Monday, March 17, 2025

'To Have the Heart Partially Erased'

“Hatred, suspicion, malice and madness seem to be reaching new highs everywhere. . . . Perhaps madness, like cancer, is a way of life trying to transcend itself.” 

This might be a template for next week’s column, a pundit’s lamentation ready for copying-and-pasting. In fact, Louise Bogan wrote it on St. Patrick’s Day 1939 in a letter to her friend Rolfe Humphries, the poet and translator.  

 

Nineteen-thirty-eight had been the year of the Moscow show trials, the Anschluss, the annexation of the Sudetenland, Munich and Kristallnacht. Louis MacNeice completed his masterpiece, Autumn Journal, a month before Bogan wrote her letter. His long poem documents, in part, the previous year’s cascade of disasters in Europe and would be published in May. The Second Sino-Japanese War continued. One day before Bogan wrote her letter, German troops marched into Prague. Three days later, the U.S. withdrew its ambassador to Germany and the Nazis burned more than 5,000 pieces of “degenerate art.” In less than six months, Germany would invade Poland and World War II would formally begin.

 

In the Fall 1938 issue of Partisan Review, Bogan had published one of her best-known poems, “Several Voices Out of a Cloud.” Among its themes is madness:   

 

“Come, drunks and drug-takers; come, perverts unnerved!

Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit; to whom and

wherever deserved.

 

“Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,

Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless. And it isn't for you.”

 

In the same issue, in an unsigned column, the editors write: “Hitler is now the master of continental Europe. The ‘democracies’ stand exposed as his collaborators. On the wreck of the Versailles system arises the specter of a new Holy Alliance.”  

 

Bogan continues in her letter to Humphries: “We do not even know if it is better to have the heart partially erased—to be ‘normal’ and at peace—or whether the mad and damned who ‘howl away their hearts’ are not, after all, the highest manifestation of the life-force. . . .”


[For the Bogan letter quoted above, see A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, ed. Mary Kinzie, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005.]

1 comment:

Thomas Parker said...

My current bedside book is the Notebooks of Samuel Butler, and a couple of days ago I came across something that seems relevant to most historical moments, including our own:

"Those people who wish to gain the public ear should bear in mind that people do not generally want to be made less foolish or less wicked. What they want is to be told that they are not foolish and not wicked. Now it is only a fool or a liar or both who can tell them this; the masses therefore cannot be expected to like any but fools or liars or both."