Fantasies of Our Identity

...They are also the precursors of that most English of traditions, the Christmas Pantomime, featuring a man dressed up as "the Widow Twankey," and of the perennial college drama-club favorite Charley's Aunt...

...Whether or not the somewhat neurotic and snobbish Rilke qualifies as a "guide to life," he unquestionably has many wise things to say...

...In fact, he spent more time penning letters to friends on custom-made stationery than crafting his poems...

...Rilke was known to use his artistic calling as an excuse for sponging off admirers and behaving badly to women...

...The fruit has been sucked dry...

...Many writers of his era sought to provide the kind of consolation once expected of religion...

...And English composers, he notes, commonly wrote "sea music," while the great landscape artists have made much of the play of light and shadow on waves and sky...

...In his Introduction to The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke (Modern Library, 272 pp., $ 19.95), translator Ulrich Baer explains: "For several hours, language had coursed through him as if it were oil or wax that becomes more pliant when subjected to movement and heat...

...The trilogy imaginatively recreates an ancient poetic tradition filled with heroic quests, magic, monsters, doomed love, climactic battles, and implacable fate...

...He adds, sarcastically, "And yet Protestants and American Christians always create a new brew with this tea that has been steeping for two millennia...

...In that sense, Rilke can be considered a true guide to this life...

...Fiery warfare, waged on innocents by magicians who aspire to world domination, is an allegory for the terror of the German air assault on Britain during World War II...

...Even those who do not share the author's views about conventional religion will find that his observations on the subject are often shrewd and funny...

...In contrast, the English, according to the lecturer, never coalesced as a "people," and are rather the motley descendants of old Britons, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, and Normans, with some German mixed in...

...The Poet's Guide to Life is arranged by theme—"On Being Alone," "On Love," "On Solitude," etc...

...For myself, I find Ackroyd's tale of the various strains that make up the culture of Albion as irresistible as the most absorbing English literature...

...The history of the Hebrews was seen as a template of English history," rendering the English God's elect...

...If "Man" (as they would put it) could not rely on the Divine, he could himself tap into the universal spirit in everyone to become a creator...

...Throughout the morning, Rilke had conversed intimately with a series of individuals, ever so slightly inflecting his voice for each of them...

...The concept of "Englishness" was vital to writers like Rudyard Kipling—but he was born in India...

...and gushing enthusiasm for red double-decker London buses...

...now it's time, to put it bluntly, to spit out the skins...

...But this correspondence served a greater purpose than mere procrastination...

...His epic is a modern purveyor of the national spirit Ackroyd prizes...

...Displays of deep feeling are frowned upon, and self-disparaging humor undercuts any hint of earnestness or emotional commitment...

...This "great thoughts" presentation undermines Baer's assurance that Rilke is addressing actual people...

...We are the bees of the invisible," Rilke assures one correspondent...

...Rilke's Duino Elegies express the angst of living in an age when it is hard to believe in a personal God: "Who, if I cried out, would hear me scream among the angels' orders...

...The first story in English may have seemed like a song...

...One suspects a sense of nationhood was most important to colonials who, serving the British Empire in distant corners of the world, never considered themselves natives of Rhodesia or Borneo or Jamaica and called "home" a country some of them had never seen...

...sunshine and rain alternate at frequent intervals, and the sea is never far away, beating the coast with novel melodies...

...Many of the poet's spiritual musings remind me more of New Age California gurus...

...They are the ancestors of Juliet's nurse, Falstaff's Mistress Quickly and the clowns of Twelfth Night and King Lear...

...To be close to another person who holds opposing views while being a deep committed friend can be a wonderful, shaping influence," he reassures one of his female friends—words worth taking to heart in a polarized era...

...Although Rilke parted ways with organized religion—"in order to be all the more inconsolably alone"—and thought God was dead, the translator observes that the poet never abandoned the idea of transcendence or the notion of an ultimate purpose to life...

...A more successful format would have printed whole letters and the names of the individuals to whom they were addressed...

...He describes the 12th-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's account of "wonders" at the dawn of English history: "The sign of the cross is seen upon the face of the moon, dragons fly through the air, fiery flashes light up the landscape—while [the Chronicle's] unadorned transcript of events is interlaced with cadences and images that might have been taken out of contemporaneous epic poetry...

...If the universe is indifferent to us, we need more than ever the ability to tell our own stones as we puzzle out our predicament...

...Ackroyd is enchanted with the notion of a seed germ that evolved into "Englishness...

...It was common among thinkers at the turn of the 20th century to envision the arts a substitute for faith...

...The Venerable Bede (672-735) began a tradition that continued through John Milton and the visionary William Blake: The stories of scripture were appropriated for the British Isles so that they became Jerusalem and Zion...

...His thieves and prostitutes parody the corruption of Robert Walpole's government, and slapstick segues into pathos, only to turn comic again...

...The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)—you might guess, rightly, that his advice bears little resemblance to our contemporary self-help literature and its pithy slogans for becoming less shy, losing weight, overcoming bad habits, or transforming oneself into Donald Trump...

...It is always wise to look for evidence of continuity rather than of violent change, because in persistence and permanence lie the true strengths of human nature," Ackroyd writes...

...No doubt the historian would argue that if you examined the same works with a hard eye you could discover significant ethnic markers distinguishing the Cockney's culture from the Cornishman's...

...What distinguishes Tolkien's saga from most humdrum swordand-sorcery fantasy is its grounding in a genuine tradition...

...On a trip to Spain, where he visits baroque churches built during the Counter Reformation, he declares, "Now boundless indifference reigns here: empty churches, forgotten churches, starving chapels—really one should no longer take a seat at this table after the meal's been finished and pretend that the finger bowls still laying [sic] about would contain nourishment...

...Ackroyd's reading of Englishness is romantic in the extreme, yet it reminds us that those who look for continuity discover it, while those who look for ruptures notice them instead...

...Occasionally his descriptions of his own behavior call to mind the selfabsorbed, pretentious character Woody Allen plays in his own films...

...He recounts a time of historical, but wonder-working, saints with names like Aelfric and Wulfstan...

...Ackroyd began his career tracking the lives of the expatriate Americans Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, but soon shifted his attention to the preoccupations and style of his native land...

...It is often said that the English deplore taking themselves too seriously...

...If you are familiar with the Austrian poet's verse—or his novel...

...When we think of "English literature" today, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan playwrights come to mind first...

...Ackroyd has written a study of crossdressing...

...He also credits the ocean's rhythms with the English predilection for alliteration that dates back at least as far as the Anglo-Saxons...

...Still, the Scottish, Welsh and Irish celebrate their countries—though two of the three have not enjoyed home rule for centuries...

...London playhouses, meanwhile, were wonderfully democratic: "In the late 16th century the audience at Rose or Curtain comprised courtiers and merchants, scholars and 'mechanicals,' poets and pie-men...

...The hearty Frenchman grunted that he had never thought anything of the sort...

...Instead it is its nature to unsettle and cause pain just as readily as to have an occasional calming or invigorating effect...

...In his satiric mode the usually stiff Rilke suddenly becomes good company...

...Ackroyd traces some elements of the plays to the medieval "mystery cycles" that drew on Bible stories, interspersing seriousness with low comedy in characters like Noah's shrewish wife and the comic shepherds "abiding in the fields" before the angel announces Christ's birth...

...Inhabitants of Yorkshire, he argued, continue to think of themselves as Yorkshiremen...

...This includes veneration, verging on idolatry, for the language of Shakespeare and the King James translation of the Bible...

...Peter Ackroyd could not disagree more strongly, la Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (Anchor paper, 524 pp., $16.95), the prolific novelist, essayist and biographer strongly maintains that there is indeed a national quality inherent in English literature, art and culture...

...For all his airs and pretensions, Rilke was an undeniably great writer...

...a passion for Jane Austen, Gilbert and Sullivan and Cats...

...Elizabethan theater derives from the Roman tragedians as well...

...Upon finishing it, I echoed a line from Chaucer he is fond of quoting: "On bokes for to rede I me delyte...

...The audience consisted primarily of members of various societies dedicated to promoting goodwill between Great Britain and the United States by honoring what they view as their English heritage...

...Lacking the notion of "country" that Americans take for granted, the English instead retain local allegiances...

...The young René Maria Rilke (who was later persuaded to change his first name to the more masculine-sounding "Rainer") claimed that work—that is, his vocation as a creative writer—was everything...

...others barely contained a proper greeting before unfolding an extended and precise reflection on a particular question or problem...

...He could at times sound like a caricature of the aesthete who is too pure for this world...

...With this perspective, he traces an unbroken line from the sixth-century epic Beowulf to the present...

...His book's impressive argument, however, falls short of disproving the thesis of the lecture I heard...

...The Shire reflects the rolling English countryside, a bucolic land of pubs and village pastimes...

...the plays of Seneca and Terence supplied the skeletons for many of Shakespeare's plots...

...Baer, whose translations at points fall short of our idiom, thus sees Rilke as a kind of unconscious Buddhist...

...The author relates this trait to England's variable climate...

...We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible...

...This scene would fit perfectly into Love and Death (1975), Allen's parody of Russian literature full of characters spouting purple prose about lofty matters...

...Albion sets out to define what differentiates the symphonies of Elgar, the art of Turner or Stanley Spencer, the drama and humor of Shakespeare, the verse of Tennyson and Auden from the works of Irish, American, Indian, or South African composers, painters, wits, writers, or architects...

...Those of Cornwall consider themselves Cornish...

...Not surprisingly, Albion often refers to J.R.R...

...His pen had yielded what he called the juice: A few of the letters were personal, playful, brimming with witty images, self-mocking asides and details of his everyday life...

...He acknowledged the phenomenon of British patriotism: Queen Victoria's clever German husband managed to stir up patriotic feelings for the United Kingdom by romanticizing the myth of King Arthur and the fellowship of the Round Table...

...Despite the barriers of language and culture, this would allow for variation in tone, making Rilke seem more human and less like a pundit...

...What was intended as advice to a specific recipient comes off, to use Douglas Adams' phrase, as general remarks about Life, the Universe and Everything...

...He grasped how difficult it is to break through the received notions and platitudes of debased ordinary speech...

...The noble language of Hamlet's soliloquies and Henry V's exhortation to his troops is modeled on classical rhetoric, a vital element of English learning during the Renaissance...

...On the Continent theatrical entertainment was rarefied amusement at the royal courts and the universities...

...Londoners are "Southerners," a very different folk from the citizens of the Industrial North...

...Its account of the rivalry between the eighth-century Mercian bards Cynewulf and Cyneheard reads like a transcription of the era's oral poetry and suggests to Ackroyd that "the island was once full of sounds and sweet airs...

...But Londoners and Yorkshiremen attended to their particular regional concerns, loyal to the local...

...The 18th-century poet John Gay stirred another mix of "high and low" in his Beggar's Opera...

...Tolkien's invented world of hobbits, elves, dwarfs, dragons, wizards, and men was inspired in part by the writings of Cynewulf...

...Tolkien, the 20th-century Oxford philologist who wrote The Lord of the Rings...

...Ackroyd believes this contributes to a certain literary fluidity, as writers move from one subject to another, shifting in tone from the grave to the humorous, then from romance to sadness, and so on...

...Ackroyd might counter that the English-language tradition, unlike German, tends to disparage grand abstractions in favor of "the poetry of facts...

...In the process of writing his letters, he had advanced not only his thinking but also his language...

...During a walk with Rodin, Rilke exclaimed to the sculptor, "How this [springtime] dissolves us and how we have to contribute to it with our own juices and make an effort to the point of exhaustion—don't you also know this...

...willingness to pay $400 a head for tea with a British Royal...

...A similar quality also pervades much American literature—think Huckleberry Finn or The Great Gatsby— though Albion neglects to mention trends across the Pond...

...The distinguished speaker shocked his listeners by denying the existence of an English identity—except, perhaps, in the fantasies of former colonials...

...Rilke knew better: "The work of art is far from providing a remedy...

...Tolkien transposes the action back in time to mimic the tales Anglo-Saxons sang at banquets to keep alive the record of their ancestors' trials and triumphs...