New and Selected Essays

by Denise Levertov

  Highly evolved, compassionate individuals who have come to perceive, over time, the oppressions in the lives of their own oppressors (which, in some instances, were the cause of their warping) and who have seen remorse, growth, and change take place in such individuals, will still face an ethical dilemma in deciding whether to publish poems which retrospectively explore past misdeeds. But the right decision might be to set aside these scruples, for such objective revelations, unlike the work of narcissistic poets who exploit themselves and their intimates, are not exclusively self-serving although they may free their authors from the paralysis of shame and concealment.

  The principle of consideration for the privacy of others could of course be carried to absurdity, and prevent the publication of virtually everything; its application calls for common sense as well as sensitivity. But a corrective is certainly needed—not from without, in the form of censorship, but from within the poet as a scrupulous avoidance of exploitively or hurtfully utilizing the lives of others: a form of self-censorship exercised with a balance of aesthetic and ethical awareness.

  This leads one to ask, if catharsis is one of the functions of art, can it co-exist with such compunction? It’s a serious question. But one has to follow it with another: catharsis for whom? For the writer, the writing has already provided it, and publication is inessential. For the reader, what is cathartic is not necessarily what was so for the writer; and cannot catharsis for the reader happen except at the expense of the writer’s intimates? Is loss of intimacy for the writer the sacrifice without which no redemption can occur? Nothing in the Greek dramatists, whose work first consciously attempted that “purification by pity and fear,” leads one to suppose so, nor is there later evidence of such a necessity.

  If poets and readers undertook to ponder these questions it might, perhaps, have an effect on the market for sensational biography. The poet’s own idea of what constitutes a “Life” may have to change before the biographies do. How different in its assumptions from those of our time is the bare list of facts, more of them about his brother than himself, with which the seventeenth-century poet Henry Vaughan modestly, albeit with eager courtesy replied to John Aubrey’s request for particulars of his life! How that modesty contrasts with the egotism of writers who assume the reader wants to know that they have smelly feet or that a sibling once deliberately pissed on them ….

  Iris Origo, the admirable historian, wrote that the two great virtues of the biographer are enthusiasm and veracity, and that three “insidious temptations … assail” him or her: “to suppress, to invent, or to sit in judgement.” But she speaks also, in the same essay on the art of biography, of “a new age of journalism, which is too curious about the great” and which Henry James described as emanating from “the cunning and ferocity of … inquisitive hunters whose quarry is all that calls for privacy and silence.” Origo’s own work demonstrates how a biographer, like a poet, can maintain veracity and avoid the suppression which would falsify, yet can judiciously discard chaff, just as a poet must (though much of what is chaff to poems is vital grain to biography, e.g., historical minutiae of genuine relevance).

  Proust’s criticism of “the method of Sainte Beuve” was essentially that the information it collected did not throw light on an author’s work but was concerned with the irrelevant. An argument can be made for the relevancy of much biographical information, but not for all of it. As long as poets publish with a disregard for their own and other’s privacy, they contribute to the trashing of that very realm of inwardness which is the source of their art. The deepest communication, the lasting communion of which poetry is capable, always flows from that inner center outward to meet the other inward depth that receives it. I will close with a quotation that beautifully articulates that reality: “The reason for this correcting and rewriting was his search for strength and exactness of expression,” Pasternak wrote, in Dr. Zhivago:

  but it also corresponded to the promptings of an inward reticence which forbade him to expose his personal experiences and the real events of his past with too much freedom, lest he should offend or wound those who had directly taken part in them. As a result, the steaming and pulsing of his feelings was gradually driven out of his poems, and so far from their becoming morbid and devitalized, there appeared in them a broad peace and reconciliation which lifted the particular to the level of the universal, accessible to all.

  * A friend pointed out to me that such poems manifest the all too common unconscious assumption among parents that their children, “belong” to them, like extensions of their own bodies.

  Anne Sexton: Light Up the Cave

  (1974)

  ANNE SEXTON’S DEATH SOME weeks ago saddened a great many people. In addition, it startled those who had assumed that, despite all the troubles of which her poetry told, she had come to the long stretch of middle age with some reserves of strength. I am told, though, that the friends who knew her best were confirmed in their fear that her determination towards suicide had not really been deflected. My own sadness at the death of a fellow poet is compounded by the sense of how likely it is that Anne Sexton’s tragedy will not be without influence in the tragedies of other lives.

  She herself was, obviously, too intensely troubled to be fully aware of her influence or to take on its responsibility. Therefore it seems to me that we who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and self-destruction. The tendency to confuse the two has claimed too many victims. Anne Sexton herself seems to have suffered deeply from this confusion, and I surmise that her friendship with Sylvia Plath had in it an element of identification which added powerfully to her malaise. Across the country, at different colleges, I have heard many stories of attempted—and sometimes successful—suicides by young students who loved the poetry of Plath and who supposed that somehow, in order to become poets themselves, they had to act out in their own lives the events of hers. I don’t want to see a new epidemic of the same syndrome occurring as a response to Anne Sexton’s death.

  The problem is not, however, related only to suicide per se. When Robert Lowell was at the height of his fame among student readers (his audience nowadays is largely an older one) many of them seemed to think a nervous breakdown was, if not imperative, at least an invaluable shortcut to artistry. When W. D. Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle won the Pulitzer Prize, young couples married and divorced, it seemed, especially in order to have the correct material to write about.

  I am not being flippant. Innumerable young poets have drunk themselves into stupidity and cirrhosis because they admired John Berryman or Dylan Thomas and came to think they must drink like them to write like them. At the very least it is assumed that creativity and hangups are inevitably inseparable. One student (male) said to me recently, “I was amazed when the first poet I met seemed to be a cheerful person and not any more fucked up than anyone else. When I was in high school I got the idea you had to be fucked up to be a real artist!” And a young English teacher in a community college told me she had given up writing poetry because she believed there were unavoidable links between depression and anxiety and the making of art. “Don’t you feel terrible when you write poems?”

  What exactly is the nature of the confusion, and how has it come about? The mistake itself lies in taking what may possibly be an occupational hazard as a prescriptive stimulus to artistic activity. Whether artists as a class are in fact more vulnerable than other people, or whether their problems merely have more visibility, a serious and intelligent statistical study might perhaps tell us. It makes no difference: the point is that while the creative impulse and the self-destructive impulse can, and often do, coexist, their relationship is distinctly acausal; self-destructiveness is a handicap to the life of art, not the reverse.

  Yet it is the handicaps themselves that so often allure the young and untried. The long lives of so many of the greatest artists, sometimes apparently uneventful, sometimes full of passion and suffering, but full too of endurance
, and always dominated by love of their work, seem not to attract as models. Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Cezanne, Pissarro, Corot, Rembrandt, Titian, Tintoretto, J. S. Bach, Stravinsky, Goethe, William Carlos Williams, Stevens, Pound, Neruda, Machado, Yeats, Shakespeare, Whitman, Tolstoi…. There is romance in their tenacity, their devotion, but it is overlooked. Why is this? There are topical reasons, but their roots are in the past, their nature historical and political.

  In summary, western culture began, during the Renaissance—only recently, that is to say, in the calendar of human history—to emphasize individuality to a degree merely foreshadowed in Greece and Rome or in the theological dramas of the Old Testament. Geographical and scientific discoveries spurred the sense of what humanity on its own could do. The “Elizabethan world picture” had wholeness and consistency; but it held the seeds of an expanded view of things. And as feudal social systems underwent economic changes with the rise of the merchant class and the growth of banking procedures, so, too, the social and economic circumstances in which art was produced underwent changes that heightened the new sense of individuality.

  The relationship of the artist to other people rapidly altered. The people began to become “the public,” “the audience” and the poet, set aside from that “public,” began to become more private, more introspective. When his work (or hers—but it was a long time before there were women poets in any numbers) was printed it was increasingly a revelation to the public of the highly personal, rather than being to a large degree the voice of the people itself which it had been the bard’s task, in earlier times, to sound forth. The value put on individual expression, the concept of “originality,” and ultimately even upon individualism as a creed, had been pushed further by the time we reach the period of Romanticism, which developed alongside the Industrial Revolution and was in part reactive to the prospect of facelessness presented to the prophetic eye by that phenomenon.

  Twentieth-century alienation is another phase of the reaction. What began as a realization of human potential, a growth of individuated consciousness (to use Jung’s useful term) out of the unconscious collective, became first a glorification of willful, essentially optimistic individualism, echoing the ambitious, optimistic individualism of its capitalist context, and then, as that turned sour and revealed more and more of greed in its operations, led to the setting of a high esthetic and moral value upon alienation itself.

  But alienation is of ethical value, is life-affirmative and conducive to creativity only when it is accompanied by a political consciousness that imagines and affirms (and works toward) an alternative to the society from which it turns away in disgust. Lacking this, the alienated person, if he or she is gifted, becomes especially a prey to the exploitation that characterizes capitalism and is its underlying principle. The manifestations—in words, music, paint, or what have you—of private anguish are exploited by a greedy public, a public greedy for emotion at second hand because starved of the experience of community. Concurrently, for the same reasons, a creative person—whether a pop star or a Sylvia Plath, a John Berryman, or an Anne Sexton—internalizes the exploitive, unwittingly becoming self-exploitive.

  And if the public is greedy, the critics, at their worst, are positively ghoulish, or at the least, irresponsible. I feel, for instance, that it is irresponsible for a columnist, in a memorial eulogy, to have written of Anne Sexton, “The manner of her death is at once frightening and fascinating to those who responded to her poetry, sharing as they do many of the same fears and insecurities she articulated so well. Her death awakens those fears and insecurities, the way some of her poems did, it raises them up from where they hide, buried by ordinary, everyday things.” It is irresponsible because it is a statement made without qualification or development in a context of praise, and without, therefore, helping readers to see (as I suppose the writer herself does now see) that to raise our fears and insecurities into consciousness in order to confront them, to deal with them, is good; but that if the pain is confused with art itself, then people at the receiving end of a poem describing a pain and insecurity they share are not really brought to confront and deal with their problems, but are instead led into a false acceptance of them as signs or precursors of art, marks of kinship with the admired artist, symptoms of what used to be called “the artistic temperament.”

  Again, when I read the blurbs on the back of the late John Berryman’s prizewinning Delusions, etc., and see what A. Alvarez wrote of Berryman’s work and death, I feel that a poisonous misapprehension of the nature of poetry is being furthered. “For years,” Alvarez says, “I have been extrolling the virtues of what I call extremist poetry, in which the artists deliberately push their perceptions to the very edge of the tolerable. Both Berryman and Plath were masters of the style. But knowing now how they both died I no longer believe that any art—even that as fine as they produced at their best is worth the terrible cost.”

  At first glance this statement might be taken as being in accord with my own viewpoint; but its effect (since it is obvious that Alvarez believes their art to have been of the highest possible quality, perhaps the best poetry of their time) is still to extol the pursuit of the almost intolerable, the deliberate driving of the self to extremes which are not the unavoidable, universal extremes imposed by the human condition, but—insofar as they are deliberately sought—are luxuries, or which, if part and parcel of individual mental illness, should rather be resisted than encouraged in the name of art. In assuming that the disasters of those writers’ lives were a form of payment for the virtues of their art, Alvarez, even while he says he has come to feel it is not worth the cost, perpetuates the myth that confounds a love affair with death with a love affair with art.

  Thus it is that long lives devoted to the practice of art seem lacking in allure, and young would-be artists, encouraged by people older than themselves but equally confused, equally apt to mistake handicap for power, model their lives on the lives of those who, however gifted, were vanquished by their sorrows. It is not understood that the greatest heroes and heroines are truly those who hold out the longest, or, if they do die young, do so unwilling, resisting to the last.

  An instance would be the young guerilla poets of Latin America, so many of whom have been killed so young. (At least one of them, Javier Heraud, of Peru, would surely have been a major poet. He was shot down at the age of 23.) They were not flirting with death, any more than Victor Jara, the extraordinary and beloved Chilean musician and poet who was murdered in the stadium in Santiago during the CIA coup (1972). They died politically conscious deaths, struggling for a better life, not just for themselves but for their people, for The People. Their tragedy is very different from the tragedy of suicide; they were conscious actors in dramas of revolutionary effort, not helpless victims.

  Anne Sexton’s struggle has its political dimensions too—but hers is the story of a victim, not a conscious participant. Anne Sexton the well-to-do suburban housewife, Anne Sexton in Bedlam, Anne Sexton “halfway back,” Anne Sexton the glamorous performer, Anne Sexton timid and insecure, Anne Sexton saying she had always hoped to publish a posthumous volume, Anne Sexton in her garage breathing in the deadly fumes, was—whatever the clinical description of her depression—“caught in history’s crossfire.” Not because she was a woman—the problem is not essentially related to gender or to sexual stance. Not because she didn’t have radical politics—god knows they are not a recipe for great art or for long life (though I can’t help feeling that a little more comprehension of the relation of politics to her own life might have helped her). But because she herself was unable to separate her depression and her obsession with death from poetry itself, and because precisely her most enthusiastic readers and critics encouraged that inability.

  The artist, the poet (like Hokusai, who called himself “the old man mad about painting” and felt that at seventy he had begun to learn, at ninety would have some command of his powers, and at a hundred would begin to do justice to what he saw in Na
ture) needs the stamina of an astronaut and the energy derived only from being passionately in love with life and with art. “This is this world, the kingdom I was looking for!” wrote John Holmes. And “You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell. You must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand heap. Else you will have lived in vain,” wrote Thoreau.

  Such purity, integrity, love, and energy—rarely fully attained but surely to be striven for—are undermined by our exploitive society, which romanticizes its victims when they are of a certain kind (thus distracting us from the unromanticizable lives of the suffering multitude). It romanticizes gifted individuals who have been distorted into an alienated individualism, a self-preoccupation that is not individuation, not maturation.

  Anne Sexton wrote in Wanting to Die,

  Suicides have already betrayed the body.

  Stillborn, they don’t always die,

  but dazzled, they can’t forget a drug so sweet …

  To thrust all that life under your tongue!—

  that, all by itself, becomes a passion.

  Too many readers, with a perversity that, yes, really does seem to me to be bound up with white middle-class privilege and all its moral disadvantages, would sooner remember and identify with lines like those than with these, which (in The Death Notebooks) she also wrote: