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| Edna O'Brien |
The Danger Zone
Each year, the American Academy of Arts and Letters invites a distinguished speaker to deliver the Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield Foundation Address, on some aspect of arts and letters. This year, on May 15th, Edna O’Brien gave the Blashfield Address. O’Brien is the author of fifteen novels and five collections of short stories. She is a Foreign Honorary Member of the Academy and a native of Ireland, where some of her books have been banned because of their sexual candor. O’Brien has published more than forty works of fiction in The New Yorker, the first in 1962, and the most recent this year. Her latest novel, “In the Forest,” has been described as an “unholy myth” and “a tour de force of finely restrained fury.”
Edna O’brien: Hello. Yes, I’m told it’s a great privilege to do this lecture. I won’t speak of the pleasure factor, because, well, you can tell why—Ian McKellen gave me advice about the microphone, which I’ve forgotten, something about the necessary degree of separation between me and it.
Down the years, the written word has incurred crucifixion, beheading, stoning, castration, burnings, outrage, vehemence, intemperance, and a bigotry that veers from the righteous to the superstitious. To take two tiny examples: Theodore Roosevelt described Tolstoy as “a sexual and moral pervert.” Subsequently, the Postmaster General prevented copies of “The Kreutzer Sonata” from being distributed, lest it imperil the morals of America. Stalin, the Kremlin mountaineer, who had liquidated millions, believed, in the occasional Faustian moment, that Mandelstam possessed the magical powers of a shaman. My own mother sustained such a revulsion for the written word it was as if she had read Molly Bloom in a secret incarnation and had to do atonement for it. Her constant adage to me, which is certainly open to interpretation, was “That paper never refused ink.”
Writers have been in the trenches from time beginning. Euripides, to my mind the greatest of the Greek dramatists, was driven out of Athens around 409 B.C., his crime being his unflinching depiction of the evil inherent in both God and man. Cutting across the orchestrated glorification of power and plunder, he wrote of the monumental folly of the Trojan War, supposedly fought over a bedizened, sensuous, and totally guiltless Helen of Troy. He fled to Macedonia and was devoured by the king’s hunting dogs, which is how he died. Danger comes in many guises—political, religious, sexual, psychological, and linguistic. The stymieing of thought and of ideas has always had precedence in every epoch. Followers of Confucius were burnt alive, the emperor Tiberius had those who criticized him starved to death and then crucified. The English crown, with a nicety inconsistent with much else of its conquest and rapine, solved it completely by forbidding printing except by royal license, thus creating an ethos of precensorship, which continued until 1695. Sexual censorship found its flowering, its glorious patronage, in the person of Queen Victoria and her vassals, who commenced the drive for the purification of literature. They might just have foreseen the advent and birth of the Jesuitical James Joyce, born in Dublin on February 2, 1882, a city that he left forever in his early twenties, disavowing Mother Church and Mother Ireland. Joyce, smarting under early rejections, wished that his work would glean the same wrath as Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” in short, to be so scandalous as to incur a public trial. His prayer was duly answered.
In Rome, he worked as a banker, and so impecunious was he that he had to receive his customers sitting down, because the seat of his trousers was torn. It was there that he first conceived of “Ulysses,” an epic in which, as he told his brother, he would put a bucket down into his own soul’s sexual department and draw up as well the muddied waters of Arthur Griffith, leader of Sinn Féin, Ibsen, St. Aloysius, Shelley, Renan—in short, the bodily fervor that runs amok in one and all. He was searching, as he put it, for fermented ink to whet his rage, in the same way as absinthe sizzled his young brain. He began “Ulysses” in Trieste in 1915, and, with the help of Ezra Pound, chapters began to appear in magazines, including The Little Review, here in New York. The two editors, Miss Heap and Miss Anderson, said they were moved, utterly, by the piercing spirit of Joyce’s words. Well, the piercing spirit turned traitor. Doubts began to simmer. And even Miss Harriet Weaver, his patron, had her misgivings. Whereas Emma Bovary’s longings were beautiful, lofty, and transporting, Joyce dismantled the human body, male and female, with the prodigality of a poet, the smut of a pornographer, and the objectivity of a mortician. When an episode from “Nausicaa,” of “Ulysses,” appeared in The Little Review, all issues were confiscated and burnt. A Mr. John Sumner, secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, had lodged a formal complaint, and Miss Anderson, the benighted editor, was summoned to a court in Greenwich Village before three judges, some doyens of culture, and intrigued New Yorkers. The chapter centers on Gerty MacDowell, a model of Catholic girlhood, who has gone to the seaside for a bit of relaxation. She who crimsoned at rude words finds herself yielding to the lascivious glances of a mysterious stranger, none other than Leopold Bloom. And while she swings her legs in and out and watches some fireworks, she gives the gentleman a good view of her nainsook knickers, imagines him to be in deep mourning, missing perhaps a wife, while Bloom, on the point of emission, reverts to his old drollery, at it again. Joyce was in no doubt about the flagrancy of this chapter. He described it as namby-pamby, jammy, marmeladey, drawersy style, with the effects of incense, Mariolatry, masturbation, stewed cockles, chitchat, and circumlocutions. So, as the offending passages were about to be read out in the court, one of the judges asked if Miss Anderson could be removed as an act of propriety, forgetting that she must have read it, being the editor. The other two judges found it so incomprehensible they had to have a week’s leave to collect their faculties. At the summing-up, the prosecuting attorney became so apoplectic that John Quinn, advocate and lawyer, pointed out as clear evidence that “Ulysses” did not corrupt or fill people with sexual urges as did the mannequins in the windows of Fifth Avenue that it made people implode with anger. The ploy didn’t work. The editors were fined, fifty dollars each, and forbidden to publish any more installments of “Ulysses.” The book itself did not reach this country for thirteen years.
Now we move on to May, 1957. A police officer—no, two police officers—in San Francisco went into the City Lights bookshop and, for seventy-five cents, purchased a copy of “Howl and Other Poems,” by Allen Ginsberg. They then obtained a warrant for Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s arrest, who was charged with violation of Section 311, for willfully and lewdly selling the book. That trial, too, had its moments of hilarity. One phrase that Joyce would surely have appropriated was “Seek filth, and ye shall find it.” At issue was whether “Howl,” with its discolored words and hallucinatory thinking, excited prurient interest. Allen Ginsberg’s odyssey of subways, Benzedrine, spilt brains, bare buttocks, and easy lays proved grist to the mill of its defenders, who argued that this nightmare world reflected this author’s rage and loneliness, and was figurative of America itself on the verge of breakdown. The judge, the Honorable Clayton W. Horn—Joyce would have also relished that—quoted Thomas Jefferson and concluded that the poem did not present a danger to society, and even had some redeeming social importance. Thomas Pynchon wrote, some years later, that the effect of that group of writers, which included Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, O’Hara, Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, was exciting and liberating, and strangely positive. And it was. But I find their work audacious rather than dangerous. They were self-created Buddhas who spat forth their mantras, Ginsberg himself praising writing for its improvisation, far-outness, and bop. In their self-absorption, their vagabond existences, and their glorification of opiate-induced works, they conferred on themselves a prestige, an exoticness, and were lucky to live in a society that itself was bursting out of puritan bondage. But real danger, in any art, is usually born in solitary. Samuel Beckett writing of Jack Yeats once said, “The artist who stakes his being comes from nowhere, has no kith.” The twentieth century has a long, salutary, shocking catalogue of brotherless, sisterless writers, men and women who for an integrity of word and thought have been incarcerated, silenced, or never even heard of at all.
Mandelstam put it this way. He said, “There are two kinds of world literature, that with permission and that without permission.” The first he depicted as functionaries who from a state of animal fear tap out the given, the appropriate, the predictable, and the accepted. The second were those who, as he said, “took language as if it was stolen air.” I want to read part of the poem that caused his downfall.
“We live, but we do not feel the land beneath us, / Ten steps away and our words cannot be heard, / And when there are just enough people for half a dialogue, / Then they remember the Kremlin mountaineer. / His fat fingers are slimy like slugs, / And his words are absolute, like grocers’ weights. / His cockroach whiskers are laughing, / And his boot tops shine. / . . . Decree after decree he hammers them out like horseshoes, / One in the groin for him, and the forehead for him, for him one over the eyes, one in the eyes for him. / When he has an execution it’s a special treat, / And the Ossetian chest swells.”
The story is well known. Mandelstam recited his epigram, as he called it, to a small group of friends, and it was reported within days. Secret police in topcoats arrived in his Moscow apartment, ransacking, questioning, confiscating everything, before arresting him for sabotage against the state. He was even invited to recall poems that might have led to his arrest. So he mentioned a few, “The Wolf,” “Old Crimea,” and then he was ordered to recite the Stalin poem, which he spoke a truncated version of. But his captors knew the real thing. He and his wife were ordered to pack their few belongings and exiled to a town in the Ural Mountains. Akhmatova, who was present, handed him a boiled egg, and foresaw his fate as the banished poet, the betrayed one. Their sentence was commuted to an exile in Voronezh, in southern Russia. Life was bleak, fearful, isolated, and totally impoverished. He even asked one of his captors if perhaps he could get a job as a night watchman, begging, as he said, “alms from a shadow.” He was driven to suicide, but one jump and he was back in his mind again. Police and informers dropped in at any hour, seizing whatever poems had been written, Mandelstam snatching them back, a fistfight ensuing, great poems torn up, and Mandelstam pleading with his wife, Nadezhda, to remember what he had written, she his living lexicon. This is a fragment written during that incarceration: “These hundred carat ingots, Rome nights, / Those breasts that for young Goethe were a lure, / Let me be answerable, but not lose all of my rights, / Life still exists outside the law.” We have to ask the question—what harm lurks in those beautiful, tender lines. None. None whatsoever, only in the poisoned megalomaniacal minds of tyrants and their cohorts.
Let it not be forgotten or ignored that these barbarities existed in other dictatorships. The Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, the “blue-eyed giant,” as he was called, had his works banned in Turkey for his Communist leanings. And it seems that some military cadets were found reading these banned poems, and he was imprisoned for thirteen years. This is a fragment of one poem: “I love my country . . . I’ve swung on her plane trees, been inside her prisons. / Nothing dispells my depression / Like her songs and tobacco.” The marvel is that such lyricism, such wonder, such luminous recollections could be sustained in a barred dungeon, subscribing, I suppose, to Borges’s claim of writing being “a vague, unreasonable, but ancient quest.”
Being only human, poor Mandelstam tried ways of ingratiating himself with the authorities, and he even worked on a long ode to Stalin—long, complex, dilatory, but unable to cross the crooked chasm into adulation. His mouth, as he feared, would be twisted by lies. When, in 1937, their sentence had expired, and they were allowed back to Moscow, they believed their servitude over. They were even treated to a stay in a sanatorium. But, in one of those ghastly reversals of fate that only Kafka could have written of, the cure was cut short. More uniformed men arrived one morning, and he was arrested, dispatched to a labor camp in eastern Siberia, where he was processed as a counter-revolutionary. Stories abound of his dementia, his refusing food, his scavenging in dustbins at night. But none, none tell precisely the hour, the place, or the cause of Mandelstam’s death. His wife learned of it on account of a food parcel being returned by the post office. It was sometime in December, 1938.
And what about now. What about now. What themes do writers choose. What barriers, what mountains of untruth and misinformation, what universes of torture and terror are there to be challenged. It is a vastly different world, at once freer, zanier, and more uncomprehendingly terrifying. The serious reportage that is being done at the moment in this country and in other countries is trailblazing; men and women at the cliff face, at the war fronts, at the sieged cities, the defiled manger, dispatching bulletins at once real and visionary, everyday Armageddons. Two of the most remarkable things I read this year were by journalists. One was Dexter Filkins, in the New York Times, describing Taliban prisoners in a truck from Kunduz. A Biblical tableau of captives, rags, and filth, flies swarming around them, bodies contorted, fighting for tiny corners of space and begging for only one thing, water. They gestured to the guards, their hands going up and down toward their mouths as dipping into a well. And what did their Northern Alliance tormentor do? He gave them a meagre amount, just enough to add to their thirst. The second was a searing essay in The New Yorker, by Jeffrey Goldberg, on the plight of Kurds in northern Iraq—precise, distilled of emotion, but with a haunting resonance. This is how he tells it: A woman is taken prisoner into a big room with over two thousand people. Women, children, all starving. One pipe spitting out brackish water. As people begin to die, the Iraqi guards outside demand the bodies be passed through the window. The woman’s six-year-old son fell ill and died, and soon after his body is handed out. Soon after that, again she looked, she looked and saw the legs and hands of her own son in the mouths of the dogs in the yard. And at that moment she lost her mind.
“Fuck you, America, with your atom bomb,” was how Allen Ginsberg put it, little knowing how the arsenal would spawn and propagate into unthinkable, unknowable proportions, vast enough to undo creation. We know the potent sounding names, Trident, Cobra, Apache, and the chirpy one, like Daisy Cutter, meant, no doubt, to infuse us with a comfortable semi-amnesiac feeling of safety. In silos, in submarines, in nocturnal repose, the beast, the nuclear beasts, the golems, waiting to be triggered into life, to be given purpose, to be given soul. We cannot write about these things because technology has jettisoned our imagination, and therefore cauterized language. Then, there are the leaders themselves—East, Middle East, West—insatiate, capricious, monomaniacal, self-deluding in their lethal cocoons, gods of a sort, each with a franchise, to be the god. But they are mortal, too. And it is our duty to remind them of that, to hammer it home. Writing, whether it be poetry, drama, literature, reportage, is more essential, more important, and more reverberatory than ever. It is a touchstone, a transparent trace of man’s potential humanity and ongoingness.
I read years ago a remark by Romain Rolland, which has stayed with me. He said, “Art is a great consolation to the individual but it is useless against history.” However, since everyone here today, and hopefully many others, are on the consolation quest, both as hostages to and witnesses of history, it is not the time to be pusillanimous or silenced by our helplessness.
I would like to end with Lear’s rousing summons to Cordelia, regardless of their fallen state. “So we’ll live, / And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh / At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues / Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too, / Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out; / And take upon’s the mystery of things, / As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out, / In a wall’d prison, packs and sets of great ones / That ebb and flow by the moon.”
I thank you for your forbearance, and for everything. ♦
THE NEW YORKER
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