A Scholar's Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe Book

Entirely by accident I encountered him in the fall/winter at Iowa of '64, my first graduate class. I remember puzzling about Collin's logic and expression in his Ode as much as Hartman was from the front of the room filled with coats and boots and scarves. He says in Tale that he wanted to write "beyond the middle style" 152 unwilling to give up a visionary kind of verse, but was a realist, not a Baptist who takes the kingdom of God by force. He wanted "to stand in the presence--a wish that has never left me. I have kept a belief in the possibility of a direct line to the truth, if only through the medium of literature" (8) He says to his seminar that it might take all their time to unpack "strange fits of passion I have known" but he outwardly looks in.

I come to this grateful to have a chance to understand the civilizations in their highest and best thoughts, marginally anyway, for I was never the companion or even had discussions with these sensibilities outside of John Cullen in graduate school. Geoffrey Hartman may be an example of one who has known them all. He cites Christopher Smart several times in his Scholar's Tale for his poetry that would pierce "the screen Twist thing and word...language straight from the soul." Smart's life would not be sought as a trade off for this. Hartman says he would "consider that [the poet] a mad and heroic endeavor beyond" (84) himself. I have loved Smart from the first contact, but all the understanding I have of philosophy and criticism comes not from the Influence that Bloom so celebrates and Hartman documents, but from wrestling with poetic issues first hand. Only because of that and not from brilliant study do I recognize the importance when Hartman cites the oblique circuitry, the history of trash, the extracanonical, multidirectional reading, thesaurus of old stories, fantasies against the scientifically correct. To me this demonstrates that we ourselves are capable of ourselves. I admit to being kindled to this thought. One explanation of my absence from academic discourse is that these faculties are so desperately dull and self consumed.

The first assignment was to pick a poem of Blake and write about it, no other restrictions. For no reason I remember I sat down that weekend with the Tyger and there gradually emerged, as if the poem opened up, a vista of Blake's system. The essay was to be four pages but mine was closer to six, which I achieved by 1 1/2 spacing with small elite typewriter.

Who could better presume to direct apprehension of truth than an American, someone brash as Bloom, who arrogates to himself the privilege of his own illusions, but this is not Hartman, a European with a love of the philosophic mind, even if his saga is most privileged and unlikely, in the right place at the right time, left in Frankfurt, evacuated to the Rothschilds, who meets his wife in the Yale commons after she is released from Belsen. But it is not his experience of the emigre that makes him one, it is the cast of his mind, which is from birth, that I share with him, but exiles he shared with the brightest lights of 20th century critics, Auerbach, Spitzler...hired guns, after a fashion, going to the high bidders at Yale...is it reward or punishment to live in exile by the power of the mind?

I feel some relation to Hartman's dispossession of the one thing he wanted, the inner émigré, 82, the refugee, the one thing we all want, to know the direct truth without intermediaries the way the priest asked the urim and thummim what was truth, that truth residing in the spirit within. David was always asking and dialoguing with instructions in the night, awaking with praise on his bed, being sent in the moment, before the fact. Precognition humbles a man. Salvation delivers him. For the man to awaken in the emotion of worship, to feel joy and the sudden prompting is the measure of his gratitude, as it says, blessed are those who have learned to acclaim you, who walk in the light of your presence Yahweh! The light of the presence can be had in the songs, spiritual songs and praises at all times, rejoicing in His Name all day long, exulting in His Righteousness, since His Word and His Name are exalted above all things. All of this is of course from the Psalms.

When Psalm 119 says Thy Word is a lamp, it meditates over and over, so that when the apostle says sing spiritual songs and psalms in your hearts all day long that meditation of the word grows. For David the word was the Torah, for the unfolding meditation it is all the prophets and writings too, language filled with the songs of hearts that blesses and sustains. David had Torah we have David, and we have Isaiah and Daniel and all the history and biography of the sacred to meditate and we have the gospels and the letters too. So our meditation is complete. When that word says, because he loves me says the Lord I will rescue him, or, I will surround him with songs of deliverance, these are the strength of a life so that truly Blessed are those who have learned to acclaim him, who walk in the light of the presence Yahweh. We rejoice in your name all day long...in your name and your word as the Psalm says, we rejoice for its own sake and because by your favor you have exalted our horn. We are exalted in spirit, joy, peace. Blessing and love overflow us as we walk. Being so led He leads, to lie down, he leads beside still waters, he restores my soul, He leads me, His rod and staff comfort me, He prepares a table... this goes on and on in the songs and spiritual psalms that surround us and deliver us.

Hartman quotes Stevens wistfully, and Blake and Wordsworth who he knew so well. He was drawn to "the mysteries of biblical figures that had to shoulder the burden of a divine election (3). ...literary sublimities I could not live up to, even in maturity." I feel his separation from himself and from the emotion he does not have for the readings of midrash or Psalms, "I hear only the void shouting back." "I adopted myself out to the words blowing in the wind and insights that detached themselves from what I read" (Tale, 147). He loves Blake because of his direct apprehension, questions the visionary company of the Romantics, cites Numbers 11 that "would that all the Lord's people were prophets." But poetry is removed from direct access which is not in words, to "walk in the light of your presence of Lord, we rejoice in your Name all day long, we exult in your righteousness." Of course this fine gentleman had zero acquaintance of such existence but I get to live through his last four books the gemütlichkeit I forfeited to live the estranged life. Further sympathies with Hartman "wish to be affirmed, to stand in the presence--a wish that has never left me. I have kept a belief in the possibility of a direct line to the truth, if only through the medium of literature" (Tale, 8), his quoting Stevens that the great poem of earth is still to come, the interlingual cues that make him aware of similarities, 124, the minimalism of a memory trigger that can produce by sonic accident some associational string, the realia, the sound value of words he locates in Smart, a literal "sound reasoning."The first two notions I hold of this obscurity are the Elizabethans who were obscure, especially Donne, but Herbert, even if they're not exactly Elizabethans. The poets are always read after their deaths, and not only the letters of their ancestors are remaking their lives as we live. The second is the inevitable conspiracy conclusion that if the work does not serve the foreordained purposes of hierarchy then it must be obscured, although to what purpose, when it can be easily ignored, one knows not. Is the apple cart that insecure that it might overturn this modern phenom since '45, shall we say from the beginning of cloning?