The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (33 page)

He was one of the finest exponents of an art form that blossomed throughout the twentieth century—a poet who wrote fascinating and exquisite prose. He used his prose above all to explain art and literature. One of his chief arguments was that in an age when God is dead, the arts in general, and poetry in particular, must take over—because God, like poetry, is an imaginary construct, and the greatest satisfactions to be had from life lie in the exploration and exploitation of the imagination. He also argued more clearly than most that the two rival phenomena that would replace God in the modern world were poetry and psychology. He was adamant that poetry was the better option.

Stevens was a slow starter. He and his siblings were read to from the Bible every night by their mother, who sat at the piano on Sunday evenings to play and sing hymns. At Reading Boys’ School in the early 1890s, because of his poker and football activities he failed his exams. But he soon made up for lost time, winning prizes, delivering a prizewinning oration at school, entering Harvard in 1897 (where he met and was taught
by George Santayana) and publishing his first poem a few months later, in January 1898. He would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, a National Book Award and an honorary degree from Yale (the “greatest prize for a Harvard man”).

Stevens was exceptionally plainspoken in his prose, and confidently advocated placing poetry at the center of life. He considered Christianity “an exhausted culture” and thought that “loss of faith is growth.” As he freely admitted, he entertained a “vast premise” that the world might be “transformed in and through” a great work of art. “God and the imagination are one. After one has abandoned belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”
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His work abounds in sentiments that directly address our theme:

Poetry

Exceeding music must take the place

Of empty heaven and its hymns . . .

And:

What is divinity if it can come

Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,

In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else

In any balm or beauty of the earth,

Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

. . .

Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be

The blood of paradise? And shall the earth

Seem all of paradise that we shall know?

The sky will be much friendlier then than now . . .
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“The paramount relation between painting and poetry today, between modern man and modern art, is simply this: that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their meas
ure, a compensation for what has been lost. Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince. Consequently their interest in the imagination and its work is to be regarded not as a phase of humanism but as a vital self-assertion in a world in which nothing but the self remains, if that remains. . . . The extension of the mind beyond the range of the mind, the projection of reality beyond reality, the determination to cover the ground, whatever it may be, the determination not to be confined, the recapture of excitement and intensity of interest, the enlargement of the spirit at every time, in every way, these are the unities, the relations, to be summarized as paramount now.”
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“In an age of disbelief, in a time that is largely humanistic (much the same thing), in one sense or another, it is for the poet to supply the satisfactions of belief. . . . I think of it as a role of the utmost seriousness. It is, for one thing, a spiritual role. . . . To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as though they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing. . . . What was most extraordinary is that they left no mementoes behind, no thrones, no mystic rings, no texts either of the soil or the soul. It was as if they had never inhabited the earth. There was no crying out for their return. They were not forgotten because they had been part of the glory of the earth. At the same time, no man ever muttered a petition in his heart for the restoration of those unreal shapes. There was always in every man the increasingly human self, which instead of remaining the observer, the non-participant, the delinquent, became constantly more and more all there was or so it seemed. . . . Thinking about the end of the gods creates singular attitudes in the mind of the thinker. One attitude is that the gods of classical mythology were merely aesthetic projections. They were not the objects of belief. They were expressions of delight. . . . It is one of the normal activities of humanity, in the solitude of reality and in the unworthy treatment of solitude, to create companions, a little colossal as I have said, who, if not superficially explicative, are, at least, assumed to be full of the secret of things. . . . However all that may be, the celestial atmosphere of these deities, their ultimate remote celestial residences, are not matters of chance.
Their fundamental glory is the fundamental glory of men and women, who being in need of it create it, elevate it, without too much searching of its identity. The people, not the priests, made the gods.”
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Later, Stevens said, during a lecture: “My purpose this morning is to elevate the poem to the level of one of the major significances of life and to equate it, for the purpose of discussion, with gods and men. . . . The gods are the creation of the imagination at its utmost. . . . It comes to this, that we use the same faculties when we write poetry that we use when we create gods . . .
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In the absence of a belief in God, the mind turns to its own creations and examines them, not alone from the aesthetic point of view, but for what they reveal, for what they validate and invalidate, for the support that they give. God and the imagination are one.”
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This must be one of the most sustained attempts in modern literature to seek out a way to live without God. Stevens was not afraid to contemplate “big” questions; he well realized that
appetite
is a crucial ingredient in the fulfilled life. And so, at the same time that he was making grand claims for the arts, embracing that “vast premise” that he spoke about, he was equally ambitious in setting out what poetry is, its exact place in our lives, how it helps us, what it can achieve. “A poet looks out at the world,” he said, “somewhat as a man looks at a woman,” a statement at once poetic and designed to get everyone’s attention. He firmly insisted that poetry is

Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses

Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend.

The role of the poet, he insisted, “is to help people live their lives. . . . Poetry should provide the resistance to the pressure of reality through the activity of the imagination.” Nor was he afraid of any elitist implications. “It is a world of fact given to us by someone with a range of sensibility greater than our own, a poetic sensibility. It is an
enlarged
world of fact, an ‘incandescence of the intelligence.’ Like light, it adds nothing but itself. Close to the heat of that light, we can be said to live more intensely.”
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“Enchanting should be understood literally, as singing the world into existence.” At its best, poetry “offers an experience of the world as meditation, the mind
slowing in front of things, the mind pushing back against the pressure of reality through the minimal transfigurations of the imagination.” There was, he thought, a kind of “soul-peace” to be had through poetry.
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A poet writes about things, he said, and his words “are of things that do not exist without words.” At the same time he was aware, as Valéry had been, that “the mind’s desire will always exceed the beauty that poetry can bring to reality.” He was drawn to poetry (rather than science, say) because in human nature “one is better satisfied by particulars.” “Poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of the imagination.”
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In saying that God is a work of the imagination—as is poetry, or any successful artwork—Stevens also thought that many metaphysical and philosophical ideas are inherently poetic: that is to say, products of the imagination. The notion of “infinity” was essentially poetic (“cosmic poetry,” he called it), as were the idea of the Hegelian state and, perhaps most pertinently for this book, the ideas of “final cause” and “wholeness,” which people seem to find so important. (Does it make sense to speak of the “final cause” of poetry? he asked.) The way in which a poem can suddenly “enlarge” our lives, effect a change in us that is like going from winter straight into spring, is the creation of meaning; of approaching—however briefly—a feeling of wholeness. “There is no wing like meaning,” he said. And we must hold within us the realization that “[i]t is not every day that the world arranges itself in a poem.”

“The poet is a stronger life. . . . The poet feels
abundantly
the poetry of everything. The tongue is an eye but the eye sees less than the tongue says and the tongue says less than the mind thinks.” (Compare Valéry.) “Poetry sometimes crowns the search for happiness. It is itself a search for happiness.” “The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.” “Reality is a cliché / From which we escape by metaphor.”
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There is nothing here that one would wish to fight with Stevens over. In making clear claims for the supremacy of poetry he manages to escape into metaphors that enlarge, reinforce and exemplify his arguments. And he chooses his moments to extend his claims to life in general and the role of the imagination in it. Here he brings a poet’s command of language, and imagination, into observations, or
aperçus
, that are both general and
specific and have almost a biblical quality: “The imperfect is our only paradise.”
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“We receive but what we give / And in our life alone does nature live.”
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“Things simply are, and are not molded to a human purpose.”

Elsewhere he speaks of “the ‘neverthelessness’ of nature.” “The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.” “Life is a composite of the propositions about it.” “Life lived on the basis of opinion is more nearly life than life lived without opinion.”

And perhaps this is Stevens’s most significant observation, which coincides with and extends Valéry’s main point: “We never arrive intellectually. But emotionally we arrive constantly (as in poetry, happiness, high mountains, vistas).”
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Once we understand this distinction, he is saying, once we accept that we will never feel whole intellectually or philosophically, we can get on and enjoy the emotional (artistic, imaginative) wholenesses, the “sudden rightnesses,” that
are
available to us.

SO HAPPY FOR A TIME

In the depths of the Depression, following the Wall Street crash of October 1929, only twenty-eight out of the eighty-six legitimate theatres on Broadway were still open, but Eugene O’Neill’s
Mourning Becomes Electra
had sold out even its top-of-the-range six-dollar seats. O’Neill had been confirmed as “the great US playwright, the man with whom true American theatre really begins,” long before
Mourning
, which premiered on October 26, 1931.
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Curiously, however, it was not until the other end of the decade, by which time O’Neill had turned fifty, that his two great masterpieces,
The Iceman Cometh
and
Long Day’s Journey into Night
, were written. The intervening years have become known as “the Silence.” We shall see how wrong this epithet is.

More than for most artists, certain biographical details are crucial to understanding his work. He had lost his faith in the summer of 1903 when he suddenly refused to go to mass with his father, and insisted on transferring from a Catholic school to a secular one.
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Thereafter he always felt there was a “spiritual vacancy” in his life and, as an adult, spoke of himself as a “Black Irishman,” one of the fallen, with a black soul.

When he was not yet fourteen, he found out that his own birth had precipitated a morphine addiction in his mother. He also discovered that his parents blamed their first son, Jamie, for infecting their second son, Edmund, with measles, from which he had died at the age of eighteen months. When, in 1902, Ella O’Neill ran out of morphine, she attempted suicide; this set off in Eugene, then in adolescence, a period of binge drinking and self-destructive behavior; he also began to hang around theatres (his father was an actor). After an unsuccessful marriage he attempted suicide himself, overdosing in a flophouse in 1911, after which he saw several psychiatrists; a year later his TB was diagnosed. In 1921, his father died tragically from cancer, his mother’s death following in 1922; his brother Jamie died twelve months after that from a stroke, which followed an alcoholic psychosis—he was forty-five.

O’Neill had intended to study science at Princeton, but in college he was greatly influenced by his discovery of Nietzsche (his “literary idol,” as he put it), and adopted an approach to life that his biographer calls “scientific mysticism.” He was eventually removed from the course because he attended so few classes. He began writing in 1912, as a journalist, but before long turned to plays. Autobiography apart, his dramatic philosophy may be inferred from his verdict on the United States: America, “instead of being the most successful country in the world, is the greatest failure. It’s the greatest failure because it was given everything, more than any other country . . . its main idea is that everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul by the possession of something outside it.”