I’ve taken
to heart a comment by Nige about a post I wrote last May:
“[N]ostalgia
certainly can be cheap and easy – but there’s a more exalted form, isn’t there,
which is a kind of painful longing or homesickness (the root meaning). This
might be ‘unhealthy’, but it’s genuine and quite profound, and, like other
forms of longing (Sehnsucht), has
certainly inspired some great art. Think Schubert’s songs, Housman’s ‘Into my heart’, etc...”
I’m still suspicious
of nostalgia and think of it as self-delusory, turning discontent with the
present into blind adulation of the past. Many people my age swoon
indiscriminately over the pop-culture of the nineteen-sixties. Our minds seem
to have a retroactive editing feature that deletes loss, pain, banality and regret and
burnishes the stuff we like. It’s embarrassing. But Nige is right. In his
1959 review of John Betjeman’s Collected
Poems, Philip Larkin writes:
“[T]he
quality in his poetry loosely called nostalgia is really that never-sleeping
alertness to note the patina of time on things past which is the hallmark of
the mature writer.”
Betjeman was an English poet whose reputation seems always to sink in the mid-Atlantic, never quite making it to these shores. He is indelibly English and his poems are filled with place names, people, products, buildings and events that sound exotic to American ears. We need an annotated edition to his poems, which seems unlikely. (In contrast, Larkin, like Auden, speaks a universal language.) As an example of “the patina of time on things past,” Larkin quotes the final lines of Betjeman’s “Middlesex”:
“And from
Greenford scent of mayfields
Most
enticingly was blown
Over market
gardens tidy,
Taverns for
the bona fide,
Cockney
singers, cockney shooters,
Murray
Poshes, Lupin Pooters,
Long in
Kelsal Green and Highgate silent under soot and stone.”
I count at
least five allusions I don’t understand or can only guess at. This is not pretentious avant-garde
obscurity. Betjeman’s large original audience would find no mysteries in
these lines. Here’s the important point: despite cross-cultural
incomprehension I find Betjeman’s music seductive, confirmation of T.S. Eliot’s observation
in his 1929 essay “Dante” that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is
understood.”
I’ve always
remembered something the late Terry Teachout wrote in a blog post ten years ago: “The English language needs a word whose definition would be ‘nostalgia
for that which one has not experienced.’”
[Larkin’s 1959 review of Betjeman’s Collected Poems is included in Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews 1952-1985 (2001).]
We could also use a word for “nostalgia for something not experienced.” For example, many of my fellow baby boomers think they personally experienced things that, in truth, they “remember” from Leave It To Beaver and other TV shows of the 50s and 60s, or from movies like American Graffiti. One might call this “nostalgia porn” but it needs to be upgraded to a Latin phrase…
ReplyDeleteFor those who look back on their lives with a nod and a smile, I take no issue. For those who tout "the good old days," I have no patience. "Nostalgia" is comforting when it is specific, not universal. The past has left scars for many; the present can bring change and joy.
ReplyDeleteDidn't Dr. Johnson say something to the effect that in life there's little to enjoy and much to endure? (He said some equivalent of that fifty or sixty times, if memory serves.) If our minds didn't have "a retroactive editing feature that deletes loss, pain, banality" what would keep us from rushing to take the gas pipe?
ReplyDeleteThat “retroactive editing feature” also allows for replacing events with alternate takes, and inserting things that happened to someone else, or not at all. “Ah. Yes, I remember it well…”
ReplyDeleteA wise Malacandrian, in C. S. Lewis's novel Out of the Silent Planet, tells his friend from our planet, “A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then – that is the real meeting. What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure.”
ReplyDeleteI think that's often true. Such remembering may be a form of gratitude, itself a key element in a happy life.
To be sure, people engaged in such remembering may err in extending to other things from the same period a depth of value that doesn't properly belong to them. Then their listeners or readers may be inclined to rebuke them with some facts they seem to be forgetting. On the other hand, I wonder if sometimes the gratitude and pleasure felt when someone remembers, is by no means experienced in forgetfulness of those old unhappinesses and injustices or whatever. Indeed, part of the good feeling that accompanies the memory might be from a real though unfocused sense of the contrast with other things that they know were indeed going on.
Thus I may remember moments, or books, or persons, from many years ago that were bright presences in times that had their gloom too. It is not the case that I simply want to "go back" and live over again what I'm remembering. But my memory may have a legitimately poetic quality, and turning to it occasionally and speaking of it to an intimate may be an invitation to someone to share in that happiness.
Thus, for example, I like to read reminiscences by people who discovered the Tolkien books many years ago (long before any of the movies, etc.). The more enargeia they can summon up, the better. You noticed one of the paperbacks at a drugstore -- what was its name, where was it, etc., if you remember?
Dale Nelson