Category: Books

I read David Kraemer’s earlier book, the Mind of the Talmud soon after it came out in the 90s, and loved it. For those not familiar with it, the Talmud is a strange work. Nominally a large repository of Jewish law, it is a miscellanous compendium that also includes snippets of stories, commentary, philosophy, history, and other types of writing according to our categorization. Instead of a single threaded, logically developed argument, the Talmud is structured as an edited record of conversations that derived from an oral tradition.

Kraemer’s “The Mind of the Talmud” analyzes the distinctive literary forms of the Babylonian Talmud for what these forms reveal about the philosophical approach of the rabbis of the Talmud. Kraemer argues that Talmud’s methods reasoning with debates, stories, and interpretation posed a deliberate alternative to the hierarchical categories of Greek rationalism. His take on the Talmud is distinctively postmodern – he identifies ways that the Talmud’s multiply-voiced rhetoric destabilizes nominal authority structures.

A follow-up to the earlier work, Reading the Rabbis has Kraemer doing a close reading of a number of sections of the Babylonian Talmud from a literary perspective. Traditional approaches to the Talmud focus on nuances of the way that it constructs legal arguments. Modern scholarly approaches have look at the document from a historical perspective, and attempt to identify the historical strata within the edited text.

In Kraemer’s literary approach, he takes the compositional unit as a whole. He looks at the choices the editors made in assembling the materials into the published whole, the structure and rhetoric of the section. The book promises to generate new insights by using this method. But after reading the book, the insights seem less dramatic to me.

In the first sections of the book, Kraemer, who is a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Rabbinical training ground for the Conservative movement, looks at a few topics that are common in Conservative movement ideology.

In Chapters 3-5, the book examines three sections that discuss the relative authority of earlier and later sources. The authority structure of talmud is traditionalist, giving more authority to earlier sources – the 5 books of Moses have more authority than later biblical texts, the Mishna (an early compilation of Rabbinic writings) has more authority than the Gemara (a compilation of commentary by later Rabbis).

Kraemer does a close analyses of three sections, one about whether it is permissable to write scrolls with subsections of the bible (Gittin 60 a-b), one about whether the biblical passage about “an eye for an eye” is to be read literally or in reference to monetary damages (Baba Qamma 83b-84a), and third about laws that seem to have no source in scripture (Hagigah 10a-11b). Based on close analysis of the rhetoric of the text, that the later authors, in the way they analyze and draw conclusions from their source material, actually assume for themselves the responsibility to interpret and decide: “what appears to be a conservative submission to the word of God turns out to be a confident assertion of the authority of the living word of God’s earthly teachers.” (50).

This conclusion that later authorities have precedence in practice (though not in theory) supports the ideology of the conservative movement, which holds that innovation is not only possible, but traditional, within a context that is centered on tradition. This contrasts with the Orthodox ideology that “there is no innovation in Torah”, and ideology in Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism holding that tradition is not binding.

In Chapter 6, Kraemer looks at the Talmud’s assessment of the differing legal opinions between the Rabbinic schoosl of Hillel and Shammai (Yevamot 13b-14a). Following Kraemer’s analysis, the Talmud goes out of its way to leave clear openings for differences in community practice – there are a small number of core principles, and beyond that, plenty of leeway for local opinion; and even tenets that appear to be core principles may be subject to variation on close reading. Congregationalist pluralism is a hallmark of the Conservative movement governance, and this interpretation supports that principle.

In Chapters 7 and 8, Kraemer reveals additional ways that he is situated within a sociological and ideological context. Chapter 7 is entitled “Women Categorized.” It explores the nuances of the ways that the Talmud categorizes the obligations of women in Jewish observance. In traditional interpretations of Jewish law, womens’ exclusion from roles in communal decision-making and synagogue leadership derive from womens’ lower level of obligation. In Kraemer’s close reading, he observes that the Talmudic Rabbis are extremely suspicious of categorization itself, and progressively undermine the categories they set up. And he finds alternative sources and interpretations that could make a strong case for alternative conclusions.

However, in the title and the structure of the chapter, Kraemer raises no protest against the seemingly obvious sociological problem in the structure of the discussion. In my copy of Reading the Rabbis, I was unable to refrain from annotating the title, “Women Categorized By Men”. In a power structure that consisted of men analyzing source materials and creating categories (however ambivalent they are about categorization), it is clearly problematic that the structure of categorization places women as exceptions to rules, and in the company of other lower-status members of society. Kraemer doesn’t take this on at all. He is willing to read the sources with an eye toward using traditional resources to remedy the discrimination of women, but not to make a radical critique that the structure of the argument is flawed by its social power structure.

In Chapter 8, Kraemer does a similar analysis about circumcision, which differentiates Jewish men from non-Jews and from individuals with ambiguous biological sex characteristics. Once again, Kraemer draws subtle conclusions from the nuances of the rhetoric, but does not do any significant critique of the categories themselves. Kraemer’s traditionalist approach does not go so far as to openly question the category structure he has to work with. There is no shortage other contemporary Jewish thinkers –Rachel Adler among many Jewish feminists who criticize the traditional structures because the tradition was written by men, Daniel Boyarin among other scholars who analyzes concepts of Jewish masculinity. Kraemer does not do radical analysis. He does close analysis to find room at the edges, but leaves the frame of the structure he finds.

My favorite chapter of the book was Chapter 9, which analyzes a section in Berachot 5a-b on Rabbinic approaches to human suffering. This is a topic that Kraemer has studied in depth and written a book about. In the section, the Talmud brings a large number of arguments showing that suffering is a valuable gift from God, like a parent’s valuable correction of a child. These arguments are undermined, at the end of the section, by a series of stories that show Rabbis discussing their own experiences of suffering and declaring that they didn’t find the suffering to have value and contain its own reward (p. 135). Hearing this, the Rabbi who is listening heals the sick person.

The text includes a statement that is even more radical than the ones that Kraemer highlights. When R. Yohan visits R. Eleazar on his sick bed and asks the sick man why he is crying, R. Eleazar replies, “I am crying on account of this beauty that will rot in the earth.” Not only do the stories undermine the ascetic message of the previous section, but the emotional heart of the story supports a shockingly Greek-sounding message of nostalgia for the loss of physical beauty instead of any moralistic lesson.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. I appreciated the process of walking through Kraemer’s close readings of the texts, and seeing how Kraemer built his analysis by parsing out the rhetoric of the sections. But the selections of the sections, and the conclusions Kraemer draws from the analysis, read like fine and familiar JTS-style interpretive sermons. This is a valid practice by someone who is, afterall, a professor and community teacher based at JTS. But I didn’t find the book to be as thought-provoking and insightful as The Mind of the Talmud. – I need to go back and reread the book to see if it remains as impressively insightful to me.

Maps and Legends is Michael Chabon’s love letter to the genres and works of popular, non-realistic fiction that he’s loved all his life – Sherlock Holmes, comic books, Norse myths, ghost stories. Chabon is the Pulitzer prize-winning writer of novels including The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.

The wonderful thing about book is hearing Chabon read his favorite tales, with the enjoyment of a fan, the perspective of an attentive reader of the narrative forms, and the technical eye of a good professional writer. Chabon unpacks the rhetoric of ghost and horror stories, where the narrator tone is confessional, testimonial – telling the reader in confidence that the story they are about to hear, and the shocking fact they are about to discover, is observed truth. He demonstrates these techniques later on in the book, in a tour de force “memoir” disclosing his personal encounters with golems in Flushing, LA and Seattle. He reads Cormac McCarthy’s The Road against the traditions of post-apocalyptic science fiction; the blasted landscape, the brutalized survivors, the ambivalence toward technology; and against the genres of Jack London, Robinson Crusoe survivalist adventure and Gothic horror, in which things get progressively more horrific in increasingly shocking ways.

He writes nicely, and occasionally can’t restrain himself from using his decorative chops – this is how he describes the world of Norse myths, which “begins in darkness, and ends in darkness, and is veined like a fire with darkness that forks and branches. Everything that is beautiful, in the Norse world, is something that glints, sparks from ringing hammers, stars, gold and gems, the aurora boealis, tooled swords and helmets and armbands, fire, a woman’s hair, wine and mead in a golden cup.” And this on a comic book distopia by Howard Chayken: “above all with its accumulated history of stale, outmoded, and rotting bright futures, the comic book was perfectly suited not mearly to adapting but in some measure to embodying the hybridized, trashy, garish future of simulacra and ad copy that comics had been hinting out over the past decade.”

Chabon makes it clear that he experiences these works of popular genre fiction as a fan. The introductory quote for the book is Melville writing about his love for whaling, and the attribution reads “Herman Melville, on the writing of fan fiction.” This is the book’s point of view throughout. One example among many – Chabon describes the attraction of the believability of ghost stories: “We love [ghost stories], if we love them, from the depth and antiquity of our willingness to believe them.” He uses the second person plural pronoun – he includes himself among the fans.

Chabon writes interestingly about how the Sherlock Holmes stories served as an early catalyst for a culture of fan fiction. For nearly a century, Holmes has gathered an army of pseudo-scholarly fans who assiduously fill in the backstory and the gaps of the arch-detectives universe. The genres and traditions of contemporary fan fiction communities, which use internet forums and wikis to elaborate upon the fictional worlds of television shows, movies, and books, have been popularized and facilitated by the internet, but preceded the internet.

The pre-socialmedia, pre-blog genres of review and critique pretended to objectivity – the professional reviewer has an obligation to deliver his informed opinion to consumers in need of guidance; the academic critic provides a purportedly objective reading of a text, in the service of advancing some greater esthetic, theoretical, or historical argument. Even (one might argue) critics who demolish claims of objectivity still purport to do so in a manner that pretends disinterest in the text itself – a politically oriented critic, or a literary theorist would not pretend to take on the text out of love.

By declaring his love for works of genre fiction, Chabon joins the post-Cluetrain throng, carrying the banner saying “transparency is the new objectivity.” In this cultural norm, one’s voice is more credible if one discloses one’s point of view, than if one pretends to have a neutral point of view. But unlike the cultural followers of David Weinberger, who carry the banner proudly, Chabon is reluctant to admit to being a fan.

Instead, the book is a long apology for the author’s fandom. As a defense, it gives the presumed attackers more power than they deserve, and reveals much about Chabon’s cultural identity in the high-culture literary establishment. The first chapter of the book is a defense of artwork that comes from the domain of popular entertainment. It identifies pleasure and passivity among the attributes that taint works of entertainment. Chabon agonizes about his attraction to these declasse forms, using the language of class – “Duly I had written my share of pseudo-Ballard, quasi-Calvino, and neo-Borges. I had fun doing it. But no matter how I tried, I couldn’t stop preferring the traditional, bourgeois, narrative form.”

Chabon’s esthetic superego is partly the academic establishment, and partly the publishing establishment. He writes about internalizing the esthetic hierarchy of literary academia. “As a young man, an English major, and a regular participant in undergraduate fiction-writing workshops, I was taught– or perhaps in fairness it would be more accurate to say I learned–that science fiction was not serious fiction, that a writer of mystery novels might be loved but not revered, that if I meant to get serious about the art of fiction I might set a novel in Pittsburgh but never on Pluto.” His point of view in part internalizes the point of view of the literary publishing establishment: “over the course of the twentieth century the desire of writers and critics alike to strip away the sticky compound of Orange Crush and Raisinets that encrusts the idea of entertainment, and thus of literature as entertainment, radically reduced our understanding of the kinds of short stories that belong in prestigious magazines or yearly anthologies of the best American short stories.” Chabon resists the prejudice, but accepts the established hierarchy of prestige. He cites his own Pulitzer prize as the thing that gives him the courage to publicly discuss his love of genre fiction.

Another sign of Chabon’s establishment identification – in an article on comic books, Chabon laments the fact that publishers have cultivated the market for graphic fiction for adults, while abandoning comic books for kids. He encourages publishers to once again publish well-done comic books for children. In his plea to the publishing industry, Chabon has the demeanor of a musician who was signed by a major label before the industry imploded – he is looking to the industry to create something, instead of acting as an artist or impresario and doing it himself. One wants to urge Chabon to DIY! – and have dinner with Cory Doctorow sometime.

In the way that it frames the disclosure of the author’s love of genre fiction, Maps and Legends is also a coming out story. Michael Chabon comes out of the closet with his unacceptable loves and shameful predilections. I’m not making up this analogy between gender & sexual preferences and genre, Chabon goes there himself. “A detective novelist or a horror writer who made claims to artistry sat in the same chair at the table of literature as did a transvestite cousin at a family Thanksgiving…” “A lonely business, transgressing”.

Chabon’s discomfort with the esthetic “coming out” process is paralleled with discomfort with sexual identity. When he wrote “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”, which includes a love affair between men (disclosure, I haven’t yet read that novel) he was acutely self-conscious that people would think he was gay. And in “Maps”, he discloses that he had a sexual relationship with a guy, though he’s currently on his second (and longterm, and presented credibly as happy) marriage with a woman.

Now, Chabon is well within his rights to self-identify as not gay. And I can very easily how one might notice and need to negotiate a non-gay identity. Personally, I’ve been politically active for gay rights, keep my hair short, don’t paint my nails or wear heels, and my circle of friends is diverse in sexual and gender identity. People sometimes think I’m gay (which would be very cool, but I’m not.) I need to politely and gently give them accurate information. It’s a little awkward, but not that big a deal to come out as not gay. As someone involved in an artistic subculture in the Bay Area – of all places, here! – why is Chabon so uncomfortable with the fact that some people might think he is gay?

In “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union“, Chabon commits the now-obsolete homophobic cliche in which the characters who are gay or gay-seeming die alone, their identities unrevealed, their love lives stymied – a cliche that has been out of style for 30+ years now. I wondered, in a blog post on that book, how Chabon could be quite that dense. Unfortunately, based on this book, he really is that obtuse – he hasn’t quite got the point that people with identities off the center of the bell curve aren’t doomed or shameful – he lives in Berkeley – it doesn’t take much!

The political obtuseness regarding sexuality carries over into other sociopolitical domains. Chabon reads Sherlock Holmes in the context of adventure fiction, and adventure fiction in the context of empire, without regard for the seemingly obvious impact of colonialism.

Empires are built, however, by laying the groundwork for their own destruction. Subject peoples are educated, organized, given national identities. Any colony made strong enough to survive and flourish becomes too strong to remain a colony

.
I doubt there’s a South Asian who could read that paragraph without blood pressure medication.

The paragraph in the Holmes chapter proceeds to lament the diminishment of undiscovered territory. “The great explorations undertaken by the Empire, the surveys and royal expeditions of the previous few centuries, had done grave harm to the atlas of adventure.” Ulp. Chabon is not seeing how much the perspective of this “adventure fiction” comes from the viewpoint of the colonizer – the territories being “explored” were plenty familiar to the people who happened to live there, and the perspective of “savage wilderness” comes from the insular perspective of the explorers who saw their own culture as the only possibility for civilization. There is post-colonial speculative fiction where Chabon could learn perspectives about “exploration” and “adventure” from the perspective of people whose cultures were being “explored.”

In summary: I enjoyed this book, and recommend it, mostly for Chabon’s readings of his favorite works, and also in part for the biographical chapters that shed light on the author’s creative process and artistic identity. Unfortunately, “Maps and Legend” also reveals Chabon to be un-admirably obtuse about the social/political/economic contexts of his writing and esthetic preferences. I wish he would take advantage of the wealth of role models around him to gain more comfort with sexual and gender diversity, worry less about status hierarchy of the academic/publishing establishment, and realize the cultural biases of the colonialism-influenced “tale of adventure.”

Now, as a fan of literary interpretation, I enjoy readings that dive into the work, and have theory and politics as background not foreground. There’s a reason I got a degree in English, where classes read literature, rather than in Comp Lit, where the classes focused on theory and political analysis, and barely read any literature itself – I loved the literature and wanted to read it – I took theory classes as icing on the cake. But the meta-analysis has its lessons to teach.

Why were salads in aspic fashionable in the early part of the 20th century? Because of the recent spread of refrigerators in middle class homes. In the late 1920s, cookbooks published by the makers of Frigidaire and Kelvinator refrigerators promoted “refrigeration cookery”, while the Ladies Home Journal, the leading advertising vehicle for household technology, “ran recipes for pigs feet aspic and egg-and-asparagus modes, and urged readers to keep their fridges well-stocked with olives, capers, pimentos, and other colorful garnishes for luncheon salads and “jellied things.” Why did San Francisco become a center for graphic design, a role that’s continued into the 21st century with web design? It was the place where fruit crate labels were designed, when California’s fruit growers banded together to expand the market for oranges shipped long distance.

Fresh: A Perishable History, Susan Freidberg’s book on the social history of the concept of freshness, is chock-full of amusing and telling little details that illustrate stories of the definition of the concept of freshness in the modern age. The story is always more complex than it appears. The “fresh” salads that appear in grocery stores are delivered in high-tech polymer bags, variably permeable in response to temperature changes, and filled with nitrogen. The live fish that swim around the fishtanks of Hong Kong and mainland China are imported from the Phillippines and Indonesia, caught by shipped by air, anesthetized. The “fresh” milk that is purchased in supermarkets is the product of a system of regulation originally intended to preserve local markets but now a convoluted tangle; and a labor system dependent on migrant workers from Mexico who fearful to leave the farm and face capture and deportation. The concept of fresh food, which on its surface appears like the most natural and uncomplicated of attributes, is the product of complex webs of technologies, transport systems, legal structures and labor markets. The colorful, shiny surface of the consumer marketing of food is designed to hide the technological sophistication and the messy and often cruel realities of the production process.

This is a wonderful book that is entertaining even as it informs about aspects of life that many of us take for granted. My one quibble with the book is that the author attempts to maintain a scholarly equanimity about the unsavory and unsustainable aspects of the food system. The chapter on fish, for example, tells story after story of a given fishery stripped of its population, and the industry’s moving on to the next shoals. Unlike, say, the environmental tragedy told in Mike Kurlansky’s Cod, Freidberg’s matter-of-fact narration fails to consider the obvious and well-reported inferences about the ultimate conclusion of increasing consumption and declining fish stocks. Nor does Freidberg draw strong conclusions like long-form journalist Michael Pollan, whose Omnivore’s Dilemma offers a well-researched indictment of the health and environmental failures of the industrial food production system.

The chapter on the locavore movement, which is attempting to reconstitute markets and practices for locally produced food, doesn’t quite go to the false-equivalence depths of newspaper articles that dismiss the environmental value of local because some people produce hothouse tomatoes in Vermont in January. The environmental intent of the locavore movement is to reduce the fossil fuel cost of food trucked and shipped and flown around the world, not just to produce food as closely as possible to the eater regardless of environmental cost. But Freidberg is extremely skeptical of any efforts to improve the situation. Looking at previous failed efforts, ranging from Upton Sinclair’s slaughterhouse exposes to attempts to preserve local milksheds with counterproductive results, Freidberg concludes that any efforts to improve matters are likely as not to have negative unintended consequences, so by implication why bother trying? And since all systems have mixed natures, why try to evaluate what is better or worse?

I’m not wishing that Freidberg had written a manifesto, that would be a different book entirely. My ideal for the genre is Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s More Work for Mother, which by the way Freidberg quotes in places, a brilliant book on the social history of household technology with a steel skeleton of the history of technology adoption in the 20th century US. Without diverging into prescriptive politics out of place in a work of history, Cowan nevertheless has an underlying well-supported argument that household technology has served, for reasons of ideology and marketing, to maintain housework at a consistent level beyond need and value.

Even though Freidberg refrains from drawing seemingly obvious conclusions and making potentially supportable judgements, the robust material of her history provides a good foundation for those who may wish to follow the facts further toward reasonable conclusions, and who have less skepticism about the value of action in an imperfect world. And the counterintuitive tales of the unintended consequences of idealistic action, and the complex roots of seemingly simple things are good cautionary warnings about any simple story, whether it be the promise of a pretty supermarket package or the promise of any simple sustainable solution.

I just read a book that I had wished existed when I was in college, but wasn’t published until later. Terence Brown’s biography of Yeats put into context the work of a poet I’d found compelling but baffling.

Reading Yeats, one can become captivated by sound, and images, and then the meaning, and back to sound and image. From The Wild Swans at Coole:

The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

Dead gorgeous. And what is this Coole place, which returns again and again in Yeats’ poetry, and how is it important to the poet’s sense of the regret at the the passing of time? Who are the various women who appear and reappear as characters and muse figures in the poetry. What was up with Maud Gonne? Many of Yeats’ poems are political, and deal with events of the time. Where was he coming from, and what was he trying to say? Many of Yeats’ poems are based on some sort of mythological and/or spiritual system. What was that that about? At least for me, endnotes in anthologies provided factoids that didn’t add up to a coherent picture.

Terence Brown is a professor of Irish literature and cultural history at Trinity College in Dublin. His knowledge of historical, social, and literary background fills in the context for Yeats writing. The book is enlightening, helpful in getting more out of the work, and in some respects very discomfiting. Here is a summary of what I learned.

Politics

In the mists of history, Yeats has a reputation as a quintessential Irish nationalist. But in his time and place he was an advocate of a highly idiosyncratic and minuscule faction in the midst of a popular movement. The center of gravity of Irish nationalism was the Catholic majority, with a rising middle class. Yeats came from a Protestant family. Though his grandparents’ family were sea-merchants, and his father rejected law practice for a life as an impecunious painter, Yeats disdained his middle-class roots and idolized the aristocracy. Yeats affiliated with the tiny minority-within-a-minority of Nationalist-sympathizing Protestant aristocrats; the Protestant landowning class had implemented English rule and were largely loyal to England.

In his poetry and plays, Yeats reached back to Celtic myth and folklore from the pre-modern past and not-yet-modern countryside, where the world of the spirit was present to people, in an attempt to forge a new culture that would rescue Ireland from the stultifying mediocrity of middle class prosaic realism. Yeats found few followers for his cultural movement. The Abbey theater company, which he co-founded in 1904 and managed in his 40s, with the goal of helping to create the cultural voice and shared self-understanding of a nascent nation, played to uncomprehending and often angry audiences. And even his own theater presented most of its plays in more modes that were more realistic than Yeats’ high ritual style.

With his aristocratic preferences and non-Christian spirituality, Yeats was often viewed, from the perspective of contemporary Nationalist perspective, with suspicion and worse. As theater-manager, and a public figure, Yeats became embroiled in a variety of controversies which didn’t go very well. Later in life, with the reputation of a literary lion, he was appointed to the Senate of the new Irish parliament. There, he advocated for freedom of speech, for separation of church and state, for legal divorce, as well as support for the arts. His goal was to prevent censorship by the Church and the philistine masses, not to facilitate democracy.

Yeats loathed the middle class. His favorite epithets include “shop-keeper” and “greasy till”. Typical examples of the contempt can be found in lines such as: “Indignant at the fumbling wits, the obscure spite/Of our old Paudeen in his shop” (Paudeen), and “What cared Duke Ercole, that bid His mummers to the market place, What th’onion-sellers thought or did/So that his Plautus set the pace For the Italian comedies (To A Wealthy Man, Responsibilities 1916). Given the hostile reception Yeats’ experimental plays received from religious censors and convention-loving audiences, I can sympathize a little bit, but not all that much. James Joyce dealt with the provincial nature of Dublin with more humor, which made for better art on the topic.

In keeping with nostalgia for the old-fashioned social structure dominated by the very rich and very poor, Yeats’ Responsibilities celebrates beggars; in Brown’s words, these representations “as a metaphor of the spiritual freedom the Irish materially minded moneyed class so signally lacks, are without purchase on much beyond the literary salon’s version of mendicancy.” As a reader, Yeats’ prejudices make me want to reach for some good healthy Whitman.

In the 1930s, Yeats looked optimistically to Fascist Italy as a potential model for a dictatorship that would spare Ireland from chaos and rule by the inferior classes. Toward the end of in his life, in the late 1930s, when he had retired from public service and the need to maintain a minimal level of social acceptability had gone, Yeats openly advocated eugenics as a way to purify the declining Irish race. Some of his very late poems look forward to a bloodbath that will purge the race of impure elements. Read without the political background, the poems are dark, disturbing, chilling, nihilist. With the political background, they are worse, and Terence Brown rightly calls them for what they are.

Spirituality and psychology

Yeats’ attraction to Celtic myth and the world of mysticism, came from a rejection of the rationalist mindset that valued Darwin, math and commerce – he considered science the “opiate of suburbia.” The focus of folklore, dominant in his early work and persistent throughout, fits squarely in heart of romantic ideology which has had incarnations ranging from late 18th century Germany through mid-20th century US. What’s distinctive in Yeats is the focus on the spiritual and psychological content of the myths. Brown writes about Yeat’s changelings as an expression of the poet’s lifelong theme of multiple and contradictory aspects of the self.

Yeats was drawn to enact his attraction to the world of spirits in personal experience. In this, he was part of a trend toward mysticism and spiritualism in late Victorian/Edwardian society. He joined the “Theosophist” sect led by Madam Blavatsky in 1887 at the age of 22, and not long after helped found the Order of the Golden Dawn. Things in his poetry; roses, birds, cats, sun, moon, oceans, trees, colors, are all pointers to symbolic meaning in these mystical systems. When the Golden Dawn fell apart due to this-worldly-infighting (Brown has a rather funny story in which Alstair Crowley shows up at the door in regalia as an enforcer for a feuding faction), Yeats turned to the creation of a personal system of mysticism. Yeats and his wife George engaged in automatic writing, where the medium dictated words from a multi-tier cast of shades. Out of this exploration, they created a detailed mystical/psychological system, which is explicated in Visions (annotated online here for those who have the patience. The system surfaces in poems – the well-known “Turning and turning in a widening gyre” from The Second Coming comes from a complex pseudo-geometrical scheme of recurring spirals of time, predicting an impending new messianic cataclypse.

Reconstructing a system of meaning out of scraps of the past was the modernist game to remake meaning in a world where old structures of meaning and social order were collapsing – Eliot captures it with the famous quote, “these fragments I have shored against my ruin.” Yeats literally lived in his rebuilt castle – he created his fantasy-role-playing game and moved in.

As a reader, the explication (and a little Wikipedia) helps me more parse more patiently through Yeats’ allusions. And as a reader, I find that the mythic skeleton works unevenly in adding depth to the poetry. Yeats uses place names, character names to give an incantatory quality and local flavor; so does Newark, Rahway, Metuchen, New Brunswick, and Trenton. When Yeats says the word Rose, or the color Yellow, it has a specific experiential meaning for a Golden Dawn adept. (Sometimes it’s just sound and decor, and I’m not the first to observe this; James Joyce parodies this tendency in early Yeats, when Yeats was live and mid-career.) Yale Prof. Langdon, in the name of the editor of the Norton Anthology says you don’t need to know the mystical correspondences to get the poetry. I think you shouldn’t, but you should get more out of it if you do, and with Yeats I’m finding that that can be more or less the case.

Yeats’ system also included a complex taxonomy of character types which puts the Enneagram to shame. The taxonomy of personality fleshes out Yeats’ psychology of masks, the idea that people, and artists in particular, act out various typed roles. This believe is rather different from the psychological myth of romantic authenticity, that one can unify, reconcile, and find the essential self within conflicting impulses and aspects of identity. Mid-life, Yeats fell hard for Nietzsche. The neurotic, conflicted poet was drawn to Neitzsche’s philosophy whereby a complex and timid man can become a hero by daring to be an asshole. And in fact, in Brown’s telling, this attitude helped Yeats be successful by enforcing his will in the management of the Abbey Theater (but, I suspect, hindered his efforts to play an ongoing role because he made so many enemies.) I appreciate Yeat’s perspective as an esthetic, and see how it helped create depth in his poetry; but not necessarily as a psychologist, moral philosopher, or politician.

Women

With regard to women, the story, at least the way Terence Brown tells it, is somewhat more sympathetic than the mental image that I had. Like many modern writers, Yeats mined his life for his poetry. The love of his life was Maude Gonne, a nationalist radical. She consistently rejected his repeated marriage proposals. The current interpretation of available evidence is that they only had a brief physical affair in a relationship that lasted decades, instead, they had an “occult marriage” where they collaborated in spiritual exploration, state that left Yeats in a state of perennial longing that his poetry saved for us in poems including the Song of Wandering Aengus:

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Out of a combination of infatuation with Gonne and rather more prosaic poverty which made him an unsuitable partner for women who sought financial stability and weren’t independently wealthy, he didn’t lose his virginity til the age of 31 with a married woman, Olivia Shakespear, who chose him as a refreshing change from her dull husband. As Brown tells the story, having actual sex had a positive influence on Yeats’ his mental health and writing.

Another influential woman in Yeat’s life was Lady Gregory, one of the tiny cadre of nationalist aristocrats. She became a patron to Yeats and her financial support took the edge of his poverty (Brown provides the numbers in Yeat’s annual budget). Brown was a bit dismissive of Gregory’s patronage: “she collected a poet” is the phrase he uses. In an era when financial models for art are up in the air, it is hard to dismiss basic patronage as a model. Coole, the place in the Wild Swans, Coole Park and Ballylee, Seven Woods and other poems, is the Gregory family estate; Yeats spent part of each year at Coole for many years. The poem at the top has the poet in his 50s feeling rueful about the passage of time, and perhaps indirectly here, about a form of life that is slowly dying. Yeats admires the feudal social structure in which peasant are tenant farmers for landlords, but that opinion was not universally shared. During Lady Gregory’s life she had recurrent problems with renter strikes that threatened to become violent. In 1927, the house was sold to the state, and after she died the house was razed to the ground.

At the age of 51, after a strange courtship and proposal to Maude Gonne’s daughter Iseult, Yeats met and married 24-year-old George Hyde-Lees on the rebound, and the marriage was surprisingly successful. The poet had met the young spiritualist through occult circles; as described above, the two collaborated on spiritual exploration and cataloging their discoveries from their ventures into the afterlife. Brown also reads the record of their spirit-world experiments as working through the psychosexual dynamics of their marriage. This story is not near the center of the bell curve, but given the variance of human relationships, it seems churlish to criticize.

Yeats’ relentless pursuit of new lovers to stimulate his libido and artistic creativity, appears, at least in Brown’s telling, to have be a pattern only in the last five years of his life. Before doing the homework, the stereotype that I had of Yeats was of a poet who deliberately and periodically picked his muses, and then stalked them for their impact on his psyche and writing. Perhaps other biographies would support this impression, but Brown does not. Yeats’ early and mid-life romantic unhappiness was transmuted into poetry, but in a less calculated version than my stereotype.

If anything, Brown may be a bit too literal about reading sexual frustration into Yeats’ images of unfulfilled yearning. To use a rather unrelated example, Jewish literature of exile carries a perennial theme of God’s distance; and the rabbis were all married, and their ideology was (often) in favor of regular, pleasurable sex. Yearning for something that is beyond one’s grasp and beyond human life is a human spiritual state, and not entirely reducible to sexual frustration.

If anything, Brown is not quite tough enough with regard to Yeat’s take on women. In the context of Yeat’s modernist peers, Brown praises Yeats’ symbolic representation of the power of female sexuality, compared to Eliot’s “mandarin mysogynistic lament.” But Yeats’ valorization of the spiritual feminine principle is not all that much better – it would take more homework to evaluate, for example, how much George contributed to his late work, unattributed. Yeats saw his lovers and muses as icons of beauty; it would be interesting to find out (and there is probably more in the record) what these interesting and accomplished women thought of him.

In A Prayer for My Daughter, Yeats expresses the hope that that she would stay away from the world of intellectual and political discourse:

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

The thought in this late poem did not appear for the first time here; Yeats expressed these ideas earlier, for example in a 1910 diary entry, and an essay on the Death of Synge, published in 1928 in which he refers fairly explicity to Maud Gonne on the unseemliness of political opinion in women. To his credit, Yeats had longstanding friendships and collaborations with interesting and accomplished women throughout his life. It’s not fair to judge by contemporary standards (although there were real live feminists at the time; the choice was available for those who sought it). Given Yeats’ opinion expressed above, it shows good judgement on Maude Gonne’s part to have refrained from marrying the poet.

As feminist, with consciousness raised early by Jane Austen and George Eliot, I can’t simply let it slide when there is a body of art that constructs women as the principle of beauty, and denies women other roles, at least in theory. Unfortunately, a history of art pruned to include only works that take for granted the subjectivity of women would be sadly short.

Summary

I found Terence Brown’s biography of Yeats really helpful. I have much better comprehension of the poems, coming out of a basic understanding of the context. If you are interested in the topic, and don’t already know the core context, I strongly recommended the book. Other bios I haven’t read include Ellman’s classic (which I suspect is more personal and poetic, and less historical), and Roy Foster’s magisterial two-volume biography, which has excellent reviews but is over 800 pages long; it was hard enough to make the time for Brown’s 400. There is an entertaining and informative book talk by Foster online, which I also recommend.

And what does this all mean to me. To be honest, I’m troubled by the politics. For an historian, the worst sin for a student of history is present-mindedness – reading and evaluating the past as if the actors were in our world. But art is a bit different. People who experience the social context of art for granted are experiencing indoctrination and propaganda – take cowboy and Indian movies for a start.

It is particularly different when one is not in school, where understanding and explication is the goal, far ahead of the experience of art. Great art hacks upon the operating system of your mind, and when that happens you are better off having a sense of what it is doing, with its ideas and its esthetics. This isn’t to advocate for the kneejerk expression of emotional reaction, the statements of nuance-free subjectivity you’ll find in, say, YouTube comments (wow, that that was the best song ever, I cried all week). Fine for a diary, but communication-free unless you’re the poster’s BFF.

Which is to say that I’m attracted to the writing, still. The early work is seductive, and the later work is terrifying. In a post-post modern era it is considered dubious to be attracted to beauty. For Yeats, who was trying in this respect to be un-modern, beauty conveyed eternity and apocalypse. To us, beauty can imply esthetic cover for conservatism, sometimes in the context of political or commercial kitch. Or romantic sincerity that we’ve learned to distrust and mock. And if not that, it’s opiate receptors and dopamine. Understanding what Yeats is doing, with his symbols and masks, his politics and psychology, helps this reader of his work feel less entranced and more like a partner in the dance.