He wanted to get “beyond poetry.”

“Many critics and students have come dangerously close to subscribing to the tenuous proposition that a nearly exact formal analogy exists between the structure of T.S. Eliot‘s Four Quartets and that of Beethoven‘s late string quartets,” wrote Thomas R. Rees in “The Orchestration of Meaning in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets” in 1969.

As if the idea had ever crossed our minds.

However, I’ve since learned that the association of my all-time favorite Eliot piece and the Beethoven late string quartets really is a thing. And not only from Rees. I discovered this article written by Katie Mitchell on the subject way back in 2005, when she and a colleague were developing a performance of Eliot’s masterpiece:

It was only by chance that we discovered – in Lyndall Gordon‘s book on Eliot’s later career, Eliot’s New Life – that the poem was inspired by one of Beethoven’s late string quartets. Once the initial connection had been made between the two pieces, I started to research them both, with a view to working out how to put them together. The idea of an evening that somehow combined a reading of the poem with a performance of the string quartet was born. …

Beethoven composed his string quartet, Opus 132 in A minor, in the winter of 1824-52. He was 54 and recovering from a serious bowel condition from which he had nearly died. As a result, he entitled the central movement “a song of thanksgiving … offered to the divinity by a convalescent”, and the second section of this movement bears the inscription: “Feeling new strength.”

“Feeling new strength.”

Over 100 years later, in March 1931, TS Eliot, aged 47, wrote to Stephen Spender: “I have the A minor Quartet on the gramophone, and I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly, or at least more than human gaiety, about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.”

Eliot began the Four Quartets in 1935 and worked on it for years, finishing it in 1941. Whereas the composer wrote one quartet, with five movements, the poet wrote four pieces, each divided into five sections. Like Beethoven’s work, Eliot’s poem was triggered by personal suffering, although not of a physical nature. It was probably connected to his separation from his wife, Vivienne, in 1932; her mental illness; and the rekindling of a platonic relationship with his first love, the American university teacher Emily Hale. …

In 1933 Eliot said he wanted to get “beyond poetry, as Beethoven in his later works, strove to get beyond music”.

Intrigued as I was? Read the whole thing here. Rees’s piece is here. Or listen to the A Minor String Quartet here.

Postscript on 10/14: Faithful Book Haven reader Henry Gould alerted us to his own 2009 post at “HG Poetics” on this very subject, here.

Watchful Book Haven readers alerted me to letters that have been published at the Times Literary Supplement, touching on subjects we have written about in the past. Two are in the September 28 letters column of the eminent weekly!

The first, forwarded to us by Elizabeth Conquest, concerns the recent TLS piece on my Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard. Read about it here.) Was René Girard a pacifist? It’s a subject I tackle in the postscript of my book:

René Girard is not a pacifist. That was the word I received from Paul Caringella, a friend and longtime visiting fellow at Stanford, who had been the first reader for this book. He had sent me a quick note of correction to an early draft of this manuscript, which he thought might lead readers to that erroneous conclusion.

I had not put Girard in quite those terms, but once the issue came up, I realized I had made certain assumptions. Given Girard’s emphasis on the renunciation of violence and his warnings about the “escalation to extremes,” it stands to reason that he would advocate disarmament and pacifism. How could one sanction any participation in the calamity of war, the inevitable atrocities and injustices, the destruction of cities, the “collateral damage” as
civilians are pulled into the slaughter, the unstable and temporary peace that follows? “René doesn’t belong to any ‘ism.’ He’s not an ‘ism’ man,” Paul later explained. “People of his stature are not going to be put in classifications like that.”

David Martin of Woking, Surrey, takes on the question with his own example of the complicated relationship between pacifism and violence. Many thanks, once again, to Liddie for the heads-up.

***

We had also written about Elizabeth Powers, concerning her review of  Friedrich Hölderlin’s Life, Poetry and Madness, which has just been republished by Hesperus Press (translated by Will Stone).

She had written:

Although the inspiration came from the Greece-drenched enthusiasm of Winckelmann and Goethe, the ancient divinities were not, for Hölderlin, allegories or personifications, to be converted in art. Rather, prophet-like, he sought to bring them back to life in order to regenerate a world that, he felt, had grown old and lost its way. His earliest poems, from 1791, express the darkness of the world without such rejuvenation. “Half of Life,” however, published in 1804, without any Greek poetic apparatus, intimated where his own life was heading:

But oh, where shall I find
When winter comes, the flowers, and where
The Sunshine and shade of the earth?
The walls loom
Speechless and cold, in the wind
Weathercocks clatter

(Michael Hamburger’s translation)

Kyriaco Nikias of the University of Adelaide wrote a letter about the various rewritings of the Greeks – also included at right. Thanks to Elizabeth Powers for passing this along!

He gave “electrifying” lectures.

Herbert Lindenberger  died on October 1 at 89, of multiple myeloma. He was active till a few weeks ago, visiting museums and attending operas.

I met the Stanford professor of English and comparative literature … well, “met” Herbert Lindenberger.. eighteen years ago when I contacted him for a profile of Dana Gioia (you can read it here). He commented on his former student. We’ve spoken by phone more recently, and was a warm and lively presence, but we never got the face-to-face we’d discussed.

He was born in Los Angeles on April 4, 1929. He was a recipient Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Vienna (1952-53), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1968-69), two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships (1975-76, 1982-83), a  Stanford Humanities Center Fellowship (1982-83), a resident fellow at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy (1996), named a “Distinguished Alumnus in the Humanities” at the University of Washington (2006), and a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 2008).

His most recent books are Aesthetics of Discomfort: Conversations on Disquieting Art, with Frederick Luis Aldama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016) and One Family’s Shoah: Victimization, Resistance, Survival in Nazi Europe (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

Previous books include:  On Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963; Princeton paperback edition, 1966); Georg Büchner, in Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques series (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964); Georg Trakl, in Twayne World Authors Series (New York: Twayne [now G.K. Hall], 1971); Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, l975; Phoenix paperback edition, 1978); Saul’s Fall: A Critical Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); Opera: The Extravagant Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984; Cornell paperback edition, 1986); The History in Literature: On Value, Genre, Institutions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Dogstory: A Memoir in Hypertext. Stanford University, April, 1999; Situating Opera: Period, Genre, Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Years ago he commented on Dana. Now it’s time for his former student to comment on him. I sent the news to Dana half an hour ago, and got this reply: “Terrible news. I knew Herbie for nearly half a century. He was a wonderful man.” Dana has known him for half-a-century.

“Herbie Lindenberger was my mentor at Stanford, and we became lifelong friends.  His famous course on Modernism was an intellectual milestone in my life. He was one of the finest teachers I’ve ever known. He brought a level of animation and intensity to the classroom that electrified his students. What good fortune to have known him as a teacher and friend.”

His son Michael Lindenberger posted this: “We recently went through a document he had given us regarding action items to take upon his death. (He was unbelievably organized and prepared for virtually any eventuality.) Regarding communicating with the Stanford English department, where he was a professor for many years, he had written to us, ‘Tell them that when the chair announces my death not to say “passed away” as the last chair did, but simply to use the word “died” and say that if this order is not followed I shall place a hex on the chair from wherever I am.’ That was our dad – candid and humorous even about death. And, as is evidenced by people who have reached out to us over the past 48 hours, it’s clear that his enthusiasm, warmth, humor, and intense intellectual energy were truly infectious. Not a moment of his 89 years was wasted.”

A pleasant vision on my return to California: both Elizabeth Conquest and Ronald Meyer of the Harriman Institute sent me a jpeg of the back page of the current edition of the London Review of Books. 

Couldn’t be more pleased to share space with Benoît Chantre‘s excellent Battling to the End, which I discuss at length in Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard. Make it a twofer and order both books at once.

We wrote some months ago about the American poet A.E. Stallings who is based in Athens, at the forefront of the refugee crisis – you can read about that here. She has been chauffeuring refugees, teaching traumatized children, leading poetry classes for the adults, gathering supplies for the impoverished, and even showing kids how to play baseball.

But she is doing most of all what a poet does best: writing poems. 

Here is the latest, which has been making the rounds in the social media. From the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books: