In an earlier post, Greatness and Aristocracy, I wrote about the idea of greatness as relating, not to absolute achievement, but to achievement within a particular context, specifically, among the aristocratic. The life of Denys Finch-Hatton (left), as depicted in Sara Wheeler's Too Close to the Sun, bears out my observation.
Everyone instantly recognized Deny's greatness, insists Wheeler, even though he achieved nothing. "Denys was a great figure," according to his obituary in Eton's magazine, "not only to Masters and boys, but to the Eton population at large, human and animal." (p. 34 (emphasis added).)
Eton's magazine is not alone in promoting the absurd notion that the animal kingdom hailed Denys' greatness. In Out of Africa, Karen Blixen reported that "'[a] lion and lioness have come [to Finch-Hatton's grave], and stood, or lain, on the grave for a long time.' . . . It was fit and decorous that the lions should come to Denys's grave and make him an African monument." (p. 308.)
But, by the end of his life (short, but still 44 years), Denys had accomplished nothing. "In terms of a career -- positions held, books published, the shibboleths of success one lists in Who's Who -- there was nothing," admits Wheeler. He left behind no written record, no diary, no significant letters. Perhaps his most enduring legacy is of the abortions and miscarriages that Beryl Markham and Karen Blixen had respectively, carrying children for whom he showed no inclination to take responsibility. "It's not clear what he ever did to merit a biography of his own," adds Nicholas Best, reviewing Too Close to the Sun for The Observer.
Plainly, when people characterized Denys as "great," they were responding not to his accomplishments, but to his place in the (waning) aristocracy. "He was the Last Edwardian Male," wrote Florence Williams, in a New York Times book review.
This use of "greatness" to invoke the aristocratic is both imprecise and not, in my view, without harm. Great people are worth our time; alive or dead, kind or mean, great people have something to teach us. Whatever their personal natures, great people have contributed something to society and human existence. Greatness, despite the costs, ought to be encouraged.
Aristocrats, on the other hand, are people who have convinced themselves and the rest of the population that they have an entitlement to wealth, based on their cultural superiority and proximity to a divine monarch. Though this class of individuals, like any strata of social organization, has something to teach us about human nature, individual aristocrats (potentially Denys among them) are often privileged wastrels, fungible in their educational value. They have not invariably contributed something to society and, as a group, they are not necessarily normatively valuable. (While, anecdotally, culture typically flourishes in aristocratic societies, the cost-benefit equation doesn't compare favorably to non-totalitarian societies in which the government substitutes as patron.)
But regardless of the larger issues at stake in conflating a romanticized notion of aristocracy with genuinely great achievement, Denys Finch-Hatton is an easy case: he was unquestionably artistocratic; he was also, unquestionably, not great. Sara Wheeler does him no favors by wrapping him in a mantle that's too broad for his shoulders: doing so only makes the man look small.
In Black Swan Green, David Mitchell writes, "If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin and say, 'When you're ready.'" (p. 183.) Funny that creative writing should make the author so vulnerable, but my own experience confirms his observation. The act of writing a novel, for example, seems to arm everyone around the author, while transforming the surroundings into a battleground where the pen is not mightier than the sword.
I recalled the Black Swan Green quote when reading Too Close to the Sun, Sara Wheeler's biography of Denys Finch-Hatton. Wheeler is open about her dislike of Karen Blixen, who -- by memorializing her love affair with Finch-Hatton in Out of Africa -- is the only reason anyone recalls Denys Finch-Hatton today.
Wheeler's distaste for Karen Blixen spills over into gratuitous pot shots about her writing: "[Karen Blixen] liked sweep and grandeur, and later imbued her tales with it (often with little substance beneath the glittering surface)." (p. 125.) This remark is typical of Wheeler's regard for Karen Blixen, and every time I stumble on another Wheeler's tossed-off, untutored literary judgments, I feel more empathy for Karen Blixen, lying in her coffin, with Wheeler gleefully wielding the stake overhead.
On the other hand, I also feel sympathy for Wheeler. Her subject, Mr. Finch-Hatton, died without leaving any substantive written record of his existence. While this silence might be one reason why no one previously published a biography of him (despite the lapse of more than 70 years since his death and Wheeler's biography), Wheeler isn't dissuaded. She grunts through three years of research, until she comes "to see the lack of material not as a biographical handicap but as a cipher for the unknowability of anyone else's inner life." (p. 3.)
In other words, she begins a process of rationalization to stave off the certainty that she's been wasting her time, chasing a phantom. Thankless task, biography writing. As thankless, no doubt, as literary criticism.
In the past month, I've had may opportunities to feel fear. I've feared running out of money, of course; a constant fear in my hand-to-mouth existence these days. I've feared having an ulcer, the most recent manifestation of another underlying fear of mine: cancer; or, more generally, physical degeneration in disease. I've feared for my physical well-being and, specifically, being raped, another fairly stable baseline in my life, especially when I find myself (as I did recently) careening around Mumbai, at night, with a stranger at the wheel and no idea where he was taking me.
I don't enjoy feeling frightened, and I don't find much social support for the experience of fear. Just two weeks ago, I attended a training on maintaining security in disaster operations, where I was surrounded by men who were described (or who described themselves) as "impervious" to fear and who equated being "strong" with being fearless. I, on the other hand, was the person who cried during the hostage-taking simulation; no one congratulated me on being strong.
I therefore savored two passages in recent reading selections. In Gone with the Wind, Grandma Fontaine warns Scarlett,
Child, it's a very bad thing for a woman to face the worst that can happen to her, because after she's faced the worst she can't ever really fear anything again. And it's very bad for a woman not to be afraid of something. . . . [T]hat lack of fear has gotten me into a lot of trouble and cost me a lot of happiness. God intended women to be timid, frightened creatures and there's something unnatural about a woman who isn't afraid.
(p. 430.) While I'm the last person to believe that God intended me to be timid or frightened, Grandma Fontaine's warning -- that a lack of fear has gotten her into trouble and cost her happiness -- resonates. Danger, of course, is alluring, and once the deterrent fear wears away, the magnetic attraction of dangerous situations is less resistible. Nor have I observed great happiness among people who are war junkies; once hooked on the adrenaline rush of conflict situations (or disasters, or other high-stakes danger), enjoying the pleasures of ordinary life is a challenge. Most people I've seen "solve" this challenge with booze.
And, of course, women war/conflict/disaster junkies are especial outcasts. Whether I buy in to Grandma Fontaine's standards or not, most of the rest of society does; and I haven't met a man yet who wants a war/conflict/disaster junky for a wife.
But there are worse fates than being an outcast, and Isak Dinesen describes one in "The Dreamers," the sixth tale in Seven Gothic Tales:
Alas, [says the famed story teller, Mira Jama, who now can tell stories no more], as I have lived I have lost the capacity of fear. When you know what things are really like, you can make no poems about them. . . . I have become too familiar with life; it can no longer delude me into believing that one thing is much worse than the other. The day and the dark, an enemy and a friend--I know them to be about the same. How can you make others afraid when you have forgotten fear yourself?
(p. 274.) I had never before considered the relationship between fear and fiction, that the fearless hero is always the subject, and never the narrator. Isak Dinesen's insight seems right: fearlessness atrophies the imagination. (Indeed, Rhett often describes Scarlett -- who has become fearless -- as lacking imagination.) Also, an absence of fear diminishes compassion for those who do feel fear. (For example, the "impervious, strong" men with whom I was training couldn't relate to my fearful despair during the hostage simulation.) And without imagination and compassion, you can't tell a story.
Perhaps, then, I should be more respectful of my own fears, should bolster myself against shame in feeling them, and protect my fears from erosion by experience. Because to lose the capacity to tell stories -- the means by which I comprehend the world, process my experience, and comfort myself and others -- would be a true horror.
David Orr discusses in this week's NY Times Book Review the crisis of "greatness" in the current American poetry scene. "Poetry needs greatness," he explains, because poetry remains "the highest of High Art." And while Orr recognizes that the concept of "greatness" can be "strategy for concealing predictable prejudices," he also argues that without it, "we stop making demands on the few artists capable of practicing the art at its highest levels."
His argument reminded me of a passage in "The Deluge at Norderney," the first tale in Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales. In it, a Cardinal and an eccentric older woman, Miss Malin Nat-og-Dag, are stranded during a flood and, to pass the time, they discuss theology. Miss Malin asks the Cardinal if he believes in the fall of man, and he replies:
I am convinced . . . that there has been a fall, but I do not hold that it is man who has fallen. I believe that there has been a fall of the divinity. We are now serving an inferior dynasty of heaven. . . . [N]o human being with a feeling for greatness can possibly believe that the God who created the stars, the sea, and the desert, the poet Homer and the giraffe, is the same God who is now making, and upholding, the King of Belgium, the Poetical School of Schwaben, and the moral ideas of our day.
at pp. 55-56 (emphasis added). Just as the Cardinal intuits an inferior dynasty of heaven, today's poets perceive an inferior muse: how can Billy Collins and Kay Ryan answer the same Apollonian call as Lord Byron?
But from my perspective, the Cardinal (and perhaps, by extension, Isak Dinesen) got it wrong: it's not the God who has changed, but the worshipful. "Greatness," in the sense that Orr uses the term, relates not so much to achievement in an absolute sense, but to achievement within a certain context, specifically a society in which an aristocracy (in the sense of a superior class) exists.
Just as Aristole limited tragedy to a fall by an aristocrat from the pinnacle to the depths, "greatness" is similarly confined to a feat of glory by nobility. In Aristotle's day (and for centuries thereafter), society widely accepted those categorizations. But we no longer do so. In Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller claimed tragedy for those who don't have far to fall. And in Elizabeth Bishop (to take an example that Orr discusses), poetry finds glory without aristocratic pedigree.
The Isak Dinesen who scripted the Cardinal's "inferior dynasty of heaven" was, beneath her nom de plume, a woman mourning the waning of the artistocracy. She'd married into nobility and clung to her title (Baroness) long after her husband, the Baron, divorced her. She associated aristocracy with a set of values, like honor, that she seems to have felt wouldn't exist after the aristocrats expire.
But aristocracy was the bastion of unearned privilege, exploitation and cruelty, as much as it was the crucible of beauty, and art at its "highest levels" is as possible without an aristocracy as tragedy is.
Perhaps what's lacking in American poetry is not greatness, but confidence. We are not inferior humans to our ancestors, simply because the god we serve is more humane, meritocratic and accessible than in years past. We are not less because we reject the fall of man altogether. Our belief in progress, a gradual rise as opposed to a precipitous fall, is an attribute. When American poetry has the moxy to stop apologizing for society and get on with the harshly difficult job of writing poems, then we will witness a democratic greatness.
In an earlier post, Greatness and Aristocracy, I wrote about the idea of greatness as relating, not to absolute achievement, but to achievement within a particular context, specifically, among the aristocratic. The life of Denys Finch-Hatton (left), as depicted in Sara Wheeler's Too Close to the Sun, bears out my observation.
