A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet 9781442676510

Citation preview

A.M. Klein The Story of the Poet Throughout his career A.M. Klein was concerned primarily with his relationship to his community, seeing himself, and all serious artists, as necessarily shaping and being shaped by the community in which they are rooted. Yet Klein's vision of this relationship was profoundly ambivalent, and this ambivalence is reflected most clearly in his troubled attitude to the two dominant strains in his work, Jewishness and modernism. In this study of A.M. Klein's work, Zailig Pollock focuses on 'the story of the poet,' which Klein retells again and again at major turning points in his career. Pollock argues that the story reflects Klein's attempt to mediate between his dual Jewish and modernist ambitions. While Klein's Jewishness gave him a sense of rootedness and vocation, it placed constraints on his personal and artistic freedom. Modernism offered Klein freedom for personal exploration and artistic expression, but the rootlessness implicit in modernism repelled him. The story of the poet who engages in a strategic inner retreat from a hostile or, at best, indifferent society, eventually returning as a redeemer of the society which spurned him, was first formulated in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens.' It was most fully articulated in 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape' and The Second Scroll, and abandoned only in the despairing works which immediately preceded Klein's final breakdown and silence. This is the first book to survey all of Klein's poetry, prose, and journalism, published and unpublished, and place it in the context of its times. ZAILIG POLLOCK is professor of English, Trent University, and chairman of the A.M. Klein Research and Publication Committee.

This page intentionally left blank

\ll ZAILIG POLLOCK

A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

>vJ

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1994 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-0446-6 (cloth) ISBN 0-8020-7234-8 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Pollock, Zailig A.M. Klein Includes index. ISBN 0-8020-0446-6 (bound) ISBN 0-8020-7234-8 (pbk.) i. Klein, A.M. (Abraham Moses), 1909-1972. I. Title. PS8521.L45Z76 1994 C8n'.52 PR9199.3.K53Z76 1994

C94-93O953-2

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

According to the dialectics of Jewish mysticism, the drive to the essence was at the same time the drive outward. The re-establishment of all things in their proper place, which constitutes redemption, produces a totality that knows nothing of ... a division between inwardness and outwardness. - Gershom Scholem, Towards an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism'

O Seligkeit der kleinen Kreatur die immer bleibt im Schoosse, der sie austrug; O Gliick der Miicke, die noch innen hiipft, selbst wenn sie Hochzeit hat: denn Schoos ist Alles. [Oh, bliss of tiny creatures that remain for ever in the womb that brought them forth! Joy of the gnat, that can still leap within, even on its wedding-day: for womb is all.] - passage marked by Klein in his copy of Rilke's Duino Elegies

The Klein bottle has no inside or outside. What seems to be its inside is continuous with its outside ... Unfortunately it is not possible to construct a Klein bottle in three-dimensional space. - Martin Gardner, 'Mathematical Games,' Scientific American (July 1963)

This page intentionally left blank

vn

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix ABBREVIATIONS xi

1 Unrolling the Scroll 3 2 Escape 10 3 By a Well... over the Wall 19 4 The Prism and the Flying Motes 34 5 Fragments Again Fragmented 76 6 Hallowing the Wilderness 93 7 The Frustral Summit of Extase 113 8 Taiku 146 9 Kebec 175 10 Tikkun 196 11 Ken' 233

12 Where Shall I Cry Bereshith? 253

viii

Contents

NOTES 271 WORKS CITED 301 INDEX 309

•\7^ Acknowledgments

In the decade or so during which I thought about and then wrote this book, I benefited greatly from discussing my ideas with numerous friends and colleagues. It would be impossible to list them all, but I would mention, in particular, my fellow members of the A.M. Klein Research and Publication Committee: Dr Usher Caplan, Dr Mark Finkelstein, Colman Klein, Sandor Klein, Professor Noreen Golfman, Professor Seymour Mayne, Professor Elizabeth Popham, Professor Linda Rozmovits, Professor M.W. Steinberg, and Dr Robert Taylor. Professors Mayne, Popham, and Rozmovits provided helpful comments on all or part of the manuscript, as did Professors Gordon Johnston, Yves Thomas, and Fred Tromly of Trent University, Professor Francis Zichy of the University of Saskatchewan, and Professor Sandra Djwa of Simon Fraser University, whose very detailed and perceptive critique of the volume was particularly valuable. The National Archives of Canada was most helpful in making available the A.M. Klein collection and in providing special use of its facilities. The Trent University Library, and, especially, its inter-library loan department, were also most helpful. The financial assistance provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada was invaluable in furthering my work, and is very much appreciated. My deepest debt of gratitude is, as always, to my wife, Didi, my most critical and most supportive reader.

This page intentionally left blank

Abbreviations

Klein's poems are quoted from his Collected Poems (CP) and are cited by the line numbers given there; unpublished works by Klein are quoted from the Klein Papers in the National Archives and are cited by manuscript page number. The dating notation from the Collected Poems is occasionally employed in the present work; the reader will find a complete explanation of this notation in CP, p. xxxii. WORKS BY KLEIN

BS CP LER NB SS Stories

Beyond Sambation: Selected Essays and Editorials 1928-1955.

Ed. M.W. Steinberg and Usher Caplan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1982 Complete Poems. Ed. Zailig Pollock. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1990 Literary Essays and Reviews. Ed. Usher Caplan and M.W. Steinberg. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1987 Notebooks: Selections from the A.M. Klein Papers. Ed. Zailig Pollock and Usher Caplan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1994 The Second Scroll. New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1951 Short Stories. Ed. M.W. Steinberg. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1983

OTHER ABBREVIATIONS

CJC

Canadian Jewish Chronicle

xii

Abbreviations

JE LOTD

The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls 1906 Usher Caplan. Like One That Dreamed: A Portrait of AM. Klein. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson 1982

A.M. K L E I N : THE STORY OF THE POET

This page intentionally left blank

1 Unrolling the Scroll

What we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, pp. 85-6 Any human movement, whether it springs from an intellectual or even a natural impulse, is impeded in its unfolding by the boundless resistance of the outside world. - Walter Benjamin, 'One-Way Street,' in Reflections, p. 75

This book is about a story, the story of the poet which A.M. Klein tells and retells throughout his career. Storytelling for Klein is an act of selfdefinition, and as his definition of his own role as a poet changes often in unpredictable and sometimes in disturbing ways - so does the form his story takes. But through all its retellings the story of the poet remains recognizably the same, drawing on the same basic set of characters, images, and gestures, and unfolding the same central vision, a vision of the One in the Many. The poet who is the hero of Klein's story is engaged in an unending search for a unifying pattern underlying the bewildering multiplicity of the world, for an 'effective, valid, real ... unity' which 'makes [the world] one' (The Provinces/ 50, 31). Klein's most powerful and complex retellings of the story of this search occur at key moments in his career, when he is forced, often at great psychological cost, to redefine his sense of himself and of his role. The most important of these retellings - for example, 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens,' 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ The Second Scroll (especially 'Gloss Gimel'), and The Bible's Archetypical Poet' - reverberate throughout Klein's

4 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet career, not least in the silences which punctuate this career and ultimately mark its end. Different as these retellings may be from one another in detail and in emphasis, their 'archetypical' pattern remains remarkably consistent. We are first introduced to the poet - or, more broadly, the creative individual - who is 'under interdict/ in a state of complete isolation from a society which views him with fear and contempt. The 'disjected members' of this dismembered society seek to unite behind a series of demagogic 'impostors' who have taken the place of the true poet, exploiting, in a spirit of destruction rather than creation, society's yearning for wholeness: 'since the godlike touch of creation was not theirs, like gods would they be in destructions.' The poet finds himself 'alone; yet not completely alone'; others, his fellow-poets, see through the demagogue and his false relationship to society, but they lack the strength or imagination to present a genuine alternative. Instead, in an effort to deny their sense of isolation, they escape into the 'schizoid solitudes' of impotent and self-hating cliques. Only the real poet acknowledges the fact of his isolation and uses it: rather than yielding to despair and bitterness, he retreats within himself as part of a process of self-discovery. From the perspective of his inner exile he is able, for the first time, to achieve a 'single camera view' of the interrelationship of 'all things' in the world around him. In the final stage of his story, the poet, inspired by this vision, returns, in the hope of transforming his fragmented and alienated society into what it once was and can be again, a genuine, unified community where, 'rooted in the common soil,' he once more has a role to play.1 In 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape' Klein describes the ideal poet as 'unroll[ing] our culture from his scroll' (22), and it is the metaphor of unrolling a scroll or, more generally, of unfolding to which he turns whenever he retells his story of the 'typical role' (The Bible's Archetypical Poet' [1953; LER, p. 143]) of the poet.2 Specifically, as the poet 'unrollfs] our culture from his scroll' or 'explicated] the folded present' (To the Prophets, Minor and Major, a Psalm or Song,' 2o),3 he makes readable to the Many 'the thing that makes them one.' It goes without saying that this portrait is a self-portrait, and it is significant that Klein's own most ambitious attempt to fulfil the poet's role is entitled The Second Scroll, and that at its very centre a scroll is unrolled, both literally and metaphorically. In the third of The Second Scroll's five chapters, Uncle Melech writes a commentary on Michelangelo's paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which he views from a vantage point

Unrolling the Scroll 5 directly beneath the painting of Ezekiel unrolling his scroll (SS, p. 56). It is from this vantage point that Melech presents an 'explication - an unfolding/ beginning with the creation of Eve out of Adam's rib, which represents the unfolding of 'thousands of thousands' of human beings from the 'convolute' (i.e., 'rolled up') Adam (SS, p. 145). For Klein, the role of the poet, to 'explicate' that which is 'folded/ is the role of the critic as well. Klein's poet frequently appears in the guise of a critic or commentator, and Klein's most important works of literary criticism, like his poetry, are conceived of as the unfolding of the One in the Many. Typically, Klein's critical method consists of identifying a central concept out of which he then rigorously and single-mindedly derives all the key elements of the work in question. In The Bible's Archetypical Poet/ for example, he 'draws out' of the story of Joseph the 'paradigmatic implications' of a 'universal law.'4 Sometimes the concept he chooses to unfold is one that in itself suggests the act of unfolding: for example, the 'winding workings of Providence' in the Telemachus' chapter of Ulysses ('A Shout in the Street' [1951; LER, P- 346]), or 'evolution' in The Oxen of the Sun' chapter (The Oxen of the Sun' [1949; LER, p. 290]). Perhaps the clearest example of Klein's critical method is his essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Towards a Psychoanalysis of G.M. Hopkins: The Art of the Rorschach' (NB, pp. 125-8), and, as such, it can serve as a model of the kind of critical approach Klein, no doubt, would have liked taken to his own work, an approach that has as its central assumption the presence of a central unifying principle to be unfolded.5 In this five-page essay, Klein identifies a 'peculiar pattern' which he 'senses ... everywhere' (NB, p. 125) in Hopkins: the Rorschach blot. Hopkins's Rorschach mind ... considers the design of the Rorschach - blot, blur, and symmetry - as the most satisfying exemplar of beauty ... [AJlways the passion of this mind for the speckled and the numinous is accompanied by an equally strong infatuation with the symmetrical ... [T]he design ... unwinds ... unfolds to wavering erratic continuations of itself ... Hopkins' eye (or his mind, or his personality) reduces all things worth commenting on to but one form - the Rorschach blot, the model of internal symmetry frayed with peripheral ambiguity. (NB, pp. 125-6)

The Rorschach blot describes both the principle of the One in the Many ('the model of internal symmetry frayed with peripheral ambiguity')

6 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet and the process of unfolding through which the principle manifests itself ('the design ... unwinds ... unfolds to wavering erratic continuations of itself). And it is precisely this process of unfolding which is demonstrated in the essay, as Klein himself 'unwinds ... unfolds' a central 'design ... to wavering erratic continuations of itself.' The final result of this process is a complete and unified account, unfolded from the image of the Rorschach blot, of the multifarious variety of Hopkins's work (vocabulary, imagery, aesthetic theories, rhythms, rhymes, assonance, rhetorical and syntactical devices), as well as of his life (poetic and religious vocations, homosexuality). Thus, for example, Klein unfolds 'the key-words of Hopkins' aesthetic,... inscape and sake/ from the 'core' and the 'spotted ambience' (NB, p. 127) of the Rorschach blot respectively; and he unfolds Hopkins's use of assonance, as well as his homosexuality, from the blot's symmetry (NB, p. 128). The student of Gerard Manley Hopkins may well doubt whether Klein has, in fact, achieved his ambition of unfolding the totality of Hopkins's life and work from a single unifying principle. For the student of Klein, however, the model of unfolding as total interpretation which informs Towards a Psychoanalysis of G.M. Hopkins' is a compelling one, if only because it is Klein himself who proposes it. It is a dangerous model as well. There is evidence that Klein himself may have sensed the danger of 'the rhetoric of totality and totalization,' which, as Fredric Jameson tells us, has become 'the object of a kind of instinctive or automatic denunciation by just about everybody.'6 He certainly felt the need to defend his method, most notably in his article on The Oxen of the Sun/ his most elaborate critical study, in which he is at pains to counter scepticism about the totalizing tendency of his interpretation. He cites, for example, 'a rule touching the interpretation of documents that a document ought to be understood in that sense whereby all of its words receive meaning,' and he claims that through his analysis 'every figure - at the least - is given purpose and significance' (LER, p. 313). Although Klein's vigorous selfjustification is directed at the 'incredulity and resistance' of 'some readers' (LER, p. 313), it is, perhaps, also an attempt to quell doubts he himself may have had about his method.7 But for the strongest evidence of Klein's doubts, we must look again to the Hopkins study, particularly to its characterization of the Rorschach mind as 'reducing all things worth commenting on to but one form.'8 Klein suggests that this reductive tendency, far from being admirable, is a sign of madness or at least of neurotic obsession, a 'mental idiosyncrasy' (NB, p. 126) by which the

Unrolling the Scroll 7 'subject is afflicted': as 'one senses [the] peculiar pattern everywhere/ one becomes aware of 'some insidious mental agency ... It is as if one were being looked at by a squint-eyed man' (NB, p. 125). But whose insidious mental agency is it? Who is this 'squint-eyed man' who stares at Klein from Hopkins's pages if not Klein himself, as he seeks to unfold every aspect of Hopkins's life and work out of a single all-encompassing 'form' or 'pattern' or 'design' or 'model'? The metaphor of unfolding is valuable for the student of Klein insofar as it provides a genuine insight into Klein's ambition as a poet and critic; but the danger of uncritically adopting the metaphor as a model for interpretation is that it leaves nothing unexplained, nothing unaccounted for - except for what really matters. As Walter Benjamin has said, 'It is likely that no one ever masters anything in which he has not known impotence; ... this impotence comes not at the beginning of or before the struggle with the subject, but in the heart of it';9 yet the metaphor of unfolding, through its very claim to master experience by deriving all phenomena from a single all-explanatory principle, rejects the very possibility of impotence. Simply to unfold Klein's life and work as a unified whole begs the crucial question of how unified and whole that life and work were. Any adequate account of Klein's achievement must go beyond the metaphor of unfolding and its claim of mastery, to acknowledge the impotence in the heart of Klein's struggle with his subject - and Klein's growing awareness of this impotence. The impotence in the heart of Klein's struggle is an impotence in the face of history. No writer was more concerned with the history of his time than Klein was, and the story which he tells and retells never ceases to respond to changing historical circumstances. Yet Klein's ultimate purpose in unfolding his story is not so much to make sense of history as to deny its power:10 specifically, its power to disrupt the inevitable unfolding of the One in the Many as embodied in tradition and community. Klein sees history as the enemy of unfolding, as the golem which 'lumbers on / over men falling and fallen circumstance,' reducing the 'fold[ed]' name of God to a meaningless 'guttural diphthong.'11 The aim of Klein's story is to defeat the golem of history. To cite Mikhail Bakhtin's characterization of the 'energetic type of biography,' in Klein's story historical reality is deprived of any determining influence on character as such, it does not shape or create it, it merely manifests it. Historical reality is an arena for the disclosing and unfolding of human characters - nothing more.12

8 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Yet despite Klein's efforts to deprive historical reality of any determining influence, the golem of history lumbers on, everywhere at work in Klein's unfolding story of the poet, though everywhere denied. For, again and again in this story, we sense a countercurrent of scepticism, an inescapable awareness that the metaphor of unfolding assumes the presence of a principle of unity which seems strikingly absent from Klein's own historical experience. A counter-metaphor is required, one which will acknowledge the shattering impact of history rather than deny it. As was the case with the metaphor of unfolding, it is Klein himself who provides us with the counter-metaphor we need: re-membering. In contrast to the metaphor of unfolding, with its implicit confidence in the One as a presence which is independent of the determining influence of historical reality, and which the poet simply discovers and reveals, re-membering evokes an absence which the poet must confront and must struggle to overcome. Whether or not the One was a real presence at some period in the past, here and now it certainly is not. The world which Klein's poet experiences, as opposed to the one he envisions, is characterized not by wholeness, but by fragmentation. It is a world of 'pulver' ('Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens'), in which the scroll of our culture is in 'shreds' (Talisman in Seven Shreds'), and in which the human body and the body of language have been cruelly dismembered. Our only hope, then, of gaining access to an absent Oneness is through a creative act of memory which enables us to reconstruct or, to use Klein's term, re-member the dismembered body of the One. This metaphor suggests a much less sanguine view of the One in the Many, not only because it emphasizes the absence of the One, but also because it leaves open the possibility that the sense of lost unity may be merely a form of nostalgia, and that the ambition to recreate this lost unity is perhaps little more than a delusion.13 Klein's most explicit and disturbing statement of the metaphor of remembering occurs in 'Meditation upon Survival/ the first direct response to the Holocaust in his poetry, in which he speaks of himself as a 'severed head' (22) 'longing for its members' re-membering' (24-5). Klein's coinage 're-membering' (perhaps owing something to the Joycean 'redismembers,' which Klein marked in his copy of Finnegans Wake)14 recurs in 're-membered bones' in The Second Scroll (SS, p. 34), where the reference is again to the dismemberment of the Jewish people in the Holocaust. But although the word 're-member' occurs, to my knowledge, only twice in Klein's work/5 the concept which it represents frequently makes itself felt as a counterpoint to the metaphor of unfold-

Unrolling the Scroll 9 ing, most notably in 'Gloss Gimel' where Michelangelo's portrayal of the oneness of humanity - 'the one universal stream of everybody's blood' (SS, p. 139) - immediately evokes for Uncle Melech a vision of a dismemberment beyond re-membering: 'the human form divine ... broken down to its named bones, femur and tibia and clavicle and ulna and thorax and pelvis and cranium' (SS, p. 140) in the Nazi death camps. Like Uncle Melech's unfolding of the Sistine Chapel, all of Klein's major statements of the poet's role, though primarily conceived of in terms of the metaphor of unrolling a scroll, inevitably evoke its dark opposite, the far from reassuring metaphor of re-membering. This duality marks Klein as very much a man of his age. Alan Wilde, for example, identifies a 'perception of fragmentation ... balanced by ... [a] vision of oneness or fusion'16 as characteristic of the age of modernism. But if Wilde's 'portrait of the modernist artist as absolute ironist' recalls Klein's portrait of the poet as unfolder/re-memberer, there is one crucial difference between the two. Klein never achieved, or sought, the balance of which Wilde speaks, the 'equal poise of opposites' between two 'simultaneously valid' ways of 'deal[ing] with the phenomenal world.' For Klein the Vision of oneness' and the 'perception of fragmentation' are in perpetual, agonizing conflict. In the pages that follow, I will be telling the story of the central ambition of Klein's career, the ambition to unfold his vision of the One in the Many, as it is expressed over and over again in his own story of the poet. But, to cite Walter Benjamin once more, the story I will be telling will 'brush [Klein's storyl against the grain,'17 emphasizing the ways in which his ambition was repeatedly shaped, reshaped, and finally frustrated altogether by history. The two epigraphs to this chapter point to the difference between Klein's story of the poet and my own. The first - 'What we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us' - precisely describes the concept which is crucial to Klein's story in all its forms, the concept of a central unifying principle with the power to transcend whatever opposes it 'from the outside.' But for the story which I have chosen to tell, a more suitable epigraph is the second: 'Any human movement, whether it springs from an intellectual or even a natural impulse, is impeded in its unfolding by the boundless resistance of the outside world.' For better and for worse, Klein was the product of an unceasing dialectic - between his yearning for a One which would unfold in defiance of the outside world of history, and the boundless resistance of that world to such an unfolding. It is this Klein whom I seek to re-member.

2

Escape

Klein's earliest poetry, it can be argued, falls outside the scope of this study, since, at the beginning of his development as a writer, his story of the poet had not yet taken shape, even in a rudimentary form. Yet, in these works, dating from about 1926-8, when Klein was in his late teens, we can already sense the tensions which eventually drove him to formulate his story, tensions which the story would never entirely resolve. Although the story itself is absent from the poetry of the period, with the benefit of hindsight we seem to catch tantalizing glimpses of it in a number of passages. Perhaps the most significant of these passages are the ones in which the world is presented as a text to be read/ and, even more to the point, as a scroll to be unrolled, as in 'the scroll of sky/ which occurs in both 'Auto-da-fe' (18) and 'Escape' (87). This 'notation imagery'2 clearly points forward to Klein's conception of the poet as decipherer ('Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens,' 64), unroller of the scroll ('Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ 22), explicator ('To the Prophets, Minor and Major, a Psalm or Song/ 20), or interpreter (The Bible's Archetypical Poet' [1953; LER, p. 144]). In addition to passages such as these, there are several others in which Klein seems briefly to touch on crucial aspects of the story which he will more fully develop in the years to come. In To Keats/ for example, Klein's very first 'portrait of the poet/ he establishes an image to which he will return again and again in his exploration of the poet's alienation from the world around him, the image of diseased lungs: ... death began in birth. Thy twin-branched lungs burned red - wast drought and dearth Thy breast wast thy funereal pyre -

(4-6)

Escape 11 Compare, for example, Spinoza's 'consumptive fretting' in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' (129), 'the daily larcenies of the lungs' in 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape' (157), as well as the recurrent image of diseased lungs as a dying 'inverted tree' in prose works of the early forties (see pp. 128-36 below). A second example is a passage in 'Auto-da-fe/ in which a young lover tries to seduce his beloved by evoking the future generations whose begetting will be prevented if she refuses him: I feel as if within my heart I bore My clamouring generations seeking through My love to live, and I them swallow ere They find their birth ...

(501-4)

There are several parallel passages in Klein's later works in which procreation is seen as an act of unfolding which it is a crime to interrupt. In 'Sonnet Unrhymed/ which Klein referred to as his 'poem on contraceptives' ('From the "Raw Material" File' [NB, p. 49]), the poet has a post-coital vision of many the bodies, my own birthmark bearing, and many the faces, like my face ... They beg creation. From the far centuries they move against the vacuum of their murder ...

(5-6, 9-10)

A note, probably dating from about the same time as 'Sonnet Unrhymed,' reads: 'Our glory swims away in contraceptives' ('Selected Notes and Fragments' [NB, p. 183]). 'Gloss Gimel' describes 'the generations that should have been born [and] are not born' as the result of the Holocaust, 'frustrate generation after frustrate generation' (SS, p. 145). And Klein's explication of the 'Oxen of the Sun' chapter of Ulysses cites Joyce's comment that 'the idea [is] the crime committed against fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition' ('The Oxen of the Sun' [1949; LER, p. 289])But perhaps the most extraordinary example of such apparent anticipations of the story of the poet is a passage near the end of 'Manuscript: Thirteenth Century': ... Fair Blanche it was Who at the midnight from the garden tore The herbs malevolent and the poisonous grass;

12 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Fair Blanche who made a dust of hellebore And powdered roots against the heathen brass, Initiate in worse than devil's lore, The brain-touched Blanche who sang her screech-owl tune Plucking mandragora in the light o' the moon ...

(201-8)

There are very striking parallels between this passage and the conclusion of 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens/ Klein's first major statement of the story of the poet: Think of Spinoza, rather, plucking tulips Within the garden of Mynheer, forgetting Dutchmen and Rabbins, and consumptive fretting, Plucking his tulips in the Holland sun, Remembering the thought of the Adored, Spinoza, gathering flowers for the One, The ever-unwedded lover of the Lord.

(127-33)

The parallels go beyond the obvious ones of the garden settings and the acts of 'plucking' 'in the light o' the moon' and 'in the Holland sun.' There is the incantatory repetition of names ('Fair Blanche ... Fair Blanche ... Blanche' / 'Spinoza ... Spinoza'), the use, for similar incantatory effect, of a series of syntactically parallel subordinate clauses ('who ... tore... who made ... who sang' / 'plucking ... forgetting ... plucking ... gathering'), even curiously similar rhymes - 'hellebore/lore' and 'Adored/Lord/ 'tune/moon' and 'sun/One.' Finally, the references to 'dust' and 'powder' in the earlier passage point forward to the central image of 'pulver' in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens'; just as the metaphor of Spinoza as 'the ever-unwedded lover' points back to Fair Blanche, abandoned by the lover who had promised to wed her. Nothing, of course, could be more different than the pathetic madwoman in 'Manuscript: Thirteenth Century' and the serene, triumphant philosopher in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens'; the parallels, nonetheless, are undeniably real. Having noted these parallels, however, one must go on to point out that there is nothing else in 'Manuscript: Thirteenth Century' which seems to foreshadow 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' or any of Klein's other versions of the story of the poet. Moreover, this one passage which does seem to do so is not particularly striking, except in hindsight. It is simply one of many stanzas, which neither stands out

Escape 13 from the poem as a whole nor plays an especially important role in it. There is no reason to think that anyone coming upon it, or upon any of the other passages which I have cited, without Klein's story of the poet already firmly in mind, would consider it worthy of note. One should not allow such passages to blind us to the radical discontinuity between the works which precede Klein's formulation of his story of the poet and the later ones which are shaped by it. If we attempt to ignore this discontinuity, in an attempt 'to unify, to discover the pattern, to make all aspects cohere' (MS 6942) - imitating, in effect, Klein's own method of total explication - we are not really unfolding a unifying pattern; we are imposing such a pattern, re-membering it from our knowledge of Klein's career as a whole. One could even argue that the scattered occurrences in Klein's early poems of images or ideas or phrases that seem to anticipate his story of the poet not only fail to provide evidence for continuity between these works and the ones which are to follow; they strongly suggest the contrary. That is, their very inertness - Klein's inability, at this stage, to make anything of them, to develop their potential in terms of his story of the poet - only serves to emphasize how remote the story is from his concerns. This is hardly surprising, for nothing could be farther from the young Klein's mind than telling a story about the reintegration of the poet into his community. Rather, his main concern is to escape from his community. By the time Klein began to write poetry, he had drifted away from the orthodoxy of his parents and Jewish teachers, who had hoped he would become a rabbi - and the resolutely secular, inward-turning poetry of this period is, no doubt, a kind of declaration of independence from communal expectations, a search for an alternative vocation. The David Lewis Papers in the National Archives contain a memorable portrait of Klein at precisely this stage in his career: One Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), I believe in late 1925,1 called Klein out of the synagogue he was attending out of respect to his parents and we went for a walk in the east end of the city, - the French-Canadian section. We had decided to become acquainted with that part of Montreal. Klein's French was already fair, mine just beginning. We entered a restaurant and ordered sandwiches, - he with a gesture of daring and I quite matter-of-factly because my family was not in the habit of observing religious holidays. He began to fidget a little and pulled a paper out of his pocket saying it was a poem he had just written. It was the first one he had shown me - perhaps the first he had actually

14 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet worked on to the point where he felt free to expose it to his friend. To my knowledge the poem was never published and I don't recall it except that it was a romantic love poem.3

If the retreat from community in Klein's early works is a sign of adolescent rebellion, it is more than that as well. It is, to use one of Klein's favourite images, the first swing of a pendulum whose alternations would continue throughout his career, as he sought, on the one hand, to live up to the public role that he came to accept as his duty and, on the other, to seek refuge from this role in the private world of his art. It would not be long before the pendulum began to swing in the other direction, as Klein became increasingly involved in public life in response to profoundly disturbing historical events at home and abroad. But, even before Klein began to formulate his story of the poet in response to these historical pressures, there is evidence of his growing dissatisfaction with the kind of poetry he was writing. It is this dissatisfaction which would eventually lead him to his first tentative attempts to redefine his role through his story of the poet. Klein's dissatisfaction is, no doubt, in part, simply a young poet's selfcritical response to what is often not very impressive apprentice work. Klein's earliest poems, especially those which can be confidently dated to the very beginning of the period, suffer from all the faults which one would expect in the work of a beginner, even of one with as much promise as Klein: awkward rhymes and rhythms; odd contortions of grammar and syntax, often at the cost of sense; clumsy use of traditional forms without much understanding of their potential; recherche, even grotesque, imagery and vocabulary; derivativeness, especially from Romantic and Victorian models, etc. The following passage from 'Autoda-fe' exemplifies all of these faults: All day the sun had burned and now the soot Of night remained, with still a glowing coal, The moon: the moon round which collected moot Of clouds formed eyelids round the aureole Moon-eye; such lids where rain-tears festering stole And puffed them soon upon the earth to drain ... Now Pascal saw the clouds dark pleat and fold One lid on lidded fold; and he would fain Seek Bessie ere she would be sought by downpoured rain ...

(262-70)

Escape 15 However, it was not long before Klein began to leave behind the worst crudities of his very earliest works. A number of poems which can be dated towards the end of this period, are, at a minimum, technically quite competent, and, although Klein has not yet found his voice in these works, he is certainly capable of taking a more critical stand towards his models, even in the act of imitating them. But, as Klein's work shows a growth in mastery and critical judgment, his sense of dissatisfaction seems, if anything, to increase. There is evidence in the poetry and prose of the period that what troubles the young Klein goes deeper than technical inadequacies; it is his sense that there is something radically wrong with the kind of poetry he is writing, that it lacks a meaningful, unifying centre. In one of his articles for the McGHl Daily, 'Verbum Sat' (1927), Klein draws up a comic, but nonetheless highly relevant, indictment against his own use of language: [H]e has concocted a beverage which inebriates with the multiplicity of its components;... with a fiat of prolixity he has created a world which possesses longitude without latitude ... his immoral inclinations ... emanate from the very centre of his being ... No doubt [he] will argue ... that [his] lengthened lingo snares complete epistemological entities in the intricacy of a polysyllable, and that in the amalgamation of several verbs into a single philological essence ... [he] make[s] a word suffice. (LER, p. 156)

What is particularly interesting about this passage is that, in it, Klein draws up his indictment of the corruption of language in terms of the One in the Many. The passage alludes repeatedly to the Many ('multiplicity,' 'prolixity,' 'entities/ 'several') unfolding or 'emanating]' from the One ('a fiat/ 'the very centre/ 'a single ... essence/ 'a word'). But in this passage, and in the essay as a whole, the concept of the One in the Many is evoked in a spirit of irony: Klein's point is that language has become a Many without a One, an act of self-elaboration, unfolding nothing but its own lack of a centre. To use a term from a later period of Klein's literary criticism, Klein's early poetry is excessively 'centrifugal' (The Poem as Circular Force' [1948; LER, pp. 183-4]). The poems' ostensible subjects are mere occasions, starting points, for the poet to spin out kaleidoscopic patterns of language which have little or no contact with the central theme from which they supposedly emanate. Syntactically, these poems tend to consist of series of clauses tacked on

16 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet to one another with little attempt at organization, logical or emotional; their imagery is usually decorative rather than functional; and their diction constantly strives for richness rather than for coherence. In 'Wonderlust' (1927), another one of Klein's McGill Daily articles, he describes this centrifugal tendency, and gives some examples: A bread to us is not so many calories of food-energy but a martyred field of waving wheat in tabloid form ... flowers are not pre-eminently subjects for the botanists, rather are they the princes of the earth taking their morning airing, wearing their coronets of silver or gold or ruby or sapphire ... (LER, p. 160)

If we compare this passage to one from a mature work, such as 'Grain Elevator/ which similarly consists of a list of elaborate images in rich and evocative language, we are struck by an important difference. In 'Grain Elevator/ the centrifugal flight outward is answered by a centripetal return inward, towards a centre, a One, which unifies and gives meaning to the Many: It's because it's bread. It's because bread is its theme, an absolute. Because always this great box flowers over us with all the coloured faces of mankind ...

(29-32)

In 'Wonderlust/ Klein characterizes poetry as 'a rampage of imagination, a stampede of the fantasy, a capering of the inventive spirit, ingenuity let loose, prancing/ arising out of a desire to escape from a sense of emptiness by filling the void with endlessly proliferating words; poems written in this spirit are little more than 'the rescues of boredom' (LER, p. 160). The poem 'Boredom/ which appeared in the same issue of the McGill Daily as 'Wonderlust/ also takes up this theme ('Blase nihilities encompass me ... I will contrive to fill days with strange words' [i, 9]), and Klein returns to it, directly or indirectly, again and again in his early poems, most notably in the three most ambitious works of the period, 'Auto-da-fe/ 'Haunted House/ and 'Escape.' 'Auto-da-fe/ a long narrative in Spenserian stanzas, in obvious imitation of Keats's 'Eve of St. Agnes/ is the earliest and least mature of these poems, the one which reflects the inner conflicts of the young Klein in their rawest form. As such, it provides particularly clear evidence of his confused struggle to find a role for himself and his poetry.

Escape 17 The poem is loosely based on Klein's relationship with his future wife, Bessie Kozlov, although it ends on a purely fictional note when the two lovers, Pascal and Bessie, after finding refuge from a storm in an old abandoned house, die in an 'ecstasy of tight embrace' (520) as it bursts into flame. It is this climactic Liebestod which gives the poem its name, for auto-da-fe refers to the executions of Jews, generally by being burned at the stake, at the hands of the Inquisition. Like much of 'Auto-da-fe,' this attempt to glorify an adolescent love story by evoking a particularly horrible episode in Jewish history is in questionable taste; but, beyond that, it does point to an unresolved problem in the poem and in the early poetry as a whole. 'Auto-da-fe' is Klein's most explicit declaration of independence from the traditional expectations of his orthodox parents: Pascal's love for Bessie is an act of rebellion against 'all the tenets and the lore / Which grew on sires' graves' (77-8). But it is significant that, in attempting to give tragic resonance to the lovers' defiance of community and tradition through an allusion to the martyrdom of the auto-da-fe, Klein is driven back to the very traditions of the Jewish community which he is trying to escape. He has nothing else to put in their place. 'Haunted House/ a later and much more accomplished poem than 'Auto-da-fe,' seems to carry on where the earlier poem left off. Like 'Auto-da-fe/ it describes two lovers seeking shelter from a storm in an old house. But, whereas in 'Auto-da-fe' the house and the storm seem little more than faded Romantic props, in this poem they have a more interesting, symbolic function: the house 'haunted by fictions' (78) represents a futile attempt to impose meaning on the emptiness of existence, to 'adorn ... nihilities with frills' (83). This house is repeatedly assaulted by the storm, which breaks (5, 53,115), tatters (18), wrenches (25, 100), shatters (19), crumples (72), and tears (99) it. In all of these images of mindless violence we sense the fragmentation of language itself, which becomes An inky hieroglyph spattered Against a parabolic wall ...

(20-1)

'Haunted House' ends with a silence which is indifferent to the lovers' experiences or desires, and which seems to mean nothing at all. Klein's most elaborate vision of a fragmented language out of contact with any genuine unifying centre is the dramatic poem 'Escape.' Against the background of the Easter moon, we are introduced to two

i8 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet lovers who, at first glance, seem to be simply somewhat more talkative versions of the lovers in 'Auto-da-fe/ Talking is virtually all that they do: their conversation consists of verbal contests in which each one seeks to outdo the other in the elaboration of their protestations of love. These contests are interrupted at two points by the sardonic comments of a disembodied poet speaking from a balcony, who, in the first instance, mockingly contrasts his own egotistical self-sufficiency ('Always I love ego' [181]) with the lovers' claims of mutual devotion, and, in the second, heaps scorn on their attempt to impose their vision of love on the indifferent world around them ('Must all creation be an amorous sign?' [316]). These latter comments drive the lovers to everincreasing heights of rhetoric, until, in the midst of a seemingly endless series of variations on the theme of the beauty of the moon, they are interrupted by guards from the insane asylum from which, we learn, they have recently escaped. The hidden poet has the last laugh; singing the nursery rhyme 'Humpty Dumpty,' he drops an Easter egg from his balcony. The lunatic lovers mistake the shattered egg for the moon, and, as they vainly attempt to put its fragments together again, the poem ends. 'Escape' is Klein's most successful presentation of the situation he himself faces as a poet. The debate between the lunatic lovers and the cynical (and perhaps equally lunatic) poet reflects a debate within Klein himself. If 'Auto-da-fe,' in its clumsy way, attempts to celebrate one kind of escape, an escape from the traditional demands of family and community into a substitute world which the lovers create on their own, 'Haunted House' and, even more, 'Escape' make it clear that any freedom Klein might have thought he was attaining is illusory: cut off from any sense of community, he feels trapped in the web of his own meaningless rhetoric, which merely confirms and reconfirms his sense of isolation and fragmentation. When the escape from the insane asylum of language, for which Klein seems to yearn in 'Escape,' finally comes, it will be, like all the major developments in Klein's career, an escape which is also a return, a movement forward which is also a movement back. Specifically, it will be a movement simultaneously back into the familiar world of Jewishness which he has temporarily tried to leave behind, and forward into the new world of modernism. As a result of this double movement, Klein's story of the poet will begin to take shape.

3

By a Well... over the Wall

As for modernism in Canada, it was finished before we got there. We never looked into the eye of the storm. - Louis Dudek, 'Can Lit Notes I/ in Metcalf, ed., The Bumper Book, p. 41 The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. - Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History/ in Illuminations, pp. 258-9

Near the end of 1927, Klein finally abandoned the Romantic themes and techniques with which he had become increasingly dissatisfied. The crucial factor in his decision to do so seems to have been the influence of the group of young writers whom he met that year at McGill A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, Leon Edel, and Leo Kennedy - who helped to spread the gospel of modernism through their literary magazine, the McGill Fortnightly Review. But, unlike the members of the Fortnightly group, Klein did not immediately go on to adopt a modernist idiom after he had abandoned Romanticism. The poetry which he wrote in the years immediately following his introduction to modernism, poetry on predominantly Jewish themes,1 shows no direct evidence of modernist influence; indeed, it seems resolutely anti-modernist in its style and concerns. However, if Klein's commitment to Jewish concerns stood in the way of his adopting the stances and idioms of modernism with the

20 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet same alacrity as his contemporaries at McGill, it was precisely this commitment that eventually led him to engage the central issues of modernism more fully than any of them, although always with profound reservations. The appeal of modernism to Klein's contemporaries at McGill is obvious. The 'historicist feeling/ characteristic of modernism in all its forms, 'that we live in totally novel times, that contemporary history is the source of our significance'2 was immensely attractive to a group of poets who saw themselves living in an 'age of change/ as A.J.M, Smith put it, 'of a change that is taking place with a rapidity unknown in any other epoch.'3 It was modernism that seemed to offer these poets the best opportunity to break away from 'that mollycoddle imitative school of Dominion poetasters, who have been variously dubbed as quasisemi-pseudo-Victorian' ('Mortal Coils' [1934; LER, p. 204]), and to discover new voices which would be adequate to the new reality which they saw around them in Canada. However, without necessarily accepting Louis Dudek's blanket dismissal of modernism in Canada -'it was finished before we got there' - it seems clear that the socioeconomic conditions which gave rise to modernism in Europe were so remote from Canada of the twenties that modernism became something very different in the hands of the young poets of the Fortnightly group, losing much of its original raison d'etre in the process. The European founders of modernism were faced with an unprecedented social and cultural crisis; feeling themselves 'under specific, apparently historical strain/4 they came to share, despite all their differences, 'apocalyptic, crisis-centred views of history.'5 This is especially true of the modernists who meant the most to Klein throughout his career - Kafka and Rilke, Pound and Eliot, the Hebrew poet Bialik, and, above all, Joyce. In Canada, however, the situation was very different. Reaching Canada at a time of emerging nationalism, 'the modernist movement, which devoted its energy to rejection of the old and assertion of the new, found relatively little to reject ... There were few decaying structures to topple, and the social impact of technological progress, for the most part, took the form of a spirit of optimistic change accompanying the process of nation building.'6 The distance between this youthful optimism and the profound pessimism which marked European modernism is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the Canadian response to the First World War. Although the origins of modernism preceded the First World War, it was a commonplace that the war was the death blow to the Old Order which

By a Well ... over the Wall 21 modernism had set out to subvert. This, for example, is the view which F.R. Scott expresses in the most important discussion of modernism by any of the Fortnightly group, 'New Poems for Old': Then came the war... [The] loss of faith in the pre-war outlook on life predisposed [poetsl to an abandonment of pre-war literary conventions ... It only needed the failure of the beatific visions of the 'reconstruction' period, on top of the intellectual ferment caused directly by the war, to complete a shifting of beliefs the like of which has probably not been experienced in Christendom since the Renaissance ... [N]othing, not even poetry, could ever be the same.7

Scott and his Canadian contemporaries were far from unique in their conviction that the First World War had marked the beginning of a new age in world history and civilization. What does distinguish their response to the war from that of the Europeans and, to a lesser extent, the Americans is the spirit of optimism with which, as Canadians, they greeted this new age. For, as Sandra Djwa points out, the First World War played a uniquely positive role in the development of a sense of national identity in Canada, one with no parallels in Europe or America: An immediate cause of the new national consciousness was Canada's participation in the Great War. Despite an appalling loss of life, and internal dissension as a result of the conscription crisis, the national mood was buoyant. With the conclusion of the war, Prime Minister Robert Borden had sought and obtained an independent seat for Canada at the Peace Table at Versailles, thus confirming in 1919 Canada's status as a separate nation state and reinforcing a new sense of national consciousness. This nationalist spirit accelerated, as it did after Confederation, a desire for a truly Canadian art and literature... In Canada, as in some of the eastern European countries where romanticism came late and where the introduction of modernism coincided with the revival of the nationalist spirit, the modern was also the buoyantly romantic.8

Nothing could be further from the Toss of faith' which Scott identifies as the European response to the war and as the crucial stimulus for the development of modernism in Europe. In the two or three years following his encounter with the Fortnightly group, Klein, to a large extent, shared their 'buoyantly romantic' attitude to modernism as well as their 'nationalist spirit' - although the focus of Klein's nationalism was primarily Jewish or Zionist rather than Canadian. However, from the beginning there were other forces at work in Klein's

22 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet response to modernism which ensured that it would differ radically from that of his McGill contemporaries. To begin with, Klein's sense of the historical crisis at the root of modernism had little to do with the First World War. Rather, for Klein this sense of crisis was both more diffuse and more immediate. From his perspective as a Jew, the First World War was simply a single episode in one of the profoundest crises which his people had endured in their history. This crisis, which began in 1881 with the outbreak of pogroms against the Jews of the Russian empire in response to the assassination of the reformist Czar Alexander II, would continue unabated until it reached its climax in Hitler's destruction of the Jewish communities of eastern Europe, with whom Klein felt an intense kinship. The unfolding of these terrible events impressed themselves on Klein's imagination from his earliest childhood: in particular, the memory of the stories, which he had heard as a child, of the pogroms which swept the Jewish communities of eastern Europe during 1918-20 still had the power, many years later, to 'evoke' his 'entire childhood' for him (SS, p. 11, note). Klein's experience as a Jew, then, enabled him to appreciate the intensity of the modernist reaction against the continuing chaos and violence of contemporary history, with an immediacy which was simply not possible for his fellow writers at McGill. But, paradoxically, this experience also made him more wary than they of the characteristic modernist reaction to this history, which Scott celebrates: Not till the modernist movement began was the proper independence of poetry re-established. The modernist... realizes that poetry, like music or painting, dwells in a world of its own creation, obeying no laws but its own and paying homage to no external god, king, or country. He discards the ulterior motive; poetry shall have no aim but to express faithfully and in the most fitting language his deepest emotional experiences and his clearest vision of the world about him.9

The obverse of Scott's celebration of artistic freedom is his contempt for the outmoded Victorian concept of the poet as 'Seer': He must have a Message. His verse had to be inspired by a search for the good and the beautiful, a love of country (his own), and an earnest desire to lighten the burden sorrow and suffering which oppressed his fellow creatures.10

Coming from a poet as engage as Scott, these comments serve to emphasize the appeal of the doctrine of artistic autonomy to Klein's

By a Well ... over the Wall 23 McGill contemporaries. They also serve to emphasize how very different, in the end, was Klein's view of the poet's role from their own - for while, as a modernist, Klein shared Scott's enthusiasm for the 'independence of poetry [which] dwells in a world of its own creation,' as a Jew he was unable to share Scott's contempt for the Poet/Seer with his 'message' and his 'love of... his own.' In this Klein is fully typical of many Jewish writers who sought to reconcile a deep attraction to modernism with an equally deep attraction to a traditional Jewish vision of the poet and his role which modernism seemed to deny. As David G. Roskies argues, from the very beginnings of Jewish modernism there had existed 'along with a modernist trend that absorbed the techniques and sensibilities of European culture... a countermovement to return to the sources of Jewish literary tradition.'11 The reason for this ambivalence is clear: although Jewish writers found much they could recognize in modernism's vision of historical crisis, there was much to disquiet them in the attempt of most of the great modernists to transcend historical crisis through the power of the imagination. As Robert Alter points out, the Jews have had no tradition of aesthetics as an autonomous realm... Recalling a heritage that stressed sharpness of exegesis and legal argument, moral wisdom grounded in belief, Jews have generally found chill comfort in art as they saw themselves flung into the maw of modern history, too often its principal victims. In their vulnerable position of exposure and deracination, Jews have frequently proved to be the modernists par excellence, but, at least in some notable instances, they retain a lingering suspicion that the whole dramatic agony of modernity is not worth the candle, that there is something perhaps bogus and certainly futile in the effort to be authentically modern through a heroism of the imagination.12

The option of a permanent retreat from history into the private world of the imagination, Scott's 'world of its own creation/ is simply not available to those modern Jewish writers who have retained a strong sense of their Jewish identity: At a time when rabbis, the traditional spokesmen and legislators, were losing their authority by virtue of being the traditional authority, the secular writers were gaining stature, perhaps in inverse ratio. The role of imaginative art, deprived, by halakhic Judaism of any independent value, expanded among Jews to the degree that they adapted to their secular environments. Writers filled part of the vacuum in spiritual authority and were looked to as fountainheads of inspiration ...13

24 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Such writers feel themselves inextricably bound to a community and its traditions, which sustain them and which it is their responsibility to sustain in turn. It is this attitude to community and its traditions, with its emphasis on interdependence and continuity, which marks Klein's imagination as peculiarly Jewish, as much in works which have no direct connection with Jewish themes as in ones which do. This is particularly clear, for example, in The Bible's Archetypical Poet' (1953): Joseph [is] blessed to be even a fruitful bough by a well. Not isolated, not alone, not altogether self-sustained, does the poet live; he lives hard by a refreshing and ever renewed source of water; he lives and labours within a tradition. The spider weaves entirely from his entrails; but all he creates is a web. The ant, to whom one bids all sluggards go, the ant, no mean maker of artifacts, he works within a society. Thus Jacob, addressing Joseph, conceals his unspoken reproach within the very heart of his blessing, and by indirection enjoins his favourite son from sundering himself from his brothers, themselves, in their way, the makers of a tradition. The bough is fruitful only near the well; removed therefrom, it thirsts, is parched, and withers away. (LER, pp. 147-8)14

Throughout his career, Klein celebrates tradition as a source of continuity, which links poet and community, and which protects both from the chaos of history. In 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' [version 2], for example, it is tradition, the 'ethic and the lights eternal / Kindled upon the wick of the renewing brain' (148-9), which has enabled the poet to withstand the 'pandemonium, / ... lunatic changes, [and] capricious play' (146-7) of history, and to 'endure ... / As evil whirled about [him] and about' (152-3). A similar point is made in 'Had Not Thy Torah Been My Delight...' (1945), where Klein contrasts the responses to the Holocaust of German Jewry, which had lost its traditions, and of Polish Jewry, which had not: It does not take much shrewdness to see why German Jewry crumbled - in a spiritual sense - so miserably before the onslaught of the Nazis, and why Polish Jewry - even to the last mortal quiver - knew itself superior to its taskmasters. Polish Jewry had intellectual and spiritual resources to fall back upon. (LER, p. 42)

For Klein, the crumbling of German Jewry provides a lesson of special importance to the Jewish writer, a lesson which, he feels, the American

By a Well... over the Wall 25 Jewish writers of his generation, in their scrambling after the strange gods of modernism, have failed to heed. In Those Who Should Have Been Ours' (1945), he condemns those writers for failing to take up the role which history has thrust upon them - to 'contribute... something towards the preservation and advancement of the tradition in which they remain, whether they would or not, inextricably involved' (LER, pp. 246-7), and he urges that 'in the light of current history they survey again the treasures of their heritage' (LER, p. 251). He develops this theme in even stronger terms in a draft of a letter to Karl Shapiro (27 December 1948 [MS 422-4]): 'One can either ... associate one's Jewishness with all the negativism history ... has appended to it; or one can feel oneself, and develop oneself as part of a great tradition, a tradition whose fruitfulness is by no means exhausted.' But the Jewish writer who takes up the challenge of 'the continuation of [his] culture' must take up another challenge as well, the challenge of maintaining some sort of balance between the demands of community and tradition, on the one hand, and of his own vision and need for artistic independence, on the other. In The Bible's Archetypical Poet,' Klein paints a portrait of a poet who has successfully met this challenge: Rooted in the common soil, he turns his eyes to new directions. He is, indeed, a fruitful bough; he springs from earth fed secretly by a well; but his branches run over the wall. Thus are the ideas of convention and revolt, of tradition and innovation, conjured up in the single image of Jacob's benediction. (LER, p. 148)

Most commentators on Klein would accept this passage as a more or less accurate description of Klein's own achievement. William Walsh, for example, argues that, because of Klein's 'vital sense of a continuous tradition,' he 'is one of the few serious Canadian writers untroubled by the problem of identity and free of its attendant, modish hysteria about alienation. His work has in it all the richness, the inclusiveness, of the Jewish character and mind, the product of an ancient, sophisticated, oppressed, and still living tradition.'15 Klein, no doubt, would have approved of this eloquent characterization of himself, but it is a characterization which corresponds more to an ideal than to a reality; for, in the end, Klein's concept of tradition, which is so central to his sense of his role as a poet, is much more problematical than he is willing to acknowledge. John Sutherland suggests something of this problematical quality, in a comment on The Rocking Chair which is true of Klein's work as a

26 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet whole: 'We are aware both that Klein is writing out of a tradition and defending himself against it/16 And, in Klein's 'elaborate Rabbinical apparatus/ Northrop Frye sees evidence, not of 'the vital sense of a continuous tradition/ but of precisely its opposite: an uneasy relationship with a tradition which has been 'broken off/ and whose Varied and conflicting patterns' no longer have 'definite shape or meaning.'17 The uneasiness which both Sutherland and Frye have detected in Klein's relationship to tradition, and, in particular, in his invocation of tradition as a source of continuity, is very real. As Gershom Scholem argues, 'the desire for historical continuity which is of the very essence of tradition is translated into a historical construction whose fictitious character cannot be doubted but which serves the believing mind as a crutch of external authentication.'18 In the twentieth century, this crutch has become increasingly fragile. We live in an age, as Hannah Arendt puts it, when 'the continuity of Occidental history' has been irreparably 'broken'; 'the break in our tradition is now an accomplished fact. It is neither the result of anyone's deliberate choice nor subject to further decision/19 One response to this break, according to Arendt, is to attempt to reduce the 'overwhelming mass of the most divergent values, the most contradictory thoughts and conflicting authorities/ to a 'unilinear ... consistent' system as a substitute for the broken 'thread of historical continuity.'20 This is precisely the impulse behind Klein's attempt to present a unified and unifying Jewish tradition as a heritage transcending history, which must be carefully preserved in all its integrity to be drawn upon for protection in times of historical crisis. The difficulty for Klein of maintaining a sense of a vital continuous tradition is suggested in a letter he wrote to the Yiddish critic Shmuel Niger, on 21 January 1941, in which he speaks of 'the nostalgia and the beauty of my childhood, which was a Yiddish-speaking and Hebrewthinking one, Mithnagid from my teachers, Chassidic from my father.21 The theology, I may say, has vanished but the tradition has remained.' Although Klein's commitment to the Jewish tradition as he saw it is beyond doubt, one might question the extent to which a tradition based on 'the nostalgia and the beauty of... childhood' could, in fact, remain a vital presence in anyone's life. Klein's attempt to define 'the tradition [which] has remained' after 'the theology... has vanished' should be seen in the context of the repeated, and usually abortive, attempts by secularized Jews, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to create a substitute secular tradition in place of the religious one to which

By a Well ... over the Wall 27 they could no longer give assent. David G. Roskies argues that this 'last ditch effort to reimpose a sense of cohesion on an ever more fragmented reality/22 to 'reinvent' a culture in the face of a realization 'that everything of value had already been destroyed/23 was particularly characteristic of the Jewish writers and intellectuals of the Montreal of Klein's youth.24 For Klein, as for them, 'the tradition [which] has remained' has done so only insofar as it can be re-membered out of 'the most divergent values, the most contradictory thoughts and conflicting authorities.' Klein's re-membering or reinventing of the Jewish tradition drew on many sources, but perhaps the two most important were the modern ideologies of Yiddishkayt ('Jewishness'), with its commitment to the preservation of Jewish cultural values as embodied in the Yiddish language; and Zionism, with its commitment to the creation of a new culture in a new land and to the revival of Hebrew as the language of everyday speech.25 Throughout his life, Klein struggled to synthesize these two ideologies, presenting them as aspects of a single unfolding tradition which the worst historical disasters were ultimately powerless to destroy. Klein's attempt to construct a tradition out of Yiddishkayt and Zionism, in response to a sense of historical discontinuity, was not without its ironic precedents. For Klein, two figures above all represented the traditions he was trying to synthesize: Sholem Aleichem, whose Yiddish stories sum up the experience of the Jews of eastern Europe, and Chaim Nachman Bialik, the greatest poet of the modern Hebrew Renaissance and the embodiment of the culture of Zionism. Yet, although Klein saw both of these men as the fortunate heirs of a continuous, unified tradition, they saw themselves very differently. In fact, driven by the same sense of historical discontinuity as Klein was, they both felt the need consciously and deliberately to create a tradition where only the potential fragments of such a tradition had existed before. Sholem Aleichem took upon himself the task of single-handedly establishing the canon of modern Yiddish literature along the lines of other national literatures: 'Sholem Aleichem revolutionized Yiddish literature ... His, however, was a "conservative revolution," i.e., his revolutionary idea was that there existed in Yiddish something worth conserving, prolonging, developing.'26 The parallel between Klein and Bialik is even more striking. Bialik dedicated much of his life to kinnus or cultural reunion, gathering together longforgotten texts and publishing them in an accessible form as part of an attempt 'to bring together the fragments of the collective past of the

28 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Jewish people and make of them a new secular culture/27 The impulse behind this project, according to David Aberbach, was 'his own experience of fragmentation ... his need to put the pieces of his shattered life back together/28 As with Bialik, Klein's desire to create a continuous tradition seems to be rooted in 'his own experience of fragmentation/ It was a desire, however, that was doomed to frustration, for not only did the ideologies of Yiddishkayt and Zionism prove, in the end, to be irreconcilable; they themselves were profoundly transformed in the course of Klein's lifetime by the very forces of history which he sought, through them, to deny. Klein's sense of Yiddishkayt was largely shaped by his second-hand experience of the world of the shtetl, the world of Jewish, Yiddishspeaking towns and villages scattered throughout eastern Europe. He knew this world through the older generation of immigrants, who had left the shtetl behind but still retained many of its customs and ways of thought and expression; and he knew it, as well, from books, from the rich Yiddish literature which had grown out of the shtetl in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Klein was well aware that the shtetl represented only one episode in the two-thousand-year history of the Diaspora, which was limited to a particular time and place and had no special claim to universality or permanence. He makes this point, for example in The Yiddish Proverb' (1952-3), in which the proverbial wisdom of the Yiddish language is identified as one 'element' among many others 'in [the] cultural thesaurus' of the Diaspora (LER, p. 112), an element, moreover, which is 'not as alive and vibrant as aforetime' (LER, p. 122). Yet, at times, Klein seems to claim that the Yiddish culture of the shtetl is, in fact, universal, 'representing] elements ... that are constant in the Jewish psyche' (LER, p. 113), and that it transcends the historical fact of the shtetl's physical destruction, surviving, in its essence, as an 'unbroken sacred legacy' to be 'cherished' and 'transmitted' to later generations ('In Memoriam: I.J. Segal' [1954; LER, p. 87]). What tends to be ignored in Klein's account of the 'fine and beautiful' world of the shtetl, which 'shone with piety and humility' ('Poet of a World Passed By' [1950; LER, p. 79]), is that this world was already in an advanced state of decay, both physical and spiritual, for many decades before the Nazi onslaught which destroyed it once and for all. Even Sholem Aleichem frequently took a highly critical and pessimistic stance towards the society which was his subject. In his most popular book, for example, Tevye the Dairyman, which has done most to shape

By a Well... over the Wall 29 our sense of the life of the shtetl (if only in its musical and movie version Fiddler on the Roof), it is clear that he is describing a world being torn apart by irreconcilable conflicts. The stories of Tevye's daughters - stories of suicide, intermarriage, emigration, revolutionary politics leave little doubt that, as Hillel Halkin says, 'if Tevye himself is the very incarnation of the traditional culture of the shtetl, then beginning with the novel's second chapter, every one of its episodes illustrates another phase of this culture's helpless disintegration.'29 History is an enemy which works from within as much as from without; the values of the shtetl never were and never could be a refuge from history.30 It is an awareness of this that led many of the leading modern Yiddish writers, who often combined a deep commitment to Yiddish language and culture with an equally deep commitment to the revolutionary politics of the left, to attack what they saw as a sentimental and reactionary celebration of the shtetl. When such writers - for example, Lamed Shapiro, I.M. Weissenberg, and Peretz Markish - describe the shtetl in their fiction and poetry, they emphasize its irredeemable decay. Life in the shtetl, as they describe it, is marked by brutality, ignorance, and repression: it is a world to be escaped from rather than celebrated. One of the most famous expressions of this loathing for the romanticization of the shtetl, and for the consequent trivialization of Yiddishkayt, is the poem 'Yiddishkayt/ by Jacob Glatstein, which begins: Yiddish poets, why such yearning after what remembered burning of Sabbath candles turning to tapers round a bier? It's only pity here, and pain, to see Yiddishkayt becoming no deeper than the tune the cantor's humming while by and by the well of ritual runs dry.31

Glatstein's poem reflects a widespread dissatisfaction among Yiddish writers of his generation with the assumption that it was their role to preserve the values and traditions of the community and to provide a

30 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet sense of continuity which earlier generations might have expected of their rabbis. As 'the well of ritual runs dry/ these writers attempt, in Klein's phrase, to 'run over the wall': They seek desperately to assert their own voices, their own temperaments and moods; they insist upon the right to shake off the burdens of the folk and the curse of history, so that they may sing or speak as solitaries/32 Yet even those poets who declare themselves most committed to modernist ideals of aestheticism are unable to escape 'the shadow of history' which 'falls heavily' upon them,33 and they are drawn back again and again to their community and its desperate fate. In other words, these poets find themselves engaged in the same struggle as Klein would be engaged in throughout his career. Significantly, though, this is a parallel which Klein himself was unwilling to recognize, because to do so would force him to question his reassuring vision of Yiddishkayt as a serene and harmonious refuge from a chaotic world. It is not surprising that the one contemporary Yiddish poet whom Klein seems to have admired without reservation was J.I. Segal, whose work represents for him precisely the kind of nostalgic Yiddishkayt which Glatstein attacks: There is an old odour of things beautifully antiquated: ancient and musty parchments; phylacteries giving a nostalgic perfume of sanctified leather; samovars of fresh Sabbath tea; citrons redolent in cotton; oriental besomim-boxes reminiscent of myrrh and galbanum; heirloom prayer-shawls about which the odour of sanctity still floats; the familiar fragrance of worn and cherished things. ('Baal Shem in Modern Dress' [1930; LER, p. 7])

'No other contemporary poet/ Klein argues, 'has developed so authentically Yiddish a muse' (The Poetry Which Is Prayer' [1945; LER, p. 50]). In contrast, Klein tended to dismiss the many Yiddish poets whose work reflected the spirit of modernism. This attitude is particularly striking in his comments on Moyshe Leyb Halpern, perhaps the most powerful and disturbing of these poets. Klein unfavourably contrasts Halpern's 'worldlier' poetry with Segal's (The Poetry Which Is Prayer' [1945; LER, p. 50]) and characterizes him as 'not a particularly Yiddish poet; he was essentially European and twentieth century' (letter to Shmuel Niger [21 January 1941]). Interestingly, Klein chose to translate a number of Halpern's poems, but he did so in a manner that effectively 'demodernized'34 them, to use Linda Rozmovits's term, reshaping them to his vision of an 'authentically Yiddish' poetry untouched by the conflicts which are, in reality, at the heart of Halpern's poetry - and of his own.

By a Well ... over the Wall 31 The attempt of the Jews of eastern Europe, and of their descendants, to substitute the ideology of Yiddishkayt for the fading authority of normative Judaism was a heroic one, but, even before the final devastation of the Holocaust, it had become increasingly clear that the attempt was doomed to failure. It was the recognition of this historical reality which led to the creation of the other ideology which was to play such an important role in Klein's concept of the Jewish tradition, Zionism. Of all the attempts to find a viable substitute for the loss of the central religious tradition, Zionism seemed to be the only one which had history on its side. Yet the historical realization and consequent transformation of the Zionist ideal proved to have terrible consequences for Klein and for his sense of himself as a Jew and as a poet, consequences which he could never have foreseen as long as Zionism remained little more than a dream. From the beginning, Zionism was a far from unified movement. It was riven by numerous ideological differences, the most important of which, at least for Klein, was the relationship between the Jewish homeland and the Diaspora. Klein's allegiance was always to the ideal of cultural Zionism associated with the philosopher Ahad Ha'am, who had argued for a close and enriching relationship between a Jewish homeland and a continuing and vigorous Diaspora culture. Ahad Ha'am believed that Zionism must be concerned not, as Herzl put it, with the plight of the Jews, but with the plight of Judaism. By Judaism he meant the sum total of Jewish experience and the accumulation of Jewish learning ... Ahad Ha'am conceived Palestine as a spiritual center of the Jewish people, where an intellectual and culturally creative elite would develop and enrich Jewish national culture. Emanating from this center to the majority of Jews remaining in the Diaspora, that national culture would sustain and invigorate them.35

The appeal to Klein of this ideal of a spiritual centre whose influence would emanate throughout a complex and vigorous worldwide Jewish community, which it would unify and sustain, is obvious: not only does this ideal enable him to justify his own position as a Zionist who has no intention of abandoning the world of the Diaspora for the Promised Land; it also reflects his central vision of the One in the Many. In 'Zionism - Our National Will-to-Live' (1932), he draws on one of his favourite images of the One in the Many, the sunflower,36 to celebrate this ideal:

32 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet [T]he importance of Eretz-Israel lies in the spiritual influence it will have and already has on the Diaspora, as a cultural centre, as a vortex of Jewish life. It radiates to every corner of the dispersion its glowing warmth ... The position of the Jews in exile is like the position of the flower known as the heliotrope, which gets its name from two Greek words meaning 'to turn to the sun' ... Without the sun it would cease to grow; growing, it lifts its face to its lifegiver. (BS, pp. 24-5)

In 'Of Jewish Culture' (1949), Klein's association of Zionism with the principle of the One, and the Diaspora with the principle of the Many is even more explicit: A culture which is confined to but one area tends to become restricted and insular; a culture which is everywhere planted tends to become diffuse and diluted. Neither the one nor the other are consummations greatly to be desired. But with Israel hewing straitly to the line, following directly in the path of ancient tradition, and with world Jewry thinking in larger cosmopolitan terms, our culture is very likely to acquire a completeness and wholeness it never enjoyed before. At once placed solidly in the ground and yet looking with eager eyes upon the world, surely it may inherit the best qualities of both Diaspora and Israeli culture. (BS, p. 339)

But, as Klein was well aware, there was a very different view of the relationship between the Jewish homeland and the Diaspora, the view that the establishment of such a homeland is not the fulfilment of the Diaspora, but its negation. According to this view, Zionism should not be seen in the context of 'historical continuity, as a continuation and evolution of those forces that have determined the existence and endurance of the Jewish people even during the long years of dispersion'; rather, it was 'a revolution in the life of the Jewish people, a rebellion against the latter's existence in galut [exile], which it negated radically in order to inscribe on its banner an equally radical new beginning in the land of Israel/37 The negators of the Diaspora saw the two-thousand-year exile of the Jewish people as a historical disaster to be rejected at all costs; once a Jewish homeland was established, the Jews of the Diaspora would be forced to choose between immigration or inevitable annihilation through assimilation or physical destruction; the creation of the new would necessarily imply the destruction of the old, the clearing away of 'the fetid air in the miasmic corners of Eastern

By a Well... over the Wall 33 ghettoes/ as Klein has an unsympathetic Zionist character say in his story 'Memoirs of a Campaigner' (Stories, pp. 2O7-8).38 To Klein's dismay, this rejection of the Diaspora and of all of its achievements became increasingly dominant in the aftermath of the Holocaust, which was interpreted by many Zionists as the final retrospective judgment of history on the futility of the previous two thousand years of Jewish existence. It was a bitter irony to him that the Holocaust not only destroyed the heartland of Yiddishkayt, which was so central to his sense of a continuous Jewish tradition; it also seemed to lend support to a vision of Zionism which denied the very possibility of continuity with those Jews of the Diaspora who remained, a vision in which there was no place for Klein himself. Klein argued against the negation of the Diaspora again and again in his writings of the late forties and early fifties,39 but he was eventually forced to acknowledge the collapse of the ideal to which he had dedicated himself throughout his career, the ideal of 'the true poet ... nourished upon the ancestral heritage ... rooted in the common soil, [who] turns his eyes to new directions.' With the collapse of this ideal, the only direction left for him to turn was inward, upon himself, and the result was inevitable: he 'thirsted, parched, and withered away.' For the young Klein of the McGill years, confident and optimistic and just beginning to exercise his true power as a poet, all this was still far in the future. But it is in these early years that we see the first signs of the lifelong conflict between his desire, on the one hand, to remain rooted 'by a well,' and, on the other, to let his branches run 'over the wall'; of the conflict between a commitment to community and a desire for independence and artistic freedom. From this perspective, the initial turning away from modernism to Jewishness, which marks the real beginning of Klein's career as a poet, can be seen as the first stage of an unceasing dialectic which will shape his career for good or for ill from beginning to end. As the editors of The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse say of the modern Yiddish poets, whom Klein recalls in so many ways: 'Always, the rhythm of flight and return: toward the lure of personal speech and back to the web of Jewish destiny. Weak poets succumb to the tension of this movement back and forth; strong poets make it into the very substance of their work.'40

4

The Prism and the Flying Motes

At the chronological and conceptual centre of the works of Klein's early maturity - the poems on primarily Jewish themes which he wrote between 1927 and 1934 - stands 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens/ first published in 1931, when Klein was twenty-two. In this poem, by far the most ambitious and successful of the period, Klein attempts, for the first time, to define the basic elements of his story of the poet, and, by so doing, to explore the implications of his role as a Jewish modernist. Most of Klein's other works during these years can be seen as anticipating this crucial statement of the poet's role, or as deriving from it. To paraphrase one of Klein's metaphors for the One in the Many, the relationship between these other works and 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' is like that between 'flying motes,' in which Klein's central vision can be glimpsed only momentarily and in fragments, and a 'prism,' in which this vision is presented with almost geometrical clarity and precision ('Pulver/ 60). It is only when the flying motes are illuminated by the light 'suffused' through this prism that their full significance 'enkindlefs] and flash[es] forth' ('Spinoza: On Man, on the Rainbow/ 8, 4). The relationship between 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' and the Jewish poems of the late twenties and early thirties curiously foreshadows a similar relationship some fifteen years later - between 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape' and the Quebec poems of the late forties. In both cases, a major poetic statement of the story of the poet illuminates and lends coherence to a body of smaller works in which various aspects of this story are reflected. However, there is one important difference. 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape' comes at the very beginning of Klein's Quebec period; it acts as a kind of manifesto in

The Prism and the Flying Motes 35 which Klein lays the groundwork for the kinds of poems he will be writing over the next couple of years. If 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' is also a manifesto of sorts, it is a largely retrospective one, written after the bulk of the poems whose underlying concerns it manifests have already been written; and there is no reason to believe that these concerns were clear to Klein at the time he was writing these poems. It could therefore be argued that, in centring my account of Klein's development in the late twenties and early thirties on 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens/ I am re-membering a miscellaneous group of works, rather than unfolding a unifying principle which is actually implicit in them from the beginning. One might cite, in this regard, the discussion of the pier-glass in Middlemarch, so reminiscent of Klein's prism and polished lens: Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection.1

But, although the 'concentric arrangement' of the works of the period around the 'centre of illumination' provided by 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' may possibly be an 'illusion/ I would argue that the principle of 'optical selection' which creates this arrangement at the very least has the virtue of corresponding to the vision of the One in the Many which Klein's story of the poet unfolds. Before beginning to speculate on the role of 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' in Klein's development, we must, of course, have some sense of the order in which the works of the period were written. Here, as elsewhere in this study, I draw on the chronology established in my edition of Klein's Complete Poems, but there is no period in Klein's career in which the chronological evidence is less precise: no dateable holograph manuscripts have survived, and there is, in most cases, little dependable chronological evidence of any other sort, such as historical references. The principles which I followed in establishing as exact a chronology as possible under these circumstances are discussed in detail in the Textual Chronology' section of the Complete Poems, and I will not go into them here; but one of the strongest arguments in favour of the

36 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet chronology I propose is that it seems to make sense of Klein's development. I am, of course, aware of the danger of circularity in basing an interpretation of a poet's development on an account of the chronology of his poems which may have been influenced by this interpretation in the first place. Fortunately, most of the poems which play a crucial role in my story of Klein's development in the late twenties and early thirties can be assigned at least a relative position in the chronology with some degree of certainty, even if an absolutely precise date of composition is impossible to arrive at. In short, I am confident that my account is a reasonable one, but I am aware that some of its details are, to a certain extent, based on educated guesses. With this caution in mind, I would suggest that it is possible to see Klein's career in the late twenties and early thirties as unfolding in a manner which is internally coherent, yet which is shaped, in all of its major developments, by historical forces which exerted an increasingly intense pressure on Klein throughout the period. The process is a simple one in its broad outlines: it consists of a groping, hesitant struggle towards the story of the poet which is first fully articulated in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens,' followed by a gradual retreat from the disturbing implications of that story into silence, Klein's longest silence as a poet before the final one which would end his career. This process falls into four main stages (with a certain amount of overlap) followed by a kind of epilogue. The first stage, from 1927 to 1928, consists of a small number of poems on biblical themes in which Klein begins to explore, in a rudimentary way, his concept of the poet/hero. The second stage, from about 1928 to 1931, shifts the focus from the poet/hero to his community. These poems are mostly folkloric in nature, describing characters and rituals associated with the shtetl, and showing little sign of the threatening historical developments which were to preoccupy Klein increasingly over the next few years - the global depression and the rise of fascism in Europe and in Quebec. The much darker works of the third stage, from about 1931 to 1932, include some of the most ambitious poems, thematically and formally, of the period, and the ones in which the impact of modernism first makes itself felt: for example, 'Design for Mediaeval Tapestry,' Talisman in Seven Shreds,' 'Soiree of Velvel Kleinburger,' 'Diary of Abraham Segal, Poet/ and, most important of all, 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens.' In these poems, Klein approaches, from various directions, the vexed relationship of the heroic or anti-heroic individual to a society

The Prism and the Flying Motes 37 under severe historical stress. In the fourth stage, from about 1932 to 1934, Klein turns away almost completely from these formally and thematically ambitious poems to write a series of brief lyrics for children. Finally, the epilogue consists of two poems concerning Klein's relationship with his father, 'Heirloom' and 'Petition For That My Father's Soul Should Enter into Heaven/ both written after his father's death in November of 1933. These poems mark the end of the first important period of Klein's career, and, in light of the raw bitterness and self-contempt of 'Petition,' which Klein was never able to finish, it is not surprising that for the next few years he ceased writing poetry altogether. Although the period of Klein's early maturity seems to come to an end in response to closely linked personal and historical crises, this is not true of its beginning. His original decision to become a poet may have been related to a crisis of faith, but no similar crisis can be adduced for his decision, a couple of years later, to turn from predominantly Romantic themes to predominantly Jewish ones. Despite the lack of Jewish content in his early poetry, Klein continued throughout his adolescent years to be involved in a regular way with Jewish cultural affairs and especially with the Zionist youth organization Young Judaea, which had its most important Canadian branch in Montreal; and, in fact, his gradually increasing involvement in Young Judaea is one obvious explanation for his turning to Jewish themes. In 1928 Klein became educational director of the organization, and most of his earliest Jewish poems were published in its monthly magazine the Judaean while he was its editor. Klein seems almost to have drifted into Jewish themes, without any great sense of urgency, and without any awareness of the implications of taking up these themes at this particular point in history. It is not until 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens,' and the series of related poems which follow, that Klein begins to explore the implications of the role which he has chosen to assume. Klein's turning to Jewish themes is marked by a group of sonnets on biblical subjects - the sonnet sequence 'Five Characters,' 'Mattathias,' and 'Joseph' - which appeared at the end of 1927 and in 1928. As a group, these are by far the weakest and least mature of Klein's Jewish poems. They bear the marks of the Romanticism which Klein was still struggling to outgrow, not only in their diction and imagery, but also in their focus on heroic individuals to the near exclusion of the social relationships which will be Klein's main concern in his mature work.

38 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet There is little in these poems to suggest Klein's attitude to community, and perhaps by setting the poems in the remote biblical past, rather than in the eastern European / immigrant milieu with which he was most familiar, Klein was able to avoid an issue with which he did not yet feel ready to deal. But, although these biblical sonnets are narrow in focus and negligible as works of art, they are of great interest in terms of Klein's development, for they are the first poems in which we are able to glimpse the outlines of his story of the poet. The earliest of these poems to be published was 'Five Characters,' a sequence of five sonnets retelling the story of the Jewish holiday Purim. Each sonnet is devoted to one character from this story: Ahasuerus, the foolish King of Persia; Vashti, the wife whom he rejects for disobedience; Esther, the beautiful Jewish maiden whom he marries and who risks her life to defend her people; Haman, the evil counsellor who plans to destroy the Jews; and Mordecai, Esther's uncle - the first of many protective uncle figures in Klein's work - whose crucial role in revealing a plot to assassinate Ahasuerus is rewarded by the death of Haman and the defeat of his plans against the Jews. Of the five sonnets, the most important for Klein's development, and the only one which he chose to reprint separately, is 'Mordecai.' This sonnet is Klein's earliest portrait of the hero, and, as in most such portraits, the hero is presented as part of a contrasting hero/demagogue pair:2 in this case, Mordecai is played off against Haman. Haman's initial animus against the Jews is caused by the refusal of Mordecai, who is 'not snared within the common mesh / Of hero-worshipping' (45-6) to bow down to him. After Haman's plot is foiled, he is tricked into attending on Mordecai who rides in triumph through the city. The sonnet ends with a strangely ironic description of Mordecai's triumphal procession: And now when Haman passed, though everyone Fell prostrate in a belly-walking crowd, Haman and Mordecai erect alone, No one could tell for whom the people bowed ...

(53-6)

The crowd's confusion between Mordecai and Haman, a detail which is not present in Klein's source,3 will recur repeatedly in Klein's account of society's inability to distinguish between the genuine hero and the false demagogue who usurps his role. The hero/demagogue contrast is repeated in 'Mattathias,' in which the heroic priest Mattathias kills a 'Hebrew renegade' (3) who has

The Prism and the Flying Motes 39 perverted a traditional ritual by sacrificing a swine on 'the Lord's altar' (7). Mattathias's act precisely re-enacts the perverted ritual and redeems it: 'Behold within a single pool / A swine's blood and the blood of traitor Jew! ...' (13-14). The theme of the perverted ritual which the hero must somehow redeem is another motif which will recur in Klein's story of the poet. Compare, for example, Shabbathai Zvi's marrying the Torah in 'Out of the Pulver of the Polished Lens' (122-6), the distorted echoes of the Mass in 'Political Meeting/ or the Nazi parody of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony in The Second Scroll (SS, pp. 27-32). Of all the sonnets on biblical themes, the one which is most clearly relevant to the story of the poet is 'Joseph,' foreshadowing, as it does, Klein's interpretation of Joseph as the 'Bible's Archetypical Poet' a quarter of a century later. It is also the most pessimistic. Like 'Mattathias,' 'Joseph' focuses on the perversion of a traditional rite of blood sacrifice, the sacrifice of the kid whose blood, smeared on Joseph's coat of many colours, is used to convince Jacob that his beloved son Joseph is dead: They slew A kid and took the coat of many dyes And steeped it in its blood to make a clue ... And held before old Jacob's dimming eyes A coat of one red retribution hue ...

(9-14)

Although 'Joseph,' like 'Mattathias,' ends with an image of blood - 'A coat of one red retribution hue' - the perverted blood ritual is not redeemed in 'Joseph' as it is in 'Mattathias.' There is no hint in the poem of the reconciliation between Joseph and his brothers with which the story ends in the Bible. Instead, we are left with 'the dreamer' (i) in a state of apparently permanent alienation from his society, abandoned by his resentful and uncomprehending brothers 'in [the] pit' (6) or, as Klein would later put it, 'at the bottom of the sea' ('Portrait of the Poet as Landscape,' 163). To sum up, then, what we see for the first time in this group of biblical sonnets is the outline of what will eventually become Klein's story of the poet, albeit in a rudimentary form. The hero of this story is a dreamer, a man of vision who seeks to redeem his society. But opposing him is an evil demagogue who has won the support of society by usurping its traditions, while the poet, the true hero, is rejected. Two of the poems, 'Mordecai' and 'Mattathias/ portray the eventual triumph

40 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet of the hero over the demagogue, and the redemption of his community and its traditions, but the third, 'Joseph/ most emphatically does not. Having roughly sketched in his portrait of the poet in these early poems, Klein entirely abandons it in the poetry he then goes on to write, returning to it, only after the passage of several years, in the much more elaborate and sophisticated form of 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens.' In the poems which immediately follow the sonnets on biblical themes, Klein shifts his attention to his community, the Jewish community of the Diaspora with its roots in the shtetl. It is as if he needs to work through his attitudes towards this community - to recreate it imaginatively for himself - before he can return to his story of the poet and explore its most crucial aspect, the poet's relationship to his community and its traditions. At the beginning of the next stage of Klein's development stand two sequences, both published in 1929, 'Haggadah' and 'Portraits of a Minyan.' These are the first works by Klein in which he seems to have found his voice; they certainly contain the earliest poems by him which have made their way into anthologies, poems such as The Still Small Voice' and 'Sophist.' But questions of artistic merit aside, 'Haggadah' and 'Portraits of a Minyan' are important as Klein's first attempts at representing a traditional Jewish community. The two sequences have much in common, and together they establish certain basic thematic and formal patterns which Klein will continue to elaborate throughout his career. But, in terms of Klein's later development, their differences are as important as their similarities. These differences reflect a tension in Klein's attitude to tradition and community which the passage of time and a growth in artistic and emotional maturity will do nothing to resolve. The most obvious similarity between 'Haggadah' and 'Portraits' is a formal one: they both consist of sequences of short lyrics. Klein had written sequences before - for example, 'Obituary Notices,' 'Conjectures/ 'A Sequence of Songs/ 'Five Characters/ 'Five Weapons against Death' - but it is only in these two groups that the sequence form takes on, for the first time, a thematic significance. That is, by juxtaposing a number of short poems, Klein is able to imply the presence of a central unifying principle, so that the form of the sequence becomes in itself a symbolic representation of the principle of the One as it is glimpsed through the Many. But the principle of unity suggested by the sequence form of 'Portraits of a Minyan' and 'Haggadah' never becomes explicit.

The Prism and the Flying Motes 41 Our primary experience in reading these sequences is of the Many rather than of the One; it is not until 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' that Klein will attempt to create a larger structure which emphasizes the One as well as the Many, the prism as well as the flying motes. In sharp contrast to the looseness of the overall structure of the sequences are the very tight, precise structures of the individual poetic units of which they are composed. Throughout his career, Klein was attracted to closed poetic forms; his earliest article on modern poetry, the admittedly juvenile 'Worse Verse' (1927; LER, pp. 151-3), is an attack on free verse, and even in his most mature works Klein generally tends to avoid open forms, except for special effect, as in 'Cantabile/ his parody of Ezra Pound's Cantos. The poems which make up 'Portraits of a Minyan' and 'Haggadah,' like most of the poems of the period, are characterized by the use of simple stanza forms - often reminiscent of folk-songs - whose structures are thrown into relief through the use of regular rhythms, end-stopping, and alternating masculine and feminine rhymes. Especially when combined with Klein's frequent use of unusually short lines, these formal characteristics all contribute to the impression the poems give of being finely etched miniatures rather than full-scale three-dimensional portraits striving for depth and complexity. 'Junk-Dealer' is a typical example: All week his figure mottles The city lanes, Hawking his rags and bottles In quaint refrains. But on the High, the Holy Days, he is lord; And being lord, earth wholly, Gladly is abhorred. While litanies are clamored, His loud voice brags A Hebrew most ungrammared. He sells God rags.

The contrast with the later group of portrait poems in The Rocking Chair and Other Poems is instructive in this regard. What differentiates these

42 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Quebec portraits from the Jewish ones (apart from their greater formal complexity) is that they are, to paraphrase the title of one of Klein's later poems, 'portraits and commentaries.' That is, the portraits in poems like 'Political Meeting' or 'Monsieur Gaston' or 'Librairie Delorme' contain a historical commentary in a way in which the Jewish poems do not. The characters are seen in the process of being shaped by historical forces, and, although Klein sometimes spoke of Quebec as a kind of idyllic, unchanging traditional society, his portraits of individual Quebecois do not, on the whole, support this impression. If the three-dimensional, dynamic portraits in The Rocking Chair create an impression of a society in transition, the intention of the Jewish portraits seems to be exactly the opposite: to present a set of sharp little sketches, each capturing a single isolated trait, brought together in a glittering but static whole.4 This is certainly true of 'Portraits of a Minyan.' The community presented in this composite portrait appears to be singularly untouched by history. It consists of types which could have been met with anywhere in the shtetl over the previous couple of centuries. The portraits are, no doubt, to some extent based on characters in the immigrant community whom Klein knew from personal experience, but there are no signs in any of the portraits of a contemporary Montreal setting; the portraits clearly owe as much to the stereotypes of folklore as they do to personal experience. 'Portraits of a Minyan' does have its satirical edge - the hypocritical landlord, the sophist who is confident that he knows the meaning of God's book better than God himself, the mercenary matchmaker - but the edge is blunted by a mood of nostalgic irony and goodwill, reminiscent more of Leacock's Mariposa than of the historical shtetl, 'rent by class dissension, united only by its common impotence in the face of Tsarist or peasant might,'5 which Klein never really knew. Klein's aim in 'Portraits of a Minyan' is the one he will formulate some years later in 'Ave Atque Vale,' to celebrate the 'parfait jolly company' (9) of the Jewish community in all its variety. To suggest the presence of a unifying principle underlying this variety Klein frequently invokes traditional rituals and ceremonies. The 'minyan' in 'Portraits of a Minyan' is the quorum of ten adult Jewish males required for public prayers, and, although its significance does not extend beyond the fact that the sequence consists of the portraits of ten Jewish men, by giving the sequence that title Klein is able to imply a unity without having to demonstrate it. In 'Haggadah,' the unifying ritual is much more to the fore. 'Haggadah' is one of many poems

The Prism and the Flying Motes 43 throughout Klein's career which draw on traditional rituals.6 In many of these ritual poems, especially the earlier ones, the ritual is more or less a given, an unquestioned source of unity, but already in 'Haggadah' there are some hints that the ritual, and the tradition it embodies, are coming under increasingly severe historical pressure. The haggadah is the book of readings used during the Passover meal or seder, in which the Jews' triumphant exodus from Egypt, and their escape from exile and slavery, are celebrated. The dominant tone of the poem, however, is neither triumphant nor celebratory. The community which the sequence portrays is still in a state of spiritual exile and enslavement, passively acquiescing in its debased condition while impotently yearning for something better. The 'little Jew' at the end of 'Portraits of a Minyan' (136) has become the 'old midget Jews' at the beginning of 'Haggadah' (3): a note of gentle affection has been replaced by a suggestion of actual deformity. The 'old midget Jews' are 'stooped' (4) and 'creep' (5), and when they 'stare' at the 'golden platter' (5-6) of the moon, it seems infinitely distant from them, permanently beyond their grasp, like the vision of the 'golden globes in orient orange-groves' (83) with which the sequence ends. The second poem in the sequence, 'Once in a Year,' echoing Heine's account of the Sabbath in 'Prinzessin Sabbath' (which Klein knew),7 describes the Passover celebration in regal terms, only to emphasize how 'unroyal' the rest of the 'long ... year' (16) of Jewish life is. In The Bitter Dish/ symbolic dishes which traditionally represent the bitterness of the Egyptian slavery from which the Jews were released become symbols of an enslavement which persists: 'You are the afflicted, the embittered, and the clay' (35). But the most revealing poem, in terms of Klein's sense of his community, is the one which concludes the sequence, The Still Small Voice': The candles splutter; and the kettle hums; The heirloomed clock enumerates the tribes; Upon the wine-stained table-cloth lie crumbs Of matzoh whose wide scattering describes Jews driven in far lands upon this earth. The kettle hums; the candles splutter; and Winds whispering from shutters tell re-birth Of beauty rising in an eastern land, Of paschal sheep driven in cloudy droves; Of almond blossoms colouring the breeze;

44 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Of vineyards upon verdant terraces; Of golden globes in orient orange-groves.

And those assembled at the table dream Of small schemes that an April wind doth scheme, And cry from out the sleep assailing them:

Jerusalem, next year! Next year, Jerusalem!

(72-87)

Taking as his cue the concluding prayer of the seder, 'Next Year in Jerusalem/ Klein ends 'Haggadah' on a note of Zionist longing; and, as is frequently the case when Klein turns to the theme of Zion,8 the Zionist 'dream' is cast in a pastoral mode, which has nothing to do with the reality of Zion, of which Klein knew little, but everything to do with the discontents of the Diaspora, which he knew very well. Zion and Jerusalem are 'next year'; the 'unroyal world' of the Diaspora is now. Everything in The Still Small Voice' serves to emphasize the impotence of the dream of Zion as a response to the frustrations of the Diaspora. The clock striking twelve recalls the exile of the twelve tribes of Israel; and the spluttering of the candle, the crumbs of matzoh, the stains on the tablecloth, all evoke a sense of waste and futility. Although the seder may 'assemble' the remnants of the twelve tribes around the Passover table, it is unable to recreate the unity and vision which have been lost. The world of 'Haggadah' is a world of 'wide scattering/ a world 'assailed' by sleep, in which 'midget Jews' are reduced to 'dream[ing] small schemes.' For all the nostalgia and affection which 'Haggadah' does express, the contrast which it draws between the Diaspora and Zion suggests a much harsher view of the community which Klein celebrates so warmly in 'Portraits of a Minyan.' The impotence of the dream of Zion which concludes 'Haggadah' is a reflection of Klein's own ambivalence towards Zionism, an ambivalence evident even in poems which seem unequivocally committed to the Zionist ideal. An excellent example is the sonnet 'These Northern Stars Are Scarabs in My Eyes/ This poem expresses as unambiguously as possible Klein's dissatisfaction with his Diaspora existence under the 'northern stars' of Canada and his desire for the pastoral Zion of 'orange-blossoms in an orange grove' (10) and 'contented drove[s]' (12), reminiscent of the 'blossoms/ 'orange-groves/ and 'cloudy droves' of 'Haggadah/ Typically for Klein, the commitment to Zion is described in linguistic terms: 'supple be your tongue / To speak the crisp words baked beneath the sun' (6-7). The reference is to the clipped Sephardi pronunciation of Hebrew which had been adopted by the Zionist

The Prism and the Flying Motes 45 settlers in Palestine, in preference to the gentler Ashkenazi pronunciation, which was used by Klein and by other Jews of eastern European descent. The reason given for adopting the Sephardi pronunciation was that it was more authentic, but at least as strong a motive seems to have been the desire of the founders of Zionism, most of whom were from eastern Europe, to leave behind all traces of their Diaspora origins. Although Klein seems to support this decision in the sonnet, his essay The Yiddish Proverb' (1952-3), written near the end of his career, gives a very different view: [W]ith the establishment of the State of Israel, there was introduced into that country the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew. This is a pronunciation which is as removed from the Ashkenazic which prevails in the Diaspora as Arabic is from Italian. The first is hard, clipped, guttural, the pronunciation of a people afraid to catch sand in its throat; the second is soft, caressing, it lingers over its vocables, it has a rise and fall. (LER, p. 113)

What is intriguing about These Northern Stars' is that the last line of the poem - There will be sparrows twittering Mazel Tov' - scans only if its final words, 'Mazel Tov/ are pronounced with an Ashkenazi rather than with a Sephardi accent (mdzel tov rather than mazdl tov). The very language, then, in which Klein envisions his freedom from the bonds of the Diaspora testifies to the continued power of those bonds. But it is in Klein's most ambitious poem on a Zionist theme, 'Greeting on This Day,' that his ambivalence towards the reality of the Diaspora community which he knew and the Zionist ideal against which he judged it is most striking. 'Greeting on This Day' was written in response to Arab riots in Palestine in August 1929, in which a number of Jews were killed. The poem rarely rises above the level of overheated rhetoric: O Chronicler, pull down the heavy tome; Open a blank page; fashion a pen from bone; Dip it in skulls where blood is ink ...

(9-11)

However, there are two exceptions: sections III and VI, in which, respectively, Klein recalls his Diaspora childhood and paints a portrait of the new Zionist man. Section III is a nostalgic mood-piece in which the kabbalists of medieval Safed blend imperceptibly with the rabbis and teachers of Klein's Montreal childhood:

46 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Your streets, terraced and curved and narrow, I climbed in my youth, attending on your sages, I sat at the feet of Rabbi Joseph Caro, I turned the musty and snuff-tinctured pages Of mystic books bewildering my little pate, And with Reb Isaac Luria, surnamed the Pard, Who rose on Friday twilights to become God's ward I ate, and blessed the single plate. I followed them, I loved them, sage and saint, Greybeard in caftan, juggling the when and why, Ascetic rubbing a microscopic taint, Scholar on whose neat earlocks piety ascended In spiral to the sky I followed them ...

(26-39)

This passage introduces one of the central motifs of Klein's poetry, which will recur again and again throughout his career whenever he wants to evoke a sense of continuity and tradition: the motif of a young child being escorted by a loving and protective male adult, generally an uncle or father or teacher.9 In section VI there is no sign of these beloved escorts of Klein's youth. In this section of the poem, the Diaspora is negated with a vengeance. The pastoral celebration of the new Zionist man, 'bearing a basket of grapes, vaunting the golden apples' (70-1) is very much at the expense of the Diaspora Jew: If this be a Jew, indeed, where is the crook of his spine; and the quiver of lip, where? Behold his knees are not callous through kneeling; he is proud, he is erect. There is in his eyes no fear, in his mind no memory of faggots. And these are not words wherewith one tells a Jew. Truly this is such an one; he has left his hump in Ashkinaz; in Sphorad his maimed limb; beyond the seas his terror he has abandoned. (74-82)

The contrast between the physically and spiritually deformed Jew in this passage and the sages and saints in section III is inexplicable, except in terms of a basic unresolvable conflict within Klein concerning

The Prism and the Flying Motes 47 his own status as a Diaspora Jew and his relationship as a poet to his Diaspora community. The darker side of Klein's relationship to his community is particularly evident in a number of the short stories which he was writing during this period, in which the very concept of community itself is thrown into question. As M.W. Steinberg points out in his introduction to the Short Stories, these stories present us with 'the stresses that come with blows to one's dignity or self-esteem/ 'degradation/ 'evil, social and metaphysical, and frustration, defeat, and suffering/10 Why they should be so much more unrelievedly pessimistic about social relationships than anything in the poetry of the period is not entirely clear, but it may have something to do with Klein's particular limitations as a writer of fiction, limitations which, in his most successful fiction, he would turn to his advantage, but would never really transcend. Specifically, Klein is rarely able to create characters who interact with one another in a convincingly realized social world. This inability appears to be rooted in a deep ambivalence on Klein's part concerning his relationship with his community, a suspicion that there is no genuine basis for interaction between himself and others. From this perspective, Klein's insistence that the poet must share and express the experience and the values of his community can be seen as growing out of his own sense of alienation: it is a description not of what he is, but of what he would like to be. Klein is able to successfully invoke the ideal of community in his poetry, but he is uneasy about the actual dramatization of social interaction which most fiction would seem to require. This uneasiness is reflected in his preference for forms which do not require the working out of social relationships - such as monologues, anecdotal character sketches, parables, parodies, satires, allegories, and, most interestingly, detective stories (see pp. 204-5 and 237-8 below).11 In most of Klein's fiction, he simply avoids, as much as possible, the need to dramatize such relationships. There are many good reasons, for example, why the narrator in The Second Scroll is never allowed to meet the uncle he seeks, but one reason, no doubt, is that Klein would have found it impossible to dramatize their meeting, to describe in a convincing way what these two characters would actually do and say to one another when they finally met. Like The Second Scroll, the early short stories abound in frustrated rendezvous and dreams, but, unlike The Second Scroll, they lack the intellectual and artistic maturity to do more than merely testify to these frustrations.

48 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet The story which seems most transparently an allegory of the frustrations Klein experienced as a poet in relationship to his community is The Meed of the Minnesinger/ which tells of a medieval Jewish minnesinger, Susskind von Trimberg, who tries to succeed at the court of a local nobleman and ends up being humiliated by the court for his efforts and rejected by his own people. The story ends with Susskind alone and in disgrace, burning the manuscript of his verses. But if this story is intended as an argument that the poet should stick to his own people, none of the other stories seems very optimistic about the possibility of a healthy relationship between the individual and his community. In 'Prophet in Our Midst/ an outcast halfwit is convinced he is Elijah the Prophet; in 'By the Profit of a Beard/ an impoverished old Jew, whose magnificent beard is the only thing which gives him social prestige, is humiliated when the beard is maliciously destroyed; in The Triumph of Zalman Tiktiner/ a committed Zionist's dream of emigrating to Israel is repeatedly frustrated; in 'Master of the Horn/ the ageing Reb Mayer, who has always blown the ram's horn or shofar on the High Holidays, is publicly disgraced when his strength fails him in front of the whole congregation; in 'Shmelka/ a simpleton is the object of a cruel practical joke. Of all the early short stories, perhaps the most impressive is The Seventh Scroll.' The central figure in this story is a scribe, Yekuthiel Geller, and, as elsewhere in Klein's work, the scribe is a figure for the poet.12 The closest and most instructive parallel to the portrait of Yekuthiel in The Seventh Scroll' is Klein's poem 'Scribe/ the most complex of the series of portraits of traditional Jewish types which began with 'Portraits of a Minyan.' Although the tone and emphasis of these two portraits of the poet as scribe are quite different (typically the prose version is much darker than the poetic one), they both give expression to Klein's mixed feelings about his role as a poet. Reb Yekuthiel Geller is an artist with 'a native genius for calligraphy' (Stories, p. 98). His most intense relationship is with the holy letters to which he has devoted his life, and this devotion to the scribal calling is reflected in the description of his body as a text: His eyes, wreathed in crow's feet, like two iotas with embellishing traceries, scrupulously examined the script. As he bent over the goatskin manuscript, his small tuft of a beard poised, like an oriental brush, above the writing. His jowls were covered with patches of hair, which were neither beard nor down, but a set of black smudges, curiously grained; contrasting with black dot-like eyes,

The Prism and the Flying Motes 49 and fine hirsute nap, there shone from his face the white splendour of a broad brow ... (Stories, p. 99)

As the story opens, he is at work on the seventh Torah scroll of his career, which is to be dedicated to the memory of his late wife. But he is not allowed to finish his scroll in peace. A shadchan, or marriage broker, bullies him into remarrying, and his new wife, jealous of her predecessor, does everything she can to take revenge on him, humiliating him in public and eventually bringing about his death. As he is dying, he struggles to complete the scroll, but in his weakened state he makes a number of mistakes which render the scroll unfit for religious purposes. The scroll is buried with him. While there is something tragic in Reb Yekuthiel's saintlike devotion to his task, there is something pathetic and futile about it as well. Reb Yekuthiel may remind us of the sympathetically presented scholars, saints, and ascetics in section III of 'Greeting on This Day/ but 'his back curved in ghetto hump' (Stories, p. 97) may also remind us of the contemptible Diaspora Jews in section VI of the same poem, with crooks in their spines and humps on their backs. Like them, he is spiritually as well as physically deformed. His devotion to the memory of his dead wife, while admirable in some ways, is excessive, and, like his singleminded devotion to his traditional art, it appears to be a way of substituting an obsession with the past for an engagement with the present and the future. In contrast to the bleakness of The Seventh Scroll/ 'Scribe' is a much more celebratory treatment of the scribe as a figure of the poet who has entirely dedicated himself, body and soul, to the traditions of his ancient craft. Nothing could be more different than the endings of the two works, describing the deaths of the scribes. While Reb Yekuthiel is buried in defeat along with his useless scroll, the Scribe's 'true essence, joyous as a lark, / Will settle on God's wrist, devoutly proud' (34-5). Nonetheless, the two works have much in common. To begin with the most obvious similarity, the description of the Scribe's body as a text is extremely close to the passage in The Seventh Scroll' quoted above: His eyes are two black blots of ink. The thin hairs of his beard Are symbols of the script revered; His broad brow is the margin of a parchment page, Clean for the commentaries of age.

(13-17)

50 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet To emphasize this identification of the Scribe's body with his text, the poem opens with a description of the Scribe at prayer wearing phylacteries whose leather thongs are wrapped around his left arm and hand in the traditional fashion, forming the word Shaddai (shin, doled, yod), one of the names of God: The black phylacteries about his arm Impress the first initial of God's name Upon the skin, encircled by this charm. The Sheen of Shaddai intricately drawn Into the flesh sets bone and blood aflame. The heart beats out the tetragrammaton.

(1-6)

In the following stanza, the tradition, which has literally been inscribed on the Scribe's body, becomes a protective armour (compare 'the arsenal of Shaddai' [Stories, p. 97]): Let heathenesse seek refuge in its steel; Let pagandom invest its coat of mail; This prayer-shawl is armour to this Jew! Satan endures its pendules as a flail; Demons are frighted by its white and blue; And Lilith knows a hauberk she can not undo.

(7-12)

The first three stanzas end with a celebratory description of the Scribe's brow as 'the margin of a parchment page, / Clean for the commentaries of age.' The following stanzas, however, suggest a more ambivalent attitude towards the Scribe and his tradition. The Scribe's eyes, beard, hand, and brow, which, in the first three stanzas, are symbols of his text, become, in the following stanzas, associated with contamination and decay. The 'hair fallen from [the Scribe's] beard' has the power to 'unhallow' (20) his text; his fingernail and hand are the hiding place of 'imp[s]' (21) and 'satans' (24); his eyes become 'water' (28) as a result of his devotion to his task; and his parchment-brow is marked by 'slimy exegetes' (32) in the grave, in an image which forcefully reminds us that parchment is, after all, made from the skin of dead animals. The description of the Scribe's bones becoming 'hooks' (28) as a result of years of copying combines the images of the decay of the body and of its transformation into a text: the reference seems to be to the taggin, the 'mystic hook[s]' which adorn the tops of certain characters in the Torah

The Prism and the Flying Motes 51 scroll ('A Psalm of Abraham, Touching the Crown with Which He Was Crowned on the Day of His Espousals/ 7), or to the 'hooked characters' themselves (The Seventh Scroll' [Stories, p. 97!). If, therefore, the Scribe finds his fulfilment in inscribing himself in his tradition, in literally embodying it, this fulfilment is at the cost of his own physical destruction: in retrospect, the image of the Scribe inscribing God's name in his own flesh and 'set[ting] bone and blood aflame' evokes not only an act of faith but an auto-da-fe. For the Scribe, the daily act of re-membering the tradition by inscribing it on his body is an act of dismembering as well. This dismembering is enacted in the formal structure of the poem. Of all the portrait poems, 'Scribe' is the one which uses traditional forms in the most sophisticated way, not simply to portray tradition but to comment on it as well. The first stanza is a simple sestet with two alternating rhymes (ababab). In the second stanza the pattern begins to break down. This stanza is also a sestet with two rhymes, each occurring three times, but now in no particular order (aababb). In the third and fourth stanzas the pattern is further dismembered; the third stanza has five lines (abbcc), and the fourth has seven (abacbdd), and there is no recognizable pattern to the rhyme schemes. Towards the end of the poem there is an attempt to re-member the pattern, but it is only partially successful. The fifth stanza (ababa) reasserts the rhyme scheme of the first but falls one line short. In the last two stanzas the original stanza is finally re-membered, but it is simultaneously dismembered as well, split in two between the sixth (abab) and seventh stanzas (aV). This re-membering/dismembering perfectly parallels the end of the Scribe's story. In contrast to the beginning of the poem, in which the physical and the spiritual were united in a single image of body as text, at the end the Scribe is separated out into the physical slime of the sixth stanza and the spiritual essence of the seventh. Although the overall tone of 'Scribe' is positive and celebratory - much more so than in The Seventh Scroll' - it seems more critical and sceptical than any of the earlier portrait poems about the cost to the individual who seeks to embody and express tradition on behalf of the community. In April of 1931 Klein submitted to Poetry [Chicago! his belated apologia for adopting Jewish themes, 'Ave Atque Vale.' The poet addresses the words in the title (Latin for 'hail and farewell') to representatives of the predominantly Christian literary tradition, as he turns to his own tradition for themes and models:

52 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet ... that par fait jolly company That roistered in my salad days, calls me O sages of Sura, Pumbeditha's wise, Drawers of elephants through needles' eyes! When he forsakes you, Shakespeare, for a space, Or you Kit Marlowe of the four good lines, Or Jonson, you, your sack, your muscadine, your wines, This Jew Betakes him to no pharisaic crew ...

(9-12, 51-5)

But Klein's 'hail and farewell' could just as well be addressed to the poetry on Jewish themes which he had been writing for the previous few years, a kind of poetry of which 'Ave Atque Vale' marks an end. Although Klein would continue to concentrate on Jewish themes for some years yet, by the time he wrote 'Ave Atque Vale' he had begun to turn away from the predominantly celebratory stance of his earlier Jewish poems to a more critical investigation of the relationship of the creative individual to his society. There is no explicit indication of this change of direction in 'Ave Atque Vale/ but it is not far-fetched to sense some strain in the poem's unremitting air of good cheer: perhaps Klein protests too much as he tries to convince himself, as well as his audience, that he is part of a vital community with roots reaching far back into history. Although the poem may give the impression that Klein has thousands of years of Jewish tradition at his fingertips, this is, to some extent, an illusion, since the poem is largely stitched together from various articles in The Jewish Encyclopedia. But even if the air of easy familiarity with a rich tradition which this poem tries to maintain were not, to some extent, an illusion, one wonders how many of Klein's readers, even those with a substantial Jewish education, could respond to this highly allusive poem in any but the most superficial way. This is especially troubling in a poem whose aim is, above all, to assert a sense of community and continuity. In the very act, then, of reasserting his vision of the continuity of the Jewish tradition, and of the close link between poet and community, Klein leaves us with the impression that this vision is under increasing strain. 'Ave Atque Vale' is probably one of the very last poems in which Klein attempted to present this vision uncritically. In the poems which were to follow, culminating in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens/ his story of the poet and his community enters a decisive new stage.

The Prism and the Flying Motes 53 By 1931 Klein had completed his studies at McGill and had enrolled in the Faculty of Law in the Universite de Montreal. Although he was still, at this time, hopeful about his future, the excitement and enthusiasm of the McGill years were a thing of the past. For one thing, Klein, like all of his contemporaries, was affected by the Depression. In the spring of 1932, Leon Edel, who had spent the previous four years studying at the Sorbonne, returned to Montreal to find him considerably chastened: The carefree twenties now seemed ... like some fool's paradise. Many old friends had already left for other cities and countries, all hoping to ride out the Depression and somehow find the futures they had dreamed of in those better times. (LOTD, p. 61)

As well, Klein was deeply troubled by the growing threat of Nazism to the Jewish communities of Europe. When David Lewis returned to Montreal from Oxford in 1935, he, like Edel, was struck by the change in Klein: I think there was a visible development in his spirit from the sometimes boisterous, always jovial adolescent and university student to the sadness and heartbreak of the '305 with the advent of Hitler. When we came back from England in 1935 and met Klein and his wife ... I could see in Abe a very important change of mood. Some of the joviality had gone ... The holocaust hadn't yet started but was threatening. And the way in which the Jewish people were being treated in Germany even before the War ... [caused] a change of mood in the man - almost a desperation.13

In addition, Klein's personal circumstances had grown increasingly difficult. The divorce of his sister Dora in 1930, who returned with her children to live with Klein's parents, and the steady decline of his father's health forced Klein to take on a heavy burden of family responsibilities before he was ready to do so financially and, perhaps, emotionally. The sense of isolation, frustration, and anxiety of these years inevitably found expression in his poetry. The most important poems of these years, in their ambition if not, in every case, in their artistic success, are 'Design for Mediaeval Tapestry/ Talisman in Seven Shreds,' 'Soiree of Velvel Kleinburger,' 'Diary of Abraham Segal, Poet/ and, above all, 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens.' These poems are all sequences (with the partial exception of 'Soiree of Velvel Kleinburger/ in which the subsections, though

54 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet formally distinct from one another, are not separately numbered or titled). However, in contrast to such earlier sequences as 'Portraits of a Minyan/ 'Haggadah/ 'Holy Bonds/ or 'Greeting on This Day/ there is a growing sense, in most of these poems, that the unifying principle, if there is one, can barely hold the forces of disintegration in abeyance. The gap between the reality of the Many and the ideal of the One seems increasingly unbridgeable. The contrast is particularly evident in 'Design for Mediaeval Tapestry/ precisely because of its superficial similarity, both thematic and formal, to earlier, more optimistic sequences such as 'Portraits of a Minyan.' Like 'Portraits/ 'Design for Mediaeval Tapestry' consists of portraits of ten Jews bound together in a larger whole which is implied, in both cases, by a unifying image in the title ('tapestry'/'minyan'). In a sense, the portraits in 'Design' are more tightly unified than those in 'Portraits': they all portray responses to the same experience, a murderous attack on a community of German Jews during the Crusades. However, the society which is presented in 'Design for Mediaeval Tapestry/ unlike the idealized shtetl world of 'Portraits of a Minyan/ is in a state of complete fragmentation: The winds assemble; the cold and hot winds gather //To scatter us' (173-4). While characters in 'Portraits of a Minyan' are very much members of a community, participating in communal rituals, in 'Design' we see, with only one exception, a group of isolated individuals, crushed by history and unable to find a larger traditional context in which their suffering can be shared and made meaningful. When 'Job reviles' there is no voice out of the whirlwind to answer his complaints: God is grown ancient. He no longer hears. He has been deafened by his perfect thunders. With clouds for cotton he has stopped his ears.

(79-81)

The destruction of Solomon Talmudi's book, whose 'essence and quintessence' (120) was a vision of the One in the Many 'gathered ... from dispersion' (119) and 'proving the one creed / A simple sentence broken by no commas' (124-5), is emblematic of the fragmentation of the world of the poem as a whole. In a time of crisis, tradition has failed to unify the community and to protect it against the onslaught of history, and the pathetic attempt of Nahum-this-also-is-for-the-good to make sense of the dismemberment of the body/text of tradition only serves to underscore this failure:

The Prism and the Flying Motes 55 Our skeletons are bibles; flesh is rent Only to prove a thesis, stamp a moral. The rack prepared: for this was Israel meant.

(67-9)

In only one of the portraits in 'Design' is there a genuine attempt to remember what has been dismembered, to see beyond individual suffering to the suffering of another, and by so doing to evoke the community which has been destroyed. This is the final portrait, 'Esther Hears the Echoes of His Voice/ in which Esther remembers the voice of her murdered husband. It is a voice which calls up for her the whole range of traditional communal life which has been destroyed: family meals, conjugal love, study, prayer, parenthood. But the voice, like the community it once embodied, is silent; all that remains are fragmentary 'echoes': 'His voice. His voice was so. His voice that was ...' (161). The exploration, in 'Design for Mediaeval Tapestry,' of the impotence of tradition in the face of history is carried a step further in Talisman in Seven Shreds,' in which the attempt to defeat history through an appeal to tradition is not only futile but corrupting. Talisman in Seven Shreds' is Klein's first treatment of the legend of the golem, to which he would turn repeatedly throughout his career.14 References to golems, manlike creatures created through magic, go back at least to the Talmud, but the version which is best known, and which is the source of all of Klein's treatments of the legend, was, in fact, created a mere twenty years before Klein's poem, in response to historical events of the time. In Niflaot Maharal im ha-Golem (1909) by Yudel Rosenberg (later to become a prominent Montreal rabbi), the golem is created to defend the Jews against accusations of ritual murder. This motif, which has no precedent in the original legends, was introduced by Rosenberg in response to ritual murder accusations which had gained new currency as part of a wave of anti-Semitism sweeping Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like Rosenberg's, Klein's various versions of the golem story are very much a response to historical events of his own day. And, even in Talisman,' where no explicit historical parallels are drawn, the pressure of history can be felt. The irony with which the sequence grapples is that the golem, created as a defence against the assault of history, seems to embody the very mindless, destructive forces it is meant to oppose: history is 'the work of golems stalking in nightmare' (84). 'Syllogism,' with which the sequence begins, 'reduces to the absurd / the godhead' (7-8) by arguing that, if God created man in His image,

56 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet and if man created the golem in his, then the golem is the image of God, and there is no divine purpose to be unfolded in the universe. This note of nihilism is reflected in the imagery of fragmentation and disintegration which pervades the poem: in addition to the 'shreds' of the title, there are 'mould' (12), 'dusts' (28), 'ashes' (29), 'spit' (39, 58), 'shard' (42), 'mud and mire' (43), 'spue' (54); and the sequence ends with Klein's central image of the fragmentation of the Many, dust: But I will take a prong in hand, and go over old graves and test their hollowness: be it the spirit or the dust I hoe only at doomsday's sunrise will I know.

(95-8)

The principle of the One, which should unify and make sense of this fragmentation, has been reduced to 'the dark formula, the vital cue' (56) which seems beyond human 'grasp' (52). And, perhaps most significantly, the divine scroll has been swallowed by the golem, reduced to 'spit' and 'shard/ and the tetragrammaton - the name of God, written with the four consonants YHWH, which was reputed to have magical powers - is no longer legible on it (37-42). The Rabbi/Poet who seeks to overcome history through his traditional art finds not only that his art is defenceless but that it reproduces the very condition of fragmentation and meaninglessness which it strives to overcome. Although Rabbi Low's creation of the golem is a rejection of the helpless passivity in the face of historical disaster which characterizes 'Design for Mediaeval Tapestry/ the end result is not all that different. In 'Design/ the destructiveness of history is triumphant at the end as The sun rises and leaps the red horizon, And like a bloodhound swoops across the sky.

(175-6)

In Talisman in Seven Shreds' 'the kennels of the hounds of God are full' (79), and the poem ends with 'doomsday's sunrise.' In their focus on the failure of traditional responses to historical crisis, and in their emphasis on alienation and fragmentation, both 'Design for Mediaeval Tapestry' and Talisman in Seven Shreds' are much closer to the concerns of modernism than are any of Klein's earlier poems on Jewish themes. Formally, however, they would appear to be entirely traditional: 'Design' uses terza rima throughout (with the partial exception of one section), and Talisman' consists of seven sonnets. But

The Prism and the Hying Motes 57 although these two sequences draw on traditional literary conventions, they do so with an ironic recognition, which is particularly modern, that 'our age is ... outside all the conventions of past literature and art.'15 Klein's awareness of the limitations of the conventions of past literature is especially obvious in Talisman in Seven Shreds/ where the tight formal control of the sonnet form is played off against the blundering and confused attempts to impose a sense of order on history through the creation of the golem. The ironic formal symbolism in 'Design for Mediaeval Tapestry' is more subtle and far-reaching. Because of its associations with Dante, terza rima always has solemn connotations for Klein, and he generally uses it in poems focusing on religious/social rituals.16 In 'Design for Mediaeval Tapestry/ the contrast between the traditional associations of terza rima and the brutality of the events which the poem describes is striking. But the most interesting instance of formal symbolism occurs precisely at the point where terza rima is abandoned. In 'Judith Makes Comparisons/ Judith's illusions about love, based on the conventions of literary romance, are shattered when she is raped by a crusader: the shattering of traditional literary conventions under the onslaught of history is enacted by the breakdown, for the only time in the sequence, of the terza rima: Judith had heard a troubadour Singing beneath a castle-turret Of truth, chivalry, and honour, Of virtue, and of gallant merit, Judith had heard a troubadour Lauding the parfait knightly spirit, Singing beneath the ivied wall. The cross-marked varlet Judith wrestled Was not like these at all, at all ...

(92-ioo)17

If, in Talisman in Seven Shreds' and 'Design for Mediaeval Tapestry/ Klein has pushed literary traditionalism to the edge, by setting up an almost unbearable conflict between traditional literary forms and the historical experiences which they are obviously inadequate to embody, in 'Soiree of Velvel Kleinburger' he goes over the edge into an idiom which is clearly derived from modernism, especially the modernism of Eliot. At a time when Klein was looking for ways of expressing his increasingly troubled sense of his role as a poet, the appeal of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock/ with its unrelentingly ironical portrait of

58 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet futility and alienation, is not surprising. But although 'Soiree' marks an important step in Klein's ongoing dialogue with modernism, it is not among his most successful works, rarely rising above the level of skilful pastiche. In his almost slavish imitation of Trufrock/ Klein has produced a curiously monotonous and self-indulgent work, lacking in the tension between affirmation and criticism, between solidarity with community and alienation from it, which is at the heart of all of his best writing. In 'Soiree of Velvel Kleinburger' the limitations of a not very interesting character are simply presented, without being adequately contextualized. The heart of the poem is Velvel's speech attacking social injustice (31-84), a speech which, no doubt, encouraged Klein's contemporaries to see in him an interest in proletarian poetry18 and prompted Miriam Waddington to include 'Soiree' in her category of 'radical poems.'19 But Velvel Kleinburger, as his name suggests ('Kleinburger' is a literal German translation of 'petit bourgeois'), is no radical, and his banal and cliche-ridden speech is no more than an expression of frustration and resentment. His aim in life is not to make the revolution but to 'place the lucky bet' (83). All this is obvious enough. What is not obvious is what exactly we are to make of this portrait of a pathetic and embittered loser. 'Soiree of Velvel Kleinburger' gives the impression of being a confused as well as a confusing work without a point of view or convictions of its own, in which Klein has been unable to assimilate the influence of his modernist models because he does not yet have anything to assimilate them to, apart from a vague and unarticulated feeling of discontent.20 He has yet to formulate a story through which he can clarify his own troubled relationship with his community and its traditions. It is in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' that Klein begins the formulation of this story in earnest. 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens,' which appeared near the end of 1931, was probably occasioned by the approaching tercentenary of the birth of its subject, Benedict Spinoza, in 1932. Without the impetus of the tercentenary, it is unlikely that Klein would ever have considered writing a poem about Spinoza. All the evidence suggests that Klein had little knowledge of, or abiding interest in, Spinoza's philosophy: after the tercentenary had passed, he undertook no new poems on Spinoza,21 and, as far as I have been able to determine, in all of his prose writings Spinoza is referred to only once, and even then very much in passing.22 Moreover, there is nothing in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' to suggest more than a superficial, second-hand

The Prism and the Hying Motes 59 acquaintance with Spinoza. All of the information on Spinoza in the poem can be traced to one source, the Modern Library selection of Spinoza's writings, edited by Joseph Ratner, of which Klein owned and annotated a copy.23 His annotations, as well as the references to Spinoza in the poem itself, suggest that Klein was primarily interested in Ratner's introductory essays on Spinoza's life and work; he seems to have scarcely glanced at the selections from Spinoza's works which make up the bulk of the volume.24 What Klein was looking for in Spinoza, and what he found, was not a philosophy but a story. Spinoza's story, as told by Ratner, spoke directly to Klein's own personal experience, offering him an opportunity to define, once and for all, the basic elements of the story of the poet which he would continue to elaborate for the rest of his career. This, rather than any supposed influence, is the real significance of Spinoza in Klein's career. There are two aspects of Ratner's account of Spinoza's life and of his philosophy which Klein seized upon as useful to him in constructing his story of the poet. The first is Spinoza's excommunication by the Jewish community of Amsterdam (as recounted by Ratner in his introduction to Spinoza's life) to which Klein devotes the first half of 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens'; the second is Spinoza's pantheistic concept of God as the One in the Many (as recounted in Ratner's introduction to Spinoza's philosophy) to which Klein devotes the second half of the poem. It is clear enough why Klein would be intrigued by the conflict between the experience of social fragmentation in Spinoza's life and the redemptive vision of wholeness in his philosophy, since it corresponds precisely to the conflict in his own sense of himself as a poet. What is not clear is how this conflict, to which Klein responds so powerfully in Spinoza's story, is to be resolved in his own story of the poet. In 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens/ Klein transforms both the biographical fact of Spinoza's excommunication and the philosophical concept of the One in the Many into poetic metaphors for the relationship of the individual and his community. In so doing, he is faced with the challenge of how to tell a story which will relate these two metaphors as part of a process of development moving from disintegration to reintegration. The process of reintegration is left very much hanging at the end of the poem, where we see Spinoza at peace with himself and his God but totally unreconciled to the Jewish community which exiled him and which he has chosen simply to 'forget' (128). But the very fact that Klein is writing a poem about Spinoza suggests that, with the passage of time,

60 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Spinoza and his vision have been reintegrated into the Jewish community and its tradition; if this were not true, then Klein would not be writing a poem about Spinoza rather than, for example, one about Kant or Hegel. In other words, Klein's poem becomes a self-validating argument that there is a continuous, still vital Jewish tradition, generous enough to include the non-orthodox such as Spinoza - and Klein himself. In its breadth and unity, this tradition is the very embodiment of Spinoza's vision of the One in the Many. But there are difficulties with Klein's attempt to reincorporate Spinoza into the Jewish tradition. One might question, in the first place, how vital this tradition really is, at least from Klein's perspective, when all that he really knows about Spinoza is what he has been able to crib from a popular account. In a broader sense, Spinoza's relationship to the Jewish tradition, no matter how generously we define such a tradition, is highly problematical. As the first example in history of the cosmopolitan, free-thinking Jew of the Enlightenment, Spinoza marked the beginning of the inevitable dissolution of the European Jewish community, which had always been based on adherence to Jewish religious traditions; and after his excommunication by the Jews of Amsterdam on charges of atheism, he no longer considered himself a Jew and ceased contributing in any way to a specifically Jewish tradition. Perhaps the 'paunchy sons of Abraham' ('Pulver/ i) were right to recognize in Spinoza an alienation from the traditions of Judaism which was beyond hope of reconciliation. If, then, Spinoza's story offers Klein a model for the conflict between his ideal of community and his personal sense of social alienation, there is nothing in this story to suggest to him how the conflict might be resolved. And at this stage of his career, when Klein is just beginning to acknowledge this conflict within himself, he is not yet ready to create on his own a narrative which will ultimately lead to its resolution. In other words, although all the elements of Klein's story of the poet are present, for the first time, in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens/ these elements do not yet quite add up to a story. The poem's lack of narrative development is most evident in its characterization. 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' establishes the basic cast of characters to which Klein will return again and again in retelling his story of the poet; but, in this version of the story, he presents the relationships among his characters in conceptual rather than narrative terms. Spinoza is seen in the context of three such relationships, first with the Jews of Amsterdam, then with Uriel da Costa,

The Prism and the Flying Motes 61 and finally with Shabbathai Zvi. Klein's presentation of these three sets of relationships probably derives from a paragraph in Ratner, which he marked in his copy. I quote the passage in its entirety, because it can be seen as a kind of paradigm for Klein's story of the poet in all its versions: It was inevitable that the intellectual life of the Jews of Amsterdam should bear the marks of their inner and outer social constraints. Their intellectual life was cramped and ineffectual. Indiscriminate erudition, not independent thought, was all the Jewish leaders, connected in one way or another with the Synagogue, were able to achieve. It was far safer to cling to the innocuous past than it was to strike out boldly into the future. Any independence of thought that was likely to prove socially dangerous as well as schismatic was promptly suppressed. The humiliation and excommunication (circa 1640) of the indecisive martyr Uriel da Costa when he ventured to entertain doctrines that were not orthodox, were prompted as much by political as by religious considerations. It is true, many of the faithful were attracted by Cabbalistic wonders and the strange hope of being saved from a bitter exile by a Messianic Sabbatai Zevi. But these wayward deviations, in reality not so very far removed from orthodox tradition, exhibited only the more clearly the fearsome inner insecurity which a strained formalism in thought and habit bravely attempted to cover. (Ratner, p. xii)

In terms of Klein's story of the poet, 'the Jews of Amsterdam' represent the community in which the poet is rooted and which he seeks to redeem; but because of its 'fearsome inner insecurity' it feels threatened by the poet's 'independence of thought' and rejects out of hand his attempt to 'strike out boldly into the future.' Uriel da Costa, 'the indecisive martyr' who was forced to recant his unorthodox ideas under pressure from the Jewish establishment and was eventually driven to suicide, represents the class of alienated intellectuals who attempt to set themselves apart from the received orthodoxies of the day, but lack the moral strength and intellectual independence to persevere in the face of the resulting 'humiliation and excommunication/ And the 'Messianic Sabbatai Zevi,' who aroused widespread hopes of imminent redemption when he proclaimed himself Messiah, and clashed those hopes when he converted to Islam, represents the destructive demagogue who exploits the demoralized community with false promises 'not so very far removed' from what it wants to hear, thus usurping the position of leadership of the genuinely creative and challenging poet. If 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' is remarkable for the

62 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet clarity and thoroughness with which it establishes the basic cast of characters of the story of the poet, it is equally remarkable for how little it does with them in narrative terms. The characters never interact with one another; they are simply juxtaposed. We never see Spinoza confronting the Jews of Amsterdam or even giving any thought to his relationship with them; and the same is true of the presentation of Uriel da Costa and Shabbathai Zvi (neither of whom the historical Spinoza ever actually met). In narrative terms, Spinoza and the other characters in the poem are as isolated from one another as are the characters in 'Portraits of a Minyan' or 'Design for Mediaeval Tapestry.' But unlike these earlier sequences, which seem to offer little opportunity for dramatic or narrative development, Spinoza's story begs to be told as a story of conflict and resolution. Klein's refusal to tell such a story is reflected in the structure of 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens.' In terms of narrative, the most striking structural feature of the poem is the lack of any narrative link between its two halves, the first, 'biographical' half, and the second, 'philosophical' one. Not only is there no clear narrative development between the two halves of the poem; the potential for any such development is positively subverted by the order in which the two halves of the poem are presented, which neatly reverses the chronological process of cause and effect crucial to any narrative development. Spinoza's concept of God, which led to his excommunication, is presented in the second half of the poem, while the excommunication itself is presented in the first half: thus, effect precedes cause. And the organization of the biographical material within the first half of the poem further disrupts any sense of chronology and causality. Thus, in section I, the attempt on Spinoza's life follows his excommunication rather than precedes it as in Ratner's account; the same is true of Uriel da Costa's suicide in section II, which actually occurred sixteen years earlier, when Spinoza was eight years old. Section IV concludes with Spinoza's decision to 'forsake the God suspended in mid-air' (53), although supposedly this decision was made well before the events described in the poem. And it is only in section V that the charge of atheism, which led to Spinoza's excommunication in the first place, is actually laid against 'the horrible atheist' (56). As with its characters, the relationship between the two halves of 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' is conceptual rather than narrative. The first four sections of the poem are linked by an intricate series of thematic parallels with its last four. Section V is preceded and followed

The Prism and the Flying Motes 63 by two carefully balanced triads, sections II-IV in the first half of the sequence and sections VI-VIII in the second: The first triad moves

The second triad moves

from the defeat of da Costa, who seeks acceptance from society (section II);

from the triumph of Spinoza, who withdraws entirely from society (section VI);

through Spinoza's agonizing expression of doubt (section III);

through Spinoza's ecstatic expression of faith (section VII);

to Spinoza's rejection of a transcendent God (section IV).

to Spinoza's celebration of an immanent God (section VIII).

Forming a kind of symmetrical frame for the poem as a whole are sections I and IX, which serve as prologue and epilogue respectively. Section I, which is set in the urban world of 'the maculate streets of Amsterdam' (2) and describes Spinoza's excommunication by his society, is paired off against section IX, which is set in the pastoral world of 'the garden of Mynheer' (128) and describes Spinoza's communion with the Divine principle of unity. A simple diagram of the structure of the poem would look something like this: prologue I

:

triad i II-IV

:

centre V

:

triad 2 : VI-VIII

epilogue IX25

As this account suggests, the form of 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' is spatial rather than temporal. The nine sections of the poem are laid out like tiles in a mosaic - more geometrico, to quote Spinoza - rather than like episodes in a story. In common with other modernist examples of 'spatial form,' 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' 'frustrat[es] the reader's normal expectation of a sequence and forc[es] him to perceive the elements of the poem as juxtaposed in space rather than unrolling in time':26 there is no process of unfolding, no unrolling of the scroll. The effect of the elaborate symmetry between the two halves of the poem is to mask the absence of a developing narrative which would bridge the gap between them, and, more specifically, between the opposite perspectives from which they represent the central concept of the One in the Many.

64 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet The first half of the poem takes place in the world of the Many, the world of 'pulver/ It presents a world in a state of social disintegration, a world of excommunication ('interdict' [4], 'anathema' [6], and 'schism' [35]), ruled over by a God who has been 'exiled' (46) and exists in total isolation from his creation, 'within his vacuum of heaven' (48). In this world, the body is dismembered, reduced to paunches and breasts, thumbs and noses: The paunchy sons of Abraham Spit on the maculate streets of Amsterdam Informing the breast where Satan gloats and crows That saving it leave false doctrine, jot and tittle, No vigilant thumb will leave its orthodox nose

(1-2, 10-12)

Theology' (5) in this world divides rather than unites: it 'winnow[s]' (7) and 'whittle[s]' (8). The second half of the poem takes place in the world of the One, the world of 'the polished lens.' It focuses, not on the alienation of the individual from society, but on his communion with the One, and on his vision of the Unity underlying the 'fragments]' (89) of the Many. It is a world of re-membering rather than dismembering - 'remembering the thought of the Adored' (131), who is conceived of as a single living body: Even as the stars in the firmament move, so does my inward heart, and even as the moon draws the tides in the bay, so does it the blood in my veins. (116-18)

In this world the central impulse is not to divide, to 'winnow,' but to unite, to 'gather' (132). The emphasis on fragmentation and discontinuity in the first half of the poem is reflected in its constantly shifting narrative voice. The effect is unprecedented in Klein's work; for precedents we must look to 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley' and The Waste Land, poetry sequences which seek to express the modernist sense of crisis and dislocation by depriving the reader of the reassurance of a coherent and authoritative point of view. Thus the heavy irony of section I is directed by the narrator against 'the paunchy sons of Abraham' and the corrupt values which they represent. Section II presents Uriel da Costa's story from a similarly ironic point of view:

The Prism and the Flying Motes 65 Uriel da Costa Flightily ranted Heresies one day, Next day recanted.

(20-3)

But whose is the irony now? The 'paunchy sons of Abraham' are certainly hostile to the heretic da Costa, but the tone of playful mockery seems out of character for such self-righteous pillars of society. It seems equally out of character, in its lack of human sympathy, for Spinoza as well, especially in light of the anguish of the following section in which he is haunted by the ghost of da Costa. The voice must, by default, be that of the narrator, although his contempt for da Costa, which is as great as, if not greater than, that for 'the paunchy sons of Abraham' seems excessive. Section III is the most straightforward in terms of point of view. It is clearly spoken in the voice of Spinoza, as he struggles with the 'vestiges of doubt' (38). But section IV again presents difficulties. Like section II, it takes a teasing, mocking tone, reminiscent of some of Eliot's poems in quatrains, such as The Hippopotamus' (which is imitated more directly in 'Diary of Abraham Segal, Poet/ 58-81): Jehovah is factotum of the rabbis; And Christ endures diurnal Calvary; Polyglot God is exiled to the churches; Synods tell God to be or not to be. The Lord within his vacuum of heaven Discourses his domestic policies, With angels who break off their loud hosannas To help him phrase infallible decrees.

(44-51)

This attack on the concept of a transcendent God expresses Spinoza's views, but is Spinoza the speaker? The tone again seems odd - totally unlike any of the passages in the second half of the poem which are definitely spoken by Spinoza - and the final stanza appears to describe Spinoza from the perspective of a third person: Soul of Spinoza, Baruch Spinoza bids you Forsake the god suspended in mid-air, Seek you that other Law, and let Jehovah Play his game of celestial solitaire.

(52-5)

66 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Perhaps, though, this is intended to be Spinoza himself addressing his soul ('I bid you ...') in a rather elaborately roundabout manner. But the most puzzling passage of all in terms of narrative point of view occurs at the climax of the first half of the poem, the first paragraph of section V. Section V, although set as prose, is, in fact, a sonnet, with the rhyme scheme abbacddceffegg. It combines features of both the Shakespearean and Petrarchan forms, its division into four sentences suggesting the three quatrains and couplet of the Shakespearean sonnet (abba cddc effe gg), and its division into two paragraphs suggesting the octave and sestet of the Petrarchan sonnet (abbacddc effegg). Klein uses prose sonnets elsewhere in his work,27 but only here does he do so with significant symbolic effect: by discovering the sonnet hidden within the apparently shapeless prose, the reader parallels the process by which Spinoza 'brought to light' (59) the One which is immanent in the Many. An important part of this process is the movement from the Many irreconcilable voices of the octave of the sonnet to the One unified voice of the sestet, a movement which is recapitulated in the sequence as a whole. The octave begins, unmistakably, in the voice of 'the paunchy sons of Abraham' (I indicate the line breaks): Reducing providence to theorems, / the horrible atheist compiled such lore / that proved, like proving two and two make four, / that in the crown of God we all are gems. (56-8)

But, even within this hostile account of Spinoza's philosophy, there is a curious shift in tone, from the pejorative 'reducing' and 'horrible atheist' to the positive, or at least neutral, note of the final line. In the second quatrain, any suggestion of hostility seems entirely to have vanished: From glass and dust of glass he brought to light, / out of the pulver and the polished lens, / the prism and the flying mote; and hence / the infinitesimal and the infinite. (59-61)

But it is only in the sestet that a complete turnaround occurs: Is it a marvel, then, that he forsook / the abracadabra of the synagogue, / and holding with timelessness a duologue, / deciphered a new scripture in the book? / Is it a marvel that he left old fraud / for passion intellectual of God? (62-5)

The Prism and the Flying Motes 67 There is no ambiguity at all about point of view here. The beliefs of 'the paunchy sons of Abraham' are categorically rejected as 'abracadabra' and 'fraud/ in contrast to the 'passion intellectual of God' ascribed to Spinoza, who, just a few lines earlier, was 'the horrible atheist.' In the second half of 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' the conflict among the many voices which dominated its modernist first half has been stilled: one voice speaks, whether through Spinoza or through the narrator - the voice of the Jewish tradition. When Spinoza unfolds his philosophy in section VIII of the poem, the voice in which he does so is unmistakably the voice of that tradition, specifically of the Psalms, which are frequently quoted and alluded to throughout the section, and everywhere echoed in its imagery, diction, syntax, and rhythms, as in the following passage: Thy glory fills the earth; it is the earth; the noise of the deep, the moving of many waters, is it not thy voice aloud, O Lord, aloud that all may hear? The wind through the almond-trees spreads the fragrance of thy robes; the turtle-dove twittering utters diminutives of thy love; at the rising of the sun I behold thy countenance. Yea, and in the crescent moon, thy little finger's finger-nail. If I ascend up to heaven, thou art there; If I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there. (95-103)

But if the voice of the Jewish tradition is unmistakable in the language of section VIII, so is the voice of Spinoza in its argument, and in the way in which this argument is structured. Section VIII presents Spinoza's pantheistic argument (which is not the argument of the Psalms) that ... we can apprehend the infinite essence of God or Nature because every particular finite thing is a determinate expression of the infinite ... Thus from the comprehension of any particular thing, we can pass to a comprehension of the infinite and eternal. (Ratner, pp. Ixi-lxii)

Moreover, it does so by 'reducing providence to theorems,' that is, by imitating the geometrical method used by Spinoza who believed that 'it must be just as possible ... to apply the mathematical method to man, as it is to apply it to matter' (Ratner, p. xxviii; marked by Klein). Although the language of section VIII recalls the Psalms, its structure recalls Euclid's Elements: specifically, its apparently rhapsodic structure is, in fact, a rigorously logical syllogistic proof.

68 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Spinoza begins by identifying himself with the Many, and God with the One: Lord, accept my hallelujahs; look not askance at these my petty words; unto perfection a fragment makes its prayer. (88-9)

He then states, twice, a syllogism concerning the relationship between himself and God, between the Many and the One: For thou art the world, and I am a part thereof; thou art the blossom and I its fluttering petal. I behold thee in all things, and in all things: lo, it is myself; I look into the pupil of thine eye, it is my very countenance I see. (90-4)

In less figurative language: major premise: minor premise: conclusion:

God is the world I am part of the world I am part of God

The major premise is elaborated in lines 95-112 (Thy glory fills the earth, it is the earth ...'); the minor premise in lines 113-18 ('brother to all that lives am I'); and then, after a recapitulation of the major and minor premises ('For thou art the world, and I am part thereof [119]), there is a statement of the conclusion, in which the dust of the Many is taken up into the divine: 'Howbeit, even in dust I am resurrected; and even in decay I live again' (izo-i).28 The celebration of Jewish tradition as a vital whole capable of creative renewal, which is so evident in section VIII, could hardly contrast more strongly with the bitter modernist vision of fragmentation and alienation in the the first half of the poem. But what is missing in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' is any sense of precisely how Spinoza, or the reader, is to get from the experience of the first half of the poem to that of the second. As the last section of the poem tells us, Spinoza can only 'remember ... the thought of the Adored' (131) by 'forgetting' (128) the society that has rejected him. And if we are to 'think of Spinoza' (122) as representing the imaginative triumph of the vision of the One, we must 'not... think / Of Shabbathai Zvi' (122-3), who represents the defeat of this vision in the world of the Many. The gap between the two halves of the poem corresponds, of course, to Klein's own experience as

The Prism and the Flying Motes 69 a poet, and it will be many years before he is able to formulate a story which will offer him some hope of bridging it - not until he comes to write 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ It is not surprising, then, that in the works written in the wake of 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' there is a strong sense of frustration.29 This is particularly evident in the satire 'Diary of Abraham Segal, Poet,' which avoids the painful conflict between the poet's ideal vision of wholeness and the reality of his experience of social alienation by subjecting both the poet's society and his artistic vision to savage parody. 'Diary of Abraham Segal, Poet' is reminiscent of 'Soiree of Velvel Kleinburger' in its bitter satire of modern urban society, and, like the earlier poem, it shows evidence of Klein's familiarity with the formal conventions of modernism. There is, however, an important difference between the two: whereas 'Soiree of Velvel Kleinburger' contains no sign of any of the basic elements of the story of the poet which Klein was to establish in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens,' most of these elements are present in 'Diary of Abraham Segal, Poet.' They are present, though, in a debased and parodied form, suggesting a sense of frustration and impotence. Like Spinoza, Segal is alienated from his society and has a keen awareness of its failings, but, unlike Spinoza, he lacks a positive vision to inspire or to console him. Segal, like all of Klein's poets, is faced with a fragmented world, a world of the Many which has entirely lost touch with the One. This sense of fragmentation is expressed in a number of ways: by the diary form itself, consisting of discontinuous entries; by the extensive use of pastiche and quotation in the manner of Pound or Eliot; and by the images of fragmentation and dismemberment which pervade the poem: hearts are 'broken' (31); workers are mere 'hands' ('He Considers the Factory Hands'), 'piecets] of work' (44) who are treated like 'cadavers' to be 'dissect[ed]' (47); restaurants are 'one-armed' (126); movie audiences are reduced to mindless 'feet' and Imttocks' (185) watching a 'phallus' (186); and the poet's 'idols have been shattered into shards' (175). In describing Segal's attempts to deal with this world of fragmentation, Klein draws on all of the basic elements of his story of the hero. Corresponding to the 'paunchy sons of Abraham,' with their hostility to any form of intellectual or spiritual challenge, are the masses who are made 'numb' and 'callous' (185) by watching movies in which sex and wealth are the only values. Corresponding to the irresolute and suicidal

yo A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Uriel da Costa are the poet's 1>itter friends/ intellectuals who are always 'at loggerheads' (189) with one another, and whose opposition to the prevailing norms of society degenerates into futile and selfdestructive infighting. Segal's proper role as leader has been usurped, like Spinoza's, by an evil impostor: his Shabbathai Zvi is his boss, the rich businessman, Schwartz (i.e., 'black'), who holds power over society and over Segal himself. Segal's story, like Spinoza's, ends with a retreat from the hostility of society to a pastoral world of love and beauty, 'the meadow on the mountain-top' (206) of Mount Royal where 'He Communes with Nature' (206-20). In the end, though, despite the more complex framework provided by the story of the poet, 'Diary of Abraham Segal, Poet' is not much more successful than 'Soiree of Velvel Kleinburger/ It, too, suffers from the limitations of its central character, who can only return again and again to the fact of his alienation, without any attempt to resolve his situation or at least to achieve a broader perspective on it. By far the strongest section of the poem is 'He Contemplates His Contemporaries,' in which Segal deftly skewers the pretensions of his pseudo-intellectual acquaintances who think they can redeem a world which has little interest in being redeemed by them: ... the radical Pounding upon an unprovisioned table Rendering it, not Canada, unstable All, in the end, despite their savage feuds, Italic voices uttering platitudes.

(196-200)

Although Segal sees himself as superior to this self-deluded crew, there is nothing in the poem to suggest that he is any less deluded than they, that he is the Spinoza to their Uriel da Costa. This may, of course, be the very point Klein is making, but it does not seem a point worth making at such great length; the effect of listening to Segal's voice uttering modernist platitudes of alienation for over two hundred lines is, to use Segal's own term, 'numbing.' The reduction of the heroic portrait of the poet in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' to this tired caricature suggests that Klein has come to something of a dead end, that he is finding it increasingly difficult to maintain his high artistic ambitions in the face of a steadily worsening social and historical situation, and that in the absence of anything to replace these ambitions he is reduced to self-parody.

The Prism and the Flying Motes 71 At about the time that 'Diary of Abraham Segal, Poet' was published, Klein was beginning to turn to the writing of a very different kind of poem: poems for children. A couple of such poems - 'Elijah' and 'King Elimelech' - had been published slightly earlier, in 1931, but the bulk of them appeared between 1932 and 1934. Although these playful poems are among the most charming and cheerful Klein ever wrote, they represent as much of an admission of defeat as the bitter satire of 'Segal,' a defeat of the ambitions represented by 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens.' It is as if Klein, having given up the attempt to communicate with 'the paunchy sons of Abraham/ is trying, at least, to reach their children. Klein's turning to children's poems is foreshadowed in a particularly interesting way by 'Reb Levi Yitschok Talks to God,' first published in 1932. Reb Levi Yitschok of Berditchev, a Chassidic rabbi, was famous for the intimacy with which he addressed God. The poem is freely based on a Chassidic folk-song attributed to Levi Yitschok (later translated by Klein), in which he boldly calls God to account for the suffering of the Jews. However, Klein dramatizes Levi Yitschok's monologue in a way completely at odds with his source: he presents Levi Yitschok's challenge to God, not as heroic and admirable, but as futile and pathetic: he is 'talking to himself (27), and his arguments are those of an 'infant' (28). As his 'monologue' (55) proceeds, he works himself up emotionally - 'He raged, he wept' (56) - and then he 'suddenly [goes] mild' (56): Begging the Lord to lead him through the fog; Reb Levi Yitschok, an ever-querulous child, Sitting on God's knees in the synagogue, Unanswered even when the sunrise smiled.

(57-60)

The parallels between this passage and the final lines of 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' are quite striking, especially in their syntax:30 Plucking his tulips in the Holland sun, Remembering the thought of the Adored, Spinoza, gathering flowers for the One, The ever-unwedded lover of the Lord.

(130-3)

But while the 'unwedded' Spinoza is a 'lover' engaged in a genuine 'duologue' (63) with 'God,' the 'unanswered' Levi Yitschok is a 'child'

72 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet reduced to a monologue. This reduction of Spinoza's heroic search for understanding and redemption to the prattle of a lost child foreshadows the direction Klein's poetry would take during the following two or three years. Reb Levi Yitschok's childlike prayer to God 'to lead him through the fog' is, in a sense, answered by Klein's children's poems. The children in these poems are not lost and bewildered, as Levi Yitschok is; they are escorted by 'leader[s] of tots' ('Baal Shem Tov,' 4), such as the prophet Elijah and the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Chassidism, who embody the protective power of tradition. The children's poems have long been recognized as among Klein's most successful and attractive. John Sutherland, for example, argued that they were 'likely to be read in Canada long after the weightier works are forgotten.'31 However, as Usher Caplan has pointed out, although their success as poems seems beyond doubt, their success as poems specifically for children is more questionable: 'Many of the poems, in fact, seem far too richly allusive to be appreciated by children.'32 Klein's motives in writing these poems were, no doubt, mixed. Most were published in the Judaean for younger readers, as part of Klein's duties as education director of Young Judaea, and this may, to some extent, explain why Klein seems to go out of his way to pack the poems with allusions to Jewish rituals and traditions. But it is hard not to suspect that at least part of Klein's reason for turning to children's poetry was that it offered an escape from the increasingly intolerable pressure of historical events. (An interesting parallel is the modern Yiddish poet Mani-Leyb - whose work Klein knew and translated - who also turned to children's poetry when he felt overwhelmed by history.)33 With few exceptions, heroes, bandits, doctors, beggars, kings, prophets, and sages all blend playfully together into a single idyllic community, untouched by time. And the recurrent emphasis on littleness in these poems, which has been noted by several commentators,34 seems to reflect Klein's personal need to retreat into a diminished, unthreatening world. Perhaps the poem which best sums up Klein's frame of mind at this time is 'Bestiary/ which describes the Bible as a magical landscape through which a child can wander at will, free of danger from even the most terrifying of beasts: God breathe a blessing on His small bones, every one! The little boy, who stalks

The Prism and the Flying Motes 73 The Bible's plains and rocks To hunt in grammar'd woods Strange litters and wild broods; The little boy who seeks Beast-muzzles and bird-beaks In cave and den and crypt, In copse of holy script; The little boy who looks For quarry in holy books.

(1-12)

This fantasy of retreat into the self-enclosed and entirely unthreatening world of the book represents the general strategy of these poems as a whole, a retreat from the adult world of history into the timelessness of an unchanging and protective tradition. Among the predominantly children's poems which Klein collected in a bound volume of typescripts in 1934 is one which, while it evokes a childlike retreat into the reassuring world of 'holy books/ reminiscent of 'Bestiary/ does so from a very different point of view and with very different effect. 'Heirloom/ along with the unfinished 'Petition For That My Father's Soul Should Enter into Heaven' - both written soon after the death of Klein's father - form a kind of epilogue to the works of Klein's early maturity, marking the end of his first attempt to explore his relationship to his community and its traditions. In 'Heirloom/ Klein describes himself as looking through a collection of books which have been left to him by his father: My father bequeathed me no wide estates; No keys and ledgers were my heritage; Only some holy books with yahrzeit dates Writ mournfully upon a blank front page Books of the Baal Shem Tov, and of his wonders; Pamphlets upon the devil and his crew; Prayers against road demons, witches, thunders; And sundry other tomes for a good Jew. Beautiful: though no pictures on them, save The scorpion crawling on a printed track;

74 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet The Virgin floating on a scriptural wave, Square letters twinkling in the Zodiac. The snuff left on this page, now brown and old, The tallow stains of midnight liturgy These are my coat of arms, and these unfold My noble lineage, my proud ancestry! And my tears, too, have stained this heirloomed ground, When reading in these treatises some weird Miracle, I turned a leaf and found A white hair fallen from my father's beard.

Although there is no denying Klein's affection for his father's books, they no longer represent a living tradition to him. If they did, he would not use the word 'weird' of their subject matter: it is impossible to imagine the 'good Jew' for whom these 'sundry tomes' were intended doing so.35 The 'coat of arms' which 'unfoldfs his] noble ancestry' consists, not of the actual contents of the books, but of the 'snuff and 'tallow stains' he finds on their pages; and the 'heirloom' of the title is, in a typical Kleinian pun, an actual 'hair' from his father's beard. In other words, the tradition which these books appear to 'unfold' must, in fact, be re-membered by Klein out of odd bits and pieces - grains of snuff, tallow stains, a single hair - which happen to have personal associations for him. The process of re-membering is completed in the final stanza of the poem when the stains of the poet's tears are added to those left by his father's snuff and tallow, and the circle of tradition is closed. But it is a very fragile tradition indeed, whose only basis, after 'the theology ... has vanished,' is 'the nostalgia and the beauty of ... childhood.'36 Klein returns once more to his relationship with his father, and to the tradition which his father embodied for him, in 'Petition For That My Father's Soul Should Enter into Heaven.' The poem is less an elegy for his father than an act of self-laceration in which Klein presents himself as a betrayer of the traditions his father held dear: Unworthy even to utter His slightest name, Before Him meaner than a beggar's shoe, A breaker of Sabbaths, a man of dubious fame, A knave-defender, crony of the unholy crew,

The Prism and the Flying Motes 75 A withered limb upon a sacred tree, I, my own self, durst not advance to sue Before the heavenly throne, nor ease my heart Of that which so perturbs, so troubles me.

(1-8)

A withered limb dismembered from the body of his community and its traditions, the poet offers his poem as a poor substitute for the prayers he is no longer able to say: How can I read that script with profane tongue, With sceptic eyes, with lips incredulous, How can I mouth them, the good verse, the pious song?

(33~5)

Alienated from the beliefs of his father, he no longer has a loving escort who will lead him, like a child, along the paths of tradition: For I have gone a long and crooked path Since the bright innocence of Aleph-bais, A long and tortuous way, a bitter road

(36-8)

But, at the same time as condemning himself as an apostate, he has little patience for the 'devout simplicity' (64) of his brothers who 'know what is the right and proper thing' (50) and follow the prescribed rituals without thought or questioning. And, at the very end of the poem, when Klein finally turns his attention to his father, it is with some bitterness that he describes how, even when he was broken by economic exploitation - probably at the hands of a fellow-Jew - he 'still praised his God, and blessed his bread' (75). But Klein is hot yet ready to engage in the kind of critique which would express his growing unease with his community and with his own role as a spokesman for its traditional values, and the poem breaks off at this point. Klein's abandonment of poetry for the next three years indicates the depth of the crisis which he now faces.

5

Fragments Again Fragmented

The mid- to late thirties were difficult years for Klein, perhaps the most difficult of his career. During these years, the story of the poet which he had elaborated in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' lay in fragments, shattered by the forces of history. Unwilling to abandon his conviction that a true poet must play a central role in his community, yet no longer able to define that role in the face of the increasing social disintegration which he saw all around him, Klein temporarily abandoned poetry, as he groped for new bearings in journalism, fiction, and translation. But, although he returned to poetry at the end of the period, the political satires of the late thirties are as fragmented and incoherent as any of the work of the previous few years; as long as the bleak historical conditions of the thirties remained unchanged, Klein's various attempts to redefine his role as a poet inevitably proved futile. Throughout the thirties, as history began to take on a more terrifying shape than ever before, Klein could no longer find consolation in the vision of a continuous, timeless tradition which he had earlier invoked. His invocation of tradition had been ambivalent at the best of times, but now it seemed increasingly inadequate in the face of the collapse of the world economic order and of the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism in Europe and closer at home in Quebec. Events were clearly moving towards a terrible crisis, and Klein could only look on with a sense of dread and hopelessness as this crisis drew nearer. The apparently endless Depression and the inexorable rise of fascism not only threw into question the validity of Klein's story of the poet and his redemptive role; these developments also had very real practical effects on Klein's career, as both a lawyer and a writer. Klein had entered law school with high hopes of a practice which would be

Fragments Again Fragmented 77 financially successful, intellectually challenging, and socially progressive. In a thinly veiled autobiographical account of these youthful hopes, Klein describes his naive faith in the law as a 'sacred service. The hard rock of jurisprudence would he strike, and the fresh and liquid crystal of the prophets would flow forth!' (untitled novel [NB, p. 135!). This faith was soon shattered as he began his practice in the depths of the Depression, when work of any sort was very difficult to find, and interesting and challenging work almost impossible. The practice of law was frustrating and disappointing to Klein. Most of the legal work he could find was tedious and dry ... The rough-and-tumble of the legal profession destroyed any illusions he may still have had about the nobility of his calling.'1 His accounts of these years2 emphasize the boredom and frustration he experienced as he waited endlessly for the clients who never appeared, and his attitude to the law in general became increasingly cynical: That law and justice were not things synonymous was the truism of old wives; but how life conspired always to prove its truisms true! The heart said one thing, the code as a rule echoed it, and then, when these sounds were coursed through a courtroom - with circumstance distorting them, and the human voice recording them in prejudiced fortissimo, in self-protective fortissimo, how strange, how unrecognizable, the original high principle issued! (untitled novel [NB, p. 135])

The frustration of the high hopes which Klein had for his career as a lawyer was parallelled by the frustration he was beginning to experience in his attempts to achieve recognition as a poet. And this frustration, too, can be directly attributed to the social and economic dislocations of the thirties. Klein's career had had a promising beginning, with his publication, by the age of twenty, in Poetry [Chicago] as well as in such leading American Jewish periodicals as Opinion and Menorah Journal; but the next stage - getting a book published - proved much more difficult. In the harsh economic climate of the Depression there was little interest in Canada in publishing books of poetry, especially modern poetry.3 Of all the members of the Fortnightly group, only Leo Kennedy managed to get a volume of his poetry, The Shrouding (1933), published in the thirties, and when the New Provinces anthology, which included Klein's 'Soiree of Velvel Kleinburger' and 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens,' appeared in 1936, it was to general indifference. For Klein there was one alternative to the virtually non-existent

78 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet market for poetry in Canada - certain American presses specializing in material of Jewish interest. The most important of these presses was the Jewish Publication Society of America, and, in 1931, Klein submitted to the JPS a manuscript of his poems on Jewish themes entitled 'Greeting on This Day/ All of the readers' reports contained high praise for the artistic merit of the collection: 'a true poet';4 'a poet of deep thought and fine poetic feeling';5 'subtle and melodious ... a sage and a poet in one ... might easily climb to greatness';6 'splendid ... authentic power ... sufficient excellent material ... to justify a volume.'7 But the manuscript was rejected, and when Klein resubmitted a revised version in 1935, it was rejected once again. The rejection of Klein's manuscripts by the JPS had less to do with the economic constraints that had stood in his way in Canada than with social ones. At a time of growing fascism and anti-Semitism, Jewish community leaders were concerned with presenting Jewish culture and Jewish values in the best possible light, especially to non-Jews. Several readers felt that Klein's poetry failed to do this, that, in fact, much of it was gratuitously offensive. Their comments form a useful corrective to Ludwig Lewisohn's frequently quoted characterization of Klein as 'the first contributor of authentic Jewish poetry to the English language.'8 One reader criticized the 'bitterness and vindictiveness' and the 'blasphemy and cynicism'9 of some of the poems; another found them 'repellant/ 'offensive,' and 'dismal';10 a third objected to their 'somber, pessimistic, cynical, at times agnostic and often repellant'11 themes. In recognition of the artistic merit of the poems, the Publication Committee of the JPS drafted a letter to Klein suggesting that he resubmit his manuscript to 'a general publishing house' such as Viking or Harper Brothers or Macmillan,12 but this suggestion was deleted from the final draft of the letter at the insistence of Cyrus Adler, the chairman of the committee;13 so that Klein (who never saw the readers' reports) was denied even that encouragement. A collection of Klein's Jewish poems was finally accepted for publication, as Hath Not a Jew ..., by the less prestigious Jewish publisher Behrman's, in 1936, but to Klein's chagrin the publication date was put off again and again. In a letter to his Montreal friend Joe Frank, dated 5 August 1938, he wrote: As for my book - may my publisher be drowned in ink, may he be crushed between presses, may the printer's devil take him. - he is giving me the runaround. The contract is signed. The manuscript has been made up, but the publisher stands, like life, between me and immortality.

Fragments Again Fragmented

79

The volume would not appear until 1940. In response to these repeated rebuffs and delays, Klein tried to find a new market for his work and began to submit short stories on a range of themes to various publishers, but with very limited artistic and financial success. Perhaps the most important source of continuity and consolation for Klein throughout these difficult years was his increasingly active involvement in Zionist affairs. His frequent public lectures on Zionist matters, both political and cultural, provided a much more satisfactory opportunity than his law practice to exercise his oratorical skills; and the lectures, along with his other Zionist activities, also provided a much-needed, though very modest, source of income. In 1936 he became director of publicity of the Zionist Organization of Canada and editor of its monthly magazine, the Canadian Zionist, and the bulk of his journalism in this period, whether for the Canadian Zionist, the Judaean, or the Canadian Jewish Chronicle, was on Zionist themes. Although the depth of Klein's commitment to Zionism cannot be doubted, the journalism of this period - from 1934 until he assumed full-time editorship of the Canadian Jewish Chronicle near the end of 1938 - is perhaps the least impressive of his career. Significantly, of the nearly one hundred articles which Klein published during these years, only one is reprinted in Beyond Sambation: Selected Essays and Editorials 1928-1955. No other period of Klein's journalism is so poorly represented in the volume; the previous few years, for example, during which Klein published somewhat less, are represented by ten items. The journalism is not only disappointing in quality; it also seems curiously disconnected from the major historical events of the day, especially as they affected the Jews. In contrast to the journalism of the late twenties and early thirties, the journalism of this period contains surprisingly few references to the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism either in Quebec or in Europe. Earlier, Klein had begun to take powerful stands in his journalism on these issues. He wrote a number of editorials attacking the racist propaganda of Adrien Arcand, Joseph Menard, and others - most notably The Twin Racketeers of Journalism' (1932), occasioned by ritual murder accusations against the Jews in Le Miroir (BS, pp. 26-9) - as well as several others dealing in more general terms with the increasingly strained French-Jewish relations in Quebec.14 He also turned his attention to the fascist movements in Italy, Spain, and, especially, Germany, devoting, for example, a prescient editorial to the implications of the strong Nazi showing in the German elections of 31 July 1932.15 In every way the situation of the Jews in Quebec and

8o A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet in Europe grew much worse in the years that followed/6 but there is not much evidence of this in Klein's journalism. There are noticeably fewer editorials dealing with anti-Semitism in Quebec, and no discussion at all of the most ominous development for the Jews of Quebec in the thirties, the defeat of the provincial Liberals in 1936 by the Union Nationale party under Maurice Duplessis, with its close ties to the openly fascist Arcand. Duplessis, in fact, is mentioned only once, and in passing, in the editorials of this period, in contrast to numerous references to him in later years.17 The situation is even more striking with regard to the developments in Nazi Germany, which pass almost without mention. There is nothing, for example, about the Reichstag fire, or Hitler's appointment as chancellor, or the occupation of the Rhineland, or the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, or the Anschluss, or Munich - events which one would have expected Klein to comment on, and all of which he did comment on retrospectively in later years. These rather startling omissions suggest that Klein's intense focus on Zionism, by far the most important single topic of his journalism at this time, may have acted, at least in part, as a distraction from historical developments which he felt himself unable to confront directly. Although, to judge by Klein's journalism, the Zionist vision was of central importance to him in the mid-thirties, there is little evidence of this vision, or of any other unifying vision, in the fiction of the period.18 M.W. Steinberg's comment on one of these stories, that it portrays a 'world floundering futilely in an economic morass and increasingly beset by evil doctrines and violent political forces,'19 is true directly or indirectly of all of them. It is true as well of Klein himself, who seems, in these stories, to be 'floundering futilely' through a bewildering variety of genres in an unsuccessful attempt to find a new voice adequate to the times. In a few explicitly political stories - 'Blood and Iron: A Satire on Modern German Ideology/ 'Friends, Romans, Hungrymen/ and 'Beggars I Have Known' - Klein addresses the issues of the day directly. But, as Morley Callaghan commented on 'Friends, Romans, Hungrymen/ they are not 'authentic' and their effectiveness is limited by Klein's 'very great determination to pull off striking effects.'20 Such effects as the elaborate allegory of Hitler as a kind of vampire with a literal thirst for blood in 'Blood and Iron/ or the slangy parody of a fairy-tale in 'Friends, Romans, Hungrymen,' call attention to themselves to no particular end, and are distracting, even trivializing. A number of stories avoid any direct reference to politics but seem to

Fragments Again Fragmented 81 reflect, in what Steinberg describes as their 'absurd, chaotic,' 'bizarre,' and 'ghoulish'21 manner, Klein's sense of helplessness and despair. Apart from a common fascination with death, especially death in grotesque forms, these stories seem to have little in common with one another in tone, degree of seriousness, or intended audience.22 If, as Steinberg puts it, Klein is 'experiment [ing] somewhat with surrealistic effects'23 in many of these stories, the aim of his experiments is far from clear. The most ambitious story of the period is the 'enigmatic parable' (Stories, p. 125) 'A Myriad-Minded Man/ Its protagonist, Isaiah Ellenbogen, is conceived of, not as a coherent, developing character, but as an abstract representation of a particular state of mind, the 'myriadmindedness' of the title: he is a 'robot with [a] versatile soul' (Stories, p. 151). To him, the universe consists of a mass of infinitely varied phenomena, and his monologues, whether in conversation or in print, constantly hark back to this theme and to the search, always frustrated and increasingly desperate, for some underlying unity. The first of his several monologues concerns Jewish cooking, which he defines as a heterogeneous pot-pourri without any unifying principle: 'the Jews haven't been home long enough to develop an autochthonous meal' (Stories, p. 135). The next time he appears, he is acting as an expert witness in a case involving industrial pollution, and his deposition expresses a vision of the 'inscrutable labyrinths of the earth' in which are concealed 'spirits and phantoms' (Stories, p. 144) and 'death floating in a hundred forms' (Stories, p. 145). He then becomes a circus barker for a freak show claiming that freaks, in their infinite variety, are 'the only real authentic manifestations of divine creativeness' (Stories, p. 147). Ellenbogen then takes up Nazi theories of racial differences and racial purity for which he becomes a spokesman in an anti-Semitic journal. The last we hear of him, he has become the disciple of a mystic-charlatan, retreating to a Tibetan monastery to study 'the subtle and profound innuendoes of existence' (Stories, p. 153). Isaiah Ellenbogen, the 'fetish-worshipper whose fetishes were varied in form, but identical in principle' (Stories, p. 150), foreshadows another of Klein's spiritual adventurers, Uncle Melech, who also goes through a series of sometimes disturbing transformations in his search for the One in the Many. But if Ellenbogen is an early version of Uncle Melech, he is a pathological one, and if the narrator of 'A Myriad-Minded Man' foreshadows the narrator of The Second Scroll in his fascination with the larger-than-life protagonist of his story, his fascination is mixed with horror. Ellenbogen, unlike Uncle Melech, becomes increasingly gro-

82 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet tesque and destructive as the story progresses, and, by the end, the narrator has lost touch with him completely, without ever having come to terms with him and what he represents. There is no suggestion that Ellenbogen, like Melech, has arrived at the end of his spiritual journey and has achieved his vision of the One. Instead, we are left with a sense that any such vision which he may attain in his Tibetan monastery will be illusory, and that the desperate and futile groping of Ellenbogen's 'many-tentacled mind' has not, and never will, come to an end. 'A Myriad-Minded Man' is characteristic of much of Klein's work in the late thirties in its formal incoherence: it does not unfold as a continuous narrative but lurches from one episode to another, without development or resolution. This is true, for example, of the presentation of Ellenbogen's relationship with the professional anti-Semite Geoffrey Somers, which makes little sense, either psychologically or symbolically. It is also true of the presentation of 'the Main': Hundredweights of avoirdupois impeded our way. Corpulent tubs. Fleshpots of Egypt. The pavement was crowded with Jews and Jewesses doing their weekly shopping, some actually entering the welcoming stores, most making their purchases vicariously. There were many, and much of them ... Bulky sausage-armed Jewesses pushed carriages holding at least two sons of the Covenant, while their husbands, in most cases diminutive and cadaverouslooking homunculi, walked by their sides. , (Stories, pp. 126-7)

The sense of physical disgust in this passage is surpassed only by the description of the Mellah of Casablanca in The Second Scroll. But in The Second Scroll, the Dantesque horrors of Mellah play a crucial role in unfolding the narrative. There seems to be no similar narrative justification in 'A Myriad-Minded Man' for the narrator's dwelling on the 'sordidness and malodour' (Stories, p. 131) of the Main. The narrator's attitude, in fact, is something of a mystery. When Somers expatiates on 'melting pot[s], organic grease thawing with the heat of motion' (Stories, p. 127), the narrator claims to feel 'some kind of inward resentment' (Stories, p. 128), but he has nothing but praise for the 'very good' (Stories, p. 132) sonnet in which Somers expresses his contempt for the teeming world of the Main: It being no longer Sabbath, angels scrawl The stars upon the sky; and Main Street thrives, The butcher-shops are as so many hives,

Fragments Again Fragmented 83 And full is every delicatessen stall. Obese Jewesses, wheeling triplets, crawl Along the crowded thoroughfare. Fat wives Lead little husbands, while their progeny dives Between fat legs in a ubiquitous sprawl ... The whole street quivers with a million hums, And Jewish arms tell jokes that are not funny; Upon the corners stand the pool-room bums; Most valiantly girl-taggers smile for money; From out a gramophone loud-speaker comes: 'O, Eli, Eli, lama, zabachtani/

(Stories, p. 131)

'It was strange/ the narrator says, 'how thought crystallized itself when one took pen in hand, and how in the passing of time a rose-bush would flourish even upon a dungheap' (Stories, p. 131). The feeling of revulsion towards the 'dungheap' of the Main, as it is portrayed in 'A Myriad-Minded Man/ seems to reflect Klein's loss of confidence in any kind of meaningful relationship between himself and his community. And his account of Ellenbogen, an increasingly isolated man of potential genius with wide erudition and a gift for 'salesmanship of ideas' (Stories, p. 153), who 'fritters away his madnesses ... instead of concentrating them into something inspiring' (Stories, pp. 152-3), suggests inevitable parallels to his own situation at this dark period of his life, as he struggles to establish some new relationship to community which will give his work purpose. Perhaps the most interesting and successful body of work resulting from this struggle are Klein's translations from Hebrew poetry, especially the poetry of Chaim Nachman Bialik, the greatest poet of the Hebrew Renaissance, in which, through a kind of creative ventriloquism, Klein tries to find a voice through which he can give full expression to his aspirations and anxieties. With the exception of some not very distinguished translations of poetry of the Yishuv, the Jewish settlement in Palestine, which he published in 1931, Klein's early translations had all been from the Yiddish. But by the mid-thirties Klein began to translate works by several Hebrew poets who expressed disillusionment with the Diaspora and a yearning for Zion.24 He translated several poems by the great poet of the golden age of medieval Spain, Yehuda Halevi, who was famous for his poems of Zion, and who died on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, according to a legend on which Klein would later base his long narrative poem 'Yehuda Halevi, His Pilgrimage.' A passage from

84 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet an untitled novel on which he was working in the late forties suggests that Klein closely identified with the situation of Halevi and the other 'Hebrew poets of the post-exilic era': [T]hey stood on their far-flung stances, these Levites in exile, singing the Lord's song. And he, like some prodigal returned from the north, had stood in their midst, bringing back the echoes that their words had made against his Canadian forests and the resonant rock of his mountains. (untitled novel [NB, p. 134])

Klein also translated a set of lyrics by the Yishuv poet Rachel. He was obviously intrigued by the tension between Rachel's European sensibility and her aspirations for a new life in Zion, and his translations of her wistful, delicate lyrics are much superior to those of the rather strident, propagandistic poems by the other Yishuv poets whom he had earlier translated. But of all the translations of the period, the ones that are most important and provide the most accurate barometer of Klein's inner conflicts are undoubtedly those he did of the poetry of Chaim Nachman Bialik. Bialik's life and work represented for Klein the outstanding example in modern literature of the unfolding of his story of the poet.25 In two essays which Klein devoted to Bialik, 'Chaim Nachman Bialik' (1937; LER, pp. 13-19) and 'Bialik Thou Shouldst Be Living at This Hour' (1942; LER, pp. 32-6), the outlines of Klein's story of the poet are clear. Like the poet of The Bible's Archetypical Poet' (1953), who combines 'tradition and innovation' (LER, p. 148), Bialik is a poet whose 'sources [arel sunk deep in the Bible and the Talmud' (LER, p. 16), yet who is, at the same time, 'ultra-modern' (LER, p. 17): There is about his lines, reminiscent though they be of the lofty epical speech of the prophets, something perfectly twentieth-century' (LER, p. 17). But even more important for Klein than Bialik's synthesis of the traditional and the modern is the role he played in his community: 'No one realized better than he that all his creative work would be vox et praeterea nihil, if ... it did not exist within the living fabric of a people' (LER, p. 34). It is Bialik's role as the 'national poet' (LER, p. 15) that is most strongly emphasized in the essays: 'Above all, Bialik is powerful in his national poems; here his voice is a very trumpet-blast' (LER, p. 18). There is nothing original about Klein's comments on Bialik in these essays; it is the standard account one would expect from the period. Yet Klein's account of Bialik the national poet presents a very one-sided

Fragments Again Fragmented 85 view of his achievement. Most significantly, Klein almost completely ignores a large body of more personal poems in which Bialik expresses intense feelings of self-doubt and self-disgust and of resentment of the public role which he has been forced to assume.26 This darker side of Bialik suggests interesting parallels with Klein's own situation, as does the fact that Bialik virtually fell silent as a poet in his early forties, when still at the height of his powers. As Robert Alter says: In the case of the greatest modern Hebrew poet, H.N. Bialik, the perception of an unbridgeable gap between his grand biblical language and a modern spiritual decadence eventually led him to abandon poetry: nothing unreal could be allowed to survive, and the inner emptiness of the age finally made his language seem to him infected with unreality.27

It is not surprising that, at a difficult stage in his career, Klein would try to use Bialik's achievements as a public poet as an encouraging model for the kind of relationship between poet and community that was eluding him; nor that he would tend to downplay those troubling elements in Bialik's poetry and career which might suggest uncomfortable parallels to his own. What is surprising, though, is that these elements are abundantly present in the Bialik translations, including several which accompanied the first published version of the 1937 essay.28 Of all the examples of incoherence in this period of Klein's career, the contradiction between the Bialik portrayed in the essays and the Bialik represented in the translations is perhaps the most blatant. The thirteen poems which Klein chose to translate - ten of which are representative of the 'personal' rather than of the 'national' poet - are dominated by images of decay and corruption. Together let us rot away,' the poet says at the end of 'On My Returning' (20), describing the world of the shtetl from which he is trying to escape, and to which he is inexorably drawn back - and these words could stand for his attitude to community throughout many of these poems.29 It is not surprising that the most positive of the poems which Klein translated is an explicit rejection of the ambition to play a heroic, public role: in 'God Grant My Part and Portion Be ...' Bialik celebrates the 'meek of the earth, humble in wit and works' (i), the 'poets of most lovely silence' (12), who 'fashion [...] no masterpieces' (29) but live a simple and retired life. As Bialik puts it in 'Beneath the Burden ...,' he prefers the 'burdens of his [own] heart' (20) to those which his people constantly attempt to impose on him.

86 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Among the few national poems by Bialik which Klein did choose to translate, the most important is The City of Slaughter.' It is Klein's longest translation by far, and clearly had a special significance for him: he returned to it again and again, producing at least seventeen whole or partial versions of it. This poem is the one which most obviously justifies Klein's characterization of Bialik's voice as 'a very trumpetblast/ Written in response to a pogrom in Kishinev in 1903, the poem is credited, as Klein says, with 'transform[ing] a people in a single generation ... [A] nation which once trembled in its ghettoes was converted into a proud people, ready to defend the right' (LER, p. 34>.3° Klein's motives in translating and publishing this great 'national' poem would at first glance need no explanation. There is, however, something troubling about his fascination with it at this particular point in history. In the poem, Bialik 'pour[s] forth the vials of his wrath' (LER, p. 18), not on the brutality of the perpetrators of the pogrom, but on the passivity and cowardice of its victims, his aim being to awaken a spirit of selfdefence in his demoralized contemporaries. But it is hard to see what justification such an attitude of contempt for the victims could have in the late thirties, when the historical situation of the Jews of Europe had changed so drastically. As Klein was well aware, there was little that they could do to defend themselves against the much greater and much more systematic horrors being prepared for them by the Nazis. Whatever the poetic value of The City of Slaughter/ historical events would seem to have rendered its original purpose obsolete. What purpose, then, did Klein see the poem serving in 1936? I would argue that, although as a public 'national' statement the poem had been left behind by history, it retained a powerful personal significance for Klein. Specifically, in his translation of The City of Slaughter,' Klein found a way of continuing to explore the disintegrating relationship between the creative individual and his community which had occupied him over the past several years. The most striking evidence of continuity between the translation and Klein's own writings is the almost uncanny way in which they seem to share certain key motifs. The central motif of the poem is the one which for Klein always evokes tradition - the escort - but it is presented in the form of a terrible parody. The escort is a nameless figure who is eventually identified as God, but a helpless, defeated God who can offer neither explanations nor consolation. The nightmare landscape through which the reader is escorted is dominated by imagery which Klein had always associated with the world of the unredeemed Many, imagery of

Fragments Again Fragmented 87 dismemberment. There are literally scores of such images, from 'the spattered blood and dried brains of the dead' (5) at the beginning of the poem to the 'soul, ren[t] ... in many a shred' (352) at the end. But perhaps the most significant image, in terms of continuity with Klein's own work, is the scroll, which is the first recognizable object we come upon as we are escorted through the devastated ghetto: There will thy feet ... stumble On wreckage doubly wrecked, scroll heaped on manuscript, Fragments again fragmented -

(12-14)

The fragmented scroll is a powerful image for the poem itself, as it 'unfoldfs]' (58) its tale of a physical and spiritual dismemberment which extends even to language in a passage describing ... a babe beside its mother flung, Its mother speared, the poor chick finding rest Upon its mother's cold and milkless breast; ... a dagger halved an infant's word, Its ma was heard, its mama never heard.

(62-6)31

The fragmented scroll is a powerful image as well for Klein's own sense of loss and confusion, at this stage in his life, as he 'stumbles' through a world of 'fragments again fragmented,' whose meaning he is no longer able to unfold. If, then, Klein sought in Bialik a model for the ideal relationship between poet and community which had eluded him, in the end his Bialik translations seem only to echo his dilemma. Soon after the last of the translations had appeared, Klein sought a solution to this dilemma in an entirely different direction. He returned, for the first time in three or four years, to writing poetry: a set of four political satires which were quite unlike anything he had written before or would ever write again - 'Blueprint for a Monument of War,' 'Of Daumiers a Portfolio,' 'Of Castles in Spain,' and 'Barricade Smith: His Speeches.' Usher Caplan's assessment of these satires as 'lack[ing] the controlled intensity of feeling characteristic of [Klein's] best writing'32 seems just, and is widely shared. Miriam Waddington, it is true, has provided a spirited defence of the poems, calling attention to a number of undoubtedly effective passages, mostly ones in which Klein's combination of verbal playfulness and mordant irony is in evidence;33 but her account blurs a

88 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet number of crucial distinctions, with the effect of making these poems seem more controlled and coherent than they really are. Perhaps the most serious problem with Waddington's account is that she groups together, as 'Radical Poems/ the four satires from the late thirties with two much earlier poems, 'Soiree of Velvel Kleinburger' and 'Diary of Abraham Segal, Poet/ from which they differ very significantly. The most obvious difference between the earlier and later satires is that the central characters in the earlier ones are Jews, while in the later satires Klein has abandoned any attempt to speak to or for a specifically Jewish community. The other major difference between the two sets of satires is the much greater 'literariness' of the language in the earlier poems. Klein is always, to some degree, allusive and self-conscious in his use of language, but there is, nonetheless, a significant difference between the two sets of poems in this regard. The earlier poems are packed with parodies and fragmentary quotations, the effect being of an inward-turning, self-directed irony. These are very much poems by a highly literate, highly self-conscious poet, in which his own aspirations and pretensions are mocked even as he makes genuine criticisms of society. Klein plays fewer games of this sort in the later satires, in which he is intent on communicating social criticism in a relatively direct and comprehensible manner. One need only compare the opening lines of 'Diary of Abraham Segal, Poet' and of 'Barricade Smith: His Speeches' to see the difference: No cock rings matins of the dawn for me; No morn, in russet mantle clad, Reddens my window-pane; no melodye Maken the smalle fowles nigh my bed.

('Diary/ 1-4)

What does the word mean: Violence? Are we not content? Do not our coupons fall, like manna, from the bonds? Are we not all well-fed? Save for the twelve months of Lent? ('Barricade Smith/ 1-3)

The reason Waddington gives for grouping all of these poems together as 'radical' is that they 'are informed by Marxian economies' (A.M. Klein, pp. 31-2). This is especially questionable for the early satires, with their mocking references to 'social revolutions on a table

Fragments Again Fragmented 89 of roulette' ('Soiree/ 84) and 'the dark capacious beard of Herr Karl Marx' ('Diary/ 169). But even the later satires, written at a time when Marxism was at the height of its intellectual popularity, give little evidence of being informed by Marxism or by any other coherent critique of society, with the exception of certain equivocal passages in 'Barricade Smith: His Speeches.' In fact, what is striking about these four satires, taken as a group, is the inconsistency of their various points of view. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the two poems on war, 'Blueprint for a Monument of War' (c. 1937/1937) and 'Of Castles in Spain' (c. 1938/1938). 'Blueprint for a Monument of War' is probably the least impressive of Klein's political satires: even Waddington concedes that it is 'long [and] cumbersome' (A.M. Klein, p. 41). The poem takes its place in a tradition of anti-war poetry, dating back to the First World War, with its obligatory attack on the army, big business, the clergy, and, especially, stay-at-home writers who hypocritically urge other men on to their deaths from a position of safety: Advancing the slogans; retreating with epigrams; Fighting courageously; bugling the call; All On the map that hangs upon his office-wall!

(35-8)

But while the attitudes Klein expresses in this poem might have been fresh and provocative in 1917, this would hardly have been true in 1937. As Peter Stevens points out, 'the poem fails principally because the 1914-1918 war was too remote at that time, particularly when there were wars and rumours of war at the time the poem was published.'34 It is surprising, to say the least, that when the world was in the midst of an armed struggle against international fascism in Spain, Klein would write an anti-war poem, steeped in the imagery and conventions of twenty years ago. It is even more surprising in light of Klein's support for this struggle in 'Of Castles in Spain' (c. 1938/1938), in which he urges on the war against Franco in precisely the kind of overwrought armchair rhetoric which is condemned in 'Blueprint':35 The iron heel grows rusty in the nape of peasant feeding with the earthworm - but

90 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet beware aristocrat, Don Pelph, beware! The peon soon will stir, will rise, will stand, breathe Hunger's foetid breath, lift arm, clench fist, and heil you to the fascist realm of death!

(41-6)

'Of Daumiers a Portfolio' (c. 1938/1938), Klein's attack on the corruption of the legal system in Quebec, does not present the same stark, irreconcilable contradictions as the two war poems do, but it, too, is symptomatic of Klein's difficulties in genuinely coming to terms with the realities of contemporary history. In its overall structure, a sequence of short satirical portraits, it recalls 'Portraits of a Minyan/ but its tone is crude in comparison, and its observations obvious and hackneyed: lawyers are driven by personal ambition, judges are in the pockets of the all-powerful corporations, the police are stupid and brutal, etc. In contrast to the banal generalizations of most of the poem are the vividly personal episodes from Klein's childhood, described in section VIII of the poem, 'Guardian of the Law.' Klein first recalls how, as a child, he lost his way and was escorted home by a policeman: You held me, dried my tears, and wiped my nose (Your uniform smelled like my own father's clothes) You led me, and I followed, like a mouse, Until I suddenly ran, to recognize my house!

(81-4)

He then contrasts the friendly smile of the fatherly policeman with his brutal grin as he attacks workers during the strike of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in 1917: For I have seen you grin Outside the factory where my father is A spool for a spool of thread Yes, seen you grin, and strike my father's friend With baton on the head!

(89-93)

It is only when Klein turns away from the overwhelming social problems of the present, to memories of childhood experiences which had taken place some twenty years earlier, that the poem comes alive. Of all of the political satires of the late thirties, the most ambitious, the most interesting, and the most obviously confused is 'Barricade Smith: His Speeches.' In a letter to Joe Frank (8 January 1938), Klein

Fragments Again Fragmented

91

indicates that Smith's 'speeches' had originally been intended to form part of 'a play in verse/ which may account for some of the poem's disjointed quality, but it is hard to imagine a play that would resolve the contradictions of the poem as we have it. Although this poem, especially its opening sections, seems the most radical of the political satires, Klein's attitude to Smith's radicalism is far from clear. In another letter to Frank (5 August 1938), he says that the poem is 'intended as revolutionary, but remember, I am only a snuff-tobacco bandit armed with tzitzith and tfillin'; and, even without this self-deprecatory comment, it would be clear that Klein views Smith with an increasing lack of sympathy as the poem proceeds. The early sections of the poem are undeniably vigorous in their incendiary rhetoric, which owes much to the Marxist poet Kenneth Fearing,36 as well as to Klein's extensive experience as an orator: Where will you be When the password is said and the news is extra'd abroad, And the placard is raised, and the billboard lifted on high, And the radio network announces its improvised decree: You are free? Where will it find you, that great genesis?

(34~9)

However, as the poem proceeds, Barricade Smith's speeches become less vigorous and more elaborately literary, no longer speeches at all: Let Keats forget his father's stables, smelling The mythical odour of the asphodel; Let Wordsworth clutch his sensitive bosom, leaping When he beholds a rainbow he can sell

(127-30)

And some of the later sections of the poem - such as the description of 'the lotiferous movie-show' (86) - would not be out of place in 'Diary of Abraham Segal, Poet' (compare 183-6). In the final section, 'Of the Lily Which Toils Not/ with its obsessively detailed account of the daily life of a wealthy debutante, Smith even comes to remind us of Velvel Kleinburger: his admission that he 'did love [Lily] from afar' (235) suggests that, like Kleinburger, he is motivated as much by envy as by a passion for social justice, and that, for all his revolutionary rhetoric, he is no less a petit bourgeois than Kleinburger is. As is so often the case in Klein's writings of the period, it is difficult to know what to

92 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet make of this. Is Klein for or against Smith's calls for revolutionary violence? Does he himself know? Despite some powerful moments, 'Barricade Smith: His Speeches/ like all of Klein's work of the mid- to late thirties, reflects a persistent confusion and lack of direction.37 At the end of this period, as at its beginning, Klein is at an impasse from which he does not have the power to extricate himself. In November of 1938 the last instalment of 'Barricade Smith' appeared in the Canadian Forum. On the ninth of that month the Nazis, under the pretext of revenge for the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jewish refugee, Herschel Grynszpan, launched Kristallnacht, a massive, coordinated attack on the Jews of Germany and Austria, which marked an irreversible turning point in the fate of European Jewry. By a strange coincidence, it was in the very week of Kristallnacht, on 11 November, that there appeared the first issue of the Canadian Jewish Chronicle under Klein's editorship, which was to continue for seventeen years. The following issue contained Klein's powerful indictment of the perpetrators of Kristallnacht, 'Vandal and Victim': 'There is a lunatic abroad in Europe; and the world had better give heed' (BS, p. 36). The role for which Klein had been fruitlessly searching over the past several years was now brutally thrust upon him by history.

6 Hallowing the Wilderness

Klein's decision to take on the editorship of the Canadian Jewish Chronicle was one of the most important of his career. Although it could be argued that the thousands of editorials which he wrote for the Chronicle from 1938 to 1955 were a distraction from his more creative work, the close engagement with the 'most terrible and most glorious years in modern Jewish history'1 which his journalism demanded provided a crucial stimulus for his art. It is not surprising, then, that Klein's taking on the editorship of the Chronicle coincided with the beginning of the most productive period in his career, and that many of the concerns which he would explore in his poetry and fiction in the years to come can be traced directly to his journalism. Apart from encouraging the engagement with history which was to prove so important to his art, journalism served another crucial function for Klein; it gave him a public forum, and thus the opportunity to fulfil, at least in his own eyes, the role of community spokesman and leader. His editorship of the Chronicle was a natural extension of his career as a public lecturer, and his editorials are best seen as a form of oratory.2 Committed 'to Truth's partisanship, and not to Truth's ambiguous neutrality' ('Pierre van Paassen: The Remembering Friend' [1944; BS, p. 207]), Klein aimed not just to record or to analyse events, but to influence his readers' responses to them with all the powers of language at his command. The extent to which Klein actually achieved this aim is open to question. M.W. Steinberg argues that the influence of Klein's journalism was 'pervasive and widespread. As editor of the leading Anglo-Jewish journal in Canada for very many years ... he reached a large public and on the whole successfully expressed their feelings and helped to shape their responses/3 But there were those who saw the journalism as no

94 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet more than hack work. Leo Kennedy, for example, who was working for an advertising firm at the time, wrote to Klein that he considered 'those editorials in the Chronicle ... even lower than [his own] copywriting/4 Wherever the truth lies, the Chronicle was, at least initially, a fairly limited forum for Klein's ambitions. It was not widely read outside Montreal, and even in Montreal it shared the readership of the Jewish community with another local Anglo-Yiddish paper, the Canadian Jewish Review, as well as with the Yiddish-language Keneder Adler (for which Klein wrote a thrice-weekly column in English from 1938 to 1941) and with two major Yiddish-language periodicals from New York, Der Tog and Forverts. Moreover, when Klein took on the editorship of the Chronicle, it was far from a serious journal of opinion. Judith Seidel, in a study of the Jewish community of Montreal in the thirties, characterizes the Chronicle, and its rival the Canadian Jewish Review, in terms very different from Steinberg's: The most extensive and attractive feature of these papers is their social column, relating to the births, marriages, engagements, bar-mitzvahs, and deaths of the greater and lesser lights of the community, their parties and other social functions, their trips to and from various points on both sides of the CanadianAmerican border, and the meetings of clubs and organizations, great and small ... The advertisements deal in large measure with commodities that would appeal to the fashionable or would-be fashionable element: beauty treatments, gowns, furs, restaurants, piano or dancing lessons, and the like.5

Klein clearly had higher ambitions than chronicling the 'more established and assimilated elements of the Jewish community.'6 But these ambitions did not always meet with the approval of his colleagues on the Chronicle, who criticized him for refusing to acknowledge the limitations of his readership: When one of the staff suggested that he tone down his vocabulary out of consideration for his less educated readers, Klein replied with some annoyance: 'Let them go to a dictionary and rise to my level, I'm not going down to theirs.'7

Although Klein clearly did raise the level and prestige of the Chronicle, throughout his editorship the tension between his high ambitions as a journalist and the very real limitations of the parochial medium through which he expressed himself always remained.

Hallowing the Wilderness

95

The importance, then, of Klein's editorship of the Chronicle lies less in the actual influence on his community which it may or may not have given him than in the opportunity it represented for him to make the gesture of commitment that he saw as crucial to his sense of himself as a writer. There is evidence in Klein's poetry that he had felt the need of such a gesture for some time before taking up his new position. In a letter to Joe Frank (5 August 1938), he mentions two works on Jewish themes which he had recently begun, 'a poetic rendition of Rabbi Nachman Bratzlaver's "Tale of the Seven Beggars'" and 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.' The first of these proved abortive;8 however, 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' marks an important turning point in Klein's poetry and in his redefinition of his relationship to his community and to history. Like 'Barricade Smith: His Speeches,' which Klein had completed some months earlier, 'Childe Harold' consists of several loosely related speeches. The speaker is a Jewish refugee from the Nazis, who addresses an undefined audience on four related topics: (i) the plight of Jewish refugees (1-35); (2) the irrational nature of anti-Semitism (36-119); (3) Jewish responses to anti-Semitism (120-53); and (4) the power of the Jewish tradition to endure (154-72). Klein would deal with each of these topics in the Chronicle in the years to come, and, in fact, 'Childe Harold' can be seen as a collection of versified editorials. Childe Harold, the nominal hero of the poem, is little more than Klein's mouthpiece: of all the protagonists whom Klein had created in his poetry and fiction up to this point Childe Harold is by far the least fully realized. This is reflected especially in the language of the poem, which represents Klein at his most rhetorical. Some of his rhetoric achieves an impressive solemnity, as in the poem's final lines: A baleful wind, a baneful nebula, over A saecular imperturbability.

(171-2)

But stilted and padded lines such as the following are more typical of the general level of the poem: For they have all been shut, and barred, and triple-locked The gates of refuge, the asylum doors; And in no place beneath the sun may I On pilgrimage towards my own wide tomb Sit down to rest my bones, and count my sores

(16-20)

96 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet However, although 'Childe Harold' is not one of Klein's most impressive poems, its final section, with its affirmation of faith in the continuity of the Jewish tradition, is important as an indication of the direction of much of his work over the next few years. The crucial passage comes after Harold has considered suicide: No, not for such ignoble end From Ur of the Chaldees have I the long way come; Not for such purpose low Have I endured cruel Time, its pandemonium, Its lunatic changes, its capricious play; And surely not that I might at long last Vanish Have my feet crossed these many frontiers, and My brain devised its thoughts.

(154-62)

The importance of 'Childe Harold,' then, is that, as the first direct response in Klein's poetry to the stark threat of Nazism, it represents the recovery, after years of aimless disappointment and frustration, of a renewed vision of solidarity with community and tradition. What the poem fails to do, however, is to unfold this vision in a convincing way. It is only in 'In Re Solomon Warshawer,' published about a year and a half later, that Klein finally does discover a way of doing this, or rather rediscovers it, for 'In Re' marks the triumphant return to Klein's poetry, after an absence of half a dozen years, of his story of the poet. Like 'Childe Harold,' 'In Re Solomon Warshawer' is built around a series of monologues spoken by a Jew suffering from Nazi persecution. It is conceived of primarily as a legal deposition by an unnamed Jew he is identified as Solomon Warshawer only in the title - who has been apprehended by the S.S. after being harassed by a hostile mob. The deposition is taken down by an unsympathetic narrator, who adds his own contemptuous commentary. The deposition begins with a statement of defiance: the Jews will survive persecution by the Nazis, just as they have survived other persecutions throughout the ages. This theme of the 'outlivers' is a recurrent one in Klein's journalism: it occurs, for example, in the first and in the last of the essays reprinted in Beyond Sambation, the latter of which actually quotes lines 75-89 of 'In Re.' But, although Klein clearly took this theme seriously, he was capable of treating it with a degree of irony as the hoary old cliche of Jewish oratory which it is. For example,

Hallowing the Wilderness

97

the Klein Papers contain a satirical account of the standard 'campaign dinner' speech which Klein was called upon to give countless times: We are the people of the Book. When the Germans were still barbarians - as they have remained - shaking their spears in forests black, our ancestors etcetera ... Peroration: Our strength is our ideals. Where is the wolf Assyria? Where is Rome? Where is Carthage? (Is there a Carthaginian in the house?) They may destroy our homes, uproot our people, slaughter our children, but the truths which Israel launched upon the world, they cannot destroy. (Applause). ('From the "Raw Material" File' [NB, p. 6])9

The treatment of this theme in 'In Re' is not really all that different from the campaign dinner rhetoric Klein mocks, and, while the speeches of the unnamed Jew are livelier than those in 'Childe Harold/ they are clearly cut from the same cloth. What really distinguishes 'In Re' from 'Childe Harold' is the narrative context it provides for these familiar rhetorical commonplaces, a context which is entirely lacking in the earlier poem. First, there is the obvious context of the Jew's immediate situation. If, at times, he resorts to high-flown rhetoric and bombastic cliches, he has ample psychological justification for doing so: his is a perfectly comprehensible response to the harassment of the crowd, the contempt of the narrator, and the brutality of the S.S. But even more significant, from a narrative point of view, is the way in which Klein uses the Jew's familiar arguments about the survival of his people to prepare for an entirely unexpected turn of events. Forestalling the objection that the survival of the Jews in the past is no guarantee of their continued survival in the future, he appeals, somewhat mysteriously, to 'the very pattern of the world' (105) and goes on to say: And in that scheme of things I am enfurled, Am part thereof, the whole as it was planned.

(107-8)

In these two lines we see the re-emergence, after an absence of many years, of the concept of the unfolding of the One in the Many which is central to Klein's story of the poet. Unfolding is evoked in the first line by the word 'enfurled/ Klein's own coinage combining 'unfurl' ('to unfold') and 'enfold'; and, in the second line, the One in the Many is evoked by the reference to 'whole' and the 'part thereof - compare Spinoza's 'For thou art the world, and I am part thereof ('Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens/ 90). Having established these concepts, the Jew now unfolds his

98 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet vision of the One in the Many in the story which gives the poem its title. He claims that he is King Solomon, who has been deposed by the evil demon Asmodeus and has been forced to wander over the face of the earth as a beggar, in a vain attempt to recover his kingdom: I who now stand before you, a hunted thing, Pressed and pursued and harried hither and yon, I was, I am the Emperor Solomon! O, to and fro upon the face of the earth, I wandered, crying: Ani Shlomo, but But no one believed my birth. For he now governs in my place and stead, He who did fling me from Jerusalem Four hundred parasangs; Who stole the crown from off my head, And robed him in my robes, beneath whose hem The feet of the cock extend, the tail of the demon hangs! Asmodeus!

(114-26)

We never know whether the Jew actually is King Solomon, literally 'disguised in rags/ or merely a poor beggar driven to distraction. Whatever the case, the important point is that Klein has found, in a traditional Jewish legend, his story of the poet, which had eluded him for the last half-dozen years. Its cast of characters has many echoes elsewhere in his writing, especially in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' and 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape.' In the poet-king Solomon, we recognize Spinoza and the Poet; in the usurping demon Asmodeus, Shabbathai Zvi and the 'impostor' ('Portrait/ 101); and in the mob which fails to recognize Solomon, 'the paunchy sons of Abraham' ('Pulver/ i) and 'our real society' ('Portrait/ 15). And, like 'the ever-unwedded' Spinoza ('Pulver/ 133) and the Poet 'at the bottom of the sea' ('Portrait/ 163), the Jew is left, at the end of the poem, in a kind of suspended animation: 'The Jew was not revived ... And further deponent saith not' (160-2). But the crucial fact about 'In Re Solomon Warshawer' is that, despite the narrator's dismissive comment, the Jew is revived: Solomon Warshawer's silence is only temporary. The works that follow 'In Re Solomon Warshawer' are all attempts to find a voice for the deposed deponent in which he can continue to unfold his story which has been so brutally interrupted by history.

Hallowing the Wilderness 99 'In Re Solomon Warshawer' was first published in the Canadian Jewish Chronicle in April of 1940. On 31 October of the same year, Klein wrote to Leo Kennedy that he was 'working on a book of psalms ... beginning at 151 and ending probably at 200. More than half is already done, the rest outlined, awaiting only the moving spirit.' However, 'the moving spirit' never returned, and Klein gave up his plan for writing fifty psalms after completing about thirty of them. Among the psalms which he did complete are some of the finest poems of his career, yet, when they were published in Poems (1944), as part of The Psalter of Avram Haktani,' they were not as well received as Klein had hoped.10 Klein himself bears much of the responsibility for this, since he chose to present the psalms in a way that almost ensured their poor reception. Specifically, he made two decisions which led to serious misunderstandings of his intentions. The first was his decision to characterize the poems as psalms, which raised false expectations in many of his readers, and the second was his decision to attempt to produce fifty of them, which led him to pad out the set with earlier, incongruous, works, after 'the moving spirit' had left him and he could write no more. Although these two decisions were to have unfortunate consequences, in the context of his career they can be seen as part of a necessary and, in the end, fruitful process of self-definition. Formally, most of Klein's psalms have nothing in common with the Psalms of the Bible. Klein himself makes this point very forcefully in a letter to the Jewish Publication Society (7 August 1942) responding to the criticism of one reader, Robert D. Abrahams, that he had not mastered the 'imitation psalmic form': Haktani's are not imitation psalms. Their tone and content are perhaps psalmodic in a twentieth century sort of way - but only one psalm ['A Song of Degrees'] is written in biblic style ... The suggestion of your reader that a foreword be written 'explaining and listing which of the psalms have inspired the author's psalms' indicates so gross a misapprehension as to the nature of the manuscript as to leave me almost breathless. (Almost, but not quite). The fact is that the poems were not 'inspired' by the psalms - Haktani has resources of his own. Certainly Haktani does not take Psalm I and say to himself: 'Now I will write another with all modern improvements and conveniences/ King David's are good enough for him. That of course, does not preclude the compilation of a series of poems into a psalter.

Klein's indignation is understandable, but he never does explain pre-

ioo A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet cisely why he feels it necessary to characterize his 'compilation' as a 'psalter/ A more serious objection than the formal one was raised by another of Klein's readers at the Jewish Publication Society, Julian B. Feibelman: I began reading this manuscript with great anticipation. I was seeking deep devotional refreshment, such as the title might have led me to believe I would find. I do not like the use of the word PSALTER in the title, nor do I approve of the frequent usage of the word PSALM in the writings. Both of these words have come to possess a distinctive meaning, in our, as well as in general literature. Their usage should be restricted, at least, to some semblance of the type of literature which the Original represents.11 The type of literature which the Original represents' to Feibelman, and to most other readers of the Psalms, is poetry of praise and thanksgiving, as in Psalm 19: The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race. (1-5) Or, best known of all, Psalm 23: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he guideth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil ... (1-4) In Klein's psalms the note of praise and thanksgiving is almost entirely absent; in the world of these poems there is little to praise or to be thankful for:

Hallowing the Wilderness 101 From pastures green, whereon I lie, Beside still waters, far from crowds, I lift hosannahs to the sky And hallelujahs to the clouds, Only to see where clouds should sit, And in that space the sky should fill, The fierce carnivorous Messerschmidt, The Heinkel on the kill. They'll not be green for very long, Those pastures of my peace, nor will The heavens be a place for song, Nor the still waters still. ('A Psalm of Abraham, Touching His Green Pastures')

In fact, Klein explicitly defines himself as the one who is unable either to offer praise or to give thanks. In 'Grace before Poison/ others may 'thank [the Lord] for drink and food' (i), but his 'praise' (11) and 'thank[s]' (12) are reserved for 'poisons' (11), 'pollens venomous, the fatal gum' (12), and 'exhilarators of the brain' (24), which offer an escape from the 'fretful world' (29). In To the Chief Musician, Who Played for the Dancers/ Klein describes those who, despite their sufferings, 'thanked their God / with dancing jubilant shins' (1-2), and concludes: I did not see this dance, but men Have praised its grace; yet I Still cannot fathom how they danced, Or why.

(9-12)

Even in 'A Psalm to Teach Humility/ an eloquent and witty expression of childlike wonder at the common barnyard rooster, Klein ends on a note of alienation from God's creation: O creature marvellous - and O blessed Creator, Who givest to the rooster wit to know the movements of the turning day, to understand, to herald it, better than I, who neither sing nor crow and of the sun's goings and comings nothing know.

(16-21)

102 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet But perhaps an even more serious obstacle to readers than this obvious flouting of their expectations was one that none of them would even have been aware of - Klein's initial decision to produce fifty of these psalms, a decision which he refused to abandon, even after it was clear that his inspiration had waned. In the typescript of Poems which Klein submitted to the Jewish Publication Society on 18 February 1942, he included twenty-odd older poems, which had not been originally identified as psalms, to make up the desired number. These older poems - some going back a dozen years - are entirely different from the more recent ones, both in their more conventionally poetic diction and in their folkloric celebration of Jewish traditions and rituals. Eventually, over Klein's vigorous protests, his editors reduced the number of psalms from fifty to thirty-six, but the proportion of old poems to new remained roughly the same. As a result, the impact of the 'Psalter of Avram Haktani' is considerably blunted, and Klein's padding of his initial submission to the Jewish Publication Society bears as much responsibility for this as the timidity and philistinism of his editors. The reason for Klein's ill-judged commitment to the idea of fifty psalms must be sought, I would suggest, in his renewed sense of commitment as a poet to the Jewish tradition as he was in the process of defining it. As we have seen, some ten years earlier, in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens,' Klein had celebrated one of the heroes of that tradition, in whose story he found an encouraging precedent for his own concerns and ambitions. But, until he returned to Jewish themes in the late thirties, the figure of Spinoza as a Jewish cultural hero remained a relatively isolated one in his writings. From then on, until the end of his career, Klein ransacked Jewish lore for examples of such heroes whose stories could be seen as paralleling his own: the Bratzlaver, King Solomon, Rashi, Yehuda Halevi, Joseph, the Hohe Rabbi Low of Prague, even Trotsky. In the story of Uncle Melech in The Second Scroll, the most comprehensive of Klein's protagonists, we glimpse most of these figures, as well as others such as Bialik, Herzl, Moses, and even the Messiah. It is as part of this process of creating a tradition of predecessors that Klein's decision to produce a set of fifty psalms can best be understood. In the most general sense, by identifying his poems as psalms Klein indicates a renewed commitment to Jewish tradition; but, more specifically, he links himself with the traditional author of the Psalms, King David, whose story, like the story of David's son Solomon in 'In Re Solomon Warshawer,' clearly points to Klein's own story of the poet.

Hallowing the Wilderness 103 Like Solomon, David is a poet-king who experiences a period of exile and despair: when his life is sought by King Saul, he goes into exile, at times disguising himself as a madman and a beggar, until he eventually gains his rightful throne. Many of the Psalms traditionally date from this period of exile, and express a sense of alienation and despair which has close parallels in Klein's own. But if Klein's decision to characterize his poems as psalms can be seen in terms of his search for traditional precedents for his story, his decision to create a set of fifty is more puzzling, since the number fifty has no particular significance in Jewish tradition. However, the number five does have a traditional significance - with respect to the Psalms, which are traditionally divided into five books. The parallel between Klein's fifty psalms and the five books of the Psalms points to a second, even more significant parallel: according to a rabbinical interpretation, cited in the article on the Psalms in The Jewish Encyclopedia, ... the Sefer Tehillim [i.e., Book of Psalms] is regarded as a second Pentateuch, whose virtual composer was David, often likened to Moses (Midr. Teh. ch.i.): 'Moses gave [Israel] the five books of the Torah, and to correspond with them David gave them the Book of Psalms, in which there are also five books.'

This interpretation of the five-part structure of King David's 'second Pentateuch' may well have played a role in Klein's conception of The Second Scroll, also a work in five books deliberately alluding to 'the five books of the Torah.' Klein suggests as much when he names the hero of the novel Melech Davidson, that is, 'King, the son of David,' and when he points out that 'it is the first David who writes the colophon [i.e., Psalm 30, which ends 'Gloss Hai' of The Second Scroll] for Davidson' (letter to Leon Edel [19 October 1951]). For Klein, then, King David's five books of Psalms offer a model for breaking the silence to which King Solomon is reduced at the end of 'In Re Solomon Warshawer/ for finding a voice which will be personal and contemporary, but at the same time informed by tradition. One of the most important themes of Klein's psalms is, in fact, the search for a voice. This is reflected in the prominence Klein gave to 'A Psalm of Abraham, When He Hearkened to a Voice, and There Was None': it was the first of the psalms in the original group of fifty, a position it retains in Poems. In the final lines of the poem, Klein establishes the theme of the search for a voice in the midst of the chaos and violence of modern history:

104 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet There is noise only in the groves of Baal. Only the painted heathen dance and sing, With frenzied clamouring. Among the holy ones, however, is no sound at all.

(10-13)

Of the many psalms in which the poet vainly searches for a voice of explication and justification,12 by far the most important is 'A Psalm of Abraham, to Be Written Down and Left on the Tomb of Rashi/ This poem, which was occasioned by the seven hundredth anniversary of the birth of Rashi (Rabbi Solomon bar Isaac)/3 the most influential of all commentators on the Bible and the Talmud, is probably the first of the psalms to have been written/4 and can be seen as a kind of prologue to the series as a whole. Rashi's commentaries were, traditionally, the first to be studied by children because of their clarity and simplicity ('Simple, and for a child were they, your words' [13]). For Klein, therefore, Rashi embodies the Jewish tradition as mediated through childhood memories. At a time of chaos and destruction, Klein 'remember[s]' (5) the reassuring sense of wholeness and continuity which Rashi represented for him in his childhood. In doing so, he evokes and combines his two most powerful images of tradition: I, in bewilderment, remember you, Mild pedagogue, who took me, young and raw, And led me, verse by verse, and clue by clue, Mounting the spiral splendid staircase of the Law, You, Rabbi Solomon bar Isaac, known Rashi, incomparable exegete.

(5-10)

The first of these images is the escorted child. In his current state of 'bewilderment/ that is, of being 'lost in pathless places' (OED), Klein remembers Rashi as a kind of loving and protective belfer, the teaching assistant responsible for leading children to school in the shtetl and helping with their first lessons (compare 'Baal Shem Tov' and 'Elijah'). He is a 'pedagogue' (literally, 'leader of children'), an 'exegete' (literally, a 'guide') who 'led' the young Klein through the ways of the Torah ('the Law'). These ways are described, in a striking image, as a 'spiral splendid staircase.' In a letter to the Jewish Publication Society (i July 1943) Klein explains this image as describing 'the form of logic known as "pilpul" in which one rises ever upward, as in the Hegelian dialectic,

Hallowing the Wilderness 105 upon the compatibility of contradictions/ But 'the spiral splendid staircase of the Law' evokes, as well, Klein's other central image of tradition, the unrolling scroll. In this passage the acts of unrolling the Scroll of the Torah and of leading a child through it are one and the same. They are both forms of explication. Against this image of continuity and wholeness, Klein contrasts the inexplicable chaos and destruction of his own day: Nothing was difficult, O Master, then, No query but it had an answer, clear, But now though I am grown, a man of men, The books all read, the places seen, the dear Too personal heart endured all things, there is Much that I cannot grasp, and much that goes amiss, And much that is a mystery that even the old Gaul, Nor Onkelus, nor Jonathan, can lucidate at all.

(20-7)

If the poem had ended at this point, it would have been little more than a sentimental exercise in nostalgia for simpler times - for Klein's own childhood and for Rashi's era - when all the answers were simple and clear. But Klein goes on to make the point that Rashi himself lived through a period of horrors comparable to his own, the massacres of the first Crusade. History has always been 'terrible [andl tumultuous' (i). There is not and never has been an explication that can make sense of it or an escort that can protect you from it. There is only the continually recreated voice of tradition, speaking across the generations and providing a sense, however fragile, of continuity and consolation. Klein prays to Rashi for a revelation of 'the unequivocal truth' 'behind the equivocal text' (40), but, although he 'wait[s Rashi'sl answer' (44), he neither receives nor expects it: ... in the interim I do, for you who left no son to read The prayer before the sacred cherubim, Intone, as one who is of your male seed, A Kaddish: May it reach eternity And grace your soul, and even bring some grace To most unworthy, doubt-divided me.

(44-50)

This 'interim' solution recalls the similarly interim state of the 'ever-

io6 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet unwedded' Spinoza in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' (133) and points forward to the 'meanwhile' of 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape' (159). But the most important parallel is with The Second Scroll, which ends with an identical gesture of continuity between two Jews across the abyss of history, the Kaddish which the narrator says for his Uncle Melech: As at the centre of a whirlwind, amidst a great silence, I intoned the kaddish for my uncle who had had no son, uttering with pride this wonderful mourner's Magnificat which does not mention death ... (SS, pp. 120-1)

The psalms as a whole can best be thought of as an unfolding of this 'interim Kaddish,' a gesture of re-membering made in defiance of history, without, however, any hope or illusion of achieving an 'unequivocal truth.' In the psalms, then, Klein's truest voice is not the voice of the 'prophet' which he prays for in To the Prophets, Minor and Major, a Psalm or Song' (19); it is the voice of the Tjewildered' child, or the voice of ... Azazel, that dear goat, Sent forth into the wilderness To hallow it with one sad note. ('A Psalm or Prayer - Praying His Portion with Beasts,' 18-20)

Azazel the scapegoat, although 'sad/ is also 'blessed' (17), because it has found a voice with which to 'hallow' the 'wilderness' of exile and suffering which is history. It has been able to do so, not by 'explicating] the folded present' (To the Prophets, Minor and Major, a Psalm or Song/ 20), but by becoming 'enfold[ed]... in [the] fold' (13) of community, at the very moment when the community appears to have rejected it. For the 'dear' scapegoat is not merely cast out into the wilderness; it is 'sent forth/ as part of a ritual of redemption. By taking on the voice of Azazel, whose sad note expresses not only its own suffering but the suffering of the community as a whole, Klein is able to make sense of what might otherwise have been a merely personal and historically irrelevant experience of despair. This is perhaps the one point at which there is a genuine similarity between Klein's psalms and the Psalms of the Bible. A large proportion of the Psalms consists of psalms of lament. Many of these directly address the concerns of the community as a whole, but others seem entirely personal in their expression of physical and mental suffering:

Hallowing the Wilderness 107 My wounds stink and are corrupt because of my foolishness. I am troubled; I am bowed down greatly; I go mourning all the day long. For my loins are filled with a loathsome disease; and there is no soundness in my flesh. I am feeble and sore broken: I have roared by reason of the disquietness of my heart. (Psalms 38.5-8) For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an hearth. My heart is smitten, and withered like grass; so that I forget to eat my bread. By reason of the voice of my groaning my bones cleave to my skin. I am like a pelican of the wilderness; I am like an owl of the desert. I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top. (Psalms 102.3-7)

Klein undoubtedly knew the traditional rabbinical interpretation of these and similar passages - associated, in particular, with Rashi which allegorized them as expressions of communal suffering. This superimposing of the voice of the community on the voice of the individual, is, I believe, precisely what Klein is attempting to achieve in even the most personal of his own psalms of lament. In psalms such as 'A Prayer of the Afflicted, When He Is Overwhelmed/ 'A Psalm of Abraham of That Which Was Visited upon Him/ 'A Psalm of Abraham, Which He Made Because of Fear in the Night/ or 'A Prayer of Abraham, against Madness/ Klein feels free to express his deepest anxieties precisely because he is able to see them as representative, as rooted in the historical situation of his community. But if Klein's renewed sense of solidarity with his community in the face of the Nazi threat enables him to express his anxieties with great power and directness, there are dangers in this confessional phase of his work. As is suggested by the titles of a number of the psalms - in which Klein speaks of 'poison/ 'blasphemy/ 'fear/ 'madness/ of being 'killed/ 'afflicted/ 'overwhelmed/ 'sore pressed/ and of having unnamed sufferings 'visited upon him' - the anxieties which Klein is exploring in these poems may be beyond the power of any sense of community solidarity to redeem. At times, there are even premonitions of the madness which will eventually 'afflict' and 'overwhelm' him, most obviously in 'A Prayer of Abraham, against Madness': Palsy the keepers of the house; And of the strongmen take Thy toll.

io8 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Break down the twigs; break down the boughs. But touch not, Lord, the golden bowl!

(9-12)

But the most disturbing vision of madness in the psalms is 'A Psalm of Abraham of That Which Was Visited upon Him': A prowler in the mansion of my blood! I have not seen him, but I know his signs. Sometimes I hear him meddling with my food, Or in the cellar, poisoning my wines, Yet face to face with him I never come; But by a foot print, by a book misplaced, Or by the imprint of an inky thumb, Or by the next day's meal, a strange new taste, I know that he has breached my household peace, I know that somehow he has let him in. Shall I fling open a window, and shout Police! I dare not. He is of my kith and kin.

The poem is disturbing not only for its uncanny evocation of paranoia, but also for its mysterious identification of the evil 'prowler' as 'kith and kin': the poet is simultaneously isolated - there is no one to whom he can turn for help - and invaded, by someone or something very close to him. Perhaps this is meant to suggest a taint of hereditary madness, but I believe that the term 'kith and kin' is also to be taken quite literally. Although Klein may take solace in feeling himself part of a community, he is oppressed by having his identity usurped by the demands which he feels, rightly or wrongly, that his community makes on him. It is perhaps because Klein found the intensely personal mode of the psalms too unsettling that he abandoned the series when he was a little more than halfway through. However, he did not abandon the social role itself. Instead, first in a group of ballads, and then in The Hitleriad, he sought to redefine that role in less personal terms, turning from introspection and lamentation to satire and invective, to a type of poetry that would be, on the one hand, more immediate and publicly accessible and, on the other, less psychologically revealing and demanding. Klein seems to have begun to write his ballads very soon after it

Hallowing the Wilderness 109 became obvious that 'the moving spirit' behind the psalms was not going to return. One of the ballads, 'Ballad of the Nursery Rhymes/ with its motif of the 'wandering' child trying to 'remember' the fragments of his shattered world, reads like a continuation of the psalms: Upon a day, and after the roar had died, And the dust had settled, and the cities were no more, He sat him down, alone, in a world that was wide, As wide as is to a child his nursery floor. And he sang all alone remembered snatches of song, He wandered with the wandering of his mind: Hey-diddle-diddle, and the music all gone wrong, And the old clock turned by three mice that were blind.

(1-8)

But the same cannot be said of any of the others, which form an unmistakable and distinctly unpsalm-like group. They deal much more directly with the Nazi threat than most of the psalms do, and they do so in language which is, on the whole, relatively straightforward and impersonal. With the exception of 'Ballad of the Days of the Messiah,' they are all in couplets or quatrains, and they are all regular and emphatic in their rhythms, with a high proportion of end-stopped lines. Klein is clearly striving for a kind of forceful simplicity in these poems, but the result is sometimes inappropriately jaunty. 'Ballad of Quislings' is the worst offender in this regard: Poltroons may fear the foeman, for such are less than cattle, But men will fear no other man who can be met in battle, Where courage and the claymore cut apart the bitter quarrel, Awarding one the willow, and the other one the laurel.

(1-4)

This is not very different in effect from a similarly jaunty literary ballad, Thomas Love Peacock's The War Song of Dinas Vawr': The mountain sheep are sweeter, But the valley sheep are fatter, We therefore deemed it meeter To carry off the latter.

(1-4)

And in 'Ballad of the Days of the Messiah/ where, following a different

no

A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet

tack, Klein tries to restate the theme of the coming of the Messiah in contemporary terms, the effect can only be called grotesque: Don't you hear Messiah coming in his tank, in his tank? Messiah in an armor-metalled tank? I can see the pillared fire, speeding on the metal tire Over muck and out of mire And the seraphim a-shooting from its flank! O Messiah, he stands grimy in his tank!

(25-30)

Klein is somewhat more successful in grimmer ballads such as 'Ballad of the Nuremberg Tower Clock/ 'Ballad of the Thwarted Axe/ and 'Ballad of the Evil Eye/ but it is hard to imagine that he was very satisfied with any of the ballads, and he soon abandoned the form. The ballads are probably best seen as a not very successful experiment, a first attempt to go on the attack, to move beyond the temptations of despair towards a more active confrontation with the evil represented by the Nazis. The climax of this development is The Hitleriad. As Klein makes clear in the opening section of The Hitleriad, it is only out of a sense of duty that he has taken on the task of 'indicting' (4) Hitler: Happier would I be with other themes (Who rallies nightmares when he could have dreams?) With other themes, and subjects more august Adolf I sing but only since I must.

(8-11)

It is his duty as a poet to defend the values of tradition and community against the forces of history that would seek to destroy them, and it is in Hitler that these forces find their most absolute embodiment. But there is another, more personal reason why Klein feels driven to deal with Hitler: the specific nature of Hitler's power poses a challenge to Klein's very concept of the poet, a challenge which he must confront before he can move on to other, more congenial themes. The crucial issue that Hitler raises for Klein is not the nature or origin of evil, but its power. Klein is not concerned with why a particular individual is evil: the evil of Hitler and his followers is simply a given. What he is concerned with is the power of an evil individual to persuade others to follow him, to bend a whole society to his will. Klein's Hitler is, above all, a great persuader, a demagogic orator, and it is no

Hallowing the Wilderness

111

coincidence that by far the longest section of the poem, and the climax of Klein's portrait of Hitler, is an analysis of his rhetoric (226-302). As an orator himself, Klein no doubt has a professional interest in Hitler's 'bag of tricks' (210). But there is much more at stake than that, for Hitler's power over the German people is a terrible perversion of the ideal relationship with community which is at the heart of Klein's sense of himself as a poet. In what is the most effective statement in The Hitleriad of the nature of Hitler's power, Klein presents him as offering, like the poet, a vision of the One in the Many, albeit in a debased and exploitative form, which answers to the desires of a fragmented society: His strength is as the strength Of ten, and ten times ten; For through him, magnified Smallness comes to our ken The total bigness of All little men.

(66-71)

But although this passage has many echoes in Klein's later works (especially in his portrait of another racist demagogue in 'Political Meeting'), it has none in the rest of The Hitleriad. At this stage in his career, Klein's sense of his own relationship to his community is still too fragile to allow him to entertain, except momentarily, the darker implications of the parallel between the evil demagogue and the true poet. It is therefore not surprising that most of The Hitleriad falls far short of a satisfactory account of the power of the evil which Hitler represents, alternating between crude and trivial personal abuse in the first half of the poem A peasant's face, an agent's face, no face At all, no face but vegetarian blob! The skin's a skin on eggs and turnips fed, The forehead villainous low, the eyes deepset The pervert big eyes of the thwarted bed And that mustache, the symbol of the clown Made emperor, and playing imperial pranks

(45-51)

- and lists of Hitler's crimes and atrocities in the second.15 In one of the least convincing passages in the poem, Klein even goes so far as to

112 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet deny, despite his own certain knowledge to the contrary, that Hitler had any real power of 'persuasion' (204) at all. The Hitleriad, then, is a disappointment as a climax to Klein's increasingly direct confrontation of the Nazi threat, which began with his editorship of the Canadian Jewish Chronicle, and which was so crucial to his sense of himself as a poet. However, as a body of work the poetry of confrontation of the early forties is far from disappointing. Not only does it contain, in 'In Re Solomon Warshawer' and in several of the psalms, some of Klein's finest poems; more importantly, in the poems of this period Klein has once more found the sense of direction which had eluded him for the previous half-dozen years, and which will never entirely elude him again until the end of his career. The groundwork has been laid for greater work to come.

7

The Frustral Summit of Extase

Between completing The Hitleriad, towards the end of 1942, and beginning 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ towards the beginning of 1944, Klein produced a substantial body of work of striking power and originality which has remained largely unknown. In contrast to The Hitleriad and 'Portrait of the Poet/ which, for all their differences, have in common a celebration of the social role of the poet, most of the work of this period is intensely personal, focusing on the almost unbearable inner conflicts which must be borne by any poet who seeks to assume such a role. Klein was unable to bring any of the major prose works of the period to completion, and most of the poems were either left unpublished, or, if published, were left uncollected.1 Nonetheless, these works are of great interest, and not only because they comprise an impressive achievement in themselves. For it is only as a result of the unremitting self-analysis which they represent, in which everything is explored, nothing is resolved, that Klein was able to move beyond the unreflective public stance of The Hitleriad to his grand though precarious synthesis of the personal and the social in 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape.' The most important writings of this period consist of two sets of related prose texts - 'Raw Material' (MS 3454-558 [NB, pp. 3-50]) and 'Stranger and Afraid' (MS 3726-79 [NB, pp. 51-89]) - and approximately three dozen poems. While the prose texts all form part of a single evolving project, a more or less autobiographical Kunstlerroman, the poetry is more diverse in its concerns and, with certain obvious exceptions (for example, 'Autobiographical'), less explicitly autobiographical. However, most of the work of the period, both poetry and prose, can be seen as the exploration of a single theme: frustration. This theme,

114 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet which takes a bewildering variety of forms, is rooted in Klein's own experiences as a poet who has made an irrevocable commitment to a social role, yet finds his attempts to perform this role repeatedly frustrated by an uncomprehending community. Klein's rededication to his social role in the late thirties, after several years of silence as a poet, had led to a burst of creativity culminating in The Hitleriad. But towards the end of this period, after his initial enthusiasm had begun to wane, Klein began to have serious misgivings about what he had actually accomplished. These misgivings were, at least in part, a response to the reception of his work, specifically the reviews of his first book, Hath Not a Jew ..., which had appeared in 1940, and the long-drawn-out battle with the Jewish Publication Society over the manuscript of Poems (1944). Hath Not a Jew ..., according to Klein's thinly disguised autobiographical account in 'Raw Material,' was not reviewed as widely as he had hoped: [W]hen it first appeared, it received a few notices in the Anglo-Jewish press, and then was lost, like a letter-bearing bottle on the ocean wave. The liberal English periodicals had seen it, sniffed it, smelled gabardine and ghetto, citron and Zion; and had turned away. It was the decade of an all-embracing glutinous internationalism; poems particular to a single tribe, to one twelfth of a nation, were too narrow in scope for the cosmopolitan taste of the critics ... Jewish periodicals who recognized in its pages the spectre of their own plight or the image of their own hopes hailed it with hyperbole, at last a poet writing in English who spoke the authentic voice of his biblic ancestors, at last, the Semite naturalized into Saxondom, etc. etc. while the English journals saw only what they suspected was a narrow chauvinism, a retrogressive nostalgia for outmoded traditions, a too-jealous remembrance of things past. They ignored the volume. (NB, pp. 44-5)

This account is misleading in two respects. First, the volume was not 'ignored' by 'the English journals,' which were, in fact, responsible for a substantial proportion of the reviews which it received (four out of the eleven reviews which I have been able to discover). There were reviews in the three major literary journals in Canada - by Leo Kennedy in Canadian Poetry, by Earle Birney in the Canadian Forum, and by E.K. Brown in the University of Toronto Quarterly - as well as in one of the most prestigious such journals in the United States - by Leon Edel in Poetry [Chicagol.2 And all four reviews were essentially positive (the

The Frustral Summit of Extase 115 one by Klein's friend Edel, interestingly, being the least positive of the four). Second, Klein's claim that 'the English journals' saw only 'a narrow chauvinism' in his work is not really supported by the reviews, in which the main criticism of the volume was not that it focused on Jewish matters per se, but that it retreated into a quaint folkloric version of Judaism which seemed inappropriate in 1940 - a fair comment, considering that most of the poems in the volume had been written years earlier, before the worst of the Depression, before the rise of Hitler, and before the beginning of the Second World War. If Klein was disappointed by the reception of Hath Not a Jew ... in 'the English journals,' he was infuriated by the one really negative review which it received in the Jewish press, a review by Allen Lesser in the Contemporary Jewish Record.3 In response to this review, Klein wrote a scathingly sarcastic letter to the editor of the journal, Abraham G. Duker (26 June 1942), the tone of which can be gauged by its final paragraph: As for Mr. Lesser, extend him my forgiveness; he knows not what he does, nor how to do it. Assure him that I will keep the manner of his disgrace as secret as it presently is within the pages of the Record; and for the rest, wish him for me a ripe old age, during which he may sit at his fire, and tell his wife's children how once, when he was young and the weather hot, he snapped at my heels.

Lesser's review seems to have planted in Klein's mind an idea which he would never abandon, that the editors of the Contemporary Jewish Record and its successor, Commentary, were 'climbing assimilationist[s] who didn't know the difference between an aleph and a swastika' ('From the "Raw Material" File' [NB, p. 46]), and were engaged in a conspiracy against him because of his commitment to true Jewish values.4 Klein's exaggerated response to the critical reception of Hath Not a Jew ... is at least partly explicable by his sense of his public role as a poet. If he was to succeed in this role, he had to reach out to as broad an audience as possible, and anything that prevented him from doing so cut to the very heart of his poetic vocation. That is why he attributed what he perceived as the rejection of his volume not simply to aesthetic misjudgment but to a deliberate attack on his commitment to his community. If Klein's response to the reviews of Hath Not a Jew ... seems exaggerated, the same is not true of his response to his treatment by the Jewish Publication Society. Ironically, the earlier rejection by the JPS of Klein's

n6 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet manuscript of 'Greeting on This Day' may, in the long run, have caused him less pain than its decision to publish Poems: because the earlier manuscript was simply rejected without comment, Klein never had to deal with the kinds of small-minded and ill-informed criticisms to which the Poems manuscript was subjected. Klein replied to these criticisms in a number of letters, including one of twelve single-spaced typed pages in the form of a legal brief 'written by myself on behalf of a client, one Avram Haktani/ and two other substantial ones in which he grudgingly yielded to most of the demands for alterations or omissions.5 His initial reaction to this humiliating episode was to see it as further evidence of the conspiracy directed against him by those responsible for the negative review of Hath Not a Jew ... which had recently appeared in the Contemporary Jewish Record: I am wondering ... whether your critic has any association, direct or indirect, with any of the editors of the Contemporary Jewish Record, some of whom, to Haktani, are personae non gratae, - and they know it. If his suspicion is unfounded, he apologizes, and puts the whole matter back in its proper perspective - a difference in educational background and cultural outlook. (Letter to Louis E. Levinthal [7 August 1942])

But in a later letter he analysed the attitude of the JPS to his work in a cooler and more reasonable manner: [T]he J.P.S. which knows not who its eavesdroppers are, cannot afford to give its imprimatur to something which the enemies of Israel might use against us. We have indeed come to a sorry pass when we cannot afford the luxury of selfcriticism, lest the foe seek to confound us out of our own mouths. This viewpoint I can understand, occupying as I do in the local Jewish community some positions which entail a responsibility greater than that usually felt by the skylark poet. (Letter to Louis E. Levinthal [i July 1943])

The irony is a bitter one: it was precisely because of Klein's sense of responsibility towards the Jewish community that the JPS felt free to criticize his work in the community's name. Significantly, Klein never again submitted his work to a Jewish publishing house,6 and never again did he have to face such shabby treatment from a publisher. Klein's frustration at the lack of appreciation and understanding of his poetry by the community to which it was addressed was only exacerbated by the obvious success of his hackwork as a speech-writer

The Frustral Summit of Extase 117 for Samuel Bronfman and as 'poet parsleyate' of the Canadian Jewish Congress: Rejoicing and drinks - the maestro's - at the planning of the final banquet of the annual philanthropic campaign. Everybody complimented by everybody, even me, who am only the author of its slogans - the proxy of the poor - the compiler of its sob-letters. Particular backslap for an anonymous poem about the grace of charity - Ah, the charm of gilded platitude - printed on the banquet souvenir-program. Poor me! poet parsleyate to a menu. Actually the sonnet was written only to avoid writing the sickening prose called for in the premises. But that I should write it at all. It is a humiliation only a philanthropic world makes possible. ('From the "Raw Material" File' [NB, pp. 9-11])

Perhaps the best description of the sense of frustration Klein feels is the comment by the prison inmate, Drizen, in 'Stranger and Afraid': 'One is isolated, but one is never alone' (NB, p. 80). Klein feels 'isolated' because his work as an artist finds no response from his community; he is 'never alone' because he always feels the eyes of that community upon him with all its demands and expectations, which he is unwilling or unable to fulfil. The frustration of being isolated but never alone finds many expressions in the poetry and prose of the period, most strikingly in two recurrent and interconnected metaphors: the body and the city. The exact nature of this interconnectedness is suggested by Robert Melangon, who describes Klein as ... un homme habite. II porte en lui la forme d'une ville ... et la longue succession de ses ancetres, remontant de generation en generation a travers la Diaspora, les prophetes et la Torah, jusqu'a Abraham et Moise dont il portait les noms.7

As the bearer and renewer of the tradition which has the power to make his community One, the poet embodies 'la ville interieure.'8 But this ideal of the embodied city is undercut again and again in the poetry and prose of the period, which portray the poet as trapped in a body and city which have ceased to function as living organisms and which he can neither redeem nor transcend. Although the concept of the embodied city does not really become central to Klein's work until the early forties, there are signs that he was already reaching towards it in the late thirties. In The City of Slaugh-

n8 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet ter/ for example, the collapse of the city of Kishinev into chaos and violence finds a precise parallel in the dismembered bodies which are its most horrific manifestation. And in 'Yehuda Halevi, His Pilgrimage/ Halevi's lament for the broken city of Jerusalem9 (translated by Klein from Libi bamizrah) is brought to a cruel end when Halevi's own body is broken, cut down by an Arab horseman.10 This vision of Halevi's 'broken heart upon [a] broken field' (351) serves as a kind of paradigm for the works Klein will soon be writing himself, in which the fragmentation of experience against which the imagination struggles is represented by the dismemberment of both the body and the city. The two most important visions of the ideal city in the poetry of the early forties are 'Autobiographical' and 'Montreal.' 'Autobiographical/ which appeared near the beginning of the period, looks back to the Jewish themes rooted in childhood memories, which will play a smaller role in Klein's poetry in the years to come. 'Montreal/ which appeared near the end of the period, points forward to Klein's growing interest in the community of Quebec, which will culminate in The Rocking Chair and Other Poems. But there is an unmistakable continuity between the two poems. 'Autobiographical' opens with an evocation of Montreal which is, at the same time, an evocation of Jerusalem: Out of the ghetto streets where a Jewboy Dreamed pavement into pleasant bible-land

But Klein's vision of a 'fabled city' (82) is touched by a persistent sense of menace: 'the loutish Sabbath-goy' (4); 'the two strangers, come / Fiery from Volhynia's murderous hordes' (30-1); the 'ogred corridors' (44); the 'furious dog, / And guilty boys in flight' (62-3). The 'shouting boys ... / Playing the robust robbers and police' may be 'oblivious of mothers on the stoops' (56-8), but the mothers are there, nonetheless, watching over their children and protecting them against dangers they cannot yet understand, but will some day have to face. Among the protective adults in the poem - brothers, sisters, uncles, teachers, neighbours, shopkeepers - on whom the very existence of the child's paradisal world depends, the most important is the poet's father ... pickabacking me to bed To tell tall tales about the Baal Shem Tov, -

The Frustral Summit of Extase 119 Letting me curl his beard. O memory of unsurpassing love, Love leading a brave child Through childhood's ogred corridors, unfear'd!

(39-44)

The description of the 'pickabacking' father telling tall tales about the Baal Shem Tov - who himself Ijore children on his back' ('Baal Shem Tov/ 14) - is one of Klein's most striking statements of the escort motif. Like Rashi, who 'led' the poet when he was a child 'mounting the spiral splendid staircase of the Law' ('A Psalm of Abraham, to Be Written Down and Left on the Tomb of Rashi/ 7-8), Klein's father is a member of that Torah-escorting band' ('Autobiographical/ 5) of protective and loving adults 'escort[ing him], like good wishes, on [his] way' ('Stranger and Afraid' [NB, p. 76]). But, as in the Rashi psalm, the poet evokes the loving security of childhood only to emphasize his current state of 'bewilderment' ('Rashi/ 5). The poet's father is dead and there is no other 'friendly beard' (4) to lead him through the 'ogred corridors.' In the last two stanzas of 'Autobiographical/ in which the poet meditates on the significance of his childhood experiences, it becomes clear that he has been unable to consolidate or build on them. The description of the city as 'stand[ing] in Space's vapours and Time's haze' (83) suggests that it is growing ever more inaccessible as time passes and as the poet 'wander[s] away / From home and the familiar' (74-5). And, as the vision of the fabled city becomes weaker, so does the poet's body: his senses are already fading, and compared to 'the strength and vividness of nonage days' (80), his days are now 'a dying-off (73). Although, as he tells us, he is 'no old man fatuously intent / On memoirs' (78-9) - he is actually in his early thirties - he reminds us of the old men in The Green Old Age/ with their pathetic, failing bodies, who 'strive ... again toward [their] babyhood' (11). The re-membered vision of the fabled city lacks the power to stave off the poet's sense of physical and spiritual decline. 'Montreal/ structurally, is strikingly similar to 'Autobiographical/ Both poems consist of eight stanzas of which the first six are descriptive and the last two are meditations on the passage of time, centring on the relationship between the body and the city. But this relationship could hardly be more different in the two poems. Whereas in 'Autobiographical' the ideal of the fabled city is sharply contrasted with the reality of the mortal body, in 'Montreal' the ideal and the real, the city and the body, are one. No longer isolated and failing, as it had been in

120 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet 'Autobiographical/ the poet's body in 'Montreal' has become identified with the living city which 'populate[sl the pupils of [his] eyes' (9) and 'reside[s]' (64) in his heart. In 'Autobiographical/ because of the poet's sense of isolation, time appears linear to him, a process of 'dying-off leading to his own inevitable extinction as an individual. In 'Montreal/ because the poet feels part of an endlessly self-renewing community, time to him is circular. 'Montreal' begins with a description of the city as 'riverain' (i), an allusion to 'riverrun/ the word which begins Joyce's celebration of the 'commodius vicus of recirculation' in Finnegans Wflfce;11 and the poem ends with an image of that 'recirculation/ the circulatory system of the body: Mental, you rest forever edified With tower and dome; and in these beating valves, Here in these beating valves, you will For all my mortal time reside!

(61-4)

The closest parallel to this embodied city in Klein's other poems of the early forties is 'A Psalm Touching Genealogy':12 Not sole was I born, but entire genesis: For to the fathers that begat me, this Body is residence. Corpuscular, They dwell in my veins, they eavesdrop at my ear, They circle, as with Torahs, round my skull, In exit and in entrance all day pull The latches of my heart, descend, and rise And there look generations through my eyes.

In both poems, the poet's body has been transformed into a place of residence for a living community ('you will / For all my mortal time reside!'; 'For to the fathers that begat me, this / Body is residence'), where the scroll of tradition is eternally unrolled ('A parchemin roll of saecular exploit / Inked with the script of eterne souvenir'; They circle, as with Torahs, round my skull'). However, while in 'Montreal' the city and its inhabitants are essentially passive - 'residing' and 'populating' - the 'generations' in 'A Psalm Touching Genealogy' are active and intrusive. They appear to have taken over the poet's vital functions: presumably, if they stopped pulling the latches of the poet's heart he would die. They appear to have taken over his identity as well, for it is

The Frustral Summit of Extase 121 they who look out of his eyes, not he. As Rachel Feldhay Brenner says, the poem has a claustrophobic intensity. The subject, 'fathers/ governs the poem through the active mode, while the poet and his body are relegated to the position of an object. The emphasis is on control exercised through infiltration and fusion: tradition ... represents an internalized reality that the poet has to confront from within.13

We are not far from the poet's paranoid vision, in 'A Psalm of Abraham of That Which Was Visited upon Him/ of the 'prowler in the mansion of [his] blood' (i). If, then, 'A Psalm Touching Genealogy' echoes the idealized vision of the poet and his community in 'Montreal/ it points beyond 'Montreal' to a number of other works of the period in which the body is not merely resided in, but usurped. This is most explicit in 'Desideratum/ an amusing, but nonetheless disturbing, jeu d'esprit, in which Klein coolly contemplates the advantages of dismemberment. He begins by invoking a Kabbalistic tradition that the six hundred and thirteen injunctions of the Mosaic Law are literally embodied in the six hundred and thirteen nerves, organs, and limbs of the human body, but then goes on to say that he would prefer limbs which were 'separable' (12). This would free the brain to do what it does best, unrolling scrolls: ... its sheathed brain, a watch whose tickings were in heaven wound, unwinding Time ...

(26-8)

Meanwhile, the 'severed body' (28) with its 'members divisible' (13) could ... go about its business, its grosser tasks, ejaculate, excrete, digest, perspire, micturate. The head knows no dependence, lives!

(29-32)

This playful picture of the dismemberment of the body is echoed repeatedly in the poetry of the period, but in a far from playful manner: in 'Polish Village/ the body is 'broken' (4) by the Nazis; in 'Address to the Choirboys/ its legs are 'cut off (16) and its arms are 'lopped' (17);

122 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet in 'Of Tradition' it is 'scattered in shards' (5); in 'Post-War Planning' it is 'chopped with an axe' (11), among other forms of destruction. At other times, when not actually being dismembered, the body is in unbearable pain ('Dentist') or is senile (The Green Old Age') or is simply dead or dying (Tn Memoriam: Arthur Ellis'; 'Actuarial Report'; 'And in That Drowning Instant'; 'Not All the Perfumes of Arabia'). Perhaps most interesting are the instances when the body is not literally dismembered, but is reduced to a set of isolated bodily functions, the 'grosser tasks' enumerated in 'Desideratum': 'ejaculate, excrete, digest, perspire, micturate.' In 'Not All the Perfumes of Arabia/ we smell 'the little panic smell of sweat' (30) of terrified men who perspire as they stand against a wall, waiting to be shot. The universal need to digest food is the subject of 'Bread': None are elect Save you be common. All philosophies Betray them with your yokel dialect.

(10-12)

Klein commented on this passage in a reading he gave on 22 November 1955: We are not angels. We must subsist upon matter. No one can exist without bread. This is our Achilles heel. Those of us who would like to rise and mount and soar into the high altitudes empyrean and think of ourselves not only as lesser but almost close to the angels, always are brought back by this basic element, the element of our humanity, of our necessity to lean one upon the other.

'Les Vespasiennes' (i.e., 'public lavatories'), a poem about excreting and micturating, makes a similar point about the way in which our bodily functions remind us that 'we are not angels': an anxiety dream where fallen seraphims, maimed by metabolism, like children of men, do get their leeching, and rise above their limbs, and think themselves the angels once again: and thus, standing in that dream, I and its persons know at the chemical core, at the bubbling self, that which was built on and known even by Vespasian the Emperor,

The Frustral Summit of Extase 123 namely: that we are not God. Not God. Why, not, not even angels ...

(9-18)

But the grosser task which recurs most frequently, and through which Klein most powerfully expresses his sense of alienation and frustration, is ejaculating. Sex, in the poems of this period, is inevitably sordid and joyless, presided over by 'the pudendal face of Doctor Freud' ('Come Two, like Shadows/ 21). 'Members' are either 'numb' ('Girlie Show,' 23) and 'flaccid' (The Green Old Age,' 8) or, if they are capable of being aroused, it is not by love, but by a 'foul euphemism of the apes in rut' ('Love,' 4) which always leaves us 'sad' ('Love/ 22). Literature and music in this sexually frustrated world consist of 'condom novels' ('Et j'ai lu tous les livres/ 4) and the 'amati bawdy ... straddle-various' 'throbbing beneath the hair of Pegasus' ('Song without Music/ 4-5,15). Its temples of worship are strip joints, 'the city sanctuary' where 'the crippled come / To throw away the crutches of their sex' ('Girlie Show/ 35,21-2), or public lavatories, 'the subterranean dantesque / [below] the public square' ('Les Vespasiennes/ 26-7) where ... pornoglot identities swim up within our ken from the graffiti behind the amputate door, (the wishful drawing and rhyme!) creatures - the homo, the pervert, the voyeur, all who grasp love and catch at pantomime.

('Les Vespasiennes/ 19-24)

In this 'crippled' and 'amputate' world, ejaculating usually takes the form of masturbation, the ultimate expression of alienation in which all hope of community with others, either through mutual love or procreation, is denied. The public executioner in 'In Memoriam: Arthur Ellis' describes with relish the ejaculation of 'hanged men, shocked, expelling seed' (30). In 'Et j'ai lu tous les livres/ Klein condemns journalism - presumably including his own - as 'the journalonanist spill' (4). In 'Of Tradition/ he describes with horror an 'inverted rite of Onan, seed spilling sire' (13), in which a son shatters the urn containing the ashes of his father, 'spilling his father to the ground' (3) while his father's portrait Looked on himself in ashes, Lying with cigarette-ash, with carpet-dust, with dried invisible phlegm. (15-16)^

124 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet But the most explicit treatment in Klein's poetry of the act of masturbation as a gesture of alienation from community and tradition is 'Sonnet Unrhymed':15 When, on the frustral summit of extase, - the leaven of my loins to no life spent, yet vision, as all senses, sharper, - I peer the vague forward and flawed prism of Time, many the bodies, my own birthmark bearing, and many the faces, like my face, I see: shadows of generation looking backward and crying Abba in the muffled night. They beg creation. From the far centuries they move against the vacuum of their murder, yes, and their eyes are full of such reproach that although tired, I do wake, and watch upon the entangled branches of the dark my sons, my sons, my hanging Absaloms.

The Abba which the poet imagines he hears is both the rhyme scheme of the first stanza of a Petrarchan sonnet, frustrated by the fact that the sonnet is unrhymed, and the Hebrew word for 'father/ cried out by all of the potential generations whose existence the poet has frustrated by the act of masturbation, 'the frustral summit of extase.' But the 'summit of extase' is 'frustral' in another sense as well, since the poet's attempt, through the extase of masturbation, to frustrate the community's claims on him is itself frustrated. For even in this most private of all acts, he continues to be haunted by the nightmarish demands of 'the shadows of generation/ which, like the 'generations' in 'A Psalm Touching Genealogy/ see him and his body only in terms of their own needs. His body continues to be a 'residence/ usurped by generations past, present, and future who 'look ... through [his] eyes' with 'eyes [which] are full of ... reproach.' The frustration of being isolated but never alone, which Klein expresses so powerfully in a number of poems in the early forties, is even more pervasive in the prose narratives of the period, in which he is able to draw out more fully than in the poems the implications of his frustration and of the image of the embodied city through which it is expressed.

The Frustral Summit of Extase 125 The earliest of these works consists of a series of first-person narratives by a poet named Kay, which Klein referred to collectively as 'Raw Material.' While Kay is clearly based on Klein himself, he has been transformed into a fictional persona, who is modelled, to a significant extent, on protagonists created by two writers whose visions of the body and the city influenced Klein's own - Kafka and Joyce. Klein's Kay is clearly intended to echo the K. of Kafka's The Castle and The Trial; and Klein's description of Kafka's narratives - 'the sense of overwhelming alienation ... rises from every one of Kafka's pages like some poisonous vapour unbalancing the reader' ('Hemlock and Marijuana' [1948; LE.R, p. 276]) - applies equally well to his own. As with Kafka, Klein's 'sense of overwhelming alienation' is frequently expressed through disturbing images of the city, and the whiff of Kafka's Prague which we detect in Klein's portrayal of Montreal foreshadows the much stronger 'poisonous vapour' of Klein's last work, the unfinished novel The Golem/ which is actually set in Prague. The equally disturbing images of the body in Kay's narratives also have their counterparts in Kafka, especially in the two stories which Klein singles out as presenting 'a microcosm of the Kafka world' (LER, p. 276): The Metamorphosis,' in which a man wakes up to discover that he has turned into an insect; and 'In the Penal Colony,' where criminals are punished by being incorporated into a grotesque machine which inscribes and re-inscribes on their bodies the law they have violated, until they die. A second, equally important model for Kay is provided by another alienated urban Jew, Joyce's Leopold Bloom. As Usher Caplan points out, Joyce's 'death in 1941... probably marked a turning point in Klein's obsession with the man and his work.'16 'Raw Material' contains a reference to an 'Elegy - James Joyce' (MS 3462), which apparently was never written, and there are several Joycean echoes in the poetry of the period.17 For Klein, Joyce's great work was Ulysses, and its central character offers many parallels to Kay: in particular, like Kay, Bloom is a creature whose thoughts and dreams are firmly rooted in the sheer physical reality of the body and the city, both of which are presented in Ulysses with a vividness unparalleled in earlier literature. In 'Raw Material,' then, Klein is engaged in the process of transforming 'raw' autobiographical material into literature. The relationship between autobiography and literature is the subject of a brief meditation, which sums up Klein's concerns in 'Raw Material' as a whole. It begins:

126 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Whatever I think, or imagine, is also something that happens to me. Not the least of the incidents of my life are my poems. Sentences, too, may constitute the adventures of the picaresque. The truth is, in fact, that with most people their careers are fulfilled mainly in their minds. (NB, p. 3)

This passage expresses an ideal which haunts Klein throughout 'Raw Material/ the ideal of the inner life of the mind and spirit unfolding independently of the outside world and its demands. But having stated this ideal, Klein is immediately forced to acknowledge the realities that inevitably frustrate it, the realities of the body and the city. First, he acknowledges 'the influence and the impact of the purely physical even upon the most spiritual of biographies ... The gut is only spatially removed from the cerebellum' (NB, p. 3). And then he goes on to admit that his ideal of an independent life of the spirit may be little more than an attempt to compensate for the sense of powerlessness experienced in a modern urban society: 'By and large, we, in a well-ordered society, with policemen on every corner, and detectives behind every newspaper, must confine our adventures to the mind' (NB, p. 3). He tries to make the best of his situation - 'Nor is it really a frustrate fate' - but everything in 'Raw Material' suggests that the very opposite is true. Klein's first attempt in 'Raw Material' to expand on the kinds of concerns raised in the meditation takes the form of a fictionalized diary (NB, pp. 4-19), which begins, like the meditation, by emphasizing the autonomy of the world of the mind and the importance of the autobiographical impulse which is at the heart of all literature: No thing happens but it is autobiographical. The irreducible residuum of all literature - the diary, journal of the mind. Ich dien - its constant plumaged plot; hero, Sir Egomet Meipsum. Even those ubiquitous bards - Ibid and Anon Blind Ibid, mute inglorious Anon - are but ego in incognito dight and doubly proud.

But, as is the case with the meditation, by the end of the diary this inner world has been overwhelmed, and the poet's spiritual aspirations frustrated. The diarist's pretensions to spiritual independence are repeatedly deflated throughout the diary - both metaphorically and literally, for this process is especially associated with the organs of the body most subject to deflation, the lung and the penis. Each of these organs is the subject of an elaborate comic set piece. The first is an account of the

The Frustral Summit of Extase 127 havoc wrought by hay fever on Klein's law partner, Sam Chait (NB, pp. 11-12), and the second purports to be a record of annulment proceedings on the grounds of impotence: 'in caressings despite, [he] was unable to follow the path of erectitude, and this although he sought carnally to know plaintiff at least a score of times, all to no avail, his gland forever prostate' (NB, p. 14). The deflationary motif, which is little more than a joke in these passages, elsewhere takes on a deeper resonance. In a passage immediately following the introductory paragraph on the 'doubly proud' ego, Klein evokes the poet's pride in his craft, but he does so only to deflate it: These are the charms against oblivion. On Andalusian cavewalls scribblings dark. Papyrus lifted - a shield - beyond this, go not, Death. Tilebook and chiselled plinth and cunniform [sic] brick - a lapidation on the head of Time. Non omnis moriar, drawls Horace, quaint and flaccid, drawing stylus from scabbard. Dogs scratching to bury an immortal bone. (NB, p. 4)

The impotence of flaccid Horace (compare 'the member flaccid' in The Green Old Age,' 8), who hopes to defeat oblivion with his phallic stylus, is echoed a couple of pages later in the account of the diarist's 'unclejew' (NB, p. 5), who also hopes to defeat oblivion, not through poetry, but through religious ritual, the ritual of the festival of Succoth. His 'charms against oblivion' are the palmleaf and citron used in this ritual: the 'palmleaf sceptre' and 'regal ball' (NB, p. 5). The sexual implications of these images become explicit when, after the ritual is over, 'the golden citron shrivels again, a dried testicle, its power gone' (NB, p. 5). The deflation of the poet's ambitions is associated as well with the deflation of the lungs. Klein ends his account of the 'charms against oblivion' with a reference to Aesop's fable of the frog which burst when it tried to inflate itself to the size of a bull: O froggish belly-busting vanity, croaking from twilit ponds bovine afflatus, windy brekekex! (NB, p. 4)

Deflated lungs will take on increasing importance as an image of the poet's fate when Klein recasts this diary as a novel, a development that is foreshadowed by the diarist's own 'spontaneous pneumothorax - the perforated bellows' (NB, p. 6).

128 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet The process of frustration, symbolized by the collapsed lung and detumescent penis, dominates the diary, which consists of a series of vignettes of the diarist's various social relationships - as poet, orator, speech-writer, lawyer, etc. - virtually all of which end on a note of sarcastic deflation. The one exception to this pervasive mood is an exchange between the diarist and his little son Colman, in which Colman describes how he had accidentally locked himself in the lavatory at school and had panicked (NB, pp. 7-8). The diarist attempts to reassure his son, but with limited success: unlike the father in 'Autobiographical/ he is incapable of 'leading a brave child / Through childhood's ogred corridors, unfear'd!' All he can offer is the hope that the incident will eventually be forgotten: Efface, O Lord, the memory of that hour! Let be as if it never was! Weed out its evil grass from the little garden of his brain. Not this of childhood for remembrance! Let him not know the name of fear, nor the terror of the closed door, nor aloneness, far from friends!

The reason why the diarist is incapable of reassuring his son is obvious. He can identify only too intensely with Colman's situation, with his 'fear ... terror of the closed door ... aloneness, far from friends/ and since he sees no source of reassurance for himself - there is no escort to lead him safely on his way - he is unable to offer it to his son. In a sense, the world which Klein describes in the diary is the world of Colman's lavatory writ large, 'the subterranean dantesque' of 'Les Vespasiennes/ and it is fitting that the diary abruptly breaks off with a group of poems rooted in the unredeemed subterranean world of the body and the city, a world of physical 'anguish' ('Dentist/ 10), 'crippled' sexuality ('Girlie Show/ 21), and 'social guilt' ('Pawnshop/ 48). Klein made two attempts to rework the diary material as a novel, which he entitled The Inverted Tree' (NB, pp. 21-31, 32-47).18 The concept of the inverted tree is an ancient one, going back at least to Aristotle's comparison of the human body to an inverted tree in De Partibus Animalium 4.10. This comparison was adopted by a number of Jewish writers, as noted in a passage in the article on 'Botany' in The Jewish Encyclopedia, which is marked in Klein's copy (although probably not in his hand).19 But Klein's use of the concept of the inverted tree is quite different from the traditional one. As is clear from a set of notes for the novel (NB, pp. 19-21), Klein's inverted tree represents, not the body as a whole, but the lungs. With its roots in the external world of

The Frustral Summit of Extase 129 air, and its bronchi branching deep within the body, the inverted tree of the lungs, and the act of breathing, become Klein's symbol of the interaction between the individual and the community around him. Since Klein is concerned with the failure of this interaction and with the poet's consequent frustration and alienation, he presents the inverted tree as dead or dying. Of several notes by Klein touching on the inverted tree,20 the most suggestive is number 11: Inverted tree. Locusts sitting upon it. Branches lifeless, no birds sing. Advert to Rilke poem on air.

The allusion to Keats's 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' (The sedge has wither'd from the lake, / And no birds sing' [3-4]) transforms the inverted tree of the lungs, with its lifeless branches, into a particularly apt symbol of the poet's fate: for Keats, of course, died of tuberculosis of the lungs. Klein had noted this some fifteen years earlier in his poem To Keats,' in which the comparison of lungs to an inverted tree first appears: Thy twin-branched lungs burned red' (5).21 But even more suggestive than the allusion to Keats is the one to Rilke: 'Advert to Rilke poem on air.' Klein had alluded to Rilke earlier in 'Raw Material,' in a passage leading up to the poems which conclude the diary: I become more and more impatient with merely capable poets. Second-story men, they rise above the pedestrian, but they still live in a flat, like a hundred million others. Give me the basement poet, like Villon, or the penthouse bard, like Rilke!

In The Inverted Tree/ as in the diary, it is very much the world of 'the basement' which is explored. However, the urge towards transcendence, towards 'the penthouse,' makes itself strongly felt as well. And it is with Rilke that this urge towards transcendence is primarily associated. For Klein, Rilke represents poetry at its most spiritually refined: he is 'probably one of the greatest, and certainly the subtlest and most sensitive poet of this century' ('Rilke and His Translators' [1946; LER, p. 252]). And in the notes for Klein's lecture The Contemporary Poet' (NB, p. 101), Rilke is the only twentieth-century poet on the list of 'literary heroes/ On at least three occasions, Klein singles Rilke out as a hero of the imagination by contrasting him to Hitler, by whom 'the language [Rilke]

130 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet used to such God-like purpose [was] depraved into a medium for recording the "inventories" of crematoria' (LER, p. 252)." His fascination with Rilke is so strong that, at one point, he warns himself of the danger of too slavish an imitation of him: 'Limitations of Rilke as Model - derivativeness' (MS 5178). But, in fact, the danger was not a serious one, for although Rilke and Klein shared some of the same concerns, their approaches to these concerns could hardly be more dissimilar. The main point of similarity between Klein and Rilke is that, like Klein's other great models, Bialik and Joyce, Rilke sees his task as ensuring the continuity of a tradition which has been disrupted by history: 'Rilke is perhaps the twentieth-century poet most seized with the idea of the poet having a task of fulfilling the past so that it redeems the present. In doing this, imagination becomes the force in which memory of traditions which once gave living significance is reinvented.'23 But, as a model of the imaginative re-invention of tradition, Rilke is very different from both Bialik and Joyce, for, unlike them, and certainly unlike Klein himself, Rilke has no interest whatsoever in any community except the community of art. The most cosmopolitan of poets, he has no ambition to speak for anyone but himself and a likeminded elite devoted to the highest spiritual and artistic ideals. His response to the assault of history on tradition is to turn his back on history altogether, to turn increasingly inward. Rilke expresses this ambition in a passage which Klein marked in his copy of the Duino Elegies: 'We are the bees of the Invisible. Nous butinons eperdument le miel du visible, pour 1'accumuler dans la grande ruche d'or de 1'Invisible.'24 For this task, the basic necessity is not community but solitude, and Rilke's biography is the story of a man constantly in search of the solitude that will allow him to commune with his inner self, his Weltinnenraum, without any interruption from the world of society. In another passage marked by Klein in his copy of the Duino Elegies, Rilke advises aspiring poets: 'What's needed is just this: Loneliness, vast inner loneliness. To walk in oneself and to meet no one for hours on end, that's what one must be able to attain.'25 For Klein, the experience of solitude may be a necessary stage in the poet's development, but it is an experience which he is unable to embrace with the wholehearted enthusiasm of Rilke. His ambivalence is suggested by his rather flippant note in The Contemporary Poet' on the poet's 'qualifications': 'solitariness - I want to be alone. Solitude A good place to visit but a poor place to stay' (NB, p. 101). And, in 'The Perfect Man' (1943; BS, pp. 195-8), an essay dating from the same

The Frustral Summit of Extase 131 period as 'Raw Material/26 he expands on the painful 'antithesis ... between man the lonely one in a wide world and man the unsuccessful social animal/ citing the 'parable of the porcupine': Unable any longer to suffer the stings and quills of his fellow-porcupines, the hero of the fable retired to the loneliness of the mountain-top. Here, however, he found his solitude unbearable. He descended back into the woods. Again the society of his brothers was intolerable. Again to the mountain-top. So was he ever torn between the anguish of solitude and the agony of society. (BS, p. 198)

Rilke was much less tempted than Klein to abandon the loneliness of the mountain-top: we need only try to imagine him practising law or editing the equivalent of the Canadian Jewish Chronicle or running for political office or helping to raise a family - all major concerns of Klein's reflected in 'Raw Material' - to sense the abyss that separates his relationship to the social world from Klein's. Rilke appeals to Klein, then, not as a model which there is any real possibility of his emulating, but as a powerful alternative to the role he has chosen or which has been chosen for him. Rilke's example encourages Klein to examine and to question this role, but never to abandon it. It is impossible to say for certain which of Rilke's poems is intended by the phrase 'Advert to Rilke poem on air/ but the likeliest candidate is the first sonnet from book 2 of the Sonnets to Orpheus: Breathing, you invisible poem! World-space constantly in pure interchange with our own being. Counterpoise, wherein I rhythmically happen. Solitary wave, whose gradual sea I am; most sparing you of all possible seas, winning of space. How many of these places in space have already been within me. Many a wind is like a son to me. Do you know me, you air, still full of places once mine?

132 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet You onetime smooth rind, rondure and leaf of my words.27

For Rilke, the harmonious and creative interchange between the poet and the world is represented by breathing, the gradual 'winning of space' by filling the 'world-space' with 'places [that] have already been within' the poet's lungs. In stark contrast to Klein's poet, with his lifeless lungs on whose branches no birds sing, the breathing poet whom Rilke celebrates transforms the air around him into the 'rondure and leaf of [his] words.' Here, as elsewhere in 'Raw Material,' the Rilkean ideal is most powerfully 'adverted to' through its absence. The first version of 'The Inverted Tree,' which develops directly out of Klein's notes, begins with a parable (NB, pp. 21-2), one of Klein's most haunting versions of his story of the poet. The speaker, a poet, begins, T feel like one who lives somewhere on an African veldt at the edge of a jungle/ and goes on to describe the attack of a panther that 'stalk[s] forth from the leafy design of the horizon, and maim[s] or kill[s] a child playing on the outskirts of [a] village.' The villagers are thrown into a frenzy as 'they seek the double quarry of vengeance and security.' The poet's 'curiosity' and even his 'envy' are aroused "by this tremendous expedition/ but he is unable to take part in it: Unfortunately - and perhaps fortunately - I must stay behind. My lungs, say those who looked through my bones, are not fit for hunting. They say right for when I run one of them flaps behind my ribs, like the unlaced tongue of a shoe.

The poet's deflated lung recalls the similarly debilitating and isolating 'perforated bellows' of the diarist. When the diarist is criticized for not doing his bit to defend civilization, he replies, T am the civilization for which you are fighting' (NB, p. 6); and the poet in the parable might well argue the same, for, from his position of exclusion, he is able to comprehend, more fully than his neighbours, the 'wearisome ascent, stumbling over a claw, tripping over a tail/ of 'thirty centuries' of 'civilization.' He is also able to appreciate the fragility of this civilization, threatened as it is not only by the attack of the panther, but by the 'terrible activity' which arouses the mindless enthusiasm of the other men of the village, including 'the other poets/ until 'one cannot tell who is hunter and who is quarry.' It is he alone who remembers the death of the 'child [who] lay with no motion save that of his slowly-gliding blood'; as far as the villagers are concerned, 'the child is forgotten.' The

The Frustral Summit of Extase 133 paradoxical role of the poet, excluded from his society and despised by it, yet necessary for the preservation of its highest values, is summed up in the conclusion of the parable: 'So here I am, with the womenfolk. I am like one who in meditation watches a thunderstorm, and pares his nails.' Behind this portrait of the poet among the womenfolk, dispassionately viewing the thunderstorm in which the vengeful and bloodthirsty hunters are caught up, we can perhaps glimpse the portrait of another poet as well, the 'penthouse bard' Rilke. For, throughout his most creative years, Rilke, too, sat apart from the world of men, surrounded and supported by women. And this was especially true during the writing of the Duino Elegies, which spanned the 'thunderstorm' of the First World War, when, in Rilke's words (marked by Klein in his copy of the Duino Elegies), 'the world ha[d] fallen into the hands of men.'28 But whether or not one sees a specific allusion to Rilke in this passage, there can be no doubt about the allusion in its closing words: the poet who 'pares his nails' can be none other than the God-like artist whom Stephen Dedalus describes in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.29

The main narrative of The Inverted Tree' begins with a realistic, circumstantial account of the funeral of Kay's oldest sister, who has died an agonizing death as a result of an unspecified lung disease: [N]ow and again, her arms moved towards her throat seeking that which was oppressing her; her panting was like that of a runner at the last thirty yards before the tape-line. Dr. M. who arrived shortly after I did seemed to come to his conclusions by the appearance of her face and the sound of her breath; he examined her cursorily, said something about the lungs having already filled with fluid, and with his usual forthright grave-side manner, gave us to understand that soon he would pronounce her dead. Beneath the oxygen tanks she survived for another thirty-six hours. Her bedclothes stirred by the unseen air, and the bed itself shaken by her struggle to breathe - pathetic motion without visible cause - it was as if she was wrestling with a phantom. At six o'clock the phantom went away. (NB, p. 24)

As Kay coldly observes the various responses of the members of his

134 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet family, he suddenly imagines that it is his own funeral which he is attending. He seems to hear the rabbi praising him for his devotion to the community, but is 'unmoved by the ululation' which ensues. All he feels is a certain glow of mild satisfaction. Here, my whole biography has been recounted, but nobody mentioned the fact that I was a poet. I have kept the secret well. Now, no one will ever know of what I died. (NB, p. 26)

Kay's sense of alienation is intensified when, terrified by his sister's death, which 'had brought home to [him] once more the realization that the lungs of the Kays were not quite equal to their task' (NB, p. 26), he goes to a doctor for reassurance. The experience is completely dehumanizing. Stripped to his waist in a darkened room, he feels like a 'condemned man,' or like a human sacrifice whose 'lungs and entrails' are being examined by 'some Martian aurispex' (NB, p. 27). The experience reminds him of a similar sense of violation on another visit to the doctor when he was shown x-rays of his wife's skull: I was like one who out of curiosity approaches a finely carved cabinet, and on opening it discovers it to be an upstood coffin ... The doctor had looked on secrets of my beloved's body that I had never beheld myself. (NB, p. 28)

After introducing the central concerns of The Inverted Tree' in the opening parable, and then developing them in the more conventional fictional terms of the sections which follow, Klein is now ready to state explicitly, for the first time, the metaphor which gives the novel its title and unity: I am a garden cherishing a tree. It is an inverted tree, its doubled branches spreading in my chest, its ringed trunk rooted in the sky. It lives on air. It might have been so wonderful a growth, with music bursting upon every twig, my heart in its shade. But locusts have fallen upon it, they devour its leaves, and no birds sing. (NB, p. 28)

This passage leads into the final movement of The Inverted Tree/ in

The Frustral Summit of Extase 135 which the Rilkean urge towards spiritual transcendence is identified with a Keatsian attraction to 'easeful Death' ('Ode to a Nightingale/ 52). Although the doctor has been unable to find anything wrong with him, Kay is 'consistently losing weight ... diurnally dwindling ... oppressed with the fear of ultimate extinction' (NB, p. 28). The wasting away of his body reminds him of the favourite theme of [his] bearded rabbi... the contrast between the material and the spiritual. The spiritual, the ruchnioth, evoked his finest praises; the material, the gashmioth, only curled his nose. Gross, and crass, and heavy it was, and a good Jew should strive with might and main to divest himself of it ... And now I was going spiritual, spiritual by my rabbi's awesome definition. (NB, pp. 28-9)

After an extended meditation on the transformation of the physical into the spiritual, he concludes with the ironic observation, 'Under the ... transmutations of disease, I myself am progressing from flesh to symbol' (NB, p. 29). Kay's ironic celebration of the progression 'from flesh to symbol' leads him inexorably to 'the great non-fiat itself,' suicide (NB, p. 30). 'At last I had decided upon it' (NB, p. 30), he says, and proceeds to consider the various possible 'gracious exit[s]' (NB, p. 30) culminating in choicest of all, dissolution's loveliest prelude - the phial of veronal, inducing sleep, death with the sound of lullaby, death with the taste of the sweet half of the apple, clean to itself, and clean to its beholder. (NB, p. 31)

With this Keatsian celebration of the richness of death, the first version of The Inverted Tree' comes to an end. Of the various texts that make up 'Raw Material,' the first version of The Inverted Tree' is the most impressive. Like all of Klein's most successful works, it is marked by a tension between conflicting impulses towards variety and unity. By beginning with the story of the poet on the African veldt, in which the metaphor of the 'inverted tree' is unfolded in narrative terms, Klein establishes a unifying framework for the sequence of heterogeneous passages that make up the text as a whole, precisely the kind of framework which is missing from the rather miscellaneous diary. However, for obvious reasons, Klein could not remain satisfied with a text in which the poet can find no way of transcending the frustrations of his social role but suicide, and he

136 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet decided to recast the material again, seeking a more optimistic resolution of the frustrations it explores. The most important evidence of Klein's intention to achieve such a positive resolution is a set of notes (NB, p. 32),3° beginning with a reference to the familiar motif of the lungs: The world diminished by the contents of my lungs - paid back/ But if the motif is familiar, it is being used in an entirely new way: the phrase 'paid back' suggests, for the first time in 'Raw Material/ the possibility of moving beyond isolation and frustration to the kind of genuinely fruitful interchange between the poet and the world which is celebrated in Rilke's 'poem on air/ What then follows is a passage which seems to have been written in great haste and in a state of high excitement; it is in places almost illegible (and, in fact, I am not entirely confident about all the details of my transcription): Describe being a poet. Who wants him in this age, the day of gasoline and oil. Cursed be the day I penned my first pentameter. What prompted me. Vanity, mimesis, afflatus But here it is. That's what I am. I have yet in me to do something. So many things still unpraised (See Natonek)31 still unlabelled by my words. My inventory has not yet been taken Moreover I want more than discrete isolated visions. I want yet to see the world as a photographer on Mars, focusing all of the sunlit in the camera glimpse.

The reason for Klein's palpable excitement is obvious: these notes contain in embryo the vision which he will unfold in 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape,' in which there is hope that the sense of guilt and frustration which has dominated 'Raw Material' will be overcome as the poet 'pay[s] back the daily larcenies of the lung' (157). The evidence suggests that Klein did not yet feel ready to elaborate on the redemptive vision sketched out here, and that he temporarily put the sheet aside (which is perhaps why it was filed separately from the rest of 'Raw Material') and turned back once more to his revision of The Inverted Tree/ This revision is on very different lines from those he would eventually pursue in 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape'; indeed, what is most striking about the second version of The Inverted Tree' is its deliberately 'unpoetic' quality. Once Klein has conceived of the poetic treatment of the metaphor of the 'inverted tree' which will eventually become 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ he no longer

The Frustral Summit of Extase 137 seems interested in such an approach for his novel: it is as if he has decided to drain off the poetry from The Inverted Tree' into 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ The most striking evidence of this change is the fact that, although the second version of the novel is still entitled The Inverted Tree/ the raison d'etre of this title has disappeared. Kay still suffers from a serious illness, but it is a form of angina rather than lung disease, which is biographically more accurate,32 but much less suggestive; and, in any case, the motif of bodily illness plays a greatly diminished role in the text. Significantly, in the parable of the poet on the veldt, which is taken over from the first version, the only major revision is that the reference to the poet's lungs has been dropped altogether. Klein has replaced the striking description of the collapsed lung 'flap[ping] behind [the poet's] ribs, like the unlaced tongue of a shoe' with the blandly vague comment, The medicine-men have added an insulting initial to my name; and I am not fit for hunting' (NB, p. 33). The loss of poetic texture in The Inverted Tree' is compensated for, to a certain extent, by a gain in the vividness of its satire. Particularly striking in this regard is the portrait of Kay's mother: [M]y mother has a talent for sadness, a native and indoctrinated gift for misery. The happiest days in the calendar are for her the fast-days, the routine noneating Mondays and Thursdays, the anniversary penitences in memory of some long-forgotten and since-nullified salvation of Jewry, the self-mortifications retroactively grateful for martyrdoms recorded only in encyclopedias. That, as they say, is her meat ... Some people go for picnics in the country, but my mother visits the Jewish cemetery ... she returns pale and tired, afterwards she will rest in her low chair pensive for hours; but I know that secretly she is filled with a sense of great worth, the elation of piety ... That's my ascetic mother, a little dressful of bones, a face wrinkled and runnelled, like a topographical map, and hands bony, the veins transparent through the very sheer skin. I should call her Mummy. (NB, pp. 34-5)

The satirical tone of this portrait of the Jewish mother, of which there is scarcely a hint in Klein's earlier works, is typical of the cynicism of the text as a whole, in which virtually all aspects of the narrator's social relationships are tinged with bitterness. But although there are several other such vivid touches of satire in the second version of The Inverted Tree/ the overall effect of the text is disappointing. Klein does not seem to have any clear sense of where he is going, and after an account of Kay's first angina attack and of a visit to the doctor, the narrative peters

138 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet out. It ends with two unrelated episodes, in which the motif of the diseased body, which has heretofore provided an undercurrent of unity for 'Raw Material/ is simply abandoned. In the first of these episodes (NB, pp. 41-4), which is based on Klein's article 'Advertising Declares War' (1945; BS, pp. 162-5), Kay describes how the advertising firm for which he works cynically exploits the war effort; and in the second episode (NB, pp. 44-7), which is the 'rawest' piece of autobiography in 'Raw Material,' Klein - there is no longer any real attempt to maintain the fictional persona of Kay - complains about the poor reception his work has received, and reproduces, with only the most minor of revisions, the indignant letter he had sent to the Contemporary Jewish Record in response to its negative review of Hath Not a Jew ... (see p. 115 above). It is with this letter that the second version of 'The Inverted Tree' grinds to a halt. Only one episode in the text seems to stand apart from the general mood of weary cynicism: Kay's memory of picking wildflowers on Mount Royal with his son Colman, which comes back to him after his heart has begun to fail. This episode, like the one concerning Colman and the school lavatory in the diary and in the first version of The Inverted Tree/ seems to have a special resonance for Klein. Like the earlier episode, it evokes the motif of the escorted child, although in this case the motif seems entirely positive. It is a kind of idyllic interlude, like Mount Royal itself a 'parcel of imported Nature' (NB, p. 39) amidst the alienation of urban life. But there is a darker undertone to the episode. The wildflowers which Colman picks are blood-roots: The plant gave way before his careful ritual grasp, coming up with its bleeding roots, its clinging soil, its delicate thin rootlets. 'Is this really blood?' He looked at me as if he had perhaps done something wrong, guilt and elation in his face, thrilled and shuddered. (NB, p. 41)

Colman's 'blood-roots' recall one of the most cryptic allusions to the metaphor of the lungs as an inverted tree in Klein's notes for the novel: 'Debate on S. - Dante ref. turned into trees. = Lung' (NB, p. 21). 'S.' is an abbreviation for 'Suicide/33 and the 'Dante reference]' is to Canto 13 of the Inferno, where suicides are punished by being 'turned into trees.' When Dante arrives at the Forest of Suicides, he breaks off a branch from one of the trees, and is horrified to see it bleed - exactly like Colman's 'blood-roots.' Nothing else in the predominantly prosaic second version of The Inverted Tree' equals the poetic power of the

The Frustral Summit of Extase 139 blood-roots episode, in which the 'subterranean dantesque' of 'Les Vespasiennes' makes itself felt in the midst of a vision of childhood innocence. With the failure of his attempt to impose a satisfactory narrative resolution on the tensions he had so far explored in 'Raw Material/ Klein decided to recast the material once more, this time in the nonnarrative format of 'A Document, with Commentary' (NB, pp. 48-50), through which these tensions could be, if not resolved, at least clarified. He never completed this process of clarification, and much of the relevant material is in the form of notes and drafts, but the outlines are clear enough. The 'Document,' in its most finished form, consists of a list of fifty exhibits (NB, pp. 48-9) - poems, stories, essays, letters, medical reports, certificates of various sorts, photographs, etc. - focusing on Klein's life in the early forties. It is supposed to have been put together by a coroner who is conducting an inquest into the poet's death under 'suspicious circumstances' (exhibit i), likely suicide, as is suggested by exhibit 10, 'Poem on Suicide.' The 'Commentary' begins with the following notes: a) Apparently written by someone in Coroner's or DA.'s office - presents documents, and every document followed by his own remarks. b) Arrange so that the frustration of all elements develops, one by one. (NB, p. 49)

As it now stands, the 'Commentary' consists of a table in which a list of exhibits, similar to the one in 'Document/ is organized under five headings: 'Personal/ 'Social/ 'Jew/ 'Poet/ 'Angel.'34 The first four categories represent the oppositions which Klein has been exploring throughout 'Raw Material': between his 'social' role as a 'Jew' and his 'personal' aspirations as a 'poet.' The significance of the fifth category, 'angel/ is less immediately obvious, but a reference to Rilke, who 'invoked angels' ('Rilke and His Translators' [LER, p. 252!), seems likely. Rilke's angels represent the highest state to which the poet can aspire. They play a key role in the Duino Elegies, in which, as Rilke explains in a passage marked by Klein, they are the beings 'in whom that transformation of the visible into the invisible we [poets] are performing already appears completed' (Duino Elegies, p. 159). But the items which Klein lists under the heading 'angel' suggest that he does not share Rilke's optimism about the poet's ability to attain the spiritual ideal

140 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet which the angel represents. 'Always after/ 'On not being and angel/ and 'Old Age' refer to the treatment of sex in 'Love' ('And after, always, every man is sad' [22]); of defecation and urination in 'Les Vespasiennes' ('not even angels' [18]); and of senility in The Green Old Age.' And 'Utopia' and 'We who are about to be born' refer to two stories of the period: 'One More Utopia' (Stories, pp. 217-23), about an attempt to create perfect human bodies which leads to madness and suicide; and 'We Who Are About to Be Born: A Parable' (Stories, pp. 213-16), about the horror experienced by an unborn soul who is about to descend from the world of the spirit into the world of the flesh. With these repeated references to the frustration of the Rilkean ideal of spiritual transcendence, references which ultimately point to Klein's sense of his own 'frustrate fate' of 'not being an angel/ the 'Raw Material' file is, in effect, closed. 'A Document, with Commentary' marks a critical juncture in Klein's work. The frustration of all elements/ which he has recorded again and again, has been taken as far as it can go; if he has any hope of moving beyond this frustration, he must create new ways to explore it. This need for new directions is acknowledged in one of the notes in 'A Document': Notebook. Projects - Lyrics Detective Story New styles New language

(NB, p. 48)

What is especially interesting about this note is that it points to the two main lines of development which Klein's work will follow in the years to come, the most creative years of his career. 'Lyrics' points to 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape' and the group of poems, mostly collected in The Rocking Chair and Other Poems, which will grow directly out of it. 'Detective Story/ or 'Detective story of the soul' as another version of this note has it (MS 7519), points to a series of detective stories, culminating in The Second Scroll. As we have seen, Klein had already taken the first tentative step towards the lyric in his preliminary sketch of 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape.' A similarly tentative step towards the detective story can be seen in revisions he made to the two episodes involving Colman, the episodes of the blood-root (MS 3517-20) and of the school lavatory (MS 3522-3), in which they are presented as memories of an unidentified convict. But Klein did not carry these particular

The Frustral Summit of Extase 141 revisions any further. Instead he began afresh with 'Stranger and Afraid/ a 'detective story of the soul' without a detective or a recognizable crime. The central character in 'Stranger and Afraid' is a poet-journalist named Drizen, Yiddish (draytseri) for thirteen, who has been imprisoned for some unnamed crime.35 The novel begins with an episode in which Drizen appears before the warden while on a hunger strike in protest over being deprived of writing materials. After debasing himself to the warden, he is given a pencil, and the rest of the text is his account of the events leading up to this opening episode, beginning with his trial and continuing through his first prison experiences. In the course of this account, Klein paints a portrait of the city of Montreal which is incomparably more vivid than anything in his previous works. The only similarly detailed portrait of the city, in fact, is the composite one made up of 'Autobiographical' and a number of poems in The Rocking Chair and Other Poems, but the two portraits could hardly be more different. In 'Stranger and Afraid' the emphasis is almost exclusively, as the novel's title would suggest, on a sense of alienation and fear. The difference is particularly striking in a Traherne-like passage describing the 'beautiful ghetto' of Drizen's childhood, which seems, at first, to be identical to the idealized 'ghetto streets' of 'Autobiographical': A million million watts of sun shone down upon the street, and in the distance padded my Hebrew teacher, bearing his curled umbrella. On the corner, in the windows of the big cafeteria, philosophers sat stirring the livelong tea. At the door, old man Ungar, as usual took up his stance, his tzitzith dangling from his fly, in his outstretched hand pamphlets - the miracles of the Baal Shem Tov, the Jewish Calendar in a twelve-page book. Across the street, a dog was leashed by a bitch's tail. My friends played in the street the game of frogs, the game of running sheep, the game of ball and mitt. The staircases stretched their legs down from the buildings, so good, so warm. A water waggon passed with its crystal broom of water, and the asphalt changed colour, and the air changed odour. But the sun was still shining, licking the barber's candy-pole, warming the hot-house garden in the grocery window. (NB, p. 81)

But this idyll is brutally shattered when Drizen is humiliated and beaten by a local bully. He is saved from an even worse beating by the sudden appearance of his father, who comforts him and escorts him home:

142 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet I walked meekly beside him. It was so good to be near him, he so protective, and knowing all about the true things in life, and what God really esteemed. Moreover, he never made any great fusses. Everything, he felt, would pass. Nothing that happened to him or his was unbearably tragical. (NB, p. 83)

One is reminded of the description in 'Autobiographical' of the poet's father 'leading a brave child / Through childhood's ogred corridors, unfear'd!' But in 'Stranger and Afraid/ although the ogres may have been momentarily defeated, they will be back again, especially in the form of the anti-Semitism that Drizen experiences again and again in the streets of his city. Against these ogres his father cannot protect him: I am walking with my father to the synagogue. My faith in the efficacy of prayer has long since been lost, but I do honour my father upon earth, so I accompany him. Moreover, I like the cantor's singing. We arrive and find that the door of the synagogue is scribbled over with all kinds of symbols and graffiti. In the centre is a double triangle, a swastika superimposed upon it, as if to cancel it out. Nor can one erase it; it is the Sabbath. I want to pause at the door to decipher the lewd and insulting inscriptions. But my father hurries me along: Let the heathen rage, he says. We, we enter to the service of our Creator. You see now where I get this-is-nothing stuff. My father, however, he can afford it; he knows his reward in heaven. (NB, pp. 69-70)

Shaken by these memories and by nightmares of the horrors occurring in Nazi Europe, Drizen questions why he remains a Jew. After exploring the various ties that bind him to his community - religion, race, education - and finding them wanting, he decides that it is because of his sense of honour, his refusal to 'forsake ... the weak in whose midst he finds himself to go over ... to the camp of the strong' (NB, p. 76). Noble as this attitude may be, it does not suggest that Drizen feels particularly close to his community; there is no one, including his fellow Jews, among whom he is not a stranger and afraid. Drizen's intense sense of alienation from society is paralleled by an equally intense sense of alienation from his own body, which is never anything but a humiliating source of frustration for him. At the beginning of the novel, after being prevailed upon to break his hunger fast, he reflects: It is so good to eat; and so humiliating. That I, the last perfected - presumably perfected - link of a long chain of generation should still find it imperative, at given intervals, which know neither my intention or convenience, to surrender to

The Frustral Summit of Extase

143

the insistence of a gut, to abandon ratiocinations the most cherished for the purpose of concentrating entirely, expectantly, with rendezvous impatience, upon the imminent consumption of the ugly satisfying prison-stew; to find myself reacting only with a stomach;... to see myself, despite all the hansards of philosophy, still on the same level as the beasts of the field, still subject to a common set of tablemanners - this nauseates me... O, if only air were nutritious! - how like gods we would be, immune to these procedures penultimate to defecation! (NB, p. 53) One is reminded here, and not for the last time in 'Stranger and Afraid/ of Leopold Bloom and his obsession with bodily functions - in particular, of the passage where he fantasizes about the statues of the 'naked goddesses' in the 'library museum': Quaffing nectar at mess with gods, golden dishes, all ambrosial. Not like a tanner lunch we have, boiled mutton, carrots and turnips, bottle of Allsop. Nectar, imagine it drinking electricity: god's food ... And we stuffing food in one hole and out behind: food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine.36 But if the gut is one source of humiliation for Drizen, an even more powerful one is the genitals. Immediately after arriving at the prison, he is forced to strip for a shower: I am, in fact, naked; my clothes, my neatly tailored suit, my shirt, my shoes, my socks - so bright and caducean - are all parcelled away. Narrow-shouldered, bony, and terribly conscious of the dark leaf and lighter fruit of my sex, which seems to draw away all the whiteness of my body ... (NB, p. 54) One of the prisoners notices that he is circumcised and begins to taunt him, to the amusement of the others: [A]s the prisoners issued from their booths, he danced about me, pointing at my pudenda. They did really feel pudendal... They were all looking at me, but at one place, like so many converging telescopes; and they were grinning. (NB, pp. 65-6) This nightmare of exposure and humiliation, foreshadowed in the accounts of the medical examinations in the two versions of The Inverted Tree/ sets the tone for the rest of Drizen's prison experiences, which are simply an intensification of the alienation which he has

144 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet always experienced. Like Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Metamorphosis/ he has been turned into an insect, under the dome of the Bordeaux jail, which he imagines as a bell-jar under which might be viewed, as by a passionless scientist, the insects that lie beneath it, and vainly crawl up its walls ... One is isolated, but one is never alone; always a pair of eyes is on its way to catch you in seclusion's occupations, shameful or innocent... So they look at you from on top, and they look at you from the side - this is not a mortared tomb, but a glass case. I am a smear on a slide of a microscope. (NB, pp. 79-80)

'Seclusion's shameful occupation/ masturbation, is described in an image which again recalls Kafka, in this case the grotesque machine of 'In the Penal Colony/ the other story which, for Klein, represents 'a microcosm of the Kafka world': Conceive a great machine, huge enough to fill an entire hangar, fitted with wheels, and belts, and pistons, suddenly set in motion, its pistons moving mightily up and down - and producing nothing, nothing at all. It's merely a try-out! These iron limbs are only showing their muscles! Such is the population of a jail, the hour before it falls asleep. (NB, p. 81)

In this passage, in which Drizen's body is reduced to a nameless cog in a great masturbation machine, the humiliating experience of 'being isolated, but never alone' finds its ultimate expression. In the final episode of 'Stranger and Afraid/ Drizen struggles to preserve his sense of personal identity and to prevent himself from going mad by playing 'the game of superimposition.' That is, he superimposes on his cell a mental map of the city of Montreal: 'my world, my cosmos. The quadrature of the globe. All time and space within my cubits four' (NB, p. 87). The survey comes to a sudden stop when he reaches the Art Gallery. From this point on, until the end of the text, he circles obsessively around this one 'blanket fold' (NB, p. 88) in the 'quiltwork' (NB, p. 87) of Montreal, in a weird Joycean language that seems to be spinning out of control. The passage begins: Technicon of eocene glyptics and plastics agamic. Discoboloi non-ithyphallic; nymphs only partially ecdysiast. The temple that apopemptic Butler apotheosized: O Basilicoria! (NB, p. 88)

The Frustral Summit of Extase 145 The allusion is to Samuel Butler's poem 'A Psalm of Montreal/ according to Klein, 'a cry of ironic distaste evoked from him by the spectacle of Greek statuary standing in a local museum, pantaloon'd or brassiered to spare a possible outraged modesty' CO God! O Montreal!' C/C, 10 April 1947, p. 3).37 After describing the poseurs who frequent the gallery but despise true art, Klein turns, finally, to the voyeurs who use the nude statues in the gallery for sexual stimulation: 'For them the hoi phalloi, the proctoscopists - these gluteal petrifactions, alpha and omega, genesis and eschatology. But not for heroes and athletes' (NB, p. 89). Like Drizen's meditation on 'the insistence of a gut' in the opening pages of 'Stranger and Afraid,' the reference to 'proctoscopists,' that is, 'anus-viewers/ calls to mind Leopold Bloom's contemplation of the statues of the 'naked goddesses' in the 'library museum.' Sexually frustrated, and aroused by an erotic memory, Bloom has a masturbatory fantasy about the statues' anuses (or lack of them), foreshadowing his actual act of masturbation later in the day: They have no. Never looked. I'll look today. Keeper won't see. Bend down let something fall see if she.'38 Far from enabling Drizen to transcend his sexual frustrations, his evocation of the city has culminated in a masturbatory image of the body in which his sexual urges reassert themselves with more power than ever before. And the increasingly frenzied language in which they do so is in itself masturbatory, for its purpose is not so much communication as release from frustration through a kind of verbal ejaculation. 'Stranger and Afraid' ends in mid-sentence - 'But not for heroes and athletes' - and Klein's intentions for the rest of the novel remain unclear. What is clear, however, is that the world portrayed in 'Stranger and Afraid' is certainly 'not for heroes and athletes' or for any others, including poets, whose ambition is to rise to the height of achievement in the name of, and with the support of, their communities. All this world has to offer them is 'the frustration of all elements' of their ambitions; and the only height to which it will allow them to rise is 'the frustral summit of extase.'

^b

8

Taiku

'Du musste dein Leben andern' ['You must change your life'] - Rainer Maria Rilke, 'Archaic Torso of Apollo/ in New Poems [1908], p. 3

By the mid-forties, Klein knew that the time had come for a change. Change is the dominant concern of his life and work in these years, just as frustration had been in the years immediately preceding. In the early forties, Klein's sense of frustration had given rise to some powerful writing, but his inability to bring the major works of the period to a satisfactory conclusion did not bode well for his future as a writer. If he was to have such a future, he clearly could not continue to drift passively through a life which seemed somehow to have been chosen for him; he would have to act, to take substantial, practical, measures to change his life. Klein's dilemma, and his eventual resolution of it, after much hesitation and several false starts, are reflected in 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape,' the story of a poet who learns how to 'bring / new forms to life' (155-6) by changing the way in which he imagines his own life and the life of his times. Although Klein knew that he wanted to change his life, and, in particular, to escape from his emotionally draining and time-consuming law practice, he had no clear idea of how to do so. This uncertainty led to what Usher Caplan calls 'a number of surprising moves.'1 The first of these was his plan to apply to the Guggenheim Foundation for a fellowship which would enable him to devote a year to translating the poetry of Bialik. Like most of Klein's plans at this period, it was accompanied by 'much procrastination and uncertainty'2 and was undertaken only at the urging of someone else, in this case A.J.M. Smith. Part of the reason for Klein's hesitation might have been his recognition that, as far as his development

Taiku

147

as a writer was concerned, the time for such a project had passed. The evidence of the Klein Papers suggests that he had not worked on translations of Bialik, or of any other Jewish writers, for the previous half-dozen years, and it is unlikely that he would have considered returning to Bialik without the inducement of the freedom from drudgery which a Guggenheim Fellowship offered. In the event, by the time he finally did submit an application, he had abandoned the idea of the Bialik translations altogether. Instead, he requested support for a miscellaneous assortment of unrelated projects: 'a long poem of homage to James Joyce/ 'a satiric poem' on the law, 'an emendation of the fourth act of Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice," with ... a contemporary lineal descendant of Shylock, viewing and interrupting the trial scene from amidst the audience,' a play on the legend of the golem set in Nazi-occupied Prague, 'a series of poems, portraits of anonymous Jews,' and 'poems divers and sundry, unknown and unspecifiable, born as the spirit moveth.' Not surprisingly, the Guggenheim Foundation refused to support a project so lacking in clear direction.3 Soon after the rejection of his application, Klein was approached by another friend with another offer to change his life, which, again, he accepted only with great reservations: his childhood friend David Lewis asked him to run for the CCF in Cartier. Although Klein threw himself energetically into campaigning well before an election had been declared, his misgivings continued to grow: Am full of misgivings. Wonder why I a poet should allow myself to be contaminated by this political struggle. Here are so many mean motives, so many ignoble drives; in poetry, only cleanliness, starched words, and the smell of air. (Diary entry, 9 April 1944 [NB, p. 94])

In a letter which Klein wrote to E.K. Brown, soon after he had won the nomination (21 April 1944), he admitted that he was less than fully committed to his new course of action: My political commitment - tell it not in Gath - was partly a rebound from the Gugg. rebuff... Under ordinary circumstances, albeit I cherish certain desiderata in the social order, I would never have thought to fling myself into a type of battle which is repugnant to me.

Finally, towards the end of the year, he withdrew from the race. Almost immediately thereafter, Klein made what was perhaps his most surprising attempt to change his life. In January of 1945, having

148 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet heard that the American Jewish Committee was about to launch a new magazine, Commentary, Klein unofficially let it be known that he was willing to move to New York and take on the job, even though the magazine was being published by the same group of 'climbing assimilationists' who were responsible for the Contemporary Jewish Record. In any case, for whatever reason, Klein's approaches came to nothing. Another, much more promising opportunity to move to New York at this time also came to nothing: the Jewish Agency for Palestine invited Klein to join their New York office as a writer and publicist for the Zionist cause. But, although this seemed the kind of work for which he was ideally suited, he turned the offer down (letter to Meyer W. Weisgal [26 February 1945]). It is difficult to say how long Klein would have continued to be 'loosed yon, leashed hither' (The Rocking Chair,' 28) by his desire for change and his fear of it, if he had been left to his own devices. But, fortunately, he was not. Sometime earlier, at least as early as his decision to run for the CCF, Samuel Bronfman had offered to help Klein obtain a lectureship in the English Department of McGill University, to which he was a major donor. Klein had refused the offer, preferring to try his hand at politics, even though, in the diary which he kept at the time, he recorded a conversation with Bronfman in which he 'assured him that [he] still would prefer professorship at McGill to House of Commons seat' (NB, p. 93).4 In any case, after Klein withdrew from the campaign and began to consider moving to New York, Bronfman, who did not want to lose his services as a speech-writer and public relations adviser, repeated his offer. This time Klein accepted, although, as always, with misgivings: Now that it seems practically settled, I am full of misgivings ... I am worried about the students: A Jew teaching English poetry! About students who will have come back from the wars: And where were you all this time? About the subjects I will teach. About what will constitute the measure of success? About the 'experimental' nature of the thing; and then, what? Return to the law? I'll never do that. O, that my father had left me an inheritance. (Diary entry, 4 May 1945 [NB, p. 98])

But, although Klein's misgivings were to prove groundless, the McGill lectureship was only a partial solution to his problems as a writer. What he still lacked was a community which understood and was sympathetic to his aims as a modern poet. Klein had come to realize that he was

Taiku

149

not going to find this understanding and sympathy in the Montreal Jewish community, but he did not find it at McGill, either. He felt very uneasy in the intellectually and socially conservative atmosphere of the university, and his sense of unease was, no doubt, increased by the irregular nature of his appointment. During his years at McGill, he tended to avoid his colleagues and spent as little time as possible on campus. But, fortunately for Klein, there was one more change in his life at about this time - again urged upon him by a friend, and again accepted with reluctance - which provided a perfect complement to his McGill lectureship. Some years earlier, in 1942, a number of poets, including Patrick Anderson, P.K. Page, Bruce Ruddick, F.R. Scott, and Neufville Shaw, had joined together to found the literary magazine Preview. F.R. Scott had invited Klein to become a member of its editorial board, but he had refused. Although he submitted a few poems to the magazine and occasionally attended social gatherings of the group at Scott's home, it was not until March of 1944 that he finally decided to accept Scott's invitation and began to attend the meetings of the editorial board on a regular basis. He also became involved, though less closely, with another group of writers - Louis Dudek, Irving Layton, and John Sutherland, who founded First Statement, partly in reaction to what they saw as the stuffiness of Preview. Klein was fully capable, in certain moods, of taking a highly sarcastic view of the avant-garde world of the little magazines and their incestuous in-fighting,5 but there can be little doubt that his relationship with these writers had an invigorating effect on the poetry he would write in the next few years. In a letter to Leo Kennedy (8 February 1945), Klein reported enthusiastically on these developments: As you know there is quite a literary 'renaissance' taking place in the old town, what with the Preview group, and in small measure, the First Statement group. It reminds me of the good old days of '28 and '29; you would like the goingson, too, I know, if only for its juvenescent effect.

Like the Fortnightly group years before, the poets associated with Preview and First Statement offered Klein an opportunity to engage more closely than he might have otherwise done with contemporary poetry. However, Klein's response to this opportunity in the mid-forties was very different from what it had been in the late twenties and early thirties. As I have argued, with the exception of such weak and unchar-

150 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet acteristic pastiches as 'Soiree of Velvel Kleinburger' and 'Diary of Abraham Segal, Poet/ Klein's work of the late twenties and early thirties shows surprisingly little evidence of his familiarity with the first generation of modernists who were so important to the Fortnightly group. The opposite is true of Klein's work in the forties, in which the influence of Anderson, Page, Layton, and of their models and contemporaries in Europe and America - such as W.H. Auden, Kenneth Fearing, Dylan Thomas, Karl Shapiro, and the recently rediscovered Gerard Manley Hopkins - is everywhere evident.6 Because of changes in Klein's sense of himself as a poet in the intervening years, as well as changes in the nature of modernism itself, Klein was now able to accept and assimilate the techniques and, to a certain extent, the premises of modernism in a way which had simply not been possible for him earlier in his career. At the time when he was involved with the Fortnightly group, Klein still saw himself, or tried to see himself, as the spokesman for a coherent, living Jewish community, preserving and articulating its broadly shared and unbroken traditions. This sense of his relationship with community and tradition stood in the way of his adopting the early modernist view (most closely associated in Canada with AJ.M. Smith) of the poet as a member of an austere aristocratic elite charged with the task of recreating a tradition of high art which had been lost in the modern world, and which was beyond the capacity of the mob to appreciate. And the fact that many of the early modernists (with the prominent exception of Joyce) were right-wing in politics, if not actually fascists, certainly did not endear them to Klein. But, by the mid-forties, Klein's views on poetry and politics were no longer as out of step with those of his most influential contemporaries as they once had been. On the one hand, Klein had more or less abandoned his idealized view of his relationship as a poet to the Jewish community and its traditions; he had come to know, through bitter personal experience, the sense of discontinuity and alienation which is central to modernism in all its varieties. On the other hand, modernists like Auden, while not necessarily enthusiastic about the modern world, at least seemed more at home in it than their predecessors, and tended to put their hopes for the continuation of civilization less in some priestly elite of poets than in humanity's capacity for common decency - a view reflected in the Marxism which many of them professed. Klein was frequently impatient with the dogmatism of his Marxist contemporaries, but he was much more sympathetic to their view of the world, and of poetry's place in

Taiku

151

it, than he could ever have been to the fastidious disdain of their predecessors. At a time when he was trying to find a new social role for himself as a poet, a new way of relating his art to the society around him, he was attracted by the example of poetry which explored modern urban civilization with some interest, even, at times, in a spirit of exuberant celebration. We see this, particularly, in his comments on Karl Shapiro, the poet whom he probably echoes more directly than any other of the period: Who, other than copy-writers, had ever written a poem in praise of a Buick? One would have thought that this theme could never rid itself of the smell of gasoline. Yet Shapiro's 'Buick' emerges as a most precious and vital thing, a slim ecstasy, pure motion, a motored Pegasus ... Drug-stores he sings, and the colour and perfumes of barber-shops ... 'Cokes' and not hippocrene, is the beverage of his Muse; neon flashes through his verse. Others, of course, have noticed before this that the American scene is somewhat peculiar; it was left to Shapiro to endow these pedestrian quotidian things with a richness and vividness which one had hitherto associated only with medieval pageantry as floridly painted by Keats. (Those Who Should Have Been Ours' [1945; LER, p. 248])

The changes, then, that Klein had made in his life by the mid-forties provided the necessary conditions for the renewal of his art. But if these changes were necessary for such a renewal, they were not in themselves sufficient. As Klein well knew, the lot of the poet in the modern age was an inevitably frustrating one, and a new job and new friends could do nothing to alter this basic fact; at best, these changes could give him the freedom and confidence to come to terms with the conditions of his age rather than simply to be overwhelmed by them. But if he were to do so successfully, the changes in his outward circumstances had to be accompanied by an inner change as well, in the way he thought about the frustrations he had experienced and would continue to experience as long as he chose to be a poet. This inner change came about as Klein began to think of the experience of frustration, not as something to be escaped, but as something to be confronted and transformed, a necessary stage in his development, which he now conceived of as dialectical. It is this dialectical conception which is unfolded in 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ Klein's most important version of his story of the poet, and the one which lays the groundwork for all of his most important work in the future.7 Klein's concept of the dialectic draws on a number of different

152 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet sources. The most obvious of these, the Hegelian dialectic, was rooted in the ancient Greek concept, associated especially with Socrates, of philosophy as conversation or discussion (the literal meaning of the Greek term dialektikos), a process of arriving at the truth through a series of questions and answers. This process was developed by Plato into a method of reducing the multiplicity of the world of phenomena, the world of the Many, to the Oneness of systematically organized Ideas. Hegel, however, argued that the dialectic was more than a philosophical method; it was the basic process underlying history, which he saw as the unfolding of the World-Soul through time. According to Hegel, a thesis generates its opposite, the antithesis, and the interaction of the two produces a synthesis, which in turn becomes the thesis of a new triad, until the unfolding of the World-Soul is complete and history comes to an end. Although there is no evidence that Klein was familiar with more than the broad outlines of the Hegelian dialectic, its appeal to him at a critical time both in his personal life and in world history is obvious. The dialectic enabled him to redefine his sense of frustration in terms of a progressive process, as an antithesis necessary for the eventual achievement of a higher synthesis. The reason for the appeal of the dialectic to Klein is suggested by Hannah Arendt's observation that, from its first inception, the Hegelian dialectic was an attempt to deal with the collapse of tradition in the face of the discontinuity of history, to relocate 'the thread of continuity in history itself. The thread of historical continuity was the first substitute for tradition.'8 At a time when Klein was losing faith in the power of tradition to provide salvation from the radical discontinuities of modern history, the dialectic allowed him to reinterpret these very discontinuities as evidence of the continuity he yearned for: as the clashes and transformations through which the dialectic unfolds. The most influential version of the dialectic in the forties, and the one which probably first aroused Klein's interest in dialectical interpretations of history, was dialectical materialism, the official philosophy of Marxism. Dialectical materialism sought to ground the dialectic in a scientific, materialist worldview by elaborating three laws of nature which were sufficient to explain the world without recourse to the metaphysical entities of Hegel. The law of the transformation of quantity into quality states that at a certain point changes in quantity lead to an abrupt change in quality. The law of the interpenetration of opposites (or of the unity and struggle of opposites, as it is sometimes called) states that change is possible only because the world consists of opposing forces constantly

Taiku

153

overcoming or being overcome. The law of the negation of the negation states that the natural process of growth consists of the destruction or negation of a state which itself resulted from the negation of the one that preceded it. Although these laws (especially the negation of the negation) had an important influence on Klein's concept of the dialectic, he was always profoundly suspicious of the way in which dialectical materialism was used by Marxists to explain away inconvenient facts in terms of some endlessly deferred higher synthesis.9 He was particularly indignant about its use to justify the cynical twists and turns of Soviet foreign policy, especially Stalin's opportunistic accommodation with Hitler. Significantly, the first reference to the dialectic in Klein's journalism occurs in a prescient article, 'Stalin: The Man of Flexible Steel' (C/C, 17 March 1939, p. 4), predicting the non-aggression pact which Stalin would sign with Hitler a few months later, and the desperate attempts of Marxist intellectuals to justify it: We pity the Stalinite. Every time he gets accustomed to a new change of policy, the policy is changed yet again ... [L]et no wise dialectician - even Hegel, with his thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, would not have been able to reconcile that which the Man of Steel has reconciled - give us any more of that feeble cant and outworn piffle about Russia and the fight for freedom. (BS, p. 50)

Several years later, in The Hitleriad, Klein made the same criticism of the way in which a naive faith in the dialectic played into the hands of Hitler, in his description of The dialectic theorist who saw the ever-thickening mist And cheered, in hope that soon therefrom The light, Hegelian, would come.

(436-8)

Significantly, although Klein is clearly attacking the Marxist use of dialectical materialism in these passages, it is the name of Hegel he evokes, not, as one would expect, of Marx. This blurring of the boundary between the dialectics of Hegel and of Marx is typical of Klein's treatment of the dialectic, in which there is no attempt to draw a sharp distinction between a 'good' dialectic associated with Hegel and an 'evil' perversion of it associated with Marx. Rather he is concerned with 'the interpenetration of the opposites' of good and evil which is inherent to the basic concept of the dialectic - Hegelian as well as Marxist. That is, although Klein is attracted by the interpretive power

154 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet of the dialectic, which allows him to make sense of his experience of frustration, he never forgets that the dialectic, in any form, may simply be a form of self-delusion, an excuse for passively acquiescing in the triumph of evil. There is another aspect of Klein's presentation of the dialectic which points to his ambivalence about its claims. It often seems that Klein has simply misunderstood the one premise that is basic to any version of the dialectic, the premise that change is progressive. As Mark Finkelstein puts it, Klein has a conception of [the dialectic] that emphasize[s] perpetual alternation without essential development or progress ... a conception of the dialectic as consisting merely of continuous alternation. Existence is thus characterized by regular or rhythmic change, but one that in a broader sense is no change at all, moving as it does within a static pattern.10

A particularly clear example of this conception are the comments on the dialectic with which Klein prefaced 'Sestina on the Dialectic' at his poetry reading at McGill in 1955: Dialectical thinking, the thinking of the dialectics of the Hegelian philosophy ... holds that all life is made up of thesis, antithesis, these resolving into a synthesis and this again breaking up into antithesis, and so the world moves like a pendulum, backward and forward and yet maintaining a kind of equilibrium as the pendulum reaches its central point. This pendulum effect is observable in many of the phenomena of nature, in the ebbing and flowing of human blood, in the ebb and flow of time, and appears also, according to Hegel, to be a mode of general historical and human behaviour.11

In these comments, Klein begins with what looks like a perfectly orthodox account of the dialectic as progressive, but, by the end, he is speaking of it in entirely different terms, as an endless alternation, symbolized by a swinging pendulum. As a statement of Hegel's philosophy, this may seem confused. But Klein is not really interested in accurately paraphrasing Hegel's ideas; rather, his interest is in using them, as he had used Spinoza's years earlier, for expressive purposes. The apparent confusion in this passage, and in Klein's presentation of the dialectic in general, is, in fact, the expression of a genuine ambivalence, which he shares with many modernists. James McFarlane traces the modernist ambivalence towards the

Taiku

155

dialectic back to Kierkegaard's attack on the Hegelian synthesis of opposites as a 'both/and' which destroys the living reality of experience, reducing it to a dead and empty abstraction. In place of Hegel's 'both/and/ Kierkegaard proposed a vision of 'either/or/ in which there is a fruitful tension between opposites, whose identities are enhanced rather than subsumed into some higher abstraction. McFarlane argues: What is distinctive - and difficult - about the Modernist mode is that it seems to demand the reconciliation of [these] two distinct ways of reconciling contradictions, ways which in themselves are also contrary ... It is then as though the Modernist purpose ought to be defined as the resolution of Hegel with Kierkegaard; committing oneself neither wholly to the notion of 'both/and/ nor wholly to the notion of 'either/or/ but (as it were) to both - and to neither. Dauntingly, then, the Modernist formula becomes 'both/and and/or either/or.'12

Klein had some knowledge of Kierkegaard - he lists him among the 'heroes' in the 'Contemporary Poet' (NB, p. 101) and praises him, in T.S. Eliot and the Nobel Prize' (1948; LER, p. 272), as one of those by whom 'the old truths ... [are] refreshjed] ... with new insights'; but he had an example much closer to home of an 'either/or' concept of the dialectic to play off against the Hegelian 'both/and': the Talmud. The quality that distinguishes the dialectic of the Talmud from that of Hegel and the ancient Greeks is an indifference to synthesis. Gershom Scholem argues that this is characteristic of 'the rabbinic genius' as opposed to the 'system-construction' of Greek thought, and he cites the example of the treatment in the Talmud of the 'mutually contradictory attitudes toward theoretical and practical problems' of the two teachers Hillel and Shammai which are codified by the Talmud with great thoroughness, although the rule is that in the application of the law the views of Hillel's school are decisive. But the rejected views are stated no less carefully than the accepted ones. The Talmudists formulated no ultimate thesis concerning the unity of these contradictions ...13

Klein's description, in a late version of 'Ave Atque Vale,' of those 'witty men, and playful men, who forth and back again / Swung the great Talmud's Babylonian pendulum' (30-1) clearly reflects the lack of an ultimate synthesis of opposing views in the Talmudic version of the dialectic. Klein explicitly describes this aspect of the Talmudic dialectic

156 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet in a crucial passage in The Second Scroll, in which, like Scholem, he cites the examples of Hillel and Shammai. The narrator, after vainly seeking in the poetry of Israel an adequate expression for the miracle of rebirth that the State of Israel represents, finds it in the everyday Hebrew spoken in the street, in which an ancient language is given new life and new meaning. He cites several examples, concluding with the word taiku: In my student days I had been fascinated always by that word which put an end to the irreconcilable controversies of the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai: this House would maintain Permitted, that House would insist Prohibited; a deadlock would ensue. Came then the Talmud editor and wrote taiku, stet, the question abides. My teacher would then go on to explain that taiku was really a series of initials that stood for Tishbi yetaraitz kushioth v'abayoth, the Tishbite [i.e., the prophet Elijah, the herald of the Messiah] would resolve all problems and difficulties. Now the magic cataleptic word was before me again, in a new context, in a newspaper, the report of a football game where the score had been tied. Taiku! (SS, pp. 107-8)

Ironically, taiku, the narrator's climactic example of the miraculous synthesis of the old and the new, is an expression of scepticism about the very concept of synthesis. And this irony is typical of all of the most important works which grow out of Klein's interest in the dialectic. In their presentation of the final synthesis which will resolve all contradictions we see a similar tension between yearning and scepticism: 'both/and and/or either/or/ to use McFarlane's 'modernist formula/ or, to use Klein's own more concise Talmudic terminology, taiku.14 The work which most clearly expresses this ambivalence towards the dialectic and its promise of a final synthesis is 'Sestina on the Dialectic/ which is at once Klein's most elaborate exposition of the dialectic and his most sceptical critique of it. Klein's own comments indicate that the concept of the dialectic in this poem is at once Hegelian, Marxist, and Talmudic. In the draft of a letter (7 February 1947) to the Kenyan Review, intended to accompany a submission of the poem, Klein explicitly refers to its 'Hegelian content.' However, in a set of notes for the poem, he makes no mention of the Hegelian thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, but lists instead the three basic laws of dialectical materialism: Law of the transformation of quantity into quality Unity of the opposites Negation of the Negation.

(MS 7536)

Taiku

157

And, finally, in one of the versions of the poem (MS 2622), Klein has written above the title, in Hebrew letters, shakla vetarya, an Aramaic expression (literally, 'take up and throw back') for the endless and endlessly unresolved play of the Talmudic dialectic. The poem begins with a definition of the dialectic which could refer equally well to the version of Hegel or of Marx: Yes yeasts to No, and No is numinous with Yes. All is a hap, a haze, a hazard, a do-doubtful, a flight from, a travel to. Nothing will keep, but eases essence, - out! - outplots its plight. So westers east, and so each teaches an opposite: a nonce-thing still. (1-5)

The dialectic is the process which 'eases out' the 'essence' of the world of phenomena through the conflict of interpenetrating opposites, which, in themselves, are transitory 'nonce-things.' Having defined this process, the poem then goes on to argue that it is a 'law' of nature which 'binds us' all (6), a kind of basic metre - 'stress, slack, and stress' (10-11) underlying the 'rhythm' and 'dance' of life (11). Its workings can be detected in our bodies (13-16), in our history (17-21), and in the very minds with which we interpret the world (22-6). After having described 'change that changes still' (25), the poet then prays for the synthesis promised by the dialectic, the ultimate escape from the world of change: When will there be arrest? Consensus? A marriage of the antipathies, and out of the vibrant deaths and rattles the life still? O just as the racked one hopes his ransom, so I hope it, name it, image it, the together-living, the together-with, the final synthesis. A stop. (27-31)

But in this description of a victim on the rack, hoping for an end to his tortures, there is a strong suggestion that the promise of the dialectic is a lie, that the dream of a 'final synthesis' may be little more than wishful thinking. The 'haze' of experience, described in the opening lines of the poem, which the dialectic is supposed to dispel, may be identical to the 'ever-thickening mist' in The Hitleriad out of which no 'light, hegelian, will come,' despite the deluded hopes of the 'dialectic theorist.' In the final lines of the poem, scepticism about the possibility of synthesis, at least within the speaker's lifetime, becomes explicit: But so it never will turn out, returning to the rack within, without. And no thing's still. (32-3)

158 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet To the question 'When will there be arrest?' the only answer the poem has to offer is taiku. If 'Sestina on the Dialectic' is Klein's most explicit statement of his vision of the dialectic, 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape' is his most important attempt to recast the story of the poet in terms of this vision. The many parallels between 'Portrait of the Poet' and Klein's earlier versions of this story only serve to emphasize the radical change in Klein's concept of the poet's development which has resulted from his new interest in the dialectic. This is especially striking when we consider 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens/ the most important of these earlier versions, and the one whose characters, setting, and imagery most clearly foreshadow 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape.' Both poems begin with a 'portrait of the poet as a nobody,' to cite the original title of 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ a portrait of the creative individual rejected by a fragmented society which is unable to appreciate his redemptive vision. In the eyes of this society, Spinoza is 'nothing at all' ('Pulver/ 87), and the poet is 'incognito, lost, lacunal' ('Portrait/ 28). The redemptive vision which society rejects is associated with a higher mathematical order in both poems: the Euclidian method of Spinoza's philosophy is described in section V and demonstrated in section VII of 'Out of the Pulver'; and Klein's poet, the 'nth Adam' ('Portrait/ 134), sees the world in terms of 'integers' and 'cube-roots' (52), and his 'status' in terms of 'zero' (160). The frustrations which both poets experience in attempting to share their vision with their community is associated with lung imagery, already familiar in this context from 'Raw Material': Spinoza is 'consumptive' (129) at the end of 'Out of the Pulver'; and, at the end of 'Portrait of the Poet/ the poet dreams of 'somehow pay [ing] back the daily larcenies of the lung' (157). In both poems, the hero is played off against three distinct groups of characters. The first group consists of the society which rejects the redemptive vision which is offered to it: in 'Out of the Pulver/ it is 'the paunchy sons of Abraham' (i) who excommunicate Spinoza; and in 'Portrait of the Poet/ it is 'our real society' (15) by which the poet is 'ignored' (29) and 'forgotten' (30). The second group consists of spiritually divided victims who are repelled by the sterile conformity demanded by society, yet lack the heroic strength and conviction required to formulate and defend a genuine set of alternative values: Uriel da Costa, for whom suicide is the only escape from 'schism' (35); and the 'schizoid' (89) poets of the avant-garde in 'Portrait of the Poet.' Finally, both poems contain a usurper, a demagogue who has taken

Taiku

159

over and perverted the social role that, by rights, belongs to the hero: 'Shabbathai Zvi' in 'Out of the Pulver' (123) and the 'impostor' in 'Portrait of the Poet' (101). Apart from the similarity in their cast of characters, the two poems share a similar symbolic setting. Both begin in an alienating urban environment: in 'Out of the Pulver/ the debased ghetto of sixteenthcentury Amsterdam with its 'maculate streets' (2), and, in 'Portrait of the Poet/ the anonymous modern city with its 'shouting mob' (21) and its 'lonelinesses peering from the eyes of crowds' (51). In contrast to this demonic city is a paradisal garden: the 'garden of Mynheer' (128) in which Spinoza 'gather[s] flowers for the One' (132) and the Eden in which the poet becomes 'the nth Adam' (134). In retreating from the city to the garden, the heroes become physically united with the landscape in a cosmic vision of the One in the Many, so that both poems move from a 'portrait of the poet as a nobody' to a 'portrait of the poet as landscape':15 for Spinoza, the world becomes the 'blood in [his] veins/ which is 'move[dl' by his 'inward heart' (116-18); and for the poet, the world becomes 'pressured blood/ which is 'pulsated' by his 'heart' (143-4). However, neither poem actually ends with this redemptive vision of the One in the Many. Rather we are left with a sense of incompleteness: at the end of 'Out of the Pulver/ Spinoza is 'ever-unwedded' (133) and at the end of 'Portrait of the Poet/ the poet is '[a]t the bottom of the sea' (163). Although Klein wrote many versions of his story of the poet, there are none so close to each other in so many ways as 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' and 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ despite the fifteen-odd years which separate them. It is almost as if Klein has deliberately set out to revise the earlier poem with the aim of replacing it with a new version. Whether or not there is any truth to this speculation, it is a fact that, in his later years, Klein seems to have disowned 'Out of the Pulver/ even though he had once considered it his favourite work.16 As far as I have been able to determine from material in the Klein Papers and from recordings, Klein never included the poem, either in whole or in part, in the numerous readings he gave towards the end of his career, even though he included other poems of comparable length and difficulty, such as 'In Re Solomon Warshawer' and 'Portrait of the Poet' itself. Even more striking is the fact that the poem is not included in the Selected Poems typescript which Klein put together in 1955. It is, by far, the most surprising omission from this volume. In its place is a short lyric entitled 'Spinoza: On Man, on the Rainbow/

160 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet which first appeared as a replacement for section VII of 'Out of the Pulver/ written into a copy of Hath Not a Jew ... The difference between this poem and the original section VII suggests why Klein may have become so unsympathetic to the masterpiece of his youth. In the earlier poem, Klein gives direct lyric expression to Spinoza's sense of being taken up into the Oneness of the universe: I am weak before the wind; before the sun I faint; I lose my strength; I am utterly vanquished by a star; I go to my knees, at length Before the song of a bird; before The breath of spring or fall I am lost; before these miracles I am nothing at all.

(80-7)

The later poem is more didactic than lyric, and, significantly, the lesson which it has to teach is a dialectical one, not found anywhere in the original version of 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens': All flowers that in seven ways bright Make gay the common earth, All jewels that in their tunnelled night Enkindle and flash forth All these, now in the sky up-thrust, To dazzle human sight Do hang but on a speck of dust, But dust suffused by light.

Through the negation of the negation, dust is dialectically transformed, 'up-thrust,' into the higher synthesis of the rainbow, produced when the light of the sun, the One, suffuses dust, the Many. This dialectical account of the 'rainbow' suggests a similarly dialectical account of the 'man' as well: that is, an account of Spinoza's story whereby his negation by the world of the Many, his fragmented society, forces him to retreat into himself, where he is able to commune with the divine One and formulate his philosophy which synthesizes the One and the Many. However, the dialectic plays no part in Spinoza's story as it is actually

Taiku

161

told in 'Out of the Pulver.' In 'Out of the Pulver/ the alienation of the creative individual is simply a given; there is no attempt to construct an argument to show how this alienation is a necessary condition for creativity, no attempt to negate this negation dialectically. 'Out of the Pulver/ as I have argued (see pp. 60-3 above), is essentially static; its spatial structure works through juxtapositions, and there is little sense of development, dialectical or otherwise. The poem is the work of a young man who is carefully laying out the basic issues which will concern him for the rest of his career, but who does not yet have a clear conception of how these issues relate to one another as process: a sense of dynamic interaction, of necessary connections, is missing. I would suggest that by the mid-forties, when Klein is obsessed with finding such connections, he becomes disturbed by their neglect in the poem, which he consequently sees as intolerably facile. His replacing of section VII of 'Out of the Pulver' by 'Spinoza: On Man, on the Rainbow' is one sign of his rejection of his earlier vision, but, of course, a far more important one is his recasting of the static juxtapositions of 'Out of the Pulver' as a whole into the dynamic dialectic of 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape.' The sketch of 'Portrait of the Poet' in 'Raw Material' (NB, p. 32; see p. 136 above) suggests that Klein did not originally conceive of the poem dialectically, but in terms of the juxtapositions familiar from 'Out of the Pulver.' In the first half of the sketch, Klein describes the frustration of the poet ('Who wants him'), and in the second half, his cosmic ambition ('to see the world as a photographer on Mars'); but there is no development from one to the other. However, in the first published version of the poem, which appeared about a year and a half after the sketch was written/7 there is a very clear sense of such a process, and it is explicitly dialectical, leading to a 'synthesis Olympic, / fields where no negatives can live' (149-50). Even in later versions of the poem, in which these lines are replaced by ones which do not refer explicitly to the dialectic ('and each afflated tick, / its talk, its trick, its tracklessness'), the dialectical process through which the poem unfolds is clear. For a parallel to this dialectical presentation of the story of the poet we must look, not to Klein's earlier work, but to the work of the poet who had profoundly influenced him in the years leading up to 'Portrait of the Poet': Rilke. Rilke's Duino Elegies tell the story of a poet's dialectical transformation of lament into praise. At the beginning of the Elegies, the poet is in a state of despair, unable to conceive of a role for himself in a world of

162 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet meaningless change. He contrasts himself with the angel, who transcends change and, from its serene vantage point, is able to grasp the world as a coherent, eternal whole. But even at his most despairing, the poet senses that somehow 'sorrow's so often / source of blessedest progress.'18 The Duino Elegies chart the poet's progress from lament in the early elegies to praise in the final ones, a progress that continues in the Sonnets to Orpheus, with their portrait of the poet as 'one appointed to praising.'19 The moment of transformation occurs when the poet learns to accept the painful fact of his transitoriness as a necessary qualification for his task as a poet, a task that no one else, not even an angel, can perform. This negation of the negation is described by Rilke's translator, J.B. Leishman, in a passage which Klein marked in his copy of the Elegies: Only in and through the finite consciousnesses of a succession of transitory beings like ourselves could the visible world be re-created into an invisible one, could 'externality/ in the words of a modern philosopher [i.e., Hegel], be 'raised towards the Absolute.' Transitoriness, therefore, is no longer regretted as a limitation, but joyfully accepted as a condition: negation is overcome by affirmation, and affirmation is strengthened by what it has overcome.20

This account offers a very close parallel to the dialectical argument of 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape.' The note of lament is sounded in the opening lines of 'Portrait of the Poet,' establishing the initial thesis of the dialectical process, the negation to be negated: Not an editorial-writer, bereaved with bartlett, Mourns him, the shelved Lycidas.

These lines introduce us to the society which has cast the poet out, negating him and his unifying vision. The unifying 'scroll' from which the poets of the past 'unrolled our culture' (22) has been replaced by Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, the language of the imagination reduced to a heap of dead fragments. As Milton Wilson puts it, the poet has become 'an Orpheus dismembered into Bartlett's Quotations.'21 The slap of the flat of the platitude' (73) echoes throughout this 'bartlett' world as, for example, in stanza 2, which consists entirely of what D.M.R. Bentley describes as 'cliched diction' and 'catalogic clichets]':22

Taiku It is possible that he is dead, and not discovered. It is possible that he can be found some place in a narrow closet, like the corpse in a detective story, standing, his eyes staring, and ready to fall on his face. It is also possible that he is alive and amnesiac, or mad, or in retired disgrace, or beyond recognition lost in love.

163

(8-14)

Perhaps only in Joyce's portrayal of Leopold Bloom is there a precedent for Klein's bold attempt, here and throughout 'Portrait of the Poet/ to create a serious work of literature out of a mass of trite stereotypes, hackneyed allusions, and cliches - the detritus of a civilization in an advanced state of disintegration. Section II introduces the antithesis to the thesis of section I, the response of the poet to his negation by society. In the face of the complete fragmentation of 'our real society' (15), the poet has lost faith in the unifying power of his art. No longer confident enough to 'unroll' a vision of the One in the Many for his society, he turns inward, where he tries to console himself by re-membering such a vision, at least for himself, out of the dismembered body of language: Then he will remember his travels over that body the torso verb, the beautiful face of the noun, and all those shaped and warm auxiliaries! A first love it was, the recognition of his own. Dear limbs adverbial, complexion of adjective, dimple and dip of conjugation!

(41-6)

The poet's gesture of retreat in this section of the poem is remarkably similar to Spinoza's at the end of 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens.' Spinoza, like the poet, turns inward in an act of re-membering ('remembering the thought of the Adored' [131]) which puts him in touch with the principle of unity ('the One' [132]) which his society denies. But, whereas the retreat in Spinoza's case is the culmination of his story, here it is only an early stage in the dialectic of a story which has just begun to unfold. For Klein is no longer satisfied, as he had been when he wrote 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens/ with an act of re-membering which is also an act of forgetting. In 'Out of the Pulver/ Spinoza is allowed to 'forget' (128) the world he has left behind, the world of 'Dutchmen and Rabbins' (129); someday, perhaps,

164 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet this world will realize what it has lost and will search him and his vision out, but that is none of his concern. In 'Portrait of the Poet/ however, the poet cannot simply reject the world which has negated him; he must negate it. That is, he must learn to confront it and to transform it, and to transform himself in the process: until he does so, the negation will not be negated, and the dialectic will not unfold. The inadequacy of the poet's initial response to his negation is clear. As the description of the 'body' (41) of language moves towards its erotic climax, an act of 'conjugation' (46), the body is not re-membered but dismembered, broken down into a series of discrete erogenous zones. And, as was the case in 'Stranger and Afraid,' there is a strong suggestion of masturbation in this attempt to find in language a substitute for social relationships: the act of conjugation at the climax of the passage is with a body which the poet recognizes as 'his own' (44). In any case, whatever ecstasy the poet achieves in his escape from society into himself is temporary at best. His moods swing wildly between euphoria and despair, 'zenith' (53) and 'nadir' (36), and, despite his attempt to turn his back on the society that has rejected him, he continually fantasizes about making a triumphant return to it. These fantasies have no hope of being fulfilled because they simply reflect the 'rehearsed role[sl' (54) which society imposes on the consciousness of its members to distract and control them. At the end of the section, the fantasies of the frustrated poet are 'deflated' (58), just as they were, again and again, in 'Raw Material/ Having realized the futility of simply retreating into himself, the poet, in the two sections that follow, turns his gaze outward. In section III he becomes aware that '[hie is alone; yet not completely alone' (59); other poets have experienced the same rejection as he has. In one way, their response to this rejection is very different from his own, for, rather than retreating into solitude, they have formed an alternative society, the society of the avant-garde. But the poet realizes that this alternative society is an illusion. Ultimately, the response of the avant-garde to the indifference of society is as futile as the poet's because it, too, is based on a strategy of denial rather than negation. Irving Howe describes this strategy in a passage which could almost be a gloss of section III: Most of the time ... these groups broke up almost as fast as they were formed, victims of polemic and schism, vanity and temperament... When we refer to the avant garde we are really speaking of isolated figures who share the burdens of intransigence, estrangement, and dislocation ... And as both cause and effect

Taiku

165

of their marginal status, they tend to see the activity of literature as self-contained, as the true and exalted life in contrast to the life of contingency and mobs.23

'Fear [of] the slap of the flat of the platitude' (73) is no substitute for a genuine vision growing out of a dialectical encounter with the world. Inevitably, the poets of the avant-garde end up simply reproducing the fragmentation and incoherence of the society they despise: O schizoid solitudes! O purities curdling upon themselves! Who live for themselves, or for each other, but for nobody else; desire affection, private and public loves; are friendly, and then quarrel and surmise the secret perversions of each other's lives.

(89-94)

In section IV, after having seen the futility of running from the negation of society, either into himself or into the pseudosociety of the avant-garde, the poet, for the first time, faces the fact of his negation directly. He is forced to acknowledge that 'something has happened' (95), that the social role which is crucial to his existence as a poet has been usurped by 'an impostor' (101), or by a series of them: business tycoons, politicians, popular entertainers, scientists. However, even more important than this acknowledgment is another which is, if anything, more painful: that what really bothers him is not the harm these impostors may do to society as a whole; it is his own sense of injured pride: ... Pride, lost impostor'd pride, it is another, another, whoever he is, who rides where he should ride.

(116-18)

The poet realizes that all along he has been motivated, not by a genuine sense of poetic vocation, but by vanity, by a desire for the applause of the society which has rejected him, even though he is aware of the emptiness of that society's values. His negation by society, then, has forced him to recognize a harsh truth about himself. Once this recognition is achieved, he is ready, in section V, to grieve, more directly and more honestly than ever before, the fame which will never be his:

166 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Fame, the adrenalin: to be talked about; to be a verb; to be introduced as The; to smile with endorsement from slick paper; make caprices anecdotal; to nod to the world; to see one's name like a song upon the marquees played; to be forgotten with embarrassment; to be to be.

(119-25)

This stanza marks the climax of the 'portrait of the poet as a nobody/ The most distended catalogue of platitudes in the poem (eight items packed into five and a half lines), it does not merely deflate at the end, but bursts apart; and its bursting point is precisely where the negation of the negation begins. This dialectical transformation can be understood as an instance of the first law of dialectical materialism, the law of the transformation of quantity into quality. That is, the very quantity of the 'rehearsed role[s]' (54) which the poet takes on in this passage, the frantic rapidity with which they succeed one another, brings out their quality of flickering insubstantiality; and this allows us, and the poet himself, to see, more clearly than ever before, 'the shivering vacuums' of the 'absence' (103) which they are intended to conceal. The poet realizes that, if he is to be a true poet, he must no longer yearn to be 'just like a poet' (35) in the eyes of society, to take on roles which society makes available to him. The one genuine, prophetic, role which is crucial to the poet's being will never be available to him in society as it is presently constituted. The dialectical transformation of 'to be -,' a mere copula with a blank to be filled in with a 'rehearsed role' at society's whim, into the verb 'to be' marks the poet's dedication to the true role which is his essence, 'unroll[ingl our culture from his scroll.' It is this new dedication which is the subject of the second half of section V. Rejecting the false 'attractions' (126) which might distract him from his role, the poet turns to 'the thing' (126) itself: ... it is stark infelicity which stirs him from his sleep, undressed, asleep to walk upon roofs and window-sills and defy the gape of gravity.

(129-32)

In this passage, Klein, in effect, retells the story of the poet from the point of view of his newly achieved dialectical transformation. From

Taiku

167

this point of view, the poet's 'stark infelicity/ which had been a subject of lament, is now praised - for its starkness. 'Stark' suggests the stark nakedness of the 'undressed' poet, who has been stripped, in the previous stanza, of all of the 'rehearsed roles' (54) which have concealed his true essence; but 'stark' in its original sense (the sense of its Yiddish cognate shtark) means 'strong.' The poet's 'infelicity,' his society's rejection of him, has been a source of strength, not weakness, to him: as Klein's note to these lines puts it, it is a 'challenge' whose 'enormity ... renders him unhappy ... but he is willing.'24 The poet is not yet aware of where this challenge will lead - he is sleepwalking, not yet awake but his willingness to expose his innermost self and to 'defy' the fear of 'ultimate anonymity,' to cite Klein's note once more, shows that he is finally ready 'to be' a poet. In this passage it is not only the shape of Klein's story of the poet which is transformed; the very language in which this story is told - its syntax and rhythm - is transformed as well. The syntax of the earlier part of the poem, with its loosely structured catalogues, is primarily paratactic, an effect which is further emphasized by the broken rhythm of its numerous end-stopped lines. This 'mistaking] the part / for the whole' (68-9) is, of course, appropriate to the fragmented world which this part of the poem describes. In contrast, the description of the sleepwalker is hypotactic in its syntax, with clauses logically subordinated to a larger whole ('... which ... to ... and ...'), and its enjambed lines come together rhythmically in a single unified verse paragraph. Both syntax and rhythm, then, enact and foreshadow the 'synthesis Olympic/ the poet's vision of the One in the Many, which the final section of the poem unfolds. At the beginning of section VI, the poet is isolated, the 'nth Adam' (134), alone in the garden of Eden. But unlike the inward-turning 'poet as a nobody' in section II, who tries to escape from the world by turning his back on it, the 'poet as landscape' in section VI is engaged in a creative interchange with the world around him. He is 'taking a green inventory' (134) of it, not only recording what is already there, but also recreating it, 'inventing' it anew, by a process of 'naming, praising' (135). In this portrait of the poet as 'one appointed to praising/ the influence of Rilke is deeply felt. Two passages from Rilke, in particular, seem to be at work in these lines and in the ones which immediately follow them. The first is the 'poem on air/ the first sonnet in the second book of the Sonnets to Orpheus (see pp. 131-2 above), which was so central to 'Raw Material' and to the initial concept of 'Portrait of the

168 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Poet as Landscape': specifically, its description of the act of poetic creation as the 'interchange' of breathing, a 'winning of space' which recreates the external world in the image of the internal world of the poet. The second is the crucial turning point of the Duino Elegies, the passage in the ninth elegy in which the poet comes to a true realization of his role: Praise this world to the Angel, not the untellable: ... Tell him things ... ...These things that live on departure understand when you praise them: fleeting, they look for rescue through something in us, the most fleeting of all. Want us to change them entirely, within our invisible hearts, into - oh, endlessly - into ourselves!25

Klein's poet, like Rilke's, breathes the world in, and then gives it back to itself, transformed through praise: For to praise the world - he, solitary man - is breath to him. Until it has been praised, that part has not been. Item by exciting item air to his lungs, and pressured blood to his heart. they are pulsated, and breathed, until they map, not the world's, but his own body's chart!

(140-5)

The climax of this process is the poet's 'single camera view' (148) of the world's 'total scope, and each afflated tick, / its talk, its trick, its tracklessness' (149), seen from the perspective of Rilke's angel, on 'another planet' (147). With this vision of the One in the Many, the 'synthesis Olympic' of the Rilkean dialectic which Klein has taken for his model is achieved. But the poem does not end here. It continues for two more stanzas, taking a turn in a new direction for which the example of Rilke can offer Klein little guidance. For Rilke, the 'blessedest progress' of the poet is in one direction only - inward. In Rilke's version of 'dialectic philosophy/ according to Erich

Taiku

169

Heller, it is 'the apocalyptic poetry of a human inwardness that takes over the divine agency of salvation: "Nowhere will be world but within/" Heller locates Rilke's vision of salvation through inwardness in the context of the traditional Christian emphasis on inner spiritual transformation: 'the perishable bread ... is invisibly transubstantiated, and the perished body ... is invisibly resurrected.' In light of this tradition it is inevitable that 'Rilke's poetic Messianism' would take the form of a 'journey into the interior.'26 But Klein, working out of a different tradition, and out of a different concept of Messianic redemption, has a very different view of the ultimate aim of the journey which the poet must take. According to Gershom Scholem, 'redemption of the soul without redemption of the social body,... of the outward world from its broken state, has never had a Messianic meaning in Judaism.'27 Unlike Christianity, Judaism thought nothing of ... a chemically pure inwardness of redemption ... An inwardness, which does not present itself in the most external realm and is not bound up with it in every way, was regarded here as of no value. According to the dialectics of Jewish mysticism, the drive to the essence was at the same time the drive outward. The re-establishment of all things in their proper place, which constitutes the redemption, produces a totality that knows nothing of such a division between inwardness and outwardness.28

For Klein, 'the drive to the essence' is justified only if it is 'at the same time the drive outward/ back into the social world from which his long journey into the interior has taken him. He must redeem the broken state of the social body, re-member its dismemberment. Much as Klein admires Rilke's poetry and is influenced by it, Rilke's ambitions, in the end, are not his own, and it is for this reason that Klein places Rilke among the escapist poets of the avant-garde in section III of 'Portrait of the Poet': 'another courts / angels, - for here he does not fear rebuff (85-6). In the last two stanzas, Klein turns his attention to the social world, the only world in which it is possible for him to find a 'function' (152) for his art: perhaps by necessity and indirection bring new forms to life, anonymously, new creeds O, somehow pay back the daily larcenies of the lung!

d55~7)

170 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet The most puzzling aspect of this new statement of purpose is the poet's promise to 'pay back the daily larcenies of the lung/ It is, at first, difficult to see what debt the poet can possibly feel that he has to 'pay back' to a world that has sought only to negate him. But it is precisely because his society has negated him that he owes it a debt, for its negation of him has constituted the absolutely crucial initial condition for his development as a poet. Klein's poem as a whole is an attempt to repay this debt in the only way he can, by giving the world of negation back to itself, but in a 'new form' (156), that is, dialectically transformed through an act of poetic negation which is at the same time an act of redemption. It is in the poem's final stanza that, for the first time, we see this act of redemption through negation in the very process of taking place. It is as if the poet as 'Mr. Smith' (27) has allowed us into his smithy, where we can watch as he 'make[s] a new thing' (153) with his 'craft / archaic like the fletcher's' (152-3), dialectically transforming lament into praise: ... Meanwhile, he makes of his status as zero a rich garland, a halo of his anonymity, and lives alone, and in his secret shines like phosphorus. At the bottom of the sea.

(159-63)

The exact nature of the transformation which this passage describes is perhaps best suggested by the word which Hegel uses for the transformation of the dialectic, aufheben. As Hegel pointed out, this word has three meanings which are relevant to the concept of the dialectic: its root meaning 'lift up/ and two apparently contradictory meanings which derive from it, 'bring to an end' and 'preserve/ Erich Heller argues that all three of these meanings are at work in Rilke's version of the dialectic,29 and the same argument can be made for Klein's. Klein was certainly familiar with the Yiddish equivalent of aufheben (oyfheberi), meaning 'to lift up/ and his rather curious use of the word 'up-thrust' to describe the dialectical transformation of the dust in 'Spinoza: On Man, on the Rainbow' may be an allusion to this meaning. However, whether or not Klein was familiar with the concept, either directly through Hegel or through the example of Rilke, the process of dialectical transformation which the final stanza of 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape' describes is very much an Aufhebung in all senses of the

Taiku

171

word. The 'platitudes/ 'characters/ 'rehearsed roles/ and 'poses/ which precede the moment of dialectical transformation in section V, are all simultaneously 'brought to an end/ 'preserved/ and 'lifted up' after this transformation has taken place: that is, the dismembered fragments of the Many in the first part are all re-membered in the vision of the One in the Many which is unfolded in the second. This process begins with the portrait of the poet as a sleepwalker on the rooftops defying gravity. This is an aufgehoben version of several previous portraits of the poet: the poet as 'Lycidas' (2) (whom Milton describes as 'sunk low, but mounted high' ['Lycidas/ 172]); the poet as 'the corpse in the detective story, / standing, his eyes staring, and ready to fall on his face' (10-11); the poet 'zoomed to zenith' (53) and 'depressed to nadir' (36); the poet as 'the chloroformed prince awaking from his flowers' (57); or the poet for whom there has been a 'nightmare ordered' (96). The process then continues, 'item by exciting item' (142) throughout section VI, transforming the 'record' (5), 'table' (19), 'register' (27), and 'catalogue' (64) of the moribund fragments of 'our real society' (15) into the poet's 'green inventory' (134). The climax of this process is the portrait of the poet as dialectician in the final stanza, which is not only the most explicit description of Aufhebung in the poem ('making of his status as zero a rich garland'), but is the passage which most fully embodies this process: for these few lines represent the remembering of literally dozens of fragmentary bits and pieces from earlier in the poem, dialectically transformed into a new synthesis. For example, the poet's 'status as zero' at the beginning of the passage remembers a cluster of images relating to mathematics, measurement, and notation: 'does not count' (16); 'statistics' (17); 'Gallup poll' (19); 'a dot in a government table' (19); 'seven-circled air' (25); 'a number, an x' (26); 'nadir' (36); 'quintuplet' (39); 'integers' (52); 'cube-roots' (52); 'zenith' (53); 'twenty-one jewels' (76); 'the multiplying word' (78); 'symbols convex and concave' (88). And the poet's descent to 'the bottom of the sea' at the end of the passage re-members several earlier versions of such a descent: the drowned 'Lycidas' (2); 'the corpse in a detective story ... ready to fall on his face' (10-11); 'the Count of Monte Cristo' (whose escape from his island prison involves being cast into the sea in a weighted sack) (55); and the poet who is 'depressed to nadir' (36) and 'know[s] neither up nor down' (68).30 There is something exhilarating in the boldness and directness with which Klein confronts the 'total scope' of negation in these final lines. Unlike Spinoza in 'the garden of Mynheer/ the poet 'at the bottom of

172 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet the sea' re-members everything, forgets nothing. Yet there is something disturbing in this passage as well, for, in terms of the unfolding of the dialectic, the poem seems to end half a line too soon or too late. Up until its closing phrase, the stanza proceeds by a series of negated negations: zero/garland, anonymity/halo, alone and secret / shines. 'At the bottom of the sea' is the one negation which is left unnegated. It just stands there, a sentence fragment flanked by two periods which emphasize its finality and incompleteness.31 The key word in this passage is, of course, 'meanwhile.' For all that he has achieved in 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape,' the poet still has not completed the journey on which he has set out. In a passage uncannily similar to the conclusion of 'Portrait of the Poet,' Rilke had once described himself 'as though at the bottom of the sea,' where 'phosphorescent ideas' appeared to him,32 but for Rilke, with his love of solitude and his devotion to his art above all else, this state of being is perfectly acceptable, even desirable. For Klein it is very much a dangerous 'meanwhile' state, and to linger in it is to drown. John Sutherland, who, as editor of First Statement, published the first version of 'Portrait of the Poet,' points to this danger in some comments on modern poetry which seem to be directed specifically at the poem's final lines: Poetry is proud because it gives voice to the whole man in balance with his world. But, garb the poet in a false modesty, demean him to a watery blob, and this pride is twisted into arrogance. Oysters, too, taste glory in the depths of degradation. They wallow joyously in the ooze at the sea-bottom, see their isolation as the sign of their salvation ... Soon they grow such a shell as the sharpest knife of analysis cannot hope to pry apart, being determined to keep their mouths shut and never to disclose whether they hold pearls or not. Soon they will discover the profound truth that the purest poetry is the silence which reigns at the bottom of the sea ...33

And Klein himself is certainly aware that, like the 'dialectic theorist' in The Hitleriad, he may be deluding himself in claiming that he has triumphed over frustration by negating it; the poet who 'makes of his status as zero a rich garland' may simply be one of the 'victims of frustration worshipping their zero' whom Klein mocks in a diary entry dating from the same period as the poem (10 April 1944 [NB, p. 94]). This disturbing conclusion, then, serves to emphasize, as powerfully as possible, Klein's realization that, if he is ever to fulfil his ambitions of /bring[ing] new forms to life, ... new creeds,' he must eventually

Taiku

173

return to the community which he has left behind, even if only by 'indirection/ If Rilke was a crucial model for the necessary descent to 'the bottom of the sea/ for the equally necessary reascent to 'our real society' in his works that follow, Klein turns to another model, whom Irving Howe describes as the 'only [one] among modernist writers ... [who] negotiates the full journey into and through [the] depths while yet emerging into the commonplace streets of the city and its ongoing commonplace life':34 James Joyce. As D.M.R. Bentley notes, from the very beginning, Joyce has been a presence in 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ whose title 'embodies a verbal and syntactical allusion to Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.'35 But, as Bentley also notes, it is at the end of the poem that Joyce's novel is most 'deeply present.'36 Specifically, there is a precise parallel between the last two stanzas of Klein's 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape' and the last two entries in Stephen Dedalus's diary at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the first of these entries, Stephen writes: 'I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.'37 This passage, in which, according to Richard Ellmann, Joyce expresses his own commitment to literature 'as creating and measuring social value/38 is echoed by the similar commitment of Klein's poet to 'bring / new forms to life, anonymously, new creeds.' But Stephen knows that he must not remain forever within 'the smithy of his soul'; unless he 'go[es] to encounter the reality of experience/ he will fail to achieve his ambition as an artist. He expresses his fear of failure in his final diary entry: 'Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead' (Portrait, p. 253). The 'old artificer' is Daedalus, who fashioned wings for himself and for his son Icarus to escape from the island of Crete, and with whom Stephen's ambitions as an artist have been identified throughout A Portrait of the Artist. But now, in addressing Daedalus as 'old father/ Stephen speaks, for the first time, in the voice of Icarus, whose wings melted after he flew too close to the sun, causing him to plunge to his death into the sea. This abrupt shift from the soaring Dedalus to the drowned Icarus precisely parallels the shift at the end of 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape' from the poet who 'has climbed to another planet' to the poet 'at the bottom of the sea.' The parallel between Stephen Dedalus and Klein's poet becomes even more compelling when Stephen, having failed in his 'encounter with the reality of experience/ reappears in Ulysses in the guise, not only of the drowned Icarus, but also of Milton's 'welter[ing]' Lycidas

174 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet ('Lycidas/ 13): Icarus. Pater, ait. Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering/39 If Klein is not to fail, if he is not to remain forever at the bottom of the sea, he must fulfil the two, perhaps contradictory, ambitions which he entertains: the Rilkean one of naming, praising the world from the vantage point of an angel on another planet, and the Joycean one of encountering the world, and bringing to it new forms, new creeds. But entertaining such ambitions is not the same as fulfilling them. If there is to be a final synthesis of the dialectic which unfolds in 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ we must look for it elsewhere, to the poems on Quebec which Klein will write over the next couple of years and, ultimately, to The Second Scroll. Only then will we be in a position to judge whether he really has changed his life. Meanwhile, 'taiku, stet, the question abides/

9

Kebec

In 1945 Klein began a series of poems which mark the return to community foreshadowed at the end of 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape.' But, as 'Portrait of the Poet' suggests, the return is by 'indirection' (155), since his subject in these poems is not the Jewish community which he had written about in the past, but a community which had played virtually no role in his earlier poetry, the French-Canadian community of Quebec. There are obvious parallels between Klein's portrayals of community in the Quebec poems of the late forties1 and in the Jewish poems of the late twenties and early thirties, but there is a radical difference between them as well. The Jewish community as Klein had portrayed it was essentially unchanging, unified by a continuous tradition which offered a refuge from the 'pandemonium' ('Childe Harold's Pilgrimage/ 157) of history. History, Klein seems to say, may have the power to annihilate this community and its tradition, but it can never transform them. However, Klein views the community of Quebec from a new perspective, the dialectical perspective which he had achieved in 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape.' From this perspective, it is seen as a community embroiled in change; and the tradition to which it appeals for its survival in the face of history is itself continuously shaped and reshaped by history, through a dialectical process symbolized by the 'sunken pendulum' (The Rocking Chair,' 27) of the endlessly rocking rocking-chair. In retrospect, Klein's development from 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape' to the Quebec poems may seem inevitable, but it did not seem so at the time. Immediately after completing 'Portrait of the Poet,' Klein wrote three poems on the theme of community, only one of which, The Rocking Chair,' focuses on Quebec. The other two explore entirely

176 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet different models of community, the nation of Canada in The Provinces' and an Indian reserve in 'Indian Reservation: Caughnawaga.' A comparison of these two complementary poems suggests why it was to Quebec that Klein eventually turned for the model of community which he was to elaborate in the works which followed. The Provinces' describes a deliberate and conscious attempt to create a community where none has existed before, 'to make present, to find, what is absent,' as Robin Davies puts it.2 Beginning with an inventory of the Many - Canada's provinces and territories - the poet tries to discover some shared vision of the One which will re-member these fragments into a whole: But the heart seeks one, the heart, and also the mind seeks single the thing that makes them one, if one.

(30-1)

After searching unsuccessfully for such a vision, he concludes with a tentative proposal for its creation: Or find it, find it, find it commonplace but effective, valid, real, the unity in the family feature, the not unsimilar face?

(49-51)

There is something heroic about the poet's attempt to create a community through an act of imaginative sympathy, but there is something facile about it as well; and the result is bland and unconvincing. By calling up, out of a historical vacuum, a vision of undifferentiated unity based on the lowest common denominator of 'the not unsimilar face/ the poet denies the dialectical conflict between tradition and history which is crucial to the development of any living community. 'Indian Reservation: Caughnawaga' presents an equally undialectical portrait of tradition and community, but for precisely the opposite reason: not because of the absence of history but because of its overwhelming presence. The conflict between history and tradition in this poem is simply too unequal for the development of the dialectic by which a living community is sustained. Subjected to the irresistible onslaught of history, the Indian community attempts to survive by retreating into the 'grassy ghetto' (29) of the reserve, but the attempt is doomed; all that remains of the Indians' traditions is a grab-bag of curios 'sold in a shop' (22). By the end of the poem, the 'braves' whose 'faces like autumn fruit' (i) were once so vivid have grown 'pale,' have

Kebec 177 lost their 'shine/ and have 'bleached' (33-4). If their faces have become 'not unsimilar' to our own, it is not because we have all been taken up into some greater universal community, but because the traditions which defined their own community have been utterly overwhelmed by history. Like The Provinces,' 'The Rocking Chair' presents a vision of 'the one' for which 'the heart seeks and also the mind,' but it is embodied in a genuine, rather than a purely notional, community, whose traditions have grown up gradually, over time. Like 'Indian Reservation: Caughnawaga,' The Rocking Chair' explores a community under severe historical stress, but unlike the defeated and demoralized Indians, who have been reduced to 'fauna in a museum kept' (30), the French Canadians have been able to maintain and adapt their traditions, and thus survive as a living community. In the rocking-chair, Klein finds a 'commonplace but effective, valid, real' symbol of 'tradition' (22), with the power to 'unroll ... [a] culture from [its] scroll' ('Portrait of the Poet as Landscape,' 22) in defiance of time and change: 'to its time, the evenings are rolled away' (5), and 'centuries have been flicked / from its arcs' as 'it rolls' (22-4). As such, the rocking-chair introduces a series of images of rolling, furling, folding, unfolding, coiling, and scrolling which occur with much greater frequency in Klein's portraits of community and tradition in Quebec than anywhere else in his work,3 with the possible exception of The Second Scroll. However, what is new about the unfolding/unrolling imagery in the Quebec poems is that it is now presented in specifically dialectical terms. The rocking-chair rocks as well as rolls, and its 'pendulum' (27) motion represents the power of tradition to overcome time by confronting and transforming it. Unlike 'the mere stuttering clock' which it 'rivals' (4), the rocking-chair has the power to make meaningful and reassuring 'music' (32) out of time. As it does so, its crisp tic-toe its 'tick, / its talk' ('Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ 149-50) - echoes onomatopoeically throughout the poem ('seconds/ 'crickets/ 'clock/ 'arithmetic/ 'rocking/ 'sabbatical/ 'character/ 'Lacoste/ 'flicked/ 'flicked and pinned/ 'act/ 'static/ 'Invoke, revoke/ 'like/ 'make/ 'music/ T^ack/ and, of course, 'Quebec').4 Although Klein celebrates the rocking-chair's dialectical transformation of the stutter of history into the music of tradition, he mistrusts it as well, for there is another dialectic at work in The Rocking Chair/ a dialectic that unfolds, not between tradition and history, but within tradition itself. The tradition which the rocking-chair embodies has a

178 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet double nature, destructive as well as creative, and the dialectical struggle between these two tendencies is as relentless as the rockingchair's endless rocking. If the music of the rocking-chair reminds the poet of 'a national bird' (3), the chair's wooden frame reminds him of a 'cage' (4) in which the bird is trapped. The sense of entrapment is developed in the description of the 'family, / grown-up, but still cradled by the chair' (7-8). Further on, the 'dance' of the rocking-chair is described as 'dangerous' (12) to the toddler, and 'the white haloes / dangling above the blue serge suits of the young men' who are seated in the rocking-chair 'among the hanging plants' (14-16) suggest hangman's nooses, 'the zero dangling for [the] breath' ('In Memoriam: Arthur Ellis' [Version 3], 2). However, it is only at the end of the poem that Klein's ambivalence towards the rocking-chair and the tradition which it represents becomes explicit: It is act

and symbol, symbol of this static folk which moves in segments, and returns to base, a sunken pendulum: invoke, revoke; loosed yon, leashed hither, motion on no space. O, like some Anjou ballad, all refrain, which turns about its longing, and seems to move to make a pleasure out of repeated pain, its music moves, as if always back to a first love.

(24-32)

As a national bird, the rocking-chair is loosed yon, but only to be leashed hither. Its song, an 'Anjou ballad, all refrain,' 'invokes' the comfort of the familiar, but only at the cost of 'revoking' the challenge of the unfamiliar, which is necessary for growth and progress. In other words, it forces its listeners to 'refrain.' The power of the rocking-chair to make pleasure out of repeated pain recalls the similar power which the poet displays at the end of 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape,' when he 'makes of his status as zero a rich garland, / a halo of his anonymity' (160-1). But, unlike the dialectic in 'Portrait of the Poet/ the dialectic in The Rocking Chair' and in the Quebec poems as a whole is one of alternation without progress; there is no hope of the final synthesis which is promised, if not actually achieved, in 'Portrait of the Poet.' The music of the rocking-chair may move us emotionally, but of genuine movement there is none, only an impotent longing about which it turns.

Kebec 179 The way in which the rocking-chair makes a pleasure out of repeated pain inevitably brings to mind the motto of Quebec, 'Je me souviens'; but it brings to mind, as well, its Jewish equivalent: 'Next year in Jerusalem/ Nowhere in Klein's poetry is there a more powerful description of a specifically Jewish attitude to tradition and suffering than in these lines, in which he is ostensibly characterizing the essence of tradition in Quebec. And the Jewishness of this passage goes even deeper than may be immediately obvious. The last four lines of The Rocking Chair' seem to have given Klein more trouble than any comparable passage in his work, going through at least eight versions. It is only in the final version that the puzzling Anjou ballad appears, puzzling because the French province of Anjou does not seem to have any special connection either with ballads or with Quebec. Previous to this final version, Klein had written, not 'Anjou,' but 'antique/ so that the last major revision he made to the poem was to replace the syllable 'tique' in 'antique' with 'jou,' which he pronounced exactly like 'Jew,' as is clear from the recordings of his readings of the poem.5 In other words, Klein completes his invocation of the tradition that binds together the community of Quebec by inscribing, at its very heart, the word 'Jew.' The recording of Klein's reading of this poem at McGill, in 1955, suggests an even more intriguing connection between the Jewish community and the community of Quebec. As Klein approaches the final lines of the poem, his voice rises to a chant, like the chant of Orthodox Jews at their prayers. These prayers are traditionally accompanied by a motion known in Yiddish as shokeln. The English equivalent of shokeln is 'rocking.' Klein was clearly aware of the parallels between the French Canadians whom he portrays in his Quebec poems and the Jews. In a letter to Poetry magazine (22 July 1946), for example, he wrote: I need hardly offer any comments on the subject matter except to say that for an interval I have abdicated from the Hebrew theme which is my prime mover to look upon the French-Canadian in this province: we have many things in common: a minority position; ancient memories; and a desire for group survival. Moreover the French-Canadian enjoys much - a continuing and distinctive culture, solidarity, land - which I would wish for my own people. So maybe I've not abdicated, but am only travelling incognito, disguised as a Frenchman.6

Klein was probably encouraged in his decision to 'travel incognito, disguised as a Frenchman,' by James Joyce's similar act of imaginative

i8o A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet sympathy, his decision, in Ulysses, to travel incognito through the streets of Dublin, disguised as the Jew Leopold Bloom. While the direct influence of Ulysses is not as evident in the Quebec poems as it will be in The Second Scroll, there are some intriguing parallels between Klein's portrait of Quebec in these poems and Joyce's portrait of Dublin in Ulysses, especially in the latter's 'Wandering Rocks' chapter, a title which seems to be echoed by The Rocking Chair.' Unlike the other chapters of Ulysses, The Wandering Rocks' does not unfold as a narrative; instead, it is conceived as a series of vignettes of Dublin, which, like Klein's vignettes of Quebec, form 'a montage / of inconsequent time and uncontiguous space' ('Grain Elevator/ 27-8). Klein's rockingchair, which 'rolls with the gait of St. Malo' (24) and sings a ballad, has its equivalent in Joyce's 'one-legged sailor, swinging himself onward by lazy jerks of his crutches/ also singing a ballad, who appears at the beginning of The Wandering Rocks.'7 The pendulum-like motion of the rocking-chair is further paralleled in another passage in The Wandering Rocks/ marked by Klein in his two working copies of Ulysses, in which Stephen Dedalus is 'swaying his ashplant in slow swingswong.'8 But the passage which suggests the strongest parallel between the portrayal of Dublin in The Wandering Rocks' and Klein's portrayal of Quebec, and, especially, of Montreal, is the one which describes the historic council chamber of saint Mary's abbey where silken Thomas proclaimed himself a rebel in 1534. This is the most historic spot in all Dublin. O'Madden Burke is going to write something about it one of these days. The old bank of Ireland was over the way till the time of the union and the original jews' temple was here too before they built their synagogue over in Adelaide road.9

In all likelihood it was this passage, which is heavily marked in both of Klein's working copies of Ulysses, that led him to consult the articles on 'Dublin' and 'Ireland' in The Jewish Encyclopedia, and to mark their descriptions of the Jewish district of Dublin.10 Joyce's interweaving of a Jewish presence into the texture of Dublin seems to have intrigued Klein and may well have reminded him of his own vision of Montreal. But even more intriguing is the reference to 1534 (the year of a rebellion against England, which led Henry VIII to abolish the monasteries and to establish a Protestant Church of Ireland), as the most important date in the history of Dublin. What is intriguing about this date is that it is also the most important one in the history of Quebec, for on 24 July 1534, Jacques Cartier, having set sail from St Malo, landed in Gaspe,

Kebec 181 thus introducing the French presence into Quebec. It is this event that is recalled by the rocking chair as 'it rolls with the gait of St. Malo.' If the parallels between the French Canadians and the Jews offered Klein an opportunity to 'travel incognito/ and if the example of Joyce offered him a precedent for doing so, the question that still remains is what was the 'necessity' ('Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ 155) that led him to this 'indirection'? Why did Klein not speak directly about the community he knew best, the Jewish community of Montreal? The simple answer would seem to be that he couldn't. The constraints of his public role as spokesman and defender of his people had become stronger than ever in the aftermath of the Holocaust. It was inconceivable that Klein would publicly express the disenchantment and frustration with his community which had played such a major role in 'Raw Material' and 'Stranger and Afraid' at a time when the historical centre of that community had been destroyed and its remnants were only beginning to confront the reality of the most terrible event in its history. Having committed himself irrevocably to a poetry of community, having come to see that no other kind of poetry was possible for him, Klein was faced with a stark choice, silence or indirection. He chose indirection, and, having done so, he discovered that he was free to deal, more successfully than ever before, with the complexity of his own community and its traditions, with its strengths and weaknesses, its potential for good and for evil, for inspiration and frustration. Klein's strategy of indirection, of shaping his portrait of the FrenchCanadian community of Quebec, which he knew only as a sympathetic outsider, to the contours of the Jewish community, which he knew so much more intimately, accounts for the peculiarly slanted presentation of Quebec in The Rocking Chair' and in the poems which follow. As Linda Luft Ferguson points out, although these poems were well received by the Quebec press, it was generally with the reservation that Klein's portrait of the province, for all its sensitivity and accuracy, was highly selective, focusing on 'the remnants of Old Quebec/11 rather than on the developments which would lead, eventually, to la revolution tranquille, and which a number of the cultural and political leaders of the day were already beginning to articulate. In Klein's portrait of Quebec, the ever-present reality of historical change is seen as a threat, not as an opportunity: [The] concept of growth, particularly as a result of the challenges posed by rapid industrialization and urbanization, is not expressed in The Rocking Chair.

182 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Instead, 'progress' seems to lead only to the corruption of those values with which Klein sympathizes.12

What is particularly paradoxical about this negative attitude to change is that it is precisely the radical changes that Quebec was undergoing in the forties that made Klein's Quebec poems possible in the first place. According to Pierre Anctil, Klein's new interest in Quebec was part of a general movement of reconciliation between the Jewish and FrenchCanadian communities of Quebec that began to take place after the war: On peut done supposer que Klein n'ecrivit pas en fait son Rocking Chair dans le vide, sous le coup d'une pure impulsion, mais qu'il reagit de tres pres a un certain courant de sympathie ou a tout le moins de non-hostilite qui commenqait a faire jour entre deux voisins de longue date a Montreal: le Juif immigre ... et le Quebecois francophone.13

As Anctil goes on to argue, this change of attitude was a result of the breakdown of traditional values which had defined and isolated Quebec in the past: En fait, 1'ouverture du Quebec tout entier au contexte seculier et liberal nordamericain, la prosperite manifeste des nouvelles classes moyennes francophones et leur acces a une certaine mobilite occupationelle commencerent a briser, a la fin des annees quarante, la mefiance viscerale des Quebecois de vieille souche envers tout ce qui n'etait pas a leur image sur le plan culturel et religieux.14

Klein's consistently negative attitude to change in The Rocking Chair' and in his other Quebec poems has less to do with the history of Quebec in the forties than it does with the history of his own community in that period. In the immediate postwar years, the years in which Klein was writing these poems, it was difficult for someone who felt part of the Jewish community to see history as anything but terrifyingly destructive. These were the years in which Klein, like Jews all over the world, was struggling to come to terms with the fact of the Holocaust, as its extent gradually became apparent. The Holocaust and its aftermath are recurrent themes of Klein's journalism in these years/5 as well as of poems such as 'Elegy' and 'Meditation upon Survival,' whose titles could serve equally well for most of the Quebec poems. Although the Holocaust is never directly mentioned in the Quebec poems, it haunts

Kebec 183 his elegiac meditations on the struggle for survival of a community whose very existence is threatened by historical forces beyond its control. For example, the rather startling evocation of murder, grief, suffering, and anguish in the otherwise playfully ironic 'Parade of St. Jean Baptiste' would not be out of place in the Holocaust poems which are contemporary with it: O who can measure the potency of symbols? The hieratic gesture murdering grief? The gloss on suffering? The jewelled toy that sports away quotidian the anguish? For the grey seasons and the frustrate heart, therefore, these rituals, which are therapy, a ceremonial appeasement.

(99-105)

Paradoxically, this passage leaves us with a sense of the 'potency/ not just of symbols, but also of the destructive forces of history against which these symbols are arrayed. This acknowledgment of the potency of history is characteristic of the Quebec poems as a whole, in which an optimistic faith in tradition as a way of defeating the chaos and confusion of history no longer seems tenable. At best, Klein is able to conceive of an endless dialectical struggle between tradition and history, in which tradition itself is inevitably shaped and reshaped. This is particularly clear in 'Parade of St. Jean Baptiste/ in which the parade is a perfect example of what E.J. Hobsbawm calls 'the invention of tradition/16 not so much a traditional celebration as a celebration of tradition, deliberately created to ensure that a community undergoing rapid modernization maintains a certain sense of its traditional identity. Carefully managed by the St Jean Baptiste Society, the parade draws on the collaborative efforts of schools ('the crayon'd class' [24]), artists ('Massicotte' [29]), the business elite ('courtesy / of Simpson's and of Eaton T. and Son' [29-30!), the church ('benedictions / douce-digital from priest and eminence' [71-2]), and politicians ('seniors of the city' [79])- Klein is sympathetic to the universal human need for 'rituals, which are therapy' (104), and he enjoys the irreverent 'camaraderie and jokes' (74) linking the common people and its 'marked elect' (84). At the same time he is fully aware of the 'sinistral' (88) way in which the newly powerful capitalist class, 'the seigneurie / of capital' (89-90), is taking over the traditional trappings of leadership, and using them to exploit the 'loyal, inexpensive, liege' (98).

184 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet It is this dialectical presentation of tradition in the Quebec poems which separates them from the Jewish poems of the late twenties and early thirties, in which tradition tended to be presented as a monolithic, unchanging essence. Both groups of poems create a composite portrait of a community by focusing on representative characters, communal rites and ceremonies, and cultural artifacts: 'person, ritual and thing/ to paraphrase the title of Karl Shapiro's Person, Place and Thing, which was an important influence on the Quebec poems.17 But while Klein's rabbis and scribes, Chassidic dances and seders, Torah scrolls and gragers, tend to suggest a static community bound together by traditions which transcend history, precisely the opposite is true of the politicians and lawyers, political meetings and annual banquets, rocking-chairs and spinning wheels of the Quebec poems. Klein's manifesto for the more dynamic portrayal of community and tradition which he undertakes in these poems is 'Doctor Drummond,' in which he criticizes the superficial portrayal of the people of Quebec in the 'patronizing' (11) poetry of William Henry Drummond. Drummond's habitants are a collection of static and superficial cliches, 'type[s]' (2), 'characters' (14), 'a fable folk' (15). Klein, however, is aware of ... the true pulsing of their blood and of the temperature of their days, the chills of their despairs, the fevers of their faith

(24-7)

Drummond's folkloric caricatures are, in fact, not so very different in approach from Klein's sketches of the Jewish community in such poems as 'Portraits of a Minyan.' John Sutherland's characterization of these earlier poems as 'a fascinating zoo, rather than a human community,... like a series of comic illustrations for a book of nursery rhymes'18 may be overstated, but it does point to a real difference between the childlike timelessness of many of the Jewish poems and the brooding awareness of change that hangs over the Quebec poems as a whole. Although some poems, such as The Snowshoers,' The Sugaring,' or 'Krieghoff: Calligrammes,' recall the folkloric element of the Jewish poems, in the context of the Quebec poems as a whole they look very different. The 'pat petted verities' ('Krieghoff: Calligrammes,' 10) which they celebrate represent no more than momentary respites from a world of historical change which must eventually be acknowledged. They cannot withstand historical change forever:

Kebec 185 How private and comfortable it once was, our white mansard beneath the continent's gables! But now, evicted, and still there a wind blew off the roof? we see our fears and our featherbeds plumped white on the world's crossroads.

('Air-Map')

Klein's striking image for the 'fears' of an exposed and vulnerable community - 'our featherbeds plumped white on the world's crossroads' - recalls a similar image, which, as David G. Roskies points out, recurs again and again in accounts of pogroms in Jewish literature (including The City of Slaughter/ 12-18): 'the feathers of torn bedding symbolizing] the desecration of the hearth. The security and basic comfort of one's home was scattered in white all through the streets of Odessa and Balta and Kiev and Yekaterinoslav.'19 The elegiac celebration of a vanished or vanishing past in poems such as The Rocking Chair,' 'Air-Map/ 'Filling Station/ or 'Librairie Delorme' represents one pole of Klein's attitude to the struggle between tradition and change in Quebec. Klein appreciates the need people feel for 'certainties' (The Notary/ 19), and he sympathizes with Monsieur Delorme, whose heritage is being 'put ... up for sale' (29). But in counterpoint to this elegiac note is the satire of poems such as 'Political Meeting/ The Spinning Wheel/ 'Sire Alexandre Grandmaison/ 'Annual Banquet: Chambre de Commerce/ or 'Hormisdas Arcand/ directed at those who cynically exploit traditional values, perverting them for their own ends. By far the most complex and important of these satirical poems is 'Political Meeting.' If The Rocking Chair' is primarily a celebration of the positive potential of tradition, 'Political Meeting' is a critique of its potential for evil. But in true dialectical fashion, the ultimate effect of Klein's portrayal of these two opposite poles of tradition is to leave us with a sense of their interpenetration. At the centre of 'Political Meeting' is a portrait of Camillien Houde, the charismatic mayor of Montreal, who also plays a prominent role in 'Parade of St. Jean Baptiste.' For Klein, Houde embodies Quebec at least as fully as the rocking-chair does. In fact, there is some evidence in the Klein Papers that Klein may have considered making the portrait of Houde in 'Political Meeting' the centrepiece of his volume of Quebec poems, rather than The Rocking Chair.' MS 7563 contains what appears to be a title page for the collection which eventually became The Rocking Chair and Other Poems:

i86 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet P.Q. Poems by A.M. Klein Je la cherchai longtemps, cependant; mais enfin je la trouvai, au milieu de la place de Kebec. Voyage dans la lune: Cyrano de Bergerac

To anyone familiar with Montreal in the thirties and forties, the quotation from Cyrano de Bergerac immediately calls to mind Camillien Houde, 'Cyrano, ne p'tit gars de Ste. Marie' ('Parade of St. Jean Baptiste/ 77). Houde, who had an enormous nose, and, in his youth, played Cyrano de Bergerac in Rostand's play, frequently referred to himself as Cyrano. Klein was deeply suspicious of Houde's demagoguery, but he identified with him as well, seeing in his intimate relationship with the people of Montreal a parallel to the kind of relationship which he himself sought with his own community. In deciding to retain the archaic spelling of 'Kebec' with a 'K/ in the quotation from Cyrano de Bergerac, Klein probably intended to emphasize this parallel even further, with an allusion to his own name (compare 'Kay' in 'Raw Material'). Like the 'Jew' in the 'Anjou ballad,' the 'K' in 'Kebec' suggests that, at the heart of his portrait of Quebec, we see Klein the Jew 'travelling incognito as a Frenchman.' The portrait of Quebec in 'Political Meeting' would seem, at first glance, to be totally at odds with that in 'The Rocking Chair.' Despite Klein's critique of the limitations of traditional Quebec in The Rocking Chair,' his tone in that poem is predominantly sympathetic. The opposite is true of the fiercely satirical 'Political Meeting.' The poem describes an anti-conscription rally at which a xenophobic orator, based on Houde, captivates a crowd and brings out the worst in it by a calculated appeal to its traditions. 'Little Red Riding Houde' (1939; BS, pp. 46-7), an editorial describing a rally addressed by Houde, on which 'Political Meeting' is largely based, leaves no doubt about Klein's hostility to Houde and to what Klein saw as Houde's racist and fascist sympathies; and Klein publicly rejoiced when Houde was interned in 1940 for making speeches of the kind described in 'Political Meeting' ('A Contrast,' C/C, 16 August 1940, p. 4). Klein realized that what made Houde so dangerous was his profound understanding of the 'potency of symbols' and his ability to appropriate these symbols for his own demagogic ends. The symbols in 'Political

Kebec 187 Meeting' are primarily religious, the most potent of all. They are introduced at the very beginning of the poem: 'the agonized Y' (3) of the Christ's crucified body looks down on the meeting which, while ostensibly 'laic' (4), is accompanied by the sound of 'the skirted brothers' (4), whose 'surplices' (6) are heard in the curtains blowing in a breeze. And the religious aura of the poem is intensified by the use of terza rima. However, the 'worshipped' (19) orator is a false 'idol' (22), and the act of communion over which he presides is, in fact, an evil perversion, destructive rather than creative in nature: The whole street wears one face, shadowed and grim; and in the darkness rises the body-odour of race.

(37~9)

'Political Meeting/ then, portrays the appropriation of the traditional values celebrated in The Rocking Chair' - 'of being Canadien, / of being at peace, of faith, of family' (31-2) - for destructive purposes. The 'national bird,' which is 'loosed yon, leashed hither' in 'The Rocking Chair' (3, 28), reappears in 'Political Meeting' in the form of 'the ritual bird' (9), which the crowd 'lets loose' and 'snares' (8-9). But, whereas in The Rocking Chair' the bird's song offers harmless solace as it 'make[s] a pleasure out of repeated pain' (31), in 'Political Meeting' it embodies the dark forces of destruction which Houde's oratory calls up. Unlike the 'Anjou ballad,' it is a song, not of re-membering, but of dismembering, the dismembering of the alouette which the crowd 'catches and plucks, throat, wings, and little limbs' (10). Yet it would be misleading to suggest that the portrayal of tradition and community in 'Political Meeting' is purely negative. As he did in The Rocking Chair,' Klein presents us in 'Political Meeting' with a dialectical vision of the interpenetration of opposites. Just as there is a disturbing undertone to the elegiac celebration of community and tradition in The Rocking Chair,' there is sympathy and understanding underlying the satirical critique of them in 'Political Meeting.' Klein's sympathy for Houde is suggested not only by the poem's dedication, 'For Camillien Houde/ but also by the fact that Klein sent Houde a copy of The Rocking Chair and Other Poems (which unfortunately seems to have disappeared), with a personal inscription. In a letter of acknowledgment to Klein (MS 421), Houde refers to the inscription as 'a poem in itself/ and singles out 'Political Meeting' for praise (along with The Rocking Chair/ 'Montreal/ and The Mountain'),

i88 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet thanking Klein for 'having thought of mentioning [his] name/ It is always possible, of course, that Houde missed the point and that Klein wrote both the dedication and the inscription with tongue in cheek. It seems much more likely, however, that Klein was in earnest. If, in his public, semi-official role as a journalist, he felt constrained to take an unambiguous stand against Houde, as a poet he is as much for him as against him, sympathizing with the 'agonized why' of his community. One need only contrast 'Political Meeting' with Hugh MacLennan's coldly contemptuous treatment of a similar anti-conscription rally in Two Solitudes20 to realize how deeply Klein's sympathies are engaged, especially in the passage describing Houde's relationship with the crowd: Worshipped and loved, their favourite visitor, a country uncle with sunflower seeds in his pockets, full of wonderful moods, tricks, imitative talk, he is their idol: like themselves, not handsome, not snobbish, not of the Grande Alleel Un homme! Intimate, informal, he makes bear's compliments to the ladies; is gallant; and grins; goes for the balloon, his opposition, with pins; jokes also on himself, speaks of himself in the third person, slings slang, and winks with folklore; and knows now that he has them, kith and kin.

(19-29)

As one orator writing about another, Klein cannot help but be fascinated by the consummate skill with which Houde plays on his audience. Moreover, Houde's aims as an orator, as he seeks to rally the spirits of his community at a dark time in its history, are not all that dissimilar from Klein's own. There are obvious parallels, for example, in the campaign dinner speech in 'Raw Material/ with its attack on the German 'barbarians' and its '[alrgumentum ad vulgum' (NB, p. 6). Klein's ambivalence towards Houde and Houde's relationship with his community is summed up in the phrase which concludes the passage: 'he has them, kith and kin/ Depending on how this phrase is read, it can suggest the sinister manipulation of a crowd by an evil demagogue, or a genuine relationship between a community and its beloved leader

Kebec 189 and spokesman. But perhaps an even more significant indication of Klein's ambivalence are the opening lines of the passage, whose full resonance is apparent only in the context of Klein's work as a whole. The characterization of Houde as a 'country uncle' links him to the series of loving and protective adults, frequently uncles,21 who personify tradition throughout Klein's work. And the sunflower seeds in Houde's pocket call up a very powerful personal association for Klein from his childhood. In The Second Scroll, the narrator describes a childhood memory of refugees from a pogrom recounting, 'with great and bitter intensity,' the atrocities they had witnessed. 'I discovered,' he says, 'that they had sunflower seeds in their pockets.' In a note to this passage, he comments, 'Somehow my entire childhood is evoked through this incident' (SS, p. n).22 For Klein, then, the 'grim' emotions Houde arouses among his audience are akin to the 'great and bitter intensity' of his own people threatened by forces of history that seek to destroy them. For Klein, of course, these forces are embodied, above all, in the Holocaust, of which the pogrom in The Second Scroll is a foreshadowing; and it is in 'Political Meeting' that the intimate connection between the Holocaust and Klein's portrayal of Quebec is clearest. From one perspective, Houde, with his opposition to Quebec's participation in the war against Hitler, and his stirring up of 'the body odour of race,' represents the kinds of forces which made the Holocaust possible. Paradoxically, however, Klein cannot help but recognize in the struggle of Houde's community to maintain its survival a parallel to his own community's struggle, more terrible, yet 'not unsimilar/ against annihilation. In The Rocking Chair' and 'Political Meeting,' then, Klein sympathizes with the community's appeal to tradition, yet, at the same time, he sees tradition as potentially a 'cage' and a 'snare.' There seems to be no way, in these poems, of transcending the dialectical alternation between the tendencies to invoke and to revoke, to remember our own and to forget others; there is no final synthesis in sight.23 In a few of the Quebec poems, however, there is a suggestion that it might be possible for the dialectic to be transcended, at least on the personal level. 'For the Sisters of the Hotel Dieu,' The Cripples,' and 'Grain Elevator' stand out from the other portraits of the 'persons/ 'rituals,' and 'things' of Quebec in that they are the only such poems in which the poet speaks as an individual, in first person singular, about an experience which is essentially private. The experience which all three poems describe is the attempt of the poet, as an individual, to break out of the 'cage' of

190 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet tradition, by finding a way to invoke his own tradition, without revoking the humanity of others. Tor the Sisters of the Hotel Dieu' recalls a traumatic event of Klein's childhood, which thrust him, for the first time, outside the boundaries of his own community: being hospitalized with a broken leg in the Catholic Hotel Dieu. The poem opens with a description of the nuns who nursed him: In pairs, as if to illustrate their sisterhood, the sisters pace the hospital garden walks. In their robes black and white immaculate hoods they are like birds, the safe domestic fowl of the House of God.

(1-6)

Everything in this stanza emphasizes the self-contained inward-turning quality of the nuns. They come in complete sets, 'pairs'; their movements are carefully circumscribed by 'the hospital garden walks'; their robes and hoods - 'black and white' like the simplicity of their faith set them off from the rest of the world. As 'safe domestic fowl,' they recall the 'national bird' of The Rocking Chair' and the 'ritual bird' of 'Political Meeting,' but they are never 'loosed yon' or 'let loose.' Having portrayed the nuns as birds content in the 'cage' of tradition, Klein then goes on to show how, under certain circumstances, it is possible to transcend the limitations of this cage: O biblic birds, who fluttered to me in my childhood illnesses - me little, afraid, ill, not of your race, the cool wing for my fever, the hovering solace, the sense of angels be thanked, O plumage of paradise, be praised.

(7-12)

Unlike the 'national bird/ which sings its ballad of 'refrain,' or the 'ritual bird/ whose dismemberment underlines the potential for tradition to divide as well as to unite, these 'biblic birds' have no difficulty in transcending the boundaries of tradition in an act of human sympathy. And the poet reciprocates with praise. A similar, but more complex, dynamic is at work in The Cripples/ in which the boundary between the poet's own traditions and those of

Kebec 191 Quebec seems insurmountable. The ritual being enacted in The Cripples' is perhaps the most difficult for someone of Klein's background and education to take seriously: the pilgrimage of 'the folded cripples' (3) who, in an act of penance, climb the ninety-nine stairs leading up to the Oratoire de St Joseph in hope of a miracle cure. The poet feels sympathy for the cripples, but, at the same time, he seems to find the scene grotesque, almost comic: They know, they know, that suddenly their cares and orthopedics will fall from them, and they stand whole again. Roll empty away, wheelchairs, and crutches, without armpits, hop away!

(16-19)

But it is precisely at this moment in the poem, when the distance between the observer and the observed is at its greatest, that the personal voice breaks through: And I who in my own faith once had faith like this, but have not now, am crippled more than they.

(20-1)

The distance is still there: not only has the poet lost his faith, but the faith which he has lost is a different one from that of the cripples. Nevertheless, he experiences a feeling of oneness with them which distance does not diminish. The very fact that he can no longer share their childlike faith only serves to bring home to him, all the more intensely, the profound similarity between his need and their own for 'rituals which are therapy.' It is in the last of these poems, however, 'Grain Elevator/ that Klein makes his most impressive effort to suggest a higher synthesis of all communities and traditions, to find 'single the thing that makes them one/ The poem is a record of the poet's attempt to impart symbolic significance to the most unpromising object imaginable, one of the massive cement grain elevators in Montreal harbour. In the first three stanzas, he attempts to construct, in a deliberate, almost heavy-handed manner, a symbolic identity for the grain elevator, drawing primarily on elements of his own tradition: the Tower of Babel, the Leviathan, Noah's ark, Joseph's dreams. As the poem proceeds, he casts his net

192 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet wider, drawing in Arabians, Caucasians, and Mongolians; however, it is only when he returns to the essence of the grain elevator - to the grain which it contains - that he is able to unfold out of it the image of the One in the Many which he is seeking, to 'rol[ll [itl like a rug of a thick and golden thread' (13): A box: cement, hugeness, and rightangles merely the sight of it leaning in my eyes mixes up continents and makes a montage of inconsequent time and uncontiguous space. It's because it's bread. It's because bread is its theme, an absolute. Because always this great box flowers over us with all the coloured faces of mankind ...

(25-32)

The 'great box flower[ing] over us / with all the coloured faces of mankind' is an incomparably more vivid image of community than the bland abstraction of 'the family feature, the not unsimilar face' in The Provinces.' And it is an entirely positive one, unlike the frightening mob 'flowered with faces' in 'Political Meeting' (16). However, although the gestures of human sympathy in 'Grain Elevator/ 'The Cripples/ and Tor the Sisters of the Hotel Dieu' are clearly deeply felt, they are limited as well. There is no sense that the dialectical conflict between tradition and history has been seriously engaged, or that a genuine synthesis has been achieved. Rather, in these poems Klein seeks to sidestep such an engagement by retreating into a subjective ahistorical inner world which is essentially childlike in its simplicity and in its denial of conflict. The nuns in 'For the Sisters of the Hotel Dieu' and the pilgrims in The Cripples' attract Klein because their simple faith awakens a nostalgia in him for a time when he, too, saw the world with the eyes of a child; and the powerful simplicity of the vision of the 'coloured faces of mankind' at the end of 'Grain Elevator' recalls the 'children's coloured book' (4) with which the poem begins.24 Klein's strategy of retreat from conflict into an inner childlike world, and the limitations of this strategy, are even more striking in a set of three other intensely personal poems, the poems on Mount Royal: 'Winter Night: Mount Royal/ 'Lookout: Mount Royal/ and The Mountain.' According to D.M.R. Bentley, these poems 'harmoniously reconcile ... apparently contradictory aspects of man's external and internal worlds' through 'the speaker's transcendence of his adult self in the

Kebec 193 recovery of ... childhood experience/25 In these three poems, alone of all the poems on Quebec, Klein makes no attempt to portray the community and traditions of Quebec either through persons, or rituals, or things. The subject of these poems, Mount Royal, has been drained of all symbolic significance, deliberately stripped of the 'potency of symbols/ As Ferguson points out, Klein ignores the public significance which Mount Royal had acquired in Montreal as a 'general cultural symbol,'26 not to mention the powerful associations of the symbol of the mountain in Jewish tradition as the site of divine revelation. What the mountain represents to Klein is not revelation, but escape; not perspective on the city below, but distance from it. It offers him an opportunity to retreat into himself as far as possible from the demands and conflicts of community. All three Mount Royal poems work towards a similar climax, a harmonious vision in which the conflict between permanence and change appears to be resolved. Although this conflict is obviously related to the conflict between tradition and history throughout the Quebec poems, the Mount Royal poems ignore these broader implications entirely, or eventually leave them behind. As all three poems move towards the epiphanic visions with which they conclude, both the city with its 'other kids of other slums and races' ('Lookout: Mount Royal/ 14) and the mountain itself, in whose 'layers' are 'the history of mankind' (The Mountain,' 7) simply fade away. The poet's distancing of himself from the outside world is clearest in the simplest of the three poems, 'Winter Night: Mount Royal/ At the beginning of the poem, the speaker is cut off from the city below by darkness, snow, and mist: all he can see are snowflakes glittering against the darkness, and all he can hear are sleighbells in the distance. By the poem's end the mountain, too, has disappeared, leaving the speaker alone with a cosmic vision which seems to transcend time and space: One would say the hidden stars were bells dangling between the shafts of the Zodiac. One would say the snowflakes falling clinked together their sparkles to make these soft, these satin-muffled tintinnabulations.

(26-31)

In the two other poems, both the mountain and the city below begin as much stronger presences. As their titles suggest, 'Lookout: Mount

194 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Royal' describes a panoramic view of the ever-changing city from the vantage point of the mountain, and The Mountain' focuses on the mountain itself, the embodiment of permanence in the midst of change. In both poems, the attempt to reconcile these opposites is, as Ferguson says, 'wholly personal';27 despite their much more detailed presentation of the mountain and of the city it overlooks, in both poems mountain and city disappear, as the poet retreats into personal reverie. At the end of 'Lookout: Mount Royal/ the speaker is 'lost' (31) in a vision of ... clouds like white slow friendly animals which all the afternoon across his eyes will move their paced spaced footfalls.

(32-4)

And at the end of The Mountain,' the act of distancing is even more explicit: One of these days I shall go up to the second terrace to see if it still is there the uncomfortable sentimental bench where, - as we listened to the brass of the band concerts made soft and to our mood by dark and distance I told the girl I loved I loved her.

(37~43)

Bentley describes 'Winter Night: Mount Royal' - in terms which could apply just as well to the two other Mount Royal poems - as expressing 'man's perennial and proper (because joyful and creative) desire to transform the cosmic and natural realms into places of beauty and meaning, harmony and significance, where he can feel comfortable, celebratory, and at home.'28 The desire is, indeed, proper, and these serene and harmonious poems are among the most attractive Klein ever wrote. However, in their attempt to transcend the dialectical conflict between tradition and history by ignoring it, they do not point the way to the future. In his most important works in the years to come, Klein will seek, not to ignore the dialectic, but to redefine it - as a progressive process leading to a higher synthesis, and not merely as the endless swinging of the 'sunken pendulum' which dominates the Quebec poems. The culmination of this process of redefinition is The Second Scroll, in which Klein abandons indirection to confront a historical onslaught of unprecedented proportions on his community and its

Kebec 195 traditions, and comes as close as he ever will to fulfilling his ambition of 'bring[ingl / new forms to life, anonymously, new creeds' ('Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ 155-6).

10

Tikkun

[Commentary is the legitimate form through which truth is approached. This is a most important principle indeed for the kind of productivity we encounter in Jewish literature. Truth must be laid bare in a text in which it already pre-exists ... [T]ruth must be brought forth from the text. - Gershom Scholem, "Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism/ in The Messianic Idea in Judaism, pp. 289-90 [T]he Holocaust, like any historical event, has no 'meaning' of its own to divulge. Its meaning, instead of being a discoverable essence, depends upon the interpretive traditions of the community or culture seeking that meaning. - Alan L. Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature, p. ix

In 1948, after the publication of The Rocking Chair and Other Poems, Klein drafted a letter to Karl Shapiro (27 December 1948 [MS 422-4]), in which he described what was to be the next stage in his development as a writer: Now the continuation of our own culture stands before the Jewish writer as the challenge. The hiatus of the Diaspora has been closed - closed even for those who still remain therein. We do not write any longer in vacua; we write in the aftermath of a great death, European Jewry's, and in the presence of a great resurrection. Our miracle, moreover, owns to a miracle's greatest virtue contemporaneity ... Now, of course, I do not require my Gallic prototype's beatific vision; the original is re-building.

Tikkun

197

And how it is to be rebuilded is a matter of concern to me, though I may never dwell therein.

Klein's decision to move beyond the 'indirection' ('Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ 155) of his 'Gallic prototype/ which had served his purposes so well in The Rocking Chair, reflects a new sense of solidarity with his own community. Faced, like Jews the world over, with 'the challenge' presented by the Holocaust and its aftermath, he has made a commitment to speaking as directly as possible about his profoundest concerns, which, he feels, are widely shared by the Jewish community as a whole. This new commitment clearly foreshadows The Second Scroll, but, at this point, the way towards The Second Scroll was still far from clear to him, and it would continue to remain so until he had undergone two experiences which were to have for him the effect of a revelation. One of these was his trip to Israel in 1949, which enabled him to see at first hand the 'miracle' which he had heretofore viewed only from afar. The other, less obvious but no less important, was his discovery of a way of making sense of 'the great death' and 'the great resurrection/ in an aspect of Jewish tradition which he had previously neglected, the tradition of mystical commentary on the Bible known as the Kabbalah. The work in which Klein first successfully brings together these two revelatory experiences is 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel/ a kabbalistic commentary on Michelangelo's paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which interprets them as an allegory of the Holocaust and of the subsequent creation of the State of Israel. This text is both a dramatic breakthrough in Klein's development and the culmination of a continuous process of clarification and definition in which he had been engaged for several years. As this process unfolds through a series of works of poetry, fiction, and journalism, it gradually becomes clear that Klein is moving towards a dialectical narrative which will link the Holocaust to the creation of the State of Israel, and that this narrative will take the form of a commentary, of a 'gloss on suffering' ('Parade of St. Jean Baptiste/ 101). 'Meditation upon Survival' (c. 1946/1946), the earliest of these works, presents, in the starkest possible terms, the problem which confronts Klein as he tries to come to terms with the Holocaust. The poem is a portrait of what David G. Roskies calls 'the self under siege/ the individual who, whatever his own needs or wishes, is unable to escape the demands which the community makes upon him as its right, at times of crisis:

198 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Ever since the first Jew tried to remove himself from the crowd of exiles mourning by the waters of Babylon, the presence of the one still implied the presence of the many. For if the self desired to bear witness to the destruction, it then became the symbolic survivor of the community (and thus, the community in miniature); or if, as a result of ideology or devastation, it wished to detail its willing or unwilling departure from the community, the rejected group loomed just as large as the self ...x

This problem is particularly acute after the unparalleled devastation of the Holocaust, a devastation which, in 'Meditation upon Survival/ appears even more absolute than it, in fact, was, since, at the end of the poem, the speaker sees himself as the lone survivor of an utterly annihilated people, a poet without a future addressing a community which no longer exists. Recoiling from the literally unimaginable horror of both the present and the future, Klein retreats into the past, re-membering the poem out of fragments of earlier works. The result is a kind of nightmarish echo chamber, its distorted echoes serving to emphasize the poet's sense of impotence in the face of the present and his fear of what the future may hold for him. In the opening stanza, the poet describes how he is tortured by a sense of having been cut off from the 'six million' dead, and yet of still being haunted by them: At times, sensing that the golgotha'd dead run plasma through my veins, and that I must live their unexpired six million circuits, giving to each of their nightmares my body for a bed inspirited, dispirited those times that I feel their death-wish bubbling the channels of my blood I grow bitter at my false felicity the spared one - and would almost add my wish for the centigrade furnace and the cyanide flood.

(1-10)

This unmistakably echoes the description of the 'fathers' in 'A Psalm Touching Genealogy' (2) who 'dwell in [the poet's] veins,... eavesdrop at [his] ear, / ... circle, as with Torahs, round [his] skull' (4-5). But the 'golgotha'd dead' recall as well the sinister 'prowler in the mansion of [his] blood' ('A Psalm of Abraham of That Which Was Visited upon Him,' i), and the unborn children in 'Sonnet Unrhymed,' who demand that he fill 'the vacuum of their murder' (10).

Tikkun

199

Driven to thoughts of suicide, the poet finally decides to continue to live and to testify to what he knows. But, having made his decision, he finds himself caught in a terrible dilemma: the more he struggles to testify to what he knows, the more he ... makes his stuttering innocence a kind of guilt O, like that man am I, bereaved and suspect, convicted with the news my mourning breaks.

(17-20)

Whether he speaks or remains silent, his feeling of guilt is the same. In the following stanza, the poet turns to the pitiful remnants of the Jewish people, seen as a grotesquely dismembered body: Us they have made the monster, made that thing that lives though cut in three: the severed head which breathes, looks on, hears, thinks, weeps, and is bled continuously with a drop by drop longing for its members' re-membering!

(21-5)

This image of dismemberment recalls the playful images of 'separable limbs' in 'Desideratum' (12). But the playfulness of the earlier poem is no longer possible in light of the historical fact of the actual dismemberments performed by the Nazis on countless suffering human beings. These dismemberments are beyond the power of any poet, of any act of the imagination, to re-member. In the final stanza, the poet imagines, with bitter irony, the only way which is left to him to keep alive the memory of his people, by becoming, in Roskies's terms, 'the symbolic survivor of the community (and thus, the community in miniature)': Myself to recognize: a curio; the atavism of some old coin's face; one who, though watched and isolate, does go the last point of a diminished race the way of the fletched buffalo. Gerundive of extinct. An original. What else, therefore, to do but leave these bones that are not ash to fill O not my father's vault - but the glass-case some proud museum catalogues Last Jew.

(31-40)

200 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet This description of the poet as 'the last point of a diminished race' going 'the way of the fletched buffalo' echoes the fate of the Indians in 'Indian Reservation: Caughnawaga/ who have also become a 'curio' (23) 'in a museum kept' (30), a collection of 'bones' (34). And the glass-case in which the poet imagines his remains being exhibited recalls the 'glass case' (NB, p. 80) of the Bordeaux jail in which Drizen experiences the horror of being 'isolated, but ... never alone' (NB, p. 80). Tn 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ the poet had expressed the hope that he would 'find a new function for the declasse craft / archaic like the fletcher's' (152-3); but, with his community gone 'the way of the fletched buffalo,' it is hard to imagine what such a function could be. It is in 'Elegy' (c. 1947/1947) that Klein takes the first, tentative steps towards finding 'a new function.' Like the poet in 'Meditation upon Survival/ the poet in 'Elegy' feels torn between his duty towards the dead and his powerlessness to fulfil this duty. But, whereas 'Meditation' is a poem of ever-deepening despair, in which the poet sees no possibility of coming to terms with the Holocaust and of thus moving beyond it into the future, in 'Elegy' he is at least able to conceive of such a possibility, even though he is not yet able to see the shape it will take. Like 'Meditation/ 'Elegy' opens with an image of the poet isolated, but never alone, as he is haunted by the inescapable presence of his absent people: Named for my father's father, cousin, whose cry Might have been my cry lost in that dark land Where shall I seek you? On what wind shall I Reach out to touch the ash that was your hand? The Atlantic gale and the turning of the sky Unto the cubits of my ambience Scatter the martyr-motes. Flotsam-of-flame! God's image made the iotas of God's name! O through a powder of ghosts I walk; through dust Seraphical upon the dark winds borne; Daily I pass among the sieved white hosts, Through clouds of cousinry transgress, Maculate with the ashes that I mourn.

(1-13)

This absent presence is expressed through the imagery of ashes: because the Jewish people have been reduced to ashes in the Nazi crematoria, there is nothing identifiable left of them; yet, in the form of ashes, they

Tikkun

201

are omnipresent. Klein is not alone among writers on the Holocaust in being struck by this grim paradox. In fact, Alvin H. Rosenfeld argues that ashes 'must be the end point of all images of the Holocaust' and quotes a passage from A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova, by Arnost Lustig, which closely parallels the opening of 'Elegy': These ashes will be contained in the breath and expression of every one of us and the next time anybody asks what the air he breathes is made of, he will have to think about these ashes; they will be contained in books which haven't yet been written and will be found in the remotest regions of the earth where no human foot has ever trod; no one will be able to get rid of them ...2

But if Klein's ashes, motes, powder, and dust have parallels in other works on the Holocaust, they have numerous parallels, as well, in work which he himself had written years earlier. In particular, the dust and motes of 'Elegy' recall the 'dust' (59) and 'mote' (60) of 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens.' In 'Out of the Pulver,' the dust of the Many is re-membered in a vision of divine unity, as 'gems' 'in the crown of God' (58); and there is a parallel to this act of re-membering in 'Elegy/ where the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust are seen as 'the iotas of God's name.' But, in 'Elegy,' this redemptive vision is tentative at best. Unlike Spinoza, who transcends 'the maculate streets of Amsterdam' (2), the poet in 'Elegy' is 'maculate with the ashes that [he] mourn[s]'; and the rest of the poem can be seen as a series of attempts on his part to accomplish the act of re-membering which is hinted at in its opening section. Standing in the midst of his 'sundered cindered kin' (20), the poet attempts again and again to find a satisfactory answer to his repeated question 'Where shall I seek you?' (3, 14), both physically and imaginatively. And, although these attempts all fail, they bring us, step by step, closer to the possibility of success. The poet first turns his attention to individuals, named human beings who have not only been denied recognizable memorials for their physical remains - 'a tomb, a mound, a sod, a broken stick' (15) - but have been mocked in death by the grotesque dismemberment of their bodies: David, whose cinctured bone Young branch once wreathed in phylactery! Now hafts the peasant's bladed kitchenware; And the dark Miriam murdered for her hair; And the dark Miriam murdered for her hair;

202 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet The relicts nameless; and the tatoo'd skin Fevering from lampshade in a cultured home ...3

(21-7)

Turning in 'horror' (30) from these nightmarish dismemberments, Klein shifts his attention from the fates of individuals to that of the Jewish community of eastern Europe as a whole, the community of the shtetl, which he had celebrated so often in his earlier work: A world is emptied. Marked is that world's map The forest color. There where thy people praised In angular ecstasy thy name, thy Torah Is less than a whisper of its thunderclap. Thy synagogues, rubble. Thy academies, Bright once with talmud brow and musical With song alternative in exegesis, Are silent, dark. ... there Is nothing, nothing ... only the million echoes Calling thy name still trembling on the air.

(44-51, 60-2)

The very act of imaginatively re-membering this world brings home all the more powerfully the fact that it is gone forever: where it once was, 'there is nothing, nothing/ All that remains is whispers, silence, echoes. Any attempt to come to terms with the Holocaust, to see the possibility of a future unfolding beyond it, must be based on an acknowledgment of this great emptiness. After surveying the grim memorials which the Nazis have left behind them in the form of the death-camp crematoria, the poet calls on God to punish the Nazis, and the German people as a whole, for their terrible crimes. This section of the poem, which is reminiscent of The Hitleriad, seems almost hysterical in contrast with the sombre, measured eloquence of the poem as a whole. The outburst appears to give the poet some temporary relief, but he realizes that fantasizing about the fate of the destroyers of his people is futile. He leaves vengeance to God ('Vengeance is thine, O Lord' [129]), who has dealt with the Jews' persecutors in the past, and ends with a return to the central concern of the opening lines of the poem, the re-membering of his dismembered people. Now, however, he turns his thoughts from the 'scattered] ... martyr-motes' (7) of those who were destroyed by Hitler to 'the scat-

Tikkun

203

tered bone / Stirring in Europe's camps' (138-9), of the homeless refugees. If 'the scattered bone' recalls the despairing images of dismemberment in 'Meditation upon Survival/ 'stirring' recalls the resurrection of the dry bones by 'Ezekiel's prophesying breath' (141); and it is with a prayer for such a resurrection that the poem ends: Hear me, who stand Circled and winged in vortex of my kin: Forego the complete doom! The winnowed, spare! Annul the scattering, and end! And end Our habitats on water and on air! Gather the flames up to light orient Over the land; and that funest eclipse, Diaspora-dark, revolve from off our ways! Towered Jerusalem and Jacob's tent Set up again; again renew our days As when near Carmel's mount we harbored ships, And went and came, and knew our home; and song From all the vineyards raised its sweet degrees, And thou didst visit us, didst shield from wrong, And all our sorrows salve with prophecies; Again renew them as they were of old, And for all time cancel that ashen orbit In which our days, and hopes, and kin, are rolled.

(155-72)

The tentative note of hope in these final lines has no parallel in 'Meditation upon Survival.' The most obvious reason for the difference between the two poems is a historical one: in the year or two that separates them, the establishment of a Jewish state, of which there is no hint in the earlier poem, has come to seem a real possibility, and, as a result, Klein can begin to see the Holocaust as leading to something beyond itself. In dialectical terms, the Holocaust is now conceived of as a negation which may yet be negated by the establishment of a Jewish state. The final section of 'Elegy,' then, provides a glimpse of the dialectical pattern which will shape the treatment of the Holocaust in The Second Scroll', but the outline is still very dim indeed. The horror of the Holocaust is too great for it to be hastily dismissed in a few lines promising renewed days; such a promise may offer the poet and his shattered people some consolation, some 'salve' for their sufferings, but no clear

204 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet vision of the actual process leading to the promised redemption. Klein is still not ready to unfold such a vision, to unroll it from his scroll, and the most striking aspect of the imagery of unrolling in the final lines of the poem is how it turns back upon itself to suggest futility and entrapment. Thus the poet's dream of a dialectical process through which the Holocaust will be 'revolved from off our ways' is undercut by his fear of being forever 'circled and winged in vortex of [his] kin.' And the poem ends, not with a confident statement of faith in the inevitable unfolding of the dialectic, but with the poet's prayer for an escape from 'that ashen orbit / In which our days, and hopes, and kin, are rolled.' Before his trip to Israel, Klein made one more major attempt to deal with the Holocaust, in an unfinished and untitled detective novel which he appears to have begun around 1948 (although he may have been working on it as late as 1950). All that we have of the novel are two chapters and a set of notes - not enough to enable us to determine what conclusion, if any, Klein had in mind. What is clear, however, is that, in this novel, Klein focuses more explicitly than ever before on the problem of interpretation which the Holocaust presents, the problem of making sense of an event that seems to deny the possibility of sense; and he does so by drawing on two models of the interpreter which will eventually prove central to The Second Scroll, the biblical commentator and the detective. Klein had always been fascinated with the detective novel as a popular literary form. In a letter to Circle magazine (14 May 1945), accompanying an unsuccessful submission of 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape,' he comments: [T]he position of the poet in contemporary society is exactly nowhere. What with our magazines, big or little, quarterly or hebdomadal, we delude ourselves for a sweet moment into believing that perhaps some importance is attached to our function. But it is mirage, sheer and Saharan. The writers of detective yarns command more attention, more respect, and of course, more gratitude palpable.

Klein himself attempted to write popular 'detective yarns': 'Whom God Hath Joined' (Stories, pp. 154-74), a story of a murder committed by one of a set of Siamese twins; The Trail of "Clupea Harengus"' (Stories, pp. 224-31), a burlesque of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and That Walks like a Man' (MS 3802-4441), an unpublished spy novel based on the Igor Gouzenko affair, cast in the mould of a hard-boiled detective novel. But, for Klein, the detective story represented more than just a way of achiev-

Tikkun

205

ing popular success. As is suggested by one of his notes for 'Raw Material' - 'detective story of the soul' (MS 7519) - Klein saw the detective story as a genre with serious potential. Specifically, in its central motif, the careful interpretation of scattered and apparently unrelated clues which eventually add up to a single coherent solution, he saw a model for his own search for a meaning underlying the apparent chaos and fragmentation of existence. As Paul Auster, another writer who uses the detective novel as a way of exploring the search for meaning, says: The detective is one who looks, who listens, who moves through [the] morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable. The reader sees the world through the detective's eyes, experiencing the proliferation of its details as if for the first time. He has become awake to the things around him, as if they might speak to him, as if, because of the attentiveness he now brings to them, they might begin to carry a meaning other than the simple fact of their existence.4

Klein's attempt to recast 'Raw Material' in the form of 'Stranger and Afraid' is one example of how seriously he took the detective genre. Another, despite the slighting reference to 'detective yarns' in the letter to Circle, is 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape' itself, in which the narrator searches for a missing person, whom he finds, after interrogating all of the likely suspects, '[a]t the bottom of the sea' (163), 'like the corpse in a detective story' (id).5 The parallel between the detective and the biblical commentator, Klein's other model of the interpreter in the forties, is first suggested in a short story entitled 'Detective Story, or A Likely Story' (Stories, pp. 210-12), in which biblical commentators are seen as detectives attempting to find clues in the Bible to the perfect crime, the creation of the universe. Although Klein himself never wrote biblical commentary in the traditional sense, he was profoundly influenced by having been raised in a community in which the role of the commentator was of paramount importance: In no major tradition was the place of commentary and the commentator so dignified, exalted, and even divinized as in rabbinic Judaism ... Torah study and interpretation so permeated the fabric of medieval Judaism that most of the great figures of postbiblical Jewish cultural history are most celebrated for their exegetical works... Such lionized exegetes were an inspiration to Jewish youth ...6

206 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Central to Judaism was the conviction that the Jewish people had been granted a Book, the Torah, which contained within it all truth. The role of the commentator was to draw this truth out of the Torah, bringing to light those aspects of it which spoke to the community's ever-changing historical experience. It was the process of commentary, the forging of an immense chain of interpretation spanning the generations, which ensured the continuity of tradition and the survival of the community.7 This sense of the importance of commentary carried over into Klein's writings, most directly into the literary criticism which he wrote in the late forties, during and immediately after his years at McGill. This is particularly obvious, for example, in Towards an Aesthetic' (1948; LER, pp. 182-3), in which he presents a theory of poetry in the form of a commentary on the first chapter of Genesis. Klein was capable of satirizing, at least indirectly, his own rabbinical approach to literary criticism: in 'And the Mome Raths Outgrabe/ he describes a literary conference which 'is still in session' (Stories, p. 240) and which recalls the web of commentary which the rabbis of the Talmud wove unceasingly around their texts. The session opens with a reference to the four levels of biblical interpretation, 'literal ... allegorical, moral, and anagogical' (Stories, p. 245), and continues with a series of commentaries on 'Jabberwocky/ as if it were 'some halidom, some hieratic document which holds in it the substantive secrets of the craft, and indeed the meaning of life itself (Stories, p. 246). Klein's description of the reverence shown to 'Jabberwocky' as a sacred text is a perfectly accurate reflection of his own attitude to the work which was the subject of his most elaborate rabbinical commentary in the guise of literary criticism, Joyce's Ulysses. As Klein put it in a letter to Leon Edel (22 January 1948), Ulysses requires a 'glossator' seeking 'apocalyptic discoveries/ rather than a traditional literary critic interested in context and evaluation. What Klein calls his 'idolatry' of Joyce is the subject of an amusing but nonetheless revealing passage in another letter to Edel (2 August 1950): I read your article on James and Joyce with a great deal of interest - and frequent friendly dissent. It was as if two Chassidim, having met, set to praising each their own Rebbe; the one says the Telser Rebbe is chief among the saints and scholars, the other that his Rebbe, the Belser Rebbe, is nonpareil. So with us, I felt as I read your essay the furious conflict of two idolatries, mine and yours.

Tikkun

207

One might question whether Klein's commentaries on Ulysses, with their exclusive focus on Joyce's intricate pattern-making, benefited from this idolatrous attitude. But what seems beyond question is that the interpretive skills which Klein developed in writing these commentaries would have an important role to play when he undertook the most challenging interpretive task of his career, making sense of the Holocaust. The protagonist of Klein's unfinished detective novel, Pimontel, is a detective by trade but a biblical commentator by training, and he is fully aware of the similarities between these two modes of interpretation. He says of his work as a detective: It had been like Torah and like Talmud - like Torah for its enunciation in practise of the basic laws, like Talmud for its involvements and unravellings. He became proficient in the hermeneutics of bullets, expert in exegesizing from its effects a poison, and like the veriest Talmudist in the building up from the mere straw of a clew the cities of Pithom and of Rameses. His especial forte, it had soon turned out, was organization, and time and again had he been called upon to direct investigations where he stood, like some master-commentator, compiling and comparing the reports and commentaries of his various sleuths. (NB, pp. 136-7)

In the course of his varied career as a commentator, Pimontel is repeatedly faced with anomalous, unprecedented situations which resist interpretation. These are referred to as hapaxlegomena: Isolated words. Lonesome words. They occur but once in the whole Torah, and are related to no other word. In English, or rather in Greek, they are called hapaxlegomena, words of single occurrence. Once, only once, do they appear in the Bible, and then are not heard from again ... (NB, p. 131)

Such words, because they have 'no derivation' (NB, p. 131), are impossible to interpret with any certainty. The epigraph of the first of the novel's two completed chapters is a quotation from the Jewish philosopher Philo, which immediately raises the issue of the unique, uninterpretable utterance: The voice of God pronouncing the commandments was an especially created voice' (NB, p. 129). As Klein's notes indicate, the revelation on Mount Sinai was central to his conception of the novel. These notes contain a schema (MS 4445), reminiscent of ones Joyce produced for Ulysses, relating the structure of the novel to the ten

208 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet commandments, as well as a sketch for a demonic parody of the divine revelation, a nuclear explosion, described as 'the New Sinai... enunciating the new Monologue, Kill' (MS 7539),8 through which, in all likelihood, the unprecedented destructive impulse unleashed by the Holocaust would find its 'especially created voice.' Klein's novel would be an exploration of this terrible hapaxlegomenon, and, especially, of ways of interpreting it. Beginning with a 'description of [the] world scene, perhaps, focusing at length on Israel... converging on [a] mountain near [the] Dead Sea' where the explosion takes place (MS 4443), the novel was to unfold like a kind of modern day Canterbury Tales (MS 7558), drawing together a number of 'Diaspora Jews' engaged on 'pilgrimages' (MS 4443). But it would be a Canterbury Tales consisting, not of tales, but of commentaries. Klein's concern with the interpretation of the hapaxlegomenon of the Holocaust is central to the novel's two completed chapters, 'Hapaxlegomenon' and 'Adloyada.' The first chapter begins and ends with the word 'Hapaxlegomenon,' which is addressed to Pimontel by a mysterious stranger seeking his help as a detective. We never learn who this stranger is, or the exact nature of the mission on which he has been sent, since the word, like a 'mystic incantation/ a 'crossroad omen' (NB, p. 129), sets Pimontel off on an autobiographical reverie, which forms the substance of the chapter. The central theme of this reverie is the 'interpretations of signs and portents' (NB, p. 129). It focuses on three turning points in Pimontel's life, in each of which the interpretation of a 'hapaxlegomenon' plays a central role. The first of these episodes occurs in Pimontel's childhood. His Hebrew class is visited by community leaders who want to test the children's proficiency in the Bible. Pimontel impresses the visitors by his ability to interpret one word by analogy with another, but he is stymied when he is asked to interpret a word for which there are no analogies; it is, as one of the visitors explains, a hapaxlegomenon. Pimontel is fascinated by the questions of interpretation raised by this initial episode and considers becoming a rabbi. However, recognizing that he lacks any true sense of vocation, he decides to become a translator of poetry, a 'smuggler ... of commentary' (The Bible Manuscripts' [1951; LER, p. 142]), interpreting medieval Hebrew poetry by the creation of English equivalents. To his dismay, reviewers can make no sense of his work and generally ignore it. The only reviewer who does notice his book ends his review: 'Such a book as Pimontel's may perhaps be allowed - once! Once and bastaV Pimontel comments, 'So there

Tikkun 209 it had come again, the hapaxlegomenon' (NB, p. 135); and he decides to turn to law. As a lawyer, Pimontel runs up against the phenomenon of hapaxlegomenon for a third time, when, after carefully constructing a case on the basis of the Code, he is told that the issue in question is 'sui generis, unique, it [is] a cause [sic] d'espece' (NB, p. 136), and thus, like all hapaxlegomena, not open to usual modes of interpretation. It is at this point that, rather improbably, Pimontel is invited to join the police force as a detective, where he can exercise his interpretive skills with complete freedom. Soon after, the mysterious stranger appears with his offer: There aren't many we could ask to undertake this job. We - we trained nobody for it. But you have the knowledge, the experience, and I know that you are with us in our struggle. You must accept! You will be the first of that function in two thousand years! You can't refuse! The first - a great, glorious, unprecedented hapaxlegomenon! (NB, p. 137)

The unnamed 'function' probably has some relation to the interpretation of God's will by the Temple priests through consulting the oracles known as Urim and Thummim. With the destruction of the Temple and the disappearance of the Urim and Thummim two thousand years ago, this function ceased. Because of Pimontel's unique training as both a biblical commentator and a detective, he is the 'unprecedented hapaxlegomenon' best suited to take up this interpretive function once more, for as one of Klein's notes for the novel puts it, the 'Urim & Thummim [are] equated with modern detective work - fingerprints, etc.' (MS 7266). 'Adloyada,' the second chapter of the novel, continues to explore the theme of interpreting the hapaxlegomenon but now places it explicitly in the context of the Holocaust. The term adloyada refers to the carnivalesque holiday of Purim, which is being celebrated in the chapter, commemorating the victory of the hero Mordecai, as recounted in the Book of Esther, over the villain Haman, who had tried to destroy the Jewish people. According to the Talmud, on Purim one should drink until one cannot tell (ad delo yada) the difference between 'Cursed be Haman/ and 'Blessed be Mordecai.' In other words, 'Adloyada' describes a state in which the interpretive faculties are suspended, and even the most basic distinctions and comparisons are rendered impossible. From one point of view, the events described in the chapter do not live up to its festive title, since there is little celebration among the

210 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet worshippers in the synagogue, who are obsessed with the bleak aftermath of the Holocaust. However, as a reference to the breakdown of the process of interpretation, the title is very apt. The parallels between Purim and the events of the Holocaust are obvious enough; Klein himself drew them more than once in his journalism.9 In 'Adloyada,' these parallels are both drawn and questioned. After the mysterious stranger has left, Pimontel goes to his old synagogue to celebrate the holiday, where he finds a heated argument in progress between a traditionalist, who tries to interpret the Holocaust by means of parallels with the Purim story, and a 'perverse-faced Jew' who rejects all such interpretations: 'And what about the six million? That's nothing! They don't count, eh? What kind of Purim have they known about? I ask you: insofar as they are concerned, who won, Mordecai or Haman?' (NB, p. 139). The traditionalist replies that all will be explained with the Coming of the Messiah, and then goes on to describe the great banquet at which the Coming will be celebrated. This inspires one of his listeners to elaborate his own commentary on the banquet, in which the various dishes are associated with persecutors of the Jews throughout history. The effect is to deny the uninterpretability of the Holocaust, to neutralize Hitler by assimilating him to a pattern which has repeated itself throughout history, most notably in the story of Purim. The climax of the banquet is 'Haman taschen [a pastry served on Purim]. And Hitler baigel - as mementos of zero.' The cynic responds, 'Mister, you make me to vomit' (NB, p. 141). On this note the chapter ends. Through its formulation of the problem of interpreting hapaxlegomena, Klein's unfinished detective novel represents a important stage in his attempt to create a commentary adequate to the unparalleled horror of the Holocaust. However, Klein is not yet able to solve the problem which he has so clearly formulated, and, despite his elaborate plans, he abandoned the novel after completing only two chapters. Several years later, he returned to the story of a detective / biblical commentator who struggles to interpret the hapaxlegomenon of the Holocaust, and, this time, brought it to completion - in The Second Scroll. There were two events in the intervening years which made this possible: Klein's trip to the State of Israel, and his reading of Gershom Scholem's account of the Lurianic Kabbalah in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Throughout most of Klein's career, his attitude towards the Kabbalah, like that of most educated, secularized Jews, was dismissive, or, at best,

Tikkun

211

condescending. In contrast to dozens of references to the Talmud and hundreds to the Bible in his journalism, there are scarcely any such references to the Kabbalah: there are only three before the late forties and only one of them, a review of a study of the Zohar ('White Magic' [1932; LER, pp. 10-13]), the central text of the Kabbalah, consists of more than a passing mention. The review leaves little doubt that Klein's knowledge of the Kabbalah was very superficial, and that the Zohar interested him, if at all, only as a rather quaint 'collection of poetic flowers' (LER, p. 12). Of particular significance in light of later developments is a comment he made in 1939 on the appeal of the Kabbalah to a people overwhelmed by the threat of Nazism: Indeed, the agony of our people is so great, that mysticism seems to appear as the only alternative to that manifestation of despair, pessimism ... The abovementioned mysticism, of course, does not mean a grovelling in Cabala and a juggling of the Zohar. ('Of Him Whom We Envy' [BS, p. 49])

The irony of this passage is that ten years later Klein was himself, if not 'grovelling' in the Kabbalah, then 'gambol[ling]' (SS, p. 35) in it, and had adopted a kabbalistic approach to the 'despair' and 'pessimism' of the Holocaust. The impetus for this change was his reading of Gershom Scholem. Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism was published in 1941, although Klein probably first read it in the revised edition of 1946:10 he owned a copy of this edition, which he signed and dated 1947, and he made numerous markings in it. The section of the book which had the most profound impact on him was Scholem's account of the version of the Kabbalah formulated in the sixteenth century by Rabbi Isaac Luria," which Scholem presents, not as a historical curiosity, but as a powerful and still relevant response to historical catastrophe. The kabbalistic tradition in which Luria worked dates back at least to the time of the second Temple. This tradition found its classic formulation in the Zohar, the Book of Splendour, an extended commentary on the Bible, which was written in Spain in the thirteenth century. The central problem which the Zohar explores is the relationship between the One and the Many: How can the infinite Creator, referred to as En-Sof, 'the One without End,' manifest himself in the multiplicity of his Creation? In response to this problem, the Kabbalah developed a theory of Creation, according to which God, conceived of as Ay in, or 'Nothing/

212 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet because He is beyond human apprehension, makes Himself known through a process of emanation or unfolding, known as atzilut. This process consists of ten distinct stages, the sefirot, which, in their entirety, make up Adam Kadmon, Primordial Man. In the sixteenth century, this theory of Creation was given a startling new development by Luria, who sought to explain the inner dynamics of the process of emanation through a dialectical myth of Creation. According to Luria, atzilut is preceded by an act of tzimtzum, a 'withdrawal' or 'retreat.'12 This act creates 'a kind of mystical primordial space' to which God 'return[s] in the act of creation and revelation': The first act of En-Sof, the Infinite Being, is therefore not a step outside but a step inside, a movement of recoil, of falling back upon oneself, of withdrawing into oneself. Instead of emanation we have the opposite, contraction.13

Following the tzimtzum, a light emanates from God, in the form of the sefirot, and, to complete the process of emanation into the world of finite beings, the light of the sefirot is collected in specially created vessels. However, under the impact of the divine light, the vessels shatter, in a cosmic disaster known as shevirat hakelim, or the Breaking of the Vessels. This disruption of the process of emanation, and of the harmonious embodiment of God's creative power in Adam Kadmon, is the origin of evil. It is only when the broken vessels have been restored and the dismembered body of Adam Kadmon has been re-membered that the Messiah will come, and the unfolding of God in his universe will be completed. This process of restoration and re-membering, known as tikkun, depends on the cooperation of mankind: Tikkun ... corresponds to the process of mundane history. The historical process and its innermost soul, the religious act of the lew, prepare the way for the final restitution of all the scattered and exiled lights and sparks. The lew who is in close contact with the divine life through Torah, the fulfilment of the commandments, and through prayer, has it in his power to accelerate or to hinder this process.14

What is most striking in Scholem's account of Luria's myth of Creation is his contention that it is deeply rooted in history, that, even in its most esoteric aspects, it can be understood dialectically as an instance of a living tradition being transformed by the pressures of history and transforming history in turn. According to Scholem, the

Tikkun

213

myth was an attempt to come to terms with the terrible shock of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the worst of many such disasters which had befallen the Jewish people since the beginning of their Exile. Luria's account of Creation placed the experience of Exile at the very heart of a redemptive process which is profoundly dialectical, 'in the strictest sense of the term as used by Hegel/15 As Scholem points out, both tzimtzum and shevirah are images of Exile: tzimtzum, God's 'banishing Himself from His totality into profound seclusion ... is the deepest symbol of Exile that could be thought of/16 and shevirah, as well, symbolizes the fact that 'Everything is in Exile/17 In both cases, however, Exile is seen as part of a dialectical process leading to a Return: first, the inward withdrawal of tzimtzum leads to the outward emanation of atzilut, and, then, the shattering of shevirah leads to the restoration of tikkun, through which the act of Creation is completed. And since the act of tikkun is dependent upon human agency, the Exile of the Jews can be seen as a holy mission - the Jews are to scatter to every corner of the universe so as to hasten the process of tikkun, by gathering together all the fragments of the vessels shattered by shevirah. In this way, the suffering and humiliation which the Jewish people have endured throughout the ages is given meaning and purpose. Scholem's account of the Lurianic response to historical catastrophe has had a powerful appeal to a wide range of modern Jewish writers searching within their own tradition for a way of coming to terms with the Holocaust.18 For Klein, the appeal was all the more powerful because of the striking parallels between the Lurianic myth of Creation and his own story of the poet, which he had developed in its basic outlines years before he had read Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Scholem's dialectical perspective on the interplay between tradition and history is precisely the one that Klein had been working towards throughout the forties, especially in the Quebec poems. And the dialectical structure of Luria's Creation myth is paralleled by the structure of Klein's story, in which the poet's inward retreat is a kind of tzimtzum preceding his act of poetic creation. This parallel is particularly striking in 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ so much so that, even though the poem almost certainly precedes Klein's reading of Major Trends, one critic has produced a plausible analysis of it in Lurianic terms.19 But perhaps the most significant point of contact between Luria and Klein is that Luria's Creation myth provides Klein with a model for the synthesis of his two contradictory metaphors for the relationship between the One and the Many, unfolding (atzilut) and re-membering (tikkun).

214 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Scholem himself would find nothing surprising in these similarities, since the main thrust of his argument is that the Lurianic Kabbalah has had a profound shaping effect on the imagination of all Jews with a living relationship to Judaism. The first unequivocal evidence in Klein's work of a familiarity with the Lurianic Kabbalah is 'Notebook of a Journey' (1949; BS pp. 340-83), a series of articles which appeared in the Canadian Jewish Chronicle between August and December of 1949, during and immediately after a fact-finding trip to Israel, Europe, and North Africa which Klein undertook in that year for the Canadian Jewish Congress. The trip was proposed to Klein only a few weeks after he had suffered a shattering defeat as the CCF candidate for Cartier in the 1949 federal election. His decision to run once more for the CCF, after withdrawing his candidacy in 1945, is puzzling, but, perhaps like his similarly puzzling decision the year before to give up his very successful lectureship at McGill, it reflected a need to take on a more public role at a period of historical crisis. Whatever his reasons, Klein went into the campaign confident of victory, and was fully unprepared for the results, which devastated him emotionally. The contrast between the humiliating rebuff which he felt his community had just dealt him and the exuberant sense of unity and purpose which he discovered in Israel only served to heighten his enthusiasm; and in 'Notebook of a Journey,' we see him 'dizzy with excitement'20 at almost everything he sees in the new Jewish state. At times, as in the final instalment, 'Of Sundry and Diverse Things and Places' (BS, pp. 381-3), he is almost overwhelmed by the variety of impressions which crowd in on him, and he can do no more than simply record them without any attempt to discover in them a principle of order or coherence. But if he is not yet able, in 'Notebook of a Journey,' to find a unifying image or narrative capable of summing up his varied experiences in Israel, one of the fascinations of the series is his struggle to do so, a struggle which is conducted largely in terms of commentary. The theme of commentary as a way of reconciling variety and unity is established in the first instalment of 'Notebook of a Journey,' which begins: In how many ways, in how many varied and lingering ways, is the full implication and force of this so-unexcited time-table brevity to be made clear? For certainly as it stands now, cold, staid, typographical on a printed page, not a millionth of the emotion it evokes, can issue therefrom. Shouldn't one pause

Tikkun

215

over these equations, turn them - like ben Bag Bag was wont to do to the texts of Holy Writ - about and about - to note them, to spy them, to see them, and in all their aspects to comprehend? (BS, p. 340)

Ben Bag Bag was a Talmudic sage who gave classic expression to the biblical commentator's creed: Turn it [i.e., the Bible] and turn it for all is in it' (Avot $.22).21 What follows is a commentary, in the spirit of Ben Bag Bag, on 'the plain unvarnished fact. I'm going to Israel/ taking the form of ten different elaborations, the climactic one being Cabbalistic. When the years were ripened and the years fulfilled, then was there fashioned Aught from Naught. Out of the furnace there issued smoke, out of the smoke a people descended. Sambation22 raged, but Sambation was crossed, the desert swirled, but the desert was sand. (BS, p. 341)

A second passage which testifies to Klein's new interest in the Kabbalah is a long description of Safed (BS, pp. 364-6), emphasizing its close connection with Luria and his fellow kabbalists. Both passages are incorporated into The Second Scroll, the first as the climax of a letter from Uncle Melech, which outlines the organizing principle of the novel, and the second as the conclusion of the novel's final chapter. But, although Klein is beginning to move towards the kabbalistic model which will reach its full development in The Second Scroll, he is still searching for effective ways of presenting it. The most sustained example of kabbalistic commentary in 'Notebook of a Journey' is Klein's interpretation of the story of Moses as an allegory of the process of shevirah and tikkun. In this commentary, shevirah is associated with two episodes in Moses' story: his shattering of the tablets containing the ten commandments (Exodus 32.19) and his death before completing his journey to the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 34.1-5). According to Klein's commentary, the establishment of the State of Israel represents the tikkun of both these examples of shevirah. Moses' failure to complete his journey is the subject of the first reference to him in 'Notebook of a Journey': At last, at long last, to see with one's own eyes the primal hearth, the original home! The dream of a lifetime about to be fulfilled! Surely one should make ready, like Moses, to look from the heights of the plane upon the Promised Land, ... to descend and press one's lips against the sacred soil, and (BS, p. 340)

216 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Klein, whose middle name was, of course, Moses, will achieve the goal which eluded his namesake: he will descend to the Holy Land, which Moses could only view 'from the heights' of a mountain top. As another Moses, the buffoon Moishe (Yiddish for 'Moses') Choneh, later puts it, 'Moishe Rabbenu ["Moses our Master"] did not get into the Promised Land, and he, Choneh with the big feet, did!' (BS, p. 352). Klein draws an implicit parallel between the forty years that Moses and the Israelites wandered in the desert and the fact that he himself has 'waited forty years ... [and] journeyed thousands of miles ... to sojourn awhile in [his] spiritual oasis' (BS, p. 354). And he draws a similar parallel with Theodor Herzl, who, 'at the age forty, had died/ but, at length, with his burial on Mount Herzl, is 'granted what even to Moses was not granted - to rest, a king of the kings of Israel and Judah, in the Promised Land' (BS, p. 356). If the establishment of the State of Israel represents the tikkun of the broken journey which Moses was never able to complete, it represents, as well, the tikkun of the tablets which he shattered. Klein's most explicit reference to this episode is in his description of the tablets on the Arch of Titus, which commemorates the destruction of the Temple by the Romans: [T]he two tablets, so wantonly transported -1 would have seen them shattered, as Moses did his tablets shatter; and the trumpets - out of the very stone they sounded, not as of yore, the sound of jubilee, but the broken murmur, the tragic shvarim, of wandering and exile. (BS, p. 381)

Klein associates the tablets which Moses shattered with shvarim, the 'broken' notes blown on the ram's horn on the Day of Atonement, a term which recalls shevirah (with which it is cognate). The tikkun of this shvarim/shevirah of 'wandering and exile' is the State of Israel, as Klein emphasizes with a pun on Moses' name: [T]he developing law of Israel is mosaic in more than one sense: it is, first of all, mosaic in that wherever possible the skullcap supporters of the Government insist on observance of the decrees of Moses; it is mosaic also, in that in the attempt to make these decrees conform to modern concepts, the original legislation is often chipped, and broken and put together again, much after the fashion of Byzantine art. (BS, p. 374)

The Israeli Mosaic' (MS 7152) or The Mosaic of Israel' (MS 7153) was the title which Klein gave to a lecture on Israel which he delivered in

Tikkun

217

various forms after his return to Canada. As his lecture notes (MS 5820-6012) indicate, in the course of giving these lectures he developed the story of Moses as an organizing motif more fully than he was able to do in 'Notebook of a Journey/ Of all the references to Moses in 'Notebook of a Journey/ by far the most important is in the instalment entitled 'Rome: The Statue of Moses/ a description of the statue of Moses by Michelangelo in the Basilica of St Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. More explicitly than any of the other instalments of 'Notebook of a Journey/ this one is presented as a commentary, more precisely, as a commentary on a commentary on a commentary. That is, it is Klein's commentary on James Joyce's commentary on Michelangelo's commentary on the biblical story of Moses. Michelangelo's statue 'speaks to' Klein both because of its 'Hebraic accent' and because it is familiar to him from Joyce's description of it in the 'Aeolus' chapter of Ulysses,23 which Klein cites in its entirety (BS, p. 378). The key phrase in this passage is one which Joyce borrowed from Blake's The Divine Image/ 'the human form divine/ and it sets the tone of Klein's own account of Michelangelo's Moses as a kind of Adam Kadmon, a representation in human form of the divine Oneness initially dismembered by the shevirah, and now re-membered by tikkun. For Michelangelo has represented Moses with the second set of tablets, which he has 'carve[dl out on stone' (BS, p. 378), after having shattered the first, which were inscribed by God Himself.24 But, although Michelangelo's statue of Moses embodies the process of tikkun, it bears, as well, traces of shevirah: The toe-nail was broken - true sign of the desert-refugee, the wanderer of the wilderness' (BS, p. 378). In this portrayal of Moses at his greatest moment of glory, we are reminded that he was to remain the eternal exile, never allowed to complete his journey and enter into the Promised Land. Klein's description of the statue of Moses ends with a curious detail: he points out an error, a 'misreading' in Michelangelo's commentary on the Bible: Holy Writ when speaking of Moses describes the rays of light - karnai or25 shooting from his forehead. Unfortunately the word karnai may also be rendered 'horns'; Michelangelo, thus misreading, has affixed horns of stone rising from the forefront of the Mosaic head. (BS, p. 379)

This attention to a troubling minor detail, which seems strangely out of keeping with the exalted tone of the rest of the passage, in fact, per-

218 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet forms an important function: it forces us to think about the limitations of any commentary, about the fact that all readings are, to some extent, misreadings. This self-consciousness about the act of commentary will prove to be central in the next work to grow out of Klein's experience of Israel, 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel,' which was later incorporated, as 'Gloss Gimel/ into The Second Scroll.26 It is in this work, which is a kind of extension and elaboration of The Statue of Moses,' that Klein finally realizes the full power, as well as the limitations, of the Lurianic Kabbalah as a model for commentary on the Holocaust. 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel' is, along with 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' and 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape,' one of the three major texts in the evolution of Klein's story of the poet. If 'Out of the Pulver' establishes the basic elements of this story, and 'Portrait of the Poet' introduces the principle of the dialectic through which these elements enter into a dynamic relationship with one another, it is only in 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel' that the dialectical process is carried through to its conclusion, and a final synthesis is achieved. The two earlier versions of the story of the poet served, as we have seen, as models for wide-ranging explorations of the nature of community in all its variety and complexity. 'Out of the Pulver' played this role in relation to the Jewish poems of the late twenties and early thirties, and 'Portrait of the Poet' did so in relation to the Quebec poems of the late forties. Exactly the same role is played by 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel' in relation to The Second Scroll, in which Klein will explore the new community arising in Israel out of the devastation of the Holocaust. 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel' appeared in three consecutive instalments in the Canadian Jewish Chronicle, between 28 April and 12 May of 1950, a few months after the last of the 'Notebook' articles. Curiously, there is no mention in 'Notebook of a Journey' of a visit to the Sistine Chapel, which, judging by 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel,' must have had a powerful impact on Klein. Perhaps he felt that a commentary on one work by Michelangelo was sufficient, and that the statue of Moses was the obvious choice, in light of the many earlier references to the story of Moses in 'Notebook of a Journey/ Whatever his reason, when Klein finally did decide to write about Michelangelo's paintings, he adopted the same interpretive stance as he had taken towards Michelangelo's statue; like The Statue of Moses,' 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel' is a kabbalistic commentary, interpreting Michelangelo's representation of 'the human form divine,' the key phrase in both texts, as an allegory of the process of tikkun.

Tikkun

219

In 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel/ as in The Statue of Moses/ Klein calls attention to the fact that he is engaged in a commentary, which, by its very nature, is open to the charge of 'misreading.' In The Statue of Moses/ Klein made this point, as we have seen, in his discussion of Moses' 'horns.' The discussion of this issue in 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel' calls attention more directly to the ambivalent status of Klein's own act of creative misreading: [S]uch is the nature of art that though the artist entertain fixedly but one intention and one meaning, that creation once accomplished beneath his hand, now no longer merely his own attribute, but Inspiration's very substance and entity, proliferates with significances by him not conceived nor imagined. Such art is eternal and to every generation speaks with fresh coeval timeliness. In vain did Buonarotti seek to confine himself to the hermeneutics of his age ... (SS, p. 139)

This statement is entirely typical of the traditional attitude of rabbinical commentators on the Bible, the attitude which Klein associates, at the very beginning of 'Notebook of a Journey/ with Ben Bag Bag: Turn it and turn it for all is in it.' Paradoxically, it is precisely because Klein holds Michelangelo's 'text' in such high esteem, believing that, as with the Torah, 'no single interpretation of [it] in human language is capable of taking in the whole of its meaning/27 that he feels free to contradict Michelangelo's apparent intentions, or rather the intentions of 'Buonarotti/ that aspect of Michelangelo which is limited to the 'hermeneutics of his age.' As Gershom Scholem says, It is the usual fate of sacred writings to become more or less divorced from the intentions of their authors. What may be called their after-life, those aspects which are discovered by later generations, frequently becomes of greater importance than their original meaning; and after all - who knows what their original meaning was?28

In its broadest outline, Klein's commentary interprets the nine central panels of Michelangelo's paintings, illustrating episodes from the Book of Genesis, as a narrative of redemption in which the shevimh of the Holocaust leads to a tikkun represented by the establishment of the State of Israel. The intricacy and ingenuity of Klein's commentary, which can be fully appreciated only through a detailed comparison with the paintings themselves, recalls his 'line-by-line ... commentary on Ulysses, tracking down all allusions ... explicating the text, and relating the parts

22O A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet to the whole' (letter to Leon Edel [22 January 1948]). In particular, the commentary on chapter 14 of Ulysses, The Oxen of the Sun/ which Klein had recently published (Here and Now i [1949], 28-48 [LER, pp. 289-325]), offers interesting parallels to 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel.' The subject of this commentary is 'nineparted' (LER, p. 289) like Michelangelo's nine-panelled painting, and its central theme, 'the crime committed against fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition' (LER, p. 289), the destruction of 'those Godpossible souls that we nightly impossibilise,'29 is echoed in Klein's commentary on the middle panel, The Creation of Eve, in which the act of murder is seen as denying life to 'the generations that should have been born and are not born' (SS, p. 145). Another probable influence on Klein's commentary is The Messianic Theme in the Paintings of the Dura Synagogue (i948),3° an archaeological study of a cycle of wall paintings in a third-century synagogue, of which Klein owned a copy. Like the Lurianic Kabbalah, these paintings represent an attempt to come to terms with a historical catastrophe - in this case, the destruction of Judaea by the Romans in A.D. 70 - through the formulation of a myth of redemption.31 The paintings, based on episodes from the Bible, develop a dialectical 'messianic concept,' in which 'one of the important aspects ... was that trials and sufferings are a necessary phase on the road to salvation.'32 One aspect of the paintings throws a particularly interesting light on Klein's development. The main cycle, illustrating the story of the Messiah, is echoed in a secondary cycle illustrating the story of Moses, who is seen as a prototype of the Messiah, 'as a future Redeemer who ranks with the Messiah.'33 This provides a striking parallel with Klein's use of Michelangelo's Moses as a prototype for the much more elaborate allegory of Messianic redemption which he sees in the paintings in the Sistine Chapel. While the influence of Joyce and of the Dura paintings on 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel' must remain, to some extent, a matter of speculation, there can be no doubt concerning the most important source for Klein's commentary, Charles de Tolnay's Sistine Chapel.34 The influence of Tolnay's analysis of Michelangelo's paintings is evident, not only in numerous details of 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel,' but, more significantly, in Klein's most audacious act of creative misreading, his decision to read Michelangelo's nine panels backwards, in reverse chronological order, beginning with The Drunkenness of Noah over the entrance to the Chapel, and ending with The Separation of Light from Darkness over the altar. Tolnay was the first of Michelangelo's commentators to suggest that

Tikkun

221

the meaning of the panels can be understood only when they are read 'in a sequence opposed to their chronological order':35 Until now they have been seen in their historical order, that is, starting at the altar and finishing at the entrance. But viewed in this way, the nine historical compositions appear completely inverted. It is therefore evident that they unfold from the entrance toward the altar. Only in this direction does the cycle reveal itself as a unified whole to the spectator.36

Reading the paintings in this manner, Tolnay sees them as a vast, coherent, neo-Platonic allegory illustrating the circular process of emanatio and remanatio: the emanation of the divine One into the material world of the Many, answered by the upward return of the human soul to God, a process which is also seen as deificatio, the progressive deification of man. In Tolnay's account of Michelangelo's paintings, the emanatio is illustrated by the nude figures of the young men, the ignudi, and the pairs of cupidlike figures, the putti, which frame the nine central panels. The return movement of remanatio or deificatio is the subject of the panels themselves, beginning with The Drunkenness of Noah and other scenes of chaos and corruption, and ending with a vision of deified man in the final scenes describing God's creation of the universe. The parallels between the neo-Platonic doctrine which Tolnay detects in Michelangelo's paintings and the Kabbalah are obvious. As Scholem says, in a passage marked by Klein: [T]he interpretation of Maaseh Bereshith, the esoteric doctrine of creation, has always formed one of the main preoccupations of Kabbalism. It is here that Kabbalism comes nearest to Neoplatonic thought, of which it has been said with truth that 'procession and reversion together constitute a single movement, the diastole-systole, which is the life of the universe.'37

There is a significant difference, however, between the 'magic circles' (SS, p. i5o)38 of neo-Platonism and those of the Kabbalah: neoPlatonism, with its emphasis on individual spiritual redemption, is completely ahistorical, while the kabbalistic myth of shevirah and tikkun is deeply engaged in history and, indeed, cannot be fully understood, as Scholem argues, except as a dialectical response to history. And it is here that Klein's commentary on Michelangelo's paintings differs most profoundly from Tolnay's: for Klein, the paintings are ultimately historical, a 'parable of [hisl clays' (SS, p. 139).

222 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Although Klein draws heavily on the Lurianic myth of Creation as a model for his parable of the Holocaust and its aftermath, he is aware that not all aspects of the myth are equally useful for this purpose. In particular, he tells us, his commentary on Michelangelo's paintings will not make use of the concept of 'zimzum and retractations' (SS, p. 139), of God's withdrawal into Himself prior to the act of Creation. However, although this concept plays no role in the commentary on the paintings themselves, it plays a crucial role in the passage immediately preceding the commentary, which serves the same function of preparation through withdrawal as the tzimtzum which precedes the act of divine Creation. The opening paragraph of 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel' describes Klein making his way through the corridors leading to the Chapel. The paragraph concludes: ... I reached the threshold of that door and, the long umbilical cord of corridors behind me, pressed forward with infant eagerness to enter this new world, truer than sculpture, not tunnelled, but global - ceilinged. (SS, p. 136)

The language in this passage - 'umbilical cord,' 'infant eagerness' suggests a birth, but it is a birth run backwards. The infant's journey through the long umbilical cord of the corridors leads not outward but inward, not out of a womb but into one, into the great womb of the Sistine Chapel. Paradoxically, however, this inward movement completes itself as a movement outward, like the tzimtzum preceding emanation, for the 'global' womb of the Chapel, 'ceilinged' with Michelangelo's paintings, contains within it a 'new world.' In terms of Klein's story of the poet, this passage recalls the 'journey into the interior' (see p. 169 above) at the end of 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' and, especially, 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ the 'drive to the essence' which promises to be 'at the same time the drive outward' (see p. 169 above). The difference is that, by the end of 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel/ this promise will actually be fulfilled, and the story of the poet will, for the first time in Klein's career, be brought to a conclusion. When Klein came to revise 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel' for inclusion in The Second Scroll, he made one change in the presentation of the text which had the effect of blurring an important aspect of its structure. In the Canadian Jewish Chronicle, the text appeared in three unequal instalments, of approximately 1200, 1400, and 800 words respectively. The breaks between the instalments are not arbitrary, but correspond to the

Tikkun

223

three distinct stages of atzilut, shevimh, and tikkun, or, in terms of the dialectic, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. These stages are not as clear in 'Gloss Gimel/ where the text is printed continuously, without any breaks. The first stage of the commentary consists of a survey of the overall organization of Michelangelo's painting - the frame, so to speak, in which the nine central panels are set - as a representation of the unfolding of the One in the Many through the process of atzilut. Klein begins with the basic layout of the paintings (SS, p. 136), which he describes in mathematical/geometrical terms ('geometry/ 'triangle,' 'square,' 'circle/ 'rectangle/ 'parabolic/ 'symmetry/ 'Euclid/ 'theorems'), using such terms, as he had previously done in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' and 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ to suggest the underlying principle of the One. He then turns to the Many through which the One unfolds itself, represented by the human figures, the 'theorems made flesh' (SS, p. 136), placed at regular intervals throughout the ceiling's geometrical scheme. As in Tolnay's analysis, the two sets of figures, the ignudi and the pairs of putti, represent a progressive movement away from the One into the world of the Many. Klein describes this movement as the unfolding of a single Word, the Fiat of Creation. The ignudi, flanking the nine panels 'high and central in the chapel's empyrean' (SS, p. 136), represent the earliest stage of this emanation, having come into existence immediately after the 'lordly utterance' (SS, p. 138) of the divine fiat: [E]ach body is a song echoing the Creator's voice.39 Fiat! The dew of paradise is still upon them ... [AJbout their countenances ... reigns ... the memory of the fingertouch, of God's lifegiving fingertouch, which through each pulsating vein and every quickened limb proclaims divine origins and makes of this adamicseraphic ceiling a pantheon of gods. (SS, p. 137)

The phrase 'adamic-seraphic' suggests a punning reference to the divine prototype of humanity, Adam Kadmon Cadamic'), and the sefirot ('seraphic') of which he is the embodiment. The next stage of this emanation is represented by the putti, who are set beneath the ignudi, 'the lesser clan springing from the heels of the giants' (SS, p. 138). If, in the ignudi, we still hear the 'lordly utterance' of the One divine Word, in the pairs of putti the Word has split off into 'diphthongs' (SS, p. 138), as it unfolds in the world of the Many. Taken together, the ignudi and putti, and the geometrical frame in which they are set, represent 'one

224 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet sole word ... The Flesh' (SS, p. 139), which, in a passage reminiscent of 'Desideratum/ is seen as the embodiment of the Divine Law: Twelve score and eight the limbs, parts, and members of the body, and eighteen score and five its organs and sinews - the sum all-embracing of commands and forbiddings, the six hundred and thirteen, curriculum taryag!40 (SS, p. 139)

Klein, then, begins by establishing his initial thesis that the act of divine Creation is a continuous, unbroken emanation or unfolding of the One into the Many. But no sooner is this thesis established than it generates its antithesis, an opposing, apparently irreconcilable view of the transformation of the One into the Many, not through a creative process of unfolding but through a destructive one of dismemberment. The first suggestion of this antithetical process is the commentator's description of a 'circuit of ... murderous medallions rolling before [the] feet' of the ignudi, containing scenes of violence from the Bible. The ignudi 'recoil back horror-struck,' but, despite their efforts to escape, they are 'circle-racked' and 'caught in these wheels the colour of dried blood' (SS, p. 137). By the end of the first instalment of 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel,' Klein's ideal vision of the divine Word unfolding itself in 'the weighted animate corpus of humanity' (SS, p. 136) has yielded entirely to its absolute antithesis, a terrible vision of shevirah, of the dismemberment of 'the human form divine' in the Nazi death camps: Certainly I could not look upon those limbs, well fleshed and of the colour of health, each in its proper socket, each as of yore ordained, without recalling to mind another scattering of limbs, other conglomerations of bodies the disjected members of which I had but recently beheld. For as I regarded the flights of athletes above me the tint subcutaneous of well-being faded, the flesh dwindled, the bones showed, and I saw again the relictx of the camps, entire cairns of cadavers, heaped and golgotha'd: a leg growing from its owner's neck, an arm extended from another's shoulder, wrist by jawbone, ear on ankle: the human form divine crippled, jackknifed, trussed, corded: reduced and broken down to its named bones, femur and tibia and clavicle and ulna and thorax and pelvis and cranium: the bundled ossuaries: all in their several social heapings heaped to be taken up by the mastodon bulldozer and scavengered into its sistine limepit. (SS, p. 140)

In its physical horror, this passage recalls a famous Yiddish poem by Peretz Markish, which Klein probably knew, The Heap,' describing the

Tikkun

225

corpses of the victims of a pogrom, thrown together indiscriminately in a heap. But there is another, more surprising allusion, which links the fate of the victims of the Holocaust to Klein's exploration of the process of Creation: 'scattering of limbs' and 'disjected members' echo the Latin phrase disiecta membra, literally 'scattered limbs,' which Horace uses to describe disjointed words and phrases (Satires 1.4.62). By means of this allusion, the commentator evokes the shattering of the Word, of the Fiat of Creation. The Word will eventually be re-membered, along with 'the human form divine,' and the 'wheels the colour of dried blood' will eventually undergo a dialectical transformation into 'magic circles'; but before this tikkun can occur, shevirah must take its full course. Having identified the Holocaust as the shevirah of 'the human form divine/ Klein then goes on, in the second instalment of 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel,' to focus on this 'wreckage/ whose 'meaning' he must 'understand' (SS, p. 140) before the process of tikkun can begin. He begins by interpreting the first four of Michelangelo's nine panels as a historical allegory of the Holocaust. The Drunkenness of Noah represents the 'great drunkenness' that 'intoxicated [his] generation's men of blood' (SS, p. 141), and The Flood, 'the deluge of the uncontained blood' (SS, p. 141) which engulfed the Jews of Europe. The burnt offering in Noah's Sacrifice 'speak[s] ... to [Klein] ... of recent furnaces and holocausts' (SS, p. 143),41 and The Expulsion from Eden, of the pitiful fate of the survivors of the Holocaust who were forced to flee from a devastated Europe represented by 'a landscape infertile of barren soil and unyielding rock' (SS, p. 144).42 In the next stage of his commentary on shevirah, Klein goes beyond the specifics of the Holocaust to consider the essential nature of the act of murder itself. In 'a fuller explication - an unfolding - of the ugly heinousness of killing' (SS, p. 145), he focuses on the next two panels, The Creation of Eve and The Creation of Adam. In The Creation of Eve, he sees 'the chain of generation ... figured' and argues, in terms reminiscent of 'Sonnet Unrhymed' (see p. 124 above), that when one person is murdered so are all of his or her potential descendants: [T]he hand that slew is seen again to be slaying, and again, and again; frustrate generation after frustrate generation, to all time, eternal murder, murder immortal! (SS, p. 145)

The paradox of 'murder immortal' is followed by an even more striking one, which concludes the second instalment. In his analysis of

226 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet The Creation of Adam, Tolnay had pointed out the parallel between the representations of God and of Adam: It is the first time in the scene of the Creation of Adam that God the Father is represented in a horizontal position which corresponds in mirror image, broadly speaking, to that of Adam, thereby expressing the words of Genesis 1:27, 'So God created man in his own image ...' ... Michelangelo made God in the image of man ...43

Klein, developing this parallel - 'And in his eyes is imaged God' draws a conclusion from it which Michelangelo 'dared not transliterate/ that 'the unspeakable nefas' of the Holocaust is 'deicide' (SS, p. 146); and it is with this statement of the ultimate act of negation that the second instalment of 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel' ends. The third instalment opens with the word 'But/ signalling the beginning of the final stage of Klein's dialectical commentary, the negation of the negation which will lead to the synthesis of tikkun: 'But deicide - its syllables contradict each other - this is the evil possible only in its attempt, not in its perpetration' (SS, p. 147). We now realize the significance of the characterization of deicide, in the previous instalment, as an 'unspeakable nefas.' Nefas, the Latin word for 'crime/ means, literally, 'that which cannot be spoken'; and deicide is unspeakable because of the contradiction between its syllables, 'dei-' representing 'God/ and '-cide' representing murder. This unspeakable contradiction brings to a head the dialectical conflict between the creative Word and its negation, between fiat and nefas. Having reached this point of absolute contradiction, Klein is now ready to negate the negation: since the destruction of 'the human form divine' is impossible, the Holocaust must not be final but must lead to something beyond itself. Specifically, the Holocaust is part of the dialectical process of shevirah leading to the final synthesis of tikkun. It is this process which is the subject of the last three panels. In the first of these panels, The Separation of Heaven from the Water, the 'magic circle' linking shevirah and tikkun is completed in terms of the remembering of a dismembered body. Klein sees a reference to the rainbow in this panel and to God's promise of tikkun, that 'the remnant would be whole again' (SS, p. 147). What he describes, in fact, are two rainbows, joined together to form a single 'magic circle/ in the first half of which the colours represent the shattering of a human body, and in the second its restoration:

Tikkun

227

Though bloody coursed the red and orange fevered bright, though the pus yellow yeasted, the gangrene green and the smitings waxed bruise-blue contused to indigo and the virulent violet, violet waned, the indigo fled, the veins throbbed azure, and green was the world once more and golden, high sanguinary, and the body ruddy with health. (SS, p. 147)

Then, taking his cue from Tolnay,44 Klein casts his eye over the whole of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, where he sees the seven colours of the rainbow, with which Michelangelo made of the 'ceiling his seven-sealed token' (SS, p. 147). The phrase 'seven-sealed' is an allusion to the seven seals in the Book of Revelation 5.1, an allusion repeated in the word 'sigils' (SS, p. 150) at the end of 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel,' which echoes the sigillis septem of the Vulgate. But, whereas the apocalyptic vision in the Book of Revelation results from the breaking of seals, here it is associated with the opposite, with the sealing, through tikkun, of what has been previously broken. As the pun on 'ceiling'/'sealing' suggests, the act of sealing is what Michelangelo's ceiling represents: the sealing of the 'seven-sealed token/ which, through an even more brilliant pun, we recognize as the token of tikkun.45 The seven-sealed token of tikkun on the ceiling is inscribed with seven mysterious words representing the seven colours of the rainbow: 'ADAM PALSYN ZAHAV YEREQ KOHL ISOTHYS ADAM-SAPIRl' (SS, p. 147). The three middle words are quite straightforward: ZAHAV, YEREQ, and KOHL are the Hebrew words for yellow, green, and blue, respectively. It is only the first two and last two which require further commentary. The first word, ADAM, is Hebrew for red, but it also, of course, means 'man/ the first man having been created out of red clay. The rainbow, then, is an image of man, as we have already seen from the earlier commentary on its colours in terms of the human body. The second word, PALSYN, derives from apelsin, Yiddish for orange (compare German Apfelsine). Why, however, does Klein drop the initial a, and why does he use a Yiddish word here, and nowhere else in the text? The answer seems to be that, by transforming apelsin to PALSYN, Klein is able to create a pun on the Aramaic word pulsin, meaning 'blows/46 or, to use the term from the earlier description of the rainbow, 'smitings.' In this way, Klein introduces the idea of shevirah. The second last word, ISOTHYS, is a Hebrew word derived from the Greek for indigo, whose usual transliteration would be isatis. However, ISOTHYS looks much more like another Greek word, isotheos, meaning godlike. That Klein had this pun in mind is suggested by the phrase similis filio dei, 'like the son of God/ which

228 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet occurs in the quotation from the Vulgate translation of Daniel 3.25, accompanying this passage in 'Gloss Gimel' (SS, p. 147). ISOTHYS, then, recalls what Klein had earlier perceived in Michelangelo's ignudi, that men can be 'like gods.' The 'basic premise: the divinity of humanity'47 is reasserted. Of all the colours, the most complex is the last, ADAMSAPIRI, Hebrew for red-sapphire. There is a perfectly good Hebrew word for violet, so that Klein must have a special reason for this roundabout way of achieving violet by combining red and sapphire. For one thing, it allows him to end his rainbow as he began it, with a reference to ADAM, man, thus completing the 'magic circle' through an act of tikkun. Less obvious, but even more important, is the similarity between SAPIRI and sefirah, the singular of sefirot', the two terms were, in fact, identified by kabbalists on the basis of a biblical passage in which heaven is compared to 'a paved work of sapphire (sapir)' under God's feet (Exodus 24.io).48 Klein, then, is alluding to the kabbalistic doctrine which identifies the God of the sefirot with Adam Kadmon, Primordial Man (compare 'adamic-seraphic' [SS, p. 137]). To sum up, then, ADAM PALSYN describes shevirah, the shattering of Primordial Man (ADAM) by the 'smitings' (PALSYN) of evil; and ISOTHYS ADAM-SAPIRI describes tikkun, the restoration of 'the human form divine' (ISOTHYS) of Primordial Man (ADAM), who embodies the sefirot (SAPIRI). This completion of the act of tikkun is symbolized at the end of the passage by the coming together of the seven colours of the rainbow into the unbroken white light of which they are fragments: 'All colours melled to hope; the spectrum fused to white' (SS, p. 147).49 In the final two panels, the process of tikkun, which has been presented in terms of the microcosm of the human body, extends, first, to the macrocosm of the created universe, and, then, back to its source, to the Creator Himself. In The Creation of the Sun and Moon, the heavens become whole along with man their beholder: 'Oh, the proliferation in the heavens as the dry bones stirred!' (SS, p. 148). In The Separation of Light from Darkness, we finally achieve a vision of En-Sof, 'the form of formlessness, unphraseable, infinite, world-quickening anima, the shaped wind ... Cloud numinous with Creation' (SS, pp. 148-9).5° Just as the human form had earlier been seen as a text in which one could read the curriculum taryag, the 613 commandments, the divine formlessness is now seen as a text in which, according to the commentary of the narrator of The Second Scroll, one can read 'the thirteen credos of Maimonides' (SS, p. 58), the most important statement of the essence of Judaism, which are paraphrased in the commentary on this

Tikkun

229

panel. The sentence in which En-Sof, 'the One without End/ is described is itself 'circular ... without beginning or end' (SS, p. 58), since its last words, 'authorizing Days' (SS, p. 149), bring us back to its first, 'to see the Author of their Days' (SS, p. 148). When its two broken ends, their brokenness indicated by ellipsis points, are joined together, like the two rainbows in The Separation of Heaven from the Water, they re-enact the process of tikkun: those 'who wait,' at the end of the sentence, for the Messiah 'who tarries, merciful-munificent with ascensions, aliyoth, resurrections, authorizing Days ...' find what they are waiting for at its beginning: '... to see the Author of their Days.' At the opening of his commentary on Michelangelo's nine panels, Klein had historicized the concept of shevirah by associating it with the Holocaust. As his commentary draws to a close, he does the same with the answering concept of tikkun, whose historical expression he sees in the establishment of the State of Israel. Thus, while the word 'ascensions' in The Separation of Light from Darkness recalls ascensio, the neo-Platonic equivalent of tikkun, 'aliyoth,' Hebrew for 'ascents,' has a very specific historical association for Klein, and for any Jew contemplating the events of the previous few years. In this historical context, 'aliyoth' refers to the various waves of Jewish immigration to Israel, culminating in the one following the Holocaust. This expression of the 'resurrections' of tikkun is the historical culmination towards which 'the parable of [Klein's] days' points. After completing his commentary on the nine central panels with this return to history, Klein then considers the pendentives in the four corners of the ceiling, comprising a 'quadruplicate communique' (SS, p. 149) in which tikkun can be seen to be unfolding in the events of contemporary history. These paintings, David and Goliath, Judith and Holofernes, The Hanging of Haman, and The Brazen Serpent (SS, pp. 149-50), all illustrate the destiny of 'Israel/ a word which does not occur earlier in the text, and which now means, not simply the Jewish people, but the new Jewish state. The final message of this communique is that 'in the round of serpents, by God's grace, Israel lives': the dialectical transformation, through tikkun, of the 'wheels the colour of dried blood' into 'magic circles' is complete; the prayer at the end of 'Elegy/ that 'the ashen orbit' be 'cancelled/ has been answered. As Klein prepares to leave behind him 'the sigils, talismans, and magic circles of Michelangelo [which] to this purpose [he has] read' (SS, p. 150), he looks up at the painting of Jonah and quotes, without commentary, Jonah's prayer from inside the whale. It 'spoke for me' (SS, p. 150), he

230 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet says, and it is as if the paintings in the Sistine Chapel have found a voice of their own to comment on their commentator, to apply to his own story as a poet the kabbalistic model of tikkun which his commentary has discovered in them. Jonah, who is 'compassed ... about' by 'the waters ... [at] the bottoms of the mountains' and promises to 'pay [to God] that that [he has] vowed' (SS, p. 150), is an unmistakable version of the poet in 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ who is 'at the bottom of the sea' (163) and promises 'to pay back the daily larcenies of the lung' (157). But, unlike the poet in 'Portrait of the Poet/ Jonah does not remain at the bottom of the sea: God has 'brought up [his] life from corruption' (SS, p. 150). Klein, too, is now able to accomplish what the poet in 'Portrait of the Poet' could only dream of: he is able to complete the negation of the negation which the poet had begun, and to achieve the final synthesis which was the poet's ambition. As he leaves the chapel, he looks up at 'the series of rams' skulls of which the poet had made a device to signify, some say, the descent to mortality/ but, in a final act of deliberate misreading, he negates the obvious meaning of the rams' heads as symbols of mortality, transforming them into symbols of liberation, the shofars, or rams' horns, blown on the Jubilee year to proclaim the freedom of all Hebrew slaves: 'But to me, through the long marble corridors hurrying back, they were rams' horns sounding liberation' (SS, p. 150). Just as Jonah's prayer had extended the process of tikkun to the poet himself, this final act of commentary extends it to his text, for it takes us 'hurrying back' to the sentence fragment with which 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel' opened, joining beginning and end in a 'magic circle/ like 'the single circular sentence, without beginning or end/ describing En-Sofm The Separation of Light from Darkness. It is only when the two ends of the text are joined together that the fragmentary first sentence51 becomes whole, and we discover the missing antecedent of the phrase 'and so/ the heretofore hidden source of the faith in redemption which is at the heart of Klein's commentary on the Sistine Chapel: But to me, through the long marble corridors hurrying back, they were rams' horns sounding liberation / to the Sistine Chapel, and so to me the long passage through the marble corridors leading to the beatific door was no more than a flotation upon a channel of foam, a transit between walls of wind forgotten as soon as blown. (SS, pp. 150/135)

The ostensible beginning of 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel/ then, with its promise of liberation through its allusion to the Exodus from Egypt, is preceded by the proclamation of this liberation, sounded by the rams'

Tikkun

231

horns and echoed back throughout the Sistine Chapel. To put it another way, the act of re-membering which the narrator accomplishes with such impressive ingenuity is, simultaneously, an act of unfolding something that has always been there, not just in the beginning, but before it. Alan L. Mintz says of certain rabbinical commentaries written in response to the Destruction of the Second Temple, 'Like most acts of virtuosity, these performances dazzle but do not entirely persuade/52 And he goes on to observe that 'with all their interpretive will and brilliance the Rabbis could not entirely close the gap' between the traditional models of commentary available to them and 'the actual experience of ... catastrophe in their own times/53 It could be argued that Mintz's observations apply with some justice to the dazzling virtuosity of 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel/ However, if Klein's commentary 'dazzle[sj but do[es] not entirely persuade/ it is not for the reason Mintz adduces in this discussion of the rabbinical commentaries - that 'the cleverness of their means diverts but fails to supply the kind of consolation that can only derive from a sense of deep struggle with loss/54 The cleverness of Klein's commentary, I would argue, ultimately has the opposite effect, of actually focusing our attention on his 'deep struggle with loss,' not of diverting it. As with 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens' and 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ the very complexity and coherence of the structure which Klein has created have the paradoxical effect of throwing into relief a gap at the centre which no act of the imagination can entirely bridge. In 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel/ this gap occurs at the turning point of the text, at the commentary on the word 'deicide/ the negation of the negation which leads to the final synthesis of tikkun. The gap is, in fact, a literal one: the statement of the ultimate negation, 'the unspeakable nefas - deicide/ occurs at the end of the second instalment and is therefore separated from its negation, at the beginning of the third instalment, by a gap of a week. But more important than this chronological gap is the logical gap in Klein's argument. Curiously, Klein had once before attempted, but then abandoned, a similar argument, in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens/ In some early versions of the poem,55 the climax of Spinoza's carefully constructed argument for the One in the Many in section VIII was: he who does violence to me, verily sins against the light of day; he is made a deicide. Howbeit, even in dust I am resurrected; and even in decay I live again.

232 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Klein seems to have been uncomfortable with the argument, or the implied argument, for immortality on the basis of the divinity of man, and he deleted the reference to deicide in later versions. But if the deicide argument was troubling in 'Out of the Pulver/ it is all the more so in 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel.' In the light of the knowledge of the Holocaust which we share with Klein, the syllogism on which his commentary hangs - the Divine cannot be murdered; the human form is divine; humanity cannot be murdered - is clearly inadequate. It is surely not true, in any literal sense of the word, that murder is possible 'only in its attempt' since this attempt succeeded six million times in the Holocaust. Perhaps Klein intends a distinction between individuals, who obviously can be murdered, and humanity as a whole, which cannot, but there is no support for such a distinction in the text, where it is each individual human being who is seen as divine, not just the species. The more we consider this passage, the more we realize that, despite appearances, logic has nothing whatever to do with the optimism which Klein begins to express from this point on in his commentary. What has really happened is that logical argument has been replaced by a statement of faith. The logical gap at the heart of 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel' is the most striking manifestation of what Tom Marshall calls the 'precarious'56 quality of Klein's commentary. As such, it is not a regrettable artistic flaw, but absolutely essential to the meaning of the text, which, like all of Klein's commentaries on the Holocaust, calls into question the very act of interpretation in which it is engaged. This gap provides a 'space, a kind of margin of indeterminacy, from which issue the perplexities, questionings, and insecurities'57 which are crucial to the power of tradition to redefine and renew itself in response to historical catastrophe, especially catastrophe of the unprecedented magnitude of the Holocaust. It is out of such a 'margin of indeterminacy' that The Second Scroll, Klein's most ambitious and ambivalent response to the Holocaust, will arise.

11 Keri

[T]he novel... by [a] barrister ... is a rather uneasy combination of ... allegories ... and of [a] brand of detective stories ... The story's outline is ... plain: the untiring search for a human soul through the barely perceptible reflections cast by this soul in others ... [T]he person foreshadowed by these touches is ... unheard and unseen ... There are a few regrettable details ... [which] seem to suggest a single God who reconciles himself to the many varieties of mankind. In my opinion, the idea is not greatly exciting ... [T]he object of the pilgrimage [is] himself a pilgrim ... [H]idden analogies may stand for the identity of the Seeker with the Sought ... It is considered admirable nowadays for a modern book to have its roots in an ancient one ... The many but superficial contacts between Joyce's Ulysses and Homer's Odyssey go on receiving - I shall never know why - the harebrained admiration of critics ... With due humility, I suggest a distant and possible forerunner, the Jerusalem Kabbalist Isaac Luria ../

The above passage is a particularly useful introduction to The Second Scroll, not only because it presents a concise catalogue of the major organizing principles which Klein drew upon in shaping the novel, but also because it calls into question the shaping impulse itself. Thus, Klein's combination of detective story and Lurianic allegory is 'uneasy'; his vision of the One in the Many ('a single God who reconciles himself to the many varieties of mankind'), which is reflected in the analogies between the narrator ('the Seeker') and Uncle Melech ('the Sought'), is 'regrettable' and 'not greatly exciting'; and the method of modelling his novel on an ancient archetype, which he adopts from Joyce's Ulysses, is 'harebrained.' Although the tone of this passage is far from sympathetic, its scepticism points to a crucial tension at the heart of The Second Scroll,

234 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet ignored by most interpreters of the novel, who concentrate on explicating its intricacies.2 For The Second Scroll is not only the most elaborate expression of Klein's ambition to construct a unified and coherent commentary on the Holocaust, it is also his most radical expression of scepticism about the very possibility of such a commentary. What is most remarkable about this passage, which points so directly to the interpretive crux of The Second Scroll, is that it is taken from a work published in 1935, some sixteen years before The Second Scroll: The Approach to al-Mu'tasim/ by Jorge Luis Borges, a writer with whom Klein was entirely unfamiliar. Even if we accept Borges's own theory that 'each writer creates his precursors,'3 the coincidence remains a remarkable one. But perhaps a partial explanation is that in his story - actually a review of a non-existent novel - Borges is raising issues which, by the time The Second Scroll came to be written, were very much in the air. Specifically, Borges's story represents one of the earliest postmodernist critiques of the totalizing ambitions of modernism, which Borges associates especially with the complex symbolic/mythological structure of Joyce's Ulysses. From this perspective, Klein's own 'rather uneasy' attitude to the process of constructing a commentary around the Holocaust can be seen as reflecting the scepticism about the interpretive act which is at the heart of postmodernism. This uneasy attitude is immediately established in the two epigraphs of The Second Scroll. Biblical commentary is the subject of the first epigraph, quoted from Milton's Areopagitica: ... And ask a Talmudist what ails the modesty of his marginal Keri that Moses and all the prophets cannot persuade him to pronounce the textual Chetiv.

A chetiv (literally, 'that which is written') is a word in the biblical text which presents difficulties of interpretation. Traditional commentators on the Bible were unwilling to emend the text, since they believed that every word of the Bible issued directly from God; instead, they added a commentary in the margin of the text, known as keri (literally, 'that which is read'), indicating how they believed the word should be read. Milton is contemptuous of what he ironically calls the 'modesty' of the commentators who, in the guise of glossing difficulties, in fact gloss over them. The anomalous and disturbing textual chetiv which the Talmudist cannot pronounce recalls both the uninterpretable hapaxlegomenon in Klein's unfinished detective novel and the unspeakable nefas in 'A Jew

Keri

235

in the Sistine Chapel/ All three represent the resistance of the Holocaust to .commentary, to being reduced to a reassuring keri. This resistance to commentary gives rise to two major interpretive strategies in writings on the Holocaust - what Roskies calls the 'apocalyptic' and the 'neoclassical' - both of which are reflected in The Second Scroll. The apocalyptic, radical school'4 views the Holocaust as absolutely incommensurate with any previous event in history, and therefore rejects all traditional Jewish modes of dealing with historical catastrophe which have been developed over the millennia. This school includes 'the best known writers on the Holocaust ... writers who represent a new beginning, who share no common assumptions and who project no coherent vision of the present and past, let alone of the future/ 5 and whose nihilistic despair has a powerful appeal in a post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima era. The 'neoclassical' alternative to this absolute rejection of tradition seems much closer to Klein's perspective in The Second Scroll. In neoclassical writings on the Holocaust, 'the greatest collective Jewish trauma [is] "worked through" by means of internal codes and archetypes.'6 While abandoning the unquestioning faith of classical Orthodoxy, the neoclassicist 'attemptfsl to piece together the broken tablets of the Covenant':7 The neoclassicist, like God, can make wholeness where only fragments remain ... The neoclassicist is most in demand in time of crisis - when the tablets are most clearly shattered, the letters most visibly struck out, and the people most widely dispersed ... [T]he greater the catastrophe, the more its victims reshape the ancient archetypes in its wake.8

There is, however, an obvious danger in the neoclassical response that the return to ancient archetypes becomes a means of evading the immediate horror of the Holocaust by explaining it away in terms of some larger pattern. The work of Nelly Sachs, for example, has been criticized on these grounds. Like Klein, Sachs draws on kabbalistic concepts to develop a redemptive vision of the Holocaust leading to the creation of the State of Israel. But, as Edward Alexander comments: To say that the end of the world of European Jewry brought about the rebirth of the Jewish people in Israel is not necessarily to assert that a higher power than man willingly presided over the death of European Jewry for the purpose of resurrecting the Jewish people in their homeland. Yet sometimes Nelly Sachs seems to assert precisely this. As the epigraph to one poem ... she cites the

236 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet statement from the Zohar that 'the sinking occurs for the sake of the rising' ... Our uneasiness with this conjunction [between life and death] in Nelly Sachs ... arises from the fear that it is too sanguine. If we have forced ourselves to see the Holocaust in its full horror, we cannot blink the fact that for the Jews of Europe this calamity was indeed - as Hannah Arendt says - 'the end of the world.'9 An instructive contrast to the 'too sanguine' neoclassicism of Sachs, with its somewhat facile resort to the Kabbalah, is offered by one of the most famous Yiddish poems on the Holocaust, 'Without Jews/ by Jacob Glatstein, which contains the following lines: Shattered Jewish skulls, shards of the divine, smashed, shamed pots these were Your light-bearing vessels, Your tangibles, Your portents of miracle! Now count these heads by the millions of the dead. Around You the stars go dark. Our memory of You, obscured. Soon Your reign will close.10 Alvin H. Rosenfeld comments: Understood against its sources in Jewish esoteric thought, this is a radical, antiLurianic poem, a 'de-kabbalization/ one might even call it, for in its portrayal of a broken people and its fragmented God, it represents a reversal of the kabbalistic account of origins, according to which reintegration or restoration succeeds an initial cataclysmic shattering. In Glatstein's post-Holocaust rewriting, though, there is no tikkun, or healing of the cosmic rupture, but only the shards of the disaster piled up to evidence the extinction rather than the effulgence of the creative fire ..-11 Klein, who corresponded with Glatstein and translated a number of his poems, was almost certainly familiar with 'Without Jews' and its rejection of the Lurianic model for interpreting the Holocaust, which he himself had first adopted in 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel/ and would develop in The Second Scroll. If, in the end, The Second Scroll avoids the

Keri 237 complacency which is always a possibility in the 'neoclassical' approach to the Holocaust, it is precisely because Klein is aware of the 'apocalyptic' critique of this approach. It is this awareness which is the source of the 'incongruities' in The Second Scroll, identified by Rachel Feldhay Brenner and a number of other recent critics as 'engenderfing] a subtext which subverts' its 'exalted vision of all-encompassing harmonious unity.'12 Klein originally intended to provide only one epigraph to The Second Scroll. However, in response to a last minute request from his publishers, who, for technical reasons, required some text between the title page and the contents page (letter from Herbert Weinstock [13 April 1951]), he provided a second epigraph (letter to Herbert Weinstock [18 April 1951]) from 'A Thou Song,' by the Chassidic Rabbi Levi Yitschok of Berdichev, which he had recently translated: REBONO SHEL OLAM:

Tis a Thou-song I will sing Thee Thou ... Thou ... Thou ... Thou AYEH EMTZOEKO, V'AYEH LO EMTZOEKO?

O, where shall I find Thee? And where art Thou not to be found? Wherever I fare - Thou! Or here, or there - Thou! Only Thou! None but Thou! Again, Thou! And still, Thou!

Like the first epigraph, this one, too, raises the issue of commentary: it is a commentary on a line from a poem by Yehuda Halevi, which Levi Yitschak quotes in Hebrew and then translates into Yiddish: 'O, where shall I find Thee? And where art Thou not to be found?' But Levi Yitschak is a detective as well as commentator; his search for a missing person, in this case God ('REBONO SHEL OLAM'), recalls similar searches in earlier works by Klein, for the 'lost' poet in 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape' (28), and for the victims of the Holocaust ('Where shall I seek you?') in 'Elegy' (14); it also points forward to the narrator's search, in The Second Scroll, for his Uncle Melech.13 There is one crucial difference, however, between Levi Yitschok and Klein's other 'detectives.' His search, unlike theirs, is successful; he finds the missing person for whom he is searching because He is omnipresent. There are hints, in The Second Scroll, that, in some sense, Uncle Melech is omnipresent as well - 'to look for Uncle Melech was to suspect him everywhere and to find him nowhere' (SS, p. 92) - but the

238 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet ecstatic union between Seeker and Sought in Levi Yitschok's ThouSong' has no parallel in The Second Scroll, the story of an 'incognito uncle and nephew unmet' (SS, pp. 37-8). The 'detective story of the soul' (MS 7519), which Klein had intended to write for years, turns out to be an 'anti-detective story/ one of a number of works in this genre which became increasingly dominant after the Second World War, most notably in the writings of postmodernists such as Robbe-Grillet, Nabokov, and, interestingly, in light of his anticipation of The Second Scroll, Borges. The anti-detective story, it has been argued, is 'the paradigmatic archetype of the postmodern literary imagination/ having as its 'formal purpose ... to evoke the impulse to "detect" ... in order to violently frustrate it by refusing to solve the crime .../14 As such, it poses a direct challenge to the underlying assumptions of modernism: Post-Modernists use as a foil the assumption of detective fiction that the mind can solve all: by twisting the details just the opposite becomes the case ... By exploiting the conventions of the detective story such men as Borges and RobbeGrillet have fought against the Modernist attempt to fill the void of the world with rediscovered mythical symbols. Rather, they dramatize the void.15 The most important example of the 'Modernist attempt to fill the void of the world with rediscovered mythical symbols' was also the one which had the greatest influence on The Second Scroll, Joyce's Ulysses. But, in The Second Scroll, torn between the modernist impulse to 'fill' the void and the postmodernist impulse to 'dramatize' it, Klein does not merely submit to Joyce's influence: he struggles against it, by rewriting Ulysses as an anti-detective story. The aspect of Ulysses which exerted the most obvious influence on The Second Scroll was its formal method of constructing a complex series of parallels between a contemporary narrative and an ancient archetype - what Borges dismisses as 'the many but superficial contacts between Joyce's Ulysses and Homer's Odyssey.' The Pentateuch plays precisely the same role in The Second Scroll, as a structural model and a source of symbolic imagery, as the Odyssey does in Ulysses. But there is another point of contact between the two works, a thematic rather than a formal one, which suggests a more complex relationship between them than simple imitation. Like The Second Scroll, Ulysses is about being 'in search of [a] kinsman' (SS, p. 43): for Leopold Bloom the kinsman is his son; for Stephen Dedalus it is his father. Stephen becomes Leopold's substitute for his

Keri

239

son, Ruby, who died when only a few days old, and Leopold becomes Stephen's substitute for his father, Simon, from whom he has become alienated. In the climactic episode of the novel, Leopold comes to the aid of Stephen, who has been drinking heavily and has been knocked down in a fight. He helps him to his feet and leads him to his home: 'Accordingly he passed his left arm in Stephen's right and led him on accordingly.'16 This climactic gesture of 'accord' between the older man and the younger corresponds precisely to the central motif throughout Klein's career for continuity and tradition: a child being escorted by a protective and loving adult - father, teacher, belfer, rabbi, policeman, and, of course, uncle. But Ulysses does not end on this gesture of accord. Although Stephen does accompany Leopold to his home, where the two of them achieve a degree of mutual understanding and sympathy despite their differences of character, intellect, and background, the encounter is only momentary; by the end of the novel, Leopold and Stephen have parted, almost certainly never to meet again, and it is unclear what lasting effects, if any, the events of the night before will have on either of them. In The Second Scroll, the quality of inconclusiveness, of 'almosting it' as Rosmarin Heidenreich describes it, citing a phrase of Stephen's/7 is much more strongly emphasized. From the very beginning, The Second Scroll establishes a stronger expectation than does Ulysses of a successful conclusion to the search for a kinsman. In contrast to Leopold's and Stephen's searches, which are largely symbolic with no expectation of practical results, the narrator's search in The Second Scroll is much more conscious and deliberate, much more detective-like. The narrator knows precisely whom he is looking for, and has a number of leads to track down; and, as the narrative unfolds, there is every reason to expect a successful resolution. The shock and sense of frustration, then, is all the greater when Uncle Melech is murdered and disfigured beyond recognition before his nephew is able to achieve his goal, to solve his case. Heidenreich argues that this inconclusiveness represents 'the elusiveness of a sense of the meaning of life.'18 And Michael Greenstein makes a similar point, drawing comparisons with Martin Buber's concept of '"mismeeting" and the Frankfurt School's irresolute negative dialectics ... forerunners of Derrida's deconstruction with its ... need to undo Hegelian synthesis.'19 Klein's own justification of the inconclusive ending of the novel, in a letter to Leon Edel (17 Sept. i95i),20 who complained about feeling frustrated by the lack of proper denouement, is curiously inadequate.

240 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet He explains that the narrator's quest for Uncle Melech is 'a Messianic pursuit/ and that the Messiah is, or is of, or is in the ubiquitous anonymity of universal Jewry's all-inclusive generation, he is the resurgent creativity of the incognitos of the folk ... That he should be killed was ... inevitable; it is the messianic fate; but his resurrection has already taken place. If I had displayed Uncle Melech plain, then would there have been frustration, frustration of my design and of his divinity.

Uncle Melech's role as the embodiment of 'anonymity' may explain why the narrator is never actually allowed to see him face to face. It fails to explain, however, why it is necessary for Uncle Melech to be brutally murdered: death may be the 'messianic fate' in the Christian tradition, but not in the Jewish. If Klein had intended to suggest the open-ended nature of the Messianic pursuit, surely he could simply have had Uncle Melech elude the narrator once more, as he had done so many times in the past. In the letter to Edel, Klein comments on the 'commentary' on Uncle Melech which he has just offered: Certainly the reader has been given fair warning through the Miltonic Hebrew of the epigraph, where he is told that the Chetiv (that which is written) is not often identical with the Keri (that which is read).

But, like the interpretation itself, this comment seems to avoid a crucial issue. The epigraph says much more than that 'the Chetiv is not often identical with the Keri': it actually condemns the keri as a falsification of the chetiv, thereby throwing into question the very act of commentary. Klein's letter to Edel, then, not only glosses over the most disturbing episode of the novel; it also glosses over the epigraph which warns specifically against glossing over what we find disturbing. Klein's comments on The Second Scroll, in letters to Edel and others,21 suffer from precisely the same limitations as his critical studies of Joyce and Hopkins: an obsession with reducing everything to a single coherent and reassuring pattern. As such, these comments should not be taken as any kind of final word on The Second Scroll. Rather, they are best seen as simply one more expression of Klein's impulse to transform textual chetiv to marginal keri, an impulse which is continually called into question within the novel itself. The failure of the narrator to meet his uncle is only the most extreme

Keri 241 case of the 'mismeetings' which are characteristic of The Second Scroll as a whole. The Second Scroll is almost entirely lacking in the kinds of interactions between characters which are the source of narrative development in most novels. Klein's inability to create convincing characters and to dramatize their interactions is just as apparent in The Second Scroll as in the weakest of his short stories.22 Where he attempts to do so, as in the episodes of the Kamenets massacre in 'Exodus' (SS, pp. 27-32), or the confrontation with Settano in 'Leviticus' (SS, pp. 46-54), the effect is an unconvincing blend of melodrama and rather heavy-handed allegory. But throughout most of The Second Scroll, he avoids these pitfalls by focusing less on the relationships between characters than on the relationships which really interest him: between texts and commentaries.23 In a letter to Herbert Weinstock, his editor at Knopf (14 August 1951), Klein refers to The Second Scroll as 'above all, a commentary,' specifically, as its title indicates, a commentary on the first scroll, the Pentateuch. The work as a whole is flanked by commentaries: the two epigraphs at the beginning, and the epilogue, consisting of the thirtieth Psalm, at the end. And there are five separate commentaries, in the form of glosses, corresponding to the five chapters. Less immediately obvious examples of commentary, but at least as important, are to be found in the numerous self-contained texts scattered throughout the novel - letters; newspaper articles; literary criticism; essays on philosophical, aesthetic, or historical themes; biblical exegeses, etc. - which comment in one way or another on the action of the novel. The Second Scroll, then, is not only a scroll which is unrolled as narrative, but also a 'palimpsest' (letter to Herbert Weinstock [14 August 1951]) which is overlaid with layer after layer of commentary.24 This layering effect is particularly striking in 'Gloss Gimel.' Its original version, 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel,' already consisted, as we have seen, of a layered commentary: a commentary on Michelangelo's commentary on the Bible. In The Second Scroll, however, the levels of commentary are multiplied to a vertiginous extent. Within the text, the levels of commentary are increased by the addition of a series of passages from the Vulgate forming a continuous commentary on the commentary on the biblical episodes portrayed in the central panels. The text as a whole, now attributed to Uncle Melech, becomes a commentary - 'Gloss Gimel' - on the third chapter of the novel, 'Leviticus.' And, in 'Leviticus,' 'Gloss Gimel' itself becomes the subject of an extensive commentary by the narrator (SS, pp. 55-8).

242 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet The story which forms the basis on which this towering structure of commentary is constructed is, essentially, very simple. In its broadest outlines, it follows the familiar pattern of Klein's story of the poet. Its hero, Uncle Melech, is a version of Klein's poet, a creative individual who, like Spinoza in 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens/ is 'under interdict' (4), declared 'tabu' (SS, p. 3) by a fragmented society which feels threatened by him. Like the poet in 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape,' who is 'incognito' (28) and 'makes ... a / halo of his anonymity' (160-1), the 'incognito uncle' (SS, p. 37) becomes 'the ubiquitous anonymity of universal Jewry's all-inclusive generation' (letter to Leon Edel [17 September i95i]).25 In addition to the poet and his community, the story includes the two other groups of characters familiar from the story of the poet: the evil usurper/impostor, in the form of Hitler and his followers, most notably the commandant whose slaughter of the Jews of Kamenets is a demonic parody of the coming of the Messiah; and the other poets, the 'bardlings' (SS, p. 99), who fail to rise to the miraculous occasion of the creation of the Israeli state. The story is developed in five chapters, which loosely parallel the five books of the Pentateuch. In 'Genesis,' the narrator's Uncle Melech, a model of piety and learning, becomes a communist after witnessing a pogrom and, as a result, is rejected by his orthodox relatives in Canada. At the end of the chapter, he is engulfed by the Holocaust. In 'Exodus/ several years have past. As the narrator is about to leave for Israel with the intention of compiling an anthology of Israeli poetry, he receives a letter from Uncle Melech, addressed to his parents, who are now dead. In the letter, Uncle Melech recounts how he survived the Holocaust, and is now in a refugee camp in Bari, waiting to depart for Israel. The narrator decides to try to track his uncle down. In 'Leviticus/ the narrator follows his uncle from Bari to Rome, where he learns that he has toyed with the idea of conversion to Roman Catholicism but has rejected it. Rather than leaving directly for Israel, Uncle Melech has decided to spend some time working with the impoverished Jewish community of Casablanca. In 'Numbers/ the narrator goes to Casablanca but just misses his uncle, who has left for Israel under a cloud, after upsetting the local Jewish community by publicizing the deplorable conditions of the mellah, or ghetto, of Casablanca. In 'Deuteronomy/ the narrator makes a number of fruitless attempts to contact his uncle in Israel, finally discovering that he has made his way to the synagogue of Rabbi Luria in Safed. But, before they can meet, Uncle Melech is murdered by Arab terrorists, and his body is burnt beyond recognition. The novel ends with his funeral.

Keri

243

As Linda Rozmovits points out, although the narrator and Uncle Melech never actually meet, 'over the course of the novel, the narrative family resemblance becom[es] increasingly apparent.'26 Specifically, it becomes increasingly apparent that the narrator's interpretation of Uncle Melech reflects Uncle Melech's own kabbalistic interpretation of the Holocaust, especially as elaborated in 'Gloss Gimel.' For, in addition to being the object of other people's commentaries in The Second Scroll, Uncle Melech is the master-commentator, who represents what Rozmovits calls the dialectical 'interpretive strategy'27 which shapes its narrative. In sharp contrast to this dialectical model of commentary is the 'antipathy to the dialectic' (SS, p. 14) which characterizes the commentaries other characters in the novel construct around Uncle Melech. These commentaries are perhaps best understood as a series of marginal keris, whose aim is not genuinely to negate negations, but to gloss over them as unpronounceable textual chetivs. The Second Scroll opens with the first and most extreme example of this kind of anti-dialectical commentary: For many years my father - may he dwell in a bright Eden! - refused to permit in his presence even the mention of that person's name. The mere imminence of an allusion to my uncle soon brought my father to an oblique deliberative ominous knuckle-combing of his beard, a sombre knitting of his brow, and froze at last his face to the stony stare Semitic. The tabu was recognized, and the subject was dropped. (SS, p. 3)

With his Medusa-like 'stony stare Semitic/ the narrator's father is typical of the commentators on Uncle Melech in the novel, who, whatever their perspectives, all attempt to turn him to stone, to reduce a protean, open-ended, 'unidentifiable entity' (letter to A.J.M. Smith [18 September i95il)28 constantly in process to a single, static, easily comprehensible category. The father's sense of betrayal is shared by most of the commentators on Uncle Melech, who begin by seeing him as a larger than life heroic figure, but one cast in their own image. When their attempts to categorize Uncle Melech prove inadequate to his baffling nature, they feel betrayed and attempt to replace their earlier positive interpretations with negative ones, but ones which are equally reductive and inadequate. With one exception, all of the acquaintances of Uncle Melech whom the narrator meets have undergone the same experience of initial infatuation followed by rejection: this is true, for example, of Monsignor Piersanti in Rome, Nachum Krongold at the refugee camp in Bari, and the JDC officials in

244 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Casablanca. The only apparent exception is the old man whom the narrator meets in the synagogue in Safed, whose admiration for Uncle Melech, as a kind of reincarnation of Rabbi Isaac Luria, is undimmed; but, then, Uncle Melech has not been in Safed long enough to disappoint this latest set of expectations. Of all the commentators on Uncle Melech, it is only the narrator himself who seems to be able to avoid the pattern of infatuation and disappointment, for he is the only one who has learned to adopt the dialectical perspective of Uncle Melech's own commentary. That is, he interprets the repeated, unexpected turns in Uncle Melech's story, not as betrayals, but as part of an unfolding dialectical process leading to a final synthesis. But throughout The Second Scroll there is evidence of a conflict between a yearning for this final synthesis and doubts about whether such a synthesis is possible or even desirable. This conflict is reflected in the implicit comparisons which Klein draws between the kabbalistic dialectic, which is at the centre of the novel, and two other versions of dialectic which he rejects as fallacious: the Marxist negation of the negation in the first three chapters; and the negation of the Diaspora, characteristic of some versions of Zionism, in the last two. It can, of course, be argued that Klein's strategy is to emphasize the positive qualities of Uncle Melech's kabbalistic dialectic by contrasting it with these two negative versions. However, the nagging suspicion remains that, whatever form it takes, the very concept of the dialectic is a delusion. Although Klein clearly prefers the kabbalistic dialectic which Uncle Melech eventually adopts to the Marxist one which he abandons, he remains, as Michael Greenstein argues, 'skeptical of dialectical modes of thought' of all varieties, and he rejects attempts 'to reconcile antitheses into a conclusive synthesis ... in favour of a more open-ended and open-minded fluidity.'29 This ambivalence towards the dialectic, even the 'good' dialectic of the Kabbalah, is suggested in Uncle Melech's letter at the end of 'Exodus/ in which he first formulates his kabbalistic interpretation of the Holocaust as part of the dialectical unfolding of history: When the years were ripened, and the years fulfilled, then was there fashioned Aught from Naught. Out of the furnace there issued smoke, out of the smoke a people descended. (SS, pp. 35-6)

This ringing affirmation cannot quite drown out the more hesitant voice of the Talmudic commentator cited in the same letter, who prefers to

Keri 245 defer all considerations of final synthesis to the Tishbite, whose 'benediction [is] not yet composed' (SS, p. 35). This is the same Tishbite who will 'resolve all problems and difficulties' at the end of time, and who is invoked by the formula taiku (SS, pp. 107-8) whenever the dialectic fails to achieve a resolution. By the end of the third chapter of The Second Scroll, the Marxist dialectic has been entirely rejected as a viable model for interpreting history; neither Uncle Melech nor the narrator is susceptible to the Satanic temptations represented in that chapter by the Marxist Settano, 'smiling that dialectical smile of his' (SS, p. 49). But the two final chapters of the novel are haunted by another version of the dialectic, which poses a much more serious challenge to the narrator's and Uncle Melech's interpretation of history: shlilath hagaluth, according to which the creation of the State of Israel is the negation, not of the Holocaust, but of the Diaspora, marking the end of a shameful two-thousand-year hiatus in Jewish history, which is best forgotten (see pp. 32-3 above). Klein vehemently rejects this concept of a Jewish state in isolation, turning its back on a Diaspora doomed to 'ultimate perdition' (SS, p. 100); and he proposes, in its place, a continuing and mutually beneficial relationship between Israel and the Diaspora. But the concept of the negation of the Diaspora continues to cast a shadow over the novel's conclusion, a shadow which Klein's eloquence is unable entirely to dispel. Klein begins his exploration of the relationship between the Diaspora and Israel in the second last chapter of the novel, 'Numbers,' which presents the Diaspora at its most negative, in the form of the mellah of Casablanca, a kind of 'Inferno' (SS, p. 74) on the way to the Paradiso of the new Jewish state.30 Before the narrator enters the mellah itself, he explores the city of Casablanca, where his 'eyes luxuriat[el upon each opulent still life' (SS, p. 67). He is attracted by this opulence, but repelled by it as well; for, as he comes to realize, the life of Casablanca is, in reality, a 'still life/ stagnant, inward-turning. Life has become petrified by a 'stony stare/ as is suggested by the omnipresent 'arabesques ... the calligraphy of growing things, pattern of shoot and tendril and climbing vine' which are 'combined and embraced, interlaced, wove[n] out of iron or the inscribed stone' (SS, p. 69). The geometric patterning of these arabesques recalls the geometry of the Sistine Chapel: 'triangle consorting with square, circle rolling in rectangle, the caress parabolic, the osculations of symmetry' (SS, p. 136). But, whereas in the Sistine Chapel abstractions are given life, 'theorems [are] made

246 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet flesh' (SS, p. 136), in Casablanca precisely the opposite occurs: the 'remote' art of Casablanca is an art not of incarnation but of abstraction, 'abstracting the beauty of the world to its planes and lines, rolling in intimate involvement the intertangled triangles, the paired squares; eschewing image, delighting in form' (SS, p. 69). The reduction of dynamic process to static form in the art of Casablanca, which can produce effects of great beauty, has its demonic counterpart in the profound spiritual paralysis of the mellah. The nature of the mellah is established from the very beginning, in a passage which, as Rozmovits points out, is a kind of 'fouled'31 version of Uncle Melech's movement through the corridors leading into the Sistine Chapel: We entered, we slid into the mellah; literally: for the narrow lane which gaped through the gateway at the clean world was thick with offal and slime and the oozing of manifold sun-stirred putrescences. (SS, p. 73)

There is no hint, in the swarming mass of humanity which the narrator encounters in the mellah, of 'the human form divine.' The world of 'Numbers' is, as its title suggests, the world of the Many cut off from any unifying principle of the One; it is a world in which there is no sense of a process unfolding towards some final resolution. Process is conceivable only in terms of physical decay, 'the oozing of manifold sun-stirred putrescences/ or of spiritual degradation, suggested by the reference to Circe at the beginning of the chapter (SS, p. 64), the sorceress who transforms men to beasts. The inhabitants of the mellah have no concept of progressive change but accept their situation as part of a static pattern, which they have not created and cannot change. They exist in a world outside of time: they have forgotten the glories of their past and have no hope for the future, and, as far as they are concerned, neither the Holocaust nor the creation of the State of Israel might ever have occurred. The word which re-echoes throughout the mellah is 'katoob' (SS, p. 81), 'it is written,' a word which, interestingly, is a cognate of chetiv. For the inhabitants of the mellah, there is no keri which can transform this chetiv/katoob; trapped in their physical and spiritual Inferno, they have abandoned all hope of redemption. It is precisely such a hope that the narrator searches for and discovers in Israel. As if to emphasize the stark difference between the Diaspora, which the narrator has just abandoned, and the Promised Land, which he is about to enter, 'Deuteronomy' opens with a commentary on the events

Keri 247 of recent history which dialectically links the creation of Israel to the passing of the Diaspora. On the airplane to Israel, the narrator has a conversation with a fellow-passenger who interprets the creation of Israel as the Incarnation of a discarnated people (SS, pp. 85-90). According to this theory, ever since the Exile of the Jewish people from their homeland, the Jewish historical experience has been one of Discarnation, of the separation of Existence from Essence. The Idea which the Jewish people represent was once embodied in the life of a nation, but, in the Diaspora, it finds expression only in a disembodied, spectre-people, an Essence without an Existence. The creation of Israel represents a leap of the Jewish people, and of the Idea which they represent, back into Existence, into time and reality. What made this leap possible, paradoxically, was the Holocaust, specifically the ability of the Jewish people to survive the greatest assault upon them in their history. This survival proved that 'the spectre-people was immune to death ... In the light of this truth, the chance involved in seeking a Return to Time could now be taken, since it did not at all involve taking a chance; nothing could be lost' (SS, p. 89). Armed with a new confidence in their ability to survive, 'pulverized, etherealized Jewry had put on flesh again' (SS, p. 89). The crux of this argument, that 'the spectre-people was immune to death,' recalls the similar crux in 'Gloss Gimel,' where Uncle Melech argues that 'deicide ... is the evil possible only in its attempt, not in its perpetration.' And, like Uncle Melech's argument, the argument of the fellow-passenger fails to convince. It certainly fails to convince the narrator, who comments: I could not refrain from taking issue with many of his assertions. They seemed to me to be too facile, too glib; his novelties were largely verbalizations; there was much that his theory too gallantly ignored. (SS, p. 89)

'Deuteronomy,' then, begins with both a statement and a refutation of a dialectical commentary on the Holocaust, which have the same effect as the two epigraphs with which the novel begins, of simultaneously affirming and denying the interpretive strategy of the book as a whole. In 'Deuteronomy,' this interpretive strategy involves two searches: The search for [Uncle MelechJ runs simultaneous with the search for Israel's poetic principle - they are one and the same' (letter to A.J.M. Smith [18 September 1951]). These parallel searches are complete when the narrator is convinced that he has discovered, in both Uncle Melech's story and 'Israel's poetic principle,' the working out of the

248 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet kabbalistic dialectic, which Uncle Melech had first articulated in his letter in 'Exodus/ and then elaborated in 'Gloss Gimel.' Yet, although the narrator interprets both of his searches as successes, the nagging possibility remains that 'there [is] much that his theory too gallantly ignore[s]/ and that his apparent successes may, in fact, be thinly disguised failures. This is especially true of his interpretation of the two crucial acts of tikkun which bring the novel's double search to a close, the rebirth of the Hebrew language and Uncle Melech's funeral. The narrator's 'search for Israel's poetic principle' takes him to many different poets, none of whom is able to give adequate voice to the new Jewish state. Finally, however, he discovers what he has been looking for where he has least expected it, not in the works of the poets, but in the everyday language of the street: It was all there all the time - the fashioning folk, anonymous and unobserved, creating word by word, phrase by phrase, the total work that when completed would stand as epic revealed! (SS, pp. 106-7)

The rebirth of the Hebrew language reverses the millennia-long paralysis of the Diaspora, the reduction of 'shoot and tendril and climbing vine' to dead, static patterns: Nameless authorship flourished in the streets. It was as growth, its very principle, shown in prolific action! Twigs and branches that had been dry and sapless for generations, for millennia, now budded, blossomed - and with new flowers! (SS, p. 108)

To the narrator, this miraculous renewal of the Hebrew language is an act of tikkun, symbolized here, as in the rainbow passage in 'Gloss Gimel' (SS, p. 147), by the re-membering of a dismembered body: It was as if I was spectator to the healing of torn flesh, or heard a broken bone come together, set, and grow again. Wonderful is the engrafting of skin, but more wonderful the million busy hushed cells, in secret planning, stitching, stretching, until - the wound is vanished, the blood courses normal, the cicatrice falls off. I had at last discovered it, the great efflorescent impersonality. (SS, p. 108)

But, the narrator's genuine excitement at the rebirth of the Hebrew language notwithstanding, the fact remains that his mission, to find the

Keri

249

great Israeli poet, the new Bialik, has been a failure. His attempt to find a substitute for this poet in the inventions of copywriters, who exploit the language of the Bible to advertise insurance, dry-cleaning, or ice cream, is paradoxical to say the least. Elsewhere, Klein expresses contempt for the debasement of language by commerce, and for the connivance of poets in the process, most notably, as Linda Rozmovits points out,32 in The Usurper' (1949), an article published in the year he made his trip to Israel: [H]e took sacred things - and prostituted them to a peddler's purpose and profit... [T]he skill he once enjoyed had degenerated among the easy ephemera he daily created ... [He] has usurped and degraded the true function ... the debaucher of words. (LER, p. 197)

It is only, then, through the most extreme and self-contradictory paradox that the narrator can convince himself that his search for 'Israel's poetic principle' has not failed. As his climactic example of 'nameless authorship' - taiku (SS, pp. 107-8) - reminds us, the story is not yet over; for the moment, at least, this question, like so many others in the novel, 'abides' (SS, p. 107). Of all the questions which still abide at the end of the novel, the most important, of course, is the meaning, if any, of Uncle Melech's brutal murder. At Uncle Melech's funeral, the narrator argues that his death has not been meaningless because it has provided the occasion for a great act of tikkun, the coming together of the Jewish people in a new spirit of wholeness: [I]t was as if the tribes of Israel had come to life again and were travelling as in olden times, each with its devices and gems ... A vast congregation it was, solemn, sacerdotal, gathered as for some high mythic rite in which were concealed its most personal experience and its most deeply cherished verities. (SS, pp. 119-20)

The novel ends with the narrator revoking the tabu under which his uncle had been placed, by uttering with pride the name he had always been forbidden to mention: In that assembly where Uncle Melech's passing was being made into a dedication service, I was the only one within the degree of mourning. As at the centre of a whirlwind, amidst a great silence, I intoned the kaddish for my uncle who

250 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet had had no son, uttering with pride this wonderful mourner's Magnificat which does not mention death; with pride, for it was flesh of my flesh that was here being exalted. The name that had once rung for me with angel pennies was resounding now to the conning of a new alphabet. It was my kinsman's name. Uncle Melech was brought to his final rest. The crowds dispersed. I turned for the last time from the city of Safed, holy city on whose hills once were kindled, as now again, the beacons announcing new moons, festivals, and set times. (SS, pp. 120-1)

By negating the negation of Uncle Melech's death, the narrator negates, as well, the negation of the Holocaust. The symbolic transformation of the flames which had destroyed Uncle Melech's body into 'the beacons announcing new moons, festivals, and set times' is the final culmination of the process which had begun in 'Elegy/ of 'gathering] the flames up to light orient / Over the land' ('Elegy,' 160-1). Without denying the genuine eloquence of the final pages of The Second Scroll, it does seem possible to question whether the 'national demonstration' (SS, p. 119) occasioned by Uncle Melech's murder is commensurate with what we know of him. As far as we have been led to believe, Uncle Melech was scarcely a national figure at the time of his death: he had remained in relative obscurity, known only to a small circle of kabbalists in Safed. So obscure was he that his nephew's many attempts to track him down had all failed. Why, then, the widespread interest in his funeral, and why the claim, made by one of his eulogists, that he 'had through the sheer force of his existence again in our life naturalized the miracle' (SS, p. 120)? The strange gap between the troubled and troubling figure of the Uncle Melech whom we know from the rest of the novel and the national icon into which he has been mysteriously and abruptly transformed is typical of the gap between keri and chetiv throughout the novel and, especially, in its final pages. Perhaps the 'wonderful mourner's Magnificat which does not mention death' at the end of the novel is simply one more marginal keri glossing over an unpronounceable textual chetiv - no different, in this respect, from the tabu on 'the mention of that person's name' with which the novel began. In Hurban, Alan L. Mintz has a comment on the return of the Jewish people from their first exile which is relevant to the return from the second exile celebrated in The Second Scroll: Now ... some of the exiles did return, and in time a temple was built; however, it takes only the barest familiarity with the writings of Ezra, Nehemiah, and the

Keri

251

latter prophets to realize that the protracted, tortuous difficulties faced by the postexilic community present the strongest possible contrast to Isaiah's visionary consummations. And it is hard to say whether this stunning gap between vision and reality served for these generations more as a ground for continuing hope or deepening embitterment.33

The protracted, tortuous difficulties' of the past forty-five years, as the State of Israel has attempted to legitimate itself as one nation state among many, has resulted in a similar 'gap between vision and reality/ And it has become increasingly difficult to share Klein's euphoric Visionary consummations/ according to which the establishment of the Jewish state represents the final synthesis of Jewish history, the tikkun which has negated, once and for all, the shevirah of the Holocaust. Whatever one's attitude to Israel, there seems little doubt that it has not provided any sort of final answer to the questions which the Holocaust has raised and continues to raise about humanity's capacity for evil. The Holocaust remains as unspeakable as ever, a hapaxlegomenon, an unpronounceable textual chetiv, that defies all attempts to reduce it to a modest marginal keri. Yet, despite the failure of the Visionary consummations' of The Second Scroll to convince, the novel retains its power, and especially in those passages, such as 'Gloss Gimel' and the final pages of 'Deuteronomy/ in which Klein expresses his redemptive vision with the greatest urgency. The source of this power, I would argue, is not in the marginal keri itself, but in the poignant tension between marginal keri and textual chetiv, a tension which neither Klein nor any other commentator on the Holocaust can ever resolve. As Edward Alexander says of writing on the Holocaust: We are ... dealing here with one of those problematic human enterprises in which some degree of failure or inadequacy is almost a precondition of success, in which we can expect no more than a shattered majesty and a noble imperfection ... [Ljiterary works that are characterized by uncertainty, paralysis, and ambivalence may provide a more adequate response to the Holocaust than works controlled by a tangible voice committed to the traditional transmutation of suffering into beauty and chaos into tragic significance.34

In The Second Scroll, although the voice of 'uncertainty, paralysis, and ambivalence' can be clearly heard, the dominant voice of the novel is still 'committed to the traditional transmutation of suffering into beauty and chaos into tragic significance/ In the works which follow, the

252 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet possibility of such a 'gloss on suffering' comes to seem increasingly remote, until, by the end of this final phase of Klein's career, he can no longer even conceive of the possibility of a marginal keri. All that remains for him is the unpronounceable textual chetiv and silence.

12

Where Shall I Cry Bereshith?

With The Second Scroll, Klein's story of the poet is complete. During the years remaining to him before his final breakdown in the mid-fifties, Klein adds nothing new to this story, which no longer has the power to sustain him. But, although he has lost confidence in his story of the poet, he has not lost interest in it. Rather than simply abandoning it altogether, he turns against it, subjecting it to a series of profoundly sceptical revisions, with the aim of dismembering it beyond any hope of re-membering. Klein's interest in revising earlier versions of his story of the poet, rather than developing new ones, is most obvious in his poetry. With a few minor exceptions, Klein wrote no original poetry in the fifties. However, during this period he undertook an ambitious series of revisions of his earlier poetry for inclusion in a 'Selected Poems,' which was never published. These revisions contain some of Klein's most accomplished writing, suggesting that the reason he abandoned poetry was a loss of confidence in his story of the poet rather than a failure of poetic skill. This suggestion is supported by perhaps the single most impressive revision from the period, a long passage which Klein added to 'In Re Solomon Warshawer,' which is as much a revision of 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape' as it is of 'In Re.' In the course of this passage, Solomon Warshawer describes what he has learned of the human heart: I fathom d that heart's depths, how it may sink Down to the deep and ink of genesis, And lie there, that once could the heavens explore, A sponge and pulse of hunger on the ocean-floor ...

(141-4)

254 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet The allusion to the Book of Genesis in these lines is bitterly ironical, for no divine light of creation issues from these dark depths; no phosphorus shines at the bottom of this sea. The vision is a despairing one, of a negation for which no negation is possible. The note of despair is sounded even more powerfully in another set of revisions of the period, to the translations of Bialik which Klein had first undertaken twenty years earlier. As he had done in the midthirties, Klein once more turns to Bialik as a kind of surrogate who enables him to give voice to feelings too painful to express directly in his own poetry. Two of these revised translations, in particular, are among Klein's most powerfully disturbing admissions of the complete failure of his ambitions as a poet. In 'O Thou Seer, Go Flee Thee Away/ the poet rejects, with unbridled contempt, the community which has never valued his attempts to serve it: 'Fly! Run away!' Not such as I do run. I followed cattle, they taught me to walk slow. Slow comes my speech, my words come one by one The strokes of an axe they come down, blow by blow. The strokes fell false? ... Not mine, not mine the blunder. Yours was the fault the strokes were falsely sunk: My hammer struck, and found no anvil under; My axe struck punk. No matter; I accept my fate, retire, And gird my gear about my loins once more: A hired man, but cheated of his hire I will return - at my pace - to my door; And there, in the deep forest, will strike root With the great sycamore, and there hold firm; But unto you, - rot, fungus, trodden fruit I prophesy - the whirlwind and the storm!

Years of brooding on the bitterness of rejection separate the contemptuous violence of 'My axe struck punk' from the blandness of the version from the late thirties: 'Wood that was rotten took my sharp axe in' ('Seer, Begone/ 8). But it is in another of the revised Bialik translations, 'A Spirit Passed before Me/ that the full extent of Klein's despair is

Where Shall I Cry Bereshith? 255 evident; for in this poem it is not only community, but language itself, which has failed him. Moved by a sudden impulse to speak, the poet discovers that he is unable to do so, because the only language available to him has become irredeemably fouled: For my speech, O Lord, is altogether abhorrent, has become a broth of abomination. There is not a word in it that has not been infected to the root; not a phrase but heard and it is mocked, not a locution but it has boarded in a house of shame. (9-13)

Now even the option of retreat, which had always been available to the poet in the past - retreat into the garden of Mynheer, or to the bottom of the sea - is denied him: Daily, as the gutters are swept and the urinals emptied, their fetor, too, rises and corrupts the air, penetrates even to the man shut solitary in his room, unsabbaths his peace. (31-3)

The phrase 'unsabbaths his peace/ which has no equivalent in the original, denies the possibility of an alternative to the corruption of the everyday world. The poem ends with a wistful hope for such an alternative among as yet uncorrupted children: Only in the twittering of the birds, twittering at sunrise, or in the company of little children, playing in the street their simple games, only there may I be cleansed. I will go, therefore, I will mingle with them, I will join in the aleph-bais of their talk and their lessons; and in that clean breath feel clean again. (38-43)

This passage reverses the escort motif which throughout Klein's career had embodied the redemptive power of tradition: now it is the adult who seeks guidance from the child. But one is left with a serious doubt about the ability of the innocence of children to take over this redemptive role. Although the poet hopes to 'feel' clean/ it is unlikely that he will ever actually become so; it is more likely that he will corrupt the innocent children with whom he 'mingles.' Klein's revisions to his own poems and to his translations of the poems of Bialik provide a powerful glimpse into his disillusionment

256 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet with the poet's role. But it is in certain prose works of the period that the implications of this disillusionment for his story of the poet are most fully worked out: in the essays The Bible Manuscripts' (1951), 'In Praise of the Diaspora' (1953), and The Bible's Archetypical Poet' (1953); in the novella The Bells of Sobor Spasitula' (c. 1955); and, most importantly, in the unfinished novel The Golem' (c. 1955). The Bible Manuscripts,' whose first instalment appeared in the Canadian Jewish Chronicle in the month following the publication of The Second Scroll,2 marks the beginning of this process. The essay takes as its subject the central metaphor of The Second Scroll, the Torah scroll, methodically examining, and ultimately rejecting, the claim that it embodies an unbroken tradition reaching back to the original divine revelation on Mount Sinai. Klein begins by stating the traditional view that this revelation is the ultimate expression of the principle of the One, which has unfolded throughout history. It is 'the One ... One! and Alone! Unique! Sole! Singular! First! Last! Eternal! Sempiternal! One!' (LER, pp. 133-4), and within it is 'coiled' (LER, p. 134) the essence of the moral law from which generations of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic commentators have 'deduced ... pandects and codes entire' (LER, p. 133). But, as Klein points out, direct evidence of this divine revelation no longer exists. The tables on which God Himself inscribed the ten commandments were shattered by Moses, and even the copy which Moses made to replace the originals has disappeared. The Torah, then, which appears, literally as well as metaphorically, to unroll the divine Word from its scroll, is, in fact, merely re-membering what has been shattered. It is no more than a 'transcript' (LER, p. 135), testifying to the absence of the One rather than to its presence: 'our ethic [is] based on hearsay' (LER, p. 133). Moreover, there is a gap of at least two thousand years separating the earliest surviving copies of the scroll from the revelation on Mount Sinai, and there is no reason to assume that the Torah has remained unchanged during these millennia. In fact, the many inconsistencies and incoherencies in the text strongly suggest the opposite. Klein discusses the unconvincing attempts of commentators to explain these problems away, especially by means of keri and chetiv, which he rejects with even greater vehemence than in the Miltonic epigraph to The Second Scroll: And now consider it, the most startling, the most shattering of the idiosyncrasies of these scribes. For here, and here, and here again, the word's writ one way, and tradition bids you read another. Ketib - thus it is written, but Keri -

Where Shall I Cry Bereshith? 257 you must read it thus. Nor is it a simple innocuous ambiguity which thence ensues, but often - and this is the most un-hinging thought of all - downright negation. For the word is written lo, with an aleph, meaning 'no'; it is read lo, with a vav, meaning 'to him.' A no has been nullified! The Bible's no, Sinai's prohibitory no! has been argued, edited away; the nay is converted into yea! What follows? Volcanic are the implications, the earth's foundations tremble, seismic is the human heart... (LER, p. 139)

The example he cites is, quite literally, a negation of the negation ('A no has been nullified!'), but one which leads, not to the unfolding of the dialectic towards some final synthesis, but to the 'shattering' of all certainties. By the end of the essay, Klein arrives at the conclusion that all is in doubt, that there is no sure basis for morality, no divine One to be unfolded: Can it be that all these centuries when we have conformed, we conformed to the edict of a forgery? And when we sinned, the sin was but an illusion, an error in a reading? The question sends earthquakes under the world's foundations. The dynasties tremble. The question distils poison in the brain - the moralists shake in a chill, the philosophers go mad. (LER, pp. 142-3)

The Bible Manuscripts,' then, can be seen as a radical revision of The Second Scroll, in which doubts about the vision of the One in the Many, and about the metaphor of the unrolling scroll through which this vision is expressed, have moved from the margins to the centre. This process is further developed in an essay which began to appear in the Canadian Jewish Chronicle about a year later, Tn Praise of the Diaspora (An Undelivered Memorial Address).'3 Like The Bible Manuscripts/ 'In Praise of the Diaspora' seems to reflect directly back on The Second Scroll. It begins, in fact, where The Second Scroll left off, with a funeral oration for a departed uncle: To mark, to mourn, and to pray tribute to the memory of a world and a life that has passed, - it is for such sombre rite that this assembly, come from the congregations and tabernacles and booths of Israel, has gathered here this day in concourse pious and solemn. (BS, p. 463)

The uncle is Uncle Galuth, the personification of the Diaspora:

258 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet One who had been real and warm and human, and was no more, - my deceased kinsman, he who had walked a stony, tortuous road, had known men and cities, had embraced, had wrestled the world, and, at length, giving up the ghost, had left - a name! (BS, p. 467)

But there is a crucial difference between the deaths of the two uncles. In The Second Scroll, Uncle Melech's death was a negation which was dialectically taken up into the higher synthesis of the State of Israel; but in 'In Praise of the Diaspora/ there is no higher synthesis into which Uncle Galuth's death can be taken up: the State of Israel is simply 'the very antonymn and negation of the Diaspora' (BS, p. 467). The concept of the negation of the Diaspora, which had haunted the optimistic celebration of the creation of the Jewish state in The Second Scroll, and which Klein had sought to dismiss as a temporary aberration, can no longer be denied. Klein abandons his attempt to argue for a continuing and mutually beneficial relationship between the Jewish state and the Jewish communities of the Diaspora, and, instead, is reduced to pleading for a recognition of the accomplishments of a period in Jewish history which is now closed. At the heart of the essay is the argument that it is only through the experience of the Diaspora that the Jewish people came to embody the principle of the One in the Many, demonstrating an openness to the variety of human experience while continuing in its adherence to the unifying principle which makes it One: Is there anything, indeed, more protean than the Diaspora, changing with the meridians, adaptive to clime and time, mobile but not unstable, mutable, volatile, almost mercurial, yet ever beneath all its transmogrifications constant to its purpose, undenting adamant with regard to the first principle of its religion and faith? (BS, p. 475)

It is, Klein argues, this richness of experience which will survive in the Jewish people as they establish a new existence in the Jewish homeland; and the essay ends with a celebration of the spirit of the Diaspora, which will transcend its physical destruction: [A]t the hour of his death he is seen in the true light, exemplar, model, inspiration. We shall remember him. In the hour of prosperity his memory shall be to us as a warning; and in the hour of adversity that same memory shall be strength impregnable. Our kinsman has passed on, but no, he is not dead, is

Where Shall I Cry Bereshith? 259 with us still. He has but suffered a time-change. His body we have lowered into the grave, but his spirit, now in our own lives made more free, now summoned to tasks easier than any of those he has already vanquished, now for constructiveness and not simply for survival 'bound in the bond of the living' - his spirit shall prevail! (BS, p. 477)

Klein's resolutely optimistic argument that, despite the destruction of the Diaspora as a historical reality, its greatest triumphs, in some sense, lie ahead is paradoxical, to say the least. A comparison with a wellknown Yiddish essay by Hayim Greenberg, 'Golus-Jew' (i.e., Diaspora Jew), which was probably a model for 'In Praise of the Diaspora/ suggests how extreme Klein's defiance of historical reality is. Like Klein, Greenberg defends the heroism and achievements of the Diaspora Jew throughout the ages, and he argues that the values of the Diaspora are worthy of respect. But his claims concerning the continued relevance of these values are much more modest than Klein's: Are we about to conclude this great and Quixotic chapter in our biography? It is likely. But Israel must not become the land of Sancho Panza. The tensions of the golus-Jew, some of his ability to vault chasms, elements of his piety, and his constant sense of guilt should become part of the new way of life.4

The contrast in tone between Klein's heroic defiance and Greenberg's melancholy, and much more realistic, resignation is striking. As is so often the case in Klein's final works, the elevation of the rhetoric cannot mask the depth of the despair; the crucial point about 'In Praise of the Diaspora' is that Klein now admits, as he had refused to do in The Second Scroll, that 'the Diaspora is dead' (BS, p. 477). While there is no evidence that Klein ever abandoned his faith in the creation of the State of Israel as the redemption of the Jewish people as a whole, it seems clear that, in the end, he came to see this redemption, from his own perspective as a 'golus-Jew,' not as a negation of the negation, but as a negation of himself. There is, to paraphrase Kafka, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope - but not for Klein.5 The final instalment of 'In Praise of the Diaspora' was followed the next week in the Canadian Jewish Chronicle by the first instalment of The Bible's Archetypical Poet.'6 If, as I have argued, both 'In Praise of the Diaspora' and The Bible Manuscripts' can be read as profoundly sceptical revisions of The Second Scroll, the same argument can be made for the relationship between The Bible's Archetypical Poet' and 'Portrait

260 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet of the Poet as Landscape.' The poet who is portrayed in this essay is Joseph, and the landscape with which he is identified consists of 'a fruitful bough by a well; whose branches run over the wall' (LER, p. 147), a landscape which, as we have seen (see p. 25 above), Klein allegorizes as a representation of the ideal relationship between the poet and his people. This commentary on the biblical text, while ingenious, offers nothing new: it simply recapitulates the argument which Klein had developed in his numerous versions of the story of the poet over the previous twenty years, most notably in 'Portrait of the Poet.' But there is another passage in The Bible's Archetypical Poet' which strikes a note which we have not heard before, at least never as clearly: It is impossible to preserve this story, detail after symbolic detail, without realizing that here we have encountered the classic design figuring the relation between the poet and his fellows. Described in its bare and epic outlines in the Book of Genesis, it is a design which repeats itself down through the ages. The dictionaries of national biography are replete with it. Every generation sees its repetition, every clime has its counterpart. It is a design which, beginning with misunderstanding and envy, moves on towards conspiracy, suggests, at first, a mere humiliating of its victim, then, feeding upon its own thoughts, soon clamours for revenge, and thus, by its own clamorous blood encompassed, broods on the ultimate: murder. (LER, p. 146) There are, of course, many earlier statements in Klein's work of his dissatisfaction with his relationship to his community. But here, as Usher Caplan notes, 'Klein carried this point to its limit by suggesting that there is an underlying hostility of the folk towards its artists that verges on murder.'7 And Caplan is probably right in seeing in the essay evidence of Klein's 'incipient paranoia.'8 In light of this deeply disturbing outburst of bitterness and resentment towards his community, what Caplan characterizes as the 'ultimate reconciliation between the poet and the folk' through 'the dialectic'9 at the end of the essay rings hollow indeed. It is difficult to conceive of a dialectic with the power to transform the vengeful mob conspiring against the poet's very life into 'the makers of a tradition' by whom the poet is 'nourished' (LER, p. 148). In Klein's other works of the period which touch on the poet's fate, 'The Bells of Sobor Spasitula' and The Golem,' it is, not surprisingly, the 'classic design' of the poet as helpless victim which predominates, rather than the optimistic vision of dialectical resolution with which the essay ends.

Where Shall I Cry Bereshithl 261 The Bells of Sobor Spasitula' translates Klein's biblical allegory of the poet as victim of a murderous conspiracy motivated by misunderstanding and envy into historical terms. Vladimir Sergeivich Terpetoff is a gifted and popular composer whose world has been swept away by the Russian Revolution. Unable to produce the kind of simple-minded program music demanded of him by his political masters, he finally decides to deceive them by allowing a piece composed before the Revolution, 'Prelude to the Dormition of the Little Mother/ to be performed, in a slightly revised form, under a new title, 'Overture Proletarian.' This supposedly new work is reviewed with great enthusiasm by a leading party theoretician, who claims that it is 'an illustration of how the technique of Marxian dialectics may be applied to composition itself (Stories, p. 299); and he goes on to demonstrate this absurd interpretation at great length. When the truth comes out, the infuriated authorities threaten Terpetoff with public humiliation unless he creates a genuine work for the people. He agrees. Secretly making his way to the belltower of the Sobor Spasitula Cathedral, he rings its bells, which have been silenced since the Revolution, attracting crowds of onlookers. He is shot by the authorities and falls to his death. The relationship between the narrator of The Bells of Sobor Spasitula/ Arkady Mikhailovich, and its protagonist, Terpetoff, recalls the relationship between the narrator of The Second Scroll and Uncle Melech. In both cases, the narrator attempts to construct a commentary on the life and brutal death of a mysterious, larger than life figure, some years his senior. But, whereas in The Second Scroll the commentary is largely successful, in The Bells of Sobor Spasitula' it is much more problematical. We are never convinced that the narrator has really understood Terpetoff. For example, he is never able to make sense of the most important relationship of Terpetoff's life, his love affair with a peasant woman, which, in some unexplained manner, gives the authorities power over him. But even more to the point is the suggestion that the narrator has no truer an understanding of Terpetoff's music than the Marxists do. The narrator's most explicit act of commentary in the story, a religiose analysis of 'Prelude to the Dormition of the Little Mother/ is just as tendentious as the Marxist analysis of 'Overture Proletarian.' Both are stories made up in response to the titles, which are not even Terpetoff's own, rather than to the music itself: as far as Terpetoff is concerned, the piece is 'Opus 13' and is purely abstract in nature. As Margaret I. Broad points out, the narrator's initials, 'A.M./ are probably intended to suggest a parallel with Klein;10 but, significantly, the Marxist commentator on 'Overture Proletarian' signs his

262 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet review 'K/ It is as if these two commentators together form a unit, 'A.M.K./ Klein's mocking portrait of himself as a storyteller/commentator, constructing his irrelevant 'marginal Keri.' The narrator's description of himself as condemned to the emigre's fate of being a kind of 'marginalia' on a page he can never fully decipher (Stories, p. 275) has obvious relevance to the story as a whole and to Klein's own sense of impotence. This impotence is most evident in the climactic episode of the story, Terpetoffs death. Terpetoff's Icarus-like plunge from the bell-tower of Sobor Spasitula recalls the poet's descent to the bottom of the sea in 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ But, in The Bells of Sobor Spasitula/ the descent is final, a negation beyond negation: Terpetoff's 'body, shattered, lay motionless on the ground' (Stories, p. 307), and all that remains of his 'concluding composition ... [is] the small cicatrice produced by a piece of falling stone, which a certain former Commissar of Religious Property still bears, the shape and size of a minim, upon his forehead' (Stories, p. 308). Unlike the 'zero' at the end of 'Portrait of the Poet,' this 'minimal' sign will never be transformed into 'a rich garland/ for Klein has lost all confidence in the story which would make this transformation possible.11 Klein's loss of confidence in his story achieves its most powerful expression in his unfinished novel, The Golem/ the culminating work of his final phase, and the one in which the poet's claim to unroll our culture from his scroll is subjected to its most devastating critique. In Klein's hands, the story of the creation of the golem by Rabbi Judah Low of Prague takes on a significance entirely lacking in traditional versions: it becomes an attack on 'the creative act' (NB, p. lyo).12 The most obvious creator in The Golem' is, of course, Rabbi Low, who is described as an 'artist, sculptor of the golem' (NB, p. 178); but at least as important as the creation of the golem, in Klein's version of the legend, is the creation of the narrative itself. Klein assigns a central role, without precedent in his sources, to his self-conscious narrator, whose profound misgivings about the story he is attempting to tell parallel Rabbi Low's own misgivings about his creation of the golem. Klein was able to bring only two chapters of The Golem' (NB, pp. 142-61) to a more or less finished state, but it is possible to reconstruct his plans for the novel as a whole from the hundreds of pages of notes in the Klein Papers (MS 2986-3295) on which he appears to have been working up until his final breakdown.13 Rabbi Low creates the golem as a defence against the machinations of Rumphaeus, the chief

Where Shall I Cry Bereshith? 263 counsellor of Emperor Rudolph II, who is planning a ritual murder accusation against the Jewish community of Prague. In terms of Klein's story of the poet, Rumphaeus is the evil impostor, seeking to usurp the role of the true hero, Rabbi Low. However, the relationship between hero and impostor is profoundly ambiguous, for the golem which Rabbi Low creates is as much a figure of evil as of good: after initially doing the rabbi's bidding, it comes to see itself as the Messiah and attracts the worship of Jews and gentiles alike. At one point, it even allies itself with Rumphaeus. Eventually, however, the golem goes mad, attempts suicide, and is destroyed by Rabbi Low. What characterizes Klein's version of the golem legend, then, as we can reconstruct it from his notes, is its blurring of the boundaries between creation and destruction, its throwing into doubt the redemptive ambition which inspires Rabbi Low and which had inspired the poet in all earlier versions of Klein's story. In the two chapters which Klein managed to complete, it is precisely these issues which are brought to the fore. The story of the golem, as it is presented in these two chapters, is a story which refuses to unfold. In the first of the chapters, the golem is referred to only obliquely, and in the second not at all: the real subject of these chapters is the narrator's inability to tell his story. The narrator is a scribe named Sinai ben Issachar, and both his profession, traditionally associated with a meticulous devotion to accuracy, and his name, recalling the ultimate revelation of divine truth on Mount Sinai/4 might suggest that he is worthy of our trust. However, we may be reminded of the passage in The Bible Manuscripts' in which Klein asks, '[C]an it be that this writ we cherish is not at all the reportage of God's Sinai, but the feigning, the invention of some petty molehill of a Sinai, a scribe's secret megalomania ...?' (LER, p. 135). Sinai, who suffers from 'sudden scepticisms' (NB, p. 147), has grave doubts about his role as sole purveyor of the true story of the golem. His narrative opens, typically, with a passage in which he struggles to arrive at some form of absolute truth, even if only the trivial one of the date of Rabbi Low's death: On this twenty-second day of the month by the gentiles designated August, in the year by them numbered one thousand six hundred and nine, the which day, after our own true reckoning anno mundi is the eighteenth of Elul of the three hundred and sixty-ninth year of the Sixth Millenium ... (NB, p. 142)

But the obtrusive over-elaboration of this passage serves only to arouse

264 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet the doubts which it seeks to allay. Why is Sinai not satisfied with the traditional Jewish reckoning, anno mundi, dating back to God's creation of the universe? If this reckoning is 'true/ as he insists, then why bring in a second one, that of the gentiles, dating back to the birth of their false Messiah? These opening lines are the first of many indications that Sinai is far from confident in his ability to attain a single unequivocal truth, that he is always aware of other reckonings. This awareness almost immediately brings him to an impasse. After praying for divine guidance, he attempts to begin his story in earnest: And it came to pass, say the Scriptures, ever announcing with this phrase, as our commentators aver, either the imminence of calamity or the advent of salvation - but at what curve of this revolving circle, this coming and passing and coming again, at what tangent shall I snatch? Where shall I cry bereshith, in principio [the first words of the Book of Genesis in Hebrew and Latin], thus in the beginning it was! (NB, p. 143)

For this deeply divided narrator, unable to decide whether his story is one of 'calamity' or 'salvation,' the image of the unfolding scroll has been replaced by one of a 'revolving circle ... coming and passing and coming again' at which he can only 'snatch.' Sinai goes on to contrast his own doubts and hesitations with the confidence of 'the calligraphists of the gentiles' (NB, p. 143), whose story is already fully present in their minds, simply waiting to be unfolded. They are, therefore, able to 'herald their texts with the initial ornate, some single letter in the curlecues and branchings whereof there is already shadowed forth, not only the emblem, but almost the whole narrative of the illumined page' (NB, p. 143). He gives an example of one of these 'initials ornate,' but, in the very act of doing so, he throws into question the concept of a truth that can be unfolded through narrative: There was a scribe out of Hibernia whose leaf I saw once at Tergesta - the script was from Genesis, the chapter beginning, Sed et serpens. How cunningly colubrine that S was shaped, sinuous, undulant, nowed, the subtlety of the old serpent symbol'd in every spiral and twist of that sigmoidal letter! And within its daedalian convolutions, about its rampant head and sleek ophidian tail, how helplessly was caught our Mother Eve! Surely in that coloured letter, with its rings of gold and gorgets of minium, the third chapter entire found its likeness and similitude! (NB, p. 143)

Where Shall I Cry Bereshith? 265 In the 'spiral and twist' of the initial S, representing the serpent in which Eve was helplessly caught, we see a kind of anti-scroll: the more Eve struggles to unroll these 'daedalian convolutions/ the more deeply and helplessly she is entrapped by them. Without realizing it, Sinai has found the 'likeness and similitude' of his own situation as a narrator. Sinai's despair is all the more poignant when we recognize in the scribe from Ireland ('Hibernia') an allusion to Klein's master, James Joyce who began Ulysses, his 'daedalian' narrative about Stephen Dedalus, while living in Trieste ('Tergesta'). In his confusion and despair, Sinai prays for guidance from the spirit of his 'Master and Teacher,' Rabbi Low (NB, p. 142). Rabbi Low, who has 'guide[d]' and 'defend[edl' (NB, p. 142) him in the past, and whose smile was 'like a patting on the head' (NB, p. 147), is the last of Klein's protective escorts; but like other such figures in the final phase of Klein's career - the poet among the children at the end of 'A Spirit Passed before Me,' Uncle Galuth, Terpetoff - Rabbi Low is no longer a source of consolation and protection. As he lies dying, he suffers from the same misgivings about the 'magic quickening word' as Sinai does, questioning his decision to create the golem by 'speak[ing] the Unutterable Name' (NB, p. 146), a decision which he now fears was both blasphemous and futile: 'Did I do right? Did I do wrong? ... When I summoned him from out of chaos? ... Would it not have been better, altogether better, had I allowed the Lord's occasions to take their intended course?' (NB, p. 146)

Unable to resolve the question himself, he turns to his disciple Sinai, whom he commands to tell the story of the golem as he sees it. But Sinai, who is aware of his own doubts, is horrified by the burden which has been laid upon him and tries to convince Rabbi Low of his own unworthiness. Rabbi Low replies, in proper dialectical fashion, that it is precisely a sceptic such as Sinai who will be best able to 'unfold' (NB, p. 146) the story: 'Sweetness from the lion's sweated fell. The truth will issue from the doubt' (NB, p. 146). As the chapter ends, Rabbi Low becomes the very embodiment of the scroll in whose unrolling he still has faith: I watched the glory of his beard, its curls and fine white ringlets like the delicate loops about the square inked letters of our scrolls, rising and falling upon his coverlet.

266 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet Suddenly, he turned on his side, sighed, and closed his eyes. Scroll of the Torah consumed in flame!

(NB, p. 148)

But, as we have seen, for Sinai the concept of the unrolling scroll is highly problematical, and he remains unconvinced and unconsoled by Rabbi Low's dialectical vision of truth unfolding out of doubt. By the end of chapter i of The Golem/ Sinai appears to be on the verge of beginning his story. But chapter 2 provides no answer to his question 'Where shall I cry bereshith?' as Sinai's paralyzing doubts about the creative act proliferate without any sign of resolution. In chapter 2, Sinai abruptly turns from the story of the golem to the story of his own life before he made his way to Prague and became a disciple of Rabbi Low. The opening pages of the chapter are dominated by three apparently heterogeneous motifs - Venice, silkworms, and the Talmud. What they all have in common is that, like the story of the golem itself, they all point to the ultimate futility of the creative act. To the young Sinai, Venice is 'a shimmering vision resting half in the insubstantial air and half in the wavering water ... a city out of the Scriptures' (NB, p. 149), associated in his mind with all the most magical passages in the Bible. But, in a passage which recalls 'In Re Solomon Warshawer' (which Klein was revising at about this time), he describes a vision of 'the Doge, his brocaded robes covering, [he] was sure, his tail and hooves, his hood suppressing horns ... [He] thought that parchment face the face of Asmodeus who, with Solomon's seal, had brought into being these castles on these streams' (NB, p. 149). After this vision of evil at the heart of the beauty of Venice, Sinai begins to suspect that 'this city was no city at all, but a sorcery, a spell cast upon the waters which some sudden storm would one day shatter' (NB, p. 149). Similar to the glorious, shimmering, but insubstantial and obscurely evil fabric of Venice are the fabrics of silk which are the source of prosperity for Sinai's family. For Sinai, the silkworms become a metaphor for the grim fate of the poet whose creative gift dooms him to destruction: Composers of delicate distich, they were my first payttanim [Hebrew for poets], these silkworms. Gilgul and metamorphosis of the winged moth, in the orchards on-the mainland, on the leaf of the mulberry, we fed them, coupling thus the earthy and the aerial; we watched their hatchings; we measured their changes; and when, in the fullness of time, their little heads, as each fashioned its cocoon, its stanza, began to whirl, and whirl unceasingly for three days, we uttered

Where Shall I Cry Bereshith? 267 benediction. These were, indeed, vermicules of the true inspiration! From the head and inward they wrought; the memory of their several transmigrations entered into their reelings, as with the floss and blaze of filament they breathed forth the raiment of a princess. Then they perished. Like small pharaohs in their sheaths they lay there, until our skilled men, like pious priests, disrobed them, twisting and reeling and weaving and dying the spool of their mummification into something bright and quick. (NB, p. 150) The silkworms' inspired 'reelings' recall the poet's 'unrolling' of our culture from his scroll; and for both silkworm and poet, the reward is the same: they 'perish.' Like the 'shimmering vision' of Venice and the 'floss and blaze of filament' of the silkworms, Sinai's Talmudic studies, under the dazzling master of pilpul, Samuel Archevolto, represent the destructive impulse at the heart of creation. Rabbi Archevolto (based on Klein's childhood Talmud teacher, Rabbi Simcha Garber) has unparalleled skill at creating and destroying ingenious logical structures at will: Again and again he would take, for my pleasure and the honing of his wit, four far-flung ordinances, each hidden either in a piece of commentary or a Tosfoth, and would found them, like four cornerstones, for the erection of some ingenious syllogistical structure; then he would build, with forced parallels and subtle divagations, story upon specious story, the last topped with two towers of dilemma, the whole tipped, triangled, and crowned with some conclusion, earlier announced, and now rendered irrefutable: in wonder would I gape at this perfection: then would my teacher, adding virtuosity to virtuosity, point out the fallacy, Here lies a fallacy: with a twist of reason he would withdraw, then, one of the buttresses of our palace of logic: down would it tumble, myself astonished again; whereupon he would add, smiling: But here is the flaw which pronounced our argument fallacious: and back flew the buttress; the structure once more stood. (NB, p. 151) Overwhelmed by 'these illusions of rationality' (NB, p. 151), Sinai soon develops a scepticism towards all creations of the mind, not least the possibly 'specious story' which he himself will one day be called upon to tell. The 'bursting seed' (NB, p. 151) of scepticism planted in Sinai by his early experiences blossoms when he meets Leon da Modena. Modena is an immensely attractive figure, brilliant, learned, and cosmopolitan. He offers Sinai 'that intoxicating foam, Doubt, wherein the imps of

268 A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet enzyme are always at their revels' (NB, p. 154), teaching him that the world consists of 'toys for the mind, trifles to be juggled in the air, while we stood by, ourselves abiding firm' (NB, p. 155). But, of course, Sinai does not abide firm, for there is no firmness in the 'insubstantial' and 'wavering' world of The Golem.' Sinai eventually tries to shake off the influence of Modena by becoming a disciple of Rabbi Low, but the doubts which Modena encouraged in him 'crop out in the very midst of piety' (NB, p. 154). Sinai's friendship with Modena is suddenly shattered when both their families are ruined by an evil employee of Sinai's father. Modena mysteriously disappears, and Sinai seeks to draw consolation from his rather tattered and threadbare faith. He supports himself as a proofreader, and one day the printer for whom he works receives an anonymous manuscript entitled The Perfect Crime' (a revised version of Klein's short story 'Detective Story, or A Likely Story'), which Sinai recognizes as Modena's. It purports to be a plan, by an obviously insane mass murderer, for a crime of horrifying magnitude involving countless victims. With great amusement, the master criminal imagines the futile attempts of his victims to make sense of the clues he deliberately leaves behind to confuse and torment them. The manuscript ends with his imagining the story which his deluded victims will tell about 'his exploits': [A] lengthy writ would it be, detailing the stages of his career, giving the canon and tally of his destructions, speaking to his power and even to his glory. Its opening sentence - he could see it plain - its opening sentence would read: In the beginning He created the heaven and the Earth ...

(NB, p. 160)

'Where shall I cry bereshith, in principle, thus in the beginning it was?' Sinai had asked when faced with the task of telling the story of the creation of the golem. Modena's manuscript, in which creation is a crime and the story which glorifies creation is a folly, suggests that Sinai would do best to leave his story untold. Klein may, of course, not have intended this to be the final word on the matter, but there is a kind of fitness in the fact that the narrative which begins by invoking 'the true reckoning anno mundi' ends by arguing how false that reckoning is. With The Golem/ the collapse of Klein's story of the poet is complete. Klein was not alone among the writers of his age in ultimately

Where Shall I Cry Bereshithl 269 rejecting the possibility of what Jean-Frangois Lyotard calls 'grand narratives/15 with the power to make experience seem coherent and meaningful. But he is clearly not to be counted among Lyotard's insouciant postmodernists who 'have lost the nostalgia' for such unifying narratives, and who see their 'splintering' as a matter of indifference or even of celebration.16 If, in the self-reflexive nihilism of his final works, Klein is moving towards a vision which is closer to postmodernism than to modernism, it is to the kind of postmodernism which Gerald Graff characterizes as tragic - the postmodernism of Borges, for example, whose 'stories generate a pathos at the absence of a transcendent order of meanings.'17 Having lost faith in such an order, Klein found it impossible to resurrect the story of the poet which had proven so crucial to his achievement as a writer. In his final portrait of the poet, of Sinai ben Issachar, the storyteller who is unable to begin his story, we see Klein's tragic dramatization of his own fate.

This page intentionally left blank

-^ «...

-/-?

Notes

CHAPTER i Unrolling the Scroll 1 The sources of the quotations in this paragraph are as follows: 'under interdict' ('Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens/ 4); 'disjected members' (SS, p. 140); 'impostor' ('Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ 101); 'since the godlike touch of creation was not theirs, like gods would they be in destructions' (SS, p. 141); 'alone; yet not completely alone' ('Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ 59); 'schizoid solitudes' ('Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ 89); 'with single camera view' ('Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ 148); 'all things' ('Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens/ 92); 'rooted in the common soil' (The Bible's Archetypical Poet' [LER, p. 148]). 2 For examples of scroll imagery, see 'the scroll of sky' ('Auto-da-fe/ 18; 'Escape/ 87); 'parchemin roll of saecular exploit' ('Montreal/ 58); 'sacred upon the roll' (The Notary/ 13); 'scrolling it into the mist' CWinter Night: Mount Royal/ 24); 'the heavens like an unrolled scroll' ('Stance of the Amidah/ 9); 'scroll heaped on manuscript' (The City of Slaughter' [Version i], 13); 'Nature unwound its scroll' (The Glory of the Homeland/ 18); 'my country ... / Its hide is parchment - parchment for a Torah' ('Behold/ 1-2); and The Seventh Scroll/ SS, The Bible Manuscripts/ and the unfinished novel The Golem.' For examples of the metaphor of unfolding/unrolling, in addition to the ones cited in the main text, see 'unwinding time' ('Desideratum/ 28); 'the evenings are rolled away' (The Rocking Chair/ 5); 'the folded cripples' and 'Roll empty away' (The Cripples/ 3, 18); 'Saskatchewan / is rolled like a rug of a rich and golden thread' ('Grain Elevator/ 12-13) (Klein comments on this line, 'the longest-syllabled flat province in monosyllables unfolded' [CP, p. 1008]); 'flags / on limb and torso curled - / furling of

272 Notes to pages 4-6 white' (The Snowshoers/ 11-13); 'folding seats' ('Political Meeting/ i); 'revolve from off our ways' and 'our days, and hopes, and kin, are rolled' ('Elegy/ 162, 172); 'a folded loneliness' ('Les Filles majeures/ 4); 'My heart on itself enfolded' (Thy Breath, O Lord, Passed Over and Enkindled Me' [Version i], 4). 3 Explicate 'is an English word used in its Latin connotation, ... to unfold, and gives full meaning to the phrase which follows it, "the folded present." In other words, "explicate" is here charged with two meanings, (a) to explain (b) to unfold' (letter to the Jewish Publication Society [i July 1943])4 Compare also his comment on Isaak Babel: '... for Babel the zeugma is the key, key not only to his style, but key to his political position, key to his heart' ('Isaak Babel' [LER, p. 260]). 5 Here, as elsewhere in his criticism of the late forties, Klein is clearly influenced by the New Criticism; and one of the main sources for the Hopkins essay is a classic of the New Criticism, Austin Warren's 'Instress of Inscape/ Kenyan Review 6 (1944), 369-82. However, Klein goes much further than the New Critics, including Warren, in his attempt 'to unify, to discover the pattern, to make all aspects cohere' (MS 6942). 6 Fredric Jameson, Foreword, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, by Jean-Franqois Lyotard, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press 1984), p. xix 7 That Klein was defensive about his method is clear from his correspondence with the Joyce scholar Ellsworth Mason. Mason was impressed by Klein's ingenuity but suspicious of it as well: at the end of a lengthy critique of Klein's analysis of The Oxen of the Sun/ he comments, 'I hope that what I have pointed out will at least make you reconsider the method you have applied to the interpretation of the chapter' (24 August 1948). Although Klein made some changes of detail to the published version 'in answer to [Mason's] original objections' (23 February 1948), Mason's misgivings about Klein's general approach remained: 'You seem, at points, to be so awed by Joyce's ingenuity (this, to some extent, because it reminds you of your own) that you are carried away, and consequently overvalue, if I am right, what you see as Joyce's patterning ability' (21 July 1949). Interestingly, Klein criticized Mason's own interpretation of Joyce on similar grounds, finding it too 'all-embracing' and 'paradigmatic' (14 October 1949). 8 Compare Klein's comments, in an entirely different context, on the 'unitarian': 'His is the one-track mind par excellence. For every problem, for every situation, he has some single panacea, some isolated nostrum, some

Notes to pages 7-9 273 inclusive cure-all. That his solution does not answer all the aspects of the problem, does not seem to concern him; he loves the geometry of unity, oneness has a certain mystical charm, it is inconceivable to him that life, and its problems, are varied and ramified ...' (The Jewish Unitarian' [BS, p. 160]). 9 Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. and introd. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1978), p. 4 10 Rachel Feldhay Brenner, in A.M. Klein, the Father of Canadian Jewish Literature: Essays in the Poetics of Humanistic Passion (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press 1989), p. 20, speaks of Klein's 'combative poetic response to history.' 11 These words occur in a late, unpublished version of Talisman in Seven Shreds.' See the textual notes to lines 9-14 and 36-42 in CP, pp. 346-7. 12 M.M. Bakhtin, 'Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel/ in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press 1981), p. 141 13 In The Sense of Angels,' Jewish Dialog [Toronto], Passover 1973, p. 19, P.K. Page speaks of Klein's 'struggle to overcome duality, to reverse the fragmentation of contemporary consciousness, to make whole,' which she sees as becoming more 'acute' towards the end of his career. 14 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber 1939), p. 8. Klein drew a vertical line through 'redismembers' after the prefix re. 15 Klein often uses 'remember/ in its conventional spelling, in the sense of 'bringing together scattered fragments into a unity/ a sense which is explicit in 're-member.' For example, see: 'Plucking his tulips in the Holland sun, / Remembering the thought of the Adored / Spinoza gathering flowers for the One' ('Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens/ 130-2); 'Scattered on mountains, driven over seas, / Remembering, Zion, thee, / ... thy shattered stones' ('Yehuda Halevi, His Pilgrimage/ 334-6); 'remembered snatches of song' ('Ballad of the Nursery Rhymes/ 5); 'he will remember his travels over that body - / the torso ... face ... limbs' ('Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ 41-5). 16 Alan Wilde, Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1981), p. 30. See, in particular, Wilde's analysis of 're-collecting' in Virginia Woolf's short story 'Monday or Tuesday/ a process which is precisely analogous to Klein's re-membering. Compare also Matei Calinescu, 'From the One to the Many: Pluralism in Today's Thought/ in Innovation/Renovation: New Perspectives on the Humanities, ed. Ihab Hassan and Sally Hassan (Madison:

274 Notes to pages 9-20 University of Wisconsin Press 1983), p. 263: 'It is almost a truism to say that modernity was a period dominated by various monistic models of thought ... [M]odernity also was, in some of its major philosophical and aesthetic formulations, sharply critical of its own visions of unity.' 17 Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History/ in Illuminations, ed. and introd. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken 1969), p. 257 CHAPTER 2 Escape 1 Klein is particularly fond of describing the starry sky as a text. See, for example, 'Shelley/ in which Shelley 'parse[s] / The world ... punctuatefs] each line with stars' (1-2); 'Astrologer/ in which the stars are 'writing on the wall of the horizon' (2), 'the calligraphy of spheres' (5), 'alphabetic disks' (10), and 'asterisks' whose 'reference' only the astrologer knows (14); and 'Request/ in which the stars are 'the dots within a / Blindman's book' (11-12). 2 For a discussion of such imagery, see Mark Finkelstein, The Style of A.M. Klein/ diss., University of Toronto 1988, pp. 254-9. 3 David Lewis Papers, National Archives, MG32C-23 vol. 123 CHAPTER 3 By a Well ... over the Wall 1 'Five Characters/ the first of Klein's poems on Jewish themes to be published, appeared in the Menorah Journal in November 1927. By this date Klein was familiar with the Fortnightly (it began publication in 1925 and Klein entered McGill the following year) and had met its editors. See LOTD, pp. 50-1. 2 Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, The Name and Nature of Modernism/ in Modernism, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (New York: Penguin 1976), p. 22 3 A.J.M. Smith, 'Contemporary Poetry/ McGill Fortnightly Review, 15 December 1926; reprinted in The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada: Essential Articles on Contemporary Canadian Poetry in English, ed. Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski (Toronto: Ryerson Press 1967), p. 24 4 Bradbury and McFarlane, p. 26 5 Bradbury and McFarlane, p. 20 6 Linda Rozmovits, 'A.M. Klein and Modernism/ MA thesis, McGill University 1988, p. 6. My account of Klein's relationship to modernism is

Notes to pages 21-7 275 greatly indebted to Rozmovits's thesis as well as to discussions which we have had on the subject over the years. 7 F.R. Scott, 'New Poems for Old: i. The Decline of Poesy/ Canadian Forum 11 (1931), 296-8 8 Sandra Djwa, '"A New Soil and a Sharp Sun": The Landscape of a Modern Canadian Poetry/ Modernist Studies 2 (1977), 3, 16 9 'New Poems for Old/ pp. 297-8 10 'New Poems for Old/ p. 297 11 David G. Roskies, 'The Story's the Thing: Afterword/ Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 5 (1985), 69 12 Robert Alter, 'Defenses of the Imagination/ in Defenses of the Imagination: Jewish Writers and Modern Historical Crisis (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America 1977), p. 15 13 Ruth R. Wisse, 'Di Yunge and the Problem of Jewish Aestheticism/ Jewish Social Studies 38 (1976), 265 14 I have emended 'one withers away/ the reading in LER, to 'and withers away.' 15 William Walsh, 'A.M. Klein and the Condition of Being Jewish/ Journal of Canadian Studies 19 (1984), 9, 12 16 John Sutherland, 'A.M. Klein: The Laughter of Seriousness/ in Essays, Controversies and Poems, ed. Miriam Waddington (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1972), p. 143 17 Northrop Frye, 'Canada and Its Poetry/ in Dudek and Gnarowski, p. 92 18 Gershom Scholem, 'Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism/ in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken 1971), p. 288. For a more general discussion of the relationship between tradition and the desire for continuity, see The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983). 19 Hannah Arendt, Tradition and the Modern Age/ in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking 1961), p. 26 20 Between, p. 28 21 Chassidism was a popular pietistic movement which was founded in the eighteenth century and quickly spread throughout the Jewish communities of eastern Europe. The Mithnagdim (lit., opponents) opposed the Chassidic movement. 22 David G. Roskies, 'Yiddish in Montreal: The Utopian Experiment/ in An Everyday Miracle: Yiddish Culture in Montreal, ed. Ira Robinson, Pierre Anctil, and Mervin Butovsky (Montreal: Vehicule Press 1990), p. 26

276 Notes to pages 27-9 23 Everyday, p. 31 24 David Rome characterizes Klein's milieu in similar terms: 'The old Yiddish world transplanted from the shtetl to Montreal was basically secular, or at least agnostic, and yet its roots lay deep in Jewish tradition, which is essentially religious. As a result, traditional culture was perpetuated in the discourse of radicals. Such was the paradox of Montreal Jewry' (Jacques Langlais and David Rome, Jews and French Quebeckers: Two Hundred Years of Shared History, trans. Barbara Young [Waterloo, Ont: Wilfrid Laurier Press 1991], p. 126). 25 In Zailig Pollock, Usher Caplan, and Linda Rozmovits, A.M.. Klein: An Annotated Bibliography (Toronto: ECW Press 1993), there are hundreds of items listed under the heading 'Zionism' from all periods of his career. Entries related to Yiddishkayt (there is no specific heading for Yiddishkayt) are also numerous, although there are virtually none for the mid- to late thirties (approximately 1933-9). As is suggested by Klein's commitment to the CCF, he was also deeply influenced by the strong Bundist or socialist tradition among Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. However, with the exception of the handful of not very successful political poems and stories which he wrote in the late thirties, there is little direct evidence of this influence in his writings, apart from their broadly humanitarian tone. There are very few entries under 'socialism' and 'Bundism' in the bibliography, although this may simply be because of the nature of the Canadian Jewish Chronicle, where most of the journalism appeared. For what David Lewis called Klein's 'mild kind of socialism,' see LOTD, pp. 63-4. 26 Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Schocken 1973), p. 32 27 David Aberbach, Bialik (New York: Grove-Weidenfeld 1988), p. 117 28 Bialik, p. 117 29 Hillel Halkin, Introduction, 'Tevye the Dairyman' and 'The Railroad Stories,' by Sholem Aleichem (New York: Schocken 1987), p. xxi 30 For a discussion of 'the human impulse, the profoundly tragic emotion, that ... led many writers to romanticize the shtetl' after 'the foundations of this society began to crumble/ see Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, eds., A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (New York: Viking 1954), p. 4. See also David G. Roskies, The Rape of the Shtetl,' in Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1984), pp. 109-32. 31 Jacob Glatstein, 'Yiddishkayt,' in The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse,

Notes to pages 30-3 277 ed. Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk (New York: Viking 1987), p. 462 32 Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, Introduction, A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1969), p. 60 33 Penguin Book, p. 43 34 Linda Rozmovits, 'Klein's Translations of Moyshe Leib Halpern: A Problem of Jewish Modernism,' Canadian Poetry 22 (1988), 3 35 Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Introduction, The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1967), P- 54 36 See Zailig Pollock, 'Sunflower Seeds: A.M. Klein's Hero and Demagogue,' Canadian Literature 82 (1979), 48-58. 37 Gershom Scholem, 'Israel and the Diaspora,' in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays (New York: Schocken 1976), p. 248 38 Ironically, in recent years there have been signs that the hostility on the part of Israelis to the traditions of the Diaspora is breaking down, and that something like the synthesis which Klein envisaged may be taking place. See the comments of Gershon Shaked, one of Israel's leading contemporary literary critics, in 'Jewish Heritage: Revolt and Transformation in Israeli Culture/ in The Shadows Within: Essays on Modern Jewish Writers (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society 1987), p. 104: 'Authentic Israeli culture ... is the product of cultural tensions rather than an escape from them, formed by blending and recasting the preexisting components into a new entity.' See also Yael S. Feldman, 'Whose Story Is It, Anyway?' in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the 'Final Solution,' ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1992), p. 227, in which he describes how 'the old arch-opposition between "Jew" and "Israeli"' has been 'destabilized' in recent years. 39 See, for example, 'The Dangers of Success,' C/C, 13 April 1949 (BS, pp. 333-5); 'The Literature of Israel/ C/C, 10 June 1949; 'Notebook of a Journey/ C/C, 21 October 1949 (BS, pp. 369-71); 'The Chernicovsky Prize/ C/C, 7 April 1950; 'The Yiddish Proverb/ C/C, 28 November 1952-2 January 1953 (LER, pp. 112-22); Tn Praise of the Diaspora/ C/C, 9 January27 February 1953 (BS, pp. 463-77); and SS, pp. 99-100. 40 Penguin Book, p. 47. Compare Robert Alter's comment on Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem: 'Paradoxically, the very act of turning imaginatively toward a tradition receding into the past gave a depth of definition to the modernism of their respective literary enterprises as novelist, critic, and historian' (Necessary Angels: Tradition and

278 Notes to pages 35-46 Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem [Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1991], p. 23). CHAPTER 4 The Prism and the Flying Motes 1 George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1986), p. 258 2 For a discussion of the hero/demagogue pair see Zailig Pollock, 'Sunflower Seeds: A.M. Klein's Hero and Demagogue/ Canadian Literature 82 d979)/ 48-58. 3 Klein may have had in mind the tradition that on Purim the celebrants should drink until they no longer know the difference between 'Cursed be Haman' and 'Blessed be Mordecai.' 4 For some other examples of Jewish portrait poems see: 'Ave Atque Vale/ 'Baal Shem Tov/ section IX of 'Ballad of the Dancing Bear/ 'Cantor/ 'Elijah/ 'Lamed Vav: A Psalm to Utter in Memory of Great Goodness/ 'Mourners/ 'Portrait/ 'Preacher/ 'A Psalm of Abraham, Touching the Crown with Which He was Crowned on the Day of His Espousals/ and 'Scribe.' 5 Ruth R. Wisse, ed., 'A Shtetl' and Other Yiddish Novellas (New York: Behrman 1973), p. 26 6 See, for example, 'Five Weapons against Death/ 'Festival/ 'Holy Bonds/ Talisman in Seven Shreds/ 'Dance Chassidic/ 'Exorcism Vain/ 'Plumaged Proxy/ 'Of the Making of Gragers/ 'Political Meeting/ The Cripples/ 'Parade of St. Jean Baptiste/ The Sugaring.' 7 For Klein's knowledge of Heine, see explanatory notes to 'Yehuda Halevi, His Pilgrimage' (CP, p. 979). 8 Compare, for example, These Northern Stars Are Scarabs in My Eyes/ 'A Song That the Ships of Jaffa Did Sing in the Night/ 'On the Road to Palestine/ 'Greeting on This Day/ and 'Yehuda Halevi, His Pilgrimage/ 9 For other treatments of this motif, see 'Reb Levi Yitschok Talks to God/ 56-60; 'Baal Shem Tov'; 'Elijah'; 'Petition For That My Father's Soul Should Enter into Heaven/ 36-45; The City of Slaughter/ passim; 'Of Daumiers a Portfolio/ 70-84; 'A Psalm of Abraham, to Be Written Down and Left on the Tomb of Rashi/ 5-8; 'Autobiographical/ 5, 39-44; 'Raw Material' (NB, pp. 7-8, 23-4); 'Stranger and Afraid' (NB, pp. 69-70, 76, 83); SS, passim, but especially pp. 116-17, 135-6; Tn Praise of the Diaspora/ passim; 'A Spirit Passed before Me/ 38-43; The Golem' (NB, pp. 142-3).

Notes to pages 47-58 279 10 Stories, pp. x-xi 11 Compare Ken Adachi's comments in his review of the Short Stories ('Poet Klein's Short Stories Heavy-Handed/ Toronto Star, 18 June 1983, Hio): '[The] short story doesn't suit [his] imagination. He does not have the delicately inquisitive sensibility, the natural inclination towards writing about people brought to the moments of white-hot awareness. He won't allow his fictional accidents to happen ... [The short stories] are in the tradition of the sermon, the lecture, the essay, the prayer - not in the tradition of narrative fiction.' 12 Usher Caplan comments on the story: 'On an allegorical level it speaks of the sad fate of the artist; Klein often seemed to regard the scribe as a figure of the poet in Jewish ritual' (LOTD, p. 65). 13 Transcript in the David Lewis Papers (National Archives, MG32C-23 vol. 123) of a talk Lewis gave in 1974 at the Klein Symposium at the University of Ottawa 14 See the poem The Golem,' the unfinished play 'Death of the Golem,' the unfinished novel The Golem/ and the articles The Golem of Prague' (C/C, 20 January 1939, p. 4), The Perfect Man' (C/C, 24 December 1943, p. 4 [BS, pp. 195-8]), and The Golems of Prague' (C/C, 28 November 1952, p. 3 [BS, pp. 423-5]). See also notes on the golem for a talk which Klein gave on 6 March 1949 (MS 5649). 15 Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (London: Hamish Hamilton 1963), p. x 16 Compare To the Chief Musician: A Psalm of the Bratzlaver, Touching a Good Gardener,' 'Political Meeting,' The Cripples/ and section XXIV of The Hitleriad. 17 For a discussion of the way in which 'the unifying effect of terza rima is sharply played off against the speciousness or ineffectuality of the attempt to respond to chaos,' in 'Design for Mediaeval Tapestry' and other poems, see Linda Rozmovits, 'A.M. Klein,' pp. 44-53. 18 See, for example, Leon Edel, 'Abraham M. Klein,' Canadian Forum 12 (1932), 300-2; and E.K. Brown, The Immediate Present in Canadian Literature/ Sewanee Review 41 (1933), 430-42. 19 Miriam Waddington, A.M. Klein (Toronto: Copp Clark 1970), pp. 32-4 20 For a more sympathetic view of 'Soiree of Velvel Kleinburger/ see Noreen Golfman, A.M. Klein and His Works (Toronto: ECW Press [1991]), pp. 17-24. Golfman argues that Klein's 'open borrowing from Eliot' - especially from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' - is intended to 'belife] the feebleness of Velvel's imagination' (p. 19), and that 'when Klein might appear to be "aping" Eliot and his contemporaries, he is usually subordi-

280 Notes to pages 58-68 nating Eliot's hollow modern men - and not necessarily Eliot - to a critical examination of their limited resources' (pp. 23-4). 21 The one apparent exception, the short lyric 'Spinoza: On Man, on the Rainbow,' is actually a revised version of section VII of 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens,' dating from the period in the early fifties when Klein was preparing a 'Selected Poems.' 22 '... a Maimonides, a Spinoza, a Bergson ...' (The Gesture of the Bible' [LER, p. 131]). The Annotated Bibliography lists, for example, twenty-three references to Einstein; ten to Kant, Maimonides, and Rashi; nine to Nietzsche; eight to Freud; six to Aristotle; and four to Hegel. 23 Benedict Spinoza, The Philosophy of Spinoza: Selected from His Chief Works, with a life of Spinoza and an introduction by Joseph Ratner (New York: Modern Library 1927) 24 For Klein's use of Ratner, see Zailig Pollock, 'A Source for A.M. Klein's "Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens,"' Canadian Poetry 12 (1983), 34-9. G.K. Fischer, in In Search of Jerusalem: Religion and Ethics in the Writings of AM. Klein (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen's University Press 1975), pp. 34-52, argues, unconvincingly in my opinion, that Klein was deeply influenced by Spinoza's philosophy. 25 For other discussions of the structural symmetry of 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens/ see Fischer, pp. 37-51, 214-15 note 3; and Linda Hutcheon and Alain Goldschlager, "'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens": A.M. Klein as Wordsmith,' Canadian Poetry 4 (1979), 52-8. 26 Joseph Frank, 'Spatial Form in Modern Literature/ in The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press 1963), p. 10. For other formulations of the distinction between temporal and spatial form which are particularly relevant to 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens/ see the discussions of 'nacheinander (one after another) and nebeneinander (one next to another)' in Ann Daghistany and J.J. Johnson, 'Romantic Irony, Spatial Form, and Joyce's Ulysses,' in Spatial Form in Narrative, ed. Jeffrey Smitten and Ann Daghistany (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press 1981), p. 51; and of 'totality as an ordered sequential whole' and 'totality as an aggregate of parts' in David Mickelsen, Types of Spatial Structure in Narrative/ in Spatial Form in Narrative, p. 64. 27 See 'A Coloured Gentleman' and sections III and IX of 'Murals for a House of God.' 28 The conclusion was more explicit before Klein deleted a passage which originally followed the repetition of the major and minor premises: 'he who does violence to me, verily sins against the light of day; he is made a

Notes to pages 69-72 281

29

30 31 32 33 34

deicide.' Klein may have deleted the passage because he felt it verged on blasphemy. Interestingly, in 'Gloss Gimel/ which is also conceived of as a set of 'theorems' (SS, p. 136) proving that the Many is an expression of the One, and that, consequently, humanity is divine, a very similar conclusion is drawn: 'I read it plain and spell it out - summation and grand indictment - the unspeakable nefas - deicide' (SS, p. 146). See p. 226. For examples of poems expressing this sense of frustration, see the sonnets 'Saturday Night,' 'Rather Than Have My Brethren Bend the Knee/ These Northern Stars Are Scarabs in My Eyes,' 'From Beautiful Dreams I Rise; I Rise from Dreams/ 'My Literati Friends in Restaurants/ as well as 'Exorcism Vain/ which is a 'frustrated' Shakespearean sonnet lacking its final couplet. Compare the similar parallels with 'Manuscript: Thirteenth Century/ 201-8, discussed on pp. 11-12. John Sutherland, 'The Poetry of A.M. Klein/ in A.M. Klein, ed. Tom Marshall (Toronto: Ryerson Press 1970), p. 54 LOTD, p. 65 Ruth R. Wisse, A Little Love in Big Manhattan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1988), pp. 161-2 See, for example, 'Baal Shem Tov/ 'Baldhead Elisha/ 'Bestiary/ 'Biography/ 'Counting-out Rhyme/ 'Doctor Dwarf/ 'Into the Town of Chelm/ 'King Dalfin/ 'Mourners/ 'Song of Exclamations/ 'Song of Toys and Trinkets/ 'Song to Be Sung at Dawn/ 'Upon a Time There Lived a Dwarf, a Jew/ 'Wandering Beggar.' Tom Marshall comments on the 'dwarfing process' in these poems: 'Here is a pleasant diminutive world peopled by dwarfs, children, homunculi and elves. Love prevails, and life's problems are scaled down ... The little, it seems, can be enough if it is self-contained and self-sustaining ...' ('Theorems Made Flesh: Klein's Poetic Universe/ in Marshall, ed., A.M. Klein, p. 155). For discussions of littleness in Jewish folklore and literature, see Miriam Waddington, Folklore in the Poetry of A.M. Klein, The Pratt Lecture (St John's, Nfld: Memorial University 1974), pp. 6-9; and Ruth R. Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1971), pp. 23-4. Wisse describes 'the little man' as 'the mainstay of Yiddish typology' (23). Hath Not a Jew ..., in which most of the poems cited above were collected, was criticized in a review by Allen Lesser (Contemporary Jewish Record 5 [1942], 333) for its 'constant qualification' of Jews as little. Klein was particularly annoyed by this criticism: in a letter to the editor, Abraham

282 Notes to pages 74-9 G. Duker (26 June 1942), he wrote, 'One expects a higher type of criticism than objections that Klein's Jews are not six-footers.' 35 Klein no doubt intends the older sense of 'weird' - 'of a mysterious or unearthly character; unaccountably or uncomfortably strange; uncanny' as well as the more common current sense - 'out of the ordinary course, strange, unusual; hence, odd, fantastic' (OED). In neither sense would the word 'weird' occur to a devout Jew for whom the miracles of the rabbis were commonly accepted facts of everyday life, anything but 'uncanny' or 'odd.' 36 See p. 26. CHAPTER 5 Fragments Again Fragmented 1 LOTD, p. 68 2 See, for example, 'Whom God Hath Joined' (Stories, pp. 155-7) and 'That Walks like a Man' (MS 3972-3). 3 For an account of the collapse of the market for Canadian literature during the Depression, see Desmond Pacey, The Writer and His Public (1920-1960),' in Literary History of Canada, 2d ed., ed. Carl F. Klinck et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1976), 2:11-13. 4 S. Solis-Cohen, 8 February 1932 5 Rabbi Max D. Klein, n.d. 6 Oscar Loeb, n.d. 7 Harry W. Ettelson, 30 March 1932 8 Ludwig Lewisohn, 'Concerning a Jewish Poet,' Jewish Standard (September 1936), 8. Lewisohn's essay was reprinted as a foreword to Hath Not a Jew ... 9 Harry W. Ettelson, 30 March 1932 10 S. Solis-Cohen, 8 February 1932 11 Rabbi Max D. Klein, n.d. 12 Julius Grodinsky, 20 June 1933 13 22 June 1933 14 See, for example, the following articles in C/C: 'A French-Canadian Speaks' (8 July 1932, p. 4), 'A French-Canadian Editor Speaks' (15 July 1932, p. 3), 'A Challenge to Justice' (22 July 1932, p. 3), 'Victorious Circulars' (22 July 1932, p. 4), 'The Deputy-Speaker: Full of Sound and Fury' (29 July 1932, p. 3), 'The Holy See versus Armand Lavergne' (12 August 1932, pp. 5, 17), 'St. Armand de Montmagny, Martyr' (26 August 1932, PP- 5, 17)15 The German Elections/ C/C, 5 August 1932, pp. 3-4 (BS, pp. 29-31). See

Notes to pages 80-5 283 also the following articles in C/C: 'Dictatorship in Germany' (29 July 1932, pp. 3-4), 'Mussolini and His Cabinet' (5 August 1932, p. 4), The Song of the Shirt' (5 August 1932, p. 4), The Spanish Enigma' (12 August 1932, p. 4), 'Poland Defends the Jews' (12 August 1932, p. 4). 16 For the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism in Quebec and in the rest of Canada in the thirties, see Lita-Rose Betcherman, The Swastika and the Maple Leaf: Fascist Movements in Canada in the Thirties (Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside 1975). 17 The Annotated Bibliography contains 22 entries under Duplessis's name from 1939 to 1954. 18 The one exception is 'Memoirs of a Campaigner' (Stories, pp. 205-9), a monologue by a fundraiser for Zionist causes, which appeared in the Canadian Zionist and which, with its clearly didactic intent, is perhaps best thought of as fictionalized journalism, rather than as a genuine work of fiction. 19 Stories, p. xiii 20 Morley Callaghan, 'A Criticism/ New Frontier i (April 1936), 24 21 Stories, p. xiii 22 'Whom God Hath Joined' is a long drawn out joke about the legal complications that arise when one half of a set of Siamese twins is convicted of murder. 'No Traveller Returns ...' is a horror story about a mad scientist who has the power to rise from the dead. 'Portrait of an Executioner' is a fictionalized interview with Canada's official hangman. The Tale of a Marvellous Parrot' is a Chassidic-style tale about a childless rabbi who trains a parrot to say Kaddish, the prayer recited in memory of the dead, for him. 'Kapusitchka' is a bathetic monologue by a child mourning a dead cat. 23 Stories, p. xiii 24 See 'A Decline and a Rise,' C/C, 12 August 1932, pp. 4, 16, in which Klein contrasts the decline of Yiddish with the growing role of Hebrew in Jewish life. 25 For a discussion of 'Bialik's attractiveness for Klein,' see Mark Madoff, '"B'ir Ha-Haregah" - "In the City of Slaughter": Sources of Rhetorical Tension in A.M. Klein's Hitleriad,' in Translations in Canadian Literature, ed. and introd. Camille La Bossiere (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press 1983), pp. 88-9. 26 In 'Bialik Here and Now' (The Shadow Within, pp. 123-32), Gershon Shaked points out that some of Bialik's intensely personal, at times even 'decadent' (p. 125), poems troubled his admirers who were in search of a 'national poet': It is ... difficult to justify Bialik's inclusion in the literary

284 Notes to pages 85-94

27 28 29

30 31

32 33 34

35

36 37

canon if we measure his poetry only against the values of national renascence' (p. 125). Defenses, p. 16 For the textual history of the Bialik translations and essay, see the introductory textual note on Bialik in CP, pp. 925-6. Compare 'rotten' ('Seer, Begone,' 8); 'stale mushrooms in the bole of a rotted tree' ('When the Days Shall Grow Long/ 17); 'carrion' and 'rottenness' (Thy Breath, O Lord, Passed Over and Enkindled Me/ 12, 15). For the genesis of this poem and its influence, see Roskies, Against, pp. 88-92. The image of 'unfold[ing]' is Klein's own; the original simply has 'tell' (higidu). The image of 'halv[ing] an infant's word' is also Klein's; in the original it is the infant's body which is 'halved' (nikra), not its 'word/ as in the translation. LOTD, p. 72 A.M. Klein, pp. 30-59 Peter Stevens, The Development of Canadian Poetry between the Wars and Its Reflection of Social Awareness/ diss., University of Saskatchewan 1968, p. 292 See also the editorial 'Non-Intervention' (C/C, 23 July 1937, P- 3)/ in which Klein attacks the policy of non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War adopted by the Western powers. For Fearing's influence on Klein, see Finkelstein, pp. 335-9. Peter Stevens, while acknowledging the many contradictions in the poem, argues that the persona of Barricade Smith acts as 'a centre about which passages of self-mockery and self-doubt can play in order to prevent a god-like attitude of knowing all the solutions to all the social problems' ('Development of Canadian Poetry/ p. 305). I would question whether Smith is ever clearly enough defined to function as a persona. CHAPTER 6 Hallowing the Wilderness

1 LOTD, p. 81 2 'Sometimes he would dictate [his editorials] to Bessie from a set of notes such as he used for speeches, which accounts ... for their pronounced oratorical style' (LOTD, pp. 79-80). 3 BS, p. xx 4 Cited in LOTD, p. 81 5 Judith Seidel, The Development and Social Adjustment of the Jewish Community in Montreal/ MA thesis, McGill University 1939, p. 92

Notes to pages 94-104 285 6 Seidel, p. 92 7 LOTD, p. 80 8 For an account of the Bratzlaver poems which Klein did manage to complete, see the introductory explanatory note to To the Chief Musician, a Psalm of the Bratzlaver, a Parable' (CP, p. 960). 9 See also 'Stranger and Afraid' (NB, p. 71) on these 'defense-mechanisms of Jewry, the cliches of an impotent chauvinism.' 10 The reception of Poems by the Jewish, and especially the Yiddishlanguage, press was uniformly positive. Elsewhere the responses were mixed, as is suggested by the title of the review by J.F. Nims in Poetry [Chicago] 66 (1945), 104-5, 'Tares and Wheat.' E.K. Brown was enthusiastic in his praise in 'Letters in Canada 1944: Poetry,' University of Toronto Quarterly 14 (1945), 261-2. Irving Layton praised the psalms as a whole for their 'gusto, warmth, eloquence and imagination/ but he criticized some as 'noisy and unconvincing' (untitled review of Poems, First Statement 2 [1945], 36). John Sutherland condemned most of the psalms as 'of little importance, ... not very convincing and certainly very dull,' and had nothing positive to say about any of them (The Poetry of A.M. Klein,' in Marshall, ed., A.M. Klein, pp. 47-8). Unfortunately, by far the most prominent of the reviews of Poems was also the most negative, These Are Not Psalms,' by Randall Jarrell, in Commentary i (1945), 88-90. For more information on the critical reception of the psalms, see the Annotated Bibliography, pp. 297-9. 11 'Report on the Psalter of Avram Haktani/ n.d. Compare Randall Jarrell's comment: Tt was a mistake to call most of these poems psalms, and to number them as psalms' (These Are Not Psalms,' p. 89). 12 Compare 'Maschil of Abraham: A Prayer When He Was in the Cave'; 'A Prayer of Abraham That He Be Forgiven for Blasphemy'; 'A Prayer of the Afflicted, When He Is Overwhelmed'; 'A Psalm of Justice, and Its Scales'; 'A Psalm of Resignation'; 'Shiggaion of Abraham Which He Sang unto the Lord'; To the Prophets, Minor and Major, a Psalm or Song'; and 'A Psalm of Abraham, concerning That Which He Beheld upon the Heavenly Scarp.' For a discussion of 'the silence of God [as] a testimony of absence' in Klein's psalms, see Ann Margaret Munton, 'Silence as Subject and the Void or Voice of God in the Poetry of A.M. Klein,' in The Paradox of Silence in Modern Canadian Poetry: Creativity or Sterility?' diss., Dalhousie University 1981, pp. 390-5. 13 The article on Rashi in JE, which is the major source for the poem, is marked '1940' in Klein's hand.

286 Notes to pages 104-15 14 The Rashi psalm was published in May 1940. None of the other psalms was published earlier than 1941, although some were submitted for publication in November 1940. 15 Brenner, pp. 61-80, argues that Klein's trivialization of Hitler is part of a deliberate process of 'de-demonization/ foreshadowing Hannah Arendt's concept of the 'banality of evil.' CHAPTER 7 The Frustral Summit of Extase 1 Of the approximately three dozen poems of this period, eleven were never published. Of the published poems, only eight were reprinted in book form: 'And in That Drowning Instant,' 'Autobiographical,' 'Bread,' 'Commercial Bank/ 'The Green Old Age,' 'Montreal,' 'Pawnshop/ and 'A Psalm Touching Genealogy.' It is not always clear why particular poems were left unpublished and uncollected; however, among the unpublished and uncollected poems are all of those which contain explicit sexual allusions: for example, the unpublished 'Et j'ai lu tous les livres/ 'Girlie Show/ 'Les Vespasiennes/ 'Of Tradition/ and 'Song without Music'; and the uncollected 'Come Two, like Shadows/ 'Love/ and 'Sonnet Unrhymed.' 2 Canadian Poetry 5 (1940), 39-40; Canadian Forum 20 (1941), 354-5; University of Toronto Quarterly 10 (1941), 283, 286-7; Poetry [Chicago] 58 (1941), 51-3 3 Contemporary Jewish Record 5 (1942), 333 4 This conspiracy theory was confirmed for Klein by Randall Jarrell's hostile review of Poems in the first issue of Commentary (These Are Not Psalms/ Commentary i [1945], 88-90). In a letter to Isador Goldstick (30 January 1946), who had written to Commentary defending Poems against Jarrell's criticisms, Klein characterizes the review as 'an attempted "job" ... [T]here are some of the crew of the American Jewish Committee who ... do not like my intransigent Zionism. So - and this is traditional they use a goy to heat a fire to make their Sabbath.' In a letter to Robert Laughlin (18 October 1944), Klein attributed the silence of the American Jewish intellectual community concerning The Hitleriad to a similar conspiracy of Fadiman, Untermyer, Cerf, Kreymborg ... - you may think of this junta as the composite of their initials ... These arbiters of public taste together with the lesser marranoes - maintained their silence about the H. - not because it was written by a Jew, but by a Jew not of their ilk. A Jew who admits it! A Jew who is no way embarrassed by his nativity ...

Notes to pages 116-20 287 But this crew ... dousing their Ellis Island smell with true New England spice, are not content unless they don starspangled thimbles upon their circumcised penises. See also 'Portrait, and Commentary' and 'To the Lady Who Wrote about Herzl.' 5 Letters to Louis E. Levinthal (7 August 1942, i July 1943); and to Solomon Grayzel (15 December 1943). The archives of the Jewish Publication Society at the Philadelphia Jewish Archives Center contain a dozen letters from Klein concerning Poems, from 18 February 1942 to 26 January 1945. There is a heavily revised draft of his letter of 7 August 1942 in the Klein Papers (MS 161-76), in which the language is more intemperate than in the version which he finally sent. For example, he says of one of the passages objected to that it could be 'embarrassing only to eunuchs' (MS 170). 6 Alfred A. Knopf, the publisher of The Second Scroll, was Jewish, but his firm did not specialize in Jewish books. 7 Robert Melangon, 'Reedifier Jerusalem/ in Montreal: I'invention juive, Actes du colloque tenu le 2 mars 1990 a 1'Universite de Montreal, ed. Pierre Nepveu (Montreal: Universite dp Montreal 1991), p. 27 8 Melangon, p. 27 9 Klein translated a number of poems in the thirties contrasting the present desolation of the city of Jerusalem with its past and future glory: 'O Site Most Kingly, O Royal Sanctum,' by Solomon Ben Moses Ha-levi Alkabez; To Jerusalem the Holy' and 'O Heighte Sovereign, O Worldes Prys,' by Yehuda Halevi; 'Mother Jerusalem,' by Uri Zvi Greenberg; and 'Be There No Altar,' 'Make Blind, O Sun of Jerusalem,' and 'With Every Stone,' by Judah Kami. In 'Mother Jerusalem,' Greenberg compares the city to a dismembered body: 'Yet to me, O Jerusalem, thou art the body of my mother, lacerated; every stone a limb lopped off (14-15). 10 Klein's account is based on a traditional legend that Yehuda Halevi was murdered in the Holy Land by an Arab horseman as he was kneeling in prayer. But it is only in Klein's version of the legend that this happens while Halevi is actually reciting his Ode. The Ode was, in fact, written in Spain before Halevi undertook his pilgrimage. Since this is obvious in Klein's original translation, he revised it when incorporating it into 'Yehuda Halevi, His Pilgrimage.' For a discussion of Klein's revisions, see the introductory explanatory note to the poem (CP, p. 978). 11 The phrase is underlined in Klein's copy (p. 3). 12 Melangon notes the parallel between the two poems (pp. 26-7). Their dates of composition appear to be very close: 'Montreal' was first pub-

288 Notes to pages 121-30

13 14

15 16 17 18

19

20 21

22 23 24

25

lished in Preview in September 1944; "A Psalm Touching Genealogy' was submitted to the JPS for inclusion in Poems on 11 July 1944, just before the book went to press. Brenner, p. 11 These lines recall the episode in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu ([Paris: Gallimard 1954], pp. 159-65) in which Vinteuil's lesbian daughter desecrates his memory by making love in the presence of his photograph and by encouraging her lover to spit on it. As a passage in 'Raw Material' indicates, Klein was reading Proust at this time, although without much enthusiasm: he found him a 'windy, garrulous bore' (NB, p. 13). 'Sonnet Unrhymed' was not published until 1945, but it is probably the 'poem on contraceptives' referred to in 'Raw Material' (NB, p. 49). LOTD, p. 155 For Klein's 'Joycean' poems of the period, see the introductory explanatory note to 'Sennet from Gheel' (CP, p. 976). The first version of The Inverted Tree' is untitled. It does, however, include an elaborate presentation of the image of the inverted tree (NB, p. 28). The article in JE does not mention the Kabbalistic 'tree of the Sefirot,' a diagram of the ten Sefirot or stages of divine emanation in the form of a 'reversed tree' (Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah [New York: New American Library 1974], p. 106). Klein may have been aware of this Kabbalistic version of the image, but it does not seem to be relevant to The Inverted Tree.' See, in particular, notes 5, 7, 12, 13, and 21. There are several parodies of Keats in Klein's poetry of the period. See 'Les Vespasiennes,' 20; 'Variation of a Theme/ 1-2; and 'Girlie Show' throughout. The diary section of 'Raw Material' (NB, p. 13) contains the note 'Attempted to re-write Keats' Ode to Nightingale. Failed. Could achieve only "seizin of mysts," "close beausome frond of maturing sun."' 'Ode to Nightingale' is a slip for To Autumn' ('Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun' [1-2]). See also The Hitleriad, 89-91, and 'Of National Characteristics,' C/C, 23 February 1940, p. 4. Spender, p. 14 Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, the German text with an English translation, introd. and commentary by J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender, 3rd rev. ed. (London: Hogarth Press 1948), p. 157. This is the edition which Klein owned. Duino Elegies, p. 120

Notes to pages 131-47 289 26 C/C, 24 December 1943, p. 4 27 Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. M.D. Herter Norton (New York: W.W. Norton 1942), p. 71. This is the edition which Klein owned. 28 From a letter written in August 1915, cited in the notes to the fourth elegy (p. 116) 29 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1960), p. 215 30 Although MS 7594 is not filed along with the rest of 'Raw Material/ it is certainly part of it since it contains a number of notes for the second version of The Inverted Tree.' 31 'Natonek' refers to Hans Natonek, a Czech-born Jewish writer who fled the Nazis to New York after the fall of France. 'Raw Material' contains a note (MS 3557), dated 5 December 1943, on Natonek's In Search of Myself (New York: Putnam 1943). For an account of the influence of Natonek's book on 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ see the introductory explanatory note to the poem (CP, p. 1001). 32 Klein had angina-like symptoms in the late thirties. 33 Note 16, for example, refers to 'S. attempt.' 34 There are two versions of this table, MS 3459 and MS 3462. Although the second is probably later, it is the rougher of the two and incompletely revised. I, therefore, refer to the first version. 35 In the earliest version of 'Stranger and Afraid/ Drizen is named Kay, like the protagonist in 'Raw Material.' 36 James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House 1934), p. 174 37 The relevant passage from 'A Psalm of Montreal' is: Stowed away in a Montreal lumber room The Discobulus standeth and turneth his face to the wall; Dusty, cobweb-covered, maimed and set at naught, Beauty crieth in an attic and no man regardeth. O God! O Montreal! 38 Ulysses, p. 174 CHAPTER 8 Taiku 1 Usher Caplan, 'A.M. Klein: An Introduction/ diss., State University of New York 1976, p. 120 2 Caplan, 'A.M. Klein/ pp. 78-9 3 Klein's Guggenheim application is discussed, and most of it is reprinted

290 Notes to pages 148-62 in Harold Heft, The Lost A.M. Klein Guggenheim Application/ Canadian Poetry 32 d993)/ 73~8i. 4 Klein made a similar comment in the letter to E.K. Brown cited above. 5 See, for example, The Usurper' (1949; LER, pp. 195-7) and Section III of 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape.' 6 See Finkelstein, pp. 283-348, for an account of the influence of the first and second generations of modernists on Klein's poetry. 7 Usher Caplan (LOTD, pp. 196-8) was the first to note the importance of the dialectic in Klein's later work. See also Finkelstein, pp. 196-206, 386-9. 8 Between, p. 28 9 In a letter to A.J.M. Smith (14 January 1944), Klein complains about the 'superciliousness' of some of the Marxist poets associated with Preview: 'My only consolation lies in watching them jump through the hoop every time the party changes its line. The punishment is Dantesque.' 10 Finkelstein, pp. 196-7 11 Cited in the explanatory notes to 'Sestina on the Dialectic' (CP, p. 1013) 12 James McFarlane, The Mind of Modernism,' in Bradbury and McFarlane, pp. 87-8 13 Messianic, p. 290 14 Michael Greenstein, in 'Doublecrossing the Atlantic in A.M. Klein's The Second Scroll,' in Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1989), pp. 22-3, speaks of the 'poststructuralist aporia or talmudic taiku' which indicates that 'ultimate answers must be held in abeyance.' 15 Milton Wilson points out that 'the title of ["Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens"] might just as well be "Portrait of Spinoza as Landscape"' ('Klein's Drowned Poet: Canadian Variations on an Old Theme/ in Marshall, ed., A.M. Klein, p. 98). Wilson draws a number of parallels between 'Pulver' and 'Portrait.' 16 'His poem on the tragedy of Baruch Spinoza, "Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens," is nearest to his heart' (S.H. Abramson, 'Abe Klein in Person/ Jewish Standard [September 1936], 23). 17 First Statement 3.1 (June-July 1945), 3-8 18 Duino Elegies, p. 31 19 Book i, sonnet 7 (p. 29). See also the two following sonnets. 20 Duino Elegies, p. 139. Since the third edition (1947) of the Elegies, which Klein owned, postdates 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape' (the first edition appeared in 1939), Klein's markings do not provide evidence of his familiarity with Rilke at the time the poem was written - which is, in any

Notes to pages 162-72 291 case, beyond doubt. They do suggest, however, that Klein was aware of the close parallels between 'Portrait' and the Elegies. 21 Wilson, p. 94 22 D.M.R. Bentley, 'A Nightmare Ordered: A.M. Klein's "Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/" Essays on Canadian Writing 28 (1984), 15, 25. Bentley refers elsewhere to 'unsubdued echoes' (22). There was an even stronger emphasis on the debasement of language in the original version of the poem, which contained a section, following the present section II, describing the poet earning his living as an advertising copywriter. 23 Irving Howe, The Culture of Modernism,' in Decline of the New (New York: Harcourt Brace & World 1970), pp. 17-18 24 'Portrait' was reprinted in Longer Poems for Upper-School, 1955-1956, ed. Roy Allin and Alan Meikeljohn (Toronto: Ryerson Press 1955). Some of the notes for this edition were provided by Klein himself. See Bentley, 'Nightmare,' p. 42, note 3, for a fuller account. 25 Duino Elegies, p. 87 26 Erich Heller, The Artist's Journey into the Interior,' in The Artist's Journey into the Interior and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1965), p. 170 27 Messianic, p. 194 28 Messianic, p. 16 29 Heller, p. 170 30 In addition to the first and last phrases of the passage discussed above, every other phrase consists of an Aufhebung as well: a rich garland, a halo ('lenses ... on a brow' [30], 'green-shaded' [63], 'special haircut' [97], 'wigged with his laurel' [104], 'merkin joy' [128]); of his anonymity, / and lives alone, and in his secret ('no record' [5], 'retired' [13], "beyond recognition' [14], 'disappeared' [16] 'a number, an x, / a Mr. Smith' [26-7], 'incognito, lost, lacunal' [28], 'ignored' [29], 'forgotten' [30], 'unnoticed' [31], 'alone' [59], 'alone' [87], 'solitudes' [89], 'set apart' [96], 'introvert' [98], 'absence' [103]); shines (like phosphorus ('mirroring lenses ... / that shine' [30-1], 'the glow and growth of his being' [48] 'shaken tinfoil' [49], 'dandled brightness' [82], 'flash of brass' [112], 'the marquees' [123]). 31 When Klein revised 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape' in the early fifties, after he had begun to experience the first symptoms of his final breakdown, he replaced the period at the end of the poem with ellipsis points: 'At the bottom of the sea ...' Perhaps he now found the suggestion of finality in the original version too painful to bear. 32 In a letter cited in Donald Prater, A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1986), p. 164. It is highly unlikely that

292 Notes to pages 172-9

33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Klein was familiar with this letter. For a more likely source of Klein's 'phosphorus/ see the explanatory note to 'Portrait/ 163 (CP, p. 1004). 'Pegasus on Parnassus/ in Essays, Controversies and Poems, p. 85 Howe, 'Culture/ p. 24 Bentley, 'Nightmare/ p. 2 Bentley, 'Nightmare/ p. 45 note 45 Portrait, p. 253 Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey (New York: Oxford University Press 1972), p. xii Ulysses, p. 208. 'Lycidas' is quoted or paraphrased on pp. 26, 27, 50, 645. CHAPTER 9 Kebec

1 These poems are often loosely referred to as the Rocking Chair poems, since most of them were collected in The Rocking Chair and Other Poems (Toronto: Ryerson Press 1948). I do not follow this practice, however, not only because several of the Quebec poems of 1945-7 are omitted from the volume, but also because the volume includes poems from an earlier period and poems which do not deal with Quebec. 2 Robin Davies, '"A Game's Stances": Questions of Language and Unity in Klein's "The Provinces/" Canadian Poetry 19 (1986), 53 3 Compare 'the folded cripples/ 'Roll empty away, wheelchairs' (The Cripples/ 3, 18); 'rolled like a rug of a thick and golden thread/ 'ship in whose galleys roll / sunshines' ('Grain Elevator/ 13, 14-15); 'rolls the f ('M. Bertrand/ 3); 'flags ... curled - / furling' (The Snowshoers/ 11-13); 'sacred upon the roll' (The Notary/ 13); 'the folding seats' ('Political Meeting/ i); 'rolled from old France' ('Dominion Square/ 15); 'the monsters coil' ('Filling Station/ 9); 'a folded loneliness' ('Les Filles majeures/ 4); 'rolls in his heap of fruit' ('Lone Bather/ 12) 'Roll now the batons' ('Parade of St. Jean Baptiste/ 3); 'scrolling ... into the mist' ('Winter Night: Mount Royal/ 24). 4 See Finkelstein, pp. 372-5, for a discussion of how the rhythm of the poem mimics the pendulum-like motion of the rocking-chair. 5 Klein included the poem in two of his recorded readings: at McGill, to the Canadian Authors' Association, 22 November 1955; and in Six Montreal Poets, Folkway Records 98095, 1957. 6 In submitting the typescript of The Rocking Chair and Other Poems to the Ryerson Press (24 October 1947), Klein quotes a comment by AJ.M. Smith making the identical point, and he repeats the point in a draft of a letter to Karl Shapiro (MS 422-4).

Notes to pages 180-9 293 7 8 9 10

Ulysses, p. 216 Ulysses, p. 225 Ulysses, p. 227 Compare '[T]he congregation removed to Mary's Abbey, where it had bought a meeting-house for £300 ... Subsequently the congregation removed to their present building in Adelaide Road' (JE, 'Dublin'); '[A] new synagogue was built in Mary's Abbey in 1835; and the present place of worship is in Adelaide road' (JE, 'Ireland'). 11 Linda Luft Ferguson, 'The Rocking Chair. Portrait of the Poet as Province/ Journal of Canadian Studies 19 (1984), 58-9 12 Ferguson, p. 59. For examples of the negative attitude to change, and to the passage of time in general, in The Rocking Chair, see 'The Break-up/ 'Les Filles majeures/ 'Librairie Delorme,' 'Monsieur Gaston/ 'Parade of St. Jean Baptiste/ 'Sire Alexandre Grandmaison/ and 'Universite de Montreal.' 13 Pierre Anctil, 'A.M. Klein: du poete et de ses rapports avec le Quebec frangais/ Journal of Canadian Studies 19 (1984), 116 14 Anctil, p. 129 15 See, for example, the following items from 1945-7 which are reprinted in BS and LER: The Jews of Europe' (BS, pp. 243-5); 'A Fitting Memorial' (BS, pp. 267-8); The Nuremberg Trial' (BS, pp. 276-8); 'Science and Savagery' (BS, pp. 290-2); 'Had Not Thy Torah Been My Delight' (LER, pp. 41-2); The Snows of Yesteryear' (LER, pp. 46-9); The Poetry Which Is Prayer' (LER, pp. 49-52); 'An Encyclopedic Work' (LER, pp. 52-4); The Snows of Yesteryear' (LER, pp. 57-9); 'Look on This Picture and on This ...' (LER, pp. 60-2); Those Who Should Have Been Ours' (LER, pp. 246-51). There are many other similar items from the period which are not reprinted in either volume. 16 See Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition. 17 The title of Shapiro's first book, Person, Place and Thing, would indeed have been an apt subtitle for The Rocking Chair' (LOTD, p. 151). 18 John Sutherland, The Poetry of A.M. Klein/ in Dudek and Gnarowski, P-44 19 Against, p. 81 20 Hugh MacLennan, Two Solitudes (Toronto: Collins 1945), pp. 41-3 21 Compare the uncle in 'Mourners'; Uncle Mayer in 'Autobiographical/ 28-9; Uncle Melech in SS; and the 'favourite uncle' (BS, p. 469), who personifies the culture of the Diaspora in Tn Praise of the Diaspora' (1953). 22 For a discussion of the significance of sunflower seeds in Klein's work, see Pollock, 'Sunflower Seeds/ pp. 48-58.

294 Notes to pages 189-212 23 See Noreen Golf man's comments on the 'fragile ... balance of dialectical tensions' in The Rocking Chair (p. 31; italics mine). 24 For similarly childlike flowering faces, see 'Parade of St. Jean Baptiste/ 22-5: There pass before the flowering faces, imaged, the animal fables, myths of the crayon'd class, the nursery's voyage and discovery 25 D.M.R. Bentley, 'Klein, Montreal, and Mankind/ Journal of Canadian Studies 19 (1984), 50-1 26 Ferguson, p. 64 27 Ferguson, p. 63 28 'Klein/ p. 50 CHAPTER 10 Tikkun 1 Against, p. 133 2 Alvin H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1980), p. 81 3 Compare 'A Lady with a Lamp' (1948; BS, pp. 326-8). 4 Paul Auster, City of Glass (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1987), p. 9 5 See Brian Diemert, 'A Note on W.H. Auden's "Detective Story" and A.M. Klein's "Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/" Canadian Poetry 32 (1993), 65-72. 6 John B. Henderson, Scripture, Canon, and Commentary: A Comparison of Confucian and Western Exegesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1991), pp. 85-6 7 Gershom Scholem, 'Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism/ in Messianic, pp. 282-303 8 Compare 'over the once-blest lagoons / Mushroom new Sinais' ('Elegy/ 133-4)9 See, for example, 'Of the Purim to Be' (1944; BS, pp. 210-11) and The Feast of Purim' (1951; BS, pp. 394-5). 10 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, rev. ed. (New York: Schocken 1946). This edition was reviewed by Rabbi Abraham J. Bick in C/C, 28 February 1947, p. 13. 11 'Isaac Luria and His School' (pp. 244-86). Curiously, this section of Klein's

Notes to pages 212-17 295 copy of Major Trends contains no markings. However, from references to Luria and his philosophy in 'Notebook of a Journey/ 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel,' and SS, it is clear that Klein knew it well. 12 Major Trends, p. 260 13 Major Trends, p. 261 14 Major Trends, p. 274 15 Kabbalah, p. 143. See also Scholem's comments on the 'affinity between mystical and dialectical thinking/ in Major Trends, p. 218. 16 Major Trends, p. 261 17 Major Trends, p. 280 18 'Scholem's remarkably lucid and accessible writings have succeeded in reaching an audience far wider than the narrow circle of Judaica scholars ... Diverse intellectuals from the writer Jorge Luis Borges to the literary critic Harold Bloom have taken to quoting the Kabbalah as interpreted through Scholem's eyes ... [Scholem has] succeeded in making ... an ostensibly alien and obscure subject ... compelling to secular Jews and nonJews alike' (David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History [Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1979], p. 2). In Canadian literature, the most obvious example of the influence of Scholem's account of the Lurianic Kabbalah is Adele Wiseman's Crackpot (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1974), which has an epigraph attributed to Luria and whose title is an allusion to the Breaking of the Vessels. 19 S.J. Stephen, 'Adam in Exile: A.M. Klein's "Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/" Dalhousie Review 51 (1971/72), 553-8 20 LOTD, p. 167 21 Compare Therefore have we pondered upon it, turned it in the mind about and about' ('In Praise of the Diaspora' [1953; BS, p. 467]); 'Segal himself following the injunction of Ben Bag-Bag, he turns it "about and about"' ('Poet of a World Passed By' [1950; LER, p. 79]); The Bible, as Ben Bag-Bag was wont to say, "is a Book that may be turned about and about, for all is in it"' (The Bible's Archetypical Poet' [1953; LER, p. 148]). Alter cites 'Ben Bag-Bag's famous formulation' as a 'principle whose workings Scholem studied for a lifetime, that often mesmerized Benjamin, and that Kafka absorbed into his very marrow' (Necessary Angels, p. 72). 22 Sambation was a legendary river across which part of the ten lost tribes was exiled by the Assyrians. It was impassable on weekdays; and on the Sabbath, when it became still, the tribes were not allowed to cross it because of the sanctity of the day. 23 Ulysses, p. 138

296 Notes to pages 217-27 24 For the shattering of the first set of tablets, see Exodus 32.19; for the making of the second set, see Exodus 34.28. The phrase which misled Michelangelo into representing Moses with horns occurs in Exodus 34.29. 25 Curiously, Klein himself is guilty of a misreading here. The phrase in Exodus 34.29 is not karnai or ('rays of light'), but karan or ('sent out rays of light'). 26 All quotations are from 'Gloss Gimel/ which provides a cleaner and more accessible text. 27 Major Trends, p. 14 28 Major Trends, p. 14 29 Ulysses, p. 383 30 Rachel Wischnitzer, The Messianic Theme in the Paintings of the Dura Synagogue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1948) 31 Wischnitzer, pp. 11-15 32 Wischnitzer, p. 67 33 Wischnitzer, p. 48. For the tradition of the Messiah as 'Moses redivivus,' see Scholem, Messianic, p. 53. 34 Charles de Tolnay, The Sistine Ceiling (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1945) 35 Tolnay, pp. 122-9 36 Tolnay, p. 22 37 Major Trends, p. 20 38 Adele Wiseman also uses the term 'magic circle' to refer to the process of tikkun (Crackpot, p. 304). 39 Tolnay describes the ignudi as 'spiritual echoes' (p. 22). 40 '[T]he work of art in its totality, i.e. the figures, space and architectural setting taken together ... form the members of a higher organism ... It has become a microcosm containing the cosmic law of life of the macrocosm' (Tolnay, p. 116). 41 According to Tolnay, The Sacrifice of Noah of Michelangelo is perhaps the first attempt to give this Biblical scene (Genesis 8:20) the aspect of an ancient holocaust'; and he notes the 'anthropomorphic expression' of the animals being sacrificed (p. 29). The earliest occurrence in the OED of 'holocaust' in the sense of the Nazi genocide of the Jews is from 1943. 42 Compare Tolnay's description of Michelangelo 'representing the landscape [of Eden] as a desert' (p. 32). 43 Tolnay, p. 36 44 According to Tolnay (p. 77), Michelangelo used seven colours on the Sistine Chapel, although Tolnay, unlike Klein, does not identify these as the colours of the rainbow.

Notes to pages 227-34 297 45 This pun was suggested to me by my wife, Didi Pollock. 46 The Yiddish and Aramaic references were suggested to me by my father, John Pollock. 47 This comment is made by the narrator of SS (p. 56). 48 The etymology of sefirah is, in fact, obscure. It may derive from the Hebrew word safar, 'to count.' 49 Compare Tolnay's description of the ceiling 'flooded ... with a white glow ... the image of the accumulated hopes of the race' (p. 44). 50 'His body seems to be the condensation of a cloud-like substance, soft, immaterial and formless ... God is assimilated to the nature of clouds ...' (Tolnay, p. 40). 51 In SS, p. 43, we are told that 'the first page is missing/ and in 'Gloss Gimel' (SS, p. 135), the text is described as an 'excerpt from [a] letter' and begins with ellipsis points, which are not in 'A Jew in the Sistine Chapel.' 52 Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York: Columbia University Press 1984), pp. 74-5 53 Mintz, p. 79 54 Mintz, pp. 74-5 55 See chapter 4, note 28 (pp. 280-1), and the textual note to 'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens,' 119/20 (CP, p. 350). 56 Tom Marshall, 'Introduction/ A.M. Klein, p. xvii 57 Mintz, p. 79 CHAPTER 11 Keri 1 Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Approach to al-Mu'tasim/ in The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969, ed. and trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author (New York: E.P. Dutton 1970), pp. 45-51 2 Most of the earlier critics tend to regard such tensions, when they notice them, either as flaws or as the result of misunderstandings of Klein's aims. Thus, for example, Irving Layton argues that the novel 'doesn't convince' ('Fire-Drake/ Teangadoir 5 [1961], 78), and Warren Tallman sees 'a serious discrepancy between the artist's perceptions and his creation' ('Creation beyond Perception/ Canadian Literature 11 [1962], 73). Miriam Waddington begins her very positive account of the novel, in A.M. Klein (Toronto: Copp Clark 1970), pp. 92-108, with an excellent account of several aspects of the novel which made her feel 'very uneasy' (p. 92) when it first appeared, but largely ceased to do so when she came to appreciate Klein's aims more fully. It is only relatively recently that critics have come to see the 'uneasiness' of the novel as an important part of its meaning.

298 Notes to pages 234-41 See especially Greenstein, pp. 18-34; Brenner, pp. 34-6; and Linda Rozmovits, 'A Narrative Messiah: The Redemptive Historiography of A.M. Klein's The Second Scroll/ Prooftexts 11 (1991), 25-39. 3 Jorge Luis Borges, 'Kafka and His Precursors/ in Other Inquisitions 1937-1952, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms (New York: Washington Square Press 1966), p. 113 4 The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe, ed. David G. Roskies (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society 1988), p. 107 5 Literature, p. 565 6 Literature, p. 566 7 Literature, pp. 565-6 8 Against, pp. 258-9 9 Edward Alexander, The Resonance of Dust: Essays on Holocaust Literature and Jewish Fate (Columbus: Ohio State University Press 1979), p. 47 10 Jacob Glatstein, 'Without Jews,' trans. Cynthia Ozick, in Penguin Book, P- 434 11 Double Dying, pp. 123-4 12 Brenner, p. 34 13 Usher Caplan points out that SS is 'modeled outwardly on the pattern of a detective's pursuit' (LOTD, p. 154) 14 William V. Spanos, 'The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination,' Boundary 2 i (1972), 154 15 Michael Holquist, 'Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction/ New Literary History 3 (1971/72), 155 16 Ulysses, p. 644 17 Rosmarin Heidenreich, 'Epic Allusion as a Narrative Strategy in A.M. Klein's Second Scroll/ in The Postwar Novel in Canada: Narrative Patterns and Reader Response (Waterloo, Ont: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 1989), P- 133 18 Heidenreich, p. 133 19 Greenstein, p. 10 20 Reprinted in The AM. Klein Symposium, ed. and introd. Seymour Mayne (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press 1975), pp. 25-6 21 See also a second, unpublished letter to Leon Edel (19 October 1951) and letters to A.J.M. Smith (18 September 1951; reprinted in Mayne, pp. 12-13) and to Morris Laub (9 October 1951; reprinted in 'A.M. Klein: A Recollection/ Congress Bi-weekly, 22 December 1972, p. 21). 22 For a discussion of 'sparse' and 'sketchy' characterization in SS, see Waddington, A.M. Klein, p. 95. 23 Alter's account of Kafka's novels focuses on a similar fascination with the

Notes to pages 241-59 299 act of interpretation to the exclusion of the traditional concerns of the realist novel: 'The interaction of individual personalities ... is displaced by a collision of exegetical viewpoints. His characters repeatedly ... argue or trade hypotheses about what things, or actual texts, mean ... [E]xegesis acts as a solvent in Kafka's world, steadily eating away the foundation of knowledge even as it seems to promise access to knowledge ...' (Necessary Angels, p. 78). 24 Greenstein discusses the concept of the palimpsest (Third, p. 18). Brenner presents 'the narrative as a multi-layered construct of diverse texts ... [a] seemingly incongruous juxtaposition of textual components' (p. 113). See also Rozmovits on the 'layering' effect of the novel ('Narrative/ p. 26). 25 Reprinted in Mayne, p. 25 26 'Narrative,' p. 33 27 'Narrative/ p. 27 28 Reprinted in Mayne, p. 13 29 Third, p. 8 30 To the Inferno of the Mellah, its unspeakability, the new state of Israel provides the Edenic counterpart' (Richard Cavell, 'The Nth Adam: Dante in Klein's The Second Scroll,' Canadian Literature 106 [1985], 50). 31 'Narrative/ p. 34 32 'Narrative/ p. 36 33 Hurban, p. 45 34 Resonance, p. xiii CHAPTER 12 Where Shall I Cry Bereshith? 1 Mark Finkelstein, in an analysis of this translation, points out that 'there is no promise of real cleansing. The earlier translation gave be clean, in keeping with the original. The later translation offers only feel clean: Real salvation is impossible' (p. 413). 2 SS was published in August 1951; 'The Bible Manuscripts' appeared in C/C between 28 September and 26 October 1951. 3 Tn Praise of the Diaspora' appeared in C/C between 9 January and 27 February 1953. 4 Hayim Greenberg, 'Golus-Jew/ trans. Shlomo Katz, in Voices from the Yiddish: Essays, Memoirs, Diaries, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1972), p. 274. Galuth and golus are the Sephardi and Ashkenazi pronunciations, respectively, of the same word: Klein uses the phrase 'galuth-]ew' in 'Notebook of a Journey' (1949; BS, p. 369).

3OO Notes to pages 259-69 5 Cited in Benjamin, 'Franz Kafka,' in Illuminations, p. 116. Brenner comments on Klein's realization 'that the [Jewish] State displaced his world view by promoting new cultural ideology he could not partake in' (p. 19). 6 The Bible's Archetypical Poet' appeared in CJC between 6 March and 20 March 1953. 7 Usher Caplan, introduction to reprint of The Bible's Archetypical Poet,' Prooftexts 2 (1982), 124. See also M.W. Steinberg's comments on the 'rather bitter note which may well have some significant biographical relevance' (The Conscience of Art: A.M. Klein on Poets and Poetry,' in A Political Art: Essays and Images in Honour of George Woodcock, ed. William H. New [Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 1978], p. 91). 8 'Bible's,' p. 123 9 'Bible's,' p. 124 10 Margaret I. Broad, 'Art and the Artist: Klein's Unpublished Novella/ Journal of Canadian Fiction 30 (1980), 116 11 Broad offers a more optimistic reading of this conclusion: 'A minim is only a half-note, yet it stands for the removal from office of at least one man who would suppress freedom. Terpetoff may not have been able to make sweeping social or political changes, may not have been able to gain freedom for artists, may even seem to have been forgotten. But he does leave his mark' (p. 129). However, compared to the ambitions that inspired the poet in 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape/ or the narrator of SS, to leave one's mark by slightly injuring a minor bureaucrat and interfering with his career seems anticlimactic at best. 12 Compare Isaac Bashevis Singer, Foreword, Golem! Danger, Deliverance and Art, ed. Emily D. Bilski (New York: The Jewish Museum 1988), p. 7: The golem-maker was, essentially, an artist.' For a discussion of the creation of the golem as a metaphor for 'the creative act/ see Emily Bilski, The Art of the Golem/ in Golem!, pp. 46-7. 13 There is evidence in the Klein Papers that Klein was involved in research for The Golem' until at least the end of 1954 (LOTD, pp. 205-6). 14 Sinai is not a common Jewish name. However, the article on Rabbi Low in /£, one of Klein's sources for The Golem/ notes that he had a younger brother of that name. 15 Postmodern, p. 60 16 Postmodern, p. 41 17 Gerald Graff, The Myth of the Postmodern Breakthrough/ in Literature against Itself: Literary Ideas and Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1979), p. 56

0^>

Works Cited

WORKS BY KLEIN

Beyond Sambation: Selected Essays and Editorials 1928-1955. Ed. M.W. Steinberg and Usher Caplan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1982 Complete Poems. Ed. Zailig Pollock. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1990 Literary Essays and Reviews. Ed. Usher Caplan and M.W. Steinberg. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1987 Notebooks: Selections from the A.M. Klein Papers. Ed. Zailig Pollock and Usher Caplan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1994 The Second Scroll. New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1951 Short Stories. Ed. M.W. Steinberg. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1983 OTHER WORKS

Aberbach, David. Bialik. New York: Grove-Weidenfeld 1988 Abramson, S.H. 'Abe Klein in Person.' Jewish Standard (September 1936), 23 Adachi, Ken. 'Poet Klein's Short Stories Heavy-Handed.' Toronto Star, 18 June

1983, Hio Alexander, Edward. The Resonance of Dust: Essays on Holocaust Literature and Jewish Fate. Columbus: Ohio State University Press 1979 Allin, Roy, and Alan Meikeljohn, eds. Longer Poems for Upper-School, 1955-1956. Toronto: Ryerson Press 1955 Alter, Robert. Defenses of the Imagination: Jewish Writers and Modern Historical Crisis. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America 1977 - Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1991

302 Works Cited Anctil, Pierre. 'A.M. Klein: du poete et de ses rapports avec le Quebec frangais.' Journal of Canadian Studies 19 (1984), 114-31 Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future. New York: Viking 1961 Auster, Paul. City of Glass. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1987 Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press 1981 Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. and introd. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken 1969 - Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Ed. and introd. Peter Demetz. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1978 Bentley, D.M.R. 'Klein, Montreal, and Mankind/ Journal of Canadian Studies 19 (1984), 35-57 - 'A Nightmare Ordered: A.M. Klein's "Portrait of the Poet as Landscape."' Essays on Canadian Writing 28 (1984), 1-45 Betcherman, Lita-Rose. The Swastika and the Maple Leaf: Fascist Movements in Canada in the Thirties. Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside 1975 Biale, David. Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1979 Bilski, Emily D., ed. Golem! Danger, Deliverance and Art. New York: The Jewish Museum 1988 Borges, Jorge Luis. The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969. Ed. and trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author. New York: E.P. Dutton 1970 - Other Inquisitions 1937-1952. Trans. Ruth L.C. Simms. Introd. James E. Irby. New York: Washington Square Press 1966 Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane, eds. Modernism. New York: Penguin 1976 Brenner, Rachel Feldhay. A.M. Klein, the Father of Canadian Jewish Literature: Essays in the Poetics of Humanistic Passion. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press 1989 Broad, Margaret I. 'Art and the Artist: Klein's Unpublished Novella.' Journal of Canadian Fiction 30 (1980), 114-31 Brown, E.K. The Immediate Present in Canadian Literature.' Sewanee Review 41 (1933), 430-42 - 'Letters in Canada 1944: Poetry.' University of Toronto Quarterly 14 (1945), 261-2 Butler, Samuel. Works. Ed. Henry Festing Jones and A.T. Bartholomew. New York: AMS Press 1968 Callaghan, Morley. 'A Criticism.' New Frontier i (April 1936), 24

Works Cited 303 Caplan, Usher. 'A.M. Klein: An Introduction.' Diss. State University of New York 1976 - Introduction. The Bible's Archetypical Poet.' Prooftexts 2 (1982), 123-4 - Like One That Dreamed: A Portrait of A.M. Klein. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson 1982 Cavell, Richard. The Nth Adam: Dante in Klein's The Second Scroll.' Canadian Literature 106 (1985), 45-53 Darling, Michael. The Myth of Smith.' Essays on Canadian Writing 20 (1980-1), 68-76 Davies, Robin.'"A Game's Stances": Questions of Language and Unity in Klein's "The Provinces."' Canadian Poetry 19 (1986), 49-56 Dawidowicz, Lucy S., ed. The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1967 Diemert, Brian. 'A Note on W.H. Auden's "Detective Story" and A.M. Klein's "Portrait of the Poet as Landscape."' Canadian Poetry 32 (1993), 65-72 Djwa, Sandra. '"A New Soil and a Sharp Sun": The Landscape of a Modern Canadian Poetry.' Modernist Studies 2 (1977), 3-17 Dudek, Louis, and Michael Gnarowski, eds. The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada. Toronto: Ryerson Press 1967 Edel, Leon. 'Abraham M. Klein.' Canadian Forum 12 (1932), 300-2 Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Ed. David Carroll. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1986 Ellmann, Richard. Ulysses on the Liffey. New York: Oxford University Press 1972 Feldman, Yael S. 'Whose Story Is It, Anyway?' In Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the 'Final Solution.' Ed. Saul Friedlander. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1992, pp. 223-39 Ferguson, Linda Luft. 'The Rocking Chair. Portrait of the Poet as Province.' Journal of Canadian Studies 19 (1984), 58-65 Finkelstein, Mark. The Style of A.M. Klein.' Diss. University of Toronto 1988 Fischer, G.K. In Search of Jerusalem: Religion and Ethics in the Writings of A.M. Klein. Montreal and London: McGill-Queen's University Press 1975 Frank, Joseph. The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press 1963 Golfman, Noreen. AM. Klein and His Works. Toronto: ECW Press [1991]. Graff, Gerald. Literature against Itself: Literary Ideas and Modern Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1979 Greenstein, Michael. Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1989 Halkin, Hillel. Introduction. 'Tevye the Dairyman' and 'The Railroad Stories.' By Sholem Aleichem. Trans. Hillel Halkin. New York: Schocken 1987

304 Works Cited Hassan, Ihab, and Sally Hassan, eds. Innovation/Renovation: New Perspectives on the Humanities. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1983 Heft, Harold. The Lost A.M. Klein Guggenheim Application.' Canadian Poetry 32 (1993), 73-81 Heidenreich, Rosmarin. The Postwar Novel in Canada: Narrative Patterns and Reader Response. Waterloo, Ont: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 1989 Heller, Erich. The Artist's Journey into the Interior and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1965 Henderson, John B. Scripture, Canon, and Commentary: A Comparison of Confucian and Western Exegesis. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1991 Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983 Holquist, Michael. 'Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction.' New Literary History 3 (1971/72), 135-56 Howe, Irving. Decline of the New. New York: Harcourt Brace & World 1970 -, Ruth R. Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk, eds. The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse. New York: Viking 1987 -, and Eliezer Greenberg, eds. A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1969 -, and Eliezer Greenberg, eds. A Treasury of Yiddish Stories. New York: Viking 1954 -, and Eliezer Greenberg, eds. Voices from the Yiddish: Essays, Memoirs, Diaries. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1972 Hutcheon, Linda, and Alain Goldschlager. "'Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens": A.M. Klein as Wordsmith.' Canadian Poetry 4 (1979), 52-8 Jarrell, Randall. These Are Not Psalms.' Review of Poems, by A.M. Klein. Commentary i (1945), 88-90 The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls 1906 Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber 1939 - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1960 - Ulysses. New York: Random House 1934 Klinck, Carl F., et al. Literary History of Canada. 2d ed. 3 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1976 La Bossiere, Camille, ed. Translations in Canadian Literature. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press 1983 Langlais, Jacques, and David Rome. Jews and French Quebeckers: Two Hundred Years of Shared History. Trans. Barbara Young. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 1991 Laub, Morris. 'A.M. Klein: A Recollection.' Congress Bi-weekly, 22 December 1972

Works Cited 305 Layton, Irving. 'Fire-Drake.' Teangadoir 5 (1961), 73-80 - Review of Poems, by A.M. Klein. First Statement 2 (1945), 35-6 Lesser, Allen. Review of Hath Not a Jew ... Contemporary Jewish Record 5 (1942), 333 Lyotard, Jean-Frangois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Introd. Fredric Jameson. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press 1984 MacLennan, Hugh. Two Solitudes. Toronto: Collins 1945 Marshall, Tom, ed. AM. Klein. Toronto: Ryerson Press 1970 Mayne, Seymour, ed. The A.M. Klein Symposium. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press 1975 Metcalf, John, ed. The Bumper Book. Toronto: ECW Press 1986 Mintz, Alan. Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature. New York: Columbia University Press 1984 Miron, Dan. A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Schocken 1973 Munton, Ann Margaret. 'The Paradox of Silence in Modern Canadian Poetry: Creativity or Sterility?' Diss. Dalhousie University 1981 Nepveu, Pierre, ed. Montreal: Vinvention juive. Actes du colloque tenu le 2 mars 1990 a I'Universite de Montreal. Montreal: University de Montreal 1991 Nims, J.F. Tares and Wheat.' Review of Poems, by A.M. Klein. Poetry [Chicago] 66 (1945), 104-5 Page, P.K. 'The Sense of Angels.' Jewish Dialog [Toronto], Passover 1973, pp. 18-19 Pollock, Zailig. 'A Source for A.M. Klein's "Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens."' Canadian Poetry 12 (1983), 34-9 - 'Sunflower Seeds: A.M. Klein's Hero and Demagogue.' Canadian Literature 82 (1979), 48-58 -, Usher Caplan, and Linda Rozmovits. A.M. Klein: An Annotated Bibliography. Toronto: ECW Press 1993 Prater, Donald. A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1986 Proust, Marcel. A la recherche du temps perdu. Paris: Gallimard 1954 Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies. The German text with an English translation. Introd. and commentary by J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender. 3rd rev. ed. London: Hogarth Press 1948 - Letters to a Young Poet. Trans, and with a foreword by Stephen Mitchell. New York: Random House 1984 - New Poems [1908]: The Other Part. Trans. Edward Snow. San Francisco: North Point Press 1987

306 Works Cited - Sonnets to Orpheus. Trans. M.D. Herter Norton. New York: W.W. Norton 1942 Robinson, Ira, Pierre Anctil, and Mervin Butovsky, eds. An Everyday Miracle: Yiddish Culture in Montreal. Montreal: Vehicule Press 1990 Rosenfeld, Alvin H. A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1980 Roskies, David G. Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1984 -, ed. The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society 1988 - The Story's the Thing: Afterword.' Prooftexts 5 (1985), 67-74 Rozmovits, Linda. 'A.M. Klein and Modernism.' MA thesis. McGill University 1988 - 'Klein's Translations of Moyshe Leib Halpern: A Problem of Jewish Modernism.' Canadian Poetry 22 (1988), 1-9 - 'A Narrative Messiah: The Redemptive Historiography of A.M. Klein's The Second Scroll.' Prooftexts 11 (1991), 25-39 Scholem, Gershom. Kabbalah. New York: New American Library 1974 - Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Rev. ed. New York: Schocken 1946 - The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality. New York: Schocken 1971 - On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays. New York: Schocken 1976 Scott, F.R. 'New Poems for Old: i. The Decline of Poesy.' Canadian Forum 11 (1931), 296-8 Seidel, Judith. The Development and Social Adjustment of the Jewish Community in Montreal.' MA thesis. McGill University 1939 Shaked, Gershon. The Shadows Within: Essays on Modern Jewish Writers. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society 1987 Smitten, Jeffrey, and Ann Daghistany, eds. Spatial Form in Narrative. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press 1981 Spanos, William V. The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination.' Boundary 2 i (1972), 147-68 Spender, Stephen. The Struggle of the Modern. London: Hamish Hamilton 1963 Spinoza, Benedict. The Philosophy of Spinoza: Selected from His Chief Works. With a life of Spinoza and an introduction by Joseph Ratner. New York: Modern Library 1927 Steinberg, M.W. The Conscience of Art: A.M. Klein on Poets and Poetry.' In A Political Art: Essays and Images in Honour of George Woodcock. Ed. William H. New. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 1978, pp. 82-94

Works Cited 307 Stephen, S.J. 'Adam in Exile: A.M. Klein's "Portrait of the Poet as Landscape."' Dalhousie Review 51 (1971/72), 553-8 Stevens, Peter. 'The Development of Canadian Poetry between the Wars and Its Reflection of Social Awareness.' Diss. University of Saskatchewan 1968 -, ed. The McGill Movement: A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott and Leo Kennedy. Toronto: Ryerson Press 1969 Sutherland, John. Essays, Controversies and Poems. Ed. Miriam Waddington. New Canadian Library. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1972 Tallman, Warren. 'Creation beyond Perception/ Canadian Literature 11 (1962), 72-3 Tolnay, Charles de. The Sistine Ceiling. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1945 Waddington, Miriam. A.M. Klein. Toronto: Copp Clark 1970 - 'On A.M. Klein,' Jewish Dialog [Toronto], Passover 1973, p. 30 - Folklore in the Poetry of AM. Klein. The Pratt Lecture. St John's, Nfld: Memorial University 1974 Walsh, William. 'A.M. Klein and the Condition of Being Jewish.' Journal of Canadian Studies 19 (1984), 9-21 Warren, Austin. 'Instress of Inscape.' Kenyan Review 6 (1944), 369-82 Wilde, Alan. Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1981 Wischnitzer, Rachel. The Messianic Theme in the Paintings of the Dura Synagogue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1948 Wiseman, Adele. Crackpot. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1974 Wisse, Ruth R. A Little Love in Big Manhattan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1988 -, ed. 'A Shtetl' and Other Yiddish Novellas. New York: Behrman 1973 - 'Di Yunge and the Problem of Jewish Aestheticism.' Jewish Social Studies 38 (1976), 265-76 - The Schlemiel as Modern Hero. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1971

This page intentionally left blank

i