Collected Prose

soul could be content with its own society. But she discovered that consciousness was captivity as well as liberty, so that even here she was prey to her own self-imprisonment in despair or fear…. For the sensitive visitor, then, Emily’s room acquires an atmosphere encompassing the poet’s several moods of superiority, anxiety, anguish, resignation or ecstasy. Perhaps more than any other concrete place in American literature, it symbolizes a native tradition, epitomized by Emily, of an assiduous study of the inner life.”
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    Song to accompany The Book of Memory. Solitude , as sung by Billie Holiday. In the recording of May 9, 1941 by Billie Holiday and Her Orchestra. Performance time: three minutes and fifteen seconds. As follows: In my solitude you haunt me / With reveries of days gone by. / In my solitude you taunt me / With memories that never die … Etc. With credits to D. Ellington, E. De Lange, and I. Mills.
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    First allusions to a woman’s voice. To be followed by specific reference to several.
    For it is his belief that if there is a voice of truth—assuming there is such a thing as truth, and assuming this truth can speak—it comes from the mouth of a woman.
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    It is also true that memory sometimes comes to him as a voice. It is a voice that speaks inside him, and it is not necessarily his own. It speaks to him in the way a voice might tell stories to a child, and yet at times this voice makes fun of him, or calls him to attention, or curses him in no uncertain terms. At times it willfully distorts the story it is telling him, changing facts to suit its whims, catering to the interests of drama rather than truth. Then he must speak to it in his own voice and tell it to stop, thus returning it to the silence it came from. At other times it sings to him. At still other times it whispers. And then there are the times it merely hums, or babbles, or cries out in pain. And even when it says nothing, he knows it is still there, and in the silence of this voice that says nothing, he waits for it to speak.
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    Jeremiah: “Then said I, Ah, Lord God! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child. But the Lord said unto me, say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak…. Then the Lord put forth his hand, and touched my mouth. And the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth.”
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    The Book of Memory. Book Seven.
    First commentary on the Book of Jonah.
    One is immediately struck by its oddness in relation to the other prophetic books. This brief work, the only one to be written in the third person, is more dramatically a story of solitude than anything else in the Bible, and yet it is told as if from outside that solitude, as if, by plunging into the darkness of that solitude, the “I” has vanished from itself. It cannot speak about itself, therefore, except as another. As in Rimbaud’s phrase: “Je est un autre.”
    Not only is Jonah reluctant to speak (as Jeremiah is, for example), but he actually refuses to speak. “Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah…. But Jonah rose up to flee from the presence of the Lord.”
    Jonah flees. He books passage aboard a ship. A terrible storm rises up, and the sailors fear they will drown. Everyone prays for deliverance. But Jonah has “gone down into the sides of the ship; and he lay, and was fast asleep.” Sleep, then, as the ultimate withdrawal from the world. Sleep as an image of solitude. Oblomov curled on his couch, dreaming himself back into his mother’s womb. Jonah in the belly of the ship; Jonah in the belly of the whale.
    The captain of the ship finds Jonah and tells him to pray to his God. Meanwhile, the sailors have drawn lots, to see which among them has been responsible for the storm, “… and the lot fell upon Jonah.
    “And then he said unto them, Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you; for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you.
    “Nevertheless the men rowed hard to bring it to the land; but they could not; for the sea wrought, and was tempestuous against them….
    “So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea; and the sea ceased from her raging.”
    The popular mythology about the whale notwithstanding, the great fish that swallows Jonah is by no means an agent of destruction. The fish is what saves him from drowning in the sea. “The waters compassed me about, even to the