West of Eden

The Iowa Writers Workshop turns 75 this year, and a number of alumni will be writing about it. You can read all the essays as they come in here. IWW was the first creative writing program offered at an American university. Its alumni boasts three laureates and seventeen Pulitzers, and the program itself won the National Humanities Medal. Former faculty include Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Philip Roth, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell, and past students include Michael Cunningham, Nam Le, and Flannery O'Connor.

Marilynne Robinson (one of those Pulitzers) has been on the faculty for twenty years. In this lecture at Washington U, she gives a wry account of the contest between East and West in the United States:

"I find that the hardest work in the world— it may in fact be impossible—is to persuade easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling. On learning that I am from Idaho, people have not infrequently asked, 'Then how were you able to write a book?' Once or twice, when I felt cynical or lazy, I have replied, 'I went to Brown,' thinking that might appease them—only to be asked, 'How did you manage to get into Brown?'"

Iowa, being roughly in the middle, but still west of east, defies the preconception. It's a byword for culture, and its capital is a UNESCO City of Literature, rubes and all. I want to go to there.

All well and good

Sonya Chung writes, at The Millions, “on Facebook, you compose your status, you present a manufactured version of yourself, your voice, your images. It occurs to me that I recoil from Facebook and Twitter partly because they feel to me like the Flanders household from The Simpsons, where everything is ‘okeley-dokeley!' — upbeat, positive, happy."

This is part of a larger argument that today's young creative set, unlike Bloomsbury or the Beats, are happy, healthy and conscientious - and boring. They marry and have children, they tend their mental and physical health. They're not battling addiction, depression, and dysfunction so much as juggling child care and yoga.

Sounds good to me, but Chung thinks that with mental health and emotional clarity come “a certain creative loss." It's true that creative achievement has often been accompanied by melancholia, but melancholy is not always the harbinger of genius. It's also true that health and happiness are not the be-all and end-all of human fulfilment. However, given how tenuous our hold on both tends to be, I don't think either should be counted cheap. Anyone who's lost them knows their value.

And which would you honestly choose? A tragic life followed by literary immortality, or a happy and sane one, followed by anonymity? Unhinged or okely-dokely? Call me boring, but I'd take the latter every day.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep

Is there more than whimsy in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by woods on a snowy evening”? Is there a comment here on the soul’s exile from nature, its emersion and collusion in civilisation, in contracts with neighbours and even with tamed beasts that use bells to speak? Perhaps. But scraping off the snow to look for social commentary rather wrecks the effect. I think instead Frost wanted us to read a poem about somebody stopping by woods on a snowy evening. To feel the chilly breath, the softness of falling snow, the dark, deep loveliness of evening woods that half tempt him to forego sleep and venture further in. It’s a delicious moment, but one he cannot keep except in poetry.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

The Asparagus Trench

I'd never heard of John Lodwick, but this memoir of his Edwardian childhood under the aegis of his formidable Victorian grandfather is a delight. Here's a passage that made me laugh out loud. Somehow I'm picturing Stephen Fry.

[O]nce or twice, if I was bottom in Geometry or Algebra - both subjects which he despised - he would deign to accompany me himself, back to school, on a Sunday evening, and observing the crowd of jeering boys who greeted our arrival, would say: “Ha! I am glad to see you are popular.”
After which, dismounting, he would wave the starting handle: “Back, you young curs, back.”

An interview with Basil Bowers, the Headmaster, followed; always very much to my advantage, since the latter had been at school with my father: “Well, Basil. I said you'd never grow much. Still fond of liquorice, I dare say...What's that? Don't mumble.”

Then, with a wink at me: “Caned his bottom many a time for stealing apples. Suppose he now thinks he can cane yours.”

“Won't you put that thing down, sir, and have a glass of sherry?” Bowers pointed to the starting handle.

“All in good time. What's this about your father being made a bishop? I see the hand of Rome behind it. Why, I remember taking a catapult away from him in church once.”

These two imparadis'd

I mean can you really see the star of The Hangover (1 and 2) and He's Just Not That Into You as the fallen archangel, brooding over lovely Eden, designing monstrous vengeance on Almighty God?

Sight hateful, sight tormenting! thus these two
Imparadis’d in one anothers arms
The happier Eden, shall enjoy their fill
Of bliss on bliss, while I to Hell am thrust,
Where neither joy nor love, but fierce desire,
Among our other torments not the least,
Still unfulfill’d with pain of longing pines;
Yet let me not forget what I have gain’d
From their own mouths; all is not theirs it seems:
One fatal Tree there stands of Knowledge call’d,
Forbidden them to taste: Knowledge forbidd’n?
Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord
Envie them that? can it be sin to know,
Can it be death? and do they onely stand
By Ignorance, is that their happy state,
The proof of their obedience and their faith?
O fair foundation laid whereon to build
Their ruin! Hence I will excite their minds
With more desire to know, and to reject
Envious commands, invented with design
To keep them low whom knowledge might exalt
Equal with Gods; aspiring to be such,
They taste and die: what likelier can ensue?
But first with narrow search I must walk round
This Garden, and no corner leave unspied;
A chance but chance may lead where I may meet
Some wandring Spirit of Heav’n, by Fountain side,
Or in thick shade retir’d, from him to draw
What further would be learnt. Live while ye may,
Yet happy pair; enjoy, till I return,
Short pleasures, for long woes are to succeed.