How to Read Literature Like a Professor (17 page)

Okay, so here’s the general rule: whether it’s Italy or Greece or Africa or Malaysia or Vietnam,
when writers send characters south, it’s so they can run amok.
The effects can be tragic or comic, but they generally follow the same pattern. We might add, if we’re being generous, that they run amok
because they are having direct, raw encounters with the subconscious
. Conrad’s visionaries, Lawrence’s searchers, Hemingway’s hunters, Kerouac’s hipsters, Paul Bowles’s down-and-outers and seekers, Forster’s tourists, Durrell’s libertines—all head south, in more senses than one. But do they fall under the influence of warmer climes, or do those welcoming latitudes express something that’s already been trying to make its way out? The answer to that question is as variable as the writer—and the reader.

Now most of this has had to do with fairly specific places, but types of places also come into play. Theodore Roethke has a wonderful poem, “In Praise of Prairie” (1941), about, well, prairies. Do you know how few poems there are of any quality about prairies? No, his isn’t quite the only one. It’s not a landscape that’s inevitably viewed as “poetic.” Yet somehow Roethke, the greatest poet ever to come from Saginaw, Michigan, finds beauty in that perfectly horizontal surface, where horizons run away from the eye and a drainage ditch is a chasm. Beyond this one poem, though, the
experience
of being
a flatlander informs his work in obvious ways, as in his poems about this uniquely American/Canadian open, flat agricultural space, in the sequence
The Far Field
(1964), for instance, but in less subtle ways as well. His voice has a naive sincerity in it, a quiet, even tone, and his vision is of a vast nature. Flat ground is as important to Roethke’s psyche, and therefore to his poetry, as the steep terrain of the English Lake District famously was to William Wordsworth. As readers, we need to consider Roethke’s midwesternness as a major element in the making and shaping of his poems..

Seamus Heaney, who in “Bogland” (1969) actually offers a rejoinder to Roethke in which he acknowledges that Northern Ireland has to get by without prairies, probably couldn’t be a poet at all without a landscape filled with bogs and turf. His imagination runs through history, digging its way down into the past to unlock clues to political and historical difficulties, in much the same way the turf-cutters carve their way downward through progressively older layers of peat, where they sometimes come upon messages from the past—skeletons of the extinct giant Irish elk, rounds of cheese or butter, Neolithic quern stones, two-thousand-year-old bodies. He makes use of these finds, of course, but he also finds his own truths by digging through the past. If we read Heaney’s poetry without understanding the geography of his imagination, we risk misunderstanding what he’s all about.

For the last couple of centuries, since Wordsworth and the Romantic poets, the sublime landscape—the dramatic and breathtaking vista—has been idealized, sometimes to the point of cliché. Needless to say, vast and sudden mountains—the geographic features we find most spectacular and dramatic—figure prominently in such views. When, in the middle of the twentieth century, W H. Auden writes “In Praise of Limestone” (1951), he is directly attacking poetic assumptions of
the sublime. But he’s also writing about places we can call home: the flat or gently rolling ground of limestone country, with its fertile fields and abundant groundwater, with its occasional subterranean caves, and most important with its non-sublime but also nonthreatening vistas. We can live there, he says. The Matterhorn and Mont Blanc, those emblems of the Romantic sublime, may not be for human habitation, but limestone country is. In this case, geography becomes not only a way by which the poet expresses his psyche but also a conveyor of theme. Auden argues for a humanity-friendly poetry, challenging certain inhuman ideas that have dominated poetic thinking for a goodly period before he came along.

It doesn’t matter which prairie, which bog, which mountain range, which chalk down or limestone field we envision. The poets are being fairly generic in these instances.

Hills and valleys have a logic of their own. Why did Jack and Jill go up the hill? Sure, sure, a pail of water, probably orders from a parent. But wasn’t the real reason so Jack could break his crown and Jill come tumbling after? That’s what it usually is in literature. Who’s up and who’s down? Just what do up and down mean?

First, think about what there is down low or up high. Low: swamps, crowds, fog, darkness, fields, heat, unpleasantness, people, life, death. High: snow, ice, purity, thin air, clear views, isolation, life, death. Some of these, you will notice, appear on both lists, and you can make either environment work for you if you’re a real writer. Like Hemingway. In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), he contrasts the leopard, dead and preserved in the snow on the peak, with the writer dying of gangrene down on the plain. The leopard’s death is clean, cold,
pure, while the writer’s death is ugly, unpleasant, horrible. The final result may be the same, but one is so much less wholesome than the other.

D. H. Lawrence offers the contrasting view in
Women in Love
. The four main characters, tired of the muck and confusion of life in near-sea-level England, opt for a holiday in the Tyrol. At first the alpine environment seems clean and uncluttered, but as time goes on they—and we—begin to realize that it’s also inhuman. The two with the most humanity, Birkin and Ursula, decide to head back downhill to more hospitable climes, while Gerald and Gudrun stay. Their mutual hostility grows to the point where Gerald attempts to murder Gudrun and, deciding the act isn’t worth the effort, skis off higher and higher until, only yards from the very top of the mountains, he collapses and dies of, for want of a better term, a broken soul.

So, high or low, near or far, north or south, east or west, the places of poems and fiction really matter. It isn’t just setting, that hoary old English class topic. It’s place and space and shape that bring us to ideas and psychology and history and dynamism. It’s enough to make you read a map.

H
ERE’S MY FAVORITE SNIPPET OF POETRY:

As you know, that’s Shakespeare’s sonnet 73, your constant bedside reading. I like it for a lot of reasons. First, it just sounds wonderful—say it out loud a couple of times and you’ll start to hear how the words play off each other. Then there’s the rhythm. I often recite it in class when I’m explaining meter and scansion—how the stressed and unstressed syllables function in lines of poetry. But the thing that really works here, and
in the next ten lines, is the meaning: the speaker is seriously feeling his age here and making us feel it, too, with those boughs shaking in the cold winds, those last faded leaves still hanging, if barely, in the canopy, those empty limbs that formerly were so full of life and song. His leaves, his hair, have mostly departed, we can surmise, and his appendages are less resolute than formerly, and of course, he’s entered a quieter period than his youth had been. November in the bones; it makes my joints ache just to think about it.

Now to the nuts and bolts: Shakespeare didn’t invent this metaphor. This fall/middle-age cliché was pretty creaky in the knees long before he got hold of it. What he does, brilliantly, is to invest it with a specificity and a continuity that force us to really
see
not only the thing he describes—the end of autumn and the coming of winter—but the thing he’s really talking about, namely the speaker’s standing on the edge of old age. And of course he, being himself, pulls this off time and again in his poems and plays. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” he asks. “Thou art more lovely and more temperate.” What beloved could turn her back on that one? When King Lear is raging in his old man’s madness, he’s doing it in a winter storm. When the young lovers escape to the enchanted woods to sort out their romantic difficulties and thereby take their proper places in the adult world, it is a midsummer night.

Nor is the issue always age. Happiness and dissatisfaction have their seasons. A thoroughly unpleasant king, Richard III, rails against his situation by saying, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “Now is the winter of our discontent, / Made glorious summer by this son of York.” Even if we don’t know what he means by that, we know from his tone what he feels and we’re pretty sure it doesn’t say anything good about this son (with its play on “sun”) of York’s future. Elsewhere he speaks of seasons as having each their appropriate emotions, as in the song from
Cymbeline,
with its “Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun, / Nor
the furious winter’s rages.” Summer is passion and love; winter, anger and hatred. The Book of Ecclesiastes tells us that to everything there is a season.
Henry VI, Part II
gives us the Shakespearean formula for the same thing, although a bit more mixed, “Sometimes hath the brightest day a cloud, / And after summer evermore succeeds / Barren winter, with his wrathful nipping cold; / So cares and joys abound, as seasons fleet.” Even his titles tell us seasons matter with him:
A Winter’s Tale, Twelfth Night
(that is, the last of the twelve days of Christmas),
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
.

Of course, seasons aren’t the private playground of our greatest writer. We sometimes treat old Will as if he’s the beginning, middle, and end of literature, but he’s not. He began some things, continued others, and ended a few, but that’s not the same at all. A few other writers have also had something to say about the seasons in connection with the human experience.

Take Henry James, for instance. He wants to write a story in which the youth, enthusiasm, and lack of decorum that mark the still comparatively new American republic come into contact with the stuffy and emotionless and rule-bound world that is Europe. He must overcome an initial problem: nobody wants to read about geopolitical entities in conflict. So he needs people, and he comes up with a pair of real beauties. One is a girl, American, young, fresh, direct, open, naive, flirtatious, maybe a little too much of each; the other is a man, also American but long resident in Europe, slightly older, jaded, worldly, emotionally closed, indirect, even surreptitious, totally dependent on the good opinion of others. She’s all spring and sunshine; he’s all frosty stiffness. Names, you ask.
Daisy
Miller and Frederic
Winter
bourne. Really, it’s just too perfect. And obvious. You wonder why we don’t feel our intelligence has been insulted. Well, for one thing, he sort of slips the names in, and then the emphasis is really on her surname, which is beyond ordinary,
and her hometown, which is Schenectady, for crying out loud. We get so involved with those aspects that the first name seems to us merely a quaint holdover from the old days, which weren’t old to James. In any case, once you pay attention to the name game, you pretty much know things will end badly, since daisies can’t flourish in winter, and things do. On one level, everything we need to know is there in those two names, and the rest of the novella pretty much acts as a gloss on these two telling names.

Nor are the seasons the exclusive property of high culture. The Mamas & the Papas, expressing dissatisfaction with winter, gray skies, and brown leaves, do some “California dreamin’” as they wish their way back to the land of perpetual summer. Simon & Garfunkel cover much the same unhappy ground in “A Hazy Shade of Winter.” The Beach Boys made a very lucrative career out of happy-summer-land with all those surfing and cruising songs. Head for the beach with your surfboard and your Chevy convertible in a Michigan January and see what that gets you. Bob Seger, who is from Michigan, goes nostalgic for that first summer of freedom and sexual initiation in “Night Moves.” All the great poets know how to use the seasons.

For about as long as anyone’s been writing anything, the seasons have stood for the same set of meanings. Maybe it’s hardwired into us that spring has to do with childhood and youth, summer with adulthood and romance and fulfillment and passion, autumn with decline and middle age and tiredness but also harvest, winter with old age and resentment and death. This pattern is so deeply ingrained in our cultural experience that we don’t even have to stop and think about it. Think about it we should, though, since once we know the pattern is in play, we can start looking at variation and nuance.

W. H. Auden, in his great elegy “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”(1940), emphasizes the coldness of the day Yeats died. Auden
had the great good fortune that it happened to be true; Yeats died on January 31, 1939. In the poem rivers are frozen, snow falls, the mercury settles to the bottom of thermometers and won’t budge—everything unpleasant winter has to offer, Auden finds it for his poem. Now, the traditional elegy, the
pastoral
elegy, has historically been written for a young man, a friend of the poet, often a poet himself, who died much too young. Typically the elegy turns him into a shepherd taken from his pasture (hence the pastoral part) at the height of spring or summer, and all nature, which should be rejoicing in its fullness, instead is sent into mourning for this beloved youth. Auden, an accomplished ironist and realist, turns this pattern around in memorializing not a youngster but a man, born at the end of the American Civil War and dead on the eve of World War II, whose life and career were very long, who had made it to his own winter and who died in the heart of meteorological winter. That mood in the poem is made colder and more desolate by Yeats’s death, but also by our expectations of what we might call “the season of the elegy.” Such a tactic requires a very great, very skilled poet; fortunately, Auden was one.

Sometimes the season isn’t mentioned specifically or immediately, and this can make the matter a bit trickier. Robert Frost doesn’t come right out and say, in “After Apple Picking,” that it’s now October twenty-ninth or November umpteenth, but the fact that he’s finished his apple picking informs us we’re in autumn. After all, winesaps and pippins don’t ripen in March. Our first response may not be, “Oh, here’s another poem about fall,” although, in fact, this may be the most autumnal poem in the world. Frost expands on the seasonal implications with time of day (late evening), mood (very tired), tone (almost elegiac), and point of view (backward-looking). He speaks of the overwhelming sense of both tiredness and completion, of bringing in a huge harvest that
surpassed even his hopes, of being on a ladder so long that the sense of its swaying will stay with him even after he falls into bed the way a fishing bobber, watched all day, will imprint itself on the visual sense of eyes closed for sleep.

So harvest, and not only of apples, is one element of autumn. When our writers speak of harvests, we know it can refer not only to agricultural but also to personal harvests, the results of our endeavors, whether over the course of a growing season or a life. St. Paul tells us that we will reap whatever it is that we sow. The notion is so logical, and has been with us so long, that it has become a largely unstated assumption: we reap the rewards and punishments of our conduct. Frost’s crop is abundant, suggesting he has done something right, but the effort has worn him out. This, too, is part of autumn. As we gather in our harvest, we find we have used up a certain measure of our energies, that in truth we’re not as young as we used to be.

Not only has something come before, in other words, but something else is coming. Frost speaks in the poem not only of the coming night and his well-earned sleep but of the longer night that is winter and the longer sleep of the woodchuck. Now this reference to hibernation certainly fits with the seasonal nature of the discussion, but that longer sleep also suggests a longer sleep, the
big sleep,
as Raymond Chandler called it. The ancient Romans named the first month of our calendar after Janus, the god of two faces, the month of January looking back into the year gone by and forward into the one to come. For Frost, though, such a dual gaze applies equally well to the autumn and the harvest season.

Every writer can make these modifications in his or her use of the seasons, and the variation produced keeps seasonal symbolism fresh and interesting. Will she play it straight or use spring ironically? Will summer be warm and rich and liberating or hot and dusty and stifling? Will autumn find us tot
ing up our accomplishments or winding down, arriving at wisdom and peace or being shaken by those November winds? The seasons are always the same in literature and yet always different. What we learn, finally, as readers is that we don’t look for a shorthand in seasonal use—summer means
x,
winter
y minus x
—but a set of patterns that can be employed in a host of ways, some of them straightforward, others ironic or subversive. We know those patterns because they have been with us for so long.

How long?

Very long. I mentioned before that Shakespeare didn’t invent this fall/middle age connection. It predates him by a bit. Say, a few thousand years. Nearly every early mythology, at least those originating in temperate zones where seasons change, had a story to explain that seasonal change. My guess is that the first thing they had to account for was the fact that when the sun disappeared over the hill or into the sea at night, the disappearance was only temporary; Apollo would drive his sun chariot across the sky again the next morning. About the time the community had a handle on this cosmic mystery, though, the next item on the agenda, or next but one, was probably the matter of spring following winter, the days growing shorter but then growing longer again. This, too, required explanation, and pretty soon the story had priests to carry it on. If they were Greek, they would come up with something like this:

Now, if the tellers of the tale were Celts or Picts or Mongols or Cheyenne, they’d be telling a different version of this tale, but the basic impulse—we need a story to explain this phenomenon to ourselves—would remain constant.

Death and rebirth, growth and harvest and death, year after year. The Greeks held their dramatic festivals, which featured almost entirely tragedy, at the beginning of spring. The idea was to purge all the built-up bad feeling of winter from the populace (and to instruct them in right conduct toward the
gods) so that no negativity would attach to the growing season and thereby endanger the harvest. Comedy was the genre of fall, once the harvest was in and celebrations and laughter were appropriate. Something of the same phenomenon shows itself in more modern religious practice. Part of the immense satisfaction of the Christian story is that the two great celebrations, Christmas and Easter, coincide with dates of great seasonal anxiety. The story of the birth of Jesus, and of hope, is placed almost on the shortest, and therefore most dismal (preelectric) day of the year. All saturnalia celebrate the same thing: well, at least this is as far as the sun will run away from us, and now the days will start getting longer and, eventually, warmer. The Crucifixion and Resurrection come very near the spring equinox, the death of winter and beginning of renewed life. There is evidence in the Bible that the Crucifixion did in fact take place at that point in the calendar, although not that the birth took place anywhere near December 25. But that may be beside the point, because from an emotional standpoint, and quite apart from the religious significance of the events for Christians, both holidays derive much of their power from their proximity in the calendar year to moments on which we humans place great emphasis.