Beauty / Truth, Truth / Beauty

On John Keats, Ocean Vuong, and writing too beautifully

(Above: Keats’ life mask)

I’ve been thinking a lot about John Keats lately. Around the start of December, I was invited to contribute to a mildly sexy poetry anthology inspired by historical figures. The prompt was to write a love poem to someone from history. After a few long moments of “oh no… I couldn’t… like wanking on someone’s grave -” Keats was the first person I thought of. Sorry, Keats. It had to be you.

I spent a while over Christmas rereading Keats’ poems, wondering how to ‘write back’ to him without making his skeleton climb out of the earth. While Keats’ contemporaries, such as Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and Jane Austen, are more remote figures in my mind, I feel as though I know Keats. His work challenges my (limited) ability to be critically detached. I think this is due to the openness of his pain. His sufferings remain visible and legible, in both his poems and his letters, and this makes us (by which I mean, me) imagine that we know him. Pain as a shortcut to intimacy, or at least the impression of intimacy.

At much the same time, I was thinking about Ocean Vuong, because I had read his 2019 novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous this winter. Vuong’s writing has certain things in common with Keats. Specifically, the close combination of beauty and pain.

In Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, Keats describes an ancient Greek urn with quite ominous events depicted on its surface. Men ‘or gods’ chase maidens who ‘struggle to escape’, and a heifer is led to ritual slaughter:

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

         To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

         And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

It took me an embarrassingly long time to see the violence in Keats’ poem. He makes so much of the urn’s beauty, overwrought with flowers, that it’s easy to gloss over. In a recent essay on Keats in the LRB, Susan Eilenberg acknowledges Keats’ ‘sadistic’ aspects, especially in his letters to Fanny Brawne:

He was intent on her body, and when she told him she disliked his emphasis he doubled down: ‘Why may I not speak of your Beauty, since without that I could never have lov’d you – I cannot conceive any beginning of such love as I have for you but Beauty.’ He was possessive, adoring, controlling, jealous, sadistic.

Yet Eilenberg dismisses the idea that ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ portrays beauty as an imagined enticement to (or excuse for) sexual abuse, though this is hardly ambiguous in the poem (the maidens are ‘loth’, i.e. reluctant). Does this ‘Cold pastoral’ depict ‘happy, happy love’? The answer is forestalled; the heifer’s flanks remain ‘silken’ and dressed with garlands, not blood, and the ‘men or gods’ have not yet caught the maidens. If we really wanted to, we could imagine that the maidens, once caught, will consent, and that this all amounts to no more than an adult version of kiss-chase. The poem evades consequence, and appears to conclude that the urn’s beauty is what matters, above all else:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

And, well, is it? What is beauty, really? Aestheticised ambiguity? In the writing workshops I teach, when a poem has impressed me in some way, I often find myself saying the word ‘beautiful!’, in complete disconnection from my brain. Beautiful! I’ll say, when what I actually mean is that the work has made me feel something more complicated or intense, something that I can’t easily put into words.

Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous tells the story of a Vietnamese mother and her son, nicknamed ‘Little Dog’, trying to make their way as first and second-generation immigrants in Hartford, USA. Like Keats, Vuong is preoccupied with beauty as a prelude to suffering - as something desired, and therefore both powerful and vulnerable to abuse. He specifically uses the word ‘gorgeous’, which derives from jewellery (something wrapped around the throat). He writes ‘To be gorgeous you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.’

Animals in pain are everywhere in Vuong’s novel, with Vuong aligning human and nonhuman wounds (‘What we would give to have the ruined lives of animals tell a human story – when our lives are in themselves the stories of animals’, he writes). As in Keats’ ode, heifers particularly feature. Wandering in the night towards an animal calling in pain, he likens ‘Little Dog’ to a male calf, separated from his mother:

I hear her call again, convinced now that it’s a heifer. Ranchers often sell off the calves at night, ferrying them away on truck beds while the mothers slept in their stalls so they wouldn’t wake up screaming for their babies. Some would wail so hard their throats would swell shut and a balloon had to be placed inside and inflated to expand the neck muscles.

Vuong’s prose is unflinching in this way, wince-inducing. It’s also, often, extremely gorgeous. I have never read anyone describe shit - actual shit - as beautifully as Vuong does (‘like soil, but sharp with flaw’). In fact, I had steered around reading Vuong’s novel for a long time, because I had read his debut poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, with a wary feeling. Vuong’s poems were exquisite, it seemed to me, even where they expressed horror. I didn’t know whether to trust their beauty, didn’t want to participate in rapturous, pleasurable, vicarious ways of looking at pain. Vuong’s novel contains some wry acknowledgment of this:

I know. It’s not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter.

We’ll have to cut it open, you and I, like a newborn lifted, red and trembling, from the just-shot doe.

Just look at that description, of the ‘just-shot doe’. So gorgeous, it makes me queasy. ‘Little Dog’s lover in the novel, named Trevor, sometimes calls him out on such poetic tendencies:

“Hey,” he said, half-asleep, “what were you before you met me?”

“I think I was drowning.”

A pause.

“And what are you now?” he whispered, sinking.

I thought for a second. “Water.”

“Fuck off.” He punched me in the arm.

I laughed at this, at Trevor’s impulse to pull Little Dog back to earth. A lot of the novel’s power lies in its ability to laugh, to puncture its own solemnity with moments of irreverence.

I don’t know where this leaves truth. Truth implies that some knowledge, or lesson, has been imparted. I don’t know if we learn any lessons from beauty, or from pain. I’m not here to valorise suffering (Hera Lindsay Bird: ‘I never learned anything good from being unhappy. I never learned anything good from being happy either’). Maybe we’re back to Susan Sontag’s ‘instead of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art’.

All of this quibbling over beauty is somewhat ironic on my part, because ‘too beautiful’ is also a note I’ve received on my own writing. An early reader of my poems sent me a bitchy little line that read ‘if you’re really going to write about death, you’re going to have to do it more viscerally.’

I thought fuck you, you fucker. After all, I had seen death, and had described my experience of it as it was. In shock, the body receives impressions more acutely. Colours rush in with intensified immediacy. The outer world bleeds through, insists on its continued presence. In grief I floated, exhausted, on that surface. It was an undeniably beautiful surface. To express beauty is not always to evade some more ‘gritty’ or ‘visceral’ truth. It may be that to grapple with such things truly, we have to also confront beauty.

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