Ian Brown – on reading Paradise Lost.

Toronto, Ontario
October 3, 2000

Dear David:

The only other time I tried to read Paradise Lost – John Milton’s late-Renaissance rendering of the Fall of Man, the greatest epic poem in the English language, the anvil of words upon which every subsequent poem has been forged, the only contender to Shakespeare’s greatness, quite possibly the most profound meditation on good and evil ever written – I managed exactly 125 lines, or less than 1 per cent of the endlessly acclaimed masterpiece, in six months. I kept falling asleep at

So spake th’apostate angel, though in pain….

But this summer, while everyone else was out having a good time and the world seemed to be an oversold, venal, thoughtless, cramped and unwashed place, I decided to try something difficult, for a change, and read one of the all-time monster brain-crackers of Serious Literature, from start to finish.

I borrowed a shack in the Pocono Mountains of northern Pennsylvania and packed one copy of Paradise Lost and two T-shirts. No telephone, no TV, no one.

Strange coincidences sprang up almost immediately. In the notebook I grabbed as I rushed from my house, I found the words to “Ripple,” by the Grateful Dead, copied out in my wife’s neat and efficient hand:

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung
Would you hear my voice come through the music
Would you hold it near, as it were your own?
It’s a hand-me-down; the thoughts are broken
Perhaps they’re better left unsung.

Somehow that sentiment didn’t seem foreign to the theme of Paradise Lost. Nor did the eight-hundred-mile blight of endless Big Boys, Price Choppers, and McDonald’s restaurants that line the road from Toronto to Pennsylvania. Everywhere I looked I saw former paradises. Finally in Scranton I saw a sign that said “A Good Place to Start Feeling Better,” so I checked into a hotel. It was a Day’s Inn, and was itself next to a Price Chopper and a McDonald’s. A trucker and his wife were having a private barbecue in the parking lot. That was nice, and so was the hickory smoke coming up off his portable hibachi. “Tired?” the guy at the check in said. “Get some rest.” The door of my room wore a sign:

Always lock your door. Use all locks.

I lay on the bed and listened to the trucks vibrating by on the highway, vibrating on to everywhere but where I was. I turned on the radio, and a voice said, “Who says you can’t eat the food you want and still lose weight? Just use Fat Whacker! And be careful not to lose too much weight!” I turned off the radio and turned on the TV. A blond weatherperson on a local newscast smiled out of the set at me as she bantered with her fellow newscasters. “Mother’s Day is a week away,” she said, “so if you haven’t bought a present to show your mother your respect, there’s still time to do so. Storms to come.”

I turned off the TV, and cracked open Paradise Lost.

All Miltonists – and there are many of them; they tend to be detail weenies, to be terrifyingly well-read, to love marathon readings of the text, and to be able to cite lines from memory by book and line number – end up debating one question: Whose side is Milton on? Grumpy God’s (as C. S. Lewis believed), the side of subjugation of the self and salvation? Or silky Satan’s (as William Blake famously insisted), the casino world where you can be you, but entirely on your own?

God seems to have the upper hand, at least as the poem opens, with Satan dazed and face-up in a lake of fire, after Mr. Big Stuff hurls him from Heaven for being uppity. It’s a promising start, very sci-fi. But God quickly becomes a wooden bore and a martinet.

Satan, on the other hand, is for most of us in the twenty-first century a (frighteningly) pleasant ball of charm. For all his lack of empathy and his tireless schemes to overthrow Heaven, Satan shows some class. He never apologizes, never makes excuses for himself. “To bow and sue for grace/With suppliant knee…That were an ignominy and shame beneath this downfall.” Satan turns out to be a combination of Bill Clinton and Wile E. Coyote, insisting he’s never done anything anybody with a little ambition wouldn’t do.

Life in Eden, by contrast, resembles a Soviet propaganda film from the 1950s extolling the virtues of happy blond life on the collective. Not only do Adam and Eve have to obey God; God, the Ultimate Bossy Boots, constantly reminds them they have to be obedient.

Is it any wonder Eve ate the apple?

One night, deep into Book Nine (the only chapter of twelve that actually happens in anything like what screenwriters call “real time”), I went for dinner to a local bar. The Pines Tavern was a typical Pennsylvania highway joint, festooned with yellow flags hailing Coors beer and blue flags touting the Philadelphia Eagles. I later learned my late father-in-law drank himself to death there. Three couples in their sixties were sitting at an oak bar, drinking and flirting and laughing while choking to death (“We’re hell-raising! Heh heh heh heh heh heeuuuaaallllllggghhh”) – the usual rituals of the post-industrial American Dream. It was the perfect setting to read one of the classics of Western literature.

The waitress recommended the broasted chicken. “It’s actually a lot better than roasted,” she said. I thought that meant broiled and roasted, hence healthier. In fact the bird had been breaded, then roasted, and looked like lumps of slag from a recently cooled planet. I stabbed a piece and turned back to Paradise Lost.

As I say, it was the crux of the action. Satan had turned himself into a serpent, and now “the wily adder, blythe and glad” was trying to convince Eve to eat an apple from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge.

“Some good homework?” the waitress said, writing out my cheque.

“Just a project.” I flipped the book to show her the cover. A mistake, I realized instantly.

“Ooo-kay,” she said. “You’re thinking way too much.”

“Actually,” I said, “I’m probably not thinking enough.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

I was about to get up when a loud new talk show appeared on the TV screen above the bar. The show consisted of young men talking about the times they’d thrown up. Then they called out to some busty girls in Dutch peasant costumes who were serving steins of beer to the studio audience. “Juggies!!” the men called. That was the name of the costumed girls. “Dance us out to commercial!”

That was when I left. Reading Paradise Lost can make you feel that way, especially at first – ashamed somehow, as if you belong nowhere in the modern world.

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