Adam and Evil

This review appeared today in the San Francisco Chronicle:

ORDINARY THUNDERSTORMS

By William Boyd

Harper, 416 pp., $26.99

We are all Adam's kindred, and in Adam's fall we sinned all. The protagonist of this novel is named Adam Kindred, which is a pretty good indication that William Boyd wants us to think of him as an Everyman.

That's a shrewd move for a thriller writer, which is what Boyd, a versatile novelist to say the least, has become for this book. We all want characters who resemble us in some way, especially when they're put in situations as discomfiting as the one Adam Kindred finds himself in: without a job or a place to live, without the accouterments of everyday life such as credit cards and cell phone, without a family or even an identity, and on the run from both the police and the man who wants to kill him. He becomes a contemporary version of Shakespeare's “unaccommodated man,” not naked on a heath but holed up in the shrubbery on the banks of the Thames in London, drinking river water and eating a snared seagull.

Like the original Adam, Boyd's Adam is a sinner, a man whose moral fittings are not as snug and tight as they might be. And as he meditates on what he did to deserve his suffering, he makes explicit his connection to his ancestral namesake: “One stupid mistake – one lapse, one near-unconscious answering of an atavistic sexual instinct – that was all it took to put a perfectly secure life, a fairly happy and prosperous life, in free fall. Tell Adam and Eve about it, he thought, with some bitterness, some self-reproach.”

How he got this way is, as much as how he gets out of it, is something for the reader of this well-plotted novel to discover, and not for the reviewer to disclose. But plot isn't the only attraction of the novel. It's also rich in setting and characterization. We explore the circumstances of Adam's fall not only from his point of view but also from a variety of others, including an assassin, a policewoman, a drug company CEO, and a prostitute. They all bring with themselves back-stories as intriguing and complex as Adam's, and each presents the reader with a mystery to solve. Why, for example, is the prostitute named “Mhouse”?

And the novel teems with secondary characters, even with what you might call walk-on characters, each of whom is strikingly individualized; they pop into the imagination the way Dickens's minor characters do. Which is as it should be: One of the inspirations for the novel that Boyd has cited is Dickens's “Our Mutual Friend,” which begins with a body being dragged from the Thames. And Boyd makes a Dickens-like use of the city itself, the modern, polyglot, multiracial city that fringes the Thames, its neighborhoods strung out in a panorama ranging from the most affluent to the most sordid.

Also like Dickens, Boyd uses the novel for commentary on the times in which he lives, including the role of the military-industrial complex. The assassin, a veteran of every war since the Falklands, works for a Blackwater-like “security consultancy” firm called the Risk Averse Group. The CEO heads Calenture-Deutz, a pharmaceuticals company that is about to announce a breakthrough cure for asthma and is therefore the object of a takeover by another Big Pharma company. But since truth is not only stranger but also more mutable than fiction, Boyd takes pains not to make his fiction too topical, too bound to a particular year. To add a just-a-bit-in-the-future color to the novel, he invents his own street slang -- “monkey” for crack cocaine, for example, or “green, green peas” as a small boy's expression of delight – which he leaves to the reader to decipher.

As noted, Boyd is a versatile writer. “Ordinary Thunderstorms” is a very different kind of novel from his previous one, the spy thriller “Restless,” or from “Any Human Heart,” his exploration of 20th century history, or from his 1981 debut novel, “A Good Man in Africa,” which earned him comparisons to Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis. It may be that this versatility, this bit of the literary chameleon, has deprived Boyd of the kind of fame that comes to the more easily pigeonholed. But all of his books have a very smart author in common. The only problem with “Ordinary Thunderstorms” is that some readers may be so swept along by the thrill of the chase that they may not stop long enough to admire how smart it is.

Poem of the Day: Robinson Jeffers

Hurt Hawks 

I

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder, 
The wing trails like a banner in defeat, 
No more to use the sky forever but live with famine 
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote 
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons. 
He stands under the oak-bush and waits 
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom 
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it. 
He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse. 
The curs of the day come and torment him 
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head, 
The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes. 
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those 
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant. 
You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him; 
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him; 
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him. 

II

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail 
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved. 
We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom, 
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death, 
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old 
Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. 
          What fell was relaxed, 
Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what 
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising 
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality. 

--Robinson Jeffers 

The man who has been called the greatest California poet was, like most Californians, born somewhere else. And Californians used to boast about Jeffers so much that the rest of the country seems to have decided that he must be overrated (like John Steinbeck). He is rarely mentioned in the same breath as writers like Eliot and Frost. But it takes only a careful reading of a poem like this one to realize that Jeffers had a powerful gift for observing nature and drawing the emotional essence from it. Is it sentimental? Perhaps there's too much anthropomorphizing of the wounded hawk, and perhaps that famous line about preferring to kill a man than a hawk has just a hint of posturing to it. But the sentiment is Jeffers's own, and I think we should honor it as such.    

Poem of the Day: Edward Taylor

Upon a Spider Catching a Fly

Thou sorrow, venom elf: 
     Is this thy play, 
To spin a web out of thyself 
     To catch a fly? 
          For why?

I saw a pettish wasp 
     Fall foul therein, 
Whom yet the whorl-pins did not clasp
     Lest he should fling 
           His sting. 

But as afraid, remote 
     Didst stand hereat 
And with thy little fingers stroke 
     And gently tap 
          His back. 

Thus gently him didst treat 
     Lest he should pet, 
And in a froppish, waspish heat 
     Should greatly fret 
          Thy net. 

Whereas the silly fly, 
     Caught by its leg 
Thou by the throat tookst hastily 
     And hind the head 
          Bite dead. 

This goes to pot, that not 
     Nature doth call. 
Strive not above what strength hath got
     Lest in the brawl 
          Thou fall. 

This fray seems thus to us. 
    Hell's spider gets 
His entrails spun to whip-cords thus, 
     And wove to nets 
          And sets. 

To tangle Adam's race 
     In's stratagems 
To their destructions, spoiled, made base
     By venom things, 
          Damned sins. 

But mighty, gracious Lord 
     Communicate 
Thy grace to break the cord, afford 
     Us glory's gate 
          And state. 

We'll nightingale sing like 
     When perched on high 
In glory's cage, thy glory, bright, 
     And thankfully, 
          For joy.

--Edward Taylor 

Yesterday a snake, today a spider. Not intentionally trying to creep anyone out here. Taylor's little sermon about the wiles of an arachnid Satan -- stroking its waspish enemy into submission, swiftly dispatching the silly fly -- is pretty potent stuff. It's worth comparing Frost's poem about a spider:

Design 

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, 
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth 
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth -- 
Assorted characters of death and blight 
Mixed ready to begin the morning right, 
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth -- 
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, 
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white, 
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height, 
Then steered the white moth thither in the night? 
What but design of darkness to appall? -- 
If design govern in a thing so small.

 While Frost's questioning is more to my way of thinking about things -- you might read this as a kind of response to "intelligent design" -- I think Taylor has given us the more satisfying, and wittier, poem.    

Poem of the Day: D.H. Lawrence

Snake 

A snake came to my water-trough 
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, 
To drink there. 

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree 
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me. 

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom 
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough 
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom, 
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness, 
He sipped with his straight mouth, 
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body, 
Silently. 

Someone was before me at my water-trough, 
And I, like a second comer, waiting. 

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do, 
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do, 
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment, 
And stooped and drank a little more, 
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth 
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking. 

The voice of my education said to me 
He must be killed, 
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man 
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off. 

But must I confess how I liked him, 
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough 
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless, 
Into the burning bowels of this earth? 

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? 
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? 
Was it humility, to feel so honoured? 
I felt so honoured. 

And yet those voices: 
If you were not afraid, you would kill him! 

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, 
But even so, honoured still more 
That he should seek my hospitality 
From out the dark door of the secret earth. 

He drank enough 
And lifted his head dreamiliy, as one who has drunken, 
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black, 
Seeming to lick his lips, 
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air, 
And slowly turned his head, 
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream, 
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round 
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face. 

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole, 
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther, 
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole, 
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after, 
Overcame me now his back was turned. 

I looked round, I put down my pitcher, 
I picked up a clumsy log 
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter. 

I think it did not hit him, 
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste, 
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front, 
At which, in the intense still noon I stared with fascination. 

And immediately I regretted it. 
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act! 
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education. 

And I thought of the albatross, 
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king, 
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, 
Now due to be crowned again. 

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords 
Of life. 
And I have something to expiate; 
A pettiness.

--D.H. Lawrence

Lawrence, once so central a literary figure, has moved toward the periphery. But I think he'll be back again: There's too much going on in his work, too much pointed criticism of the vitiations of civilized life for him to dwindle into obscurity. And maybe it will be his poetry, often as direct and clear-sighted as this poem, and not his often too-talky, too-preachy novels that will bring him back.

Poem of the Day: John Dryden

Prologue to The Tempest 

or, The Enchanted Island

As, when a tree's cut down, the secret root 

lives underground, and thence new branches shoot; 

So from old Shakespeare's honored dust, this day 

Springs up and buds a new reviving play: 

Shakespeare, who (taught by none) did first impart

To Fletcher wit, to laboring Jonson art. 

He, monarch-like, gave those, his subjects, law; 

And is that nature which they paint and draw. 

Fletcher reached that which on his heights did grow, 

Whilst Jonson crept, and gathered all below. 

This did his love, and this his mirth digest: 

One imitates him most, the other best. 

If they have since outwrit all other men,
'Tis with the drops which fell from Shakespeare's pen. 

The storm which vanished on the neighboring shore, 

Was taught by Shakespeare's Tempest first to roar. 

That innocence and beauty which did smile 

In Fletcher, grew on this Enchanted Isle. 

But Shakespeare's magic could not copied be; 

Within that circle none durst walk but he. 

I must confess 'twas bold nor would you now 

That liberty to vulgar wits allow, 

Which works by magic supernatural things; 

But Shakespeare's power is sacred as a king's. 

Those legends from old priesthood were received, 

And he them writ, as people then believed.

But if for Shakespeare we your grace implore, 

We for our theater shall want it more: 

Who by our dearth of youths are forced to employ 

One of our women to present a boy; 

And that's a transformation, you will say, 

Exceeding all the magic in the play. 

Let none expect in the last act to find 

Her sex transformed from man to womankind. 

Whate'er she was before the play began, 

All you shall see of her is perfect man. 

Or if your fancy will be farther led 

To find her woman, it must be abed. 

--John Dryden

Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare get a pretty bad rap, and some of them, such as Nahum Tate's rewriting of King Lear with a happy ending in which Cordelia marries Edgar, deserve it. But as Dryden's prologue to his version of The Tempest asserts, they did it to honor Shakespeare, not to better him. And really, is adapting Shakespeare to the theater of the times really any different from what Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim did when they turned Romeo and Juliet into a musical about street gangs, or when Giuseppe Verdi adapted Macbeth, Othello and The Merry Wives of Windsor for the opera stage? Not to mention countless film adaptations, modern-dress stagings and transpositions of The Taming of the Shrew to the American West (or the American high school). 

Actually, Dryden's version of The Tempest (co-written with William D'Avenant) was nowhere near as radical as Tate's Lear. And All for Love, his version of Antony and Cleopatra, rewritten to adhere to the so-called "unities," stands on its own. Like Pope, Dryden is a difficult sell to modern readers, and his best poems are his satires, "Absalom and Achitophel" and "MacFlecknoe." But his mastery of poetic technique is unsurpassed.    

Poem of the Day: William Carlos Williams

The Yachts 

contend in a sea which the land partly encloses 
shielding them from the too-heavy blows 
of an ungoverned ocean which when it chooses 

totures the biggest hulls, the best man knows 
to pit against its beatings, and sinks them pitilessly. 
Mothlike in mists, scintillant in the minute 

brilliance of cloudless days, with broad bellying sails 
they glide to the wind tossing green water 
from their sharp prows while over them the crew crawls 

ant-like, solicitously grooming them, releasing, 
making fast as they turn, lean far over and having 
caught the wind again, side by side, head for the mark. 

In a well guarded arena of open water surrounded by 
lesser and greater craft which, sycophant, lumbering 
and flittering follow them, they appear youthful, rare 

as the light of a happy eye, live with the grace 
of all that in the mind is fleckless, free and 
naturally to be desired. Now the sea which holds them 

 is moody, lapping their glossy sides, as if feeling 
for some slightest flaw but fails completely.
Today no race. Then the wind comes again. The yachts


move, jockeying for a start, the signal is set and they 
are off. Now the waves strike at them but they are too 
well made, they slip through, though they take in canvas. 


Arms with hands graspoing seek to clutch at the prows. 
Bodies thrown recklessly in the way are cut aside. 
It is a sea of faces about them in agony, in despair 


until the horror of the race dawns staggering the mind, 
the whole sea become an entanglement of watery bodies 
lost to the world bearing what they cannot hold. Broken, 


beaten, desolate, reaching from the dead to be taken up 
they cry out, failing, failing! their cries rising 
in waves still as the skillful yachts pass over.

--William Carlos Williams

Back in their day, it seemed that Eliot and Frost were likely to be the poets most honored by posterity. But now I think the honors are more likely to go to Stevens and Williams. Eliot's ragged malaise and Frost's folksy irony have dated; Stevens's celebrations of the imagination and Williams's hard-edged directness haven't. "The Yachts" may be a metaphorical depiction of the class struggle, but it has transcended that reading to become what it primarily is: a magisterial use of sight and sound that liberates the imagination instead of restricting it politically, socially or ideologically.
 

Poem of the Day: Henry Vaughan

The World 

I saw eternity the other night 

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

          All calm as it was bright; 

And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years, 

          Driven by the spheres, 

Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world 

          And all her train were hurled. 

The doting lover in his quaintest stran 

          Did there complain; 

Near him, his lute, his fancy, and his flights, 

          Wit's sour delights, 

With gloves and knots, the silly snares of pleasure, 

          Yet his dear treasure, 

All scattered lay, while he his eyes did pour 

          Upon a  flower. 

The darksome statesman, hung with weights and woe, 

Like a thick midnight fog, moved there so slow 

          He did nor stay nor go; 

Condemning thoughts, like sad eclipses scowl 

          Upon his soul, 

And clouds of crying witnesses without 

           Pursued him with one shout.

Yet digged the mole, and, lest his ways be found, 

          Worked undergrounds, 

Where he did clutch his prey. But one did see 

          That policy:

Churches and altars fed him; perjuries 

          Were gnats and flies;

It rained about him blood and tears, but he 

          Drank them as free. 

The fearful miser on a heap of rust 

Sat pining all his life there, did scarce trust 

          His own hands with the dust; 

Yet would not place one piece above, but lives 

          In fear of thieves. 

Thousands there were as frantic as himself, 

          And hugged each one his pelf: 

The downright epicure placed heaven in sense, 

          And scorned pretense; 

While others, slipped into a wide excess, 

          Said little less; 

The weaker sort, slight, trivial wares enslave,

          Who think them brave; 

And poor, despiséd Truth sat counting by

          Their victory. 

Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing, 

And sing and weep, soared up into the ring; 

          But most would use no wing. 

"O fools!" said I, "thus to prefer dark night 

          Before true light! 

To live in grots and caves, and hate the day 

          Because it shows the way,

The way which from this dead and dark abode 

          Leads up to God, 

A way where you might tread the sun and be 

          More bright than he!"

But, as I did their madness so discuss, 

          One whispered thus: 

"This ring the bridegroom did for none provide, 

          But for His bride."

--Henry Vaughan

This is Vaughan's Divina Commedia in miniature. The opening seven lines are among the most stunning I know of: They make me recall what the nighttime sky was like when I lived out of range of urban light pollution. But the satirical portraits that follow aren't bad either. Vaughan was a Welshman, which maybe explains my fondness for his poetry -- I'm Welsh on my mother's side of the family.         

Poem of the Day: Vachel Lindsay

Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight 

(in Springfield, Illinois) 

It is portentous, and a thing of state 
That here at midnight, in our little town 
A mourning figure walks, and will not rest, 
Near the old court-house pacing up and down,

Or by his homestead, or in shadowed yards 
He lingers where his children used to play, 
Or through the market, on the well-worn stones 
He stalks until the dawn-stars burn away. 

A bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black 
A famous high top-hat and plain worn shawl 
Makes him the quaint great figure that men love, 
The prairie-lawyer, master of us all. 

He cannot sleep upon his hillside now.
He is among us: -- as in times before!
And we who toss and lie awake for long 
Breathe deep, and start, to see him pass the door. 


His head is bowed. He thinks on men and kings. 
Yea, when the sick world cries, how can he sleep? 
Too many peasants fight, they know not why, 
Too many homesteads in black terror weep. 


The sins of all the war-lords burn his heart.
He sees the dreadnaughts scouring every main. 
He carries on his shawl-wrapped shoulders now 
The bitterness, the folly and the pain. 


He cannot rest until a spirit-dawn 
Shall come; -- the shining hope of Europe free: 
The league of sober folk, the Workers' Earth, 
Bringing long peace to Cornland, Alp and Sea. 


It breaks his heart that kings must murder still, 
That all his hours of travail here for men 
Seem yet in vain.  And who will bring white peace 
That he may sleep upon his hill again? 

--Vachel Lindsay

Best known now, if known at all, for the bumptiousness of "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven" and the naive boomlay of "The Congo," Lindsay had some serious admirers in his time, including W.B. Yeats. His ambition ultimately exceeded his talent, perhaps, but there's a genuine voice at work in his poems, especially this one about Lincoln's restless ghost, stalking the streets as the horror of World War I begins. Lincolnolatry at its purest. 
 

Poem of the Day: Andrew Marvell

To His Coy Mistress

     Had we but world enough, and time, 
This coyness, lady, were no crime. 
We would sit down, and think which way 
To walk, and pass our long love's day. 
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side 
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide 
Of Humber would complain. I would 
Love you ten years before the flood, 
And you should, if you please, refuse 
Till the conversion of the Jews. 
My vegetable love should grow 
Vaster than empires and more slow; 
An hundred years should go to praise 
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; 
Two hundred to adore each breast, 
But thirty thousand to the rest; 
An age at least to every part, 
And the last age should show your heart. 
For, lady, you deserve this state, 
Nor would I love at lower rate. 
     But at my back I always hear 
Time's wingéd chariot hurrying near; 
And yonder all before us lie 
Deserts of vast eternity. 
Thy beauty shall no more be found; 
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound 
My echoing song; then worms shall try 
That long-preserved virginity, 
And your quaint honor turn to dust, 
And into ashes all my lust: 
The grave's a fine and private place, 
But none, I think, do there embrace. 
     Now therefore, while the youthful hue 
Sits on thy skin like morning glow, 
And while thy willing soul transpires 
At every pore with instant fires, 
Now let us sport us while we may, 
And now, like amorous birds of prey, 
Rather at once our time devour 
Than languish in his slow-chapped power. 
Let us roll all our strength and all 
Our sweetness up into one ball, 
And tear our pleasures with rough strife 
Thorough the iron gates of life: 
Thus, though we cannot make our sun 
Stand still, yet we will make him run. 

--Andrew Marvell

Once, when I was wasting time trying to be a professor of English, I took a poll of my colleagues asking them to name the five greatest poems under 100 lines in English. Yes, it was a silly thing to do, and yes, by demonstrating my fundamentally unserious approach to literature it probably contributed to my not becoming an English professor, but anyway... This poem by Marvell easily made the top five. I think it is probably the wittiest poem in English, with its absolute mastery of voice, of imagery, and of versification. It may also be one of the sexiest.               

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