By Stuart Mitchner

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

—Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

In the opening sentence of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika (New Directions), the Statue of Liberty is holding aloft a sword instead of a torch. There are disputes online about whether this was unintended or intentional. Not to worry. With a writer as infinitely suggestive as Kafka, errors can have prophetic consequences, and since he has, in effect, arrived in post-election America for a centenary exhibit at the Morgan Library & Museum, some interesting connections are already in play, notably Barry Blitt’s New Yorker cover depicting a very nervous, verge-of-vertigo Lady Liberty walking a tightrope.

It’s also worth mentioning that the November 11 issue is centered on “The Home Front,” an article subtitled, “Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.” A few days ago my wife and I watched Alex Garland’s dystopian fantasy Civil War. The week before, we saw London being spectacularly bombed in Steve McQueen’s no less devastating Blitz just as we were also finishing Josh Zetumer’s Say Nothing, a searing miniseries about “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland.

Emily for the Ages

Moving on from the violent imagery that abounds in those three works, I found special pleasure in the ageless shock-and-awe of Emily Dickinson, whose 194th birthday was this Tuesday. The real Civil War “corresponded to Dickinson’s most intense period of productivity as a poet,” according to emilydickinsonmuseum.org, and although she wrote “roughly half of her total number of poems” during that time, “her precise relation to the war remains something of a puzzle.” In a February 1863 letter to her mentor and longtime correspondent Thomas Wentworth Higginson, she admits that “War feels to me an oblique place.”

There was nothing puzzling or oblique about the way Dickinson defined her relation to poetry early in her correspondence with Higginson: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Call it what you will, there’s violence in her art, played out on the page in the way she fires off dashes like those in “Much Madness is divinest Sense — To a discerning Eye,” a dash-driven poem that seems to anticipate the modification of her artillery: “Assent — and you are sane — Demur — you’re straightway dangerous — And handled with a Chain.” In “chained” editions of this poem, all dashes but the last one have been removed or replaced by semicolons.

Shakespearean Lightning

What poetry does to Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare does to Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), whose birthday is today, December 11. In Chapter 18 of his Memoirs, published posthumously in 1870, Berlioz describes the “sudden and unexpected revelation” of the Bard: “The lightning-flash of his genius revealed the whole heaven of art to me, illuminating its remotest depths in a single flash.”

In 1827, when Berlioz attended a British production of Hamlet at the Paris Odéon, it was “the supreme drama of my life,” and Shakespeare’s lightning was revealed by a 27-year-old Irish girl who translated Ophelia into a language Berlioz could understand, “her dramatic genius … equaled only by the havoc wrought in me by the poet she so nobly interpreted.” It took a five-year courtship before Berlioz married his Ophelia, his Juliet, and his Shakespeare in the person of Harriet Smithson. To win her, he composed a song cycle in 1930 based on Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies and later that year projected his tragedy of unrequited love into Symphonie Fantastique, adding a sequel, Lélio, two years later. In 1833 Berlioz and Smithson were married at the British Embassy in Paris.

Tender and Tremendous

Berlioz is the only composer whose words reached me ahead of his music, coming by way of the Memoirs, which surge with the same genius of excess found in Balzac’s Human Comedy. In fact, Berlioz was caricatured with Balzacian vigor by Heinrich Heine, who called him a “gigantic nightingale, a lark the size of an eagle.” Berlioz quotes the line from Heine’s book Lutetia on the way to denouncing the poet’s accompanying claim that he “has little melody and no real simplicity whatever.” Writing in Memoirs, Berlioz notes that the first performance of his oratorio L’Enfance du Christ took place three weeks after Heine’s book was published. On the next day, “I received a letter from Heine in which he apologized profusely for having misjudged me,” writing, “I hear from all sides that you have plucked a nosegay of the most exquisite blooms of melody, and that all in all your oratorio is a masterpiece of simplicity. I can never forgive myself for having been so unjust to a friend.”

Fair enough, but Heine’s original outburst of hyperbole does do a crazy sort of justice to the tumultuous Requiem. Berlioz goes on to quote, with obvious relish, Heine’s “visions of mammoths and other beasts long extinct, fabulous empires of preternatural depravity, and many a cloud-capped wonder. Its magical strains conjure up Babylon, the hanging gardens of Semiramis, the marvels of Nineveh.”

The essence of Hector Berlioz, at once tender and tremendous, is in the descent from the manifold trumpets of the Day of Judgment to the Shepherds’ chorus of the L’Enfance du Christ. Whether these shepherds are on their way to or from Bethlehem or Mecca or Brooklyn, what matters is the hushed, simple, swelling beauty of the singing and the grace it lends to the Christmas season.

Shakespeare and Love

Berlioz has said that the love scene from his choral symphony Romeo et Juliette (1839) was his favorite work. Arturo Tosanini called it “the most beautiful music in the world.” David Cairns, who edited the Memoirs, suggests that Berlioz identified with Romeo, meaning of course that he “died’ with Smithson’s Juliet a decade before he wrote the symphony inspired by his love and decades before her painful and untimely death in 1853, which inspired one of the most memorable passages in the Memoirs. After describing “the horror” and “pity” of her “long vista of death and oblivion,” he writes: “Shakespeare! Shakespeare! I feel as if he alone of all men who ever lived can understand me, must have understood us both; he alone could have pitied us, poor unhappy artists, loving yet wounding each other.”

Listening to Lennon

This week’s birthdays include not only Dickinson and Berlioz, but John Milton (December 9, 1608) and Gustave Flaubert (December 12, 1821). Saving Paradise Lost and Madame Bovary for another day (if only), I spent Sunday, December 8, with John Lennon, who was murdered on that day in 1980. After listening to the posthumous Beatles reunion songs “Free as a Bird,” “Real Love,” and “Now and Then,” I put on the Beatles CD closest at hand, which happened to be Rubber Soul. With the classic love story lived and died by Berlioz still fresh in my mind, I heard Lennon sing classics like “Norwegian Wood” (“I once had a girl or should I say, she once had me”), “Girl” (“all about the girl who came to stay”), “Nowhere Man” (“Sitting in his nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans for nobody”), and the brilliantly obsessive “The Word” (“Say the word and you’ll be free, Say the word and be like me, Have you heard the word is love?”).

This Sunday “The Word” was especially chilling because Lennon’s voice has an eerie afterlife ambience — the same is true of all the voices. Finally, there’s one of his most personal performances, “in My Life,” a song I didn’t have the heart to listen to: “With lovers and friends, I still can recall, some are dead and some are living: in my life, I’ve loved them all.”

Kafka in New York

The Morgan exhibit runs through April 13, 2025. I’m wondering if it’s best to go before or after January 20. Writing about Amerika in his essay collection, Expeditions to Kafka (Bloomsbury 2023), Stanley Corngold describes the novel’s mood “touched by a human quality only to the extent that it is anxious. In its world, authority is maintained by brute force; its violence is out in the open.”

One wonders what sort of New Yorker cover Barry Blitt will come up next spring. Will Lady Liberty have made it safely to the other side? Maybe Blitt will get some ideas from Kafka at the Morgan, where a manuscript of Amerika is among the items on display.