'Yes, Evil Is E'

More than thirty years ago I heard Steven Millhauser read a story titled “An Alphabet of Women.” He assigned a woman’s name to each of the twenty-six letters. I remember an accelerating sense of hilarity and nothing else about the story. Millhauser has never published it, perhaps judging it too Oulipian or simply silly, though arbitrary pattern-making can be amusing if treated like a game and not taken too seriously. Take Tom Disch’s “Abecedary” (ABCDEFG HIJKLM NPOQRST UVWXYZ, Anvil Press, 1981), a poem likewise organized around the alphabet.

 

Disch must have liked the idea because he did something similar in “Zewhyexary” (Yes, Let’s: New and Selected Poems, 1989). Here he reverses the alphabet, beginning with “Z is the Zenith from which we decline” and ending with “B is bone. / A could be anything. A is unknown.” This is not children’s verse. Here are the immediately preceding lines that caught my eye and ear:

 

“H is your Heart at the moment it breaks,

And G is the Guile it initially takes

To pretend to believe that it someday will heal.

F is the strange Fascination we feel

For whatever’s Evil–Yes, Evil is E–

And D is our Dread at the sight of a C,

Which is Corpse, as you've surely foreseen.”

 

Disch is right about the fascination of evil. He echoes a passage in another book I'm reading, Nicholas Berdyaev’s The End of Our Time (trans. Donald Atwater, Sheed & Ward, 1933):

 

“Morally, it is wrong to suppose the source of evil is outside oneself, that one is a vessel of holiness running over with virtue. Such a disposition is the best soil for a hateful and cruel fanaticism. It is as wrong to impute every wickedness to Jews, Freemasons, ‘intellectuals,’ as it is to blame all crimes on the bourgeoisie, the nobility, and the powers that were. No; the root of evil is in me as well, and I must take my share of the responsibility and the blame. That was true before the revolution and it is true still.”

 

That’s from Berdyaev’s chapter titled “The Russian Revolution.” Another Russian later echoed him. Evil is often denied but impossible to ignore. He understands that utopia can only be realized only through the Gulag, Babi Yar and the Katyn.

 

“Utopias,” he writes, “are more realisable than those ‘realist politics’ that are only the carefully calculated policies of office-holders, and towards utopias we are moving. But it is possible that a new age is already beginning, in which cultured and intelligent people will dream of ways to avoid ideal states and to get back to a society that is less ‘perfect’ and more free.”