and that I would have to choose between them. I had so grown used and devoted to the
conflated text that I found myself unwilling to relinquish some of the lines I prized.
Anyway, I’ve always been on guard, as a reader first of all, against what
has been called ‘Land-of-heart’s-desire’ poetry, which tends to be vapid and sentimental.
On the other hand, I would still continue to affirm what I wrote about the contemplation
of horror not being edifying. I have always found that the stories and paintings of
Christian martyrdom are very strange because they can be understood in two different and
opposing ways. The orthodox way is to say that they inspire admiration for fixity of faith
in the face of the most horrible and obstinate persecution. At the same time, of course,
they are often remarkable for their morbidity, and, alas, a part of their meaning seems to
concern the ineradicable savagery of the human race; and not just of pagans and infidels
but people of all kinds, as the many religious wars among Christians – the Thirty Years’
War, the so-called Wars of Religion in Spain, France and the Netherlands being merely
examples – have abundantly demonstrated.
There’s a Byzantine mosaic icon in Washington of ‘The Forty Martyrs of
Sebaste’ – they were ’stripped naked, herded onto a frozen pond, and kept there; to help
break down their resistance a fire was kindled and warm baths prepared where they could
see them. By the next day most of them were dead; those who were not were killed,’ says a
little handbook of hagiography. But this is no more than a puny prologue to the Holocaust.
It is the Vatican’s dubious position that German anti-Semitism as it was exhibited under
the Nazis ‘had its roots outside Christianity,’ and that the people who ran the camps were
essentially pagan.
This, however, fails to agree with the Nazis’ own view of the matter. In
Peter Matheson’s documentary account, The Third Reich and the Christian Churches,
he writes of a report by one Hanns Kerrl on the membership and finances of the Churches,
dated 3, July, 1944 (not long, that is, before the war ended) – a report sent to Goebbels
‘on the request of the Ministry for popular Enlightenment and Propaganda,’ containing
statistics ‘with the rather anxious request that caution be used in their exploitation for
propaganda purposes. It is worth noting how little success the National Socialists had in
winning people away from their adherence to Christian beliefs. Only 3.5% acknowledged
themselves as "Gottgl?ubige",’ a word that Cassell’s German dictionary defines
as ‘followers of the modern German cult of non-Christian theism,’ and which Matheson calls
simply ‘neo-pagans.’
[Hoy] In Philip Larkin’s ‘Ambulances’, passers-by, looking on as people in
extremity are fetched off to hospital, are said to ’sense the solving emptiness / That
lies just under all we do, / and for a second get it whole, / So permanent and blank and
true.’ Larkin was clearly no stranger to the experience he describes here, but my guess is
that you are. It’s hell you worry about, not the void …
[Hecht] I agree. Larkin did not have to serve in the war and he was not a
Jew, and he counted himself lucky on both scores. It may be that one of the appeals of his
poetry for many readers lies in his contemplation of ‘the solving emptiness,’ which is
obscurely comforting. Not paradise, to be sure, but a kind of beneficent anaesthesia.
from Between
the Lines: Interviews with Poets. For additional extracts from the Hecht
interview, click here.