New and Selected Essays

by Denise Levertov

  As if God were an old man

  always upstairs, sitting about

  in sleeveless undershirt, asleep,

  arms folded, stomach rumbling,

  his breath from open mouth

  strident, presaging death …

  No, God’s in the wilderness next door

  —that huge tundra room, no walls and a sky roof—

  busy at the loom. Among the berry bushes,

  rain or shine, that loud clacking and whirring,

  irregular but continuous;

  God is absorbed in work, and hears

  the spacious hum of bees, not the din,

  and hears far-off

  our screams. Perhaps

  listens for prayers in that wild solitude.

  And hurries on with the weaving:

  till it’s done, the great garment woven,

  our voices, clear under the familiar

  blocked-out clamor of the task,

  can’t stop their

  terrible beseeching. God

  imagines it sifting through, at last, to music

  in the astounded quietness, the loom idle,

  the weaver at rest.

  In other poems I have explored passages of Julian of Norwich and passages of the Gospel—for example, the parables of the mustard seed, which have always seemed to me, for the simplest botanical reason, to be misinterpreted (it is not a simple assertion along the lines of “great oaks from little acorns grow!”). Or again, the sheer daring of the Virgin Mary in the Annunciation narrative, contrasted with her so often-alleged meekness; or what I imagined as the state of mind of St. Thomas before and after his meeting with the risen Christ. Before, I imagine Thomas as one “whose entire being had knotted itself/into the one tightdrawn question”—the question raised dramatically by such an encounter as that of Jesus with the possessed child in Mark 9, which I assume he witnessed.

  Why,

  why has this child lost his childhood in suffering,

  why is this child who will soon be a man

  tormented, torn, twisted?

  Why is he cruelly punished

  who has done nothing except be born?

  Thomas identifies with the father’s cry of “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief”; but his harrowing doubt remains with him despite all the miracles he witnesses, for they do not address the profoundly disturbing matter of the suffering of the innocent. Even his meeting with the risen Christ does not suffice to give him certitude as long as it is visual alone; it is the concreteness of touch, of flesh and blood, which frees him at last. He is moved from tenuous belief to an illuminated conviction in which he can rest, like Lady Julian, from the nagging need for explanation, recognizing that (as Robert McAfee Brown has said) “puzzles are to be solved, but mysteries are to be experienced.”

  But when my hand

  led by His hand’s firm clasp

  entered the unhealed wound,

  my fingers encountering

  rib-bone and pulsing heat,

  what I felt was not

  scalding pain, shame for my

  obstinate need,

  but light, light streaming

  into me, over me, filling the room

  as if I had lived till then

  in a cold cave, and now

  coming forth for the first time,

  the knot that bound me unravelling,

  I witnessed

  all things quicken to color, to form,

  my question

  not answered but given

  its part

  in a vast unfolding design lit

  by a risen sun.*

  The writing of each of these poems has brought me a little bit closer to faith as distinct from mere shaky belief. Thus for me the subject is really reversed: not “faith that works” but “work that enfaiths.”

  I was encouraged to be “as personal as you wish”—but what has all this personal history to do with the other issue we were commissioned to address? Has it any relevance to “the world of higher education and learning” and to “the problems of our wider world”?

  My partial response has to do with the fate of poems after they leave the writer’s desk. In writing, I was of course following personal imperatives, as any artist must. But it could not fail to occur to me that, once these poems of religious quest were published, I was likely to lose some of my readers. This proved not to be true. In fact, the positive response I’ve had to them from people I’d have expected to be hostile or disappointed has amazed me. Of course, there have been some who have said they just “couldn’t get into” poems of Christian content and terminology; but the reverse has more often been the case. My Jewish readers, for instance—while not subscribing, of course, to whatever is specifically Christian in the poems— responded to them without hostility, and with solidarity in the basic interfaith assumption of belief in God. We often hear it said that there is much spiritual hunger in our society—but I have been surprised by how much quiet, unadvertised religious commitment there is among people one can loosely characterize as intellectuals—the people who constitute the audience for contemporary poetry in twentieth-century America.

  This being so, one becomes aware that in so secular a society little in contemporary literature articulates the beliefs or yearning which such people hold almost secretly. Just as I was shy about frankly uttering my beliefs in print, and did so with a resigned anticipation of negative response, yet was relieved and indeed exhilarated at the consequences, so, I think, do many crypto-Christians experience relief and pleasure when a poet whose work they already know, and with whose politics they are familiar and sympathetic, turns out to be one of themselves.

  In recent years, the impulse to search for or return to cultural roots has been a factor in making religious practices less “uncool” for Jewish intellectuals than for their Christian counterparts. For Gentile intellectuals with Christian roots or leanings, a great deterrent is the disgusting vulgarity of “born again” hucksters and their poisonous alliance with militarism and repression. Catholic intellectuals have an easier time, because despite many conflicts, within the Church and about it, regarding a number of very important issues, many non-Catholics as well as Catholics find inspiration in the heroes and martyrs of Latin America and elsewhere and in the church’s leadership in peace and justice concerns in many places. Moreover, the Catholic Church has modem traditions of high intellectual discourse and major artistic contributions. One thinks of Messiaen in music, David Jones in poetry, Rouault in painting, Flannery O’Connor in fiction—to name a few off the top of my head. These are artists whom even avowed atheists respect and admire (often with a certain wistful envy), without fear of being considered naive and stupid by their peers.

  Yet there is not a whole lot of contemporary poetry—in English, anyway—which articulates a faith-life (or quest) parallel to that of the many readers who appear to welcome such poetry when they do find it. The appeal of Wendell Berry’s work is partly due, surely, to the way in which his land ethic has more and more seemed to draw on underlying Christian themes. (The converse is probably also true: readers drawn first to his ecological concerns are led through those concerns to an assimilation of his spirituality.)

  Of course, attempting to supply a demand would be fatal to artistic integrity. But supply sometimes happens, by surprise, to meet demand; and in my own case I think the fact that my poems have been addressing doubts and hopes rather than proclaiming certainties has turned out to make them accessible to some readers, letting them into the process as I have engaged in building my own belief structure step by step. They are poems written on the road to an imagined destination of faith. That imagination of faith acts as yeast in my life as a writer: in that sense I do experience “faith that works” as well as “work that enfaiths.” If the results sometimes attain their own autonomous life in the world, as every artist hopes will happen, it is possible that they may contribute to the life of other people. If they do, it must be first and for
emost as works of art, on the same basis as any others, regardless of content. But since content evolves its forms and permeates them, each work that satisfies formally will bring with it the character of its content.

  Finally, a poet speaking from within the Christian tradition and using traditional terms (though not necessarily upholding every orthodoxy) may have more resonance for our intellectual life than is supposed. The Incarnation, the Passion, the Resurrection—these words have some emotive power even for the most secular minds. Perhaps a contemporary poetry that incorporates old terms and old stories can help readers to reappropriate significant parts of their own linguistic, emotional, cultural heritage, whether or not they share doctrinal adherences.

  * A Door in the Hive, 1989.

  * Breathing the Water, 1987.

  * Oblique Prayers, 1984.

  * “St. Thomas Didymus,” A Door in the Hive, 1989.

  This essay was written for a Consultation on “Faith That Works,” organized by the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life in 1990. The papers were published in the summer 1990 issue of Crosscurrent: Religion & Intellectual Life, which is a quarterly.

  Autobiographical Sketch

  (1984)

  “WHO ARE YOU? AND how did you become what you are?” are questions which, when I try to answer them honestly, increase my awareness of how strong, in my case (where in others place and community often play a dominant part), were inherited tendencies and the influence of the cultural milieu— unsupported by a community—of my own family. My father’s Hasidic ancestry, his being steeped in Jewish and Christian scholarship and mysticism, his fervor and eloquence as a preacher, were factors built into my cells even though I rarely paid conscious heed to what, as a child, I mostly felt were parts of the embarrassing adult world, and which during my adolescence I rejected as restrictive. Similarly, my mother’s Welsh intensity and lyric feeling for Nature were not just the air I breathed but, surely, were in the body I breathed with. Reading, at 60, the out-of-print or manuscript pages of my father’s theological writings, or the poems my mother took (shyly) to writing in her late 70s and 80s, I see clearly how much they, though not dedicated to the vocation of poetry, were nevertheless protopoets.

  When I say the cultural atmosphere of our household was unsupported by a community I refer to the fact that my parents—he a converted Russian Jew who, after spending the First World War teaching at the University of Leipzig (though under semi-house arrest as an “enemy alien”), settled in England and was ordained as a priest of the Anglican Church; she a Welshwoman who had grown up in a mining village and later in a North Wales country town, and subsequently travelled widely—were exotic birds in the plain English coppice of Ilford, Essex. Even though our house was semi-detached and exactly like its neighbors architecturally, it looked different because it had no half-curtains or Venetian blinds like the others, only side-curtains on its large windows, so passers-by could look right in. What they could see included bookshelves in every room, while in the bay window of my father’s upstairs study was an almost life-size stone statue representing Jesus preaching, which caused strangers to stare and cross the street to get a better look at it. And my mother’s front garden, though more restrained than the larger back garden, was never prim like many of the others along the street but suggested a foreign opulence, especially when the California poppies—later to delight homesick G.I.s billeted down the road—were in full orange glory.

  The Levertoffs lived in Ilford because my father had been given (in the mistaken supposition that he would want to proselytize a Jewish neighborhood) a church in Shoreditch that had no vicarage and no local congregation. Ilford, though in Essex, was then at the eastern extremity of London; its own western end was still country, though rapidly being “developed” into monotonous row upon row of small “mock-Tudor” houses I early learned to despise as jerry-built architectural monstrosities.

  I didn’t go to school, nor had my sister (nine years older) done so except briefly, another thing which set our household apart from others. Dissatisfied with my sister’s one year at a convent boarding school during my infancy, and unimpressed by local day-schools, whether private or council, my mother (who had been teaching at a Constantinople high school run by the Church of Scotland when she met my father in 1910) taught me herself until at 12, enamored of the de Basil Russian Ballet to which my sister had taken me, I began daily classes at a school of ballet on the other side of London. At that point I was put on my honor to continue reading some history, and went also for weekly French, piano, and art lessons in London; my other formal education ceased.

  Romantic and beautiful Wanstead and Valentines parks, frequent expeditions into the Essex countryside with my sister, and my mother’s very strong sense of history, developed in me a taste for seeking-out and exploring the vanishing traces of the village Ilford which London had engulfed. The reading I did myself, and the reading aloud which was a staple of our family life, combined to give me a passion for England—for the nuances of country things, hedges and old churches and the names of wildflowers—even though part of me knew I was an outsider. Among Jews a Goy, among Gentiles (secular or Christian) a Jew or at least a half-Jew (which was good or bad according to their degree of anti-Semitism); among AngloSaxons a Celt; in Wales a Londoner who not only did not speak Welsh but was not imbued with Welsh attitudes; among school children a strange exception whom they did not know whether to envy or mistrust: all of these anomalies predicated my later experience. I so often feel English, or perhaps European, in the United States, while in England I sometimes feel American—and certainly as a poet have been thought of for decades as an American, for it was in the United States that I developed, though my first book had been published in England before I crossed the Atlantic. But though I was quick to scornfully protest anti-Semitic remarks, or references to the Welsh language as a “dialect,” these feelings of not-belonging were positive for me, not negative. I was given such a sense of confidence by my family, in my family, that though I was often shy (and have remained so in certain respects) I nevertheless experienced the sense of difference as an honor, as a part of knowing (secretly) from an early age—perhaps by seven, certainly before I was ten—that I was an artist-person and had a destiny. I did not experience competitiveness, because I was alone. The age gap—nine years—between me and my sister was such that my childhood was largely that of an only child. I was given a great deal of freedom to roam about outdoors as soon as I’d learned to cross streets safely; only the loneliest depths of Wanstead Park were out of bounds. The house was full of books, many of them late seventeenthand eighteenth-century volumes. Everyone in the family did some kind of writing; my mother and sister always seemed to be helping my father correct galley proofs. My mother sang Lieder, my sister was a really fine pianist. The church services I attended were, despite the frequent childish embarrassment I’ve mentioned and my teenage doubts, beautiful with candlelight and music, incense and ceremony and stained glass, the incomparable rhythms of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.

  All of this sounds idealized ad nauseam, I’m afraid. There were also tremendous domestic arguments and periodic fullscale “rows” and even real tragedy (my gifted but erratic sister’s life and her conflicts and reconciliations with my parents were complex). But all in all I did grow up in an extraordinarily rich environment which nurtured the imaginative, language oriented potential I believe was an inherited gift; and gave me—or almost seduced me into—an appreciation of solitude. Since writing poetry is so essentially a solitary occupation this has always stood me in good stead and perhaps I would not have developed it if I’d gone to school (unless I’d hated school, of course) for I have a sociable, gregarious tendency too, that might have taken away too much time and concentration and necessary daydreaming. Or I might have become caught up in aggressive competition, to the certain detriment of my creative possibilities.

  While it is true that I was not competitive because I had no peers
to compete with (my playmates, whether neighbors or kids I met in the park, were altogether separate from my beginnings in literature), I did, once I’d read Keats’s letters, have hopes of Fame; but I thought of this as posthumous, and thus was saved from careerist ambition. And misinterpreting, to some extent, the gists of Mann’s Tonio Kröger, I rather luxuriated in the protagonist’s wistful alienation—though it was really his friend Lisaveta Ivanovna, the painter, the artist who was getting on with doing her art, who most excited me; especially since when I first read the story at 13, 1 had the chutzpa to believe I would be a painter as well as a poet. (I never deeply believed I would be a dancer despite the five years of my life when I took two ballet classes a day, shedding many tears in the process.)

  Though my favorite poets were all men, I had enough faith in myself, or more precisely enough awe at the magic I knew sometimes worked through me, not to worry about that. Boys seemed, in fiction, to have more adventures; but in the “pretend-games” I made up and got my sister to play with me in my later childhood, some daring young female spies and messengers worked to combat Fascism and Nazism and to assist the government side in the Spanish Civil War (which was then going on). I didn’t suppose my gender to be an obstacle to anything I really wanted to do.

  Humanitarian politics came into my life early—seeing my father on a soapbox protesting Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia; my father and sister both on soapboxes protesting Britain’s lack of support for Spain; my mother canvassing long before those events for the League of Nations Union; and all three of them working on behalf of German and Austrian refugees from 1933 onwards. When I was 11 and 12, unknown to my parents (who would have felt, despite their liberal views, that it was going too far, and was inappropriate for my age, as indeed it was), I used to sell the Daily Worker house-to-house in the working-class streets off Ilford Lane, down towards Barking, on Saturday morning. Oddly enough I was never questioned, despite knee-socks and long plaits (or pigtails, as one said then) though I had many a door slammed in my face.