The Darkness of the Glass
ROSENTHAL, RAYMOND
WRITERS & WRITING The Darkness of the Glass By Raymond Rosenthal While other writers, even some of the greatest, have only an ideology or philosophy, Isaac Bashevis Singer is the possessor...
...WRITERS & WRITING The Darkness of the Glass By Raymond Rosenthal While other writers, even some of the greatest, have only an ideology or philosophy, Isaac Bashevis Singer is the possessor of a cosmology, a strangely harmonious universe in which all fits together and forms, at least in his imagination, a darkly glittering whole instinct with life, charm, humor and mystery...
...His lips held a cigar in an amber cigar-holder...
...Although Singer's latest book In My Father's Court (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 307 pp., $5.50) will add little to his artistic stature, it is fascinating, among other reasons, because it tells us so much about Singer's struggles with, and developing relation to, his cosmology...
...Notice that there is not a word of direct derogation in this portrait, and yet we do not have to be told, so deft are the strokes, that Singer is revolted by such smug, overweening success...
...Their manner seemed to say...
...This cosmology is derived, of course, from the Jewish religion as he himself received it from his father, a poor rabbi who carried out his mission in the pre-World War I Warsaw ghetto, but it is also his own creation, diverging from traditional Judaism at various crucial points...
...But Singer has also found a place for this negation, "this darkness of the glass," in his cosmology, although in his expository writings, such as the present book, darkness seems to merge with darkness...
...Unable to take his brother's path, which was that of not believing either in this world or the coming one, Singer has created a universe for himself, a Renaissance world of intense, flaring chiaroscuro in which demons exist both to goad and somehow uphold the pure forces of spirituality and sanity...
...Both phases of human existence have continued to interest me...
...They are not really short stories as we have come to know them...
...But here Singer is busy fitting it all into the radiant whole...
...Speaking of the outbreak of World War I, he says: "It seemed to me that if only we had accepted the lack of toilets and gas in No...
...Nature, human destiny, history, politics, sex-all of the common materials of action and thought in the modern world have been transmuted by Singer into elements in his cosmology...
...The political comment seems inadequate, shallow, but the strength of Singer's system lies in its ancient wisdom...
...as it does...
...I had thought," Singer says in his story, 'The Wild Cows,' "that dew fell only in the Land of Israel, or in the Biblical portion" He is shocked to find it otherwise, but then he overcomes his shock by a characteristic movement...
...In part borrowed from the Polish Jewish community-all religious cosmologies are social productsin part created out of Singer's attempt to square his imaginative beliefs with his modern doubts, it provides the structure on which all of his works rest...
...Such questions come often to his mind, because more than its proud and haughty, its representatives of vulgarity and success, the Warsaw ghetto housed degraded underground dwellers who seemed inhabitants of some Goyaesque nightmare...
...Mordecai Meir is Mordecai Meir, and we are we...
...Something that has largely gone out of contemporary writing reappears here, and it is a surprisethe bare moral reality of each person, caught in its autonomous fullness and mystery...
...They lack the concentration and complexity of mood characteristic of modern short stories, including the best of Singer's own...
...Politics, the mad upsurgings of men and movements, are dealt with somewhat summarily, though always with a firm cosmologica...
...When Singer goes to visit a slum hovel, he wonders whether the man living in this crawling filth is not a ghost, a fearful spirit from the abyss...
...Yet none of these stories is fully satisfying by strict modern standards...
...He's a corpse, but we're alive...
...My throat is tight How can anyone do such a thing-and here, of all places, where everything is so beautiful and radiant and fragrant like the Garden of Eden...
...He's about to be buried, but we must pay our rent and our children's tuition...
...Singer's latest works, in fact, are tales, in a more ancient, insouciant sense, often close to the Biblical directness of feeling that Tolstoy prescribed for the "universal art of the future...
...The rich man's attributes have a folk or fairy tale quality, beyond ordinary good or evil, at the same time as they are solidly presented, with a thick materiality that is almost oppressive...
...Even in my stories it is just one step from the study house to sexuality and back again...
...Whereas Babel deserts Judaism for the random delights and disasters of nature, Singer converts his trauma into the mystic's acceptance of the holy unity of the universe: "There was a strange stillness here, and yet everything murmured, rustled, chirped I looked up at the sky, the sun, the clouds, and suddenly I understood more clearly the meaning of the words of Genesis...
...It was Mordecai Meir's funeral cortege...
...To be able to suggest whole unspoken universes of spiritual discourse through the agency of the most mundane events and persons-this, it seems to me, is Singer's most arresting artistic trait...
...but a moment later he sees a girl and boy making love in a field and the truly characteristic Singer note is struck: "Something inside me wants to cry out...
...10, we might have been spared all this...
...It is arresting because it is so unusual in our day...
...One can see this process best in his encounter with nature...
...This, too, finds its place in the cosmology...
...Here, for instance, is a funeral: "One day I saw a procession...
...It is this "hiddenness, this darkness of the glass," as the English philosopher Collingwood called it, "that gives religion all of its negative characteristics...
...This is the sort of book, moreover, which only a writer at the height of his powers, firmly in command of his created world, his mind charged with vivid memories, can somehow shake effortlessly out of his sleeve -tales, anecdotes, sketches, each written in a pure, flowing style that in its modesty and grace is itself an impressive feat of literary tact and decorum...
...Exploring complicated moral and spiritual situations in an utterly unmoralistic tone-which would have astonished Tolstoy in his last phase-they yet manage in their deceptively simple way, to communicate "universal feelings" about love, marriage, birth and death...
...It is not entirely pellucid, sometimes it seems more like a Renaissance chiaroscuro...
...When he removed his overshoes, I saw gilt letters on the red lining and was told that these were monograms...
...He wore a long fur coat, shiny galoshes, and a fur hat...
...Here, Singer sounds a bit didactic, though the intention is clear: Sex is one of the motive forces of life and so must find its rightful place in any complete cosmology...
...Poverty, on the other hand, is one of the many expressions of the Evil One, the demons that lurk in the darkness of human life...
...This is only the beginning of a constant shuttling back and forth between the natural, material world, with its menace of sex, politics and power, and the pellucid world of Jewish cosmology...
...Not one touch of sentimentality, not a single word that is loud or shrill, not a single misplaced note...
...This is the one point that he cannot explain...
...The stage on which most of them take place is the Beth Din, a rabbinical court, an ancient institution among the Jews-"a kind of blend," Singer says in his preface, "of a court of law, synagogue, house of study, and, if you will, psychoanalyst's office where people of troubled spirit could come to unburden themselves.' Singer's father was the presiding judge, his family were the often horrified or despairing onlookers, and the voluble procession of the Warsaw ghetto's rich and poor, thieving and upright, scholarly and worldly, were its impassioned litigants...
...We no longer have anything in common.' Singer wrote these sketches as a working journalist for the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward...
...Even sex, as he later sees it among his brother's Bohemian friends, becomes a gay, natural thing, "like the Garden of Eden, before Adam and Eve had partaken of the Tree of Knowledge This was quite a change from my father's studio...
...This then, was the world God had created, the earth, the heavens, the waters above that are separated by the firmament from the waters below...
...Here is a rich man: "One of the litigants was tall, with a sparse, black beard and angry, coal black eyes...
...Superstition is a great motive force in all religions, for, though religion can be a metaphor for the reality of the universe, taken literally the metaphor can easily become a breeder of devils, transmigration of souls, and evil spirits...
...For 2,000 years the Jews lived out of a book, the Bible, and every Jewish child-Isaac Babel has written poignantly of this fateful experience-must at one point step from the pages of the book into the glowing, confused, disconcerting reality of a nature he has never known...
...What he has actually done is to translate them out of the cosmology and then back into it...
...Behind her came a number of men, who were chatting as they walked...
...An aura of importance, learning and shrewdness emanated from him...
...In other words, political convulsions are due to man's desire for material comfort, which, weighed in the scales of Jewish spiritual values, could only result in bloodshed and catastrophes...
...A cat, a horse, a whole community talks out, and the gay lightness of tone has the colloquial vigor and richness of a Verga or a Hamsun...
...He tells us that he grew up in a household where "there was always talk about the spirits of the dead mat possess the bodies of the living, souls reincarnated as animals, houses inhabited by hobgoblins, cellars haunted by demons," yet this is not an explanation...
...intent and grasp...
...His widow walked with uplifted arms, weeping and moaning...
...Singer could not be more orthodox...
Vol. 49 • May 1966 • No. 10
