Life is Meaningful (Australian Literary Review, December 2009)

John Potts, A History of Charisma
Palgrave Macmillan; $59.95; 265pp

Stephen Miller, The Peculiar Life of Sundays
Harvard University Press; US$27.95; 310pp

Benet Davetian, Civility: A Cultural History
University of Toronto Press; Can$39.95; 607pp

Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things
Polity Press; $32.95; 302pp

In a recent issue of Intelligent Life, the journalist and critic Jonathan Meades deplores the ubiquity of the word ‘iconic’. Having wrestled free of its religious denotation, the word, he writes, is now ‘fuzzily approximate’. The OED definition of ‘iconic’ is, he adds, ‘no longer adequate, for this is a word whose meanings have forked and forked again in a delta formation’. Two images – of Jesus and a jar of Marmite – and an extensive survey of contemporary usage (including such bathetic juxtapositions as ‘iconic wig’ and ‘iconic wheelchair’) serve to underscore his point.

Funny and interesting though Meade’s article is, I can’t help feeling that it is predicated on some questionable assumptions. First, there is the implication that language is less precise than it used to be, that the immoderate contemporary use of ‘iconic’ is revealing of a general decline – a decline for which the growing army of ‘marginally literate word-operatives’ (i.e. journalists) appears to be largely responsible. Second, and carrying on from this, one gets the sense that this decline is part of a wider spiritual decline, that emotional depth and moral seriousness have given way to shallowness. ‘We live in an era of incontinent celebration and exponential hyperbole’, writes Meades, before going on to enumerate some other instances of adjectival intemperance, such as the use of ‘legendary’ to describe any rock band that re-forms in ‘wizened middle age’.

If these four books have one thing in common it’s that they all, in very different ways, challenge the notion that people’s lives are less ‘meaningful’ than they used to be. Their authors would no doubt agree with Meades that religious values are in decline, but all, I think, would also contend that meaning, far from declining with them, has relocated to other spheres. In fact, Meades himself makes a similar point when he writes, ‘If churches can’t provide appropriate gods, we must make our own.’ But the pejorative note is unmistakable and it is this – this note of disapproval – with which these books implicitly take issue. Yes, we may be less religious. But the notion that we are increasingly shallow as a consequence is itself journalistic hyperbole.

In his absorbing book, A History of Charisma, John Potts explores another word that has moved from the religious to the secular sphere. As employed by Paul in his New Testament writings, ‘charisma’ means broadly ‘the gift of God’s grace’. Charisma implied miraculous powers such as prophecy, healing and speaking in tongues. Absent from Paul’s definition of charisma was any implication of leadership or authority; the gift of charisma was to be used for the community rather than for personal prestige. By community, Paul meant the Christian community, every member of which, writes Potts, ‘was held to possess a charisma’. Indeed, it was in order to distinguish the Christian community from its religious ‘competitors’ that Paul originally employed the term. ‘The concept of charisma,’ Potts suggests, secured for these miraculous powers ‘a specifically Christian explanation.’

Paul’s vision of the early Christian church as a charismatic community was formulated against a background of widespread belief in prophets and magicians. As the church began to grow, however, the ‘significance of the supernatural gifts described by Paul was marginalised’. The official church preferred to invest its ministers with spiritual power; indeed, it began to regard ‘charismatics’ as radical and idealistic, a challenge to the church’s authority. By around the middle of the third century, suggests Potts, the concept of charisma had largely disappeared.

It was not until the twentieth century that the concept burst back into popular consciousness, thanks to the sociologist Max Weber. In Economy and Society, published posthumously in 1922, Weber put forward a tripartite taxonomy of ‘legitimate domination’ in which ‘charismatic authority’ is identified as a countervailing force to bureaucracy and rationalisation. Channelling Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘overman’, Weber effectively redefined charisma as a broadly secular phenomenon. He also moved the concept away from the Pauline emphasis on community. For Weber, charisma was a quality of leadership in the political and religious spheres.

Today, of course, the term ‘charismatic’ is pressed into service in all manner of contexts. Potts, however, does not regard this as evidence of increasing triviality. Charting the rise of the Hollywood ‘celebrity’ in the first half of the twentieth century, Potts suggests that the concept of charisma has survived as a way of attempting to distinguish authenticity from artificiality. (Not all celebrities have charisma; indeed, it is often conspicuous by its absence.) Easy to identify but difficult to define, ‘charisma’ implies some ineffable quality, some irreducible spirit or essence. In short, a little of Paul’s definition is retained in the modern concept of charisma, though our sense of charisma as a personal quality owes more to Weber’s definition.

It is impossible, in such a short space, to do justice to the subtlety of Potts’s dissertation. Suffice it to say, it is brilliantly argued and, though deeply scholarly, fully accessible to the general reader. Not even academics, however, can avoid the pitfalls of fashionable usage. ‘In the post-Kennedy world,’ Potts writes at one point, ‘Clinton became an iconic figure and reference point for political charisma.’ Jonathan Meades would not like that.

In his peculiar The Peculiar Life of Sundays, Stephen Miller explores another concept that has, depending on your point of view, either suffered or benefited from secularisation: Sunday, or the Christian Sabbath. Once a day for religious contemplation, it is now more widely regarded as a break – as a holiday rather than a holy day. Like the concept of charisma, however, Sunday retains a sort of spiritual charge. Whether you’re a practising Christian or an atheist, or fall, as it were, between the pews, Sunday feels like a special day.

While the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity hastened the decline of Pauline charisma, it heralded the birth of the traditional Sunday. In the fourth century AD, Constantine decreed that Sunday should be a day of rest, though he refrained from calling it the Lord’s Day, for fear of antagonising his sun-worshiping subjects (the Latin name for Sunday is dies solis: literally, ‘day of the sun’). Not until the fifth century AD did Augustine attempt to Christianise Sunday while also seeking to persuade practising Christians that Sunday should replace Saturday as the Sabbath Day. Augustine also expressed concern that Sunday had become a day of diversions. This theme was taken up by Caesarius, Bishop of Arles, one hundred years later. His solution – not especially subtle – was to lock his congregation into his church.

Jumping forward to Elizabethan England, Miller shows how Sunday observance sat at the centre of religious disputes between radical Protestants and Anglicans. By the eighteenth century, Miller suggests, a sort of romantic primitivism had come to challenge traditional Sabbatarianism, with figures such as the poet Thomas Gray suggesting that God was more likely to be found on a mountaintop than in a fusty old church. But the eighteenth century also saw the rise of Christian evangelism and with it a renewed interest in Sunday observance.

This conflict between romanticism and evangelism continued throughout the nineteenth century. As Christian societies and Sunday schools spread the Sabbatarian word, others began to articulate a more ‘aesthetic’ conception of Sunday. John Ruskin, whose parents were evangelicals, was exemplary in this regard, suggesting that the appreciation of art was of greater spiritual benefit than listening to preachers and dreary hymns. Of the American writers that Miller looks at, Ralph Waldo Emerson is particularly interesting. A man whose prominence coincided with a spike in evangelical activity, Emerson favoured nature over religion. Like Henry David Thoreau (a self-declared pagan), he talked a great deal about the sun. ‘I love the picturesque glitter of a summer’s morning landscape’, he wrote; ‘It kindles this burning admiration of nature and enthusiasm of mind.’

Though Miller’s largely literary approach is, for the most part, beneficial, by the end of the book it has ceased to pay dividends. Close readings of poems by Wallace Stevens and Robert Lowell, though interesting, do little to advance the book’s thesis, which founders on some generalities about the spiritual nature of American life (‘Most Americans’, according to Miller, ‘subscribe to Emerson’s gospel of enthusiasm’). I also had a sneaking sense that Miller was pushing a secret agenda, attempting to pass off opinion as fact. Can it really be the case, as Miller asserts, that ‘no major American writer has been a secularist’? Robert Frost, who declared himself a secularist, is dragged back into the fold by Miller on account of the ‘religious feeling’ in his poems. This strikes me as intellectually slippery.

There is a significant thematic overlap between Miller’s book and Benet Davetian’s Civility: A Cultural History. For the Christian societies that sprung up around England at the height of the evangelical revival were not exclusively concerned with the Sabbath but sought to promote good manners as well. Thus, the philanthropist Hannah More, born in 1745, emerges as an important figure in both books. For her, good behaviour and Sunday observance were different sides of the same Christian coin.

Both of the puffs on the back of this book describe it as a ‘tour de force’. Unfortunately, at over six hundred pages, it feels more like the tour de France. To be fair, civility is a massive subject and Davetian has 800 years to cover, and three nations in which to cover them (England, France and the United States). Still, his rather clinical prose does nothing to make the journey any happier. To take one example from his introduction: ‘Thus, I will be arguing that the manner in which trust, distrust, pride, and embarrassment/shame are managed are the ultimate measures of a culture’s civility ethos and an important variable in the construction of a locally and cross-culturally valid theory of contemporary civility.’ Note how the ostensible precision of this sentence is unsupported by the fact that ‘the manner’ and its verb (the second ‘are’) don’t agree. Still, this is a book on civility, so perhaps they can agree to disagree.

Davetian defines civility as ‘the extent to which citizens of a given culture speak and act in ways that demonstrate a caring for the welfare of others as well as the welfare of the culture they share in common’. However, he also demonstrates how the early medieval ‘courtesy writings’ promoted a system of deference and not ‘a philosophy of generalised kindness’. Their role was largely to inhibit violence. Not until the modern state successfully monopolised violence did mutual consideration emerge as a factor in the discourse of civility.

Things began to change radically in the Renaissance. As people began to free themselves from a medieval theology predicated on self-denial, the perception of civil behaviour was transformed. The medieval conception of modesty was, argues Davetian, liberalised, with the result that individual style ‘emerged as a valued part of personality’. Similarly, virtue no longer implied adherence to a set of social rituals but an inner, individual quality. By the mid sixteenth century, courtesy writers had begun to talk about public conduct rather than proper behaviour at court. The concept of public civility was born.

The split between Protestant and Catholic Christianity is, argues Davetian, a decisive event in the evolution of western civility. ‘In the Protestant communities,’ Davetian writes, ‘civility now acquired a religious function; to regulate the civic relationships of men and women so that the community might appear better in the eyes of a demanding God unwilling to provide easy assurances of salvation.’ The removal of the confessional led to a kind of ‘mutual surveillance’ and a graver ‘interactive style’.

Davetian’s initial historical survey of the development of western civility concludes with the Enlightenment and the emergence of the modern idea of rights. From here, the narrative splits into three as Davetian embarks on a comparative study of England, France and the United States. Of these, I found England the most interesting case. Davetian shows how the English system – ‘a constitutional monarchy tempered by an active parliament’ – had a considerable influence on English civility, as indeed did the Anglican Church and the networks of credit established by merchants. His analysis of the nineteenth century and the rise of evangelical Christianity also makes for absorbing reading. I was particularly interested to read of the conflict between conduct writers and etiquette writers – of how the latter were sometimes suspected by the former of favouring manners over morality and thereby encouraging corruption and hypocrisy.

Nevertheless, there is a massive problem with Davetian’s analysis of England. He neglects to mention the Civil War. Since a civil war can be usefully defined as a time in which normal civility is suspended to the point of out-and-out hostility, this strikes me as eccentric at best. That the Civil War is inextricably linked to two major elements in Davetian’s thesis – the rise of radical Protestantism and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 – makes its exclusion even more bewildering. I can’t help feeling that Davetian has got rather carried away with the idea that the British would rather have a cuppa than a coup and neglected the facts that don’t suit his thesis.

It was their puritanical legacy, of course, that led the Victorians to worry inordinately about the ‘paradox of moral propriety living side by side with ornamental splendour’. This moral anxiety has survived into our own time. Clive Hamilton, Oliver James and other commentators insist that materialism is bad for the soul, that ‘affluenza’ is to the spirit what swine flu is to the constitution. I’ve never particularly liked this view and if one thing can be said for Daniel Miller’s The Comfort of Things it’s that it seeks to challenge it. That’s all that can be said for the book, however, for it is, in all other respects, preposterous.

The book is a series of about thirty portraits of people all living in the same street in London. Miller’s aim is to study the ways in which people express themselves through possessions. Challenging the Hamiltonian view, Miller suggests that spiritual maturity is in fact closely linked to material possessions. The closer our relationship with objects, he posits, the better our relationships with the people around us.

The book is very clumsily written, but the gushing, self-indulgent style (this in a book purporting to be a work of social anthropology) is as nothing to the staggering impertinence of its author. Take the unfortunate George, for example. ‘George’, writes Miller, ‘is more than just a royalist. One could imagine the appeal for him of a movement such as fascism …’ George, I should add, says nothing to invite or indeed to merit this observation. But George is a lonely, loveless man with very few material possessions. As such, he is grist to the Miller mill.

It is here, perhaps, that we begin to glimpse an alternative danger to the one represented by Meades in his article in Intelligent Life: not a reflexive disillusion with the present but an over-exuberant acceptance of it. What do you imagine is being described by Miller in the following phrase: ‘the aesthetic totalisation of her existence’? A photograph? A painting? A family heirloom? Nope. A McDonalds Happy Meal. Yes, modern life is meaningful, but surely not that meaningful.

Toy Story: The Tin Drum at Fifty (The Weekend Australian, December 2009)

Towards the end of Book One of The Tin Drum, Günter Grass’s great first novel, we are told of the fate of Musician Meyn, who, despite his ‘conspicuous bravery on the night of 8 November’ (Kristallnacht), has been expelled from Hitler’s Brownshirts on account of his having beaten some cats. ‘For inhuman cruelty to animals’, we are told, ‘he was stricken from the membership list. It was not until a year later that he gained admittance to the Home Guard, which was later incorporated in the Waffen SS.’

Thus does the German author lay bare the moral perversity at the heart of Nazism, an ideology that condemns a man for taking a poker to a sackful of cats and congratulates him for torching a synagogue. But this passage, which occurs at a time in the book when the Second World War is fast approaching and is couched in an incongruous fairy-tale past tense that seems to announce the coming catastrophe, is also interesting for another reason. For in 2006 Grass dropped a bombshell. In an interview with a German newspaper about his forthcoming memoir Peeling the Onion, he revealed that in 1944 he too had served in the military wing of the organisation responsible for supervising the extermination of the Jews. He too had served in the Waffen SS.

Though Grass saw very little fighting, his hypocrisy was manifest. For years, he had fairly revelled in the role of Conscience of a Generation, and here he was, at the age of seventy-eight, confessing his part, however small, in the greatest crime of the twentieth century. Grass, who had frequently criticised Germany for its moral failure to face up to its past, had evidently failed to face up to his own.

Despite this fact – and, I shall argue, to a large degree because of it – The Tin Drum remains a magnificent achievement. Like Ulysses and Moby-Dick, it is huge and hugely difficult, and yet one feels, as one does with those novels, that both the hugeness and the difficulty are essential to the work, integral to the aesthetic experience. A gargantuan gothic structure of a novel, complete with puking gargoyles, it is prolix and yet it is also perfect.

Set largely in Langfuhr, a borough of Danzig, it is the story of Oskar Matzerath, a sardonic, misanthropic cripple with the power to shatter glass with his voice and to summon up the past with the aid of a tin drum, on which he plays relentlessly. Oskar has the physical stature of a child, having stunted his growth at the age of three by throwing himself down some cellar steps. However, he is also highly intelligent, describing himself as ‘one of those clairaudient infants whose mental development is completed at birth’. Part seasoned adult, part little drummer boy, Oskar is thus a strange combination of innocence and experience. He is peculiarly alive to ugliness, to the exact constitution of a pool of vomit, to armpit hair and unpleasant smells. Above all, he is an oblique witness to history and, in various subtle ways, its conduit and representative. In one famous chapter, he climbs to the top of the Stockturm Tower in the heart of Danzig and lets out a scream that ‘unglasses’ the Stadt-Theatre, an act that seems to prophesy the coming saturnalia of Kristallnacht.

When the novel opens, Oskar is in his thirties and an inmate of a mental hospital. From here, he describes the hypocrisy-ridden, lower-middle-class milieu into which he was born in 1924. His mother, Agnes, is a Kashubian Pole. She marries Alfred Matzerath, a self-important German grocer, but pursues an affair with her cousin, Jan Bronski. When his mother dies from a bizarre eating binge, Oskar becomes increasingly isolated. Jan Bronski, his uncle, is executed after the siege of the Danzig Post Office, while Matzerath (described as ‘my putative father’) marries Maria, Oskar’s first love. Maria gives birth to a son, Kurt, whom Oskar firmly believes is his own. However, the aggressive Kurt rejects him and Oskar joins a troupe of dwarves performing to German soldiers on the front line. Later, he falls in with a criminal gang, the Dusters, of which he becomes the leader. At the end of the war, Matzerath dies attempting to swallow his Nazi pin and Oskar resolves to support ‘his’ family. Willing himself to grow again and dispensing with his drum, he develops a hump. In Düsseldorf, he becomes a stone mason’s apprentice, an artist’s model and celebrated jazz drummer. He falls in love with a nurse, Dorothea, of whose murder he is eventually accused.

The symbolism of the book is exceptionally rich, as one set of images – of whiteness, for example: a freshly whitewashed graveyard wall; a huddle of frantically feeding seagulls – bleeds, so to say, into another set of images: the red and white of Poland’s flag or the serrated red and white fields of the drum, with their suggestion of streaks of blood or of flames – another recurrent motif in the novel. And yet Oskar is frequently openly hostile to symbolic interpretation or analysis. Indeed, he is less an unreliable narrator than he is an antagonistic one. At one point, he invites us to find significance in the ethnic ménage of his family circumstances. Is the romantic rivalry between Alfred and Jan an allegory for the German-Polish struggle for Danzig? Oskar appears to imply that it is. In so doing, however, he rather undermines it, revealing it as mere artifice.

All this throws the central symbol of the book – the tin drum – into sharp relief. For the drum is, above all, a symbol of art. It is through his drumming that Oskar is able to recall the past in such lavish detail; the drum, in a sense, is his imagination. However, it is not an innocent instrument. Much has been made of the scene in which Oskar disrupts a Nazi rally with his drumming but this is just one of many events that Oskar contrives to sabotage. Moreover, the drum is a martial instrument; it is, so to speak, an instrument of war. (It is interesting to reflect that Adolf Hitler was described, and described himself, as ‘the drummer’.) To be sure, it is very difficult to uncouple the themes of art and destruction in The Tin Drum. When Oskar climbs the Stockturm tower and shatters the windows of the Stadt-Theatre, he describes it as the beginning of his ‘productive period’.

It seems to me that it is only in the light of Grass’s 2006 admission that we can fully appreciate the significance of this theme of the culpability of art and the artist. Grass, it appears, is glancing critically both at his art and his own guilt and at the relationship between the two. The abovementioned business with Musician Meyn – he of the cats and the Waffen-SS – was added late on in the writing process, one of a number of what John Reddick terms, in his introduction to the Everyman edition, ‘moral-political’ additions to the text. (Meyn plays the trumpet, another martial instrument.) In the thrilling final pages of the book, Oskar is arrested in the very Paris street – Rue d’Italie – where the book was written. He is thirty, as was Grass when he finished the manuscript.

In a piece published in 1974, Grass talks of how his magnum opus ‘abandoned’ him when he finished it in a way that no other book has done since. He adds, ‘I’m still not sufficiently prepared to examine my conditions and impulses from that time; I’m almost afraid of finding myself out.’ Reading The Tin Drum in 2009, fifty years after its first publication and three years after Grass’s confession of complicity in the Nazi war effort, it seems to me increasingly clear that personal guilt was Grass’s muse when he wrote his first and greatest novel. Little wonder that the rise of the author’s moral-political public persona coincided with the decline of his work, all of which was clearly written from a more decided moral standpoint.

I will always think of Grass as a hypocrite, but his failings as a man were the making of his art, and for his art he deserves to keep his laurels. For while Auden was wrong when he wrote that time ‘Worships language and forgives / Everyone by whom it lives’ (‘In Memory of W. B Yeats’) he was right when he wrote, in ‘The Novelist’, that the writer of fiction must ‘be subject to / Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just // Be just, among the Filthy filthy too …’ That last line especially meets the case. Steeped in the filth of history, The Tin Drum is a magnificent novel.

Shakespeare in Love? (Meanjin, December 2009)

Four hundred years ago this year, a book of poems appeared in Quarto (which is to say in a small edition about the size of a modern paperback), probably without the author’s knowledge and almost certainly without his consent. This book, which is often referred to as Q, consisted of 154 sonnets and bore an oblique dedication or inscription: TO. THE. ONLIE. BEGETTER. OF. THESE. INSUING. SONNETS. MR. W. H. ALL. HAPPINESSE. AND. THAT. ETERNITIE. PROMISED. BY. OUR. EVER-LIVING. POET. WISHETH. THE. WELL-WISHING. ADVENTURER. IN. SETTING. FORTH. This dedication is signed T. T., for Thomas Thorpe, the publisher. About the identity of Mr W. H. there has been much informed conjecture, and not a little wild speculation. About the author of the poems, however, there is very little disagreement. He, of course, is William Shakespeare. Or, as the printer prefers, SHAKE-SPEAR.

Even before one gets to the poems a number of mysteries present themselves. Who was Mr W. H.? William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke? Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton? William Harvey, Southampton’s stepfather? And what did ‘onlie begetter’ mean? Inspiration for? Procurer of? Even ‘ever-living poet’ isn’t without its difficulties, as it wasn’t customary to refer to a poet actually living as ‘ever-living’. Might it refer to Ovid, or to Horace? Many academics have built their careers on attempting to answer such questions as these – more, it seems, than have built their careers on an appreciation of the sonnets themselves. As Michael Schmidt writes in Lives of the Poets, ‘no title page in history has been more pored over’.

These preliminary mysteries are as nothing, however, to the mysteries presented by the sonnets themselves, which appear to fall into two distinct groups. Sonnets 1 to 126 are addressed to an unknown young man, the Fair Youth; sonnets 127 to 154 to a mystery woman, the Dark Lady. Both are addressed in amorous language, and both are accused, or appear to be accused, of sexual infidelity, probably, though by no means certainly, with each other. Elsewhere in the poems, Shakespeare alludes to, but does not elucidate, some scandal or controversy, and also refers to a Rival Poet, whose attempts to win the Fair Youth’s affections rouse our poet to jealous self-defense. (It’s probable that both Shakespeare and his rival, whatever ‘love’ they felt for the Youth, were also engaged in a bid for patronage.) In short, the sonnets are an emotional jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces obstinately but tantalisingly missing. Or rather, the sonnets would appear to be comprised of a number of different jigsaw puzzles. And while some pieces can be fitted together, the whole remains a stubborn conundrum. ‘There are many footprints around the cave of this mystery,’ wrote Sir Walter Raleigh in his life of Shakespeare; ‘none of them pointing in an outward direction.’

So little is known about Shakespeare’s life that the playwright is effectively anonymous, a fact that has sanctioned all manner of theories – some of them wilfully controversial – as to Shakespeare’s true identity. Naturally, then, the appeal of the sonnets is linked to their biographical content and the critic-as-sleuth is much in evidence. From A. L. Rowse’s stakhanovite unearthings in William Shakespeare and Shakespeare the Man to students thrilled by the possibility that Shakespeare was gay or at least bisexual, the explicators are thick on the ground. Little wonder that writers of fiction have also taken up the subject. In ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’, Oscar Wilde speculates on the identity of the mystery dedicatee, while Anthony Burgess, in Nothing Like the Sun (which takes its title from sonnet 130), suggests that the Dark Lady may have been African. Nor was Burgess under any illusions as to the prurient character of such investigations. As he put it in a magazine article: ‘[I]s there one person living who, given the choice between discovering a lost play of Shakespeare’s and a laundry list of Will’s, would not plump for the dirty washing every time?’

Consequently, every comma and dash of the sonnets has been subjected to scrutiny, scanned for biographical consequence. This has led to some notable follies. It takes a special kind of insensitivity to suggest, as does the assiduous editor of my New Shakespeare edition of the sonnets, that the lines,

That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang

‘may have been apt to a prematurely bald man as the Stratford bust suggests Sh. to have been’, but such statements are not unusual. (Incidentally, the recently unveiled Cobbe portrait shows Shakespeare with a handsome set of locks. But then it might not actually depict Shakespeare.)

In his own introduction to an edition of the sonnets published in 1964, W. H. Auden put the case against such biographical readings:

Probably, more nonsense has been talked and written, more intellectual and emotional energy expended in vain, on the sonnets of Shakespeare than on any other literary work in the world. Indeed, they have become the best touchstone I know for distinguishing the sheep from the goats, those, that is, who love poetry for its own sake and understand its nature, from those who only value poems either as historical documents or because they express feelings or beliefs of which the reader happens to approve.

To establish the identity of the Fair Youth or the Dark Lady or the Rival Poet, continues Auden, would be to throw no light at all on the quality or even the meaning of the sonnets. Nor would it matter particularly if Germaine Greer, say, could establish beyond doubt that some of the sonnets are addressed to Anne Hathaway. Indeed, and as Jonathan Bate suggests in his recent (and brilliant) Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare: ‘When Shakespeare’s purpose is to write about the power of art to defeat the ravages of time or the feeling of loss or rejection or disillusionment in love, the identity of the addressee is immaterial.’

Not all critics are so preoccupied. Some – Helen Vendler, Auden himself and, most notably, William Empson – have eschewed the biographical approach in favour of a technical one that treats the sonnets as individual artefacts to be criticised in isolation. The danger of this approach, perhaps, is that context will be forgotten altogether, but this is by no means inevitable. The important thing is to recognise that unless new information comes to light about the identity of W. H. then the identity of W. H. or of anyone else referred to in the sonnets is liable to remain a mystery. The sonnets themselves are all we have and, more important, all we need. Moreover, the question of who is addressed is less important, at the end of the day, than the question of who is doing the addressing, and this is a literary critical question not a biographical one. It makes no difference who the Fair Youth is. But the question of who the poet is, of what version of himself he is putting forward – that is genuinely fascinating.

It is my contention that the voice of the sonnets is the voice of a poet and not of a lover, or at least that the love expressed in the sonnets is of secondary importance in the overall scheme. In the popular imagination or consciousness, Shakespeare’s sonnets are all about love, are even in some sense symbolic of it, such that Cole Porter in ‘You’re the Tops’ compares his lover to a ‘Shakespeare sonnet’. (Then again, he also compares her to Mickey Mouse and a Bendel Bonnet.) But this is something of a simplification. As has been noted, it is very likely that Shakespeare was involved in a bid for patronage. As Bate suggests in Soul of the Age, such bids were apt to conflate or collapse the language of courtship and the language of courtiership. Love poems, in other words, were very often coded bids for patronage or preferment. (Certainly Shakespeare had money on his mind: financial language peppers the sonnets, such that one imagines the poet unable to tear his eyes from the accounts.) Thus, whatever Shakespeare felt or didn’t feel for this golden-haired boy, the strong possibility that cash was a factor in his motivation should be borne in mind. That this lends a certain tension to the sonnets will, I think, be readily admitted, as indeed will the proposition that this poetic ‘conflict of interest’ may account for the peculiar sense of a double focus in many of the poems, as if the poet were trying to reconcile the need for flattery with his own integrity.

The Fair Youth himself is never described physically, a fact that appears to have caused some friction between the poet and his would-be patron, who seems as a consequence to have transferred his attentions and indeed affections to the Rival Poet. Of course, this adds a layer of mystery to the mystery-enshrouded publication. But as well as adding a layer of mystery, it also lends to the sonnet sequence a certain literary sophistication. For the strong predilection amongst sonneteers was for precisely the kind of physical inventory – ‘your eyes are like sapphires, your lips are like rubies, your teeth are like pearls etc. etc.’ – of which our poet refuses to partake. Nor does Shakespeare merely refuse to rehearse the well-worn sonnet conventions. He is also concerned to challenge them. Sonnet 130, for example, begins, ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun / Coral is far more red, than her lips red, / If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun: / If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head …’ Furthermore, and as Bate suggests, this critique of the conventions associated with the sonnet was not confined to Shakespeare’s poetry. It appears to inform his drama, too. In Twelfth Night, for example, Olivia enumerates her own corporeal attributes in what is perhaps a sarcastic allusion to the perfunctoriness of the conventional sonnet (‘item, two lips, indifferent red’). Evidently, Shakespeare was not content merely to go through the poetic motions.

In the Fair Youth sonnets in particular, the love expressed will often strike one as artificial or insincere. Of course, we must tread carefully here: the sonnets are over four centuries old and it may be that we are ill-equipped to understand the conventions attendant on poetry written by one man for another. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is something bloodless about the Fair Youth poems. For one thing, one cannot discern in these sonnets anything resembling sexual desire. Only in some of the poems to the Dark Lady does one feel the hot breath of authentic passion, as in the sonnet beginning ‘Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ (note, for example, the panting assonance of ‘Had, having, and in quest, to have extreme’). Again, it may be a question of convention. But it may also be that genuine feelings were experienced only fitfully. At the very least, one is forced to admit that much of the praise in the sonnets is perfunctory. There are times, indeed, when Shakespeare sounds like an eighteenth-century Poet Laureate: ‘There lives more life in one of your fair eyes, / Than both your poets can in praise devise.’

It’s possible that Shakespeare found himself trapped by the technical aspects of the English sonnet. If so, he would not be the only one. For whereas the Petrarchan sonnet, which divides very naturally into octave and sestet and has a certain ‘rightness’ to it (such that Don Paterson, in his introduction to 101 Sonnets: From Shakespeare to Heaney, notes its close mathematical correspondence to the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, which recur with conspicuous regularity throughout the natural and non-natural worlds), is an incomparable tool for conveying emotion, the English sonnet – three quatrains and a couplet – tends to lend itself to more abstract thought. Indeed, in the hands of inferior poets, the English sonnet tends to become a three-pronged argument and a concluding epigram. Consequently, it can sometimes seem rather glib. As Bate puts it in Soul of the Age: ‘The very form offered an incentive to multiplication and digression that encouraged sonnets to be expressions of their authors’ wit and ingenuity as much as – perhaps more than – outpourings of their real feelings.’

So does the English or ‘Shakespearean’ sonnet militate against the expression of emotion? No, not necessarily. For one thing the poet can still divide his poem into octave and sestet, retaining the traditional ‘volta’ – or change of mood – at about line nine. Here, for example, is Shakespeare himself in one of his most famous sonnets. There is nothing pat, or trite, about this:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time tho grow’st,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Note how the concluding couplet is not an epigrammatic summary of everything that has gone before but an additional salvo of thought and feeling. Clearly, Shakespeare could, when inspired, use the English sonnet form to excellent and emotional effect. But the point is very few of the sonnets achieve this level of excellence. What, then, is the essential difference between the best and the weakest sonnets and what does this tell us about Shakespeare’s inspiration?

Never less than technically brilliant, it is the technical brilliance of the sonnets that has made them slightly suspect to some ears. Syntactically dense, semantically playful, many are little more than exercises – ingenious conceits ingeniously set out but devoid of genuine sentiment. ‘They seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally – in the intensity of working out conceits’, wrote Keats, just one of a number of Romantic poets to have noticed a lack of emotion in the sonnets, most particularly in those sonnets – those expressing love – in which emotion is most insisted upon. Conversely, it is precisely those sonnets that tackle subjects other than love, or that tackle the subject of love more generally, that seem to me the most successful from the point of view of authentic emotion. The principal subjects are mortality and posterity, and mortality as it relates to posterity, which is to say the power of art to overcome our inexorable decay.

The importance of this theme is demonstrated by the fact that, in the opening sonnets, Shakespeare’s attempts to convince the Fair Youth to settle down and conceive a son – in order, so he says, that succeeding generations may partake of his preternatural beauty – slowly give way to the theme of poetry’s own capacity to record that beauty. Progeny and poetry are linked explicitly, as in the lines, ‘But wherefore do not you a mightier way / Make war upon this bloody tyrant, Time? / And fortify your self in your decay / With means more blessed than my barren rhyme?’ (My italics.) In the next sonnet (17), Shakespeare reiterates: ‘But were some child of yours alive that time, / You should live twice, in it and in my rhyme.’ In sonnet 11, sexual reproduction is linked to the paraphernalia of writing. Nature, writes Shakespeare, ‘carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby, / Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.’ Just as a man conceives a son who carries his likeness into the future, so the poet, in writing a poem, bestows upon that poem’s subject a degree of immortality. And not only upon the poem’s subject but also upon the poem’s creator, which is to say upon himself. Indeed, this latter point is crucial to an understanding of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which can be read as the cri de coeur of a poet suddenly and anxiously alive to his significance as a literary artist.

In one sense, all art is an attempt to freeze time, to render a likeness so that it may be revisited or record an emotion so that it may be re-experienced. But of poetry this is especially true, or rather it is true in a special way. The reason for this has to do with its origins. Poetry affords illiterate societies a way of recording information. Rhyme and metre are aids to memory. Perhaps it is only natural, then, that the theme of immortality, and of poetry’s ability to confer immortality, should come up so often in the poetry of the great. From Anonymous to Auden, the notion that poetry represents a sort of stay against eternity is commonly encountered as a theme in its own right.

So too with Shakespeare – the Shakespeare of the sonnets. The sonnets, indeed, are crammed with references to the enduring power – the permanence – of poetry. To take a few examples at random: sonnet 63 concludes with the lines, ‘His beauty shall in these black lines be seen, / And they shall live, and he in them still green’, while sonnet 100 contains the petition, ‘Return forgetful Muse, and straight redeem, / In gentle numbers time so idly spent’. These lines are from sonnet 55:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.

And here, in full, is sonnet 60:

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end,
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,
Crookéd eclipses ’gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave, doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.
And yet to times in hope, my verse shall stand
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.

That this sonnet is one of the best in the sequence and also one of the most impersonal is, in my view, no coincidence. Not until the final line does the Youth himself afford a mention. Here, indeed, we find the poet looking past his immediate object to more general themes of death and decay. That this is accompanied by an increase in quality seems to suggest that it is those themes and not the Youth that interests the poet – that the poet experiences the wider focus as something of a liberation. The same may be said of the sequence as a whole. The less personalised the sonnet the better it is.

One clue as to Shakespeare’s state of mind when composing his 154 sonnets is the way he refers, as it were, to his day job. The sonnets are peppered with disparaging references to drama and to makeup in particular, which Shakespeare uses as a metaphor for the kind of sickly art he despises. In sonnet 110, he writes: ‘Alas ’tis true, I have gone here and there, / And made myself a motley to the view’ – a reference to his appearances on stage. Why he took such a low view of drama cannot be known and so shouldn’t detain us. But that Shakespeare did take such a view is consistent with his deepening interest in non-dramatic poetry. Was Shakespeare thinking of his own posterity? And had such thoughts attached themselves to the sonnets written to his would-be patron? As noted earlier, the sonnets dealing with the theme of poetry’s permanence are more successful when set in the context of death and decay and the passing of time; those that attempt to link the theme to the Fair Youth’s immortality are, in general, less successful. It is likely that many of the sonnets were written in the early seventeenth century. Shakespeare, then, was no longer a young man. That questions of posterity and questions of age should be linked in his mind is hardly surprising. Nor is it surprising in the circumstances to find Shakespeare wrestling with the age-old question of poetry’s time-defeating qualities. It is, as Anthony Burgess suggests, ‘the common stock of all poets – the opposition of the moving river to the static stone, the agony of transience, the need to build something on which to rejoice’.
I don’t say Shakespeare wasn’t in love, but I don’t think the 126 sonnets addressed to the Fair Youth convince us that he was so. Bate suggests that Shakespeare’s sonnets may have appealed to a courtly milieu in which bisexuality was newly fashionable. Certainly he makes a convincing case. But in the end all any critic can do – all any reader of poetry can do – is listen for the note of authenticity, is to cast his being towards the poem and wait for the divine afflatus, which comes in suddenly, like a sea breeze. When I do this with Shakespeare’s sonnets, I hear, not a lover’s voice but a poet’s – concerned, above all, for the survival of his craft – that fragile, storm-tossed ‘saucy bark’ set free on an ocean of inspiration. For so it must have seemed to him, when the name of Shakespeare was known about town as that of a reasonably respectable playwright but hadn’t yet contracted its aura of artistic infallibility and could still be misspelled by professional printers. Now we are more likely to talk of the ‘proud sail’ of Shakespeare’s verse, as Shakespeare himself describes the efforts of the Rival Poet to woo the Fair Youth. But Shakespeare never had any guarantee that his name would be remembered to history. Or, indeed, that four hundred years on academics would still be mining his sonnets for veiled references to premature hair-loss.

Review of Timothy Garton Ash's Facts Are Subversive (Sydney Morning Herald, October 2009)

Timothy Garton Ash
Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name
Atlantic Books; $34.95; 441pp

C. P. Scott’s celebrated remark ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred’ lives on in the newspaper of which he was the editor. Or rather, one half of the remark lives on, in the form of the Guardian’s Comment is Free website. The journalist Timothy Garton Ash, himself a contributor to Comment is Free, is worried about the other half, especially in the light of the enormous challenges currently facing the newspaper industry. ‘In the news business today,’ he writes sardonically in his outstanding collection Facts are Subversive, ‘comment is free, but facts are expensive.’

His title thus has a double function. First, it serves to remind the reader of the forgotten half of Scott’s dictum. Second, it seeks to persuade that reader of why the forgotten half is important. Facts are sacred because they are subversive – subversive, as Garton Ash writes in his preface, ‘of the claims made by democratically elected leaders as well as dictators, by biographers and autobiographers, spies and heroes, torturers and post-modernists’. They are also, one hopes, subversive of indifference, though that firewall can be hard to breach. When, early in 2006, Garton Ash implored the readers of Comment is Free to consider Belarus, then in the middle of a sham election in which President Lukashenko held all the cards, one reader, ‘thedacs’, responded thus: ‘Nah, still don’t give a toss …’ When comments are free, they are very often cheap.

Containing pieces originally published in Prospect, the New York Review of Books and various other publications, Facts are Subversive is the substantial opus of someone who most certainly does give a toss. Garton Ash is a journalistic gumshoe of seemingly inexhaustible energies, touching down in Serbia (there to witness the fall of Milosevic), Ukraine (to witness the Orange Revolution), Burma (to witness totalitarianism’s survival into the twenty-first century) and many other political hotspots. Determined to put events into context, his journalism is almost always augmented with wide-ranging and apparently impeccable scholarship (his is, he writes, a ‘mongrel craft’). He is also a political man of letters of a kind not much in evidence these days. The book contains a number of pieces on writers who exist at what the literary critic Lionel Trilling called ‘the bloody crossroads’ – the point at which literature and politics meet.

It so happens that Trilling used that phrase in an essay on George Orwell and ‘the politics of truth’ and Garton Ash is a devotee of ‘the Saint George of English political writing’. Orwell is everywhere in Facts are Subversive. More precisely, ‘Orwellian’ is everywhere, not just as an adjective to describe the ways in which the powerful tend to manipulate the truth but also as an adjective denoting the kind of journalist that Garton Ash aspires to be. For Orwell it was who, in his own words, had ‘a power of facing unpleasant facts’ and the facts that Garton Ash must face, or ends up facing, are often unpleasant. He also has Orwell’s ear for language. Here he is at his brilliant best, in a review of Stefan Collini’s book about intellectuals, Absent Minds:

Intellectuals begin at Calais. ‘British intellectual’ is an oxymoron, like ‘military intelligence’. The river of colloquial English carries a heavy silt of mildly pejorative or satirical epithets: egghead, boffin, highbrow, bluestocking, know-all, telly don, media don, chattering classes, too clever by half. The qualifier ‘so-called’ travels with the word ‘intellectual’ like a bodyguard. The inverted commas of irony are never far away.

Is Garton Ash an intellectual? He certainly is, but he’s also a journalist – one for whom the second appellation is never in danger of being overshadowed by the first. As ‘dead tree’ journalism continues to suffer and C. P. Scott slowly turns in his grave, one writer at least holds firm to the view that reporter journalism is the first draft of history.