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| ISBN-13: | 9780520954786 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 04/17/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 532 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
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A Poet's Revolution
The Life of Denise Levertov
By Donna Krolik Hollenberg
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95478-6
CHAPTER 1
"The walls of the garden, the first light"
Beginnings (1923–1933)
Ilford, Essex, with its two large parks, east and west of the River Roding, is notable for its semirural setting, yet it is only fourteen kilometers northeast of central London. A spirited six-year-old, Denise Levertov could easily walk the three blocks from her home at 5 Mansfield Road to the gates of Valentines Park, with its cultivated lawns and ample plea sure grounds. There, along the Long Water canal, she could wander alone among the stately London plane trees she grew to love and, seated in a leafy alcove, admire their reflection in the green water. Or she could pause in the romantic rose garden and imagine a scarlet bouquet gleaned from its pickings. Best of all, she could sit in a brick alcove at Jacob's Well and make a wish, poised in reverie before the clear water. (This wishing well would inspire future poems.) If she wanted to play in a more ancient, wilder landscape as she grew older, she could ride on her scooter farther, to Wanstead Park, with its dense forest of firs and pines, its mysterious grotto, and its larger ornamental waters. She could pretend to sail "grassy seas in the three-masted barque Emanuela" and undertake daring adventures with a friend. In both parks there were hidden paths amid the hedges to stimulate her imagination and old mansions to awaken a historical awareness. Accompanied by her older sister, Olga, she could walk in the lush fields and farms beyond the town's borders, which were then easily accessible by foot, or travel deeper into the countryside on the red double-decker, open-topped buses. Unencumbered by a regular school day—she was homeschooled by her mother—Denise roamed this landscape until age twelve and returned to it frequently thereafter in her work.
In "A Map of the Western Part of Essex in England," a poem she wrote after emigrating to the United States in 1947, Levertov adds depth and nuance to the emotional importance of this region:
the little streams of Valentines heard my resolves, Roding held my head above water when I thought it was drowning me....
Wanstead drew me over and over into its basic poetry.
Levertov's birthplace provided a fundamental refuge from danger, an interest in the past, and a lasting penchant for imaginative transformation. As a child, Denise could not articulate the source of that danger, but she certainly intuited it, for, in the poem above, she links herself with her parents, who were themselves outsiders and immigrants in England. Estranged in a new environment, she now understands their predicament in her childhood. A sense of hazardous alienation lingers here, but Levertov does not dwell upon it. Rather, she reinforces a primary kinship with the places and people she loves, and she invests her childhood home with the remembered sweetness of a golden age: "the walls of the garden, the first light."
Priscilla Denise Levertoff was born at 9:15 A.M. on October 24, 1923, at 24 Lenox Gardens, in the town of Ilford, Essex. She was the youngest of three daughters born to Beatrice Adelaide Levertoff, née Spooner-Jones, an artistic Welsh school teacher, and the Reverend Paul Philip Levertoff, a scholarly Russian Jew who had converted to Christianity and been ordained as a priest of the Church of England. Her parents had met in 1910 in Constantinople, where her mother was teaching in a secondary school run by the Scottish Church and her father was lecturing as a visiting scholar. They were married in England, lived in Warsaw and Leipzig before and during World War I, and settled in England soon after the war ended. Their first child, Philippa, born in 1912, lived only six months before dying of a respiratory ailment. She was buried in Leipzig, where in 1914 their second child, Olga Tatjana, was born. Nine years later, Denise arrived, the only one in her family born in England.
Cultural heterogeneity and personal loss marked the lives of Levertov's nuclear family. Her parents (especially her father) were "exotic birds" in this ordinary English thicket. They had endured religious persecution, expatriation, family tragedy, and war, which could have crippled people with fewer intellectual and spiritual resources. Downplaying their privation, Levertov lauded these resources: not only were they all writers, her mother sang lieder and her sister was a fine pianist, and Denise emphasized the impact of the household's foreign atmosphere upon her evolving identity. Even though she grew up with a passion for the trees, churches, and wildflowers of rural England, she viewed herself as an outsider: "Among Jews a Goy, among Gentiles ... a Jew or at least a half-Jew ... among Anglo-Saxons a Celt; in Wales a Londoner ... among school children a strange exception." This sense of anomaly continued into adulthood—Levertov often felt English, or at least European, in the United States, where she was usually considered American, and American in England—but it did not inhibit her artistic development. Her family had given her such confidence that, though "often shy," she "experienced the sense of difference as an honor, as a part of knowing (secretly) from an early age—perhaps by seven"—that she was "an artist-person and had a destiny."
What were the attributes of the members of this family who invested the child Denise with such inner strength, despite their own earlier suffering? What clues to her future do we find in their backgrounds? A richly textured robe of family legend envelops each of them.
* * *
Paul Philip Levertoff was a traditional patriarch. Both his perceptions of the world and his emotional attitudes derived from the Russian Jewish shtetl in which he was born and raised. In that world, as a boy of exceptional intellectual ability and linguistic talent, he was devoted to the divinely decreed obligation to study Scripture, a duty and a joy that offered "a means of escape from dark reality," whether it be domestic troubles or religious persecution. He also had a "bold heart" and a rebellious personality. As he grew into manhood, his theological studies carried him beyond the Pale of Settlement, areas in Eastern Europe in which Jews were allowed to live, and away from the mainstream of his people. After he read the New Testament, he became convinced that Jesus was the Messiah and embarked upon the project of reconciling the two faiths. For the rest of his life, he considered himself a Jewish-Christian.
In adulthood, Levertov saw this "bold heart," the "certainty of wings" for the soul, as the essence of her father's personality. In her poem "Wings in the Pedlar's Pack," and in her essay "The Sack Full of Wings," she compares her father with Marc Chagall, his contemporary. Both men saw, as children, "an old pedlar ... carrying a big sack over his shoulder," trudging along the streets of Orsha, her father's hometown, or through the city of Vitebsk, Chagall's birthplace, which he made famous in his painting "Over Vitebsk." This figure may allude to the Christian, anti-Semitic image of the Wandering Jew, who, in medieval legend, taunted Jesus en route to the Crucifixion and was then cursed to walk the earth as a beggar until the Second Coming. Paul Levertoff's Hasidic beliefs, imbued with the ardor of ecstasy inherited from his rabbinic ancestor, "the Rav of Northern White Russia," contravened this noxious stereotype. He knew that the pedlar's sack contained "wings which would enable people to fly like birds," and he later interpreted that knowledge to incorporate the Gospel of Jesus as the Messiah.
Paul Philip Levertoff was born in Orsha, Belarus, a town south of Vitebsk on the Dnieper River, to Saul and Judith Levertoff. His birth date is unclear: one source states October 12, 1875; another states October 14, 1878. He preferred the latter. His birth name was not "Paul Philip," a Christian name. In a letter in Hebrew, his father, Saul Levertoff, employs the Hebrew-Yiddish name "Feivel," which was probably Paul's given name. His family were originally Sephardic Jews who emigrated from Spain to Russia after the Spanish Inquisition and there intermarried with other Jewish families noted for their piety and learning. According to family legend, he was a descendant of the founder of Chabad Hasidism, Rabbi Schneur Zalman, who was his mother's uncle. The family thus had strong Hasidic roots, part of Paul's heritage that he never rejected. He cherished an inherited copy of his great-uncle's central treatise, The Tanya.
Hasidism was one of two major social currents within Eastern European Jewry. Founded by Rabbi Israel Ba'al Shem Tov (known as the Besht), Hasidism was a popular communal mysticism that arose in Poland in the eighteenth century, and despite bitter opposition by the traditional rabbinate, spread rapidly. The Besht "emphasized the importance of prayer and obedience to the Law above the study of the Law," where such study degenerated into mere intellectual exercise. Contrary to classical Jewish philosophers, the Besht also taught that divine providence extends not only to every individual but to every particular in the inanimate world as well, a view not unlike that of the pantheism of the Romantic poets whom Denise Levertov came to love. Further, "in the tradition of the Kabbala, the Besht taught that the end of Divine worship is attachment to G-d (devekuth), which is essentially a service of the heart rather than the mind." Since God cannot be understood rationally, it is by means of emotional commitment and obedience to the divine will that the human being can come closest to his Creator. Hence the Besht emphasized the "intention of the heart (kavannah) in the performance of the Divine precepts.... Above all, the Besht endeavored to instill the quality of joy into Divine ser vice."
Dancing and singing are intrinsic to Hasidic religious worship, with special tunes for various occasions, such as the religious festival of Simhat Torah, which celebrates the completion of reading the Pentateuch. Hasidim may also dance after seeing their beloved rebbe face to face, honoring his leadership. Olga Levertoff fondly remembered that, in her childhood, her father often rejoiced upon reuniting after a separation from his family by dancing with her. In tune with his childhood, he sang a Yiddish-inflected nonsense song—"Yachiderálum, pûzele, mûzele"—in accompaniment. The Hasidim even dance in mourning, in loving memory of the deceased. In this context, as in Levertov's poem "In Obedience," written after she learned that her father "rose from his bed shortly before his death to dance the Hasidic dance of praise," dancing allows a free expression of grief, which often includes guilt, and takes one beyond these feelings. As Levertov wrote, "Let my dance / be mourning then, / now that I love you too late."
Hasidism spread across political borders. By the nineteenth century, half of all Eastern European Jews had joined its ranks, although different Hasidic groups interpreted the principles of the Besht idiosyncratically. Schneur Zalman was known for his intellectual enthusiasm. He insisted on the three pillars of "wisdom, understanding, knowledge" (which in Hebrew form an anagram for Chabad), and eventually became the leader of the Hasidim of Belarus. By the late nineteenth century, when Paul Levertoff was born, the breach between the Hasidim and their rabbinic opponents had been healed, and the Chabad branch had come to represent the ultra-Orthodox position in Jewry.
The Levertoff family was prosperous. Despite pervasive anti-Semitism, the czar had awarded Paul's father, Saul, the status of "Hereditary Honorable Citizen," a classification that customarily applied to influential or very wealthy townspeople. He is listed in one source as a "sometime Principle of Theological College, Poltava." The Levertoff family claimed relationships by marriage to several wealthy Jewish business families in Saint Petersburg, including the Poliakoffs (bankers) and the Günsbergs, who acquired titles. Saul Levertoff read and spoke Russian as well as Yiddish and Hebrew, and he was a good mathematician. He was acquainted with the local Christian intelligentsia, with whom he conversed, and as Levertov wrote in her unpublished "Notes on Family," "Most unusual for a pious Jew, he seems to have read some Russian literature—Tolstoy for one." Thus, he probably was receptive to the ideas of the Haskalah, a second important Jewish movement in Eastern Europe.
About the same time as Hasidism was born in Poland, the Haskalah originated in Germany. The followers of this movement, the Maskilim, encouraged Jews "to abandon their exclusiveness and acquire the knowledge, manners, and aspirations" of their national homelands. They emphasized the study of biblical Hebrew and of the poetical, scientific, and critical parts of Hebrew literature, rather than the Talmud, and they opposed the superstition they associated with Hasidism. In turn, they were denounced as destructive heretics in Russian Jewish communities, where they were accused of hastening assimilation. By the mid- nineteenth century, when the Russian government began to introduce secular education among the Jews, the tide turned toward the Maskilim, and at the end of the century, all the new movements in the modern era grew out of the Haskalah. Jewish nationalism, and even Orthodoxy, adopted elements of its legacy.
Both Hasidism and Haskalah existed in the context of the greatest threat to the Jewish world, a particularly virulent wave of anti-Semitism that pervaded Russia's political factions after Jews began to live outside the Pale of Settlement. Among the radical Left, Jews were portrayed as "Western urban foreigners who live at the expense of the Russian people." Among conservatives, Jews represented "the West, introducing modernism into Russia ... and undermining the old order." Ironically, the reforms of Czar Alexander II exacerbated this situation, as Jews were granted new economic powers. According to the anti-Semitic press, which the government encouraged, the "Jewish exploiting leaseholder of the old type, who served the Polish aristocracy," was now the "new Jewish capitalist," who inflicted damage in his modern metamorphosis. The Jews of Russia were deeply disillusioned by these sentiments, but they could not stop their escalation. The pogroms that broke out in 1881, after Czar Alexander was killed, were a virulent culmination. Further, under the rule of the next two czars, Russian nationalism identified itself with the Russian Church, and religious persecution continued to assume brutal and anti- Semitic forms.
This was the turbulent, dangerous world into which Paul Levertoff was born and from which he extricated himself. Not surprisingly, he seemed to have few childhood memories. Typical of Orthodox Jews, he was one of many children. He spoke with emotion of one "little sister ... who died at an early age," Levertov recalled in "Notes for Nikolai." Later, after Paul's own first child died in infancy, his wife, Beatrice, thought his deep depression revived this earlier loss. Paul also remembered that one "much older sister ... had gone to study medicine in Zurich," which Denise interpreted as meaning that she must have been among the "enterprising young proto-revolutionary women [Peter] Kropotkin writes about so movingly in his wonderful Memoirs." Every year, when Denise was a child, a "certain delicious apple called Cox's Orange Pippin" would remind her father of the shtetl garden, where similar apples grew. He also recalled that when "the ice was breaking up in the spring he and other boys used to jump from ice floe to ice floe for a ride down-river—very dangerous and of course strictly forbidden." Denise treasured this memory, in particular, because she loved to think of her "studious" father, who "seemed so sedentary," being so audacious.
Like other boys of his time and place, Paul Levertoff began to study the Torah and Talmud at a very early age. He was taught by his father and in a traditional Hebrew primary school (cheder). He first encountered the New Testament and Jesus when he was eight or nine, on the way home from playing with friends. Levertov later recalled this family legend as follows:
As he trudged homeward my father's eye was caught by a scrap of printed paper lying in the gray, trampled snow. Though he was a playful, disobedient boy ... he was also ... a little Talmud scholar, respectful of words; and he saw at a glance ... that this paper was not printed in Russian but in Hebrew. So he picked it up and began to read. Could it be a fragment of Torah? Never before had he read such a story about a boy like himself who—it is said—was found in the Temple expounding the scriptures to the old, reverent, important rabbis!
He took the rescued page home to show his family, but instead of praising Paul, his father became very angry. He tore the page into pieces, thrust the pieces into the stove, and told his little son "to avoid such writings," but did not explain why. The child was, of course, "awed to see written words destroyed—Hebrew words," and his curiosity was awakened about the boy in the story.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Poet's Revolution by Donna Krolik Hollenberg. Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsPrologue
PART ONE. LISTENING TO DISTANT GUNS (1923–1948)
1. "The Walls of the Garden, the First Light": Beginnings (1923–1933)
2. "When Anna Screamed": Levertov’s Response to Nazi Oppression (1933–1939)
3. The Double Image: Apprenticeship during World War II (1939–1946)
4. "Recoveries": Abortion, Adventure, and Marriage (1947–1948)
PART TWO. A COMMON GROUND (1949–1966)
5. "Dancing Edgeways": Coming of Age as a Poet in the New World (1949–1955)
6. "The True Artist": Levertov’s Engagement with Tradition (1954–1960)
7. "The Poem Ascends": Taking a Postion (1960–1963)
8. "To Speak of Sorrow": Levertov’s Emergence as a Social Poet (1963–1966)
PART THREE. LIFE AT WAR (1966–1974)
9. "Revolution or Death": Living in the Movement (1966–1970)
10. "The Freeing of the Dust": The Revolution Hits Home (1970–1974)
PART FOUR. SLEEPERS AWAKE (1975–1988)
11. "A Woman Alone": Beginning Again (1975–1981)
12. "The Task": Social Protest and Liberation Theology (1982–1988)
PART FIVE. RESETTLING (1989–1997)
13. "Of Shadow and Flame": The Re-cognition of Identity (1989–1992)
14: "Beauty Growls from the Fertile Dark": Facing Death (1992–1997)
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgment of Permissions
Index