“Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.”—W.H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”
I had been meaning to use this poem ever since the news broke of Farrah Fawcett’s final hours. Something in the way that, three decades after her great fame as a ‘70s pinup and Charlie’s Angels star, she continued to spark the longings of men of a certain age fascinated me, reminding me inevitably of the Auden couplet about time being “indifferent in a week/To a beautiful physique.”
But the event that served as the excuse for looking at this poem—the hook, if you will—occurred 25 years ago today: Vanessa Williams’ reluctant resignation as the first black Miss America, because of explicit photos taken of her and later published in Bob Guccione’s rag, Penthouse.
Leave aside, hard as it might be, the question of Williams as a racial pioneer. A part of me still wonders why so much attention was paid to mistakes made by this young woman that forced the premature end of her beauty-queen reign, just as I shake my head now when I think about the hullabaloo over Carrie Prejean’s views on same-sex marriage.
I had been meaning to use this poem ever since the news broke of Farrah Fawcett’s final hours. Something in the way that, three decades after her great fame as a ‘70s pinup and Charlie’s Angels star, she continued to spark the longings of men of a certain age fascinated me, reminding me inevitably of the Auden couplet about time being “indifferent in a week/To a beautiful physique.”
But the event that served as the excuse for looking at this poem—the hook, if you will—occurred 25 years ago today: Vanessa Williams’ reluctant resignation as the first black Miss America, because of explicit photos taken of her and later published in Bob Guccione’s rag, Penthouse.
Leave aside, hard as it might be, the question of Williams as a racial pioneer. A part of me still wonders why so much attention was paid to mistakes made by this young woman that forced the premature end of her beauty-queen reign, just as I shake my head now when I think about the hullabaloo over Carrie Prejean’s views on same-sex marriage.
Why care about what is done or said by a twentysomething female with not much life experience, whose major accomplishment to date is parading across a stage in a swimsuit?
(Let me hasten to add right here that Williams demonstrates one positive aspect of the decline of shame in America: the generosity involved in giving someone a second chance. She worked enormously hard to build and sustain her subsequent career as actress and singer. In the end, her career might have taken off anyway, because of her youthful glamour, but to her credit it did not end there, nor with the notoriety unfairly tagged on her by the egregious Bob Guccione.)
Some with a scientific bent think that interest in beauty is genetically hard-wired into us, an outgrowth of evolution—nature’s signal that the object of our gaze is healthy, a mate ideal for maintaining the species.
(Of course, this line of speculation has elements of the pseudo-scientific, too, as it can be extended to justify the likes of Mark Sanford, Ted Kennedy, John Ensign, Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and John Edwards straying from their wives. If that’s science, I’m sure that spouses of these wayward politicos, for all their other ideological and personal differences, will gladly opt for any pre-Darwinian explanation for the existence of the male species, thank you very much.)
Maybe there’s a different element at work here, though—a mythological one.
Among the ancient Romans, the deities that seemed to hold the most interest were Venus and Adonis. Their looks made them seem especially fortunate (aside, of course, from Adonis’ fatal encounter with a boar).
Perhaps that’s one reason why Hollywood actresses of particular distance and allure—the Ava Gardners of the world—are known as goddesses. And perhaps that’s why the decline and destruction of beauty appalls and mesmerizes us. If even these people, unfairly blessed with an extra-long youth and health, are subject to the laws of decay, what hopes do the rest of us have?
When the media engage in overkill about vapid celebrities—models who think no great thoughts or accomplish no great deeds, such as Paris Hilton—our inner Jack Nicholson springs out of nowhere, like his vulpine alter ego in Wolf growling at Michelle Pfeiffer: “The problem is, aside from all that beauty, you’re not very interesting.” It’s only a short leap from that to say, “All that beauty isn’t very interesting.”
The fate of the beautiful, in these cases, becomes a warning to us, delivered with the matter-of-fact, Audenesque indifference of Bob Dylan in “Buckets of Rain”: “I’ve seen pretty people disappear like smoke.”
The past century might be one in which the whole notion of human—evolutionary—progress might have been overturned—not just because the struggle to overcome war, poverty and disease suffered repeated serious reversals, but because the rise of mass culture turned beauty into a far more exploitable, delusive, and even dangerous commodity than ever before.
The need to extend the period of one’s good looks—even to create the illusion of it over the course of a lifetime—proved once again that the business of beauty can be singularly ugly. Plastic surgery might as well be a tax writeoff in Hollywood, it’s so common. (For all I know, it already is.)
And yet, the drawbacks of it all are becoming more and more apparent. To start with, it’s unnatural.
(Let me hasten to add right here that Williams demonstrates one positive aspect of the decline of shame in America: the generosity involved in giving someone a second chance. She worked enormously hard to build and sustain her subsequent career as actress and singer. In the end, her career might have taken off anyway, because of her youthful glamour, but to her credit it did not end there, nor with the notoriety unfairly tagged on her by the egregious Bob Guccione.)
Some with a scientific bent think that interest in beauty is genetically hard-wired into us, an outgrowth of evolution—nature’s signal that the object of our gaze is healthy, a mate ideal for maintaining the species.
(Of course, this line of speculation has elements of the pseudo-scientific, too, as it can be extended to justify the likes of Mark Sanford, Ted Kennedy, John Ensign, Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and John Edwards straying from their wives. If that’s science, I’m sure that spouses of these wayward politicos, for all their other ideological and personal differences, will gladly opt for any pre-Darwinian explanation for the existence of the male species, thank you very much.)
Maybe there’s a different element at work here, though—a mythological one.
Among the ancient Romans, the deities that seemed to hold the most interest were Venus and Adonis. Their looks made them seem especially fortunate (aside, of course, from Adonis’ fatal encounter with a boar).
Perhaps that’s one reason why Hollywood actresses of particular distance and allure—the Ava Gardners of the world—are known as goddesses. And perhaps that’s why the decline and destruction of beauty appalls and mesmerizes us. If even these people, unfairly blessed with an extra-long youth and health, are subject to the laws of decay, what hopes do the rest of us have?
When the media engage in overkill about vapid celebrities—models who think no great thoughts or accomplish no great deeds, such as Paris Hilton—our inner Jack Nicholson springs out of nowhere, like his vulpine alter ego in Wolf growling at Michelle Pfeiffer: “The problem is, aside from all that beauty, you’re not very interesting.” It’s only a short leap from that to say, “All that beauty isn’t very interesting.”
The fate of the beautiful, in these cases, becomes a warning to us, delivered with the matter-of-fact, Audenesque indifference of Bob Dylan in “Buckets of Rain”: “I’ve seen pretty people disappear like smoke.”
The past century might be one in which the whole notion of human—evolutionary—progress might have been overturned—not just because the struggle to overcome war, poverty and disease suffered repeated serious reversals, but because the rise of mass culture turned beauty into a far more exploitable, delusive, and even dangerous commodity than ever before.
The need to extend the period of one’s good looks—even to create the illusion of it over the course of a lifetime—proved once again that the business of beauty can be singularly ugly. Plastic surgery might as well be a tax writeoff in Hollywood, it’s so common. (For all I know, it already is.)
And yet, the drawbacks of it all are becoming more and more apparent. To start with, it’s unnatural.
Several years ago, I saw a picture of Gloria Vanderbilt with son Anderson Cooper in Vanity Fair. She’s eight-five; he’s half her age. Guess who looked younger? A mite freakish, wouldn't you say?
Submitting to the surgeon’s scalpel might not even be a Faustian bargain, let alone a real one. Even if done reasonably well, plastic surgery and Botox can leave an inert expression on the face—not good if you want to demonstrate emotions, as actors are called on to do. And there’s always a chance of a mistake—one that can make you look oddly different from what you were before, or simply dead.
And yet, for all that, we continue to worship our gods and goddesses, helplessly in thrall to beauty. Few epitomized that dilemma, for all the studied indifference of this poem and its self-evident confidence in his profession, more than W.H. Auden himself.
During the Weimar Republic, Auden and close friend Christopher Isherwood flocked to Germany’s capital because, in the latter’s summation, “Berlin meant Boys”—invariably beautiful ones.
It was Auden’s misfortune to take up with 17-year-old Chester Kallman in 1939. For all his formidable intellect and poetic genius, Auden was utterly captivated by his younger lover, to the point where he regarded their relationship as a marriage.
Naturally, within just a few years, Kallman was faithless, breaking Auden’s heart.
Amazingly enough, Auden might have been a worse judge of the value of his early, powerful work than he was of overs. Harmed by experience and an overactive artistic conscience, he edited out one of his indelible lines, “We must love one another or die,” from one of his landmark poems, “September 1, 1939.” (“We die anyway,” he said grouchily.)
I wasn’t surprised, then, to find that, in editing his collected works, Auden deleted the three stanzas at the top of this post. I’m not sure why. They don’t have the ferocious, metaphoric force of what famously follows (“In the nightmare of the dark/All the darks of Europe bark”), but Auden was at the top of his game when he wrote this—almost anything he committed to paper glittered.
Submitting to the surgeon’s scalpel might not even be a Faustian bargain, let alone a real one. Even if done reasonably well, plastic surgery and Botox can leave an inert expression on the face—not good if you want to demonstrate emotions, as actors are called on to do. And there’s always a chance of a mistake—one that can make you look oddly different from what you were before, or simply dead.
And yet, for all that, we continue to worship our gods and goddesses, helplessly in thrall to beauty. Few epitomized that dilemma, for all the studied indifference of this poem and its self-evident confidence in his profession, more than W.H. Auden himself.
During the Weimar Republic, Auden and close friend Christopher Isherwood flocked to Germany’s capital because, in the latter’s summation, “Berlin meant Boys”—invariably beautiful ones.
It was Auden’s misfortune to take up with 17-year-old Chester Kallman in 1939. For all his formidable intellect and poetic genius, Auden was utterly captivated by his younger lover, to the point where he regarded their relationship as a marriage.
Naturally, within just a few years, Kallman was faithless, breaking Auden’s heart.
Amazingly enough, Auden might have been a worse judge of the value of his early, powerful work than he was of overs. Harmed by experience and an overactive artistic conscience, he edited out one of his indelible lines, “We must love one another or die,” from one of his landmark poems, “September 1, 1939.” (“We die anyway,” he said grouchily.)
I wasn’t surprised, then, to find that, in editing his collected works, Auden deleted the three stanzas at the top of this post. I’m not sure why. They don’t have the ferocious, metaphoric force of what famously follows (“In the nightmare of the dark/All the darks of Europe bark”), but Auden was at the top of his game when he wrote this—almost anything he committed to paper glittered.
I have never made any attempt to memorize this poem, and yet the verses are so vivid that I can call most of them to mind instantly. That includes the three stanzas quoted here. Like the rest of the poem, they drive home the point of the impermanence of life and of so many of our superficial values—very much including an inheritance from the ancients, the worship of the human body—while hailing what lasts: in this case, poetry that sustains the human spirit.
No comments:
Post a Comment