Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on Why ‘We Must Love One Another or Die’)

“All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.” — English poet-critic W.H. Auden (1907-1973), “September 1, 1939”

Quote of the Day (Sidney Lanier, on ‘Tolerance, That Can Kiss and Disagree’)

“Bring Tolerance, that can kiss and disagree,—
Bring Virtue, Honor, Truth, and Loyalty,—
Bring Faith that sees with undissembling eyes,—
Bring all large Loves and heavenly Charities,—
Till man seem less a riddle unto man
And fair Utopia less Utopian.”—Southern poet, musician, literary critic, and academic Sidney Lanier (1842-1881), “Ode to the Johns Hopkins University (Read on the Fourth Commemoration Day, February 1880),” in Poems of Sidney Lanier (1885)

I found these lines while tracking down the source of a quotation from Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life: specifically, that phrase “large Loves and heavenly Charities.” That led me to this poem and Sidney Lanier, who preached here a message of idealism and charity—and who was himself a casualty of a society that had lost that capacity.

Like Robert Louis Stevenson, Lanier ended up disregarding his father’s wish that he practice the law and took up poetry—which, along with his skill in playing the violin, flute, piano, banjo and guitar, evidenced his inclination towards the arts.

Most photos of Lanier show him bearded, in his later years. I prefer this one, from age 15, where you can see him in all his youthful promise.

But the poet-musician’s life was transformed—and, eventually, curtailed—by the Civil War. Leaving an offer as a tutor at Georgia’s Oglethorpe College, he joined the Confederate Army.  In 1864, after transferring to a blockade runner seized by the Union, he was imprisoned and contracted tuberculosis—the disease that killed him at age 39.

I first came across Lanier’s name in a high school English anthology from the late 1960s. Even then, he was considered old-fashioned for exhibiting the influence of Anglo-Saxon and Romantic poets.

“In Lanier,” Edmund Wilson wrote in his influential 1962 overview of the literature generated by the Civil War, Patriotic Gore, “the chivalric romance of the South was to merge with German romanticism and to become inflated and irised, made to drip with the dews of idealism.”

Critical disdain only gathered force in the years afterward because Lanier’s style, unlike Walt Whitman’s or Emily Dickinson’s, was not original for his time; he was crowded out of “best of” poetry collections by 20^th-century giants like the “beat” and “confessional” poets; and some of his verses, written in African-American dialect, are dated.

Though not a slave trader or slave owner himself, or even a veteran of combat (according to this 2020 Montgomery Independent article, he only led his unit’s band and never fired a shot), Lanier, like many white male southerners of his time, served in the Confederacy’s armed forces and in the Reconstruction Era wrote verses critical of civil rights for freedmen. That put him in the crosshairs of the movement to rename southern schools to remove vestiges of the slavery and Jim Crow eras.

After some heated debate, the Austin (TX) school named in Lanier’s honor was changed in 2019 to commemorate Juan Navarro, a 2007 graduate who died in Afghanistan five years later from an explosive device.

In reading about Lanier’s life and character, I couldn’t help but think of Gone With the Wind’s Ashley Wilkes—another bookish, sensitive scion of the Old South who, out of loyalty to his state, marched off to a war that ends with his life “permanently shattered once the North wins the war,” as Marc Eliot Stein (aka Levi Asher) noted in this 2015 post from his blog “Literary Kicks.”

Stein’s characterization of Wilkes’ genteel racism, born of a “fear of invasion” (in this case, Northerners out to destroy slavery and, with it, the antebellum plantocracy), applies just as readily to Lanier—who, in one of the first examples of what might be termed “Lost Cause literature,” memorialized one of the fallen heroes of the defeated South in “The Dying Words of Stonewall Jackson.”

It was deeply tragic that a multi-talented artist and intellectual like Lanier had his life cut short before he could achieve even more. It was also tragic that he could never see beyond the closed circle of his society and imagine a life of opportunity for freedmen.

These days, for the first time in my lifetime, the American political atmosphere has been inflamed by talk of civil war. We would do well to follow the high ideals that Lanier advocated in the verses I quoted above, rather than commit to the lack of a broader vision that wrecked his world and his life.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Thomas Merton, on the Christian Subject to Misinformation and Demagoguery)

“The Christian who is misinformed; who is subject to the demagoguery of extremists in the press, on the radio or on TV, and who is perhaps to some extent temperamentally inclined to associate himself with fanatical groups in politics, can do an enormous amount of harm to society, to the Church and to himself. With sincere intentions of serving the cause of Christ he may cooperate in follies and injustices of disastrous magnitude.” — American Trappist monk, theologian, memoirist and poet Thomas Merton (1915-1968), Life and Holiness (1963)

Flashback, September 1916: Griffith’s ‘Intolerance’ Tests Audiences

Fresh from the stunning commercial and critical triumph of his controversial film, The Birth of a Nation, director D.W. Griffith released an even more ambitious epic, Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages. Yet the new movie, though less ideologically problematic than its predecessor and hailed by film professionals for adding to the tools of cinema, was not as successful on the bottom line.

It is important to state here that, contrary to decades of conventional wisdom, Intolerance was not a flop. True, it cost $2 million in 1916 currency—not only 20 times the amount spent on Birth of a Nation, but reputedly the most expensive film to that time.

But in its initial run, it actually made a modest profit, a fact demonstrated in Richard Schickel’s definitive biography of Griffith. It wasn’t until the film was exhibited on the road, away from larger cities with state-of-the-art theaters, that the costs became prohibitive. It didn’t help that Griffith insisted that these theaters in the hinterlands be modeled with a special decoration and that a live orchestra play the score of the movie.

One has to ask why Griffith embarked on such a massive undertaking. The immediate impetus was an Italian film called Cabiria, so visually stunning that Griffith couldn’t get it out of his mind. The second factor was Birth of a Nation. As I discussed in a prior post, several elements of that blockbuster--its benign view of the Ku Klux Klan, its horror of miscegenation, and its depiction of an attempted rape of a white woman by a black man—were racially incendiary. Griffith may not have wanted to apologize or atone for the film, but he did want to show he was a social observer of good intentions.

The success of Birth of a Nation gave him a freer hand than he had previously. While he was with Biograph studios, he was continually second-guessed. In the wake of his blockbuster, he no longer had this oversight at Triangle Film Corp. When he ran into financing problems on Intolerance, he dipped into his own reserves from Birth of a Nation—and when even that wasn’t enough, he convinced actresses Mae Marsh and Lillian Gish to invest in the film.

He would need every dollar that they and he could scratch together. In contemplating the success of Birth of a Nation, he looked at the property he had in hand—a melodrama called The Mother and the Law—and realized how modest it seemed by comparison. For someone like Griffith, who felt that film did not yet approach the theater as an art—but that it should—The Mother and the Law must have seemed positively anti-climactic following Birth of a Nation.

So, instead of simply telling one story of injustice and persecution, he would tell four: not just about an Irish-Catholic youth framed for murder amid labor strife in California, but about a French Huguenot couple at the time of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre; the clash of Jesus with the Pharisees, followed by his betrayal and crucifixion; and the fall of ancient Babylon to King Cyrus the Persian.

These narratives are centuries, even millennia, apart, with no characters in common—yet Griffith hoped that audiences would see their similarities, through visual leitmotifs (e.g., the image of Gish with a baby, with an “intertitle” from Walt Whitman, “Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking”).

The most prominent of the quartet of stories, the Babylon sequence, posed the greatest challenges and required the most extraordinary ingenuity. In much the same way that Alfred Hitchcock began North by Northwest with a single image in mind (a man hanging from Abraham Lincoln’s nose from Mount Rushmore), Griffith was seized, after returning from a tour of San Quentin, by an astonishing sight: the “Tower of Jewels” overlooking the Pan-Pacific Exposition ground in San Francisco. Its Oriental-style grandeur was just the look he was striving for with his Babylon sequence, so he hired three craftsmen who worked on the tower.

Just how improvisational Griffith’s style and genius were can be seen by what followed next:

*Lacking a formal art director on the film set, Griffith had another film professional figure out how to build the Babylonian tower from pictures he provided: either boss carpenter Frank Wortman or, as one surviving crew member remembered it, the English theatrical designer Walter L. Hall.

*Griffith didn’t merely want a static tower for the Babylon story, but one that could be shot through camera movements. A balloon was tried, but proved unsuccessful. The eventual solution: an elevator built inside the tower, coupled with trucks with cast-iron wheels that allowed the tower to move forward. The stunning set offered a blueprint of how filmmakers could surmount daunting technical challenges, particularly for epics set in ancient times.

*In an article on the film in the September 12, 2016 issue of National Review, film critic Armond White pointed to “innovative cinematic techniques” that Griffith devised with his photographers Billy Bitzer and Karl Brown: “tinting scenes in varied colors for moods…and giving images extra height and panoramic breadth to accentuate dramatic moments.”

*No script existed to inform the film’s artists, craftsmen, or actors what the whole thing was about. (It didn’t help that the same title was used for all four sequences: The Mother and the Law. It was like the boxer George Foreman giving all his kids the first name George.) So Griffith simply kept shooting. His first rough cut was eight hours long, more than double what exhibitors warned that audiences could endure. He had to find a way to trim it. Even scenarist Anita Loos (who later wrote the novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) thought the whole thing “awful” and “completely bewildering,” she told film historian Kevin Brownlow five decades later. The four stories fused as one in the editing room, when Griffith employed cross-cutting not just between contemporaneous actions, as in Birth of a Nation, but in the new film’s astonishing conclusion, when all four stories rushed to their collective climax.

 

After Intolerance, Griffith continued to make films for another 15 years, but never with as much ambition or creative freedom. Studio accountants hounded him every time a project seemed about to run behind schedule or exceed costs.

Such a colossal production required a number of assistant directors, and Griffith employed a bench that would go on to make some of the most celebrated movies of the late silent and early talkie era, including W.S. Van Dyke (the “Thin Man” franchise), Joseph Henabery (Cobra), and Sidney Franklin (The Barretts of Wimpole Street, The Good Earth).

Griffith was a huge contradiction in terms. It was not simply because, as Orson Welles noted in this YouTube clip introducing Intolerance on public television in the 1970s, Griffith created just about every cinema technique used for the following decades, in service to a vision of life that was old-fashioned even in 1916. 

No, it was because the director appealed both to the most reactionary elements of American society (Birth of a Nation became a virtual recruiting tool for the Ku Klux Klan) and to its most progressive (Intolerance championed unionism and pacifism while capital punishment at a time when these were not generally acceptable positions).

This is not to say that Intolerance always displayed enlightened attitudes. The most technologically daring filmmaker of his age could never surmount a paternalistic, Victorian attitude toward women, for instance. (One of the film’s “intertitles" can’t help but make modern audiences guffaw: “When women cease to attract men, they often turn to reform as a second option.")

Intolerance not only influenced straight dramas, but also comedies: It was parodied in Buster Keaton’s first feature-length film, Three Ages (1923), which in turn inspired Mel Brooks’ bawdy History of the World, Part 1.

Griffith wanted Intolerance to be his monument. Instead, it became his movie memorial.

Quote of the Day (Anne Frank, on the ‘Upholding of One’s Own Honor and Conscience’)

“People who have a religion should be glad, for not everyone has the gift of believing in heavenly things. You don’t necessarily even have to be afraid of punishment after death; purgatory, hell, and heaven are things that a lot of people can’t accept, but still a religion, it doesn’t matter which, keeps a person on the right path. It isn’t the fear of God but the upholding of one’s own honor and conscience. How noble and good everyone could be if, every evening before falling asleep, they were to recall to their minds the events of the whole day and consider exactly what has been good and bad. Then, without realizing it you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you achieve quite a lot in the course of time. Anyone can do this, it costs nothing and is certainly very helpful. Whoever doesn’t know it must learn and find by experience that: ‘A quiet conscience makes one strong!’” —Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (1952)

On an unrecorded date 70 years ago this month, 15-year-old Anne Frank and her older sister Margot died at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Before she perished, Anne told childhood friend Nanette Konig, also at the Nazi death camp, that after the war she planned to use her diary entries as the basis for a book.

Anne did not survive, but her diary, of course, did. It is the extraordinary record of a girl moving into adulthood under the most harrowing conditions—and, along the way, developing a powerful conscience. The diary also stands as a rebuke to the forces of intolerance. In her time, they were Nazis; in ours, even in the Europe that once paid dearly for its acquiescence to evil, anti-Semitism continues to spread across national borders.

Anne “would be very happy with all the attention she is getting,” Ms. Konig told an interviewer from London’s The Independent this week. “She always wanted to be seen. She wanted to be heard. She was full of life and this would be right in her, what she would have liked to happen."