The Nation.
716
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December 4, 199s
No Choice But W oMinds
that has been transmuted into whatfeels
like common-communal-sense. In one
THE REDRESS OF POETRY. By of the best essays, Heaney describes ElizSeamus Heaney. Farm< Sfrausd Giroux. abeth Bishop’s poems as shifting“from
self-containment to anacknowledgment
211 pp. $22.
of the mystery of the other, wlth the writfew days after he was elected ing functioning as an enactment of all
professor of poetry at Oxford the bittersweet deferrals in between.” The
University in 1989, Seamus same could be said of Heaney’s effort
Heaney stopped his car at a on her behalf.
traffic light. A woman recognized him
In its concern with poetry’s social
behind the wheel and, as Heaney remem- function, The Redress of Poetry builds
bers, she gave him“a quck-unsmilingon Heaney’s last critical effort, The Govnod, a very definite thumbs-up, and then ernment of the Tongue, published in
hurried smartly on abouther business.” 1989. But while Heaney focused in the
This encounter could not have happened earlier book on poets like Osip Mandeljust anywhere. “DOnot be elected to the
stamand Zbigniew Herbert(whoare
Senate of your country,” said W.B. Yeats
to Ezra Pound, who needn’t have worried: Not all countries are Ireland, where
a poetic utterance seems almost automatically political (as doesthe election of a
Northern Irish Catholic to the Oxford
professorship). More than any other poet
writing in English today, Seamus Heaney
has honored poetry’s civlc responsibilities, and he has done so without idealizing them and withoutcompromising poetry’s responsibillty to itself. For years,
Heaney’s name has been prominent on
the short list for the Nobel Prize, and
when the Swedish Academy announced clearly alienated from the dominantculon October 5 that he had won it, Heaney ture or ideology), he now gravitates toward writers like Elizabeth Bishop and
was climbing a mountain inGreece-as
George
Herbert (who appear to exist more
if to avoid the fuss with which the anor
less
peacefully
with the world as they
nouncement would rightly be greeted.
A selection of the lectures that Heaney find it). This shift of emphasis IS striking,
delivered during his five-year tenure at for in The Government of the Tongue,
Oxford has now been published as The Heaney glanced at George Herbert (a
Redress ofPoetry, a title that,like others seventeenth-century Anglican), implicltly
he has favored (Seerng Things, The Gov- depreciating him as a poet who “surrenernment of the Tongue),hovers between dered himself to a framework of belief
two meanings. Heaney wants to think of and an instituted religion.” In the title
poetry not only as something that inter- essay of the new book, in contrast, Hervenes in the world, redressing or correct- bert’s poetry is the featured example of
ing imbalances, but also as something a work of art In which “the co-ordlnates
of the imagined thing correspond to and
that must be redressed-re-established,
celebrated as itself. The criticism poets allow us to contemplate the complex burwrlte is most often interesting because of den of our own experience.” What haptheir own poetry, but Heaney’s criticism pened in between these two books was
would be read even if it were unbolstered the rise of a critical fashion in which, as
by a contiguouspoetic achievement. The Heaney puts it, “imaginative literature 1s
essays (whose subjects range from Chris- read simply and solely as a function of
topher Marlowe to Philip Larkin) are not an oppressive discourse.” Heaney wants
always startlmgly revisionary; theyare the none of this. In his current thinking, the
result of a deeply personal engagement value of Herbert’s poetry-whatever Its
cultural affiliations-is that it teaches us
James Longenbach 1s the author of Stone to live withinconclusiveness,with contraCottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism diction and double-mlndedness.
While it 1s easy, in a general sense, to
(Oxford). He teaches at the Unwersrty of
imagine that apoem might illumnate the
Rochester.
JAMES LONGENBACH
A
To the monks, the ship
i s a wonder, but to the
world is Eizrth., where
the poet dwells.
December 4, 1995
burden of our experience, even Heaney
must resort to broad conjecturewhen attempting to describe the way in which a
particular poem might perform this function: “When the terrorists sit down at the
negotiating-table, when the newly independent state enters history still beingadministered by the old colonial civil service,” then the spiritual crisis of Herbert’s
“The Collar”is “merely being projected
upon a more extensive and populous
screen.” By conflating spintual and political negotiations too bluntly-by inflating
poetry’s value-Heaney obscures Herbert’s particular relevance: If “The Collar” can illuminate all this, so can innumerable other poems-or novels or films.
The argument becomes far more substantive when Heaney brings it closer to
home. Derek Mahon once said that the
fastest way to clear a room is to ask if
Louis MacNeice is an English or an Irish
poet. Discussing the problem ofIrish cultural identity m the final essay of TheRedress of Poetry, Heaney embraces MacNeice: With its “challenge to be in two
minds,” MacNeice’s poetry provides a
way to imagine a political order “tolerant
of difference and capable of metamorphoses within all the multivalent possibilities of Irishness, Britishness, Europeanness.” In a sense, it is nowmore provocative for Heaney to imagine theways
rather
in whichany poet resembles George
than Zbigniew Herbert; all writers, he explains, have been“predisposed to accommodate themselves to the consciousness
which subjugated them.”
Irish literature is not especially promment inThe RedressoJPoetry (there are
essays on Mernman, Wilde and Yeats),
but Heaney always writes as someone
who, like MacNelce, has had no choice
but to be of two minds. To illustrate his
own stake In the argument, he ends the
book by quotingpart of “Squarings,” the
long sequence in hls 1991 book Seeing
Thrngs. In this poem, a sailor descends
in the sky
to earth froma v~slonary boat
and is helped back to his true element by
the monks to whom he
appears: “the freed
ship salled, and the manclimbed back/
Out of the marvelous as he had known
it.” TOthe monks, the ship is a wonder,
but to the sailor, the marvelous world IS
Earth, theplace in whichthe poet dwells.
This poem 1s surely about a kind of
double-mmdedness, but the two minds
seem more mentalor sp~rltual than
clvlc
or cultural. Recently, Heaney has given
us a more acutely visionary poetry, a poetry of “seeing things,” and at least one
of the meanmgs of the tltle of h ~ forths
coming collection, The Sprrrt Level, sug-
The Nation.
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JOHN BORNEMAN
AND JEFFREY M.
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face ””Sander L Gllman
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1
717
The Historyof the
Protocols of the Eldersof
Zlon
BINJAMIN W. SEGEL
Translated and edlted by
Richard S Levy
A repugnant mysteryof
the twentmth century IS
the durability of the
Protocols of the Eldersof
Zion, a clumsy forgery
purportlng to be evldence
of the supposed Jewlsh
plot to rule the world. In
1924 the Jewlsh author
and lournallst Blnlamtn
Segel wrote amqor
hlstorlcal expose of the
fraud Translator Rlchard
S Levy provldes an
extenstve lntroductlon on
the ctrcumstances of
Segel’s work
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The Nation.
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gests that he will give us more. It consequently seems to me that Heaney’s real
interest in George Herbert has less to do
with the negotiating table than with the
marvelous-with the feeling that provokes
Elizabeth Bishop to ask, when a long bus
rlde is interrupted by a homely yet otherworldly moose, “Why, why do we feel/
(we all feel)this sweet/sensation of joy?”
A poetry of marvels is no small thing,
and asHeaney demonstrates in his read-
December 4, 1995
ing of Bishop, it may be as responsible as
any other kind of writmg. But the sure
way to make it look small is to credit it
with performing cultural work it cannot
do. Heaney sees the current critical
world-the world that will receive The
Splrit Level-as one of “accusing ideologies and impugned ideals.” I suspect
that this book will be subtle enough to
deserve a reader with as many minds as
Heaney himself.
A Millennium of Silence
NICOLE HALA
BURY ME STANDING: The Gypsies
and Their Journey. By Isabel Fonseca.
Knopj 322pp. $25.
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FOR THE SAKE
OF CLARITY
Selected addresses by
Row. Stophon H. Frltthman
lntroductlon by Norman Corwm
Some of the subjects addressed
church 8 polltlcs
death
rnlxed rnarrlages
antlcommunlsm
freedom of the press
women
Latln Amerlca
Vietnam
how do Unltarlans think of Jesus?
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blographlcal sketches of some of the
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Chrlstrnasspeclal $20
Make checks payable to Frltchman Publlcatlon Corn Send to Betty Rottger, 2004
Balaan Rd , Redondo Beach, CA 90278
S
ometime in the tenth century,
the
Gypsies began their thousandyear rnigratlon from India into
Europe. Thelr history is marked
by cycles of persecution and debasement,
mcluding the vicious 400-year enslavement in Romania, and extermination as
“social deviants’’ under the Third Reich.
Today, although they are Europe’s largest
minority, their history remainsa mystery
to most people, including many Gypsies
themselves. And for a long tlme, this is
quite how the Gypsies wanted it.
The Iittle that has been written about
the Roma (as they are frequently known
today) who live in modern Eastern Europe falls roughly into two categorles:
general histories, which
maintain a scholarly distance from the subject, and forays into “Gypsy life,”its folklore and legends. Of the second genre, The Gypsies,
a memoir by Jan Yoors,is the best
known. Written by a Belgian man who
severed his ties withmainstream society
to live ten yearsamong a Gypsy tribe, it
is regarded as a romantic tribute totheir
exotic and endangered way of life.
A new book by Isabel Fonseca, Bury
Me Standing: The Gypsm and Therr Journey, comes in between these two poles
and
provides an intlmate look at thecontemporary Roma community, while examining it in relation to the world beyond. It
is the tension between these two worldsthe insulated, secretive society ofthe Gypsies and the changing political landscape
of post-Communist Eastern Europethat makes Fonseca’s book so compell-
NIcole Hala I S a freelance journalrst who
has traveled throughGypsy communltres
i n East Central Europe and the Ealkuns.
ing. Layered with lore,history, sharp social analysis and amazingly candid and
thoughtful impressions, Bury Me Standing is a rich narrative account of Fonseca’s travels through a number of Romany communities at a time when the
Gypsy people have begun
to unravel their
past and take charge of their future.
The Roma have no written history of
their own. The “past” usually begins
with the earliest memories of the oldest
living member of the tribe. Stories are
passed down orally, spoken or sung.
These stories don’t
document a history or
chain of observed events. Rather, they are
fables with universal themes.
Until now, Gypsies have exlsted
without an outside history, as part of their
strategy for survival, which is rooted in
secrecy and separation. According to
their tradition, if the experiences of the
group were recorded, their disguise and
the curtainthat separates them from the
world of their longtlme oppressors, the
gauje (whites), wouldbe lifted. This
self-imposed estrangement from mainstream society has helped Roma endure
centuries of hardship. And now, Fonseca
suggests, ~t’sthis same isolation that may
be their worst impediment.
“This not-knowing,” Fonsecacame to
believe,’was a“definingattribute
of
Gypsy identity.If youcouldn’t say where
you came from, you were nobody, and
anyone could say anything about you.”
But inEastern Europe, where talk of origins, ethnic ped~gree and
nat~onalldentity has become an obsession, a growing
body of Roma are sensingthe drawbacks
of the~ranonymity, and slowly they are
talking about who they are. Since 1989,
the long mute community has begun to
make some noise, in parliaments and in
the U.N., through Romany-produced television programsand Gypsy-editednewspapers and magazines. Still, Fonseca
cautions that many oldtraditions remaln untouched. “The secret society continues.’’
1
I