art

Some pages bearing bodies

1

Start at the back of the book, with the appendix. It’s six pages long, and it begins this way.

“Appendix: some lists and references

“Proof of Jewishness is found in the following sources:
. . .

“Collaborators with the ‘Storm’ group,
led by the Jew Herwarth Walden:”
. . .

Click to enlarge.

 

The book, Säuberung des Kunsttempels, is by a German artist named Wolfgang Willrich, and literary history remembers it for its attack on Gottfried Benn as the author of poems unworthy of a Nazi. I knew it only by that reputation when I mentioned it in my April 22 post “The poetics of cleansing,” http://theartpart.jonathanmorse.net/?p=82, where I translated its title as Cleansing the Temple of Art. Now that I have the book in front of me, however, I see that I should have relied for my vocabulary on the newspaper, not the dictionary. I shouldn’t have written “cleansing,” which (in contemporary American usage) is ladylike, euphemistic, and semi-literary. I should have gone directly to the language of men in leather boots and written “purging.” The phrase requires such a word from the nineteenth-century nomenclature of shit. It proposes that there be a purge to rid society of certain unhealthful men and women. Listing them, name by name, it proposes that Jews are shit and non-representational artists are shit.

 

2

The book was published in 1937 by the house of J. F. Lehmann. In the years when the international language of science was German, Lehmann was perhaps the world’s greatest medical publisher, and after it became a political publisher as well during the Third Reich it continued to publish works of Nazi science. It was the publisher, for instance, of Hans F. K. Günther’s Racial Typology of the German People, one of the most important texts in National Socialism’s educational curriculum.

Here at the back of Säuberung des Kunsttempels the book is advertised in both a long and a short edition, along with a companion Racial Typology of the Jewish People (“Blond hair and blue eyes among Jews; gestures and behavior; odor; crime”). The page is headed, “Every German must inform himself of the questions and responsibilities of racial thought,” and at its foot it completes its catalog of Günther titles with a picture book: German Heads Belonging to the Nordic Race.

“A splendid collection of truly Nordic women and men,” explains the text. After the temple of art has been purged, to see a face there in the temple will be to take it to ourselves. The visions we place in the penetralia of memory will be fully blond, and all head. Later, when we contemplate our collection, the word Geist might come into play. We might even believe it could be perceptible in the collection’s interior, a dark blur ensouled, form by single form, just behind the bright collective hair.

 

3

But no; the art of Wolfgang Willrich and J. F. Lehmann is community property. It is Leviathan: an art that forms one body.

“To artists we cry, ‘Create the exemplary!’ and to other racial comrades we cry, ‘Demand exemplary forms in which a fundamentally healthy and racially noble life and a noble, undivided mind are revealed! Turn away from the worthless doll figures and saccharine nonentity of the era before the war, and turn away before all else from the ghosts and gnomes in whose sickly and foul doctrine can be seen a great evil! Be certain: what you demand of an art whose creators hearten you by deed and command, art will give you. Be certain: its images will make you obedient and disciplined German people, your better selves pledged only to what is elevated, for the sake of your children’s children!’

. . .

“Then — a servant first of the church, after that of princes, after that of cosmopolitans and philistines, latterly of the most questionable pseudo-society — German art will at last serve the German people and its highest hope: the immortality of the noble German blood!”

 

4

August 7, 1942. Rauca, accompanied by Garfunkel, toured the institutions of the Ghetto. During the tour he noticed a pregnant woman, in her seventh month. Rauca said: “This embryo must perish. If not, it will be taken away from its mother right after birth.”

— Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary, ed. Martin Gilbert, trans. Jerzy Michalowicz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 123

 

5

The title of Willrich’s own painting can be translated, “The Guardian of Kind.”

It shows us body within body, body all the way to the center. The blank face and averted eyes communicate only with an opaque interior. When this embryo comes forth, its hair will be blond and it will speak in imperatives and (because it will be a kind, not a man or a woman) immutable Euclidean truths. In its book now, however, it has been delayed at an imperfect stage. Its paper matrix is brown, the spine of the cloth and cardboard that shield the matrix has been snapped, and the routing slip on my interlibrary copy from the University of Nebraska is annotated, “Please HANDLE WITH CARE.” That imperative, at least, I can obey. But what may I do if or when the event promised by the image goes to completion?

River, crying

On his Facebook page, the poet Alfred Corn plays himself as the educational version of Whitman’s Spontaneous Me: a Socrates who bestows questions, instant by instant, on the corpus of poetry. Professor Corn’s May 4 question, for example, was: “Can a poem indict or pronounce judgment and still be a good poem? Is, for example, Neruda’s poem about the United Fruit Company a good poem?”

Neruda aside, the answer is “Of course.” But on the Facebook page the exercise generated much excited brow-furrowing among the friends. The reason for the excitement may have been only pedagogical: Corn teaches modern literature, and in the here and now (any here and now) it’s hard to predict what is likely to last. Still, even here and now it wouldn’t have taken much effort to recall The Divine Comedy. If the words “poem,” “good,” and “judgment” have any meaning, then of course The Divine Comedy is a good poem, and of course it pronounces judgment. Indicting and pronouncing judgment are what saturnine temperaments do, and if someone with a saturnine temperament also happens to be a great artist — say, a Dante or a Swift or a Goya — then we’ll get great art that pronounces judgment.

So far, so sophomore survey. If it slipped the minds of Corn and his friends, the explanation may be no more shameful than a desire for unshadowed pleasantness during the act of reading. After all, garden statuary throughout the English-speaking world speaks to that desire by making a little verbal gesture of motto and performative self-description:

Click to enlarge.

At the beginning of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” Ezra Pound took uncompromising exception to this sunniness. For his own motto and and self-description, he took a long view of himself in the third person, declared that third person “out of step with his time,” and then explained in bibliographic detail:

His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate isles;
Observed the elegance of Circe’s hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.

That was in 1920, and as of 2011 Pound has long since fallen into step with the academic calendar. But it seems likely that sundials and their poem are still the more convincing pacers-off of time. From their garden in 2011, sundial and poem invite us to join the orbit of Facebook and become part of its unending cycle of nervous small talk and reassuring consolation.

But the inconsolable among us may still need the poetry of judgment for the different way it teaches us to look toward the sun. Consider Psalm 137, for instance.

 


“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,
yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”
From the Chludov Psalter (9th-century Byzantine).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chludov_rivers.jpg
Photoshopped for color and sharpness

 

This river doesn’t follow the law of cycles. Its course is linear, with a beginning and an ending. It begins in the wordy cry of an uttering mouth, and it comes to an end at the margin of the parchment, where the words run out and (as the idiom has it, but usually not this literally) nothing remains to be said.

 

 

Once it has reached that wordless space, the psalm pronounces its judgment. Its penultimate verse is, “O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.” In the English of the King James Version, the term “happy” has its old sense of “fortunate,” so this verse plays a grim, delphic word game with the vocabulary of gift exchange and reward. But where there are no clouds, the delphic must give up its smiling secrets. Irony evaporates from the words, they begin radiating a heat as dry as desert rock, and the psalm ends: “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.”

When he drew those words, the artist of the Chludov psalter understood that in this text the river and the man must be one. Where there is no water cycle, every loss is irrecoverable and every word spoken is a word that is gone. Where the words run, man and river are one cry. In the light by which we read the cry, every hour is sunny.

 

Poets vs. people

When we say “good,” what do we mean? The ambiguous old word caused its standard old problem once again last week.

Humanly speaking, this time the problem came out looking like a hybrid of Anthony Trollope and Newt Gingrich. At Oxford University, the Afro-Caribbean poet Derek Walcott withdrew from competition for the prestigious elective post of Professor of Poetry after at least 100 electors received an anonymous mailing which called attention to his age, 79, and documented accusations of sexual harassment brought against him in the 1980s. Walcott, a Nobel laureate, had been the candidate most favored to win; after his withdrawal, the only remaining competitors were the Englishwoman Ruth Padel and the Indian Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Padel won easily, becoming the first female Professor of Poetry in history. In her gracious victory statement, she deplored the smear campaign against Walcott.

But shortly afterward, it turned out that she’d been associated with the campaign herself. After a tenure of just nine days, she resigned.

And then, of course, it was time for one more run with the old problem. Yes, what do we mean when we say “good”? By way of locating Walcott in a historical context, the Telegraph columnist Michael Deacon raced his readers through a whole list of good (i.e., competent) poets who were not entirely good (i.e., virtuous) men, from the physically filthy W. H. Auden all the way back and down to the depraved Earl of Rochester. Here’s a link to the column.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/5330369/An-Oxford-poet-slayed-by-gossip.html

And when you put the problem the way this column does, it is as simple as the columnist makes it sound. John Henry Newman stated it this way for his mistaken students who thought they were in college to become good men: “Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another.” That was in 1852, in the lectures that would become The Idea of a University. In freshman comp in 2009, I still teach the oceanic paragraph where Newman’s idea comes rolling in, wave after wave. I teach it as an example of the periodic sentence, but I believe it too.  

Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another; good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility, nor is largeness and justness of view faith. Philosophy, however enlightened, however profound, gives no command over the passions, no influential motives, no vivifying principles. Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life;–these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a University; I am advocating, I shall illustrate and insist upon them; but still, I repeat, they are no guarantee for sanctity or even for conscientiousness, they may attach to the man of the world, to the profligate, to the heartless,–pleasant, alas, and attractive as he seems when decked out in them. Taken by themselves, they do but seem to be what they are not; they look like virtue at a distance, but they are detected by close observers, and on the long run; and hence it is that they are popularly accused of pretence and hypocrisy, not, I repeat, from their own fault, but because their professors and their admirers persist in taking them for what they are not, and are officious in arrogating for them a praise to which they have no claim. Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.

Simple enough, for all its elaborate beauty. To become smart, go to college; to become good, go to church. To learn virtue, go sit at the feet of Maya Angelou. To learn poetry, take a course from Derek Walcott. Poetry has its own claims. But how do those claims become ours? Where does language become a poem — in a poet’s isolated mind, or in the world that the poet shares with readers and their needs for language?

To make the problem manageably small, we could consider just one little world with poetry in it; say, England after World War II. England after World War II was feeling pathetic, I sometimes tell my students, and the reason Philip Larkin became the most historically significant poet of the era was that he was uniquely qualified to put pathetic feelings into accessible form. Consider, for instance, the bitter nostalgia suffusing Larkin’s masterpiece, “High Windows.” All but physically soiling the page it’s printed on, this poem is the secretion of a narrator who is a dirty old man; and (I tell my students) one reason Larkin was so good at realizing that dirty old man in words may be that in what’s called real life he was a dirty old man: a bigoted, alcoholic miser with a collection of stroke magazines.

“Always historicize,” says Fredric Jameson, writer of ugly prose. In the undergraduate poetry classroom, the dictum works. But post-Padel you can see how historicizing can also oversimplify. By linking a poem to its time-bound poet the way I did, by making a poem the subject of biography and thematic analysis and moralism, I didn’t leave myself any way to read its actual words. It’s as if I think any dirty old man could write “High Windows.” I’ve demoted Philip Larkin, a poet, to the status of Maya Angelou, a talking biography. I’ve left out the art part.

And the art part is what this blog proposes to be about.