And sometimes that is all we have to see—sometimes that is all we have to hold to, amid the sordid squalor that comes to us, from one report or another. Because the sky reflected in the puddle is Tolstoy’s way of imploring us to realize the gifts of man’s greater soul.
So then I am not certain if there is anything else man searches for but beauty. And if that is the case, then we must search well for it, and must look hard to find it, and must seek it where it rightly is, and not be seduced by what it pretends to be. That is the secret, also, the secret of beauty, that I will speak about briefly—for I do not need to go on so long about it—for true beauty has in its own way a finality, and a truth, and it must have, for it is, this true beauty, always at war with that which must try to destroy it.
And what tries to destroy it? What attempts to destroy it is the false beauty that parades as beauty, that sets itself up in glory, and parades and postures and struts and makes us want what it is, and if we want what it is bad enough, if we need what it is, we must in some respects kill the beauty that God always intended for us.
This, then, is the dilemma cast and wrought out in our human souls.
So there is a difference between these two beauties, and this difference is profound and earth shaking and I might even say—in fact, I have to say—apocalyptic.
Yes, the war against these two beauties is apocalyptic.
But we have seen it this war—in Homer’s Iliad, in Virgil, in Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, too; in Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, in Malcolm Lowry—in all the writers who have transposed into their work the longing for truth against the odds. This fight for beauty was shown to us in the work of all the prophets.
And of course, by Christ himself.
This line—“beauty will save the world”—comes to us from Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and we must recognize what he meant by this, this frightened, brave, incorrigible man, who lived and died well over a century ago.
We must reflect on this idea that beauty will save the world, for it is a great and harsh and wondrous claim.
And if we visit his books, we might begin to see what he means—not for his books or Russia alone but for all mankind. And we might realize that it in fact is a fight for the very essence of life.
In one of the greatest scenes in The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri and Alyosha are in the garden at the back of their small town, talking about Dmitri’s proposal of love to the beautiful Katerina and the allure of the also beautiful, earthly Grushenka, when he suddenly makes this profound statement:
“The devil and Christ fight for the souls of the men of the earth, and the weapon they use is beauty.”
* * *
—
And we think: How could the devil and Christ use the same weapon? Well, reflecting upon it, they both use beauty as the weapon, but the weapon of beauty is so profoundly different. One in fact is the anathema of the other.
I would like us to reflect briefly on Dmitri’s statement that Christ and the devil fight for the souls of men and the weapon they use is beauty.
Later in one of the most famous chapters of all literature, called “The Grand Inquisitor,” their brother Ivan speaks about Torquemada, whose blood lust perverted Christianity and Catholicism.
Ivan, using the Grand Inquisitor’s logic, condemns Christ. Citing Satan’s three temptations in the desert, he decries that Christ could have helped the world by accepting the devil’s offer. It would have been so simple and needed—and Christ at that moment in the desert could have so suddenly done what man wanted him to do for over two thousand years: rule the world with his love!
So Ivan’s question becomes the Grand Inquisitor’s: Why didn’t he? Why did he not accept the empires of the world as his own—for accepting it would have brought all the souls to him, and would not then he have been able to create heaven on earth? And that he did not create it made him lose it—and so, Ivan says, the Grand Inquisitor is now obligated to burn Christ at the stake, to prevent the perversion of a Christianity the Inquisitor believes in. And it is Christ’s fault, he says, that this has happened.
The one problem is—and we see it, in the smile of pride, and in the arrogance in the questions—that the Inquisitor has accepted the world, has embraced its empire and, in some grave way, has demonstrated how he in accepting the world perverted the very beauty Christian men and women are asked, and demanded, to seek.
And this is what Christ knew when he said, “Do not tempt the lord thy God.”
For great as empires are, this is not the beauty Christ wishes us to embrace.
So Christ could no more embrace the devil’s beauty than he could succumb to Satan’s entreaty. That is, the nature of the beauty Christ offers and the beauty the earth offers is fundamentally different—and it is this difference that every poet and scribe who ever wrote has tried to delineate for themselves as well as others. There is a secretive, otherworldly beauty—a beauty that exists on a different plane, within the realm of empathy—the beauty that transgresses against helplessness and hopes to alleviate pain that illuminates the beauty Christ fights with—this is the message of the conversation in the garden between Dmitri and Alyosha. The beauty of Christ is a beauty that understands man’s nature of helplessness and hopes to alleviate it against all the odds the world has thrown up—against the profusion of cant, and pride and scorn set against this helplessness. Christ’s beauty reminds us to set out to deploy what Shakespeare deploys, the fact that “They laugh at scars who never had a wound.”
The Grand Inquisitor laughs at scars, delights in fact in wounds.
In fact the temptation in the desert is in the final analysis what has happened to our Grand Inquisitor. He has succumbed to such a beauty as the tempter offered. It is as beautiful and unblemished as a statue of some Greek god in the sun. And it wrought him nothing in the end but false piety and false treasure and—in the beauty of his auto-da-fe—hell.
Christ’s answer to why he cannot give himself into Satan’s temptation is in fact in the very persona of Torquemada himself.
But do these things, the temptation and the inquisition, show up in modern day, or are they so anachronistic they are not worthy to speak about? People in fact refrain from speaking about them as if to recoil from a hot stove. As if they did not matter—or more to the point (for if they did not matter, no one would recoil so quickly) that they do matter so much we become embarrassed by their presence, and do not know how to relate our idea of them.
But no matter what age, this argument does manifest itself.
When Mr. Wilberforce the slave trader embraced the money and emblazoned the beauty of the slave trade—to deliver healthy, beautiful bodies of girls and boys, men and women for profit across the sea—it was not so long ago. And when he was in a ravaged storm in the Atlantic and begged Christ if there was Christ to save him, saying he would not trade in beautiful bodies anymore, that was not so long ago. And when the storm calmed, he let his cargo of frightened human beings free, and years later, finally free himself from what he had partaken in, in youth, he wrote for us the song all of us have heard, “Amazing Grace.”
And that was not so long ago.
In 1938 Prime Minister Chamberlain and his entourage invited to Dresden (the second meeting with Hitler)—during the Munich crisis over Czechoslovakia—was overcome by German beauty—in fact he was seduced by beauty: There were thousands of Nazi flags waving in the sun, the lake was crystal blue, the great suites in the grand hotel were plush with carpet and every whim of food and beverage an Englishman might desire. And the SS guards, young and handsome, tall and strong, stood guard, in black helmets and white gloves, with their bayonets glinting. While little blue-eyed, blond girls and boys dressed in traditional dresses and trousers, their faces glowing with health, handed out flowers and plums and oranges to the guests.
Yes, this was the paradigm of beauty, and it was remarked by everyone in the worl
d as beauty—by the Paris and London papers as beauty—by our own Lord Beaverbrook, as well.
Beauty that the world wanted and needed. And because of this beauty, the beauty that Hitler presented to his guests, Czechoslovakia was dismantled, and peace assured for all those who needed and longed for beauty. The seduction was in fact the seduction by beauty of something greater than one might first imagine. It was a beauty that took away courage and honour.
As Winston Churchill, one of the few dissenters in all of England, said later to an almost empty House of Commons:
“You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.”
That was a kind of beauty—the kind we seem to be unable to resist—and the kind that allows, sooner or later, disgrace.
But I will now mention the other beauty—the beauty that came from that beauty in order to counter it.
It was in 1941, and the Russian city Leningrad was surrounded, possibly by some of those very same SS troops who were so resplendent in Dresden three years before. The city was being bombed and strafed; people were starving—there was no way into the city of death except by the lake on the eastern shore, Lake Ladoga. And in December of that year a middle-aged truck driver was waiting at the far end of the lake, walking back and forth in the minus-thirty-degree weather, looking anxiously toward the bombed city. He was there for one reason, and for one reason only: he was waiting for the lake to freeze deep enough so he could take a Lorrie across it. And though everyone told him not to risk it, that the ice was not thick enough, he dove his Lorrie onto the windswept ice and, battered by cold and shells from the German guns, made it into the city of death and starvation and despair, with his cargo. He managed to make it against all the odds thrust upon him, in the dark cold and terrified night. He made it.
And his cargo, well then, his cargo—oranges for the children for Christmas.
That simply told is true beauty. It is a beauty that does not seduce but asks us to emulate, a beauty that does not contrive to give but asks us to sacrifice. A beauty that depends and even seems to ask for too much. A beauty that Satan in tempting Christ has no answer for and does not know.
But in the eternal spark of human creation, we know.
A beauty that, Dostoyevsky reminds us, will not destroy, manipulate and seduce, but will save the world.
It follows the firemen up the towers on that dreadful day and watches over a small boat when it turns back into a storm toward a doomed vessel floundering in the swell.
It is in fact the harshest and most necessary beauty the world has ever known. It is the beauty I ask, for all of you graduating this year. It is that beauty that I hope you never relinquish. It is beauty so profoundly startling it is sometimes caught only in a moment among so many other moments in a day
It is why “Amazing Grace” is sung in death, and the world celebrates with the “Song of Joy” when a man or woman hands over their very last piece of bread.
2009
I WENT DOWN TO MEET ALDEN NOWLAN
I WENT DOWN TO FREDERICTON TO MEET ALDEN NOWLAN, THE man from Desolation Creek, Nova Scotia, a founding member of the Flat Earth Society, whose charter relinquishes Earth to the abyss somewhere off the farther coast of Newfoundland; member of the inner court of King James Stewart, the Stewart monarchy in exile (yes, Stewart—the French changed the spelling to Stuart); honorary doctor of laws, like one of his heroes, Sam Johnson—both prodigious towering men, with grave knowledge and a curious softheartedness, a more curious vulnerability to be a target of their times; like Sam, as well, a brilliant conversationalist—or more precisely, what is a Maritime trait, a “monologist”; a cook, and a good one; a secret watcher of daytime soaps; an intentional lover of bad movies—which is, to my way of thinking, always a sign of greatness; a self-taught reader by four years of age, with, by the age of thirty-five, a library containing thousands of volumes of works on every possible subject, and thousands of his own poems; a reader of five newspapers a day, who quit school in grade five to work in the woods, which made him the only poet in the country deemed functionally illiterate by Statistics Canada—a fact he was whimsically proud of; a large, imposing, generous, self-deprecating, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, complex, irascible, irritating wonder of a man, who had been born in poverty, the son of a woodsman and a teenage girl, in the Depression year of 1933 in rural Nova Scotia.
I went down to meet Alden Nowlan, which might have been a title of one of his own poems, and I could quote dozens of them.
I would quote his poems and watch in Sydney, Australia, or Brisbane, or Virginia, or New Orleans, or London, people’s faces light up for the first time at the man’s genius—recognize themselves in him, and hear in his simple, straightforward words some great eternal wisdom.
It was a wisdom tinged with sorrow, that always came, it seemed, in the form of a parting between friends said at the door on a cold winter evening.
The last time I quoted them (I leave it to others now), people asked about him, at the writers’ conference in Brisbane, Australia, in 1993:
“Where is he from?”
“Where can we get his poems?”
“What are the names of his books?”
“Did he win the Nobel Prize?”
One middle-aged woman, whispering in my ear: “His Cousins—you know a secret—I grew up like that, here in Australia, that’s what I’ve been trying to say in my work, but I never heard anyone say it like that. Can I write to him? Is he Canadian?”
“He would love you to—and he would answer—but he is gone from us” was the only answer I could give.
He lived at best a precarious childhood, growing up in the Mosherville-Stanley area of central Nova Scotia. There are scenes in the novel about his childhood, The Wanton Troopers, that are truly horrific. But as he once said, children can exist in a world adults would go mad in.
By the time Alden Nowlan was thirty-three, he would have the first of his major operations for throat cancer—the doctor telling him that the chances of his living through it were about the same as a Canadian soldier living through the landing at Dieppe in 1942. When the doctor told him he had cancer, he burst out laughing. It seemed so strange. He had gone to see about a sore throat.
He lived through the first operation, and a second one, and a third—losing the muscles in his shoulders as a result—and as a result of that growing a lion-like beard to hide the scars on his throat that his closer friends would sometimes see whenever he sat in his den in his housecoat and leather slippers. He did not quit smoking.
Still, why would he not live through these operations? He had lived through so much before this. Abused as a child of poverty—tormented, abandoned, beaten. Thought of as retarded, and mocked by men and boys he knew, spending years in isolation—discovering mocking came because of their fear of him. He learned over time how prevalent this would be.
Finally he left home at nineteen, never to return, to take a job at the newspaper in Hartland, New Brunswick, the Observer, lying about certain qualifications he never had and, as it turned out, never needed. There he formed friendships with people such as Hugh John Fleming and young Richard Hatfield, the latter being a friend he would not desert. In fact, Nowlan would desert so few in his life. Even his father, who treated him cruellest of all, he did not desert. His poems about and his letters to his father reflect this. In his 1974 novel, Various Persons Named Kevin O’Brien, he admitted that he was the only person in the world who ever feared his father, one line that says more about the excruciating circumstances of an impoverished child’s life than any report on the subject ever could.
His life as a child, he once said, was the life of Huckleberry Finn—not the romantic freckle-faced kid—that, he said, was Tom Sawyer. No, the world of Huck Finn was both violent and terrifying, and Twain made sure he let us know it was. So, too, did he.
I was on my way to see Alde
n Nowlan, on my motorcycle on a summer’s night, shifting down through the turns on the Killarney Road in Fredericton, during one of the last summers of his life—I did not know this then, of course, though I now suspect he must have. Looking back, he was probably forty-eight years old, so he had done some living. And more than his share of suffering, though he almost never complained and, like James Joyce, had a resolute will to forge out of the smithy of his soul his own destiny. There is something great in that attribute, that rare ability to be one’s own man, and to (as Chekhov said) “squeeze the slave from my soul.”
Destiny it was. And it was his great intellect, matched with a brave heart, that saw him through. He was a friend of Hatfield and Dalton Camp, of Irving Layton, knew Ernest Buckler, and Pat Lane, and John Newlove; conversed with Morley Callaghan and corresponded with Henry Miller; a friend also of Stompin’ Tom Connors; a friend of ordinary men and women everywhere. Sometimes he would pick an area code out of the telephone book late at night and phone the operator in a small town in Virginia or New Mexico to have a chat. Knowing loneliness and human nature, he knew they were often happy to have a person listen to them for a change.
He said he would make a great old man—but he said it the way people do who test the waters, hoping God is listening. At times he matched his age against those whose work he respected, and felt some achievement in outliving them, because death was always so intimate a presence.
He had outlived Keats (and once he smiled and said to me, “Well, except for Thomas Chatterton, who hasn’t?”). He had outlived Emily Brontë, Shelley and Byron, and D. H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan and Malcolm Lowry. He was the last to think that earthly longevity was the measure of any man or woman (just look at the names mentioned), but it was no less true that to keep going and keep writing would be fine with him.
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