Dear David,
The first person to read Paradise Lost, Milton's Quaker friend Thomas Elwood, thought it was brilliant. Few have disagreed since, thanks largely to the poem's 10,565-line title bout between an inhuman God and an all-too-human Satan. But if Paradise Lost is so brilliant, why does it feel so heavy? Why have so many of the literary lasting – Johnson, Coleridge, Pope, Borges, dozens of others – felt obligated to defend it?
More to the point, why did it make me fall asleep? One day, in two-and-a-half hours, between Miltonic naps, I read sixty-five lines. That's eight words every two minutes. Twenty-five lines were like a draught of chloral hydrate. Anything could distract me from its grandeur. One day early in my unsuccessful efforts to read the poem, during a stretch back in town, I kept a list:
Milton (four lines)
Ultimate Cribbage
Milton (fifteen lines)
Nap
Free Cell/Ultimate Cribbage
Oral-sex pictures on the Internet
Nap
Milton (ten lines)
Oral-sex pictures
Nap
It isn't bad writing (as Samuel Johnson claimed) that makes Paradise Lost exhausting; it's the poem's very brilliance, the same quality that made it riveting hundreds of lines at a time when I finally managed to swim through the narcoleptic sea that surrounded the poem on all sides. In Paradise Lost, Good and Evil stand face to face with Judgment between them, and the clarity is seductive. In our own borderless, morally relative world anything goes; the more forcefully you can rationalize your behaviour, the more successful you tend to be. What drove me to escape into sleep, and what kept me reading, was the poem's strict and vivid insistence that there is right and wrong; that we can't help but fail; and that we have to admit it.
What happens in Paradise Lost is that Adam and Eve become human. The poem is the history of the self, the story of how the human conscience came to be. I found it a surprisingly traumatic read. And even more surprising, a comfort. Maybe that's why I took so long to read it: when I was in the world of Paradise Lost I felt clear and clean.
Before Milton wrote Paradise Lost, he stopped writing poetry altogether, and spent about seventeen years as Oliver Cromwell's public relations man. (This fact cheers up many aging writers.) He was anti-monarchist, anti-church, anti-censorship, but in favor of divorce and the beheading of Charles I. By the time Milton turned fifty, however, his situation was dire. Cromwell was dead; Charles II was on the English throne; a retro number called the Restoration was underway. Imprisoned and released, Milton was on the outs and frequently afraid for his life; his fame fading, his fortune expropriated, his pamphlets burned. He was also twice-widowed, blind, and the father of three children.
So what does Milton do? He marries a girl twenty-five years his junior and begins to dictate Paradise Lost, the masterwork he has been planning in his head for twenty years. He prefers to do so leaning back in a chair with a leg thrown over one arm. He manages an average of forty lines a day "as it were in a breath," and then cuts half of them. His misfortune as a man turns out to be his salvation as a poet. (Like Beethoven, whose deafness let him create a world entirely on his own terms, without interference from the outside world; and unlike Mozart and Shakespeare, who seem not to have had to will their art into being, but merely let it out of themselves.)
Seven years later Milton finishes Paradise Lost. It's an instant hit. Shakespeare's plays enjoy more of a life outside English departments these days, especially in Hollywood. But between 1700 and 1800, Paradise Lost was republished more than 100 times, twice as often as anything by the Bard.
What's most impressive about Milton is his grasp of the big picture. He knows he's writing in the big leagues, and his aim and concentration never stray from universal concerns. He's confident. He has what Virginia Woolf later spotted as the thing that lasts in literature: certainty of judgment. It makes me think that it is impossible to write anything that will last even the writer's lifetime unless the writer believes in a moral universe – in God, for starters. Because without such a belief, without a strong faith in a moral universe, how can you know, with enough certainty to tell it in an authoritative way, what will happen when an unhappily married woman has an affair with a cad? Or when poor boy meets rich girl? You have to believe in something, anyway, to tell an effective story.
Milton thought of talent in the same way the Biblical parable does, as a fist-sized sack of gold from God. It was not to be squandered. The exercise of that talent required discipline, which as a paid-up Puritan he considered spiritually hygienic to boot. Getting up every day at four a.m. and reading the Hebrew Bible for a couple of hours before dictating forty lines of Paradise Lost wasn't just a mental lubricant; it was colonic irrigation for his soul. "He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things," Milton once wrote, "ought himself to be a true poem, that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honorablest things." Live well, he says, and you will write well. But how easy is that?
Suddenly, one day in August, as if a door blew open, I was finished. One of the few things the novelists Martin Amis and his late father Kingsley agreed on (though they weren't alone) was that the last 150 lines of Paradise Lost stand as some of the best poetry ever written. The Son of God sacrifices himself for Adam's sins, which turns out to be some consolation for our own inevitably approaching deaths. But Milton buries the lede:
...For then the earth
Shall all be Paradise, far happier place
Than this Eden, and far happier days....
then wilt thou not be loath
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A paradise within thee, happier far.
Earth will be a happier Paradise than Eden ever could; the unhappy Fall of man will be his unexpected redemption. It turns out that a difficult time in history or in life can be cured by difficulty, by strictness, even by reading a difficult poem – by adhering to some unchanging standard. We could even read Paradise Lost and relearn how one becomes human, not through triumph but by failing.
I put the poem down, and stepped outside.
Next door to the cabin was the Caesar's Palace Cove Haven Honeymoon Resort, the self-described "Land of Love" and "Honeymoon Capital of the World." I decided to take a tour. Contented couples strolled hand in hand across the Haven's greensward. Every room had a king-sized round bed and a heart-shaped tub, and some of them had seven-foot-high whirlpool baths in the form of champagne glasses (Cove Haven had been the brain wave of a plumber).
But what caught my eye were the Garden of Eden Apples. The Apples were pie-shaped windowless rooms in a series of round concrete bunkers. "You'll notice there're no windows," Cheryl, my guide, pointed out. "So no one can see in. It's like you're in your own world."
"Why do they call them Apples?" I asked.
"You know, the whole scenario with Adam and Eve and temptation and desire and fulfillment. The whole Biblical thing?"
"But," I said, "I thought they weren't supposed to eat the apple."
"Well," Cheryl said matter-of-factly, "here they can do whatever they want."
I was back in my own time. I could tell, because I was once again ashamed of myself.
Even more respectfully,
Ian
