Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  Critics argue that the difference between Ginés and the Don, picaroon trickster and chivalric visionary, is partly an opposition of two literary genres, the picaresque and the novel, which Cervantes essentially invented, in much the same way that Shakespeare (who did not know Greek tragedy, only its crippled remnant in the Roman Seneca) invented modern tragedy and modern tragicomedy as well. As in the Shakespearean protagonists, authentic inwardness incarnates itself in Don Quixote, whereas the scamp Pasamonte is all outwardness, despite his deep talents at duplicity. Ginés is a shapeshifter; he cannot change except in externals. The Knight, like the great Shakespearean characters, cannot stop changing: that is the purpose of his frequently irascible but always finally loving conversations with the faithful Sancho. Bound together by the order of play, they are also united by the endless love they induce in one another. Their quarrels are frequent; how could they not be, in the realm of the Quixotic? Sancho hesitates sometimes on the verge of abandoning the relationship, yet he cannot; partly he is fascinated, but in the end he is held by love, and so is the Don. The love cannot perhaps be distinguished from the order of play, but that is as it should be. Certainly one reason for Ginés de Pasamonte’s return in Part II is that he never participates in play, even as puppet master.

  Every reader recognizes that the difference between the two parts of Don Quixote is that everyone who matters most in Part II is either explicitly credited with having read Part I or knows that he was a character in it. That provides a different frame for the reappearance of the picaroon Ginés when we reach the moment in Part II, Chapter XXV, when we encounter a man clad in chamois skin, hose, breeches, and a doublet, and with a patch of green taffeta over one eye and that whole side of his face. This is Master Pedro, come, as he says, with the divining ape and the spectacle of the freeing of Melisendra by her husband, the famous knight-errant Don Gaiferos, she being the daughter of Charlemagne held captive by the Moors, and he being a principal vassal of Charlemagne.

  The landlord at the inn where Master Pedro joins Don Quixote and Sancho Panza says of the puppet master, “He talks more than six men and drinks more than twelve.” After he identifies the Don and Sancho, at the advice of his divining ape (whose divination goes only backward, from present to past), Ginés-Pedro stages the puppet show, certainly one of the metaphorical splendors of Cervantes’s masterpiece. The classic exegesis here is from Ortega y Gasset, in his Meditations on Quixote; he compares Master Pedro’s puppet show to the Velázquez Maids of Honor, where the artist, in painting the king and queen, simultaneously places his studio in the picture. It is not a painting upon which Don Quixote could safely have gazed, and he is certainly the worst possible audience for the puppet show:

  And Don Quixote, seeing and hearing so many Moors and so much clamor, thought it would be a good idea to assist those who were fleeing; and rising to his feet, in a loud voice he said:

  “I shall not consent, in my lifetime and in my presence, to any such offense against an enamored knight so famous and bold as Don Gaiferos. Halt, you lowborn rabble; do not follow and do not pursue him unless you wish to do battle with me!”

  And speaking and taking action, he unsheathed his sword, leaped next to the stage, and with swift and never before seen fury began to rain down blows on the crowd of Moorish puppets, knocking down some, beheading others, ruining this one, destroying that one, and among many other blows, delivered so powerful a downstroke that if Master Pedro had not stooped, crouched down, and hunched over, he would have cut off his head more easily than if it had been so much marzipan.

  That downward stroke, by no means unintended, may be the heart of this delightful intervention. Master Pedro has intruded in the order of play, where he has no place, and it moves to avenge itself upon the picaroon. A while before, Don Quixote has said to Sancho that the puppet master must have made a bargain with the devil, because “the monkey replies only to past or present things, which is as far as the devil’s knowledge can go.” The Knight’s suspicion of the trickster continues when he criticizes Master Pedro’s mistakes in ascribing church bells to the Moorish mosques. Ginés-Pedro’s defensive reply further prepares us for the Don’s shattering of the show:

  “Your grace should not concern yourself with trifles, Señor Don Quixote, or try to carry things so far that you never reach the end of them. Aren’t a thousand plays performed almost every day that are full of a thousand errors and pieces of nonsense, and yet are successful productions that are greeted not only with applause but with admiration? Go on, boy, and let them say what they will, for as long as I fill my purse, there can be more errors than atoms in the sun.”

  Don Quixote’s reply is dark: “That is true.” Master Pedro has become Cervantes’s great literary rival, the monstrously productive and successful poet-playwright Lope de Vega. The Knight’s subsequent assault upon pasteboard illusions is at once a critique of public taste and a metaphysical manifestation of Quixotic or visionary will, making ghostlier the demarcations between art and nature. The humor of disjunction is salted by literary satire, hardly mitigated by the aftermath in which the chastened Knight makes financial amends for his generous error and blames the usual wicked enchanters for having deceived him.

  It would hurt me too much to rehearse again the final defeat, surrender of identity, and virtuous death of Alonso Quijano the Good, who had been Don Quixote. Sancho Panza urges his friend to rise up and go on fresh adventures, but the good Alonso declines. All is redeemed by the final entry of Miguel de Cervantes:

  For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him; he knew how to act, and I to write; the two of us alone are one, despite and regardless of the false Tordesillan writer who dared, or will dare, to write with a coarse and badly designed ostrich feather about the exploits of my valorous knight, for it is not a burden for his shoulders or a subject for his cold creativity; and you will warn him, if you ever happen to meet him, to let the weary and crumbling bones of Don Quixote rest in the grave, and not attempt, contrary to all the statutes of death, to carry them off to Castilla la Vieja, removing him from the tomb where he really and truly lies, incapable of undertaking a third journey or a new sally; for to mock the many undertaken by so many knights errant, the two he made were enough, and they have brought delight and pleasure to everyone who knows of them, in these kingdoms as well as those abroad. And with these you will fulfill your Christian duty, by giving good counsel to those who do not wish you well, and I shall be pleased and proud to have been the first who completely enjoyed the fruits of his writing, just as he wished, for my only desire has been to have people reject and despise the false and nonsensical histories of the books of chivalry, which are already stumbling over the history of my true Don Quixote, and will undoubtedly fall to the ground. Vale.

  I experience the same sadness here that afflicts me when Sir John Falstaff departs forever. For just this once in my life, I will quote Ezra Pound at his elegiac best:

  And sorrow, sorrow like rain.

  (“Lament of the Frontier Guard,” in Cathay [1915])

  CHAPTER 2

  Clarissa (1748)

  SAMUEL RICHARDSON

  WHEN I WAS YOUNG, I devoted most of my days to reading poetry. Otherwise I read mythology, history, religious texts, novels, and stories. I omit the reading of Shakespeare, which was constant. Reaching back into time, I remember an early obsession with the novels of Thomas Hardy. He led me on to D. H. Lawrence and then to Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster.

  As a Cornell undergraduate of seventeen, I had the good fortune to participate in a seminar on the novel taught by Professor William M. Sale, Jr. Sale was a lean, rangy Kentuckian who spoke with a slow drawl and demonstrated a fierce reluctance to deal with fools. At seventeen I was afraid of him, but by the time I graduated I had spent many afternoons in his house with him, his gracious wife, Helen Stearns, and with his oldest son, William, who became a distinguished classicist and a lif
elong friend until his death in Saint Louis in 2017.

  In a yearlong seminar with Professor Sale, we began with Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. We devoted a month to that extraordinary novel, reading it uncut. I regard Clarissa and In Search of Lost Time as the two most eminent of all novels, surpassing even Tolstoy and Dickens. I realize that again I will always be Sale’s student. I am assuming that Don Quixote, Moby-Dick, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables are closer to epics than to novels.

  Sale’s seminar was eclectic, and included Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, Vanity Fair, Nostromo, Absalom, Absalom!, and Howards End. Not everything was on that level. Sale’s personal taste gave us John P. Marquand’s H. M. Pulham, Esquire, and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Several years ago I tried to reread Pulham but failed, and though Warren’s best novel holds up, it remains less impressive than his later poetry.

  Sale’s impact on me remains largest when I reread Clarissa, which I do every other year or so, as I do also with In Search of Lost Time. Richardson’s art converts an epistolary novel into a narrative frequently tumultuous and just as often given to a kind of unearthly stasis. Clarissa Harlowe dies majestically but with an excruciating slowness. Dr. Samuel Johnson, who admired the novel with absolute conviction, famously remarked to Boswell, “Why, sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story…you would hang yourself….You must read him for the sentiment.”

  Shakespearean inwardness can be said to have been absorbed by Richardson more fully than by any other novelist except for Proust. Clarissa Harlowe remains the ultimate Protestant heroine. I say this warily, because for the last quarter-century I have been beaten up by Christian critics for my heretical views on what I have come to call the American Religion and its relation to the spiritual history of the Protestant will. In my exhausted old age, I do not know whether the School of Resentment or the orthodox oxen are more unmannerly. Perhaps being gored by a Christian is more salubrious than being speared by a Franco-Heideggerian, but I will not know that until I get to the place of rest.

  I do not know of a more ambivalent erotic relationship between a woman and a man than the mutually destructive passion of Clarissa Harlowe and Robert Lovelace. The only rival might be Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and Antony. It is very difficult to compare the strife of empires to a domestic trauma, though the tragic grandeur of Clarissa Harlowe is not lessened by juxtaposition with the Egyptian queen.

  How could a marriage between Clarissa and Lovelace have worked? Lovelace is the Restoration rake resurrected, while Clarissa is a Protestant martyr. Her slow death becomes for her a mounting glory, for him an annihilation of the will.

  It is only a step from that to his dying words after he has lost his duel with Colonel Morden, Clarissa’s kinsman:

  Blessed—said he, addressing himself no doubt to Heaven; for his dying eyes were lifted up—a strong convulsion prevented him for a few moments saying more—But recovering, he again with great fervour (lifting up eyes, and his spread hands) pronounced the word Blessed—Then, in a seeming ejaculation, he spoke inwardly so as not to be understood: at last, he distinctly pronounced these three words,

  LET THIS EXPIATE!

  And then, his head sinking on his pillow, he expired; at about half an hour after ten.

  Lovelace dies invoking a goddess, the transfigured Clarissa Harlowe. It is hardly a Christian death. Clarissa dies a Protestant death but one very much transmembered by the force of her will:

  I beseech ye, my good friends, proceeded she, mourn not for one who mourns not, nor has cause to mourn, for herself. On the contrary, rejoice with me that all my worldly troubles are so near their end. Believe me, sirs, that I would not, if I might, choose to live, although the pleasantest part of my life were to come over again: and yet eighteen years of it, out of nineteen, have been very pleasant. To be so much exposed to temptation, and to be so liable to fail in the trial, who would not rejoice that all her dangers are over!—All I wished was pardon and blessing from my dear parents. Easy as my departure seems to promise to be, it would have been still easier had I had that pleasure. BUT GOD ALMIGHTY WOULD NOT LET ME DEPEND FOR COMFORT UPON ANY BUT HIMSELF.

  Richardson wishes us to remember that the sublime Clarissa is only nineteen. To say that God withdraws all comfort except Himself is not exactly a humble sentiment. She dies on her own terms and accepts God’s esteem in a mutual exchange of overwhelming wills. Poor Lovelace is quite accurate at the close. His final view of Clarissa is not so very different from her own self-estimate.

  I have always been impatient with critics who ascribe flaws to Clarissa Harlowe. Far more than Richard Lovelace, who cannot quite bridge the gap between Restoration libertine and Herculean hero in the mode of John Dryden’s dramas, Clarissa has the wholeness of the great Shakespearean personalities. Richardson appropriates from Shakespeare the representation of inwardness, and Clarissa is as persuasive as Rosalind or Portia, though she stems from Shakespearean tragedy and not from comedy.

  In 1987, I edited a volume of critical essays on Samuel Richardson, including work by Ian Watt, Martin Price, and Mark Kinkead-Weekes. Rereading it now, in 2018, I am captivated by the final essay, “Reading the Fire Scene in Clarissa,” by Rosemary Bechler. It seems to me the most enlightening discussion I have encountered on this Protestant masterpiece of internal struggle to achieve the original bareness of the soul confronting the divine.

  Bechler returns me to William Law (1686–1761), who has always been a spiritual preceptor to me since my early years as a scholar of William Blake, when I wrote a long study, Blake’s Apocalypse (1963), and also composed an immense commentary for my friend David V. Erdman’s edition of The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (1965). William Law was the center of a circle around Samuel Richardson, who was a printer and publisher as well as a novelist. The group included two physicians, George Cheyne and John Freke, as well as the poet John Byrom, disciple of William Law and author of the poem Enthusiasm (1752). William Law’s most famous work remains A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729), which inspired a marvelous response from the magnificent Dr. Samuel Johnson:

  When at Oxford, I took up Law’s Serious Call to a Holy Life, expecting to find it a dull book…and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion, after I became capable of rational inquiry.

  Law’s later work was in the hermetic tradition that had been revived by Jacob Boehme (1575–1624). Boehme, a shoemaker, had mystical visions that identified God the Father as fire, and the Son as light. To be saved, we have to go through hell in this life, and learn to read The Signature of All Things. William Blake read Boehme with some sympathy, as he initially did with Swedenborg, but then decided that a poet like John Milton contained the larger truths that the mystics could only touch.

  Samuel Richardson and his group were conscious of reviving the seventeenth-century tradition of the English Inner Light Puritans: at one point Lovelace remarks that the light of the Bible “is too glaring to be borne.” Against it, he sets on fire the house of assignation in which he has confined Clarissa:

  Meantime Dorcas, after she had directed me upstairs, not knowing the worst was over, and expecting every minute the house would be in a blaze, out of tender regard for her lady (I shall for ever love the wench for it) ran to her door, and rapping loudly at it, in a recovered voice, cried out with a shrillness equal to her love, Fire! Fire!—The house is on fire!—Rise, madam!—This instant rise—if you would not be burnt in your bed!

  No sooner had she made this dreadful outcry, but I heard her lady’s door with hasty violence unbar, unbolt, unlock, and open, and my charmer’s voice sounding like that of one going into a fit.

  You may believe how much I was affected. I trembled with concern for her, and hastened down faster than the alarm of fire had made me run up, in order to sa
tisfy her that all the danger was over.

  When I had flown down to her chamber door, there I beheld the charmingest creature in the world, supporting herself on the arm of the gasping Dorcas, sighing, trembling, and ready to faint, with nothing on but an under-petticoat, her lovely bosom half-open, and her feet just slipped into her shoes. As soon as she saw me, she panted, and struggled to speak; but could only say, oh, Mr Lovelace! and down was ready to sink.

  I clasped her in my arms with an ardour she never felt before: My dearest life! fear nothing: I have been up—the danger is over—the fire is got under—And how (foolish devil! to Dorcas) could you thus, by your hideous yell, alarm and frighten my angel!

  Oh Jack! how her sweet bosom, as I clasped her to mine, heaved and panted! I could even distinguish her dear heart flutter, flutter, flutter, against mine; and for a few minutes, I feared she would go into fits.

  Lest the half-lifeless charmer should catch cold in this undress, I lifted her to her bed, and sat down by her upon the side of it, endeavouring with the utmost tenderness, as well of action as expression, to dissipate her terrors.

  But what did I get by this my generous care of her, and by my successful endeavour to bring her to herself?—Nothing, ungrateful as she was! but the most passionate exclamations: for we had both already forgot the occasion, dreadful as it was, which had thrown her into my arms; I, from the joy of encircling the almost disrobed body of the loveliest of her sex; she, from the greater terrors that arose from finding herself in my arms, and both seated on the bed from which she had been so lately frighted.

  The sadistic element in Lovelace’s lust for Clarissa cannot be overstated. There is a schizophrenic trace in his alternations as rake and as Dryden’s Herculean hero, more in the mode of Marlowe than of Shakespeare. As sadistic rake he rapes Clarissa Harlowe, in the actual presence of procuress and whores, and with the aid of drugged alcohol. The rape will destroy them both. With her will and integrity violated, Clarissa’s possible love for him vanishes forever. The tragedy, because of her spiritual eminence, is greater for her, yet for Lovelace it is tragic also, because the heroic strain in him authentically loves her.