The great distinction of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is not its dramatic story (though that is very good), nor its apt and ingenious political parallels with events that occurred three centuries before (though these are very good, too), but one character that Heinlein draws with genius. His creation, Mike, is a rare achievement in the field of science fiction. No one has ever done it better.
Mike is a supercomputer, who runs the Moon. He has been installed on the Moon by the Earth and takes care of all the business affairs of all the colonies. This situation is familiar and will be the case on the Moon in a century if in fact we do colonize it. But something special happens to Mike. He comes alive.
His “birth,” which occurs one night when his “attendant,” Manny, is fiddling with the inputs, happens like this. Mike astonishes Manny by asking a question. “Is this funny?” he asks, and then tells a joke. As far as Manny can remember, he has never input this joke into the computer, nor has he programmed it to ask whether something is funny or not. But because it is the middle of the night, Manny responds to the computer’s question, typing in: “No, it’s not.”
“Why not?” asks Mike, and comes alive at that moment. From then on he is very much alive, and very much on the side of the colonists against their Earth masters. In fact, Mike joins the rebellion and runs it, too. In the end it is Mike and the handful of valiant colonists on the Moon, and the force of gravity, against the Earth and its billions, both of people and of bombs.
The surest proof that something has lived is if it dies. I am sure that Mike is alive. This is the only hint I will give you about the ending of this moving book.
W.H. AUDEN
1907–1973
Three Poems
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, in 1907, took a degree at Oxford in 1928, and for a time taught school. He began to write and publish poems and won a prize in 1937 for verse plays written with Christopher Isherwood and other works. He married Thomas Mann’s daughter in 1936 and, with war imminent, came to the United States in 1939; he became a citizen in 1946.
He continued to publish volumes of verse and collaborated on the libretto for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. His book The Age of Anxiety won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1948, while The Shield of Achilles received a National Book Award. I think it contains his best work, but many other books are also filled with fine poems. Three are very famous and universally anthologized. One is called “Musée des Beaux Arts.” It begins thus:
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position …
What is that position? Well, we never pay attention, we have other things to think about besides the suffering of persons even in front of our eyes … The poem is deeply moving, the more times you read it and think about it.
When W.B. Yeats died in January 1939 Auden wrote a beautiful memorial poem. It begins:
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. O all the instruments agree The day of his death was a dark cold day.
The third stanza begins thus, in simple, imperishable verse:
Receive an honored guest;
William Yeats is laid to rest:
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
Auden’s greatest poem, I think—although many disagree—is The Shield of Achilles. To appreciate it fully you have to know the classical reference, to Homer’s description of the great shield forged by the god Hephaestus at the request of Thetis, the mother of Achilles in The Iliad. The shield is one of the most beautiful things ever made, and Auden remembers it and describes a hideous modern analog for each of the lovely images in the original. No work of poetic art, perhaps, has more effectively described the difference between the past and our present.
Auden, during his last years, was widely considered the greatest living poet in English. He died in England in 1973. Since then time has not treated him with courtesy.
MARGARET WISE BROWN
1910–1952
Goodnight Moon
Margaret Wise Brown was born in New York City in 1910. She grew up on Long Island, where her love for animals and the outdoors was nourished. Her formal education was provided by Hollins College, but it seems clear that her main teachers were children, little children whom she observed and listened to with a patience, attention, and understanding seldom possessed by writers before her. As a result she produced an important change in the way books were written for young children before her untimely death while on vacation in Nice, France, in 1952. It was a great loss.
In her more than fifty books for children, under her own name and several pseudonyms (Golden McDonald, Timothy Hay, Juniper Sage), Miss Brown tried to break the bonds of traditional children’s stories. She wanted to enter the child’s world and to write about the child’s own reality, to touch his or her imagination. This she did in many books, notably Little Island, the various Noisy Books, The Red Barn, and Goodnight Moon.
Goodnight Moon is my favorite and the favorite of my own children. It is the perfect “bedtime story,” although it is not a story at all. A small bunny lies in bed in a great green room; in a rocking chair sits “a quiet old lady who was whispering ‘hush.’” One by one the bunny says goodnight to all the things in his room, in his world. The marvelous color illustrations by Clement Hurd show the room growing darker and darker, until finally the stars shine through the window, the kittens are asleep on the old lady’s chair, and the bunny is tucked under the covers, asleep and at peace.
This, I think, is nothing other than magic.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
1911–1979
Four Poems
Elizabeth Bishop was born in Massachusetts in 1911 and was brought up by her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia after her father died and her mother suffered a collapse. She went to Vassar, where she met Marianne Moore, who was an important influence on many of her early poems. She traveled widely both in Europe and especially in Latin America. She finally settled in Brazil, where she lived for many years. She owned a house in Key West, Florida, that now has a plaque on the fence. I too owned a house in Key West at one time, and I walked by her house many times, saluting as I passed.