by Rex Murphy
Mocking the absolute misery of another human being has to be—next to deliberately and wantonly designing that misery—the lowest of human behaviours.
Mocking the misery, torment and death of six million human beings, therefore, belongs to some unspeakable category of epic depravity.
What form, what shape, would the keenest of such mockery take? Would it be to jeer publicly and laugh at the torments and death of so many, to take open delight at the nearly unimaginable pain and terror visited on so many?
To cheer the misery of millions would surely be an offence to scorch the ears of hell itself. But, if you are a Jew, I suspect that the last and perfect insult, the one that surpasses even open mockery of the Holocaust—its last cruelty, so to speak—is to say there was no Holocaust.
And yet, here we are, barely six years out of the bleak century forever stained by Adolf Hitler’s near-extermination of European Jewry in the great murder factories of the concentration camps, and the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, hosts a “conference” on the “myth” of the Holocaust. He assembles a clutch of “scholars” to launch an inquiry into the Holocaust, most eminent among whom is that paragon of erudition and dispassionate inquiry, a veritable Causabon-under-a-white-sheet, the former Ku Klux Klanner David Duke. Dr. Duke, as he pretentiously styles himself, may be a depleted merchant of old and expired hatreds in North America, but he’s the headline guest and revered scholar at the conference in the soon-tobe-nuclear Iran.
Lesser Aristotles include Robert Faurisson, a French professor who denies the existence of the gas chambers; an Australian, Michele Renouf, who hails Mr. Ahmadinejad as a hero just for holding the conference, and another Australian, Frederick Toben, who delivered to the assembled illuminati this ferocious particular: “The number of victims at the Auschwitz concentration camp could be about 2,007.” The use of “about” in that sentence is amazing.
There was also a Canadian professor, Shiraz Dossa from St. Francis Xavier University, who evidently travelled to this zoo of mountebanks unawake to the thought that a conference called to discuss the myth of the Holocaust would be a gathering dedicated to the idea of the Holocaust as a myth. When the news broke that the professor was attending this festival of blight, he lamented that the gathering was full of “hacks and lunatics” and that he wouldn’t even “shake hands with most of them.” One can only hope for the students of St. F.X. that Professor Dossa is not teaching either logic or holiday planning.
The target of it all, as it always is, was Israel and the Jews. For Mr. Ahmadinejad, the nearly illimitable suffering of the six million is a Jewish lie. On state television, he proclaimed: “They [the Jews] have fabricated a legend under the name Massacre of the Jews, and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself and the prophets themselves.” The same Mr. Ahmadinejad, who mocks and derides the historical Holocaust, opens this demented seminar with the clear promise of one soon to come: “The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom.” He has so often proclaimed that Israel will be “wiped off the map” that the phrase hardly needs quotation marks. But note, too, how he links Israel’s eradication with humanity, all humanity, “achieving freedom.”
The death of Israel—i.e., the death of Jews—as millennial panacea, the removal of the one impediment to universal harmony—where have we heard this before? We are not far, not far by one inch, from the racist dogmas that found such terrible audience in 1930s Germany. The Jew now, as then, is always out of scale—in power, in insidiousness, in perniciousness to the common good of mankind.
“If somebody in their country questions God, nobody says anything,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said. “But if somebody denies the myth of the massacre of Jews, the Zionist loudspeakers and the governments in the pay of Zionism will start to scream.”
This is anti-Semitism’s latest diabolic twist. The Holocaust was powered by the great lie of the Jewish world conspiracy, and now the Holocaust itself is another “Jewish conspiracy.” Anti-Semitism as the snake that swallows its own tail. The malice here is profound. While most of the sane world looked upon this conference as deranged and hateful, and many worthy people said as much, hatred and mockery of Israel and the Jews has become so common that this outlandish gathering in Tehran this week seemed almost ordinary, predictable.
Let us recall that was Arendt’s reading of Eichmann: ordinary, predictable, banal.
Ahmadinejad, however much his ravings excite the chuckles of “right thinkers” everywhere—as “not to be taken seriously,” as merely a “pose” for geopolitical purposes—is not a harmless clown. The complacency with which so much of the world takes his government’s acquisition of nuclear weapons approaches the status of being an absolute proof that “Never Again” was never a resolution—just a convenient slogan.
A FEROCIOUS PARABLE | January 28, 2008
A recent immigrant to Canada—Toronto, to be particular—is another in the grim chain of innocent people gunned down on this city’s streets and in one horrible case, even on school property. His name was Hou Chang Mao.
What was Hou Chang Mao engaged in when some miserable waste of breath let loose the bullet that took all the rest of Mr. Hou’s hopeful, honourable life away from him, and him away from his two—now wretched and terribly grieving—children? Why, the reckless new citizen was outside a fruit store on a main street in this great multicultural city, stacking oranges in a crate. It’s still a truth that newcomers to this country start at the bottom, do long and dreary work, sacrifice for the next generation of their children—work hard, and play by the rules, to use the stiff phrase—and Hou Chang Mao was a model of that extremely benign and, to my mind, extremely honourable stereotype.
Mr. Hou’s death is really hard to take. He had just come back from China, where he’d gone to bring his (now weeping) eighteen-year-old daughter to join him and his twenty-three-year-old (now tormented) son. What a horrific somersault for that young woman—to come to this fresh, vital, safe country, and barely here, when her father, at nothing more than stacking oranges in a crate outside a grocery store, is shot down by some menacing coward.
It should make us shudder to consider what she thinks of this country now. What a brutal twist this story puts to this man’s hopes and dreams. How hard was it for him to get here in the first place? What were his visions of this country before he arrived? What had he told his children? How can they now square all that he had told them then with the image of their father dead on a Toronto sidewalk? For that matter, in some wide sense, how can we?
The next day, his son was brave enough to try to say, through a translator, a few things about this callous and empty slaughter, and the sight of him and his grieving sister trying to balance shock and grief, their visible, astonished pain at a dream turned upside down, would melt stone.
I suppose it’s pointless to ask if those who execute the innocent and the harmless, who by their idiot violence create widows and orphans, ever really contemplate how perfectly selfish and egotistical they are. Their squabbles over moronic ideas of honour, or their vile and empty turf battles, or the laughable idea of “respect” that supposedly “justifies” letting bullets fly—if anybody else dies, well hey, we didn’t mean to kill them.
Well, it doesn’t mean much, either, to those children that their father wasn’t meant to be killed. And apparently doesn’t mean enough, either, yet, for some people who were there to come forward and honour the dead man with a visit to the police station and a little information.
Canada has lost a decent human being; two children in a strange land have lost an honourable and self-sacrificing father. And some fragment of the hope and sanity that this country stands for in the minds of so many who are not its citizens, but would one day like to be, has been icily chipped away, by mean people not worth the shadow of the life they ended.
In the swirl of “big” news, this isn’t a big story, but Hou Chang Mao’s life and death is a ferocious and sad
parable whose meaning may outstay a hundred headlines. And his family deserves our respect and sympathy.
LITERATURE
IMAGE OF A POET | November 15, 2003
The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection
of the life or of the work.
This is W.B. Yeats’s formulation, typical in its aphoristic force, the concentrated eloquence he imparts to what is, otherwise, a bare assertion. Typical also in its subject matter.
Yeats was no careless rhapsode. Writers often speak of their craft, the self-conscious, studious, disciplined portion of their calling. Craft is the careful twin of art’s wild mystery. Yeats, more than most poets who have spoken of what they do, was alert from the first days of his muse that it is as much a study and a progress to write poetry, as it is a rush of inspiration, the fluttering of a visiting muse, or the unbidden speech of secret origins.
He thought very much about what he did and knew that real poetry, great achievement, was never merely “given.” It was given only after an apprenticeship of toil, study, practice and time. It filled a life to “do” poetry. That, I suppose, is the burden of the couplet.
But we must never take poets at their word. Yeats is almost singular in the degree to which the “life” and the “work” are not opponents, not the counter-matter one of the other. It is nice work to find the daylight between the life of William Butler Yeats and the poetry of William Butler Yeats. Where shall we look to find the space open between them? The many poems to, or of, Maude Gonne? Where does the life stop and the poem begin in either of these? Yeats’s passion, yearning, pursuit and eventual renunciation of Gonne is an electrical current in the poetry and the life. “Easter 1916”? The great matter of Ireland, the Troubles, as they have come to be called, were not a spectacle to be limned by the indifferent, fingernail-paring artist.
They were as much of Yeats’s life as sexual passion. The Byzantium poems, with their strange and beautiful, hypnotic rhythms and images—not even these were “dream” poems, pieces carved out of the fantasies of some solitary. Yeats’s spiritualism, his thirst for arcana and busy traffic with the nebulous concourse of the “other world,” was a real pursuit for him. There was a lot of Coleridge in Yeats—the beckoning of the numinous had a reality and force more “grounded” people find difficult to understand, and many dismiss as embarrassingly ridiculous. They eminently were not ridiculous for him. Byzantium and the cluster of poems that seem fixed on the idea of art itself, art pure and changeless, came out of his insistent intercourse with that (for him) real world of mystic chatter and esoteric speculation.
If we were to take Yeats’s postulated opposites, the life or the work, and choose to read just the one or the other, we could not do so. The life infiltrates the work; the work, the life. He who saw poetry as a vocation, who may indeed be the last Western poet to whom we can apply without an inch of irony the term bard, with its connotations of gifted authority or licence to speak “larger” than other men, saw the doing of poetry, the art, as the centre of any hope for the perfect life.
It is because one is wound so intimately, the temptation is to say so perfectly, with the other—how can we know the dancer from the dance?—that the case of Yeats is so singular an instance of the use of biography as a help to poetry. The biography of Wallace Stevens may be interesting. It may offer some clues and hints as to what went on in that strange and coloured mind. But Stevens’s life, such as can be known from biography, will not unwind “The Comedian as the Letter C.”
How different with Yeats. Here we need a concordance of the biographical with the literary. So, for those who think the poetry of Yeats one of the great inheritances of the century now mercifully finished, W.B. Yeats: A Life; II: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939, the second half of the mighty work of University of Oxford historian R.F. Foster, is welcome. It is one of the many merits of Foster’s approach that he demonstrates, frequently and in specific detail, Yeats’s marked awareness that he was “cutting a figure,” that as a poet and an Irish citizen he deliberately composed a persona. All poets are self-aware: it is almost a definition of a poet to be so. Poets mine themselves, their emotions, their family histories. What is the poetry of Wordsworth but a lifelong excavation of certain episodes of intense personal experience, the history of his self-consciousness?
Yeats was self-aware in something of this same precocious and extravagant manner, and aware as well of how others of his time and place were aware of him. He played both to the mirror of himself and of others’ opinion of him. Much of his poetry is pitched to construct what today we call his “image”—how the Irish people saw him, and would come to see him. His poetry is, to some degree, an artful biography, and seen by him as such.
Foster, for instance, gives illuminating comment on what Yeats called his “bread and butter” letter to the Swedish Academy, The Bounty of Sweden, which incorporated his lecture to the Academy upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. It is a calculated document, intended to burnish and reinforce some of Yeats’s central convictions about Irish culture and politics. Foster writes: “The Bounty of Sweden, taken as a whole, shows both WBY’s brilliant ability to reconstruct history in terms of its meaning for himself and to place his work, and his circle, at the centre.”
An earlier comment by Foster on the awarding of the Nobel, including a quotation from Yeats, underscores how deeply the poet saw, or wished others to see, his achievement, his work, as intrinsically interleaved with the achievement and history of his country: “An Irish winner of the [Nobel] prize, a year after Ireland gained its independence, had a symbolic value in the world’s eyes, and he was careful to point this out: His reply to the many letters of congratulations was consistent. ‘I consider that this honour has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish literature, it is part of Europe’s welcome to the Free State.’” In a poet of less capacity, one less intricated with the public life of his country, such an observation might seem the height of giddy, grand egotism, but the truth is simply that Yeats had the right to such a claim. His poetry cannot be detached from the theatre of early modern Irish history; it is a great part of that history’s world voice.
And it achieves not a little of its power, that peculiar Yeatsian sublimity, its unmistakable public voice, from its attachment to the grand themes, the mix of honour, beauty, horror and reverence he saw playing throughout the history of his time. It is a great part of the merit of Foster’s work that it traces the current, the charge which enters Yeats’s poetry, to its sources, and enables those who would understand at least part of that poetry’s power to realize that it springs from his passionate affiliation with the cause of Ireland.
Yeats is a peculiar mix. He can be among the most esoteric of poets—almost hermetic, a delver into mysticism and self-constructed mythologies. At the same time, he can be among the most exoteric, no more enigmatic than a newspaper headline. It is another virtue of Foster’s work that he combs with diligence and acuity both realms, and marks their intersection, the flashpoint of inspiration, where they flare into lyricism or image.
“Leda and the Swan” is one of Yeats’s fiercest, finest works. It is also a difficult poem, difficult because of the compression inherent in its form—so much “thought” packed into the narrow house of the sonnet. Foster’s treatment of it is typical of the virtues of his book. He cites the journal of Lady Gregory, Yeats’s longtime friend, patron and colleague, for a telling entry on what Yeats was thinking at the time of his first effort at the poem. The Russian Revolution woke him to the thought that “the reign of democracy is over … and in reaction there will be violent government from above.” Lady Gregory’s entry continues: “It is the thought of this force coming into the world that he is expressing in his Leda poem, not quite yet complete.”
The same entry concludes with a glimpse into how the poem “occupies” him, a quick look at Yeats in the workshop: “He sat up till 3o’c this morning working over it, and read it to me as complete at m
idday, and then half an hour later I hear him at it again.” The last phrase there—the poem’s complete, he’s working at it again half an hour later—is a wonderful vignette.
Foster has much more on “Leda,” its revisions, alterations, the hostile response from the Catholic Bulletin, and finally his own (Foster’s) compact, insightful reading of the poem.
The treatment afforded “Leda and the Swan” can be taken as a touchstone of the book’s method and manner. Diligent, thorough, unobstructed by jargon or modishness, careful with the details of both the life and any poem under consideration, measured and intelligent in its readings and criticism, this is a model approach to literary biography.
“Did that play of mine send out/ Certain men the English shot?/ Did words of mine put too great strain/ On that woman’s reeling brain?” (“The Man and the Echo”). The work of Yeats occupies a brilliant space in the intersection of the private and public “meaning” of poetry. And so it is especially the case that a biography of Yeats, more than of most other poets, is part of our schooling in the poetry. It really is impossible to separate Yeats’s life and work—they interpenetrate so thoroughly. This is what makes The Arch-Poet the wonderful work that it is. Foster is unimpaired by any other ambition or agenda, save to offer in accessible language and scholarly detail all that is useful or necessary to tune us to the poetry.
I shall take but one last example of his method. “Easter 1916,” the great poem of the Irish uprising, is infallibly Yeatsian, stamped with his signature rhythms, oracular voice and saturated with the public matter of Ireland. It has also the peculiarly Yeatsian ambition of intending to condition the way its matter, the uprising, would be enrolled in future Irish history.
Is the poem private? Yes, as belonging to, as issuing only from, the particular consciousness of W.B. Yeats. Private in the manner that all poetry is private, that it is the shaped utterance of one mind, of one singularly tuned imagination. Is the poem public? Yes, both in its subject and its intent. “Easter 1916” is meant to be an influence, a force, in the shaping of Irish understanding and aspiration. It is something of an “uprising” itself. Those unfamiliar with the background to the 1916 rebellion, innocent of Yeats’s complicated relationship to many of its key participants, his lifelong mission to register the essence of Ireland and its people, will find here all that is needed to read the poem in its fullness.
