#16: What did I know, what did I know
Dear Readers:
You will receive one email from me each month containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the sixteenth one.
Boredom. I have always liked the level of novels a half-step above chick lit. When I was in middle school and high school, I read every Anne Tyler novel I could get my hands on; I never miss a new Meg Wolitzer or Cathleen Schein book. (There’s a level of book a quarter-step above chick lit, like Emma Straub, Allegra Goodman, and Taffy Brodkesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is In Trouble. I really dislike that level; I’ll tell you more about that another time). I like these books because they are bright without being stupidly happy. And I like how they tend to allude to, almost wink at, the existence of High Literature. The Uncoupling, by Meg Wolitzer, is an exemplar of the form. I read it when it came out, in 2011, and I hardly remember any of it, except that I loved it. But there’s this one part that has stayed with me. A shy teenager, Willa, is making out with her boyfriend, thinking about how much she’s enjoying it.
Willa knew there was no one in the world she could tell about this, no one at all. It seemed inappropriate to tell Marissa, and definitely inappropriate to tell her mother. But then she thought: I can tell him. I can talk to him!
This is really the pinnacle of the brightness that I enjoy in these novels. It’s such a sweet vision of a romantic relationship: that you have all these exciting feelings that are secret except from the person you’re having the relationship with, and when you tell them to that person, it pulls you in closer.
Horror. But is that true? I don’t really think so. I can’t tell my husband those exciting feelings; or I can, but he certainly doesn’t like it when I do. I’ve been thinking about this because the final two lines from Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” have been popping into my mind a lot lately:
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
It started a couple weeks ago. I was talking to Jennifer Morrison, who is not only my best friend but the best reader I’ve ever known in my life, about poems we’ve been thinking of during this time of national and international attention to racism. Jenny talked about the beautiful poem “Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note,” by LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), and I realized I had been thinking of his poem “An Agony. As Now.” with its burning first lines, “I am inside someone / who hates me.” Jenny said she was thinking about the Robert Hayden 1962 book Ballad of Remembrance, and suddenly I had this thunder strike of feeling for “Those Winter Sundays.”
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Glory. Hayden is a conservative poet. He writes about history and historical figures, and he evokes prosodic traditions; “Middle Passage,” his epic about the slave trade, is in the model of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” And he was conservative in his self-presentation as a poet. He wrote and published in the 1960s and 70s, at the same time as the Black Arts Movement, which was about establishing a Black aesthetic that had absolutely nothing to do with Western, white supremacist literary traditions. Unlike Black Arts poets (Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, June Jordan, Ishmael Reed, and many others), Hayden was insistent on being known as “American poet,” as opposed to a “Black poet.” He wanted to be read in conversation with Western, white supremacist literary traditions. Hayden wasn’t just not part of the Black Arts Movement; he actively disagreed with it. His “project” (as they say) was to write African-American histories and linguistic traditions into American modernism. Ironically, this has sort of sidelined him in American poetry; when you learn about the 1960s and 70s, you learn about the Black Arts Movement.
I prefer the methods, the excitement and rage, of the Black Arts Movement poets. The “chronic angers of that house” in which “Those Winter Sundays” takes places are muted, muffled, by the poem’s cold control (the word cold appears in each of the poem’s three stanzas!).
But I read “Those Winter Sundays” differently lately—as an observer of online reactions to protests against racism and police brutality and also as a parent.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
What these lines say to me right now is: you love alone. This is what feels off about White Fragility, or the many ways people—and, especially, companies—try online to show their anti-racism, their goodness, their love. They say the phrase systemic racism while presenting racism as a person-to-person problem with a person-to-person solution. But even if that were possible or true, how could personal relationships, love, be administered in public like that?
"Those Winter Sundays" is about real love: mature, complicated, private, difficult. Conservative, even. Like the love Hayden had for the Western canon.
Love is austere; it’s work, harder than anything you’d do in an office—it has its own offices.
Love is lonely; I didn’t know before I was a parent, but I know now. And that sweet thing in the Wolitzer novel isn’t true, I don’t think. You can try to talk about it, but it stops being love in the telling. You just have to live it, up early in the blueback cold.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Recommended: Collected Poems (1997), by Robert Hayden, S O S: Poems 1961-2013, by Amiri Baraka, Blacks, by Gwendolyn Brooks, The Uncoupling, by Meg Wolitzer, Rameau’s Niece, by Cathleen Schine, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, by Anne Tyler
Unrecommended: Modern Lovers, by Emma Straub, Fleishman Is In Trouble, by Taffy Brodkesser-Akner