Bukowski was a jerk! Berryman was best!

I hardly know any of John Berryman's poetry--I see the only one of his I've got bookmarked in my browser is "The Ball Poem"--but W.S. Merwin's "Berryman" is one of my touchstone poems. It ends

I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write

... which is not necessarily a thing I believe but it's a thing you have to believe in case there are times, especially in case there are extended times, in which you're not sure whether anything you write is any good--I think in fact that if you're not fairly convinced that what you write is any good it most likely isn't, but you have to keep doing it anyway (or do you really though? There were years, and years again, when I didn't write, and what did it cost me? I really don't know), and you have to keep your morale up to keep doing it, so when you don't think it is you have to believe that you don't really know. (And I always think of reading Leonard Cohen's collected poems way back when and thinking that a lot of the later ones were garbage and thinking I guess he didn't know, and who was going to tell him? And I was thinking yesterday for some reason of how I used to think about writing papers in philosophy that you don't have to worry about being mistaken about whether your paper is really any good because that's what the reviewers are for--I mean, you don't have to worry about being embarrassed by your paper at a conference, say, because its having passed review certifies it as not embarrassing--but it's not true, the reviewers are all over the place and on occasion they will even tell you they made a mistake. (I know I made a painful mistake once in a bad review I gave to a paper that I was not really equipped to review. These things happen.) Anyway--I was reading this review of a book of Berryman's letters today (and I have to say I guess I take the point about "cheap phone calls" having killed off the letter insofar as they may have sucked up all the biographical minutiae previously conveyed by letter, but I wrote some essays of letters in my early e-mail days, such that I feel like there was a brief golden age of the letter sometime in the early-to-mid-'90s, and absolutely it was the internet (or at first, technically, the usenet) that killed that off) and it says that Berryman "was devastated not to win the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award" for one of his earlier books, and that, before his first book was published, he wrote in a letter, "I see Lowell as my peer. No one else." I mean what in the world really do you make of it? So often I see prominent writers complain about their bad reviews in the Times or the NYRB or really pretty much anywhere, and I think good Lord what is it like not to feel that if you're worthy of a bad review pretty much anywhere it means you've made it pretty much to the top of the world? I used to wear my Youtube dislikes as badges of honour. But what isn't after all relative: "The spring otherwise went well, apart from a drunken brawl over Berryman’s pugnacious attempt to sleep with a workshop poet’s fiancée." Anyway I'd written all this before reading the whole thing; it turns out that apparently "he vacillated between believing he was the best poet of his generation (except, he admitted, for Lowell) and thinking his poetry so much rubbish." I don't know Lowell either.

OK all right here's something about the bible. I read Jonah last night, and one of those things struck me that when it strikes me I wonder how it has never struck me before. First off, I happened to pay attention, this time, to the fact that the city, Nineveh, whose destruction Jonah is supposed to go and prophecy is in Assyria. This is a kind of thing I have looked out for on my last couple of passes through the bible: once God has chosen the descendants of Abraham, and then of those the descendants of Isaac, and then of those the descendants of Jacob as his own, what interest does he take in people who are not those descendants? The Assyrians are the first people God uses to punish the Israelite kingdoms for turning away from him; his interest in them is mostly portrayed as instrumental: he is interested in them insofar as they interact with his chosen people. But in Jonah God is concerned about the wickedness of the people of Nineveh, per se, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this is the most concern God ever has for the wickedness per se of anyone other than his chosen people, once he's chosen a people. As I think I've mentioned before, there is a contractarian strain in the Hebrew bible which seems to hold that sinfulness is defined by the covenant that God has with his chosen people; this is especially apparent when Joshua (I think it's Joshua) tells the people to be careful about their choice to reaffirm the covenant because it puts a heavy burden of obligation on them. One of the recurring themes of the books of the prophets could be seen as a pushing back against this contractarianism--what's important to God isn't following the rules of sacrifice and so on but not being an asshole. But then again the ways of not being an asshole that tend to be specified--not oppressing widows and orphans and maybe foreigners--are part of the covenant, so I'm sure it's possible to read the Hebrew bible, once the law of the covenant is spelled out in the books after Genesis, as contractarian through and through. But there would also be a reading available holding that the not being an asshole thing is part of what it simply is to be good, and God endorses that because he is good, rather than it being the case that it's good because he endorses it (as opposed to all the sacrifice kind of stuff, which obviously is only good because God prescribes it (and then there would be the, uh, interesting question whether all the (sexual) purity stuff goes in the God-prescribes-it-because-it's-good column or the it's-good-because-God-prescribes-it column)) ... and God's interest in the wickedness of Nineveh, with which he has no covenant, seems to indicate that Jonah (if not Jonah) takes that view.

Anyway here's the thing that struck me last night. It's a puzzle why Jonah initially refuses to go to Nineveh; I think the children's-bible impression you get is that Jonah doesn't want to go and prophecy doom because no one likes a prophet of doom (and prophets of doom are not warmly received elsewhere in the bible; Jeremiah complains a lot about this), but this is not the reason he ultimately gives, which is also the reason he's mad when God decides not to destroy Nineveh because Nineveh is repentant: Jonah says he knew God would relent, because God is compassionate, and that's why he didn't want to go. The last time (or the time before, I dunno) I read through the bible the reason I came up with for Jonah's being mad at God about this is that somewhere earlier on it says that false prophets should be put to death, and you can identify false prophets by the fact that, you know, what they say will happen doesn't happen. So this would give Jonah reason to be upset about God making a false prophet of him. So, I dunno, that's one way to look at it, I guess (though clearly the people of Nineveh take Jonah's prophecy to be at least possibly conditional, as it turns out to be, so that his prophecy is not false at all), but I think what struck me last night is a more compelling way to look at it: Jonah believes that if the people of Nineveh are not warned that God will destroy them for their wickedness, then God will destroy them for their wickedness, but if they are warned, then they might repent, in which case God in his compassion will not destroy them--so, if Jonah flees and doesn't warn them, possibly no one will warn them and God will destroy them, but if he does what he's told, God might not destroy them--so, Jonah flees because he wants God to destroy Nineveh. Which, why wouldn't he! Nineveh is a great city of Assyria, the terrifying empire to the north which will eventually conquer Israel--why would Jonah want to save Nineveh?

Of course now that I've spelled it out it seems so obvious as to be hardly worth the effort of spelling it out.

One other little thing that caught my attention this time: when Jonah leaves Nineveh there's a bit where he parks himself out in the wilderness and God makes a plant grow over him to shade him, and Jonah is happy, and then the next morning God makes a worm kill the plant and sends a hot wind, and Jonah is mad--and God says, look, you have compassion for the plant, which you didn't make; why shouldn't I have compassion for Nineveh, a city of 120,000 idiots who don't know their right hand from their left? (And that's the end of the book, with no reply from Jonah.) The thing that has stood out to me about this previously is that, obviously, it isn't that Jonah has compassion for the plant, it's that it was useful to him--this is one of those things, which you see in Plato all the time, where the reasoning is so plainly off that it has to be off for a reason. The thing I noticed this time (but it's right there in plain sight) is that before God makes the plant grow, Jonah builds himself a shelter to shade himself, which is not mentioned again once the plant appears. So Jonah apparently didn't need the plant in the first place, because he has made his own shelter, but then once God gives him the plant, he's mad when God takes it away. When God says you had compassion for the plant which you didn't even make, you expect God to be making an analogy to his relationship to the Assyrians, whom God did make, but God doesn't refer to his having made the Assyrians. So what there is explicitly in the text isn't a comparison between Jonah's not making a thing and God's making another thing, but between Jonah's not making a thing and Jonah's making another thing. What to make of that?

( ETA March 24 )