Rereadings Page 5

  It cannot last, this perfect peace, this ecstatic natural concord. Into Eden comes Eve, in the form of Edvarda, the young daughter of Herr Mack, owner of the village trading post. She appears at Glahn’s hut one day in the company of the stolidly pretentious man called simply the Doctor. He and Edvarda have been out walking and have decided to pay a call on Glahn.

  The three talk awkwardly, moving from subject to subject, and only when the visitors have left are we allowed to grasp the intense fixity with which Glahn has been regarding Edvarda: “Suddenly I saw before me her brown face and brown neck. She had tied her apron low on her hips to accentuate the length of her body, as was fashionable. Her thumb had a chaste and girlish look about it that touched me; and the few wrinkles on her knuckles were full of kindliness. She had a generous mouth, and her lips were red.” This, we realize, is not the fruit of idle observation, but something else. These details have been gathered by the eye of the avid soul, the same eye that casts abroad in the forest for intimations of our higher connectedness.

  The attraction proves to be mutual, whereupon, in keeping with the ancient principle of romantic magnetism, operative whenever two people think only of each other, Glahn and Edvarda are soon encountering one another everywhere—on the forest paths, down in the village. Here is the pure intoxication of young love, and if the particulars vary slightly across the surface, deep down they are subject to the delicious lifts and plunges of the universal erotic dance:

  “You are happy to-day, you are singing,” she says, and her eyes sparkle.

  “Yes, I am happy,” I answer. “You have a smudge of something on your shoulder there, it’s dust, from the road perhaps. I want to kiss it—no, please, let me kiss it! Everything about you arouses tenderness in me, I am quite distracted by you. I didn’t sleep last night.”

  And that was true; for more than one night I had lain sleepless.

  Edvarda takes the first deeper initiative. She comes to Glahn’s hut and, declaring her full passion, stays the night and plants the barb of the hook so that it will never be extricated.

  The congruence, the easy blending of their affections is soon—who knows why—pushed into a terrible discontinuity. Glahn catches the first intimation: “Sometimes there would be a night when Edvarda stayed away; once she stayed away for two nights. Two nights. There was nothing wrong, and yet I had the feeling that my happiness had passed its peak.” Whether this is an illustration of what Proust called “the intermittencies of love”—as if affection were a flame that must rise and fall—or simply something perverse in the deep down nature of things, some fateful coupling of eros and sadism, the idyll of Glahn and Edvarda changes track almost as soon as it has begun.

  Now follows the mad Lawrentian combat of the wills. Edvarda pulls away; Glahn suffers, sulks, practices his own stratagems of indifference. Then, just when he is strengthening toward a new resolve, ready to cut her loose, Edvarda flashes the ray of her vulnerable sweetness, and Glahn is drawn back into the circuit of wanting and hoping.

  Sitting near Glahn on a group outing to a nearby island, Edvarda admires the beautiful feathers he uses for tying flies. Glahn promptly gives her two. “Please take them,” he says, “let them be a memento.” But later, when they are returning in a rowboat together, Glahn seizes Edvarda’s shoe and flings it far out over the water. He does not begin to understand his own impulse. The air between them is crackling with disturbance.

  So things continue for a time—sightings, meetings, rebuffs, spasms of searing jealousy whenever Glahn sees Edvarda giving her attention to another. The tension pushes them apart. Edvarda no longer comes to the hut at night. Glahn wanders about, disconsolate, but all obvious emotion is thrust below the waterline; he betrays none of his feelings when they chance to meet. As readers, however, we need no compass. We can reckon the state of his heart from his erratic actions, his distractedness, his willed affair with another village girl. Nothing avails this poor man. His erotic grief has no way to discharge itself, and as it builds, he is driven ever more irretrievably into himself.

  Weeks then pass without encounter; summer is slowly winding down. As the time for Glahn’s departure draws near, the pressure of his longing and frustration grows almost intolerable for the reader.

  Then, just days before he must go, he unexpectedly meets Edvarda at the counter of the village store:

  I greeted her, and she looked up but did not answer. Then it occurred to me that I did not want to ask for bread while she was there; I turned to the assistants and asked for powder and shot. While these were being weighed I kept my eye on her.

  A grey dress, much too small for her, its buttonholes worn; her flat breast heaved desperately. How she had grown during the summer! Her brow was pensive, those strange arched eyebrows were set in her face like two riddles, all her movements had become more mature. I looked at her hands, the expression in her long, delicate fingers affected me powerfully and made me tremble.

  On the day of his departure, almost as an afterthought—so he portrays it—Glahn decides he must say farewell to Edvarda. He finds her at home, sitting with a book. His news seems to startle her, though we pick up but the slightest hint:

  “Glahn, are you going away? Now?”

  “As soon as the ship comes.” I seize her hand, both her hands, a senseless rapture takes possession of me and I burst out: “Edvarda!” and stare at her.

  And in an instant she is cold, cold and defiant.

  Edvarda can only say: “To think that you are leaving already!” A moment later she adds: “Who will come next year, I wonder?” Whereupon she seats herself with her book. The interview is over.

  But no—suddenly, perversely, she rises to her feet again with a parting request.

  “I should like something to remind me of you when you have gone,” she said. “There was something I thought of asking you for, but perhaps it is too much. Will you give me Aesop?”

  Without reflecting I answered “Yes.”

  Later, alone in his hut, Glahn agonizes over his decision:

  Why had she asked me to come and bring the dog myself? Did she want to talk to me, tell me something for the last time? I had nothing more to hope for. And how would she treat Aesop? Aesop, Aesop, she will torment you! Because of me she will whip you, caress you too perhaps, but certainly whip you in and out of season and utterly destroy you … .

  I called Aesop, patted him, put our two heads together and reached for my gun. He was already whining with pleasure, thinking we were going out hunting. Again I put our heads together, placed the muzzle of the gun against Aesop’s neck and fired.

  I hired a man to carry Aesop’s body to Edvarda.

  So much for Glahn’s coy disingenuousness: “It amused me to see two so fiendishly green feathers.” Indeed. Has Nordic stoicism, the most indurate of all stoicisms, ever shown itself more starkly? Has the blade of unrequited love ever turned quite so painfully in its wound? When I read these words, I was in the grip, I then imagined, of my passion for my own Edvarda. K., so shy to begin with, would grow perceptibly more aloof whenever I brought myself the slightest bit closer to risking some admission. Now I understood; Hamsun had given me the hard news about love. And about life—for in the wake of such utter devastation it seemed there was little point in anything else. I took that sadness down into the center of my heartsick summer and incubated it there.

  Pan concludes with a section called “Glahn’s Death: A Paper from the Year 1861.” Six years later, in other words. The short section comes to us in the voice of a bitter comrade of Glahn’s (“But Thomas Glahn had his faults, and I am not disposed to conceal them, since I hate him”), a man who first met the lieutenant two years earlier somewhere in India or Ceylon. The gist of the “paper”—a confession, or self-exoneration, of sorts—is that the mysterious and erratic Glahn, after befriending him, began to goad him systematically, setting up a situation in which the man would have no choice but to shoot him. One day when they were out hunting together he did just that: />
  The court entered his name and the circumstances of his death in a stitched and bound register, and in that register is written that he is dead, I tell you, yes, and even that he was killed by a stray bullet.

  How can we ever gauge the effects of a work like this on a susceptible young reader? I was shaken to the core. I was just sixteen; I had no wisdom to hold against this vision of hopelessness, no mitigating perspective. I had only the riot of my own emotions, the certainty that if K. would not recognize and greet my love, I would have nothing to get me through my life. The only thing that cut against my despair was my hope. K. and I were still seeing each other, walking and talking; she was still hearing out my thoughts and confidences. Somehow I would bring her to see who I was, how I loved her.

  I never did. K. told me one day in late July that she was going away for a month with her family. I swallowed the sudden absence like some horrid emetic—I had no choice— and I resolved to wait. While she was gone, I did everything I could to make myself into the person she would want to be with. I lost weight. I whittled my soul into something sharp and fierce. But when summer ended, when she returned, I had changed. I have no explanation for what happened. Time had worked its decisive will: I had miraculously moved away from wanting her. When, a few weeks later, someone else suddenly appeared in my life, I gave everything I had hoarded to her.

  Still, I was not able to look at Pan for many years. It compressed so much of my pain, my longing, in its pages, and even the receding memory was a threat. My deepest unhappiness was secreted there. And I had the superstition that if I were to open the cover and glance at the words, I might somehow come unstitched. The book was put away. And when I went to college, moving my prize possessions, mainly books, from one place to another, I did not bring Pan with me.

  Just a month ago, imagining myself ready to write about the novel, I bought a marked-up paperback and, in a spirit of edgy curiosity, began to read. I expected that I would prevail over the romanticism; that its mainspring—Glahn’s brooding stoicism—would now strike me as forced; that his communings with nature would seem overheated. I was armed to the teeth.

  And utterly powerless. For such is the power of a book, a memory, that it can in a flash outwit any structure or system we have raised against it. I had, yes, steeled myself against Glahn, against the sorrow of his story, against his complete destruction by the passion that had erupted in his unguarded heart. I had not, however, braced against the encounter with myself, the sixteen-year-old who went at the world, at the dream of love, with such unscreened intensity. I read Pan, but the person I met on those woodland paths was my feverish younger self. I felt sorrow from the first sentence on, sorrow so sweet and piercing that it was hard to turn the pages. Worse, though—for sorrow recollected can bring a certain pleasure—was my self-reproach. As I read I indicted myself. I had, in stages, without ever planning it, traded off that raw nerved-up avidness. I’d had to, of course; it was inevitable. We do not survive the dream of love, not at that pitch. We build in our safeguards and protective reflexes. We give in to the repetitions, let them gradually tame the erratic element. We grow wise and find balance—or perish. Still, to encounter the stalking ghost of the self here, now, at midlife …

  But no, I have found the rationale, the way to understand. Indeed, when it came to me, I felt a great rush of relief. “This is not the tragic truth of things.” I actually said it out loud. I remember. I was walking along a scenic path in Bennington, Vermont, just two weeks ago, trying to make sense of this old business for the hundredth time in my life.

  The thought formed itself so clearly. What Hamsun offers is not the final truth, because whatever it tells about love, it somehow leaves out the people who do the loving. Pan is the legend of desire feasting upon itself, struggling against itself, turning on itself to eradicate the unendurable pain, the source of all wanting. Glahn and Edvarda are just figures in the dance. They have nothing to hold up against the pulverizing momentum in their separate souls. They have, I saw it now, no … relationship. And realizing this saved me from the harshest effects of my sadness, allowed me to close the book up around the beautiful black feather I keep as a bookmark, allowed me my equanimity, which is now punctured, but not riddled, by secret doubts.

  VIJAY SESHADRI

  Whitman’s Triumph

  “Song of Myself,” by Walt Whitman

  On the Monday after the World Trade Center attack, I taught “Song of Myself” to my first-year-studies class in poetry (half literary survey, half workshop) at Sarah Lawrence. The class was the first group of freshmen I’d been put in charge of, and, nervous about facing people so young and expectant and free from dissimulation, I had planned the syllabus, in August, while vacationing in Vermont, with a minute and excessive rigidity: Whitman and Dickinson first, then a long leap back to Donne and Herbert, followed by a massive progression through Milton, Smart, Blake, Wordsworth’s and Shelley’s prose manifestos, Hardy and Hopkins, and then, in late November and early December, the blizzards of modernism—all of this buttressed by supplemental critical texts and contemporary poems that illustrated the persistence and continuity of theme, rhetoric, strategy. A muscle-bound course—but one that I was convinced would make my students, about whose respect for the past glories of poetry I was dubious, love the art as they never had before.

  The syllabus I’d assembled in the Green Mountains during the summer had lost its specific density, and even a lot of its meaning, by that Monday; but the imperative, at the college and across New York City, which begins a few miles to the south, beyond Yonkers, was to get on with it, to affirm the ordinariness of our existences and the privilege, until then taken for granted, of the day-to-day business of working and living and studying, which, among other things, the murderers had sought to annihilate. I was as sedulous as anybody about getting on with it. I went into my Monday class thinking that we had already lost the previous Thursday’s session to confusion and grief and talk that went nowhere, and that we had to turn back to the demands of my schedule. The dust from the collapse of the towers had been carried by the prevailing winds to the South Brooklyn neighborhood, just across the East River from Manhattan’s financial district, where I live. That Tuesday and Wednesday, the air had been thick and infernal. There was an asbestos scare abroad. We were told not to go out without masks. Dust that was once the World Trade Center made the leaves of the plane trees and the ginkgoes spectral; it tarnished the pavements and covered the cars. All that week and into the next, I was among the millions of people in the city ricocheting from blank shock to incomprehension to grief to—this a liberation and a satisfaction, and the only energetic feeling most of us could summon—defiance (though defiance of what, I couldn’t have said). From my roof, I’d seen the first tower collapse, and had already heard one of the stories about people I knew who had died, but in keeping with this strange defiance—which seemed atavistic, which antedated thought, and which was hardwired into the organism itself—and though it seemed almost sacrilegious, the first thing I did when I got back to Brooklyn from my Thursday class was to take my car to the local car wash and clean the dust off.

  My freshman class might have been feeling something of the same defiance. They didn’t, in any case, take to “Song of Myself,” and they let me know it. A couple of them tried, halfheartedly, to defend Whitman, but most thought that what they called his “egotism”—a character trait vivid to people their age—was unattractive. The events of the previous week—their first week of classes in their first semester at college, a time, in normal circumstances, of anticipation and adventure—had made them wary and self-contained. They were politely incredulous when I pointed out this line (in the 1855 version of the poem, which was the one we were using): “I am the man … . I suffered … . I was there.” When I read the lines that follow soon after, lines that repeated quotation would make famous in subsequent weeks,

  I am the mashed fireman with breastbone broken … . tumbling walls buried me in their debris,
/>
  Heat and smoke I inspired … . I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades,

  I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels;

  They have cleared the beams away … . they tenderly lift me forth.

  I lie in the night air in my red shirt … . the pervading hush is for my sake,

  Painless after all I lie, exhausted but not so unhappy,

  White and beautiful are the faces around me … . the heads are bared of their fire-caps,

  The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches.

  they said yes, he was empathetic and prescient, but returned to the question of his self-love. Wasn’t this another one of its manifestations? they asked, with a sophistication about human motives that I found impressive (though, in this case, misplaced). I told them that the poem, untitled in the 1855 edition, was called “Walt Whitman” through successive editions of Leaves of Grass after 1856, until the comprehensive edition of 1881 (the one that was banned in Boston), when it came to be called by the name we know. Didn’t such aplomb, so barefaced, so unashamed, actually subvert conventional ideas about egotism, and suggest that something else was at work? No, they said. A poet who would call a poem by his own name had some real problems. I told them about the Upanishads and the Oversoul. I talked about Whitman’s fresh and original use of the English language, unequaled outside Shakespeare: “Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil”—that verb choice, so precise, visual, and unexpected; the wonderful play of the conjunct consonants; the clash as of metals between “environ” and “anvil”—and “Happiness … . which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search of this day,” with its nested, overlapping relative clauses handled with speed and effortless athleticism. I told them that “Song of Myself,” which seems so much like a natural object, a mountain range or a piece of driftwood, was, in fact, strictly Aristotelian, with a beginning, a middle, and an end; a turn in its curious plot (wherein a certain individual born on Long Island the same year as Herman Melville becomes the universe itself); and a moment of discovery, which occurs in and around the fireman passage. I drew their attention to the lines in “The Sleepers” in which the poet transforms himself into a woman and has a sexual encounter that concludes with the line “I feel the hot moisture yet that he left me.”