be mined by sifting carefully the grains of illusion.

It has been observed that Hamlet is out of place in his own play, a tricksy fool miscast in the part of the prince. Hamlet needs to learn his part, and once he does the actions will define him.

IV.
Harold Bloom says that Hamlet is no more obsessed with death than any other Shakespeare play, but that can't be right. A play that not only contemplates life and death but hinges on suicidal impulse must be said to explore the meaning of death from a singular perspective. The core of the play is the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, and in this speech Hamlet identifies the uncertainty of death--"the undiscovered country"--as that which "puzzles the will." Hamlet does not know if death is something he ought to embrace or something he ought to flee from. He accuses himself of cowardice, but if this is so it is a cowardice in need of qualification: a metaphysical cowardice--looking over the edge of the abyss and not knowing where to place your foot--and no mere knocking of the knees with fright.

Hamlet's core problem is that he does not understand the meaning of death.  Once he figures that out, he can learn how to live, even if to do so means to proceed posthaste toward his own certain death.  Thus, as Montaigne, quoting Cicero, has it: "To philosophize is to learn how to die."  Hamlet confronts the uncertainty of death until he finds certainty: and the certainty is that of the grave. This knowledge becomes bedrock for him in Act 5.

V.
The experience upon which Hamlet forges an identity--the experience upon which he rights himself and overcomes his vertigo--is the direct confrontation with death. More than Fortinbras, more then the gravedigger or even Yorick, it is the soil itself--the desolate patch of ground that Fortinbras sends an army to its potential doom to gain, the muck of Yorick's grave, the fresh dirt of Ophelia's--the soil that he will relentlessly become, that gives Hamlet certain knowledge of death. Once he knows it--once he has prepped for his part, practiced the method--then he knows he can play the part. "The readiness is all": Hamlet decides to determine his being through his actions and not through his death. He decides to accept his fate and not to defy it. He will face the uncertainty, which has become a certainty: that the "quintessence of dust" is indeed just that, just so many skulls in the dirt.

VI.
Ultimately, Hamlet goes beyond good and evil, beyond God, beyond character as it is traditionally understood, to a secular mode of being that is on its own level, framed in the mind. There is a relativism at work here, both ethical and epistemological, and it is true that Hamlet--like every other Shakespeare play--offers no moral truths. In fact, it is predicated on the assumption that there are no hard and fast moral truths as we wish to understand them.  That is, there are no transcendentally signified moral truths.  The only values that matter are the ones that Hamlet himself resolves to believe in.

One cannot disavow relativism simply because it bears the potential to present unpleasant consequences. Hamlet gives us those unpleasant consequences--and, in its final act, a way to get past them. It is the power of the mind that causes trouble for Hamlet--more so than his uncle, a middling sort of villain for Shakespeare--but it is also the power of the mind that renders to Hamlet a sense of self, forged from experience.

A Soul at the White Heat

Brenda Wineapple's White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson is, if nothing else, worthwhile for one great feat that it accomplishes: to rescue the reputation of Higginson from that of being a mere sidenote in the story of how Emily Dickinson's poetry was first published to the masses. In Wineapple's presentation, Higginson is not so much the bumbling editor who nearly demolishes Dickinson's accomplishments in the process of preparing her poems for posthumous publication, or the product of the then-fading era of Transcendentalism who cannot recognize The New when he really sees it, as he is a man on the cusp of two movements, a man on the verge of the modern but not wholly of it, who has the sensitivity to recognize Dickinson's genius without the capacity to fully understand it. In fact, no one in Dickinson's time understood her poetry; Higginson at least realized that the future would understand her. And Dickinson realized that she had an ally in Higginson, someone who would at the least be receptive to the possibility of her genius at a time when no one else was willing to entertain the thought of it. What Dickinson sought from Higginson, despite all the talk of "precepter" and "pupil" in her letters, was sympathy, it seems.

Higginson is (and was even in his day) less of interest for his own literary efforts than he was for the way in which he captured the ethos of his time. If Emerson was the great armchair Transcendentalist who enjoyed nature best from the comfort of his study and Thoreau the man of deed who translated the attitude of the movement into action through his experimental living in Emerson's back forty, Higginson is somewhere between the two but closer to Thoreau, though more politically involved. In addition to writing essays, novels, a few poems, and yet more essays, Higginson received a saber cut while storming the gates of the federal courthouse in Boston in an attempt to free the captured slave Anthony Burns, he ran guns to free-staters in Kansas, and he--not Robert Gould Shaw--was in fact the first to lead a regiment of black soldiers during the Civil War. Higginson was a Unitarian minister, as well. For years, he was a regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, the medium through which he first sparked the interest of Miss Dickinson. Though his writing is not without some moments of eloquence (Wineapple cites some of the finer passages), he is not remembered as a major writer of his era for a reason. Rather, it is fullness of his life story that prompts our attention today--that and his relationship with Dickinson.

Like most biographies of this sort, White Heat sometimes veers a little too close to rank speculation. Did Higginson harbor romantic feelings toward Dickinson? The books suggests that maybe he did ... then pulls back on that assumption, because if he did he certainly did not tell anyone in any direct manner. Wineapple wisely lets most of the speculations on Dickinson's sexual behavior resonate on their own. Was Dickinson in love with her sister-in-law, Sue Dickinson? The two were close in an odd sort of way, but Wineapple stops short of drawing any conclusions. That Dickinson fell in love with Judge Otis Lord is not to be doubted; what is uncertain, however, is the precise nature of their love affair and whether it was ever consummated in full-blown fashion. Lord, the very epitome of crusty, conservative cranks, seems a truly odd choice for the feisty and spirited Dickinson, but this relationship merely furthers the point that Dickinson's private life, including the precise nature of her feelings for Higginson, whom she did meet several times before she died, will forever be fraught with unknowns.

Which bring us to the poetry itself. Any literary biography is primarily of interest in its capacity to bring greater depth and meaning to a writer's work. And in this case, our appreciation of Dickinson's poetry is enhanced by a greater understanding of how her contemporaries received it--and in particular how Higginson perceived it. Wineapple points to Mabel Loomis Todd, Higginson's co-editor in preparing Dickinson's poems for publication, as the one with the heavy hand in the editing process. The examples she presents do indicate that some blunt and savage editing work was done by Todd, though Higginson was indeed guilty of altering the poems to make them more presentable to a mainstream literary audience of the 1890s. Regardless, the poems in their current "restored" form (first published as such in 1955) still have the power to captivate a contemporary audience with their startling sensibility, and they remain the most unique and idiosyncratic body of verse in American literature--a challenge, certainly, for any editor.

Cambridge Journal

I.
I came here with new glasses, and I'm still getting used to them, so that when I climb a stairway I look down at the steps and they appear to me to be curved. I keep looking down at my feet, wondering how they got to be all the way down there, wondering how I got to be so tall. My eyes haven't learned yet how to navigate the depths of what they take in. My left eye is the good one -- better than 20/20, the optometrist said. The right one is weak. I can close my right eye and read the label on an electric fan from ten feet away with my left. With my left eye closed, everything is a blur in the right.

II.
Harvard Yard: six in the morning on a Sunday, the Fourth of July. I forgot to wear my glasses, but even through the blurred edges that form the shapes of things around me I can tell that we are the only ones about, Ben and me. Ben is unusually quiet in his stroller. I wonder what he sees, how he is learning to process it. He is just learning his colors, and we are practicing with the things we see on our walk, especially the blue of the hydrangeas, which look as though someone had spray painted them: it doesn't seem like they could be real. To me, without my glasses, they look like cotton candy on a stick, something out of Dr. Seuss.

We cut between buildings, through alleys of brick, through the silence of Divinity Avenue this early in the morning. Automatic sprinkler systems are shooting water deep into the green of green grass. There's enough brick here to build a castle in four dimensions, enough wrought iron to build an ocean liner. Wonder how all that iron railing made it through the war without being commandeered by the government, but then again this is Harvard. We don't quite belong here, feel a bit like intruders, but this early on a Sunday morning any place is yours if you are walking through it quietly enough: on tippy toes.

The moon is still up in the sky, fragmentary, pouring out of a cup you might make with your left hand. Ben points it out to me. Signs: It's natural ... Organic Landscaping; All Pets Must Be On A Leash, stick man walking stick dog. Commemorative plaques, various and sundry in nature. The words are ragged around the edges, but I can still read. The difference between what's there and what I see is only a little less pronounced than it ever is, even with glasses. I'll never know what it is that a bird sees, what stick man walking stick dog sees. Through the gate by Canady Hall and up on top of the building there to the left, a hawk screams from a high perch. Not a warning to the little birds below but a summons to some other hawk somewhere else, a hypothetical bird that might be in the vicinity: a call to all hawks, if anyone out there is listening.

Still no one else. Then we see a jogger, and the gig is all up. We're no longer the sole inhabitants of the grounds of America's oldest university.

Past the statue of John Harvard: once I walked by here, years ago, and he had a pigeon on his head. It seemed apt, somehow, a humbling message: that we all might end up splattered with pigeon shit someday. There are more people now, a couple standing at the top of a set of monument-worthy stairs: Widener Library, repository of knowledge. It's late night for the lovers, I can tell. They are oblivious to anything, lost in their embrace. Summer school students who found each other more truly and more strange, it seems. One wonders where they are off to next, if they'll see each other again when summer's over. Either way, it couldn't matter to them now: they are embedded in the moment.

A covered passage through the middle of Wigglesworth Hall and into Harvard Square. Rampant commercialism tamed, at rest on a Sunday morning. That is, nothing's open. We pause at the bookstore, look over the titles, the names of visiting authors posted on the calendars, used books for sale. I tell Ben about the books I'd like to get, but he doesn't seem much interested. He quietly waits it out. The couple walks by, down from their vertiginous perch and among the walking and fully awakened once more. Hand in hand, delighted still at each other's company, and who would ever begrudge them that? The world is newly created for them and they the only couple. Just don't set foot ouside of the garden, I want to tell them. Stay here forever. If you can.

And then we wander through the residential areas below and to the east of campus. A good place to live, no doubt, with brick sidewalks and gardens well maintained in the side yards. They're New England gardens: the hydrangeas are tall and upright from the long New England spring and the mild summer, bright blue from the acidity of the soil. Onward and around, I'm looking up and squinting at street signs, registering the names and cataloguing landmarks for future navigations.

I pride myself on my sense of direction. I refer to it as innate, a natural product of the midwestern sensibility, but it's not. I claim that it comes from a childhood spent lying flat next to my brother in the bed of our dad's pickup truck, looking up at the blank of a blue sky as we crossed over the line from Johnson County into Wyandotte, guessing where we were and taking occasional glances over the edge of the truck bed to see if we were right. But more likely it comes from my willingness to learn the ground the old-fashioned way, on foot, finding a few landmarks and fixing them in my mind: an apartment building on Kirkland that I can recognize from any direction, a patch of sidewalk under construction, a walkway that I discovered that leads you out of a dead end street. Keeping track of your turns and always knowing which way is north.

Soon I've navigated our way through slums of hydrangea and clematis and brick sidewalks and back to our street, Francis Avenue, wondering about the prices, what it would cost to live here instead of just staying here for a month. The phrase "prohibitively expensive" comes to mind. Then we are on the grounds of the Divinity School. Is everything holy here? What about the infidels, the non-believers -- like us? What does it take to believe in things you can't see when you're not even sure about the things you do see?

These questions don't matter much to Ben: he's ready to get out of the stroller by now and go inside for a cool drink of water.

III.
My daughter wakes late, still terrified of the redcoats. The patriots, too, for that matter: anyone with a gun. The re-enactors are out in force this weekend. Yesterday she had a bad run-in with the redcoats on Boston Common; cannons were involved. Fourth of July on a Sunday, the cradle of liberty: that's what you get. There's the particular and peculiarly fervant brand of patriotism espoused by New Englanders. The revolutionary era is their heritage. They bring out cannons to every major park around and fire them off at fifteen minute intervals. No live rounds, of course, or at least we assume.

This is arguably the best place in the country to be on July Fourth, but Edie will have none of it. My wife explained to her that the redcoats were the bad guys, the others (white shirts, mostly, it seems, coarse cloth) are fighting for freedom. More or less. I'm about to side with the redcoats myself, thinking that maybe we should have just shut up and paid our taxes, then we wouldn't be dealing with cannons going off right next to the playground. I might openly declare myself a Tory. Edie goes about with her fingers in her ears, asking questions -- the answers to which she can't hear because her ears are covered. She can't figure out why anyone would ever want to go to war. We tell her that guns aren't allowed on campus, that she's safe here. No one is ever allowed to bring a gun on campus, and certainly not a cannon. Not in the residential areas, either. (I explain to her what a residential area is: it's a place where people live, and they don't want to be bothered. There are playgrounds in these residential areas that we can visit. No cannon, no musket, no grape shot.) She's very sensitive about noise, despite the fact that on any given parcel of land where she might find herself she is usually the loudest thing there -- no volume control yet. She had bad dreams last night about the redcoats.

Just outside the range of the cannons, though, we find ourselves in a little utopian socialist enclave, also known as the playground at Cambridge Commons. Wood bricks and plastic buckets are all held in common. Children work together to send water through a stainless steel aqueduct. It's an inversion of the instinct of mine at work here: no such thing as private property, and that takes the kids a bit of getting used to, but it's a good thing. The redcoats are forgotten, for the time being, at least. Boston may or may not be the hub of the universe, still, but it boasts the best playgrounds I've ever seen, anywhere.

IV.
Later in the morning, we are all walking together through Harvard Square. I stop into a cafe for coffee to go, and when I come out my wife is gesturing wildly at a figure just crossing the street. I turn to look and I know who he is instantly, and after the initial shock of recognition the entire mystery of his character suddenly makes sense.

Even from half a block away, he is easily distinguished by the particular qualities of his gait, the guitar that he carries with him everywhere in a hard shell case. I have my glasses on, but the pattern of his movements is so distinct that I think I would recognize him even without them on. He wears a rumpled suit, a white shirt with no tie, and his white hair is combed back, down almost to his collar: this is the same ensemble, the same look that I have associated with this fellow for almost twenty years. His face is red, weathered from walking so much, but at the same time you don't get the sense that he lives out of doors. He's a walker, a wanderer, no stranger to public transportation. Shabby but dignified. He comes from a cultured background. For twenty years, he was a fixture of Lawrence, Kansas, the town where Amy and I live, but here he is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as I said it all somehow makes sense.

The man with the guitar is named John. For years, Amy and I seemed to see him wherever we went. He could often be found sitting quietly at a coffee shop, staring at nothing in particular. He played guitar -- expertly -- during Sunday brunch at a restaurant where I worked. We track him down. He has a head start, and the walk signals are against us, but Amy catches up with him when he stops at a newsstand. He is happy to see us. He recognizes me, or he pretends to -- it's hard to know. He has a soft, refined voice, and he is very courteous. He grew up here, he says, and after twenty years of living in Lawrence he has just moved back. He plays every Monday night for the dinner crowd at such-and-such restaurant here in Cambridge, and he encourages us to come see him, and we agree to do so even though we know that it's not likely, given the fact of the young children who seem somehow to follow us around wherever we go.

A small world, I say, as we prepare to part ways, but even as I say it I know it's not true. The world is big and wide, and Boston, sadly, is no longer its hub, and there is much to see throughout the world's expanse. It's not a small world, you just keep running into the same crowd everywhere you go, like these children who keep following us around. We go our own ways. I have no doubt that we will run in to him again: he's the kind of person you keep running in to. Nevertheless, for some reason, we are all indescribably happy to see each other, even though if pressed on it none of us would be able to explain in the least why, except that we have these two places in common, here in the whole wide world.

V.
The kids go to bed around eight o'clock on the Fourth of July. Ben is too young to get much out of fireworks, we assume, or at least we don't want to navigate the crowds with him in tow, and Edie is still terrified of loud noises, explosions, and it's their bedtime, anyway. So here we are, the best place in the world to experience Independence Day, and it's lights off at eight-thirty. I set my glasses aside for the evening; I don't need them now. Amy and I stay up reading until she falls asleep. I turn off the light, then go into the bathroom so as not to keep her up and sit on the edge of the tub reading: about why we need wolves in the wilderness today, about an underappreciated Danish painter whose paintings radiate with an inborne light, about new translations of old scriptures -- what do the words mean, and where did they come from? The extreme degree to which Christianity depends upon translation -- translations of translations, even, of works by a person or persons unknown. All of which is to say that we do indeed see darkly through the glass. Advertisements for books, ridiculous personals: Uninhibited telephone exploration of your sexual fantasies. Call Julia. Dating/Intimacy Coach: Manhattan, Upper East Side location. The hand-in-hand couple are far, far away from this now.

I crinkle the magazine shut, then I, too, head for the mattress. It's a heat wave, and there's no air conditioning in our apartment. We've got four fans running. We had hoped to escape the heat by coming here, but the heat came with us and settled in, at least for a few days, at which point the winds off the ocean will push it back to where it came.

I lie in bed for a long time, awake, waiting to get settled in to the darkness, but I know that when I do sleep I will sleep until dawn. We're not so different from John, the man with the guitar. We're different from the hawk. You might remember things (scenes, images) but you don't know what it's like anymore to be young, to be very young. I see now what I see when my eyes are awake.

Hunger

All through the book, we wait for the big moment: when the narrator finally makes it as a writer, when the money comes in -- a hundred kroner, say -- that lifts him up out of poverty and obscurity and allows him a decent place to live and a steady diet -- and a modicum of respect, to boot. It doesn't have to be a fortune, even: just enough to get by, to get his waistcoat out of hock, enough for him to claim with accuracy that he makes a living by his pen.

Of course, the moment never comes -- not in the pages of this book, at least. The writer in question, the quasi-autobiographical narrator of Knut Hamsun's Hunger, gives the perfect picture of the motive to write, but the means are at a loss. We have to extrapolate from the novel's conclusion: when the unnamed speaker takes to the seas, a habitat hostile to the craft (but, apparently, if Melville is to be considered, not hostile to the formation of the proper temperament). It is then and only then -- in the last page and a half of the novel -- that we figure out how the narrator got out of the mess he was in -- starvation-grade poverty -- and made it to the point at which he could actually pull together the wits required to tell his own tale. It isn't so much the sea, though, that catalyzes this writer's pursuance of his craft; rather, in keeping with the point of the book, it's the fact that he finally has the benefit of a steady diet. Forget five hundred dollars and a room of your own -- it's daily bread that a writer needs above all.

And without that daily bread, how good a writer can this character be? We know better than to assume that the masterpieces he believes himself to be crafting in the midst of his poverty are genuine. It's clear from his inane ramblings -- and the sympathetic but sensible rejections he repeatedly receives -- that whatever he is trying to write in the midst of maintaining his unwonted hunger diet is not material on par with the final product -- the novel we are reading, written in the style of a memoir. It's only after the fact, with the benefit of looking back from a very different vantage point, that the narrator can present this kind of experience with any kind of clarity or artfulness. The narrator himself is not so much unreliable as much as he is reliably capturing an unreliable state that he inhabited in the past; alternating between complete arrogance and a supreme self-loathing, he himself realizes as much when he is in the latter mode. The voice of this novel has a perfect immediacy, but at the same time we can recognize a certain distinct distance. The experience has passed, but it has remained with him.

Hunger reads like a leaner, more taught Crime and Punishment, only there is no murder -- no galvanizing, irrevocable act -- to force the young would-be man of consequence into the crucible of his fate. The narrator of Hunger does, however, give Raskolnikov a run for his money when it comes to alienation. The alternating currents of self-doubt (a hazardous and even self-destructive sense of pride) and delusions of grandeur are common to both. Both are crazed and alienated by the dire poverty of their situations. Both are prompted equally by impulses of dire cruelty and seemingly random impulses toward utter kindness; if impulses toward kindness could be said to reach a hysterical pitch, they do so with both of these fellows. Both of them reside within the very midst and broil of the city yet are separated from everyone around them. Both talk to themselves aloud, oblivious as they wander the streets. Yet Raskolnikov commits his irrevocable act based on logic -- to prove a theory, to put thoughts into action. Hamsun's narrator, by contrast, doesn't seem capable of sticking with a particular train of thought long enough to see it through to the name of action; he is too sicklied over with a cast of thought that is not only pale but fractured as well. Laughing at himself, jumping on his hat, weeping his way through the streets, throwing what little money he has to near-perfect strangers, selling off his near-worthless possessions one by one to pawnbrokers ... In that sense, Hamsun's narrator matches Raskolnikov almost deed for deed. But the case could still be made: without any ability to hold a thought together long enough to act upon it, Hamsun delivers in a certain unmistakable way the crazier of the two. This we recognize as a kind of modern paralysis, bearing with it the sting of a psychological acuity that is Freudian in nature. The voice of the novel is the crucial element here, what allows this insanity to be rendered with such relentless precision.

Given the limitations of the mental state of the narrator at the time of the events he recounts, it's a bold move to use first-person here. But the use of first-person is also exactly what makes Hunger work. What it sacrifices in terms of clarity, though, it makes up for in expressiveness. The real feature that separates Hunger from Crime and Punishment -- what, in fact, makes it not only a leaner novel but a more realistic and more modern novel -- is Hamsun's trenchant use of voice, the psychological depth that is conveyed not only by the story but by the language of the story. Hunger reaches beyond the psychological depravity of Poe, for instance, because it deals with a more realistic and less sensational fringe. The voice carries this book. It is, one might argue, the most modern of 19th century novels, one that is full thirty years ahead of its time, and in addition it deserves to be lauded for not doing what we might expect it to do: to give us the story of how and why a writer became a writer. In that sense, Hunger keeps good company: neither The Bell Jar nor This Boy's Life tells us directly how the person speaking came to be the person writing; we have to extrapolate from the data provided. John Fante's Ask the Dust runs most nearly parallel to Hunger. We can see the drive, the examples that prove, over and over, the capacity for verbal fluency and the will to pursue the writer's life. What goes into the formation of a writer, though, is perhaps ultimately something very hard to know, even for the writers themselves. What Hunger proves, though, is that the writer's life begins with hunger and only reaches fruition when there is food to be had.

The Crow Census

Common American Crow by John James Audubon

Certainly, they are common enough, these birds that so often when we look up are there, bracketing the sky with their uneven wingbeats. If we consider the crow as a punctuation mark, it's an ambiguously rendered one, one that means whatever you want it to mean. I was surprised to find out that people in some cultures consider the crow a symbol of harmony, but I can certainly see it. The meaning of the crow depends on context, mood. Like Walt Whitman, your average crow contains multitudes.

Of course, many people consider the crow a nuisance; you don't need a license to kill a crow, and there's no bag limit in the United States between August and March. And many people consider it an omen, like its slightly bigger, rougher, more scraggly cousin, the raven, and just about any other black bird, for that matter. Anything that eats carrion and trash tends to get a bad rap, but undeservedly so, I would say. Such scavengers merely take out the trash we ourselves don't want to deal with.

Regardless, the crow is a survivor. It has been around for a long, long time, and it can adapt to just about any climate. The crow is universal, world-wide. Crows are smart birds; they can be taught to speak. Legends abound about their intelligence. Aesop was rather fond of them. Crows are raucous, noisy, selfish, social, gregarious. But to see a congress of them -- what's called, in a somewhat unjustifiable maligning, a "murder" -- is to become aware of something crucial about the world we inhabit, and that is that they are much more at home in this place than we are. It belongs to them as much as or more than it belongs to anyone or anything else. When we clear out of here, I have a suspicion that they will still be around.

The etymology of "crow" is somewhat telling. Suddenly one day I was struck when it occurred to me that the Scottish word "corbie" and the Latin word "corvus" and the English word "crow" are all related. This suggests that there has been a lot of talk about crows for many years: the words that span multiple languages are often the words that have been around for a while.

Crows can supposedly recognize distinct features among human beings, but we are unable to recognize any defining differences between one crow and the next. I wonder: can a crow really tell himself apart from any other crow? Where does one crow end and the next one begin?

Each time I visit the Rocky Mountains, the crows there -- in much stronger numbers than anywhere else I have been -- remind me that they are the dominant feature of the landscape: more so than than the pines, even, which merely sway in the wind while the crows circle about them. Their cries call all through the wind as though the birds were themselves putting it into motion themselves with their calls, their breaths, their wingbeats.

I don't know that anyone would ever be able to perform a census. The king of crows himself couldn't pull it off. Maybe that's what they're up to, though, what they're attempting -- all that cawing and cakling about in the trees, on fence posts, atop dumpsters -- they're taking their own count, sounding off, checking names to see who's there. But every time they start to finalize the roster, confusion sets in: they can't tell who has been counted and who hasn't, and by that time there are that many more of them and they lose count. They scatter, break and combine, they multiply -- and the count starts again.

Catalpa

With their big, broad, rubbery leaves and their seed pods that hang down all ragged and stringy, catalpa trees seem to me as though they belong in a swamp, in the South, somewhere very humid. They seem to have been designed precisely to fit into a William Faulkner novel. The trunk of a well-grown catalpa is massy and round, but then the branches droop and tangle themselves all around, tending to dip back down toward the ground. What makes this tree my favorite, though, is the flower. I found this image on the Oklahoma University website:



You don't expect a catalpa to have such a pretty flower, and you can't quite believe it until you actually look at it up close. The catalpa flower has an orchid-like quality to it, a long tongue and a fine spray of purple coming out of the bell, the yellow splotches on either side, the ruffled white skirts. I don't know enough about botany to know what any of it is for except that it is all essential to the process of making more catalpa trees. The flower seems like it ought to be delicate, but there are thousands of these things all over a tree that seems otherwise to be quite sturdy. If I were a bee, I would spend time here. The fragrance of the flowers is sweet and drowsy, not as powerful as honeysuckle but still maintaining a definite presense when you are in proximity of the tree. The fact that these trees grow around here -- that they flourish, even -- never ceases to surprise me. I'm glad for that.

Sucking in the 70s

Disco still sucks, but awful as it was it may also have been the best thing ever to happen to rock and roll. Two things happened. First, it gave further impetus to the emerging punk movement, which was powered by its blatant rejection not only of disco but also of the bloated, radio-ready behemoths of sound that would ultimately be boxed up and sold as "classic rock." The second thing that happened, though, was in a way a more curious triumph: rock music co-opted elements of disco and added these features to the existing mix. Rock was already a polyglot musical style, a mixed-up bastard of older, more traditional sound styles and new innovations such that the more obvious influences on the genre (country, blues) only served to obscure the less obvious ones (pop ballads and the range of genre-defying novelty songs that seemed to be ubiquitous in the middle decades of the twentieth century). Disco entered something new into the equation.

Sometimes these two phenomena overlapped: consider the end of The Clash's "Stay Free" (1978), when Mick Jones' slashing guitar lines build up an anthemic instrumental coda in the wake of Paul Simonon's bouncing disco bass line. But the second effect of disco on rock music is also clear in the best mainstream rock of the period: to wit, numerous tracks by The Rolling Stones and Blondie. In the case of Blondie, we have a band that married a disco beat to the attitude of punk rock, not just here and there but rather as a defining quality of their sound. The guitars don't rend and tear like they do in The Clash or The Buzzcocks, but the idea of punk is still there, and it was clearly with the band when it first formed. With the Stones, you hear disco in "Miss You" and other tracks from the Some Girls era. In this case, the disco synthesis helped to extend the relevance of a band that could by all means have descended into the formulaic shadow-of-their-former-selves that other 60s bands that were still around had relegated themselves to. The Rolling Stones were among the very few commercially successful rock artists of the 1960s who were really able to maintain their sense of vitality--and that was because they did not merely follow the changes going on around them but rather innovated as they went along; they absorbed what was going on around them, but ultimately they were their own catalysts.

All of which is to say that rock music is a strange beast, one that continually takes on new shapes, new dimensions. And, in the end, who would really have it any other way?

Sylvia Plath Reconsidered

Despite her enduring popularity, it is easy for some to dismiss her. Her airing of her own personal afflictions seems self-indulgent, and at times -- as in "Daddy" -- bombastic and overblown. Her voice is perennially immature, her work a phase for artistically-temperamented teenage girls to go through and then outgrow. How dare she, middle class white girl with a fine education and a Fulbright Scholarship, compare her own trite domestic suffering to that of the Jews in World War II? Self-indulgent and overblown it is, but "Daddy" is also a viscerally powerful poem; despite the anger, self-righteousness, and general emotional drag of it, there is also a thrill to its awful daring. There is no denying the impact of her words, the blunt force of this poem: the language is startling, even after repeated readings. I wonder sometimes about daddy's side of things, what he himself might have said, but ultimately his perspective is irrelevant: Sylvia Plath's poems are all about the speaker's perspective, what goes on in her mind, and the interior of that mind is inevitably a dark but fascinating place.

"The Moon and the Yew Tree" is, to me, the most compelling vision of the interior of that mind. The poem begins:

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

A light that is distant and devoid of warmth is a light that is drained of all the good that we commonly associate with "light" when we encounter the word in a work of literature; this is the light by which the speaker sees. What kind of mindset must you suffer such that the very grass itself is a "prickling" burden? How despressed do you even have to be for the grass to possess "griefs" to be unloaded? One cannot but help to think of Whitman here, how he loved the grass, the freedom and democracy of it, and how different an attitude we are treating here. The "Fumy, spiritous mists" and the "row of headstones" in this stanza (picture the set from "Night of the Living Dead," a washed palette, cheaply rendered) are none too cheery, but what really chills, what strikes the note of despair, is the speaker's assertion in the final line of this stanza that she cannot see any way out of this walking nightmare. At this point, we believe her. We are willing already to acknowledge that this despair is bred of more than mere self-indulgence. It resonates from the core of the speaker's consciousness.

The second stanza of the poem displays Plath's trademark shifts in imagery:

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky——
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

These abrupt transitions are disorienting by design, startling. We go from a "door" to a "face" to a "knuckle" and then -- "terribly upset" -- presumably back to the face, the expression on it. The door is noted by its absence -- again, no way out. The moon is a fist instead, revealed in the next line to be committing a crime: a satellite body has killed the sea and is dragging off the corpse. The face comes back, expression intact: its "O-gape of complete despair." In context, "complete despair" is startling for its nakedly abstract emotional content. The assertion again, no way out: "I live here." Here is where nature itself is a murderous thug. Whither now, Walt Whitman?

The middle of the second stanza introduces a set of contrasts between the moon as goddess and the Virgin Mary: this doomed, dismal paganism and a Christianity that promises but fails to provide any kind of redemption or resurrection. Here, the moon is also sinister: without any explicit reference to Shakespeare, the speaker aligns herself with Edmund the Bastard. This moon-vs.-virgin motif continues in the following stanzas:

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness——
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence.

The key line, perhaps, is the speaker's weary, hopeless claim: "How I would like to believe in tenderness." She would like to embrace Mary, mild and gentle, but she cannot. The concluding words of the poem -- "blackness—blackness and silence" -- indicate a stunned resignation, a sense of finality: no hope of any change.

The core mechanism of this poem is the speaker's sense of sight, her faculty of seeing, and everything the speaker sees is distorted, drained of its usual color. The moon is perhaps less the cause of the speaker's despair than it is the object of her own despairing vision: "The moon sees nothing of this." If the moon does have a hand in shaping the darkness of the speaker's vision, it is not deliberate but rather elemental, like the speaker's depression -- like everything else in the universe a by-product, ultimately, of gravity and electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. Nothing is on purpose here. The moon itself is necessarily evocative of perspective: we see it from earth, it tells us where we are by telling us where we are not. Those of us not beset by the burden of despair look at it and wonder. The ancients were right to believe that it has a power on us, a power that Plath evokes in the structure of this poem: four stanzas of seven lines each, representing the lunar cycle: four weeks of seven days each, the bare essence of a month and also roughly equivalent to the cycle of a woman who menstruates. The antonym of Plath's speaker here is the speaker of Wallace Stevens' "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon": both poems are about the power of the mind, the power of the imagination, but in Stevens' poem the mind (through its positive ability to see more than what the eye neutrally sees) frees the self to find itself "more truly and more strange." In Plath's poem, the mind (through its negative ability to color darkly what the eye neutrally sees) sets limits on the self, confines it. "I simply cannot see where there is to get to."

Not all of Plath's poetry is so dim, though, as the dimmest of it. My favorite Plath poem is "Morning Song"; the tone of it is both like and unlike the tones we see at work in other poems. There is a temptation to read into "Morning Song" the voice of that same despair that we find elsewhere, but to limit the poem to that one tone is to sell it short. The prevailing tone is not so much one of despair as it is one of distance, detachment, and bewilderment -- a bafflement that at times borders on wonder, but far away wonder. The speaker sees her child as a distant object; when it cries "a far sea moves in my ear." With the child's first breaths, its "bald cry / Took its place among the elements." "Love" is identified as the ultimate cause of this child's being, but it merely "sets [the child] going like a fat gold watch": mechanical, impersonal, not something embodied, not as though the speaker were intimately involved in the process.

As anyone who has ever lived with a newborn knows, the experience is exhausting and disorienting. You don't sleep much; you stagger through inspired by the knowledge that the child depends on you for survival. In the case of this speaker, she rises from bed in the middle of the night, "cow-heavy and floral / In my Victorian nightgown." Here we find the modern scholar turned into an animal, a dairy cow, and thrown straight back into the century preceding her, one in which the obligation of dutiful motherhood was in most cases the primary obligation -- the confining obligation -- of her life.

The most startling stanza of "Morning Song" is its third:

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

The image here is that of a wisp of breath condensing on the surface of a mirror, then disappearing completely, as though it had never been. Or perhaps the image is of a sky-cloud dissolving in some metaphorical mirror. Either way, it's a jarring claim of the distance between mother and child, a denial of a relationship that we take as a given. It's not an angry statement nor a mean-spirited one, nor is it full of despair. It is, rather, simply matter-of-fact. It's the statement of a mother who feels that she has no influence, no binding tie to her child. "Love" set the child going, and now we watch it tick. The child is its own thing, and that's not necessarily bad.

Still, this vision of motherhood is a far cry from that espoused by today's culture writ large. A posthumous diagnosis of post-partum despression seems to be in order, but at the same time that diagnosis sells short the poetic vision of this poem. Are we not allowed to question the conventional wisdom of the mother-child relationship?

The title and the last line of the poem bear potential for both ironic and sincere readings. The song of the title is that of the child crying, hardly a joy to hear at two o'clock in the morning, especially when you've barely slept for days, but at the same time that cry is the animating principle of the child, the sign that it is alive and that air is filling its lungs, that it is viable outside of the womb. This is the child's only form of self-expression, as valid in its way as the poet's is. The "clear vowels [that] rise like balloons" in the last line present an image that can only be described as bittersweet: the celebratory nature of balloons, the fact that they are rising, escaping, out of hand for good.

Some of Plath's poetry is indeed sweet and touching, in moments at least. In "Nick and the Candlestick," in the midst of some otherwise characteristically gloomy cave-darkness imagery, we encounter the line "O love, how did you get here?" The fact is that there is love as well as despair in Plath's vision, and sometimes that love offers the possibility of holding the despair in check. In a script for a BBC broadcast, Plath noted of "Nick and the Candlestick": "a mother nurses her baby son by candlelight and finds in him a beauty which, while it may not ward off the world's ill, does redeem her share of it." Another poem, "Black Rook in Rainy Weather," notes the presence of the odd miracle now and then: "Miracles occur, / If you care to call those spasmodic / Tricks of radiance miracles." It's a highly qualified hopefulness she posits here, but it counts for something. Too bad the odd miracle could not save the poet herself.

In all, the darkness that typified Plath's vision is well-matched by the power of her lexicon. Had it not been so, her poetry would not be worth reading. As it is, there is an undeniable force to her words, and she presents compelling insights into the life of a kind of mind that none of us would desire to call our own, a mind that breathed poetry in and out but could not in the end be sustained by it.

A final issue that any reader of Plath's poetry must contend with is that of poet versus persona. The temptation abides, especially in supposed "confessional" poetry, to conflate the two. But to do so in the work of any poet is to place unduly strict confines on interpretation. To say that Plath herself is the speaker of one of her poems limits the meaning of the poem to the details of Plath's biography, and there is then no legitimate way to argue that the poem might mean anything out of the context of that life. Under this rubric of interpretation, there is no room for interpretation; to every question, there is a right answer -- one related to the poet's life -- that the reader needs to discover. A poem becomes an equation with a tightly defined solution -- not that there is anything wrong with an equation, but poetry is not mathematics.

Such an approach cannot do justice to a poem. Poets write with ambiguity in mind. The language of metaphor is not a language of right answers; it's a language of fuzziness and deliberate imprecision, one that states forthrightly that things are what they are not. The animating principle of a poem is to render an idea so that it produces an aura of potential meaning, a vague outline that is, paradoxically, created by sharply-defined detail. All this is not to say that a poet's biography is irrelevant, but we have to consider interpretations beyond the biographical in reading any poem. Even when Walt Whitman identifies himself as the speaker of Song of Myself, he becomes himself a metaphor. The speaker of Song of Myself, large and multitude-containing as he is, goes way beyond what any mortal being can literally be or do. The same is true with Plath's poetry. Clearly, she was inspired by her own thoughts and feelings, but to assume that the poems give a complete autobiographical account of the life is to mistake the purpose and power of poetry. As any good poet would, Plath knew this herself. Consider: "a mother nurses her baby son by candlelight." Here and elsewhere in the BBC scripts, Plath clearly delineates the speaker of the poem as potentially someone other than herself.

Of course, these poems are the product of the life she lived. But we can be thankful that the poems themselves have a life beyond that of the poet.

Man Is Wolf to Man: Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More

In Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, the resident genius of King Henry VIII's court is the novel's protagonist, Thomas Cromwell. Mantel's genius is in choosing to tell the story of the English Reformation and its attendant personal and political turmoils through Cromwell's perspective. Does Mantel's view of Cromwell reflect accurately the reality of Cromwell's character? It's impossible to say with certainty, but the portrait she displays here is nonetheless convincing, and in it we see Cromwell as the central figure who takes England from its backward-looking feudal past and propels it headlong toward its future. Through Mantel's novel, we see what exactly is at stake here, and though religion is the mechanism of the social and political change at work, religion is ultimately only a part of what's going on at this historical moment. Wolf Hall presents nothing less than the story of the formation of the modern world: Cromwell is a self-made man, a prototype of the modern man, and his work is ingeniously devoted to breaking the stranglehold of authoritarian tradition. It takes a little bit of authoritarianism, of course, to do such a thing, and Cromwell is ready just for that.

What Mantel does--and what Shakespeare's Henry VIII and Richard Bolt's A Man for All Seasons do not do--is to present Cromwell as a fully realized human being. Cromwell, a prodigiously talented linguist, financier, and power broker, is a sharp and at times Machiavellian critical thinker, a pragmatist who is at times ruthless. He can both endure beatings and give them out, but he is also a man with heart--one who takes in urchins in need of a home, one who cares deeply for his family and grieves mightily but quietly at their loss, one who is sympathetic to heretics whose only crime is that they want the people to be able to read the Gospels in their native tongue. Cromwell has a heart, but it does not malign his character to say that at times he has to override his feelings to serve his duty. Mantel has based her depiction of Cromwell on historical research, but more importantly there is an idea underlying her development of his character, an idea that is illustrated in the conflict between Cromwell and Thomas More.

Many accounts of this era in British history paint Thomas More as the icon of conscience, as the moral exemplar in a time of great corruption. Mantel, however, will have nothing to do with such notions. She pits Cromwell and More against each other, but they are not so diametrically opposed here that they don't have some room to move around; though enemies, they seem to realize that the paths they tread are parallel, though moving in opposite directions. To define these antagonists more fully, Mantel plays up the background of the two figures: Cromwell the son of a notoriously violent and crude blacksmith/brewer, More the educated child of some status and privilege whose humanism stops shy of admitting the actual masses of humanity who surround him. Cromwell is of the people, More above them. In Mantel's fiction, Cromwell remembers a childhood encounter with his future nemesis, and this event sets a pattern for future interaction between the two: when young Cromwell works as a serving boy in the house where More takes his studies, the young scholar refuses to discuss with his future rival the contents of a book he is reading. It is telling as well that Cromwell remembers the incident very clearly, More not at all.

Beyond class and background, though, More is set here as a man of conscience, certainly, but the novel raises the question--in such a way that the reader will never forget it--what good is conscience if the thing that it defends is crooked, outmoded, or merely false? It's hard not to think of the certainty that propels our modern day religious extremists--Islamic terrorists, the Texas Board of Education--when thinking of how More is portrayed here. Mantel captures the sum of More's character through Cromwell's thoughts after an encounter with More early in the novel:

Why does everything you know, and everything you've learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. (32)

Cromwell lays it all out in plain, nearly undeniable terms in a later encounter with More:

Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs. (463)

Cromwell himself presents with a slippery conscience--not a weak one, but one that is accustomed to ambiguity. It's not that the ends justify the means for Cromwell, but rather that ends and means are sometimes hard to separate. All of which is to say that Cromwell inhabits a moral world that is shot through with uncertainty, with gray areas. Cromwell's moral world looks familiar to us. As such, Wolf Hall continually suggests itself as a parable of modern politics. It could replace All the King's Men in that regard.

And what of the king that Cromwell serves? (It is worth remembering that he is the same king that More served until religious matters got in the way; had Pope Clement decided otherwise on Henry's request for an annulment to his marriage, More might never have gone to the chopping block.) No doubt, Henry is true to the notions we already have of him: he is vain, self-important, lustful. But he is also tender at times and charismatic. More importantly, Cromwell the pragmatist says,

If he were oppressive, if he were to override Parliament, if he were to pay no heed to the Commons and govern only for himself ... But he does not ... so I cannot concern myself with how he behaves to his women. (366)

Of course, how Henry behaves to his women becomes a matter of national and even international importance, but Cromwell seems to see beyond the personal and find the political here: Why should England answer to Rome? It's true that the break with Rome will keep funds that were in the past headed toward the Vatican at home instead, which serves Henry's greed but also serves the overall good of the state. What Cromwell understands, what we of the fully modern world do not, is that at this era in history the good of the people is indeed to some extent necessarily reliant upon the good of the king. It's no secret as well that the Catholic Church was notoriously corrupt at the time; why should the wealth of the English people go to support corruption abroad?

Cromwell eventually comes to serve not only as the king's political advisor but as his conscience as well: "If you snap your fingers, Majesty, a hundred priests will come running to tell you right from wrong," he says to the king, who responds: "It seems I prefer to hear it from you" (419). After Henry divorces Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn, Cromwell considers the child of Henry and Anne's union "the guarantee of no more civil war ... the beginning, the start of something, the promise of another country" (367). That child--though not the boy Henry and Anne hoped for, but a girl, the Princess Elizabeth--would eventually be the monarch that brings England together for good. As Mantel has it, Henry and Anne conceive the child, Cromwell the nation. The Reformation--in England as elsewhere--was a bloody, remorseless process, but the solution was perhaps inevitable from the start: the formation of the secular state--the world we live in now.

More and Cromwell lived in a time that was caught between past and future. As Cromwell says in the novel: "It's England against Rome ... The living against the dead" (521). Mantel's approach to this material is riveting. You can't help but admire Cromwell after reading this novel, even if the compromises he makes threaten to tear him apart--literally as well as figuratively, given the punishments of the day--punisments that Cromwell evetually succumbs to himself. Knowingly, we wait for the moral and personal tragedy that is to be Cromwell's downfall and demise, but it doesn't come--not yet, not in Mantel's pages, which end with King Henry's second marriage in decline but not at the bottom. As Joan Acocella wrote in her review of Wolf Hall in the New Yorker, "Mantel should be congratulated for creating suspense about matters whose outcome we’ve known since high school. What’s going to happen to Anne Boleyn? we think." To anyone who has ever endured sighingly an episode of The Tudors or winced at the pat moral satisfaction of A Man for All Seasons, Wolf Hall is a revelation.

The Puritans in America

There are two basic ways of looking at the British expatriates whose New England adventures form the core of what is remembered of America's pre-revolutionary founding.

One perspective, that of the Pilgrims as the steeple-crowned progenitors of our national founding myth, Thanksgiving, has lost a lot of ground in our culture, and for good cause: there's little that is historically or culturally accurate about this popular perception of these so-called "freedom men" (as the perennially twinkle-eyed Ronald Reagan once referred to the Puritan John Winthrop) who knew they really had it made once they got their hungry mitts on what (according to Benjamin Franklin) should have been our national bird. This myth was begun innocently enough, in a way, by Abraham Lincoln as a way of boosting the nation's spirits in the midst of the Civil War, but the story seems to have taken on a life of its own, as myths are so often wont to do.

The second perspective, established, oddly enough, a few decades before the Civil War, has a more solid grounding in historical fact and is borne out, more or less, by the voluminous written legacy the Puritans left behind in the form or their sermons, journals, captivity narratives, letters, and histories. This is the notion of our pre-founding fathers as dour, grim-visaged killjoys who (counter to the Thanksgiving myth's claim that they came here seeking "religious freedom") were so narrowly and single-mindedly devoted to their retro-Old Testament God that any aberration in the theory or method of worship could be grounds for banishment. These are the Puritans (e.g., Cotton Mather) who referred to the burning of witches at the stake as "miracles," the Puritans (Mather again) who expressed delight when an earthquake struck Jamaica and killed lots of people there, those people being, from the Puritan perspective, iniquitous and therefore fully deserving of their own tragic demise. These people also branded Hester Prynne with a red-hot letter A on the front of her otherwise dun-colored smock for committing an offense that would, in a more sensible era, the narrator points out, be merely the subject of derision, not of legal action.

Or so the story goes. If Lincoln was the founder of the Thanksgiving myth, Nathaniel Hawthorne is the one who has done the most to popularize the opposite perspective. And though the 19th century Dark Romantic view of the Puritans can withstand a lot of scrutiny, it too needs to be qualified. A little bit, at least.

Think of all of the millions of American high school students (past and present) who have read The Scarlet Letter. Think of the millions more who were supposed to have read it and who, thanks to Cliff's Notes or SparkNotes, scraped by (just barely) on the unit test over the novel. The Scarlet Letter is, of course, greatly admired by students for its intricate prose style, which boasts such gems as this one, from the first chapter of the narrative proper: "Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured some awful business in hand." This is, for Hawthorne, a short sentence, but it still manages to get its point across: even on a good day, these are clearly the most anal-retentive people in history. Hawthorne's narrator in The Scarlet Letter (who also happens to be named Nathaniel Hawthorne) takes every opportunity he can to point out how narrow-minded and somber these people are. Even the Puritan children are stiff and joyless, their insults hurled at Hester's daughter, Pearl, being marked by the stilted formality of children who aren't really children at all, having had anything that might resemble child-like joy sapped out of them by the dry stern-ness of their parental units. This Hawthornian perspective was in the 20th century the beneficiary of a supplemental booster thanks to Arthur Miller's The Crucible, read or supposedly read by a few million more students. The result is that there are more people who have read 19th and 20th century perspectives on the Puritans than there are people who have actually read the Puritan literature itself.

Clearly, the Hawthornian view does have much to go on: the banishments of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, the Englishmen's land grab and the near-genocide of the Pequot Indians, the witch trials, and pretty much every sour word Cotton Mather ever committed to paper. Of particular bearing to Hawthorne was the role that his own great-ancestor played in the witch trials -- and Hawthorne's own subsequnt feelings of inherited guilt. These things have to be balanced out, though, with a broader sense of historical context. Back in Europe, Protestants and Catholics were still killing each other at every convenient opportunity, and the violence there makes Williams' and Hutchinson's banishments seem progressive by comparison. As far as the witch trials, we can compare the dozens of witch executions in 17th century America with hundreds or even thousands in Europe. The land grab was brutal, but it was no different from what Europeans were doing in every other corner of the globe, so is it fair to single the Puritans out for the common crime of the era? Should we expect them to be any different from their contemporaries elsewhere? Perhaps we should, because they claimed to be creating a "city upon a hill" here--a model Christian community for all the world to follow, populated by practitioners of mercy and goodness. We would have to be pretty historically naive, though, to assume that they ought to have succeeded without spilling blood.

All of which is to say that the English who gradually came to dominate New England in the 17th century were pretty typical Europeans of their day. They were not Americans; the concept of an American identity did not exist yet and wouldn't really for another hundred years.

What good can we say of these people? Despite the fact that they were religious zealots, they were also rationalists. They were thinking people, and they were highly literate, and they brought the art of self-reflection to a new level. That's why we remember them (and not those Virginians to the south) as the founders of American culture: the Puritans wrote obsessively both of the otherworldliness of divine truth and of the minutiae of the everyday. Sometimes the two worlds intersected when Divine Providence saw fit to suffer a sign bespeaking the nature of His will. For a people who believed in predestination but had no other way of assessing what God had in store for them, these omens became the currency of their spiritual lives. Max Weber understood as much when he wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Many Puritan women, even, were educated, such as the most charming and sly Puritan writer of them all, Ann Bradstreet, America's founding poetess. As an exercise in comparison, consider Ann Bradstreet's "Contemplations" and Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature side-by-side. Doctrines aside, both documents make the same point about nature as evidence of God's greatness (Bradstreet) or of the greatness of the "Universal Being" (Emerson). For evidence of Bradstreet's aforementioned slyness and charm, see "The Prologue" or Bradstreet's poem dedicated to Queen Elizabeth.

The Puritans were also proto-democratic in their own way, although they would certainly not have identified themselves as such. They were sticklers for the rule of law, as all Englishmen not wearing a crown have tended to be. They were robust mercantilists. All that was necessary to add to the mix at that point was a healthy dash of Enlightenment-era belief in the inherent freedom of humankind, a tonic (or antidote, perhaps) to assuage the presumed guilt of original sin, and you could really go somewhere with that formula. As soon as the pendulum swings a little to the godless proto-scientific rationalist side, you have the necessary preconditions for the kind of ideas endorsed by the founding fathers of our political heritage. Much of American Enlightenment thought is reactionary to Puritan and Great Awakening theology, but there is also much in the American Enlightenment that draws on foundations established by the Puritans.

Though in many ways the bearers of a typically European worldview, the Puritans did have a couple of things that distinguished them, especially their willingness to risk life and fortune for the right to pursue their own collective (and narrowly defined) religious beliefs. And though they were not directly the founders of our nation politically, we are right to look to them as originators of so many qualities, good and bad, that still define America today.

Books I Read in 2009

Othello, William Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
"Master Harold" ... and the boys, Athol Fugard
Netherland, Joseph O'Neill
Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor
The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros
This Boy's Life, Tobias Wolff
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller
A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allen Poe
Out Stealing Horses, Per Petersen
The Street, Ann Petry
Antony and Cleopatra, William Shakespeare
Native Son, Richard Wright
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John Le Carre
No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Macbeth, William Shakespeare
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell
Dispatches, Michael Herr
Going After Cacciato, Tim O' Brien
Atonement, Ian McEwan
Saturday, Ian McEwan

Of these 34 books, I had already read 18 of them at least once.