Stephen Greenblatt

‘After the first death,’ Dylan Thomas wrote, ‘there is no other.’ I know what he is getting at, I suppose, but it isn’t true, at least not for me. I have had other deaths, but the death last month of my friend Michael Rogin was a shock. It’s not that we had, in recent years, spent much time together. I left Berkeley, where we taught together on the faculty...

I am an American who thinks of himself (interchangeably, with increasing degrees of specificity) as an Eastern European Jew, an Ashkenazi and a Litvak, but this self-identification, I have to acknowledge, is strange. It is true that my grandparents were born in Lithuania: my father’s parents in Kovna, my mother’s in Vilna. But they left for America sometime in the early 1890s, and, with a single exception, it was more than a century before anyone in my family returned for a visit. No one seems to remember the precise year of their departure or even the precise occasion, though there was somewhat vague talk, when I was growing up, about the need to escape a tsarist Russification scheme that centred on drafting eligible young Jewish men into the Army for 25-year terms of military service. I know that the Russian Government lurched between wanting to isolate Jews in a carefully demarcated Pale of Settlement, as if they were a dangerous virus, and wanting to swallow and absorb them by destroying their separate identity. Twenty-five sounds suspiciously like a mythic number, but Russian reality has often had a mythic quality, so it is possible that some such scheme at one time existed, and even a much shorter term of military service would have seemed almost unendurable, particularly to anyone who was committed, as were both my grandfathers, to observing Kashrut and keeping at least a reasonable number of the other commandments.

The closest analogues in the West to Borges’s ‘Chinese encyclopedia’, if not its direct source, are the Wunderkammern, strange collections in cabinets that signalled the prestige of many princes and prelates and served as Early Modern tourist attractions. In Borges’s description of the encyclopedia – perhaps the most famous passage in his work, and famously celebrated by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things – we are told that animals are classified as follows: ‘(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.’ The contents of the Wunderkammern are no less striking – coconut-shell goblets, elaborately carved ivory knick-knacks, seashells, bits of coral, antique coins and cameos, stuffed armadillos, geodes and fossils, polished rocks that looked like landscape paintings, unicorn horns, birds of paradise, aberrant fruits and monstrous animals, anamorphic pictures, mechanical ducks that quacked and flapped their wings, Indian featherwork capes, Turkish shoes, barnacle geese that grew on trees in Scotland, mummified hands, dragons’ teeth, ostrich eggs and so on and so forth. They are likely to evoke in us something like the laughter that the passage in Borges aroused in Foucault: a shattering, liberating laughter, ‘breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things’.

It would be easy for a reader who was encountering Empson for the first time to wonder what on earth this critical performance was about and why these ragged relics – the second part of a two-volume edition of his miscellaneous writings on Renaissance literature – were being presented with such thoughtfulness and scrupulous care. About half of the present volume’s contents have been previously published, from a 1956 essay on The Spanish Tragedy, through essays from the Sixties on Volpone and The Alchemist, to a pair of reviews. None of this is close to the level of Empson’s major work. To the uninitiated these pieces will, I think, often seem cranky and arbitrary, skirmishing with enemies who have long since vanished, condescending to the views of ‘lady students’, and assuming a virtually direct access both to the mind of the maker and to the responses of the original audience. The hitherto unpublished pieces – a letter to a colleague who had ventured to disagree on a point of interpretation, an unfair and largely tedious drubbing of a critical essay on Volpone, and unfinished essays on The Ducless of Malfi and A Midsummer Night’s Dream – pose even more of a problem. For apart from the repetitions that would certainly have been eliminated in a finished version, these pieces – especially the crucial long essay on the Dream – indulge in speculations that seem, well, zany.’

The small dacha in Peredelkino outside Moscow where Boris Pasternak lived for several years and where in 1960 he died is now a museum. It was there that the Writer’s Union representative took us – a group of jet-lagged American journal editors – on the first afternoon of our recent visit. The books and the furniture and the grand piano and the drawings by his father Leonid, all of which had been carted off after Pasternak’s death, when the dacha was unceremoniously assigned to another writer, have been brought back, and the poet who had been expelled by the Writer’s Union in the wake of the publication of Doctor Zhivago, is now given culture’s highest tribute – museumification. This means a woman at a desk, tearing tickets printed on cheap paper; another woman with a feather duster and an expression of unutterable boredom; and a voluble young man with mad eyes who conducts a tour. He shows us the drawing-room, the dining-room, the small bedroom where Pasternak died. A framed reproduction of his father’s portrait of Tolstoy hangs on the wall; on the bed lies a wilted bouquet of flowers, a reminder of the thousands of mourners who showed up to pay their last respects, lining up for three days on the lanes that ran through the birch woods, even though there had been only the smallest death notice in the newspapers and though public expressions of grief were not, to put it mildly, encouraged.’