Now, Mother, What’s the Matter?
Only the monsters do not have troubled hearts.
Life is for troubled hearts. Art is for troubled
hearts. For my whole life, Hamlet has been
a bridge between. Hamlet’s ‘Now, mother,
what’s the matter?’ is life on earth. Something
is always the matter, and not just for mothers.
(As I write this, the Angelus rings.) Every
character in Hamlet is troubled, there are
no monsters in it. I render unto Caesar
the things that are Caesar’s — everything is
troubled there and, if I am lucky, Caesar
is troubled. I render unto God the things
that are God’s and feel — want to feel? Do feel —
that God is troubled. I also render unto art.
But I have no idea what art is. What
Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’ is. What
the luminous chaos of The Portrait of
a Lady is. What The Pilgrim’s Progress is.
My feet knew the way before I opened
the book: that just before the gate to heaven
is yet another hole to hell.
Richard W Halperin was born in Chicago to an Irish mother, and an American father with Russian ancestry. Early in his childhood the family moved to New York. He taught for a short period at Hunter College, and subsequently made a career in education administration, latterly with Unesco in Paris, where he currently lives.
Now, Mother, What’s the Matter? is from the New Poems section of All the Tattered Stars: Selected and New Poems published by Salmon Poetry in 2023 to celebrate Halperin’s 80th birthday.
The New York School’s influence is audible in his work’s refreshing lightness of texture. Halperin is deeply serious, though, about the function and power of art, cinema and the literary arts in particular. Considering the impact of a poem sequence by an unnamed writer, he says of their portrayal of daughterhood, “None of this is my experience, / All of it is my experience. / Don’t tell me I cannot be daughter.”
Hamlet’s address to his mother, Gertrude, which forms the current poem’s title, is freighted with his still-to-be-spoken accusation – of lechery and adultery with his uncle, Claudius, if not direct connivance in the murder of his father, King Hamlet. Halperin, abandoning quote marks or footnotes, cleverly escapes Shakespeare at the same time, and allows himself a little dry fun with the ideal of universality. The unanchored question inevitably sheds some of its specific complexity, and starts to look like a sentence a contemporary son or daughter might utter to a mother who is entirely innocent of the dangerous “matter” associated with Gertrude. Perhaps, as the child’s emphatic “Now” might suggest, this mother is overdoing some small complaint, and the words are uttered with mockery or exasperation rather than complete earnestness (though the latter isn’t impossible). Halperin’s artfully expanded context demonstrates the subjectivity of artistic interpretation.
His speaker goes on to renew, lightly, the seriousness associated with the original context. The near-euphemism “troubled hearts” suggests a complex perspective from which to read Hamlet’s mother and the play’s other characters – in fact, mothers and “others” in general. Hamlet, the play, has always been the speaker’s bridge between “life” and “art”, he says, since both are “for troubled hearts”. “Hamlet’s ‘Now, mother, / what’s the matter?’ is life on earth. Something / is always the matter, and not just for mothers.” Art permits self-recognition: it brings “troubled hearts” into an encounter with themselves.
This “matter” is gracefully expressed, with the interrupting comment from the Angelus bell pertinently timed. The Angelus marks the incarnation of Christ announced when the Angel Gabriel visits the Virgin Mary. It’s now that Halperin’s denial of there being any “monsters” in Hamlet makes a sharpened point. Art offers a route out of the judgmental “monsters v angels” binaries of religion, though not, of course, a route out of the problems of morality.
In the agreed obligation to Caesar, referencing Christ’s words from Matthew 22:21, Halperin projects himself into that imperial political scene and updates it: “I render unto Caesar / the things that are Caesar’s — everything is / troubled there and, if I am lucky, Caesar / is troubled. I render unto God the things / that are God’s and feel — want to feel? — do feel / that God is troubled. I also render unto art.”
Being “troubled” might be less of a guarantee of compassion than hoped. But the cleverly nervous enjambment that sustains a biblical and colloquial mix of register encourages tentative optimism.
As the speaker disarmingly confesses, he has “no idea what art is”. Art seems more demanding than any Caesar. The intransitive form of “render” in “I also render unto art” suggests more than self-giving service – the possibility of psychic “rending”, for example.
The three literary texts the speaker cites later seem random, but may have a common theme of pilgrimage, one that might stretch to include both the heroine of The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer, and the poet Edward Thomas. The concept admits Halperin’s persona, too: “My feet knew the way before I opened / the book”. The mind is pre-patterned with the traditional techniques of storytelling. What the speaker unquestioningly knows is “that just before the gate to heaven / is yet another hole to hell.” That conclusion is surprising and suggests the unilluminable: then we remember the poet Dante, who illuminated the hell holes, too. Without irony, Halperin reveals the magnitude of the literary pilgrimage.
Drama and fiction, poetry and allegory, are consolidated by the last three lines; “troubled hearts” and “holes to hell” are always integral. To travel these worlds, without rejecting the human-ness of the misnamed demons and monsters, may be another foundational characteristic of literary art.
