A poet writing about a poet? Commonplace. But there’s something provocative about the pairing of author and subject in The Life of David (Schocken Books, 2005), former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky’s extended essay on the biblical poet-king of ancient Israel. Pinsky’s conflicted relationship with the religion of his forefathers makes the duet more tantalizing.
Pinsky, MA ’65, PhD ’67, was raised in a home that kept kosher; he didn’t taste ham until he was in college, and he went to Hebrew school at 11. But his family went to synagogue infrequently. His grandfather sneered at religion, celebrated Christmas and married a Gentile. It was a family of religious ambiguity despite its nominal orthodoxy.
Pinsky has an uncertain foot in both worlds. In a 1997 Paris Review interview, he recalled the lure of secular life: “The Jewish service and the rituals of Jewish life seem designed to insulate, to define one away from the majority culture. And the majority culture is so attractive. It was the fifties with American baseball in its golden age, and rock ’n’ roll in its formative, glorious years. . . . Terms like assimilation or saying you’re second or third generation, don’t catch the subtlety of this richly absorbing conflict, the crisis of attraction toward the sweets, the question of idolatry.” Pinsky has had more than a taste of secular acclaim since his Stanford days as a Stegner Fellow and student of Yvor Winters, winning major poetry prizes and serving an unprecedented three terms as poet laureate.
The young David, who slung a stone and killed the redoubtable Goliath, was also a golden boy, handsome and favored. Pinsky tackles the misconception that David’s sling was a child’s recreation; it was a formidable infantry weapon for centuries. He quashes so many other myths that it’s hard to recognize David as a “good man” in any normal sense.
David had his own ambiguities. His vicious military reprisals and political double-crossings are counterpoised with the exquisite Psalms—sometimes prophetic, sometimes anguished—he composed to his God. He was a man equally at home with the harp and the sword, paradoxically capable of passionate loyalties and deathless hatred, sometimes aimed at the same person. David is most famous for his exploit with Goliath and his adulterous liaison with Bathsheba (Pinsky demolishes Talmudic exonerations of the affair), but Pinsky focuses on the issues of his long kingship around 1000 B.C. and consolidation of his new capital, Jerusalem. It is the mature David who seems to fascinate him.
Pinsky’s attraction to his subject is more than academic. In his 1999 Stanford Commencement address, Pinsky eloquently urged Stanford grads to “walk among the dead.” He described how the Suquamash Indian leader, Chief Seattle, chastised the white race for forgetting the graves of its forebears. Indians, by contrast, believed that the dead do not forget the living, but continue to comfort and guide them. “And then Chief Seattle makes a remarkable statement, a sentence that has rung in my mind since I first read it,” Pinsky said: “ ‘They are not powerless, the dead.’ ”
We can select our influences, he noted, and choose the dead who form our company. Choosing David’s company, Pinsky accepts the biblical yarns, making the king of Israel a real ancestor. Fiction would not have created a hero so flawed, he argues.
Is it the flaws that attract him? Pinsky lingers, for example, on David’s vindictive deathbed wishes, including long-delayed paybacks for henchmen and foes. The author aptly compares David and his circle to Mafioso—the Sopranos, perhaps. His many riffs on the Mob remind us that the world of 10th-century B.C. Judah and Israel is insular and tribal: “this is no more the world of Uncle Saul dancing with Aunt Naomi than Abraham is Lincoln, or Ahab is a whaling man.” Yet despite his attempts to delve into the mindset of the times, Pinsky often interprets David with a post-Freudian slant.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that Pinsky, coming from a family of religious ambivalence, has recreated a secular David, a kind of Hebrew Odysseus in his ruthlessness and slyness. His David is a great and unifying king, but where is the spiritual figure that has haunted Islam, Judaism and Christianity for three millennia? Pinsky’s more psychological portrayal misses that critical target, suggesting a lack of insight into David’s mainspring, his faith. “What is the difference between magic and religion?” he asks. “A quick simplifying answer might be that your religion is my magic. But another is that as religion is to strategy, magic is to tactics.” Such a glib, breezy interpretation might satisfy the literati, but it would baffle a saint.
Elsewhere he writes, “Whatever wrestling-with-God may mean, it entails becoming a nation or a people or a company of nations: vertical in time. . . .” Well, and so much more than that. The Psalms are David’s own wrestling with God, the attempt of his faith to encompass his fate, and the forging of a nation was a mere byproduct of their spiritual power.
Pinsky weaves through the contradictions of David’s long and complicated life toward his own personal hero. He wades through the spread of David stories in Samuel I and II, Chronicles I, the Psalms and several other biblical books consulting rabbinic wisdom, ancient and modern scholars, English and Hebrew poets; weighing and discarding Cabalist tradition and Talmudists; and riffing on the Hebrew language itself. “The story of David is a story of flawed fathers, of unexpectedly powerful women and of defiant sons,” he writes. And perhaps in that phrase is a key. Pinsky is also exploring his own Tree of Jesse.
Pinsky dedicates The Life of David to his own father, Milford Simon Pinsky. Milford makes a cameo appearance at the end of the book in a 1939 photo of a dozen basketball players holding a trophy. The Jewish Aces each have a Star of David sewn onto their uniforms. A symbol of his family’s assimilation, the seduction of the secular way—or is it? Several thousand miles away, the symbol had been sewn onto other clothes and become a mark of unimaginable suffering.
There’s a mystical significance in the pairing of universal symbol and these real-life men. Pinsky points out that several members of that grinning New Jersey high school team would, within a few years, go to war against the regime that imposed the symbol as a sign of death and unwittingly gave it a transcendent importance. The symbol would reappear a decade later on the flag of the new nation of Israel, reweaving sacred and secular, though not always successfully.
Seesawing between these eras, Pinsky honors his ancestors with a book that is a sort of propitiatory offering. Milford Pinsky is another of the dead his son walks with, joining hands with their common forefather, the enigmatic poet and warrior and mystic, King David.
CYNTHIA HAVEN frequently writes on arts and letters for Stanford.
