I’ve deeply admired the distinguished American poet, W.D. Snodgrass, ever since the day Oxford University Press published After Experience* in the States; I attended the launch of this volume in New York in 1968.
In particular, the superb title poem, “After Experience Taught Me . . .”, resonated with me because at once I recognised the quotation from the little Guide to Spinoza bequeathed to me by my father. It is Spinoza’s* Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect that provides Snodgrass with the poem’s schematic thesis (‘After experience had taught me that all things which frequently take place in ordinary life are vain and futile ... etc.’ ) against which he counterpoints antithetical couplets of martial brutishness devised to reduce the enlightened lens-grinder to a dehumanised husk.
My father, an eye-witness at the Nuremberg Trials, served in SHAEF under U.S. General Eisenhower from late 1943 until the end of WW2. I believe Father would have had a profound understanding of Snodgrass’s After Experience since listening at first hand to harrowing evidence of Nazi atrocities had been his daily lot.
(See: Rates of Exchange: ‘Ici. Français assassinés par les Boches.’
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/rates-of-exchange-ici-francais.html )
But it was not until I learned much later the truth of the baptismal names masked by the initials W.D. – they actually stood for William De Witt and, therefore, he appeared to be of Dutch extraction – that it occurred to me to summon the courage to write to the poet.
Was it too fanciful, I asked myself, to view Snodgrass’s cathartic work eviscerating the agents of the Holocaust (The Führer Bunker Cycle of Poems) as an act of reparation on behalf of his ancestors, the patrician de Witt brothers, murdered and disembowelled in 1672 in the Hague, in whose suburb, Voorburg, Spinoza resided.
In particular, the superb title poem, “After Experience Taught Me . . .”, resonated with me because at once I recognised the quotation from the little Guide to Spinoza bequeathed to me by my father. It is Spinoza’s* Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect that provides Snodgrass with the poem’s schematic thesis (‘After experience had taught me that all things which frequently take place in ordinary life are vain and futile ... etc.’ ) against which he counterpoints antithetical couplets of martial brutishness devised to reduce the enlightened lens-grinder to a dehumanised husk.
My father, an eye-witness at the Nuremberg Trials, served in SHAEF under U.S. General Eisenhower from late 1943 until the end of WW2. I believe Father would have had a profound understanding of Snodgrass’s After Experience since listening at first hand to harrowing evidence of Nazi atrocities had been his daily lot.
(See: Rates of Exchange: ‘Ici. Français assassinés par les Boches.’
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/rates-of-exchange-ici-francais.html )
But it was not until I learned much later the truth of the baptismal names masked by the initials W.D. – they actually stood for William De Witt and, therefore, he appeared to be of Dutch extraction – that it occurred to me to summon the courage to write to the poet.
Was it too fanciful, I asked myself, to view Snodgrass’s cathartic work eviscerating the agents of the Holocaust (The Führer Bunker Cycle of Poems) as an act of reparation on behalf of his ancestors, the patrician de Witt brothers, murdered and disembowelled in 1672 in the Hague, in whose suburb, Voorburg, Spinoza resided.
As I eventually wrote in my letter to W.D. Snodgrass: ‘I’m told that Spinoza, a Sephardic Jew, had developed an intimate friendship with Jan de Witt and his brother so the controversial philosopher had to be forcibly restrained from going into the streets to publicly denounce the murder. The two de Witts had been mistakenly identified as traitors by a Dutch mob that lynched them and mutilated their bodies, believing the brothers had been responsible for the defeat of the Dutch troops by the French in 1672.’
(It is said that Spinoza was moved to attend the scene of the crime with a notice inscribed Ultimi Barbarorum – Basest of Barbarians – until dissuaded by van der Spyk, the painter.)
Ten generations or so later, I asked the poet, did latterday De Witt owe Spinoza a debt of honour?
Some weeks later an airmail from Erieville NY arrived, which went some way to solve the riddle. W.D. Snodgrass wrote:
Thanks for your very kind letter . . . Your question about Spinoza, the de Witt brothers and my poems about the Third Reich is fascinating – downright ingenious – but I’m afraid my answer will have to be disappointing. I was always curious about where my middle name came from (that is, previous to my father, who was Bruce DeWitt Snodgrass). My family was always very vague about this, saying that we were mostly Scots, with a little Irish thrown in, but they thought we’d had an ancestor who was “German or something.” I was surprised, then, to find, on a trip to Belgium, and again on a later visit to Holland, that the name appeared frequently, often on store windows in the spelling “deWitte.” This amused and further puzzled me because, when I attended a high school reunion, I’d been surprised to find that everyone addressed me as “DEwitt,” a name which seemed to imply the removal of someone’s intelligence. (I still believe that when I was actually in School, friends called me “De,” the same nickname my father went by, and I still do.)His signature and handwriting had a crispness and flow that reflected the agility of a questing mind. (The letter was dated April 10 2004, some five years before his death, aged 82.)
This puzzle was solved for me by Philip Hoy, the literary critic and publisher who came here from London to interview me about 10 years ago. When I asked where he’d got his Dutch name (there were several Hoys in my home town), he said it was just where I’d got mine — many Dutch Covenanters had fled to Scotland or England before emigrating on with their fellow-believers to the U.S. As a matter of fact, there was a Covenanter college (Geneva) only a block from my home in Beaver Falls, PA, but they are Reformed Presbyterians while my family were all United Presbyterians and considerably less stringent and hide-bound.
I once had known of the de Witt brothers and their relation with Spinoza, but had forgotten about it. Thanks for reminding me – it gives me a sense of closer relation with Spinoza than I can probably claim with justice. I hope this will give you the information you need.
With best wishes,
W. D. Snodgrass
Ultimi Barbarorum
It is my belief that Ultimi Barbarorum would make a fitting epigraph to this meditation on “After Experience Taught Me . . .” or even, perhaps, this stanza (from the The Führer Bunker Cycle, in the mouth of Joseph Goebbels):Pray, children, pray.
Our Father who art in Nihil
We thank Thee for this day of trial
And for the loss that teaches self-denial.
Amen.
 | ||
| The mutilated bodies of the Brothers de Witte by Jan de Baen |
Postscript.
To pursue the resonances of W.D. Snodgrass’s name to a point of supererogation, I should add, for the benefit of non-British readers of this text, that WD indicates ‘War Department’ in common notation in the UK, and can often warn civilians of sites of unexploded bombs.
* For another literary title derived from Spinoza’s works, see Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (The Ethics – Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, Part IV: Of Human Bondage).
For After Experience, see:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171513
For an intimate insight into the psyche of a committed Nazi, whose Anglophobic thoughts are preserved within the covers of Goethe’s Faust, see:
Between life and death . . . January 14 1944 . . . Franz Lüdtke’s ‘Ostvisionen’ for Colonisation to the Baltic Coast
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171513
For an intimate insight into the psyche of a committed Nazi, whose Anglophobic thoughts are preserved within the covers of Goethe’s Faust, see:
Between life and death . . . January 14 1944 . . . Franz Lüdtke’s ‘Ostvisionen’ for Colonisation to the Baltic Coast
See also The Humbert in the Park, for further amateur literary sleuthing:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/the-humbert-in-park-more-palimpsestic.html
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/the-humbert-in-park-more-palimpsestic.html
•
Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence,
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
