The Book of Fortune
Epstein, Daniel Mark
Christian religion, a text often cited by the court in favor of government "neutrality" toward religion. But as Cord points out, Madison also wrote, and in the same year as the "Memorial" in...
...In 1971 the National Council, by now less interested in religious freedom than in exposing the villainy of U.S...
...Cord's reason: in neither case did the state prefer a particular religion...
...For example, President Jefferson approved land grants to sectarian sitting on the court since 1947 for their selective use of history to support their "neutrality" thesis...
...There can be little doubt that had the court stated this principle, many of the First Amendment questions that it subsequently has had to decide would never have reached it...
...incorrect...
...evening could not be there: Ida Nudel, the imprisoned Jewish human rights leader, as well as heads of Solidarity and Charter 77, the Czech human rights monitoring group, whose leaders move in and out of prison...
...But as Cord points out, Madison also wrote, and in the same year as the "Memorial" in fact, "A Bill for Punishing Disturbers of Religious Worship and Sabbath Breakers" (emphasis added...
...This is so because the history of an idea, while obviously important, is not a sufficient reason for accepting its truth...
...At day's end, "sadly he rides the elevator down / and starts again at the foot of the blind wall...
...But then we felt the need to acquaint ourselves with the Western press, and so we divided the work-Aleksandr Isayevich looked at everything in the German language and I investigated everything in the English language...
...Here was a poet with the technique and intellectual rigor of the Modernists, and the madness of the Beats...
...Battling this belief will require more than invoking history...
...A harsh, all-seeing light/rushes, crowds your room as if the sun/had risen on both sides of us at once...
...He emerges very much with his own voice...
...But failing that, it certainly deserves to be read in the offices of the eight old men, and the one lady, E1 THE BOOK OF FORTUNE Daniel Mark Epstein / The Overlook Press / $10.95 Jeffrey Hart i n the September 1982 issue of The American Spectator, in the course of a review of Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth, a memoir about John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and other mid-century poets, I mentioned the special difficulties that beset poets who wrote in the shadow of the great twentiethcentury modernists...
...Separation of Church and State deserves a wide reading...
...And suddenly I had in my hands the journal RCDA, and I simply could not believe my eyes...
...0~IQQ0D0~0~0Ig~O0~Q0~I~m0II~0D0Q008OQ000qQB0Q~QQ~DQ0~Q~Q~0~0~Q08~0D~i~gD~OQD~QQ~0QOQ~Q~Qo~OI~O~Q000O0o000~0~QBQg~DIQQQ~00o~OO~00i S P E C T A T O R ' S J 0 U R N A L QI00g~QQIQ0Q~QOQIOgQOQQ0Qo0OQ~0Oo~O0ggQI000gQ0gQ0QmQOQQQ000IQ0m0IOQ000Qm~O0mB~m0Qo0000oQO0Oe0I~0QIQQOQQl0QO'0I0QII0Q0O0Q0m60QQ0~QQ000e0~0m000IoQD0Qm~iiQQ0mQm A Solzhenitsyn's Tribute On October 28, 1982, almost three hundred people gathered for dinner at the Essex House in New York City to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of a little known quarterly, Religion in Communist Dominated Areas (RCDA) and to pay tribute to the two extraordinary people who have kept it alive, Blahoslav and Olga Hruby...
...And I ran with the journal to Aleksandr Isayevich and cried to him: "Look, look, here in the West they know everything[" A little time went by and we soon learned that in the West they knew very little and understood very little and that such people as Blahoslav Hruby and his wife Olga belong--as always has been true in the past--to a very, very small flock.* Most of the others receiving RCDA's human rights awards that *Mrs...
...According to Cord, the court should have approved the in-school release-time program it struck down in 1948...
...The failure to develop clear First Amendment guidelines has indeed meant that the court has had to act more or less as a legislature on state aid questions, effectively disenfranchising citizens in an area that should be constitutionally open to them...
...On a stroll with his daughter around a ruined school, Epstein leads us to the question: "What have I learned in school but the savage joy/of asking questions that brought the building down...
...Solzhenitsyn spoke in Russian and her remarks were translated by Father Leonid Kishkovsky...
...I read one of the appeals of Father Gleb Yakunin...
...In particular, this belief is that America should be a secular nation, with religion consigned wholly to private living, none of its distinctive features aUowed to influence public life...
...American Life in the Fifties...
...The poem is tragedy wrought to its uttermost, and a breakthrough for the elegaic form...
...That Cord has not attempted to make this argument is, however, no mark against his timely book...
...Windows, like readers, need constant refreshening, and are mostly indifferent to the windowwash~' s dangerous efforts...
...Where Byron and Browning were the guardian spirits of Epstein's earlier work, T.S...
...Cord's handling of history is so persuasive that it is hard to see how anyone could disagree with his central conclusion--namely, that the establishment clause was not designed to forbid the government's nondiscriminatory use of religious institutions to further secular ends...
...And I saw there a detailed description of the difficulties and sufferings of the monks in the Pochayev monastery...
...Eliot is the influence most evident in The Book of Fortune...
...Daniel Mark Epstein's No Vacancies InHell (1973) and The Follies (1977) produced impassioned and puzzled responses...
...The author of The Book of Fortune may be the first American poet to synthesize these opposing poetics, to have it both ways...
...Demonstrating that this idea is wrong would require a lengthy argument about the nature and sources of virtue, and its relationship to the American republic...
...Paul regrets you died too soon to be converted...
...This is a major literary development, and I believe we have a new major poet on our hands...
...Paul Anderson, a specialist on the Russian Orthodox Church, and Blahoslav Hruby, a Czech-born Presbyterian minister...
...This is not merely an academic point...
...The achievement of Eliot, Yeats, Stevens, joyce, Proust, Pound, and the other towering figures put unusual pressure upon those who came after them...
...What is remarkable, of course, is that the modern Supreme Court has somehow found it possible to conclude otherwise, Cord is right to score the justices prayer in question, drawn up by Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, preferred these religions to any others and was thus unconstitutional...
...It will require sustained argument in behalf of an idea, and this argument will have to take place not only in scholarly forums but also the culture at large...
...He absorbs the technical virtuosity of the classical modernists, but still, marvelous to report, he is not absorbed by them...
...But it strikes me that the court, here as in so many other areas, has been tess interested in history than in using it to advance its particular belief about the kind of society America should be...
...St...
...There are twelve poems, selected and ordered with Eliotic precision...
...Mrs...
...The poems "Schoolhouses" and "Lafayette Square" are destined to become classics...
...If Young Men's uom seemed at times impetuous and sprawling, the new book is careful, almost too careful...
...Critics did agree the work was strong and musical, and Epstein won the Prix de Rome...
...Allen Ginsberg, for example, leaps backward over the modernists and takes Whitman for his model...
...and unassimilated for the most part...
...If Art is accomplished at a necessary risk, so is all human intimacy...
...If the court finally does accept the proposition that even incidental aid to religion might actually serve the public interest, Robert Cord will have the satisfaction of knowing that he demonstrated its honorable historical origins...
...Solzhenitsyn tescribed first learning about RCDA in Switzerland, where she and her husband had gone upon being expelled from the Soviet Union: We had just arrived there and we had the feeling that everything was foreign, alien, and that it was very difficult to live...
...These poems are awesomely learned, in the manner of High Modernism, but they bear their learning in a graceful, sometimes carefree manner...
...The Book of Fortune helps to answer these questions...
...Moreover, it seems to me that the country would be substantially better off had somewhere along the line-and obviously Everson would have been the best occasion--the court stated clearly that sectarian methods for achieving secular ends are not unconstitutional...
...society, withdrew its support, and the Hrubys founded their own research center to continue publication of the magazine...
...but the problem of our modernist inheritance has lingered, troubling Jeffrey Hart is Professor of English at Dartmouth College, a contributing editor of National Review, and author, most recently, of When the Going Was Good...
...I read analyses and commentaries about the religious life of our country which could well have been written by one of us living there in the USSR...
...The first book opened with sensuous love lyrics one might expect from a 24-year-old, and closed with Gothic monologQes reclaiming lost chapters of American history...
...Only Maxwell Cohen, a lawyer cited for his efforts on behalf of Biafra and the Sudan, was able to accept in person...
...The most dramatic in a series of tributes to RCDA came from Natalia Solzhenitsyn, who accepted RCDA's human rights award on behalf of Father Gleb Yakunin, the Russian Orthodox priest currently serving a lengthy sentence at hard labor in a Soviet prison camp...
...Epstein can handle the classic line, but he can also manhandle it, as he does in the prophetic "Ode To Virgil": "Pneumatic sage, son of the Empire, come homel/Your villa is on firel Vergilius, all is forgiven...
...In a companion monologue the humorous mystic John Burroughs offers an antidote, as he advises Thomas Edison and Henry Ford to respect "the universe that is one human soul...
...Furthermore, the same Jefferson who gave to history (in 1802, in a letter to the Danbury Baptists) the metaphor of a "wall" separating church and state also, as President, took actions suggesting that in his view the wall was not all that high...
...Lafayette Square," in the voice of Henry Adams's wife, is a profound psychological portrait of a woman driven to suicide by her husband's technological prophecies of doom...
...Now, in his latest volume, The Book ofFortune, the young poet Daniel Mark Epstein confronts the issue head-on...
...Writing poetry and fiction became difficult...
...In the last decade the Hrubys have fought the disheartening indifference of the leadership of mainline churches, who lend themselves to such propaganda festivals for religious leaders as the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1983 39...
...Every day we received thousands of journals, books and appeals, and we felt that we would not be able to penetrate that jungle...
...Blahoslav Hruby struggled against the Nazis in occupied Europe and immediately after the war, in Prague, helped refugees escape from Sovietcontrolled territory...
...Today the establishment clause has an almost sorcerous power such that its mere mention, like the mention of the words "separation of church and state," suggests for many people--including even political conservatives like Barry Goldwater-that religion must have no place in our public life...
...For the court's view that government should be neutral between religion and nonreligion has had effects far beyond particular cases...
...And Epstein's intentions, thematic and aesthetic, are as clear as Eliot's in Prufrock...
...I am not sure that on Cord's terms societies dedicated to "propagating the prayer decision,in 1962 was 9 "the gospel among the Heathen...
...And everything we read was full of those things that interest the Westmoil shortages, the election of the French President, and so on...
...scholarly publication devoted to reporting on religionmand religious repression--behind the Iron Curtain, RCDA was founded under the sponsorship of the National Council of Churches by Dr...
...Epstein's paean to his grandfather, the anti-elegaic '~lotes For A Conversation," sets up a compelling drama...
...Yet except in this and perhaps one or two other cases, Cord's views of how the court should have decided particular cases are persuasive...
...Cord has written the kind of book the court's interest in history invites...
...It took the hysteria and antiacademic line of the Beats to free poetry from the scholarly rule of Pound and Eliot...
...The opening poem "Climbing," about a window-washer who "loves high windows," is an exuberant metaphor for the poet and his audience "Whose vision he rinses clean as fresh glass...
...The poets of the sixties, some of them at least, deliberately ducked the issue...
...it could be argued that the And he specifically asked the Senate to ratify a treaty with the Kaskaskia Indians, a condition of which was that federal money would be used to support a Catholic priest in his religious duties...
...Too, it should have let stand the religiously bland school prayer sponsored by New York State, which it voided in 1962...
...The only U.S...
...Justice White, one of the few justices in recent years to say something correct about the establishment clause, was right when he noted in 1977 that "the court continues to misconstrue the First Amendment in a manner that discriminates against religion and is contrary to the fundamental educational needs of the country...
...The first is a poem of metaphysical wit, on the violence inherent in education...
...Who are his antecedents, and what is his aesthetic position...
...Ideas never made a child," she says, "though they kill men...
...It is accomplishment enough that he has done what he set out to do--write a book that successfully criticizes the court's uses of American history...
...No one knew quite what to make of it...
...There still remains, however, the important need for argument--for showing why government need not be neutral between religion and nonreligion...
...Father Yakunin's 1975 appeal for help for the oppressed church had been smuggled out of the Soviet Union, translated by Olga Hruby, and then sent to the World Council of Churches meeting in Nairobi where for the first time WCC leaders were forced to deal with the subject of religious persecution in the Soviet Union...
...First, Art succeeds only at great risk...
...Young Men's Gold (1978) and the verse drama Midnight Visitor, produced off38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1983 Broadway, broadened Epstein's technical range without defining his place in American poetry...
...The tonal influence here is Allen Ginsberg...
...But Epstein does not leave us on this note...
...On the way to his grandfather's deathbed the poet composes an eloquent farewell, Then he cannot deliver it because he is overwhelmed...
...In Howl and, especially, Kaddish, Ginsberg has written well...
...And certainly, if the court had understood history as he does, and used it as he would have, very different opinions would have been handed down over the past 35 years...
Vol. 16 • January 1983 • No. 1
