“Despite the heartening achievements of some black schools, which have repeatedly demonstrated what is possible even with children from low-income backgrounds, the general picture of the education of black students is bleak. Much of what is said–and not said–about the education of black students reflects the political context, rather than the educational facts. Whites walk on eggshells for fear of being called racists, while many blacks are preoccupied with protecting the image of black students, rather than protecting their future by telling the blunt truth. It is understandable that some people are concerned about image, about what in private life might be expressed as: “What will the neighbors think?” But, when your children are dying, you don’t worry about what the neighbors think” (245).

Though bleak, attitudes are changing, will continue to change, will, as Ward Connerly has remarked, take time to change, creating a new climate of expectations and performance, on all sides. The passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative registers such change. Neighbors of goodwill do exist, are distressed, worried, and concerned, willing to help, where they can, if allowed. It needs to be said much more often that 14% of black voters approved the proposal. They are people who want much of what Sowell discusses in terms of education for their children and community. These two essays ought to be read by anyone serious about assessing where we are after the passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, and where, together, we are all going from here.

His emphasis on the necessity of basic human virtue and morality stands as both an indictment of us all and a call to struggle together toward a new vision of what it means to be an American.

At last someone other than a radical black or white "civil rights professional" has found a way to speak to these issues and reach all Americans--not merely the campus crowd.

Connerly rightly deserves to be more widely known not merely as an opponent of race preferences but rather as a matchless defender of free speech and conscience, a cause for which he has also suffered dearly at one university after another throughout our country.

Whatever shape our future will take regarding race, Ward Connerly’s personal and public odyssey will be part of the answer, as it is a clear sign for renewed hope that reason and sanity may yet prevail.

Others may criticize Mr. Steele for emphasizing this and underplaying that, but I want to praise his thoughtful probing of the dynamics of affirmative action and how it assuages white guilt while keeping some black people from developing their highest potential. As a former college English instructor, I occasionally had minority students who were accustomed to being handed A’s and were shocked to receive C’s. Repeated experience convinced me that affirmative action was part of the problem. They lacked the self-discipline and responsibility that Steele extolls: "Very often those who educate poor blacks feel excused from the responsibilities of high expectations and academic rigor by the very conditions that make such expectations mandatory."

My students had had years of misguided low expectations from both teachers and administrators and had ultimately internalized them. I recall one student telling me he had to have a grade higher than a C. When I responded that he should read the Harbrace Handbook from cover to cover and do as many of the exercises as possible, he stared at me in disbelief. I encouraged him to be gentle with himself and to expect to retain only perhaps sixty to eighty percent of his study but that with time and continual effort he would achieve a more sophisticated level of literacy.

Having started as a TA in the early 1980s when most students in writing classes received the C they deserved, I found it difficult to hand out largely all B’s, while the pressure for all A’s sent me looking for another way to make a living so as not to participate in the fraud of "higher" education. Misguided white guilt only complicates matters for serious, capable minority students and makes it all the more unlikely they’ll be called upon to strive to develop their abilities to the highest degree possible. Steele perceptively touches on how university administrators are exacerbating this decline.

On another note, Steele states "to be human is to be responsible" and profoundly probes the intricacies of human motivation, responsibility, and the ways in which affirmative action and the thinking of politically correct race elites erode individual agency:

"Race should *never* play a role in social reform for many reasons, not least of which is that it is *always* used to help people avoid full agency for their fate. It always transforms the responsibility that free minorities should carry into a commodity that others will use for their own moral power. Race absolutely corrupts those who use it for redemption and absolutely weakens those who use it for advancement" (112).

To all of which I say, "amen." I hope, indeed struggle to hope, that men like Shelby Steele, Ward Connerly, Thomas Sowell, David Horowitz and others will find the resources to continue to set a new course from the lamentable situation that plagues race relations today, especially in the university, though the struggle against patronizing white guilt for true individual responsibility and achievement exists in all walks of life. It seems to me that it is a struggle that must be fought primarily by intelligent blacks and minorities who have had enough of the insult of affirmative action to stand up and fight for the unquestionable respect and honor they so rightly deserve and merit.


 

The "morally self-anointed," as he calls excessively liberal reformers and radicals, "have for centuries argued as if no honest disagreement were possible, as if those who opposed them were not merely in error but in sin.... Given this exalted vision of their role by the anointed visionaries, those who disagree with them must be correspondingly degraded or demonized." Marx, Lenin, Hitler, and Mao all followed this procedure, as have utopians of similar or less horrible results.... That comparable dynamics rule the day, especially in the humanities in many American universities, will not surprise those who have any real experience of those departments. Sowell evokes the American political system and tradition in the hope of preventing its further erosion.

One of the many perceptive and striking points Sowell makes in the book involves "The High Cost of Envy." Pointing out its dangers broadly to poor people, he writes,

"The very terms of the discussion encourage them to attribute their less fortunate position to social barriers, if not political plots, and so to neglect the kinds of efforts and skills which are capable of lifting them to higher economic and social levels."

The acquisition of such "skills, education, discipline, foresight," needed to improve their lot, becomes less likely, as the "ideology of envy" blames others for exploitation and racism, undermining their own will to act, while rendering "more successful members suspect as traitors." Sowell observes this same "bogus explanation" can keep entire societies in poverty, making me think of my recent experience as an accredited participant at the United Nations Millennium Forum, May 22-26, 2000, where I witnessed Kofi Annan’s wise proposal for a Global Compact with business swept aside and essentially replaced with the "sophisticated modern versions of the envy vision spread by the Third World intelligentsia, often seconded by the intelligentsia in more fortunate countries."

Summing up in a passage that has very wide application, Sowell states, "cosmic justice attempts to create equal results or equal prospects, with little or no regard for whether the individuals or groups involved are in equal circumstances or have equal capabilities or equal personal drives. To do this, it cannot operate under general rules, the essence of law, but must create categories of people entitled to various outcomes, regardless of their own inputs . . . assuming with little or no evidence that only malign intentions or systemic bias could explain unequal results. ’Affirmative action’ is perhaps the classic example of this approach but it is only one example." His insight into the subtleties of modern ideologies is truly remarkable, as is his own high and demanding sense of justice.

Alas, I seriously found myself wondering at times if Sowell’s Quest for Cosmic Justice is not a voice in the wilderness, as always, one come much too late. But I take heart in knowing such people as he, Shelby Steele, and Ward Connerly have the courage to speak out on race and other matters and in the end hope that events will unfold for the good in ways I can not imagine and that now seem so often unlikely. In this context, I recommend reading Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century, a parallel meditation on the dilemmas of modernity.
 

I grew up in the white suburbs of Detroit during the `60s and `70s and have vivid memories of the Detroit riot and my uncle and aunt’s bakery being almost burnt to the ground, while their neighbors and friends were increasingly driven out by violence and the erosion of social order. In the end, they too accepted the inevitability of flight for their lives. More than forty years of programs and promises of "renaissance" have only produced a dysfunctional city that often can neither educate its young nor reliably provide the most basic services such as snow removal and, for a couple of days now, electricity.

At the University of Michigan I studied with Robert Hayden, a former Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress, who thought of himself as a human being, first and foremost, though he begrudgingly accepted Afro-American, despite his preference at times for Negro, coming from an older time. The child of an interracial marriage, Hayden loathed the divisiveness of racial politics and lacerated radical blacks on more than one occasion. Ultimately, his vision of human oneness melded with that of Martin Luther King and similar figures, challenging us all to a deeply demanding spiritual ethic, a universal standard holding all accountable, before which all must struggle and strive.

David Horowitz devastatingly chronicles the result of the lack of such a standard on race relations during the last forty years; the result in the university; the result in the media; the result in the legal system; the result in politics; the result in the hearts and minds and souls of our entire nation.

As one who has edited the poems and prose of a human being usually identified as black, I have had the experience several times of being invited for job interviews at colleges only to be met with disbelief and gaping mouths when I, a whitey, walked in through the departmental door. I am one who has lived through almost everything about which Horowitz writes regarding academia, including losing a tenure track job as the result of a relentless and byzantine conspiracy of "colleagues" who wanted a black in the position, one widely perceived by those fit to judge as nowhere near my intellectual equal and who eventually had to be removed from my post for incompetence.

Horowitz’s major shortcoming, typical of the modern secular mind, liberal or conservative, is that his critique, unlike Dostoevsky who understood the nature of modernity, does not go deep enough into the spiritual collapse that underlies the dynamics of race, as they underlay the collapse into communism. This failure is also evident in his Destructive Generation, which is, nevertheless, another of his brave and brilliant books. Perhaps someday Horowitz will plumb further into the depths of radical causes.

Being a white man and given the politically charged nature of race today, Horowitz demonstrates a rare streak of moral strength and courage by his daring to speak his conscience against black racism and the misguided designs of race elites. Fortunately, he is not alone. Along with Hating Whitey, those truly interested in beginning to understand and confront the race dilemmas of America should also read Ward Connerly’s Creating Equal, Shelby Steele’s A Dream Deferred, and Thomas Sowell’s The Quest for Cosmic Justice, works by exceptional, heroic human beings who have all been slandered as Uncle Toms by more than one race radical.
 

 India’s Kali Yuga.... December 21, 2000
The novelist R. K. Narayan (1906-) was born into a Tamil-speaking, Brahmin family. For several years he attended Christian schools in Madras, where he was raised by his grandmother, a devout Hindu who taught him the traditional songs and prayers. His fiction often presents a persona who undergoes a crisis that drives him back in some way to a resolution suffused with an evocation of the Hindu past. Often portrayed as a simple pious Hindu, R. M. Varma, of the University of Jodhpur, more insightfully observes, "Cultural ambivalence is a marked characteristic of Narayan’s fictional technique and he hovers between his Hindu faith and lack of it. He merely uses it as a landscape in his fiction."

In his brilliant The Vendor of Sweets (1967), Narayan presents a character named Jagan who owns a small shop that sells sweetmeats. Presented as somewhat of a religious crank, he is a follower of Gandhi who still works his spinning wheel and sits in his shop reading the Bhagavad Gita in between customers. Jagan lives in an idealized traditional India of long ago incongruously conflated with the modern present.

Jagan’s only son Mali fully lives in the modern world, not only of India but of America as well. Dropping out of college, as Jagan had as a young man out of misconstrued loyalty to Gandhi, Mali, without consulting with his father, enrolls in a creative writing program in Michigan and helps himself to Jagan’s attic stash of rupees in order to pay his expenses. Narayan consistently portrays Mali as a son who has lost all the traditional Hindu virtues while Jagan spoils him and makes excuses for him.

After three years in America Jagan abruptly receives a cable announcing Mali’s return with "another person" whom upon arrival at the train station he introduces as his wife, Grace. Jagan suffers a severe shock. His son has not only gone to America, where he in fact does begin to eat beef, but married there without informing his family. Further disoriented because the girl is a Korean-American, Jagan thinks she is Chinese and reflects, "Don’t you know that one can’t marry a Chinese nowadays? They have invaded our borders. . . ." Having stopped reading the Bhagavad Gita while receiving letters he believed were from Mali in America, but were actually from Grace, Jagan starts reading it "becoming mentally disturbed once again." Narayan subtly dramatizes his reading of the Gita as linked to his disturbed relationship with his son and thereby with modern India. Before long Grace, his new daughter-in-law, begins to take charge of the house and care for Jagan, his wife having died while Mali was in America. Soon she transforms the part of the nineteenth-century house in which she and Mali live with modern Western paintings and furnishings.

In one of the few revealing statements by Mali, "with a gesture of disgust," he says to his father, "Oh, these are not the days of your ancestors. Today we have to compete with advanced countries not only in economics and industry, but also in culture." Satirizing the trash creative writing programs churn out in America, Narayan underscores simultaneously the gulf between father and son, traditional and modern.

Shock upon modern shock rolls over Jagan. His son not only lived unmarried with a foreign woman of mixed descent in his ancestral home but shamelessly concealed it from his father. As Jagan explains to the cousin, "Even my grandfather’s brother, who was known to be immoral, never did this sort of thing." His "dirtied" home, "which had remained unsullied for generations, had this new taint to carry." Since all of Jagan’s traditional, conventional relations have already "ostracized him" over the "beef-eating Christian girl for a daughter-in-law," Jagan realizes they would "remove themselves further" should they learn of the "latest development." In a significant moment of honesty, Jagan observes he "felt grateful for being an outcast, for it absolved him from obligations as a member of the family." Jagan sits in the dark by the Sir Frederick Lawley statue, a relic from the British past, and meditates on his own arranged marriage in a richly embellished chapter that brilliantly evokes the traditional marriage customs of the joint family system in India and devastatingly insinuates the decayed state of his own house and modern India.

Jagan awakens in the dawn from his night of memories, fantasizing again of entering "a new janma." In regard to the traditional ceremony marking a man turning sixty, the narrator honestly concedes again that Jagan himself "had had his fill of these festivals." In his own way, the narrator frequently intimates, Jagan has picked over and repudiated various customs from the past. So one relative is imagined as saying how could the son Mali be different with "a father like Jagan." Narayan suggests a subtle, logical, and culminating connection of decline between father and son.

The values of the Ramayana and other sacred texts have no resonance for Mali. Jagan, lost and faltering, unable to cope fully with the clash of his traditional values with the modern world, resolves absurdly to retreat across the river, taking his bank book with him, after agreeing to pay for a lawyer for Mali and offering an airline ticket for Grace to return to America: "It’s a duty we owe her."

V. S. Naipaul has remarked of Narayan’s The Vendor of Sweets that it is "a novel in which his fictional world is cracked open, its fragility finally revealed, and the Hindu equilibrium . . . collapses into something like despair." In his "On Alternative Modernities," Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar has similarly observed, "Everywhere, at every national or cultural site, the struggle with modernity is old and familiar." Narayan has so thoroughly undermined and complicated Jagan with the tensions of twentieth-century life, deep within the structure of the narrative voice itself, only the most shallow or tendentious reading can fail to perceive the scathing critique of both the antedated and bankrupt, traditional and modern, values of India and Western civilization.
 

Global Tragedies of Our Own Making.... October 30, 2000
I’ve often thought or returned to passages in Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s Unvanquished since reading it in the early summer of 1999. Throughout the debate and defeat of the CTBT, the charades over Congressional withholding of funding to the UN, Jesse Helms’ appalling performance before Security Council Members in January of 2000, my attending the Millennium Forum as an accredited participant at the UN in May 2000, watching and hoping the requisite will might be found at the Millennium Summit in September 2000, I have repeatedly found myself recalling Boutros-Ghali’s devastating critique of US undermining of the United Nations, struggled to fight off a pervasive sense of tragedy and lost opportunity, lost since 1992 when Boutros-Ghali’s Agenda for Peace was shunted aside.

How many echos I’ve heard from the couple of hundred books I’ve read on the League of Nations and United Nations. How frightening it has been to watch my fellow citizens so obsessed with their own little private, selfish worlds, turning away from international responsibilities and duties, scape-goating the UN for our own failures and loss of nerve. During the last year, I’ve interviewed on over 230 radio stations about my own book, Into the Ruins, on the UN, in my own terms, and have heard firsthand all the extremist arguments against the participation of my country in the Organization, attempting to refute them as best I can.

There are many who understand the seriousness of the situation. William H. Luers, the President of the UNA-USA, writes a comprehensive appeal for UN support in his "Choosing Engagement: Uniting the U.N. with U.S. Interests" in the September/October 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs. The UNA, World Federalist Association, and others have done much to educate and elevate discussion about the necessity of our global cooperation through the United Nations. Alas, I often doubt, in the end, such efforts will save the day. Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s Unvanquished reveals why. Having read all the writings and memoirs of the UN Secretary Generals, I believe Unvanquished stands alone as the most insightful, courageous, heroic work ever written about the realities of the United Nations and its Member States, especially the US.

Having failed the League of Nations and themselves, the global community rose from the ashes of World War II to form a more perfect union. As the Millennium Summit has recently demonstrated on paper, while most of the US media ignored it, the Member States understand precisely what needs to be done. Events already suggest they, we, still lack the will and shall quite likely have to suffer the dread forces of history in order to find it.
 

 Antinomies.... October 24, 2000
In A Year of the Hunter, Czeslaw Milosz unequivocally writes, "Poetry’s separation from religion has always strengthened my conviction that the erosion of the cosmic-religious imagination is not an illusion and that the vast expanses of the planet that are falling away from Christianity are the external correlative of this erosion." Road-Side Dog exudes this same consciousness, yet, interested only in Christianity, he fails to perceive that vast expanses of the planet have also left behind the Islamic, Hindu, Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist religions.

Like his contemporaries, Milosz is a child of dualities and contradictions, as he discloses in Unattainable Earth: "Sometimes believing, sometimes not believing, / With others like myself I unite in worship." Though "loyal and disloyal," he performs what is in itself an act of affirmation. One reason for such tensions must be his recognition that we are "In an intermediary phase, after the end of one era and before the beginning of a new one." In another entry he writes, "There is only one theme: an era is coming to an end which lasted nearly two thousand years, when religion had primacy of place in relation to philosophy, science and art. . . ." Milosz recognizes the validity of his own honest doubts and the abyss of evil and historical calamity that is swallowing everything before it, yet he does so while continuing to "unite in worship." Similarly, in "Lecture V" of The Collected Poems, the persona affirms "We plod on with hope," and then allows, "And now let everyone / Confess to himself. �eHas he risen?’ �eI don’t know.’" It was perhaps these lines that led Pope John Paul II to say to Milosz, as he reports in A Year of the Hunter, "You always take one step forward and one step back." In an essay in New Perspectives Quarterly, Milosz describes himself as a believer, while in A Year of the Hunter he refers to an experience in church on Palm Sunday as an "intuitive understanding that Christ exists." These contradictions achieve their fullest expression in "Two Poems" in Provinces: The first poem celebrates earthly life and its values, while the second poem, "A Poem for the End of the Century," bitterly, ironically recalls the religious past. Of these two contrasting poems, Milosz writes in a headnote that "taken together" they "testify to my contradictions, since the opinions voiced in one and the other are equally mine." To highlight either side over the other would be a distortion of his psyche. Milosz conveyed his complexity to the Pope when he replied, "Can one write religious poetry in any other way today?" I have often thought of Virginia Woolf’s Mr. Ramsay in To The Lighthouse, ascending the island rocks, exclaiming, in one of the most poignant settings of modern literature, "There is no God."

Perhaps because Milosz perceives our age as an intermediary one, he finds it more possible than most poets to hold out hope for the future. His hope, though, as we have seen, is not naive, foolish, or unaware of the incessant disintegration. It is that of one tried by experience, who yet believes there are reasons for such a poem as "Thankfulness." To give "thanks for good and ill" manifests a trust that transcends our usual human self-centeredness and that submits to the power of the mystery of being, a trust that acknowledges in another poem "They are incomprehensible, the things of this earth." Such trust is also the prerequisite to finding "Eternal light in everything on earth." Although from the viewpoint of traditional Catholic belief some might think such lines are suffused with vague gnosticism, accuse him of having fallen off from the faith, of "willing belief," as he says of himself in The Land of Ulro, one must recognize the honest complexity of his commitment if one wishes to confront, as he has, the undeniable damage that has been visited upon all organized forms of religion and government during the modern era.

In reference to religion, while recognizing the undeniable damage, Milosz has often expressed his skepticism and uneasiness with Catholicism. Although he seems to favor at times reversion to Catholicism, suggests he himself is a heretic, harbors the conceit of possessing the true truth among the great religions, he also writes of going "forward, but on a different track," of a "new vision," "a new awareness," "new perspectives," as in A Year of the Hunter:

Why should we shut our eyes and pretend, rejecting theobvious, that Ancient Rome is again in decline, and this time it’s not pagan Rome under the blows of Christianity, but the Rome of the monotheists’ God? Since this, and nothing else, is the undeclared theme of contemporary poetry in various languages, obviously this conflict has already crossed the threshold of universal consciousness. . . . Perhaps . . . new perspectives will open up . . . .

Milosz has worked more deeply with the spiritual dislocations of modern life than any other poet of the twentieth century since T. S. Eliot.

In regard to government, Milosz’s experience prepared him to understand where we have been and where we are going in a manner unique among modern poets. All the more eloquently rings his plea in his Nobel Lecture for sanity eventually to prevail among the nations of the earth:

We realize that the unification of our planet is in the making, and we attach importance to the notion of international community. The days when the League of Nations and the United Nations were founded deserve to be remembered.

This realization of the importance of international community can be found throughout his writings. Its source, beyond his own experience, was, by his own testimony, his uncle, Oscar Milosz, poet and seer, who predicted the "triumph of the Roman Catholic Church." Narrow Catholic hopes aside, history, lower case, moves toward the vindication of both of them, as well as of all those who have stood throughout this century for the further development of international institutions through which the nations may cooperate for the protection of the weak and vulnerable, for the protection of the little ones. If "There are no direct lessons that American poets can learn from Milosz," the fault lies entirely with us and the age of academic criticism that has almost strangled the life out of poetry.
 

Milton knew the "consistence of a true poem," and both Paradise Lost and many passages scattered throughout his prose attest to it. In The Reason of Church Government he surveys the abilities of such masters as Homer, Virgil, Job, and Sophocles. Along with the modern loss of belief in God has gone his high and serious belief in the office of the poet. Equally banished from the modern conception of poetry is all respect for positive values, morals, and virtues. The story of twentieth-century literature is the abuse and misguided replacement of such healthy standards with the perversions of modernism and postmodernism. In brief, "the modern problem."

Unlike in the work of Jacques Derrida and his academic flies, the "presence" of God is a reality for Milton. Here in the abstract Milton gives us what throughout Paradise Lost he has been dramatizing--the "principles and presuppositions" to which Adam, representative man, must obediently submit, not merely in Eden, but for the fulfillment of his life during his journey on the earthly plane. In Satan, Milton presents the picture of the rebel, almost a type of the Renaissance hero Benvenuto Cellini, who through pride usurps power and whose fundamental actions and motives have their most appropriate modern analogue, as many have observed, in the archvillains Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Such men fully embody the will to power that the nihilist Nietzsche, as Thomas Mann put it, glorified. Such totalitarian dictators were the inevitable product of the romantic fascination with Satan, as though he were a hero and not an arrogant aspirant after power. Such cultural confusion reveals itself in Goethe’s Faust as well as in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Such errors in judgment, such fundamental confusion of values, mark the modern era and set it off from the spiritually healthier times of Dante, Langland, Spenser, and Milton--healthier only in terms of possessing to a degree a unified spiritual vision that provided universal standards with which to confront the damnable deeds of their day. Far from the banal optimism of the modern era, as in Whitman, they know that the long hard way of man is through suffering and turmoil and that the assurance Michael gives Adam about future generations abides eternally: "Doubt not but that sin / Will reign among them." Despite Freud’s "freeing" man from sin, the twentieth century proved to be the most sinful in history, precisely because the unique spiritual reality of each soul and its fundamental limitations were denied. The violent, arrogant, insidious deeds of the archvillains of modern political nihilism alone account for the suffering and deaths of hundreds of millions of people, while much of the so-called intelligentsia of the West and East defended or prepared the way for the slaughter. Whereas Virgil denounced war except as the last resort for establishing peace, modern poets have often ignored the inhumanities of our century--save for those like Pound whose totalitarianism abetted the brutalizing of millions of innocents and the early Auden who approved "the necessary murder." Here at the end of the twentieth century when humankind still stands technologically capable of destroying much of the vast expanse of the globe and much, though not all, of its population, here when a more trustworthy political form has yet to be securely established to channel the will of the citizens of the international community, epopee must again take account of the social domain and man’s earthly journey through these immense atrocities. For by faithfully treading the dark way of horror, by weighing the modern loss of belief, humankind may begin to regain the path in the twenty-first century, and, like Dante’s persona, attain the highest summit of peace and glory.
 

Vanishing.... October 12, 2000
For Japan and its writers, the modern darkness deepens during the period of military fascism and World War II. With the defeat and unconditional surrender, immense shock waves rocked the entire culture calling into question the pseudo-Shinto and Confucian values Japan had based its society on for almost a century. As writers returned from one front or another of the war, they found a Japan devastated by the Allied bombing. Maebashi, for instance, where I lived for a few years, was reduced to rubble along with its bridges. Before long, the entire country was restructured by the Occupation. Japanese writers now understood much more deeply the experience of the Western World War I generation. Better than any other postwar poet, Tamura Ryuichi (1923-) registers, since his own hometown in the suburbs of Tokyo no longer existed, the shock and disorientation of the modern Japanese psyche. Briefly a student of Hagiwara Sakutaro, Tamura had little interest in classical Japanese poetry, which emphasized the unity of man and nature, but read widely in Western literature and was especially influenced by T. S. Eliot, Steven Spender, C. Day Lewis, and W. H. Auden, whom Tamura eventually met in New York in 1971. In a literary magazine called Arechi or "wasteland," Tamura and other postwar poets gave voice to the despair and horror they felt, unequivocally stating, in an early manifesto, "The present is a wasteland." The first poem in which Tamura finds his true voice and distance from his material is the prose poem "Etching," published in 1956:

Now he sees a landscape he saw in a German etching it appears to be an aerial view of an ancient city between twilight and darkness or a realistic drawing of a modern-day cliff being taken from midnight toward dawn This man the one I began to describe killed his father when he was young that autumn his mother went beautifully insane (tr. Christopher Drake)

The critic Ikuko Atsumi has said of this poem that it aims at a universal vision of East and West, ancient and modern. The extreme nationalism of the Japanese fascists now defeated, the "he" can view the fullness or "landscape" of Western culture, specifically German, declining into "darkness" or rising as "a modern-day cliff," ominous, dehumanized, marked by loss and angst. Atsumi suggests the father "possibly refers to the emperor system in Japan, and the mother he made beautifully insane to Japan’s aesthetic consciousness." Like the West, the East too descended into a wasteland of madness and violence, the ancient now discredited and rendered nugatory. This is the "Etching" come to light, etched into Tamura’s consciousness and all postwar Japanese writers of worth. Blending together the perspective of the subjective "I" and objective "he," aware of the horror, Tamura introduces into Japanese poetry a voice of detachment, observing life outside his own personal existence with meditative restraint, seeking a deeper understanding of modern human experience.

Having known and read Tamura’s work for more than fifteen years, I have often thought of him as akin somehow to Robert Lowell. He has a memory of Japan’s past that he never idealizes, but works with and probes it, pondering always without sentimentality the modern and by-gone days. Like Lowell and so many postmodern Western poets, Tamura also goes through a time of fairly formalistic writing, but he seems to outgrow it and returns to engaging universal experience outside his own little personal consciousness. Many other Japanese poets, as in the United States, are still stuck in such solipsism. Saigyo and Basho both believed poetry must consider the transcendent and involve conceptual knowledge outside the self, not merely aesthetic formalism. As late as 1982, in what is one of his greatest poems, "Spiral Cliff," Tamura looks soberly at modern world history. After the speaker reflects on a photograph of a deer "falling off a cliff" and wonders "what’s after it," he says,

Our century ends without decadence/ after the night and fog of Nazi gas chambers/ after Soviet forced labor camps/ after two U.S. atomic bombs on Japan/ there’s no thrill left in killing,/ no fear of the soul, no crime in adultery. . . .

In "our century," the values requisite for perceiving and defining "decadence" have disappeared, "crime and evil disconnected," all restraining sense of the soul lost. As a result, unimaginable horror has been perpetrated in every region of the globe on an appalling scale affecting both the social and individual realms. Like a roller coaster, "our century ends on pure speed." Recalling the photo of the deer, he thinks,

I’m afraid of high places/ the cliff in me/ am I the hunter/ or the prey?

The "high places" are both those of earlier mentioned "boardrooms / of huge corporations," East and West, in a manner reminiscent of Kaneko Mitsuharu’s Book of Mud, and the "modern-day cliff" of confusion, now "the cliff in me." The ambiguity of the question "am I the hunter / or the prey?" acknowledges the complexity of modern life where all are somehow complicitous in human tragedy. Terrified by "blank paper," by "what dreams will live and die there," Tamura accepts the writer’s obligation to struggle for values worthy of all human beings, not just Japanese.

Next in dream half nightmare, he sees his own inner cliff protruding "between dreams / spiraling" down. Waking in the dawn, lying horizontally across the bed, he reads the morning newspaper full of massacre and civil war:

Vanishing/ cliff dream/ vertical dream/ elementally/ Gone

All the dreams have vanished as off the edge of a cliff. Vertical dreams have been replaced by the horizontal, exactly the information that fills the newspaper. Like the best of modern writers, Auden or Lowell, Tamura has the honesty and strength of intellect and spirit to recognize it is all "gone." I believe his vision of modern life and Japan is true, for it has been my own experience, lived not only in Japan but also in the United States, where "without decadence" the culture sinks to ever more dehumanized levels of violence, depravity, and social fragmentation. The importance of Tamura’s poetry has not been sufficiently recognized in the West, nor in Japan.


 

In Front of the Bridge.... October 1, 2000
By the end of the nineteenth century, several anthologies of Western literature had been translated and published introducing Japanese writers to a variety of new literary styles and genres. After a long and natural period of imitation and derivative writing, as a result of the fresh exposure to the outside world, Japan, deeply affected by its centuries of sakoku or forced isolation, produced its first truly modern poet in Hagiwara Sakutaro (1886-1942). Born northwest of Tokyo in Maebashi, "in front of the bridge," at the center of Japan, Hagiwara made himself into a Japanese Baudelaire, writing in an at times obscure symbolist free verse, in the colloquial tongue, about alcoholics, bars, squalid love, and sin. He also acknowledged Poe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Dostoevski as Western writers who were important to him, while an heir of the lyrics of Saigyo and Basho. Hagiwara has been commonly recognized by Japanese critics as the most important modern Japanese poet since the publication of his first book of poems in 1917, Howling at the Moon, which he wrote in provincial Maebashi, often longing for life in Tokyo where he did at times live. In "Sad Moonlit Night," Hagiwara gives voice to his sense of life in modern Japan, after hearing a dog howling on a wharf: A damned thief dog is howling at the moon above the rotting wharf. A soul listens, and in gloomy voices, yellow daughters are singing in chorus, singing in chorus, on the wharf’s dark stonework.

Always, why am I like this, dog, pale unhappy dog? (tr. Hiroaki Sato)

The symbolic moon of Saigyo no longer reflects transcendence but misery, alienation, self-pity, and despair, a psyche as distressed as the "damned" dog. Hagiwara is painfully conscious that something is lacking in or has gone wrong with "the rotting wharf" of modern life. At the end of the poem, identifying not with the moon but with the howling dog, he further projects his own feelings of loneliness and unhappiness and ponders the nature of the modern self, lost and restlessly struggling in the same malaise as the West. In 1925 Hagiwara published a collection of poems that includes "Owatari Bridge," which I quote in full. The Japanese poet and critic Miyoshi Tatsuji wrote about this poem that "It is not only the jewel among Hagiwara Sakutaro’s poems, but a masterpiece that occupies a prominent place among the countless poems written since shintaishi [new style poetry] became free verse":

The long bridge they’ve erected here No doubt goes from lonely Sosha village straight to Maebashi town. Crossing the bridge I sense desolation pass through me. Carts go by loaded with goods, men leading the horses. And restless, nagging bicycles. When I cross this long bridge Twilight hunger stabs me.

Ahh--to be in your native place and not go home! I’ve suffered to the full griefs that sting like salt. I grow old in solitude. How to describe the fierce anger today over bitter memories? I will tear up my miserable writings And throw every scrap into the onrushing Tone River. I am famished as a wolf. Again and again I clutch at the railing, grind my teeth,

But it does no good: something like tears spills out, Flows down my cheeks, unstanched. Ahh--how contemptible I have been all along! Past me go carts loaded with goods, men leading the horses. This day, when everything is cold, the sky darkens over the plain. (tr. Donald Keene)

Having lived for a year and a half in Maebashi, where I taught at Gunma University, I cannot read this poem without stirring up my deepest emotions. While it is true that Maebashi is a provincial town, since everything of cultural importance to most Japanese takes place in Tokyo, I can’t share Hagiwara’s bitter feelings. I have many warm memories of Maebashi which is now surely less isolated than during Hagiwara’s lifetime, or even when I was there. Almost daily I saw the cemetery of the Buddhist Shojun temple where Hagiwara’s remains are buried. It was while I was living in Maebashi that I first forced myself to read Baudelaire and recall reading him on the express train from nearby Takasaki to Tokyo. Crossing the Tone River on its bridges at least a couple of times a week, I enjoyed the sight of fishermen in rubber waders fly casting, the bridge crowded with bicycles, often children on their way to school. Hagiwara’s poem "Owatari Bridge" impresses deeply upon me how the state of the consciousness of the individual poet affects perception. Accepting the decadent clichés of the poète maudit of modern Western literature, Hagiwara chose to view life through tainted, distorting lenses. Standing between express cars, rocking along between Maebashi and Tokyo, I knew Baudelaire’s vision of life, though true in terms of social change and loss, was essentially unhealthy, the product of a sick mind. Modern life in Maebashi helped me to understand that. Unfortunately, Hagiwara never learnt that lesson but ended his ever-darkening life, as he put it, "in the shadow of the hazy landscape of Nihilism," writing poems heavily influenced by Nietzsche while militarism took over his country.