The Wound and the Bow

Edmund Wilson

Sometimes you have a wound that never heals. That was the story of the Greek warrior Philoctetes who was exiled to the island of Lemnos due to a suppurating laceration that also smelled. There was the wound and the additional insult resulting from being ostracized and made into a pariah by his peers. Loss of any kind is such a wound, whether it's unreciprocated love, unfulfilled ambition or the death of a loved one. At first you're surrounded with family and friends who console you. Jews sit shiva and Catholics have wakes, but the purpose is not only to remember the dead. It’s to help the living go on. However, after it’s all over the person in mourning always comes back to the empty house or apartment, one of those dirty brick pre-war affairs one imagines the Glass family occupying in Franny and Zooey—with a window overlooking an aging water tower and stamped with a built-in solitude. There's no person or thing that can replace loss. It just sits there and then life takes its course and the pain turns into memory that is ultimately distorted by some degree of denigration or idealization depending on the compromise formation that occurs in the psyche of the mourner. The pain never goes away, though there are people for whom it becomes a kind of fuel as Edmund Wilson describes in his famous series of essays, The Wound and the Bow, based on the Philoctetes myth. Others  succumb and eventually drown in their sorrows.

Burmese Days

In a recent article, “Back to a Burmese Prison By Choice”(NYT, 12/6/14 U Htein Lin, the Burmese artist and dissident is quoted thusly about his years of imprisonment, “I was completely cut off from art critics and an audience. I just did what I wanted. In the cell I found freedom. It was the most important time in my art career.” Now Mr. Lin makes the journey back to his former prison “to reconnect with a sense of confinement.” Edmund Wilson's The Wound and the Bow intertwined the Philoctetes to myth with the lives of writers like Dickens, Kipling, Joyce, Wharton and Hemingway to show how suffering can lead to creation. And Lin’s career and his nostalgie de la boue, as the French put it, underscores the idea of the part misery can play in generating insight. Of course there are many former dissenters once incarcerated in Burmese prisons who probably don’t share Lin’s fond memories. While pain may result in enlightenment, it more often then not simply crushes the human spirit. Solzhenitsyn who survived the Gulag and Dostoevsky who went onto achieve greatness after a mock execution are the exceptions. In John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, Lawrence Harvey plays the role of Raymond Shaw a former prisoner of war, who has been brainwashed into becoming an assassin. The Times story recounts how Lin used “old prison uniforms,” “syringes,” and “the flint wheels of cigarette lighters” as his palette. It’s a wonderful talent to be able to constantly recycle experience, performing a version of alchemy in which dross is turned into gold. Hannah Wilke the sculptress made her own death the subject of her last pieces. Lest we forget, George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days, derived from his deployment as a police officer during the waning of the Raj.The only problem would seem to occur when things are good. Many artists become so attuned to making their own subjective experience into an object that they are no longer able to enjoy the unmediated experience of reality. 

The Fame Lunches

There is an obligatory and routine sanctimony to op-ed columns mourning the loss of the celebrity who didn’t make it. These antics usually last about a week in which the repetition becomes numbing and something more lurid (a football player delivering knock out punch tho his wife for instance) takes over. That was the case with Michael Jackson and more recently with Philip Seymour Hoffman. But just when one was about to lose patience with all the vapid and often self-congratulatory eulogizing, then came the venerable Daphne Merkin to the rescue, providing her own post-mortem for the actor on The New Yorker blog. Listen to this: “I can’t imagine I am alone in having found an almost preternatural youthfulness about Hoffman, as though he had never fully cast aside the boy he once was, alert to every slight. In any case, when I think of the actor, a line from a letter by Malcolm Lowry, author of 'Under the Volcano,' the ur-novel about the unslakable thirst for self-destruction, comes to mind: 'I am a small boy chased by furies,' Lowry wrote to his mentor, Conrad Aiken. I like to think of Hoffman in a heaven that’s a big swimming pool, held aloft by the buoyancy of the water, resisting nothing, chased by furies no more.” Daphne Merkin is a disappearing species. John Gross wrote a book entitled The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life Since 1800. Merkin is part of an almost extinct breed, the belle letterist. Neither academic, nor journalist, these essayists find their roots in a style, sometimes aphoristic, that goes back to Montaigne, in which everything high and low qualify as ingredients for a delicate recipe known as sensibility. Dwight Macdonald and Susan Sontag were two of Merkin’s storied predecessors. However, she is not only increasingly singular but sui generis within her chosen vocation to the extent that she has also created a reputation as a provocateur. She's the author of a collection of essays entitled Dreaming of Hitler: Passions and Provocations which contained an essay on her own adventures being spanked (“Spanking: A Romance”).  The controversy Merkin has created is both admirable and obfuscating to the extent that it camouflages a glorious talent for the iteration of states of being. Merkin has just published a new collection of essays The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontes and the importance of Handbags. She reads both books and the world like no one else. The Fame Lunches includes pieces on topics as varied as Michael Jackson (“Locked in the Playground”),  “The Unbearable Obsolescence of Girdles,” Henry Roth (“Portrait of the Artist as a Fiasco”)  and V.S. Naipaul (“Brilliant Monsters”). She upsets the applecart by beginning her piece on Michael Jackson’s pathology which she describes as representing “in his one tortured and talented being every conflict of identity imaginable--beginning with race and gender-- on the most astonishingly primordial level” in her own therapist’s office where she discountenances the accusations of pedophilia, saying “he strikes me as presexual.”  She employs a wistful irony in citing Milan Kundera’s erotic masterpiece The Unbearable Lightness of Being in her search for an anachronistic undergarment, finally concluding “It was incontrovertible: where girdles had once reigned, rowing machines, ab crunches, personal trainers, and plastic surgeons now held uncontested sway.” No matter how exalted or banal the subject, Merkin never fails to underscore the phylogenic consequences of an ontogenic decision. On Henry Roth’s incestuous relationship with his sister she pulls out her full psychic artillery, “within the context of the violently dysfunctional marriage of their parents, and the generally xenophobic climate of the Roth household, the incestuous detour makes a kind of anthropological sense, as though an ingrained Jewish pattern of tribal endogamy had been taken to its logical conclusion.” Here Merkin takes over a role Lionel Trilling once occupied: the literary critic as psychoanalyst. One of her recurring themes is the price paid by those whose wounded existence leads to the creation of art (an idea famously dealt with by another great belle lettrist Edmund Wilson in The Wound and the Bow). In the V.S. Naipaul (“Brilliant Monsters”) essay, Merkin deals with “the human wreckage” left by a man who inflicted great mental and physical pain on his wife and mistress respectively and wrote with what she calls “a wounded pen." Don’t miss this latest collection of Daphne Merkin's essays.

Art Versus Life for the Heavyweight Title of the World

In an essay entitled “Examined Lives,” (The American Scholar, Autumn 2013) the prominent biographer Phyllis Rose makes the following statement: “The material does not make the work. The life does not make the art. Exactly the opposite. The work creates the material. The art creates the life…it’s the imagination that creates the life not vice versa.” As Rose points out, Proust argues a similar point in his essay Contre Sainte-Beuve which is condemnation of the biographical interpretation of literature as practiced by the Charles Augustine Sainte-Beuve, the l9th century critic who was a thorn in his side. It’s a stunning statement by someone who has devoted her life to the study of writers. In one sense, Rose starts her essay by closing the door on a whole area of understanding that involves following the footsteps of the author. But she soon makes a turn around. Citing the case of Paul de Man, an exemplar of the French school, who turned out to have written anti-semitic screeds, she concludes denying the validity of the writer’s life, as the American counterparts of the French school the text oriented new critics did, discountenances much valuable anecdotal material that can illuminate a writer’s work. Rose writes, “To take Edmund Wilson’s essay on Dickens in The Wound and the Bow as an example: he explored how Dickens’s childhood experience of being sentenced to what he saw as slave labor by his parents affected his future sympathies and themes.” So in the end what Rose is advocating is that the biographer must navigate a fine line between what Kierkegaard called the esthetic and the ethical view. Whether biography ever climbs to the most evolved of the categories Kierkegaard offers, the religious, might in the end depend on the equanimity with which the biographer is able to approach the two sides of a writer’s life. In any event, the study is of literature is for Rose as spiritual act. “We want to learn the secret of creativity, because it can be the secret to happiness,” Rose writes. “We  turn to all kinds of literature, biography and fiction both, to learn how to live, and in a way, all books are self-help books."