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THE DILEMMA OF
ASSIMILATION
Interview with Dr.
STEPHEN WILSON, Consultant Psychiatrist, Psychotherapist and Poet.
Formerly Senior Clinical Lecturer, Department of Psychiatry,
Lidia Vianu:
You were looking for an interview with Michael Hamburger when you stumbled on my
site (http://lidiavianu.scriptmania.com).
Is literature your hobby or your job?
Stephen Wilson:
Hobby seems too small a word. Literature has been an enduring passion. Poetry is
a life-force, a kind of anti-aging growth factor.
SW.
Psychiatrists do not know much about the human mind. We know a little about how
the brain functions and psychoanalysis teaches us something about the mind, its
tremendous creative potential and its extraordinary destructive capacity. Its
tendency to self-deception. My
profession helps me to read poetry (including my own ) and poetry helps me to
practise my profession. Both activities can be ways of strengthening one’s
ability to come to terms with the truth. T.S. Eliot famously tells us that
humankind cannot bear very much reality, but Emily Dickinson found a way – ‘Tell
all the truth but tell it slant – Success in circuit lies.’ Poetry is
non-discursive language, it is writing which is undetermined by the width of the
page, it is ‘tropological’, it is ‘circuit’, but it does not hurt. This does not
mean (as Plato would have it) that poetry has to tell lies. Paradoxically it
delivers a shot of truth-tolerating medicine together with a large dollop of
pleasure.
Chance Encounter With My Grandmother
The odds of meeting you on
the Nevskiy Prospekt
must have been verging on a
billion to one,
especially since you were
born in
more than a hundred and
twenty years earlier.
Yet there you were –
walking toward me
through the snow,
surprisingly sure-footed
among a mass of bobbing
hats and coats.
Your fur was out of
fashion, as were your
flat-soled boots, and you
were carrying
two shopping bags, one in
each hand,
full of provisions. I saw
you glance down
and tut as you crossed the
where beer bottles and
empty cans had been
chucked into the Fontanka,
frozen into a carpet
of snow and ice and slush,
littered like the bedroom
floor of a teenage boy.
Opposite the Literary Café,
where Pushkin, having been
dubbed, “Grand Master
of the Most Serene Order of
Cuckolds”,
waited for his fatal duel
with Georges d’Anthés,
we ran right into one
another. You seemed deeply
unimpressed and as I kissed
your cheek, warned me
against poetry, not to get
any meshúgga ideas,
or
fritter away my time on a ganze megíllah.
In Yiddish ‘meshúgga’ means
crazy, ‘ganze megíllah’ means, in this context, a long book with aspirations to
literary merit.
Does this mean your parents
were Russian (or at least one of them)? You remember going to the Synagogue in
Names
On Fridays just before
sunset,
mother lit candles for the
Sabbath.
We thanked the King of the
Universe
for the fruit of the vine,
the gift
of bread from the earth,
the beauty
of the day coming in like a
bride.
At sunrise we woke to a
stillness,
washed and reminded
ourselves
there was only one God –
begged that our lips be
opened,
our mouths declare His
praise.
Clad in our best for
synagogue
we walked the three-quarter
mile,
my father’s trilby, my
school-cap
raised in unison to ladies
passing by.
A silk tallith draped over
his shoulders
like the stole on a
ball-gown,
Rabbi Rabinovitz unfurled
the scrolls,
a silver finger pointing
the way –
parchment teaming with tiny
black fauna,
each one with a pop-star’s
quiff:
,dal
eht otnu dnah yht htrof hcterts ton
oD
.mih otnu mrah yna uoht od rehtien
After the service I ran
home through
the playing fields of
passing ruffians calling –
Jew, Jew-boy.
This last line, ‘Jew,
Jew-boy’, reminds me of Harold Pinter, who had a similar experience as a
teenager. Is it comfortable to be a Jewish Londoner? Are you Jewish or British
at this point in your life?
SW.
My parents were born in the
By contrast with the
violent anti-Semitism they had experienced, British anti-Semitism was mild,
mainly cultural. I was brought up in an observant Jewish family in
SW. I
cannot choose my identity, I experience it as a given. I was raised in a Jewish
Community. My parents spoke English but they could also speak Yiddish. I learnt
and prayed in Hebrew from an early age. I had a Bar Mitzvah when I was thirteen.
My early cultural heroes were secular Jews central to the intellectual
development of the modern world, Marx, Freud, Einstein, Kafka. My Jewish
identity was not primarily formed in reaction to anti-Semitism (although this is
also an inescapable factor).
‘Poetics of the Diaspora’,
which I am working on, is not so much an anthology as a critical commentary
investigating the figurative structure of Anglo-Jewish poems. I discovered
sequences of metaphor in my own work which seemed to be employed in an
unconscious attempt to process troublesome experience. I wanted to see if other
Anglo-Jewish poets used the same or similar strategies.
LV.
Why do most Jews prefer to live in the Diaspora?
SW.
In 130 Hadrian visited Judea and ordered the province to be renamed
Given
full economic, political and religious freedom, equality of opportunity and
freedom from persecution, given a pluralist liberal-democracy,
the disadvantages attached to ‘otherness’ do not apply. Under these
circumstances, I think most people would prefer to live in the country where
they were born. But these conditions have rarely existed in Jewish history,
sometimes referred to as a ‘lachrymose’ history. The
hopelessness of satisfactory Jewish life in ‘exile’ terribly confirmed by the
Nazi genocide of European Jewry was replaced by the hopefulness of the Jewish
State set up in its aftermath.
It is a tragedy of immense
proportion that this has led to the creation of a new Palestinian Diaspora and
seemingly irresolvable conflict. Jewish nationalism at the end of the nineteenth
century was a late development compared
to other national movements. Palestinian nationalism even later. Jews in
SW.
These
questions are unanswerable. No doubt ‘Jewishness’ is more than one thing or
different things to different people. Zionists have sometimes castigated
diasporic Jews for their supposed
chameleon characteristics (See ‘Author
A.B. Yehoshua vexes US Jews’,
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3246476,00.html ), even suggested
that assimilation engenders anti-Semitism. Assimilation carries with it cultural
loss, on the other hand pluralism aspires to cultural gain. But is it possible?
Is the creative hyphen meaningful – Jewish-American, Anglo-Jewish,
Black-American, Anglo-Irish etc.? There has been a sad loss of Jewish diasporic
languages and culture (they were banned in the early days of the State of
Israel). But there has been a gain in the revivication of the Hebrew language.
Judaism itself discriminates against its men folk by insisting on a matrilineal
definition of ‘belonging’. This is a self-defeating policy which contributes to
its own extinction.
LV.
Why is it always so awkward for a Jew to adopt another religion or another
country? Jews feel so uncomfortable to say: this is my homeland. They simply
say, I was born in... When they turn Catholic, they are afraid of their
co-nationals as much as of the other Catholics. Why this constant and hard to
account for sense of guilt?
SW.
Betrayal. For centuries Christianity needed to define itself against the split
off ‘bad’ otherness of the Jews, to identify the Jewish people as a whole with
‘Judas the (eponymous) betrayer of Christ’, the eternal villain.
It
takes a Jewish poet (who had only ever worshipped in the Church of England),
Michael Hamburger, to write a poem sympathetic to the plight of Judas:
No part was harder than his and none more cruel:
To be God’s chosen villain in the absolute play,
Cast out by friends and enemies, cast out of self,
Hated by all for ever, hating himself;
And that the sinuous prophecy might be fulfilled,
Wriggle, a viper, down the appointed path,
Dust on his tongue,
Till he was dry and twisted as the final rope…
[See
Peter Lawson, Passionate Renewal:Jewish
Poetry in
It took nearly two
millennia of Christian
anti-Semitism and the horrors of the
Holocaust to elicit, twenty years after the end of
World War II, an (almost) unequivocal Declaration from Pope Paul VI,
Nostra Aetate, to the effect that not
all Jews were to be held responsible for the death of Christ.
In Christian anti-Semitism
(but not the later racist variety) conversion was seen as a remedy for the
Jewish condition. Forced conversion was a punishment – Shylock’s punishment for
his lust after Christian blood – without doubt a variant of the ‘Blood Libel’.
Jews who convert have to deal with the deeply embedded anti-Semitism in
Christianity. They are invited to betray themselves. If they stay Jewish they
are identified with Judas betraying Christ, if they convert they become Judas
betraying the Jews.
LV.
May I ask if you are a religious man? If you cultivate your Jewishness while you
are an important member of British society? Doctor, professor, writer... What
more could you do to prove you are British? Yet... are you?
SW.
I am not a religious man. I do not cultivate my Jewishness anymore than I
cultivate my respiration or my heartbeat. And yes, I am also British, I do not
think about that very much. Britishness is a fairly inclusive category nowadays.
Nobody would ever say: ‘You don’t look British’, although they might say: ‘You
don’t look English.’ Jews are a small minority in this country, probably 0.5% of
a population of 60,000,000. By contrast there are thought to be about twice as
many Afro-Caribbeans and about 1.5 million British Moslems. About 200,000 Poles
are thought to have entered the country since they joined the EU. Multicultural
LV.
When did you write your first poem?
SW.
I think I was fifteen or sixteen. It was published in the school magazine,
The Kilburnian. Later I became its
editor. I attended an all boys grammar school in
SW.
I wrote poems sporadically over the following years.
The fact that I did so seemed to threaten
my career in medicine before it had even begun. It was only after several
rejections from London Medical Schools that I ended up at the
About sixteen years ago I
began to publish occasional poems in magazines but it is only during the last
couple of years that I have devoted half my week to poetry and the other half to
psychiatry. Dannie Abse knew he had to do this when he was a young doctor, it
took me rather longer to get to the same point. Now I’m a man in a hurry.
LV.
Some say poetry is a young man’s prerogative, meaning there is no poetry without
love in it. Great poets have always
managed to combine thought and feeling in a passionate love for ideas. How do
you write? What produces the poem, in your case? Could it have anything to do
with that Jewish sensibility that is like a fine lace?
SW.
Well I don’t think love is a young man’s prerogative. But poetry is words,
stuff, linguistic material through which the emotions are ‘given a local
habitation’. My poems tend to be derived from experience which is then filtered
through the associative (holophrastic) process that language allows.
My sense is that all forms of
love including passionate love can
grow with age. My poem, ‘Eva’, is a love-poem, an unrequited lover’s poem
to my granddaughter:
Eva
at fifteen months
The way your small head
turns,
you could be networking
at a cocktail party or a
waitress
trying not to catch my eye,
a barmaid serving someone
else—
worse, a lone woman waiting
for the last tube. I want
to tell you,
once, during a bomb scare,
I received an unexpected
parcel
wrapped in plain brown
paper,
which turned out to contain
a
single orchid, whose stem
was immersed in a crystal
scent bottle, filled with
water.
SW.
One of Plato’s objections to poetry was that it would subvert young men’s
courage by giving expression to emotions, to ‘weakness’.
Shelley,
however, believed that poetry had a transformative effect upon the emotions, an
enabling function which allowed us to take in ‘the poisonous waters that flow
from death through life and in a secret alchemy convert them to ‘potable gold’ –
in other words ‘to metabolise’ mental pain.
Nowadays
we have ‘Poets in Residence’ in mental hospitals and prisons as well as arts
centres and universities but editors of magazines and judges of poetry
competitions sometimes warn against submitting ‘therapy’ by which I suppose they
mean poems which have only personal value.
I believe
that a series of poetic tropes may not
only express emotional conflict but also be capable of modulating its
unconscious roots. Poetry can help us to resolve conflict, poetry can help us to
bear pain and poetry can give us pleasure. Yes, I am convinced that poetry can
make us happier.
SW.
There are probably more ‘closet poets’ than published poets. Writing poetry is
an act of self-expression so intimate that many perform it in secret. When Emily
Dickinson died in 1886, her sister Lavinia discovered about 1800 poems locked in
a silver box, gathered together in sixty packets of loosely-sewn-together paper.
But you are asking who will read
poetry and this is a different question. I agree that the reading of poetry also
answers a basic human need and am optimistic about its future. Poetry is as
unlikely to die out as song.
SW.
Language can be put to good or bad use. Poetry can be meaningfully contrasted
with propaganda. I think the social function of poetry is to make us more human,
that of propaganda to make us less so. Poetry, like serious fiction, masquerades
as ‘lies’ but promotes the truth, propaganda masquerades as the truth but it
pedals lies.
November 15, 2006