Mark Helprin began publishing short stories in The New Yorker shortly after graduating from Harvard in the late sixties. His own account of how he began writing is a story in itself, how at age seventeen, recovering from the wounds of a motorcycle wreck, having been evicted from a Swiss hotel, he ended up delirious in a Parisian hotel. Awakening in the middle of the night, miraculously free of pain, he turned on the light:

I thought perhaps I had died. I got up, sat at the desk and stared at the blotter. In the absence of pain, I began to write on the blotter. As I did so, I lost track of what was up and what was down. I seemed to be revolving in space, without either gravity or time. I have no idea how long I was at this, but I eventually went back to bed.

When I awoke in the morning, I felt as if I had never been sick in my life. On the blotter, in my horrendous handwriting, were several paragraphs describing the Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul, where I had never been. I read them and was astonished. Not by what seemed to be the veracity of the description, but by the quality of the prose. I though that it could have been written not merely by an adult, but by a real writer. It had the force, compression, and beauty of that which is written by someone who really knows what he is doing. Never before had I even come close to setting down anything like it. I had exceeded myself by so far that I was stunned, and as I read the short paragraphs over and over again, I felt such satisfaction and joy that I knew I had found my profession for life. ("Art of Fiction" 186). Helprin's early stories included "Because of the Waters of the Flood" and "Ruin," both written during his days at Harvard, published in The New Yorker, and later anthologized in A Dove of the East, his first book. It contained twenty stories and was published by Harcourt and Brace in 1975. In the title story, "A Dove of the East," Helprin begins a theme which would continue throughout his work, coming to fruition in his third novel, A Soldier of the Great War. The theme is that of the Ancient Mariner, the story of a man who, through great tribulation and lonely experience, gains an esoteric understanding of his own life and of the universe around him. As in the "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," a bird serves to represent all that is truly good in the world—including, though he may not realize it, the Ancient Mariner figure.

Reaction to A Dove of the East was mixed, as reviewers praised Helprin's talent while questioning his subjects and techniques. "A gifted voice, if one that seems, from time to time, a trifle in need of drying out," wrote Dorothy Rabinowitz in Saturday Review, September 20, 1975, "but these are small flaws in a work so estimably full of talent and—the word must out—of character" (39). Less complimentary was Amanda Heller, who wrote in Atlantic Monthly that the collection "brings to mind a wastebasket full of pretty projects, all unfinished" (108). Duncan Fallowell ended his mixed review for Spectator by saying, "But if he over-relies on our recognising the intrinsic majesty of these events it is also because he is a seeker after truth. Bits of it [truth] are squittering out all over the place, sufficiently to fuse into a magnetic center and make one recognise that the book is not written by a fool" (Fallowell 23).

Critics, whether favorable or not to A Dove of the East, realized that Helprin, twenty-eight at the time, would be a writer worth watching. Some time after the fact, a Village Voice reviewer wrote of the collection,

"More than twenty years have passed since some of these stories were written, so it is by now no insult to call them "promising." Though the book surely raised questions about how important it might be to find out where Helprin was going, it is now of interest mostly to fans who'd like to find out where he's been." ("Mark: My Words" 89)

A Dove of the East established Helprin's goal as a writer: that he would never minimize nor reduce life, but portray its exultant highs and terrible lows; the sublime and awesome beauty of the world in its mountains "so high, sharp, and bare that winds blew ice into waves and silver crowns, of air so thin and cold it tattooed the skin and lungs with the blue of heaven and the bronze of sunshining rock crevasse" (A Dove of the East 1), storms "in appearance as solid as a rock cliff" (Refiner's Fire 216), and "the power of gentle things" (Refiner's Fire 187), such as a dove or swallow.

Two years later Helprin would publish his first novel, Refiner's Fire—an ambitious, outrageous epic romance of a young foundling, how he came to lie dying in an Israeli hospital at the opening of the book. While most of the stories in A Dove of the East are loosely autobiographical, Refiner's Fire is nearly a full account of the author's life. The main character, Marshall Pearl, grows up, like Helprin, in the Hudson valley. They both attend Harvard; both study Arabic from an insane teacher who requires them to memorize long legal documents. Pearl begins an odyssey that takes him from coast to coast, to Jamaica, to the Alps, and finally to the land of his heritage, Israel, for a stint in the Israeli army. Helprin recounts many of these same adventures as his own in his Paris Review interview of 1992. He also comments on a New York Times Magazine piece, entitled "Big Books, Tall Tales," which begins, "Mark Helprin's mother, Eleanor Lynn—a Broadway leading lady in the late 30's—was once sold into slave bondage. Or so her son says. Was she really? Probably not, since Helprin tends to make up stories even when he's talking about his own life" ("Big Books, Tall Tales" 33). Helprin tells the Paris Review interviewer,

Last year, The New York Times Magazine ran a piece about me that has caused me a great deal of trouble ever since. Many people now treat me with open disdain, and others have told me that they were extremely reluctant to make my acquaintance. And who could blame them? The Time's central thesis is that I was a liar. ("Art of Fiction" 168)

Helprin would spend considerable time and energy, not only in that interview, but also on his book tour of 1991 promoting A Soldier of the Great War, his third novel, to refute the claims made by the Times. On two occasions he produced written evidence; a doctor's note indicating that Helprin indeed had received a gunshot wound in Jamaica, and a ship's roster proving that Helprin did actually serve in the British Merchant Marine.

The best account of these adventures is Refiner's Fire, generally misunderstood by critics. John Mellors, BBC book critic, says, "In Refiner's Fire, Mark Helprin makes his adventurer several times larger than life and eschews realism for a prose charged with romantic extravagances and purple rhetoric: as if The Odyssey had been updated and rewritten by Dylan Thomas in his less sober moments" (232).

Of course, Helprin himself is the adventurer, and his account is generally of his own adventures. Helprin has said many of the reviews of this work confused him, as the Times piece had done; he was not "eschewing" realism but rather embracing it ("Art of Fiction" 172). Nonetheless, Helprin returned to short stories, publishing a second collection in 1981, Ellis Island and Other Stories. This collection marked Helprin's "arrival as an accomplished writer" (Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 32 229). It included a title novella, the story of a young Jew's immigration to New York City, its eccentricities exaggerated and seen as if through the eyes of one who had no idea what to expect. After praising the novella, Rhoda Koeing concludes her review, "Some of Helprin's other stories, long on mood and short on plot, seem like watercolor sketches for more finished work, but the majority of them shimmer with the bright and lavish metaphors of this most accomplished artist" (52-3). Besides "Ellis Island," critics praised "Palais de Justice," the story of an old rower who races a brawny youngster down the Charleston River; "North Light," "a brief and frankly autobiographical recollection of battle nerves among Israeli soldiers, a lean arc of voltage conveyed through tangible human conductors to an instant effect" (Price 20), and "The Schreuderspitze," a young widower's ordeal in the Alps and the recovery of his wife and son. In the stories of Ellis Island, Helprin is funnier and less obscure than in A Dove of the East, but he continues his earlier themes of redemption and recovery of the past, of epiphanies of truth and arcana gained by existence in the extremes of life.

Critics noted Helprin's growth as a writer: A.V. Kish wrote in Best Sellers, April 1981, "Mark Helprin may be well on his way to becoming a major figure in modern fiction. As a short story writer, he is superb" ("Ellis Island and Other Stories" 6). Anne Duchene wrote, "Mark Helprin, in short, has, without any dishonour, not yet found his own focus or his own tone; only his strong will to control the story, and not to be afraid of its resonances" (278). In 1981, Helprin would begin his greatest endeavor to date. He lived in Brooklyn and worked daily at the New York Public Library, studying everything he could on New York City, in preparing to write his largest and most complex novel, Winter's Tale. Perhaps goaded by insinuations that he stretched the truth and did not deal in realism (or reality), he created a magical New York, replete with flying horses, impossible bridges, time travel, and true love. The theme of recovering the past is expressed literally: Peter Lake travels through time to protect those he loves.

Winter's Tale is also Helprin's most entirely Jewish work, a fact overlooked by nearly every critic. Pearl K. Bell, in a Commentary article in June of 1981, writes, "If the Jewish religion is indeed the nucleus of his creative life . . . then we should be able to know this from his writing, not from newspaper interviews" ("New Jewish Voices" 65). The Jewish community failed generally to realize that Winter's Tale is an allegory of the Jewish Messiah in the character of Peter Lake. In the Jewish faith, Helprin says, the Messiah does not know he is the Messiah, but commits a single good act which changes the world and brings about the millennia (Telephone interview, 4 December 1996). Peter Lake sacrifices his own life for a child, and in doing so regains all that he loved and lost. Critics were shocked. Reviews of the novel tended to the extremes.

"There's far more that I would wish to say about the book," writes Benjamin Demott, so much more that I find myself nervous, to a degree I don't recall in my past as a reviewer, about failing the work, inadequately displaying its brilliance. The canniness of the balancing of fantasy and realism, the capacity of these Dickensian presences to bring to mind, subtly, contemporaries and near-contemporaries from Rupert Murdoch to Howard Hughes to Thomas Pynchon, the excitement scholars will find in interpreting Mr. Helprin's extension of the line of American imaginers who have grappled for longer than a century with the meanings of technology. . . . Not for some time have I read a work as funny, thoughtful, passionate, or large-souled. Rightly used, it could inspire as well as comfort us. Winter's Tale is a great gift at an hour of great need. (21)

> Not every reviewer was so gracious. In a review titled "The Worst of Times," Peter Prescott calls the novel "a great, glossy pudding of a novel" (78). Seymour Krim writes, "Winter's Tale turns out to be a self-willed fairy tale that even on its own terms refuses to convince" (3). Despite many negative reviews, and perhaps because of the polarized critical reception, Winter's Tale sold 100,000 copies in hard cover and topped the New York Times bestseller list, establishing Helprin as a "literary" author who could also sell books.

In 1991, Helprin published A Soldier of the Great War, his greatest novel, both in length and theme, to date. It is the fruition of the themes he began in "A Dove of the East"; a lonely man's reckoning with his own past years later through an unexplainable and impulsive act. Alessandro Giuliani, a 74 year-old veteran of the Great War (World War I), a professor of aesthetics, an adventurer par excellence, finds himself on a deserted road with an illiterate teenager. Together they walk for two days and Alessandro imparts the grand story of his life. In telling his story, Alessandro frees himself from the memory that has defined and possessed the final stage of his own life and can join those he loves in death. Alessandro, having survived a war that claimed everyone he loved, is "alone, all, all alone," like his literary archetype, the Ancient Mariner, another figure who must tell his story as a kind of payment for the revelations he has gained. Alessandro's albatross is the past, hanging about him and forcing him to persist in Life-in-Death. He, like Leon Orlovsky in "A Dove of the East," learns from the Ancient Mariner's example. The critical response to A Soldier of the Great War was nearly unanimously positive, though it sold only 40,000 copies in hard cover. Many critics called it Helprin's "masterpiece." Section iii below deals in depth with this novel.

Helprin has also written a series of essays on aesthetics and the literary canon, such as his introduction to the Best American Short Stories of 1988, titled "The Canon Under Siege." He has written a political column for The Wall Street Journal, and he helped to write Senator Robert Dole's resignation speech from the Senate. In 1995, he published his funniest yet most somber work, Memoir From Antproof Case, a fictional autobiography of a man who will not give his name, only a series of aliases, all of which he discounts. He has been, at one time or another, or all of the time, a murderer, a patient in a Swiss insane asylum, a lover a la Don Juan, a fighter pilot, the greatest bank robber of the century, and a constant crusader against "the greatest enslaver of mankind: coffee." Though he revels in the comedy of exploring the memory of this eccentric 80 year-old, Helprin performs a piece of literary magic in unraveling the character's motivation and the truth of his past. His accomplishment is similar to Joseph Heller's in Catch-22, a grand black comedy climaxing in scenes of great pathos, as if humor were the only means of coping. Like Catch-22, Memoir From Antproof Case uses tragedy to lend meaning to the insanity and comedy of life in a reversal of "comic relief."

Helprin's work ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime, from sharp comedy to grand tragedy. He sets his stories everywhere from the Himalayas to Israel to the Alps. He refuses to be categorized by genre, by ideology, or by faith. In his essay, "The Canon Under Siege," he defines literature as "the one word for language that can be as beautiful and hypnotic as song, for the vast summing up, in precious few words, of all that is truly important" (xiii). He views himself as a guardian of literature: "I have devoted my life to it not because I thought it would be a good way to make money or because I thought it might be pleasant and interesting, but, rather, because I love it—and I love it not only because it is so pleasingly beautiful, but because it is so deeply consequential" he writes in the same essay (xiv). This is essentially the motto of his work, set forth as an epigram to A Dove of the East. Helprin quotes Dante in Italian from Canto II of Inferno: "amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare"—"love moved me, and makes me speak." In response to the Paris Review question, "Why do you write," Helprin responds with a diatribe on the condition of modern art, where artists are no longer content with simply imitating the universe, but feel they must create new universes. He concludes by setting forth his own purpose as a writer: "I write in service of illumination and memory. I write to reach into 'the blind world where no one can help.' I write because it is a way of glimpsing truth. And I write to create something of beauty" (199).

ii. A Lesson from the Ancient Mariner

The most common image of the dove is that of the bird which descends from heaven to light upon Christ during his baptism in the Jordan River. Along with the other three Gospels, Matthew 3:16 recounts this event: "And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him" (KJV). Equally well known is the dove Noah sent from the ark, returning with an olive branch signifying dry land (Genesis 8). In both cases, the dove served as a messenger of good news. Solomon likens the object of his love to a dove in Song of Solomon, a creature that "art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs" (2:24 KJV). Strange, then, that the dejected King Hezekiah should compare his mourning the end of his life to the mourning of the dove in Isaiah 38:14: "Like a crane or a swallow, so did I chatter: I did mourn as a dove: mine eyes fail with looking upward: O Lord, I am oppressed; undertake for me" (KJV).

Samuel Taylor Coleridge might have chosen a dove for his sacrificial bird in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," but he likely thought the poem was already too allegorical and so settled on the albatross, suggested to him by William Wordsworth, a word that rhymed well and easily joined the rhythm of the poem (Whalley 44). Like Noah's dove, Coleridge's albatross is the "pious bird of good omen" (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner gloss line 80); like Christ's dove, it is the incarnation of blessing: "Through the fog it came; / As if it had been a Christian soul, / We hailed it in God's name" (lines I.64-66). In a poem wrought with symbolism, the albatross is the central and most important representation. The symbolism was overbearing, at least to Mrs. Barbauld, an early reader, who raised the most famous objections to the poem: that it was "improbable, and had no moral." Coleridge was quick to defend the moral, saying "in my own judgment the poem had too much [of a moral]" (qtd. by House 175). As to the poem's "improbability," George Whalley writes in his essay "The Mariner and the Albatross" that "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is less 'a fantasticall imagination and a drowsie dream' than 'a continued allegory, and a darke conceit'" (33). The poem's value as allegory seems obvious, and questions as to its "probability" quibbles. Allegories, by definition, do not require realism (nor, generally, do poems by Coleridge). Coleridge himself indicated, and many critics since have supported his claim, that the albatross was a symbol of "imagination," that quality which was to Coleridge "the SOUL that is everywhere, and in each" (Biographia Literaria XIII 283). The Mariner's wanton destruction of the bird, then, is the murder of imagination, and the subsequent death-in-life is equivalent to Coleridge's vision of his own life without the power of his imagination. Such a hypothesis is easy, though tedious, to support, as many critics have done. The albatross, and later the dove in Helprin's short story, both represent the original innocence of an Edenic existence, and the destruction of these birds is tantamount to the original sin of man. The manner in which the two men, the Ancient Mariner and his literary descendant Leon Orlovsky, the Jew from "A Dove of the East," respond to their acts of violence as the defining moment in their lives is the contrast between the two characters.

In truth, the Mariner takes precious little action after his terrible and decisive act of slaying the albatross. The death of the bird initiates his own spiritual death, a condition of utter passivity, prior to his rebirth as the glittering-eyed Ancient Mariner. His fate, Death-in-Life, is as arbitrary as his own decision to slay the bird; Coleridge writes in the gloss of Part 3, "Death and Life-in-Death have diced for the ship's crew, and she (the latter) winneth the ancient Mariner." Noting the personification of Death, the mythic anonymity of the Mariner, and the mere use of the word "Ancient" to describe him, Walter Jackson Bate writes, in his book simply titled Coleridge, that the poem is "virtually crying out for allegorical interpretation" (56). Coleridge himself thought to explain the poem, intimating that the murder of the albatross coincided with the murder of imagination in a poet's mind. Many critics have accepted this notion and sought to make the poem autobiographical. And, in a sense, it is autobiographical; however, the allegory expands far beyond a poet's imagination and envelops the fall and redemption of all mankind. In this way, critics of The Ancient Mariner have often not done the text justice, reducing it to an anxious expression of the poet's own concern about his poetic powers rather than allowing for the greatness of the work as allegory and an expression of the fallen human condition.

Bate writes that "for months, as we have already noticed, he [Coleridge] had been thinking of writing an epic on 'The Origin of Evil'" (59). Humphrey House reports that Coleridge and Wordsworth had experimented with a prose epic called "The Wanderings of Cain" (170-171). The Ancient Mariner became this work, and, while it neither addresses directly the origin of evil nor deals specifically with Cain, the Ancient Mariner becomes at once a symbol of Adam and an Everyman. Through Adam's sin, all of mankind after him would be spiritually dead. Through the Mariner's sin, Death takes the crew of the ship. And, like Adam separated from his Creator and expelled from the garden, the Mariner must endure spiritual death. In addition, Bate points out that the Mariner's sin, like Adam tasting the forbidden fruit, leads to great knowledge. At the moment of the Mariner's sin, the ship enters new waters: "We were the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea" (105-6). In this new sea begins the dream of terror that is the main attraction of the poem, so much so that many critics all but ignore the pivotal act of slaying the albatross. Bate compares the Mariner to Faust, as men "who by violating laws acquire a depth of experience others lack." He writes, "By thoughtlessly slaying the albatross, which has so gratuitously met and stayed with the ship, he is to come into contact with forces which lie beyond the experience of ordinary men and of which he would otherwise remain ignorant" (57).

Orlovsky, the Mariner figure in "A Dove of the East," is not ignorant of such experiences, for he is a European Jew at the outset of World War II. He, too, experiences guilt his entire life—the guilt of surviving when those he loved did not. He and his young, lovely wife, Ann, board a train to Aix-en-Provence, fleeing the German invasion of Paris and expecting to meet their families at the home of a friend. At a stop, while he disembarks to find some food, German planes attack the train. He races to catch the train, only to find the doors are locked. "Other side," she motions, and he understands. While waiting

for the train to pass so that he might cross the tracks and enter through an open door, he heard a terrific roar. A fighter plane's engines came so close he thought it was going to hit him. The deafening noise was followed by a string of explosions rapidly overtaking him. They were incendiary bombs, phosphorus. One exploded some meters in front of him and the world went white. He could see nothing, and he tripped and flew forward crashing onto the railbed of stones and slate. He heard whistles, bombs, and engines, and then lost consciousness thinking he was dead. (170)

He is not dead, of course, but when he walks, hitchhikes, and stumbles to Aix, he does not find Ann or his family. Instead, he happens upon a celebration around a fountain, from which he drinks.

It is important to note that The Rime of the Ancient Mariner begins at a celebration as well—a wedding, where the Mariner appears, much to the astonishment of the Wedding-Guest. To the Wedding-Guest the Mariner relates his tale. Orlovsky also becomes a haunting figure around the fountain: "They had gathered around him as if he were a nice little dog." To them, he says:

"I was one of you . . . indeed I was, and in just a few days I have become someone else, never to return. Consider that. Consider that in your summer of trees and fountains." He was swaying back and forth, not unpleasantly, and his eyes could not focus.

"There is an ice age up there you know, in the North. It's falling down here and will slide over here any time. You know that. You know what's happening." The boy closest to him nodded. He had finally spoiled their party, a spoiled party anyway. Here was a wretched creature who said he was from the North . . . and he wailed a cry of despair and horror which silenced the night animals, for even they could sense the upwelling of Hell. (173-4)

Like the "glittering-eyed" Mariner, Orlovsky both awes and frightens, his speech somewhere between that of a madman and that of a prophet. He and the Mariner have both experienced an "ice age," Orlovsky a metaphorical ice age in occupied Northern France, and the Mariner a very literal one in Antarctica. While Coleridge makes no mention of the Ancient Mariner's life after his Death-in-Life, one may assume it is similar to Orlovsky's, who, for the rest of the war, spends his life wandering, and then, after the war, searching for any record of those he lost. Of course, there is none; like the Mariner's ship, their names and faces have sunk into the sea—"vanished into the soil. They had not even a grave," Helprin writes (174). So Orlovsky undertakes a journey, from Trieste to Palestine, half in search of Ann, half in search of himself.

For the journey across the Mediterranean, Helprin offers description in the mode of Coleridge: "He was again in the flux of history, nurtured only by events and hopes. The sun rose and beat upon the green sea. It set, and left its mark of bronze and red on the faces of those who had cast their eyes always to the East" (176). The presence of the sun and the vivid description of the colors of the sea recur in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and eastward lay the undiscovered sea into which the Mariner sails, alone.

Upon reaching the Palestinian coast, Orlovsky, to avoid capture, dives into the water and swims around the cordon. He finds himself in a dark cave with a half-naked Italian beauty from the ship. Both of these images, that of submersion and resurrection from water and the image of the tomb-like cave, reinforce Orlovsky's symbolic rebirth in a new land. Helprin reminds the reader, though, that Ann, like the albatross, is not forgotten:

His greater loyalties surfaced as if from the sea. He just stared at her [the half-naked Italian beauty], his heart contained by an open question. All was cold, and dead, and over. He would not marry again, or make love, or fall in love. Such would ruin his chances. He simply could not take certain breaths, for fear of toppling Ann into hopelessness. What had she apart from his faith? (177-8)

She is the albatross that hangs about his neck and has not yet fallen back into the sea. She is both the source of his only hope and of his greatest despair, an impossible paradox.

The greater story of Orlovsky's expatriation to Israel is contained, symbolically, in the frame narrative, in which Orlovsky sets out alone, scouting for new pastures. It is during this journey, among the hills of the Golan, that Orlovsky connects himself indisputably to the Mariner. Alone, in a strange land, he lashes out against nature. Not yet aware of his past, the reader cannot understand his acts:

He was like cavalry, speeding by trees and charging down another row with the quick turn only a quarterhorse can make; both horse and rider became heated and their blood ran fast. It was good to be sometimes like a Mongol, a Scythian, any hard fighter who used everything to find strength where there was no strength, courage where there was no courage, swirling cold air to beat against the fire of his activity. He shot down the rows breaking the grasses, the horse's hoofbeats echoing callously through the trees. He took his rope and with it beat at the trunks of the palms, strapping them fiercely as if they were an enemy. And then he paused at one end of the grove, red and wet, his blood surging through him, his lower jaw trembling, and he began to scream at the trees. (154-5)

Orlovsky's anger is the culmination of a lifetime of isolation and frustration, of loss and death. It is a strange counterpoint to the Mariner's sin, which begins a life of isolation rather than completes it. "Alone, alone, all, all, alone / Alone on a wide wide sea!" (231-4) the Mariner laments to the wedding guest, in the purest expression of his loneliness. In the following lines of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Coleridge writes an archetypal image for Orlovsky's own sense of isolation:

The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I. (236-239)

The Mariner identifies with the "slimy things"; in his double guilt, the murder of the albatross and his survival when his shipmates died, he is among them. Neither he nor the other "slimy things" deserve to live. Ironically, his first step toward redemption is to bless these same slimy things, the water-snakes, and in blessing them, he blesses himself:

O happy living things! No tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware. (281-287)

Orlovsky makes a similar determination, though more conscious, when he arrives in Israel; "I love, he thought, I must love. If I cannot love Maman, and Papa, and Ann, then I must at least love this land a little" (176). But love does not come easy. He, along with the other early immigrants to the Promised Land, "found, as if in coordination with everything else, that the climate was unbearable and the land an infested swamp. But he worked hard to clear it where it was not already cleared. For him it was as if the more beautiful the valley became the more likely that she would suddenly arrive" (179).

Now, though, alone and near the end of his life, Orlovsky has finally committed a sin against his new land, a land he could never truly love and could easily hate for the same reason the Mariner comes to hate the slimy things around him. The consequence of this sin indisputably connects Orlovsky with his literary and spiritual ancestor, the "glittering-eyed" Ancient Mariner. Exhausted after his exertion against nature, he lays down to sleep, uncharacteristically not even bothering with his kit. A sound keeps him awake:

In between the shuddering of the trees he heard a whistling, a weak deathlike wheeze at regular intervals off on his left. . . . It was, and this he sensed for sure, a steady death rattle. . . . Remembering how he had screamed at the trees and beat them, he feared that they were whining in the darkness, and bleeding, and wailing like broken bodies. His fear grew white in front of him (155-156).

He arises to find the source of the sound. "Oh God in heaven," he says. "It was a dove. He had trampled it with his horse and it was dying" (156).

The dove is as obvious a symbol as the albatross; indeed, it is reincarnation of the albatross, the spiritual bird of good omen, signifying the presence and blessing of God. The dove, with its Biblical significance, is even a more likely symbol than the albatross. Like Coleridge, Helprin, in an epitaph in the closing lines, states explicitly the dove's spiritual significance:

The gentleness of the dove is something we cannot understand. Sometimes a fighter, it is not all of one color. But most of all it is moved by a quiet love and a wish for a simple life among the trees. And when it dies it breaks us apart, for it never thinks of itself. But God protect it if it should die alone, and God protect its poor family. (180)

To destroy the bird (dove or albatross), then, is to repeat the greatest sins in history—that of Lucifer and Adam, in their attempts to live without God, and in more contemporary literature, the sin of the Ancient Mariner and Faust. For Orlovsky, the dove also represents Ann, who, like the dove, was damaged in the fury of a war in which she had no part, no stake. And it represents his own condition, as evidenced in the text: "Before the dawn broke he had passed through many an ecstasy and sustained many a second wind. But with the coming of the light he felt drained and quiet, breathing hard and slowly like the dove" (178). The reader is unsure at first whether the "he" of the first sentence is the dove or Orlovksy; by the second sentence the reader realizes it is both.

The Ancient Mariner makes a decision, a poor one, to kill the bird: Orlovsky must make a similar decision; what must he do with the bird he has unwittingly wounded?

For a long time he just stared at it. He tried to give it cool water but it would not drink. He tired to give it fruit he diced with his knife, but it would not eat. Then he laid aside the fruit and water, and after putting more twigs and some heavy branches on the fire, lay down propped on his elbow near the dove, and stared at it trying to decide what to do. (158)

Orlovsky agonizes between the dove and his responsibility to the herd and to his comrades:

He could not heal it; that was impossible. He could, however, wait with it until it died or until it got better. The chances that it would live were greater that way, since he thought it would eventually take food from him and thus not starve. But it might take days, he thought to himself, and meanwhile Yossi and the herd are waiting for me. If I don't come it will be bad for all of the animals, each one of them a thousand times this light dove, and dozens of men will be sent to look for me. (158)

His decision is as inexplicable as the Mariner's decision to shoot the albatross. Orlovsky determines to stay with the dying dove: "Leaving the dove was out of the question. When he looked at it he knew he would have to wait with it, despite the ugly things that would be said, and stories that would go around" (158). Just as the Mariner has no motive to murder the albatross, Orlovsky has no reason to save the bird; his long life has been cruel, not he. Orlovsky does not require redemption. The plight of the dove has awakened something inside of him, an imagination of the past for which Coleridge's albatross is equally a symbol. Orlovsky comes to believe that in rescuing the dove, or at least staying with it through the night, he can regain the memory of his previous life. In the closing pages of the story, Helprin even uses Coleridge's word:

She [Ann] had long ago assumed these proportions, of a shadow or a shade, a walker of the floor of the valley without touching it, a descender from the deep sky, pale and sad, a ghost, a weeping gossamer, as white as powder and as quiet. This was unavoidable, a debt to pay, for in his stronger imaginings she was red as all life, moving, bursting into laughter, singing, fighting him, loving him—and imagination's pendulum had to sway. (179 italics mine)

Orlovsky's imagination of Ann is every bit as fragile as Coleridge's poetic imagination. To protect this imagination, Orlovsky forgoes the present to the point of criminal negligence. From the herdsmens' perspective, Orlovsky's care for the dove is a sin far greater than the Mariner's slaughter of the bird. He has forsaken his duty to them and the herd, and forever violated their trust in him.

But Orlovsky, sometime during his troubled life, had heard, or intuitively understood, the Ancient Mariner's great pronouncement:

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all. (614-619)

This simple, quaint moral creed, though, as Coleridge himself admitted, does neither the poem nor this story justice. Both works are ultimately about love and remembrance, both stories of long lives, similar in theme and character. The stories provide a strange contrast between two characters, widely separated by time and space, both of whom commit strange, wanton acts of no earthly significance. Orlovsky's story is never completed, as the Mariner's is, so the reader is unsure as to the aftermath. One suspects, though, that he, in recovering the memory of Ann, somehow joins her. Helprin writes in the closing paragraph, "There is no comfort in dying, no comfort in growing old. In the end there is no solace even in history. But a young man and an old man are moved before they die to finish the task of their life" (180). Orlovsky, since losing Ann, has viewed as the task of his life to keep her memory alive. Thus, the story ends both on a realistic and an allegorical level, as two horsemen approach Orlovsky; perhaps scouts sent to find him and bring him back to the herd, or perhaps twin spirits, sent to escort him out of this life to reunion with his love.

iii. The Albatross of Memory

Alessandro Giuliani commits no great sin against nature as the protagonist in A Soldier of the Great War. To the contrary, he is a student and later a professor of aesthetics, and the book is full of his meditations on the sublime and beautiful in the world. Nonetheless, Alessandro, like his prototype Leon Orlovsky, is derived from the Ancient Mariner, and, like "A Dove of the East," the entire book resonates with the theme and imagery of Coleridge's poem. As narrator, Helprin's own descriptions again rival those of Coleridge:

No end was apparent to the silvery creases glinting amid folds of ox-blood-colored rock, to the shattered glaciers that poured from between spires and sheer walls, and to the meadows large enough to hold a city. Engraved upon the electrifying height and mass of the rock were inverse wells, steeples, and gleaming towers that echoed thunder and spun lightning like wool. (169)

Such writing enriches Alessandro's own meditations, and Helprin manages to weave into his story both his and Alessandro's (they are generally the same) aesthetic. Art, Helprin believes, should pay homage to the Creator by imitating His universe (Personal interview, 4 December 1996). Helprin takes the reader from the golden autumnal light of the Rome of another time, through the "cathedral" of the Alps, to Sicily, then back to Rome, and it is easy to forget, as many critics forgot while reviewing "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," that such journeys are actually part of a story, not merely a sightseeing tour with language as the guide. In A Soldier of the Great War, the story is the grand life of Alessandro Guiliani.

Written nearly twenty-five years later, in A Soldier of the Great War the thematic seeds planted in "A Dove of the East" bloom magnificently. Like Orlovsky, his literary ancestor, Alessandro undergoes the trauma of war, loses his true love, and reaches the end of his life bereft of all whom he knew and loved, yet possessing a recondite understanding of existence gained by "a depth of experience others lack" (Bate 57). Both stories share the split-narrative of "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," divided between a present journey which symbolizes and recounts the epic that is the past. "A Dove of the East" might have been a full novel rather than a short story of thirty-three pages had Helprin added the details of Orlovsky's travels around Europe, his experience in the Resistance, and his illegal emigration to Israel (a story Helprin tells brilliantly in his first novel, Refiner's Fire). In A Soldier of the Great War, he makes amends. From his first adventure in the Alpine bed of a young princess at age nine, Helprin relates exploits, pilgrimages, tragedies, and a healthy dose of comic relief and the absurdity of life and war in the mode of Catch-22. Alan Wade writes of the book in his review for New Leader, "this one is a grand fairy tale for adults, a Bildungsroman full of astonishing events related in brilliant prose that carries the reader through nearly 800 pages at a gallop" (19). As the title indicates, Alessandro's story is a war story. Yet Helprin says in a New York Times interview that, "What I really meant by the Great War is the war which we fight against conditions of mortality. . . .The great war is, in a sense, life" (Alexander 65).

Orlovsky, at the end of his life, neglects his earthly duty to care for a wounded dove. To describe Alessandro on the first page of the book, Helprin indubitably connects him to Orlovsky: "though it may have been accidental, doves had flown into his hands" (1). Alessandro's dove is Nicolo Sambucca, a teenager who, having missed the bus which on which Alessandro is riding to visit his granddaughter in Monte Prato, chases after it for several kilometers. The bus driver refuses to stop, so Alessandro asks to be let off on the road, hoping that Nicolo might catch up and board the bus as it is stopped. Realizing he has been tricked, the bus driver will not allow him to board. Alessandro announces, "'If you don't let him ride, I won't ride either'" (15), and finds himself on an empty road seventy kilometers from Monte Prato with an illiterate seventeen year-old apprentice propeller maker.

When Alessandro announces to Nicolo that he intends to walk to Monte Prato, Nicolo responds in disbelief. Alessandro's reply echoes the alienation which the Ancient Mariner endured, and hints at the great struggle his life has been: "'Nicolo, I once walked several hundred kilometers over glaciers and snowfields, with no rest, and if I had been discovered I would have been shot'" (16). Inspired and perhaps shamed by the old man's resolve, Nicolo requires little convincing; in no time he becomes equally determined:

Nicolo was beginning to get fiery himself. Swept up remarkably fast in a storm of passion and dreams, within a minute or two he had decided his fate and declared that he would go to Sant' Angelo, to Monte Prato, twice the distance, three times the distance, without rest, driving himself until he came close to death. (19)

This description becomes ironic with the realization that this is Alessandro's last journey; that it is he, not the youthful Nicolo, who will be driven close to death. The contrast between the two is striking; the aging Alessandro plods steadily while the energetic Nicolo runs in circles around him. Alessandro mocks, pities, and finally attempts to eradicate Nicolo's ignorance, at one point even explaining how babies are made. In a superb irony, Alessandro and the reader realize that it is to this unschooled stranger, not to an erudite biographer or a respected documentarian, that he must entrust the story of his life (the irony comes full circle, however, in that Helprin himself is Alessandro's biographer. This is not lost on the author. Alessandro asks early in the book, "Who would write a book about me in the war? Why would anyone want to, and who could ever know?" [29]. Helprin says that the inspiration for the novel came from "a bemedaled ancient, a soldier of the Great War," who stared at him for hours with a gaze of "anger, pity, amusement, respect, contempt, hatred, and affection." Helprin believed that the man had "entrusted me with his life" [Green and Pierce 106]). Helprin does not allow this irony to turn bitter, however, just as he does not allow Orlovsky's actions to seem absurd. Rather, both actions resonate with ethos, for the strange decisions are their own way of reckoning their lives.

The dove in "A Dove of the East" reminds Orlovsky both of those he loved and of himself, for he too is spiritually wounded and physically near death. In caring for the dove, Orlovsky administers his own last rites. Nicolo is not quite a portrait, but is at least a representation of Alessandro as a young man, and, more importantly, a symbol of an earlier time. In walking with Nicolo, Alessandro's heart "repaired to the past and he barely touched the ground as he walked between trees that now were shimmering in the dawn. . . . He just wanted to go back. And he did" (86). For the title of the third chapter, Helprin borrows from Raphael's portrait of Bindo Altoviti, il ritratto suo quando era giovane—"his portrait when he was young." In it, Alessandro travels from Rome to Munich to see the painting before he goes to war. The painting is also an abstraction of Alessandro when he is old, for it, like him, seems to speak of the past:

Alessandro imagined that Bindo Altoviti was saying, half with longing, half with delight, "These are the things in which I was so helplessly caught up, the waves that took me, what I loved. When light filled my eyes and I was restless and could move, I knew not what all the color was about, but only that I had a passion to see. And now that I am still, I pass on to you my liveliness and my life, for you will be taken, as once I was, and although you must fight beyond your capacity to fight and feel beyond your capacity to feel, remember that it ends in perfect peace, and you will be as still and content as am I, for whom the centuries are not even seconds." (227)

Alessandro receives these words immediately before he goes to war and his idyllic life turns tragic. They are the substance of his words to Nicolo, for he too has become a voice from the past, passing on all that he knows of the great truths of life to one who is just beginning. "You undoubtedly long for the pain of the world," Alessandro tells Nicolo, "with the same intensity that you desire to love a woman" (784). As a voice from the past, from a world which no longer exists, Alessandro is descendant from the archetypal Ancient Mariner figure doomed to live in the past, who, in penance to gain redemption, must tell his fantastic story.

The other painting that figures prominently in the novel is Giorgione's enigmatic La Tempesta, the title of the ninth chapter (the first edition of the novel also features the painting on the cover). In greens and blues, Giorgione renders a bolt of lightning on a troubled sky, the background for a man and a naked woman holding a child. Ted Solotaroff, in his review for The Nation, summarizes the significance of the painting: "For Alessandro the storm is history, the man is a soldier and the woman and child his only hope" (779-80). Storms are a major and powerful image in the novel. They serve two purposes: they are, as Solotaroff says, a symbol of history, of the constant presence of the Great War. In the trenches along the Isonzo River, Alessandro and the Italian army know that the massed Austrian army will attack when the river is lowest—when it begins to rain. A great thunderstorm prophesies the assault. As he begins to reminisce, Alessandro meditates, "No matter that distant thunder is muted and slow, it comes through the air more clearly" (86). The "distant thunder" is his memory of the war that has defined him, and the pain of losing those he loved while he continued to live. "After half and century and more," Helprin writes, "he was going to take one last look. He no longer cared what it might do to him" (86).

The storm which drives the Ancient Mariner to the South Pole is personified in Coleridge's poem:

And now the Storm-blast came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong;
He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased us south along. (41-44)

Coleridge's storm is the "natural supernatural" power which, though it does not directly cause the events of the poem, establishes the situation where they might occur. In the Antarctic, the Ancient Mariner slays the albatross and visits places no human had ever been. In war, Alessandro becomes a killer and faces death himself; later, he is positioned in the most remote post in all of Europe—at a lookout post completely alone atop the Alps. In a Christian world, where both "The Ancient Mariner" and A Soldier of the Great War take place, the storm is the strongest indication of the hand of God. Helprin says a thunderstorm is the "clearest evidence of a Divine Power in the universe" (Personal interview, 4 December 1996). Alessandro says, "I believe in God without any hope, in a God of splendor and terror" (638). As a symbol of history, and specifically of looming war, the thunderstorm represents the hand of the Divine upon the affairs of men. It is a reminder not of God's love and grace, but of his awesome, sublime power. Several thunderstorms occur in the novel, the first while Alessandro and his best friend Rafi climb in the Alps. Any storm atop a mountain must necessarily remind the reader of Moses on Mt. Sinai and his struggle with God: "And it came on the third day in the morning, that there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceedingly loud" (Exodus 19:16). Helprin echoes Exodus 19 with his own account of the storm:

It left an army of thunderbolt throwers to castigate the mountains for slowing it down, but the punishment was beautiful. Eyes open wide, breathing deeply, shaken by concussions raging about them, Alessandro and Rafi dangled in the air, stupefied. The thunder was so deep, the lightning so bright, and the wind so strong that they wondered why they survived. (181)

Alessandro's struggle is similar to that of Moses; he struggles for the lives and memories of those he loves. Like the Ancient Mariner, only he survives, and survival becomes a curse. Alessandro, too, undergoes a kind of Life-in-Death. After witnessing his the death of his true love, Ariane, in an explosion, "Alessandro grieved. His punishment was that nothing in the world could touch him. His punishment was that God had put him into battle and preserved him from its dangers" (532). After returning from the war, in the opening scene of "La Tempesta," chapter nine, Alessandro challenges the storm on the beach in a scene painfully reminiscent of King Lear on the heath, graphically realizing his own apparent and undesired immortality:

Lightning struck so close to Alessandro that is pushed him against the beach chair and bent its wooden legs like bows. Blinded, he waited for the next bolt to release him from the reeling darkness, for the logic of the lightning and its approach over the sea was like the logic of a swelling crescendo in music. He was sure it would rush him with perfect accuracy, sure of the greater and greater light and geometrically increasing shock, sure that the walking barrage would end with him, and content that it would. (677).

Surviving the storm on the beach is a turning point for Alessandro. The storm culminates the many times Alessandro has faced death in the war—in the trenches on the Isonzo, waiting for execution at Stella Maris, alone at the lookout post in the Alps, and facing down Field Marshall Strassnitzy, who pulls the trigger of an unloaded gun aimed at Alessandro's heart. It is also his final triumph over death, for after the storm he begins to regain his life. As he rests on the beach in the subsequent calm, a family vacationing from Rome invites him to join them for a meal. He sees in them the image of his own family, though he does not yet know it: the man, Arturo, for a time, serves to replace Alessandro's dead father; Arturo's wife is very lovely, reminding him of Ariane; their son is named Rafi, reminding him of his own friend Rafi, and foreshadowing the discovery of his own son. Alessandro admits to the father that he wants to join those he loves. "Real power is with those who are forever still, and I want to join them," he says. "You mean like Hamlet jumping into the grave?" Arturo asks. Alessandro agrees, and the man reminds him that "[Hamlet] jumped out" (690).

Ariane, symbolized by the woman in La Tempesta, and symbolizing Alessandro's hope, transcends the tempest: "he realized that the sound that seemed to ride far above the thunder, keeping pace, never faltering, was the beating of a heart, and it said to him, despite all he knew and despite all he had come to believe, that he had not yet lost Ariane" (691). The final validation of his return to life is his dream, which he recounts to the wife of the family. He sees his own family in the midst of a great storm, struggling and dying. "At times I was the father, at times the son . . . at times the baby sister, the mother, even the wind," he says (694). His father sends him to knock on the door of a great mansion, and when no one responds, his family enters the house and spends the night there in refuge from the storm. Eventually, since the owner never appears, they claim the house as their own. When they look at each other, however, they see that their "faces were ashen, entirely drained of all the hot and imperfect colors that show life. And when we realized that we had died, the dream dissolved in the most intense terror I have ever experienced." The wife responds, "'Most dreams are not so straightforward. What is to interpret? Is it not clear to you? It's so obvious. Don't you know? You still love'" (695).

The value of the dream is that Alessandro begins to fear death, realizing that his life is still worth living. The dream illustrates that, dead or alive, he can still be with those he loves. The dream completes a series of epiphanies that send Alessandro in search of Ariane, and begins the series of providential coincidences which reunite them. As he begins his quest, he finds new hope from his own past that death may not be final after all: "His father had appeared, in the uniform of a major, in the trenches beside him, and though he hadn't known his son, it was he" (708). In his dream, he applies his own existence to that of his loved ones, that he might, through his own existence, keep them alive as well. Even as a younger man, "he knew very well that love could make the most beautiful singing, that it could make death inconsequential, that it existed in forms so pure and strong that it was capable of reordering the universe" (133). Love is the great force in "A Dove of the East," and it is even more powerful in A Soldier of the Great War. Thomas Keneally writes in his New York Times review that "Alessandro gleans a few gracefully expressed banalities: that love is the one sane thing in the universe" (26). In war, Alessandro finds true love in Ariane, his nurse, whom he saw long before at a party in a garden. Music, and especially singing, is a symbol of their love throughout the text. Singing accompanies his first encounter with Ariane, years before he would see her again. During his first trip to the front, he hears artillery that "had begun to drown out the music of the world. It was clear to Alessandro, and easily understandable, that, for some, the music would cease to exist. But not for him, not for him" (230). He is only half right; during his tour of duty on the Isonzo river, there is not a single mention of music. Only when he deserts and returns to Rome does he hear it again: "Rome was occupied by millions of birds, perched on every branch, singing as if to warm the wind" (397).

As with "A Dove of the East," a bird incarnates all the love and memory of the past. For the Ancient Mariner, it is an albatross. For Orlovsky, it is the dove. For Alessandro, it is la rondine, "the swallows." La Rondine is the title of the final chapter, and was also the original title of the novel as well. In the first edition of the book, each page of a new chapter features a swallow in the upper right corner. The swallow is the other half of King Hezekiah's lament in Isaiah 38:14: "Like a crane or a swallow, so did I chatter: I did mourn as a dove: mine eyes fail with looking upward: O Lord, I am oppressed; undertake for me" (KJV). Alessandro tells Nicolo a story near the end of the novel, a story left out of the main narrative, of a young soldier directly hit in an artillery barrage. In the story, Father Michele, a character who appears no where else in the novel, comes to administer last rites for the boy, who cries, "I can't see." Helprin writes, "That was the only time that Father Michele quoted the Bible to him. He said, 'Like . . . a swallow . . . mine eyes fail with looking upward'" (770). Alessandro identifies himself with the bird when he returns from the war when he says to Arturo on the beach, "I myself am poor as a swallow" (681), as Orlovsky identifies with the wounded dove and the Mariner comes to see himself as the albatross.

Alessandro tells Nicolo to continue down the road after he has stopped. His final words apply to both the journey they have taken and the journey of life Nicolo is poised to begin: "Don't lose your way" (786). Alessandro, on the other hand, has come to end of both journeys. He leaves the road and pushes into the brush, heading down the hill into the meadow of the valley. His contemplations and spe culations on death throughout his life become a song as he approaches "the gate about which he had wondered and speculated all his life" (786). In the valley he finds himself in the company of hundreds of thousand of swallows, and he realizes that it is their song which he hears (788). He wishes to die among these birds, just as Orlovsky chooses to die with the dove.

A hunter follows Alessandro into the valley, and when the swallows rise in midmorning,

Alessandro knew what was going to happen. Their lives would end in a flash. It did not move him, at first, for he had seen far worse, and he was preparing to follow them that very morning. He thought that he would not feel for them, that, being one of them, as it were, he would follow them, without sympathy, to death, the way soldiers do when they are all facing the same fate. But it was not so, for Alessandro burned with the images of those he loved. (792)

Alessandro's empathy with the swallows is his final act of love, just as the Ancient Mariner's act of blessing the water snakes is his first act of love. Both men see themselves reflected; Alessandro in the swallows that take flight, and the Mariner in the "slimy water snakes" which with him persist in odious existence. Their acts of love are rewarded. The Mariner is forgiven and returned to civilization. Alessandro gains the death he has dodged many times, for he, like the swallow, observes the time of his coming (Jeremiah 8:7 paraphrased). The final line of the novel is Helprin's version of death: "And it all ran together, like a song" (792). In Alessandro's dreams, and in the strains of music he hears, are hints of this coalescence of existence. He must seek for Ariane, Rafi, Guariglia, Fabio, and his family in life before he can join them in death. When he finds them, he must remember and impart their lives to others. That is Alessandro's story, Orlovsky's story, the Mariner's story, even Job's story: losing all those they knew, then gaining them back. He rediscovers his family in another's family, and finally in his own. Yet reunion is bittersweet, for Alessandro must also tell of losing them again: his son in Libya in the Second World War, and his wife some years later. He lives on because he must tell their story, just as the Ancient Mariner lives, required for a time to tell his own story. When Nicolo says that he wishes to do something for the men and women about whom he had heard, Alessandro gives him a simple order:

Remember them. To think of them in their flesh, not as abstractions. To make no generalizations of war or peace that override their souls. To draw no lessons of history of their behalf. Their history is over. Remember them, just remember them—in their millions—for they were not history, they were only men, women, and children. Recall them, if you can, with love. That is all you need to do in regard to them, and all they ask. (785)

The albatross of memory finally drops from Alessandro's neck to hang about Nicolo's. For Alessandro, it is no longer duty but reward.

iv. The Essential Facts

Mark Helprin is unusual among contemporary writers. He persists in writing grand quests for truth which seem almost naïve in a literary world where the very word "truth" has become cliché, and many writers seek to obscure it rather than present it. They resent the shadow of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and the long gallery of others who have crystallized the true essence of life and seem to have left nothing for the posterity of their craft to accomplish. As if in rebellion, many twentieth century writers have determined to write about nada, starkly demonstrated by Ernest Hemingway in "A Clean, Well-lighted Place." Existence, they believe, is enough; that the portrayal of mere human existence will by osmosis transfer epiphanies to the reader. And in some cases they are right. Hemingway's short story exudes a profound blankness and degradation of all that is thought, perhaps without valediction, to be valuable. In this way, he follows Thoreau into the woods to "fronts the essential facts of life." What Hemingway and others finds to be mean (just about everything), they discard. But they fail to replace their discards with a new truth, and instead of denouement there is a vacuum.

Mark Helprin is not afraid to "front the essential facts of life"; that is the story of his robust life and daring writing. In his world, beauty and love still exist. The past can still be visited, and the future still discovered. In short, for Helprin there is still hope in the world. Even Orlovsky's foolish hope that he might save the dove allows him to rediscover love, another virtue turned to pitch in contemporary literature. Helprin reverses the tendency: in "A Dove of the East," he writes rather awkwardly of Orlovsky, "And he loved so much to love that he wondered if he were drawn to it by all but love itself" (160). Rather than offering experience to prove that love is a fable, Helprin takes all experience and translates it into love, which he often refers to as a song. He ends A Soldier of the Great War with such a translation: "And it all ran together, like a song" (792).

Helprin writes with a courage most of his contemporaries lack. He tackles the grand abstractions of love and hope like Jacob wrestling with the angel, and prevails over them. The struggle is evident in his writing. In A Dove of the East, he grasps at truths he himself does not yet know, and as a result his writing is unsure and awkward at times. He hopes the reader can fill in the blank for him, that truth will be self-evident. By the time he writes A Soldier of the Great War, and even more so in Memoir From Antproof Case, he owns those truths. They no longer intimidate him; he presents them boldly time and time again in a thousand different variations and representations. He controls them, and through them controls the reader. They are simply that love exists and is more powerful than death. Beauty is the craftsmanship of God, who exists whether one likes it or not. Only through great suffering or great exultation can one truly come to know Him.

In a world full of cynics, Helprin emerges as a modern-day Romantic in the mode of Wordsworth, ever seeking the "celestial light, / The glory and freshness of a dream" (Ode on Intimations of Immortality 4-5). Though "A Dove of the East" and A Soldier of the Great War follow the pattern and theme of "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," they resonate with the metaphysics of Wordsworth in his great search for the preface and epilogue of life. In the present, Orlovsky and Alessandro see everywhere intimations of the past, and they are caught between the worlds. They only live the present so that they might relive the past.

Helprin credits Dante as the greatest literary influence upon him (Personal interview, 20 October 1996). Love, of course, is the great theme of The Divine Comedy; it rescues Dante from the dark wood and allows him to see the face of God. But Beatrice's love also sends him to hell and purgatory. Only in seeing the full expanse of the universe can Dante truly appreciate Beatrice and Paradise. Helprin plumbs similar depths; Orlovsky finds himself in a dark wood, alone and angry at the world. In the shape of a dove, his own Beatrice speaks to him and rescues him. Alessandro is at once Dante, guided by the unseen but ever-present love of Ariane, and Virgil, guiding Nicolo through the night.

Rather than disown it, Helprin embraces the tradition of literature. He views himself as an extension of that tradition. Its truths, the only constant truths, he claims as his own. He musters his own extraordinary talent to continue their legacy, fully aware that he plies no new themes, quite content to extend those of Dante, Shakespeare, and the Romantics, and their predecessors. He also knows that "these days, to follow that lead you do have to be willing to go it alone" (Paris Review 199).

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