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Oxford Professor of English Literature Joe Moshenska has done something arguably long overdue in Milton studies. Approaching the Olympian of English letters from a mix of new historical and reader-response positions, Moshenska buries himself deeply into an imagined psyche of the poet and polemicist, propagandist and Latinist, John Milton while also digging down into himself to grapple with his own position on the author of Paradise Lost. The result of this double-sided inquiry is his new book, Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton.
The author of this intriguing study and I had the opportunity to speak via Zoom not too long ago, and it was my considerable pleasure to spend time not only with his John Milton but also with Joe Moshenska himself. Our interview has been edited for length.
Ryan Asmussen
You position your reader at a variety of unique angles in Milton’s life. For example, considering a specific wall clock of his childhood, you ask questions about what the nature of time was like for him—a 17th century middle-class youth from bustling London—and how those experiences may have fashioned him. I was particularly struck by your consideration, along these lines, of the influence of music upon him in his father’s home, particularly of rhythm.
Joe Moshenska
One of the first things that struck me when I read Milton as a teenager was that his language just didn’t sound like anything else I’d ever read. Reading him to prepare for my A-levels, I came across the first book of Paradise Lost, which has this catalogue of all the names of the fallen angels—one of the things he’s doing to show that he’s imitating classical epics, much like the cataloguing of the ships in Homer—and what struck me then was that I didn’t have a clue who most of these figures were. They were drawn from every mythological tradition, but it all sounded absolutely amazing. He seemed to love polysyllabic words that slither across the line as you read them, and I thought, ‘wow, I can hear this and enjoy it even before I get into the question of what any of it means.’ For me, in my book, it made sense to come to grips with the fact that his father, John Milton senior, was a serious amateur musician. He and his music, the musicians he worked with who rehearsed in his house, provided part of the backdrop of Milton’s life from the get-go.
Ryan Asmussen
Tell me about your academically unorthodox use of fictional elements. We listen along in imaginative reconstruction with the teenaged Milton as he listens to his father and his consorts play through senior’s own composition, “O Woe Is Me For Thee.” A reader can see and hear how the eventual personality and aesthetic of the older poet is being formed in the young student.
Joe Moshenska
I enjoyed writing those parts a huge amount. I also tried to be quite careful that everything in those fictionalized episodes were always based on some established core of information. On the one hand, I felt quite liberated by the fact that there have been several very good biographies of Milton. If someone wants a kind of straight, cradle-to-grave, factually grounded narrative of his life, they can find that easily. But, on the other hand, I wanted it to be a book that works for people. Additionally, it’s one of the biggest challenges for a literary biographer that if you’re writing about a poet, you must get into the poetry in a way that doesn’t kill it, that you’re not just reducing it to a set of causal explanations from the life you’re studying. On top of that, I wanted to get myself in and think about my own personal experiences with Milton, as I do when I discuss my Jewish heritage and ramblings around England with my friend and former teacher, looking for Milton’s old haunts.
Ryan Asmussen
Let’s talk about the process of educating youth Milton experienced. Obviously, the brutality is problematic for us, this pairing of intense learning— the Latin, the Greek, etc.—with frequent administered beatings. I don’t want to overstate by saying this pedagogical practice was fundamental to Milton’s character, but…
Joe Moshenska
No, I do see it as fundamental, and I think the first thing I’d say is that it’s a different kind of thing from understanding the place of music in his life, yet it’s a very different version of the same category of things we think we’ve thought about; but, I’m not sure we really have. The argument of ‘well, that’s just what they did back then’ gets used a lot to prevent people from imposing contemporary moral standards onto the past. One of the issues with this, as a defense of history, is that there is the risk that you’re not really thinking about things. In Milton’s time, the kind of world that any learned man aspired to navigate—regardless of whether one ended up in the clergy or the law or the medicine or any other kind of profession—centered around Latin and the cultural capital that came with that education was completely indispensable. If you know the real question isn’t just ‘was it normal?’ but ‘what does it mean for something like that to be normal?’, if people weren’t horrified by children having their learning beaten into them at school, if that was just expected, what does that mean, what then happens to our readings of these works of Milton that are often full of violence?
Ryan Asmussen
In a more typical Milton biography, you would have, perhaps, a page or so about this darker aspect of his life, but it wouldn’t really cause the reader much reason to think before moving on. You’re really asking the reader to pull up a chair and come to terms with it, in a sense to share some responsibility of inquiry.
Joe Moshenska
It helped a lot of things in Milton’s life come into focus for me. He was taught at St. Paul’s in London by two of the most notorious beaters of his time, Alexander Gil, father and son. He also had some big clash with his undergraduate tutor at Cambridge, which seems to have been partly about being beaten as a student, and then when he’s a school master himself later he beats his nephews and probably his other students. It’s there as a kind of thread through his life, and I thought it was worth the discomfort of confronting that head-on. It humanizes Milton, I hope to some extent, but also makes us recognize the ways in which he’s complicit in the perpetuation of a system that blended learning and violence.
Ryan Asmussen
On one hand we have this Milton of renown, the dour, rigid, puritanical Latin master from on high; but, on the other, as you show, we also have a sensitive poet listening to—depending on—voices from beyond to compose Paradise Lost. How do you understand Milton’s dream states? Is there a Blakean parallel, here, or a Zen ‘flow’ dynamic?
Joe Moshenska
Fascinating question. I started the book exactly for the reasons you’re suggesting, that there’s something so counterintuitive about the idea of these poems emerging from this very ‘other’ state of consciousness since we all know Milton as the stern, forbidding, hyper-masculine, canonical control-freak. But, actually, the whole Paradise Lost enterprise seems to have been predicated upon twilight states of the mind that hover between full awareness and total passivity, of Milton being taken over from without. At the beginning of the book, I call him a scholar and a prophet. We have Milton the scholar, the one who knows everything, has the information at his fingertips, reaches out for it and there it is. We also have Milton the prophet who receives things that are happening to him, coming to him from somewhere. This is someone for whom writing involves this extraordinary alterational interplay of mental states. In a certain way, he needs to be destabilized in order to write what he wants to write.
Ryan Asmussen
You work very deftly with an Italian word, asprezza, defined as “roughness or special kind of difficulty” as a way to think about Milton’s poetry. You argue that this aspect of Milton is something to be wrestled with so we can marvel at what happens to us during the struggle, that it engenders self-discovery. I think this is such an important notion, particularly for humanities students.
Joe Moshenska
I absolutely agree. However, one of the challenges of this idea is that it may turn into the version of the argument, ‘Milton is hard, but it’s good for you, so take your medicine.’ Many of the people who like Milton want to say that, and want me to say that too. Well, that is domesticating him. I’m committed to difficulty as strangeness, difficulty as something that can encompass a kind of uncanniness and capacity for being productively confused by things genuinely unmooring. I still find after years of teaching that Milton gives me that experience again and again. Because of all the cultural associations and all the ways Milton is presented to people, it can be difficult to allow yourself a moment of baffled astonishment. I do want to hold on to a much more radical potential in what Milton can do to people, the emphasis on difficulty and the desire to make strange. In some sense, this is what my book is really about.
NONFICTION
Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton
By Joe Moshenska
Basic Books
Published December 07, 2021
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