You can read Part 1 of Book Excerpt: A Soldier of the Great
War by Mark Helprin here and Part 2 here.
In this my concluding post on this novel, I wanted to
highlight three motifs within the novel that are striking. Let me be up front here, I don’t claim to
fully understand their full significance after only one reading, but I’ll bring
out what I do understand and document it for further scrutiny when sometime in
the future I may do a second reading. The
three motifs are the relationship to children, the significance of birds, and
the significance of colors. I’ll
highlight the three motifs by excerpting three passages.
In the last chapter of the novel, where Alessandro recites
his history to Nicolò, Alessandro explains to him why it took so long to go
back to teaching in the university after the war was over. Alessandro explains:
“At the time, I had no way to be a
professor or even to teach in a subsidiary position. The universities were in lock-step with fascism. Real intellectual independence simply wasn’t
tolerated. I had an appointment here or
there, but I didn’t stay. At first I
simply could not stand the conformism and the cowardice, and then, with the
results predetermined, I came up against the loyalty oaths and informers. I would have left anyway. After having gone through the war, I couldn’t
quibble and take offense over the meaning of a passage, or to live, die, and
divide for their idiotic theories and schools.
And nearly everything they said seemed to be in contradiction to the
truth of what I’d seen.
“And yet if you ask me what that was, I
can’t tell you. I can tell you only that
it overwhelmed me, that all the hard and wonderful things of the world are
nothing more than a frame for the spirit, like fire and light, that is the
endless roiling of love and grace. I can
tell you only that beauty cannot be expressed or explained in a theory or an
idea, that it moves by its own law, that it is God’s way of comforting His
broken children.
“Such a point of view does not lend
itself to the lecture hall. No. I returned to the university only after the
Second World War, and, even then, not having been in the resistance, I had
political difficulties.”
“Why weren’t you in the resistance?”
“I was tired. And you have to have a certain
temperament. You have to be fixed on the
point. You need what politicians have,
which is the absence of a sense of mortality.
It comes, like a drug, from adoration and deference. Revolutionaries get it from dreams. They say that nothing is apolitical, that
politics, the bedrock of life, is something from which you cannot depart. I say, fuck them.
I was interested in birds. Are birds apolitical? And I thought the finest thing in my life was
being with my son when he was a baby.
People used to look at us when we went around in the daytime, and wonder
what a man was doing taking care of a child, but every word that came from him,
every expression, every smile, even his tears, were worth a million times an
honorable profession.” [829-30]
Even though Alessandro’s son appears to have an almost
insignificant roll in the novel, I think Alessandro’s life altering
relationship with his son—never dramatized fully in the forefront of the
narrative but as a backdrop—is one of the key themes of the work. It puts the novel of war in a fuller context,
contrasting the struggle of survival and struggle with the tender interaction
of love and passing on of instruction.
Notice how many children appear in the novel. There is Alessandro as a child and the
extended narrative with his father, there are Guarilglia’s three children,
there is Nicolò, who in many ways is still a child (see p. 852 where Alessandro
says he would like to him in his arms “in the way I used to hold my son”), and
there is Alessandro’s son. It is because
of his children that Guarilglia deserts, and because of that it leads to his
execution. That little touch of knowing
the value (“a million times”) of the love of his son is particularly moving,
since I have a little boy and completely understand first hand. It is through the relationships between
fathers and their children that forms a
backbone to the war novel.
In that passage I quote, the bird motif shows up. “Are birds apolitical?” What is Alessandro’s interest in birds? Birds frequently appear in the novel. At the exact middle of the novel, page 430 of
860, Helprin puts in this digressive set piece.
Alessandro is home, in desertion caring for his dying father, and steps
out for a walk and looks across the sky.
The trees on the banks of the Tiber had
not lost their leaves, and as the wind coursed through them it rattled their
brittle foliage and raised fantastic black clouds, for Rome was occupied by
millions of birds, perching on every branch , singing as if to warm the wind,
hopping about in mad distraction on rails and cornices. The starlings, warblers, finches, and
swallows had come from Northern Europe, the Baltic, and Scandinavia, and were
about to cross to Africa, to the deserts and the savannahs, the Congo, and the
Cape of Good Hope.
Their journey was so deep and impulsive
that even at rest they knew only delirium and drive, and their immediate and
explosive rising at any sound or motion was not an indication of fear but
rather of the love of flight. When
someone below merely clapped their hands, when a truck lurched by, or when the
wind itself became anxious or fierce, they rose in a buoyant cloud that hovered
over the trees like a ball of hot smoke and then formed into a wing that
rallied back and forth until it broke into a hundred thousand anarchic flights
and the air was uniformly colored by birds darting on the winds of catastrophe.
The smaller birds rose with a deafening
sound. Sometimes their flickering mass
was shifted by the wind, like a black balloon, but one by one they returned to
their perches, gliding to a landing with the seriousness of new pilots, and
then they jumped and chirped in the branches until they took to the air once
again.
As the warblers and finches filled the
skies, people looked up at the weaving above them and felt their more prosaic
burdens lighten. The starlings were a
plague, almost like bats, though somewhat smoother as they moved. They were the birds that formed the clouds
that held the sunlight and the air, and hovered gently over the swollen
Tiber. Though they seemed to float with great
ease, Alessandro discovered in watching them that the motion of each one was no
less a struggle and no less beautiful for their having been caught up in such a
way that their individual paths were hard to trace, for if you followed one,
and if you had the patience, if your eyes were quick enough to keep him
separate and to stay with him in the dizzying turns, you could see that the way
he took the air was a great thing.
But of all the birds resting in the
trees along the Tiber at the end of October, none was half the flier, half the
sounder, half the whistler, or half the darter of the swallow. The swallows flew in great circles, picking
up speed, and rising like leaves in a whirlwind. The ascended like madness, climbing up and
up, until they flew among the higher and thicker clouds, in a soft and rosy
walls of which they would disappear and from which they suddenly burst in
surprise. Though you could barely see
them—at those altitudes they were only spots
and flecks that vanished as readily as they came into view, as if they
were merely the coloration of the sky—it was very clear that in the high
altitudes they encountered something of extraordinary beauty and import, which
is why they strained so hard to rise and stayed so long.
Coursing from cloud to cloud, in
roseate light, they had escaped, they knew the pure and abstract and were freed
from everything saved light, force, and proportion. The waves of air high above the clouds were
more hypnotic than waves in the sea. The
light was a burst of pink and gold, and the color of the sky ran from China
blue to the pale white that held the sun.
And yet, though they were taken by the
wind, and flew like golden confetti in the clouds, and might have stayed, they
descended, they came down, they whistled like rockets as they fell toward the
ground. They chose to return, as if they
had no choice, and what struck Alessandro above all was the consummate and
decisive beauty of their fall. It was
not a hopeless fall, for as they shot downward they fought the air, and,
ascending momentarily with great strain, they sailed off to left or right, and
circled about on the plateau they had marked, before another dizzying drop,
another spreading of wings, and another partial ascension.
They seemed to fly faster than the
imagination could imagine. They turned
with breathtaking force. They made
perfect curves. The air sang with their
passage.
And when they were finished, these
small birds that had been flecks of gold airborne on light and wind in a place
from which they need never have returned, they settled gently in the dark
spaces among the branches, and here, at the end, they sang a simple and
beautiful song. [p. 430-2]
What is the significance of such an extended passage that
has nothing to do with the story line?
It is interesting that doves figure prominently at the novel’s opening pages. And at the very last passage of the novel,
Helprin ends the book with swallows being killed. And so, Helprin has birds figure in the
opening, the exact center, and the closing of the novel. Clearly he is using them as a symbol. But a symbol for what? A metaphor for our human limitations and
drives? A contrast to human
depravity? A symbol for their
transcending capabilities? Their
similarity to angels and therefore God’s representatives on earth? A symbol for aesthetic perfection? Perhaps all those qualities or a combination
of some. I can’t answer it fully.
And finally let me turn to the motif of colors. In that last chapter Alessandro returns to Giorgione’s
painting, La Tempesta, as he tries to
articulate to Nicolò the meaning of his life story. If you want to see the painting La Tempesta, turn here to my blog on the
painting.
“Someday, Nicolò, when you get the
chance, go to Venice to look at La
Tempesta. Imagine then that, by the
grace of God, the soldier would lose his detachment, and that, by the grace of
God, the storm from which he had emerged would pass, and that by the grace of
God the child in the woman’s arms was his.
“In Giorgione’s painting you find very
little red. The dominant colors are
green and gold: green, of course, being the color of nature, and gold the
divine and tranquil color of which, like perfection, so little exists. The painters of Giorgione’s time, by and
large, spoke in these terms. Red was the
instrument with which they portrayed mortality; green, nature; gold, God. With the notable exception scattered from
painter to painter and school to school, you will find this born out subtly and
simply.
“You may not even have thought of red
as anything more than just a color for decoration, but red is a most precious
sign when you’re at the bedside of someone you’ve just lost, for they haven’t a
trace of it. And red is the color of
real love between a man and a woman. Its
absence from the flesh in the act of love is far more profound than any
protestation or vow, the rest useless and profane.
“I think that had Giorgione painted a
sequel to La Tempesta, in which the
soldier moves to the woman and child, he would have reddened them and made
parts of the landscape reverberate in crimson.
All the gold and the green, the lightening, the reflected sunlight, and
the cool colors of the storm, make for a dream like air. It’s like floating in the clear summer
shallows of the Aegean, or the separation of the body from its sensations prior
to the separation of the senses from the soul before the soul’s ascension. That is the natural course, and, upon it,
Giorgione, and Raphael, and the others, predicated their work. In Dante, too, the colors are refined with
the soul until, at last, one has risen through lighter and lighter blues,
silvers, and golds, and what is left is merely white with a silver glare, far
too bright to see or comprehend.”
“What of it? What of it?” Nicolò asked, thinking that the
old man was ranting, and would not be able to bring his talk of colors into
focus.
“What if you didn’t want to go in that direction?”
Alessandro asked with frightening urgency, so that the hair on Nicolò’s arms
and on the back of his neck stood up.
“I still don’t understand.”
“What if, after having come into the
presence of God, in voiceless perfection, in perpetual stillness that is yoked
to perpetual movement, you asked nonetheless to be released, to go back, to
descend, to go down, to revert. What if
you chose, rather than silver and gold, and white that is too bright to
comprehend, the lively pulse of red?
“I have felt that perfection. I have had a glimpse of the light. I have a notion, perhaps more than a notion,
of eternity in its flawless and unwanting balance. Compared to it, the brightest moments are but
darkness; and singing, like silence. What
great sin do I commit, therefore, if I hold that it is insufficient?
“For when I put my arms around her,
Ariane was red. Her cheeks and the top
of her chest blazed like a burn, or rouge, and the color spread to her breasts
and her shoulders and was only dilute once it had cooled by running, like a
viscous waterfall, down the length of her back.
“The baby followed his mother in this
flesh of her coloring like a chameleon following the light. She averted her eyes. She would not look up. Her lips trembled as if in prayer or
concentration.
“What if that moment had lasted? What metaphysical rapture could equal it for
its substance, its frailty, and its beauty?
Haven’t we been taught that it’s better to live in a simple house
overlooking a garden or the sea than to reside in a palace of great
proportion?”
“What are you saying, Signore?” Nicolò
asked.
“I’m saying that now I know exactly
what I want, and that though I doubt it fits the scheme of things, I’ll chance
it nevertheless.” [p. 832-4]
Colors figure prominently all through the novel. Let’s see how Helprin uses the colors in this
passage. We see here that Helprin is
color coding aspects of human experience: red for physical life, gold for
transcendence, and green for nature.
Here in the end, before Alessandro faces his mortality, he desires the
red of life with his beloved more than even the transcendence of God. But he is asking for the impossible. What Alessandro desires is for that moment of
total perfection in Ariane’s arms to exist eternally. But human beings are not fixed as a painting. “What if that moment lasted?” Alessandro asks. Well, a moment can’t last in life. It always moves on. The son is born, they build a life, a new war
comes about, the son dies, the wife dies, and Alessandro lives his life in exploration
of aesthetics. The red of life seems to be a
passage to the gold of transcendence.
Notice too that Alessandro describes his life in the diction
of how he described the flight of the swallows from the passage at the midpoint
of the novel:
“What if, after having come into the
presence of God, in voiceless perfection, in perpetual stillness that is yoked
to perpetual movement, you asked nonetheless to be released, to go back, to
descend, to go down, to revert. What if
you chose, rather than silver and gold, and white that is too bright to
comprehend, the lively pulse of red?
“Released,” “go back,” “descend,” “go down,” revert.” That runs parallel to the flight of the
swallows of that passage at the novel’s midpoint. And at the last paragraph of the novel, the
birds are splattered in red while Alessandro gives a final exclamation:
To the sight of the swallows dying
in mid air, Alessandro was finally able to add his benediction. “Dear God, I beg of you only one thing. Let me join the ones I love. Carry me to them, unite me with them, let me
see them, let me touch them.” And then
it all ran together like a song. [p.860]
Somehow the colors and the birds intertwine in imagery and
symbol. I do not claim to fully
understand it, but if the logic and aesthetics integral to the novel comprehensively holds
together, then this novel should rank as one of the great novels at the end of
the 20th century.
