`Some Austerity and Wintry Negativity'

In his chapter on saintliness in The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James writes:

“Where to seek the easy and the pleasant seems instinctive -- and instinctive it appears to be in man; any deliberate tendency to pursue the hard and painful as such and for their own sakes might well strike one as purely abnormal. Nevertheless, in moderate degrees it is natural and even usual to human nature to court the arduous.”

The Teddy Roosevelt of philosophy and advocate of the strenuous life, James sounds a familiar theme in an unlikely context. Like his brother Henry, William labored prodigiously. Both were social creatures, charming company, but neither could have settled into a life of leisure. We can argue that both brothers worked their way into sanity. James follows the passage above with some unhelpful psychologizing but returns to form in the following paragraph:

“Some men and women, indeed, there are who can live on smiles and the word `yes’ forever. But for others (indeed for most), this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate. Passive happiness is slack and insipid, and soon grows mawkish and intolerable. Some austerity and wintry negativity, some roughness, danger, stringency, and effort, some `no! no!’ must be mixed in, to produce the sense of an existence with character and texture and power.”

This remains true after more than a century but I wonder if it’s true for fewer numbers of people. The best work is a balance of difficulty and ease – resistant accomplishment, we might call it – but the taste for that sort of sweaty satisfaction may be disappearing. If work is too simple, we’re bored and dissatisfied and grow cynical and tend to misbehave. If the work exceeds our abilities, something similar happens. We grow bitter with someone -- the boss, ourselves, the world. I’ve mostly learned to balance these things. Since leaving my fulltime job in May I’ve subsisted on a trickle of freelance writing. Without my wife’s hard work and generous salary, I couldn’t support myself let alone a family. In July I filed a magazine story that carried with it two superlatives – most difficult and most lucrative, and that was most pleasing.

These thoughts came while rereading “To Please a Shadow,” my favorite memoir of one poet by another. Joseph Brodsky writes with love and respect for his mentor, W.H. Auden. Brodsky left the Soviet Union in 1972 and sought out Auden shortly before the latter’s death the following year. In 1977, Brodsky resolved to write poems, essays and translations in English. Already a master in his native Russian, he chose to do what surely amounts to one of humanity’s rarest and most difficult human accomplishments. What’s most intriguing is his reason for doing so. Conrad, he says, jumped languages out of necessity; Nabokov, for “burning ambition”; Beckett, “for the sake of greater estrangement.” Brodsky says he began writing in English because:

“My sole purpose then, as it is now, was to find myself in closer proximity to the man whom I consider the greatest mind of the twentieth century: Wystan Hugh Auden.”

He adds:

“To put it differently, unable to return the full amount of what has been given, one tries to pay back at least in the same coin.”

I don’t recall Brodsky writing anywhere about Samuel Johnson but I sense, as men and writers, they shared deep affinities (as did Auden). The Russian would have approved of what the Englishman wrote in The Adventurer No. 111(Nov. 27, 1753):

“To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity; the next is, to strive, and deserve to conquer: but he whose life has passed without a contest, and who can boast neither success nor merit, can survey himself only as a useless filler of existence; and if he is content with his own character, must owe his satisfaction to insensibility."